Instead of tracing the fortunes of individual news media organizations,
whether legacy ones like the New York Times or digital-born ones like
BuzzFeed, we can consider the news media of a given country as an
institution, a set of organizations generally seen within a society as presiding
over a particular social sphere, in this case the production of news (Cook 1998,
p. 70). Such institutions are deﬁned by a set of cross-organizational formal and
informal norms, routines, and procedures, in the case of news media broadly
shared news values, workﬂows, and a common orientation toward the events,
ideas, preoccupations, strategies, and politics of powerful ofﬁcials, as well as
a sense of professional ethics among journalists and an orientation toward
public service. Not all news media are exactly alike, but they share many
features, and not all (national) news institutions are identical (Hallin and
Mancini 2004). At least within high-income liberal democracies, however,
Social_Media_and_Democracy