Journal of Communication ISSN 0021-9916

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Journalism Studies and its Core

Commitments: The Making of a
Communication Field
Matt Carlson1, Sue Robinson2, Seth C. Lewis3, & Daniel A. Berkowitz4
1 Department of Communication, Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO 63108, USA
2 School of Journalism & Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA
3 School of Journalism and Communication, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, USA
4 School of Journalism and Mass communication, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA

This article conceptualizes the distinctiveness of fields of scholarship within the disci-
pline of communication through particular normative assumptions and identity prac-
tices defined here as commitments. A case study of journalism studies results in the
postulation of six conceptual commitments that define its core ontological and epistemo-
logical premises: contextual sensitivity, holistic relationality, comparative inclination,
normative awareness, embedded communicative power, and methodological pluralism.
These interrelated features articulate the central dimensions of journalism studies,
establishing the boundaries of the field and its relational, cultural, holistic, ecological,
and contextual acts of scholarship. This article provides a blueprint for other communi-
cation scholars to address assumptions and commitments that situate and define their
subdisciplines as distinct fields.

Keywords: Journalism, Journalism Studies, Communication, Relationality, Discipline, Field.

doi:10.1093/joc/jqx006

Introduction

Communication is a discipline of fields (Gonzalez, 1988). As delineated and largely

autonomous sectors of the larger communication discipline, these fields function as
naturalized subdisciplines.1 They are reproduced through conference divisions, spe-
cialized journals, departmental structures, and, perhaps most centrally, how scholars
identify and position themselves among their colleagues. But these fields also matter
epistemically and ontologically. They specify and constrain both the appropriate
objects of study and the shape of legitimate knowledge production about these
objects (Messer-Davidow, Shumway, & Sylvan, 1993). Interrogating disciplinarity
and the evolving fields within communication requires inquiry into shared ways of

Corresponding author: Matt Carlson; e-mail: mcarls10@slu.edu

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knowing as epistemic cultures or interpretive communities (Fish, 1980; Knorr

Cetina, 1999). Shared epistemic predilections, in turn, produce group identity. In
this article, we suggest that fields within the communication discipline possess
scholarly commitments—embedded and localized presumptive understandings of
how best to approach a topic of scholarly inquiry. With origins that suggest acts of
joining together (from the Latin) as well as confinement (from the English), fields’
commitments encapsulate robust areas of research.
This article focuses on the specific commitments of journalism studies as a field
of communication. There are several reasons for this selection. First, the study of
news and journalism occurs within many subdisciplines of communication, which
raises the necessary question of what “journalism studies” uniquely offers the larger
discipline. The topic alone does not define a field; deeper epistemic questions need
to be addressed to make sense of the heterogeneity of communication. Second, the
label “journalism studies” is a relatively recent designation, used mainly in the past
two decades by researchers seeking to develop an identity away from other fields. Its
relative newness and emergent status provides an opportune time for scholarly
reflexivity. Third, journalism studies confronts as its object of study a news system
experiencing upheaval and uncertainty in many parts of the world. New digital
technologies, distribution platforms, and pressing questions about the veracity and
viability of journalistic accounts in an increasingly polarized media environment
present an important moment to crystallize what it means to study journalism.
We articulate six commitments that distinguish journalism studies as a field
within the discipline of communication: contextual sensitivity, holistic relationality,
comparative inclination, normative awareness, embedded communicative power,
and methodological pluralism. These commitments assemble disparate and/or
inchoate claims from the existing literature on journalism studies into a declaration
of what journalism studies is and how it contributes to communication. They arise
from the research, but the commitments are normative in espousing the correct way
to study a phenomenon. In this sense, our argument is polemical rather than
descriptive. These commitments challenge researchers to think more deeply about
their propositions and methods, potentially spurring further innovation.
Elucidating commitments for journalism studies has two chief aims. First, it chal-
lenges scholars in this area to confront the basis for their research. Notably, our
approach does not include all research on the topic of journalism or news, but
rather invites dispute and debate to clarify the boundaries of journalism studies.
The goal is to formulate the identity of journalism studies in the positive sense of
encouraging a transparency of assumptions that underlie research. Doing so leads
to continual normative questioning of dominant commitments in the service of
strengthening scholarship. Second, this article serves as an example for other fields
within communication to explore their assumptions. Given the range of topics,
methodologies, and theories housed within the domain of communication, we pres-
ent a framework for formally articulating—and ultimately debating—the shared
commitments of other fields that have gained enough traction to emerge as distinct

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scholarly bodies. Such work not only encourages reflexivity among scholars within
communication fields, but also makes a mapping of the discipline with its areas of
convergence and divergence possible.

