Interpretive Community

DAN BERKOWITZ
University of Iowa, USA

Journalists represent an interpretive community that lives and acts within shared rules
and norms, a professional culture that produces common narratives and consensual
meanings. These conventions are socially learned, both through formal journalism edu-
cation and through workplace experiences.
Given the existence of this journalistic interpretive community, it is no coincidence
that news of any particular event is reported through the same or similar terms and
story forms. Journalists, however, assert that this coincidence of language and mean-
ings is merely the result of well-trained journalists. Their professional ideology leads
them to believe that every news story is to be told fresh, independent of what has been
written before, not straying too far from accepted cultural meanings and social values.
Community members believe there is a “right” interpretation that “good journalists”
know how to report. Rather than the possibility of telling the story “wrong,” journalists
say that their peers are not getting the story “right,” and those people are considered as
“not a good journalist,” rather than as a “bad journalist.” These assertions may appear
bunny-ears heavy, but doing so is purposive and unavoidable—this belief system stems
from a commonly shared working reality of language and meanings.
In essence, journalists are subconsciously members of interpretive communities that
share meanings, work norms and a “common-sense” vision that guides them in creating
the news products they produce each day. Certain kinds of events invoke certain mean-
ings in their professional culture, leading them to experience those events as a series of
everyday rituals, along with an occasional high ritual in response to a “big story” such
as a plane crash, natural disaster, or major crime.
The foundations of the interpretive community concept stems from Stanley Fish’s Is
There a Text in this Class? where he portrays readers of books as members of a commu-
nity who share common meanings about literary texts (1980). It took only a couple
of side-steps for Zelizer (1993) to argue that “we consider journalism not only as a
profession but as an interpretive community, united through its shared discourse and
collective interpretations of key public events” (p. 219). Journalists, she added, also
engage in the meaning of journalism itself. Through discourse about the past—and
applying lessons learned in the past to understand the future—journalists use narra-
tives of key public events from both the past and the present to reaffirm and legitimate
their interpretive community.
But these shared meanings are not common across the entire field of journalism.
Rather, some sense of meaning comes from conversations in the localized present,
where journalists interact about their shared experiences from the past, and then
interface those experiences to their present-day activities. Journalists are not always

The International Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies. Tim P. Vos and Folker Hanusch (General Editors),
Dimitra Dimitrakopoulou, Margaretha Geertsema-Sligh and Annika Sehl (Associate Editors).
© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118841570.iejs0024
2 I NT E R P R E T I V E COMMU NI T Y

“there” to experience the past, so they turn to the field’s larger cultural lore of jour-
nalistic highlights that are documented through books, special reports, and televised
commemorations. The journalistic interpretive community’s lore about landmark
journalism, such as the reporting of the Vietnam war, the Kennedy assassination, or
the Watergate investigation, allows journalists to turn to consensual points of debate
that represent their community’s shared meanings and values. In sum, professional
discourse about journalism represents a community’s confirmation about itself, and
most importantly, to maintain consensus about its community’s interpretations about
their work.
Lindlof (2002) defined the essential concept of interpretive community:

Simply put, an interpretive community is a collectivity of people who share strategies for inter-
preting, using, and engaging in communication about a media text or technology. The strate-
gies are devised with respect to norms and standards that evolve among the community mem-
bers through innovation and the influence of argument. (p. 64)

Although Lindlof’s definition refers to audience members who share a text and its
meanings, it is not really a stretch to argue that journalists, too, interpret, use, and
engage in communication about the texts they create. Nor is it difficult to expect
that journalists share their creation and dissemination of meanings about public
events “with respect to norms and standards.” Indeed, Lindlof himself considered the
application of the interpretive community concept to media workers as one exemplar
of exploring meaning within “institutional communities.”
Despite the intuitive nature of the interpretive community concept and its clear impli-
cations for understanding both the nature of news and the meaning of the professional
culture, further application of the concept did not appear in published research for
nearly 6 years after Zelizer introduced it to the academic field of journalism studies.
In 1999, Zelizer’s student, Mark Brewin, applied the concept to help understand pub-
lic journalism in North Carolina to explore how public journalism could challenge the
professional ideology of journalism. He argued that professional ideology requires that
journalists maintain a distance from a story in order to present an “objective reality”
(Brewin, 1999). While doing so, journalists maintain their interpretive community’s
belief that events naturally contain news values—and that true members of the com-
munity are uniquely able to detect.
The notion of interpretive community as applied to the production of news, Brewin
argued, represents a shared negotiation that ensues while journalists are applying mean-
ing to occurrences. The interpretive process, he added, creates boundaries for acceptable
professional behaviors and journalistic story narratives. The legitimacy of an alternative
form of journalism ultimately threatens the depiction of journalists as skilled inter-
preters who know how the story should go—along with challenging the idea that news
naturally exists “out there” to be captured by those journalistic interpreters.
In that same year, Berkowitz and TerKeurst (1999) applied the concept to study the
relationship between journalists and their news sources. Their argument added the
notion that journalists juggle professional beliefs and boundaries with the preferred
interpretations inherent to the physical, geographic community in which they work.
 I NT E R P R E T I V E COMMU NI T Y 3

