Sociological Perspectives On News Production

SOCIOLOGICAL ACCOUNTS OF NEWS PRODUCTION AND ETHNOGRAPHIC TURN

Sociological perspectives on news production have offered a theoretical foundation in order to better understand the central aim of this thesis regarding the way journalists make decisions, given that some of their main news sources (car companies) are often the same sources that provide organisations with advertising revenue. News production studies have contributed to an in-depth knowledge about the nature of journalism professional practices in modern societies (Cottle, 2007). Also, they have shed light, among others, on routines, professional values and ideologies, source dependencies and journalistic practices of the news media (Cottle, 2007). Thus, as Cottle (2007:1) remarks,

These studies –still valuable in today’s literature– have shed light on several aspects of the news production practices which were previously underexplored (Cottle, 2007). Earlier studies also examined the news production processes and practices but mostly relied on professional interview evidence and retrospective accounts of media production and organisational elements (Cottle,

One important drawback was the focus on the visible practices of production at the expense of external forces that also influence this process, such as the commerce and the marketplace (Cottle, 2007). Another criticism is that “the ethnographic approach has a methodological blind spot that tends to obscure the way in which managerial pressures are brought to bear on journalists” (Curran, 1989:144). In other words, access to senior levels of management was hard to negotiate and therefore difficult to gain insights or draw conclusions regarding corporate decision-making (Cottle, 2007; Curran, 1989). Equally important though, as Cottle (2007:10) annotates, while the ethnographic turn within the sociological approach “may have helped to counter simplistic ideas of conspiracy and ideological instrumentalism as the key explanation for news output, it did so at the cost of denying journalists their agency in the purposeful construction and reproduction of different news products… A conceptual shift from ‘routine’ to ‘practice’ is therefore