Sociology of News Work

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Sociology of News Work VALERIE BELAIR-GAGNON University of Minnesota, USA

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Sociological research of news work has focused on work routines, interactions, and relationships among individuals/groups involved in news production, together with the organizations, institutions, structures, professional norms, and values that are part of news production. Today, the sociology of news work enjoys a central role in shaping scholarly and practical understandings of the process and role of news production in society. This is thanks to the early works of Max Weber on the study of the newspaper enterprise and its role in the formation of public opinion, and social anthropological and sociological influences from the “Chicago School” scholars, including Robert E. Park (on foreign language press as a factor of assimilation and Americanization) and Helen MacGill Hughes (on news and human interest stories). In the United States and Europe, the field has experienced two major transitions. Post World War II, sociologists started to focus on everyday interactions in news work and looked at the internal (e.g., ownership or structure of the newsroom) and external (e.g., events or political pressures) factors that influenced news work. This body of literature focused on issues related to social control in newsrooms. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, following the emergence of the Internet and its wider adoption in newsrooms, and the possibility of “ordinary” citizens producing and distributing news stories (e.g., with user-generated content, blogging, and social networking), sociological research, categorized under the larger umbrella of “journalism studies,” began to move towards a networked understanding of news work. For example, C. W. Anderson (2013) explored how emerging news networks (i.e., bloggers, citizen journalists, and users of social networks) were transforming the media business and ecology. For Anderson, journalism studies scholars needed to move away from the confines of the newsroom as a bounded place, and focus more on networks of news. In addition to this change in approach, the early and more recent sociological accounts of news work shared a common interest in exploring how and why news is produced in a certain way, and the part that journalists play in reconciling the civic-minded role of news with their audiences. Multiple approaches have shaped the sociological understanding of news work. Early sociological inquiries into journalism focused on the “gatekeeping” theory, a term originally coined by the psychologist Kurt Lewin during the 1940s. In the postwar era, a study of the selection process of news stories among newswire editors by journalist and media scholar David Manning White established the foundations for gatekeeping research (White, 1950). Gatekeeping research explored how external (e.g., elite nation or people) and internal (e.g., personal experiences, attitudes, and expectations of news) forces can challenge journalistic professional autonomy. Related to external forces, a second approach to news work focused on the social organization and occupational ideologies of news workers. Still relevant today, central to these The International Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies. Tim P. Vos and Folker Hanusch (General Editors), Dimitra Dimitrakopoulou, Margaretha Geertsema-Sligh and Annika Sehl (Associate Editors). © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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inquiries were questions of professional autonomy, decision making, organizational routines, and the constraints of occupational routines on news work. A third approach, related to internal forces, pertained to the political economy of news (e.g., market or ownership influence on news). Finally, a fourth approach consisted of cultural studies of news work (e.g., occupational ideologies, journalistic meta-discourses, framing, structuralism, semiotics, or performativity of news). More recent sociological studies in news work have focused on influences outside and across newsrooms (e.g., internet intermediaries and web analytics companies). These studies also linked different theoretical and methodological approaches. Following White’s early attempt to systematically and empirically analyze structuring factors of journalistic decision making, a number of scholars explored social control and selectivity of news. These studies revealed that journalism is not a pure reflection of the world in which we live. Moving away from the gatekeeping concept of information as “untouched” prior to making it into the newsroom, these sociologists found that news has purposive behavior and “constructed” realities based on news work routine, accidents, scandals, events (e.g., war, conflict, and terrorism), and journalistic roles. From a functional analytical perspective, Warren Breed (1955) showed how news organizations socialize journalists to condition their understanding of policy, by enhancing policy status quo. Breed argued that certain factors inhibited news workers to commit acts of deviance. These factors included institutional authority, sanctions, mobility, or absence of group allegiance. Allowing little individual agency to journalists, Breed argued that these newsroom practices harmed democracy. For Breed, publishers who have policy-making authority in newsrooms should apply pressure to change these cultural norms. In other words, managers should structure news production processes (e.g., through recruitment, socialization, control, planning, gathering, selection, and production) and sustain the institutional norms and practices. In turn, journalists should use news values as criteria for selecting available newsworthy material, and as guidelines for presentation of items. Like early sociologists of news work (e.g., Max Weber), Breed was concerned with the impact of social control in the newsroom and of news selectivity on democracy. He saw the press as a main driver of democracy. In sharp contrast, during the 2010s, in Western scholarship, communication scholar Barbie Zelizer argued that, democracy has occupied a more central role than it deserves in understanding journalism. Zelizer repeatedly claimed that the concept of democracy has created and maintained blinders in understanding the nuances of journalistic practices and has overstated the link between journalism and governing bodies (Zelizer, 2013). While early news work sociologists explored how news is “socially constructed,” scholars have since analyzed the complexity of this statement by shedding light on power relations in organizational contexts (e.g., news values, such as elite nation, elite people, and long-running stories, and the influence of government and top political officials on the selection and output of news items). These studies emphasized how gatekeeping elements transform news frames, emphasis, placement, and promotion. Building on the many interpretations of phenomenological sociology espoused by scholars such as Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schütz, and Martin Heidegger, symbolic interactionism (e.g., Erving Goffman and Herbert Blumer), and social constructivism (e.g.,

