Curated journalism: A field theory approach to journalistic production by environmental non-governmental organizations

Abstract

Studies of environmental communication have primarily focused on environmental journalism produced in commercial newsrooms. Yet environmental non-governmental organizations have been producing journalism in their publications for more than a century. This study takes a field theory approach to situate this production within the journalistic and non-governmental organization fields. It finds that environmental journalists who write for non-governmental organizations generally follow norms and practices of traditional commercial journalism and that the non-governmental organization field may be borrowing cultural capital from the more powerful journalistic field.

Journalism as an Advocacy Tool: Negotiating Boundaries of Professionalism in the 20th-Century American Environmental Movement

“…However, even today in a fragmented media environment where advocacy for social change more often than not takes place online, these environmental magazines persist. Although Wilderness ceased publication after the turn of the millennium, Sierra and Audubon continue with circulations in the hundreds of thousands, and the tension between advocacy and journalism persists as well (Comfort & Blankenship, 2018). As longtime Sierra editor Paul Rauber (personal correspondence, December 6, 2013) said, the magazine is “not as independent as the editorial staff would like, but more independent than the conservation staff would like.”…”

NGOs as News Organizations

“…NGOs disseminate the content they produce through their own websites and social media accounts (Imison 2014), as well as through other kinds of media outlets. These include specialist interest magazines (Comfort and Blankenship, 2018), 'alternative' periodicals (Mercado, 2013), activist media hubs (Denčik and Wilkin, 2015;Russell, 2013), and even rap news TV channels (Shaker and Falzone, 2015). But it is difficult for NGOs to gain mass audiences through such means, so placing material in mainstream news outlets continues to be the main new focus of most major NGOs' news-making activity (Powers, 2018;Wright, 2018).…”

“…There is a small, but growing body of work on environmental NGOs (e.g. Comfort and Blankenship, 2018;Coward, 2010;Dai et al, 2017;Krøvel, 2012;Lück et al, 2016;Reese, 2015;Spyksma, 2017). But there is still very little on other kinds of important organizations, including disability lobby groups (Wright, 2018); feminist organizations (Minić, 2014); indigenous rights NGOs (Mercado, 2013), worker co-operatives, and trade unions (Denčik and Wilkin, 2015).…”

“…Thus, Powers sees NGOs as adapting to mainstream news values, practices and ways of valuing success, grafting their stories onto mainstream news agendas, rather than using social media to communicate in alternative ways. Comfort and Blankenship (2018) also use Bourdieu's field theory, but in a much looser way: to establish the extent to which environmental NGO-workers producing supposedly 'alternative' magazines actually conform to the doxa of mainstream journalism. Whilst Cooper (forthcoming) uses Bourdieu's field theory to argue that the emergence of User-Generated Content, circulated through social media, has provided an external shock to the fields of both journalism and NGO-work: radically changing the rules of the game.…”