Rethinking Hard and Soft News Production: From Common Ground to Divergent Paths

Abstract

The twin issues of recent changes in journalistic phenomena and how they afford theory development are addressed by depicting a key transformation in the former—the increase in the frequency and volume of content dissemination in online news—and using this depiction to examine the current heuristic value of the conceptual distinction between hard and soft news. An ethnographic study of online news production at the largest online newspaper in Argentina is used to show that a growing separation in the temporal patterns of hard and soft news production is intertwined with major differences in critical aspects of editorial practice in which the common ground between hard and soft news work has traditionally been assumed to be significant. This finding challenges a dominant strain in the literature that underscores a blurring of the differences between hard and soft news. Because central elements of this case resonate with developments identified in several other settings, this study suggests rethinking some notions about the distinction between hard and soft news.