This dualism creates the potential for a clash between the two interpretations that jour-
nalists live by—the broader professional and the narrower local. In turn, the amount of
clash is likely to vary by the level of community pluralism. In part, this occurs because
journalistic interpretations—especially for the watchdog role—bring the potential of an
economic threat for a news organization when they depart from the geographic com-
munity’s preferred self-interpretation. Especially in more homogenous communities,
preferred meanings are narrowly defined and the economic base is smaller, raising the
likelihood of a threat.
At these times, a news organization works to protect its financial stability, as well
as the long-term standing of journalist–source relations, compromising the broader
professional community’s values. The values of an interpretive community define that
community—studying those values helps to understand the meanings that it shares.
However, an interpretive community tends to be fluid and unstructured, difficult to
constrain or shape, and unlikely to remain static over time.
Application of the interpretive community concept has surfaced in other dimen-
sions of studies about journalism, such as understanding the gendered nature of work
within the overall journalistic community. For example, journalism can be shaped by
expectations for typical gender role behaviors. In 2002, Cecil highlighted the connec-
tion between paradigm repair and interpretive community, coining the term paradigm
overhaul. He argued that in times when journalistic behavior skirts accepted behav-
iors, a search for the boundaries of the journalistic interpretive community ultimately
leads back to the core tenet of objectivity. The public repair of the journalistic paradigm
becomes a ritualistic activity where the boundaries of the journalistic interpretive com-
munity are clarified, and “good” journalists are cleared to continue working within the
assumptions of objective news.
Another application of interpretive community was explored with a large news-
paper’s opinion-page staff by Wahl-Jorgensen (2002). She observed an interpretive
community of staff members who built a shared view of their work, routinely referring
to letter writers as crazy people, conjuring the term “the idiom of insanity.” This notion
was viewed as an expression of frustration about letter writers who diverged from the
staffers’ interpretation of an effective letter writer. Ironically, this interpretive perspec-
tive derided the actual purpose of these editors’ mission of sharing public sentiments,
working against their ability to reach their interpretive community’s professional
goals.
The concept has also been applied to comparative research. For example, Berkowitz
(2007) investigated the notion that a community’s preferred interpretation of itself can
impact the reporting of both news organizations and the journalists who work there. In
general, news will be reported in ways that resonate with citizens and conform to the
local power structure. A survey of reporters at small-, medium-, and larger-sized news-
papers found two types of journalistic orientations standing out. One group adhering
more to its professional ideals was more likely to write an occasional investigative piece.
The other group—reporters with a stronger connection to their local community—felt
more constrained by the values of their geographic community and stuck more to that
community’s preferred interpretation. Interestingly, although both groups of reporters
professed the same journalistic ideals, the first group was more likely to implement them
4 I NT E R P R E T I V E COMMU NI T Y

