ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how activities surrounding news workers' coverage of their own firms relates to the phenomenon of hidden conflicts in organizations. Journalists make attributions that their colleagues are averse even to talking about self-coverage by noting that it rarely comes up as a topic of serious discussion within the news organization. The chapter suggests that how conflicts about self-coverage are managed and how this conflict management is tied to larger dynamics of organizational control. Quantitative studies linking different kinds of mergers to changes in the norms of news workers, as well as in the amount and nature of self-coverage by journalistic outlets involved in the mergers. It argues that the need to modify contemporary scholarly contentions that news firms expect to see open conflict on policy issues between reporters and their superiors. The chapter deals with contemporary opinion that organizational argumentation represents the norm rather than the exceptions in news organizations.
