Journalistic activities refer to the routinized practices that help shape both news media messages and the ways they are distributed and consumed.
The phrase “routinized practices” underscores that journalistic activities tend to follow certain routines, or ways of doing things. They’re often deeply influenced by long-standing institutional logics, processes, and cultural values that make it possible for different kinds of social actors and technological actants to not only work together but work efficiently across the multi-stage process of producing news.
Although journalistic activities are influenced by their past, they are not static or unchangeable. In fact, they frequently iterate as new configurations of actors, actants, and audiences emerge due to social, economic, and technological changes.
One example of this is that journalism was historically a more insular practice, with journalists often writing for an imagined audience and with little input from them. Put another way, after the journalist identified a story they perhaps thought was important, they would report it and write it in a way that would help answer questions they thought their audiences were likely to have. After the editors and production staff had their way, the story would appear on somebody’s doorstep and that was often the end of that story’s lifecycle.
In contrast, today, that same journalist is more likely to be looking at social media trends to identify story ideas, to put out open calls to solicit help in running down a tip, and to receive frequent audience feedback about their story. In that sense, journalistic activities today are more social and less insular.
We can broadly place some of the most consequential journalistic activities into five distinct stages: access and observation, selection and filtering, processing and editing, distribution, and interpretation.
Access and observation pertains to the information gathering stage of news production. This involves gathering source material, like attending a press conference, being present at a protest, or gaining access to confidential government reports. It also involves identifying patterns in those source materials, like the members of Congress who routinely receive more political donations from certain sectors of the economy. Today, audience members are far more likely to participate in this stage as they can serve as observers by streaming events or capturing incidents that professional journalists may not be able to observe first-hand.
Selection and filtering pertains to stage wherein gathered information is winnowed down to its most interesting and/or important parts. This involves looking at all potential stories that might emerge from an event, like a protest, and deciding what to include in a news product and where to include it. For example, a journalist may choose to focus the story on the size of the turnout at a protest, on the police response to the protesters, on the history of the issue that is being protested, on the political repercussions of the issue, and so on. Even if the journalist has the time or space to cover every one of those angles—and they often do not—they still need to decide what the lead of the story should be.
Processing and editing pertains to the stage wherein the gathered and filtered information is turned into a news product, often by following certain stylistic guidelines. For example, the journalist may be asked to organize the information using the inverted pyramid schema, wherein the most timely and important information is placed near the very top of the story, followed by decreasingly important information until you get to the non-essential background at the end. The journalist may also be expected to generally use non-emotive language, like claiming a policy proposal was “dismissed” instead of “lambasted,” to signal their neutrality. Within this stage, you may have multiple individuals from the supervising editor to a copy editor to the layout or web editor all modifying the news product as it moves through the chain.
Distribution pertains to the stage wherein news products are disseminated to audiences, such as by broadcasting the information to their televisions or trying to place it on a user’s social media feed. Historically, newsroom personnel had a limited role to play in this stage as organizations had a dedicated group of people to handle these activities. For example, dedicated print workers would print a newspaper and stash it in bunches at a delivery dock, which delivery workers would then pick up and drop off at a subscriber’s home. Today, however, newsroom personnel often participate directly in this process by posting about their own stories on social media and sometimes even trying to draw attention to them by engaging in online communities where interested people might congregate. Additionally, audiences themselves now play a crucial role in distribution: they’re often the ones driving attention to a story by sharing it, helping some news products go viral.
Interpretation pertains to the discussion around the distributed news product, and more broadly about how it becomes widely understood and accepted by the general population. Journalists can certainly influence the interpretation of a news product based on the specific words and story angles they use in describing a story, and editors can similarly play a major role based on the headline that is given to a story and the pictures chosen to accompany it. However, audiences also play a crucial role in this process based on how they talk about the product in an associated ‘comments’ section, the contexts within which they share the stories, and the rebuttals they may choose to issue themselves via blogging platforms and the like.
At the heart of these examples are human actors. This is because journalistic activities have historically been human-led, with technological actants simply acting in a support role to help enact the human-led objectives more efficiently. For example, content management systems made it possible for journalists to quickly write their stories—perhaps with some automated spell- and grammar-checking help—and move it up the chain to another human editor. However, human beings were still doing much of the core labor.
This is changing, however. In some instances, the roles are now outright inverted, with the human social actor playing the support role and the technological actant taking the primary role, and sometimes acting with a great degree of independence. For example, algorithms are now able to take in large amounts of financial reports, identify the most interesting changes from the previous financial quarter, write a news story that looks very similar to what a human journalist might have produced, post the story on a website, and promote it on social media. All of this can be done with limited human intervention, beyond initially setting up the algorithm.
While algorithmically led activities are still the exception within the general space of journalism, they have become central in some sectors. For example, the Associated Press publishes tens of thousands of algorithmically written news stories about financial reports each year, and major news organizations in Scandinavia have employed algorithms to automatically organize the stories on their homepages using a mixture of personalization and algorithmic editorial judgment.
Thus, while journalistic activities are often organized around predictable routines shaped by history, they’re also frequently iterating before our eyes.
Journalistic activities refer to the routinized practices that help shape news messages as well as their distribution and consumption.
Journalistic activities are often governed by long-standing logics, working rules, and principles. However, they also evolve to accommodate new assemblages and arrangements of social actors, technological actants, and audiences.
When it comes to journalism, we can broadly place the most consequential activities within five stages: access and observation, selection and filtering, processing and editing, distribution, and interpretation.
While technological actants have historically been used to support human actors, in some cases they are now able to work fairly independently from them.