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Journalism and Journalistic Writing: Introduction

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Journalism is the practice of gathering, recording, verifying, and reporting on information of public importance. Though these general duties have been historically consistent, the particulars of the journalistic process have evolved as the ways information is collected, disseminated, and consumed have changed. Things like the invention of the printing press in the 15 th century, the ratification of the First Amendment in 1791, the completion of the first transatlantic telegraph cable in 1858,   the first televised presidential debates in 1960, and more have broadened the ways that journalists write (as well as the ways that their readers read). Today, journalists may perform a number of different roles. They still write traditional text-based pieces, but they may also film documentaries, record podcasts, create photo essays, help run 24-hour TV broadcasts, and keep the news at our fingertips via social media and the internet. Collectively, these various journalistic media help members of the public learn what is happening in the world so they may make informed decisions.

The most important difference between journalism and other forms of non-fiction writing is the idea of objectivity. Journalists are expected to keep an objective mindset at all times as they interview sources, research events, and write and report their stories. Their stories should not aim to persuade their readers but instead to inform. That is not to say you will never find an opinion in a newspaper—rather, journalists must be incredibly mindful of keeping subjectivity to pieces like editorials, columns, and other opinion-based content.

Similarly, journalists devote most of their efforts to working with primary sources, whereas a research paper or another non-fiction piece of writing might frequently consult an encyclopedia, a scholarly article, or another secondary or tertiary source. When a journalist is researching and writing their story, they will often interview a number of individuals—from politicians to the average citizen—to gain insight into what people have experienced, and the quotes journalists collect drive and shape their stories. 

The pages in this section aim to provide a brief overview of journalistic practices and standards, such as the ethics of collecting and reporting on information; writing conventions like the inverted pyramid and using Associated Press (AP) Style; and formatting and drafting journalistic content like press releases.

Journalism and Journalistic Writing

These resources provide an overview of journalistic writing with explanations of the most important and most often used elements of journalism and the Associated Press style. This resource, revised according to The Associated Press Stylebook 2012 , offers examples for the general format of AP style. For more information, please consult The Associated Press Stylebook 2012 , 47 th edition.

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Expert Commentary

Basic newswriting: Learn how to originate, research and write breaking-news stories

Syllabus for semester-long course on the fundamentals of covering and writing the news, including how identify a story, gather information efficiently and place it in a meaningful context.

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by The Journalist's Resource, The Journalist's Resource January 22, 2010

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This course introduces tomorrow’s journalists to the fundamentals of covering and writing news. Mastering these skills is no simple task. In an Internet age of instantaneous access, demand for high-quality accounts of fast-breaking news has never been greater. Nor has the temptation to cut corners and deliver something less.

To resist this temptation, reporters must acquire skills to identify a story and its essential elements, gather information efficiently, place it in a meaningful context, and write concise and compelling accounts, sometimes at breathtaking speed. The readings, discussions, exercises and assignments of this course are designed to help students acquire such skills and understand how to exercise them wisely.

Photo: Memorial to four slain Lakewood, Wash., police officers. The Seattle Times earned the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting for their coverage of the crime.

Course objective

To give students the background and skills needed to originate, research, focus and craft clear, compelling and contextual accounts of breaking news in a deadline environment.

Learning objectives

• Build an understanding of the role news plays in American democracy.
• Discuss basic journalistic principles such as accuracy, integrity and fairness.
• Evaluate how practices such as rooting and stereotyping can undermine them.
• Analyze what kinds of information make news and why.
• Evaluate the elements of news by deconstructing award-winning stories.
• Evaluate the sources and resources from which news content is drawn.
• Analyze how information is attributed, quoted and paraphrased in news.
• Gain competence in focusing a story’s dominant theme in a single sentence.
• Introduce the structure, style and language of basic news writing.
• Gain competence in building basic news stories, from lead through their close.
• Gain confidence and competence in writing under deadline pressure.
• Practice how to identify, background and contact appropriate sources.
• Discuss and apply the skills needed to interview effectively.
• Analyze data and how it is used and abused in news coverage.
• Review basic math skills needed to evaluate and use statistics in news.
• Report and write basic stories about news events on deadline.

Suggested reading

• A standard textbook of the instructor’s choosing.
• America ‘s Best Newspaper Writing , Roy Peter Clark and Christopher Scanlan, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006
• The Elements of Journalism , Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, Three Rivers Press, 2001.
• Talk Straight, Listen Carefully: The Art of Interviewing , M.L. Stein and Susan E. Paterno, Iowa State University Press, 2001
• Math Tools for Journalists , Kathleen Woodruff Wickham, Marion Street Press, Inc., 2002
• On Writing Well: 30th Anniversary Edition , William Zinsser, Collins, 2006
• Associated Press Stylebook 2009 , Associated Press, Basic Books, 2009

Weekly schedule and exercises (13-week course)

We encourage faculty to assign students to read on their own Kovach and Rosentiel’s The Elements of Journalism in its entirety during the early phase of the course. Only a few chapters of their book are explicitly assigned for the class sessions listed below.

The assumption for this syllabus is that the class meets twice weekly.

Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5 | Week 6 | Week 7 Week 8 | Week 9 | Week 10 | Week 11 | Week 12 | Weeks 13/14

Week 1: Why journalism matters

Previous week | Next week | Back to top

Class 1: The role of journalism in society

The word journalism elicits considerable confusion in contemporary American society. Citizens often confuse the role of reporting with that of advocacy. They mistake those who promote opinions or push their personal agendas on cable news or in the blogosphere for those who report. But reporters play a different role: that of gatherer of evidence, unbiased and unvarnished, placed in a context of past events that gives current events weight beyond the ways opinion leaders or propagandists might misinterpret or exploit them.

This session’s discussion will focus on the traditional role of journalism eloquently summarized by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel in The Elements of Journalism . The class will then examine whether they believe that the journalist’s role has changed or needs to change in today’s news environment. What is the reporter’s role in contemporary society? Is objectivity, sometimes called fairness, an antiquated concept or an essential one, as the authors argue, for maintaining a democratic society? How has the term been subverted? What are the reporter’s fundamental responsibilities? This discussion will touch on such fundamental issues as journalists’ obligation to the truth, their loyalty to the citizens who are their audience and the demands of their discipline to verify information, act independently, provide a forum for public discourse and seek not only competing viewpoints but carefully vetted facts that help establish which viewpoints are grounded in evidence.

Reading: Kovach and Rosenstiel, Chapter 1, and relevant pages of the course text

Assignments:

• Students should compare the news reporting on a breaking political story in The Wall Street Journal , considered editorially conservative, and The New York Times , considered editorially liberal. They should write a two-page memo that considers the following questions: Do the stories emphasize the same information? Does either story appear to slant the news toward a particular perspective? How? Do the stories support the notion of fact-based journalism and unbiased reporting or do they appear to infuse opinion into news? Students should provide specific examples that support their conclusions.
• Students should look for an example of reporting in any medium in which reporters appear have compromised the notion of fairness to intentionally or inadvertently espouse a point of view. What impact did the incorporation of such material have on the story? Did its inclusion have any effect on the reader’s perception of the story?

Class 2: Objectivity, fairness and contemporary confusion about both

In his book Discovering the News , Michael Schudson traced the roots of objectivity to the era following World War I and a desire by journalists to guard against the rapid growth of public relations practitioners intent on spinning the news. Objectivity was, and remains, an ideal, a method for guarding against spin and personal bias by examining all sides of a story and testing claims through a process of evidentiary verification. Practiced well, it attempts to find where something approaching truth lies in a sea of conflicting views. Today, objectivity often is mistaken for tit-for-tat journalism, in which the reporters only responsibility is to give equal weight to the conflicting views of different parties without regard for which, if any, are saying something approximating truth. This definition cedes the journalist’s responsibility to seek and verify evidence that informs the citizenry.

Focusing on the “Journalism of Verification” chapter in The Elements of Journalism , this class will review the evolution and transformation of concepts of objectivity and fairness and, using the homework assignment, consider how objectivity is being practiced and sometimes skewed in the contemporary new media.

Reading: Kovach and Rosenstiel, Chapter 4, and relevant pages of the course text.

Assignment: Students should evaluate stories on the front page and metro front of their daily newspaper. In a two-page memo, they should describe what elements of news judgment made the stories worthy of significant coverage and play. Finally, they should analyze whether, based on what else is in the paper, they believe the editors reached the right decision.

Week 2: Where news comes from

Class 1: News judgment

When editors sit down together to choose the top stories, they use experience and intuition. The beginner journalist, however, can acquire a sense of news judgment by evaluating news decisions through the filter of a variety of factors that influence news play. These factors range from traditional measures such as when the story took place and how close it was to the local readership area to more contemporary ones, such as the story’s educational value.

Using the assignment and the reading, students should evaluate what kinds of information make for interesting news stories and why.

In this session, instructors might consider discussing the layers of news from the simplest breaking news event to the purely enterprise investigative story.

Assignment: Students should read and deconstruct coverage of a major news event. One excellent source for quality examples is the site of the Pulitzer Prizes , which has a category for breaking news reporting. All students should read the same article (assigned by the instructor), and write a two- or three-page memo that describes how the story is organized, what information it contains and what sources of information it uses, both human and digital. Among the questions they should ask are:

• Does the first (or lead) paragraph summarize the dominant point?
• What specific information does the lead include?
• What does it leave out?
• How do the second and third paragraphs relate to the first paragraph and the information it contains? Do they give unrelated information, information that provides further details about what’s established in the lead paragraph or both?
• Does the story at any time place the news into a broader context of similar events or past events? If so, when and how?
• What information in the story is attributed , specifically tied to an individual or to documentary information from which it was taken? What information is not attributed? Where does the information appear in the sentence? Give examples of some of the ways the sources of information are identified? Give examples of the verbs of attribution that are chosen.
• Where and how often in the story are people quoted, their exact words placed in quotation marks? What kind of information tends to be quoted — basic facts or more colorful commentary? What information that’s attributed is paraphrased , summing up what someone said but not in their exact words.
• How is the story organized — by theme, by geography, by chronology (time) or by some other means?
• What human sources are used in the story? Are some authorities? Are some experts? Are some ordinary people affected by the event? Who are some of the people in each category? What do they contribute to the story? Does the reporter (or reporters) rely on a single source or a wide range? Why do you think that’s the case?
• What specific facts and details make the story more vivid to you? How do you think the reporter was able to gather those details?
• What documents (paper or digital) are detailed in the story? Do they lend authority to the story? Why or why not?
• Is any specific data (numbers, statistics) used in the story? What does it lend to the story? Would you be satisfied substituting words such as “many” or “few” for the specific numbers and statistics used? Why or why not?

Class 2: Deconstructing the story

By carefully deconstructing major news stories, students will begin to internalize some of the major principles of this course, from crafting and supporting the lead of a story to spreading a wide and authoritative net for information. This class will focus on the lessons of a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Reading: Clark/Scanlan, Pages 287-294

Assignment: Writers typically draft a focus statement after conceiving an idea and conducting preliminary research or reporting. This focus statement helps to set the direction of reporting and writing. Sometimes reporting dictates a change of direction. But the statement itself keeps the reporter from getting off course. Focus statements typically are 50 words or less and summarize the story’s central point. They work best when driven by a strong, active verb and written after preliminary reporting.

• Students should write a focus statement that encapsulates the news of the Pulitzer Prize winning reporting the class critiqued.

Week 3: Finding the focus, building the lead

Class 1: News writing as a process

Student reporters often conceive of writing as something that begins only after all their reporting is finished. Such an approach often leaves gaps in information and leads the reporter to search broadly instead of with targeted depth. The best reporters begin thinking about story the minute they get an assignment. The approach they envision for telling the story informs their choice of whom they seek interviews with and what information they gather. This class will introduce students to writing as a process that begins with story concept and continues through initial research, focus, reporting, organizing and outlining, drafting and revising.

During this session, the class will review the focus statements written for homework in small breakout groups and then as a class. Professors are encouraged to draft and hand out a mock or real press release or hold a mock press conference from which students can draft a focus statement.

Reading: Zinsser, pages 1-45, Clark/Scanlan, pages 294-302, and relevant pages of the course text

Class 2: The language of news

Newswriting has its own sentence structure and syntax. Most sentences branch rightward, following a pattern of subject/active verb/object. Reporters choose simple, familiar words. They write spare, concise sentences. They try to make a single point in each. But journalistic writing is specific and concrete. While reporters generally avoid formal or fancy word choices and complex sentence structures, they do not write in generalities. They convey information. Each sentence builds on what came before. This class will center on the language of news, evaluating the language in selections from America’s Best Newspaper Writing , local newspapers or the Pulitzers.

Reading: Relevant pages of the course text

Assignment: Students should choose a traditional news lead they like and one they do not like from a local or national newspaper. In a one- or two-page memo, they should print the leads, summarize the stories and evaluate why they believe the leads were effective or not.

Week 4: Crafting the first sentence

Class 1: The lead

No sentence counts more than a story’s first sentence. In most direct news stories, it stands alone as the story’s lead. It must summarize the news, establish the storyline, convey specific information and do all this simply and succinctly. Readers confused or bored by the lead read no further. It takes practice to craft clear, concise and conversational leads. This week will be devoted to that practice.

Students should discuss the assigned leads in groups of three or four, with each group choosing one lead to read to the entire class. The class should then discuss the elements of effective leads (active voice; active verb; single, dominant theme; simple sentences) and write leads in practice exercises.

Assignment: Have students revise the leads they wrote in class and craft a second lead from fact patterns.

Class 2: The lead continued

Some leads snap or entice instead of summarize. When the news is neither urgent nor earnest, these can work well. Though this class will introduce students to other kinds of leads, instructors should continue to emphasize traditional leads, typically found atop breaking news stories.

Class time should largely be devoted to writing traditional news leads under a 15-minute deadline pressure. Students should then be encouraged to read their own leads aloud and critique classmates’ leads. At least one such exercise might focus on students writing a traditional lead and a less traditional lead from the same information.

Assignment: Students should find a political or international story that includes various types (direct and indirect) and levels (on-the-record, not for attribution and deep background) of attribution. They should write a one- or two-page memo describing and evaluating the attribution. Did the reporter make clear the affiliation of those who expressed opinions? Is information attributed to specific people by name? Are anonymous figures given the opportunity to criticize others by name? Is that fair?

Week 5: Establishing the credibility of news

Class 1: Attribution

All news is based on information, painstakingly gathered, verified and checked again. Even so, “truth” is an elusive concept. What reporters cobble together instead are facts and assertions drawn from interviews and documentary evidence.

To lend authority to this information and tell readers from where it comes, reporters attribute all information that is not established fact. It is neither necessary, for example, to attribute that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was first elected president in 1932 nor that he was elected four times. On the other hand, it would be necessary to attribute, at least indirectly, the claim that he was one of America’s best presidents. Why? Because that assertion is a matter of opinion.

In this session, students should learn about different levels of attribution, where attribution is best placed in a sentence, and why it can be crucial for the protection of the accused, the credibility of reporters and the authoritativeness of the story.

Assignment: Working from a fact pattern, students should write a lead that demands attribution.

Class 2: Quoting and paraphrasing

“Great quote,” ranks closely behind “great lead” in the pecking order of journalistic praise. Reporters listen for great quotes as intensely as piano tuners listen for the perfect pitch of middle C. But what makes a great quote? And when should reporters paraphrase instead?

This class should cover a range of issues surrounding the quoted word from what it is used to convey (color and emotion, not basic information) to how frequently quotes should be used and how long they should run on. Other issues include the use and abuse of partial quotes, when a quote is not a quote, and how to deal with rambling and ungrammatical subjects.

As an exercise, students might either interview the instructor or a classmate about an exciting personal experience. After their interviews, they should review their notes choose what they consider the three best quotes to include a story on the subject. They should then discuss why they chose them.

Assignment: After completing the reading, students should analyze a summary news story no more than 15 paragraphs long. In a two- or three-page memo, they should reprint the story and then evaluate whether the lead summarizes the news, whether the subsequent paragraphs elaborate on or “support” the lead, whether the story has a lead quote, whether it attributes effectively, whether it provides any context for the news and whether and how it incorporates secondary themes.

Week 6: The building blocks of basic stories

Class 1: Supporting the lead

Unlike stories told around a campfire or dinner table, news stories front load information. Such a structure delivers the most important information first and the least important last. If a news lead summarizes, the subsequent few paragraphs support or elaborate by providing details the lead may have merely suggested. So, for example, a story might lead with news that a 27-year-old unemployed chef has been arrested on charges of robbing the desk clerk of an upscale hotel near closing time. The second paragraph would “support” this lead with detail. It would name the arrested chef, identify the hotel and its address, elaborate on the charges and, perhaps, say exactly when the robbery took place and how. (It would not immediately name the desk clerk; too many specifics at once clutter the story.)

Wire service stories use a standard structure in building their stories. First comes the lead sentence. Then comes a sentence or two of lead support. Then comes a lead quote — spoken words that reinforce the story’s direction, emphasize the main theme and add color. During this class students should practice writing the lead through the lead quote on deadline. They should then read assignments aloud for critique by classmates and the professor.

Assignment: Using a fact pattern assigned by the instructor or taken from a text, students should write a story from the lead through the lead quote. They should determine whether the story needs context to support the lead and, if so, include it.

Class 2: When context matters

Sometimes a story’s importance rests on what came before. If one fancy restaurant closes its doors in the face of the faltering economy, it may warrant a few paragraphs mention. If it’s the fourth restaurant to close on the same block in the last two weeks, that’s likely front-page news. If two other restaurants closed last year, that might be worth noting in the story’s last sentence. It is far less important. Patterns provide context and, when significant, generally are mentioned either as part of the lead or in the support paragraph that immediately follows. This class will look at the difference between context — information needed near the top of a story to establish its significance as part of a broader pattern, and background — information that gives historical perspective but doesn’t define the news at hand.

Assignment: The course to this point has focused on writing the news. But reporters, of course, usually can’t write until they’ve reported. This typically starts with background research to establish what has come before, what hasn’t been covered well and who speaks with authority on an issue. Using databases such as Lexis/Nexis, students should background or read specific articles about an issue in science or policy that either is highlighted in the Policy Areas section of Journalist’s Resource website or is currently being researched on your campus. They should engage in this assignment knowing that a new development on the topic will be brought to light when they arrive at the next class.

Week 7: The reporter at work

Class 1: Research

Discuss the homework assignment. Where do reporters look to background an issue? How do they find documents, sources and resources that enable them to gather good information or identify key people who can help provide it? After the discussion, students should be given a study from the Policy Areas section of Journalist’s Resource website related to the subject they’ve been asked to explore.

