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Journalism Practice
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Business as Usual: How Journalism’s Professional
Logics Continue to Shape News Organization
Policies Around Social Media Audiences
Kelly Fincham
To cite this article: Kelly Fincham (2021): Business as Usual: How Journalism’s Professional
Logics Continue to Shape News Organization Policies Around Social Media Audiences, Journalism
Practice, DOI: 10.1080/17512786.2021.1991437
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2021.1991437
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa
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Published online: 02 Nov 2021.
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Business as Usual: How Journalism’s Professional Logics
Continue to Shape News Organization Policies Around Social
Media Audiences
Kelly Fincham
a,b
a
Discipline of Journalism and Communication, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland;
b
School of
Communications, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland
ABSTRACT
This study explores the prevailing institutional logics within
Western news outlets to examine the prevalent values and
concerns around the social media news audience amid a time of
great upheaval in the news industry. Through a qualitative
content analysis of social media guidelines from mainstream
news outlets the study finds that professional logics continue to
dominate news organization goals with the journalists positioned
as the professionals in charge of the news and their audiences
still limited to largely passive consumer roles at best allowed to
comment, like and share only after publication. While the findings
show that the news organizations view their audiences as a
consumer rather than collaborator, the study notes the
emergence of two audience-oriented values which suggest that
news organizations have already begun to respond to the ways
in which their audiences are being reshaped by digital and social
media even if those new technologies have not—yet—reshaped
the organization’s relationship with the audience. Overall, the
study shows that professional logics continue to inform news
organization attitudes in relation to their audiences as
organizations continue to privilege the role of the news
organization as the professional in charge of the content.
KEYWORDS
Social media policies; news
organizations; professional
logics; institutional logics;
control; audience;
engagement
Introduction
Journalists’work practices on social media platforms have been the focus of much
research over the past decade amid the emergence of innovative technologies which,
theoretically at least, enable new participatory interactions between news organizations
and their audiences. While studies have consistently shown that journalists themselves do
not use social media to engage with their audiences there has been little corresponding
work in relation to news organizations’attitudes around journalist/audience interactions.
This study uses an institutional logics approach in an effort to help build an understanding
around organizational priorities towards journalist-audience interactions on social media
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
CONTACT Kelly Fincham kelly.fincham@nuigalway.ie; @kellyfincham
JOURNALISM PRACTICE
https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2021.1991437
at a time when the industry is in some decline and such innovation has been positioned
by some as a potential solution to the industry’s woes (Nelson 2021b).
The emergence of social media in the mid-to-late 2000s opened up significant oppor-
tunities for new participatory interactions between journalists and their audiences, inter-
actions which were physically impossible prior to the arrival of social media. However,
research over the past decade has persistently shown that journalists ignore such oppor-
tunities to engage with their audiences and instead use social media to converse primarily
with other journalists, a pattern of behaviour that is often linked to homophily, where like
gathers with like; and normalization, where new technologies are most often used to
reinforce already-existing practices (see Singer 2005; Fincham 2019; Hanusch and
Nölleke 2019; Mourão 2015). While research into journalists’practice on social media is
relatively well-advanced, due in no small part to journalists’rapid adoption of social
media and the public nature of their exchanges, research at the organizational level is
comparatively sparse. The study is an attempt to add to our knowledge of organizational
priorities around the news audience by exploring the prevailing institutional logics within
news organizations in the liberal Western media systems in relation to participatory work
practices. The author does this by carrying out a qualitative content analysis on social
media policies, organizational texts which are a well-documented way to interrogate
organizational prerogatives and priorities. This is not to say that individual journalists’
practices are necessarily linked to their news organization’s policies, indeed the research
shows that most journalists ignore them (Opgenhaffen and Scheerlinck 2014), but more
that such policies play a key role in articulating an organization’s culture and influence the
“way we do things here”in the newsroom (Breed 1955; Vaast and Kaganer 2013; Barkho
2021; Opgenhaffen and d’Haenens 2015).
