A Community of Practice

Abstract

Over two decades ago, Barbie Zelizer argued that journalists should be approached as an “interpretive community” in order to understand the processes through which journalists generate shared meanings around major political events. This article refocuses Zelizer’s concept in order to analyse the consequences of rapid technological transformation, fraught industry conditions, and disparate audience formations in the context of contemporary news media and journalism. Focusing on the challenges faced by professional sport journalists, we invoke the concept of “community of practice” to make sense of this fluid and commercially volatile context, using it to analyse empirically the experiences of journalists in Australia and Scotland. Informed by the interrelationship that exists between formats of news and the practices that produce it, this paper presents evidence drawn from in-depth semi-structured interviews with journalists, editors, news presenters and commentators who specialise in and/or work across newspapers, radio, television, online and mobile media. Understood as a community of practice, sport journalists are shown to be under pressure because of mutually reinforcing changes in mobile and digital media technologies, journalistic routines and institutional relations.

Keywords:

• media practice
• mobile media
• public relations
• social media
• source relations
• sport journalism

Acknowledgements

This article was made possible by the support of the Centre for Cultural Policy Research at the University of Glasgow and the Australian Research Council. Thank you to all of the individuals who generously shared their time and insights in the research completed for this paper. Thank you also to Alison Anderson for her assistance in the organisation and coding of the interview data.

Notes

1. Interview data presented in this paper are de-identified in accordance with the conditions of clearance provided by the relevant University Human Research Ethics Committee.

2. The terms “community of practice” and “communities of practice” have also been used in educational theory and business studies to describe “groups of people bound together by shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise” (Wenger 1999; Wenger and Snyder 2000, 139). While acknowledging previous meanings associated with these terms, our use of “community of practice” developed from a reading of Zelizer (1993) and an attempt to identify values, beliefs and relationships that characterise contemporary sport journalism and news.

3. The “Mobile Media Sport Moment: Markets, Technologies, Power” Project website can be found at http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/mobilemediasport/.

4. Although this does not mean successful technology start-ups have never emerged from Scotland or Australia. The daily fantasy sport service, Fan Duel, began life in Scotland and its headquarters are now in New York. The high-profile wearable technologies and performance analytics company, Catapult, emerged out of sport science research activities at the Australian Institute of Sport and now has a major presence in US, UK and European markets.