Tim Vos

Michigan State University | MSU · School of Journalism

Hallin and Mancini's Comparing Media Systems has provided Mass Communication research with valuable tools to compare media settings from a transnational viewpoint. However, most recent contributions around media systems theory focus on suggesting new dimensions or variables to update the three models presented in the authors' book, leaving behind t...

The article investigates how newspaper editorials address the "fake news" phenomenon concerning (1) the damages that mis-and disinformation pose to society and journalism; (2) the roles news organizations claim for themselves; (3) the communication agents mentioned; and (4) how media companies defend the field. We use content analysis to study 375...

This response outlines points of agreement and disagreement with the argument put forward by Carlson and Peters. I argue that their provocation is largely correct in identifying Journalism Studies’ disciplinary blinders. However, I see these blinders less rooted in industry assumptions, as they contend, than in a larger array of assumptions which w...

U.S. journalists work in a digital environment in which they actively promote their news stories – and themselves – via social media. Prior research has identified an emergent marketing function, albeit one that journalists seemed hesitant to embrace in normative terms. This study seeks to understand how the legitimacy of this marketing function ha...

Based on the framework of discursive institutionalism, this study analyzes metajournalistic discourse about participatory journalism from 2002 through 2021. The focus is on how institutional actors sought to normatively position participatory journalism against the backdrop of technological, economic, and social changes transforming the institution...

Drawing on institutional theory, feminist critiques of three popular stances on gendered workplaces, and previous research about women in newsrooms, this study considers the metajournalistic discourse about gender equality in newsrooms through a discourse analysis of more than 500 online articles and blog posts in American journalism industry publi...

Journalists express support for providing a diversity of viewpoints in their reporting, but how is this reflected in their content? This study compared survey results of U.S. political journalists’ statements with a content analysis of their reporting. There was limited support for journalists reflecting a diversity of viewpoints in their reporting...

In probing how journalists negotiate the perceived discrepancy between their social role orientation and role performance, we arrive at a negotiative theory of roles. The theory is based on an inductive study where we combine classic theoretical frameworks of role theory with conceptual approaches of discursive institutionalism and Hochschilds’ the...

This study explores the discursive, normative construction of gamification within journalism. Rooted in a theory of discursive institutionalism and by analyzing a significant corpus of metajournalistic discourse from 2006 to 2019, the study demonstrates how journalists have negotiated gamification’s place within journalism’s boundaries. The discour...

Gaming journalism, which finds its origins in public relations-oriented gaming magazines, discursively attached itself to traditional journalism in the wake of the 2014 GamerGate controversy. Yet it had remained unclear where gaming journalism fits within the ecology of journalism. This study examines metajournalistic discourse regarding gaming jou...

In this chapter we will lay out the broader framework that serves as a conceptual backbone to the Worlds of Journalism Study. Theory and conceptual clarity is particularly central in comparative research. In this book we ask how do journalists around the world view their roles and responsibilities in society? Based on a landmark study that has col...

Field theory was first developed by Kurt Lewin and later by Pierre Bourdieu to account for the forces that shape journalistic work. This entry describes how the concepts of field theory —ranging from poles to doxa to illusio to habitus—account for phenomena that shape journalism. It also examines the concept of capital, as developed by Bourdieu, an...

This essay reexamines the institutional level of gatekeeping theory by retheorizing journalism’s institutional relationships and uses Silicon Valley technology platforms as a case in point. The essay puts forward a new framework for assessing institutional influences on journalism, contextualizing journalism’s relative autonomy (strong, equilibrium...

Comparative studies of journalism have gained considerable currency in recent years, and are often considered to be at the cutting edge of journalism studies. Yet, there has been relatively little systematic examination of the growth of comparative journalism studies or in-depth analysis of the power relations within the field in relation to, for e...

Journalism is often discussed in terms of its relationship to democracy. But one’s conception of democracy can influence how one understands journalistic concepts. This study surveyed 204 US political reporters to determine their views on democracy and how their views relate to professional roles, trust, and sourcing. The findings show journalists...

