Qualitative Political Communication| Sharing the News: Journalistic Collaboration as Field Repair

Abstract

Organized journalism in every era offers examples of news sharing: cooperative practices by which rival news outlets work together to produce or distribute news. Today, this behavior is being institutionalized by certain emergent news organizations. To understand news sharing, we argue, requires attention to how these journalists seek to not only practice but repair the field of journalism. This article analyzes news sharing as a form of field repair, drawing on ethnographic studies of investigative news nonprofits and professional fact-checking groups. We argue that journalism’s “high-modern” era, with its broad alignment of economic and professional goals, highlighted competitive rather than collaborative elements of newswork. As that alignment unravels, journalists are engaging in explicit news sharing in pursuit of two intertwined goals: to increase the impact of their own reporting and to build institutional resources for public-affairs journalism to be practiced more widely across the field.