Journalists as Communities of Practice

Abstract

In light of changes in the structure of how journalism works due to technological, economic, cultural, and political shifts, we examine the theoretical framework of communities of practice and explore how it can productively be applied to the study of journalists. In evaluating the feasibility of applying communities of practice to journalism, we also consider other theoretical frameworks that have been used for examining journalistic groups, including interpretive communities, professions and organizations, and boundary work. The article provides examples to illustrate how different groups of journalists may constitute communities of practice. Whereas community is often attached to the idea of discourse communities or interpretive communities, we find that focusing on the collaborative learning aspect and development of shared practice through the lens of communities of practice enables us to more fully understand the nature of skill- and practice-building among specific subgroups of journalistic practitioners.

Keywords

journalism journalism theory communities of practice interpretive communities journalistic community

Introduction

Over the past decade, journalism has experienced significant changes, including the rise of news through social media, citizen journalism, opinion and niche journalism, and data journalism, and the decline of legacy journalism outlets. In light of changes in the structure of how journalism works due to technological, economic, cultural, and political shifts, we advance the theoretical framework of communities of practice and explore how it can productively be applied to the study of journalists. In doing so, we also consider the usefulness of looking at different journalistic communities, or subcommunities, as communities of practice (Wenger, 1998). Originally coined by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger in 1991, “communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly” (Wenger, 2006, p. 1). A community of practice is constituted by “a domain of knowledge, which defines a set of issues; a community of people who care about this domain; and the shared practice that they are developing to be effective in their domain” (Wenger & McDermott, 2002). In evaluating the feasibility of applying communities of practice to journalism, we consider other theoretical frameworks that have been used for examining journalistic groups, including interpretive communities, professions, and organizations, and discuss how all of these groups take part in boundary work and metajournalistic discourse. Whereas community is often attached to the idea of discourse communities or interpretive communities, we find that focusing on the collaborative learning aspect and development of shared practice through the lens of communities of practice enables us to more fully understand the nature of skill- and practice-building among specific subgroups of journalistic practitioners. We also find the concept of boundary work useful in our exploration. Because journalism is a wide and varied field with unstable boundaries, some journalists explicitly address their identification with the community by developing and maintaining boundaries of practice, while others maintain and police interpretive rules.

The inspiration for examining this theoretical approach for thinking about journalism alongside other well-known theories such as interpretive communities was sparked by our work in an interdisciplinary academic program with colleagues of diverse theoretical backgrounds and training. We became familiar with the communities of practice framework, and after reading about it, it seemed in some ways similar to the interpretive community that we and others have employed extensively in work about journalists.

This article first traces the rise of community as a lens for looking at the actions of groups and tracks the history and applications of the community of practice conceptualization. Next, the article traces the evolution of the frameworks of boundary work, interpretive communities, and metajournalistic discourse, and their use in journalism studies. It then explicates their relationship to communities of practice. Finally, the article applies communities of practice to journalism examples in order to illustrate how different groups of journalists may constitute communities of practice.

The Rise of the Community

In recent years, there has been a heightened interest in conceiving of groups and organizations as unique communities or beds of collaborative effort. This reasoning is heavily influenced by trends in the field of knowledge management that highly value the promotion of knowledge sharing practices within an organization (“Knowledge Management Culture, 2015”), and the “pioneering practices” of Silicon Valley (Walker, 2013). Companies like Google and Facebook popularized the open-space, collaborative working environment that has become a keystone of contemporary workplace communities. “Virtually all American workers now spend time on teams and some 70 percent inhabit open-plan offices, in which no one has ‘a room of one’s own’” (Cain, 2012). This preferential shift to community-based professional environments has changed the way we work and the way we conceive of work and is indicative of a larger trend of transitioning focus from the individual to the collaborator in professional life.

Going along with this attitude, however, is significant push back in glorifying the concept of community as the best structural framework for most professions. Critics of this collaborative working environment claim that its deficiency of individual agency inhibits creativity and marginalizes the “lone geniuses,” or more introverted workers, among us (Cain, 2012). More simply put, this criticism argues “a person sitting quietly under a tree in the backyard, while everyone else is clinking glasses on the patio, is more likely to have an apple land on his head” (Cain, 2012). The established structures of some professions warrant restraint in the widespread scholarly application of community frameworks to the professional sphere, as it does not suit all workers or all professions. Still, applying community models to professions with unstable or fluid boundaries—such as journalism—may assist rather than hamper scholarly thought on that profession.

