A Research Agenda for an Institutional Media

This article presents a new institutionalism theory of news rooted in the open-systems approach developed in organizational theory. It argues that news media develop standard routines and practices—institutions—in response to three kinds of uncertainty: whether or how they will make a profit, establish their legitimacy, and find timely information. These routines and practices become taken-for-granted assumptions about how to produce news that span across news organizations to compose an institutional regime of news. It is argued that this regime constrains journalists working within major mainstream media organizations to produce extraordinarily homogeneous kinds of news. Directions for future research are suggested.