INSIDE THE EXPLODING NEWSROOM: THE NEW NEWSROOM ETHNOGRAPHY

ABSTRACT

In response to classic sociological boundary problems endemic to the ethnographic analysis of

the newsroom, this paper advocates a reemphasis on boundary spanning networks and proposes an
unlikely methodological fusion of news production ethnography, social network analysis, field theory, and
actor-network theory (ANT). Drawing on Howard (2002), it advocates a fusion of network analysis (to
determine the relevant sites of investigation, both real and virtual) and more or less traditional
ethnographic analysis. Following Latours dictum in Science in Action, furthermore, the paper argues
the name of the game will be to leave the boundaries [between journalism and non-journalism] open
and to close them only when the people we follow close them. (Latour 1987, 175; Turner 2005) At the
same time, by incorporating Eyals provocative insights on the relationship between Bourdieuean
structuralism, Latourian agency, and the spaces between fields (Latour 2003, Thompson 2003, Eyal
2005, Latour 2005) we can avoid jettisoning the work done by meso-level field analysts-- arguably the
most productive wave of sociological studies of news production in a generationas might be expected
through our invocation of Actor Network Theory. The paper concludes with a brief application of this
methodological approach to the analysis of a news production network in Philadelphia, PA.

Introduction

How is journalistic knowledge articulated and deployed, both in the classroom and in

the field, and how does this deployment impact journalists construction of their cultural

authority? One way to answer this question is to examine the professional training of journalists

through a classroom epistemography (Schaffer 2005; Anderson forthcoming). Nevertheless,

our understanding of journalistic knowledge will remain on a highly formal level if we neglect to

examine the daily deployment of journalistic knowledge on the job. This caveat regarding the

limited applicability of formal classroom study, expressed regularly by sociologists of science

(Dear 2001) is particularly appropriate to the study of journalistic knowledge. As noted by many

journalists, the training provided by many journalism education programs may have only a

superficial impact on the actual conduct of journalism in practice (cite).

 A classic sociological method for examining journalistic behavior on the job has been

the newsroom ethnography (Tuchman 1978; Gans 1980; Fishman 1980). But the current social

and technological conditions that create the need for a deeper examination of journalists cultural

authoritydigitization, the increased importance of semi-professionals in the construction of

news, the growth of blogging and other forms of citizens journalismmake traditionally

structured ethnographic analysis problematic. This paper grapples with two of these

methodological problems, both spatial in nature, and both relevant to constructing a research

program by which to examine the new newsroom. The first question: where does the

newsroom begin and end? And the second: what are the boundaries of journalism itself?

In response to what might be called, following the lead of Thomas Gieryn and other

sociologists of science, problems of inside and outside, this paper advocates a reemphasis on

boundary spanning networks and proposes an unlikely methodological fusion of news production

ethnography, social network analysis, field theory, and actor-network theory (ANT). Drawing

heavily on Howard (2002), it advocates combining network analysis (to determine the relevant

sites of investigation, both real and virtual) with more or less traditional ethnographic analysis.

Second, following Latours dictum in Science in Action, the paper argues the name of the game

will be to leave the boundaries [between journalism and non-journalism] open and to close them

only when the people we follow close them. (Latour 1987, 175; Turner 2005) Finally, by

incorporating Eyals provocative insights on the relationship between Bourdieuean structuralism,

Latourian agency, and the spaces between fields (Latour 2003, Thompson 2003, Eyal 2005,

Latour 2005) we can avoid jettisoning the recent work of meso-level field analysts-- arguably the

most productive wave of sociological studies of news production in a generationas might be

expected through our invocation of ANT.

 The ultimate purpose of this methodological interrogation is to conceptualize a new

research method through which to examine the way a journalistic community of practice, in

Philadelphia, PA articulates, negotiates, and deploys its occupational knowledge. Basic questions

include: how to determine the relevant members of this practice community? Should the

researcher conduct a newsroom ethnography of one of Philadelphias traditional newspapers?

