The imponderabilia of a stringer’s everyday life in Darjeeling Hills – excerpts from an ethnographer’s field diary

Learning about journalists, their culture, their shared beliefs and behaviours by immersing ourselves in their context through ethnography has emerged as a significant strand in journalism studies. Such a strand, however, is limited to studying elite media and elite journalists. It has thus, led to a substantial lacuna in understanding the sociology of news production particularly, in developing countries like India. Taking this as a point of departure this paper looks at a neglected but dominant workforce in the news media sector – the stringers. Based on intensive field research and building on participant observation, and employing emic and etic perspectives, this paper offers a thick description of the everyday life of a stringer. The researcher argues that the shared agreements and the manifestation of value attached to stringers are lopsided since stringers often find themselves at the lowest rung of the value structure within the journalistic reporting community resulting in a meta-social paradox. Stringers are the culture hero and the custodians of the community’s memory yet remaining the quintessential other.

Making health news: Examining how health influencers drive coverage of maternal and child healthcare issues in Nigerian newspapers

Nigeria is a developing country with varied developmental challenges. It has one of the worst maternal and child healthcare (MCH) indices, globally. The media, as a vital element within the society, has the potential to contribute to improving MCH through appropriate framing and communication of MCH issues. Achieving media inclusion poses a challenge as media contents are often products of varied power relations. Extant studies have established that health is often not primed in Nigerian newspapers where politics and business hold sway. News media contents are also influenced by varied factors which exists both within and outside of news media organisations. Premised on sociology of news as critical perspective, this study examines power relations in newspaper representation of MCH issues in Nigeria. Combining content analysis of MCH-related stories in newspapers with in-depth interview of newspaper health editors, it explores factors and underlying reasons driving coverage of MCH. It finds that government, local and international aid agencies, and civil societies often influence coverage of MCH issues. These groups drive media representation of MCH through established journalistic routine and reporter-source relations, often favouring priming of official news sources and ‘powerful’ elements within the society, as a necessity for maximising limited news media resources. This paper identifies various forms in which these groups manipulates media representation of MCH, urging the media to be more proactive in driving agenda for improved MCH for the citizenry, and not accede to satisfying peculiar interests over public interest.

“Mapping” Media Spaces: Smoothness, Striation, and the Expropriation of Desire in American Journalism from Postindustrial to Datafied Capitalism

The future of journalism in the digital age is a major topic of both vocational and academic debate—as is the question of whether anything is “new” with the rise of the digital more broadly. This article argues for a redeployment of Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of “smooth” and “striated” space. Conducting a synthesis of a new wave of scholarship on digital journalism with the body of “sociology of news” literature from the late 1970s and 1980s, it maps continuities and intensifications of processes in the interplay between journalistic desire and the constraints of liberal capitalism, while also noting a key shift in the relationship between journalism and dominant economic classes, concomitant with a new form of “datafied capitalism.”

Understanding encountering of story leads: A case of newspaper reporting behavior at Midwestern metropolitan-area newspapers

An interdisciplinary approach explores how journalists embrace the unexpected as part of their reporting routines using Erdelez’s framework of information encountering from the study of human information behavior and the concepts of news routines and story ideation from journalism studies. This paper provides a fresh perspective on the sociology of news in finding that the participating journalists embraced the unexpected by routinizing encountering of story leads and opening themselves to the opportunities they provide.

Authority signaling: How relational interactions between journalists and politicians create primary definers in UK broadcast news

How journalists construct the authority of their sources is an essential part of how news comes to have power in politics and how political actors legitimize their roles to publics. Focusing on economic policy reporting and a dataset of 133 hours of mainstream broadcast news from the 5-week 2015 UK general election campaign, we theorize and empirically illustrate how the construction of expert source authority works. To build our theory, we integrate four strands of thought: an important, though in recent years neglected, tradition in the sociology of news concerned with ‘primary definers’; the underdeveloped literature on expert think tanks and media; recent work in journalism studies advocating a relational approach to authority; and elements from the discursive psychology approach to the construction of facticity in interactive settings. Our central contribution is a new perspective on source authority: the identification of behaviors that are key to how the interactions between journalists and elite political actors actively construct the elevated authoritative status of expert sources. We call these behaviors authority signaling. We show how authority signaling works to legitimize the power of the United Kingdom’s most important policy think tank and discuss the implications of this process.

A practice approach to the study of news production

Among news production scholars, interest in the theories of Bourdieu, Giddens, Latour, and related authors has grown in the last 20 years. However, few have recognized that these theories contribute to a broader practice perspective in social theory that traces back to the writings of Heidegger, and more directly, to Wittgenstein. In this essay, I outline four basic elements of this approach that are shared across these theories. Among these elements is the notion that social action is organized into discrete practices, and that these practices are produced and reproduced in their performance by individuals. I then assess the practice scholarship in the sociology of news in the context of these elements. I show that while a great deal of research has focused on news practices, relatively little has investigated journalistic performance. Thus, the field has not exploited, as well as it might, the panoply of tools and concepts developed by practice theorists.