ABSTRACT
Digital journalism has developed as a genre of media production with a variety of characteristics which make it both distinct from and similar to whatever 'journalism' had previously been. The ethnography of news production has borrowed from, and been grounded in, the theory and research methodologies of anthropology, sociology, organizational studies, critical media studies, and more recently, the study of professions. But few ethnographers of media production fail to mention the inspiration and guidance of cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who is widely credited for reviving interest in long-term, immersive 'fieldwork' as the means to understand unfamiliar human cultures. The essential failing of ethnography, particularly as argued by positivists, is that it represents a phenomenon from a single perspective and offers little opportunity for confirmation by other researchers. Digital journalism was becoming the dominant way people learn about the world, yet research into how it is made remained sparse.