What about ethnographies of non-traditional, alterative newsrooms? If so, which ones? To what

degree should ethnographers examine email exchanges, list-serve conversations, or face-to-face

interactions at specialized conferences? In answering these questions, more than methodological

issues are at stake. Methodological problems are, in the end, theoretical problems. The question

of how we define the object of our research is itself a theoretical and empirical claim of

significant magnitude (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). At the same time, both theory and method

are useless if they are not put to work solving empirically relevant problems.

Four Methodological Approaches

Newsroom Ethnography

In recent years, as part of the gradual consolidation and self-conscious elaboration

communications field (Pooley 2005), a number of extensive literature reviews have probed the

strengths and weaknesses of the ethnographic method, placing the classic newsroom studies of

the 1970s in their historical context (Schudson 1989, 2005; Reese and Ballinger 2001; Zeizer

2004; Cottle 2007). Each review comes to remarkably similar conclusions about the ultimate

successwa and failures of the newsroom ethnography.

 Although the most influential micro-level accounts of journalistic behavior inside the

newsroom were published within years of each other in the late 1970s and early 1980s

(Tuchman 1978; Gans 1980; Fishman 1980), early examinations of social control in the

newsroom were conducted as early as the mid-1950s, and grew out of Chicago school-

influenced communications research on small-scale, location-specific subject interactions (Breed

1955). Unlike David Manning Whites psychologically grounded research on news gatekeeping

(White), Breed based his arguments about journalistic behavior on participant observation of the

newsroom and imported his theoretical premises from the sociological literature on organizations

and occupations (Breed 1954). While Whites line of analysis would ultimately connect highly

individual, possibly even idiosyncratic opinions about news with large-scale political and

ideological forces, Breed pitched his analytical tent in the newsroom itself. It was in the

newsroom, and more importantly, from within the newsroom, according to Breed, that the forces

which determined the production of news emerged and played themselves out. While [Breeds

analysis] suggested that journalists direct rewards and motivations towards colleagues rather than

readers, it also portrayed journalists acting only according to normative behavior and existing in

a world populated exclusively by other journalists (Zelizer 2004, 54) In the major ethnographic

studies published in the 1970s, many of Breeds theoretical foci, original contributions, and

blind spots would repeat themselves.

Today, the term ethnography is often applied as a generic label to a variety of

qualitative methods. Originally, however, ethnography referred to a specific practice of

participant observation originally pioneered by anthropological fieldworkers, and usually

conducted in non-Western areas after a period of deep, cultural immersion (Tedlock 2003).

Ethnographers take a detailed look at what is going on in a social setting, notes one helpful
online guide to the method. A central aspect of ethnography is that it is interested in

participants' perspectives - What do learners think is going on? How do they make sense of an

activity such as filling in a learning plan? - and it is not setting out to be evaluative. Writing in

The Urban Villagers, Herbert Gans, who later became one of the leading newsroom

ethnographers, described bis method as follows:

***

Zelizer has coinded the term newsroom ethnography arguing that it occupies a central

position in the academic history of media research. The sociology of journalism came of age, she

contends, with the publication of ethnomethodological studies by Gans, Tuchman, and Fishman

in the late 1970s. Dividing her 2004 overview of the journalism studies literature into

sociological, historical, linguistic, political, and cultural lenses, Zelizer further subdivides the

sociological study of news into three periods, with ethnographic study occupying the middle

period, preceded by the emergence of journalists as sociological beings and followed by the

analysis of the institutions and ideology of journalism. These ethnographers, notes Zelizer,

engaged participant observation, examined newsrooms in large urban centers, used organizations

to examine the relationships that determined journalistic praxis, and shared one focal point of

analysisusually the newsroomfrozen in order to flesh out the practices by which it was

inhabited. (Zelizer 2004. 68) The late 1970s work demonstrated the importance of news

routines in determining journalistic behavior, the link between sources and journalists, the

relevance of ideology, and the tight relationship between parallel bureaucratic structures in news

organizations and the government. The ethnographies provided a detailed, empirically grounded

corrective to sweeping theories about the media that usually operated without reference to actual
news production processes. By focusing scholarship on the point of production, moreover,

ethnographers laid the early groundwork for a research alternative to media-consumption

theories prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s.

