KEY POINTS

• The story meeting – the regular daily meetings of editors to discuss news and decide story play – is the predominant “speech event” in the news-production process. It serves a gate-keeping function, as well as a place to negotiate and reinforce journalistic identity through discussion of news stories and their placement.

• In the meetings, news values are invoked by different editors to resolve differences of opinion and support positions. Story meeting negotiations of newsworthiness are a more internally situated (and thus not visible) function of a newspaper's priorities and commitments than the editorial pages.

• Issues of craft and community are reified in the story meeting, through explicit reference to them.

Looking at the process of newsgathering requires a focus on the dynamic and emergent, as well as the patterned and habitual. The “story meeting” (or “budget meeting,” as it is also known) is one such patterned and dynamic event. Several times a day, editors gather to talk about the major stories that will appear in the coming day's paper, discussing and arguing for stories eligible for Page One. The story meeting, as a recurrent speech event where a great deal of professional activity is performed and decisions are made, is a primary setting for the daily negotiation and reinforcement of professional values. The story meeting, and the discursive activities that comprise the story meeting, predominate in the news process.