Folk Theories of Journalism

Abstract

To understand journalism, we need to understand how people understand journalism. We need to examine what I define as “folk theories of journalism”, actually existing popular beliefs about what journalism is, what it does, and what it ought to do that people use to make sense of journalism across sources of news, means of accessing news, and ways of engaging with news. In this paper, I use data from interviews and focus groups to identify different and sometimes contradictory views of the role played by a local newspaper in Denmark to develop the notion of folk theories of journalism. I reconstruct three different folk theories in the case community around conceptions of relevance and place, one defining the local newspaper as relevant and local (“our newspaper”), a second defining it as relevant, but geographically or politically biased (“their newspaper”), and a third defining it as neither relevant nor local (“what newspaper?”). I show that the nominally “same” newspaper means different things to people depending on which folk theory they see it through and argue that journalism studies need to pay more attention to the different ways in which people interpret journalism to understand it.