ABSTRACT
Like journalists’ routines and practices, journalistic roles generally follow logics that are in accord with the expectations, norms, and practices of a society and its dominant institutions. The taken-for-granted accord between society’s institutions and these institutional logics in journalism (i.e., those assumptions and beliefs that give meaning to journalists’ activities and are consistent with the wider institutional order) helps to account for the relative stability of a logic. However, the institutional order does change, if slowly: New institutional logics emerge, others erode, and logics come into conict with one another. Central to this chapter is change due to the emergence of digital online technology, and a “digital network logic.” These have transformed “the spatiality of social interaction by introducing simultaneity, or any chosen time frame, in social practices” (Castells, 2010, p. xxxii). They have afforded public and private communication patterns that are increasingly accessible, interactive, and synchronous. These transformations have gained institutional legitimacy, and have undermined the control associated with traditional closed-off, hierarchical communication patterns. Journalistic roles performances have also shifted in response, though unevenly and cautiously.