The widespread emphasis on community as a renewed way of thinking about what collections of people do largely began in the late 1980s and early 1990s, following the publication of various articles on the topic.

Until the early 1990s, consistent with the reigning Piagetian, constructivist, and information processing paradigms, the individual learner was the essential unit of instruction and analytic concern in research. This slowly changed when, following publications such as Cognition in Practice (Lave, 1988) and Situated Learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991), many educational researchers and practitioners switched to the idea that knowing and knowledgeability are better thought of as cultural practices that are exhibited by practitioners belonging to various communities” (Roth & Lee, 2006). An even earlier example of this paradigm was exhibited by Stanley Fish in 1976, when he introduced his theory on interpretive communities.

In his article Interpreting the Variorum, Fish (1976) first defines interpretive communities as entities “made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions.” It was originally conceived as a theoretical concept in the field of literary studies as a way to explain variances in reader-response criticism. Essentially, Fish argues that readers, or people in general, group themselves into unique communities based on their internal schema, collectively interpreting a text or the world around them in a loosely structured way. The boundaries of these interpretive communities are fluid, growing and declining as members move from one to the other. However, determining the exact size of any given community is nearly impossible, as any evidence of membership would itself be an interpretation; according to Fish, “The only ‘proof’ of membership is fellowship, the nod of recognition from someone in the same community, someone who says to you what neither of us could ever prove to a third party: ‘we know’”. This origin in literary studies markedly differs from that of communities of practice, which began as a framework for studying professional organizations.

The term community of practice became popular following the 1991 publication of Situated Learning by scholars Etienne Wenger and Jean Lave, where it was first defined as

a set of relations among persons, activity, and world, over time and in relation with other tangential and overlapping communities of practice. A community of practice is an intrinsic condition for the existence of knowledge, not least because it provides the interpretive support necessary for making sense of its heritage. (Lave & Wenger, 1991)

It was developed as a framework to explain channels of learning outside the classroom environment (e.g., apprenticeships; Weiss & Domingo, 2010). It became popular among scholars of anthropology and the other social sciences before exploding onto the business and management scene (Weiss & Domingo, 2010). “The number of companies launching initiatives on communities of practice is increasing so rapidly, we have no way of keeping track,” wrote Wenger and co-author Richard McDermott in their application-minded book Cultivating Communities of Practice (2002). They are quick to point out, however, that a community of practice is not a recent development in the academic or professional world:

They were our first knowledge-based social structures, back when we lived in caves and gathered around the fire to discuss strategies for cornering prey, the shape of arrowheads, or which roots were edible. In ancient Rome, “corporations” of metalworkers, potters, masons, and other craftsmen had both a social aspect (members worshipped common deities and celebrated holidays together) and a business function (training apprentices and spreading innovations). (Wenger & McDermott, 2002)

With such a wide range of applications—from the schoolroom to the boardroom—it is not surprising that definitions or explanations on what constitutes a community of practice are so varied. According to John Seely Brown, a former VP and Chief Scientist at Parc Xerox, a community of practice consists of “peers in the execution of real work. What holds them together is a common sense of purpose and a real need to know what each other knows” (Allee, 2000). Communities can be small or large—ranging from a few specialists to global membership numbering in the hundreds or thousands—and “regular” interaction among their members could mean weekly face-to-face meetings or scattered phone and email conversations (Wenger & McDermott, 2002).

Despite the wide variety of forms a community of practice can take, and the differing professional opinions on what defines such a community, one basic structure of three central elements is universally agreed upon: “a domain of knowledge, which defines a set of issues; a community of people who care about this domain; and the shared practice that they are developing to be effective in their domain” (Wenger & McDermott, 2002). Organization around a clear domain creates group accountability to a body of knowledge and the development of a practice; a domain is not a fixed set of problems that can be addressed and dismissed, but a key issue that evolves with the growth of the community (Wenger & McDermott, 2002). Likewise, the community element of a community of practice “is not just a Web site, a database, or a collection of best practices. It is a group of people who interact, learn together, build relationships, and in the process develop a sense of belonging and mutual commitment” (Wenger & McDermott, 2002). As for practice, Wenger and McDermott define this element as “a set of socially defined ways of doing things in a specific domain: a set of common approaches and shared standards that create a basis for action, communication, problem solving, performance, and accountability” (Wenger & McDermott, 2002).