The instructor should use this study to evaluate the nature structure of government/scientific reports. After giving students 15 minutes to scan the report, ask students to identify its most newsworthy point. Discuss what context might be needed to write a story about the study or report. Discuss what concepts or language students are having difficulty understanding.

Reading: Clark, Scanlan, pages 305-313, and relevant pages of the course text

Assignment: Students should (a) write a lead for a story based exclusively on the report (b) do additional background work related to the study in preparation for writing a full story on deadline. (c) translate at least one term used in the study that is not familiar to a lay audience.

Class 2: Writing the basic story on deadline

This class should begin with a discussion of the challenges of translating jargon and the importance of such translation in news reporting. Reporters translate by substituting a simple definition or, generally with the help of experts, comparing the unfamiliar to the familiar through use of analogy.

The remainder of the class should be devoted to writing a 15- to 20-line news report, based on the study, background research and, if one is available, a press release.

Reading: Pages 1-47 of Stein/Paterno, and relevant pages of the course text

Assignment: Prepare a list of questions that you would ask either the lead author of the study you wrote about on deadline or an expert who might offer an outside perspective.

Week 8: Effective interviewing

Class 1: Preparing and getting the interview

Successful interviews build from strong preparation. Reporters need to identify the right interview subjects, know what they’ve said before, interview them in a setting that makes them comfortable and ask questions that elicit interesting answers. Each step requires thought.

The professor should begin this class by critiquing some of the questions students drew up for homework. Are they open-ended or close-ended? Do they push beyond the obvious? Do they seek specific examples that explain the importance of the research or its applications? Do they probe the study’s potential weaknesses? Do they explore what directions the researcher might take next?

Discuss the readings and what steps reporters can take to background for an interview, track down a subject and prepare and rehearse questions in advance.

Reading: Stein/Paterno, pages 47-146, and relevant pages of the course text

Assignment: Students should prepare to interview their professor about his or her approach to and philosophy of teaching. Before crafting their questions, the students should background the instructor’s syllabi, public course evaluations and any pertinent writings.

Class 2: The interview and its aftermath

The interview, says Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jacqui Banaszynski, is a dance which the reporter leads but does so to music the interview subject chooses. Though reporters prepare and rehearse their interviews, they should never read the questions they’ve considered in advance and always be prepared to change directions. To hear the subject’s music, reporters must be more focused on the answers than their next question. Good listeners make good interviewers — good listeners, that is, who don’t forget that it is also their responsibility to also lead.

Divide the class. As a team, five students should interview the professor about his/her approach to teaching. Each of these five should build on the focus and question of the previous questioner. The rest of the class should critique the questions, their clarity and their focus. Are the questioners listening? Are they maintaining control? Are they following up? The class also should discuss the reading, paying particularly close attention to the dynamics of an interview, the pace of questions, the nature of questions, its close and the reporter’s responsibility once an interview ends.

Assignment: Students should be assigned to small groups and asked to critique the news stories classmates wrote on deadline during the previous class.

Week 9: Building the story

Class 1: Critiquing the story

The instructor should separate students into groups of two or three and tell them to read their news stories to one another aloud. After each reading, the listeners should discuss what they liked and struggled with as the story audience. The reader in each case should reflect on what he or she learned from the process of reading the story aloud.

The instructor then should distribute one or two of the class stories that provide good and bad examples of story structure, information selection, content, organization and writing. These should be critiqued as a class.

Assignment: Students, working in teams, should develop an angle for a news follow to the study or report they covered on deadline. Each team should write a focus statement for the story it is proposing.

Class 2: Following the news

The instructor should lead a discussion about how reporters “enterprise,” or find original angles or approaches, by looking to the corners of news, identifying patterns of news, establishing who is affected by news, investigating the “why” of news, and examining what comes next.

Students should be asked to discuss the ideas they’ve developed to follow the news story. These can be assigned as longer-term team final projects for the semester. As part of this discussion, the instructor can help students map their next steps.

Reading: Wickham, Chapters 1-4 and 7, and relevant pages of the course text

Assignment: Students should find a news report that uses data to support or develop its main point. They should consider what and how much data is used, whether it is clear, whether it’s cluttered and whether it answers their questions. They should bring the article and a brief memo analyzing it to class.

Week 10: Making sense of data and statistics

Class 1: Basic math and the journalist’s job

Many reporters don’t like math. But in their jobs, it is everywhere. Reporters must interpret political polls, calculate percentage change in everything from property taxes to real estate values, make sense of municipal bids and municipal budgets, and divine data in government reports.

First discuss some of the examples of good and bad use of data that students found in their homework. Then, using examples from Journalist’s Resource website, discuss good and poor use of data in news reporting. (Reporters, for example, should not overwhelm readers with paragraphs stuffed with statistics.) Finally lead students through some of the basic skills sets outlined in Wickham’s book, using her exercises to practice everything from calculating percentage change to interpreting polls.

Assignment: Give students a report or study linked to the Journalist’s Resource website that requires some degree of statistical evaluation or interpretation. Have students read the report and compile a list of questions they would ask to help them understand and interpret this data.

Class 2: The use and abuse of statistics

Discuss the students’ questions. Then evaluate one or more articles drawn from the report they’ve analyzed that attempt to make sense of the data in the study. Discuss what these articles do well and what they do poorly.

Reading: Zinsser, Chapter 13, “Macabre Reminder: The Corpse on Union Street,” Dan Barry, The New York Times

Week 11: The reporter as observer

Class 1: Using the senses

Veteran reporters covering an event don’t only return with facts, quotes and documents that support them. They fill their notebooks with details that capture what they’ve witnessed. They use all their senses, listening for telling snippets of conversation and dialogue, watching for images, details and actions that help bring readers to the scene. Details that develop character and place breathe vitality into news. But description for description’s sake merely clutters and obscures the news. Using the senses takes practice.

The class should deconstruct “Macabre Reminder: The Corpse on Union Street,” a remarkable journey around New Orleans a few days after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city in 2005. The story starts with one corpse, left to rot on a once-busy street and then pans the city as a camera might. The dead body serves as a metaphor for the rotting city, largely abandoned and without order.

Assignment: This is an exercise in observation. Students may not ask questions. Their task is to observe, listen and describe a short scene, a serendipitous vignette of day-to-day life. They should take up a perch in a lively location of their choosing — a student dining hall or gym, a street corner, a pool hall or bus stop or beauty salon, to name a few — wait and watch. When a small scene unfolds, one with beginning, middle and end, students should record it. They then should write a brief story describing the scene that unfolded, taking care to leave themselves and their opinions out of the story. This is pure observation, designed to build the tools of observation and description. These stories should be no longer than 200 words.

Class 2: Sharpening the story

Students should read their observation pieces aloud to a classmate. Both students should consider these questions: Do the words describe or characterize? Which words show and which words tell? What words are extraneous? Does the piece convey character through action? Does it have a clear beginning, middle and end? Students then should revise, shortening the original scene to no longer than 150 words. After the revision, the instructor should critique some of the students’ efforts.

Assignment: Using campus, governmental or media calendars, students should identify, background and prepare to cover a speech, press conference or other news event, preferably on a topic related to one of the research-based areas covered in the Policy Areas section of Journalist’s Resource website. Students should write a focus statement (50 words or less) for their story and draw up a list of some of the questions they intend to ask.

Week 12: Reporting on deadline

Class 1: Coaching the story

Meetings, press conferences and speeches serve as a staple for much news reporting. Reporters should arrive at such events knowledgeable about the key players, their past positions or research, and the issues these sources are likely discuss. Reporters can discover this information in various ways. They can research topic and speaker online and in journalistic databases, peruse past correspondence sent to public offices, and review the writings and statements of key speakers with the help of their assistants or secretaries.

In this class, the instructor should discuss the nature of event coverage, review students’ focus statements and questions, and offer suggestions about how they cover the events.

Assignment: Cover the event proposed in the class above and draft a 600-word story, double-spaced, based on its news and any context needed to understand it.

Class 2: Critiquing and revising the story

Students should exchange story drafts and suggest changes. After students revise, the instructor should lead a discussion about the challenges of reporting and writing live on deadline. These likely will include issues of access and understanding and challenges of writing around and through gaps of information.

Weeks 13/14: Coaching the final project

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The final week or two of the class is reserved for drill in areas needing further development and for coaching students through the final reporting, drafting and revision of the enterprise stories off the study or report they covered in class.

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8.1: Types of Journalism

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Introduction

Although "journalism" is a singular term, which may imply a homogeneous entity, it is helpful to think of it as an umbrella term for a number of distinct forms, practices, and genres. Put another way, journalism has many looks, can be produced in many ways, and can be about many things.

There are many ways to categorize different types of journalism. One helpful schema involves three dimensions: media vehicle , beat , and method . A single story is likely to be shaped by its categorization within each dimension. For example, you may have a television (media vehicle) segment about politics (beat) reported through a breaking news approach (method). That story would be tailored to meet the expectations (and advantages) of each of those dimensions, from its storytelling structure to the depth of the report.

Media Vehicle

There are a number of different media vehicles that can be used for conveying journalism. These include text-oriented (e.g., newspapers or online articles), audio-oriented (e.g., radio or podcasts), and visual-oriented (e.g., television or photography).

The media vehicle matters because it offers certain technical affordances (possibilities and limitations). For example, photojournalism relies primarily on still photographs to convey the essence of a development or issue. A photojournalist may need to capture multiple facets of a complex issue through a single, representative photograph — perhaps a melting glacier with a skeletal polar bear in the foreground. Put another way, the photojournalist may need to aim to convey a thousand words with just one shot. (They also write accompanying photo captions, but those rarely exceed a couple of sentences.) Alternatively, the photojournalist may be tasked with producing a photo essay, wherein they piece together multiple photographs that capture different dimensions of an issue in a manner that conveys a narrative. Photojournalism shoots can involve candid, heat-of-the-moment reporting (e.g., documenting a battle in a conflict zone) as well as documenting daily life for a particular group of people (e.g., homeless veterans).

Similarly, news produced for a television newscast is likely to differ in important ways from news produced for an online news article. For example, a story about local opioid addiction rates may need to be condensed into a three-minute TV segment. That might involve just 200 words of voice-over narration on the journalist’s part. In contrast, an average article on the BBC’s website is roughly 750 words in length. (If they’re writing for The New York Times , that’s closer to 1,000 words.) The shorter length for the newscast requires the journalist to hone in on a narrower aspect of the issue, or perhaps offer a more superficial account of its many aspects. Moreover, the style of writing differs: Writing for the ear is distinctly different from writing for the eyes.

Reporting jobs are often oriented around either beat reporting or general assignment reporting .

Beats are niche categories of journalistic coverage in which individual journalists may specialize. A beat can be a topic, a person, or an institution, though they are most commonly niche topics. For example, a political journalist might cover the politics beat, the election beat, or the Kamala Harris beat — or all three. Beat reporters immerse themselves in their beats and gain specialized insights and knowledge of the key stakeholders, actors, trends, and influences within those beats over time. As they do so, they become experts in those beats, and that expertise appears in the stories they identify and cover. Moreover, by virtue of repeatedly covering the same topics or people, beat reporters tend to develop deep and specialized sourcing networks, often resulting in elevated access to some sources and exclusive information.

Beats are not just genres. They may require distinct approaches to newsgathering and involve different audience expectations for storytelling structures. Consider the film beat: It may involve a mixture of reported and objective pieces (e.g., news about the latest film Ryan Gosling has signed on to), short lifestyle features (e.g., a non-combative and abridged interview with Gosling about his morning workout routine), and subjective opinion pieces (e.g., a review of Gosling’s latest movie). By contrast, the courts beat is more likely to have inverted pyramid-style stories detailing incidents and events derived from reviews of court documents, or reports about arguments in an on-going case. (Audiences are unlikely to expect short interviews with judges about their morning case review routine.)

Common beats include business, courts and crime, education, film, food, health, international affairs, music, politics, science, sports, style, and technology. Some outlets (especially niche publications) have even more specialized beats, like Big Tech, Medicare, or Green Energy. Many journalistic outlets organize their staffs and their editorial content based on distinctions between specialized beats, meaning that they will have a reporter (or group of reporters) who occupy a particular physical space in the newsroom and publish primarily on a dedicated portion of the news product (e.g., a "Science" section) based on their beat. While many journalists focus on a single beat, some journalists may be tasked with covering multiple beats — especially during times of newsroom cutbacks.

Not all journalists are assigned to a beat, though. Some journalists' expertise lies in their ability to quickly learn new topics and make sense of them for non-specialized audiences. These journalists are often called general assignment reporters because they may be tasked with covering an entertainment story one day and a court story the next. The need to cover such a wide array of topics often comes at a cost, though: General assignment reporters are typically more likely to get facts wrong (especially with an unfamiliar topic), may struggle to offer deep coverage, and their sourcing network for a topic may be sparse or superficial. Nevertheless, many journalistic outlets will complement their beat reporters with at least one general assignment reporter in order to have a frequent and predictable stream of news stories and to help round off the outlet’s news coverage as needed.

Journalism may also be distinguished based on the approach to reporting that is used. Examples of common approaches are breaking news reporting , straight news reporting , feature reporting , enterprise reporting , investigative reporting , and advocacy reporting .

Breaking news reporting involves covering a development with a particular emphasis on timeliness. Breaking news stories depict current events, recent developments, and information that is generally just coming to light. For example, this might include a shooting outside a bar. Breaking news stories are often updated regularly as news develops and as journalists uncover new information about the sometimes ongoing event. Put another way, breaking news reporting doesn’t aim to deeply report multiple aspects of a development and package it as a single, stand-alone news product. Instead, it concedes its incompleteness and focuses on unearthing and describing the most recent developments.

Straight news reporting aims to synthesize recent developments and contextualize them into a stand-alone news product. It is similar to breaking news reporting in that it emphasizes the timely presentation of information in a clear, quick, and straight-to-the-point manner — often by using a story structure like the inverted pyramid. However, compared to breaking news reporting, there is more of an emphasis on sense-making and contextualizing information, with the expectation that a story will be more complete and not require constant updating (even if the event is still developing).

Feature reporting allows journalists to take a more creative approach to the information they present. While the newsgathering methods may be similar to those of traditional reporting, the newswriting approach is quite different. First, they are typically written with a more open-ended and less-strict story structure. Feature stories often apply creative storytelling techniques, such as playful or poetic language, narrative structures, detailed anecdotes, and multi-part vignettes. Second, because of their more open-ended writing styles and less strict relationship to timeliness, feature stories are often long-form and evergreen . Evergreen stories are not tied to a specific time peg, or timely event. They are designed to maintain their relevance to audiences for a longer period of time.

Enterprise reporting relies heavily on original reporting driven by a journalist. It is called enterprise reporting because it requires an enterprising journalist who is able to develop their own story ideas, sources, and means of gaining access to information. (The opposite of enterprise reporting would be reporting that relies primarily on press releases, press conferences, or news that is given in some way to a journalist rather than uncovered by that journalist.) Enterprise reporting often involves creative and advanced reporting methods, such as public records requests, data collection and analysis, and access to historical documents. The result is often, though not always, a longer-form and in-depth news product.

Investigative reporting is a particularly rigorous form of reporting and one of the most powerful types of journalism for advancing the public’s knowledge. Investigative reporters dedicate themselves to the sleuth-like pursuit, through a wide variety of investigative techniques, of information about a niche topic that is often difficult to access. The subjects of investigative reporting are frequently topics of deep conflict and vast public importance, such as political or corporate corruption, violence, crime, financial malfeasance, or other cases of wrongdoing and injustice. Investigative journalists dedicate weeks, months, and even years to the dogged pursuit of a specific person, entity, or topic in order to bring their subject to public light. This type of journalism is strongly associated with watchdog journalism because of the role it plays in holding powerful actors accountable. In this case, investigative journalists are the metaphorical watchdogs who seek to make the actions of the powerful transparent to their audiences. (However, watchdog journalism is a broader form of journalism that also includes traditional, day-to-day reporting on the mundane matters of governance, such as attending School Board meetings.) Investigative stories often take the shape of long-form stories (or a series of shorter stories) because of the amount of reporting and information they comprise.

Advocacy reporting is a form of reporting that distinguishes itself by formulating a clear opinion, or substantiating an existing one, with timely, factual information. This approach outwardly rejects the norm of neutrality, and instead aims to promote a cause or intervention. For example, advocacy reporting may focus on illustrating the plight of young undocumented immigrants by including anecdotes about the challenges they face, statistics about the prevalence of the issue, and offering the journalist’s evaluation of a key policy presently being considered by lawmakers. Such reporting is typically labeled as a "news analysis" or presented as an author’s column in an Opinion section. However, it may also be the approach to reporting that defines the identity of a journalistic outlet (and is therefore not segregated from the other reporting done by that outlet). Not all opinion pieces warrant the label of advocacy reporting, though. Many are better categorized as "opinion writing" if they do not follow at least some of the staple practices of journalism, like verifying information.

Hard vs. Soft News

Another way of categorizing journalism is through the distinction of "hard" and "soft" news.

Hard news journalism refers to breaking news and reports about serious or hard-hitting topics that are both timely and of civic interest. They are usually based on factual information and rigorous research. Political journalism, business journalism, and watchdog journalism are all typically recognized forms of hard news.

Soft news journalism refers to reports about predominantly lifestyle and entertainment affairs, or other topics of human interest. While such journalism may involve rigorous research, it is also more open to interpretive and literary accounts. Sports journalism, entertainment journalism, and celebrity coverage are all typically recognized forms of soft news.

Although this categorization schema is quite popular — it is not uncommon to hear those terms in the newsroom — it is also arguably over-simplistic and does a disservice to certain genres. Specifically, hard news is often used to connote a superior form of journalism, and is often talked about within the industry as being more important (and pure) than soft news. However, consider the case of a rigorously reported investigative piece unearthing corruption in a multi-billion dollar sports league, resulting in criminal prosecution of league executives. It would be a disservice to label that as soft news — with its implied inferiority — simply because it is "a sports story." Conversely, a puff piece on a politician designed to help a journalist gain access hardly warrants the label of hard journalism.

Instead, it is more fruitful to view journalism through a more nuanced typology that takes into account dimensions like the media vehicle, beat, and reporting method associated with that piece of journalism. This focuses less on a shortsighted heuristic for determining a story’s import based on its genre and instead allows us to think more about the norms and expectations associated with a journalistic form.

