Gaye Tuchman Routinization Essay

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Gaye Tuchman’s routinization refers to “professional’s struggle to maintain control over decisions of what work to do and over the disposition of time and routine of life.” Putting this concept in the journalism context, Tuchman citing other scholars before her believed that, “Newsmen stand out as workers called upon to give accounts of a wide variety of disasters ─ unexpected events ─ on a routine basis. News work thrives upon processing unexpected events, events that ‘burst to the surface in some disruptive and exceptional manner.” Tuchman found out that (1) Routinization is impeded by variability in raw material. (2) Persons categorize the objects of their work to control it. To put it simply, the variability of raw material decreases …show more content…

They are as follows: hard news, soft news, spot news, developing news and continuing news. These terms identify the news content or the subjects of events as news (Tuchman, 1973) According to Tuchman, hard news refers to “news events presenting factual analysis” whereas soft news is defined as “story that is interesting because it deals with the life of human beings.” On the other hand, spot news is the report of “unexpected events and is disseminated as ‘breaking news’”, developing news is a “kind of hard news wherein facts are still on the process of gathering,” and continuing news pertains to “series of stories on the same subject based upon the events occurring over a period of time. (Tuchman, 1973). Routinization affects the problematic notion of objectivity in reporting news in the manner that the unexpectedness of a news story still demands an abrupt deadline of article. The newsman remains pressured and thus to avoid receiving flak, he tries to become an objective news reporter. There are also distinction of events presented in the article such as nonscheduled events, prescheduled events and unscheduled events. Most commonly, hard and soft news are under prescheduled or unscheduled events (Tuchman,

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