David Ryfe
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3487841 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | David Ryfe |
| NOMBRES | David |
| APELLIDO | Ryfe |
| FIRMA | RYFE D |
| AFILIACIONES | Middle Tennessee State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2493-6519 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 36 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 561 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 36 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1999 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2024 |
| ÍNDICE H | 10 |
Strengthening the Theoretical Foundations of Role Performance Theory
This article aims to strengthen the theoretical edifice of role performance theory through appeal to recent advances in cultural theory. Role performance studies often assert that journalistic roles are fluid, contingent, situational and hybridic. Yet, In the large-scale surveys and content-analyses that dominate the literature, roles become more fixed than fluid, more over-determined than contingent. This disjuncture is caused, I argue, by under…
Commercial News as Cultural Form
Advertising-supported journalism, conventionally referred to as “commercial news,” is in decline. Efforts to make sense of this fact have been hampered by the narrow assumption that commercial news is merely a business model. It is that, but it is also a distinctive cultural form of news, one that consists of purposes, definitions of news, modes of address, and practices of newsgathering that are specific to the form. Drawing on a review of the s…
How journalists internalize news practices and why it matters
Practice scholars of news production generally imagine news practices as symbolic resources that exist external to reporters and prior to reporters’ actions. This understanding has been incredibly productive for scholars, but it elides an important question. How do news practices actually get into reporters’ heads? The lack of answers to this question has created a persistent gap between the study of news practices and examination of reporters’ a…
Actor-Network Theory and Digital Journalism
This article explores the potential contribution of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to the study of digital journalism. It argues that current usage of ANT within digital journalism studies tends to centre on the symmetry principle, or the idea that humans and nonhumans may be actors in an actor-network. In a review of the broader theory, the essay shows that the symmetry principle is one tool among others that may benefit the study of digital journal…
The Economics of News and the Practice of News Production
Conceptually, the business of news is often separated from the practice of news production. In this essay, I borrow from practice theory to show that this separation is misleading. According to a practice approach, the influence of economics is not exogenous to journalism. Rather, economics serves as a series of considerations that are baked into news practices. As journalists take up these practices, they naturally reproduce these considerations…
Journalism and Democracy
The conventional story of journalism and democracy is taken from classical liberal theory. The liberal story of journalism’s contributions to democracy goes something like this: journalism is an occupation assigned the duty of producing fact-based, impartial political news. The vocabulary around journalism and democracy, which has grown up over a century, remains a constitutive background against which people understand the practice. Since the ea…
The Warp and Woof of the Field of Journalism
This essay presents a practice theory perspective, and the analogy of journalistic culture as a kind of woven fabric, to explain to describe the current state of journalism. On this view, journalistic culture is viewed as a woven fabric which contains warp and woof threads. Within the practice of weaving, warp threads represent the vertically organized threads that lend a fabric shape, while cross-cutting woof threads lend it diversity. When appl…
The ontology of journalism
The role of self-reports in the study of news production
For decades, scholars have known that much of journalistic practice is motivated by habits that lie beyond the conscious reflection of journalists. Yet, when studying news production, scholars often rely on methods, like interviewing, which elicit consciously articulated self-reports from journalists. Doing so leaves unexplored the comparatively vast terrain of news production driven by pre-reflective motivations. Borrowing from the dual-processi…
A practice approach to the study of news production
Among news production scholars, interest in the theories of Bourdieu, Giddens, Latour, and related authors has grown in the last 20 years. However, few have recognized that these theories contribute to a broader practice perspective in social theory that traces back to the writings of Heidegger, and more directly, to Wittgenstein. In this essay, I outline four basic elements of this approach that are shared across these theories. Among these elem…
The Importance of Time in Media Production Research
In a review of my book (Ryfe, 2012), David Domingo (2014) begins by noting that it ‘could well be the last of newsroom ethnographies as we know them’ (p. 115). Why the last? Because, he writes, ‘spending months among journalists to understand their practices, their values, and their aspirations will not soon be enough to analyze the evolution of journalism.’ Domingo clearly wishes to say that studying journalists is no longer enough if one wants …
News Institutions
News Routines, Role Performance, and Change in Journalism
Since the classic ethnographic studies of news in the 1960s and 1970s, scholars have recognized the power of routine in news production. In grappling with this subject, they have vacillated between understanding routine as a strong and a weak structural constraint on journalists. The present chapter examines this literature as a manifestation of a practice view, elaborates the basic elements of a practice perspective, and discusses its implicatio…
Rebuilding the News
Why Has News Production in the United States Remained Stable at a Time of Great Change?
