The nature of news rules

Drawing on new institutionalist theory, this article presents a theory of news rules to explain the curious fact that so much of the news looks similar across news organizations, yet reporters maintain a great deal of autonomy in choosing which stories to report and how to report them. The theory hinges on a distinction between constitutive and regulative rules. Where constitutive rules tell us what the news is, regulative rules tell us how the news ought to be produced. The author argues that a better understanding of how these types of rules implicate one another in the production of news explains why the news can be both homogeneous and variable at the same time.