Journal Articles

Reporting and the transformations of the journalistic field : US news media, 1890-2000

---

How have journalistic ideals of public service arisen? To what extent do journalists live up to these ideals? Can we make any claims as to the social conditions that this performance depends on? Using Bourdieu’s theory of fields of cultural production, this article addresses these questions with evidence from the history of journalism in the United States. What is most distinctive about modern journalism is a specific practice: active news-gathering or reporting. This practice became common in the 1860s and 1870s with the emergence of journalism as a field with its own stakes, relatively independent from political advantage or literary merit. The power of field-specific capital to organize practices in the media has varied since then. The field consolidated in the era from 1890 to 1914, with the newspaper industry expanding. In the interwar years, the boundary between PR and journalism became blurry and the institutional basis for active news-gathering declined. Under favorable economic and political conditions reporting practices, including local and investigative reporting, flourished between 1945 and1970 across media forms. In the past 40 years the importance of active news-gathering has declined.

---

Availability

No copy data

Detail Information

Series Title

Media Culture Society

Call Number

-

Publisher

Thousand Oak : sage publisher., 2011

Collation

-

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

01634437

Classification

-

Content Type

-

Media Type

-

Carrier Type

-

Edition

Vol. 33 no. 1, January 2011,pp. 89-104

Subject(s)

Field Theory
Reporting and the transformations
Journalism history
Media ownership
Professional autonomy

Specific Detail Info

-

Statement of Responsibility

-

Other version/related

File Attachment

Comments

---

You must be logged in to post a comment