Cottle (2007) focuses more on the methodological advantages of newsroom ethnography

than Zelizer. Ethnography makes the invisible visible, he argues, allowing non-researchers

access to the normally hidden, professionally bounded worlds of journalistic production. It

counters the problem of inference, correcting speculative generalizations (usually based almost

entirely on content analysis) about the motivations behind the production of individual news

items. It insists on the triangulation of empirical data, if possible, and consequently qualifies

overbroad theoretical claims (6-7). This anthropological approach has won important

insights into the nature of news, its informing practices and culture. Participant observation,

perhaps more than most other methods is destined to be reflexive, open to the contingencies of

the field experience and therefore less than strictly linear in its execution or predictable in its

findings. (Cottle 2007),

Nevertheless problems with the traditional ethnographic approach to the study of news

production become increasingly apparent as we widen our analytical lens. Attempting to

integrate these micro-studies of journalistic behavior into the standard approaches to the

sociology of news production, first typologized in 1989 by Michael Schudson, points towards

one particular difficulty. Schudson argues that there are four distinct approaches to explaining

how news is produced: political, economic, social organizational, and cultural explanations. The

newsroom ethnography would seem to fall into the category of social organizational

approachesalthough, interestingly, the phrase is never used in any of the multiple versions of

Schudsons important article. Instead, Schudson argues that scholars have paid the most amount
of attention to relationships between sources and reporters. In other words, they have focused the

gathering of news, rather than editor-reporter relations. (Schudson 2005, 183). The problem of

how sources (external, apparently non-journalistic actors connected to the newsroom

primarily through the symbolic umbilical cord of a reporters notes) can be analyzed through the

newsroom ethnography already draws attention to the deeper question of how, given that news is

a manufactured good, to analyze the place of non intra-organizational factors in that

manufacturing process. Are sources equivalent to iron ore in a steel plant? How do reporter-

source relations embed themselves in the physical newsroom? Ironically, the overwhelming

tendency of most early media sociologists to emphasize the manufactured nature of the news

(Schudson 20045) tended to diminish the attention paid to the raw materials involved in that

manufacture and increased the focus on the process of the manufacture itself.

Cottle notes that the digitization of news content and the rapid creation of an

interpenetrating communications environment has meant that the production of news no longer

occurs at single central site. Instead, it has become increasingly dispersed across multiple sites,

different platforms, and can be contributed to by journalists based in different locations around

the world. This clearly poses challenges for todays ethnographer. Echoing comments made

above, however, Cottle argues that news production has always been a networked activity in the

sense of being plugged into incoming sources of news, engaging in relations of mutual benefit

with competitor colleagues, and monitoring avidly the wider outpouring if news from different

news outlets. (2007, 9) The obvious solution to the problems posed by digitization, Cottle

argues, is to conduct a multi-site ethnography. We will return to this notion of the multi-site

ethnography, as well as some of the logistical difficulties posed by such an endeavor, below.

Zelizer summarizes the general scholarly consensus regarding the ethnographic approach
to the study of news production:
 the ethnographies set in place certainby now overused frames for thinking about
journalistic practice. Perhaps nowhere is this as evident as in the lingering currency of
the newsroom as a metaphor for journalistic practice, a currency largely due to the
studies that used newsrooms as stand-ins for the broader picture of journalism. While
emphasis on the newsroom as a research setting made sense for ethnographers, it has
since been generalized far beyond its relevance to news making. Few, if any, news
organizations operate with the same degree of dependence on classic newsrooms that
they displayed in earlier decades, and decisions taken at a far more diverse set of
venuesin the field, internet or telephone exchanges, social gatherings, publishing
conventionsshould not be left out of the picture. In so privileging certain settings over
others, what counts as evidence has here been narrowed. (Zelizer 2004, 68).