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Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann), sociological accounts of news work flourished in the 1970s–1980s. These studies were based on participant observation, ethnographic accounts, and in-depth first-hand knowledge of news work. Several scholars used their professional journalistic experiences as a backdrop to their studies. Concerned with the question of how news is produced and how formats and routines influence the treatment of news events, studies accounted for the ways that organizational settings, news format, audience, scheduling, and news-gathering technology generate news bias and an account of social life. Journalistic routines and news formats alter meanings, which has raised concerns about the autonomy and neutrality of journalistic norms, values, and practices. The change in meanings also suggests that news and news norms are the product of organizational structures, technical constraints, and routines. Importantly, routinization of work happens because of journalists’ need to manage the unexpected, such as covering routinized events with beat reporting and press conferences. In other words, building on phenomenological sociology, symbolic interaction, and social constructivism traditions in sociology, sociologists of news work conceded that news workers are communicators who interact with the structure of their environment, professional socialization, relationship with editors and sources, and storytelling techniques (e.g., the inverted pyramid). At an individual level, sociologists found that journalists negotiate definitions and dimensions of information and facts based on personal, situational, and organizational news definitions. In the United States during the 1970s–1980s, a series of meso-level ethnographic accounts of news routines and norms emerged. This work was influenced by the anthropologically minded approach to sociology of the 1920s Chicago School, and second-generation workplace ethnographies of occupations (e.g., Everett Hughes, Howard Becker, and Anselm Strauss). Scholars included Mark Fishman, Edward Jay Epstein, Gaye Tuchman, and Herbert Gans. Reflecting this trend, in Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality, Tuchman (1978) further developed the idea that news is a social construct. For Tuchman, news is rooted in organizational routines, and journalists claim objectivity for performative purposes. Similarly, in Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time, Gans (1979) explored the role of news values in television and weekly news production. Gans studied the organization of news stories, the journalist–source relationship, news values and ideology, the interaction between profits and audiences, and political censorship in newsrooms. He argued that while journalistic values may influence news, external factors such as political censorship also affect journalism. Ethnographic accounts of news work focused on fixed organizations and beats, which might involve a location, institution, or subject matter. Similar to gatekeeping, social control, and news selectivity research, these ethnographic accounts of news work also acknowledged the role of the bureaucratic organization of journalism in shaping news-gathering structures. Using values, ethics, and journalistic norms and values as the object of study, occupational analyses of news work explored journalistic behaviors in specific contexts (e.g., newsrooms or specific countries), as well as globally. These studies ranged from analyses of a philosophy of journalistic autonomy, journalists’ responses to ethical dilemmas, and ethical compromises in journalistic shaping of the news. There is an ongoing debate about whether some values (e.g., justice, reciprocity, and human dignity)

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are universal; other scholars conceded that values are not absolute (e.g., objectivity, independence, and fairness) and that the professional logic of journalism (i.e., epistemology and form of producing knowledge) has become more globalized. Many scholars have also explored the norm of objectivity. Tuchman (1978) argued that objectivity is a “strategic ritual” and is embedded in organizational constraints, making the norm ambiguous and contextual. Michael Schudson (1978) wrote that objectivity served for journalists as a point of reference and counterpoint for emerging journalistic forms in the United States during the twentieth century. In doing so, he traced the history of procedural and analytical fairness in journalism (i.e., objectivity) from the 1920s onwards. At the time, newspaper editors had started to form professional associations and adopt codes of ethics that included principles of sincerity, truthfulness, accuracy, and freedom from bias. Newspapers additionally had begun to disaffiliate themselves from public relation specialists and propagandists. Schudson thus showed that the ambiguity and intangibility of “objectivity” makes it even more of a symbolic and discursive center in journalism. He argued that objectivity has come to refer to the belief in factual information, the distrust of subjective values, and a commitment to the segregation of those values. Schudson suggested that norms are built on social conditions in the rhetorical formalization of norms, including the need for social cohesion (Durkheim) and for social control (Weber). This research points to a rational explanation of the complex role of occupational values in news work. Similar sociological explorations can be found in political economy, news as institution, and cultural accounts of news work. The “political economy” approach refers to the existence of a ruling class that dictates what journalists “ought to do.” The questions asked in political economy research resemble the approaches of social control, news selectivity, social organization, and occupational ideologies. Scholars have explored how social institutions and the news media mutually shape each other. Research into the political economy of news work differs from other approaches that focus on individual and organizational levels of influence by emphasizing the role of structure (macro level) or the “big picture” in news work. In other words, these studies focus on external forces that shape news, such as the relationship between government circles and news workers, and other institutional pressures on reporting. One of the most comprehensive accounts of the political economy of journalism comes from Edward S. Herrmann and Noam Chomsky (1988) in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. In this book, Herrmann and Chomsky proposed a “propaganda model” of mass media in which they conceive that mass media served to mobilize the state and the special interests of private activities. They claimed that news serves the established power (e.g., governments or advertisers). A second comprehensive account of news as institution focuses on media systems or media as a field. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1998) considered media to be a “field,” taking the position that each agent in a field depends on interactions between the rules of the field, its habitus, and its social, economic, and cultural capital. In Comparing Media Systems, Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini (2004) suggested that competing economic, political, and state influences led to distinct

