ELIMINATION OF IDEAS AND PROFESSIONAL SOCIALISATION

Abstract

This article investigates and interprets social and cultural production and reproduction as we turn our attention to an important part of routinised practice in the newsroom: the early newsroom meetings. These meetings are essential sites for the building of the craft ethos and professional vision. Our aim is to study how this building of expertise takes place at meetings with a particular focus on the decision-making process concerning ideas for new news stories. In order to do this, we perform linguistic analysis of news production practices, as we investigate how the journalists' ideas for potential news stories are eliminated by the editor at the daily newsroom meetings. The elimination of ideas for news stories are not just eliminations; they are also corrections of culturally undesirable behaviour producing and reproducing the proper perception of an important object of knowledge—what constitutes “a good news story”—in this community of practice.

Keywords:

• conversation analysis
• craft ethos
• decision-making
• journalism practice
• newsroom meetings

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to express sincere gratitude for valuable comments and constructive suggestions from Professor Erik Albæk, University of Southern Denmark; Associate Professor Mie Femø Nielsen, University of Copenhagen; Assistant Professor Thomas Hanitzsch, University of Zurich and Professor Thore Roksvold, Oslo University College, to earlier versions and presentations of this article. Also, we are very grateful for the critical and insightful readings offered by the two reviewers commissioned by Journalism Practice. A very early draft for the article was presented at the ECREA conference in Hamburg in October 2010.

Notes

1. When, for instance, surgeons perform surgery, their common understanding is enacted tacitly and embodied (Hindmarsh and Pilnick, 2002).

2. Ideas for potential news stories are eliminated at different stages in the journalists' working process. For an overview, see Gravengaard (2008, 2010).

3. For a categorisation of factors affecting these eliminations, see Gravengaard (2008, 2010).

4. Jefferson (1984) also finds that the entry into closings is recurrent when wanting to “get off” troubling topics in a conversation. This might be the case here as well.