Institutional logics are “socially constructed, historical pattern of material practices,
assumptions, values, beliefs, and rules by which individuals produce and reproduce
their material subsistence, organize time and space and provide meaning to their social
reality”(Thornton and Ocasio 1999, 804) and an institutional logics approach offers
researchers a way to understand the oftentimes overlapping and conflicting cultures
within organizations (Friedland and Alford 1991; Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury
2012). Previous studies have identified professional, commercial, managerial, and techno-
logical logics as the most dominant within journalism and of these four, the professional
and commercial are most prominent and are also the most likely to be seen in conflict as
news outlets daily negotiate multiple domains to fulfil their obligations to both the
market and the public (Lischka 2020). Accordingly, journalism is well practised, if not
always skilful, in negotiating commercial and professional logics and has long compart-
mentalized uneasy bedfellows like advertising (commercial) and news (professional) in
separate offices, if not separate buildings. That same uneasy tension exists in relation
to the news audience which, while considered commercially valuable, is typically kept
away from the places where news decisions are made and viewed as a passive consumer
of professionally-produced information with professional journalism norms like objectiv-
ity often cited as a rationale for the need to maintain a distance between journalist and
audience (Ananny 2014;Deuze, Bruns, and Neuberger 2007; Belair-Gagnon and Revers
2018; Lischka 2020; Lowrey 2018). This study asks if commercial and professional logics
continue to inform news organizations’principles regarding the newer social media audi-
ences and to do so, the author used an institutional logics approach in carrying out a
2K. FINCHAM
qualitative content analysis of social media guidelines from a sample of Western news
organizations. While content analysis of editorial policies (see Barkho 2021) is a standard
research technique, analysis of the content of social media policies is relatively new as
there were few such policies in the early days of Twitter and Facebook as news organiz-
ations declined to specifically address social media with The New York Times famously
claiming their journalists didn’t need any formal direction at all (Davis 2011). Since
then, driven in part by several high-profile social media controversies news organizations
including The New York Times have begun to create quite detailed documents (Adornato
and Lysak 2017) and these texts are helpful in shedding light on organizations’concerns
around social media news audiences, although availability is somewhat limited as we will
see in the Methods section. The main question in this study is to ask if the social media
audience is still viewed in terms of professional logics or whether we can identify the
emergence of newer logics. To explore this question, this study focuses on policies
from mainstream news organizations in the broadly similar media systems of Ireland,
Canada, the UK, and US, (Hallin and Mancini 2004) which while imperfect and somewhat
limited in scope (Ryfe 2016) are similar enough to help researchers in identifying any
developing shared set of logics in respect to news audiences.
This paper ultimately argues that professional logics are still most prominent in news
organizations’approach to their social media audiences as the news organizations are
consistently situated as the ultimate news authority, with the audience generally por-
trayed as a traditional potential eyewitness or consumer rather than potential participant
or collaborator in news work. However, the study also identifies newer audience-oriented
values or themes which show that the news organizations do acknowledge that the audi-
ence has been changed by the emergence of digital and social media even as the organ-
ization’s relationship with the audience has not. The literature on news audiences and
audience construction is reviewed first along with a discussion around current studies
into journalist/audience social media interactions and existing studies of social media pol-
icies in Western news organizations before moving on to the theoretical framework of
institutional logics. The methodological section is next and then the findings, discussion,
and conclusion sections.
Literature Review
Audiences and Engagement
The audience has long played a subsidiary role in Western news organizations, viewed
primarily as passive recipients of the professional content produced by the professional
journalist; an abstract, imaginary concept, “newsmen’s fantasies”, with any knowledge
of the news audience filtered back through market research or audience metrics, or
the erstwhile letters to the editor, rather than direct knowledge or awareness (de
Sola Pool and Shulman 1959, 145; Nelson 2021a). When surveyed about their imagined
audiences, journalists reported soliciting feedback from peers or supervisors, not the
people who paid for their product, and research has consistently shown that journalists
overwhelmingly seek approval and validation from other journalists, rather than the
people they say they seek to serve, and while readers could sometimes see their
own thoughts and ideas in print, those letters still had to be approved by the editorial
JOURNALISM PRACTICE 3
gatekeepers, again privileging the role of the professional journalist (Ananny 2014;
Bossio 2017; Heinonen 2011; Heise et al. 2014; Wahl-Jorgensen 2007; White 1950).
The rise of social media and its networked “always-on”(Hermida 2010, 298) platforms
in the mid to late 2000s created much optimism about the potential for greater journal-
ist/audience engagement and the prospects for pluralization and democratization that
could result from agonistic audiences converging online in collaborative and equitable
forms of storytelling (Heinonen 2011; Jenkins 2006; McCosker 2014; Pavlik 2000; Robin-
son 2011; Sumpter 2000).
