The Complex Core: Perspectives on Journalistic Knowledge and Higher

Education

If political theory and political science have, since Hobbes, approached authority by

asking the question, “by what right does the sovereign exercise its rule over politically free

subjects” we can rephrase this question by asking “by what right do institutions of

communication exercise their power to speak on behalf of, and in lieu of, communicatively free

subjects, i.e., subjects who can, ideally, speak for themselves? Having posed our questions (who

in journalism has authority? why do they have it? do they deserve it?) and defined our terms

(such authority is the right to speak on behalf of others, or, in James Carey’s words, to

legitimately exercise “a special skill in the manipulation of symbols … to translate the attitudes,

knowledge, and concerns of one speech community into alternative but suasive and

understandable terms for another community” [Carey 1997, 128]) we can now begin to structure

our main argument. Following political theorist R.P. Wolff, our questions can be approached

normatively—when, if at all, is journalistic authority legitimate? -- or empirically—how is such

legitimacy constructed? I want to spend the majority of the rest of this paper addressing the

empirical questions before returning, briefly, to normative questions in my conclusion.

Empirically, a researcher can take two possible paths when analyzing the means by which

authority is constructed. One can view authority as something granted: by subjects, in the case of

sovereign authority, or by the audience, in the case of journalism. Journalistic authority can be

viewed for instance, as people’s levels of trust in the media, the degree to which they accept

journalistic claims to objectivity, autonomy, or professionalism, for instance. Alternately,

authority can be seen as a structural construct that emerges, in part, out of the organization of and

competition between various social groups. Under this mode of analysis, journalistic authority
operates largely independently of the audience and is created, lost, or sustained on an

organizational and structural level. The construction of a profession, for instance, can be seen as

a group driven codification of authority that operates largely independently of the wishes or

beliefs of those outside either the profession itself or other key social institutions.

Obviously, any ideal social theory of authority would take both perspectives into account.

As social research entails making conceptual choices, however, I believe that any analysis that

primarily grounds its analysis of journalistic authority on the opinion of “the audience” is

doomed-- at best, to failure, and at worst to a shallow kind of success. It would be just as foolish

to base our analysis of journalistic authority on the variable fluctuations of audience analysis as it

would to attribute public authority to fluctuations public opinion. More is at stake here.

If journalistic authority should thus be seen as a structural construct that emerges out of

the organization of and competition between various social groups, what more can be said about

it? Actually, quite a great deal. Various strands of scholarship have probed the justification and

extent of expertise and authority. The sociology of the professions has, since the 1970’s,

examined the means by which occupational groups achieve their unique professional status. In

the most recent modification to classic professionalization theory, Andrew Abbott of the

University of Chicago argues that professions emerge out of a competitive, systemic

environment in which a successful “jurisdictional claim” links abstract knowledge to

professional work (Abbott 1988). In the field of journalism studies, Wilson Lowrey has adapted

this claim to study the relationship between journalism and blogging. Barbie Zelizer, following

the lead of sociologist Thomas Gieryn, argues in Covering the Body that journalistic authority is

the product of rhetorically created and legitimized boundary construction. Zelizer claims, in

Covering the Body and elsewhere, that journalists use narrative to strengthen their position as an
“authoritative interpretive community,” using narrative to both consolidate their “truth-telling”

position vis-à-vis other interpretive groups and to maintain internal group coherence. Other

theorists, following the lead of Pierre Bourdieu and drawing on concepts like capital, habitus,

and, field, have mapped the various relational domains of knowledge, power, and authority that

they argue make up the social world (among them what has been called the “journalistic field.”1)

A final set of theorists, including Eyal, Fournier, and Larson, have emphasized the distinction

between “experts” and “expertise,” contending it is not enough to see the seizure of a field of

expert jurisdiction as solely constitutive of the expert; rather, fields of expertise themselves must

be partially created through discourse, education, and the alignment of networks (Eyal 2005).

