Stephen D. Reese - Theories of Journalism

Theories of Journalism
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication

Stephen D. Reese
Subject: Journalism Studies Online Publication Date: Aug 2016
DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.83
Summary and Keywords
Journalism seeks to observe and communicate what it learns of social importance, something
called news, and in doing so is always in the process of creating a public by bringing it into
synchronized conversation with itself. Theories of journalism provide explanatory frameworks
for understanding a complex combination of social practice, product, and institutional
arrangement. Journalism’s late 20th-century professionalized, high modern version, which is still
recognizable today, has continued to change, particularly with the disruptive effect of the
Internet, as it has evolved to absorb other forms. The boundaries of profession and news
organization have been destabilized within this rapidly shifting media terrain, but still there
remain productive approaches for systematically organizing knowledge around the concept of
journalism.
The early 20th-century perspectives on journalism—before becoming linked to the

communication field and a more narrow media effects focus—were at home in the University of
Chicago school of sociology, which emphasized community-based, multi-method participant
observation. A sociology of news perspective resurfaced with more ethnographic research in
newsrooms in the 1950s, and theories of journalism have continued to highlight the
ethnographic method, especially in understanding the impact of technology on a more digitally-
oriented journalism practice. A hierarchy of influences perspective, developed by Shoemaker
and Reese, incorporates other perspectives beyond the ethnographic by considering factors at
multiple levels of analysis that shape media content, the journalistic message system, from the
micro to the macro: individual characteristics of specific newsworkers, their routines of work,
organizational-level concerns, institutional issues, and the larger social system. At each level,
one can identify the main factors that shape the symbolic reality constituted and produced by
journalism, as well as how these factors interact across levels and compare across different
contexts (e.g., national, technological).
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A hierarchy of influences model worked well to disentangle the relationships among

professionals and their routines, and the news organizations that housed them, which cohered
into institutions. But journalism has been newly problematized, destabilizing and restructuring
both the units and levels of analysis in journalism theorizing. The networked public sphere is
constituted with new assemblages: of newswork, institutional arrangements, and global
connections, which give rise to new emerging deliberative spaces. Journalism theories now have
as much interest in process as product, in assemblage as outcome, but still need to be concerned
with the nature of quality of these spaces. What shape do they take on and with what
implications for healthy democratic discourse?
Keywords: journalism, assemblage, levels of analysis, networked journalism, profession, media sociology,
hierarchy of influences, deliberative spaces
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Introduction
Journalism seeks to observe and communicate what it learns of social importance, something
called news, and in doing so is always in the process of creating a public by bringing it into
synchronized conversation with itself. Theories of journalism provide explanatory frameworks
for understanding a complex combination of social practice, product, and institutional
arrangement. Journalism’s late 20th-century professionalized, high modern version, which is still
recognizable today, has continued to change, particularly with the disruptive effect of the
Internet, as it has evolved to absorb other forms. Unlike many other more settled fields,
journalism research has been obsessed with the very definition of its core concept—what
journalism is. The boundaries of profession and news organization have been destabilized within
this rapidly shifting media terrain, but still there remain productive approaches for
systematically organizing knowledge around the concept of journalism. In this article I review
some of these approaches using levels of analysis framework and consider ways this perspective
must be adapted to new conceptions of this rapidly changing field.
Theories of journalism, as Löffelholz (2008) observed, come from diverse perspectives,

