ABSTRACT
The changing faces of journalism have been part of the journalistic landscape since the inception of news. From early forms of oral delivery to the most recent online exchanges of information, journalism has always been multiple, multi-dimensional, multi-directional and multiply-faceted, and its multiplicity has become more pronounced as journalism has necessarily mutated across region and locale. Despite journalism’s variety, however, scholarly inquiry on news has proceeded largely without its recognition. For various reasons associated with the shape of inquiry itself, scholars have tended to favor uniform, unidimensional and unidirectional notions of how journalism works, which over time have moved further out of touch from the forms that the news has taken on the ground. The results of this disconnect have become multiple themselves, generating tensions between journalism’s centers and its margins, fights for legitimacy over new tools of information relay, resistance toward new models of newsmaking, and a somewhat stubborn recalcitrance about journalism’s necessary attempts to remain relevant in a rapidly changing world. How would our understanding of journalism look different were we to insist
not on a unitary model of journalism – one which assumes that an elevated form of news works in prescribed ways to better the public good across contexts – but on various kinds of journalisms with necessarily multiple facets, definitions, circumstances and functions? This book considers that question. Drawing on the prevailing scholarly understanding of journalism, it queries how the instantiation of predetermined ways for thinking about the news have tweaked and shaped what we believe we know about journalism, the ideas that we hold about what it is supposed to do, and the ways in which we regard and understand what it does in practice. This book thus performs a heuristic exercise which attempts to redefine our pathways to knowledge acquisition, drawing our attention to the linkage between what we know and how we have come to know it.
