“If NPR doesn’t see this as a crisis, I don’t know what it’ll take”: How journalists use digital platforms to make industry critiques

This Research Notes piece explores how journalists use digital platforms to shift conversations about a single event into broader critiques about their industry. In this paper, we document this shift in the case of Audie Cornish’s departure from National Public Radio. We analyze a corpus of 7886 tweets related to her 2022 move from public radio to CNN. How did journalists respond to the event via digital platforms? And what prompted a shift to critical metajournalistic discourse? We find that alongside well wishes for Cornish as an individual, journalists in this context leveraged this individual event occurring within the industry space to call attention to a structural issue in the industry: an inability to retain journalists of color. This initial critical metadiscourse occurring on Twitter gained traction through a tweet by an insider with high cultural capital: Audie Cornish’s co host, Ari Shapiro. The industry critique angle got picked up by traditional news media outlets; it was further amplified by a larger group of journalists on social media. These journalists were then able to further nuance and complicate the issue of diversity and inclusion in the public radio by calling attention to the experiences of less prominent people of color in the industry. Analyzing this discourse offers a case of how critical metajournalistic discourse may emerge on digital platforms, get consolidated and legitimated through traditional news sources, and then get amplified and further nuanced through these same digital platforms.