This article presents a multiple-case qualitative study of the reading practices of newspaper journalists in Uruguay, considering journalists as a community of practice and reading as a disciplinary literacy activity. The study was based on an analysis of the outcomes of six verbal reading protocols across three genres (institutional press release, news item, and technical report) with a group of six journalists. We observed the deployment of comprehension, monitoring, and evaluation practices to: (a) construct a broad scenario about the event presented in the text and its participants based on previous knowledge; (b) critically scrutinize the content of the text according to previous knowledge on the author, the event, and its participants; and (c) monitor the text characteristics and evaluate them, especially when reading texts written by peers. Considering previous literature on the professional practice of journalists, we recognize characteristic features in the reading practices of Uruguayan journalists who are part of Western journalism culture. The existence of a literacy tradition in reading and its relation to journalism education and the understanding of journalists’ expertise are discussed.
Díaz et al. (Fri,) studied this question.