Notes on Text Production as a Field of Inquiry in Media Studies

‘Text production’ denotes an area of media research which studies the production process and the resulting texts with a degree of theoretical, methodological and empirical integration. Text production research has a somewhat equivocal status within the field of mass communication and media research. On the one hand, the number of studies that focus on text production and the text are rather few, at least relative to the number of studies that combine a focus on the text with studies of reception processes. At the same time, studies of text production and the text are central to the idea of integrating, of unifying media research as a discipline. Meanwhile, the very notion of ‘integration’ is contested. Even within the research community it is common to regard mass media research as a loosely knit assembly of disciplines around certain common objects of study. Nonetheless, it is a fact that the development of media studies as a discipline is intimately bound up with the idea of an integrated perspective on the processes of mass communication. To the extent media studies can claim to have a common foundation, the notion of a continuum that links production, text and reception is quite central. This notion also represents much of the basis for media research as an interdisciplinary project, as well. Like reception studies, studies of text production are the setting for meetings between humanities approaches to the text and social science analyses of contexts and institutions. The integration project has been institutionalized – not least in the Nordic countries – through the creation of numerous research centres and departments that apply interdisciplinary approaches to the media and mass communication. In this article I shall discuss studies of text production in the light of these larger research agendas: the desire to see mass communication as a continuous process, and the idea of integrating studies of the text in the humanities tradition with social science approaches to context. Most of the examples I use here will be borrowed from studies of television. If there is a narrowness of focus in terms of the media considered, it will be counterbalanced by the inclusion of television studies undertaken in a broad range of disciplines and research traditions. For, whereas studies of text production have been few to date, they are scattered within several sub-disciplines. We find them in journalism research, in production studies, and in research on media institutions. PLENARY SESSION II