Despite the differences in these various perspectives, all four theories view authority as

emerging out of the struggles between various groups. Consequentially, all three see the creation

and reinforcement of group boundaries—who is “inside” and who “outside” the group-- as a key

factor in determining the maintenance of authority. All of them, finally, focus on the importance

of expertise in the creation of authority.

In plumbing the creation, maintenance, and struggle over journalistic authority, I have

sought to fuse the most useful aspect of the arguments above into a coherent theoretical lens.

From the sociologists of the professions, I salvage the notion that authority is a structural,

occupationally based construct. From Abbott, I take the argument that, rather studying

“professionalization” as a general, group defined phenomenon moving towards a steady state, it

is better to begin with a focus on work and the manner in which groups seize “jurisdiction”

through the linkage of work and abstract knowledge. Following Bourdieu, I modify Abbott’s

“system-based” concept of the ecology of the professions, replacing it with a more relationally

1
For instance, see Rodney Benson and Erik Neveu, Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field. (New York, NY: Polity
Press, 2005)
defined understanding of the “field of forces” that make up social space. Along with Larson and

Abbott, I focus on the importance of expertise-- "it is less productive to work towards a general

theory of professions than it is to think of questions which go beyond the professions,” says

Larson, “and address the larger and more important theme of construction and social

consequences of expert knowledge. Finally, like many of a the authors mentioned above, I argue

that fields of expertise are created as much by professional education, discourse, and the

establishment of boundaries via a process of actor-network alignment as they are already

established domains which exist, so to speak, to be seized by those who want them.

In sum: occupational authority rests on the formalization of various forms of professional

expertise; at the same time, its possession is highly dependent on the drawing of boundary lines

and the creation of border zones. The first point refers to the manner in which expertise itself is

negotiated, the second point, to the process by which various groups seek to define themselves as

experts, i.e., “seize professional jurisdiction,” or place themselves on a certain side of the inside-

outside boundary. We are distinguishing here, following Eyal, between “experts” (relationally

defined social groups) and “expertise” (what these groups want to say they have). At the same

time, both these processes occur at various places within the “fields of force” that make up the

terrain of the struggle over authority (Eyal 2005). For the sake of time, let me simply distinguish

now between a process of boundary creation that occurs both at the center and at the margins of

the professional field, as well as a discursive and network-alignment process of expertise

construction that also occurs at the periphery and within the core. In reality, the struggles of

experts and the negotiation of expertise may be indistinguishable. More empirically distinct, on

the other hand, may be those processes that occur at the center versus those that occur on the

periphery.
 Knowledge, Expertise, and Journalism Education

Now, all of this has been highly abstract, so let me begin to tie my theoretical argument

into a more specific point about the creation and maintenance of occupational authority. Before

plunging headlong into a discussion of journalism, it might be useful, for comparison’s sake, to

briefly treat a more classic example of an authoritative profession—the legal profession. At the

core of the legal profession lies an educational process, as well as a form of certification that

occurs through the granting of the Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree, as well as through the more formal

mechanism of bar certification. At the core of the law, in other words, we see both the creation

and negotiation of legal “expertise” (defined rhetorically through educational curricula and

culturally through training in a certain style or mode of thought) as well as the erection of a

boundary line between “lawyers” and “non-lawyers” (i.e., those without the necessary degrees).

Less noticeably in the law, however, a similar process also occurs on the fringes of the

profession. The very “acting out” of legal knowledge in day-to-day work, far from both the

classroom and the bar examiners office, itself helps define legal expertise. At the same time, the

relationship between lawyers and various “non-core” occupational groups—between lawyers and

paralegals; corporate accountants and transactional attorneys; legal professionals and other

experts of various kinds (for example, so-called expert witnesses); and, increasingly, between

“firm” and “contract” attorneys (in effect, legal temp work) help make the border-line between

the inside and the outside of the profession less a sharp line than a fuzzy boundary zone.

