Conceptualizing embeddedness as a key dimension for analyzing journalistic cultures

The study of journalistic cultures has a long history in communication research. Yet, much scholarship has been criticized for emanating too much from normative and—particularly in the case of comparative work—ethnocentric assumptions. While much progress has been made, the field arguably still suffers from these imbalances, restricting a more holistic understanding of journalistic cultures. This article aims to address this gap by proposing a repurposed concept for the study of journalistic cultures that focuses on the extent to which journalists are embedded in communities’ experiences, values, histories, places, and languages. Following an overview and explication of how embeddedness has been used in journalism scholarship, but also in other disciplines, we argue that the term provides an opportunity to better contextualize journalistic cultures, contributing to a less normatively dismissive and more explanatory approach to analyzing journalism and comparing journal-istic cultures.


Introduction
This article explicates embeddedness as a journalistic concept and demonstrates its utility for understanding important features of journalistic cultures.We conceptualize embeddedness as the extent to which journalists are enmeshed in the communities, cultures, and structures in which and on whom they report, and the extent to which this may both enable and constrain their work.We also suggest that journalists' degree of embeddedness is a plausible factor in explaining the kinds of news content that journalists create.
While embeddedness has been defined and employed in the context of studying Western journalism (e.g., Gr€ unberg & Pallas, 2013), we instead offer a reconceptualization of embeddedness that we believe also resonates with Indigenous, non-Western journalism cultures.In the Western journalism context embeddedness has largely been construed as a point on a power-distance continuum (i.e., a short distance from those with social power, and hence a loyalist rather than an adversarial journalistic approach to the powerful) (Hanitzsch, 2007;Hanitzsch et al., 2019).Indeed, power-distance has understandably been a key feature in understanding and comparing journalistic cultures around the world (Hanitzsch, 2007;Hanitzsch et al., 2019).However, embeddedness has a potentially far richer meaning than a power-distance continuum suggests.
We undertake this enterprise cognizant of at least two related challenges.First, by identifying our phenomenon of interest as "embeddedness" we are signaling an etic approach, whereby the thing we observe is understood (and named) by us as social observers.This is seemingly in contrast to an emic approach, in which the phenomenon is defined or determined by the social actors we are observing (Headland et al., 1990).Journalists themselves, after all, rarely talk about their own embeddedness; and if they do, they likely mean something different from what we ultimately mean.The second, connected challenge is that concepts that originate in the Global North and West are too often treated as "definitive" (Blumer, 1954, p. 6), where their meaning is closed off and hence becomes a Western lens for seeing a picture of reality that fails to account for local realities.As Waisbord and Mellado (2014, p. 362) argue, "scholarship embedded in Western premises carries particular ontological and analytical distortions."What is more, these concepts from the North and West can come with implicit normative assumptions.We care, for example, about power-distance because journalistic independence is at stake, and it is a fundamental journalism value in most liberal, democratic societies (Hanitzsch et al., 2019).
Thus, we draw upon the literature on embeddedness from various disciplines, including journalism studies, to reframe the ways communal bonds-linguistic, material, moral, and other-are crucial for journalists' professional, ethical, and epistemic outlooks and behaviors.We show how being embedded in the communities they report on opens a range of opportunities and challenges for journalists.By explicating the various dimensions of embeddedness, we show how the concept is key to understanding journalism in collectivist cultures found, for example, in Asia, Africa and the Pacific Islands.But we also apply this lens to Western contexts, to examine dominant journalistic cultures, while also better accounting for differences in specialties, such as sports and business journalism, and to better understand alternative forms of journalism, such as ethnic journalism and advocacy journalism.

Meanings of embeddedness
An exploration of how embeddedness has been used across relevant disciplines demonstrates it is a multidimensional concept, even though not all these dimensions have been explicitly theorized.The literature is vast, and we make no attempt at an exhaustive review.Instead, we highlight those aspects of the concept that inform our own theorizing.
Embeddedness has been prominently used in economic thinking, where the idea is that individuals' actions cannot be understood in terms of economic rational self-interest alone, as classic economic theories have suggested (Polanyi, 1957).Embeddedness describes the extent to which individuals are motivated or guided by a range of social values, norms, and aspirations, and hence embedded in society (Sonnino, 2007).Social networks uphold economic relations and institutions (Lie, 1997).The primary idea of embeddedness is that social networks are "closely embedded in interpersonal relations" (Granovetter, 1985, p. 504) and often based on trust.Markets themselves, then, are socially embedded.In other words, it is difficult to see where market values and norms stop, and social values and norms begin.This is an idea amplified in institutional theory-institutions, while claiming some domain of authority, are nevertheless constituted through social interaction and hence socially embedded (Fioretos et al., 2016).