However, the promise of such participatory practices and greater pluralization has
largely remained unrealized with journalists adapting “slowly, if at all”, to innovative
engagement practices with social media interactions typically observed only in the pro-
fessional or commercial spheres such as traditional news-gathering or the business of
increasing traffic (Borger et al. 2013, 127; Quandt 2018). Engaged journalism is most fre-
quently understood as “types of participatory culture and online interactivity that go
beyond users’consumption of news”(Belair-Gagnon, Nelson, and Lewis 2019, 558)
but academic studies have repeatedly shown that while journalists have been quick
to adopt social media, they are more likely to use it in ways that ward offany audience
incursions on their role, rather than inviting them in, with audience participation
allowed only after the news is produced, echoing Hermida’s observation (2011b,
189), that “deep down, most journalists do not view the user as an active participant
in the news”and spend “little time thinking about the people they intended to
reach”(Lasorsa, Lewis, and Holton 2012; Lawrence, Radcliffe, and Schmidt 2018; Moly-
neux and Mourão 2019; Nelson 2021a, 16; Vergeer 2015). While there are notable
exceptions to this (see García de Torres and Hermida 2017, on then-NPR social
media editor Andy Carvin and his ground-breaking work in social journalism) the audi-
ence is not offered any “meaningful agency”in news selection as journalists hold on to
key stages of the news work and view the news audience as something that could
detract from their core role of control over content (Hermida 2011a, 21). Overall,
studies show journalists continue to perceive their audience as passive consumers
and display a “lingering”and “persistent”resistance to innovation with engagement
efforts restricted to post-publication activities such as comments, likes or shares, all
of which reinforces the role conception that journalists, “acting in their normative
roles, ought to wield gatekeeping control over news content on behalf of society”
(Ananny 2014; Belair-Gagnon, Lewis, and Agur 2020; Harmer and Southern 2020;
Lewis 2012, 845; Schmidt and Lawrence 2020, 533).
While the literature around journalists and their audiences is well developed there is
less research around organizational priorities and the social media policies provide a
useful lens for this enquiry as they point to concerns that might otherwise be inaccessible.
This is a timely enquiry as such policies have only recently started to become available
given that news organizations originally asked only that journalists demonstrate
“common sense”(Davis 2011) and emerging research has already explored the wider
organizational concerns around social media (see Ananny 2014; Barkho 2021; Bloom,
Cleary, and North 2015;Duffy and Knight 2019; Ihlebæk and Larsson 2018; Lee 2018;
Opgenhaffen and d’Haenens 2015; Sacco and Bossio 2017; Vaast and Kaganer 2013).
While not specifically focused on audience-related norms; Ananny’s(2014) inquiry into
press autonomy and Duffy and Knight’s(2019) work on boundary-setting are of interest
4K. FINCHAM
here as they both reported that news organizations were maintaining legacy practices in
relation to their news audiences. This paper focuses specifically on news audience gui-
dance in the social media policies and asks if the professional logics still prevail in relation
to the news audience or if newer or even negotiated logics are developing in response to
the new opportunities provided by social media.
Institutional Logics
Institutional logics were first introduced by Alford and Friedland (1985)asawayof
describing the conflicting and overlapping practices and beliefs within modern
Western institutions and has since been used to explore and better understand the
inter-relationships between individuals, organizations, and society and how organizations
work to determine accepted and acceptable goals (Friedland and Alford 1991; Scott 2013;
Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury 2012; Thornton and Ocasio 2008). Researchers generally
point to four types of institutional logics within journalism: professional, which considers
the professional role conception; commercial, which is oriented towards business con-
cerns; managerial, which is concerned with structures, process and operations; and tech-
nological, which is oriented towards the use of technology (Lischka 2020). The
professional and commercial logics are considered most dominant in journalism, for
reasons of public service and market concerns, and this study focuses only on professional
logics as the central question is about the professional role conception of journalism in
relation to the news audience.