beginning with early normative concerns leading to more empirical analysis of how journalists
work. Adding a systems perspective attempted to position the individual as part of a larger
system (e.g., Rühl, 1969) and to understand news as a cultural product. The early 20th-century
research perspectives on journalism, before they became linked to the communication field and
a more narrow media effects focus, were at home in the University of Chicago school of
sociology, which emphasized community-based, multi-method participant observation including
issues of communication and public opinion. Early figures like Robert Park had an interest in the
newspaper and how it not just affected but created community itself by extending social
networks—regarding communities as existing in communication. The post-WWII shift of
sociological influence to Columbia University, and related communication research along with it,
displaced this more holistic concern with a short-term effects, variable-analytic, social-
psychology perspective on questions of interest to the burgeoning mass consumer industries—
and to the mass media built on their advertising revenue.
Theories of journalism have largely been situated within this tradition of communication
research more generally as it developed during this period. As a result they have shared a
preoccupation with the large-scale mass media in the U.S. and Western Europe, and the
professionals operating within those media institutions. Journalism has been regarded as having
vital functions for the larger social system, leaving the task of research to explore the process of
journalistic communication and ways audiences responded to news messages. This left relatively
less room for more critical questions concerning how journalism fits within the larger social
structure—including who makes news, what counts as news, and whose interests news serves.
(Gitlin, 1978; Reese & Ballinger, 2001). Aligned with journalism and mass communication
education—which in turn was concerned with training for media industries—research took on a
strongly normative character in regarding journalism as a crucial underpinning of democratic
society. That was what journalists themselves believed, serving as a justification for their
professional status and legal protections.
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Shift to a Sociology of News
Running counter to this process and effects tradition, a couple of early newsroom studies, in
particular, signaled special concerns with journalism as a social practice. David Manning White’s
(1950) classic study of the news “gatekeeper” suggested that news is what the “newspaperman”
says it is, while Warren Breed’s (1955) study of social control in the newsroom, showed how
journalists absorbed news policy, even if that policy was not always explicit, and how the tension
between the different motivations of journalists and the (often more conservative) owner needed
to be reconciled to make the system work. As Reese and Ballinger (2001) have argued, the
findings of White and Breed were safely interpreted at the time within the prevailing narrative,
or received history of the field, as upholding the status quo: namely that the gatekeeper and
newspaper publisher would select stories in the interest of the community of which they were
part. This blunted the critical edge and subversive quality of such research, which threatened to
make journalism decision-making newly problematic.
Journalism professionals have historically adhered to a philosophical, realist view of the world in
which news of external events is “out there” waiting to be gathered and disseminated. But this
process is a social construction determined by a number of larger forces, making the search for
these forces and understanding how they interact a logical focus of theoretical development.
Theories of journalism have followed a sociological turn, a perspective that brings with it
questions of power, control, structures, institutions, class, and community: all concepts that, as
Waisbord (2014) observes, have been applied to journalism research more than other
communication subfields, yielding an area often called “media sociology.” Broadly speaking, this
approach to journalism ties social structures to symbolic formations, seeking to understand how
social reality takes shape and foregrounding normative concerns of how well journalism is
working under these arrangements.
Social protest and upheaval in the 1960s brought greater concern about how journalism was
implicated in a discredited power structure, leading to greater interest in the inner workings of
institutional journalism—as represented most visibly by a number of newsroom ethnographies.
Stonbely (2013) identifies a group of such studies that, after a long hiatus, followed in the later
60s and 70s the earlier example of White and Breed. These studies, she argues, represent a
“cornerstone” of American media sociology, covering that “legacy” period of media development
centered around a handful of major broadcast and print media that commanded mass audiences
and, for the most part, their trust. Among these she identifies Edward Jay Epstein’s (1974) News
from Nowhere (about network television news), Mark Fishman’s (1980) Manufacturing the
News, Gaye Tuchman’s (1978) Making News (about local newspapers), and Herbert
Gans’ (1979) Deciding What’s News (about national newsmagazines and television). They all
broke with the prevailing approaches to communication research by emphasizing news as an
organizational product that had to be socially constructed, not simply transmitted to the
audience. These became classic examples of newsroom sociology, time-consuming but rich in
detail, and until recently served to anchor our understanding of how newswork happens.
The sociology of news has continued to highlight the ethnographic method, long marginalized
within mainstream sociology. The method, however, has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years
across the social sciences with its greater capacity to engage public interest with accessible
storytelling—indeed, a quality more closely aligned with journalism itself. Ethnography and its
participant observation have proved especially useful in understanding with close observation
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the impact of technology on a more digitally-oriented journalism practice. A new wave of news
ethnographies has been precipitated particularly by the migration of news online. Prominent
examples include the work of Boczkowski (2004, 2010), especially in showing how technology
has affected the newsroom organization and practice. His work on Argentinian newsrooms
shows the paradox of striving in an age of digital abundance to conform to the news competition.
Ryfe’s (2012) analysis of three American newsrooms showed that journalists have not adapted
very well to change, using the tensions embedded in their profession to reconfirm and justify the
same procedures they have used since before the industry upheaval.
Usher (2014) provides the most recent single-newsroom ethnography within the Gans tradition
of the New York Times, choosing an elite news organization as the embodiment of the journalism
profession. Her participant observation shows what happens when a traditional and powerful
institution must adapt to the inescapable digital world, that despite the major technological
shifts, “many of the routines and practices of news production observed in the golden era of
news ethnography remain constant” (p. 228). What is more, the routines surrounding key values
of immediacy, interactivity, and participation show remarkable similarities to a diverse host of
other online news settings (Domingo & Paterson, 2011; Paterson & Domingo, 2008).
Levels of Analysis: Hierarchy of Influences Perspective
Although ethnographies provide a nuanced, insider view of a social setting, they can privilege
the immediate context of the newsmaking experience and work toward organizational
functionalism. That is, everything observed is easily assumed to be there for a good reason, and
selecting one organizational site elevates it as the key player in news gatekeeping decisions.
Thus, beyond the first-hand observation of newswork, primarily within an organizational setting,
a broader conception of the sociology of news is needed that incorporates the ethnographic
perspective but includes other levels of analysis, including individual professional issues and
larger macro social structures impinging on journalism. A hierarchy of influences model,
developed by Shoemaker and Reese (2014, 1996), does this by considering factors at multiple
levels of analysis that shape media content, the journalistic message system, from the micro to
the macro: individual characteristics of specific newsworkers, their routines of work,
organizational-level concerns, institutional issues, and larger social-systems. The model “takes
into account the multiple forces that simultaneously impinge on the media and suggest how
influence at one level may interact with that at another” (2014, p. 1). At each level, one can
identify the main factors that shape the symbolic reality constituted and produced by journalism,
how these factors interact across levels and compare across different contexts (e.g., national,
technological).
This approach raises, especially at the individual level, the notion of structure and agency. As a
human activity, journalism naturally involves the agency of individuals, which is both constrained
and enabled by the structures surrounding them. Ascribing relatively more agency to individuals
leads to a greater emphasis on the personal characteristics that guide them (the crusading
journalist myth and biographical tradition underscore this tendency); an emphasis on macro
structures, on the other hand, tends to de-emphasize this personal agency. A political economic
perspective, for example, has the effect of rendering journalists as mere tools of class and other
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interests. Taking these issues into account, journalism research can be organized by these
hierarchical levels as reviewed below, with examples of new conceptual issues.
Individual
On the most micro level, we assume that individual creative, professional practitioners matter
and knowing who they are helps understand the larger journalistic project—who is being drawn
to the profession, how adequately they reflect society, and what professional values they
