generating newsworthiness: the interpretive construction of public events

Generating Newsworthiness: The Interpretive Construction of Public EventsAuthor(s): Marilyn LesterSource: American Sociological Review, Vol. 45, No. 6 (Dec., 1980), pp. 984-994Published by: American Sociological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2094914 .

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GENERATING NEWSWORTHINESS: THE INTERPRETIVE CONSTRUCTION OF PUBLIC EVENTS*

MARILYN LESTER University of Nevada

American Sociological Review 1980, Vol. 45 (December):984-994

Everyday life is not organized a priori as discrete public events which can be simply mirrored by newsworkers. It does not differentiate itself into newsworthy events for reporting and publication. News is a product of reality-making activities and not simply reality-describing ones. A critical sociological task is to examine newsworkers' transformations of the everyday world into published or broadcasted events-as-stories (Molotch and Lester, 1974; Tuchman, 1972; 1973a; 1973b; 1976; Glascow University News Group, 1972; Cohen, 1972; Cohen and Young, 1973). This paper details one core aspect of this process, the routines newsworkers use to identify and display the newsworthy character of occurrences and events.1 Historically, newsworthiness has been viewed as a property of events in an external social order. Relying on primary and secondary data collected in several news organizations, an alternative conceptualization, consistent with basic tenets of ethnomethodology, is provided in this paper. Here, newsworthiness is an actively generated feature of events.

CASE MATERIALS

The principal data for this project were collected in 1972 while I was a participant observer at a large national and international newspaper, referred to as "The In- terpreter." Its owner is an international organization, referred to as "Organiza- tion," which is based in a major metropolitan area.

The major components of The In- terpreter are American News and Inter- national News. Each has an Editor and support staff in the newsroom while sub- ordinate Bureau Chiefs and reporters are geographically dispersed throughout the world. The local news bureau, here called "Regional Bureau," is officially part of American News.2 In conjunction with

great stipulations, I was assigned to Re- gional Bureau as an intern reporter. Apart from the practicality of focusing data col- lection there, it was observationally strategic in that it was the only bureau with a full complement of staff in the newsroom. Additional sources of data at The Interpreter included: the American News desk where I spent two weeks; outside the newsroom, tracking camera crews and both City Hall and Suburbs reporters on their work routines; the City in general-covering stories, conversing with news sources and newsworkers from other media; and attending official meetings of the whole Organization staff.

While there was variation in the type of materials collected at The Interpreter, a single case is insufficient for developing durable theory and specifying the conditions under which various features of a process occur and/or assume different forms (Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Bigus et al., 1978). Therefore, in the summer of 1974, further observations were collected in seven media organizations in a midwestern city: the only daily newspaper,

* Direct all correspondence to: Marilyn Lester; Department of Sociology; University of Nevada; 4505 Maryland Parkway; Las Vegas, Nevada 89154.

The Russell Sage Foundation assisted in the support of this project and obtained my entry into a major newspaper. I wish to thank Carolyn Mullins for her editorial assistance, Allen Grimshaw, Stuart C Hadden, Candace West, and several anonymous reviewers who read earlier versions of this paper and gave helpful comments.

I Throughout this paper I adopt Molotch and Lester's (1974:101-3) conceptual distinctions between happenings, occurrences, and events.

2 Officially the Regional Bureau Editor is dele- gated his authority by American News. In practice he operates semiautonomously. Regional Bureau has

control over its own pages in the Regional Edition of the paper, although some local stories are selected for publication in other regional editions, in which case the American News Editor has control of the Ptorv-

984



GENERATING NEWSWORTHINESS 985

the University News Bureau, an "alternative" weekly paper, two AM radio sta- tions, one FM radio station, and a local television station.

A third source of data is used: other sociologists' ethnographic descriptions and analyses of newswork routines, par- ticularly the work of Tuchman (1972; 1973a; 1973b; 1974; 1976).