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journalistic professionalization paths. The authors developed three models of media system—liberal, democratic-corporatist, and polarized-pluralist—which can explain differences between Anglo-American, Northern European, and Southern European democracies. Hallin and Mancini also posited that media systems gradually homogenize and tend to resemble the liberal model of media and politics that is characterized by the development of a commercial press, an information-oriented journalism, strong professionalization, and a media system dominated by the market. Unlike studies of routine and social organization of news work, with a conceptual emphasis on macro structures in news work, the political economy of news work research does not describe how these processes take place in daily routines or a given cultural symbolic system. The cultural approach to the sociology of news work is rooted in publications by Robert E. Parks on the immigrant press, and in considerations of material conditions, cultural traditions, and ideologies to explain news outcomes. In other words, this strand of the sociology of news work examines journalism’s history and symbolic representations in professional norms, values, and practices. It also explores the choices made and values set by journalists in producing news. Scholars of this approach, such as Stuart Hall, Todd Gitlin, and Barbie Zelizer, conceded that journalism is a source of information and imagination in public and popular culture. For example, the Glasgow University Media Group conducted research on television news bias using an empirical and semiotic analysis of news bulletins to explore systematic class bias. Further, several scholars have suggested that the organizational structure, routine process of framing issues, and occurrences of particular stories direct media attention and resources to the places and institutions that generate newsworthy events (see, for example, Ellis Krauss, Deborah Chambers, and Eric Klinenberg). Cultural sociologies have also examined how journalists produce and reproduce collective representations. Influenced by Ronald Jacob’s work, in a cross-national comparative study Matthias Revers (2017) explored the cultural logic of U.S. and German journalism in news events. He analyzed journalistic practices and discourses of professionalism. Revers provided a comprehensive sociological analysis of news by conceiving journalism to be institutionally situated and culturally driven. With the emergence of the Internet, Revers and other sociologically minded scholars have shifted from a rational to a network approach to news work. Media scholars and communication migrants have spearheaded this strand of research. Interdisciplinary in nature and form, networked approaches to the sociology of news work propose that news work is not a self-contained profession. Rather, it is part of a networked communicative space that challenges the professional autonomy of news workers. In this space, news workers go beyond newsroom workers by introducing human agency into news production by negotiating some of the influencing factors that previous sociology work has explored. The emergence of the Internet and social networking sites as modes of communication has allowed scholars to explore the implications of gatekeeping theory in hybrid face-to-face and online environments. Pamela Shoemaker (1991) and her colleagues discussed the concepts of “knowledge control” and “information control” to understand gatekeepers’ influences on news production in time and space. Gatekeeper

