Media expert Dan Berkowitz compiled a series of studies on exactly what is news, and why does it turn out the way it does in the text-reader Social Meanings of News. The book contains multiple methodologies and approaches, and Berkowitz's strategy is to structure the collection of studies into three parts comprising seven sections of several chapters each. Editor Berkowitz presents an overview of each section focusing on its main concepts. The chapters under consideration in this paper -- chapters nine through 20 รป are from the second and third sections of Part II, News as Social Production. Chapters nine through 12 focus on "Organizing News: News as a Workplace Product," while chapters 13 through 20 center on "Professionalizing News: News as Journalists' Norms and Routines." The role of the journalist, the news organization (print or electronic), the journalism profession, and the media as a social institution underlie all the readings of the three sections under discussion. The basic theory of mass communications underlying these chapters is the role of media interplay with the social structures in which they are imbedded.
Four studies comprise the section "Organizing News: News as a Workplace Product," and topics range from a functional analysis of social control in the newsroom by Warren Breed, to conflict as a crafted cultural norm of news organizations by Charles R. Bantz, to constraints on the reporting of news by John Soloski and an examination of science writers at work by Sharon Dunwoody in which she surveys "how organizational production demands and the collective news judgment of beat reporters combined to affect coverage of a large national science conference" (p.106). Instead of viewing each other as competitors, the beat reporters saw themselves as colleagues. Only by working together were they able to meet the demands of their various news organizations.
Cooperation, however, is not the rule among professiona...