In addition to this basic structure, communities of practice generally follow five development stages, which include the following: Potential, Coalescing, Maturing, Active, and Dispersing (Allee, 2000). These stages define a community of practice at every level of its existence, from its beginning as a “loose network of people with similar issues and needs” to its inevitable end as a function that has “outlived its usefulness” (Allee, 2000). Of course, no stage has a set time limit, meaning that it is more than possible for a community to stall in the Potential stage or idle at its height in the Active stage, which is characterized by its creation of new way to sustain community energy, educate novices, and gain influence (Allee, 2000).

Not all communities or practices fit the description of a community of practice—regardless of how wide that description may be. Project teams or working groups, for example, are too strictly focused on a particular task to qualify as a community of practice, which has looser bonds between members and focuses on overall development in a field of expertise (Allee, 2000). Furthermore, communities of practice are completely self-selecting, with members participating because they personally identify with the enterprise of the community and not because they were assigned to a task (Allee, 2000). Considerable “stretching” of the basic structure is permitted, however, as demonstrated by the “distributed community,” which is essentially any community that cannot rely on face-to-face interaction between its members as a primary connector; “… in an era of globalization and worldwide communication networks, distributed communities are increasingly the norm” (Wenger & McDermott, 2002).

Boundary Work and Journalists as Interpretive Communities, Professions, and Organizations

Journalists have alternately been viewed as members of interpretive communities, professions, and organizations, all of whom monitor and maintain their group’s boundaries. An international collection of scholars has recently applied boundary work in case studies of journalistic struggles (Carlson & Lewis, 2015). With boundary maintenance (Gieryn, 1983; Lewis, 2012), the journalistic community works to demarcate good from bad practices and content, and legitimate versus illegitimate members and contributions. We view the framework of boundary work as a compatible, complementary conceptualization to communities of practice and interpretive communities. As discussed in Carlson and Lewis’ edited volume (2015, p. 9), the communities framework is useful for understanding how journalists interact while they are engaged in the process of newswork, while the boundaries framework helps us see how, when, and why journalists feel the need to demarcate “journalism norms, practices and participants.” Journalists in interpretive communities and communities of practice can and do engage in boundary work.

Much research about journalists to date has employed Zelizer’s (1993) theoretical framework of viewing journalists as interpretive communities. Conceptualizations of journalists as interpretive communities tend to envision one all-encompassing community of journalists who discursively articulate, negotiate, and maintain the norms, values, and boundaries of their craft. But given that the actual work of people said to be doing journalism can vary to such a great degree today, the interpretive communities framework is flexible enough to be adapted to consider different kinds of journalists into subcommunities, in the same way that Fraser devised the idea of subpublics (Fraser, 1999).

In her 1990 dissertation and later work, Zelizer developed a particular notion of how journalists are tied together as a collective through which they discursively articulate, negotiate, and defend their identity and authority as purveyors of news. This is in contrast to other scholars who have conceived of journalists through the formal organizations by which they are employed (Blau & Scott, 1962; Born, 2004; Epstein, 1973; Weber, 1947), or as members of a profession (Becker, Fruit, & Caudill, 1987; Freidson, 1984; Henningham, 1985). Other scholars have used the lens of occupations to consider journalistic work (Breed, 1955; Fishman, 1980/1999; Gans, 1979; Klaidman & Beauchamp, 1987; Tuchman, 1978; Tunstall, 1971; Underwood & Stamm, 2001; Weaver & Wilhoit, 1986; White, 1950). All of these conceptualizations sought to address how journalists maintain their collective autonomy and authority through self-evaluation, adaptation, and self-control against changing external circumstances.