TRADITIONS IN THE STUDY OF

NEWSWORTHINESS

Newsworkers view their work in terms of selecting the most important events, and portraying those in an interesting and informative way. Journalists' conceptions are paralleled by the dominant sociological perspective-gatekeeping (cf. White, 1950; Gieber, 1956; Carter, 1959; Schramm, 1960; Buckalew, 1974; Harless, 1974; Janowitz, 1975; Whitlow, 1977)3- which suggests that events are suc- cessively filtered through a set of news gates. Official and unofficial (but, nonetheless, literal) values, norms, and rules constitute a template against which events sui generis and stories portraying those events are measured for their newsworthy character. A number of scholars (Halloran et al., 1970; Glasgow University News Group, 1972; Cohen and Young, 1973; Galtung, 1973; Hall, 1973a; 1973b; Phillips, 1973; Young, 1973) have mod- ified this perspective by showing that political ideologies and historical circum- stances form an inferential structure for selecting and interpreting events.

However, in both its limited and broader forms, gatekeeping is a substantive application of a paradigm which views social action as primarily deriving from actors' orientation to, internalization of, and enactment of values, norms, and rules (see Wilson, 1970; Wieder, 1974). To be

more than merely sensitizing-that is, to be empirically accurate and logically ade- quate, the "news gates" must be clearly identifiable and available for literal description in the career of an event. Moreover, their meaning and applicability would have to be specifiable prior to use as a template for gauging newsworthiness.4

If these conditions are not met, a core variable other than gatekeeping is re- quired to explain the process by which journalists identify the newsworthy character of occurrences, events, and stories. My research points to the availability of such an alternative: an ethnomethodological perspective on the process of identifying and displaying newsworthiness which I term "generating newsworthiness."

GENERATING NEWSWORTHINESS

Talk about newsworthiness is a com- monplace newsroom activity. From newsworkers' and gatekeeping theorists' standpoints, such talk merely reports on or reflects social reality.

However, when the talk-world dichotomy is analytically suspended, an alternative perspective is made available to the sociologist.5 Accounts of newsworthiness do not present reality; rather, they forge it. They are one crucial set of practices for managing newswork routines.

Articulating particular occurrences, events, and stories with accounts of newsworthiness is not a literal application of a priori rules or news norms to specific situations. Whatever the inherent structures of occurrences might be, what they will have come to as newsworthy events are socially and situationally organized. Generating newsworthiness is a reflexive process whereby: (1) accounts of newsworthiness organize and give meaning to occurrences as events and stories;

I In fact, the central concern of sociologists since World War II had not been with newswork processes at all but, rather, with either the content of media or the consequences thereof. It is quite possible that the fundamentally ambiguous-and even conflicting- findings about media bias and effects are due to a flawed (or at least highly oversimplified) view of news production (see Shibutani, 1966:130, 169). Es- sentially an input-output conception (cf. Lasswell, 1971; Wright, 1959) has operated in the majority of research.

4 Wieder (1974) discusses similar analytic requirements for behavior in general to be viewed as rule-governed.

5 For important discussions of the distinction between topic and resource, see Garfinkel (1967), Zimmerman and Pollner (1970), and Hadden and Lester (1976).



986 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

(2) accounts of occurrences, events, and stories elaborate the meaning of accounts of newsworthiness; and (3) the preceding items (1) and (2) are used to display newsworkers' professional and rational methods for doing their work.

