More Than Core and Periphery: How a Mapping Approach Can Add Nuance to Understanding the Journalistic Field

The influx of new (digital) actors and the resulting changes to the composition of the journalistic field have attracted considerable attention from journalism scholarship in recent years. However, much of the discussion about the new, so-called peripheral actors and the traditional mainstream has tended to, somewhat simplistically, assume a certain homogeneity in each. Recently, scholarship has begun to question this dichotomy, pointing to the vast variety of peripheral actors as well as traditional journalists, and instead argued for a more relational spectrum along which to locate all actors in the field. Yet, we still have an incomplete, and, crucially, under-theorized understanding of the different kinds of constellations in which peripheral journalism may exist vis-à-vis the so-called core of the journalistic field. To address this research gap, we draw on photo elicitation mappings of 101 journalistic and journalism-like actors in Austria and relate them to their position in the journalistic field. The findings show that both the core and the periphery are more nuanced, yet there are commonalities in their relational position-taking, which adds to our understanding of the journalistic field’s changing boundaries.