Professional Logics
Professional logics largely situate the journalist as a neutral and objective gatekeeper
tasked with maintaining professional control over content, and journalism’s role in the
collection, production, and dissemination of information can be viewed as objective or
activist; interpreter or watchdog; conceptions which place it in the fourth estate ideal
where it is considered a vital, if unofficial, part of the public sphere along with the legis-
lative, judiciary, and executive (Lischka 2020). These are important roles for a profession
that lacks the formal credentialing systems of medicine or law and given that journalism
derives much of its legitimacy and status from its professional role conception any incur-
sion by outsiders would be expected to create conflict (Ananny 2014; Lewis 2012). This
paper seeks to establish if professional news logics inform news organizations’attitudes
towards the social media audience or if the policies signal newer logics emerging in
response to the impact of digital and social technologies. Again, this is not to say that
the behaviour of journalists is tied to their organizations’guidance but more that the pol-
icies will help identify the prevailing ideologies within the organizations themselves. This
paper thus draws from the institutional logics approach to ask the following research
question.
Research Question
Are professional logics most prominent within news organizations in relation to the social
media news audience or can we identify the emergence of newer logics?
JOURNALISM PRACTICE 5
Methodology
Data
To answer this research question, the author collected publicly available social media
guidelines from national media organizations in the four countries of the North Atlantic
media systems (see Table 1). Borrowing from Ananny’s(2014) the organizations selected
for this paper had to fit the following three criteria:
(1). A major news organization in their respective country
(2). Publicly available social media policies
(3). Date range between 2009 and 2019 to better reveal patterns or changes over time
To find the policies, the author made enquiries to the relevant news organizations,
searched news organization websites, and used Google searches for phrases like “social
media policies”,“social media guidelines”,“journalists”, and "journalism", a search
which returned a total of 12 sets of guidelines from the four countries; one from
Ireland (state broadcaster RTÉ); two from Canada (CBC and The Globe and Mail); four
from the UK (BBC, Northern Shell group; Reuters,SKY News); and five from the US (AP, Buzz-
Feed, ESPN, NPR,The New York Times.) To ensure that other researchers could access the
same data, the policies had to be publicly available to be included and while this
obviously limited the number of usable policies, as some news organizations do not
make their policies public, the author does not consider the sample size a substantial
limitation as this data set is similar in size to those used in other published studies and
news organizations are known to mimic each other’s organizational routines (Ananny
2014; Adornato and Lysak 2017; Opgenhaffen and Scheerlinck 2014). The 12 news organ-
izations are all considered industry leaders in their home countries and there is a reason-
able amount of diversity in the types of outlet with four state broadcasters; (RTÉ, CBC, BBC,
and NPR); one commercial broadcaster (SKY News); one center-right tabloid group (The
Northern Shell group with the Daily Star and Daily Express); two center-left broadsheets
(The New York Times and The Globe And Mail); two wire agencies (Reuters and AP); one
sports news site (ESPN) and finally, the digital-only BuzzFeed. The 12 policies surveyed
Table 1. Name and country of mainstream news outlet in alphabetical order along with year of last
update and abbreviations when used.
Associated Press (AP) US 2013
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) UK 2015
BuzzFeed (BuzzFeed) US 2019
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Canada 2017
Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN) US 2017
The Globe and Mail (Globe and Mail) Canada 2017
Daily Express and Daily Star (Northern Shell) UK 2018
National Public Radio (NPR) US 2019
The New York Times (NYT) US 2017
Reuters (Reuters) UK 2018
Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) Ireland 2013
SKY News (SKY) UK 2015
6K. FINCHAM
ranged in size from one-page documents (The Globe and Mail) to lengthy detailed guide-
lines (NPR) and were issued between 2009 and 2019.
As stated earlier, these countries were chosen as they comprise Hallin and Mancini’s
Liberal/North Atlantic media system which provides a strong starting point for this type
of research as there are enough similarities in these countries’media and political
systems to help explore typical governing principles or logics in Western news
organizations.
The study uses Krippendorf’s six-question criteria (1980) for sampling:
(1). Which data are analyzed? Social media policies from national news organizations
(2). How are the data defined? Documents designed to guide journalists on audience
interactions on social media
(3). From what population are the data drawn? The four countries of the North Atlantic
media system: Ireland, Canada, the US, and UK.
(4). What is the relevant context? Institutional logics in journalism
(5). What are the boundaries of the analysis? Publicly available social media guidelines
from mainstream news organizations over a 10-year span
(6). What is to be measured? Evidence of institutional logics
The guidelines were collected in mid-2020 and the links are available in the section
labelled data at the end.