Generating newsworthiness is always grounded in some particular news project. So, as practical projects change, so do the form, content, meaning, and practical consequences of accounts of newsworthiness. Moreover, when newsworkers gen- erate competing accounts of newsworthiness, they are not, in fact, constructing competing accounts of the selfsame social object. The following excerpt from field notes (Lester, 1974) at The Interpreter is one example:

(I) In the first week of my research, I was asked to cover a protest against the Vietnam War staged by school teachers at the site of local war industries. The story was written as an "interpretive" article where the particular occurrence illustrated a basic change from a student-centered national movement to local-centered protest by nonstudents. When the story was completed and scanned by the Editor, herein called "Rex," he took me and my story to the People Reporter (a news "beat" within Regional Bureau) who usually does most of the "protest reporting." She said The Interpreter had done several pieces on the war. What I should do, she said, was focus on the question, "What is business's response to war protesters?" Then she said there already were articles which reported change in the protest movement-its decline. I claimed we were talking about two different kinds of change. Rex told her that material about business belonged in a separate article, that this story deals with the meaning attached to the protest by the protesters themselves.

Rex's initial project, informing the People Reporter about a story he per- ceived to lie in her area, faded when seemingly incompatible accounts of newsworthiness were employed. In so doing, the newsworkers actually created multiple events6 (for example, declining

protests, transformation in protest form, the subjective meaning of protest).

Organizational Variation in Generating Newsworthiness

Accounts of newsworthiness constitute a dominant focus for newsroom interaction and are central to an explanation of newswork routines at The Interpreter. Yet, they are not detailed in other research on newsmaking processes. Instead of simply assuming oversight by others, I compared others' ethnographic descriptions of research sites and published reports with my own data to discern the organizational features and/or newsworker orientations which might constitute conditions under which generating newsworthiness is a central newsroom routine.

I found two patterns in the relationship between organizational features sur- rounding newswork and the general way in which generating newsworthiness occurs, displayed in Tables 1 and 2.

At issue in this comparison is not whether generating newsworthiness occurs but where it occurs as a routine in- teractional focus-that is, "on the beat" vs. "in the newsroom." For personnel working in media organizations oriented to break occurrences, accounts of newsworthiness are constructed routinely among those sharing a beat and in the newsroom only where particular cases are typified as problematic. At other times, with an orientation to "quickening urgence," workers identify their paper simply as "a newspaper," "a paper of record," "we cover important and interesting events"; or they categorize occurrences as certain types of events-for example, "hard," " 'soft," "developing'' news, etc. (Tuchman, 1973a). When such categories

6 That competing accounts proffer different social objects is not unique to newswork. Pollner (1970; 1974a), for example, examined how traffic court judges adjudicate accounts of District -Attorneys, police, and defendants. The adjudication process constitutes the seen-but-unnoticed procedures through which mundane inquiry's commitment to

"objective reality" is displayed and sustained. Similarly, Bittner (1967), Cicourel (1968), Zimmer- man (1970a; 1970b) and Wieder (1974) point to a similar property of accounts in their respective analyses of how police on Skid Row, probation workers, welfare agency personnel, and residents and staff of a halfway house attend to, and make sense of, apparent contradictions in their rule use, and thereby simultaneously provide for their competent (for example, rule-governed) performances "for all practical purposes."




Table 1. News Media Organized to Cover Breaking Occurrences

Organizational Feature News Orientation 1. Paper oriented to supplying news on breaking 1. Principally identifies itself as supplier of met-

events (Tuchman, 1973a). ropolitan news. What counts as news is not made routinely

problematic. 2. A majority of the paper is devoted to metropoli- 2. Reporters spend relatively little time on each

tan news. story. Reporters write at least one, often several "Quickening urgence" is the orientation to

stories per day. newswork (Tuchman, 1973a). Occurrences are typified on the basis of the

need to manage the flow of work, in particular, to manage occurrences that are "specifically unforeseen." Newsworkers typify and distinguish "hard news," "spot news," "soft news," "continuing news," and "developing news."

3. Reporters have fixed "beats"-e.g., City Hall, 3. The beat location is the primary site for Police. Some of these are subdivided into even generating accounts of newsworthiness. more specific beats. Accounts of newsworthiness are routinely

Reporters spend most of their time at the lo- produced as an interorganizational cation of their beats. activity-i.e., among those sharing a beat.

