The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

Anarchy, state, and utopia

Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time

This paper is based on a review of how previous studies have defined and operationalized the term “fake news.” An examination of 34 academic articles that used the term “fake news” between 2003 and...

Defining “Fake News”: A typology of scholarly definitions

The study of journalistic roles tends to be descriptive and is thin on theory. This article advances an understanding of journalistic roles as being discursively constituted and builds on the notion of journalism as a discursive institution. Journalistic roles are negotiated in a relational structure—the discursive field—where journalists, news outlets, and media organizations struggle over discursive authority in conversations about journalism's identity and locus in society. Journalistic roles are articulated and enacted on 2 distinct levels: role orientations (normative and cognitive roles) and role performance (practiced and narrated roles). The process model of journalistic roles proposes a circular structure, where normative, cognitive, practiced, and narrated roles are connected through processes of internalization, enactment, reflection, normalization, and negotiation.

Journalistic Roles and the Struggle Over Institutional Identity: The Discursive Constitution of Journalism

Journalism researchers have tended to study journalistic roles from within a Western framework oriented toward the media’s contribution to democracy and citizenship. In so doing, journalism scholarship often failed to account for the realities in non-democratic and non-Western contexts, as well as for forms of journalism beyond political news. Based on the framework of discursive institutionalism, we conceptualize journalistic roles as discursive constructions of journalism’s identity and place in society. These roles have sedimented in journalism’s institutional norms and practices and are subject to discursive (re)creation, (re)interpretation, appropriation, and contestation. We argue that journalists exercise important roles in two domains: political life and everyday life. For the domain of political life, we identify 18 roles addressing six essential needs of political life: informational-instructive, analytical-deliberative, critical-monitorial, advocative-radical, developmental-educative, and colla...

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Journalism beyond democracy: A new look into journalistic roles in political and everyday life:

This study, based on case studies of three online newsrooms, seeks to understand the patterns of how journalists use social media in their news work. Through 150 hours of observations and interviews with 31 journalists, the study found that journalists are normalizing social media while also reworking some of their norms and routines around it, a process of journalistic negotiation. They are balancing editorial autonomy and the other norms that have institutionalized journalism, on one hand, and the increasing influence exerted by the audience—perceived to be the key for journalism's survival—on the other. In doing so, journalists are also seeing a reworking of their traditional gatekeeping role, finding themselves having to also market the news.

The journalist is marketing the news

This chapter addresses related concepts of gatewatching and gatebouncing. It argues that notions of gatekeeping still capture relevant journalistic processes. The chapter examines the history and key features of gatekeeping, the current state of the art, critical issues, and methodological issues. The basic idea that journalists act as gatekeepers of news has not been fashionable during most of the 21st century. Journalistic gatekeepers selectively gather, sort, write, edit, position, schedule, repeat, and otherwise massage information to become news. The gatekeeping function refers to gatekeeping that happens as a function of those realities of the social, physical, and digital world that inhibit or advance the flow of information. When gatekeeping studies theorize about units on different levels of analysis, confusion is certain and incorrect conclusions probable. News media environments are always changing and the body of knowledge about the gatekeeping process must stay current.

Journalists as Gatekeepers

The study of journalistic role conceptions rests on the assumption that these conceptions shape the news stories that journalists create. However, limited empirical evidence exists to support this assumed linear relationship between role conception and role enactment. This exploratory study compared role conceptions deduced from survey data of 56 journalists with a content analysis of those same journalists' articles (N=270). The findings suggest that this assumed linear relationship between role conception and role enactment should be questioned rather than presumed.

Tim P. Vos

Papers

Journalistic Roles and the Struggle Over Institutional Identity: The Discursive Constitution of Journalism

Journalism beyond democracy: A new look into journalistic roles in political and everyday life:

The journalist is marketing the news

Journalists as Gatekeepers

MIND THE GAP: Between journalistic role conception and role enactment