The roots of a journalism studies field

The scholarly antecedents of journalism studies extend back more than a century, and
can be found in many different places in the academy (Zelizer, 2004a). In their com-
prehensive overview, Wahl-Jorgensen and Hanitzsch (2009) identify four distinct yet
co-existing periods in the history of journalism research: (a) a normative emphasis in
Germanic scholarship of the 19th and 20th centuries focused on the social role of the
press, influenced by ideas from Marx, Tönnies, Weber, and others (see Hardt, 1979);
(b) an empirical turn in the United States during the first half of the 20th century that
was preoccupied with media audiences and effects but also studies of journalistic prac-
tices; (c) the sociological turn of the 1970s and 1980s, as scholars more critically and
qualitatively explored journalism’s occupational routines and ideologies, its cultures
and interpretive communities, and how such dimensions contributed to the framing of
news narratives (Shoemaker & Reese, 2014); and (d) a global-comparative turn since
the 1990s examining comparative perspectives on journalism in a globalized world
(Hanitzsch et al., 2011; Löffelholz & Weaver, 2008) and including broader efforts in
communication research to compare media systems (Hallin & Mancini, 2004). We are
now witnessing what may be a fifth turn in journalism research toward a sociotechnical
emphasis, as scholars take up the intersecting social and technological dynamics of jour-
nalism’s transformations in the digital age (Lewis & Westlund, 2015). Moreover, this
turn corresponds with upheaval in the news industry. Many legacy media organizations
grapple with fragmenting audiences, declining revenues, and other challenges associated
with the rise of digital, social, and mobile media technologies. In journalism studies,
there has been new urgency to develop concepts and methods sensitive to technological
changes affecting news (Peters & Broersma, 2013; Steensen & Ahva, 2015), the role of
participatory audiences (Lewis, 2012; Robinson, 2011), and the relevancy of past theo-
retical understandings such as gatekeeping (Vos & Heinderyckx, 2015).
Amid industry changes, the field of journalism studies has continued to grow
and gain an institutional foothold. In 2000, the simultaneous launch of the journals
Journalism: Theory, Practice, and Criticism and Journalism Studies gave new visibil-
ity to journalism research from an international array of scholars, and both journals
remain influential within communication. The Journalism Studies Division of the
International Communication Association (ICA), which began in 2004, has main-
tained approximately 600 members since 2013, making it the fourth-largest division
of ICA. Meanwhile, by 2015 the Journalism Studies Section had become the second-
largest at the European Communication Research and Education Association, and
the Journalism Research and Education Section of the International Association for
Media and Communication Research and the biennial Future of Journalism confer-
ence at Cardiff University continue to be popular.

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Even with this growth, journalism studies occupies a precarious place in the
academy with its link to a specific profession and an institutional proximity to jour-
nalism education, particularly in the United States. Many journalism scholars tend
to be former journalists who teach the trade—skills classes—and yet, for the most
part, are housed in humanities or social science programs that emphasize theory
instead of practice. This begs the question of the relationship of journalism studies
research to education and also to practice, as well as the fraught role of the “hacka-
demic” (Harcup, 2011) straddling different worlds (Reese & Cohen, 2000).
Journalism studies is caught between maintaining critical distance from its object of
study and informing the future of journalism education. This is a complicated bal-
ance as journalism education confronts the diminishment of legacy media organiza-
tions (Creech & Mendelson, 2015; Marron, 2016).
This snapshot places the uncertainty and fear plaguing the news industry in
much of the developed world alongside the growth of journalism studies as a field.
This juxtaposition indicates the importance of examining journalism in this
moment. The fate of journalism attracts attention, and rightly so, for many have
equated the free flow of ideas with the state of our governments, our communities,
and even our souls. Although movements—in academia and elsewhere—blur the
boundaries between journalism and other forms of media and communication, we
argue that journalism itself—that is, the primary sourcing, producing, and sharing
of information about public affairs by independent professionals and amateurs alike—
is fundamentally different from other kinds of communicative genres and thus
demands a specific scholarly area. At this vital juncture for journalism, we must
question and refine the field.