Reporters from ostensibly competing media In the newsroom, generating newsworthiness who share a beat spend both professional occurs when a particular case is typified as and informal time together. problematic.

are assumed to have shared meaning, they are constantly available as a general gloss of newsworthiness to manage the flow of work. However, Garfinkel (1967), Zim- merman (1970a; 1970b), Cicourel (1974), Wieder (1974), and Hadden and Lester (1979) have shown that people in the world of daily life (including reporters and editors) perform cognitive and interac- tional work to sustain and display the sense, "I know what that (for example, an identification of newsworthiness) means" so that a specifically vague account is allowed to stand without notice or breaching while other practical projects are undertaken (for example, working on the beat, generating newsworthiness with reporters sharing a beat).

The orientation to quickening urgence is not the organizational basis forInterpreter newswork. Newsroom personnel did not use the same typifying scheme as did Tuchman's subjects for carving the world of occurrences into newsworthy and nonnewsworthy events, which contravenes any generic status for her (Tuchman, 1973a) conceptualization of newsworkers' typifications of news. Generating newsworthiness occurs routinely as an intra organizational activity. Glosses of news-

worthiness are replaced by the interac- tional production and display of newsworthiness at multiple points in news production. Instead of hard vs. soft news, etc., the issues related to identifying newsworthy and nonnewsworthy occurrences-as-events and stories are of the sort: "What, in general, should we be looking at?" "Is it newsworthy?" "What kind of coverage should be given?" and "How can we make this story different from other media' accounts and meaningful to the reader?"

One indicator of this variation is that several staff moving to The Interpreter from metropolitan media encountered dif- ficulty in changing their work routines with regard to the specific organizational features described. A second source of verification of the different loci for generating newsworthiness comes from data (collected in other media organizations) which turn out to lie between the two ideal types depicted.

FRAMING THE ORGANIZATION, NEWS

NORMS, AND STORIES

Generating newsworthiness can take three different forms: (1) Framing the




Table 2. The Interpreter: An Example of a Multifocused News Media

Organizational Feature News Orientation 1. Stories on breaking occurrences typically appear

at least one day later than in newspapers organized to cover breaking events.

2. A maximum of two pages of the Regional Edi- tion of the paper is devoted to regional news, most of which is City-related.

Reporters write no more than three stories per week.

3. "Beats" are generalized roles7 (e.g., Environ- ment, People, Suburbs) which change with In- terpreter and Organization goals, personnel, and current news themes. The only conven- tional beat is City Hall, to which one reporter is assigned.

Reporters spend much of their time in the newsroom.

Due to the features outlined above, reporters have no counterpart in other media organizations and eschew such contact.

1. No one definition of the newspaper's function pervades.

What counts as news is made routinely problematic. The "real status" and "real meaning" of the paper, news, and newsworthiness are identified in different ways on different occasions.

2. Reporters spend a lot of time on each story- finding topics, discussing details with col- leagues, etc.

The newsroom has an ambience of casual- ness; "quickening urgence" is rarely an orientation.

No one typifying scheme is used by workers to manage the flow of work.

3. The newsroom is the primary site for generating accounts of newsworthiness.

Generating newsworthiness occurs as an intraorganizational activity.

Interpreter personnel are consistently available to each other for, and are oriented to, identifying and displaying newsworthiness as a routine feature of newswork.

Organization, (2) Framing News Norms, and (3) Framing Stories. Each form can be readily identified as an in- teractional focus in specific situations and each has distinct consequences for newswork.

Framing the Organization

Tables 1 and 2 show that organizational features and organizational context-as defined and accounted for by members of news organizations8-make a crucial difference in the news process. As such, persons' accounts of organization are an important component of generating newsworthiness.

