‘Where once stood titans’: Second-order paradigm repair and the vanishing US newspaper

Abstract

The demise of Rocky Mountain News and printed Seattle Post-Intelligencer only weeks apart in 2009 met with an outpouring of mediated concern among the journalistic community. In the shadow of the two failed newspapers, journalists defended the medium while warning of the growth of online news forms. In analyzing this response, this essay reappraises literature on ‘paradigm repair’ in which public repudiations of supposedly individual deviance aim to protect journalistic values and practices from scrutiny. It argues for the need to extend paradigm repair to account for an interpretive shift from individualizing and ostracizing incidents to holding them to be generalizable indicators of widespread paradigmatic challenges. Dubbed ‘second-order paradigm repair’, this concept aims to improve understanding of journalism in a time of change.