Reporting and the transformations of the journalistic field: US news media, 1890-2000

Abstract

How have journalistic ideals of public service arisen? To what extent do journalists live up to these ideals? Can we make any claims as to the social conditions that this performance depends on? Using Bourdieu’s theory of fields of cultural production, this article addresses these questions with evidence from the history of journalism in the United States. What is most distinctive about modern journalism is a specific practice: active news-gathering or reporting. This practice became common in the 1860s and 1870s with the emergence of journalism as a field with its own stakes, relatively independent from political advantage or literary merit. The power of field-specific capital to organize practices in the media has varied since then. The field consolidated in the era from 1890 to 1914, with the newspaper industry expanding. In the interwar years, the boundary between PR and journalism became blurry and the institutional basis for active news-gathering declined. Under favorable economic and political conditions reporting practices, including local and investigative reporting, flourished between 1945 and1970 across media forms. In the past 40 years the importance of active news-gathering has declined.

Is journalism a transnational field? Asymmetrical relations and symbolic domination in online news

“…Yet these similarities between US and French online news should not mask important differences between the two countries. Take the role of market forces: the amount of capital invested in news websites is much higher in the United States than France, consistent with the stronger role of corporate money in US media (Benson, ; Krause, ). In the United States, major companies such as AOL, Time Warner, Comcast and Microsoft, as well as venture capital funds, have invested massively in the online news business.…”

News Crawls in Local TV News: Do They Help or Hinder Information Recall and Retention

“…In 1948, WPIX produced the first fifteen-minute local television newscast, in New York City, utilizing the "talking head" format (Klinenberg & Krause, 2005;Hinds, 1995). Beginning in the 1960s, stations began to differentiate their newscasts using elements such as identifiable personalities, music, b-roll, and graphics.…”

The Politics of Interfield Antagonisms

“…Bourdieu's field theory has been used to analyse the internal dynamics of the journalistic field, and to compare journalistic fields in different national contexts (see, e.g., Benson 2005;Benson and Hallin 2007;Dickinson and Memon 2012;Krause 2011). However, studies of the power relations between the journalistic field and other social fields have been less common, despite the theory's general assumption about "the media's" capacity to shape the coordinates and subjectivities of agents elsewhere.…”