At the margins of center: Organized protest in the newsroom

This study of activism in mainstream newsrooms examines the strategies and histories of activist employees at 18 large city newspapers in the United States. The premise behind the study is that political activism within newsrooms parallels real‐life events in society, in spite of traditional journalistic goals of reporter neutrality and objectivity toward the events and issues that journalists cover. The activism we learned about in this study was aimed primarily at changing working conditions. But journalistic engagement with basic policy issues also represented a first step toward another goal: changing the content of news stories. This study begins to reframe news producers as subjects quite capable of actively engaging in struggles over the relations of power between themselves and those who manage them, and over meaning in their daily work lives and the news stories that they produce. The research therefore situates itself within the critical theory of media, particularly media hegemony related to gender, race and sexual orientation.