Viewing these other conceptualizations of journalists as unable to completely capture the nature of the journalistic collective, Zelizer observed their insufficiencies. While journalists do behave like formal organizations by developing and voluntarily obeying procedures of conduct, there are no official rules or designs of a formal organization from which these procedures are derived (other than external government regulation). The formal organizations framework neglects the fact that the journalistic collective establishes and follows norms and practices precisely because of its lack of a recognized governing, rule-making body, and its need for legitimacy. The characterization of journalism as a profession is similarly flawed, according to Zelizer. Journalism does not seem to fit the professional framework’s emphases on training, education, and credentialing. The professional framework also ignores the relevance of journalistic discourse in determining what members of the journalistic community do and restricts our understanding of journalistic practice to those aspects of journalism emphasized by its particular view. Although Gans (2003) characterized journalism as a service-oriented field with a certain amount of independence and a mission to serve its “clients” who are thought to be the American public, these characteristics are not sufficient to achieve professional status. While “professionalizing” journalism may serve to lend status to the journalistic community and give its members a sense of control over their work, “offsetting the dangers inherent in the subjectivity of reporting,” the professional and occupational frameworks neglect to recognize the means by which reporters arrive at shared constructions of reality, informally network and depend on narrative and storytelling practices (Zelizer, 1993).

Rather than conceptualizing a community as a profession, Zelizer (1993) borrowed from anthropology, folklore, and literary studies in suggesting that a more fruitful way to conceptualize some groups may be as interpretive communities, “united through … shared discourse and collective interpretations of key public events” that help members determine what is appropriate practice. Although these organizations may be bureaucratic or corporate by typology, their members still behave as folkloric communities that use their own talk about themselves to keep themselves in line. Although the idea of interpretive communities was originally developed in reference to audience groups and consumers (Fish, 1980; Lindlof, 1988), it has since been applied to other types of groups including producers of cultural products such as news.

Interpretive communities are characterized by common modes of interpretation of their social worlds. Interpretive communities act as cultural sites where meanings are constructed, shared, and reconstructed by members of social groups in the course of everyday life (Berkowitz & TerKuest, 1999). Other studies (Meltzer, 2010; Berkowitz, 2000; Berkowitz & TerKuerst, 1999; Brewin, 1999; Cecil, 2002; Fish, 1980; Kitch, 2003; Lindlof, 1988; Meyers, 2003) have employed the interpretive community framework, exploring the ways in which journalists have understood and articulated their professional and social roles over the years through stories that they tell about their own work, its significance, and its relevance to larger cultural and social narratives. At the heart of such stories is an ongoing process of establishing and maintaining the collective.

Comparing Interpretive Communities to Communities of Practice

The clear contrast between communities of practice and interpretive communities is that communities of practice are focused on learning from others in the domain community and developing and evolving specific practices through interaction, while interpretive communities are chiefly concerned with interpreting news events through discourse, and maintaining and asserting identity and authority through self-criticism. In their own ways, each type of community engages in boundary work.

Both community models are similar in that they began in academia as theories and worked their way into the practical sphere. But while both can be credited with popularizing the professional community framework, their conceptual origins differ widely. It has been suggested that Lave and Wenger’s framework deals with practice or action, whereas the interpretive communities framework deals more with interpretation. While the two theories developed roughly around the same time, Zelizer’s notion of the community was taken from her dissertation (finished in 1990), so it was a bit earlier and draws on Stanley Fish’s (1976) work in literary studies. According to Wenger (2012), himself, the concept of community of practice “has its roots in attempts to develop accounts of the social nature of human learning inspired by anthropology and social theory (Bourdieu, 1977; Foucault, 1980; Giddens, 1984; Lave, 1988; Vygostsky, 1978)” (p. 1). It is interesting that a focus on community would have developed in both journalism and education around the same time, drawing on earlier work produced in the late 70s and early 80s in literary studies, and anthropology and social theory, but we are not able to offer any obvious connections with political or cultural events as the catalysts.

