Media
Sociology

A news account takes shape through organised social work.

Suppose a reporter covers waterlogging near a city railway station. She speaks to commuters, photographs the road and seeks a response from the municipality. At the desk, an editor asks for a shorter report before the evening deadline. The website needs a headline; the video team needs usable pictures. A public problem becomes a news account through these decisions.

Media sociology follows that work into the relationships that make it possible. It asks who produces mediated accounts, how production is organised, which voices become authoritative and how wider relations of power enter the result.

This chapter concentrates on the Hierarchy of Influences model associated with Pamela J. Shoemaker and Stephen D. Reese. The model organises questions about influences on media content across five connected levels of analysis.

Follow the account backwards

Begin with something visible: a headline, source list, photograph or recurring omission. Then ask how it came to acquire that form. A reporter’s knowledge may matter. So may an assignment system, a staffing decision, a source’s availability and an established view of whose experience deserves attention.

Each possibility points towards evidence. Interviews can reveal reasoning; observation can show routines; documents can establish policy; comparisons can test whether a pattern recurs across settings.

Connect production with public consequences

What people encounter as news has passed through choices about access, selection, verification, emphasis and presentation. Studying those choices helps explain why some problems receive sustained investigation while others appear mainly as brief incidents.

The inquiry can also identify conditions that support better journalism: time to verify, access to records, editorial protection, professional skill and relationships with people affected by an issue.

Keep the explanatory question precise

“Why does this report quote officials first?” is more researchable than a general claim that the media are biased. Define the pattern, specify the setting and trace the decisions that could explain it.

Carry this question through the chapter: which relationships made this particular account more likely?

Research brought everyday newswork into view.

The sociology of news developed through studies of selection, organisational policy, professional practice and the relationship between journalism and power. Researchers entered newsrooms, interviewed journalists and followed the production of public accounts.

Early studies opened the newsroom

David Manning White’s 1950 study of a newspaper editor, presented as “Mr. Gates,” examined decisions about selecting news. Warren Breed’s 1955 study examined how newsroom staff learned and maintained a publication’s policy through organisational relationships. Together they brought different influences on news decisions into view. White ↓ · Breed ↓

These studies supply questions and methods for investigation. Read each in relation to its historical setting, institutions and evidence.

The development of the Hierarchy of Influences

Building a Theory of News Content: A Synthesis of Current Approaches, published in 1987 by Pamela J. Shoemaker with Elizabeth Kay Mayfield, was an early effort to integrate explanations of news content. Read the monograph ↓

Shoemaker and Reese developed the framework in Mediating the Message (1991; second edition, 1996). Their 2014 volume, Mediating the Message in the 21st Century, brings a media-sociology perspective to a changing production environment. 1996 text ↓ · 2014 volume ↓

Reese and Shoemaker’s 2016 essay revisits the model for a networked public sphere, where journalism crosses professional and organisational boundaries. It connects levels of analysis with questions about fields, networks and emerging spaces of media work. Read the essay ↓

A broad research tradition

Media sociology accommodates close observation, interviews, surveys, content analysis and comparative designs. The strongest method is the one that lets you examine the relationship your question proposes.

Move between the person, the practice and the wider setting.

The model gives an explanation a set of analytical locations. It helps distinguish a journalist’s characteristic from a recurring work practice, an organisation’s decision and a wider relationship of power.

Micro and macro are scales of inquiry

The individual level focuses on particular newsworkers. Moving outward directs attention towards recurring practices, organisations, institutional relationships and social systems. A study can connect several of these scales through one decision.

In the waterlogging example, ask how the reporter identified the problem, how the desk assigned the story, what resources were available, which sources supplied information and how the coverage framed public responsibility.

A factor acquires a level through the question

“Technology” can refer to several relationships. A reporter’s editing skill is an individual characteristic. A standard upload procedure is a routine. A newsroom’s investment in equipment is an organisational decision. Dependence on an external distribution platform is an institutional relationship.

Specify the relationship before assigning a level. This keeps classification connected with explanation.

Choose a unit of analysis

A unit of analysis is what the study examines: a news item, journalist, newsroom, organisation or wider setting. Levels of influence identify the locations of the explanatory factors. A study of news items can therefore include evidence about both reporters and organisations.