Embeddedness is discussed here at both an individual level-individuals are embedded in social relations-and an institutional level-institutions are embedded in social systems.The management studies literature underscores this distinction, but also identifies activities and resources as embedded phenomena (Welch & Wilkinson, 2004).An individual engages in "actions and interactions" that are not necessarily unique to an institution, but rather rooted in broader social relations (Welch & Wilkinson, 2004, p. 218).Likewise, resources are goods such as contracts, licenses, and regulations that embed individuals, institutions, and activities in social-legal networks.As in the economics literature, embeddedness is seen as a counter to notions of autonomous market rationality.For example, people stay in their job not for pure economic motives, and instead value things like friendship (Ng & Feldman, 2009).
Yet, another kind of embeddedness has emerged in management studies, where Whiteman and Cooper's (2000) notion of ecological embeddedness-derived from the study of Indigenous peoples-has been a flashpoint.Although substantial concerns have been raised by the appropriation of management techniques through Indigenous studies and colonial blind spots regarding Indigenous experiences (Banerjee & Linstead, 2004), the main point about ecological embeddedness is not contested-people can be embedded in a place, based on "firsthand interaction with the surrounding ecosystems" (p.1267).This is a kind of connection and knowledge that is not reducible to social relations, but rather speaks to the centrality of nature ("the land") in Indigenous peoples' life worlds (Gilbert, 2006).
Embeddedness has also gained traction in cross-cultural psychology.Schwartz (1992) identifies embeddedness as one of his seven national-level cultural value dimensions, which relates to the "nature of the relations and boundaries between the person and the group" (Schwartz, 2009, p. 2).He argues that while some cultures look upon individual autonomy and self-expression as social values, embedded cultures profess greater value for the collective: "Meaning in life is expected to come largely through identifying with the group, participating in its shared way of life, and striving toward its shared goals.Embedded cultures emphasise maintaining the status quo and restraining actions that might disrupt in-group solidarity or the traditional order" (Schwartz, 2009, p. 2).Similarly, in so-called collectivist societies, people are part of strong and cohesive groups, such as extended families with many members, which protect them in exchange for unconditional loyalty (Hofstede & Hofstede, 2005).Of course, such broad generalizations of national cultures, particularly in the context of journalistic cultures, may risk essentializing culture and obscuring important differences (Obonyo, 2011).Two so-called collectivist or embedded countries may diverge considerably in terms of different orientations, normative traditions, and histories of their respective journalistic cultures.Thailand and South Korea, which score very similarly on Hofstede's collectivism dimension, for example, have very different journalistic cultures.South Korean journalists pursue a more monitorial-interventionist role, while their Thai counterparts lean more towards a collaborative role orientation (Hanitzsch et al., 2019).It is important to state from the outset that our aim here is to avoid essentializing culture, even if we feel it does play an important, and often undervalued role.
The literature points to ontological differences in societies-in some societies, individuals have genuinely greater connection to a shared way of life and have less actual autonomy than in other societies.But it also suggests notions of embeddedness and autonomy are the "preferred response" (Schwartz, 2009) or a set of assumptions, and not necessarily ontologically real.That is, members of a culture might profess their autonomy, but they are still at least somewhat embedded in their own culture in ways they don't entirely realize and that limits their self-determination.
Five key insights emerge from the broad, cross-disciplinary literature on embeddedness.First, embeddedness expresses how individual behaviors are enmeshed in social contexts.To be embedded in a social environment is to share ways of seeing, thinking, and doing, even when people might not be fully aware of their embeddedness.Second, institutions, activities and resources can also be socially embedded.Third, people can be embedded in place.While some cultures may have greater awareness and access to their connections to place, all people have some degree of connection to place, provided sufficiently long-term exposure.Fourth, embeddedness is a continuum.Granted, there is probably no such thing as complete embeddedness-that would likely deny any human agency-but even those who claim autonomy are not without some degree of embeddedness.Fifth, embeddedness may have theoretical or conceptual shortcomings, but some conceptual dimensions do emerge.Specifically, we see elements of tightness, thickness, and mass.That is, embeddedness is a matter of how tightly individuals fits into social and physical environments; how many ways individuals are tied to a social and physical ecosystem, creating a thick overall bond; and it's about the overall mass, weight or gravity those bonds have in individuals' lives relative to other factors.These ideas help us interrogate aspects of embeddedness in journalism.

Journalistic embeddedness in the global North and west
In Western parlance, embedded reporting became a prominent term during the US-initiated war in Iraq in the early 2000s.It referred to journalism "in which journalists are attached to, and travel with specific military units" (Paul & Kim, 2004, p. iii).Reporters ate, slept, and traveled with troops -"they saw what the soldiers saw, were under fire when the troops were, and endured the same hardships" (p. 1).This kind of reporting differed from other forms of reporting, where reporters relied on standard information gathering techniques.Close access meant reporters got a first-person picture of events (Paul & Kim, 2004), usually considered a superior form of reporting in comparison to second-hand information.However, embedded television reporting was found to be more favorable to the military and the war effort and used more episodic frames in news stories (i.e., a focus on discrete events and less on context) (Pfau et al., 2005).While various studies of embedded journalism sought to make such news outcomes understandable, they also came with implicit normative understandings-mostly related to objectivity and power-distance-that such outcomes were problematic.