Defining the key commitments of journalism studies

In proclaiming journalism studies to be a distinct field of communication scholar-

ship, we offer the following definition: Journalism studies examines the realm of
informative, public texts involving news and the people, organizations, professions,
institutions, and material artifacts and technologies that produce those texts as well
as the individuals and multivariate forces shaping their circulation and consump-
tion. Rather than approaching these texts myopically, journalism studies adopts the
understanding of news media as part of societal ecosystems in which all actions—
and non-actions—have ramifications for other parts of the ecology. Journalism
studies encompasses a mid-range set of theories drawn from not only media sociol-
ogy but also anthropology, psychology, gender, race and ethnicity studies, political
economy, global studies, postmodernism, science and technology studies, and other
disciplines and perspectives. This combination of theoretical hybridity with a critical
focus on the communicative power of news defines journalism studies. Thus, jour-
nalism studies is, in essence, an empirically driven inquiry into understanding and
explaining ways in which journalism reifies power structures, social identities, and
hierarchies. It focuses on how people construct meaning and situate themselves in

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the world via journalism as well as how democracy and other political regimes are
reinforced (and undermined) through information flows.
Carving out the space of journalism studies from the universe of scholarship on
news is about establishing a normative framework recognizing its central commit-
ments rather than categorizing this or that study as inside or outside the boundaries
of journalism studies. Rigid definitions only detract from the rich variety of work
being done and the overall benefits this field has to offer. With this aim in mind,
this section draws from the literature on journalism to articulate a series of key con-
ceptual “commitments” that animate journalism studies as a distinct and fruitful
scholarly project. Deriving from the Latin committere, “commitment” combines the
idea “to unite” or “connect” (com meaning “with”) with mittere, which means to
“send” or “let go” (Commitment, 2015). It evolved into a “pledge” or “promise”
from the Anglo-French in the late 18th century. The word “commitments” reflects a
shared normative perspective from within the journalism studies field that must be
acknowledged, if not adhered to. Not all studies or scholars will meet each of the
commitments; it is not a checklist or a litmus test, but rather an attempt to enunci-
ate the prevalent commitments that support journalism studies as a distinct field
within the communication discipline.
The sections below identify six interrelated commitments that accentuate core
dimensions of journalism studies:

• contextual sensitivity
• holistic relationality
• comparative inclination
• normative awareness
• embedded communicative power
• methodological pluralism

None of these dimensions is unique to journalism studies. Many other fields

espouse similar commitments as part of their own efforts to identify the normative
assumptions embedded in their research.2 But, as a whole, these commitments coa-
lesce into a particular perspective optimized for the challenges of studying the com-
plexities of contemporary journalism. They commitments comprise the heart of
journalism studies scholarship.
Contextual sensitivity
The most basic assumption within journalism studies research is a commitment to
contextual sensitivity that places objects of study in their political, economic, cul-
tural, organizational, and social settings. The news is never a free-floating text, but
rather the product of complex human, organizational, social, and technological
arrangements. Journalism studies approaches context as a constituting and con-
straining set of forces shaping how news is made and how journalism is understood.
From normative constellations to infrastructural configurations, examining context
remains vital to the project of evaluating the creation, circulation, and consumption

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of news. A commitment to contextual sensitivity underscores how journalism stud-

ies is always questioning what journalism is in any time or place.
The insistence on foregrounding context may not seem overtly radical within
the social sciences, but it does mark perhaps journalism studies’ biggest departure
from the orthodoxical legacy of objective journalism and its concomitant insistence
on detachedness that positions journalists as separate from what they cover (Zelizer,
2004b). Even if the grip of objectivity has loosened somewhat, professional auton-
omy continues to insist on separation (Waisbord, 2013). The mythology of news
and newsworthiness as external from the journalist is rejected in favor of a perspec-
tive that insists on news as the product of human practice (Berkowitz, 1997).
Journalism is a form of cultural production that is not separate from the world, but
inextricably implanted into and part of it. Simply put, journalists are humans with
identities that shape their perceptions (Eason, 1986).
Beyond challenging the orthodoxy of journalistic detachment, a commitment to
contextual sensitivity brings an openness to local differences as to what journalism
means or how it is practiced, especially across global geographies and physical-
virtual realms. For example, all newsmaking involves subsidy in order to make news
viable. Yet different forms of generating revenue stem from distinct political and
market systems, sometimes even varying within a single system (Altschull, 1995).
By casting aside assumptions of journalistic universality, contextual sensitivity inter-
rogates how journalists and other actors make sense of journalism, as well as the
conditions in which such sensemaking occurs.
A vital part of a commitment to context is a reflexive awareness of temporal pat-
terns. Over the past decade or more, a primary focus in journalism studies has been
change—changes concerning technology, the fiscal concerns of the profession, the
economic relationships surrounding it, audiences and news reach, practices and
practitioners, and function, identity, and culture. As researchers, we must connect
these transformations and transitions to the larger social life and structures of which
journalism is one part. This begins with a necessarily measured perspective. Change
narratives accrue attention because of the decline of legacy media and the rise of
new digital news forms. This environment requires new conceptualizations to cap-
ture how news is consumed and how it circulates (e.g., Peters & Broersma, 2013;
Steensen & Ahva, 2015) as well as the heterogeneity of mediated discourse where
the boundaries of journalism are not so set (Carlson & Lewis, 2015; Chadwick,
2013). Journalism studies has much to offer in confronting a shifting media envi-
ronment, such as in clarifying the roles and relationships between humans and
machines (Lewis & Westlund, 2015; Primo & Zago, 2015) or in exploring failure as
well as success (Anderson, 2013; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2017). But as part of understand-
ing change, journalism studies adopts a long view drawing on history to appreciate
what endures as much as what arises.
Finally, as a normative commitment to examining journalism in situ, contextual
sensitivity obliges researchers to confront how their own understandings and biases
shape their work. All research is contextual, as all researchers are embedded in