For example, compare the source diversity of reports produced under different assignment arrangements. The news item supplies the outcome; the assignment arrangement supplies one possible explanation.

Journalists bring knowledge, judgement and experience to the assignment.

The individual level examines the people who make communication decisions. Their education, language, experience, beliefs, professional aspirations and understanding of their role can enter the work.

It also directs attention to agency: what a person can propose, recognise, challenge or change within a particular position.

Knowledge makes some questions visible

Suppose the reporter covering waterlogging has previously studied drainage records. She may recognise that a familiar explanation leaves an unanswered question about maintenance. Her knowledge helps her identify documents and interpret the answer.

Another reporter may know the neighbourhood well and locate residents whose experiences rarely enter an official briefing. Language and personal familiarity can open a different route into the story.

Role perceptions guide priorities

A journalist may understand the job as informing quickly, explaining complexity, scrutinising authority, representing community experience or encouraging public discussion. These purposes can shape the questions pursued and the material considered essential.

Ask journalists how they understand their responsibilities, then examine how those understandings enter a specific assignment. Compare a stated purpose with the decisions and conditions surrounding the work.

Position changes the room for action

A reporter, shift editor, section head and publisher possess different kinds of authority. The effect of a personal preference depends partly on the decision the person can make.

A junior reporter may propose a follow-up; an editor may allocate the time and staff that make it possible. Follow both the proposal and the allocation. The relationship connects individual initiative with organisational authority.

Background becomes explanatory through a process

A demographic description can help examine who enters journalism and whose experiences are represented. To explain content, investigate the pathway linking background with access, knowledge, assignments, judgement or influence.

Suppose a researcher compares journalists from different localities. Interviews might show differences in neighbourhood contacts, while assignment records show who gets to use those contacts. The combination is more informative than the background label alone.

Individual-level inquiry works best when it locates a person inside the conditions of the job. Skill and commitment become consequential through opportunities to exercise them.

Repeated practices turn a changing world into reportable material.

Routines are recurring ways of doing media work. They make production manageable: assigning beats, checking information, meeting deadlines, selecting pictures, writing headlines and deciding when an item is ready.

A routine can support speed, reliability and coordination. Its consequences also depend on what it repeatedly brings into view and what it leaves difficult to pursue.

Beats organise attention

A reporter assigned to the municipality regularly encounters meetings, notices and authorised spokespeople. The beat supplies access and continuity. It also gives the working day a particular map.

In the waterlogging example, a scheduled briefing may arrive with figures and a spokesperson. Residents’ experiences may require travel and several conversations. Examine how the routine distributes time between these routes.

Deadlines and formats shape the account

An inverted-pyramid report places the most consequential information early. A short bulletin demands compression. A live update requires repeated decisions about what can be verified and published at that moment.

These formats organise emphasis. A study can compare drafts, timings and published versions to see which details survive, which move and which are deferred.

News values become working judgements

Journalists use judgements about relevance, consequence, timeliness, conflict, prominence and available evidence to organise attention. Ask how these judgements are applied in the setting you study.

“This affects many commuters” and “we have usable footage before the bulletin” point towards different considerations. A newsroom meeting can reveal how they combine in an actual choice.

Objectivity as a strategic ritual

Gaye Tuchman’s 1972 article examines objectivity as a strategic ritual: recognised procedures through which journalists defend the legitimacy of their work and manage occupational risks. Attribution, quotations and the presentation of conflicting claims can supply such procedures. Read the article ↓

Investigate how a practice works in the report. Quoting a claim establishes who said it. Verification asks how well the claim is supported. Following both steps reveals the relationship between a defensible procedure and an informative account.

Similarity can emerge through shared practice

Reporters covering the same briefing may receive the same statement, face similar deadlines and attend to the same prominent speakers. Shared routines offer one explanation for similar coverage.

Mark Fishman’s Manufacturing the News (1980) examines the relationship between routine newsgathering and bureaucratically organised information. It invites attention to the institutions that make some occurrences readily available as news. Read the book ↓

For research, observe repeated practice across several assignments. Then trace its consequences in sources, emphasis, timing and follow-up.

