Understanding Peripheral Journalism from the Boundary: A Conceptual Framework

With increasing digitization and commercialization, a plethora of new formats has entered the journalistic field, challenging its norms, routines, and practices. Research on these so-called peripheral actors, particularly in political journalism, has grown substantially, leading to a range of studies that engage with key concepts of the core and periphery. However, because such descriptions often assume a homogeneity that fails to account for the diversity of peripheral actors, we still have an incomplete and, crucially, under-theorized understanding of the different kinds of constellations in which peripheral journalism may exist. This article intends to address this gap by offering a new and comprehensive theoretical framework, which draws on Bourdieu’s concepts of autonomy and heteronomy, as well as doxa to understand peripheral political journalism. We then test this framework in the context of the Austrian journalistic field and identify 11 different forms of peripheral political journalistic actors.