Key Takeaways

• One way to categorize different types of journalism is to focus on three dimensions: media vehicle, beat, and method.
• The media vehicle matters because it offers certain technical opportunities and limitations, and will have some associated norms. Most media vehicles can be sub-categorized under text-oriented, audio-oriented, and visual-oriented, but hybrid forms also exist.
• Reporting jobs are often oriented around either beat reporting or general assignment reporting. Beats refer to niche categories of coverage that journalists may specialize in.
• Journalism may also be distinguished based on the journalist’s approach to reporting. Common approaches include breaking news reporting, feature reporting, and investigative reporting.
• Journalism is also sometimes categorized under labels of "hard" news and "soft" news, with the former encompassing genres like crime and politics, and the latter genres like entertainment and sports. Although popular within the industry, this typology is arguably overly simplistic and problematic.

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Definition of journalism

Examples of journalism in a sentence.

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'journalism.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

1791, in the meaning defined at sense 1a

Phrases Containing journalism

• advocacy journalism
• gonzo journalism
• pack journalism
• broadcast journalism
• checkbook journalism

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“Journalism.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/journalism. Accessed 10 Apr. 2024.

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The American Journalism Handbook: Concepts, Issues, and Skills - 1st Ed.

Rodrigo Zamith, Amherst, Massachusetts

Copyright Year: 2022

Publisher: UMass Amherst

Language: English

Formats Available

Conditions of use.

Learn more about reviews.

Reviewed by Lisa Whalen, Professor, North Hennepin Community College on 3/23/23

This book does an excellent job of clearly, concisely, and comprehensively covering all aspects of news reporting. The only reason I gave it a 4 instead of a 5 is that the title indicates it's a journalism text, but it's actually a news reporting... read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 4 see less

This book does an excellent job of clearly, concisely, and comprehensively covering all aspects of news reporting. The only reason I gave it a 4 instead of a 5 is that the title indicates it's a journalism text, but it's actually a news reporting text. Except for columns and op-eds, it doesn't mention basic journalism forms, such as features or sports reporting, focusing solely on hard news instead. For an introductory-level journalism course, I'd want a text to cover the major journalism genres so students get a clear overview of the field.

Content Accuracy rating: 5

I was impressed by this text's unbiased, politically-neutral nature. It's nearly impossible to find a textbook, especially for journalism, that covers a topic thoroughly from multiple perspectives without being biased, politically-motivated, or activism-driven. This book offers true scholarship absent activism and indoctrination, unlike many I've seen that discuss the dangers of bias while simultaneously displaying it.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 5

This text is very up-to-date and seems like it is written in a format that could continue to be updated fairly easily. That's crucial in a field like journalism that experiences significant changes almost annually. I also appreciate that the last chapter addresses the future of journalism.

Clarity rating: 5

This book is incredibly clear and concise without compromising comprehensiveness, even as it explains complex, abstract concepts.

Consistency rating: 5

The format was easy to navigate and the text easy to comprehend due to short (but complete) sections, everyday language, and definitions of jargon. Information is presented in a thoughtful, logical order.

Modularity rating: 5

It would be easy to use this book as the sole textbook or to select sections and pair them with other materials.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 5

This book is one of the most organized and easy to navigate I've seen.

Interface rating: 5

I didn't see any problems. The book was exceptionally easy to navigate and read on-screen.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

I didn't see a single grammar or proofreading error.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

This book uses a variety of examples that represent human diversity and illustrate the complexity of news reporting. I didn't see anything insensitive or potentially offensive. In fact, one of the things I liked best about it was its lack of bias and straightforward, respectful tone.

This book exceeded my expectations. I liked everything about with the small exception that, although the title indicates it is a journalism (rather than news) handbook, it doesn't cover some basic journalism genres. I plan to use portions of this in my introduction to journalism course.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• I. Conceptual Foundations
• II. Media Effects
• III. Influences on Journalistic Media
• IV. Journalism Economics
• V. Journalistic Audiences
• VI. History of U.S. Journalism
• VII. Journalism Law and Ethics
• VIII. Preparing a News Story
• IX. Sourcing and Verifying Information
• X. Creating Journalistic Content
• XI. Future of Journalism

Ancillary Material

About the book.

This book is designed to help us understand the many changes to U.S. journalism and imagine new futures for it – futures in which it can serve as an even more useful tool for promoting a well-functioning society. But, before we can imagine new futures, we must take a step back and examine the institution of U.S. journalism through a critical and in-depth lens. This book aims to offer just that. It provides a conceptual foundation for understanding the development, logic, and practice of journalism in the United States; describes some of the key challenges, tensions, and opportunities it has faced, is facing, and will likely face; and offers guidance to help individuals develop the skills needed engage in impactful journalism.

About the Contributors

Rodrigo Zamith  is an Associate Professor in the Journalism Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of journalism and technology, with a focus on the reconfiguration of journalism in a changing media environment and the development of digital research methods for social scientists.

Zamith’s research has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals, including  New Media & Society , the  Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication , and  Digital Journalism . He has received multiple research awards from AEJMC, ICA, and other organizations. Zamith is a Faculty Associate of UMass’ Computational Social Science Institute and a Faculty Affiliate of its Department of Communication.

Zamith’s teaching includes both conceptually-oriented and skills-oriented courses, ranging from a broad overview of journalism to data-oriented journalistic practices. He is a former Lilly Teaching Fellow, recipient of UMass’ College Outstanding Teaching Award, and finalist for the University’s Distinguished Teaching Award.

Zamith holds a Ph.D. in Mass Communication from the University of Minnesota, an M.S. in Mass Communication from Florida International University, and a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Minnesota. Outside of work, he likes to exert himself on a tennis court, make odd gestures toward the television while watching Arsenal FC, and find reasons to end up on Stack Overflow.

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Behind the Journalism: How The Times Works

The Times publishes hundreds of pieces of journalism every day. We apply ethical standards and rigorous reporting to every article, video, podcast, newsletter and interactive we produce. Here are some explanations of the policies and processes that define our journalism.

By The New York Times Trust Team

Anonymous sources: Why does The Times use them?

“Reporters and editors have to be relentless and skeptical in handling anonymous sourcing. It should never be routine or casual.” Phil Corbett , standards editor

“Speaking on the condition of anonymity …”

“Discussed the incident on the condition that they not be named …”

“According to people familiar with …”

You’ve undoubtedly seen these phrases in Times articles, but what exactly do they mean?

Our reporting is based on sources. They can be officials, witnesses, records — essentially anyone or anything that can offer information on a particular topic. When we don’t disclose a human source by name, that person is considered an anonymous source. Under our guidelines, these sources should be used only for information that we believe is newsworthy and credible, and that we are not able to report any other way.

But why does The Times shield the identity of some sources? We recognize that the use of anonymous sources is sometimes crucial to our journalistic mission. It can give readers genuine insight into the uses and abuses of power — in Washington, on Wall Street and beyond. In sensitive areas like national security reporting, it can be unavoidable. Sources sometimes risk their careers, their freedom and even their lives by talking to us.

What we consider before using anonymous sources:

How do they know the information?

What’s their motivation for telling us?

Have they proved reliable in the past?

Can we corroborate the information they provide?

Because using anonymous sources puts great strain on our most valuable asset: our readers’ trust, the reporter and at least one editor is required to know the identity of the source. A senior newsroom editor must also approve the use of the information the source provides.

How does The Times handle corrections?

“The Times’s primary responsibility is to give readers accurate information, and our readers trust us to do that. By acknowledging our mistakes quickly and transparently, we build on that fundamental trust.” Rogene Jacquette, corrections editor

We recognize an ethical responsibility to correct all factual errors, large and small, promptly and in a prominent space. We encourage readers to reach out to us at [email protected] when they spot a possible mistake.

The corrections process:

First, we determine if we made an error. We contact the reporters and editors involved and, if a correction is warranted, we adjust the article and add the correction.

Even when we catch a mistake mere seconds after publishing, we still acknowledge it with a correction. There is no five-second rule.

Corrections should appear in any and all editions (print and digital) or platforms (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook) that carried the error. We also correct mistakes in newsletters, in videos and on podcasts like “The Daily.”

For obvious typos, we correct the error without appending a correction.

During breaking news, there are times when incorrect information is part of the story and does not require a correction: A death toll may be reduced, the number of suspects may change or officials may correct an earlier statement. We typically explain these changes in the updating article and do not append a correction.

Advertisement

Here’s how The Times is covering the Israel-Hamas war.

Reporting inside Gaza is extremely challenging right now. Israel has prevented journalists from entering the region except when accompanied by its military, and then only under certain conditions, while Egypt, along its border, is also blocking access. Communications have been limited, in part because of the Israeli siege of the enclave. Many Palestinian journalists in Gaza have been killed in airstrikes. And even before the war, Hamas restricted what reporters could cover in Gaza, limiting their movement, interrogating their sources and translators and expelling foreign reporters for work deemed objectionable.

The Times, along with other news organizations, has asked the governments of Israel and Egypt for direct access to Gaza because reporting on the ground is vital to understanding this crisis. Throughout the war, The Times has been working with journalists who were already in Gaza when the siege began. We have been interviewing residents and officials in Gaza by phone and using digital apps. We have asked people in the area to share their stories with us on video, which we then confirm are real. We also verify photos and social media posts using similar techniques, scrutinizing them to determine where and when they were taken or written and cross-checking with other sources, such as satellite imagery. We cross reference any information we gather with interviews with the U.N. and other international organizations, many of which have employees in different parts of Gaza.

In general, we try to avoid relying on a single source and we seek to include detailed information whenever possible.

— The New York Times

How New York Times reporters avoid personal involvement in politics.

Our ethics guidelines state that journalists have no place on the playing fields of politics. Of course, staff members are entitled to vote, but they must do nothing that might raise questions about their professional neutrality or that of The Times.

Staff members may not:

Endorse candidates

Give money to, or raise money for, any political candidate or election cause

Seek public office

Wear campaign buttons

March or rally in support of public causes or movements

But just because our reporters and editors are not participating in political events, doesn’t mean they don’t care deeply about certain issues. That is why we urge them to be aware of their own biases and to consider how someone with an opposing view might think about the topics they are covering. Framing and characterizing all viewpoints with fairness and depth is central to our approach to reporting.

Our reputation for independence rests upon the public’s faith that we can carry out our work free from influence and overt bias.

How The Times covers extreme weather.

“Oftentimes reporters are the first people to arrive at a place after it has been hit. That is a difficult experience.” Patricia Mazzei, Miami bureau chief

During extreme weather, and related events such as wildfires and floods, we move quickly to bring vital information to those who need it, sending reporters and visual journalists to the scene.

“Once the storm hits, we try to get as close to the hardest-hit part as quickly and safely as possible,” said Patricia Mazzei, the Miami bureau chief for The Times, who has covered natural disasters for more than 15 years, including several major hurricanes.

“At the beginning, it feels very like you’re the eyes and ears of the reader,” Mazzei said. “They’re not there, your editors are not there. You know that you have to absorb the sights and sounds and smells and what people are saying and how they feel and what it looks like and feels like for them. And then you have to pull out, in order to transmit this information. It’s a logistical dance that is very difficult and requires a lot of resources.”

When Mazzei and her colleagues reach a disaster zone, they often find people out surveying the damage or helping their neighbors. “You encounter these moments of humanity that sort of just blow your mind,” she said. “By telling their stories, we can let the world know what happened. And people really want the world to know what happened.”

Traveling with police officers, firefighters and search-and-rescue teams can also be essential in helping readers understand the urgency and severity of a storm. Their insight can help reporters piece together the damage the storm caused, and understand what it will take for a hard-hit community to come back from it.

Our reporters and editors reach out to emergency service agencies and forecasters as a disaster is unfolding, checking in hourly at times to let readers know where the most damage is occurring, and if they need to evacuate. But being at the scene, interviewing the people experiencing the brunt of the disaster, is how we can bring readers stories of survival , resilience and tragedy .

“It’s difficult to convey the panic and the immediacy of what people are feeling unless you get into the details , ” said Shawn Hubler, a National desk reporter who has covered California floods, wildfires and earthquakes for 40 years. “They’ll say it was terrifying. And by terrifying, you don’t know what they mean until you drill down a little bit and you find out there were embers the size of baseballs slamming into their car as they tried to wind their way down some two-lane highway.”

The on-the-ground reporting can also lead to some of the most important stories The Times can tell, seeking to hold decision makers accountable when warnings aren’t issued or heeded, when poor choices put people or communities in harm’s way, or when long-term planning or infrastructure has been insufficient or neglected, making the outcomes of extreme weather even worse.

For our journalists back at the office, the pace during an ongoing weather story can be frenetic. Editors on the National and Express desks field reports from several locations while also monitoring the course of a storm, the problems it is causing — including evacuations, power outages and flight cancellations — and how those affected can seek help.

For events such as blizzards, typhoons, hurricanes and severe weather that could produce tornadoes, our weather data and graphics teams step in early with forecasts and graphics that show the likely path and intensity of the storms.

Our Weather Data team is led by John Keefe and anchored by the meteorologist Judson Jones. For this team it is data, data, data. “Because we are looking at it all the time, it’s easier for us to explain when there are weird quirks,” Keefe said. This allows the team to alert editors to a coming weather system.

The team uses data primarily from the National Weather Service, augmented by other branches of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And Jones keeps in close touch with scientists at these agencies, and with academics who research weather. His expertise allows him to speak their language and interpret their jargon for readers. “My job is to translate that into terms that matter,” he said, “and sometimes that’s filtering out what doesn’t matter.”

Our Graphics desk, led by Archie Tse, takes this information and turns it into maps that track a storm’s path; animated time loops that give readers the scale of the storm; and graphics that show rainfall, wind speed and storm surge. The goal is to create weather trackers that focus on the aspects that threaten to cause the most damage. Tse said that a combination of news judgment and design expertise goes into every graphic. “Our maps and visualizations are tailored for our readers to give them the information they need in a clear and concise way,” he said.

Because the science establishing a direct link between extreme weather events and the rapid warming of the planet is increasingly clear, our Climate desk, which includes more than a dozen journalists, joins in our coverage to provide data, visual explanations and insights.

Here are some of the sources we use for extreme weather events.

The Storm Prediction Center , the Weather Prediction Center , the National Hurricane Center and other divisions within the National Weather Service.

The European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts ( E.C.M.W.F .).

The National Weather Service for the number of people under storm watches, warnings and advisories across the United States.

PowerOutage, a website that collects and aggregates data on the number of utility customers without power in the United States and other parts of the world.

FlightAware , which displays the cancellations and delays of commercial airline flights around the world.

These are all available to the public, but we sometimes subscribe for access to more data.

We also provide guidance for those in the paths of storms, offering ways they can prepare for and survive hurricanes , flash floods and tornadoes .

Weather is news. We cover it with the understanding that it has an impact on readers’ lives. And while extreme events may begin as breaking news, they often become stories of survival, tragedy, science and accountability.

Mass shootings: This is how The Times covers them.

“Our job is to never allow this to become routine, and to — once we do confirm it — react and cover it aggressively, as though it’s the very first one we’ve covered.” Marc Lacey , managing editor

Our newsroom receives reports of active gunman situations in the United States at least once a day, on average. We monitor the situation, confirm details and, if warranted, send a team of reporters to the scene. Within 24 hours of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in 2018, The Times had at least 25 reporters and 15 editors working on the story.

Our overall goal is to give readers an in-depth account, while being sensitive to victims and loved ones. We want to avoid sensationalizing the crime or elevating the stature of the attacker.

How we define and count mass shootings

Once we confirm a death count, we tell readers the scope of the shooting and how it fits into the bigger picture of these crimes across the country.

To create a consistent count of mass shootings in the United States, we have updated our definition of “mass shooting,” to include any shooting where four or more people are killed with a firearm — not including the assailant — in a public place and the shooting is not connected to another crime or circumstance, like a robbery, a drug deal or domestic violence. This definition, which was created by the Congressional Research Service , is based on the F.B.I.’s definition of mass murder. This definition is also used by the most comprehensive database on the subject: the Violence Project .

Our count of mass shootings is based on data from both the Gun Violence Archive and the Violence Project. We use data from both sources in order to make sure our database is as up-to-date and comprehensive as possible.

How we report on the crime

While we often rely on the reports given by law enforcement officials in control of a crime scene during a mass shooting, we let readers know what we can’t confirm, what we can and where and how we got the information.

We use the name of the suspect sparingly, and take special care to avoid it in headlines or social media posts.

We avoid descriptions that are cinematic, or lack attribution and sourcing.

We consult with our photo and standards editors before publishing graphic images or photographs of the suspect.

We focus on the victims’ and survivors’ experience of the shooting, while also reporting on the crime and the attacker.

We verify any information from a witness or victim found on social media and reach out to the person who posted it before we publish it.

We publish the suspect’s name when it is confirmed by authorities. But we do not want to give the person excessive prominence. There is evidence that media coverage can be a factor motivating future mass shootings.

We generally avoid publishing images in which the suspect is seen brandishing weapons. We will explain any ideology that might have influenced the gunman’s actions, but we do not typically publish or link to manifestoes that contain rationales for the attack.

Our reporters try to find out as much as they can about the suspect and approach anyone who might have crossed paths with the person. We supplement interviews with a thorough examination of public records. We want to give readers a sense of the human tragedy, so calling the loved ones of those who died in such circumstances is necessary.

How The Times uses visuals to investigate the news.

The Visual Investigations team at The New York Times uses satellite images, cellphone videos, social media posts and other visual elements to investigate and reconstruct news events like deadly police actions in the United States, oil smuggling in North Korea , and a devastating drone strike in Kabul .

These journalists employ traditional reporting methods as well, visiting the scene of an event and interviewing witnesses and survivors. But it is the digital investigative methods that set them apart and allow them to present a definitive account of the news.

When none of the police officers who raided Breonna Taylor’s home in Kentucky used body cameras, preventing a full understanding of what happened, the Visual Investigations team built a 3-D model of the scene and pieced together critical sequences of events to show how poor planning and shoddy police work led to a fatal outcome.

Malachy Browne, a senior story producer and a co-founder, in 2017, of the Visual Investigations team, spoke of the value of the team’s reporting when it earned them a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 2020: “Together, they established — without a doubt — that Russian pilots had bombed four hospitals, a market street and a refugee camp . All in Syria. Killing dozens of people.”

How the team works

Using publicly available information, social media and on-the-ground reporting, team members collect videos and other documentary evidence of the event they’re investigating.

Reverse image searching that includes running still images through search engines helps confirm that a video is current. If the material has appeared online before, it will most likely show up in the search.

Comparing landmarks or matching structural damage (as in the war in Ukraine) in a video with satellite images or Google Streetview can help to pinpoint a precise area.

To verify when a video was filmed, team members check weather reports, measure the length of the sun’s shadows and check the metadata, or file information, of a video or photo. They also interview witnesses.