A newsroom’s mission acquires force through policy, authority and resources.

The organisational level examines the entity within which media work occurs. A newspaper, broadcaster, digital outlet or reporting collective has a mission, a structure of authority and a way of sustaining its work.

Ownership, funding, staffing, editorial policy, employment arrangements and management decisions can shape what the organisation is equipped and willing to produce.

Resources make some forms of reporting possible

A newsroom can assign a reporter to revisit the waterlogged neighbourhood, inspect records and compare earlier promises with later work. That follow-up requires time, travel, editing and possibly specialised assistance.

Trace the allocation. Who approves the assignment? Which work is postponed? How long can the reporter stay with the issue? These decisions give a public-interest commitment a practical form.

Policy travels through everyday relationships

Warren Breed’s study of social control in the newsroom shows how a publication’s policy can be learned through organisational relationships and rewards. Staff can acquire expectations through experience and interaction, including the treatment of their work. Return to the study ↓

To investigate a similar process, compare an outlet’s declared policy with editorial feedback, assignment practices and accounts from different positions in the organisation.

Ownership enters through mechanisms

An owner’s influence may operate through appointments, budgets, strategic priorities, performance measures or direct intervention. Identify the mechanism relevant to the case.

For a conglomerate with interests beyond media, examine how responsibilities and conflicts of interest are governed. The research question concerns the relationship between the ownership arrangement and particular editorial decisions.

Compare arrangements with similar purposes

Two outlets can both promise public-service journalism while allocating resources differently. Compare how they commission follow-ups, support verification and respond to complaints.

Likewise, organisations with different revenue sources can adopt overlapping professional practices. The explanation rests on the procedures, resources and relationships through which the arrangement affects the work.

This level makes an important connection visible: editorial ideals need institutional support within the organisation.

News organisations exchange information and resources with others.

The social-institutional level examines relationships extending beyond a single media organisation. Journalism interacts with government, markets, advertisers, public relations, professional bodies, civil society, audiences and distribution services.

The earlier label extra-media directs attention beyond the organisation’s boundary. The later terminology also helps examine journalism as an institution interacting with other institutions.

Sources organise access

A municipal office can schedule a briefing, supply a report and designate a spokesperson. A residents’ group can organise a walk through affected streets and assemble photographs. Each provides a route into the issue.

Ask who can supply timely, usable and credible material. Access to organised information can influence what a newsroom is able to report within a working day.

News promotion is a form of purposeful activity

Harvey Molotch and Marilyn Lester’s 1974 article examines news as purposive behaviour. Its distinction among news promoters, assemblers and consumers helps investigate how happenings become publicly available events through social activity. Read the article ↓

Apply the question to a press conference: who arranges it, what account is supplied, which alternatives are available and how do journalists assemble the resulting report?

Dependence can take different forms

A newsroom may depend on an institution for regular access, on an advertiser for income or on a platform for distribution. Investigate the resource, the terms of access and the consequences of losing it.

Then follow the dependence into decisions. Does it affect the timing of publication, the range of sources, the handling of criticism or the ability to sustain an investigation?

Audiences enter through relationships

Readers and viewers can supply tips, demand corrections, subscribe, attend meetings and organise criticism. They also enter newswork through the ways journalists and managers imagine or measure them.

A newsroom that convenes a neighbourhood listening session encounters a different form of audience evidence from a dashboard counting visits. Study what each form makes visible and how the organisation uses it.

Specify the organisation’s boundary, then examine the relationships crossing it. Their influence becomes clearer when you can trace a resource or demand into a decision.

Recurring accounts connect journalism with wider relations of power.

The social-system level examines the broad arrangements within which institutions operate: political and economic structures, cultural assumptions, social hierarchies and established ideas about legitimate authority.

The earlier ideological label foregrounds meaning in the service of interests and power. It directs attention to the larger pattern that many everyday decisions can produce.

Ask what becomes normal

In the waterlogging example, reports might repeatedly present the problem as a short interruption to traffic. Another approach could examine maintenance, public expenditure and the distribution of inconvenience across neighbourhoods.

Each approach organises a different account of responsibility. Across a body of coverage, ask which problems appear routine, which voices define the situation and which solutions become thinkable.

