LETTERSFROMTHE EDITORS

Abstract

Trade magazines devoted to coverage of the changes and challenges facing the American journalism industry and the practitioners of its craft are vital resources for understanding journalism's terrain. However, scholars tend to prefer institutionalized qualitative and quantitative methods for the study of journalism, so these magazines—as windows into the field—have been underutilized as scholarly resources. Letters to editors of American Journalism Review, Columbia Journalism Review, and Editor & Publisher feature unique, monologic conversations involving a wide range of American journalism's laborers, profiteers, and consumers. The introduction of online publication and other forms of multimedia as valid journalism has afforded a cacophony of voices access to publication methods traditionally reserved for members of the commercial press. The implications of this change are reflected across a broad spectrum of the media landscape, including the letters pages used as data here. Deuze's (2005) model of professional journalism's occupational ideology is deployed here to provide a model for critical analysis of letters published in the magazines from 1998 to 2008. Ultimately, the letters suggest journalists’ ideological constraints have withstood many of the cultural and economic pressures of the past decade despite ample opportunities for growth and progressive change.

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