Journalism
SETH C. LEWIS
University of Oregon, USA
What is journalism? A colleague, whose specialty is journalism studies, once remarked
that he never sought to define the term because “once I do, I’ll be out of a job.” While
joking, he was making an important point: Journalism studies, as a field within the
communication discipline, is inherently interesting in large part because of journalism’s
definitional complexity—indeed, one could argue that the fortunes of the academic
field have been inversely related to those of the legacy industry, the one growing in
part because the other is struggling and evolving into something new (see Carlson,
Robinson, Lewis, & Berkowitz, 2018). Struggles over defining what qualifies as journal-
ism and who qualifies as journalist are ongoing contests that are more than discursive
disputes; they are key points of departure for understanding the societal roles as well
as social meanings of journalism as a feature of our twenty-first-century world. A text-
book definitionmight fall back on the functional representation of “journalism” around
whichmost can agree: Journalism refers to the systematic gathering, filtering, and circulat-
ing of information deemed to be news and in the public interest. However, that simplified
version, while useful as a starting point, masks a great deal of complexity that lies below
the surface.
Indeed, defining “journalism” may be one of the most complicated endeavors in
this encyclopedia devoted to the study of journalism in its many forms and functions.
Journalism is the backdrop against which the news-related people and processes, prac-
tices and products, are elaborated throughout this volume; as such, journalism is both
everywhere in this volume and yet, ironically, perhaps nowhere else defined as such.
Indeed, in the fast-growing field of journalism studies research—a field of inquiry that
20 years since its institutionalization now boasts several major journals, scores of stud-
ies published annually, and hundreds of scholars globally engaged in the study of news
(Carlson et al., 2018)—one could scour the many pages of books, articles, and the like
and yet be hard-pressed to find an actual definition of “journalism.” One can findmany
references to types of journalisms in the most pluralized sense and according to various
social, cultural, political, economic, and technological dimensions—from participatory
journalism, solutions journalism, and reciprocal journalism to data journalism, com-
putational journalism, and peace journalism, to name but a few. But in these and many
other iterations, more of the effort is paid to defining and conceptualizing the adjectival
addition—for example, the “data” in data journalism—rather than the original noun
being modified. In the singular sense, journalism is a comparatively neglected object of
definition.
This neglect, however, is not for lack of discussion about the concept itself. Indeed,
as Barbie Zelizer (2004) has shown, many different stakeholders have many different
The International Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies. Tim P. Vos and Folker Hanusch (General Editors),
Dimitra Dimitrakopoulou, Margaretha Geertsema-Sligh and Annika Sehl (Associate Editors).
© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118841570.iejs0001
2 J OURNAL I SM
ways for coming to terms, as it were, with this term. “Although one might think that
academics, journalism educators, and journalists themselves talk about journalism in
roughly the samemanner, defining ‘journalism’ is not in fact consensual” (Zelizer, 2004,
p. 13). Nor does this neglect of a single definition suggest that journalism studies, in
skipping over a definition of its core object of study, is somehow unique; in fact, most
scholars tend to focus on their narrow object of inquiry within their disciplines and
subdisciplines rather than continually define and redefine their field as a whole. And
yet, it may also be true that “journalism”—as a term, as a signifier for a field of study,
as a representation for an occupation, and as a signal of purposes, processes, and sen-
sibilities that may defy easy description—seems more slippery than most containers.
This is particularly true in a digital era of social media, mobile hyper-connectivity, and
human augmentation, when the hybridized nature of media—between old and new,
publisher and platform, professional and amateur, institutional and individual, human
andmachine—is challenging basic boundaries of journalism and journalist; boundaries
that, while never quite as enduring as popular mythology would lead people to believe
about twentieth-century journalism, are nevertheless being contested and reconfigured
around the world (Carlson & Lewis, 2015). As such, it may be particularly challenging
to pin down journalism with a one-sentence summation that can serve to satisfy every-
one. With that caveat, this encyclopedia entry seeks to synthesize the many definitions
and offer a crystallization that, while hardly the last or even best word on this subject,
may point toward explaining what we are talking about when we invoke “journalism.”