Analysis
The question about institutional logics is an important one and this paper seeks to answer
this through textual analysis of the organizations’formal policies. Following Ananny
(2014) the study uses a grounded theory “open coding”approach to identify themes
and potential categories in the policies rather than imposing categories at the start.
Drawing from Strauss and Corbin (1998) the author started with open coding at sentence
level on any text that contained language related to audience interactions and then used
axial coding to create a new set of themes that combined categories and finally selected
only those which were saturated with textual evidence from at least three different pol-
icies to arrive at the overall prevailing logic. The text blocks were required to be at least
sentence-size but no bigger than a paragraph and centred on the same theme or, where
themes overlapped, separated into individual text blocks (Vaast and Kaganer 2013). When
completed, the open, axial, and selective coding resulted in the categorization of three
distinct themes; audience as traditional construction; audience as new community; and
audience as potential threat.
The next section discusses the findings which initially suggested newer or negotiated
logics but ultimately situated the audience in the professional logics. While the newer
audience-oriented themes conveyed a sense of newer logics, they instead served to
show that news organizations do understand that digital and social media have
changed their audience even though they have not so far changed the organization’s
relationship with the audience. Overall, the professional logics are seen as dominant
with the audiences portrayed as consumers or potential sources allowed contribute
JOURNALISM PRACTICE 7
only after the news is published and never invited into the spaces where news is made.
The three themes are discussed below.
Findings
Audience as Traditional Construct
The policies all begin with a statement encouraging journalists to use social media in
ways that further journalism’s professional role, with social media typically described as
an “important area for news gathering and reporting”(SKY News 2015); an essential
journalism tool for “connecting readers with reporting in a timely manner”(The
Globe and Mail 2017); and a new way of “giving our listeners and readers valuable
insights into the day’s news”(NPR 2019). As can be seen in the excerpts above, the pol-
icies locate the social media audiences as the traditionally passive recipient and the
journalist as professional news worker and expert. The audience is typically described
as “readers, listeners and viewers”(NYT 2017); “those who consume our content …”
(AP 2013); people who might be able to share content “to help us do our jobs”(BBC
2019) or people who want to “post comments on our websites”(Northern Shell
2018). In this way the policies convey a sense of the audience as a passive consumer;
a breaking-news source or a social media user allowed comment only after the profes-
sionally produced news is published. Audience interactions are considered primarily as
vehicles to “find useful information and newsworthy content and get our journalism to
new audiences …gather news and sharing links to published work”(AP 2013), and
journalists are advised to initiate interactions only in the context of news gathering
or breaking news, such as “putting out a call for witnesses and other sources”(Northern
Shell, 2018); “locating sources …for angles and insights”(Reuters, 2018) or “contacting
people who have captured photos or video that AP might want to authenticate and
use”(AP 2013). Overall, journalists are positioned as the expert and “influential voices
on social media”(ESPN 2017); the professionals “encouraged to answer questions
about their areas of coverage”(Northern Shell 2018) “or subjects in which they have
expertise or interest”(BuzzFeed 2019) and if the audience initiates any interactions
the journalists are advised to respond, “time permitting”(AP 2013). In sum, social
media is conveyed as an “important area for newsgathering and reporting”(SKY
News 2015); an essential journalism tool for “connecting readers with reporting in a
timely manner”(The Globe and Mail 2017); and a way of “giving our listeners and
readers valuable insights”(NPR 2019) with the journalist situated in their traditional
role of expert and the audience as the passive recipient.
Audience as New Community
While the policies present the social audience as a traditional construct in respect to the
professional role of journalists and news-gathering they also suggest that the audience is
being reshaped by social media in ways that merit organizational concerns both for and
about the audience. For example, several of the news organizations discuss how social
media communities have their own etiquette and customs, and how journalists should
observe them as can be seen below.