Yet, while often used in the context of war reporting, embedded reporting has also been used to describe some political, business, sports, and other forms of reporting (e.g., Erickson & Hamilton, 2006;Song & Lee, 2014).In some of these accounts, what qualified reporting as embedded was that journalists travel with and observe their sources (Song & Lee, 2014).This relates to examples of reporters traveling with local medical doctors on an international medical relief trip (Erickson & Hamilton, 2006), or with government delegations on trips abroad (Song & Lee, 2014).Here too, scholars highlight moral hazards; for example, U.S. reporters embedded with U.S. politicians in China uncritically reported what they saw, seemingly unaware that what they witnessed was carefully choreographed to amplify China's policy goals (Song & Lee, 2014).The reporters failed to capture bigger issues because of their "social and epistemological isolation" in a controlled environment (p.176).Similarly, foreign correspondents have been accused of "going native" when they became too close to the places they covered and "began to lose a certain skepticism and to adopt an entirely different standard of 'objective' reporting" (Kaplan, 1981, p. 24).
Aside from these largely narrow conceptualizations of embeddedness, some journalism scholarship has sought to expand the meaning of the concept.One such approach examined the "political, intellectual, and commercial embeddedness" of South African journalists (Froneman & Swanepoel, 2004, p. 26;emphasis in original).Froneman and Swanepoel, however, explicitly conceptualize embeddedness as an extension of embedded war reporting and focus on the lack of editorial independence and power-distance of South African reporters.With journalists too close to their sources, they state, "The key to our line of argument is equating embeddedness with conflicts of interest" (p.25; emphasis in original).
A more promising attempt at an expansive conceptualization of embeddedness has been offered through an examination of Swedish business journalism.Gr€ unberg and Pallas (2013) draw directly from Granovetter and others in thinking about embeddedness in terms of social relations and activities.Thus, journalistic production is seen as "based in systems of taken-for-granted norms and values that reside in social systems that are considerably broader than journalistic ones" (Gr€ unberg & Pallas, 2013, p. 218).Journalism, in other words, is a social institution inasmuch as it is socially derived.From this perspective, it is a mistake to overemphasize journalism's autonomy.Business journalism-not unlike all forms of journalism-is part of an "institutionally embedded process where professional, organizational and technical interdependencies constitute the environment in which the business news is initiated, produced and re-produced" (p.219).
The journalism literature seems to diverge into two understandings of embeddedness-one that is concrete and focuses on journalists' proximity to their sources and one that is more abstract and focuses on journalism as an institution and as a set of socially derived practices tied to the society in which it is situated.The literature hints, however, at something in between, where journalists and news organizations operate in a relationship with the communities they serve.Froneman and Swanepoel's (2004) assessment of South African journalism comes close to this perspective but focuses almost exclusively on the most problematic aspects of this community relationship.The study of "community journalism" offers a potential way forward in conceptualizing embeddedness.Lewis et al. (2014, p. 232) identify embeddedness as characteristic of community journalism, which is "about connectedness and embeddedness.It articulates and emphasizes the 'local' in both geographic and virtual forms of belonging, using its rootedness within a particular community to sustain and encourage forms of 'human connectivity' within that environment."Within the community journalism literature, embeddedness overlaps with other concepts, particularly notions of connectivity."The study of community journalism is largely the study of the relationship dynamics between journalists and the communities they serve: it is concerned with the degree and implications of 'connectivity' between journalism and communities" (Reader & Hatcher, 2012, p. 5).Connectivity is separate from embeddedness as it is sometimes an understanding of how audiences perceive their local news outlet.However, connectivity is aligned with embeddedness inasmuch as it is seen as news organizations' "responsibility to their communities" and "nearness to people" (Byerly, 1961, quoted in Reader & Hatcher 2012, p. 7).Community journalism has been characterized as "intimate, caring, and personal" (Lowrey et al., 2008, p. 276), and thus in line with a "nearness to people" outlook and not far removed from notions of embeddedness.
Traditionally, community journalism was defined in terms of place, and thus conceptualized as journalists "involving themselves in the welfare of the place, in the civic life of their towns, participating as an active member of the very community they are covering" (Lauterer, 2006, p. xiv).However, in the digital world, community can transcend place and be, instead, a community of interest or affinity.The understanding of community journalism has shifted accordingly.In fact, the shift has placed greater interest in the theoretical characteristics of community journalism-characteristics such as connection, investment in a collective identity, shared meaning, and community membership (Lowrey et al., 2008), that align with notions of embeddedness.Community journalism, of course, can trace its lineage to Dewey's (1927) thoughts on journalism's public role, where journalists are integral, active members of a community, through to public or civic journalism (Rosen & Merritt, 1994), but also development and advocacy journalism (Xu, 2005;Waisbord, 2009).