support. The individual level of analysis considers the personal traits of newsworkers, news
values they adhere to, professional roles they take on, and other demographic features (e.g.,
gender, race, class). In spite of the traditional notion of professional “objective” detachment, we
assume these characteristics matter in their work. Journalists make decisions based on
psychological-level attributes, but they operate within a web of constraints.
Thus, this level of analysis considers the relative autonomy of individuals, how they are both
shaped by, contribute to, and identity with their surrounding organizations. Defining news
professionals as those working in major decision-making capacities for media organizations,
Weaver and colleagues (e.g., Weaver, Beam, Brownlee, Voakes, & Wilhoit, 2007) have tracked
the composition of that group over several years, along with how they perceive their roles.
Surveying journalists working for traditional news organizations shows perceptions by those
individuals most invested in the shrinking professional core. They see journalism heading in the
wrong direction, have declining job satisfaction, but give greater importance to their role in
analyzing complex problems and investigating official claims (Wilnat & Weaver, 2014).
Although many such studies seek to capture a description of the profession as a whole, the
individual level certainly draws attention to the fact that there is no single professional type, not
even within national cultures. As professional environments are shifting rapidly, analysis at this
level helps understand how professional roles relate to larger structures, serving as a means of
adaptation and survival. In the dynamic Chinese media context, for example, Hassid (2011) has
identified four types of journalists: American style professionals, communist professionals
(“throat and tongue” of the Communist Party), workaday journalists (corrupt, anything for a
price), and advocate professionals, who push the envelope and are committed to ideals of
transparency, openness, and public participation. Geall (2013) argues that these are the
professionals especially equipped for survival, who can exploit the openings provided by the
chaotic aspects and contradictions of the Chinese media environment.
Routines
The routines level is concerned with those patterns of behavior that form the immediate
structures of newswork. If journalism is primarily a social practice, routines are the ways of
working that constitute that practice. They may include those unstated rules and ritualized
enactments that are not always made explicit. In studying these routines, we assume that power
is exercised within organizations—not always by idiosyncratic dictates by leaders but through
establishing a pattern of practices that serve the needs of the organization, adapt to
requirements of news sources, control the workflow, and give it a meaningful structure. These
range from deadline and space requirements to pack journalism and the strategically enacted
procedures (e.g., using quotations and balancing) designed to invoke “objectivity” itself. News
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routines serve the needs of journalists and the organization, but they also have come to embody
considerations about the audience, what it will find acceptable and interesting in the forms of
news values.
But these routines have been unsettled, as news media adapt to digital flows and metrics,
affording the ability to present information that allows greater user participation. From a time
when journalists had only a vague conception of their audience, reading and viewing now can be
monitored in real time, leading to new value being placed on what is trending, shared, and
endorsed. News aggregators, for example, both within and outside traditional news
organizations, have had to develop new routines of screenwork, continually checking the
incoming streams of information, monitoring what types of stories drive audience traffic, and
finding ways to appropriately verify and advance what Coddington (2015) calls “second-hand
story-telling,” with routines that support transparency. They help to reconcile the tension
between the professional imperative of control and a more open participatory news space online.
This “second-order” newswork still maintains a professional ethos, distant from the eyewitness
field reporting professionals have always valorized, yet still holding that ethos as an aspiration.
Organizational
Associated with the organizational level in particular, the ethnographic approach to journalism
contributed the insight, now well accepted, that news is an organizational product. Edward
Epstein’s News from nowhere did that for television news, showing its organizational constraints
and structure in how the location of bureaus dictated what events were available to be
translated into daily news flow. Now the walls of these organizations have become more fluid as
they enter into collaborative relationships to produce news, and they take on a range of new
emerging forms from the large-scale enterprise of daily news gathering to the small-staff,
minimalist blogging operation. The key question at this level is “how does it work?” In that
respect, the early analysis of Breed (1955) of social control in the newsroom continues to be
relevant today in considering how the different parts of the organization work together to
maintain itself and accomplish its goals.
These tensions are particularly revealed during times of social change. Lee and Chan (2008)
show, for example, that although Hong Kong has a strong tradition of journalistic
professionalism, self-censorship has increased following the handover to the mainland
government, bringing greater political pressure on local media. News managers try to minimize
conflicts by assigning sensitive stories to less experienced journalists, warning them
ambiguously to “be smart,” or justifying their instructions with a professional rationale (“be
objective”). Since the so-called “Umbrella Revolution,” news organizations there have faced
greater challenges in smoothing over these conflicts with owners, many of whom have business
ties to the mainland.
Institutional
At the next, more macro, socio-institutional level is concerned with the “inter-organizational
field,” how the various organizations doing news work cohere into a larger institution. The
media institution in turn enters into structured dependency relationships with other major
systemic players: including the state, public relations, and advertising. Benson (2004) has
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advocated bringing the sociology of media (systems) back into the analysis, by emphasizing the
journalistic institutional field, deconstructing the media system (especially cross-nationally) into
its institutional components. This represents the meso-level environment for media—the
interplay of economic, political, and cultural factors—lying between organization and society as
a whole.
The new institutionalism perspective imported from political science treats the “media” as a
political actor in relationship with others (e.g., Ryfe, 2006). This approach includes a historical
dimension, which helps explain the emergence of practices and norms as a contingent outcome.
In showing how the news media have in common their goals of seeking legitimacy, access to
information, and making money, institutionalist analysis helps explain their homogeneity (Cook,
1998; Sparrow, 1999). Bourdieu’s (2005) field theory is similar to institutionalism in identifying
spheres of action, which must be understood in relation to each other, and which in the case of
the journalistic field implies autonomy, homogeneity, and is a result of a path dependent
historical trajectory. We understand the journalistic field to be structured by combinations of
economic and cultural capital, and although there is individual agency the field conditions the
actions of its members.
Both fields and institutions bring up questions of where the boundaries lie among these
institutions as they jockey for power and how these interdependencies shape the news product.
Power flows not only from the state to the media, but the other way around in a process of
mutual adaptation. Fox News, for example, has dictated to the Republican Party as it seeks to
manage the presidential campaign by creating a debate forum for aspiring candidates, some of
whom had contracts with Fox for on-air appearances. At the institutional level we can better
recognize the even more complex nature of mediatization: a distinctive stage in the long-term
development of contemporary mass democracies in which political processes have grown more
or less dependent on the mass media and shaped themselves accordingly.
Social System
The most macro, social system level is concerned with traditional theories of society and power
as they relate to journalism. Much of early U.S. communication research was predicated on a
benign, functional pluralism view of power in democratic society that assumed a self-righting
balance of interests. But when journalism decision-making becomes problematic, powerful
interests become directly implicated, and more critical political economic explanations consider
journalism to be an extension of class and corporate power. Herman and Chomsky’s (1988)
propaganda model, for example, gives journalists relatively little autonomy as they work to
uphold the interests of their sources, advertisers, and other elites. In a more subtle elaboration,
long pre-dating the propaganda model, hegemony theory takes Antonio Gramsci’s extension of
Marx to explain how power relations become naturalized, even while granting media some
relative autonomy from class power and interests. Ideology explains how the social system
hangs together as the media project ideas and meaning in the service of power and interests.
Violations of paradigmatic boundaries in a society require repair work and help explain media
representations of deviance and marginalization of dissent.
One doesn’t need to take a Marxian perspective to recognize that journalism and media
institutions function within a larger social system, and these systems increasingly span national
boundaries. The most direct way to address factors at the social system level is through cross-
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national comparison, an important theoretical development at this level. This comparative