The dilemma of journalism now becomes clear. Lacking, as it does, the strong “core

professional” advantages of a field like the law—without a clearly defined educational

curriculum or even distinct pedagogically enforced style of thought, and, even more importantly,

barred by the First Amendment from instituting a formal licensing mechanism-- journalism is

largely reliant upon its work in the periphery. Journalistic expertise, in short, is defined on the

job. Further, the lack of a clear occupational boundary marker stemming from within the core

itself makes the negotiations between journalists and their “competitors” —sources, public

relations executives, campaign communications staffers, freelance writers, bloggers, etc-- (in

Latourian language, the creation of long chains and obligatory passage points) simultaneously

more important and even more fraught. If the legal profession can be seen as a solid core

surrounded by a thin border zone, journalism might be viewed as almost entirely border-zone.

Fig. 1

The Law Journalism

Nearly all border zone … but not quite. After all, a journalistic core can be said to exist

despite protestations to the contrary—and if it exists, we are sitting in it. Journalism education

marks a limited, but real, mechanism by which the content of journalistic expertise is defined and

borders are drawn. Before examining the struggles and mechanisms by which experts and
expertise are articulated on the core, I argue that it might be useful engage in a provisional

epistemography of journalism school. At the higher levels of journalism education, what are

journalists taught they “need to know” (or, just as interestingly, don’t need to know). What are

the styles of thought and “ways of thinking” that are cultivated in journalism school? And how

might these forms of knowledge and styles of thought be changing under heavy pressures from

the periphery—the emergence of bloggers, diminishing corporate rates of return on media

properties, a return to the rhetoric of localism, and shrinking job prospects?

The most common description of journalistic expertise, of course, is that there isn’t one,

of if there is, it can’t be learned in school. As Kennedy writes:

Journalism [education] suffers from ambiguity of purpose ... the journalism professoriate
cannot agree on critical professional content or pedagogy ... The field is also split in
regard to what its core courses should emphasize. In a recent survey of journalism
educators, Blanchard and Christ (1985) found a variety of approaches to core course
requirements for journalism degrees. Some schools required no core courses; some
required courses that emphasized the scientific or technical knowledge, topics like news
writing and communication law; some emphasized thinking and analysis through case
studies or practice "researching" sources; and some provided exposure to issues of social
conscience through courses that present journalism in a broader social context. (Kennedy,
17)

Nevertheless, I hypothesize that, although a survey of the self-conception of many

journalism programs would demonstrate that both educators and students often explicitly deny

the existence of any sort of abstract, expert knowledge towards which they direct their

professional claims, such expertise is, in fact, transmitted through J-School. Such an expertise is

pre-determined by the existence of the school itself, even if the leading paradigm of professional

journalism education continues to take great pains to emphasize its “shoe leather methodology.”

The dominant notion of journalism education as craft, rather than as deeply intellectual pedagogy
through which reporters are trained to gain access to truth, renders the problem of journalistic

knowledge especially intriguing. What, after all, is an “expertise of non-expertise?” And, if

things were merely that straightforward, why would one pay tens of thousands of dollars to

obtain this odd expertise? A brief overview of different historical conceptions of journalism

education and journalistic knowledge, viewed through the lens of Aristotelian categories of

knowledge, reveal a complex and shifting series of justifications for the transmission of

journalistic knowledge.

PERSPECTIVES ON JOURNALISM EDUCATION

Philosophers of education, including some journalism educators, have drawn on

Aristotelian categories of knowledge-- scientific knowledge (episteme), craft knowledge or art

(techne) and practical wisdom (phronesis)-- in order to typologize the forms of reasoning

common to professional education (Kemmis 2005; Wilkinson 2005). Theorists of journalism,

especially those writing in the early years of the 20th century when schools were being

established in universities across the Midwest, debated whether to classify their enterprise as the

teaching of a professional craft or a more diverse educational enterprise grounded in the liberal

arts. Sociologists of scientific knowledge, for their part, have defined expertise in various ways,

with some recent work distinguishing between interactive, translation, contributory, and referred

expertise.

