Anchoring Practices for Public Connection: Media Practice and Its Challenges for Journalism Studies

Abstract

This article develops a typology of anchoring practices of public connection to systematize how new forms of interaction, participation, and articulation in networked media now challenge the primacy of journalism to offer exclusive and authoritative representations of society. The first part offers a brief summary of core contributions and assumptions in practice theory, highlighting differences between strong and weak programs of practice-based research. The second part presents the concept of public connection and how it can be expanded to include media practice on a more general, analytic level. The third part discusses four sets of anchoring practices, which allow for very different intensities of public connection to emerge: practices of information retrieval, social orientation, (self-)representation, and public intervention. The concluding outlook section addresses challenges for the study of journalism, focusing on the relations between professional and nonprofessional practices of articulation, in which speaker and audience positions can alternate dynamically between different “layers of publicness.”