This historiographical essay examines how functionalist explanations persist in a range of media histories and examines the logic and consequences of functionalist explanations. The essay argues that paying attention to social, cultural, economic or political contexts does not necessarily move media historians substantially closer to offering expla...

GamerGate is a viral campaign that became an occasion, particularly from August 2014 to January 2015, to both question journalistic ethics and badger women involved in game development and gaming criticism. Gaming journalists thus found themselves managing a debate on two fronts: defending the probity of gaming journalism and remediating attacks on...

This study seeks to understand “listening” as a practice and norm of journalism in the context of an eruption of journalistic discourse about listening surrounding the 2016 US election. An examination of US journalists’ own discourse about listening pointed to an understanding of the need to listen more, better, and to a more diverse set of voices....

The micro-documentary is a digital subgenre emerging from the overlap of long-form documentary film, broadcast news, home video, advertising, and photojournalism. Despite technological advancements that have made video production and publication tools more accessible and less expensive, a wide spectrum of gatekeeping forces affect micro-documentari...

This study, using a discursive institutionalism lens, examines how US journalists have assessed and constructed journalistic institutional authority from 2000 through 2016. The findings provide a set of pivot points around which journalistic discourse has orbited, showing how journalists renegotiated their authority in the face of challenges to jou...

Through the lens of discursive institutionalism, and drawing on an extensive corpus of metajournalistic discourse dating from 2000 to 2017, this study considers how journalists have defined and (re)constructed their gatekeeping role against the backdrop of seismic changes confronting their field. In so doing, it considers the legitimizing or delegi...

Journalists have found themselves in a complex relationship with audiences as they help gather and distribute news. Audiences represent a new type of entrant into the journalistic field, possibly bringing with them new forms of journalistic capital. This survey-based study sets out to explore how ordinary Americans assess traditional and emergent n...

This chapter works through a broad and a theoretical definition of journalism. The broad definition centers on journalism as a kind of work. The theoretical definition focuses on the cultural, institutional, and material dimensions of journalism. The exercise highlights the complexities and controversies that accompany efforts to define and delimit...

This essay posits a corollary to the notion of paradigm repair that explores how a journalistic paradigm gets built and formed over time. The essay seeks to historicize paradigm repair, showing that paradigm repair might be but one moment in the longer history of paradigm work. This essay uses US journalism history to point to five periods or activ...

The study of journalistic roles tends to be descriptive and is thin on theory. This article advances an understanding of journalistic roles as being discursively constituted and builds on the notion of journalism as a discursive institution. Journalistic roles are negotiated in a relational structure—the discursive field—where journalists, news out...

Journalism researchers have tended to study journalistic roles from within a Western framework oriented toward the media’s contribution to democracy and citizenship. In so doing, journalism scholarship often failed to account for the realities in non-democratic and non-Western contexts, as well as for forms of journalism beyond political news. Base...

This study analyzes how business and editorial staff members at US newspapers rhetorically construct or deconstruct the metaphoric norm of a wall or line of separation between news and advertising functions. The study is based on 18 in-depth interviews with news and advertising professionals at middle-market US newspapers and the subsequent analysi...

This in-depth interview-based study with US political journalists explores how they conceptualize the portrayal of political viewpoint diversity as a journalistic norm, particularly in light of changes to news and the news media ecology. The political journalists still discursively embrace the normative role of providing audiences with a range of p...

This study utilizes interviews with 53 full-time digital journalists to understand how they construct their identity. With social identity theory as a framework, the study found that medium, organizational backing, and role conception represent characteristics essential to being a digital journalist (the in-group). While the journalists also identi...

This study analyzes journalistic discourse about journalism’s gatekeeping role in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The intent is to understand how the notions of newsworthiness, news selection, and news judgment came to be expressed in normative terms in the journalistic field. The study finds discursive strategies that explained news judgme...