approach applied to professional journalism is exemplified by Hanitzsch et al. (2011), who
mounted a survey across 18 countries from a mix of news organizations on their role
perceptions, epistemological orientations and ethical views, a design that allowed them to
directly assess the influence of national context on the perceptions of journalists themselves.
Their research raises the question: To what extent is there a global journalistic culture? They
found three major clusters of similar countries classified as Western, peripheral-Western, and
developing/transitional, but generally shared is a sense of detachment and non-involvement in
their perceived professional roles, and in being a watchdog of government (and to some extent
business). They differ on the value of interventionism, the promotion of certain goals of social
change, but in general there is evidence for a universal ideology and professional identity.
Utility of the Hierarchy of Influences
As key concepts developed within journalism research, it has become helpful to unpack them
across a levels of analysis perspective. Professionalism, for example, can be seen to operate in
different ways across each of the five levels (Reese, 2001), as can another key concept, news
gatekeeping: the winnowing of a vast amount of possible news items into a constricted space.
Shoemaker and Vos (2009) examine gatekeeping across the five levels, discerning the forces at
each level operating to shape news decision-making. These questions have been more focused
on specific editorial decision-makers, but an increasing online abundance of news and social
media platforms, capacity and audience interactivity require a similar rethinking of this concept.
In spite of online abundance, news decisions are still being made, but in different locations and
sequences. This seemingly flattened hierarchy of gatekeeping authority may disguise the
actuality, as Vos and Heinderycks (2015) argue, of a persistent homogeneity to certain stories,
and missing important others altogether (e.g., financial crisis of 2008).
A hierarchical model has encouraged the sorting out of micro, meso and macro levels, and
provides a framework for analyzing the operation of combined factors. Evaluating the
contribution of multiple levels simultaneously helps yield greater explanatory power. Survey of
journalists, for example, by Weaver et al. (2007) examined the contribution of different nested
contextual factors on journalistic work (organization, medium, etc.) This has been extended to
include the social-system level in a hierarchical approach to factors shaping international
journalism (Hanitzsch et al., 2010).
New Geography of Media Sociology
For a number of reasons, then, the hierarchy of influences has been a valuable guide to
theorizing journalism, but to what extent must it be reconsidered in light of the major changes in
the media landscape? The journalism of the 20th Century was synonymous with the prevailing
industrial forms. News was what news organizations produced, and journalists were the
professionals who worked for them. A hierarchy of influences approach worked well with this
model to disentangle the relationships among professionals and their routines, and the news
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organizations that housed them, which cohered into institutions. How does this levels of analysis
framework adapt to the new media world where the lines are not as tidy?
The news industry and profession have changed dramatically in the last two decades, with the
internet severing the association of advertising with the news product, undermining the once
robust subsidy provided by those seeking the mass audiences media were able to command. As a
result, large-scale news organizations have faced serious economic disruption, along with easy
digital access to free content threatening the unique role of professional journalism. Anderson,
Bell, and Shirky (2012) put a positive face on the recent decade’s “post-industrial” effects on the
news ecosystem as an increase in freedom to communicate beyond the traditional publishing
and broadcasting models. This freedom has brought an explosion of digital practices and
platforms, with in many respects new, more effective journalistic forms—but at a cost to
institutional clarity and coherence. In the process, these changes have made the definition of
journalist and news organization increasingly problematic.
In accommodating the ethnographic perspective, the hierarchal model has not precluded the
variable-analytic, effects-on-content tradition, but the new online journalistic ecosystem has
moved theorizing farther away from that tradition in adopting more spatially-oriented models of
networks, spheres and fields. As the boundaries of journalism have shifted to include more
citizen interaction and global connectivity, various terms have been used to describe the new
journalistic eco-system, but they all suggest a more networked quality. This extends to the
broader socio-political deliberative arena in general to which journalism contributes, a space
now often loosely deemed a “networked public sphere,” or even a “global networked sphere.”
To refer more specifically to journalism’s new reality shaped by the internet, Benkler (2011), for
example, uses “networked 4th estate” to refer, along with professional journalists, to those
citizen and other social movements that combine to form a more decentralized democratic
discourse, revealing a redistribution of how content is created and shared. One of the most
prominent writers in the “future of news,” Jeff Jarvis (2006), uses “networked journalism” to
refer to the new collaborative relationships between professional and citizen in creating new
information. Journalists have become nodes in this larger networked journalism, a “diffused
capacity to record information, share it, and distribute it” (Haak, Parks, & Castells, 2012, p. xx).
At the more formal news industry level, Anderson, Bell, and Shirky (2012) use the “networked
institution” concept to capture the need for news organizations themselves to become more
collaborative. These concepts suggest that journalism can no longer be easily understood within
organizational containers but extends across traditional, more well-defined boundaries through
connectivity in unpredictable ways. These spatial metaphors and orienting concepts—whether
networks, fields, or spheres—point simultaneously to the blurring of lines between professional
and citizen, between one organization and another as they develop more collaborative
partnerships and work across digital platforms.
This is a different way of thinking of news compared to studies of production within institutions.
Adding a more organic quality to the picture, leads to terms like news “ecology” and “eco-
system” (Anderson, 2013), still suggesting interconnected but disparate units, all participating in
a similar space with a differentiation of roles. Traditional legacy media provide an anchor for
smaller publications, bloggers and citizens, who react to and supplement what happens in the
larger press. Thus, the practice, product, and institutional dimensions are captured in this new
metaphor of networked journalism. The eco-system shift is revealed in new forms of newswork
that theories of journalism must take into account. The relentless flow of abundant information
has led to a new breed of news aggregators (referred to earlier) who add value through
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digesting, repackaging information—stripping it down to its core components. The news