8K. FINCHAM
So, we respect their cultures and treat those we encounter online with the same courtesy and
understanding as anyone we deal with in the offline world. We do not impose ourselves on
such sites. We are guests and behave as such (NPR 2019)
and “(We) avoid giving the impression that RTÉ is imposing itself on a community of users
and its space, operate a ‘when in Rome’approach and are sensitive to existing user
customs and conventions”(RTÉ 2013). Journalists should consider the user’s“intended
audience”and “whether vastly increasing that audience reveals an important story—or
just shames or embarrasses a random person. We should not automatically or even typi-
cally comply with a poster’s original intention—but we should be aware of it”(BuzzFeed
2019). Journalists are advised that much of the audience content on social media “is gen-
erally for the benefit of (the poster’s) friends and acquaintances”(RTÉ 2013), and to con-
sider the social media audience as “ostensibly”rather than intentionally public (BuzzFeed
2019) with a balance needed “between appropriate use of material that an individual may
have unthinkingly put in the public domain and respect for their privacy”(RTÉ 2013) and
particular care suggested around sensitive subjects such as “sexual assault, LGBT issues,
and racial bias”(BuzzFeed 2019). The safety of the social media audience is paramount
with journalists advised to adopt “a sensitive and thoughtful approach”(NPR 2019) to
“never ask members of the public to put themselves in danger”(Northern Shell 2018)
and to avoid “multiple approaches to the same person”(BBC 2015). While the policies
all reinforce the idea that social media is for news gathering, journalists are advised to
treat the social media audience with care and make sure that “we do not use information
gathered from our interactions on such sites …without identifying ourselves to those
involved and seeking their permission to be quoted or cited”(NPR 2019); “we should
not simply lift quotes, photos or video”(AP 2013) or “publish photographs where the sub-
jects have a reasonable expectation of privacy”(Northern Shell 2018) although BuzzFeed
allows that such rules can be broken “in breaking news situations”(BuzzFeed 2019).
Audience as Potential Threat
While the news organizations acknowledge that “talking to people is crucial to getting the
most out of social media”(BBC 2015) and that “most feedback is constructive”(Northern
Shell 2018) the guidelines consistently identify journalists as vulnerable to attacks (NPR
2019) and increasingly “the targets of abuse on Twitter and other platforms”. The policies
all warn that social media communities are “places where some people’s darker sides
emerge”(NPR 2019); with “abusive, bigoted, obscene and/or racist comments”(AP
2013); and “people who think that rape memes are a good way to respond to a story
they don’t like”(NYT 2017). Journalists are advised to model “civil discourse”(CBC
2017); “avoid flame wars”(Reuters 2018); “avoid engaging in arguments”(SKY News
2015); and “avoid protracted back-and-forth exchanges with angry people that become
less constructive with each new round”(Northern Shell 2018). The news organizations
list very specific processes to be followed in cases of abuse; “consulting with supervisors”
(CBC 2017); “flagging”abusive individuals (AP 2013) or reporting incidents to their line
manager (RTÉ). Journalists are asked to evaluate whether the tone is threatening or
merely unpleasant and tailor their actions accordingly with “blocking”and similar “aggres-
sive”actions to be used only in “cases of real offence, abuse, or spamming”(BBC 2019) and
JOURNALISM PRACTICE 9
when such actions do not “unduly restrict access to our journalism”(CBC 2017). For
example,
If the message is unpleasant but not threatening and is about work you’ve done, try respond-
ing with something along these lines—“I appreciate constructive feedback. Can you tell me
more about what concerned you?”If the person responds constructively, you’ve got a con-
versation going. If the person continues to be unpleasant or becomes abusive, do not con-
tinue the conversation (NPR 2019)
and
If the criticism is especially aggressive or inconsiderate, it’s probably best to refrain from
responding. We also support the right of our journalists to mute or block people on social
media who are threatening or abusive. But please avoid muting or blocking people for
mere criticism of you or your reporting. (NYT 2017)
Given that “issues happen and can escalate quickly online …there is an established
process in place for managing potential issues and risks to our brand and reputation”
(CBC 2017).
Discussion
An institutional logics approach offers a lens into the main concerns and priorities within
news organizations and this theoretical framework has allowed me to demonstrate that
the news audience is still considered in ways that enhance professional logics and high-
lights the audience’s passive role in news gathering even as social and digital media tech-
nologies continue to weaken journalism’s longstanding control over content. In the first
theme, audience as a traditional construct, the social media audience is consistently por-
trayed as a consumer or recipient of the journalists’professional content and offered
opportunities to contribute only as a potential news source in breaking news or to
comment only after publication. Where the policies do address journalist-initiated inter-
actions it is typically to further professional news work such as soliciting quotes or eyewit-
ness content and not newer practices such as potentially soliciting input from the
audience on what issues the news organizations should cover. There is no advice on
building communities or initiating or developing audience relationships and the advice
from AP to respond (time permitting) is more an example of the kind of polite one-off
thank-you replies noted by Parmelee and Deeley (2017) rather than a model of meaning-
ful interaction. The second theme, audience as new community, suggested an insti-
tutional awareness of public/private tensions within the audience and thus an
awareness of newer participatory practices, but this theme was more rooted in concerns
around reputation management, indicating that these newer values reflect brand con-
cerns relating more to the commercial side of the house rather than journalism practice.
