ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview and discussion of meta-practices within journalism. It focuses on existing research on self-referentiality emerging from the early 2000s. The chapter begins by identifying the professionalization of communication and intensified source competition as main driving forces behind the rise of meta-practices in journalism. It presents political reporting, conflict reporting, and media scandals as three journalistic turfs, in which self-referentiality is particularly pronounced. The chapter also provides in-depth analysis of the concepts metasources and metasourcing, which may help fine-tune analyses of contemporary meta-practices and sourcing patterns in digital journalism. News stories characterized by metacoverage focus on the changing conditions for news production in light of professionalized communication acts and spin strategies performed by, for example, military and political elites. The chapter concludes with a discussion of metacoverage and metasourcing as examples of stronger and weaker forms of self-referentiality in journalism.
