Epistemology, Structure and Urgency: The Sociology of Financial and Scientific Journalists

This paper, which examines the work of journalists in one field, argues for thevalue of including journalists’ own understandings and practices in analyses ofthe role of the media. Moreover it suggests that, in this field, there may bemore commonalities between the practices of journalism and social science thanis commonly supposed.The paper is based upon a set of interviews with scientific and financialjournalists, covering their interpretations of nanotechnologies and theirdevelopment. Whereas much of the social scientific work to date in this area hasbeen concerned with the public understanding of science, and the role thatjournalism plays in relation to this, our study addresses the parallel issue ofhow, in a field characterised by high levels of commercialisation, potentialinvestors get information and make judgments about particular applications, andthe extent to which journalism plays a key role in this process. Here, we focusnot primarily on the ways in which the media frame understandings of a complextechnology, important though they may be, but on the practical epistemologicalstrategies that journalists employ to make sense of it.We argue that journalists can be seen to be engaged in epistemological strategiesthat are analogous to those of sociologists, and that this dimension is tooeasily missed by approaches that, for example, recommend that the correct unitof analysis should always be journalism rather than journalists. We conclude bysuggesting that, whilst the general applicability of our argument to otherfields of journalism is necessarily an empirical question, our approach may havemore general significance for debates about the critical role of socialscience.