How Do Journalists Read? Reading Practices and Beliefs of Journalism Professionals

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper presents a qualitative analysis of a multiple case study of the reading practices of six journalists in Uruguay. Professional groups constitute communities of practice that develop beliefs and idiosyncratic ways of integrating literacy into their activities. We investigate how six active journalists carry out reading in the context of their professional activities and how this relates to their beliefs about journalism. We used verbal reading protocols of three texts of different genres and conducted semi-structured interviews. The results show that when reading, the participants scrutinize the context, analyze the quantitative information of the texts, and evaluate their linguistic style. These reading practices can be related to participants’ beliefs that journalistic events are constructed based on the broader context, that journalists must adjust what they write to factual truth, and that news pieces must be precise and clear texts in stylistic terms. The observed reading strategies work for fulfilling participants’ interpretive frames about the events presented in the texts, connecting the new information with their previous knowledge. The similarities observed between participants’ reading practices seems to indicate that written journalism expertise shapes the reading practices of active journalists and that it makes them read differently than other professionals.