Recentering News in Journalism Studies: A Response to Journalism Studies for Realists

Carlson and Peters’ call to decenter journalism in journalism studies is intended as a corrective to a scholarly literature whose preoccupation with the “newsroom” and journalism’s distinctive role in civic life limits the questions researchers ask. Their criticism is warranted; their solution, in my view, misses the mark. I argue that better explication, particularly a task-oriented approach focusing on what, exactly, we mean to study when we study “journalism” and “news,” offers a better corrective than decentering journalism altogether.