ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses journalists’ strategies of news work, called double game strategies, through which they bypass restrictions and achieve their ends at three stages of content production. The pre-writing strategies are (1) mobilizing a network of connections, (2) publicizing issues and shaping ‘news waves’, and (3) ‘putting words into officials’ mouths’. At the stage of writing, they adopt the following strategies to write between the lines: (1) ‘using the official discourse as a shield’, (2) using euphemisms, and (3) claiming objectivity. This chapter then discusses the post-writing stage of news work and covers the journalists’ strategies for behaviour inside the newsroom, including negotiating, defying, and complying with organizational forces. It ultimately addresses how the journalists use online communications platforms to communicate the stories that they cannot publish in the established media. This chapter explains how and to what extent journalists, in controlled media settings, counter meso and macro constraints and operationalize certain strategies depending on their capital or power (a range of social, cultural, and symbolic assets) and their habitus (practical mastery of playing the journalistic game).