To begin, journalism as a term cannot be understood apart from its history. Explain-
ing journalism as “a constellation of practices that have acquired special status within
the larger domain of communication through a long history that separated out news
sharing from its origins in interpersonal communication,” Barnhurst andOwens (2008)
emphasize that journalism emerged as a thoroughly modern-era phenomenon. Telling
others about events and information that are new to the listener (by definition “news”)
has been a commonplace activity throughout humankind. But a practice limitedmostly
to one’s social and physical surroundings became distinct from ordinary communica-
tion with the advent of newsletters, which, in addition to being available only to those
with literacy and leisure, “also required some facility to producemore than one copy and
to distribute the result, as well as sufficient social status to make their activity appear to
have value for recipients. The latter quality,” Barnhurst and Owens (2008) note, “has
been the source of constant attention in journalism.” From the beginning, they argue,
journalism was defined by certain essential features as a cultural practice: telling about
events, providing novelty, and establishing truth based in fact. Later, as newsletters went
from handwritten to printed and then to newssheets, and as mechanization allowed for
circulating such news at scale, the definition of journalism broadened to include sys-
tems of production and distribution. Furthermore, Barnhurst and Owens (2008) argue,
journalism’s claim to social distinction came through its “close alliance with political
life,” insofar as early publishing, frequently linked to parties and partisanship, was often
conducted under government control or in opposition to it. Journalism thus emerged
“at the nexus of negotiating boundaries to demarcate private life, civil society (or the
market), and the state from each other”—leading, for example, to notions of journal-
ism’s interstitial role in facilitating a public sphere, a domain apart from government
J OURNAL I SM 3
yetmaintained in public where debates about civic life could occur. Finally, they suggest
that by the nineteenth century, with the growth of literacy, nationalism, and government
information systems such as the post, and with the industrialization of newspapers as
key drivers of economic activity, the term “journalism” came to refer to the group of
occupations engaged in crafting and circulating news—with journalists, in particular,
becoming “chief among workers” for their visible role as reporters and writers (and,
later, broadcasters).
Against this historical backdrop, journalism in the twentieth century became a pro-
fessionalized practice, one with high modern aspirations to act in the public interest.
Accordingly, journalists fashioned themselves as fact-based, ethical, autonomous, and
neutral observers—even if the cleanliness of that image was not necessarily reflected
in the messy practices of negotiating personalities, politics, and proclivities within
and beyond the newsroom, as sociologies of “making” news have shown since the
time of David Manning White’s (1950) classic study of the news gatekeeper and
Warren Breed’s (1955) examination of social control in the newsroom. And yet, such
ethnographic accounts of newsrooms past and present also have shown how durable
and enduring news production practices can be, even in the face of digital disruption
and industry upheaval. Institutional tendencies and routinized patterns remain hard to
overcome when so thoroughly cemented as a form of identity and culture (Broersma
& Peters, 2013; Ryfe, 2013). Indeed, particularly in the U.S. context, Ryfe (2013) argues
that the ideals of journalism have not varied greatly since their emergence in the
1920s, grounded in detachment, objectivity, and independence. In his reading, the
“symbols that compose the culture of journalism” (p. 11)—principles such as “cover
the story but do not become the story,” norms such as objectivity, and practices such as
verification—not only remain stubbornly unchanged, but are essential determinants by
which certain people, organizations, and activities come to be accounted as adequately
“journalistic.” In the context of metropolitan newspapers, which are often used as a
stand-in representation for journalism writ large, journalists “can imagine new kinds of
journalism” but nevertheless “find it exceedingly difficult to do journalism differently”
(p. 23, emphasis original).
Journalism is thus a complex and consequential social practice. It is one with par-
ticular meaning because it “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 ” (Reese, 2016, p. 2).
