Conceptualizing Journalistic Role Performance Across News Platforms

To talk about “journalism” is to talk about an abstraction. Recent theorizing has tried to account for what that abstraction is, much of it settling on journalism as a social institution (Ryfe, 2006). To talk about journalism as a social institution is to highlight the roles, rules, and routines that dene it. This is no doubt important denitional work, given that the realities of journalism are changing so much that dening who is a journalist and what is journalism have become increasingly complicated (Deuze, 2005). Scholars now generally recognize that what we have called journalism cannot be necessarily dened in terms of a media platform. Indeed, this recognition has driven recent theorizing about journalism-theorizing that seeks to understand “journalism beyond its formerly distinct and boundaried organization of newswork” (Deuze & Witschge, 2016).