This study critically examines the notion of interpretation and interpretive practices within journalist-scientist interactions in the news production process. The linguistic ethnographic work in this paper offers rare insights into an intense and lengthy collaboration between a newspaper, university, and government agency as they set up a citizen science project on air quality in Belgium. Our analysis focuses on how journalists and scientists interpret scientific results and how they actively reflect on that interpretation. Beeman and Peterson’s (2001) notion of interpretive practice is adopted as an analytical framework and operationalized by looking into how routine procedures, cultural categories, and social positions from the fields of journalism and science are adapted, negotiated or reflected on in the dataset. The findings show that the scientists go beyond providing data and expertise and are heavily engaged in the interpretive work within the news production process. The close-knit interaction between the scientists and journalists brings about a struggle over whose interpretation should be a part of the final news product and limits the interpretive power of the journalist.
This paper sheds new light on collaborative journalism and investigates how this innovative newsroom practice affects the news production process and product. More particularly, we focus on a collaborative project on air pollution involving a newspaper, university, and environmental government agency and examine how journalists and professionals within the fields of science and policy-making interact within this collaboration. We draw on linguistic ethnographic fieldwork behind the scenes of the collaborative project as well as a comparative multimodal discourse analysis of news items produced within the collaboration and similar news items produced a year earlier outside the collaboration. In our study, we analyse how the act of collaborating blurs boundaries between the traditional professional identities for the three categories of actors involved and urges them to reflect on their own and each other's discursive practices. Our study demonstrates the added value of a linguistically sensitive analysis of both the discursive processes behind the scenes of the news production process as well as the news product itself, in revealing how innovative newsroom practices like collaboration between journalists and expert sources shape the (language of) news.
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