These organizational accounts which I term "framing the organization" may, in a

direct way, socially organize and give meaning to occurrences (for example, as newsworthy events or not) as well as assemble their specific features (for example, what will be taken as features of occurrences and their ordering into a coherent pattern). As such, this form of generating newsworthiness is integral to newswork-in fact, occurring within the stream of ongoing newswork activities. The following excerpt (Lester, 1972) illustrates this relationship between accounts of organization and newsworthy occurrences.

(II) During a portion of weekly Regional Bureau staff meetings, methods for covering various occurrences are discussed. In one such session, the topic of water fluoridation arose which one reporter then abruptly closed: "The [Organization's] interest in fluoridation is declining.... The people be- hind antifluoridation are crazy. . . . I don't want to get involved. . The arguments are extreme."

Here, framing the organization is used as an embedded interpretive device for making sense of an occurrence. Recipro- cally, the account of the occurrence elabo-

7 Hughes (1940) shows that specialized feature topics are also carved out as beats in metropolitan newspapers. The difference is that these were the primary type of role at The Interpreter.

8 More generally, Bittner (1965) suggests that a person's "concept of organization" is used as an embedded organizational resource to manage work routines.




rates the meaning of the organization as formulated.

On other occasions the connection between framing the organization and the very practical routines for putting out the paper are more opaque. Accounts of organization often serve as a reminder to one's self about the status and meaning of otherwise "seen but unnoticed" newswork practices. Only upon such a reflec- tive glance, entailing a shift of attention from the immediate practical task at hand, are social actions (for example, newswork strategies; either meaningful or discern- ible as a series of discrete activities (cf. Schutz, 1962). The next illustration (Les- ter, 1974) comes from the alternative newspaper in a midwestern city. In this case, a concept of organization in terms of intended readers is used to "make sense" of particular newswork strategies:

(III) "We appeal to people in and around the University rather than to the general townspeople or to just students exclusively. ... We appeal to students who aren't into all the campus activities. . . . The main thing that we do that is different is that we spend more time researching topics and more hours with the people we're writing about. Most papers don't have the time to get the real facts. ... We usually do more than inter- view and try to follow a scene all the way through to find out what's actually happening."

Finally, framing the organization may occur outside any specific newswork situation and function to identify or formulate the organization per se. The illustration (IV), following, comes from field notes (Lester, 1972) taken at a formal meeting of all Organization workers (that is, In- terpreter and all other Organization personnel).

(IV) The Editor of The Interpreter spoke first. He said the paper as a whole including the editorial pages has a concern with healing: "If you could see a theme, it would be a responsiveness to good." Then he said the goal of [The Interpreter] was problem solv- ing. He noted three phases in journalism: "(1) fact reporting, (2) interpretive reporting, and (3) what to do about the situation. And [The Interpreter] has led the last two phases of journalism." Another speaker was the Syndication Editor who selects Interpreter stories for sale to other subscribing media.

He said the syndication activity is a "mission mandated by [the Founder of Organ- ization] by virtue that [Founder] said...."

Three distinct concepts of organization are provided: having a healing effect, leading the last two phases of Journalism, and syndication being an organizational mission. Each account offers a scheme of interpretation for understanding one's everyday activities and each elaborates the meaning of the others.

One additional feature of this form of generating newsworthiness is also frequently present, either explicitly or implicitly-subjective evaluation of the organization. The illustrations above could imply that framing the organization consists solely in accounts which proffer the "good sense of what we do." Though not occurring frequently in the data, there can, of course, be negative organizational accounts which have the same formal structure and practical consequences as other accounts, varying only in content.

