Rethinking Hard and Soft News Production: From Common Ground to Divergent Paths

Abstract

The twin issues of recent changes in journalistic phenomena and how they afford theory development are addressed by depicting a key transformation in the former-the increase in the frequency and volume of content dissemination in online news-and using this depiction to examine the current heuristic value of the conceptual distinction between hard and soft news. An ethnographic study of online news production at the largest online newspaper in Argentina is used to show that a growing separation in the temporal patterns of hard and soft news production is intertwined with major differences in critical aspects of editorial practice in which the common ground between hard and soft news work has traditionally been assumed to be significant. This finding challenges a dominant strain in the literature that underscores a blurring of the differences between hard and soft news. Because central elements of this case resonate with developments identified in several other settings, this study suggests rethinking some notions about the distinction between hard and soft news.

Through a different gate: An automated content analysis of how online news and print news differ

“…A content analysis cannot provide evidence what has caused the difference we found. Nevertheless, for instance, it seems very plausible to assume that it is the high workload in online journalism that affects the form and the content of online news (Boczkowski, 2009;Mitchelstein and Boczkowski, 2009;Witschge and Nygren, 2009). In our data, we saw that some newsrooms even publish more articles online than offline.…”

“…In particular, journalists working in an online environment have to produce more stories and have to work much faster than their print colleagues (Bivens, 2008;Witschge and Nygren, 2009). Also, they have to work on several tasks at the same time (Boczkowski, 2009;Mitchelstein and Boczkowski, 2009;Quandt, 2008) and have less time for fact-checking because of the high speed in which stories must be published (Cassidy, 2006). Occasionally, even ethical standards are violated in order to be fast enough (Agarwal and Barthel, 2013;Cassidy, 2006).…”

Hard and soft news: A review of concepts, operationalizations and key findings

“…The reason for this is that some authors (implicitly) have in mind other additional characteristics like timeliness and assume that certain topics have those characteristics in common. Some authors (2) use characteristics of the journalistic production process (for an overview see Boczkowski, 2009). For example, hard news is characterized as being timely, needing urgent dissemination or by the type of scheduling.…”

“…Lehman-Wilzig and Seletzky, 2010;Tuchman, 1973), why media makers turn from hard to soft news (e.g. Zelizer, 2004), how those forms of news are produced (Boczkowski, 2009), what their difference means from a feminist perspective (Lahva, 2009), and what effects hard and soft news has on audiences (Grabe et al, 2001;Patterson, 2000;Prior, 2003). These effects and their normative implications have been debated controversially (Patterson, 2000;Zaller, 2003).…”

¿(Para) ciudadanos o espectadores? Periodismo político chileno y sus modelos profesionales de aproximación a la audiencia

“…Estudios que han analizado la forma en que el periodismo aborda a la audiencia en sus contenidos a partir de la distinción entre ciudadanos y consumidores, tienden a asociar esta dos opciones, respectivamente, con la diferenciación entre hard y soft news (Boczkowski, 2009), y entre prensa de élite y popular (Franklin, 1997). En concreto, estos estudios apuntan a la idea de que, mientras la prensa de élite se relaciona con contenidos vinculados al interés público, la prensa popular se asocia a modelos de orientación comercial (Örnebring y Jönsson, 2004).…”