The Economics of News and the Practice of News Production

ABSTRACT

Conceptually, the business of news is often separated from the practice of news production. In this essay, I borrow from practice theory to show that this separation is misleading. According to a practice approach, the influence of economics is not exogenous to journalism. Rather, economics serves as a series of considerations that are baked into news practices. As journalists take up these practices, they naturally reproduce these considerations, which is to say, they reproduce the structural conditions of journalism. Borrowing from the secondary literature, I show how and why economic considerations have been integral to news practices since the beginning of modern news. Then, I demonstrate the point in a different way in a discussion of the recent rise of nonprofit news. As the example of nonprofit news shows, any argument that journalism needs a new business model is also, if only implicitly, an argument that the way news is produced should change as well. Practice theory helps us to make this argument explicit, and to tease out its implications for new ventures in journalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Business of news
• economics of news
• news production
• practice theory
• future of journalism
• nonprofit news

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).