That being said, there are obvious parallels between the two frameworks. One such parallel is communication, which is a necessary element within both interpretive communities and communities of practice. Communication defines the boundaries of a community and brings its members together. The ways in which this communication is apparent, however, differ slightly. Communities of practice largely favor direct communication, with members discussing in person the implications of their practice. Interpretive communities can technically include this type of communication—members undoubtedly speak to each other—but they mostly seem to operate through indirect communication, or by contributing to a body of work that “speaks” for their thoughts on their practice. The use of storytelling as a form of communication and as a tool for learning within the community is a notable exception to the general differences of discourse between the two frameworks; both communities of practice and interpretive communities use stories to understand or articulate their values to new members and to an outside audience.

Another trait the two frameworks share is a tendency toward change. Neither interpretive communities nor communities of practice are static entities. The boundaries and definitions of each change to fit the interests of their members in conjunction with external circumstances. For interpretive communities, this might mean a collective change in how to view the world, or how to view the role of journalism in society. Similarly, for communities of practice, this might mean a change in how work is completed, or a reconsideration of the community’s goals. Membership in either community is constantly in flux, though judging membership in an interpretive community is largely impossible due to the subjectivity of its determining factors. In contrast to the unknowable membership of an interpretive community, membership in a community of practice is more concrete and tethered to the physical world by a specific practice.

This disparity in determining an accurate member count is indicative of a larger divergence in community boundary rigidity in the two community models. Communities of practice require a very specific set of qualifications to earn the name, while interpretive communities exist with almost no qualifications. Ultimately, communities of practice present a framework on how we learn, while interpretive communities present a framework on how we view the world.

Other work has been done on the news media’s self-criticism, but it has not been talked about in the context or framework of interpretive community discussion that discursively maintains and reasserts norms and boundaries. Instead, it is discussed as “self-reflexive news media reporting” (Bishop, 2001, p. 23; Haas, 2006, p. 351), “journalistic metacoverage” (Haas, 2006, p. 352), or “boundary work” and “self-coverage” (Bishop, 1999, 2001). Bishop (2001, p. 23) and Zelizer (1997, p. 17) have contended that journalistic self-reflection is a kind of ritual sacrifice, performed to persuade audiences to have faith in journalism, to sustain ratings and readership, and to deflect potential external criticism. As Schudson (1982) wrote, the talk of journalists is a critical process of consensus-formation. “The group becomes a brotherhood that influences and colors, beyond any individual resistance to prejudice or individual devotion to fact, all of what [journalists] write” (p. 111). Current and recent work continues to employ the interpretive community framework for examining journalistic discourse. Some of that work talks about it in terms of paradigm repair and critical incidents.

In paradigm repair (Bennett, Gressett, & Haltom, 1985; Berkowitz, 2000; Hindman, 2005; Reese, 1990), a specific breach of good and normal practice necessitates action on behalf of the news organization, and the larger journalistic community, to demonstrate that the paradigm is being restored and can remain intact. This is in contrast to a “critical incident” (Zelizer, 1992), a singular event or evolution leads to the reexamination of journalistic practices.

Carlson (2015) most recently proposed pulling together all of the variations in theoretical frameworks involving discursive activities in and around journalism under the umbrella framework of “metajournalistic discourse.” While it hearkens to an earlier suggestion made by Haas (2006) to focus on journalistic metacoverage, Carlson’s (2015) proposition goes far beyond the applications of discursive theory to discrete events and phenomena that reside either within journalism or outside it, to instead encompass all discourse in which journalism is the object of discussion itself, or in which journalists discursively negotiate their interpretation and coverage of outside objects. It also includes discourse which involves both of those realms. Both journalistic and other external actors and sites are considered in the metajournalistic discourse theory. The new theory also delineates the different characteristics and contexts of metajournalistic discourse. In this way, the theory seeks to unify and evolve our thinking about journalism in the present day. Our project at hand in this article—advancing the communities of practice framework for understanding journalism, and comparing it to interpretive communities, boundaries, and professions—then fits within and further fleshes out connections between the various individual theoretical discursive frameworks that may be said to fall under “metajournalistic discourse.” The metajournalistic discourse framework moves closer toward a holistic systems theory approach or media ecology approach that considers all other parts of the system in which journalism operates. Although Wenger (2012) wrote that “the concept of community of practice was not born in the systems theory tradition,” he also wrote that

the concept of community of practice is well aligned with the perspective of the systems tradition. A community of practice itself can be viewed as a simple social system. And a complex social system can be viewed as constituted by interrelated communities of practice.