U.S. journalists' coverage of racial issues underscores issues of embeddedness that resonate with themes in community journalism and go beyond the narrower concerns surrounding embedded war reporting.For example, Robinson and Culver (2019, p. 383) argue that white journalists have been "embedded in journalistic practices," such as objectivity, which leaves them distant from the communities of color they cover.This distance-a lack of embeddedness in community, but significant embeddedness in an institutional culture-leads to blind spots and thus a partial, inaccurate picture of events and issues.Therefore, while embeddedness in military reporting is seen as epistemically problematic, a lack of embeddedness in coverage of race is also seen here as epistemically problematic.
Meanwhile, alternative and advocacy journalists in the Global North and West have long made similar arguments.From the perspective of alternative media, the problem with embeddedness in military reporting has been proximity to power, which necessarily distorts (Harcup, 2013).However, alternative journalists generally construe their embeddedness in their communities, which are by definition distant from power, as an essential positive feature of their practice (Atton & Hamilton, 2008).Ostertag (2006) describes how mainstream journalism was slow to report on, and incomplete in its reporting of, the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.However, a vibrant LGBTQ press, embedded in their community, understood and wrote about the crisis almost instantly.
Closeness to community, especially communities at the social margins, seemingly make for a different kind of journalism.Identity can often play a key role.In the US, Kemper (2010, p. 7) found that "native journalists are native and journalists, regardless of the order in which you put the words.From their writings, it appears it would be unthinkable to most of them to do anything that would undermine the Indigenous people they serve" (emphasis in original).Further, Loew and Mella's (2005, p. 132) study of Native American journalists showed a clear sense of native interpretations of a range of topics, and that these were "driven by a clear sense of place, which, for Native Americans, embodies identity and culture."This embeddedness of Indigenous journalists is apparent across postcolonial societies like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the US, and it results in news that is focused more strongly on the community rather than individual success (Grixti, 2011).

Journalistic embeddedness outside the global North and west
Journalists in societies such as in Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands often argue it is impossible to separate themselves from their communities.Life here is much more about communal bonds, relationships, and connection with place.In southern Africa, for example, the concept of ubuntuism has had considerable influence on journalism.Seen as a community-focused approach that is concerned particularly with expressing "compassion, reciprocity, dignity, harmony and humanity in the interest of building and maintaining a community with justice and mutual caring" (Fourie, 2008, p. 62), this approach views journalistic embeddedness as crucial.Ubuntuism views journalists as community members who are so deeply embedded in their community that it is impossible-and undesirable-to remove themselves from it.They therefore cannot be spectators in line with the Western concept of detachment.As journalists-like all members of the community-are defined through their group relations, ubuntuism emphasizes "active involvement and dialogue with the community" (Fourie, 2008, p. 65).However, the concept has also been criticized as essentializing culture and advocating a less critical form of journalism, and it remains much debated in southern Africa (De Beer et al., 2016).
In Aotearoa, New Zealand, proponents of Indigenous, M� aori perspectives in journalism have long argued that it is impossible to be detached from one's own cultural background, even for journalists from the majority, white Anglo-Saxon (so-called P� akeh� a) population (Fox, 1990).A senior M� aori journalist interviewed by Hanusch (2014) noted that P� akeh� a journalists typically argued they were neutral."But I would challenge them on that.They're not neutral.They come from a P� akeh� a perspective, and they don't say that they come from a P� akeh� a perspective, but they do, or they have certainly done in the past.But we're willing to admit that we write from a M� aori perspective and how stories affect M� aori and we'll say that" (p.959).Many M� aori journalists quite freely acknowledge the importance of their cultural values and the relationships with their communities for their work."You don't take the M� aori hat off, you put the journalism hat on.Then you take that off once you finish the interview and then you're M� aori again.And I think that's where our P� akeh� a colleagues fall short.It's that they go in and take their person hat off and put it back on when they're finished and that's different for us" (Cited in Hanusch, 2014, p. 962).
Similar notions of how cultural values play a role in impacting journalists' professional views, and how they see themselves as embedded in their communities, can be observed across the world, for example in Samoa (Kenix, 2013), among the Sami of northern Scandinavia (Pietik€ ainen, 2008), in Korea (Kim & Kelly, 2008), and Taiwan (Chang & Massey, 2010).More normative calls for a return to the roots and thus more embedded forms of journalism have emanated from parts of Africa (Kasoma, 1996), Asia (see Xu, 2005 for a summary) and the Pacific Islands (Papoutsaki & Harris, 2008).Like the situation with ubuntu journalism, however, these approaches have also been criticized as being influenced or co-opted by ulterior motives of political leaders who aimed to prevent journalists from critical reporting (Xu, 2005).