In other words: as news production decentralizes, traditional methods of exploring the

behavior of journalists at work grow ever more problematic. This is not an argument to the

effect that examining journalists at work is methodologically meaningless; rather, it merely

points out that the question of where journalistic work occurs is a difficult one. If this has always

been true for journalism, it is now doubly so, as the internet and assorted digital technologies

flatten and disperse the (post)modern workspace.

The Network Ethnography

Solutions to these difficulties must begin with an embrace of the digital, focuing on the

actual and virtual links that increasingly connect communities of practice. The problems

discussed above cannot be entirely mitigated by the examination of online communities through

the virtual ethnographic method (Mann 2000; Miller 2000 and especially Hine 2000). Instead,

the argument that we need to study online examples of journalistic work only pushes the problem

up to a higher level: if it is hard to determine the site at which to conduct real-world analysis of

journalistic behavior, a focus on online work raises the new question of which digital domains

should be selected for study. The problem has become more difficult, not less. To overcome
these difficulties, Howard (2002) argues that two strands of researchthe traditional,

ethnography andsocial network analysiscan, be combined as a network ethnography in order

to analyze online communities of practice. Howards own research is on the e-politics

community, but his methods can be adapted to examine new forms of journalistic production.

If ethnographic analysis has long been part of the repetoire of communications research,

SNA may be less familiar. SNA is the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows

between people, groups, organizations, animals, computers or other information/knowledge

processing entities. The nodes in the network are the people and groups while the links show

relationships or flows between the nodes. SNA provides both a visual and a mathematical

analysis of human relationships. (http://www.orgnet.com/sna.html) Social network analysis

ignores the traditional sociological focus on self-defined, close-knit groups and concentrates

instead on links-- on a nodes centrality, a networks periphery, bridges, clusters,

connectors, and so on. Often, the strongest ties of various network nodes span boundaries

between apparently separate groups; in Howards study of the e-politics community, for instance,

a strong link emerges between political consultants and open-source technology activists, a

connection that might have been ignored through an exclusive focus on either one group or the

other.

At the same time, Howard criticizes the un-grounded nature of Social Network

Analysis. While almost no researcher using SNA adopts it as his only methodological tool, the

fairly unsystematic follow up interviews or questionnaires submitted to key network nodes often

fail to provide the kind of deep, rich, empirical detail afforded by ethnographic study. For this

reason, Howard advocates the use of the network ethnography to analyze the new hypermedia

organization. The network ethnography uses ethnographic field methods to analyze fields sites
chosen via social network analysis. Active or passive observation, writes Howard, extended

immersion, or in-depth interviews are conducted at multiple sites or with interesting subgroups

that have been purposively sampled after comparison through social network analysis. (562)

In conducting a network ethnography, Howard contends, the meaning of field sites is

expanded, the researcher gains new tools through which to manage sample-bias, and initial

ethnographic work can improve the construction of SNA, which then loops-back upon further

ethnographic work. While Howards method would need to be altered somewhat in order to

examine the 21st century networked newsroom-- which continues to be geographically centered

in a way that many other hypermedia organizations are not-- his paper can serve as a series of

rough guidelines help facilitate the study of journalistic work in a local news community.

The Institutions and Fields of Journalism

We have seen that a common criticism of the newsroom ethnography is that it has not

kept up with the journalistic times, either in terms of the relevance of its findings or in light of

the deeply decentralized nature of 21st century news work. Linking ethnographic study with

social-network analysis may provide a partial solution to these problems. Deeper criticisms,

however, have been leveled against traditional ethnographic research by both new institutionalist

and Bourdieuean scholars. By drilling the research focus down to the level of the newsroom, the

new institutionalist critique goes, media ethnographers ignore larger systemic factors that play a

key role in the production of the news. Organizational routines and reporter-source relationships,

for instance, may merely be the byproduct of larger political, economic and technological

influences-- in which case the explanatory power of these routines is suspect. Alternately, an

exclusive focus on news routines and bureaucratic reporter-source relationships may overlook
larger modifications in news systems as a whole. To say that basic journalistic behaviors have

changed little in three decades is one thing, but to argue that the forces affecting production of

news have changed equally little strains belief. Klinenberg, operating within the Bourdieuean

tradition of field research, has drawn a connection between failures of the ethnographic method

and the dearth of important newsroom studies over the past thirty years:

