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MA/PhD Theses Abstracts of Current Students & Alumni |
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Brathwaite, Renee (MA). Making news: An ethnographic study of public radio newsroom practices (Bird). 2003
During the fall of 2001, I conducted a participant-observation
study of National Public
Radio affiliate, WLMU-FM, a public radio station located at a large
metropolitan
university, which, in the interest of anonymity, will be subsequently
referred to as LMU.
The purpose of the research was to examine the practices and procedures
that are
involved in newsgathering and dissemination. I was interested in how
journalists at the
station make decisions about what goes into their news programming,
and how, if at all,
those decisions reflect the larger newsroom culture of which they are
a part. Just as
certain cultures are guided by certain unspoken or unconscious values,
I hypothesized
that WLMU news staff function in their environment in many of the same
ways.
My analysis of the newsroom culture was dependent on the following
research
methodologies: participant-observation, interviewing (structured and
informal), observing
the process of assigning daily tasks, sitting in on editorial discussions
or meetings, going
out on stories with reporters, listening to and documenting the kinds
of questions they ask
of their sources, evaluating news content, and following most stories
through from
initiation to dissemination. Participant-observation and interviewing
offered the most
effective way for me to learn more about the organizational culture
of the WLMU
newsroom.
Towards the end of my internship, I discovered that while everyone
has different
variations of doing so, most of the staff hold some common assumptions
and expectations
about how a public radio news story is supposed to be produced. They
also seem to agree
that the content should not only be informative but that it should be
able to go beyond
"just the facts". The news narrative, as understood by WLMU reporters,
is designed to
put the listener where the news is happening and to communicate the larger
implications
of these events on people's lives. This is an approach that 1 think most
of the reporters
would agree is a hallmark of public radio news programming in general,
and of WLMU,
in particular.
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