Overall, the evidence suggests that journalists across many places around the world are deeply embedded in their communities through social relationships and see this as a natural part of life that they are unable to withdraw from.This makes Western notions of detachment difficult, if not impossible and even undesirable.Still, with journalism an "Anglo-American invention" (Chalaby, 1996), and detachment considered important globally (Hanitzsch et al., 2019), journalists do experience tension.As Cohen (1974, p. 85) has noted, the "constraints that culture exerts on the individual come ultimately not from the culture itself, but from the collectivity of the group," and there is evidence of debates among Indigenous journalists over the extent to which, for example, they could be advocates for their communities (Hanusch, 2014).Yet, for many, it is a normal part of life.Native American journalist DeMain (2001) has noted that he viewed himself as both a "guerrilla" and a "legitimate" journalist.This may be seen as irreconcilable from a traditionally Western viewpoint but appears commonplace for many journalists outside a Western hegemony.Embeddedness is a strategic advantage, rather than a problem.It means easier access to some sources, albeit with a stronger sense of responsibility (Hanusch, 2015).
Thus, what we see here is an understanding of social identity and social bonds as inescapable.The realities of living in collectivist societies, where, as Schwartz (2009) would put it, individual autonomy takes a backseat to embeddedness, mean that people experience their social bonds more explicitly and consistently.One's culture is not something you walk in and out of; it is a part of you, and you are a part of it.Therefore, journalism, in such settings, is socially embedded.It is practiced by people who may or may not seek to establish institutional processes for distancing themselves from the communities they cover, but nevertheless align themselves to some level or kind of social connection with their communities.Importantly, this applies to journalists in countries of the Global West and North just as readily.It is just that they may be less aware of their embeddedness.Membership in a dominant culture may limit people's ability to see this, because it comes naturally for them, while for counter-hegemonic cultures it may be more acutely felt.

What does the contrast in journalistic cultures suggest?
When looking at understandings of embeddedness across these various contexts, some key contrasts emerge.Acknowledging these contrasting understandings is an important step in coming to a clearer conceptualization of embeddedness.
First, outside of Western mainstream journalism, embeddedness is mostly understood as identity.Journalists see themselves, for example, as M� aori, Native American, or LGBTQ journalists.Their culture or community is a part of them, and this part cannot be simply set aside when they do journalism.Notions of community journalism also lean in this direction, where reporters see themselves, or are encouraged to see themselves, as "citizen-journalists" (Lauterer, 2006, p. xiv), fully embracing citizenship in a place they also cover.Within a Western context, embedded journalism has largely been defined in terms of practices.These include spending time alongside reporters' sources-traveling, eating, and lodging with them.Institutional practices, guided by norms of objectivity, are ostensibly designed to temper source relationships but nevertheless these practices provide something of an insider's view into the way other institutions operate.This comes from being close to the action and getting to know the participants.In the dominant Western forms of journalism, then, embeddedness seemingly can be taken up and put down as needed-it is a luxury journalists can afford.
Second, embeddedness is more apparent in collectivist than in individualist societies, as anthropologists have noted.But it also seems to be more apparent when people have a counter-hegemonic identity, in both individualist and collective societies.People are often aware of this in some explicit ways and that they are embedded in the community that forms around that identity.Journalists in these societies and communities are generally aware of this too.If they are part of news organizations that acknowledge this identity, then their journalism will likely also look different.However, even journalists in comparatively more individualist societies are embedded in their own cultures and communities, perhaps in ways that are not entirely apparent.Advocates of alternative journalism, amongst others, have already argued that socalled objective journalists simply fail to see the ways they are embedded in the dominant culture and end up producing a picture of reality that reinforces status quo ideas, values, and practices (Atton & Hamilton, 2008).Of course, objective journalists' embeddedness also affords a proximity and understanding that allows for critical, watchdog reporting, underscoring how embeddedness can enable and constrain journalistic work.Regardless, complete autonomy is an impossibility.Embeddedness, of a sort, persists.It is an essential-and telling-feature of journalism.
Third, in journalism, embeddedness comes with competing normative presumptions.When embeddedness is understood as journalists' attachment to institutions, organizations, or individuals who are the locus of social power, it is construed as normatively bad.In the criticisms of embedded reporting, proximity is the basis for a metaphor about the moral perils of embeddedness.Journalists are said to be in bed with troops, and subsequently morally compromised (Froneman & Swanepoel, 2004).Close observers of alternative and non-Western forms of journalism generally reject the idea that nonembedded journalism-for example, war reporting through traditional, non-embedded techniques-is any better normatively.Distance has clear epistemological disadvantages, in this view.Being embedded in one's community provides journalists with awareness, empathy, and understanding.Thus, within alternative, Indigenous, and non-Western journalism, embeddedness is not just taken for granted, it is seen as delivering better journalism.
