Defending judgment and context in ‘original reporting’: Journalists’ construction of newswork in a networked age

Abstract

With professional journalism facing vigorous competition over its jurisdiction in information production from online aggregators and networked forms of journalism, this article examines how journalists publicly construct their own reporting work in opposition to a networked alternative and argue to the public for its value. It does so through a qualitative analysis of discourse from mainstream journalistic sources regarding the document-leaking group WikiLeaks, identifying distinctions journalists made to differentiate their work and its professional value from that of WikiLeaks. The analysis suggests that journalists assign less importance to the sociocultural conventions and objects of evidence that have traditionally constituted professional newswork – documents, interviews, and eyewitness observation – and more significance instead to the less materially bound practices of providing context, judgment, and narrative power. In doing so, journalists cast themselves fundamentally as sense-makers rather than information-gatherers during an era in which information gathering has been widely networked.