The “Missouri Model”-- referring to the pioneering skills-based journalism curriculum

instituted at the University of Missouri in 1909-- is usually seen as the exemplar of the craft-

based mode of journalism education. In 1910, Journalism School Dean Walter Williams wrote
that the “distinctive feature of the school” was its “newspaper, the University Missourian, an

evening daily, issued by the students of the school under the direction of the faculty … thus

applying the laboratory plan to education for journalism” (Williams 1910, 20) The skills

paradigm instituted by Williams at Missouri, and embraced by many of emerging journalism

schools affiliated with state universities [CA1](Carey 1978, 848; Sloan 1990, 9), emphasized the

acquisition of a form of knowledge known, in Aristotelian terms, as techne-- “art” or “craft

knowledge.” Aristotle speaks of techne as the "capacity to make, involving a true course of

reasoning.” It is the ability to produce a certain specific object, guided by reason and concerned

with “how something may come into being which is capable of either being or not being, and

whose origin is in the maker and not the thing made.” The techne of journalism might be

envisioned as skill in constructing the “news of the world”-- either in the form of the individual

journalistic report (drawing on an understanding of techniques like the lede, the nut graph, the

interview, and the “inverted pyramid”), or in the larger form of building a daily newspaper out of

a series of single reports.

From the perspective of the sociology of professions, one of the ironies of Williams’

1910 article (and a problem still faced by practiceoriented proponents of journalistic

professionalism) is that it proclaimed the advancement of journalism to the ranks of the learned

professions while simultaneously placing most of its emphasis on the occupation’s craft

components. Other early theorists of journalism, less dependent on the patronage of state press

associations and perhaps more sensitive to the dangers of “professionalizing by fiat” (Carey

1978), would place a greater emphasis on grounding journalism schools within the broader

domain of an education in the liberal arts. One of these thinkers, Willard G. Bleyer of the

University of Wisconsin, argued in 1931 that the special function “of most courses of journalism
is to teach students how to think straight about what is going on in the world at large and how to

apply what they have learned to understanding and interpreting the day’s news.” (Bleyer 1910,

39) More eloquent, perhaps, in his definition of the function of journalistic knowledge was

Joseph Pulitzer, whose 1904 article, “The College of Journalism,” still serves as the rhetorical

touchstone upon which most modern conceptions journalism education are grounded. “What is a

journalist?” Pulitzer rhetorically asked:

Not any business manager or publisher, or even proprietor. A journalist is the lookout on
the bridge of the ship of state. He notes the passing sail, the little things of interest that
dot the horizon in fine weather. He reports the drifting castaway whom the ship can save.
He peers through the fog and storm to give warning of dangers ahead. He is not thinking
of his wages, or the profits of his owners. He is there to watch over the safety and welfare
of the people who trust him. (Pulitzer 1904, 34)

For Pulitzer, the professional journalist would serve as an expert in close contact with the

public, equally capable of discerning the ‘mood’ of that public as she was of providing the

knowledge about the world that citizens needed to be self governing. A school of journalism,

wrote Pulitzer, would give the journalist “the wisdom [and] the indispensable basis of knowledge

and independence.” (38) To facilitate this wisdom, Pulitzer, like Bleyer three decades later,

argued that the journalist must immerse herself in a curriculum that included classes in ethics,

law, sociology, history, literature, statistics, language, writing style, science—all specifically

tailored to meet the needs of journalism. Via her immersion in an encyclopedic curriculum, the

journalist would hone her mind to such a degree that she would come to serve as both the

accurate recorder of the public mind and the tribune who would instill in that mind relevant

knowledge about the world.

This distinction between the “Missouri Model” and the “Wisconsin (or “Pulitzer”)
School” has entered the professional self-conception of journalists. It marks the dominant

metaphorical trope by which journalists talk about the tensions in their work, between its’ craft

aspects (techne) and a method of knowledge acquisition that Glasser and others in the cultural

studies tradition of James Carey (Christians et. al 1993; Rosen 2002; Glasser and Ettema 2007)

speak of as a kind of common sense, “practical wisdom,” or, following Aristotle, phronesis.