Further, Wenger (2012) writes that

A community of practice can be viewed as a social learning system. Arising out of learning, it exhibits many characteristics of systems more generally: emergent structure, complex relationships, self-organization, dynamic boundaries, ongoing negotiation of identity and cultural meaning, to mention a few. In a sense it is the simplest social unit that has the characteristics of a social learning system. (p. 1)

This also seems an apt description of communities of journalists.

Journalists as Communities of Practice

A [community of practice] is a meta-theoretical approach that describes how a group communicates, learns, participates and transforms at the same time as their practice evolves. At a basic level, it is a way of understanding how knowledge and learning are intertwined and how this occurs naturally within a social group, in this case the news organization and its journalists. (Weiss & Domingo, 2010)

As a framework for knowledge sharing, communities of practice are most often applied to the areas of business management, communication studies, and education; however, “journalists and newsroom organization can be considered a form of a community of practice depending on the circumstances” (Weiss & Domingo, 2010). While this specific application has not been addressed to any great extent, certain aspects of journalism seem to fit the description of a community of practice (Weiss & Domingo, 2010). Matsaganis and Katz (2013), following Husband (2005, as cited in Matsaganis & Katz), look at ethnic media producers as communities of practice. A recent study by researchers Weiss and Domingo sought to describe specific journalist communities (e.g., online news teams) as communities of practice through their innovation practices; but while their findings technically draw associations between the two concepts, they did not seem to fully utilize relevant facets of a community of practice. For example, a section discussing the abrupt creation of a night shift at one of the observed papers to cover the Iraq War did not specify whether the decision grew organically from the community of journalists at the paper, as it would in a true community of practice, or whether it was dictated to them by management. The authors also do not make a distinction between workplace collaboration and an established community of practice.

Further research in the study of journalism implies a connection between journalism and the community of practice organizational framework, but a direct relationship is never explicitly stated. For example, in his article The Two Professionalisms of Journalism: Updating Journalism Research for the 21st Century, researcher Henrik Ornebring defines one of two competing discourses of journalism in the following way:

… occupational professionalism … is operationalized and controlled by practitioners themselves and is based on shared education and training, a strong socialization process, work culture and occupational identity, and codes of ethics that are monitored and operationalized by professional institutes and associations. (Ornebring, 2008)

This description of occupational journalism shares many characteristics of a community of practice—self-management, shared learning experiences, and community standards, among other things—but an explicit connection between the two concepts is never fully realized in the article. The Tow Center’s blog entry about their report on Sensor Journalism (2014) mentions the need for building a “community of practice” for sensor journalism, but neither the blog entry nor the report discuss communities of practice in a way that relates to any formal definitions or conceptualizations. Similarly, a number of other journalism-related organizations and authors have used the term community of practice in relation to the work of journalists or media producers, but all use it implicitly without substantive explanation (i.e., a blog and course assignment by Paul Bradshaw at Birmingham City University (2011), a report on Fair Use and Journalism by American University’s Center for Media & Social Impact (2013), the report on the future of journalism education from the Knight Foundation (Lynch, 2015), the Journalism That Matters (2015).

Additional research pertaining to the connection between journalism and communities of practice (Baumard, 1999; Macaulay, 1999) identifies the “source” (i.e., a person, publication, or record that provides information for a specific news story) as a unifying artifact in the journalism community, “where different colleagues must work together to validate the information that feeds into the creation of a news item” (Davenport & Hall, 2002). Again, a connection to the community of practice framework is implied through the suggestion of shared domain, community, and practice in the collection and verification of sources but never explicitly discussed. Each of these articles comes close but ultimately misses the chance to push the understanding of journalism as a community of practice.

The difficulty in defining “journalism” as any one thing is that the practice itself is too varied and unregulated—too loose with professional and academic requirements and standards to be a true profession, but also too structured to be a simple community. Some journalists go to school for years to work in the field; some do not have a degree at all. Some work for multimillion dollar news networks, and some manage entire news enterprises from their homes. And still, despite this disparity, this collection of scattered and diverse practitioners constitutes a defined group that overwhelmingly follows a set of rules and standards that have survived through tradition. Understanding journalists as communities of practice helps us reconcile these characteristics that are seemingly at odds and gives them a recognizable, comprehensible shape and form.