narratives traditionally housed within article story structures now get broken down into smaller
“atomic units,” which can be restructured, reordered, annotated, aggregated, and widely shared
—ordering them back up into different narrative structures (Coddington, 2015). Thus, this
potential for connectivity extends even at the content-structure level to the elements of a
traditional news story, which can be more easily disaggregated and redeployed.
Of course, this flow of dis- and re-aggregated information would not be possible were it not for
the computational power now available. Journalism, like other forms of knowledge-production,
has encountered its big data, or data-driven, moment, which has led to theoretical shifts to
better understand the restructuring of news and potential for interactivity with users. From a
professional vantage point, the effects of this computational power on journalism take on several
closely related forms. From an early concern with “precision journalism,” when journalists were
encouraged to use the tools of social science for more rigorous insights, other terms have
emerged in recent years to capture this phenomenon (Coddington, 2014). Data journalism,
loosely employed, refers to the use of data by journalists to gather and present stories, merging
with web design and visualization to allow massive amounts of information to be marshaled and
made available for crowdsourcing analytics. Access to big data tools brings both greater
analytical power to journalists but also changes the way they can structure stories to allow
greater utility for the audience. Regarding professional practice, a “computational journalism” is
regarded by Hamilton and Turner (2009) as embracing both, bringing “algorithms, data, and
social science to supplement the accountability functions of journalism” (p. 2). Through
algorithms the audience itself has a more interactive capacity to learn and tailor news
consumption based on personal traits and patterns.
Technology has reshaped the journalistic field in a more general way by importing new values.
As news organizations have relied on those from outside the professional field for digital
expertise, the values of the technology culture have become linked with journalistic practice.
The open source concept, for example, is both a practical approach to coding but also a
philosophy of sharing (it makes transparent the DNA of its design). Lewis and Usher (2013)
argue that the ethos of open source—embedded in hacker culture and emphasizing iteration,
tinkering, transparency, and participation—has important implications for journalism, drawing it
out from its closed professional boundaries into greater transparency.
New Methodological and Conceptual Challenges
Capturing the workings of these new eco-systems brings new challenges to the traditional
ethnographic method. The ethnographer must decide the appropriate “site,” identify the “social
actors,” and describe their practices. But when news becomes more diffused in its production,
with journalists working and communicating remotely, or in small organizations loosely aligned
with a larger parent company, or dispersed across platforms, the single site becomes more
difficult to select (e.g., Cottle, 2007). How can ethnography be done on decentralized,
deterritorialized communities? What is there to observe?
In keeping with the “networked journalism” perspective, newer efforts fittingly have shifted
away from a location-based “factory floor” ethnography. Howard (2002) has demonstrated the
utility of a “network ethnography”: “The process of using ethnographic field methods on cases
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and field sites selected using social network analysis” (p. 561). In his analysis, he identifies a
distributed “e-politics” community, not based in a single organization but in various agencies,
party and campaign staffs, and individual consultants—a loosely configured professional group
of digital tool developers for political communication. He locates the critical actors through their
strategically located position in the network that links them together and targets interviews
accordingly.
Beyond these methodological challenges, the new eco-system requires new conceptual tools. In
social network analysis, connections typically are found among homogeneous nodes (whether
people or news hyperlinks), but related to the network is the richer concept of assemblage,
which can include human and non-human, material and non-material, combined into a nexus of
meaningful integration. This concept is useful in many areas of social science to capture
dynamic phenomena spilling out of existing categories, becoming recombined in new ways, and
not as easily identified within a single level of analysis. An assemblage can be a contingent set of
relationships to accomplish shifting and transitory social objectives not otherwise defined by
formal institutions. In that respect, journalism is not some naturally existing category, but a
complex and contingent assemblage—less product than process.
Technology is at the heart of this transformational connectivity, affecting journalism’s tools,

