What Journalists Say News Literacy Is

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-2025

Publisher

Taylor & Francis (Routledge)

Source Publication

Journalism Studies

Source ISSN

1461-670X

Original Item ID

DOI: 10.1080/1461670X.2025.2600428

Abstract

This article examines how journalists define news literacy, a concept typically framed as an audience skill set. I analyze 204 open-ended responses from U.S. journalists using discourse analysis grounded in metajournalistic discourse and organized with the 5Cs of context, creation, content, circulation, and consumption. Four patterns recur: defending professional boundaries, reasserting epistemic authority, constructing civic identity, and performing epistemic maintenance. These uses position news literacy as professional meaning-making as much as pedagogy, enacted through boundary work across participants, practices, and professionalism. The analysis also surfaces silences about access, affect, platform power, and journalism’s own complicity. Building on these findings, I propose an extension to prevailing definitions. News literacy should retain audience competencies while adding a practice-facing component for journalists: deliberate reflection on method and constraint (creation and context), clear communication of sourcing, evidence, and genre distinctions (content), attention to how stories travel and become visible (circulation), and cultivation of habits that sustain care for truth under strain (consumption). This reframing treats news literacy as a relational and ethical framework that links what publics are asked to do with what journalists do and show, offering a more reflexive, inclusive, and structurally aware model of practice.

Comments

Journalism Studies, Vol. 27, No. 4 (December 2025): 541-564. DOI.

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