Among several concepts related to journalism and meanings, interpretive community broadly underlies the way that journalists view their shared lives and the workplace texts they produce. These communities do not, however, function in isolation but adjust and adapt through their interface with other interpretive communities. Some of journalists' interpretive communities exist in a physical place, while others develop shared meanings more abstractly through encounters across time and space.

This study explores journalists' use of Twitter and what it means for their craft. Based on 8 weeks newsroom observation and more than a dozen in-depth interviews with reporters and editors at a big metro newspaper, the study found that journalists had contradicting views on whether or not to accept tweets, a form of snippet artifact, as a legitimate journalism artifact, leading to the blurring artifact boundary. Related, journalists faced uncertainties and ambiguities regarding the implications of such snippet artifact for the journalism craft and its core mission of informing the public.

In Civic Hope, University of Texas professor Rodrick Hart builds an extensive case that the arguments and conflicts contained in letters to the editor are key for the maintenance of democracy. At first, this seems implausible in an age where news audiences are waning, where the remaining readers are becoming polarized, and where newspapers are transitioning from a role as a physical artifact for daily reconnaissance to ephemeral digital forms that engage the bulk of their audiences only lightly. But Hart does not portray letters to the editor as irrelevant. Rather, he passionately draws on a dataset of 10 000 letters to the editor spanning from 1948 to 2012—along with ten surveys conducted over a 20-year period and a series of in-depth interviews conducted with a sampling of letter writers—to make a plea for letters’ vitality. The data he reconnoiters avoid the idiosyncratic locales of a few large cities, turning instead to 12 mid-sized cities that he sees as possessing “nothing special” (p. 24), which range across the United States from the East Coast to the West, and from the north to the south.

This study applies a semiotic lens to argue that news media are not only conveyors of images of terrorism but, through a combination of photographs, editorial cartoons, and anchoring texts, have the potential to serve as facilitators of healing and solidarity in both the local and the global media arena. This anchoring function is essential for audience decodingespecially in the globalbecause many photographs and cartoons are culturally bound and therefore not readily accessible to the broader audience. Through the information they provide, written texts help to anchor meanings of the visual texts, conveying a sense of solidarity against terrorism.

Our study analyzed how cultural memory of previous and contemporary First Ladies was used as a journalistic device by US media to make sense of the unusual case of Peng Liyuan, the current First Lady of China. A textual analysis showed that news coverage of Peng relied on a Western and gendered conception of the First Lady while distancing her from her predecessors. We found that resonance with the idealized First Lady template served to signal Peng’s progressiveness in both the general and the political sense. Although Peng’s performance as a ‘first’ First Lady was celebrated in international politics, it is important to be aware that cultural values and gender norms associated with the First Lady identity can become rhetorical tools that sustain the existing political order between the West and the non-West.

In the introduction to a police audio recording of Bristol Palin describing her family's involvement in an Alaska house party brawl, CNN anchor Carol Costello commented: "This is quite possibly the best minute and a half of audio we've ever come across." The incident, however, involved an alleged assault-an act that mainstream journalism generally reports in a serious manner. Costello's glib treatment of the event could therefore be seen as potentially breaching the boundaries of professional practice, which brought a widespread media response from both mainstream organizations and right-leaning blogs. Through textual analysis of these items, this study illustrates the challenge of conducting media boundary work-and the role strain that results-when the subject of a story occupies space within both entertainment and news spheres.

Journal Article Book Reviews Get access The Sage Handbook of Digital Journalism Tamara Witschge , C. W. Anderson , David Domingo , & Alfred Hermida (Eds.) Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2016, $175 (hard), $88 (electronic), pp. 624 Dan Berkowitz Dan Berkowitz 1University of Iowa Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Communication, Volume 67, Issue 1, February 2017, Pages E1–E3, https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12281 Published: 07 February 2017

This study explores the relationship between social media and threats to journalism's authority during coverage of the mass shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Two related threats are examined. One threat concerned widespread errors in early reporting of the shootings. A second threat came shortly after, in the aftermath of a communication professor's blog claiming a conspiracy between media and government. Through textual analysis of news articles, columns, and blogs, the study considers the concepts of paradigm repair, boundary work, what-a-story news, and memory in the renegotiation of journalistic authority. Findings suggest that with increased reliance on social media for reporting, increased media errors threaten the boundaries of appropriate professional journalistic practice, which both mainstream and social media attempt to rebalance.