We argue that how, where, and to what extent a journalist is embedded is a telling feature of journalism and hence an important descriptive and explanatory characteristic or variable in studying journalism of all kinds in all places.Most obviously, it allows us to compare journalism across national contexts, but also different cultural contexts within nations.But it also provides an opportunity to compare across different types of journalism, which includes areas like investigative, alternative or community journalism, as well as different specializations or beats, such as political, sport, or lifestyle journalism.
More broadly, we have shown embeddedness is a conceptual means for linking bodies of literature that are rarely in conversion with one another.It allows us to expand how we think about journalists' relationships to the subjects and people they report on and to do so without privileging Western normative frameworks.In fact, it seems a more plausible predictor for contextually rich reporting than would knowing the degree of objectivity or detachment.

Explicating the concept of embeddedness
We now explicate the theoretical dimensions of embeddedness to arrive at a theoretically useful understanding of the concept, which nevertheless hints at operational definitions as well (Shoemaker et al., 2004).While embeddedness can describe individuals, institutions, activities, and resources, we focus here on individuals, primarily because of space limitations.However, we do not totally leave these aspects behind here.We have already noted the ways that institutions and activitiesparticularly professional activities-express embeddedness.Still, when looking at individuals, we identify five types of embeddedness, which we refer to as shared experience, shared values, shared history, shared place, and shared language (Figure 1).As the following discussion shows, while they are presented as conceptually distinct categories, we also view them as integrated, given that in many contexts they are correlated.
Shared experience: Even in narrower forms of embeddedness addressed in dominant Western journalism, we see reference to shared experience based on an extended period in close proximity to sources (Froneman & Swanepoel, 2004;Erickson & Hamilton, 2006).These attributes set embedded reporting apart from normal reporting, where it is presumed that reporters spend relatively little time close to news sources.Reporters are presumed to get what they need from a source and move on.Embedded reporting stands out as a special kind of journalistic activity.Here, embeddedness is used as more of a categorical, rather than a continuous, concept.But it is easy to see how it can be construed in a continuous fashion: The more time a reporter spends with a source or group of sources and the greater the shared experiences, the more embedded that reporter would be.Or the more the reporter comes to see, share and understand the experience of sources, the more embedded they are.Journalists, after all, need to have some measure of access to sources, spend some amount of time with them, and have some understanding of their meaning systems to do basic journalism, even if that is so-called parachute journalism (Erickson & Hamilton, 2006).Thus, thinking of embeddedness as a continuous concept helps underscore that some degree of it is intrinsic to any form of journalism.
Shared experience is an important consideration in how embedded journalism is conceptualized.The literature stresses the activities of traveling, eating, and working together (Song & Lee, 2014), allowing reporters to see what sources see, literally, but presumably figuratively as well (Paul & Kim, 2004).With greater embeddedness, shared seeing becomes a shared view or vision, which is not the effect of embeddedness but a constitutive element of it.Thus, shared vision is not about some narrow or discrete set of facts, which might characterize less embedded journalism, but an understanding of the "totality" of things (Buchanan, 2011, p. 103).Shared experiences need not be exclusively physical.Experiences may also be shared in the virtual world, as journalists are increasingly connected with their sources online (Jer� onimo 2022).Digital journalists' own experiences with online harassment, for example, may provide them with insight into public figures who also face harassment based on gender, political views, or even which sports team they are affiliated with.
Of course, alternative or community journalism as described earlier, and journalism in collectivist settings can also be described according to these dimensions.They involve reporting where essentially all of journalists' time is spent in proximity-both physical and virtual-and nearly all their experiences are shared with the communities in which they are situated.In other words, a M� aori journalist would be at the far end of an embeddedness continuum when reporting on a M� aori community (although individual journalists in these settings might be at somewhat different points on the continuum based on their own intersectional identities and the kind of news they are covering).
Shared values: Even in collectivist societies, individuals may not identify with all or some dominant social or cultural values but merely heed them because there is little choice to do otherwise.However, those who genuinely embrace many or most of the values of the community have a tighter social connection-and thus are more embedded-than those who do not embrace some or all of the community's values.Journalists who genuinely share a broad range of values of the community, social movement, ethnic group, or other affinity groups are thus more deeply embedded.This embeddedness may be even deeper when a group's values are in opposition to a dominant society or when values diverge in deeply polarized societies.
These value commitments need not be directly correlated with the actual number of shared experiences with other group or community members, although we would expect there to be a relationship.The point is that connection to enduring values is conceptually distinct from shared experiences.Indeed, exiled journalists are prevented from a shared experience but nevertheless often share values (and history and language) with those in their homeland.
