The geometry of journalism

Abstract

Scholars from multiple disciplines have been studying various aspects of journalism for nearly a century. The question of newsworthiness, what becomes news and what does not, has always been an area of great interest. While many explanations have been offered, all include varying degrees of psychology and teleology. So far, none have approached the subject using sociologist Donald Black’s framework of pure sociology. The paradigm predicts and explains the behavior of social life with the shape of social space it occurs in, its geometry. Here, I apply Black’s model to the question of newsworthiness to identify the social structures journalism occurs in, and how it behaves within them. I then extend the model to the moral nature of journalism by studying it as a form of social control. The result is a set of theoretical formulations about the behavior of journalism, and a new sociological theory of journalism.