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complex institutional and cultural milieus. Reflexivity—of the personal self, but also
of one’s cultural, organizational, and institutional positionality—necessarily exposes
how assumptions influence findings. Efforts at engaging reflexivity have been prom-
inent in other fields based on human meaning-making (e.g., anthropology), but are
lacking in journalism studies.
When journalism research fails to examine context, it results in a static view of
journalism as a social actor. Such acontextuality may treat news texts as an indepen-
dent variable, having some effect on an audience without accounting for the variety
of forces bearing on the creation of a particular news text at a particular time and a
particular place. Such reductionism may make sense outside of journalism studies
where news is only one input in a complex communicative system (e.g., health com-
munication messages), but it does not fit journalism studies’ core goal of under-
standing journalism. Rather, contextual sensitivity demands that research fully
appreciate as many dynamics at work as possible in the study of any given journalis-
tic phenomena.

Holistic relationality
A commitment to contextuality dispels an isolated view of journalism, but context
must be recognized as more than merely a setting. This leads to a commitment to
holistic relationality as a way of understanding journalism as inherently situated
within and formed by a system of interacting actors, artifacts, and activities
(Carlson, 2017; Lewis & Westlund, 2015; Shoemaker & Reese, 2014). Journalism
studies research untangles and represents how journalism is co-created. A news-
room may seem like a confined space, but it is a place where journalists interact
with managers, sources, technicians, and audience members (Anderson, 2013;
Nielsen, 2012). Beyond people, journalists confront channels, technologies, and
ownership structures that shape the cultural production of news. Relationality
invites a fluid understanding of how news gets made in and through various net-
works of social and material interactions and associations (Domingo, Masip, &
Costera Meijer, 2015; Primo & Zago, 2015; Reese, 2016).
The relationality of journalism fits within Bourdieusian conceptions of journal-
ism as inherently heterogeneous, rather than a wholly autonomous field (Benson &
Neveu, 2005). Bourdieu (1998) meant this observation to be a critique of the com-
mercialization of television news in France, but it serves as a reminder that journal-
ism is always situated in relation to rather than entirely distinct from. Journalism
studies interrogates how forces external to the newsroom—ranging widely from pol-
itics to economics to ideology, and encompassing different forms and hierarchies of
influence—affect how news is created and understood (Shoemaker & Reese, 2014).
A commitment to relationality necessitates the inclusion of audiences within
journalism research as not merely consumers acted upon by news content, but
rather as active and intrinsic components of journalism as cultural practice. This
may involve the direct role of the audience as a co-creator of news, both through
back-end feedback—including comments and criticism—as well as front-end

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contributions with first-hand accounts of events (Singer et al., 2011). Even more
fundamentally, a commitment to holistic relationality extends the production of
journalism outward to include the audience. This claim is inspired by Carey’s
(1992) ritual view of communication that positions the news as a means of
community-building. Moreover, the legitimation of journalism as a cultural activity
cannot be dictated by journalists alone. It requires the formation of a particular
authority relation with the audience—a shared notion of what journalism is, who
gets to take part in it, and what everyone’s role is (Carlson, 2017).
Relationality has become more important given the expansion of mediated
voices via digital technologies. The hegemony of the traditional mass communica-
tion model has given way to one of hybridity (Chadwick, 2013) in which legacy
news media continue to operate alongside smartphone-equipped witnesses (Allan,
2013). Getting beyond whether or not these activities qualify as journalism, the
more important question is how they alter both the circulation and consumption of
information as well as suggest new means for legitimating this information (Lewis,
2012). A growing body of work emphasizes the breakdown of journalism as tradi-
tionally conceived and its reconstitution in profoundly relation-based terms—
whether in connection with the “mass self-communication” of networked users, or
in regard to developments such as semantic automation, data analysis/visualization,
and global journalism startups (Van der Haak, Parks, & Castells, 2012). Other
research on boundary objects interrogates how actors from different backgrounds
find common ground but also have opportunities to contest traditional structures
and assumed relationships of journalists to everyone else (Ananny & Crawford,
2015; Lewis & Usher, 2016). Altogether, journalism studies maintains a commit-
ment to situating journalism’s relationality, even as its boundaries blur (Loosen,
2015).
The commitment to holistic relationality may seem more idealistic than it is
realizable. After all, where do relations begin and end if one is examining a phenom-
enon holistically? What is the threshold of an appropriately relational view? Such
questions should not obscure the goal of this commitment: to push journalism
researchers to view journalism as intermeshing with a variety of other forces. This
commitment prevents researchers from making broad assumptions about journalis-
tic autonomy. Journalism’s ability to formulate norms and practices is never without
external pressures (Vos, Craft, & Ashley, 2012), chief among them being the need to
establish legitimacy outside of itself (Carlson, 2017; Schudson & Anderson, 2009).
This all happens through relationships. The failure of journalism research to recog-
nize the push and pull of these relationships strips its explanatory power and results
in only a partial view of journalism. This includes studying journalism purely from
an internalized viewpoint with only an interest in internalized rule-making, interac-
tions, and news practices, without acknowledging the external forces that shape
journalism. Such work risks being purely descriptive or administrative, rather than
forming new knowledge about journalism.

