Through the lens of theories of field and normalization process, this research seeks to understand technology’s current role in how self-identifying digital journalists define the field. The definitions of digital journalism/journalists and what constitutes digital journalism practices are essential–they shape a range of crucial activities including how journalists prioritize sources to how journalists shape their content for audience consumption. Built on long-form interviews with 68 U.S.-based self-identifying digital journalists, this article argues that the digital turn in the industry has emboldened new entrants to the field and required dominantly placed legacy media journalists to reconsider their definition of journalism as well as their practices. Rather than seeing digital journalism as a sub-field within journalism, participants saw digital journalism as business-as-usual throughout the journalistic field.

Long trivialized as the “toy department,” sports journalism nevertheless represents an enduring, and vital subfield within journalism. As with many niches of journalism, sports journalism has needed to adjust to changes resulting from the technology of the field. In particular, digital sports journalism faces pressure from adjacent fields, represented in team and player media, which perform many of the same tasks historically attributed to sports journalism. Through the lens of field theory, the present study reports on long-form interviews with 47 sports journalists who self-defined their work as digital journalism. This study argues that the perception of insurgents—team media that prior research demonstrated is often seen as a part of the field—has caused digital sports journalists to view their work as economically vital to the individual newsroom, but not topically essential to the journalistic field at large.

Gaming journalism, which finds its origins in public relations-oriented gaming magazines, discursively attached itself to traditional journalism in the wake of the 2014 GamerGate controversy. Yet it had remained unclear where gaming journalism fits within the ecology of journalism. This study examines metajournalistic discourse regarding gaming journalism from 2010 to 2018 and analyzes 53 articles about gaming journalism from that period in order to understand how the broader journalistic field conceptualized gaming journalism’s place within it. This study argues that gaming journalism is discursively marked as a lower, marginal form of journalism based on perceived differences in professional values and journalistic savviness.

Utilizing the theory for disruptive innovation, this study endeavors to better understand how working self-identified digital journalists conceptualize innovation and perceive the impact of technological innovation on practice. Through in-depth interviews with 25 digital journalists, this study finds that journalists often perceive innovation as market-driven and fight against its incorporation, in part because their newsrooms don’t engage with the technology enough to train them to use it. The authors argue that journalism as a field is not well suited to innovation and any implementation must be thoughtfully carried out. Finally, this study concludes by theorizing about how these findings connect to both industry and digital journalism studies research.

Mobile journalism is one of the fastest areas of growth in the modern journalism industry. Yet mobile journalists find themselves in a place of tension, between print, broadcast, and digital journalism and between traditional journalism and lifestyle journalism. Using the lens of field theory, the present study conducted an online survey of mobile journalists (N = 39) from six countries representing four continents on how they conceive of their journalistic role, and how their work is perceived within the newsroom. Participants were journalists in television, print, magazine, and digital local and national newsrooms. The present study sought to understand how mobile journalists see mobile production as a part of their journalistic role, and what field theory dimensions influence mobile production in their newsrooms. While prior research has established a growing prevalence of lifestyle journalism, the present study finds that the growth of mobile journalism represents the development of lifestyle journalism norms, such as content driven by the audience, within even traditional journalism.

The COVID-19 Pandemic created a two-fold challenge for journalists: first, the task of gathering and distributing information vital to the responses of the public, and second, the challenge of mitigating the complexities of the journalism field. The purpose of this study is to connect the theoretical frameworks of metajournalistic discourse and field theory, using the touch point of journalistic practice. Prior research has postulated that metajournalistic discourse operates as a stabilizing force in the journalistic field. Using the timely test of the COVID-19 pandemic, this study seeks to explore the discursive construction of journalistic practice during a pandemic through the lens of both metajournalism and field through metadiscourse (n=141) gathered from the United States, United Kingdom, and Austria. This study will argue that metajournalistic discourse stabilizes the field by affirming the tools western journalists use in order to make sense of a crisis like COVID-19, and by providing a discursive avenue between the ideals of the journalistic field—in the journalistic doxa—and the habits of the field—as represented by journalistic habitus.