This theme also highlights an issue which emerges time and time again in newsrooms and
classrooms around reasonable expectations of privacy on social media platforms which
are only “ostensibly”public (BuzzFeed 2019). The news organizations who address this,
and not all do, position journalism as a somewhat intrusive act and that mainstream
media attention can result in a far larger audience than the social audience user may
intend but again this enhances professional logics as it locates the journalist in the gate-
keeping role. The third theme, audience as a potential threat, reflects quite real concerns
10 K. FINCHAM
about online hostility towards professional journalists and does show that news organiz-
ations have already established quite clear procedures in response to the well-documen-
ted instances of online abuse towards journalists, particularly female and people of
colour, even if they are not encouraging newer participatory practices online.
The first finding, audience as a traditional construct, confirmed the prevalence and
dominance of professional logics within the news organizations in relation to the social
media news audience but the second two findings initially suggested the development
of newer or more negotiated logics. In “the audience as new community”, the themes
reveal organizational awareness of the conflicting tensions around privacy on public plat-
forms but close analysis revealed that the main concern for the news organizations was
that the journalist consider their agency to amplify (however unintentionally) the audi-
ence’s post which again enhances professional logics. The recommendations to avoid
social media “pile-ons”, where multiple journalists contact the same user, signals aware-
ness of the differing ideas of visibility and “publicness”on social media but ultimately pri-
vileges organizational concern about brand reputation (Bradshaw 2019) which again
points back to professional logics. Additionally, the guidelines that advise journalists to
observe social community norms can also be seen in this context as they again place
the journalist in charge of information; “visiting”these communities for reporting and
news gathering purposes; rather than seeking to build partnerships or collaboration.
The organizational efforts to keep the audience at bay can also be seen in the context
—or even “context collapse”as Marwick and Boyd (2010) termed it—of the boundary
struggles taking place in journalism as news organizations attempt to ward offany
further collapse of their professional role (Broersma and Graham 2016; Domingo et al.
2008; Gans 1979; Wahl-Jorgensen 2015). The emergence of social media created some
expectations that audiences could take on new roles such as “produsers”(half producer,
half user) in converged or hybrid media systems but the findings show that such practices
have not so far been adopted by news organizations who instead “exhibit”or perform
aspects of participatory social media culture only when it serves news gathering goals
—and thus professional logics, (Broersma and Graham 2016; Bruns 2018, 2; Chadwick
2017; Bentivegna and Marchetti 2018, 287; Molyneux and Mourão 2019; Singer 2005).
Overall, the policies affirm the passive, non-collaborative role of the audience in news
gathering, and show that professional logics continue to inform news organization priori-
ties with the journalist situated as an expert and the audience viewed as either a passive
consumer or potentially hostile user, given space only after the news is published. Jour-
nalists are not encouraged to use social media to invite the audience into the spaces
where news is decided and there are no recommendations on how best to form relation-
ships with the audience or initiate dialogue even as proximity to the audience is con-
sidered a strategic imperative (Nelson 2018). The findings indicate that professional
logics continue to shape news organizations’relationships with their readers, listeners,
and viewers even as their ability to maintain professional control of production and dis-
semination of information is challenged, if not weakened, daily. However, while the
findings make it clear that the news organizations do not encourage audience inter-
actions; there are legitimate and pressing concerns about journalists’visibility and vulner-
ability on social spaces where platform owners do little or nothing to protect users from
hate speech and abuse. As Lewis and Molyneux pointed out in their 10-year review (2018),
the “all but baked-in implicit optimism”that marked the earlier incarnation of social
JOURNALISM PRACTICE 11
media, particularly Twitter, has been overtaken by the increasingly toxic reality of an
environment where many journalists, particularly female and minority, have been har-
assed offsocial media, “and any meaningful interactions with the audience on these plat-
forms in their current format may be impossible”(Lewis and Molyneux 2018).