in their work. Reporters who were surveyed from the smaller newspapers were more
likely to respond to their perceptions of their geographic community’s interpretation of
itself.
In another case, examining the values of two interpretive communities comparatively
helped to highlight the tenets of each one (Carlson & Berkowitz, 2014). In this situation,
a scandal concerned phone hacking by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. While not
an extreme problem by U.K. standards, the scandal became problematic for journalists
in the U.S. interpretive community, where Murdoch owned media such as the tabloid
Star, the Fox News Channel, and the Wall Street Journal.
This dual sense of interpretive community as both a place and a mindset was
explored by Lowrey, Brozana, and MacKay (2008). They suggested that interpretive
community members share both a common goal and a common sense of history
that guides their community cohesion. They, too, saw interpretive community as
an important sociocultural force that leads community journalists to both listen
and lead in a community, bringing different sides together but not attempting
to emphasize a solution. As gatekeepers, journalists determine both the quantity
and quality of information that flows to members of an interpretive commu-
nity whose values they need to understand. In the age of the Internet, however,
there are multiple routes for information to flow around those gatekeepers—with
the effect that voices outside an interpretive community also engage in public
discourse.
Interpretive community has also proven helpful for comparative work globally. For
example, Traquina (2004) applied the concept to coverage of AIDS by five newspapers in
four countries to explore the degree that a global interpretive community of journalists
converged in their professional beliefs when covering events rather than issues. The
four interpretive communities that were studied all engaged in strategic work practices
that favored covering pseudo-events as a means of acquiescing to the demands of the
workplace clock in relation to production deadlines and employee hours.
The possibility of an additional, informal journalistic interpretive community
such as the citizen journalist—a person who does not get paid by a mainstream
news organization—becomes part of an interpretive community that is not held
to the professional meanings of the formal mainstream. In that situation, both the
conventional journalists and the citizen journalists believed their journalistic efforts
were benefiting their community, but they each had a different opinion about what that
meant based on the tenets of their interpretive community: professional journalists
conceived the meaning of their work in conventional terms, while citizen journalists
extended greater meaning to their role as community thinkers.
An exit from the journalistic interpretive community was studied by Usher (2010) in
relation to the transformation of legacy news media. She considered this a key moment
in relation to a collective memory of journalism in a pre-web, pre-blog, pre-newspaper
slump era. In all, this historical sense of interpretive community served as a means
for its continued existence. The inverse has also been found, where somebody on
journalism’s periphery has been brought into the community instead to represent
how things were (Berkowitz & Gutsche, 2012). Specifically, this happened when
The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart appealed to the U.S. Congress to pass a long-stagnant
 I NT E R P R E T I V E COMMU NI T Y 5

bill providing health care for 9/11 first responders. Even though Stewart himself
claimed not to be a real journalist, his effort to move the bill forward was likened
by The New York Times to the work of legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow. In
doing so, journalists’ collective remembering became a means for strengthening their
interpretive community.
Journalists also belong to an interpretive community based on their shared sense
of professional memory. This commonality mostly surfaces from two interpretive
frames—the professional and the community—along with their historical interpreta-
tion of the profession and its interface with the national. This framework lends insight
into other community subsets—the concept of interpretive community can include
not only journalists, but also their audiences and their sources. The implication of
these connections suggests that a shared set of meanings and values can impact the
media coverage of public and political issues. Gutsche (2014) likewise studied the
connection between the journalistic interpretive community and the public officials
who reside in their geographic community. He argued that the two groups operate in
a shared mental space that defines place and embeds ideological constructions within
the place name. Gutsche referred to this interaction as a “second-level interpretive
community.”
In all, the concept of interpretive community has served as a helpful way to under-
stand how journalism acts as a cultural force that leads its members to share a common
vision of interpretation as well as a vision of behavior for people who identify with that
community’s culture.
Because interpretive community concerns how groups of professionals with com-
mon work experiences share norms about both behavior and meanings, it is helpful to
connect the term to similar notions. These include:

• Imagined community, introduced by Benedict Anderson (1983), is typically an

audience-related concept that refers to how individuals in media audiences develop
a sense of experience and shared meaning without actually knowing first-hand
other members of that community.
• Professional boundaries refers to social and cultural interactions about who is a jour-
nalist, what is journalism, what is a journalistic organization, and what are appro-
priate modes of behavior for somebody considered to be part of the journalistic
institution. Related to this concept is the “boundary work” required to engage in
public dialogue to define, exclude and include individuals, organizations, and texts
in relation to the boundaries generally observed by the journalistic culture.
• Paradigm repair is related to both boundary work and interpretive community, in
that it concerns how the interpretive community protects its core beliefs when an
individual or organization strays from the accepted norms of practice. The goal is to
reassure members of the interpretive community that a departure from the profes-
sional paradigm is the fault of deviant behavior, rather than a flaw of the paradigm
itself.
• Organizational socialization involves the immersion into a news organization and
its unspoken norms about what is appropriate to do, write, and say. This entrée into
the interpretive community is learned “by osmosis” rather than formally codified.
6 I NT E R P R E T I V E COMMU NI T Y

• Professional norms are those beliefs about “good journalism,” as presented in text-
books, taught in classes, and professed by journalists with career seniority.
• Professional ideology is more of an outsider’s assessment of professional norms as a
consequence of professional and organization power. Journalists do not see these
norms as an ideology, but as part of a naturally occurring belief system.

