KEY POINTS

• To explore the interaction-based nature of journalism is to challenge some fundamental models of mass communication and assumptions about the way journalists relate to each other, assuming a reciprocal transmission at the heart of the enterprise rather than a one-to-many schema.

• The “supremacy of the local” in American journalism means that local news is privileged. This internal value becomes externally manifested, and is then critiqued differently by insiders and outsiders.

• Interaction is located in many of the activities that reporters engage in to gather the news and can be identified in a number of ways: in the number of sources required for stories; in attribution practices; and in various forms of outreach to the community.

• The notion of pseudo-relationship (building on Boorstin's notion of “pseudo-event,” a constructed vs. real event) helps to characterize the dynamic that exists between the practitioner and the community of coverage, as one that is situational and partial.

News stories are seldom written as an introspective exercise, but are produced with a group of listeners or readers outside the newsroom in mind. Perhaps opaque to the layperson is the fact that mainstream journalism, despite its technical (mass-media) constraints and one-to-many paradigm, has as its goal a responsiveness and interaction with an audience (or what I call the community of coverage (see Chapter 2)). To explore the interaction-based nature of journalism is to challenge some fundamental models of mass communication and assumptions about the way journalists relate to each other.