Newsroom ethnography in a field perspective

Abstract

The reflexive sociology of Pierre Bourdieu offers a promising analytical framework for extending the insights offered by the classical tradition of ethnographic newsroom studies. On a methodological level, Bourdieu’s analytical framework has the potential to help us address one of the key questions in ethnographic research: how should we theorise and empirically investigate context? The question is, not least, practical in nature. When it comes to newsroom ethnography, one of the traditional problems concerns the ‘invisibility’ of certain structures such as the political economy of everyday news work which guides journalist practice. By employing the analytical concepts of ‘journalistic field’, ‘news habitus’ and ‘newsroom capital’, reflexive sociology offers a research strategy for simultaneously studying journalistic practices and the structures that enable and constrain them. A case study of Danish news values is used as a vehicle for presenting Bourdieu’s field theory, which is discussed in relation to newsroom studies more generally. It shows how the ‘context’, often missing in ethnographic studies, can be analysed using the framework of reflexive sociology.

Challenged by the state and the Internet: Struggles for professionalism in Southeast Asian journalism

“…In recent years, Pierre Bourdieu's fi eld theory (1984,1993,2005) has gained increased recognition as an analytical tool within journalism studies (e.g., Benson & Neveu, 2005;Benson, 2013;Willig, 2012;Willig et al, 2015). By viewing society as structured around the Emilie Lehmann-Jacobsen Article: Challenged by the state and the Internet opposition between economic and cultural capital and diff erentiated into a number of semi-autonomous fi elds separated by their own specifi c logics and internal rules, Bourdieu provides a theoretical framework to understand how social action is structured in terms of power relations.…”

La muerte de la exclusiva: efectos de trasladar el periodismo a Internet

“…Enlazando el marco teórico interpretativo con la metodología de investigación, Ida Willig (2013) Bourdieu ofrece una estrategia analítica para la investigación de la problemática epis temológica permitiendo saltar la distancia entre estructura y agencia, entre el nivel micro y macro, en una aproximación relacional, constructivista y estructuralista. Esto hace de la perspectiva de campo un arma que se adapta al marco de los estudios etnográficos, [...] porque es más que teoría.…”

“…Por eso los inte grantes del campo las aceptan, porque siempre ha sido así y ellos las incorporan desde el sentido común (Willig, 2013). La práctica de la noticia exclusiva tenía todas las ca racterísticas para arraigarse en la cultura del papel: tenía una vida como mínimo de 24 horas (aunque hemos visto el caso de un periodista que, buscando las noticias antes de un festivo, lograba incrementar su duración), lo cual impregnó el habitus profe sional, convirtiéndose en una fuente de reconocimiento y, por tanto, de obtención de capital.…”

The People Behind the Press: Building Social Capital in Networked News Models

“…The aims of these workshops were to deliver instruction about an aspect of doing Journalism, and provide an opportunity for research participants to socialise with each other (for a timeline, refer to the procedure section in appendix B). This mimics the practices of offline newsrooms as detailed in newsroom ethnographies (Anderson, 2011;Willig, 2013), and online networks. The principal investigator conducted the 3rd and 4th offline and online workshops, the first 45 minutes of the workshop was dedicated to reading and/or writing articles on Social Journalism in these instances.…”

“…Recently, this has been represented largely by newsroom ethnographies (Anderson, 2011;Willig, 2013), and studies focusing on audiences, and their use of media innovations (Becker & Schönbach, 2013;Schrøder, 2015). However, this area of the literature tends to feature an eclectic array of theories to choose from, such as change management theories (Gade, 2004), diffusion of innovation theory (Dearing, 2009), and actor-network theory (Turner, 2005).…”