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Drawing on new institutionalist theory, this article presents a theory of news rules to explain the curious fact that so much of the news looks similar across news organizations, yet reporters maintain a great deal of autonomy in choosing which stories to report and how to report them. The theory hinges on a distinction between constitutive and regulative rules. Where constitutive rules tell us what the news is, regulative rules tell us how the news ought to be produced. The author argues that a better understanding of how these types of rules implicate one another in the production of news explains why the news can be both homogeneous and variable at the same time.
David Ryfe (Sat,) studied this question.