This chapter canvases the literature in the sociology of news production for explanations as to why, in the face of great change around them, American newspapers have failed to innovate. It finds three sorts of explanations in this literature: journalists are anchored to habits; they have deep investments in traditional practices and values; and they routinely re‐enact long‐standing definitions of what journalism is and of what it is for. Each ex…
“Comment
Quoting Practices, Path Dependency and the Birth of Modern Journalism
Using Hallin's (1994) analysis of soundbites in network television news coverage as a model, we track the quoting practices of five American newspapers during the transition to modern news (1876–1916). We find that despite variation in the size, geographic location, and partisan orientation of these newspapers, trends in their quoting practices moved in relative lockstep. Drawing on the institutionalist concept of path dependency, we argue that t…
Structure, agency, and change in an American newsroom
Building on a prior ethnographic study conducted in the same newsroom, this essay offers a conceptual framework for understanding current efforts to transform metropolitan daily newspapers. At the time of the study, Calvin Thomas, a new editor and executive-vice president of the newspaper, mandated that his reporters produce more enterprise and less daily news. Yet, after a year, not only did reporters’ production of enterprise news decrease, the…
Broader and deeper
This essay offers an ethnographic analysis of The Daily Times, 1 a mid-sized American corporately owned newsroom. During the period under study, a new editor changed the way that reporters produced the news. In particular, he asked his reporters to attend less closely to the public agencies that composed their beats. Over time, his reporters alternately expressed confusion and indignation about the new rules. I explain their reaction in terms of …
Toward a Sociology of Deliberation
This essay draws insights from Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory for the development of a sociological theory of deliberation. Most work on deliberative practice is strongly shaped by the concerns of deliberative democratic theory, and that theory tends to approach deliberation as a procedural mechanism for decision-making. Thus, there has been very little effort to theorize the sociological dimensions of deliberative practice. Bourdieu’s theory hig…
The Next Form of Democracy
Narrative and Deliberation in Small Group Forums
In a videotape analysis of five National Issues Forums, I investigate the nature of deliberative talk in small group deliberative settings. I show that deliberative talk in these forums mostly takes the form of storytelling. I argue that storytelling helps participants overcome barriers to deliberation, such as lack of knowledge and the need to manage one's public face in a context that privileges open conflict. Moreover, I show that storytelling…
Presidents Creating the Presidency
This revision of its predecessor, Deeds Done in Words (1990), is weightier than the original. Literally, it is bulkier, over 100 pages longer, including two new chapters (on national eulogies and d
Hearing the Other Side
After a decade or so of research on the practice of deliberation, it is fair to say that theories of deliberative democracy have not fared very well. Studies across the disciplines—from psychology
Scandal and Silence
With all the talk of change in American journalism these days, it is almost comforting to hear that some things remain the same. Robert Entman has been one of the foremost scholars of American news
Does Deliberative Democracy Work
The growing literature on deliberative democratic practice finds that deliberation is a difficult and relatively rare form of communication. Each moment of a deliberative encounter raises significant obstacles in the path to stimulating greater intentional reflection on public issues. I explore these obstacles in the context of other empirical work in political and social psychology, small group communication, and public opinion. Taken together, …
Guest Editor's Introduction
The Practice of Deliberative Democracy
This article investigates 16 organizations that attempt to foster better public deliberation in local and national communities. It develops a typology of these organizations and discusses them in the context of the scholarly literature on deliberative democracy. It particularly focuses upon the contributions these organizations may make to debates within the literature between advocates of relational and rational modes of deliberation. It finds t…
Broader and deeper
This essay offers an ethnographic analysis of The Daily Times, 1 a mid-sized American corporately owned newsroom. During the period under study, a new editor changed the way that reporters produced the news. In particular, he asked his reporters to attend less closely to the public agencies that composed their beats. Over time, his reporters alternately expressed confusion and indignation about the new rules. I explain their reaction in terms of …
The Nature of News Rules
Drawing on new institutionalist theory, this article presents a theory of news rules to explain the curious fact that so much of the news looks similar across news organizations, yet reporters maintain a great deal of autonomy in choosing which stories to report and how to report them. The theory hinges on a distinction between constitutive and regulative rules. Where constitutive rules tell us what the news is, regulative rules tell us how the n…