These dramatic transformations in the structure of the media industry and the
composition of the newsroom are difficult to understand with the tools used by the early
media ethnographers. The newsroom ethnographies from the 1970s focus on the internal
conditions of media organizations rather than on the dynamic interactions between
journalistic professionals, corporate managers, cultural forms, technologies, and the fields
in which they are located . The methodological decision to exclude these issues from
the researchers purview has theoretical and empirical implications, since it facilitates the
argument that the news is ultimately a reflection of the professional techniques that
journalists use to summarize, refine, and alter what becomes available to them from
sources and the tugs of warover the interpretation of reality that are apparent inside
newsrooms [Gans 1979: 80-1], rather than a refraction of relations in cultural production
that work across media outlets and transcend the journalistic equivalent of the shop-room
floor. (Klinenberg, forthcoming)

Much of the recent research on journalistic fields has occurred as part of a growing move

in media research towards cross-national comparative analysis. Benson has pioneered this

approach with his study of the French and Anglo-American journalistic fields (Benson 1998).

Hallin and Mancini, while not specifically utilizing the field concept in their landmark study of

Western media systems, adopt many of its approaches, and argue elsewhere for its relative utility

in conducting systemic work on national media institutions (Hallin and Mancini 2004).

Bourdieus followers have used the field as a methodological framework for at least the last

decade or more. Meso-level approaches to the study of media have also been utilized on a strictly

national level; Klinenberg, in particular, has used field concepts in his discussion of media

coverage of the 1995 Chicago heat wave and in his recent ethnographic work (Klinenberg 2002;
forthcoming). A recent special issue of the journal Political Communication was entirely devoted

to the new institutionalist approach to media research, and included a thorough comparison of

field and new institutionalist methodologies (Ryfe 2006).

Researchers engaged in these meso-level studies of media systems disagree about a

number of key concepts, and the emergence of institutional media analysis should be seen as less

the consolidation of a specific theoretical school than as the consolidation of a line of thought

that is attempting to solve specific problems. In particular, there is the attempt to transcend

micro-organizational and macro-political/economic /cultural divide regarding to the production

of cultural goods. Whether speaking of institutional orders, regimes, matrices, or fields,

scholarship in both the Bourdieuean and new institutionalist traditions attempts to understand

how organizational structures mediate the impact of macro-level forces on micro-level actions.

There is thus an attempt to rejuvenate the realm of ethnographic media research by brining

broader social forces to bear on the particular, individual-level behaviors of journalists, editors,

and media producers. Little wonder, then, that Couldry has called the field approach the most

useful conceptual tool for understanding the multi-dimensional dynamics of journalistic

production. (Couldry 2007).

These meso-level approaches mark an important conceptual advance in the study of

journalism and constitute one of the most exciting recent sociological developments in the field

of communications research. The new media sociology, with its institutionalist approach and

structural account of media development and organizational behavior, seems to be particularly

useful for reconceptualizing media history, comparing cross-national differences between media

systems, and analyzing changes occurring in news organizations. The field approach is less

useful, however, in analyzing changes on journalisms fringes, or even outside, the field itself.
Here, we confront a classic dillemma of Bourdieuean sociologywhere do fields begin and end

(or, rephrased, where does the institution of journalism begin or end?) This is less a problem

when the researcher is studying the core institutions of national journalistic systems; the

difficulties become more extreme, however, when our goal is to analyze the role played by

alternative media in relation to the journalistic field (Atton 2002), especially the impact of

digitally empowered forms of citizens journalism on professional news production and

distribution.