J. Malcolm Garcia What Wars Leave Behind: The Faceless and Forgotten. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 2014. 310 pp.News of war is mostly about soldiers-the official warriors who plunge into battle, fighting for what their country, their sect, their beliefs see as right and just. For most part, these stories come devoid of context related to battlegrounds. Yet once war is gone, a mass of rubble remains: citizens, infrastructures, daily lives all lost in a dark blur.What Wars Leave Behind is about that dark blur. Through 15 chapters divided into three parts-Conflict Zones, Lost and Gone, Home Bound-freelance journalist J. Malcolm Garcia provides powerful imagery of gritty hopelessness that shrouds all that is left behind. Through vivid snippets of conversations with locals and an insider's view of daily life in former war zones, he paints a montage of words akin to images created by an impressionist painter. The sum of words adds up to much more than words alone. Rarely does his assault of lived experience hold still for long, as Garcia moves from one bleak scenario to next.Clearly, Garcia's book is advocacy journalism, but it is not political advocacy. Instead, through his portraits and landscapes, Garcia demonstrates why human remnants of war beg for a saner, safer world. Much of narrative drives forward without theme sentences or specific arguments. This writing technique demands that reader draw a broader understanding by meditating on details until a larger message appears.Garcia became a journalist through an unconventional route-until age of 40, he carved out his career as a social worker. Then, in 1997, he began his journalism career as a beat reporter for The Kansas City Star, turning into what he calls the wandering scribe, four years later during his first overseas assignment in Afghanistan at dawn of post-9/11 era. That experience resulted in his first non-fiction narrative book, The Khaarijee: A Chronicle of Friendship and War in Kabul. As a freelance writer, Garcia has had his work appear in Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney's, and Mother Jones, among others. In a telling interview with The Investigative Fund, Garcia reflects on his reporting process and his note-taking approach that make writing of What Wars Leave Behind rich and alive.1In What Wars Leave Behind, Garcia takes reader through seven war-torn nations: Afghanistan, Chad, Egypt, Kosovo, Pakistan, Syria, and Turkey. The earliest writings come from 2004, most recent from 2013. Nearly all writings have been previously published, with six chapters based in Afghanistan and three from Pakistan. Some common themes emerge across these works: desperation, acceptance, corruption, fear, and greed.After spending time with Garcia's stories in What Wars Leave Behind, a feeling of paranoia began to swell-I had an urge to look over my shoulder, wondering, Is reality what we imagine or what we experience? In Syria, where impending doom mixed with family life,We retrace our steps to where we started. …

Following a twerk-heavy performance by Miley Cyrus on the Video Music Awards program, CNN featured the story on the top of its website. The Onion-a fake-news organization-then ran a satirical column purporting to be by CNN's Web editor explaining this decision. Through textual analysis, this paper demonstrates how a Fifth Estate comprised of bloggers, columnists and fake-news organizations worked to relocate mainstream journalism back to within its professional boundaries.

Episodes of journalistic deviancy become moments of reflection for the journalistic interpretive community, at times assuming international proportions. This study examines the construction of appropriate journalistic norms through reactions to the phone hacking scandal that led to the abrupt closure of the British Sunday tabloid the News of the World on 10 July 2011. A comparison of reactions in US and UK newspapers reveals how boundary work articulates appropriate practices through defining deviant behavior. Rather than isolating the troubles to a single newsroom, what emerges is a form of synecdochic deviancy in which the significance of the scandal expands to larger normative questions among journalists in both nations.

When covering foreign events, journalists bring resonant cultural meanings to an otherwise little-understood occurrence. From a cultural perspective, we analyzed “Steve Jobs fever” in five publications of a progressive neo-liberal media group in China. The media texts allowed us to understand society’s neo-liberal narratives. The media re-crafted Jobs’ death into a story about Chinese society: the first theme foreshadowed the greatness and necessity of having Steve-Jobs-style genius; the second theme raised the question why not having an equivalent Steve Jobs and immediately answered it; finally, the third theme logically provided the solution to solve this social crisis. This story fits into the enduring narratives of national salvation through technological consumption and further Westernized liberalization. The study attempts to move research on Chinese media beyond the Chinese context by making a conceptual contribution for understanding journalism in a global environment.

Social media have changed the way that social actors participate in sports events. “Prosumers” are able to directly offer different interpretations without journalists’ mediation when a social issue arises. However, social media do not fundamentally change the significance of cultural narratives in communication. This study focuses on discussions initiated by a commercial feed on a Chinese microblogging site during the 2012 London Olympic Games. Qualitative textual analysis was conducted. The study found that enduring cultural narratives create the predrafts of social-media communication; the instantaneity of microblogging referred to not simply its physical appearance but also the meaning of that appearance. In addition, social-media texts illustrate a society’s ongoing stories. Going beyond the limitations of previous control-vs.-freedom paradigms, this study explores a Chinese consumer society that is more dynamic and complex than previous studies would suggest.

In mid-December 2010, The Daily Show host Jon Stewart asked Congress to address the health care needs of 9/11 rescue workers-which it did. Shortly after, the New York Times published an analysis piece comparing Stewart to the legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow. This article explores how collective memory of Murrow was used by both mainstream media and the blogosphere to negotiate membership boundaries of journalism itself, with analysis conducted through textual analysis of online mainstream news texts and blog postings.

In mid-December 2010, The Daily Show host Jon Stewart asked Congress to address the health care needs of 9/11 rescue workers—which it did. Shortly after, the New York Times published an analysis piece comparing Stewart to the legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow. This article explores how collective memory of Murrow was used by both mainstream media and the blogosphere to negotiate membership boundaries of journalism itself, with analysis conducted through textual analysis of online mainstream news texts and blog postings.

In times of great trauma, news can offer healing, consolation and inspiration. This study applied textual analysis of news items and opinion pieces about the April 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech to explore how collective memory and mythical narratives become part of the healing process that news media offer to society. Many of the items studied involved an ironic hero who survived the Holocaust only to die at Virginia Tech, with frequent references to collective memory of school shootings and the Holocaust, along with narratives based on the hero myth. The ironic hero became the perfect story character to fuse both narrative tools to bring a stronger positive message of healing.

/ This article explores how France's leading newspaper, Le Monde , `re-presented', or presented anew, French secular republican ideology and the right of free expression at the height of the `affaire des caricatures de Mahomet' (the Mohammed cartoons affair). This global crisis, which was spawned by the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, took on a specific French coloration when French newspapers republished the cartoons and added their own caricatures to the lot. It was found that Le Monde used the crisis to restate French free speech values, and placed the controversy squarely within the framework of French secular republicanism where the right to blaspheme and offend is sacrosanct.