The New Geography of Journalism Research

In this essay, I consider the challenges of doing research in a shifting domain, where technology has made the concept of journalism itself problematic. For many years, I have used (in my own work with Shoemaker on media sociology) a levels-of-analysis hierarchy of influences perspective to sort out the factors impinging on the symbolic reality produced by journalism, but a “spatial turn” has made concepts of fields, spheres, and networks much more relevant. Understanding these spaces requires thinking in less media-centric terms as we identify the newly coupled assemblages put together in producing digital journalism, beyond its traditional institutional containers. These include algorithmically restructured atomic units of news in content and different configurations of global journalism. A new wave of ethnographies has begun to tackle these challenges, using the kind of thick description that characterized the field in the pre-digital era.