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Comparative inclination
Another extension of the contextual nature of journalism studies is wariness toward
efforts to universalize the cultures, norms, and practices of journalism. In placing
the importance of difference next to sameness, the third major commitment is the
comparative inclination of journalism studies. This entails an abiding interest in
empirical research that identifies and delineates commonalities and differences
across sites and levels of analysis (see Örnebring, 2012). At a macro level, compara-
tive inclination takes the form of careful attention to contrasting press configura-
tions, ownership structures, media systems, and political ideologies that shape the
conditions under which journalism operates. Differences by nation or region high-
light the contingencies of place while recognizing transnational patterns. Beyond
simply isolating points of comparison, such research also conceptualizes the close
connections between journalism and state power. For instance, Siebert, Peterson,
and Schramm’s Cold-War era Four Theories of the Press (1956) examined national
journalistic differences at a normative level, prompting attention not only to the
operations of the press, but also to its place in the larger cultural imagination—and
not without controversy (Nerone, 1995).
The comparative inclination can be seen in the “veritable boom” of cross-
national research on journalism (Nielsen, Esser, & Levy, 2013, p. 384). This is par-
ticularly true in studies of journalistic role conceptions (e.g., Hanitzsch et al., 2011),
patterns of news coverage (e.g., de Vreese, Banducci, Semetko, & Boomgaarden,
2006), and modes of media use (e.g., Curran et al., 2013), while less apparent in
research on the changing business of journalism around the world and its implica-
tions for democracy (Nielsen et al., 2013). The comparative inclination includes
more minute differences than the nation. Variations by medium, location, owner-
ship type, or time period all yield useful data for understanding journalism at a
micro level—and scholars would do well to integrate more than one level of com-
parison (Örnebring, 2012). For example, in a 2014 Journalism Practice special issue,
scholars compared the changing nature of community journalism around the world,
from NGOs’ attempts at video journalism in Africa (Ekdale, 2014) to the assessment
of Swedish citizen-generated journalism (Karlsson & Holt, 2014). Such studies
expose the specifics of news production transpiring in multiple places and spaces,
highlighting not only differences in culture but also the forces that shape discrete
acts of journalism.
Asserting there to be a commitment to a comparative inclination within journal-
ism studies does not equate to casting out all research that fails to compare some
variables across some context. Comparison is not always the best method of illumi-
nating how journalism works. But the underlying normative premise is the avoid-
ance of flattening journalism such that one site can stand in for all others. No single
news source can serve as an index for the rest of the news industry. Efforts to posi-
tion certain sources as synecdochic need to be scrutinized for how they assign repre-
sentativeness and for what they exclude. Journalism studies needs to look outside of

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elite news organizations (Wahl-Jorgensen & Hanitzsch, 2009, p. 12) and consider
more localy-oriented dynamics (Culver, 2014). This is a difficult proposition, as
researchers wish to hold up their findings as possessing explanatory usefulness—
often a prerequisite for scholarly publishing. As the section on methods below
attests, generalizability is a fraught goal for journalism studies. As an inclination
then, this commitment asks researchers to consider not only the contingency of
what they study, but also how sites for study are located among other sites and phe-
nomena. Failure to do so risks overlooking the situated nature of all journalism.