If they find that a video is taken out of context or is used to spread misinformation, they take to social media to warn others that the content is unreliable.

For more on the team’s process, read How The Times Verifies Eyewitness Videos by Christoph Koettl , who specializes in the analysis of satellite imagery, video and other visual evidence for The Times.

When The Times publishes an obscenity.

“In an age of ubiquitous vulgarity, it’s not very persuasive to argue that someone’s use of, say, the F word is deeply revealing.” Phil Corbett, standards editor

You may have seen an obscenity in the pages, digital or print, of The New York Times. But this should be rare. We maintain a steep threshold for vulgar words.

There are times, however, when publishing an offensive expression is necessary for a reader’s understanding of what is being reported. For example, The Times doesn’t shy away from reporting vulgarities uttered by powerful public figures and wielded in a public setting. If a reporter feels strongly that offensive language should be used in an article, editors from the Standards desk — and sometimes the masthead — will discuss the merits of using the language before agreeing to publish it.

Even when we decide to publish such language, we typically confine it to a single reference, and avoid using it in headlines, news alerts or social media posts.

Far more often, we say no to offensive language, as with profiles of colorful characters who pepper their interviews with four-letter words. In these cases, we don’t feel compelled to publish every word they say. Instead, we opt for a general description like “used a vulgar expression.” And we often avoid repeating a vulgarity used in the name of a website, business, movie or band.

(There is one section of The Times where you may encounter vulgar language somewhat more often: Books. This is because we run excerpts from the books we feature, and we don’t tamper with the author’s language.)

We realize that some readers may see our approach to vulgar language as dated or even a bit stuffy. To be clear, it’s not that we think our readers are delicate or easily shocked. But we think they value a restrained and thoughtful tone. Here’s a sentence from The Times’s stylebook entry on “obscenity, vulgarity, profanity,” which is more than 700 words long:

“The Times differentiates itself by taking a stand for civility in public discourse, sometimes at an acknowledged cost in the vividness of an article or two, and sometimes at the price of submitting to gibes.”

How The Times decides who gets an obituary.

“Some 155,000 people die between each day’s print version of The New York Times and the next — enough to fill Yankee Stadium three times over. On average, we publish obituaries on about three of them.” William McDonald, obituary editor

Here, William McDonald explains the process of a Times obituary :

We start with a paper-thin fraction of the total — the deaths we happen to hear about, usually by email or from a wire service or other news outlet — and then get choosy.

We’re exclusive in the extreme. We have to be. We have only so much space in the print newspaper, only so many hands to produce stories and only so many hours in the day to produce them, yet we have a very wide world to watch.

We focus on people who made a difference on a large stage — people who, we think, will command the broadest interest. If you made news in life, chances are your death is news, too.

We investigate, research and ask around before settling on our subjects.

Some might think our process presumptuous. Who, after all, anointed a handful of Times editors to stand by the roadside as a parade of humanity passes and single out this one, this one — but not that one — as worthy of being remembered?

The answer is that no one did, actually, because that is not precisely what we decide. We make no judgments, moral or otherwise, about human worth. What we do try to judge, however, is newsworthiness, and that’s a whole other standard.

There is no formula, scoring system or checklist. One thing to remember is that it is not our intent to honor the dead; we leave the tributes to the eulogists. We seek only to report deaths and to sum up lives, illuminating why, in our judgment, those lives were significant. The justification for the obituary is in the story it tells.

What does The New York Times own?

The New York Times Company owns The New York Times newspaper, website and app, and several other businesses:

Wirecutter , the recommendation service

The Athletic , the sports news site

New York Times Cooking

New York Times Games, which includes Spelling Bee and Wordle .

Each business operates independently and is sold as a separate subscription, or as part of a bundle with the news site and app. (Wordle is free.) The company makes most of its money from these subscriptions and derives significant revenue from advertisers.

The paper also produces several podcasts, including “The Daily,” which sells sponsorships and ads. In addition, the company owns the podcast producer Serial Productions , as well as Audm, a service that creates audio versions of articles for various publishers.

The Times also publishes The New York Times International Edition, The New York Times Magazine, T: The New York Times Style Magazine and The New York Times Book Review. They all operate within the newsroom and are led by the executive editor.

The company used to own other newspapers, including The Boston Globe, as well as radio and television stations. The Times no longer owns these properties, focusing instead on fewer, digital news brands. The company has made minority investments in other businesses and start-ups, and because The Times has no operational control over these companies, it hasn’t disclosed details of these investments.

The Times owns the majority of its headquarters building in New York City and a printing plant. Both generate revenue. The building rents office space to outside companies, and the plant sells printing services to other publishers.

As a public company, The Times trades under the ticker symbol NYT, but the business is controlled by the Ochs-Sulzberger family through a trust. The publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, is a fifth-generation member of the family.

Additional financial information can be found here .

How The Times handles and confirms breaking crime news.

“When big news breaks, we aim to get to the bottom of what occurred as quickly as we can, although we keep in mind that oftentimes initial reports from the scene can be off.” Marc Lacey, managing editor

The Times often relies on the reports given by law enforcement officials in control of a crime scene during a breaking news event. These initial reports can be valuable to readers, but they also can be incomplete and even inaccurate. We let readers know what we can’t confirm, what we can and where and how we got the information. Then we work aggressively to gather a wider range of perspectives on what happened and to verify the information through public records and interviews with witnesses and victims. We also search for video recordings of the incident and verify those before publishing.

What we keep in mind in the early stages of a breaking news event

Initial reports from law enforcement officials reflect their version of the events and are based on preliminary investigations.

Additional information may contradict these early reports.

Law enforcement officials may be withholding information for various reasons.

How we approach our coverage

We are cautious when reporting about potential motives, especially when officials are making early statements about the motivation behind an incident.

We are clear with readers about what questions are unanswered.

When new information contradicts earlier reports, we level with readers on what has changed and when.

Sometimes the reporting on these events involves both the crime and how the police respond to it. Law enforcement officials at times make it difficult for us to access information, interview witnesses or verify their findings.

In the case of George Floyd, the initial police report was titled, “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction.” Video recorded by a bystander showed police officers pinning Mr. Floyd to the ground.

By being upfront with readers about what we know and don’t know, we provide as much detail as possible while acknowledging it isn’t the full picture.

Why The Times asks readers to contribute to our journalism.

“Inviting people to contribute to our reporting helps us grow the reach and scope of our journalism. — Beena Raghavendran, editor, digital storytelling and training

Our journalists are skilled at asking questions and listening. Their work is usually done with one source at a time — over the phone, in an email or text message or in person. But what if we asked dozens or even hundreds of people those same questions, all at once?

By using questionnaires we allow our journalists to broaden their reporting and give readers a chance to respond to specific questions, describe their experiences and share images or other media. Questionnaires can generate hundreds of responses, which are often used in a follow-up article. For example, when a poll showed that political discord was threatening friendships and family relationships, our call-out drew more than 500 responses, allowing us to share with readers the views of people from across the country who ranged in age from 17 to 74.

Questionnaires are an extension of our traditional reporting methods and a way to ensure that our journalism reflects the world we cover.

Here’s how they work and why you can trust us with your input

After we’ve formulated a questionnaire and published it, a team of reporters and editors works together to read through every response. We then reach out to a portion of those who respond (sometimes up to several dozen people) for follow-up conversations. These can include an interview to get a longer, more detailed response, or just the agreement that we can use the response they submitted.

These questionnaires appear as articles and are available to anyone with internet access. You don’t need to subscribe or even register on our site.

We require a full name and email to participate. We may use this information to contact you to confirm that you are who you say you are.

We use questionnaire responses only for journalistic purposes. We store all responses in a secure database, built and maintained in house and accessible only to our journalists. We never use the personal information you share for marketing or any other business communication.

Whether or not we use your response, we strive to acknowledge that we have received it. We make every effort to contact you before publishing any part of your submission.

We publish more than 100 questionnaires each year and encourage our journalists covering all topics to explore this approach to reporting.

How The Times covers elections.

Why and how we debunk election misinformation..

Our mission to bring you the truth through our journalism also includes warning you about the falsehoods. Misinformation flourished across social media in the final stretch before Election Day. We have several reporters tracking the trends and the shifting tactics employed by those spreading untruths. Here are five unfounded claims about voting in the midterm elections .

How we get live results on election night.

We report vote totals provided by The Associated Press, which collects results from states, counties and townships through a network of websites and more than 4,000 on-the-ground correspondents. To estimate how many votes remain to be counted, our team of data journalists and software engineers gathers vote tallies directly from the websites of election officials and compares these with our turnout expectations. Here’s more on how that works .

What you need to know about the needle.

The needle is an innovative forecasting tool that was created by The Times and debuted in 2016. It is intended to help you understand what the votes tallied so far suggest about possible winners in key contests, before the election is called. Here’s a deeper dive into how it works.

How we call winners on election night.

We rely on The Associated Press, which employs a team of analysts, researchers and race callers who have a deep understanding of the states where they declare winners. In some tightly contested races, we independently evaluate A.P. race calls before declaring a winner. Here’s more about how it works .

Types of Journalism

Introduction.

Although “journalism” is a singular term, which may imply a homogeneous entity, it is helpful to think of it as an umbrella term for a number of distinct forms, practices, and genres. Put another way, journalism has many looks, can be produced in many ways, and can be about many things.

There are many ways to categorize different types of journalism. One helpful schema involves three dimensions: media vehicle , beat , and method . A single story is likely to be shaped by its categorization within each dimension. For example, you may have a television (media vehicle) segment about politics (beat) reported through a breaking news approach (method). That story would be tailored to meet the expectations (and advantages) of each of those dimensions, from its storytelling structure to the depth of the report.

Media Vehicle

There are a number of different media vehicles that can be used for conveying journalism. These include text-oriented (e.g., newspapers or online articles), audio-oriented (e.g., radio or podcasts), and visual-oriented (e.g., television or photography).

The media vehicle matters because it offers certain technical affordances (possibilities and limitations). For example, photojournalism relies primarily on still photographs to convey the essence of a development or issue. A photojournalist may need to capture multiple facets of a complex issue through a single, representative photograph — perhaps a melting glacier with a skeletal polar bear in the foreground. Put another way, the photojournalist may need to aim to convey a thousand words with just one shot. (They also write accompanying photo captions, but those rarely exceed a couple of sentences.) Alternatively, the photojournalist may be tasked with producing a photo essay, wherein they piece together multiple photographs that capture different dimensions of an issue in a manner that conveys a narrative. Photojournalism shoots can involve candid, heat-of-the-moment reporting (e.g., documenting a battle in a conflict zone) as well as documenting daily life for a particular group of people (e.g., homeless veterans).

Similarly, news produced for a television newscast is likely to differ in important ways from news produced for an online news article. For example, a story about local opioid addiction rates may need to be condensed into a three-minute TV segment. That might involve just 200 words of voice-over narration on the journalist’s part. In contrast, an average article on the BBC’s website is roughly 750 words in length. (If they’re writing for The New York Times , that’s closer to 1,000 words.) The shorter length for the newscast requires the journalist to hone in on a narrower aspect of the issue, or perhaps offer a more superficial account of its many aspects. Moreover, the style of writing differs: Writing for the ear is distinctly different from writing for the eyes.

Reporting jobs are often oriented around either beat reporting or general assignment reporting .

Beats are niche categories of journalistic coverage in which individual journalists may specialize. A beat can be a topic, a person, or an institution, though they are most commonly niche topics. For example, a political journalist might cover the politics beat, the election beat, or the Kamala Harris beat — or all three. Beat reporters immerse themselves in their beats and gain specialized insights and knowledge of the key stakeholders, actors, trends, and influences within those beats over time. As they do so, they become experts in those beats, and that expertise appears in the stories they identify and cover. Moreover, by virtue of repeatedly covering the same topics or people, beat reporters tend to develop deep and specialized sourcing networks, often resulting in elevated access to some sources and exclusive information.

Beats are not just genres. They may require distinct approaches to newsgathering and involve different audience expectations for storytelling structures. Consider the film beat: It may involve a mixture of reported and objective pieces (e.g., news about the latest film Ryan Gosling has signed on to), short lifestyle features (e.g., a non-combative and abridged interview with Gosling about his morning workout routine), and subjective opinion pieces (e.g., a review of Gosling’s latest movie). By contrast, the courts beat is more likely to have inverted pyramid-style stories detailing incidents and events derived from reviews of court documents, or reports about arguments in an on-going case. (Audiences are unlikely to expect short interviews with judges about their morning case review routine.)

Common beats include business, courts and crime, education, film, food, health, international affairs, music, politics, science, sports, style, and technology. Some outlets (especially niche publications) have even more specialized beats, like Big Tech, Medicare, or Green Energy. Many journalistic outlets organize their staffs and their editorial content based on distinctions between specialized beats, meaning that they will have a reporter (or group of reporters) who occupy a particular physical space in the newsroom and publish primarily on a dedicated portion of the news product (e.g., a “Science” section) based on their beat. While many journalists focus on a single beat, some journalists may be tasked with covering multiple beats — especially during times of newsroom cutbacks.

Not all journalists are assigned to a beat, though. Some journalists’ expertise lies in their ability to quickly learn new topics and make sense of them for non-specialized audiences. These journalists are often called general assignment reporters because they may be tasked with covering an entertainment story one day and a court story the next. The need to cover such a wide array of topics often comes at a cost, though: General assignment reporters are typically more likely to get facts wrong (especially with an unfamiliar topic), may struggle to offer deep coverage, and their sourcing network for a topic may be sparse or superficial. Nevertheless, many journalistic outlets will complement their beat reporters with at least one general assignment reporter in order to have a frequent and predictable stream of news stories and to help round off the outlet’s news coverage as needed.

Journalism may also be distinguished based on the approach to reporting that is used. Examples of common approaches are breaking news reporting , straight news reporting , feature reporting , enterprise reporting , investigative reporting , and advocacy reporting .

Breaking news reporting involves covering a development with a particular emphasis on timeliness. Breaking news stories depict current events, recent developments, and information that is generally just coming to light. For example, this might include a shooting outside a bar. Breaking news stories are often updated regularly as news develops and as journalists uncover new information about the sometimes ongoing event. Put another way, breaking news reporting doesn’t aim to deeply report multiple aspects of a development and package it as a single, stand-alone news product. Instead, it concedes its incompleteness and focuses on unearthing and describing the most recent developments.

Straight news reporting aims to synthesize recent developments and contextualize them into a stand-alone news product. It is similar to breaking news reporting in that it emphasizes the timely presentation of information in a clear, quick, and straight-to-the-point manner — often by using a story structure like the inverted pyramid. However, compared to breaking news reporting, there is more of an emphasis on sense-making and contextualizing information, with the expectation that a story will be more complete and not require constant updating (even if the event is still developing).

Feature reporting allows journalists to take a more creative approach to the information they present. While the newsgathering methods may be similar to those of traditional reporting, the newswriting approach is quite different. First, they are typically written with a more open-ended and less-strict story structure. Feature stories often apply creative storytelling techniques, such as playful or poetic language, narrative structures, detailed anecdotes, and multi-part vignettes. Second, because of their more open-ended writing styles and less strict relationship to timeliness, feature stories are often long-form and evergreen . Evergreen stories are not tied to a specific time peg, or timely event. They are designed to maintain their relevance to audiences for a longer period of time.

Enterprise reporting relies heavily on original reporting driven by a journalist. It is called enterprise reporting because it requires an enterprising journalist who is able to develop their own story ideas, sources, and means of gaining access to information. (The opposite of enterprise reporting would be reporting that relies primarily on press releases, press conferences, or news that is given in some way to a journalist rather than uncovered by that journalist.) Enterprise reporting often involves creative and advanced reporting methods, such as public records requests, data collection and analysis, and access to historical documents. The result is often, though not always, a longer-form and in-depth news product.

Investigative reporting is a particularly rigorous form of reporting and one of the most powerful types of journalism for advancing the public’s knowledge. Investigative reporters dedicate themselves to the sleuth-like pursuit, through a wide variety of investigative techniques, of information about a niche topic that is often difficult to access. The subjects of investigative reporting are frequently topics of deep conflict and vast public importance, such as political or corporate corruption, violence, crime, financial malfeasance, or other cases of wrongdoing and injustice. Investigative journalists dedicate weeks, months, and even years to the dogged pursuit of a specific person, entity, or topic in order to bring their subject to public light. This type of journalism is strongly associated with watchdog journalism because of the role it plays in holding powerful actors accountable. In this case, investigative journalists are the metaphorical watchdogs who seek to make the actions of the powerful transparent to their audiences. (However, watchdog journalism is a broader form of journalism that also includes traditional, day-to-day reporting on the mundane matters of governance, such as attending School Board meetings.) Investigative stories often take the shape of long-form stories (or a series of shorter stories) because of the amount of reporting and information they comprise.

Advocacy reporting is a form of reporting that distinguishes itself by formulating a clear opinion, or substantiating an existing one, with timely, factual information. This approach outwardly rejects the norm of neutrality, and instead aims to promote a cause or intervention. For example, advocacy reporting may focus on illustrating the plight of young undocumented immigrants by including anecdotes about the challenges they face, statistics about the prevalence of the issue, and offering the journalist’s evaluation of a key policy presently being considered by lawmakers. Such reporting is typically labeled as a “news analysis” or presented as an author’s column in an Opinion section. However, it may also be the approach to reporting that defines the identity of a journalistic outlet (and is therefore not segregated from the other reporting done by that outlet). Not all opinion pieces warrant the label of advocacy reporting, though. Many are better categorized as “opinion writing” if they do not follow at least some of the staple practices of journalism, like verifying information.

Hard vs. Soft News

Another way of categorizing journalism is through the distinction of “hard” and “soft” news.

Hard news journalism refers to breaking news and reports about serious or hard-hitting topics that are both timely and of civic interest. They are usually based on factual information and rigorous research. Political journalism, business journalism, and watchdog journalism are all typically recognized forms of hard news.

Soft news journalism refers to reports about predominantly lifestyle and entertainment affairs, or other topics of human interest. While such journalism may involve rigorous research, it is also more open to interpretive and literary accounts. Sports journalism, entertainment journalism, and celebrity coverage are all typically recognized forms of soft news.

Although this categorization schema is quite popular — it is not uncommon to hear those terms in the newsroom — it is also arguably over-simplistic and does a disservice to certain genres. Specifically, hard news is often used to connote a superior form of journalism, and is often talked about within the industry as being more important (and pure) than soft news. However, consider the case of a rigorously reported investigative piece unearthing corruption in a multi-billion dollar sports league, resulting in criminal prosecution of league executives. It would be a disservice to label that as soft news — with its implied inferiority — simply because it is “a sports story.” Conversely, a puff piece on a politician designed to help a journalist gain access hardly warrants the label of hard journalism.