SEE ALSO: Boundary Work; Community and Small-Town Journalism; Critical and
Cultural Studies; Journalistic Roles; Paradigm Repair; Social Construction of News;
Sources and Source Relations

References

Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism.
London, UK: Verso.
Berkowitz, D. (2007). Professional views, community news: Investigative reporting in small US
dailies. Journalism: Theory, Practice, and Criticism, 8(5), 551–558.
Berkowitz, D., & Gutsche, R. (2012). Drawing lines in the journalistic sand: Jon Stewart, Edward
R. Murrow, and memory of news gone by. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly,
89(4), 643–656.
Berkowitz, D., & TerKeurst, J. (1999). Community as interpretive community: Rethinking the
journalist-source relationship. Journal of Communication, 49(3), 125–136.
Brewin, M. (1999). The interpretive community and reform: Public journalism plays out in North
Carolina. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 23(3), 222–238.
Carlson, M., & Berkowitz, D. (2014). “The emperor lost his clothes”: Rupert Murdoch, News of
the World and journalistic boundary work in the UK and USA. Journalism: Theory, Practice,
and Criticism, 15(4), 389–406.
Cecil, M. (2002). Bad apples: Paradigm overhaul and the CNN/Time “Tailwind” story. Journal of
Communication Inquiry, 26(1), 46–58.
Fish, S. (1980). Is there a text in this class? The authority of interpretive communities. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Gutsche, R. (2014). News place-making: Applying “mental mapping” to explore the journalistic
interpretive community. Visual Communication, 13(4), 487–510.
Lindlof, T. (2002). Interpretive community: An approach to media and religion. Journal of Media
and Religion, 1(1), 61–74.
Lowery, W., Brozana, A., & MacKay, J. (2008). Toward a measure of community journalism. Mass
Communication and Society, 11(3), 275–299.
Traquina, N. (2004). Theory consolidation in the study of journalism: A comparative analysis of
the news coverage of the HIV/AIDS issue in four countries. Journalism: Theory, Practice, and
Criticism, 5(1), 97–116.
Usher, N. (2010). Goodbye to the news: How out-of-work journalists assess enduring news values
and the new media landscape. New Media & Society, 12(6), 911–928.
Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (2002). The construction of the public in letters to the editor: Delibera-
tive democracy and the idiom of insanity. Journalism: Theory, Practice, and Criticism, 3(2),
183–204.
Zelizer, B. (1993). Journalists as interpretive communities. Critical Studies in Mass Communica-
tion, 10, 219–237.
 I NT E R P R E T I V E COMMU NI T Y 7

Further reading

Bruggemann, M., & Engesser, S. (2014). Between consensus and denial: Climate journalists as
interpretive community. Science Communication, 36(4), 399–427.
De Maeyer, J., Libert, M., Domingo, D., Heinderyckx, F., & Le Cam, F. (2015). Waiting for data
journalism. Digital Journalism, 3(3), 432–446.
Meyers, O. (2007). Memory in journalism and the memory of journalism: Israeli journalists and
the constructed legacy of Haolam Hazeh. Journal of Communication, 57, 719–738.
Robinson, S., & DeShano, C. (2011). “Anyone can know”: Citizen journalism and the interpretive
community of the mainstream press. Journalism: Theory, Practice, and Criticism, 12(8), 1–20.

Dan Berkowitz is professor emeritus of journalism and mass communication at

the University of Iowa, Iowa City, U.S.A. He is editor of Social Meanings of News: A
Text-Reader, and Cultural Meanings of News: A Text-Reader. His recent articles include,
Carlson, M., Robinson, S., Lewis, S., & Berkowitz, D. (2018) “Journalism studies
and its core commitments: The making of a communication field,” in the Journal of
Communication; and Berkowitz, D. (2017) “Solidarity through the visual: Healing
images in the Brussels terrorism attacks,” in Mass Communication and Society.