Normative awareness
In outlining commitments for journalism studies, the degree to which journalistic
practices are closely tied to normative commitments must be recognized. For jour-
nalists aiming to represent reality, adhering to a universal standard of behavior gives
meaning to—and legitimates—journalism. Normative protocols in newsmaking
have included the objective gathering of “facts,” a reliance on officials and experts as
authoritative, and “repair work” when rogue reporters step outside the accepted
routines. Within journalism studies, these norms are not taken for granted, but
become an important object of study. A commitment to normative awareness can
manifest itself as a form of reflexivity that examines both the explicit and implicit
assumptions that show up in the data and analyses of researchers. Such awareness
can also result in a critical stance that challenges the effects of journalism’s norma-
tive commitments on news. For example, objectivity has been analyzed as a histori-
cal manifestation (Schudson, 1978) and professional strategy (Tuchman, 1972), but
also as a tactic that obscures news reporting (Gitlin, 1980; Hallin, 1986) and reifies
problematic status quos (Mindich, 2000; Robinson & Culver, 2016).
Approaching the normative arguments of journalism as specific and contextual-
ized constructs sheds light on how norms are used to legitimate and shape journalis-
tic practices. Singer (2015), for instance, shows how journalists use norms such as
independence, verification, and accountability both to guide their work and to
defend their professional borders against non-journalists—even while the rise of
social media and entrepreneurial journalism complicate boundary maintenance.
Evoking Bourdieu, Vos and Craft (2017) explore the discursive construction of
transparency as a means of building cultural capital, calling transparency “the new
objectivity” that has entered the doxa of the profession. Deuze (2005) suggests that
an ethic of transparency accompanying the inclusion of the audience in digital con-
tent production could and should subvert journalistic values, while Allen (2008)
makes the case that emergent norms are used not to improve practices and relation-
ships, but rather as a strategic move to protect the profession’s authority. Usher
(2014, 2016) investigates how the appearance of new modes and new actors have
resulted in fundamental changes in news value systems and the ways in which
newswork happens.
Normative awareness shifts attention from news as an isolated textual form to
the ways in which it is embedded in larger discourses about journalism that

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circulate alongside any news story. As such, important questions to ask within this
context are: who speaks for journalism, to whom do they speak, where do they
speak, and how do they legitimate their claims (Carlson, 2016)? Just as importantly,
normative awareness encourages us as scholars to think carefully about the assump-
tions embedded in our research.
A commitment to normative awareness carries within it the controversial notion
that journalistic norms are not necessarily the center of journalism. After all, the lib-
eral model of the press is predicated on news fulfilling an indispensable role in dem-
ocratic societies—a normative belief that provides the ultimate criterion for
assessing news performance. The commitment to normative awareness refuses to
accept this notion as an automatic given and instead treats a norm as a complex,
reciprocal arrangement between ideal and practice. An overly simplified perspective
that accepts normative beliefs a priori errs by missing this contingency. If journalis-
tic norms are isolated as causes of practice—as mere independent variables—then
real pressures that shape news are left outside the analysis. Nonetheless, proposing
normative awareness still raises the question of what, if any, bedrock principles
should undergird journalism. By emphasizing “awareness,” this commitment
demands a reconciliation between what has been accepted as dogma and that which
is fluid and subject to transformation from many different forces.

Embedded communicative power

Our fifth commitment of journalism studies concerns journalism’s position within
the larger realm of communicative power, answering the questions that arise when
we approach journalism studies from the perspective of normative awareness.
Within the many domains of communication, journalism wields special power
given its charge of producing widely shared representations of the real (Schudson &
Anderson, 2009). Journalism is fully enshrined in normative democratic theory, but
the broad perspective of journalism studies extends its impact in a more fundamen-
tal way. News discourses give shape and meaning to the world, sorting social space
into good and bad, deviant and normal, and so forth (Carey, 1992). As a
knowledge-producing activity, journalism confers symbolic legitimacy to “autho-
rized knowers” (Fishman, 1980) while excluding others from the realm of public
discourse. It positions its audience in particular ways based on entrenched ideas of
citizenship. Thus, journalism studies takes as its starting position the cultural
importance of journalism in organizing the social world. It then scrutinizes journal-
istic beliefs and practices from this position. For example, a study of how journalists
use social media platforms can illuminate how these tools affect news production
and distribution. But journalistic practices cannot be detached from a larger interest
in how new forms spark new relationships or how changing media channels upset
core understandings of journalism (see Hermida, 2010). If journalists are to lay
claim to representing the world, then journalism studies researchers must maintain
a focus on theirs communicative power.