Instead, it is more fruitful to view journalism through a more nuanced typology that takes into account dimensions like the media vehicle, beat, and reporting method associated with that piece of journalism. This focuses less on a shortsighted heuristic for determining a story’s import based on its genre and instead allows us to think more about the norms and expectations associated with a journalistic form.

Key Takeaways

One way to categorize different types of journalism is to focus on three dimensions: media vehicle, beat, and method.

The media vehicle matters because it offers certain technical opportunities and limitations, and will have some associated norms. Most media vehicles can be sub-categorized under text-oriented, audio-oriented, and visual-oriented, but hybrid forms also exist.

Reporting jobs are often oriented around either beat reporting or general assignment reporting. Beats refer to niche categories of coverage that journalists may specialize in.

Journalism may also be distinguished based on the journalist’s approach to reporting. Common approaches include breaking news reporting, feature reporting, and investigative reporting.

Journalism is also sometimes categorized under labels of “hard” news and “soft” news, with the former encompassing genres like crime and politics, and the latter genres like entertainment and sports. Although popular within the industry, this typology is arguably overly simplistic and problematic.

What is public interest journalism? Providing reliable information to those who need it most

Editor, The Conversation

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Before the arrival of the internet, most journalism was produced in pretty well-off advertising businesses. The proximity of money and public interest journalism was often a source of tension, but rarely rupture. Every now and then you’d read something about the public’s right to know and sardonic journos would moan that “serving the public interest” really meant filling spaces between ads.

Advertising doesn’t pay any more – or more accurately it pays the likes of Google, Facebook and almost no one else. Space for “content” online is endless, but so is the torrent of misinformation. Cleaved from the funding it needs to survive, journalism has been freed to rethink what serving the public interest actually means.

At The Conversation we have given this a lot of thought, in part because we do journalism so differently. We only work with academic experts. We prize accuracy and trust above all else. We aim to serve our readers by giving them quality information with no other agenda than helping them be better informed.

This doesn’t always involve reporting on a high-profile court case or investigating corruption, as vital as that work is. Good information about nutrition is vital to deciding what to buy at the supermarket. Good information about how COVID-19 spreads is vital so people know how to protect themselves and each other. We know the damage that can be done when bad information spreads about a topic as important as vaccination.

So here’s my definition of public interest journalism: providing reliable and accurate information to those who need it most. At The Conversation it could be an article modelling the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, or the latest research on endometriosis. At the Sydney Morning Herald it might be a political column or an investigation of public corruption.

Because we see serving the public interest as being the core of what we do, we make sure everything we publish is free. In fact, we give our work away to other media outlets. We want to support a healthy media ecosystem and ensure expert research and analysis gets the biggest possible audience.

We think this is the right approach, but it does have one drawback: it makes it harder to fund our work. This is why each year we turn to readers and ask those of you who value our work to make a contribution.

If you can donate , please do so, and thank you to all the wonderful and public-spirited readers who have already donated.

And to the dozens of people who got in touch in recent days to say they love reading The Conversation but aren’t able to donate – no worries and you’re welcome. It’s great you value our work, especially now we’re finally out of the business of filling spaces between the ads.

• Public Interest Journalism
• From The Conversation

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Audience Development Coordinator (fixed-term maternity cover)

Lecturer (Hindi-Urdu)

Director, Defence and Security

Opportunities with the new CIEHF

Teaching Journalism: 5 Journalism Lessons and Activities

You and your students will absolutely love these journalism lessons! The beginning of a new school year can be hectic for journalism teachers who are tasked with simultaneously teaching new journalism students who don’t have any journalism experience while also planning and publishing content for the school newspaper.

If your class is anything like mine, it is a mix of returning and new students. This year, I only have three returning students, so it is almost like I am starting entirely from scratch.

Here are 5 journalism lessons to teach at the beginning of the year

1. staff interview activity.

One of the very first assignments I have my students do is partner up with a fellow staff member that they don’t know and interview them. This activity works on two things: first, it helps the class get to know one another. Secondly, it helps students proactive their interviewing skills in a low-stakes environment.

For this activity, I have students come up with 10 interview questions, interview one another and do a quick write-up so that students can have practice recording their interviews.

Before this activity, I go over interviewing skills with my students. We discuss the dos and don’ts of interviewing, we brainstorm good interviewing questions, and we talk about the need to go beyond simple answer questions.

2. Staff Bio

Another great activity for the beginning of the year is to have students write their staff bio. This provides students with an opportunity to write in the third person while also providing the most important information.

For my staff bios, I give students 80-100 words. I have them write their bios in the third person and in the present tense.

3. Collaborative News Story

For our first news story of the school year, I like to write one collaboratively as a staff. We go over the basics of journalism writing and then write together in one Google Doc. I do this as a learning activity so that new staff can see how we write journalistically. First, I have students work together in small groups to write the lead. Then, as a class, we craft one together. From there, we move on to building the story.

As we write the story, as a staff, we can then see what kind of information we need. I assign small groups of students to interview people and find quotes. Those groups then add that information to the story.

Once it is written, we edit and review the story together before it is published. This activity is particularly helpful because students get to see how we format quotes in our stories, how we refer to students and teachers in our stories, and how we go about the news-gathering process.

Once our collaborative story is done, new staff then have the green light to begin writing their own stories.

4. The News Determinants

You can also read more in-depth about the news determinants with this blog post about teaching the five news determinants .

5. AP Style Writing

As students are writing their first stories, I like to teach students about AP Style . I use this instructional presentation, and students assemble their AP Style mini flip books that they use as a reference all year long.

The news determinants and AP Style lessons are included in my journalism curriculum with many other resources that will make teaching and advising the middle school or high school newspaper much easier.

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What Does “Longform” Journalism Really Mean?

On love and ruin , terminology, and the anxiety of limits.

Writers are preoccupied with limits: temporal and physical and metaphysical, the divisions between self and other, the mind’s inability to reconstruct the subject of its fascination. Borges envisioned “a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point.” Moby-Dick ’s Ishmael claimed that “true places” resisted the attempts of mapmakers. Stories often assume the shape of their limitations. In 2006, the same year that Twitter launched, Robert Olen Butler published Severance , a story collection that employed what one reviewer called “a new—and unlikely to be replicated—art form, the vignette of the severed head told in exactly 240 words.”

For journalists, tasked with something like verisimilitude, these limits are always existential. Joe Gould claimed to be writing an oral history whose purview was the knowable world. Joseph Mitchell, who first profiled Gould for The New Yorker in 1942, came to doubt the history’s existence, and said as much after Gould’s death. Gould’s history was never published. Another New Yorker staff writer, Jill Lepore, suspects Gould’s compulsive writing was hypergraphia. “This is an illness, a mania,” she wrote, “but seems more like something a writer might envy.” Perhaps Mitchell did; after his final piece on Gould, Mitchell never published another word. Like Gould’s productivity, Mitchell’s silence was storied but impossible to verify. Lepore wrote about both men in “Joe Gould’s Teeth,” a feature article whose word count grew into a book-length manuscript.

“Writers tumble into this story,” wrote Lepore, “and then they plummet.” The boundaries of the observable world push inward and outward; we are fathomless, the universe immeasurable. Where, then, should a story begin and end?

In the past decade, as declining ad revenue constricted editorial space in print publications, online publishing offered journalists freedom from some of their limits. A story could be as complicated as its subject required, and as long as necessary, though the ancient caveat still applied: your readers might not stick with you until the end. Websites such as BuzzFeed, whose content seemed to assume a newly attention-deficient readership, occasionally published pieces of narrative nonfiction whose word counts reached into the thousands. Online publishers began to label such stories “longform.”

Journalists and their readers have an uneasy history with such labels. “I have no idea who coined the term ‘the New Journalism’ or when it was coined,” wrote Tom Wolfe in a 1972 feature article in New York . “I have never even liked the term.” Neither did Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote to Wolfe and threatened to “have your goddamn femurs ground into bone splinters if you ever mention my name again in connection with that horrible ‘new journalism’ shuck you’re promoting.” (Wolfe still included Thompson in his 1973 anthology, The New Journalism .) “Creative nonfiction” still enjoys wide usage, and a magazine exists by the same name. Its editor, Lee Gutkind, writes that Creative Nonfiction “defines the genre simply, succinctly, and accurately as ‘true stories well told.’” These labels amount to a shaggy taxonomy; journalists that share certain aesthetics are grouped together, and then those groups are differentiated from each other, to the presumed benefit of readers.

Such labels sometimes reward the writer, who becomes associated with a popular movement. They sometimes reward the reader, who has a new word for what she seeks. Most often, they reward the publisher. But a publisher’s loyalties can shift with the market. Medium, a publishing platform that developed an early reputation for longform journalism, distanced itself from the label. (“It was not our intention… to create a platform just for ‘long-form’ content,” said Ev Williams, Medium CEO and a co-founder of Twitter.) BuzzFeed, on the other hand, hired a “longform editor” in 2013 to oversee a section of the site devoted to such stories. The longform editor described his section as “BuzzFeed for people who are afraid of BuzzFeed.”

Whether labels like “longform” reward a story is another matter. “Length is hardly the quality that most meaningfully classifies these stories,” wrote James Bennet in The Atlantic . “Yet there’s a real conundrum here: If ‘long-form’ doesn’t fit, what term is elastic enough to encompass the varied journalism it has come to represent, from narrative to essay, profile to criticism?” The term “journalism” is, somehow, insufficient.

Taxonomy presents one conundrum; popularity makes for another. The “longform” label offers readers and writers a new way to self-identify, and a new hashtag by which they may find, distinguish and promote stories. An attendant risk is that a story’s appeal as a “longform” product could short-circuit editorial judgment and damage a writer or his subject before a large audience.

In 2014, Grantland published “ Dr. V’s Magical Putter ,” a 7,000-word profile of an inventor and transgender woman whose gender transition was revealed in the story—before she had revealed it to people in her life. “What began as a story about a brilliant woman with a new invention,” author Chris Hannan wrote, “had turned into the tale of a troubled man who had invented a new life for himself.” Hannan reveals in his final paragraphs that his subject committed suicide, and wrote, “Writing a eulogy for a person who by all accounts despised you is an odd experience.” In the New York Times , Jonathan Mahler cautioned readers and writers again “fetishizing the form and losing sight of its function.”

“Longform” springs from journalism’s anxiety over limitations—mainly, its online audience’s attention span. During the longform decade, software developers created programs that translate word counts into estimated reading times. Both Longreads.com and Longform.org use the program, as does Medium. For their first assignment, students of the late New York Times media critic David Carr wrote stories with estimated reading times of fewer than five minutes.

In 2011, The Atavist Magazine began to publish longform stories—“one blockbuster nonfiction story a month, generally between 5,000 and 30,000 words.” Since its inception, The Atavist ’s stories have been nominated for eight National Magazine Awards; the magazine’s first win, for 2015’s “Love and Ruin,” was also the first time the coveted “feature writing” award went to a digital magazine. While the magazine’s founder, Evan Ratliff, employs the “longform” label to describe The Atavist ’s work, he doesn’t fret about his audience’s attention span.

“The people who are making decisions based on that, I don’t think they’re doing it based on actual research, either,” he told Columbia Journalism Review a few months after The Atavist Magazine published its first story. “I think they’re all doing it based on anecdotal experience.” Ratliff concluded, “I don’t really care if attention spans are going down in the world overall or not.” And the universe—the unknowable curator of all the components of our stories—doesn’t care either.

Love and Ruin is a new anthology of stories culled from The Atavist ’s first five years. If labels like “longform” mean anything, then Love and Ruin is also the first collection of stories that typify a new genre, a successor to titles like Wolfe’s The New Journalism and Robert Boynton’s The New New Journalism .

“‘Longform’ written storytelling . . . was, it was said, going the way of the black rhino,” Ratliff writes in his foreword. “Our magazine is built on questioning that wisdom.” Still, Ratliff doesn’t dwell on the word; if length can be considered a characteristic of each story in Love and Ruin , then it’s the one that interests him least.

Each story in Love and Ruin first appeared online, via the magazine’s proprietary platform, along with interview excerpts, original photography, embedded videos, and optional audiobook downloads. Most also came with an estimated reading time. The shortest story in Love and Ruin —Brooke Jarvis’ 10,000-word account of the year she spent working with leprosy patients in Kalaupapa, Hawaii, as the community and its last inhabitants dwindled—is classified online as a “44 minute read.” The longest stories clear 20,000 words, which means a time commitment equivalent to watching a feature film.

The ten stories in Love and Ruin fall comfortably within the word counts that The Atavist sets for its nonfiction, a range that contemporary readers expect from “longform.” But word counts and reading times are poor distinguishing features for a genre, a lackluster explanation for why these stories should appear together, and a useless tool for evaluating the rewards of the book.

The stories in Love and Ruin don’t share many sensibilities. Ratliff writes in his foreword that there is no “house style”—a suggestion that each Atavist story is told in something closer to each writer’s authentic voice. In her introduction, New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean takes on journalism’s taxonomy problem, sets aside a few genre labels (“new journalism,” “creative nonfiction,” “longform”), and then classifies the stories in Love and Ruin as “magpie journalism.” It’s a laudatory phrase, but at a second glance it doesn’t distinguish the stories in Love and Ruin from plenty of others.

If the stories in Love and Ruin are bound by something other than glue, then it’s a sort of thematic unity, born from the same anxieties that gave us “longform.” Each story in Love and Ruin depicts its author’s struggle with the limits of investigation, representation, or understanding. “The Fort of Young Saplings” follows Vanessa Veselka’s tangential connection to a native Alaskan tribe back to the moment when that tribe’s history was overwritten. Jarvis’ story, “When We Are Called to Part,” approaches the same critical moment, when a community becomes a collection of stories, told selectively and bracketed by time. In “Mother, Stranger,” Cris Beam navigates the fog of her abusive mother’s mental illness and her own traumatic upbringing. “I didn’t have a language for my mother,” writes Beam, “probably because she didn’t have a cohesive language for herself.” The black boxes in Love and Ruin are figurative and sometimes literal; Adam Higginbotham’s “1,000 Pounds of Dynamite,” an anatomy of a failed extortion plot, features both.  

Underpinned by limits and all their attendant complications, the narratives that arise from Love and Ruin are fundamentally strange and unwieldy, and as long as they need to be. Leslie Jamison’s “52 Blue” provides Love and Ruin with its most luminous prose. But the story—about a solitary whale that sings at a unique and isolating frequency, and the people drawn to the whale’s story—also offers the anthology’s best consideration of the boundaries that shape stories and their telling.

“52 Blue suggests not just one single whale as a metaphor for loneliness, but metaphor itself as a salve for loneliness,” Jamison writes. “What if we grant the whale his whaleness, grant him furlough from our metaphoric employ, but still grant the contours of his second self—the one we’ve made—and admit what he’s done for us?”

Jamison does not reach her best ideas in few words. But without the words she uses, those ideas may not be otherwise reachable. A story’s word count can sometimes be a proxy for complexity; that’s the appeal of a label like “longform” for the readers that claim to love it. But complicated stories also refute “longform.” They leave their readers with a feeling that the story and its shape are an inevitable match. How else could it have been told?

Here, then, is The Atavist ’s chief achievement with Love and Ruin : In collecting its finest “longform” nonfiction, The Atavist created an anthology that undermines its own flimsy label—and, hopefully, refutes some of our anxiety about time and attention, and the other limits that govern our lives.

The anxiety of limitation—the dread of meaning lost, to time and to space—is recurrent. “Before there were even screens in our living rooms, the same worries reared their heads,” writes Nick Bilton in I Live in the Future, and Here’s How it Works . “There was a time in the 1920s when cultural critics feared Americans were losing their ability to swallow a long, thoughtful novel or even a detailed magazine piece. The evil culprit: Reader’s Digest .”

But the condensed and excerpted stories in Reader’s Digest didn’t bring about the end of attention, or of complicated storytelling. “Reader’s weren’t abandoning long stories for short ones,” writes Bilton. “The appeal of Reader’s Digest was in the overall experience.”

In 2001, David Foster Wallace—who died in the early years of the “longform” decade and whose nonfiction posthumously bears that label—reviewed a collection of prose poems. “These putatively ‘transgressive’ forms depend heavily on received ideas of genre, category, and formal conventions,” wrote Wallace, “since without such an established context there’s nothing much to transgress against.” Do away with some of those conventions and received ideas, and a genre seems more accommodating. Labels like “longform” and “prose poem” are unnecessary limitations; they may evoke a certain shape, but they also constrain it.

A few years ago, for his introduction to The Best American Magazine Writing , James Bennet wrote a short essay that later appeared online at The Atlantic , under the headline “Against ‘Long-Form Journalism.’” Bennet argues that the label is insubstantial and misleading, and then suggests “another perfectly good, honorable name for this kind of work—the one on the cover of this anthology. You might just call it all magazine writing.” But that’s like distinguishing between “book fiction” and “movie fiction,” and besides, “magazine journalism” conflates a story with a product. A medium like print may help to shape a story, but that medium is always just a tool in the service of a narrative, and media change. There will come a time when Best American Magazine Writing needs a new title.

All the stories we tell are products of limits. Time shatters histories and then hides a few pieces. Writers construct narratives and, inevitably, omit some details. Addressing the same issue in photography, Errol Morris asked, “Isn’t there always a possible elephant lurking just at the edge of the frame?” Perhaps the elephant is unimportant to the story. And yet, there he is.

Here’s the trade-off: Narratives require that we surrender our conceptions of time and space, that we readjust our ideas of what can be known and what might be said. They can be fallible by design but still leave understanding in their wake. A story, of any length, moves readers through the world without fracturing meaning. The world fractures meaning on its own.

So perhaps we can unburden ourselves of labels like “longform.” The Atavist has already begun to do just that; in 2014, the site stopped translating word counts into estimated reading times. And perhaps we can task ourselves with something more: that we read and write closer to those circumstances that bracket our lives, and simply take the time and space we need.

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Brendan Fitzgerald

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Journalism Information Literacy Framework

• Introduction
• Authority Is Constructed and Contextual
• Information Creation as a Process
• Information Has Value
• News as Conversation
• Research as Inquiry
• Searching as Strategic Exploration

Strategies for Assessment

• Background of the Development of this Framework
• Journalism Ethics Codes and Standards
• Other Journalism Associations
• Cited Sources

This Framework for Information Literacy in Journalism for Higher Education presents six frames that represent the underlying conceptual understandings or “threshold concepts” of the information practices in journalism, with each frame breaking out associated concepts, practices, and dispositions. A threshold concept is a fundamental understanding within an area of study that is transformative and irreversible in that once understood, the learner comprehends ideas and perspectives within the discipline in a new way. Oftentimes, these concepts can be difficult for students to understand and can be stumbling blocks to moving on to more sophisticated understanding and performance.