processes, and ways of thinking. Rather than regarding technology as an exogenous force
making its effects felt from the outside on journalism, it increasingly must be taken into account
as “making a difference” as it becomes integrated into journalistic practice. This has led to new
ways of theorizing socio-technical systems and examining their interconnections, such as
Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT), borrowed from science studies (reviewed in Turner,
2005). This radically descriptive approach blurs the human/technological lines, rendering both
“actants” in an “ontologically flat” perspective. From a levels perspective ANT doesn’t make the
same distinction between individual-level factors and routines, merging them into an integrated
nexus. More broadly, Lewis and Westlund (2014) have advocated approaching cross-media work,
the integration of multiple platforms, as a “system of actors, actants, audiences, activities
engaged in complex set of media activities” (p. 34).
The assemblage concept has richer utility than its association with ANT. Anderson (2013) argues
more broadly that newswork itself is one of “assemblage” and “can be envisioned and described
as the continuous process of networking the news” (p. 172) across “news products, institutions,
and networks . . . drawing together a variety of objects, big and small, social and technological,
human and non-human” (p. 4). In the case of “news objects,” these are the things available for
inclusion into larger assemblages. He maps online hyperlinks in the Philadelphia community to
show a form of assemblage within a news ecosystem, “pointing to a pattern of iterative
pyramiding in which key web sites positioned within highly particular communities of interest
act as bridges to larger, more diffused digital communities” (Anderson, 2010, p. 289).
This idea directs attention outside of journalism organizations to those places where interaction
with journalism plays an integral part, especially in political communication. Assemblages can
be viewed as a combination of heterogeneous elements oriented toward a given task (including
semantic elements, messages, frames). Chadwick (2011) argues that, facilitated by digital
platforms, political information cycles are complex assemblages of modular units, with
permeable boundaries among them, which can only be understood in their relationships with
each other. In the “hybrid media system” he designates assemblage as both process and event:
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multiple, loosely coupled individuals, groups, sites, and temporal instances of interaction
involving diverse yet highly interdependent news creators and media technologies that
plug and unplug themselves from the news-making process, often in real time (p. 64).
Recent studies of political campaigns uses the concept to capture the relational aspects of
mobilization, where elements are assembled in ways that have an identity, outside of a more
formally constituted organization or institution (e.g., Kreis, 2012). Studying the more personal
dimension of political field campaigns Nielsen (2012) finds ad hoc combinations of staffers,
volunteers, and part-timers, that vary in their allegiance to hierarchy and length of their
commitment.
Networked assemblages can still be located within specific levels of analysis, but they encourage
reordering relationships and rethinking a linear process of influence in favor of constantly
changing interest clusters driven by information entrepreneurs. Traditional political
communication studies, for example, at the institutional level have treated news production as
responding to state actors as it relays information to citizens, either in a cascading activation
process (Entman, 2003) or through the indexing of news construction to the boundaries of
debate within the political system (Bennett, 1990). Elite circuits of information exchange among
institutional players, however, don’t map onto this relationship so easily. As Davis (2007) has
argued, policy-making networks—a form of assemblage of elite actors—constitute micro-spheres
of power which don’t correspond to representative politics. Journalists are integral, often
captive, parts of these networks, not just the recipients of political newsworthy information
which yields communicative output.
Assemblages within a Levels Framework
This new geography of journalism has problematized and destabilized both the units and levels
of analysis in journalism theorizing. Because of these disruptions, much of the most important
effort in recent years has been directed at the very definition of journalism and its boundaries
with other fields (Carlson & Lewis, 2015). As a professional issue journalism becomes a
jurisdictional project, policing its boundaries and defending its prerogatives. This can also be
thought as a process of repair and maintenance of the journalistic “paradigm” (e.g., Reese,
1990), an ideological process similar to that captured at the social-system level of analysis.
These concerns resemble Zelizer’s (1993) introduction of the “interpretive communities”
concept to explain how journalists come to collective understandings of their work through
shared discourse—a frame that extends beyond the strictly formal tenets of the profession itself.
Despite the contested boundaries around the journalistic units of analysis, whether profession or
organization, these boundary actions can also be identified across the levels of analysis. In this
section, the levels of influence are considered in how they map onto new forms of assemblage.
Certain norms and routines, such as verification and sourcing, serve as boundary objects or
markers, and are used to distinguish between journalism practiced by professionals and what
they deem as less worthy practices. Individual organizations, such as the New York Times, seek
to differentiate themselves from less acceptable entities as WikiLeaks, suspect because of its
statelessness and non-institutionalized relationship with official sources (Coddington, 2012). The
institutional level points to how mainstream journalism experiences an identity confusion, given
the fuzzy borders between it and partisan news organizations such as Fox News, or comedic
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platforms such as The Daily Show and the former Colbert Report. That brings into question the
homogeneity of the institutional field, violating the assumption for both Bourdieu and
Institutionalists but making the process of boundary work more theoretically important.
As suggested earlier, the work of journalism and many of our theoretical questions are not so
easily nested now within a set of hierarchical levels. Societal changes force a re-examination of
the relationship between individuals and larger structures. That is, the aggregates traditionally
signaled by levels—whether community, organization, or nation—are containers that don’t have
the same meaning as they once did, as new structures are woven outside of and through
institutional frameworks. As Castells (1996) argues, we need to rethink particularly the
fundamental issue of identity, given that people “increasingly organize their meaning not around
what they do, but on the basis of what they are, or believe they are” (p. 3). They are no longer as
easily described by their individual markers of group membership. As a result, research needs to
be more cautious with what it claims about the explanatory power of traditional demographic
and other classifications when it comes to journalists (and other creative workers). For example,
technology has brought new pressures on journalists, increasing the velocity of incoming
information and need for multi-tasking, but it has also given them the ability to create a personal
brand. Using social media such as Twitter can create personal reach beyond anything possible
before, meaning they are not so easily subsumed within their organizational container.
The idea of assemblage is appealing in reflecting the reality of new configurations, suggesting
elements that cut across several levels of analysis. But that means the boundaries between
levels are not always as clear. Routines of newswork, for example, must now accommodate the
