JOURNALISTS AS INTERPRETIVE COMMUNITIES, REVISITED

Abstract

What does it take to make and keep a community? Since journalists were first conceptualized as an interpretive community (zelizer, 1992, 1993), journalism has undergone multiple changes. It has become more nancially unstable, more open to alternative modes of newsgathering, more diversified across task, news organization and medium, more global, more responsive to the involvement of private citizens. What impact have these changes in journalism and the larger information environment had on the establishment of journalists as interpretive communities? Have they undermined or supported journalists’ interpretive powers as we have considered them up until now? This chapter suggests that journalists have responded to their changing circumstances by doing what they have always done – crafting adjustments to both their newsmaking routines and their interpretive strategies so as to keep the journalistic community intact. Doing so maintains the relevance of collective interpretation in shaping what journalists do, the salience of their discourse, narratives and storytelling in doing so, and the impact of their informal contacts, even as their centrality, exclusivity, singularity and professional certainty have diminished. Interpretive strategies and the communities they legitimate continue to underscore how central collective interpretation remains in uniting reporters in their work and lending meaning and authority to journalism. This chapter fast-forwards earlier discussions of journalists as interpretive communities and applies them to the U.S. mainstream coverage of one recent public event – the hanging of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in December 2006. In considering how U.S. journalists collectively made sense of that event, it shows that they not only use journalistic coverage to generate meaning about journalism but also to retain a collective and authoritative voice amidst the changing – and often unpredictable – boundaries of newswork and a continually evolving information environment.