Structure, agency, and change in an American newsroom
Building on a prior ethnographic study conducted in the same newsroom, this essay offers a conceptual framework for understanding current efforts to transform metropolitan daily newspapers. At the time of the study, Calvin Thomas, a new editor and executive-vice president of the newspaper, mandated that his reporters produce more enterprise and less daily news. Yet, after a year, not only did reporters’ production of enterprise news decrease, the…
A practice approach to the study of news production
Among news production scholars, interest in the theories of Bourdieu, Giddens, Latour, and related authors has grown in the last 20 years. However, few have recognized that these theories contribute to a broader practice perspective in social theory that traces back to the writings of Heidegger, and more directly, to Wittgenstein. In this essay, I outline four basic elements of this approach that are shared across these theories. Among these elem…
The Warp and Woof of the Field of Journalism
This essay presents a practice theory perspective, and the analogy of journalistic culture as a kind of woven fabric, to explain to describe the current state of journalism. On this view, journalistic culture is viewed as a woven fabric which contains warp and woof threads. Within the practice of weaving, warp threads represent the vertically organized threads that lend a fabric shape, while cross-cutting woof threads lend it diversity. When appl…
The role of self-reports in the study of news production
For decades, scholars have known that much of journalistic practice is motivated by habits that lie beyond the conscious reflection of journalists. Yet, when studying news production, scholars often rely on methods, like interviewing, which elicit consciously articulated self-reports from journalists. Doing so leaves unexplored the comparatively vast terrain of news production driven by pre-reflective motivations. Borrowing from the dual-processi…
History and Political Communication
This essay introduces a series of articles that explore the relation of history to political communication research. It is shown that as a field of study political communication has tended to ignore historical methods and sensibilities. This tendency is traced to the field's roots in social psychology, political science, and early mass communication research. However, although political communication tends to ignore historical research, it often …
The Economics of News and the Practice of News Production
Conceptually, the business of news is often separated from the practice of news production. In this essay, I borrow from practice theory to show that this separation is misleading. According to a practice approach, the influence of economics is not exogenous to journalism. Rather, economics serves as a series of considerations that are baked into news practices. As journalists take up these practices, they naturally reproduce these considerations…
Actor-Network Theory and Digital Journalism
This article explores the potential contribution of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to the study of digital journalism. It argues that current usage of ANT within digital journalism studies tends to centre on the symmetry principle, or the idea that humans and nonhumans may be actors in an actor-network. In a review of the broader theory, the essay shows that the symmetry principle is one tool among others that may benefit the study of digital journal…
News, Culture and Public Life
In an analysis of news conventions used by 19th-century American newspapers, I show that the news of this time period took much the same form. Across geography, size of paper, and kind of paper (associational, commercial, partisan), newspapers shared the same conventions. I explain this uniformity in terms of James Carey's notion that the news expresses a form of public life. In this case, I argue that 19th-century news expressed a form of public…
The ontology of journalism
From media audience to media public
This article investigates the process by which media audiences become media publics in an analysis of Franklin D. Roosevelt's (FDR) fireside chats. Data for this analysis includes 380 randomly selected letters written in reaction to the first ten chats delivered by FDR during his first term of office. I show that FDR borrowed the `for-anyone-as-someone' structure of broadcasting to address listeners as particular individuals and as members of a m…
Quoting Practices, Path Dependency and the Birth of Modern Journalism
Using Hallin's (1994) analysis of soundbites in network television news coverage as a model, we track the quoting practices of five American newspapers during the transition to modern news (1876–1916). We find that despite variation in the size, geographic location, and partisan orientation of these newspapers, trends in their quoting practices moved in relative lockstep. Drawing on the institutionalist concept of path dependency, we argue that t…
How journalists internalize news practices and why it matters