Framing News Norms

Framing news norms is the situated identification and display of news criteria. Accounts of news norms are rules-in-use. They inform the organization of, and give meaning to, the situation at hand (for example, producing stories at some point or providing for the competent character of a particular newswork strategy, etc.). At the same time, the situation as attended to elaborates the news norm. An excerpt from field notes (Lester, 1972) taken at The Interpreter illustrates:

(V) The Clerk for Regional Bureau typically assembles one part of the Regional Pages-a relatively large "box"9 containing both original short articles and rewritten wire service material. While doing this one afternoon, she looked up and said, "You throw away car crashes, murders, throw away anything that has a really negative tone-like fires, accidents, things like that." At this point, Rex interrupted: "Some things can be newsworthy. Keep the sensationally nega-

9 A "box" is a story set off on the page by enclos- ing the entire story or stories within 4 bordering lines.




tive. When in doubt, you throw it to the Editor." While Rex went back to his work, the Clerk's conversation continued: "I throw the majority out. Certain times when I'm not sure, I save it and show it to the Editor."

In excerpt (V), the Clerk frames a news norm for doing one part of the local sec- tion of the paper-for example, throw away anything that has a negative tone. Neither she nor anyone else ever supplied a more specific set of criteria for gauging "negativism" (or any other news norm for that matter). Rather, we find her bringing substantive examples of the phenomenon ("fires, accidents, things like that")-to bear on the essence of the norm. Such examples do not merely illustrate a preestablished or clearly specified news norm. As a routine property of this form of generating newsworthiness, they are devices used by speaker and hearer to extract the situated essence-the sub- stance, applicability and meaning-of the news norm in a particular situation. And, reflexively, the news norm as formulated identifies the situated essence of the examples--for example, fires are here as- sembled as instances of negativism. (Fires can also be attended to as instances of other kinds of occurrences.) The reflexive tie between accounts of news norms and examples provides persons with a resource to perform needed ''ad hocing" work (Garfinkel, 1967:20-34), filling in unstated, but assumed, meaning that each can use to provide the sense, "we under- stand what newsworthiness is-for the time being."

A further analytic feature is illustrated in (V) above, the essential incompleteness of all news norm accounts. Rex appar- ently sensed the incompleteness and possible misunderstanding of the Clerk's first account of negativism, and he attempted to repair the situation ("Keep the sensationally negative.") However, this ''exception" to the rule renders it no more a "'news gate" than before, for it is itself specifically vague. As a repair, it sufficed only for the moment. Subsequently, the Clerk uses the Editor's "exception" as her resource to extend and, from her standpoint, to repair the previous formulation-for all practical

purposes-for example, to display her competence as a newsworker, as well as to provide practical understanding for me. However, there can never be enough elaboration for the news norm to be- come a literal description of newsworthiness-that is, to clear up its indexical or context-sensitive nature (see Garfinkel, 1967:4-7). In none of these data is there a bottom-line, once-and-for- all framing of any news norm, only for- mulations that manage the practical cir- cumstances at hand.

The reflexive pairing of news norm and examples is one method persons use to identify and display newsworthiness. A second method uses persons' accounts of the good and sensible "reasons" for a news norm. The following is illustrative:

(VI) In a conversation (Lester, 1972) with Rex, he said reporters look for "an angle" or "a different context" for their reports.10 That is, they have to "make the story relevant" because of the "time problem" (see Table 2: Organizational Feature, part 1). I asked him if he thought he missed important stories because of the time lapse between the occurrence and publication of stories. He said, "Yes," and immediately provided an example: "George Wallace was shot about 3:30 on a Monday afternoon. A small box was written by 4 p.m. The next day there appeared 'interpretive stories.' "

First, a general news norm is offered. Then, Rex details the reasonableness of the norm: structural contingencies inhibit timely coverage of breaking events. Gen- erally, the data suggest accounts of structural contingencies to be a common type of "reason" offered for a news norm along with accounts of events in which values and personal tastes are imputed to both consumers and news organizations (in excerpt III, quoted earlier). It may appear that these reasons are merely jus- tifying statements as described by Mills (1940) and Scott and Lyman (1968). While

10 "Making a story relevant" by "finding an angle" was an important news norm. In the absence of an alternative to focusing solely on hard news or "breaking events," a more serious trouble in self- identification as a news organization would result: old news is no news. Finding an angle is used as a practical, though fundamentally interpretive, solu- tion to that quandary.




they may justify news norms, they are also important for newsworkers' identification and display of the essential meaning and practical uses of the news norm. When disparate accounts of "reasons" are provided, the content, meaning, and uses of a news norm are fundamentally different.