In broad terms, journalism meets the definition of a community of practice: it is most certainly a community, with specific practices. But how can something so broad (a potentially global network of people), so multifaceted (e.g., diverse mediums and job duties), and so untraceable be considered a community of practice? Breaking the whole community down into smaller parts—groups of journalists within a single news organization, or even the organization itself—could invalidate the argument that “journalism” is one whole community but considering the entire practice to be a single community over-simplifies its multitude of working parts and stretches the definition of a community of practice.

Looking at the regular interaction among members of the journalism community—a basic necessity of any community of practice—journalism qualifies as a distributed community, especially in terms of knitting organizations together. Journalists, at times, collaborate to problem solve or discuss aspects of their domain and also interact in a remote way through criticism and acknowledgement of each other’s works.

Examples of Journalistic Communities of Practice

We find that there are many vibrant examples of journalism groups and activities that fit and exemplify communities of practice.¹ As we have suggested, journalism may be seen as a distributed community, with diverse and scattered subgroups. Although the literature on communities of practice seems to indicate that they grow out of organizations, for journalism, it could go either way: when communities of journalists become more organized over the time in which they interact over their practices in a domain, they may begin to take on the qualities of more formal organizations and can just as easily disband from any formal association. In this way, a particular group of journalists in a community of practice may be momentary and fleeting or endure for a number of years.

Among the more informal types of communities of practice are journalists providing news through social media, citizen journalists, opinion and niche journalists, and data journalists. Groups of news bloggers, political bloggers/columnists/analysts, fashion bloggers, celebrity bloggers, and media critics may similarly comprise communities of practice. These are loose collections of people in the same domain—at the coalescing stage (Allee, 2000). Each group has “a domain of knowledge, which defines a set of issues; a community of people who care about this domain; and the shared practice that they are developing to be effective in their domain” (Wenger & McDermott, 2002).

Jack Shafer, Rem Rieder, and David Carr were part of an informal community of practice of media criticism. They were not formally organized but interacted regularly about professional and social matters (R. Rieder, In person interview at USA Today headquarters, McLean, VA, 20 January, 2015; J. Shafer, Phone interview, 11 February, 2015). Although they consider other colleagues to have roles that differ somewhat from theirs, other media reporters and critics such as Paul Farhi, Erik Wemple, Michael Calderone, and Brian Stelter are part of a community of practice that acts like a reference group for the journalists (personal interviews in 2014 and 2015). One issue around which this journalistic community of practice interacts is social media use. While some news organizations, like The Washington Post, have official policies about their employees’ social media use (P. Farhi, Personal interview in person at The Washington Post, 4 June, 2014) and usually encourage them to be active on the platforms, other organizations have no official policies, or their employees do not necessarily know about the policies (R. Rieder, In person interview at USA Today headquarters, McLean, VA, 20 January, 2015). So what’s appropriate to say through social media is garnered from “common sense” (R. Rieder, In person interview at USA Today headquarters, McLean, VA, 20 January, 2015) or looking to one’s peers.

Another informal group representing a community of practice is digital multimedia news content producers. Inspired by work like the Snow Fall graphic feature by the New York Times in 2012, journalists interested in data visualization gathered together at conferences like the Journalism/Interactive one held at the University of Maryland in 2014. At the conference, Hannah Fairfield, one of the creators of the Snow Fall piece, was present to speak alongside visual editors from NPR and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who discussed data-driven storytelling² (Siguenza, 2014). Both face-to-face and remotely, these journalists share and learn about this domain of practice.

Once a group of journalists sharing a domain moves from coalescing to maturing and active, it may eventually form a more formal organization such as Andy Carvin's site for curated citizen journalism through social media, the now-defunct reportedly (Carvin, 2015).³ The movement of a broader community of digital journalists from coalescing to maturing and active led to the invention of a more formal organization, the Online News Association. Conversely, some professional journalism organizations have changed or dissolved, such as the reformulated Association of Opinion Journalists which is merging with the American Society of News Editors (Association of Opinion Journalists [AOP], 2016) and was formerly the National Conference of Editorial Writers until 2012. Its evolution reflects changes in its community’s practices, including the decreasing relevance of editorial writers amidst the ascendance of opinion journalism. Similarly, the American Press Institute was reinvented in 2012, merged with the Newspaper Association of America Foundation, amidst the turmoil in the newspaper industry (American Press Institute, 2016; Winter, 2012). The RTDNA which stands for Radio Television Digital News Association used to be RTNDA and stand for Radio-Television News Directors Association.