Trace assumptions into practice

A broad claim about ideology gains explanatory force when connected with observable practices. Examine source authority, recurring categories, the treatment of dissent and the allocation of visibility.

Suppose officials are repeatedly positioned as interpreters while residents appear only as sufferers. Code those roles, inspect the reporting conditions and ask how access and professional conventions contribute to the pattern.

Hegemony directs attention to consent and common sense

Hegemony concerns the organisation of leadership and consent through meanings and institutions that can make an arrangement appear natural. In media research, it encourages investigation of how recurring representations support or challenge an established order.

Todd Gitlin’s The Whole World Is Watching (1980) examines media coverage and the American New Left. It offers a historical study of the relationship between news framing, a social movement and wider power. Read the book ↓

Comparison makes the wider setting visible

Compare outlets operating under different institutional arrangements, or examine changes across a defined period. Ask how professional work relates to the political, economic and cultural setting.

A proposed study in India could compare coverage of the same civic issue across selected Bengali, Hindi and English outlets. Define the outlets and audiences carefully, then investigate language, resources, source networks and editorial priorities.

Identify reproduction and change

Journalism can repeat established categories, expose a neglected relationship or help an unfamiliar perspective acquire public standing. The inquiry follows which pattern occurs and under what conditions.

Social-system explanations can also cross national boundaries. Ownership networks, professional authority, markets and cultural forms may connect organisations located in different countries.

A mechanism links a condition with a decision and an outcome.

The model becomes most useful when its levels enter a connected explanation. Start with a pattern in content and follow the conditions and decisions that could have produced it.

Explain the link

Suppose the final waterlogging report foregrounds a municipal announcement. The diagram proposes one route: organised source access meets a short assignment and a familiar reporting routine.

To assess it, compare the supplied material with the report, establish the time available and ask how the reporter and editor made their choices. Examine alternative routes, including the possibility that the official announcement was the most consequential verified development.

One concept can appear at several levels

Stephen D. Reese’s 2001 article on the global journalist uses a levels-of-analysis approach to examine professionalism. It helps distinguish personal commitment from the practices and wider arrangements through which professional authority operates. Read the article ↓

Gatekeeping also crosses levels

Gatekeeping involves selection and shaping as information becomes a public message. A personal judgement, a standard threshold for publication, an editorial policy and a source’s access can each contribute.

Shoemaker and Timothy P. Vos’s Gatekeeping Theory (2009) develops gatekeeping through several levels of analysis. Use it to investigate decisions; use the hierarchy to locate and connect the influences on those decisions. Read the book ↓

Separate evidence from a plausible story

A mechanism is a proposed account of how a condition makes a difference. Build support by establishing time order, observing relevant decisions and comparing cases where the proposed condition varies.

A short report may reflect a deadline, an editorial assessment or limited verified material. Follow the evidence closely enough to distinguish these explanations.

Journalism occupies a space of competition and interdependence.

Field and network approaches help examine relationships that stretch across organisations. They direct attention to positions, resources, connections and struggles over authority.

Pierre Bourdieu’s field approach supplies an important vocabulary for studying journalism’s relationship with politics, markets and other forms of knowledge. His chapter in Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field (2005), edited by Rodney Benson and Erik Neveu, develops these questions across fields. Read the book record ↓

A field is a structured space of positions

Journalists and organisations occupy positions in relation to one another. They compete for attention, resources and recognition while sharing understandings of what counts as worthwhile work.

For an investigation, identify the relevant participants and what they value. A specialist publication and a general broadcaster may seek different audiences and forms of recognition while still responding to each other’s work.

Capital gives a position resources

Economic capital concerns financial resources. Cultural capital includes valued knowledge and competence. Professional recognition can give work symbolic authority: a reputation that makes a reporter’s account more likely to be taken seriously.

Ask how these resources operate in the case. A well-funded outlet may sustain a long investigation; an experienced specialist may recognise a problem others miss; a respected reporter may secure access to a difficult source.

Autonomy is relational

A field has relative autonomy when its own standards carry weight in decisions. Heteronomous pressures direct attention towards criteria coming from elsewhere, such as political demands or commercial performance.