It is much easier to assess what a student does than what a student understands or values, particularly when it is acknowledged that learning for understanding is a messy, recursive process. This is generally the difficulty of the assessment of conceptual understanding -  assessment is linear, and learning is not. However, there are meaningful ways of assessing student understanding that, when taken into account alongside traditional methods of assessing student products, can benefit both the instructor and the student. Assessing activities that make learning explicit, such as written reflections, diaries, critiques, research logs, and concept maps, allow the assessor to look for evidence of the understandings, practices, and dispositions of the journalism profession. Recommendations for the classroom and program levels are presented in the following sections.

Skill development is, of course, necessary in learning to become an information literate practitioner, but it is a hollow endeavor without an associated understanding of why journalists perform in certain ways or value certain things. It is even possible that a student may be able to mimic a successful product (news report, opinion piece, research paper, etc.) but not actually understand the underlying concepts of why it is good. Information literacy is a process, not a product. If we only examine the product of a task that requires information literacy, only glimpses of the student’s information literacy abilities and understanding is possible. If we also directly assess students’ actual understanding of the underlying concepts, that can serve as a diagnostic tool for articulating reasons behind the execution of student work.

Meyer, J., Meyer, J., & Land, R. (2006). Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: an introduction. In J. H. F. Meyer & R. Land (Eds.), Overcoming barriers to student understanding threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (pp. 3-18). Routledge.

Land, R., & Meyer, J. H. F. (2010). Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (5): Dynamics of assessment. In J. H. F. Meyer, R. Land, & C. Baillie (Eds.), Threshold concepts and transformational learning (pp. 61–79). Sense Publishers.  https://www.lamission.edu/learningcenter/docs/1177-threshold-concepts-and-transformational-learning.pdf

The Importance of Relationships

Meaningful assessment of information practices in journalism is a collaborative endeavor between librarians, students, instructors, and journalism programs. Strong relationships built on shared goals of creating learning environments and opportunities for students ensure that ideas brought to the proverbial table are encouraged and valued. To extend the metaphor, the collaborators are necessary legs of the table -- remove a leg, and the table will wobble. While librarians may lack frequent interactions with students in the classroom and have less access to student work where learning may be evident, they can be expert resources for faculty in designing effective assignments, mapping the curriculum for key outcomes, assessing artifacts to understand at the classroom and programmatic level what students understand, and in understanding how students use information over time.

Meulemans, Y.N., & Carr, A. (2013). Not at your service: Building genuine faculty‐librarian partnerships. Reference Services Review , 41(1), 80–90. https://doi.org/10.1108/00907321311300893

Recommendations at the Classroom Level

Journalism curricula are organized around the exposure of students to threshold concepts largely through practical exercises and assignments in order to build confidence and activate enthusiasm for creating real social change and making a difference. In order to assess conceptual understanding, design assignments that specifically diagnose a student’s ability to understand particular concepts, controlling for other factors. The knowledge practices can be clues for these kinds of assignments. For example, an assignment that asks students to, “Identify and describe different types of authority related to a story topic” will assess a student’s ability to understand the contextual nature of authority. 

Students should engage with a threshold concept in multiple ways as different scenarios and learning will be recursive. Students today are, as Filloux (2020) notes, in a “permanent skills-acquisition mode” as they try to acquire an ever-evolving breadth of technical knowledge, so start from what they know. This does not mean that threshold concepts should be simplified for novice learners, though, as this can result in later problems with learning the concept: there becomes a “false proxy” that students settle for. 

Instructors who have difficulties remembering what it is like not to understand a threshold concept should take time to listen to students in order to develop a greater understanding of their patterns when wrestling with a concept. Listening to students can take place informally through the use of written reflections like MacMillan’s (2009) I-SKILLS résumé which asks students to reflect on, assess, and describe their information skills. This type of instrument can be introduced to both novice and expert learners in an attempt to discern the growth of individuals' information literacy as well as curricular interventions. Peer review is another form of assessment that can be incorporated into classroom assignments. The act of giving feedback can aid the development of conceptual understandings.

Meyer, J. H. F., Land, R., & Baillie, C. (2010). Editors’ preface: Threshold concepts and transformational learning. In J. H. F. Meyer, R. Land, & C. Baillie (Eds.), Threshold concepts and transformational learning (pp. ix–xlii). Sense Publishers. https://www.lamission.edu/learningcenter/docs/1177-threshold-concepts-and-transformational-learning.pdf

Filloux, F. (2020, May 24). The upcoming journalism school overhaul. Monday Note . https://mondaynote.com/the-upcoming-journalism-school-overhaul-a4e7498cca70

MacMillan, M. (2009). Watching learning happen: Results of a longitudinal study of journalism students. The Journal of Academic Librarianship , 35(2), 132–142. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2009.01.002

Recommendations at the Program Level

Capstone courses are commonly found in a majority of journalism education programs, and among programs that offer a capstone course, almost all place it in the core curriculum. These kinds of courses offer programs the opportunity to “assess the quality of instruction and the level to which its students attain desired outcomes”. At the same time, capstone courses offer students the opportunity to “reflect and synthesize what they have learned” in previous courses as they prepare to embark on professional endeavors. These two goals can have competing and conflicting expectations. Capstone courses frequently have students produce a tangible product, such as a professional portfolio, in an attempt to demonstrate employability. 

Bowe, B. J., Blom, R., & Davenport, L. D. (2020). Journalism and mass communication capstone course: Bringing it all together? Communication Teacher , 34(2), 161–174. https://doi.org/10.1080/17404622.2019.1630656

Awareness of Accreditation Standards

The Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (ACEJMC) is the agency responsible for ensuring that accredited programs meet rigorous standards for professional journalism education in colleges and universities. As part of the accreditation process, journalism and mass communication programs are to comply with nine standards. 

Each standard has indicators and measures of evidence. Standards 2 (Curriculum and Instruction) and 9 (Assessment of Learning Outcomes) are especially relevant in light of this Framework. Standard 2 outlines 12 professional values and competencies necessary to prepare journalism students to work in a diverse global and domestic society. Standard 9 offers suggested assessment measures, like exit exams, interviews, and professional projects or portfolios, to improve teaching methods. Overall, the ACEJMC contends that three criteria should guide the assessment of student learning: awareness, understanding, and application.

Librarians should familiarize themselves with the language used in these standards, along with the ongoing discussions surrounding the accreditation process, when communicating with instructors and program directors about assessment, competencies, and values.  Librarians should also consider how the knowledge practices and dispositions can connect to the standards when mapping the curriculum and designing learning opportunities.

See Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications. (n.d.). Nine Accrediting Standards. http://www.acejmc.org/policies-process/nine-standards/

See Christ, W. G., & Henderson, J. J. (2014). Assessing the ACEJMC professional values and competencies. Journalism & Mass Communication Educator , 69(3), 301–313. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077695814525408 and Henderson, J. J., & Christ, W. G. (2014).Benchmarking ACEJMC Competencies: What It Means for Assessment. Journalism & Mass Communication Educator , 69(3), 229–242. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077695814525407

Assessment of Dispositions

Assessing dispositions may present unique challenges given the emphasis on the value dimension of learning which may not fully reveal itself by the end of a 10-14-week course. However, journalism education programs trying to comply with ACEJMC standards have a commitment to advancing the profession through regular communication and engagement with alumni and professionals. This commitment offers opportunities for assessing dispositions. 

Working together, librarians, instructors, and programs can conduct informal surveys or interviews with recent alumni -- e.g., those who have graduated in the past five years -- to address not only their perceived readiness for entering the profession, along with the reality of it, but also their critical attitudinal behaviors toward their place in the profession. Moreover, interviews and engagement with veteran journalists can help identify how observable changes in the profession, like disruptive innovation, alter or reinforce professional values. These kinds of conversations can offer both librarians and faculty with advantageous material to incorporate into curricula.

See Rosenstiel, T., Ivancin, M., Loker, K., Lacy, S., Sonderman, J., & Yaeger, K. (2015, August 6). Chapter 6: Skills, knowledge and comfort levels with job skills . American Press Institute. https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/survey-research/skills-knowledge-and-comfort-levels-with-job-skills/

See Ferrucci, P. (2018). “We’ve lost the basics”: Perceptions of journalism education from veterans in the field. Journalism & Mass Communication Educator , 73(4), 410–420. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077695817731870

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Investigative Journalism – Everything You Need To Know

Investigative journalism is uncovering topics that are hidden, either intentionally or unintentionally, behind a tumultuous mass of facts and circumstances — the study that exposes all pertinent information to the public.

Investigative journalism is a branch of journalism in which reporters conduct in-depth investigations into a specific topic of interest, most often a crime, government corruption, or corporate misbehavior. An investigative reporter may spend months or even years researching and writing a report. Newspapers, news networks, and freelance journalists undertake most investigative reporting. However, some practitioners prefer their work as “watchdog journalism” or “accountability reporting.”

The old phrase that the pen is mightier than the sword is accurate in investigative journalism when indulgences of money, corruption, or dominance are exposed to safeguard public duty or interest.

What exactly is investigative journalism?

Investigative journalism primarily comprises some or all of the following elements:

• Investigate social and legal issues.
• Document analysis includes examining legal papers, public records, and financial information.
• Several in-depth interviews, both with on-the-record and anonymous sources.
• Technical details, research, and physical examination of specialized equipment
• Exploration of data
• Use subscription-based tools to conduct research.
• Research that takes weeks, months, or even years to complete.

What Is Investigative Journalism? – David E. Kaplan

Why is investigative journalism important?

Investigative journalism is focused on bringing influential individuals, officials, criminals, companies, and states accountable for their activities. By exposing corruption and malpractice, investigative journalism ensures that no one is above the law. It is a profoundly democratic practice founded on truth, freedom, and fairness.

Investigative journalism also highlights underrepresented populations, giving the voiceless a much-needed platform. Historically, this has resulted in reforms in the law and cultural attitudes, resulting in healthier societies with more people treated with dignity and respect. For example, in 1887, Elizabeth Seaman, a writer at Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World , best known by her byline Nellie Bly, pretended to be mentally ill to expose the horrible circumstances at New York City’s “Women’s Lunatic Asylum.” Seaman’s widely-read writings prompted a Grand Jury investigation and increased financing for mental health facilities.

Investigative journalism also promotes the public interest by conducting in-depth investigations and reporting on injustices. This is accomplished through investigative reports providing the necessary updates to readers, listeners, and viewers. As a result, investigative journalism functions as a public watchdog against the power abuse by individuals in positions of control. Just because the media is independent, persons in positions of authority cannot use it for personal benefit. 

As a result, investigative journalism has become the public’s only shelter for learning the truth about concealed things. But unfortunately, the background of investigative justice is littered with revelations of hidden fraud, deception, terrorism, and bribery.

It is clear that without investigative media, this could have gone unnoticed for generations. Hence, investigative journalism acts as a platform for informing the public about what is going on in society.

Obsessive, illuminating, high-stakes: why investigative journalism matters

Investigative Journalism’s Cultural Aspects

Investigative journalism is critical to modern society’s cultural ideals. This is owing, among other things, to the significant role it plays in the evolution of society. With investigative journalism in play, today’s society is concerned about securing justice. You can trace the importance and influence of investigative journalism in the community to the information culture. 

Investigative journalism’s instructive nature complements this. Investigative journalism has fueled a desire to learn more about what is going on in society. At the same time, the public’s perception of the media in this regard has skyrocketed.

As a result, society trusts the media to expose the truth behind many incidents. This has increased the media’s role because it is expected to obtain facts and disseminate them through investigative work. 

Why Investigative Journalism Matters – Joseph Stiglitz

What distinguishes it from other types of journalism?

An investigative work of journalism does not read like a standard news item that follows the five W’s and one H. It also does not have to be as brief or utilize as clear a language. While there are no hard and fast guidelines for producing an investigative piece, with tone and language left to the individual’s narrative style, investigative journalism’s in-depth, critical nature lends it some broadly consistent features. Among the most important are:

• Long-form content.
• Utilize infographics, tables, and charts.
• Statistics or quotes are abundant.
• Even if these elements aren’t always there, the in-depth structure of investigative journalism causes the pieces to swing in those areas.

What Are the Factors of Investigative Journalism?

The following are the fundamental components of investigative journalism:

Thorough Investigation

Many days, weeks, or even years of study go into an investigative journalism report. It is the outcome of a journalist’s or a group of journalists’ tremendous efforts in producing and researching a large amount of data and documents. Before reaching conclusions, every bit of information is double- or even triple-checked with factual evidence.

When dealing with such a massive volume of data, it is easy to become lost, confused, and overwhelmed. Investigative journalists work methodically and deliberately through mountains of data.

The process investigative journalists use to uncover the truth is comparable to that of a scientist. After receiving a tip, investigative journalists go deeper into data, and research theories, test hypotheses as they emerge, cross-check material with different sources, and eventually arrive at certain immutable realities.

Getting to the bottom of the story

The critical distinction between traditional and investigative journalism is that investigative reporting goes beyond the story’s surface features. Once the news has been reported, a typical journalist would be content to let it go.

However, the nature of an investigative journalist’s profession requires them to get to the truth behind the story, which means that the tale does not stop until the most hidden details are exposed.

Conducting interviews and verifying facts

To illustrate how an investigative journalist would tackle a subject, consider how they would cover a regular newsworthy event, such as a building catching fire.

A conventional journalist would travel to the site and gather information about an event:

Then, the next day, you’ll likely read or hear about a store that caught fire in the news.

An investigative journalist, on the other hand, will delve deeper. In pursuing the ‘true story,’ the investigative journalist may discover that the owners of the tiny store were frequently threatened with eviction by a corporate-like enterprise.

Investigating hypotheses

The investigative journalist will then begin connecting the dots, talking to people, conducting interviews, and poring over records to check the legitimacy of the hypothesis that the big business vying for the store’s space was directly implicated in the firestorm that tore down the store to the ground.

What is Investigative Journalism?

What is the role of an investigative journalist?

Investigative journalists frequently cover essential subjects such as societal phenomena or political events:

• A news director or editor usually assigns them a specific topic.
• Investigative journalists conduct research, discover and contact experts on the issue and other materials, coordinate interviews, and fact-check the data they obtain after getting their assignment. They next compile the data and write a story that expresses their findings and offers evidence.
• Investigative journalists proofread their work before sending it to the news director or editor to ensure proper style, spelling, and grammar usage.

Previously, investigative journalists only operated for print newspapers, but as technology has advanced, many journalists are now creating articles for social media platforms, blogs, or podcasts. Among the subfields in this area are:

Political journalism

Investigative journalists who work in politics fight to keep people aware of national and local political issues and candidates so that their readers can make intelligent voting decisions during polls.

International journalism

Investigative journalists who work in worldwide and international journalism research, study, and publish reports on current events all around the world, such as significant criminal cases. They can make content for news bulletins, the internet, and television, but they also create documentaries to tell their tales.

Broadcast journalism

This broad genre of journalism encompasses all investigative stories reported via electronic channels such as the internet, television, or radio. Broadcast journalism’s primary purpose is immediately delivering essential information and news to a large audience.

Print journalism

Investigative journalists use books , periodicals, and tabloids to tell their tales.

How Do You Get Started as an Investigative Journalist?

Investigative journalists typically work as freelancers or as assistants to editors in news organizations. In any case, investigative journalism stories significantly benefit society by revealing social and economic misbehavior.

If you are in the process of changing occupations or have yet to decide, you should follow the below steps to become an investigative journalist:

Get a bachelor’s degree

Most businesses demand a bachelor’s in journalism or a related subject, such as broadcast, marketing, English, internal relations, or political science. Required courses in journalism typically cover areas such as law and ethics, graphic journalism, communication, writing and editing , and reporting. Furthermore, several journalism programs have begun to include courses focusing on media, such as multimedia.

Employers often prefer candidates with relevant experience, and institutions frequently provide opportunities to get industry exposure and journalistic skills. For instance, you could:

• Participate in events : Students and graduates can enter investigative journalism competitions with their articles. Investigative journalism groups frequently sponsor these student competitions. If your article is awarded, you can publish the award on your CV and mention the writing samples in your portfolio.
• Make use of workshops and courses: Colleges and universities frequently give various services to aid their students’ academic development. You can augment your undergraduate curriculum and gain from industry specialists by taking courses and workshops from journalism schools and investigative journalism groups.
• Participate in extracurricular activities : Working for the school newspaper and undertaking an internship are the most acceptable ways for a student to obtain industry experience. If your university offers a career center, they may be able to assist you in finding and applying for a journalistic internship.

Create a portfolio

Employers typically seek a sampling of your work when seeking opportunities as an investigative journalist. A portfolio displays examples of your most excellent journalistic work, allowing prospective employers to assess your:

• Newsgathering abilities
• Technical expertise
• Writing style

Until you obtain professional experience, you can use items you wrote for your school newspaper, journalism classes, or internship. In addition, most journalism programs mandate the compilation of a portfolio as a graduation requirement.

Keep in mind that you keep your portfolio up to date with your most recent work and successes.

Acquire experience

When you first start as an investigative journalist, you should focus on gaining experience and honing your skills with a smaller radio station, television show, or newspaper. Finding work with a larger organization is generally more straightforward once you’ve got experience and built an impressive portfolio of your work.

Make it a habit to research.

A good investigative journalist is also a good researcher. Hence, improve your research skills to get to the bottom of stories, develop new angles, and establish theories.

So you want to be an investigative journalist?

What Qualifies an Investigative Journalist?

Here are a few characteristics of good investigative journalists:

Quantitative and logical thinking abilities

Investigative journalists function similarly to detectives. They are the true Sherlock Holmes.

Analytical and logical thinking takes work, but once you’ve mastered it, you’ll be linking dots like the majestic of inference, Mr. Sherlock Holmes himself.

Research Abilities

The process of investigative journalism requires extensive research. A reporter may have to read hundreds of pages to double-check a little piece of information.

The investigative journalist’s work is so broad, and you must be patient. A single investigative journalism assignment could take months, if not years, to finish.

Time Planning

Under the heavy pile of documents, it’s easy to become frustrated or lose track of time. On the other hand, a brilliant investigative journalist makes it a point to maintain systems throughout the project so that nothing gets mixed up.

Prominent Cases of Investigative Journalism Throughout Time

Browse through some of the most noteworthy incidents of investigative journalism to explore how watchdog duty has influenced history.