Practical wisdom, writes Aristotle, “cannot be scientific knowledge or art; not science because

that which can be done is capable of being otherwise, not art because action and making are

different kinds of a thing. The remaining alternative, then, is that it is a true and reasoned state or

capacity to act with regard to things that are good or bad for man” (Aristotle 2001, 1026).

Phronesis is a kind of common sense knowledge that entails both a claim of reason (what is the

best, i.e., the “most rational” action) and a normative claim (what is “the best,” i.e., the “the most

good” action[CA2]). Applying this understanding of knowledge to journalism, Glasser argues that

journalistic knowledge is neither craft nor abstract expertise, but rather a form of knowledge-in-

action in which practical yet complex habits of thought gradually intersect with journalistic

behavior to create an experientially grounded category of complex knowledge. Glasser contends

that the education of journalists is primarily based in the cultivation of experience, and that any

study of journalistic knowledge that ignores the practical experience of journalists misses an

important aspect of journalistic thinking. “If we are serious about wanting to know how

journalists know what they know,” Glasser argued, “we would be well advised to avoid any

'view of knowledge,' as [CA3]Schon puts it,” that fosters selective inattention to practical

competence and professional artistry.” (Glasser 1992, 140).

In recent years, some theorists have begun to more explicitly emphasize the relationship

between abstract knowledge and journalism. In the debates that raged over the creation of the
Columbia University M.A. in journalism (), for instance, the term “expertise” was specifically

and strategically used in the discussions of what the expanded curriculum might accomplish. In

the Columbia University "Journalism Task Force Statement,” written by University President

Lee Bollinger in the Spring of 2003 to summarize six months of discussion about the future of

the most famous journalism program in the world, the word “expertise” was invoked a dozen

times in the seven-page document. “Journalism may be moving increasingly to a system in

which reporters have an underlying expertise, and to the extent that is true, universities ought to

provide opportunities for students to develop that expertise,” Bollinger wrote. Later, he added:

“That a journalism school is located within a great university, which houses an extraordinary

amount of expertise on virtually any subject, means that it would be an intellectual tragedy not to

ensure that students partake of the feast.” () And in the proposal for a two-year journalism

program (a proposal that would lay the groundwork for what eventually became Columbia’s 1-

year M.A), soon-to-be Dean Nicholas Lemann alluded to expert knowledge when he wrote that

the paramount purpose of journalism curriculum was to identify and teach “a method of

intellectual attack to complex problems that is distinctive to the profession and that, once

mastered, will be useful to a student over the long run of a career” (, emphasis added[CA4]).

If some journalism theorists have increasingly recognized the importance of expertise in

securing a knowledge jurisdiction for the profession, what exactly is the nature of this expertise?

One possibility is to categorize journalistic knowledge as part of the larger Aristotelian category

of episteme, or scientific knowledge. “What we know through episteme,” Aristotle writes,

“cannot be otherwise than it is," and is provable via demonstration. (). A form of journalistic

expertise that claimed the mantle of episteme would view journalism as a process via which

objective and accurate truth could be obtained about the social world. The function of journalism
school, then, would be to teach the techniques for uncovering this truth, and would function as a

domain of knowledge through which journalism educators could ground their training and justify

their claims to professional status[CA5].