The journalism community, then, could be characterized as a distributed community of practice, or many subcommunities of practice, that constantly cycle between the Potential, Coalescing, Maturing, Active, and Dispersing stages, as new technologies or models go in and out of popularity. These groups behave as, and engage in the work of, interpretive communities, policing, and negotiating boundaries, but they also act as, and constitute, communities of practice.

In applying a theoretical framework from a different disciplinary area to journalism, it was important to consider the appropriateness of doing so and the fit. Wenger (2012) wrote that when he and Jean Lave coined the term community of practice in the late 1980s, “we could not have predicted the career the concept would have (Lave and Wenger, 91).” Wenger writes that their concept “has influenced theory and practice in a wide variety of fields in academe, business, government, education, health, and the civil sector,” and that “New technologies, in particular the rise of social media, have triggered much interest in communities of practice. Indeed, these technologies are well aligned with the peer-to-peer learning processes typical of communities of practice” (p. 7). Wenger noted “the shift from an analytical concept to an instrumental one” and the fact that “the concept has been adopted and used in ways that are not always consistent with its origins and the diversity of adoption means that the concept is in some sense ‘out of control.’” But in the end, he says, “But for myself, I find the combination of analytical and instrumental perspectives particularly productive.” We find communities of practice a productive lens through which to view journalists.

Conclusion

Thinking about groups in terms of community has become popular today, following research in the fields of interpretive communities and communities of practice. What we have tried to show in this article is how thinking in terms of communities is useful for trying to understand how journalism works today, particularly as a constantly changing entity.

As Carlson and Peifer (2013) have found, journalists are being forced to reckon with “new—and largely uncomfortable—modes of public discourse operating contra traditional journalism’s institutionalized norms,” and “journalists’ responses confronted the emerging heterogeneity of mediated voices participating in the public sphere” (p. 334). Clearly, journalists of all stripes are grappling with the rapidly changing information environment and the new forms and participants that accompany it. Journalists are engaging in not just image restoration (Benoit, 1995, 1997), but in image creation, defense, protection, and maintenance (Carlson & Lewis, 2015).

Viewing this introspective work through the lens of a community of practice is useful in understanding value to the field. Journalists as members of an interpretive community engage in frequent reevaluation of the journalistic collective, while journalists as members of a community of practice are tasked with constantly and faithfully redefining their domain as their practice evolves. This similarity of group action belies the distinct origins and qualifications of both community frameworks to reveal an overall similarity of purpose—at least as it pertains to journalism. We invite other scholars to consider how particular journalism cases exemplify, or stretch, the qualifications of a community of practice. Further, journalism is not the only community struggling with boundary maintenance and identity work. Beyond journalism, it could be worthwhile for scholars to consider other fields in which the communities of practice framework could be useful.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their comments on the manuscript. We would also like to thank Dr. Barbie Zelizer for her comments on an early version of this manuscript. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2015 National Communication Association conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. We would like to thank the session respondents for their helpful comments on the paper.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biographies

Kimberly Meltzer (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) is an associate professor of Communication at Marymount University in Arlington, VA. Prior to her academic career, Dr Meltzer worked for news organizations including CNN and NBC. Her book, TV News Anchors and Journalistic Tradition: How Journalists Adapt to Technology, was published in 2010. Her other work has appeared in The International Journal of Press/Politics, Journalism, Journalism Practice, Electronic News, Encyclopedia of Journalism and National Civic Review, as well as in several edited volumes.

Emily Martik (MA, Georgetown University) is a communications specialist for Jacobs Engineering Group near Pittsburgh, PA. She is a 2015 graduate of the Master's program in Communication, Culture & Technology at Georgetown and served as a managing editor of the graduate student journal Gnovis and as aresearch assistant.

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