Shared history: Embeddedness in social relations and systems emerges from a shared history.When journalists share with people a received history or when they share socially transformative moments-such as terrorist attacks, wars, coups, elections, or even sports championships-they have common reference points for interpreting events and movements in the present.Journalists who have experienced the effects of colonialism in their own countries, for example, have a framework of interpretation that journalists outside this experience do not (Peycam, 2012).Similarly, journalists who have experienced transformative moments in their communities gain a kind of empathy with community members that informs their work (Gl€ uck, 2016).In other words, journalists can be embedded in a shared history that connects them to others and leads to shared understandings.However, Carstarphen (2021, p. 141) points out that "history is not unilateral narrative."In other words, different groups in a society can have access to different histories.Carstarphen points out that dominant American histories have, for example, barely touched on the massacre of Black residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, wiping out what was known as the Black Wall Street.Yet, for the current-day Black residents of the area, and the Black journalists of the area, this event is directly relevant to current debates about racial and economic inequalities.In this case, Black journalists are embedded in a different history than their white colleagues, which means they see and understand issues in a different way.Meanwhile, dominant media-often unaware of histories of marginalized groups-frequently end up "reinforcing historic oppressions" in their journalism (Lang, 2015, p. 85).
Shared place: Journalism's relationship with place is increasingly receiving scholarly attention, mainly in terms of how journalists can provide better reporting by going deeper into communities (Schmitz Weiss, 2015).In community journalism, physical location and social ties of communities are thus inextricably linked.Detachment from these communities arguably leads to poorer journalism, as Usher (2021) has argued in a critique of how U.S. journalism's centers of power are increasingly physically located near political elites.After all, a key benefit of local journalism has always been journalists' on-the-ground knowledge of and connections to place (Franklin, 2006).Being embedded in a place is crucial because "when journalists are unable to understand fully the places they are supposed to know about and that lack of knowledge is on display, their knowledge cannot be trusted" (Usher, 2019, p. 90).On the other hand, when journalists are rooted in place, they understand its "symbolic and cultural significance" and how it "shapes values, norms, and cognitive schemas" (Usher, 2019, p. 90).Such notions reverberate with the spiritual connection Indigenous societies have to the natural world, and the importance of place and place-based knowledge in their journalism.Hence, journalists who share the same physical or natural environment as the communities they report on, are more deeply embedded, and arguably in a better position to report in ways that maintain their cultural authority.
Shared language: Journalists' fluency in a dialect or language, particularly if that language is not the dominant language of a larger society, can also play a role in journalists' connectedness and embeddedness in a linguistic community (Stevenson, 2002;Zabaleta et al., 2014).Many countries have multiple official or semi-official languages and different news organizations publish or broadcast news in them.Yet, journalists often report on communities whose language they are not fluent in.This can create gaps in meaning-meanings that can be grasped by journalists with native language ability (Zabaleta et al., 2014).Similarly, not all languages have the same range of expression, creating another barrier to crosslinguistic understanding (Thomson et al., 2008).But fluency in language alone may also not always be sufficient, such as in countries that, despite some shared history and language, have also developed their own linguistic terminologies, ideologies as well as cultural values (Milroy, 2000).A U.S. journalist may not be able to pick up on certain nuances in the UK, or a German journalist socialized in then-West Germany may-even to this day-have difficulties understanding certain linguistic aspects in the former East Germany (Stevenson, 2002).
Similarly, science, business, and sports reporters must know the terminology of their beats to understand and translate linguistic complexity or specialization into readily understandable stories.And digitally native journalists are plausibly more versed in the meanings of acronyms, emojis, and visual memes than journalists who were not socialized from childhood in an online world.
We would expect that, for some journalists, these five components of embeddedness are highly correlated.If you've lived in the same place as most of your sources, then you've had shared histories, experiences, and language, which likely leads to shared values.Yet, racial, ethnic, class, institutional, and other differences can mean that even people in the same general place can have very different lives.And while journalists can be deeply embedded in one community, a change in circumstance-a different beat assignment, for example-can result in less embeddedness, as journalists learn a new specialized vocabulary, struggle to understand a complex history, or simply don't know their way around.
Taken together, the tighter the shared experiences, values, histories, and sense of place journalists hold and the tighter the journalists' rootedness in a shared language, then the thicker the bonds and the greater the embeddedness of journalists.Thus, when these factors add up, they can outweigh other factors and their gravity in the life of journalists can have a significant hold on them and influence the news they produce.

Conclusions
At the outset, we offered a conceptualization of embeddedness as "the extent to which journalists are enmeshed in the communities, cultures, and structures in which and on whom they report."Our contribution has been to identify some of the tangible ways in which journalists can be embedded.Embeddedness is a matter of shared experience with sources (practices), but also about shared values, history, place, and language (identity).When we wrote, "the extent to which," we signaled we saw embeddedness as a variable concept.That variability of embeddedness is a matter of the thickness, tightness, and weight of these bonds.