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theorists identified five levels of influence: (1) individual (e.g., demographics or role conceptions), (2) media routines (e.g. time constraints, verification processes, conceptualization of audiences, and interaction between sources), (3) organizational (e.g., ownership, decision-making processes, and organizational culture), (4) social institutional (e.g., pressures from citizens, government, sources, markets, advertisers, audiences, public relations practitioners, and media), and (5) social system levels (e.g., values, attitudes, and ideas). These five levels of influence relate to the four areas of focus in the sociology of work and enable a more complex micro and macro understanding of news work. In response to a lack of ethnographic accounts of newsrooms and the rise of quantitative studies in sociology during the 1980s and 1990s, in the late 1990s and early days of the Internet, a second wave of news ethnographies emerged to map theoretically and explore empirically the fast-changing and differentiated news ecology. Sociologists produced scholarship on how digital media affected the organizations, norms, and practices of journalism. One of the first works of this kind is Pablo J. Boczkowski’s (2004) book titled Digitizing the News. In his book, Boczkowski explored how daily newspapers developed online publishing sites. He concluded that the shape of these initiatives is entrenched and influenced by organizational “cultures of innovation.” Reflecting the networked news environment, the concept of “chaos” has also enabled scholars to show how factors (e.g., economic and political pressures, personal and religious affiliations, changes in news-gathering and production technology, and the role of sources and “source strategies”) contribute to the form, content, and style of journalism, which can be considered more as “chaotic” than “controlled.” British sociologist Brian McNair (2006) suggested a shift towards a “chaotic flow” model of journalism production rather than “control.” For McNair, the chaotic flow “preserved recognition of the existence of social inequality as a key feature of contemporary capitalism.” Chaos as a concept to understand contemporary journalism also adds the possibility of challenge and subversion of established power through journalistic routines in “mainstream capitalist media.” This analytical approach provided a way to explore the changing relationship between journalism and power in a networked news culture. Early approaches in the sociology of news work (i.e., gatekeeping/social control/news selectivity, social organization/occupational ideologies, political economy/news as institution, and culture/ideology) were embedded in static rather than changeable practices and norms. If change was taken into account, it was change in relation to previous studies or instances, which may not have had the same object of study (e.g., event, location, organization, and so forth). More recently, scholars have started to explore how emergent news values and actors (e.g., coders, internet intermediaries, web programmers, web application designers, ordinary citizens, amateur journalists, and hobbyists) are reordering news production, and how values and practices, such as efficiency, immediacy, interactivity, and audience engagement, play a role in enhancing tensions in networked journalistic practices and norms. This development implies deviating from the traditional understanding of news work as situated in newsrooms, and taking a broader view to encompass the changing and networked political economy, culture, and practices in the sociology of news work.

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SEE ALSO: Journalism; Journalism Studies; Social Construction of News; Ethics: Prin-

ciples and Practices; Objectivity

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References

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Anderson, C. W. (2013). Rebuilding the news: Metropolitan journalism in the digital age. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Boczkowski, P. J. (2004). Digitizing the news: Innovation in online newspapers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bourdieu, P. (1998). On television. New York, NY: New Press. Breed, W. (1955). Social control in the newsroom: A functional analysis. Social Forces, 33(4). Gans, H. (1979). Deciding what’s news. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Hallin, D. C., & Mancini, P. (2004). Comparing media systems: Three models of media and politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Herman, E. S., & Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. McNair, B. (2006). Cultural chaos: Journalism, news and power in a globalised world. London, UK: Routledge. Revers, M. (2017). Contemporary journalism in the US and Germany: Agents of accountability. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Schudson, M. (1978). Discovering the news: A social history of American newspapers. New York, NY: Basic Books. Shoemaker, P. (1991). Gatekeeping. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE. Tuchman, G. (1978). Making news: A study in the construction of reality. New York, NY: Free Press. White, D. M. (1950). The “gatekeeper”: A case study in the selection of news. Journalism Quarterly, 27, 383–391.

Further reading Alexander, J. C., Breede, E. B., & Luengo, M. (Eds.). (2016). The crisis of journalism reconsidered. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Tumber, H. (2000). News: A reader. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Vos, T., & Heinderyckx, F. (2015). Gatekeeping in transition. London, UK: Routledge. Zelizer, B. (2013). On the shelf life of democracy in journalism scholarship. Journalism, 14(4), 459–473. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1464884912464179

Valerie Belair-Gagnon is assistant professor of journalism studies at the University of Minnesota Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication. She is affiliated faculty in the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota, and an Affiliated Fellow at the Yale Information Society Project. Her research interests are in technology and innovation in journalism. She is the author of Social Media at BBC News (2015).

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Please note that the abstract and keywords will not be included in the printed book, but are required for the online presentation of this book which will be published on Wiley’s own online publishing platform. If the abstract and keywords are not present below, please take this opportunity to add them now. The abstract should be a short paragraph up to 200 words in length and keywords between 5 to 10 words.

ABSTRACT

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Since the early days of the sociology of news work, sociologists have considered news work to be “socially constructed,” “purposive behavior,” “ideological construct,” “ritual behavior,” and a “gatekeeping process.” These scholarly concepts refer to ways that journalists produce news, and the factors that affect its production. Early sociology of news work perceived journalism as rational: top-down (i.e., individual, media routines, organizational, institutional) and influenced by social and cultural factors. News was understood to be a self-contained profession that was influenced by internal and external forces, and there was little acknowledgment of human agency amongst news workers, who were working with the forces of news production. Yet, since the emergence of the Internet and the potential for audience members to be involved in news production processes, qualitative sociological accounts of news work see journalism as a complex web of networks. This change in perception poses challenges for scholars who conceive and deploy methodological, conceptual, and practical studies on news work.

KEYWORDS gatekeeping; journalism; news production; news work; norms; practices; sociology

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