ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how critical incident and related constructs are defined and used in ongoing research programs in journalism studies. It also discusses these foundational definitions, and explains how critical incident is defined and used in relation to paradigm repair, interpretive communities, and news icons. To begin to see when and why critical incident became such an important construct in journalism studies, it is important to remember that scholars have long theorized about how journalists find information, verify facts, and encode facts into truthful accounts within news stories. Similar to a critical incident in interpretive communities, news icons provide journalists with discursive polestars to look back on when stories drift into other areas in the future. Within the theoretical framework of interpretive community, these responses mark journalism’s professional boundaries and affirm its cultural authority in a society’s knowledge-building ecosystem.
