Marketing the construction of reality: Multiplatform production routines and the renegotiation of journalistic role identities in a legacy local television newsroom

Abstract

Times have changed since Warren Breed published his famous study, ‘Social Control in the Newsroom’. Today, corporate owners are requiring newsroom managers to adopt marketing strategies, launching many television newsrooms into routines similar to those of their newspaper-turned-online colleagues. This exploratory case study presents data from 6 months of observations of digital training in a legacy television newsroom, including interviews with the managers who underwent the training, conversations with newsroom staff, and a survey of that staff, all to explore how managers moderate between these corporate and journalistic needs by learning what corporations require as marketing-based multiplatform production routines and by helping journalists to reconcile their traditional role identities within these new newsroom requirements.