Practice scholars of news production generally imagine news practices as symbolic resources that exist external to reporters and prior to reporters’ actions. This understanding has been incredibly productive for scholars, but it elides an important question. How do news practices actually get into reporters’ heads? The lack of answers to this question has created a persistent gap between the study of news practices and examination of reporters’ a…
Betwixt and Between
Although Woodrow Wilson institutionalized the press conference as a routine feature of presidential opinion leadership, he detested his news meetings and did not use them effectively. Wilson bore no personal animosity to the press but rejected the culture of news the press represented, for reasons central to Wilson's theory of presidential leadership. His rejection of this news culture is discussed in terms of the progressive culture in which his…
Strengthening the Theoretical Foundations of Role Performance Theory
This article aims to strengthen the theoretical edifice of role performance theory through appeal to recent advances in cultural theory. Role performance studies often assert that journalistic roles are fluid, contingent, situational and hybridic. Yet, In the large-scale surveys and content-analyses that dominate the literature, roles become more fixed than fluid, more over-determined than contingent. This disjuncture is caused, I argue, by under…
Scandal and Silence
With all the talk of change in American journalism these days, it is almost comforting to hear that some things remain the same. Robert Entman has been one of the foremost scholars of American news
Franklin Roosevelt and the fireside chats
Franklin Roosevelt and the Fireside Chats
The theory of media events developed by Dayan and Katz is extended in an analysis of Franklin Roosevelt's first eight fireside chats. Roosevelt's fireside chats were structured in both form and content by the new mode of publicness initiated by the culture industries in the 20th century. Roosevelt employed the idioms of mass culture to close the perceptual gap between him and his mass audience. As media events, the chats were useful in dramatizin…
Betwixt and Between
Although Woodrow Wilson institutionalized the press conference as a routine feature of presidential opinion leadership, he detested his news meetings and did not use them effectively. Wilson bore no personal animosity to the press but rejected the culture of news the press represented, for reasons central to Wilson's theory of presidential leadership. His rejection of this news culture is discussed in terms of the progressive culture in which his…
From media audience to media public
This article investigates the process by which media audiences become media publics in an analysis of Franklin D. Roosevelt's (FDR) fireside chats. Data for this analysis includes 380 randomly selected letters written in reaction to the first ten chats delivered by FDR during his first term of office. I show that FDR borrowed the `for-anyone-as-someone' structure of broadcasting to address listeners as particular individuals and as members of a m…
History and Political Communication
This essay introduces a series of articles that explore the relation of history to political communication research. It is shown that as a field of study political communication has tended to ignore historical methods and sensibilities. This tendency is traced to the field's roots in social psychology, political science, and early mass communication research. However, although political communication tends to ignore historical research, it often …
The Practice of Deliberative Democracy
This article investigates 16 organizations that attempt to foster better public deliberation in local and national communities. It develops a typology of these organizations and discusses them in the context of the scholarly literature on deliberative democracy. It particularly focuses upon the contributions these organizations may make to debates within the literature between advocates of relational and rational modes of deliberation. It finds t…
Does Deliberative Democracy Work
The growing literature on deliberative democratic practice finds that deliberation is a difficult and relatively rare form of communication. Each moment of a deliberative encounter raises significant obstacles in the path to stimulating greater intentional reflection on public issues. I explore these obstacles in the context of other empirical work in political and social psychology, small group communication, and public opinion. Taken together, …
Narrative and Deliberation in Small Group Forums
In a videotape analysis of five National Issues Forums, I investigate the nature of deliberative talk in small group deliberative settings. I show that deliberative talk in these forums mostly takes the form of storytelling. I argue that storytelling helps participants overcome barriers to deliberation, such as lack of knowledge and the need to manage one's public face in a context that privileges open conflict. Moreover, I show that storytelling…
Framing American Politics and The Mediated Presidency
Framing American Politics. Edited by Karen Callaghan and Frauke Schnell. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. 264p. $27.95. The Mediated Presidency: Television News and Presidential Governance. By Stephen J. Farnsworth and S. Robert Lichter. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. 236p. $60.00 cloth, $22.95 paper. Researchers generally agree that media frames are an outcome of what Tim Cook (in Making Laws and Making News, 1989, 169)…