Schudson (2003) similarly frames journalism according to its professionalized practices
that carry a public orientation: “Journalism is the business or practice of producing
and disseminating information about contemporary affairs of general public interest
and importance. It is the business of a set of institutions that publicizes periodically
(usually daily) information and commentary on contemporary affairs, normally pre-
sented as true and sincere, to a dispersed and anonymous audience so as to publicly
include the audience in a discourse taken to be publicly important” (p. 11). Elsewhere,
Schudson (2003) defines journalism according to what it “can do for democracy,” such
as by informing the public, serving as a watchdog, offering analysis, encouraging social
empathy, and providing a forum for debate. Many studies take this normative stance as
4 J OURNAL I SM
a key point of departure, if merely implicitly: Journalismmatters and is worth studying
because, by definition, it is publicly and democratically significant.
Many scholarly accounts define journalism according to these idealized, profession-
alized dimensions. But, as Zelizer (2004) has shown, journalism may be understood
quite differently depending on one’s background, education, experience, and so forth.
“Defining journalism,” she says, “emerges from the tacit knowledge and interpretive
strategies that people share when thinking about journalism as a phenomenon” (p. 13).
When patterned and persistent, thesemodes of thinking result in “interpretive commu-
nities” that determine the boundaries of knowledge around a given phenomenon—in
this case, what journalism means, why it matters, and how it should be studied. For
example, in contrast to how they are portrayed by the interpretive community of
researchers, “journalists tend to take exception to the idea that they make or construct
the news, preferring to see their role as one of holding up a mirror to events rather
than reflecting the acts of negotiation, power brokering, and resource management
that typify newsroom practices” (p. 14). Zelizer (2004) thus offers a reminder that
“fields of inquiry work from their own interpretive assumptions,” and that “while such
assumptions help researchers fashion broad statements about how journalism might
work, they also facilitate an inattention to their relative and partial nature and limited
applicability” (p. 15).
From that vantage point, Zelizer (2004) offers a tour de force in classifying jour-
nalism. Exploring the varieties and complexities inherent in representations of terms
such as “journalist,” “news,” and “media” in relation to “journalism,” she argues that
journalism is “comprised of many contradictory sets of people, dimensions, practices,
and functions” (p. 29). In breaking these down further, she outlines how journalists talk
about journalism. They describe journalism as a sixth sense, with one having “a nose
for news”; as a container, with certain dimension and depth “holding” the day’s news;
as a mirror, or an unfiltered and objective representation of reality; as a child, or the
view that journalists are caretakers of the news, nurturing and supervising it; and as a
service, or inherently connected to citizenship and the public good.Then, she describes
how scholars talk about journalism across five dominant definitions: as a profession,
as an institution, as a text, as people, and as a set of practices. First, “journalism as a
profession” denotes those activities by which one qualifies to be called “journalist,” and
is invoked to talk about norms, values, and practices within the occupational system.
Second, “journalism as an institution,” a perspective often adopted in critical/cultural,
political economy, and ideology studies, assumes that journalism “exists in or functions
as an institutional setting characterized by social, political, economic, and/or cultural
privilege” (p. 36). The third view, “journalism as text,” puts emphasis on “news” texts
and “the public use of words, images, and sounds in patterned ways,” as in the evolution
of “story” as the defining mode of journalistic expression (p. 38). The fourth definition,
“journalism as people,” points to the way scholars have long used surveys and inter-
views to represent journalism through the attitudes and activities of people who work
as journalists—even though such accounts have too often focused on elite journalists at
the expense of more inclusive categorizations (see Deuze &Witschge, 2018). Fifth and
finally, “journalism as a set of practices” acknowledges that journalism is defined by
how news is collected, organized, presented, and circulated—from notions of “breaking
J OURNAL I SM 5
news” and “making news” to the technologically directed forms of work that have
been the focus of many recent studies, and according to routines that have interested
historians, sociologists, and others interested in tracking conventions of news work.
