Situating journalism as a cultural practice charged with delivering valid accounts of the world necessitates a theory of metajournalistic discourse to explain how meanings around journalism develop. Through metajournalistic discourse, various actors inside and outside of journalism compete to construct, reiterate, and even challenge the boundaries of acceptable journalistic practices and the limits of what can or cannot be done. Based on the premises that journalism is variable, reliant on context, and produced through social relationships, this article develops a theory of metajournalistic discourse that connects three components-actors, sites/audiences, and topics-to processes of definition making, boundary work, and legitimation.
Professional journalism's normative commitment to autonomy has long dictated the separation of editorial functions from advertising. However, the emergent practice of online native advertising complicates this division, resulting in conflicting visions of how journalistic authority should be established for digital news. This study examines reactions to a controversial Church of Scientology native advertisement on the Atlantic web site to assess how competing processes of norm-making and boundary work shape normative understandings of online journalism. Emergent understandings of content comprising both editorial and advertising components require new models for critical inquiry sufficiently sensitive to the online news environment.
The study of journalism has long included a close examination of who gets to be a news source. With their privileging of the objectivity paradigm and distrust of direct reportorial experience, journalists turn to outside sources to provide evidence for their accounts. But this is not a mere exchange of information; patterns of news sourcing confer authority and legitimacy on certain sources or groups while ignoring others. Over time, sourcing routines reinforce notions of who possesses social power. This essay reviews conceptualizations of how journalist-source dynamics result in the production of certain representations of the way things are.
Journalistic judgment is both a central and fraught function of journalism. The privileging of objectivity norms and the externalization of newsworthiness in discourses about journalism leave little room for the legitimation of journalists’ subjective judgment. This tension has become more apparent in the digital news era due to the growing use of algorithms in automated news distribution and production. This article argues that algorithmic judgment should be considered distinct from journalists’ professional judgment. Algorithmic judgment presents a fundamental challenge to news judgment based on the twin beliefs that human subjectivity is inherently suspect and in need of replacement, while algorithms are inherently objective and in need of implementation. The supplanting of human judgment with algorithmic judgment has significant consequences for both the shape of news and its legitimating discourses.
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