The reference in our initial conceptualization to "communities, cultures, and structures in which and on whom [journalists] report" merits some elaboration.We have noted that embeddedness is ontologically real and stretches across, and varies across, societies.In fact, it is likely misguided to overstate commonalities of societies, since there can be many groups within a society, and those groups have different positions of power and can diverge in important ways when it comes to values, history, and language.The relevance of a journalist's identity in a social group or with a place can be a source of high or low embeddedness based on whether (or to what extent) reporting is within and about their group or place, or outside it.
Many empirical questions remain, including whether embeddedness is an additive concept.While it seems plausible to say that the tighter and thicker the connections are to a community, the more embedded journalists are, can one form of high embeddedness offset another form of low embeddedness?For example, if it is indeed an additive concept, can time spent in physical or virtual proximity to a source offset a lack of shared values?Or more abstractly, can the tightness of a few community ties produce as much or greater embeddedness than the thickness of many ties if all the ties are loose?These kinds of questions mean that our explication of embeddedness does not lead us to an easy operationalization of the concept.While explication of a concept is likely never fully complete, explication is ultimately a process that requires iterative steps of empirical investigation and further conceptualization (Chaffee, 1991).Even without these parameters, we believe our efforts here support the importance of embeddedness in understanding journalism and its effectiveness.
The value of a concept is, in part, a matter of the comparisons it facilitates.Thinking about the value of embeddedness as a comparative concept for journalism studies, we can identify several opportunities.By neutralizing predominantly negative connotations associated with embedded journalism, the use of embeddedness as a more comprehensive concept may allow us to identify differences between all journalistic cultures.Different forms of embeddedness may be seen as having different outcomes-some which some may see as positive, others that some may see as less desirable.Such assessments will undoubtedly be made by journalists and even scholars, and they are likely contingent on related normative expectations in a journalistic culture.Having a shared experience may be considered as providing important, enhanced context and thus be seen as positive, but it may also lead to narrower reporting that privileges certain viewpoints.From an analytical standpoint, we consider embeddedness an aspect that is present, albeit to different degrees, across the globe.It is our aim to understand the conditions and contexts within which different forms occur.We believe this can take place on three levels of comparison: across countries, within countries, and across journalistic specializations, or beats.
Across countries, national journalistic cultures can be compared to their broader national cultures in terms of embeddedness and the extent to which such societal values may influence journalism.It allows us to take account of specific national contexts in better ways than previously, hopefully going some way to address critiques that much comparative journalism research lacks contextualization (Powers & Vera-Zambrano, 2018).
But, perhaps more importantly, embeddedness also allows us to address the much-debated inability of national comparative research to account for transnational developments and similarities.By examining domestic journalism cultures in terms of their relative embeddedness, we may identify similarities to other domestic journalism cultures that are perhaps more pronounced than similarities across the national level.For illustration, we would expect to find that journalistic cultures of Indigenous peoples in New Zealand and Taiwan bear more similarities than a comparison of their respective national journalism cultures would suggest.The same may apply for other sub-national and transnational fields, such as community journalism or foreign correspondence.
Embeddedness may thus also be a useful concept to compare journalistic beats.We have already noted the case of sports journalism, where reporters are often "fans" of the sport (Marchetti, 2005).The normative ideal sees such journalists as insufficiently distant from their object of inquiry.Yet, viewed through the lens of embeddedness, one could also argue that a better understanding of a sport's values, histories, places, and vocabulary may equip reporters to provide more comprehensive, contextual, and interpretatively rich journalism.It may also allow us to identify the extent to which beat-specific journalistic cultures may outweigh differences between journalistic cultures across nations.The more recent arrival of peripheral actors in journalism has been marked by what we observe to be their embeddedness within the communities they report on-be it as political experts, sportspeople, or otherwise.Arguably, their intimate knowledge of and connection to specialized communities would lead to increased cultural authority.
Finally, another value of a concept is in its ability to facilitate explanation (Shoemaker et al., 2004).Our conceptualization has not sought to neuter embeddedness of its normativity; instead, we have sought to argue that its valence can be seen as positive, and not simply negative, as it is often construed.Embeddedness can help us explain journalism's triumphs and failures.For better or worse, embeddedness may be a predictor of several journalistic and social outcomes.Those outcomes could be related to journalistic authority, epistemic veracity, interpretative resonance, powerdistance, audience engagement, or source diversity.These bear further study.
Even though we have only unpacked individual embeddedness-bracketing the embeddedness of institutions, activities, and resources-we nevertheless believe we have offered a rich concept that allows us to analyze, compare, and explain much about journalism and its social value.