One of the most importantif admittedly overhypeddevelopments in news work over

the past decade has been the emergence of quasi-journalistic bloggers (Herring 2004; Johnson

2004), muckraking citizen journalists (Deuze 2003; Lowrey and Anderson 2004), and hybrid

collaborations between professional communicators and committed amateurs (Bowman 2004;

Rosen 2006). These changes in the journalistic field have been difficult to analyze because of the

deep confusion-- both academic and professional-- about whether these new actors constitute

real journalists. and if so, when. Although, Benson has discussed the role played by alt-

weeklies in the diffusion of progressive media content, particularly the relationships between

these newsmagazines and commercial advertisers (Benson 2003), and Klinenberg has spoken of

youth media channeling into the journalistic field (2004), existing meso-level research on

alternative journalistic forms seems to have fallen short of the level reached by research into

more traditional media institutions. Indeed, Bourdieuean approaches may occasionally harm our

understanding of citizens journalism movements. Field analysis ultimately entails a decision, on

the part of the researcher herself, over what constitutes the boundaries of the field under

examination. We thus face a classic sociological boundary problem (Gieryn 1983) when

attempting to apply these usually productive analytic methods to the study of new, largely
amateur media production.

The Networks of Journalism

Given the problems and potentials of field theory, what other methods of studying news

production have been advanced in recent years? A brief article by Fred Turner (2005) turns to the

actor-network theory (ANT) of Bourdieus arch-rival on the French intellectual scene, Bruno

Latour, when probing the role of borderless socio-technical hybrids in the journalistic process.

In many ways, the actor-network approach seems to be diametrically opposed to the institutional

method advanced by the latest wave of media sociologists. As Couldry summarizes the ANT

approach:

Actor Network Theory (ANT) is a highly influential account within the sociology of
science that seeks to explain social order not through an essentialised notion of the
social but through the networks of connections between human agents, technologies and
objects. Entities (whether human or non-human) within those networks acquire power
through the number, extensiveness and stability of the connections routed through them,
and through nothing else. Such connections are contingent and emerge historically they
are not natural but, if successful, a network acquires the force of nature: it becomes, in
a favourite term of ANT, black-boxed. (Couldry 2004)

Although ANT is most widely known today for its concept of actants, and the

consequent blurring of the line between human and non-human agency, it is equally notable for

its relentless attempts to break down the borders between various social fields and its strong

denial that a boundary between the inside and outside of a social field is self-evident, or, in

fact, even exists at all. Collins and Evans note one could say that the tendency to dissolve the

boundary between those inside and those outside the community reaches its apogee in Actor

Network Theory [ANT], as first adumbrated by Bruno Latour and Michel Callon. Here even the

boundary between human experts and non-human contributors to the resolution of conflict is

taken away. (Collins and Evans 2002) Rather than seeing society as the assemblage of a number
of semi-autonomous fields, each with its own relational, internal logics that are are shaped in

part by external political and economic forces, Actor Network Theory views the social as

something to be assembled rather than as a solid substance with its own inherent qualities.

Instead of being passively shaped by structural forces, as in the Bourdieuan concepts of habitus

and field, ANT views individuals and institutions as hyper-autonomous agents, each attempting

to forge ever longer networks out of links with other agents, and each striving, in

Machiavellian fashion, to turn themselves into obligatory passage points through which other

actants and networks are impelled to cross.

Applications of Actor-Network Theory to the study of media have been few and far

between (Couldry 2007). Turners paper is more a brief programmatic statement than a

systematic piece of research (Turner 2005). Hemmingway, alone amongst Anglo-American

scholars, has systematically applied Actor-Network concepts to the study of television

newsrooms (Hemmingway 2005; 2007). Despite the general neglect of ANT approaches in the

analysis of media production, however, the strengths of the theoryits unique accommodation

of technological agency and its relentless transgression of institutional boundaries-- might

recommend it as a useful way to study changes in 21st century journalism, at least those changes

outside the professions institutional core.