As an empirically and logically related matter, if the "same" occurrence is depicted through different news norms, multiple public events are thereby made available. For example, Rex did not frame the "negativism" in the assassination attempt on Mr. Wallace in case (VI) above. Rather, these occurrences were used to render the meaning of a different news norm (that is, "finding an angle"). As an observer, however, I saw potential con- tradiction with the "negativism rule" and questioned the Clerk (who had been present during the interaction in [VI] above:)

(VII) He said, "[The Interpreter] doesn't cover negative things." I raised the point of the assassination attempt on Mr. Wallace. He said, "Yes, that got covered, but in the context of gun control" (emphasis added).

At this point, the Clerk totally reframes the occurrence and how it was covered-that is, the occurrence is now an event documenting the need for stricter gun control. In effect, his account neu- tralized a reasonable observation of con- tradiction and created consistency between the news norm (negativism) and a possible violation.

Framing news norms has analytic consequences, as well as practical effects, for any conception of newsmaking. A simple gatekeeping perspective requires, first, that rules be specifiable prior to their use as a template to gauge newsworthiness and, second, that rule application be fundamentally independent of the situations being attended to under the rubric of any particular rule. My data suggest that these requirements are not met empirically, nor can they be met. Occurrences are not pre- packaged "out there" and then selected by a finite and literal set of news norms. Nor is framing news norms just an inter- mediary stage or "gate" in newswork: (1) here's the world of occurrences, (2) here's the news norms, and (3) here's the final

events-for-reporting. Rather, this process essentially provides embedded in- structions (see Wieder, 1974) for socially organizing and giving meaning to newswork strategies as well as to occurrences, events, and stories.

Framing Stories

The focus of framing the organization and framing news norms is the situated construction and use of schemes of interpretation for managing newswork. Comple- menting that focus, framing stories in- volves the use of accounts of newsworthiness to render particular occurrences as public events. As such, this form of the process has a thoroughly practical orientation.

Framing stories includes accounts which assemble the overall newsworthy character of particular occurrences. Or a newsworker may show how an occurrence is not a newsworthy event and will not result in a good story. These types of accounts are illustrated in excerpts (VIII) and (IX) (Lester, 1972):

(VIII) The Clerk for Regional Bureau had been assigned to write a "wrap up" (summary) of college commencement exercises. He looked up at Rex and me at one point and initiated a conversation: Clerk: Commencements are so boring. Rex: Maybe work out a "box," what speakers are saying. Clerk: I don't think there's any common thing as far as I can see.

(IX) The Suburbs Reporter came over to Rex's desk: "I don't think I have a story here. The City always rejects bonds for new schools."

Without knowing "the facts," Rex identified commencement exercises as one coherent event-for-reporting in (VIII) above. With an alternative account of newsworthiness, there may have been several separate stories. Or, without this interaction, there would have been no story since the Clerk identified commencements as "boring" -that is, nonnewsworthy. Each account frames ''commencements" into a different pat- terned event-for-reporting-or nonpattern (that is, no "common thing") as in the Clerk's second account proffering the ab-




sence of a newsworthy story. However, when an account of some occurrence proffers too much typicality, it becomes nonnews. This occurs in excerpt (IX) where the rejection of a school bond ini- tiative is seen as "just" an instance of a type which "everyone already knows" (see Schutz, 1962:3-34).

Framing stories is not a literal description of occurrences. Rather, it is an interpretive device for actually assembling the essence of the occurrence, as well as the written depictions thereof, as the next two excerpts (Lester, 1972) show.