combination of individual workers and their tools, combining individuals and their techniques
into actor-networks. And “technology” has become a multi-scalar phenomenon, a nexus of
actants not easily located at any one level. Previous theorizing reasoned from structures to
predict symbolic expressions found in news coverage and mediated representations (“influences
on content”), but this content itself now is not so easily detached from the hierarchical
structures. Symbolic expression becomes a resource for inclusion in an assemblage.
Nevertheless, even in a dramatically restructured news environment, hierarchical power—not
the least of which the State—is still with us and reasserting itself in many areas, even if
deployed through different means. And much of the work of journalism continues to occur in
organized, institutionalized settings. This is true even for non-news organizations that practice
journalism as a part of their social mission. Advocacy NGOs, such as Human Rights Watch,
investigate, report and disseminate information, not only to provide to traditional media
organizations journalist but to share directly with their stakeholders (Powers, 2015).
The hierarchy of influences presents a useful standard against which to measure the
destabilization of journalism and realignment of forces, and to incorporate explanatory power.
The idea of a radically contingent and ever-shifting assemblage is at odds with the drive in social
science to find predictable aggregates of social material, congealing into institutions that have a
history and life of their own. Assemblages are still located within a framework of power, even if
not so intuitively, and these larger structures add explanatory value. Benson (2014) has
cautioned against the tendency of perspectives like actor-network theory to simply describe
these new configurations of professionals and practices, to “follow the actors,” advocating
instead that they be explained within larger structures. And a levels of analysis framework
reminds scholars to identify in which larger macro structures their phenomena of interest are
located.
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New Global Assemblages
The changing theoretical landscape for journalism must be positioned against the forces of
globalization, which brings a “stretching” of social relations, connecting people at a distance,
and “compression” as they interact with simultaneity and synchronicity. The idea of “global
journalism” brings another kind of assemblage. Certainly, there has been in recent years a
greater international emphasis in journalism theorizing, which brings greater emphasis on the
social-system level. The growing use of cross-national research designs allow for testing the
influence of the national social-system on journalism and help untangle institutional-level
variables—showing, for example, how the extent to which media rely on commercial support as
part of the political economic field shapes media practice (e.g., Benson, 2013). But emphasis on
institutional fields within national cultures may overestimate the degree of national journalistic
homogeneity. Certain components of a journalistic field—such as television, and increasingly
online news—may be more likely to converge toward a more global standard, while the printed
press, more firmly rooted in historical styles, may be less likely to change. So the social-system
level is not synonymous with the national, and assemblages help alert us to new configurations.
Corcoran and Fahy (2009) take a more pan-national approach to global journalism, examining
how power flows within and across national contexts through elite-oriented media, whether the
International New York Times, Wall St. Journal, or in their case the Financial Times. The FT is
global in the sense that it has a privileged place in European Union discourse, with a core
audience among globalized elites doing business in Europe and Brussels. Journalists became
part of networks of information flow that support elite structures, leading the authors to suggest
a “cosmopolitanism embedded in the transnational culture of European elites, whose material
interests stretch beyond national boundaries and whose social imaginary is nourished by elite
media such as the FT” (p. 110).
Globalization adds a different dimension that works beyond these nested levels-of-analysis
hierarchies to produce something of the “global” embedded in local subnational spaces. Global
phenomena operate at multiple scales and are not neatly located on a continuum ranging from
local to international. Sassen (2006) points to not only the disassembling of the state, but
reconstituted arrangements: new global assemblages of, in her case, territory, authority, and
rights. Ethnographic analysis of newswork need not be abandoned in the search for new
globalized forms of journalism. Research may take the form of case studies with thick
description where these new combinations may be properly explored. But this more subtle
aspect of global spaces raises the possibility of new sites for investigation. For example Firdaus
(2012) has studied Al Jazeera journalists working in Malaysia, signifying a subnational, “glocal”
journalistic space embedded within the global media-hub city of Kuala Lumpur.
In another approach to global journalism, Berglez (2008) advocates a new way of analyzing news
from a content-based perspective that takes into account its deterritorialized quality. News texts
can be examined empirically for their “global outlook,” to the extent that they draw wider
connections, reflecting a different epistemological stance:
The national outlook puts the nation-state at the center of things when framing social
reality, while the global outlook instead seeks to understand and explain how economic,
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political, social and ecological practices, processes and problems in different parts of the
world affect each other, are interlocked, or share commonalities (p. 3).
Mediated Spaces
The networked public sphere is constituted with new assemblages: of newswork, institutional
arrangements, and global connections, which give rise to new emerging deliberative spaces.
Journalism theories now have as much interest in process as product, in assemblage as outcome,
but still need to be concerned with understanding the nature of quality of these spaces. What
shape do they take on and with what implications for healthy democratic discourse?
Journalism research has a strong tradition of equating these spaces to a mapping of media
content, and content-based studies are growing in number with vast amounts of media material
available for analysis. Certainly, big data and related computational tools have begun to allow
the kind of analysis more consistent with the new ecosystem at a network level of analysis. This
is particularly true in research on online content that takes the hyperlink as the fundamental
connecting feature, which allows the mapping of the networked space, including blogo- and
Twitter-spheres based on a post- and Tweet-centric space. These analyses often provide striking
visualizations of the patterns, but structures of these networks must still be related to larger
structures of which they are a part. In explicating the idea of these “mediated” spaces, the
challenge, perhaps counter-intuitive, is to conceive of them from a less media-centric
perspective. Theories of journalism, by their nature, tend to begin with organized journalism and
work out from there, but this may overstate its influence and hinder a fuller understanding
journalism’s position. Journalism is itself an assemblage and a part of, albeit an important one, of
others that lie both inside and outside of institutionalized structures. The assemblage concept
alerts us to wider combinations of elements that constitute new mediated spaces, and these
configurations must be identified, while a levels of analysis framework will continue to help
organize explanatory efforts.
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Stephen D. Reese
School of Journalism, Moody College of Communication, The University of Texas at Austin
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Theories of Journalism

