Journalists’ Role Conceptions and Choice of Official News Sources: Beyond Instrumental Rationality

A number of earlier studies have focused on how journalists’ conceptualise news ideas through their heavy reliance on official sources. These sources are judged as ‘rational’ through their location in large institutions – government or corporate. A fundamental logic that informs legitimacy of these sources is an emphasis on working within a routinised set of procedures. Journalists regularly judge sources as inside or outside of the world of ‘reasonable’ knowledge. Habermas in his celebrated work on communicative action outlines three types of reason: instrumental, ethical and aesthetic. These forms of rationality are appreciated in different components of modern life the systems world and lifeworld. For Habermas, these two worlds utilise different types of reasons. Bureaucracies, scientific activities and corporations are part of the systems world. The lifeworld, in contrast, is informed by social norms and ethical considerations. The new digital milieu has pushed traditional journalism to an area where news operations are much more responsive to their empowered and engaged audiences. This paper contends that in this new digital environment the officially sanctioned instrumental reason takes a backseat. This influences how stories and the stakes are constructed. This paper looks at the role of the lifeworld through online contacts to reveal the central values and epistemologies that inform journalistic choices and stories. This paper uses the theoretical paradigm of systems world and lifeworld to understand the motivations that drive the input for routinised media products of journalists. An online survey of 216 journalists, those with both print and electronic, based in the Indian cities of Delhi, Bhubaneswar and Kolkata, maps the usage of online resources and its influence on role perceptions and choice of sources. This paper hypothesises that the perception of journalists in a ‘disseminator’, ‘interpretative’ or ‘adversarial’ role impacts their choice of instrumental rationality or otherwise.