Investigate the criteria used in a dispute. When editors defend a resource-intensive report, do they invoke verification, public consequence, professional recognition, audience demand or revenue? The answer helps locate the competing forms of authority.

Networks reveal connections across boundaries

A reporting project can connect a local journalist, a data specialist, a university researcher, a community organisation and a publisher. Map who supplies information, who verifies it, who decides what to publish and who controls distribution.

Reese and Shoemaker’s 2016 discussion brings levels of influence into conversation with such changing spaces of media work. A network map identifies connections; a levels perspective helps investigate the authority and resources operating through them.

Apply both approaches to the civic report

The reporter may have one organisational home while depending on contacts across several institutions. A collaboration could supply data that the newsroom lacks. A rival outlet’s investigation could alter the issue’s visibility and the pressure to follow it.

Trace these relationships through the work. Ask which connection changed access, which resource enabled verification and which participant retained the final decision.

Digital tools acquire influence through the practices built around them.

A newsroom’s publishing environment includes interfaces, analytics, distribution services and communication tools. Their influence becomes clearer when we follow how people use them and how organisations give their outputs authority.

Metrics make an audience visible in a particular way

C. W. Anderson’s 2011 study examines a tension between the audience imagined as active and creative and the audience rendered as measurable behaviour. It connects audience quantification with changing newsroom practices. Read the article ↓

Caitlin Petre’s All the News That’s Fit to Click (2021) studies the organisation of performance metrics in journalism. Her work directs attention to the people and arrangements through which measurement enters newsroom decisions. Read the book ↓

Ask which figures the desk sees, who interprets them and what decisions follow. Visits, time spent and subscriptions describe different relationships with the audience. Editorial use gives a number its practical role.

Distributed work changes the research setting

A freelancer may report from one place, an editor may work elsewhere and a platform may distribute the account. Define the participants and decisions involved before choosing where to observe.

Follow a story through communications, source material, edits and publication records, using access and consent appropriate to the project. The research setting can be a connected workflow spanning several sites.

Assess the contribution of the model

The model’s strength is that it keeps explanations from stopping too early. It connects an individual decision with the practices, resources and relationships around it. It also provides a common vocabulary for comparing otherwise different cases.

Questions that strengthen its use

Explain relationships as well as classify factors. A five-column inventory becomes a research argument when it shows how particular influences combine and what evidence supports the connection.

Examine variation within organisations and countries. Compare an investigative desk with a breaking-news shift, or a regional outlet with a national service. Their relationship to the wider setting may differ.

Attend to agency and change. Ask how journalists negotiate constraints, how organisations redesign routines and how publics create new reporting opportunities. These observations help explain both recurring patterns and departures from them.

Use the levels to explain a decision.

For each case, identify the content pattern, propose a mechanism and choose evidence that could assess it. Open the analysis after developing your own explanation.

Follow the model through my lecture.

In my lecture, Media Sociology: Hierarchy of Influences Model in Journalism, I explain the movement from individual newsworkers to routines, organisations, institutions and wider social systems. Watch with one news item beside you and locate the questions each level raises.

Watch my lecture on YouTube ↗

Pause and trace

Choose a source quotation from the news item. Identify what you can establish from the published text and what you would need to learn from the reporter, editor or source.

After watching, write a short explanation linking two levels. State one alternative explanation and the evidence that would help distinguish them.

Test the distinctions before applying the model.

Select an answer before opening its explanation. For each example, identify the relationship that makes the level relevant.

Turn a content pattern into a study of production.

Activity 1 · Build a five-level reporting profile

Choose a civic issue and a defined sample of coverage from one outlet. Record the period, search procedure and inclusion rules. Identify a pattern such as source diversity, follow-up, explanatory depth or the distribution of speaking roles.

1. Describe the pattern: show what appears in the sample using clear indicators and examples.
2. Map possible influences: formulate one question at each of the five levels.
3. Choose a connection: develop the most plausible mechanism linking two levels with the observed pattern.
4. Specify evidence: identify what observation, interviews, documents or comparison could assess it.
5. Assess alternatives: explain which competing account the proposed evidence could distinguish.

Suggested output: a 1,000–1,200-word analysis with a short sampling note, a content profile and a proposed follow-up study. Distinguish what the published material establishes from what remains a production hypothesis.

