Search Results

This chapter examines issues of monitoring and imitation in the online and print newsrooms of Clarín and La Nacion. The analysis reveals a greater intensity and pervasiveness in the monitoring practices and a larger reliance on technology in these practices among journalists who produce hard news than among their soft-news counterparts. It also reveals that journalists who make hard news utilize the information learned through monitoring to imitate other players in the organizational field significantly more than do their colleagues who make soft news. In addition, the account demonstrates that the monitoring and imitation actions of hard-news journalists sometimes acquire different manifestations depending on whether they work in an online or print newsroom. The changing patterns of technological infrastructures and practices also help to illuminate how monitoring and imitation emerge at the intersection of situated practices and contextual structures.

This chapter discusses homogenization of news products. It reveals the consequences of imitation in journalistic work for the resulting news products. All cases of content overlap in the print newspapers and nearly all in the online newspapers had to do with hard news. This is a clear expression of the divergent logics of hard- and soft-news production and, especially, the much higher prevalence of monitoring and imitation in the former than in the latter. A glance at the main findings regarding content overlap in hard news across the three levels of analysis reveals a homogenization of print products over time and strong evidence for homogeneity of both print and online news in the contemporary context. Further analysis shows the power of the production dynamics to generate substantive field-level effects for the resulting news product outcomes.

This introductory chapter examines various models for popularizing and democratizing news that have been influential in the United States over the past several decades. It argues that the U.S. news industry has undergone a philosophical paradigm shift, moving away from an ideal of professional autonomy and into a “postprofessional” period characterized by an affirmation that consumers' preferences should drive news production. The chapter also describes several attempts made by key groups of news producers to shift control over the news agenda away from professional expertise and put it in the hands of ordinary news consumers: the market-centered newspaper movement epitomized by Gannett's USA Today, the creation of a genre of news amid competition among the major U.S. cable news channels, and the growth of online social news sites tapping into collaborative filtering as a mechanism for democratizing the news agenda.

This chapter presents a snapshot of the main characteristics of 21st-century journalism, examining changes in its organization, practice, and performance. It also contributes to the book’s main themes by outlining links between structural changes in the news industries and shifts in journalists’ activities, attitudes, and self-perceptions. Of particular concern is the impact of the internet and more generally of digitalization. This is considered in relation to traditional print media, television, radio and also with regard to journalists’ practices, which have undergone dramatic, rapid change and disruption. The chapter then focusses on journalistic content, where according to some critics, traditional journalistic standards have been weakened by the growing ascendancy of entertainment values and by the financial need for advertising revenue. Finally, the chapter discusses identity and how journalists’ traditional concepts of self-identity have responded to the pressures described previously.

This chapter considers changing perspectives of modern time. It argues that newspapers are stuck in late-nineteenth-century modern time, raising complaints and objections to the new time regime. In contrast, television news is mired in mid-twentieth-century modern time, and the web editions of legacy media, after a moment of turbulence, returned to reflect the modernist time of an institutional memory they share. New interactive and mobile technologies create for news media a space of temporal discomfort. The modern sense of time empowered practitioners, giving them clear tools for selection and sequence, the discipline of deadlines, and the competition of the scoop and the exclusive, with the underlying assumption that time is money. The new sense of time removes their illusion of some control in a political life formerly attuned to their own news cycles.

The chapter introduces the selection of seven English newspapers owned by Indians to be scrutinized in the book’s final two chapters. It describes the history of the newspapers, ownerships, political bias as well as the change of format and layout. The latter is of particular importance as these changes indicate the massive influence telegraphic news had on a newspaper’s graphic design and formatting. Telegraphic news deeply transformed the outer appearance and the contents of newspapers, although not every newspaper under consideration was transformed in the same way. Also, as a dependent annexe to the globally operating Reuters’ news agency, Indian news agencies are taken into consideration in their attempt to gain access to local, regional, and national news production. It is in this context that telegraphic reporting in India, as elsewhere in the world, had a profound impact on the way news was produced and articles written by an emerging new professional: the journalist.

Since their emergence in 2011, mobile chat applications have gained massive user bases and given enterprising reporters a new challenge: verify truth in a set of fragmented public and private digital conversations involving journalists and audiences. This fragmentation fosters an intimacy and frankness among participants that, for journalists privy to these conversations, can deepen reporting and enhance storytelling. However, the closed nature of so many conversations means that notions of truth are highly contextual. For those who wish for a shared set of facts, chat apps pose troubling questions, such as: How can widely held truths endure as a rapidly growing form of communication encourages further political polarization and fragmentation of conversations, interpretations, and notions of truth? This chapter explores these questions, drawing on a study of 30+ interviews with reporters at major news organizations, examining the ways that reporters have used chat apps to verify claims in coverage of political unrest.