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication

Summary and Keywords

The early 20th-century perspectives on journalism—before becoming linked to the

A hierarchy of influences model worked well to disentangle the relationships among

Theories of journalism, as Löffelholz (2008) observed, come from diverse perspectives,

Shift to a Sociology of News

Levels of Analysis: Hierarchy of Influences Perspective

national comparison, an important theoretical development at this level. This comparative

Utility of the Hierarchy of Influences

New Geography of Media Sociology

digesting, repackaging information—stripping it down to its core components. The news

New Methodological and Conceptual Challenges

Technology is at the heart of this transformational connectivity, affecting journalism’s tools,

Assemblages within a Levels Framework

New Global Assemblages

Benson, R. (2013). Shaping immigration news: A French-American comparison. New York:

Berglez, P. (2008). What is global journalism? Journalism Studies, 9(6), 845–858.

Boczkowski, P. J. (2010). News at work: Imitation in an age of information abundance. Chicago:

Castells, M. (1996). The rise of the network society. Oxford: Blackwell.

Coddington, M. (2012). Defending a paradigm by patrolling a boundary: Two global

Epstein, E. (1974). News from nowhere. New York: Vintage.

Fishman, M. (1980). Manufacturing the news. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Howard, P. N. (2002). Network ethnography and the hypermedia organization: New

Jarvis, J. (2006). Networked journalism. BuzzMachine. Retrieved on August 10, 2015.

Löffelholz, M. (2008). Heterogeneous-multidimensional-competing: Theoretical approaches to

Nielsen, R. (2012). Ground wars: Personalized communication in political campaigns. Princeton,

Reese, S. D. (2001). Understanding the global journalist: A hierarchy-of-influences

Turner, F. (2005). Actor-networking the news. Social Epistemology, 19(4), 321–324.

Waisbord, S. (2014). Media sociology: A reappraisal. London: Polity.

Zelizer, B. (1993). Journalists as interpretive communities. Critical Studies in Mass

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