Activity 2 · Follow one editorial decision

With permission, interview a journalist or student editor about a specific recent assignment. Ask how it originated, which sources were available, how time was allocated, what changed during editing and what was published.

Draw a decision record with the evidence available at each point. Locate the influences, then explain one consequential choice. Include the participant’s reasoning and your assessment of the supporting material.

A qualitative design: follow the story

Research question: how do source access and newsroom routines shape the treatment of a recurring civic problem?

Observe assignments, source contacts and editing across a defined set of stories. Collect the supplied material and successive drafts where access permits. Interview reporters and editors about particular decisions. Compare these accounts with the published work.

Include a case that departs from the usual pattern. It may reveal the resources or intervention that allowed a different route. Protect confidential material and explain access arrangements in the research account.

A quantitative design: compare production conditions

Research question: is dedicated civic-reporting capacity associated with source diversity and sustained follow-up?

Define the outlets, period and kinds of report to compare. Measure staffing directly, code source categories consistently and identify follow-ups through a stated rule. Collect relevant information about medium, topic, resources and audience.

Reports from the same newsroom share conditions. Account for this dependence through a design and analysis suited to the data, such as a multilevel model where the number and structure of groups support it. Justify the sampling and assess uncertainty.

Interpret the comparison as an association unless the design supports a stronger causal claim. Interviews and observation can help investigate the mechanism connecting capacity with content.

Examination and seminar prompts

• Define media sociology and explain its contribution to the study of journalism.
• Explain the five levels using a single news example.
• Discuss how routines and organisational arrangements shape reporting.
• Show how sources and audiences enter a social-institutional explanation.
• Explain professionalism or gatekeeping across several levels.
• Assess the model’s contribution to research on platforms, metrics and distributed work.

Follow the decisions into the relationships behind them.

Key terms

Media sociology

The study of media production, institutions and practices in relation to social relationships, culture and power.

Sociology of news

Inquiry into the social organisation and conditions of journalistic production.

Hierarchy of Influences

A framework locating influences on media content at individual, routine, organisational, social-institutional and social-system levels.

Level of analysis

An analytical scale at which a proposed influence or relationship is examined.

Unit of analysis

The entity examined in a study, such as an item, journalist, newsroom or organisation.

Individual influence

A contribution associated with a particular communicator’s knowledge, experience, values, position or agency.

Role perception

A journalist’s understanding of the purposes and responsibilities of the job.

Agency

The capacity to act, make choices and intervene within particular conditions.

Routine

A recurring procedure or convention that organises media work.

Beat

A recurring reporting responsibility organised around a topic, place or institution.

News values

Judgements used to assess the relevance and reportability of occurrences or information.

Strategic ritual

A recognised procedure used to defend the legitimacy of work and manage occupational risks.

Organisational influence

A contribution arising through an entity’s policy, authority, resources or structure.

Editorial autonomy

The practical scope for editorial decisions to follow professional judgement within a setting.

Social control

Processes through which expectations and conformity are maintained in a group or organisation.

Social-institutional influence

Influence through relationships among journalism and other institutions, extending beyond one organisation.

Source access

The conditions under which a journalist can obtain information, documents, expertise or testimony.

News promotion

Purposeful activity seeking to make an occurrence or account publicly reportable.

Social-system influence

Influence associated with wider arrangements of power, culture and social order.

Ideology

Organised meanings and assumptions considered in relation to interests and power.

Hegemony

The organisation of leadership and consent through institutions and meanings that help sustain an order.

Field

A structured space of positions and struggles over valued resources and authority.

Economic capital

Financial resources that can support action and position.

Cultural capital

Valued knowledge and competence that can contribute to position and authority.

Symbolic authority

Recognised legitimacy that gives a person or account weight within a setting.

Relative autonomy

The degree to which a field’s own standards guide its practices amid external pressures.

Network

A set of relationships connecting participants, resources or activities.

Audience metrics

Measures of recorded audience behaviour used to make aspects of use visible.

Mechanism

A proposed process explaining how a condition contributes to an outcome.

Newsroom ethnography

Close study of newswork through observation and engagement with its participants.