While there are elements of this view buried in Pulitzer’s 1904 North Atlantic article (“A

newspaper never admits that there is anything it does not know. […] The newspaper may know

everything.” [Pulitzer 1904. 48]) a more common, and recent, understanding of journalistic

expertise can be discerned through a close reading of the planning documents detailing the

creation of the Columbia M.A. The expertise recommended in these documents is more in line

with what Collins and Evans (2002) have called “translation expertise.” “For groups of experts to

talk to each other,” they write, “translation may be necessary. Some people have the special

ability to take on the position of the ‘other,’ and to alternate between different social worlds and

translate between them” (Collins and Evans 2002, 258). Such an understanding of this specific

form of journalistic expertise parallels James Carey’s definition of the professional

communicator (the reporter, the public relations executive, the advertising man, the lawyer and

the computer programmer) as a person “who controls a special skill in the manipulation of

symbols and who uses this skill to forge a link between distinct persons or differentiated groups.

A professional communicator is a broker in symbols, one who translates the attitudes,

knowledge, and concerns of one speech community into alternative but suasive and

understandable terms for another community.” Carey contends that a number of important

occupations share a common function insofar as their job is to act as a “broker of symbols.”

Indeed, the “major concentration” component of the Columbia M.A. program is designed

to turn already experienced journalists into experts-- but experts of a particular kind. Not experts

“in journalism,” necessarily, but experts “in the sense of knowing a good deal about a particular
[subject] area.” (Lemann 2003, 7) As noted on the program website, “the Graduate School of

Journalism has a Master of Arts degree program that focuses on teaching future leaders in

journalism about complicated subjects they might encounter in their careers. Students may select

one of the following concentrations: Politics, Arts & Culture, Business & Economics, and

Science.” Students in the M.A. program learn a great deal about other subjects (not journalism)

under the assumption that absorbing this core knowledge of other fields will make journalists

more competent in reporting on these fields. As summarized in a December 2003 Columbia

curriculum development session, “journalism schools are moving toward specialization also in

subject matter, although not in a comprehensive way. Perhaps five graduate programs offer

specialization, due to the passion of one person at each institution.” (2003, 1). There is, in sum, a

persistent tension that runs throughout recent discussions of journalistic expertise: tension

between viewing expertise as deep knowledge of an outside subject, as translation expertise, or

as expertise in the process of reality-discovering “journalism” itself.

The various classical conceptions of knowledge, along with the categories of journalistic

expertise they most closely parallel, are summarized in the chart below:

3.1 Knowledge and Journalism

Classical Definitions of Knowledge Species of Journalistic Knowledge

Techne: Craft, art. Skill in the creation of
objects (guided by reason) external to both
their creator and to “reality.”
Phronesis: Practical wisdom. Common sense
knowledge involving both practical experience
and wisdom learned via action. Usually implies
both reason and a normative attitude to “the
good.”
Craft. The construction of “news” using certain
common journalistic techniques, either in the
form of individual news items or as omnibus
news packages.
Complex, non-abstract, non-theoretical
understandings of “how to think like a
journalist.” Grounded in experience. Involves
the absorption of various species of knowledge
and a commitment to the social good
Episteme: Science. A form of knowledge that
“stands detached from the individual knower; it
is ontologically pure in that it posits a world
that exists independent of interpreters and
interpretations.”
Translation Expertise: The ability to translate
the thoughts of a group of experts into the
language of non-experts while not sacrificing e
truth. The ability to balance
Journalistic Expertise: Sees journalism as a
process via which objective and accurate truth
could be obtained about the social world.

We have now run up against a series of paradoxes. The drive to institutionalize

professional schools of journalism education crested at the same time that some of the leading

advocates of such programs deemphasized the esoteric nature of their subject of instruction.

Such a tactic, however congenial to the press associations and state legislatures upon which these

new schools depended for support, cut the ground out from under professionalizing reformers,

leading to what Carey has called “professionalization by fiat.” A generous reading of some of the

founding documents in the “liberal arts tradition” of journalism education, on the other hand,

catches glimpses of a different drive, the drive to ground journalistic craft in a more complex

notion of journalistic knowledge—what Glasser and others have called phronesis. More recent

discussion have focused on journalistic expertise, though often that expertise is not in