What brings together these perspectives, Deuze (2005) argues, is an occupational
ideology of journalism that spans the teaching, practicing, and studying of jour-
nalism. This ideology benchmarks journalistic actions and attitudes around four
key ideal-typical standards: “providing a public service; being objective, fair, and
(therefore) trustworthy; working autonomously, committed to an operational logic
of actuality and speed (preeminent in concepts such as reporting on breaking news,
getting the story first); and having a social responsibility and ethical sensibility” (Deuze
& Witschge, 2018, p. 167). More than a decade later, “this conceptualization is still
strong within the field today and seems to endure even in the midst of profound
changes and challenges to the profession” (p. 167). Nevertheless, as Deuze and
Witschge also note, this inside-out definition of journalism, focusing on its supposedly
stable core, may be popular with industry insiders and researchers but is misleading
in its seamlessness. At the same time, however, “it would be a mistake to assume that
the type of journalism emerging outside and alongside legacy news organizations are
necessarily different or oppositional to the core values, ideals, and practices of the
profession” (p. 168). They argue for moving beyond a false dichotomy between core
and periphery approaches to understanding journalism by developing a bottom-up
representation of journalism.
Indeed, a cohesive ideological construction of journalism is increasingly out of
step with journalism as a lived experience. For journalists, their work is increasingly
freelance-based, atypical, and entrepreneurial (Deuze & Witschge, 2018). For citizens,
news consumption, once associated with certain spatial and temporal rhythms of daily
life, is becoming “de-ritualized” (Broersma & Peters, 2013, p. 8); in its place, for most
people, is incidental exposure to news across many sources, platforms, and interstitial
slices of the day. Moreover, the modernist logic of journalism’s self-presentation may
clash with broader societal shifts that prioritize the individual over the institutional.
As Broersma and Peters (2013) note, “while the societal role of journalism may be
enshrined in many influential documents—the idea of a free press being fairly central
to democracy—unfortunately, its societal relevance is not” (p. 2, emphasis original).
In their view, obsessive hand-wringing about resolving journalism’s woes—from
struggling business models to fragmenting audiences to declining influence—may be
distracting from the larger, more structural problem: that high-minded assumptions
about what journalism does, important though they are, may not match the reality of
how journalism is actually perceived by people and incorporated (or not) into their
everyday lives. What may be required is nothing less than a complete rethinking of
what journalism is and why it matters.
In that vein, scholars have been questioning key assumptions surrounding journal-
ism. For example, Josephi (2013) argues that associating journalism with democracy is
“too limiting and distorting a lens through which journalism can be viewed in the 21st
century” (p. 445). She also notes that “even if fears of the demise of journalism are gener-
ated by scholars in North America, no such decline can be observed in Asia, Africa and
Latin America” (p. 443). Together these point to two key shortcomings in journalism
6 J OURNAL I SM
studies: an overwhelming emphasis on the Global North at the exclusion of the Global
South, and taken-for-granted ideas about journalism, politics, and citizenship that may
be misleading. Amore grounded appraisal, according to Nielsen (2017, p. 1251), would
acknowledge this reality: that “a few thousand over-worked and increasingly under-
paid and inexperienced white-collar professionals” we call journalists, buffeted within
“sometimes existentially threatened media organizations,” are toiling away trying to
cater to a fickle audience—“people who see themselves as citizens only occasionally
and as one amongst many identities, and engage with news to widely varying degrees.”
Scholars have also begun to question anthropocentric assumptions about journalism
as a distinctly human endeavor, at a time when algorithms, automation, and artificial
intelligence (AI) complicate long-standing ideas about who (or what) produces jour-
nalism. Such technologies draw attention to the nonhuman material artifacts that are
imbricated in how news is made (e.g., automatically generated by software) and how
it moves (e.g., through algorithmic personalization and AI). For example, Lewis and
Westlund (2015) have argued for amore encompassing perspective of cross-media news
work, one that situates journalism as the outcome of a broader array of people, plat-
forms, and processes—a “system of actors, actants, and audiences engaged in a complex
set of media activities” (p. 34). To define journalism, then, is to better account for the
roles of non-journalist humans (such as technologists) and nonhuman technologies
(such as algorithms and automation) in the production and distribution of information
classified as “news.”