Further reading

Begin with the model’s foundational texts, then select the studies closest to your research question. Read the classic newsroom accounts alongside work on networked production and metrics.

1. Shoemaker, P. J., & Mayfield, E. K. (1987). Building a theory of news content: A synthesis of current approaches (Journalism Monographs No. 103). Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. Read ↗Read an early synthesis of explanations of news content.
2. Shoemaker, P. J., & Reese, S. D. (1996). Mediating the message: Theories of influences on mass media content (2nd ed.). Longman. Read ↗Study the five levels in a foundational account.
3. Shoemaker, P. J., & Reese, S. D. (2014). Mediating the message in the 21st century: A media sociology perspective. Routledge. Read ↗Examine the framework in a changing media environment.
4. Reese, S. D., & Shoemaker, P. J. (2016). A media sociology for the networked public sphere: The Hierarchy of Influences model. Mass Communication and Society, 19(4), 389–410. Read ↗Connect levels of analysis with fields, networks and emerging spaces of media work.
5. Reese, S. D. (2001). Understanding the global journalist: A hierarchy-of-influences approach. Journalism Studies, 2(2), 173–187. Read ↗Investigate professionalism across several levels.
6. White, D. M. (1950). The “gate keeper”: A case study in the selection of news. Journalism Quarterly, 27(4), 383–390. Read ↗Read a classic study of selection decisions.
7. Breed, W. (1955). Social control in the newsroom: A functional analysis. Social Forces, 33(4), 326–335. Read ↗Examine how policy is learned and maintained in organisations.
8. Epstein, E. J. (1973). News from nowhere: Television and the news. Random House. Read ↗Explore the organisation of television news production.
9. Tuchman, G. (1972). Objectivity as strategic ritual: An examination of newsmen’s notions of objectivity. American Journal of Sociology, 77(4), 660–679. Read ↗Study the occupational role of recognised news procedures.
10. Tuchman, G. (1978). Making news: A study in the construction of reality. Free Press. Read ↗Follow the organisational work through which news takes shape.
11. Gans, H. J. (1979). Deciding what’s news: A study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time. Pantheon Books. Read ↗Examine news selection and values through newsroom research.
12. Fishman, M. (1980). Manufacturing the news. University of Texas Press. Read ↗Study routines, beats and organised sources of information.
13. Molotch, H., & Lester, M. (1974). News as purposive behavior: On the strategic use of routine events, accidents, and scandals. American Sociological Review, 39(1), 101–112. Read ↗Investigate purposeful activity in the creation of public events.
14. Gitlin, T. (1980). The whole world is watching: Mass media in the making & unmaking of the New Left. University of California Press. Read ↗Connect framing, social movements and wider power.
15. Schudson, M. (1989). The sociology of news production. Media, Culture & Society, 11(3), 263–282. Read ↗Review major explanations of the production of news.
16. Bourdieu, P. (2005). The political field, the social science field, and the journalistic field. In R. Benson & E. Neveu (Eds.), Bourdieu and the journalistic field (pp. 29–47). Polity. Read ↗Explore positions, resources and relations among fields.
17. Shoemaker, P. J., & Vos, T. P. (2009). Gatekeeping theory. Routledge. Read ↗Examine selection and shaping through several analytical levels.
18. Anderson, C. W. (2011). Between creative and quantified audiences: Web metrics and changing patterns of newswork in local US newsrooms. Journalism, 12(5), 550–566. Read ↗Investigate audience measurement and newsroom practices.
19. Petre, C. (2021). All the news that’s fit to click: How metrics are transforming the work of journalists. Princeton University Press. Read ↗Follow performance measures into organisational work.

My lecture: Media Sociology: Hierarchy of Influences Model in Journalism ↗

Six statements to retain

1. News takes shape through the work of people operating within social and institutional relationships.
2. The five levels organise questions about individual, routine, organisational, institutional and system influences.
3. A factor’s analytical location depends on the relationship being investigated.
4. Cross-level connections explain how a condition enters a decision and appears in content.
5. Fields and networks reveal positions and connections extending across organisational boundaries.
6. A convincing explanation requires evidence about the content, the proposed influence and the mechanism connecting them.