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Adopting a critical perspective within journalism studies involves scrutinizing

how journalists’ norms and routines produce news. Doubts over objectivity extend
at least as far back as Lippmann (1922), and later sociological work exposed journal-
ism’s ideological commitments (Gans, 1979), routinized forms of knowledge pro-
duction (Schlesinger, 1978; Tuchman, 1978), entanglement with systems of power
(Bourdieu, 1998; Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, & Roberts, 1978), and hierarchies
of influence (Shoemaker & Reese, 2014). Increasingly, new communicative forms
across a variety of platforms with both mass and niche audiences erode the bound-
aries of what “journalism” entails (Carlson & Lewis, 2015). Beyond mapping this
universe, journalism studies examines how these journalistic discourses embody,
exercise, and reflect communicative power and how they shape, benefit, subvert, or
harm the larger social space.
This embedded communicative power is manifest, for example, in which classes
of people wield power and which are left out. A growing body of work—much of it
done in other scholarly realms such as women’s studies or Afro-American studies—
wrestles with issues of gender (e.g., Harris, Mosdell, & Griffiths, 2016; Lobo,
Silveirinha, Torres da Silva, & Subtil, 2015) and race and ethnicity (e.g., Alemán,
2014; Meyers, 2013; Robinson & Culver, 2016; Robinson, 2018; Squires, 2009).
From a journalism studies perspective, the question of power moves us from the
representation of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class, religion (and so on) in the
news to the institutionalized, cultural systems that produce these representations.
Moreover, developments in digital technology that extend the range of public voices
induce further need to examine how mediated power works in relation to journal-
ism as a profession (Loke, 2012). In doing so, journalism studies scholars should
deepen their investigation of the power dynamics in a media environment in which
the expansion of mediated voices clashes with the reality of offline inequities
(Robinson, 2017).
Attending to communicative power as a core scholarly commitment for journal-
ism studies avoids the pitfall of overly descriptive or administrative research.
Studies of journalism that never move beyond the voices of a newsroom, for exam-
ple, to comment on their larger significance may end up being more for journalism
than about journalism. To illustrate this, one might seek to document how algorith-
mic or other machine-based production is taking on new roles in journalism, but
what elevates it to journalism studies would be the consideration of how these new
practices change journalism’s relationship to society and knowledge production. If
journalism studies is to secure its place as an important field of communication, it
must articulate the broader relationship between journalism and society along with
the forces working upon that relationship.

Methodologically pluralistic
Journalism studies is question-driven rather than methods-first in its orientation to
research, leading to our final core commitment of being methodologically pluralistic.
It draws on an interdisciplinary array of conceptual and methodological arenas.

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Given the emphasis above on local definitions, many scholars pursue journalists’
own understandings of their work—that is, from a production standpoint. This
invites different ways of apprehending these understandings, from large-scale multi-
national surveys to in-depth interviews to ethnographic observation in newsrooms.
But journalism research also involves content and consumption studies that range
from quantitative content analyses to close-reading textual analyses, from audience
surveys to focus groups. Furthermore, mixed methods and triangulation are com-
mon (e.g., Welbers, van Atteveldt, Kleinnijenhuis, Ruigrok, & Schaper, 2016).
Appreciating emergent news ecologies can also demand data from a number of
different levels and perspectives (Lowrey, 2012; Robinson, 2018). In his accounting
of news fact-checkers, Graves (2016) utilizes ethnographic observation, in-depth
interviews, case studies, and textual analysis. Methodological innovation, too, has
been a hallmark of journalism studies, as in adaptations of “network ethnography”
that combine ethnography and social network analysis (Anderson, 2013; Robinson,
2018), as well as in efforts to recognize non-human actants (Lewis & Westlund,
2015) and other material “objects of journalism” (Anderson & De Maeyer, 2015) as
legitimate methodological participants. Indeed, drawing on actor–network theory
(e.g., Domingo et al., 2015; Primo & Zago, 2015) and related perspectives on tech-
nology, artifacts, and networked relationships (e.g., Ananny, 2013; Nielsen, 2012;
Parasie & Dagiral, 2013), journalism studies has been a fertile ground for synthesiz-
ing novel concepts and methods to study the digitization of news through its people
and places, products and processes, and the interrelationships among them
(Boczkowski & Anderson, 2017; Lewis & Zamith, 2017).
A review of culturally oriented journalism studies, however, reveals a marked
tendency toward qualitative means for understanding journalism according to the
commitments outlined above. This preponderance corresponds with a shift away
from effects-based research to develop a more close-up view of journalism and its
practices (Zelizer, 1993). Ethnographies, in-depth interviews, focus groups, open-
ended surveys, textual analyses, and other qualitative techniques better reflect the
critical-cultural, big-picture methodology necessary for many questions in journal-
ism studies. Such work tends to be locally situated and comprehensively grounded,
reviewing what came before and noting the evolutionary twists and turns that have
shaped journalistic phenomena. Comparative media histories, for example, have
traced the evolution of journalism over time, thereby establishing a contextual foun-
dation for understanding the profession and its interplay with society (Chapman,
2005; Schudson, 1978). And, while sociologists engaged in newsroom ethnography
in the 1970s, a revival of this method over the past 15 years offers both a compre-
hensive accounting of newsroom change—beginning with Boczkowski (2004) and
continuing through, among others, Anderson (2013), Ryfe (2012), and Usher
(2014)—as well as methodological insights for better evaluating context (Willig,
2013) and interactions beyond the newsroom (Robinson, 2011). Indeed, a pair of
edited volumes (Paterson & Domingo, 2008) reveals the ferment of news-oriented
ethnographic experimentation around the world.