Given the partial de-professionalization of journalism, the rise of pro-am journalistic

hybrids, and the consequent fragmentation and expansion of the news community, what is the

best method by which to analyze the production of news content? News production

ethnography? Social network analysis? Field theory? Actor-network theory? Perhaps, in fact, a

combination of all four approaches. This linkage may not be as unlikely as it first appears. None

of the major alternatives to the classic newsroom ethnography discussed in this paper propose
abandoning the ethnographic method; indeed, each advocates revisiting the micro-level study of

news production, supplemented by alternative methodologies which compensate for

ethnographys shortcomings. We have already seen how the network ethnography takes us

outside the newsroom, grounding our detailed study of news actors within a ore diverse network.

The key theoretical contradiction seems to be the widely acknowledged antipathy between

Bourdieuean structuralism and Latourean agency; following sociologist Gil Eyal, however, we

can accommodate this tension somewhat by acknowledging the existence of spaces between

fields.

Spaces Between Fields and the Methodology Applied

Imagine that we wanted to understand changes in journalism occurring in one mid-sized

metropolitan city in the United States, and with these changes, the renegotiation of the

knowledge base and cultural authority of the journalism profession itself. Philadelphia,

Pennsylvania recommends itself as one possible location for ethnographic work, as economic,

technological, cultural, and political changes in the news ecology there are both emblematic of

changes in the news industry in general and have possibly reached a more advanced stage there

than elsewhere (Shapiro 2006). In undertaking this research, what should our method be? I have

discussed three possible options the network ethnography, field analysis, or actor-network

theory. I want to argue that we would be best served by using a combination of all three.

First, it is hard to imagine that the classic newsroom ethnography --the kind undertaken

by Fishman, Gans, or Tuchman-- would, by itself, tell us much about what we really wanted to

know. This isnt to argue, of course, that it would tell us nothing. For sure, a close study of the

newsroom of the Philadelphia Inquirer or the Daily News might show us how news routines
were being impacted by the sort of flexible labor practices engendered by the internet; how

downsizing was changing the perceptions and actual practice of journalistic behavior, and how

the rise of the blog was affecting the traditional source-reporter relationship. Already, however,

by invoking technological, political, and economic forces, we are in territory best served by a

notion of the journalistic field. Happily, a field approach to journalism does not require us to

abandon close ethnographic work; part and parcel of this analytical move is the embrace of

ethnographic methods and the simultaneous attempt to place this ethnographic work in context.

In Klinenbergs recent work on the 21st century newsroom, for instance, he deposits his

ethnographic observations within recent regulatory history, documenting how changes in news

work refract technological convergence, corporate consolidation, the emergence of flexible

journalistic labor, and struggles over the rhetorical relationship between journalism and content.

(Klinenberg, forthcoming) Careful ethnographic research is not eliminated from this model of

media sociology; rather, it is contextualized and structuralized to account for forces that impact

the routines and professional competition from outside the newsroom itself. In our example,

surveying the entire journalistic field that makes up the news ecology of the city of Philadelphia

takes us beyond micro-level analysis and sharpens our explanatory edge.

Here, however, we run into a second problemor rather, a second problem and a third.

How can we be certain that ethnographic analysis of the Inquirer newsroom, even when

performed in the context of the larger journalistic field, is really one of the key sites in the

production of local area news? And related: if we are better served by thinking about

Philadelphias journalistic field, then where does this field begin, and where does it end? Who

are its members? Who is inside it, who is outside it, and what are the social relationships

between these insiders and outsiders? It should be clear that the first question can be fairly easily
dispensed with by using social network analysis to help uncover the hidden relationships

between sites of media production in the city. Perhaps our quantitative mapping will tell us that

the Inquirer newsroom is, in fact, a key node in the regions journalistic network. Or, other

relationships (and with them, field sites worthy of closer analysis) may appear. Either way, we

can proceed with the kind of micro-level analysis essential to the ethnographic, field, and actor-

network approaches to the study of news production with more confidence.

