ABSTRACT
In the early 1970s, Herbert Gans, a prominent American sociologist and occasional journalist, complained of a ‘famine’ within US-based communication research as regards ‘institutional studies’ of the production of news and of media culture more generally. By the end of that decade, however, any such famine had been replaced by the proverbial feast as a swarm of innovative institutional studies advancing new theories, empirical methods and approaches appeared on both sides of the Atlantic. Much of this swarm of new work was strongly influenced by recent develop-
ments in institutional or organisational sociology (Hirsch, 2000). However, some key ideas about media routines and patterned processes of newsmaking had been signalled in much earlier studies. These include pioneering analyses of the growing industrialisation of news, such as those of Wilcox (1900), Bücher (1901) and subsequent Progressive Era studies in the USA that invoked the idea of newsmaking as ‘a standardized routine’ (Lippmann, 1922: 183) or spoke in terms of the ‘news factories’. The 1960s had seen some important new work such as Gieber’s (1960) study of newsroom routines that frame the ‘task-orientated’ activities of individual newsmakers and Galtung and Ruge’s (1965) seminal study of news values. Indeed, Hirsch later acknowledged that his (1972) study involved a ‘depoliticized exploration’ of what the Frankfurt School had earlier characterised as the ‘culture industry’ or the industrialisation of culture (Hirsch, 2000: 356). Thus we note a relatively long tradition of research on news production drawing on institutional and sociological perspectives, often focusing on factors and tendencies ‘encapsulated in the idea of news as a manufactured
product’ (Whitney et al., 2004: 402). Clearly, the new wave of institutional studies in the 1970s was not starting from a blank sheet.
