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This study follows the advice of scholars James Carey and Barbie Zelizer in that it takes journalism seriously. The seriousness comes from the concern that modern corporate approaches to news production are contributing to the erosion of the professional status of journalists with restrictions to storytelling routines serving as one example of this issue. Using a multiple case study method, this research presents 180 hours of newsroom observations and interviews with 62 news professionals to identify some of the constraints to local television news storytelling routines, further illuminating the struggle between market-driven news production and journalistic autonomy.

This study offers a method for analyzing the narrative content of television news videos. Very few scholars approach the study of visual narratives in television news editing because the technique is highly specialized and not commonly articulated by practitioners. However, cognitive experiments are supporting the importance of understanding the way the brain processes video messages; in particular, those coming from television news. Based in norms and routines theory, this study combines an unprecedented method of content analysis with in-depth interviews of award-winning local news editors in order to reveal a contemporary state of narrative production in television news.

Times have changed since Warren Breed published his famous study, ‘Social Control in the Newsroom’. Today, corporate owners are requiring newsroom managers to adopt marketing strategies, launching many television newsrooms into routines similar to those of their newspaper-turned-online colleagues. This exploratory case study presents data from 6 months of observations of digital training in a legacy television newsroom, including interviews with the managers who underwent the training, conversations with newsroom staff, and a survey of that staff, all to explore how managers moderate between these corporate and journalistic needs by learning what corporations require as marketing-based multiplatform production routines and by helping journalists to reconcile their traditional role identities within these new newsroom requirements.

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