Conclusion
One of the central themes in the findings relates to the organizational awareness that the
news audience has been transformed by the arrival of social and digital media even as
professional logics continue to prevail around journalist/audience interactions. The
early identification of the audience-oriented themes or values had initially suggested
the development of newer or more negotiated audience -related logics but closer analysis
revealed these new themes conformed to existing professional logics and bracketed both
professional and commercial logics in the stated concerns about threats to the individual
safety and brand reputation. There was no evidence of innovation in participatory work
practices in the policies with the audience limited to a passive consumer role rather
than potential collaborator, consulted only for traditional news reasons such as letters
to the editor, or on-the-spot quotes, and excluded from spaces where the news
agenda is discussed and decided.
Researchers have suggested that engagement, even in a limited form, should be a key
normative goal for news organizations. In fact US news consumers have already signalled
approval of journalists using social media to interact with the audience, particularly on
substantive matters such as policy issues, yet there is no evidence here of any change
in priorities around the audience (Jones 2019; Molyneux and Mourão 2019; Vergeer
2015). However, any efforts at involving the audience in the selection and production
of news and other such activities would clearly challenge journalism’s status and legiti-
macy and organizational resistance to such efforts may be linked to what Nelson
(2018) termed the “currency”issue where news organizations will need to see a return
on investment before changing practice. The study shows that news organizations still
regard journalism as a product under their professional control even though the net-
worked nature of social media and the ensuing quantity, if not quality, of information
and potential actors, creates quite significant challenges to that status (Hedman 2015;
Lewis, Holton, and Coddington 2014; Yiping et al. 2020). In some ways these questions
of control over content mirror the contradiction at the heart of a profession that serves
both private and public service goals and that historically reconciled those contradictions
by “compartmentalizing”conflicting areas into separate departments but it is unclear how
news organizations can compartmentalize their way through maintaining control over
content given the “shock to the system”that is digital and social media; the resultant wea-
kened control, and the resultant weakened value of information as a commodity (Lewis,
Holton, and Coddington 2014; Lischka 2020; Molyneux and Mourão 2019; Peer and
Ksiazek 2011, 45).
As stated earlier, this paper makes no claim about the ability of such guidelines to
influence the journalists’behaviour as the effects of such policies are indirect at best
(Boeyink 1994, 894) but it is known that the behaviour of individual journalists often
mirrors organizational policies such as the documents studied here. In addition, the
well-documented tendency of news outlets to imitate each other on organizational
12 K. FINCHAM
policy indicates that the findings here can be considered representative of the wider
structural and organizational attitudes and priorities within news organizations in the
liberal Western tradition (Ananny 2014, 949; Ferrer-Conill and Tandoc 2018; Nelson
2018). However, it is important to note that this study is specific to general reporting
across major mainstream news organizations, and it is likely that this research would
have led to different outcomes in different contexts such as participatory or hyperlocal
reportage in smaller news outlets, digital-first outlets, or indeed in other cultural con-
ditions. The study is limited by its focus on publicly available policies, and it also does
not address whether journalists adhere to the guidelines which would require substantial
field work and ethnography and was beyond the range of this study.
In closing, the study shows that professional logics still play a major role in news organ-
izations and that social media culture is appropriated when it reinforces journalists’pro-
fessional role as the people in charge. While the study notes the emergence of newer
audience-oriented values, these are not seen to be located in professional logics which
suggests that audience awareness is not considered a priority in the professional practice
of journalism. While the study makes clear that news organizations are not (yet) inviting
the audience to collaborate, the lack of any clear transactional value for publishers, the
hidden costs of journalists’unpaid labour on social media and the threats posed by a
hostile audience (Nelson 2018; Lewis and Molyneux 2018; Robinson 2011) may well con-
tribute to the continued prevalence of professional logics in journalism practice. While the
study highlights that news organizations view the audience as largely passive or possibly
problematic, this finding also points to the need for dedicated training in newsrooms and
classrooms around social media audiences especially given the very valid fears about
increasing online hostility towards journalists.
Acknowledgement
The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their supportive and constructive
comments on earlier versions of this article and also Prof. Jane Suiter of DCU for her wise counsel
throughout.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
ORCID
Kelly Fincham http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4307-3018
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