How journalists internalize news practices and why it matters

Practice scholars of news production generally imagine news practices as symbolic resources that exist external to reporters and prior to reporters’ actions. This understanding has been incredibly productive for scholars, but it elides an important question. How do news practices actually get into reporters’ heads? The lack of answers to this question has created a persistent gap between the study of news practices and examination of reporters’ actions. In this essay, I build on recent advances in cognitive cultural sociology, especially the dual-process theory of social cognition, to offer an account of how reporters internalize culture. I argue that this account is especially helpful for analysis of situations in which what journalists can say about what they do is only loosely associated with what they do, or know how to do. In my estimation, such situations are increasingly common in journalism. A clearer understanding of processes of internalization will lead to more accurate assessments of reporters’ actions, especially in situations in which their words and their deeds are not aligned.