The Journalistic Gut Feeling

What goes on in editorial conferences and how do news journalists decide what is newsworthy? The journalistic “gut feeling” is an important part of the professional self-understanding of journalists and editors expressing how news judgements seem self-evident and self-explaining to the practitioners. This article presents an analysis of everyday news work drawing on the theoretical framework of Pierre Bourdieu and using ethnographic material from observations of editorial practices in a Danish television newsroom as a case study. The analytical concepts “journalistic doxa”, “news habitus” and “editorial capital” are put to empirical work on close-up observations of journalistic practices in editorial conferences and two types of news values are identified as part of the journalistic “gut feeling”: the explicit orthodox/heterodox news values which are part of the sphere of journalistic judgement, and the implicit, silent doxic news values which are part of the sphere of journalistic doxa. An important task for future studies of journalistic practice is to investigate the seemingly self-evident orthodox news values as well as making visible the doxic news values imbedded in journalistic practice.