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A commitment to methodological pluralism serves as a call for journalism scho-

lars to be reflexive about the benefits and limits of any research design. Coupled
with the commitments mentioned above, methodological pluralism suggests that
instead of aiming for generalizability, journalism studies instead strives for “trans-
ferability” (Lincoln & Guba, 1985) in the drawing of connections across related phe-
nomena without the onus of universality. Such a move recognizes the vast
variability of the profession, helps uncover dominating themes that explain the
implications of transitions, and allows researchers the flexibility in studying what
seem to be endlessly emergent phenomena in this particular institution. It sacrifices
the luster of universality for the richness of analysis.
Taken together, these commitments indicate, first, a shift away from the analysis
of journalism according to assumed normative perspectives or as an unexamined
actor whose texts have effects on audiences and social institutions. Journalism—or
news, more specifically—is not reduced to the independent variable, but instead
invites scrutiny as part of a holistic system of interlinking institutions. Second, these
commitments reject simplified perspectives that reify journalism as a single “thing”
to instead situate journalism within the larger ecological conditions of media, cul-
ture, and society. Finally, they indicate a critique of universal principles, celebrate
nuance with contextualization, and emphasize an intense awareness of relationality
while still foregrounding a concern with power. If journalism studies is to be a use-
ful field, it must recognize what its commitments are and how they contribute to an
understanding of journalism that helps make sense of its symbolic power.

Conclusion: the commitments of communication

This article isolates journalism studies as its own distinct field of communication.
Our arguments about what constitutes journalism studies must be recognized as a
purposive form of academic boundary work. Identifying journalism studies’ core
commitments and defining its central mission is a generative exercise that aligns
scholars working under the same tent to facilitate greater internal discussions and
debates. Clearly, journalism studies is not one “thing” any more than journalism is
a singular case, and we expect scholars will challenge and further develop these
commitments. But clarifying underlying assumptions is not merely about staking
out scholarly turf; it is about developing an appropriate critical and analytical
approach to a shifting news landscape. Future self-reflexive research within journal-
ism studies should work to assess and refine the particular commitments above,
which leads to illuminating discussions of what work falls inside or outside of the
field.
Beyond the scope of journalism studies, this article presents a model for
enhanced interrogation of the subdisciplinary commitments of other communica-
tion fields. This begins with a recognition that, like the subjects we examine, aca-
demics situated in specific contexts are caught in their own particular relational
dynamics with ontological and epistemological limitations and varying resources,

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 M. Carlson et al. Journalism Studies and its Core Commitments

pressures, and levels of institutional security. Self-study not only corrals a broad
swath of research but also increases reflexivity within fields. This article advocates
for clarifying the means through which a community is bound via core principles
we call commitments. Commitments are normative in nature, indicating sets of
shared assumptions about what to study and how to study it. When they are invisi-
ble, they are most powerful for directing research and creating orthodoxies.
Commitments are consequential in how they shape understandings and constrain-
ing for what they omit or proscribe. That commitments are constructs that can
vary, change, and clash is a strength rather than a weakness.
Finally, the promise embedded in the intervention of commitments moves
beyond its value for individual fields to cross-field work that examines overlapping
subdisciplinary commitments. How different fields articulate their commitments
leads to cross-fertilization when the overlapping nuances of different fields reveal
potential connections that have not been realized. Such work shines a light on the
disciplinary connections and divergences of communication (Nordenstreng, 2007).

Notes
1 We use the term “discipline” to describe communication, even if this nomenclature is
debated (Nordenstreng, 2007) along with communication’s strengths and weaknesses as a
discrete entity in the academy (Zelizer, 2016). The term “field” is used purposively to
describe distinct subdisciplines within communication as cohering around shared
understandings and recognizable institutional forms (specific journals, degrees, positions,
conferences, etc.), and therefore more than an area of specialization. What’s more, a field
is often more than just a subdivision of a discipline, as scholars in a field draw from other
disciplines.
2 Given that none of these commitments are specific to journalism studies, they provide
useful starting points for other fields both inside and outside of communication to
consider their particular commitments. However, such analyses should be sensitive to
how, on the surface, a commitment may appear to be shared among separate fields but in
practice is articulated differently.

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