The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered： Cultural Power

Recent technological change and the economic upheaval it has produced are coded by social meanings. Cultural codes not only trigger technological and economic changes, but also provide pathways to control them, allowing the dem- ocratic practices of independent journalism to be sustained in new forms. Even as they successfully defend their professional ethics, however, journalists experience them as vulnerable to subversion in the face of technological and economic change. Indeed, independent journalists and the social groups who support them often feel as if they are losing the struggle for autonomy. Just as current anxieties have been triggered by computerization and digital news, so were earlier crises of journalism linked to technological shifts that demanded new forms of economic organization. Digital production has created extraordinary organizational upheaval and economic strain. At the same time, critical confrontations with digital production have trig- gered innovative organizational forms that allow new technologies to sustain, rather than undermine, the democratic culture and institution of news production. If news producers are making efforts to adapt professional journalism to the digital age while maintaining journalistic civil values, there are parallel adaptations from the digital side： digital journalism becoming more like professional journalism.

The Perpetual Crisis of Journalism： Cable and Digital Revolutions

There pervasive sense today that journalism is in crisis is an expression of the perpetual crisis of American journalism. The crisis of American journalism is articulated through a narrative of decline that warns that the future of journalism will be worse than the past. Through discourse analysis of the introduction of new technologies and a new news anchor in journalism, this study shows that the dis- course of crisis and grave doubts about the future of professional journalism are not new. Today and in previous eras, the past seems to represent the high mark of professional journalism in the USA, and the future of the news seems exceptionally uncertain. These perennial claims of the decline of journalism serve to reinforce the sacred ideals and standards of journalism.

When Codes Collide： Journalists Push Back Digital Desecration

In an examination of the contemporary transformation of journalism at a granular level, this article exposes the process at work in the cultural construction of crisis and struggles for institutional experimentation in the New Orleans based The Times-Picayune. Layoffs and a digital-first strategy in 2012 triggered public outcry that strongly polluted the changes as anti-democratic. A narrative analysis of articles published in a variety of media and in-depth interviews with journalists and editors showed that events were related to broad and systemic cultural values, a core cultural structure inherent in every journalistic institution--including The Times- Picayune. In their narrative dimension, journalistic stories took the form of a moral texture that, in turn, fostered civil interpretations and reactions. The available narratives of the changes were--and still are--filtered, selected, and outlined from those core values.

‘All Solid Things Vanish Into Thin Air.’The Space in Modern andLate Modern Plastic Art

The article follows Max Weber's Comprehensive Sociology and uses the hermeneutic and iconological analysis sociological methods applied to plastic works(painting and sculpture),significant and representative of modern and late modern art.Starting from these theoretical and methodological bases,it pursues three specific objectives:to analyze the construction of space in plastic art,to verify how this theme has evolved in artistic practices from the first modernity to the second and to verify the way in which the complementary visual language the conceptual of contemporary sociological theory.In this regard,the analysis and interpretation of the eleven selected works reveals three important consequences of the modern influence on space,gradually emptied of meaning and replaced by non-places:its conversion into merchandise,its loss of solidity and stability and the confusion that occurs in it between reality and its representation.Consequently,the implicit content converges with the essential postulates of the sociologists who have approached the subject of space,although it goes further because the foray into the iconographic hermeneutics of these works puts an image to the conceptual theoretical discourses of the sociologists,inaway that visual language complements and enriches,with more emotional and sensitive nuances Therefore our discipline begins to overcome a traditional deficit,in that it moves from the essential rationality that structures its origin and turns towards a greater coupling of the emotional and sensitive social plane.