Solving the second problem is both more difficult and more important. The question of

where the journalistic field begins and ends is both the theoretical problem posed by this paper

and the deeply sociological problem that this theory is hoping to solve. In short: if we want to

explore the sociological aspects of the production of news, how should we draw the boundary

lines around the social space in which that production occurs, especially given the deep

arguments about what constitutes journalism in the first place? Should we envision a journalistic

sub-field of citizens media production, for example? How does that field relate to the primary

field of mainstream journalistic production and its fellow alternative media subfield? Can we

divide the journalistic field indefinitely?

There is little doubt that the emerging domain of citizens journalism is increasingly

assuming field-like properties, with its own variations and concentrations of capital and its

own relational positionings in social and virtual space. Nevertheless I have resisted the

temptation to impose the schema of field on the universe of citizens journalism. While I

acknowledge that mainstream journalisms core (and perhaps the core of citizens journalism as

well) may be productively thought of as field-like, I modify an argument of Gil Eyal in positing

that the most interesting social space in todays journalistic world is less the core than it is the

spaces between fields, the thick border-zone separating professional journalism from its
amateur counterparts. Rather than chosing to analyze the new journalistic world in either

Borudieuean or Actor-Network terms, lets give fields to Bourdieu, and the spaces between

them to Latour:

even if we did shift the lens and analyzed the space between fields as another field, we
would gain very little. We would be guided towards conceiving of this field as a lesser
one less autonomous, ergo: less of a field and of the actors in it as relatively weak and
incapable of controlling their clientele, but for this very reason the essentialist distinction
between economy, the state, art, science, etc., would remain undisturbed. There is,
however, a set of concepts that is more suitable for this task, and generates more fruitful
hypotheses these are the concepts of network and hybridity, as developed by Bruno
Latour, Michel Callon and also Timothy Mitchell. (Eyal 2005).

Applying this conceptual schema to the world of 21st century journalism, we could

envision the spatial domain of our empirical investigation along the following lines

Figure 1 about here

 And at last, we can formulate a specific research program:

The problem: How is journalistic knowledge articulated and deployed in the field, and how
does this deployment impact journalists construction of their cultural authority? Through their
daily news work, how do journalists in a specific local news area negotiate and ratify their
knowledge claims?

Background Assumption: We will neither impose field-like properties on the research area
prior to our investigation, nor will a definition of what a journalist is guide our selection of
research areas. In at least the preliminary stage of research, the name of the game will be to
leave the boundaries [between journalism and non-journalism] open and to close them only when
the people we follow close them.

Step One: Create a social network map of 353 citizens and professional journalism websites.
Analysis of this network map will determine the site locations for further qualitiative analysis.

Step Two: Guided by the network map, conduct ethnographic analysis of relevant field sites.

Step Three: Ethnographic follow-upconduct reconstruction interviews with selected

professional and amateur journalists.

Step Four: Through coding and qualitative analysis, connect daily journalistic behavior with the
articulation and deployment of professional knowledge.

Step Five: At this point, and the end of our process, we may wish to return to an institutional or
field perspective. Have our actors transformed their networks into fields?

This multi-step research program attempts to combine the best aspects of various

sociological methods for investigating the production of news and the deployment of journalistic

knowledge. Fundamentally, its method is ethnographic and relies on detailed and in-depth

analysis of journalistic work sites. However, these sites are chosen in a new way, through social

network analysis. Finally, although we bracket any structuralist explanations of the behavior of

our actors in the spaces between fields, we are left with the option of returning to a
institutionalist perspective at the end of our analysis-- should field-like properties emerge in

either the traditional or amateur journalistic networks under study here.

 Figure 1
Fields of Journalism, Citizens Journalism, and the Space Between Fields

Social Space of
Citizens Journalism

Fieldlike
Fieldlike

Social Space of
Journalism

Primary area of
investigation:
Space between
fields
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