News, Culture and Public Life
In an analysis of news conventions used by 19th-century American newspapers, I show that the news of this time period took much the same form. Across geography, size of paper, and kind of paper (associational, commercial, partisan), newspapers shared the same conventions. I explain this uniformity in terms of James Carey's notion that the news expresses a form of public life. In this case, I argue that 19th-century news expressed a form of public…
Guest Editor's Introduction
The Nature of News Rules
Drawing on new institutionalist theory, this article presents a theory of news rules to explain the curious fact that so much of the news looks similar across news organizations, yet reporters maintain a great deal of autonomy in choosing which stories to report and how to report them. The theory hinges on a distinction between constitutive and regulative rules. Where constitutive rules tell us what the news is, regulative rules tell us how the n…
Toward a Sociology of Deliberation
This essay draws insights from Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory for the development of a sociological theory of deliberation. Most work on deliberative practice is strongly shaped by the concerns of deliberative democratic theory, and that theory tends to approach deliberation as a procedural mechanism for decision-making. Thus, there has been very little effort to theorize the sociological dimensions of deliberative practice. Bourdieu’s theory hig…
The Next Form of Democracy
Structure, agency, and change in an American newsroom
Building on a prior ethnographic study conducted in the same newsroom, this essay offers a conceptual framework for understanding current efforts to transform metropolitan daily newspapers. At the time of the study, Calvin Thomas, a new editor and executive-vice president of the newspaper, mandated that his reporters produce more enterprise and less daily news. Yet, after a year, not only did reporters’ production of enterprise news decrease, the…
Broader and deeper
This essay offers an ethnographic analysis of The Daily Times, 1 a mid-sized American corporately owned newsroom. During the period under study, a new editor changed the way that reporters produced the news. In particular, he asked his reporters to attend less closely to the public agencies that composed their beats. Over time, his reporters alternately expressed confusion and indignation about the new rules. I explain their reaction in terms of …
“Comment
Quoting Practices, Path Dependency and the Birth of Modern Journalism
Using Hallin's (1994) analysis of soundbites in network television news coverage as a model, we track the quoting practices of five American newspapers during the transition to modern news (1876–1916). We find that despite variation in the size, geographic location, and partisan orientation of these newspapers, trends in their quoting practices moved in relative lockstep. Drawing on the institutionalist concept of path dependency, we argue that t…
Why Has News Production in the United States Remained Stable at a Time of Great Change?
This chapter canvases the literature in the sociology of news production for explanations as to why, in the face of great change around them, American newspapers have failed to innovate. It finds three sorts of explanations in this literature: journalists are anchored to habits; they have deep investments in traditional practices and values; and they routinely re‐enact long‐standing definitions of what journalism is and of what it is for. Each ex…
Rebuilding the News
The Importance of Time in Media Production Research
In a review of my book (Ryfe, 2012), David Domingo (2014) begins by noting that it ‘could well be the last of newsroom ethnographies as we know them’ (p. 115). Why the last? Because, he writes, ‘spending months among journalists to understand their practices, their values, and their aspirations will not soon be enough to analyze the evolution of journalism.’ Domingo clearly wishes to say that studying journalists is no longer enough if one wants …
News Institutions
News Routines, Role Performance, and Change in Journalism
Since the classic ethnographic studies of news in the 1960s and 1970s, scholars have recognized the power of routine in news production. In grappling with this subject, they have vacillated between understanding routine as a strong and a weak structural constraint on journalists. The present chapter examines this literature as a manifestation of a practice view, elaborates the basic elements of a practice perspective, and discusses its implicatio…
A practice approach to the study of news production
Among news production scholars, interest in the theories of Bourdieu, Giddens, Latour, and related authors has grown in the last 20 years. However, few have recognized that these theories contribute to a broader practice perspective in social theory that traces back to the writings of Heidegger, and more directly, to Wittgenstein. In this essay, I outline four basic elements of this approach that are shared across these theories. Among these elem…
The ontology of journalism
Sociology (29 obras) · Political science (27 obras) · Media Studies and Communication (20 obras) · Media studies (19 obras) · Politics (15 obras) · Law (14 obras) · Computer Science (12 obras) · Journalism (12 obras) · Law (12 obras) · Epistemology (11 obras)