Newspaper journalism and video: Motion, sound, and new narratives

Abstract

Video has become a key component for multi-media newspaper websites. Working with video is often a new skill for print-based journalists, who previously may have considered it the province of television news organizations. Institutional convention has held up television news as a foil to still images and the printed word, a dualism that has fostered hierarchal thinking about video and its normative role in journalism. Such hierarchal thinking, or what Pierre Bourdieu discussed in terms of distinction, is often reflected in institutional, automatic, unconscious daily practices. This study looks through Bourdieu’s lens at a set of observational and interview data to describe the way journalists in newspaper organizations are adopting video for presenting news. The study finds that newspaper journalists, both writers and still photojournalists, are responding in ways that allow them to claim a distinct form of multi-media presentation, thereby sustaining their place in the traditional journalistic hierarchy.