“journalism” itself, but rather in an outside field, the mastery of which will enable journalists to

become better translators. As many other thinkers make clear, however, it remains difficult to

envision any esoteric expertise to which journalistic knowledge can be tied (Glasser x). If

journalistic knowledge is pure techne, or techne and phronesis, or, at best, “translation

expertise,” upon what ground does journalism’s claim to cultural power rest? Glasser dances

around this question, writing at one point that the imbalance between esoteric knowledge and

practical application “is not in any important sense an indictment of journalism’s status as a

profession,” and adds, in a footnote, that “the lack of a formal and systematic core of knowledge

neither denies or contradicts a powerful occupational ethos wedded to the ideals of

professionalism.” (Glasser 1992, 141). But if one component to this ethos is the “wedding” of

knowledge and practice, and journalism lacks a core of esoteric knowledge, how does this

wedding occur?

The exact nature of journalistic knowledge, then, is obviously a matter of deep dispute.

Without a clearer understanding of this knowledge, it is difficult to make any final statements

about cultural authority claims, or even about exact contours of the border zone between

journalists and non-journalists – the results of the previous chapter not withstanding. So what to

do? We have reviewed writing about journalistic knowledge—both from educators themselves,

and from educational theorists. At this point, it may be productive to observe the actual in-class

articulation and deployment of journalistic knowledge itself, using the epistemographic method.

Towards an Epistemography of Journalism Education

Epistemography is a combination of two words: “epistemology”-- the branch of

philosophy that studies knowledge; and “ethnography”—a type of research that presents both

qualitative and quantitative descriptions of human social phenomena, based on fieldwork.

Epistemography, then, “is a description of the organization of what subjects have to know in

order to actually do” “x” (in this case, journalism). “Epistemography is not about what is in the

subject's mind … it is about shared common knowledge.” (Drouhard 2007) Peter Dear has

defined epistemography in relation to science studies; we modify the definition here to

incorporate our understanding of how it would relate to the study of journalism

 The term "epistemography" is intended to bring some clarity to the discussion by
proposing a loose grouping of the most central and characteristic kinds of work currently
encompassed by the label "[journalism] studies." The grouping strategy relies on making
explicit the following recognition: the field of [journalism] studies is driven by attempts
to understand what [journalism], as a human activity, actually is and has been.
Epistemography is the endeavor that attempts to investigate [journalism] "in the field," as
it were, asking questions such as these: What counts as [journalistic] knowledge? How is
that knowledge made and certified? In what ways is it used or valued? "Epistemography"
as a term signals that descriptive focus, much like "biography" or "geography." … It
designates an enterprise centrally concerned with developing an empirical understanding
of [journalistic] knowledge, in contrast to epistemology, which is a prescriptive study of
how knowledge can or should be made. (Dear 2001)

Pioneering epistemographic work on journalism has been carried out by educational

psychologist David W. Shaffer, whose analysis of “Journalism 828,” investigated a capstone

practicum in which “newcomers were initiated into a professional community of practice,

explicitly designed to forge the links between knowing and doing that are central to the reflective

practice of a profession.” Shaffer’s ethnography of the class—to my knowledge, the only one of

its kind specifically about journalism education—provides both a methodology that can be

replicated and some testable initial findings that would be useful in designing a larger analysis.

Data was collected through participant observation, voluntary email collection and analysis, and

interviews.

Most important for our purposes here, however, is the general theory behind the analysis

of “Journalism 828”:

For an expert journalist, ways of doing, being, caring, knowing, and thinking are bound
up in an epistemic frame of journalism that guides his or her reflection-in-action as a
member of a professional community … to do this I conduct an epistemography of the
structure of a professional practicum through the lens of epistemic frames.” (Shaffer
2005).
 My own investigation draws on Shaffer’s theory and methodology while expanding the

scope of both the project—multiple classes at multiple graduate schools of journalism, along

with interviews and curricular overviews—and the theoretical ambition—to relate structures of

expertise and knowledge to the creation and maintenance of authority in everyday life.
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and knowledge to the creation and maintenance of authority in everyday life.