Drawing on insights from field theory, this article examines journalists’ textual and discursive construction of entrepreneurial journalism from 2000 to 2014. The goal is to understand how such discursive practices contribute to the articulation and legitimation of entrepreneurial journalism as a form of cultural capital as the field's economic imp...

Drawing on Bourdieu's field theory, this study explores how journalistic doxa and cultural capital come to be discursively formed. The study culls references to journalistic transparency from a broad range of US journalism trade publications and sites from 1997 to 2015 in order to examine the discursive construction of transparency within the journ...

This study, based on case studies of three online newsrooms, seeks to understand the patterns of how journalists use social media in their news work. Through 150 hours of observations and interviews with 31 journalists, the study found that journalists are normalizing social media while also reworking some of their norms and routines around it, a p...

These four essays are geared toward examining transformations in contemporary documentary form, with the aim of profiting from intersections between discourses in Journalism Studies and Film Studies. They analyze areas of overlap in order to understand changes in the production and reception of recent nonfiction films. Roger F. Cook uses the term “...

This study examines the actions of readers as press critics and, therefore, as potentially powerful shapers of journalism’s cultural capital. An analysis of 2 years’ worth of online reader comments on the ombudsman columns of three national news organizations reveals readers’ support of - and even nostalgia for - mainstream journalism values such a...

This study explains the history of a 1959 amendment to the 1934 Communications Act through the lens of historical institutionalism. The amendment created broad exemptions for newscasts, documentaries, interviews, and news events, triggering the equal time provision for candidates for public office. While this study offers a variety of new empirical...

This historical discourse analysis examines how various social actors legitimated print advertising from 1800 to 1870. The analysis shows how supporters of advertising overcame ambivalence and hostility toward advertising. Prior to the early 1840s, advertising was promoted by publishers, geared largely to general newspaper readers, and restrained v...

This study examines a normative shift from objectivity toward a transparency-oriented journalistic field. US newspaper journalists (N = 228) whose work is published online were surveyed to ascertain their adherence to truth-telling strategies of objectivity and transparency. The results suggest that forces unleashed by the online network might be c...

This study reopens the investigation into the origins of the advertising agency in the 1840s. It reviews the historical logics of explanation implicit in previous studies and argues that agency-based, functionalist, and evolutionary approaches fall short of offering compelling explanations. By approaching the origins of the advertising agency from...

Bourdieu’s field theory suggests that the rise of the internet and blogs could generate a shift in the journalistic field – the realm where actors struggle for autonomy – as new agents gain access. This textual analysis of 282 items of media criticism appearing on highly trafficked blogs reveals an emphasis on traditional journalistic norms, sugges...

This study, building on an ideational theory of historical change, examines what role journalism education had in the articulation of objectivity as an occupational norm from the 1890s to the 1940s. An analysis of early texts of journalism education shows how objectivity was naturalized and legitimated. The texts rarely engaged criticism of objecti...

The study of journalistic role conceptions rests on the assumption that these conceptions shape the news stories that journalists create. However, limited empirical evidence exists to support this assumed linear relationship between role conception and role enactment. This exploratory study compared role conceptions deduced from survey data of 56 j...

This is a cultural history of how the mirror was invoked as a metaphor for newspapers and journalism during parts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States. This study examines how journalists’ own discourse invoked the mirror as a metaphor and how this discourse related to the broader cultural understanding about the nature of...

This study reviews a major body of research—historical explanations for the emergence of public relations as a social institution. This review of public relations histories identifies three distinct logics of historical explanation—a functionalist logic, an institutional logic, and a cultural logic. It then describes how these three logics are used...

This study explores the theoretical, methodological, and empirical challenges that come with forging a cultural explanation for a particular policy outcome. By theorizing culture as a toolkit of discrete values, two specific cultural values were explored for their role in bounding the agency of various actors in constructing broadcast policy and re...

Gatekeeping is one of the media's central roles in public life: people rely on mediators to transform information about billions of events into a manageable number of media messages. This process determines not only which information is selected, but also what the content and nature of messages, such as news, will be. Gatekeeping Theory describes t...