Ten Days at a Mental Institution (1887)

Nellie Bly, a teenage reporter, went undercover at a mental facility and uncovered its highly terrible conditions.

Almost instantly, the state of New York increased funding for mental health care by $1 million each year; her report also spurred a grand jury probe into the institution.

Moses Newson’s Feature on the Civil Rights Movement (the 1950s-1960s)

Moses Newson, a Black reporter based in Memphis, Tennessee, and Baltimore, Maryland, covered numerous pivotal civil liberties events, notably Emmett Till’s murder, school desegregation, and the 1961 Freedom Rides.

Newson’s reporting helped Americans comprehend and sympathize with the human rights movement’s ideals.

Silent Spring (1962)

Rachel Carson, a biologist, collated data on pesticide toxicity and exposed it to the American community in her book Silent Spring .

Despite initial criticism, particularly from chemical industries, Silent Spring ‘s conclusions resulted in the ban on the chemical DDT. In addition, they sparked a green movement that led to the establishment of the “Environmental Protection Agency.”

The Massacre at My Lai (1969)

Independent investigative writer Seymour Hersh discovered the US military protection of the 1968 massacre of over 500 defenseless Vietnamese civilians in the town of My Lai by US soldiers.

Hersh’s research sparked unrest, which aided the expansion and impact of the peace movement across the United States . The sole person convicted in connection with the killings was Lt. William Calley, who led one of the three platoons implicated in the massacre; President Richard Nixon released him after spending three years, mainly under home detention.

“Bad Cash or Easy Money?” (1992)

Two Florida journalists investigated a sheriff’s interstate narcotics team and discovered that it confiscated $8 million from primarily Black and Hispanic motorists in 262 car stops. No charges were filed in 199 of these cases.

The Orlando Sentinel series and other exposés of similar practices prompted the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act to be passed in 2000. It amended federal forfeiture legislation to allow proprietors of seized assets to be paid for legal fees incurred in successfully fighting the government. (However, it did not modify state law.)

Secret Surveillance on Muslim Communities (2011)

According to the Associated Press, the New York Police Department used a covert surveillance program to monitor and penetrate mosques and Muslim community organizations. However, the monitoring was based on nationality and religion rather than probable cause.

Three lawsuits were filed due to the inquiry. All were settled in favor of persons whom the NYPD had unlawfully wiretapped. The administration agreed to increased supervision.

Harvey Weinstein (2017)

The New York Times and The New Yorker released stories against Harvey Weinstein, a prominent Hollywood executive, within days of each other. More than 80 women have alleged Weinstein of sexual misbehavior or abuse since those articles were published, alleging that he used his status, riches, and network of aides to advance his sexual activity. According to the women, if they spoke against him, he threatened to terminate their careers.

Weinstein was charged with rape, aggressive sexual abuse, and illicit sexual encounter; investigations in other places are underway. In addition, the news reports sparked the #MeToo movement, in which women spoke out against elevated men who they claimed had sexually abused them.

Final Thoughts

Accountability is crucial to investigative journalism. It is the only way to rein in the extremes of power and wealth.

To achieve the big story, investigative journalism depends on considerable investigation, the rigorous pursuit of truth, freedom, and fairness, and an iterative process of hypothesis and testing. Moreover, for a democracy to function correctly, journalists must pursue their subjects independently of outside influence or manipulation to report significant social and economic concerns to the public.

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Beyond journalism: Theorizing the transformation of journalism

University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Tamara Witschge

University of Groningen, The Netherlands

Journalism has enjoyed a rich and relatively stable history of professionalization. Scholars coming from a variety of disciplines have theorized this history, forming a consistent body of knowledge codified in national and international handbooks and canonical readers. However, recent work and analysis suggest that the supposed core of journalism and the assumed consistency of the inner workings of news organizations are problematic starting points for journalism studies. In this article, we challenge the consensual (self-)presentation of journalism – in terms of its occupational ideology, its professional culture, and its sedimentation in routines and organizational structures (cf. the newsroom) in the context of its reconfiguration as a post-industrial , entrepreneurial , and atypical way of working and of being at work. We outline a way beyond individualist or institutional approaches to do justice to the current complex transformation of the profession. We propose a framework to bring together these approaches in a dialectic attempt to move through and beyond journalism as it has traditionally been conceptualized and practiced, allowing for a broader definition and understanding of the myriad of practices that make up journalism.

Introducing journalism and journalism studies

Journalism, as a profession, has enjoyed a long and stable development in most countries around the world. Whether working under conditions of censorship, pressures of nation building, or with expectations of providing a society with social cement, journalism is widely recognized and seen as a set of values, principles, and practices enacted in different ways and settings with a ‘sense of wholenessness and seamlessness’ ( Hallin, 1992 : 14) around the world. Similarly, the field of journalism studies – the scholarly pursuit of knowledge about journalism – developed alongside its object into an increasingly sophisticated and consensual body of knowledge, range of research methodologies, and theoretical developments.

This modernist dream of coherence and consensus is a fallacy. In the late or, with Zygmunt Bauman ( Deuze, 2007a ), liquid modern era, the field of journalism studies and education recognizes how journalism is more than a neat sum of its parts, instead accommodating a more dynamic and indeed unruly consideration of the profession. Journalism is transitioning from a more or less coherent industry to a highly varied and diverse range of practices. As Anderson et al. (2012) write in a review of the profession at the start of the 21st century, ‘the journalism industry is dead but … journalism exists in many places’ (p. 76).

Scholars and educators tend to respond to this shift in two ways. One is to rally the troops, close ranks, and put significant effort in bringing coherence and stability (back) to the field. This gets established by producing impressive handbooks, canonical anthologies, readers, and companion volumes (and corresponding special issues of scholarly journals and conferences). Empirical approaches in this tradition center on comprehensive surveys and content analyses of journalists and journalism based on narrow definitions of the news industry offering conclusions about what journalism does and who journalists are (see Hanitzsch et al., 2011 ; Hellmueller and Mellado, 2015 ; Willnat et al., 2013 ). 1

A second trend in the field is to dive, head first, into the chaos. This proves to be an often exciting and bewildering experience, leading to a wide variety of studies and conceptualizations of journalism in a post-industrial era, often featuring particularistic work on emerging genres, formats, and types of journalism. Theoretically, journalism research in this context enthusiastically explores the boundaries of the field ( Carlson and Lewis, 2015 ) or shows through a surge in ethnographic fieldwork how even the traditional ‘inside’ of the profession – the newsroom – is not as coherent as it is generally made out to be ( Domingo and Paterson, 2011 ).

In this intervention, we bring together these approaches in a dialectic attempt to move beyond journalism, allowing for a broader definition and understanding of the field. We critically interrogate first the normative expectations of what journalism should be and do according to dominant conceptualizations of the profession. Next, epistemologically we follow up on the newsroom-centricity of journalism studies (section ‘Toward a dynamic definition of journalism’) while recognizing that newsrooms continue to be important anchoring points for newswork (section ‘Understanding news as work’). However, the newsroom is not necessarily a solid or coherent entity in today’s post-industrial journalism (section ‘Considering the organization of post-industrial journalism’), nor is newswork outside of the newsroom necessarily free of the constraints and structures traditionally provided by the institutional arrangement of journalism (section ‘Enter entrepreneurialism’). Newsrooms and newswork are part of a profession that can best be seen as a self-organizing social system through which shifting coalitions of participants are linked, and that is interdependent on a variety of other systems (such as sales, marketing, design, programming and coding, publishing, and distribution services). It is also a field with a distinct materiality of praxis ( Sartre, 1976 : 79) – as what journalism is and what journalists do cannot be meaningfully separated from their material context (cf. technologies, work environments). We discuss how, in this context, we can understand the role of the media professional as an enterprising individual beyond the limited conceptualization of entrepreneurship as a strictly economic endeavor (section ‘Beyond journalism’). In the concluding section, we push for an ontology of journalism beyond individuals and institutions.

Defining journalism: Beyond the core–periphery dichotomy

Students and scholars coming from a wide variety of disciplines have researched and theorized journalism, resulting in a more or less coherent conceptualization of what journalism is ( Zelizer, 2004 ). The general approach to understanding, studying, teaching, and practicing journalism articulates the profession with a specific occupational ideology and culture. Journalists tend to benchmark their actions and attitudes self-referentially using ideal-typical standards, seeing themselves as 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, 2005 ). 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.

Through the occupational ideology of journalism, we can define the field from the inside out, helping us to understand how the profession makes sense of itself. External definitions of journalism tend to be more functional and instrumental, where the profession is considered to provide a particular function for (democratic) society, ‘informing citizens in a way that enables them to act as citizens’ ( Costera Meijer, 2001 : 13). Seen from such a function-specific perspective, journalism gets identified distinct from other media professions (such as public relations) ‘as a societal system providing society with fact-based, relevant and current information’ ( Görke and Scholl, 2007 : 651). Beyond systems theory – with its reluctance to be normative about what journalism could or should be – democratic theories of the profession attribute it a seminal status, as Michael Schudson (2003) , for example, defines ‘journalism [a]s the business or practice of producing and disseminating information about contemporary affairs of general public interest and importance’ (p. 11). Schudson (2008) sees journalism in terms of what it ‘can do for democracy’ (p. 11), where journalism informs, investigates, analyzes, mobilizes, provides multiple perspectives and a public forum, and publicizes representative democracy.

From this point of departure, the literature diverges, one strand embracing universalist notions of journalism, showing how it gives meaning to itself in its culture – where culture is seen as the way in which a particular group (i.e. journalists working at a specific project or within a particular context, such as a newsroom, a medium, a country or region) works and how group members make sense of this. Thomas Hanitzsch (2007) defines this ‘universal’ culture of journalism as constituted by its institutional role in society, its epistemology, and its ethical ideology. Surveys of (and interviews with) journalists, almost always sampled from within legacy news organizations, fuel such claims by asking journalists a set of standardized questions about role perceptions and professional values. They suggest consensus and add coherence to a ‘global’ journalism that is as aspirational as it is universal among working journalists ( Löffelholz and Weaver, 2008 ; Weaver and Willnat, 2012 ).

While popular, there is also much critical debate both among newsworkers and journalism students and scholars about an assumed homogeneity of the profession. The discussion on the elements of journalism ( Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2014 ) tends to assume a more or less stable core of news values and professional standards. This is a problematic assumption in the case of journalism, as the reference to a consensual core (of ‘elements’) excludes marginalized and minority voices, practices, and forms of journalism. Generally lacking formal boundaries and therefore relying on communication about itself to define and validate its privileged position in society, journalism recently has been reconceptualized in terms of its continuous boundary work , consisting of ‘efforts to establish and enlarge the limits of one domain’s institutional authority relative to outsiders, thus creating social boundaries that yield greater cultural and material resources for insiders’ ( Lewis, 2012 : 841). Research among journalists working for organizations, companies, or units both within mainstream news media and those on the sidelines shows how they engage repeatedly in boundary work, intensely debating what journalism is and who can be considered to be a (‘real’) journalist – and that such discussions have always been intrinsic to the profession and its associated praxis ( Carlson and Lewis, 2015 ).

Even journalism’s assumed significance for the functioning of democracies has come under serious scrutiny. Beate Josephi (2013) argues that such a corollary is ‘too limiting and distorting a lens through which journalism can be viewed in the 21st century’ (p. 445). The consolidation of journalism studies in the literature mainly serves the modern project of bringing an inherently unruly object under control ( Steensen and Ahva, 2015 : 3). It is crucial to recognize that the supposed core of journalism as well as the assumed consistency of the inner workings of news organizations is anything but consensual, nor is it necessarily the norm. At the same time, it would be a mistake to assume that the types of journalism emerging outside and alongside legacy news organizations are necessarily different or oppositional to the core values, ideals, and practices of the profession. We propose to widen journalistic conceptualizations beyond the false core–periphery dichotomy, understanding that the core is no more homogeneous than the so-called periphery, while neither necessarily represents the other’s antithesis.

We have to revisit the question of what journalism is for conceptual considerations – the normative construction of journalism through ideology and culture as reinforced in both scholarly work and professional publications – and practical propriety – given the increasingly fragmented, networked, and atypical nature of the labor market for newswork. When answering this question, theory needs to move beyond the limitations framing this discussion: An overreliance on journalism as an inherently stable institution, distinct from other social systems, and beyond its validation as uniquely necessary for democracy. These notions, however important, have over-extended their shelf life ( Zelizer, 2013 ). We argue for theorizing journalism from the ground up – focusing on where, how, by whom, and why ‘the lost labour of reporting’ ( Compton and Benedetti, 2010 : 487) is done.

Toward a dynamic definition of journalism

Until recently, the participation of journalists in the discursive construction of journalism was governed by being employed in (or as a student, intern, or scholar: Observing) a newsroom. The newsroom was the dominant form of employment and organization of work in journalism throughout the 20th century. This arrangement served to stabilize the industry, going hand in hand with the shaping of consensual practices in journalism studies and education. The newsroom was the site to be a journalist, to be recognized as such, and scholars validated this process by pursuing empirical approaches dedicated to newsrooms and the newswork therein. Throughout the history of journalism studies, high-profile and much-cited newsroom studies have appeared, from David Manning-White’s (1950) work on the gatekeeping selections at a metropolitan newspaper via seminal work by Jeremy Tunstall (1971) and Gaye Tuchman (1978) to more recent newsroom studies by David Ryfe (2012) and Nikki Usher (2014) , to name but a few.

Even though these studies have been important in shedding light onto newsrooms, they focus on ‘problematic sites of fieldwork as well’, as Anderson (2011 : 152) notes. Anderson points out that the traditional newsrooms ‘cannot serve as our only model for fieldwork’ as ‘the very definition of journalism is being contested on a daily basis’ ( Anderson, 2011 ). This is not simply an operational problem in the current climate of newswork destabilization. Our critique is more fundamental: Throughout its history, scholars of journalism and the news have supported the dominance of certain interpretations of (the role of) journalism by focusing on specific institutional arrangements within particular privileged settings. As Karin Wahl-Jorgensen (2009) puts it, the newsroom-centricity in journalism studies has meant that

scholars have tended to focus on journalists’ culture as it emerges within the limited areas of newsrooms and other centralized sites for news production, usually paying scant attention to places, spaces, practices and people at the margins of this spatially delimited news production universe. (p. 23)

Such newsroom-centricity has implications beyond the mere privileging of some actors and exclusion of others: It has also led to an emphasis on ‘routinized and controlled forms and aspects of newswork’ ( Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, 2009 : 25). The scholarly consensus on professional routines that make up newswork in newsrooms has been consolidated in journalism education where such routines become fixed elements in the coursework for print, broadcast, and online sequences. Cottle (2007) notes how such a focus on ‘organizational functionalism’ (p. 10) privileges routines and patterned ways of doing newswork over differentiation and divergence. What is more, even within newsroom-centered research, scholars have privileged print over other media, further limiting the range of understanding and definition of journalism. Moreover, the scholarly focus on elite, prestige, and glamorous institutions located in large cities of the capitalist Western world serves to solidify such places as the only ones deemed worthy of a voice to articulate what is journalism and who counts as a journalist ( Nerone, 2013 ).

As much of newsgathering, editing, and packaging take place elsewhere, outside of the newsroom, and with organizations virtualizing their workflow delegating work to stringers and correspondents on the road, Wahl-Jorgensen (2009) notes how the newsroom is disappearing. Anderson (2011) advocates ‘blowing up the newsroom’ when conducting contemporary newswork studies, proposing an approach that would consider news production as a network that transcends organizational boundaries. And yet, Anderson (2011) concludes, ‘The newsroom is not extinct. In many ways, it is more important than ever, for it remains, even now, a central locus in which a variety of fragmented actor-networks find themselves tied together to create an occupation’ (p. 160).

It is a challenge to consider journalism as a networked practice ( Russell, 2015 ) involving a distributed variety of actors and actants (including co-creating audiences as well as robots producing news), including an emerging global startup scene of newswork ( Küng, 2015 ) while recognizing the permanence of meaning-giving structures, such as the newsroom. The more or less formal (and professional) arrangement of journalism requires an awareness of the inhabited nature ( Hallett and Ventresca, 2006 ) of the spaces where newswork takes place. The newsroom as an inhabited institution, on one hand, provides the raw materials and guidelines for the way people work, and on the other hand, the various people moving in and out of the newsroom through their interactions produce the institution, putting it into motion. The focus in this conceptualization of newswork is on ‘institutional complexity’ ( Delbridge and Edwards, 2013 : 927) and heterogeneous understandings of occupational membership ( Bechky, 2011 : 1157). The point is not to say that contemporary news institutions are inhabited, and those in the past were not. As Matt Carlson suggests, journalism has always already been ‘a varied cultural practice embedded within a complicated social landscape. Journalism is not a solid, stable thing to point to, but a constantly shifting denotation applied differently depending on context’ ( Carlson, 2015 : 2).

The roles of institutions in newswork are dynamic and changing, opening our eyes to movement rather than stability, to what journalism becomes rather than what journalism is ( Deuze and Witschge, 2016 ).

Understanding news as work

If we assume for a moment that in some ways the newsroom is still important and key to understanding what contemporary journalism is, what would we in fact see inside one located in a legacy media organization? For one, we would observe a lot of empty chairs. The number of layoffs in journalism – especially in print – has been nothing but astounding over the last decade. Reports of journalism unions and associations, such as the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance in Australia, the Society of Professional Journalists in the United States, the National Association of Journalists in The Netherlands, and the National Union of Journalists in the United Kingdom in recent years, suggest their members see their colleagues being fired and not replaced, as journalists working in newsrooms consistently report having to do more with fewer colleagues and less resources. Long-term planning and ‘moving up the ladder’ have been replaced by job-hopping and a portfolio work life as news professionals increasingly have contracts, not careers in journalism. As a consequence, stress and burnout are on the rise among newsworkers, with many journalists considering to leave the profession altogether ( O’Donnell et al., 2015 ; Reinardy, 2011 ). Precarity and a ‘culture of job insecurity’ ( Ekdale et al., 2015 ) have come to define the lived experience for many inside the contemporary newsroom.

Of the people who are left in the newsroom proper, some still enjoy permanent employment (including benefits and protections). These, generally senior, staffers work side by side with a host of colleagues in part-time, contract, freelance, temporary, casual, and at times underpaid or unpaid roles: Practitioners who come in irregularly to file stories, produce segments, push stories online, or provide other editorial services ( Cohen, 2015 : 515). Not only are these contractual working arrangements of newsroom colleagues under-represented in discussions of the profession (about itself) and, subsequently, in surveys and ethnographies of news organizations, but also the myriad of additional functions in the newsroom ranging from technical support staff, copy editors, ombudsmen and reader representatives, designers, producers, and programmers are often left out of the conversation. In recent years, however, such functions have multiplied in the newsroom with the emergence of new roles and positions, and they are increasingly important in shaping the practice, output, and distribution of journalism ( Bakker, 2014 ).