(X) Rex and a reporter had been talking about a state official vetoing a City redevelopment project. The reporter had talked about his plan to cover "both sides" (that is, State vs. City). Rex responded: Rex: I'm concerned with the whole philosophy of urban renewal, that what we're doing is leasing large parts of the city to large financiers. Reporter: Urban renewal is concerned with rebuilding the City.... This is the best Model Cities Program in the country. Maybe on a national level it should be looked at. Rex: When are you going to do it?

(XI) During a Regional Bureau staff meeting several topics had been discussed. Then, Rex said he had two series he wanted done. One involved a five-part series on urban renewal. He said that [City] could be used as case-in-point and he expected American News to pick up the stories and carry them as well. He assigned various reporters to the five parts. (The discussion of the second series then commenced in a similar form, not shown here.)

In (X), the reporter begins by treating the State's rejection of a renewal project as a singular event. Rex then reframes the event: treat "this case" as part of a broad public issue ("I'm concerned with the whole philosophy of urban renewal...). The reporter offers an alternative account: City redevelopment is sound, but it may be a problem on a national level. Since the Editor did not deny the newsworthy character of the rejection of the City project, the alternative accounts were allowed to pass at this point. However, in (XI), Rex presents an elaboration of his previous event and story framing: City urban renewal typifies a national problem. He suggested a series with

five major aspects to be covered. For- mulating a series is a particular interpretive method by which otherwise discrete events (which could be reported as such) are transformed into a gestalt. 1 I However, this particular account of newsworthiness is no more a literal or objective interpretation of "what's really happening" than other substantive organizing principles. In this case, (XI) for example, the American News Editor attended to the stories as isolated news reports about City rather than the City program as "a typical case." Consequently, the stories remained on the local pages of the paper's local edition.

Finally, generating newsworthiness often consists of retrospective interpreta- tions of how an occurrence or written de- piction was managed "after all" by reporters, editors, copyreaders, and other technical staff. What was "finally" done with a story is used as an interpretive scheme by newsworkers to identify their own competence, treatment of their work by other staff, etc. Here is one kind of example.

(XII) A reporter had written a story about a program sponsored by the federal govern- ment in which people are trained to be bus drivers and bus boys, etc. His original lead to the story criticized the effects of the program-for example, so few got perma- nent jobs. The American News Editor (who selected the local story for national distribu- tion) added a paragraph early in the story to the effect that there were "good things" about the program too. The reporter said that the American News Editor had misused his discretion by adding a paragraph "without the facts."

SUMMARY

This paper applied principal tenets of ethnomethodology to extend sociological

1 I Framing series is not unique to The Interpreter. There is an analogue to this interpretive strategy. Fishman (1978) has done a thorough empirical study of crime waves as the news media's structuring of otherwise discrete occurrences. Here, media personnel not only treat particular occurrences as instances of a news theme, but proffering a theme is a scheme of interpretation for actively searching for instances-that is, occurrences as public events. The structuring and use of news themes is also discussed at length by Halloran et al. (1970), the Glasgow Uni- versity News Group (1972), Cohen (1972) and Cohen and Young (1973).




understanding of a crucial part of the news process-that is, how occurrences be- come newsworthy events and stories. The ethnomethodological perspective is an alternative to the more structural expla- nations of the news process, especially as found in gatekeeping studies. Various facets of the news process are dependent on newsworker interaction to construct and interpret news criteria and the occurrences such criteria help to render.

Importance and interest are not en- demic properties of occurrences, events, or even completed stories. The rules gov- erning newswork are not simply given and available, but actually constructed, inter- preted, and elaborated upon in the actual settings of newswork. Reflexively, through the process of generating newsworthiness, occurrences and events are framed in terms of their constituent features, meanings, and consequences. As well, accounts of newsworthiness render newsworkers' own work routines as rational, sensible, and competent. Finally, it has been shown that generating newsworthiness has a direct bearing on what appears or fails to appear in the newspaper.

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generating newsworthiness: the interpretive construction of public events

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