Ultimately, because dominant definitions are an expression of discursive and epis-
temic authority, future research should acknowledge power dynamics associated with
them. Who or what has the power to shape what counts as journalism—and how do
such representations influence the power expressed in and through journalism (see
Carlson et al., 2018)? For example, as Barnhurst and Owens (2008) note, “While schol-
ars debate the power relations of journalists in media and political systems, journalists
see multiple threats to their powers to practice in safety, to retain political autonomy,
and to resist losses in their tenuous professional status.” Taking power into account, def-
initions of journalism can better articulate the forces that shape how people and publics
make sense of information, what part journalists have to play in that process, and, in
the end, why journalism matters at all.
SEE ALSO: Interpretive Community; Journalism Studies; Journalistic Roles;
Journalists; News; News Judgment, News Values, and Newsworthiness; Objectivity;
Professionalization of Journalists: Historical
References
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tional encyclopedia of communication. Wiley Online Library. doi:10.1002/9781405186407.
wbiecj002.pub2
Broersma, M., & Peters, C. (2013). Introduction: Rethinking journalism: The structural trans-
formation of a public good. In C. Peters & M. Broersma (Eds.), Rethinking journalism: Trust
and participation in a transformed news landscape (pp. 1–12). New York, NY: Routledge.
J OURNAL I SM 7
Carlson, M., & Lewis, S. C. (Eds.). (2015). Boundaries of journalism: Professionalism, practices
and participation. New York, NY: Routledge.
Carlson,M., Robinson, S., Lewis, S. C., & Berkowitz, D. A. (2018). Journalism studies and its core
commitments: The making of a communication field. The Journal of Communication, 68(1),
6–25.
Deuze, M. (2005). What is journalism? Professional identity and ideology of journalists recon-
sidered. Journalism, 6(4), 442–464.
Deuze, M., & Witschge, T. (2018). Beyond journalism: Theorizing the transformation of jour-
nalism. Journalism, 19(2), 165–181.
Josephi, B. (2013). De-coupling journalism and democracy: Or howmuch democracy does jour-
nalism need? Journalism, 14(4), 441–445.
Lewis, S. C., &Westlund,O. (2015). Actors, actants, audiences, and activities in cross-media news
work: A matrix and a research agenda. Digital Journalism, 3(1), 19–37.
Nielsen, R. K. (2017). The one thing journalism just might do for democracy: Counterfactual
idealism, liberal optimism, democratic realism. Journalism Studies, 18(10), 1251–1262.
Reese, S. D. (2016).Theories of journalism. In J. F. Nussbaum (Ed.),Oxford research encyclopedia
of communication. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.83
Ryfe, D. M. (2013). Can journalism survive? An inside look at American newsrooms. Hoboken,
NJ: Wiley.
Schudson, M. (2003).The sociology of news. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.
Zelizer, B. (2004). Taking journalism seriously: News and the academy. Thousand Oaks, CA:
SAGE.
Further reading
Boczkowski, P. J., & Anderson, C. W. (Eds.). (2017). Remaking the news: Essays on the future of
journalism scholarship in the digital age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lewis, S. C. (2012).The tension between professional control and open participation: Journalism
and its boundaries. Information, Communication & Society, 15(6), 836–866.
McNair, B. (2006).What is journalism? In H. de Burgh (Ed.),Making journalists: Diverse models,
global issues (pp. 24–42). New York, NY: Routledge.
Peters, C., & Broersma, M. (Eds.). (2017). Rethinking journalism again: Societal role and public
relevance in a digital age. New York, NY: Routledge.
Seth C. Lewis is the founding holder of the Shirley Papé Chair in Emerging Media in
the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. He is vice
chair of the Journalism Studies Division of the International Communication Asso-
ciation (ICA) and is an affiliated fellow of the Yale Information Society Project. He
studies what emerging technologies mean for journalism—for how news is made, how
it moves, and how people make sense of it. His present research focuses on the inter-
play of humans andmachines inmedia work, the interplay of journalists and audiences,
and the role of news as knowledge in an era of disinformation. He received the ICA’s
award for Outstanding Article of the Year in Journalism Studies in 2013 and 2016. He
coedited, with Matt Carlson, Boundaries of Journalism: Professionalism, Practices and
Participation (Routledge, 2015).