Permanent jobs are scarce, and generally unpaid internships and other forms of free or underpaid labor now determine access – as in other cultural industries ( Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011 ). All this is accompanied by rising cost of entry into journalism: A trade school diploma is a bare minimum – for jobs in the (national) quality news media, in practice a high-level university education is required. Student grants have been cut, their duration shortened, or they have been converted into loans. The majority of newcomers in the profession start as a self-employed journalist. Tariffs for freelancer journalists have declined over the past decade. To use The Netherlands as a particular example, not only has freelance remuneration declined (up to 50% for news photographers), but also almost half of Dutch freelance journalists today depend on the income of their partner, and 60 percent have monthly earnings well below the minimum wage ( Vinken and IJdens, 2013 ). Given the stable market and state-subsidized media system of The Netherlands, we would venture that this situation is the same, if not more precarious for professionals in other developed nations.

We need to consider how changes in the way in which newswork is organized do not only affect news as an institution but also impact individual careers. Peterson and Anand (2004) suggested that careers in this fragmenting and flexibilizing industry tend to follow two different paths. The first is a top-down career, largely established through lifelong participation in vertically structured institutions, where seniority, experience, and a transparent system of salaries guide the professional toward higher positions in the office hierarchy, resulting in more or less permanent positions within the newsroom. In more competitive environments where the organization of work is tailored toward flexible production, ‘careers tend to be chaotic and foster cultural innovation, and career-building market-sensing entrepreneurs enact careers from the “bottom up” by starting from the margins of existing professions and conventions’ (p. 317). Today, a third trajectory can be added: The ‘patchwork-career’ ( Michel, 2000 ) of the atypically employed individual finding his or her permanence in impermanence, forever flexibilized on the outside as well as on the inside of news institutions.

Newsrooms are still creating positions, yet often these are temporary structures designed as more or less informal internships, often with little or no pay. Moreover, the new jobs that are available in journalism tend to be in the digital area and in numbers do not make up for layoffs elsewhere in organizations ( Deuze and Fortunati, 2010 ). With the accelerating dynamic of reorganizations and reshuffling, buyouts and layoffs, new owners and managers, new work arrangements and budget cuts, journalism has become more precarious and less accessible to everyone. In fact, if we put it provocatively, it increasingly seems to be the playing field of only those who can afford to work for years or even for the majority of their careers below or around the minimum wage in the largest and therefore most expensive cities, as that is where the main news outfits (as well as most hyperlocal companies and news startups) are generally located.

Although exclusivity of industry access is not new, it tends to be overlooked. This critique of journalism studies’ tendency to overlook the dimensions of labor and working conditions as these influence the news is not particular to journalism studies but can be made about most media studies. In fact, only in recent years has labor enjoyed a surge in scholarly attention across media, cultural, and creative industries ( Banks et al., 2013 ; Deuze, 2007b ; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011 ). Incorporating work into media studies allows us to address the diversity in roles, functions, and people’s backgrounds that exists in media work generally and newswork in particular ( Siegelbaum and Thomas, 2016 ), providing insight into how professional journalism has diversified into many different forms of reporting and newsgathering, production, and distribution.

Considering the organization of post-industrial journalism

According to Anderson et al. (2012) , journalism is evolving toward a ‘post-industrial’ model of news. They argue that in order for journalism to adapt to the new media environment (with its attendant social, economic, and cultural implications), the profession needs new tactics, a new self-conception, and new organizational structures. What their report alludes to is a trend benchmarked by developments across the creative industries more generally: A gradual shift from centralized and hierarchical modes of industrial production to what Castells (2010) coined as a ‘network enterprise’ form of production. The relationships of capital and labor in our at once global and local network society, argues Castells, are increasingly individualized. This type of post-industrial mode of production integrates the work process globally through digital telecommunications, transportation, and client–customer networks. Workers find themselves collaborating or coordinating their activities with professionals elsewhere, sometimes located in different parts of the world. Furthermore, newswork increasingly takes place with the formal or informal collaboration of the public, who participate on a co-creative continuum ranging from sharing real-time information all the way to authoring autonomous news stories, shaping an emerging type of networked journalism ( Beckett, 2010 ).

Considering the role of journalism in an always online environment, Van Der Haak et al. (2012) see the emergence of a new professional figure: The ‘networked journalist’, whose work is ‘driven by a networked practice dependent on sources, commentaries, and feedback, some of which are constantly accessible online’ (p. 2927). They consider this new role for journalists ‘not a threat to the independence and quality of professional journalism, but a liberation from strict corporate control’ ( Van Der Haak et al., 2012 : 2935). The networked character of newswork gets amplified by a particular feature of the corporate character of the global news industry: The often translocalized nature of the media production process, as media industries cross-finance, offshore, subcontract, and outsource various elements in the production process to save costs and redistribute risks. In journalism, outsourcing is called ‘remote control journalism’ as news organizations move specializations or entire divisions to another part of the world ( Compton and Benedetti, 2010 : 495; Mosco, 2009 : 350–351), while ‘journalism-by-remote-control’ refers to the increased reliance of legacy news organizations on local contacts, handlers, stringers, and correspondents in (conflict) areas around the world (rather than sending contracted employees). 2

Like media work elsewhere, post-industrial newswork still tends to take place not only in the offices and on the work floors of specific institutions – including newsrooms – but also at home, the atelier-style offices of editorial collectives and journalism startups, and in free Wi-Fi café environments as the landscape of urban media production ( Hartmann, 2009 ). As much of this work is contingent, freelance, and temporary, people constantly move in and out of such environments, continuously reconstituting the production process. Furthermore, under conditions of a changing media culture that is more interactive and co-creative ( Jenkins, 2006 ), media professionals as well as their audiences are increasingly (expected to be) working together, to converse and co-create. This process accelerates the flow of people, processes, and ideas through the networked enterprise that journalism becomes ( Heinrich, 2011 ).

Considering the individualized precarious and networked context of newswork, it becomes imperative to critically interrogate the notion of ‘organization’ as the operational framework for analyzing what it is like to do journalism and be a journalist. The emphasis in studies of contemporary organizations has been shifting from explaining the behavior of the organization as a macro-structural entity to embracing organizations as open systems of interdependent activities, linking shifting coalitions of participants in intra- and interorganizational networks ( Baker and Faulkner, 2005 ). In this light, Gernot Grabher (2002) suggests we shift our focus from the media firm as a generally unproblematized coherent and unitary economic actor to organizational practices that are built around projects, involving a project ecology of shifting alliances (or teams) of people from inside and outside the company.

Looking at temporary projects and collaborations enables us to focus on organizations as loosely integrated units of individuals working together – possibly including participants from different disciplines, with different working arrangements, and with different professional identities, along with collaborating publics. This allows for the equally necessary acknowledgment that still much of the work in the media gets done within the context of observable organizational structures and arrangements. Developments in online production and digital communication, production, and distribution technologies have facilitated the proliferation of many smaller companies and networks able to provide specialized and niche services to the generally more rigid and bureaucratically structured regional, national, and multinational media businesses ( Deuze, 2007b : 87–88). In order to make the transition toward a more flexible type of production, media companies in recent years have tended to reorganize themselves into multiple smaller units or have shifted toward a more decentralized, team-based managerial and working style – attempting to flatten existing hierarchies in the company or to bypass journalism’s obduracy – a general resistance to change produced by ‘routines, practices, and values, developed over time’ ( Borger et al., 2013 : 50).

A specific example of a new managerial style in the organization of newswork is the introduction of agile development sequences in renowned news companies, such as the Washington Post , NPR , Politiken , and the BBC ( Marshall, 2012 ). ‘Agile’ refers to a set of management principles commonly used in software development, and in the context of news production stipulates fast-paced projects with short design cycles, working in temporary teams based on the integration of people from different parts of the company – reporters, assignment editors, designers, developers, market research, and management. We have little empirical knowledge of these types of work in the field of journalism studies, but findings from organization studies (within creative industries generally) suggest that within many of these conglomerates, the sharing of knowledge or cross-fertilization of ideas and projects is in fact quite minimal and tends not so much to depend on structural intra-firm relationships (in business jargon, ‘synergies’), but rather on personal, informal, and affective personal networks ( Grabher and Ibert, 2006 ). Such networks stretch both across and outside of institutional boundaries, consisting of professionals in different fields of work and working under different contractual (if contracted at all) arrangements.

A second key example of the diversified managerial strategy deployed inside news organizations correlates with the signaled emergence of a global startup culture in journalism, as venerable news companies create separate divisions or units to act and function as startups ( Küng, 2015 ). These project units tend to have separate budgets, often consist of members from across (and outside of) the company, and are generally encouraged to adopt a unique, more or less independent work style. Their function is as much to inspire the news company as a whole to adopt more flexible ways of working as it is to develop new sources of revenue and audience attention.

Enter entrepreneurialism

This picture of increasingly networked and precarious working conditions for journalists and media workers corresponds with trends in the labor market as a whole, showing a continuous growth of independent businesses and freelance entrepreneurship. 3 At the same time, news organizations have seen major budget cuts, reorganizations, and considerable downsizing. Responding to technological disruption ( Witschge, 2012b ) and changing audience behaviors ( Witschge, 2012a ), production practices change. Managers and employers have come to stress the importance of ‘enterprise’ as an individual rather than organizational or firm-based attribute ( Du Gay, 1996 ), in effect forcing entrepreneurialism on employees and freelancers alike ( Oakley, 2014 ). The notion of the enterprising or entrepreneurial individual extends beyond the creative industries, but the emergence of the enterprising professional in journalism is a relatively recent phenomenon, coinciding with a gradual breakdown of the wall between the commercial and editorial sides of the news organization, following ‘a process of further commodification of a commercialized media workplace where market pressures are increasingly dominating content decisions’ ( Von Rimscha, 2015 ).

Faced with difficult and disruptive challenges on many fronts, the news business demands its workers to increasingly shoulder the responsibility of the company (or companies, in the case of those with patchwork careers, carrying a portfolio of multiple clients; see Platman, 2004 ). Trends such as the integration of the business and editorial sides of the news organization; the ongoing convergence of print, broadcasting, and online news divisions into digital-first and mobile-first journalism enterprises; and the introduction of projectized work styles (such as agile development) show that such hybridized working practices are not particular to freelance journalists ( Compton and Benedetti, 2010 ).

Shifting the notion of enterprise – with its connotations of efficiency, productivity, empowerment, and autonomy – from the company to the individual, it is suggested to be part of the professional identity of each and every worker, contingently employed or not. This shift reconstitutes ‘workers as more adaptable, flexible, and willing to move between activities and assignments and to take responsibility for their own actions and their successes and failures’ ( Storey et al., 2005 : 1036). In this enterprising economy, entrepreneurial journalists increasingly start their own companies – somewhat similar to their colleagues elsewhere in the creative sector starting boutique advertising agencies or independent record labels, forming editorial or reportorial collectives as well as business startups. The emergence of a startup culture is indeed global: Since the early years of the 21st century, new independent (and generally small-scale and online-only) journalism companies have formed around the world ( Bruno and Kleis Nielsen, 2012 ; Coates Nee, 2014 ; Küng, 2015 ; Simons, 2013 ). 4

This shift in focus to entrepreneurialism has not only taken place within the industry. Researchers and educators have matched this attention with scholarly work and curricular innovation, which further urges journalists to take on entrepreneurialism as a core element in their identity (for a critical take, see Anderson, 2014 ). Courses and degrees in entrepreneurial journalism have been developed in countries as varied as the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Colombia, Mexico, and The Netherlands ( Mensing and Ryfe, 2013 ; Van Der Kamp et al., 2014 ; Vázquez Schaich and Klein, 2013 ). Emphasizing individual traits, skills, attitude, and mindset, this curriculum further envisages the future of journalism in the form of journalists who (alone or in collaboration) are able to monetize content in innovative ways, connect to publics in interactive new formats, grasp opportunities, and respond to (and shape) its environment ( Briggs, 2012 ).

There are a number of issues with this conceptualization of entrepreneurialism. First, even though we can find some optimism among the independently employed, several studies ( Ertel et al., 2005 ; Gregg, 2011 ; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011 ) consistently show adverse psychosocial effects, rising levels of stress, and overall poor subjective health among freelance media workers. The real or perceived freedom of working as an ‘independent’ comes at a cost to many. In presenting the entrepreneur as a ‘savior’ ( Sørensen, 2008 ), there is too little attention for those costs.

A second, conceptual issue regarding entrepreneurship in journalism is the fact that it is generally presented as an individual-level attribute, which tends to reinforce a ‘you are on your own’ credo of individualized patchwork career trajectories. Entrepreneurship is thus presented as micro-level agency to make something happen, while the structural, unequal, and often arbitrary conditions underlying production processes do not get addressed ( Görling and Rehn, 2008 ). As Landström and Johannisson (2001) explicate, ‘entrepreneurship [is] a phenomenon that lies beyond individual attributes and abilities. Entrepreneurship encompasses … the organising of resources and collaborators in new patterns according to perceived opportunities’ (p. 228). It is imperative to understand entrepreneurial journalism in terms of both formal and informal networks, teams, and associations that tend to transcend the boundaries of news organizations large and small.

Beyond journalism

In this precarious setting – where newsrooms become networks of loosely affiliated competitor-colleagues, news organizations retool toward an enterprising mode of production, access to the profession is increasingly exclusive, and individual journalists are held responsible for market success (and failure)– to be a professional, working journalist means having to go and perform beyond journalism. 5 Working in this environment demands journalists today to be committed well beyond what any profession could ask for – without most of the securities, comforts, and benefits enjoyed by being a member of a profession. Journalists are expected to reskill, deskill, and upskill their practices and working routines, generally without any direct say in the way the organizations they engage with operate. In doing so, they vulnerably move inside and outside of newsrooms and news organizations large and small, trying to both make a difference and to make ends meet in an exceedingly competitive market. In this context, understanding journalism means to appreciate journalists’ personal drive beyond the institutional protections and privileges of the profession. In today’s post-industrial journalism, the affective and at times passionate engagement with newswork is expected in a profoundly precarious context and as such asks for rearticulation. However, there is a remarkable lack of attention for the affective and social dimensions of newswork in journalism studies and education ( Beckett and Deuze, 2016 ).

Under conditions of technology and the market, the practice of journalism is (and always has been) often something quite different than its biased self-presentation and the way dominant conceptualizations of the field get articulated in journalism education and research. Conceptually as well as practically, journalism – seen as the process and product of the work of journalists – requires an ontology of becoming rather than of being ( Chia, 1995 ). Following Robert Chia (1995) , we propose a perspective on journalism as a profession, a set of institutional practices, a system of education, as well as a theoretical concept which privileges ‘reality as a processual, heterogeneous and emergent configuration of relations’ (p. 594).

As a growing number of scholars in various fields argue, in order to understand what a media profession such as journalism is becoming and what working as a journalist is like, we need to broaden the focus of journalism studies. Widening our view is not just a mere expansion of our sample: We need to reconsider our understanding of the role of both organizations (beyond the stable news institutions) and individuals (beyond the entrepreneur as savior of journalism), as well as the notion of the audience (beyond the more or less avid consumer of news). Journalism takes place in increasingly networked settings, in formal as well as informal contexts, involving a wide range of actors and actants in various instances of both paid and free labor ( Fast et al., 2016 ), covering news in real-time across multiplying platforms, often in competition or collaboration with publics ( Witschge, 2012b ). Such an ‘ambient’ ( Hermida, 2010 ) and ‘liquid’ ( Deuze, 2008 ) conception of journalism requires a toolkit that looks at the field as a moving object and as a dynamic set of practices and expectations – a profession in a permanent process of becoming.

‘Beyond journalism’ is an approach to journalism that considers it as a dynamic object of study. It points at the permanent instability inside the news industry as well as the structural and structured nature of people committing acts of journalism outside of it. Beyond journalism does not only exclude a ‘hard’ definition of the profession as a relatively contained entity with distinct boundaries but also a ‘soft’ definition of a range of practices by a multitude of actors that in various ways contribute to its social relevance. Beyond journalism is, as we have hoped to have shown in this article, not a new conceptualization of the field – it is also not simply advocating scholars and students alike to denounce existing definitions of what we understand newswork to be. Rather, it has argued that going beyond boundaries is what is productive in this time of flux. In recognizing this theoretical point, we would in fact ground our work more solidly in the lived experience of journalists and doing journalism.

Author biographies

Mark Deuze is professor of Media Studies, specializing in journalism, at the University of Amsterdam’s (UvA) Faculty of Humanities. From 2004 to 2013, he worked at Indiana University’s Department of Telecommunications in Bloomington, United States. Publications of his work include over 50 articles in academic journals and 7 books, including Media Work (2007, Polity Press) and Media Life (2012, Polity Press).

Tamara Witschge is a Rosalind Franklin fellow at the University of Groningen, Faculty of Arts, since February 2012. From 2009 to 2012, she was a lecturer at the School of Journalism, Media, and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University. Before that (2007–2009) she was a research associate at Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre and worked on project ‘Spaces of News’. She co-edited the Sage Handbook of Digital Journalism (2016) and is co-author of the book Changing Journalism (2012, Routledge). Tamara is a member of the editorial board of the international journals Digital Journalism , New Media and Society , and Social Media + Society .

1. See, for example, Worlds of Journalism ( http://www.worldsofjournalism.org ), Journalistic Performance Around The World ( http://www.journalisticperformance.org ).

2. Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/press_box/2004/10/journalism_by_remote_control.html

3. See, for example, the annual Global Entrepreneurship Monitor reports from 2006 onward: http://www.gemconsortium.org/report

4. Examples can be found at the online database of journalism startups of AngelList ( https://angel.co/journalism ) and Multiple Journalism ( http://multiplejournalism.org ).

5. We want to acknowledge Jo Bardoel’s coining of the term ‘beyond journalism’ in 1996, where he proposed an additional instrumental function of journalism (directing the social flow of debate) above and beyond its traditional orientating function (collecting and providing information of general interest, see also Deuze, 2005 ).

Funding: The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Contributor Information

Mark Deuze, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Tamara Witschge, University of Groningen, The Netherlands.

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A photographic genre characterized by the intention to communicate information about a topical event and by the immediacy of its images . It has generated many ‘iconic’ photographs . See also decisive moment .

Chandler, D., & Munday, R. (2020).  Photojournalism . In  A Dictionary of Media and Communication . : Oxford University Press. Retrieved 17 Oct. 2020

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