The Journalistic Field in the Platform Economy: The New York Times and the Inverted Pyramid

Abstract

Bourdieu’s field theory has become a key heuristic for studying the impact of the market on American journalism, but this approach has not been employed to analyze the consequences of a technology-driven decline in advertising revenue. To understand this change and update the commercial critique of journalism, I extend the emerging Bourdieusian historical research program to chart transformations in the market’s heteronomous effects on journalism. To do so, I highlight how the New York Times was exceptionally positioned to manage heteronomy as it emanated through the technology, political, and financial fields. This analysis throws the crisis of the wider field into relief, a field I characterize as an “inverted pyramid” to reflect how the Times’ success deepened hierarchy, while also giving it the freedom to reinvent orthodoxy in a wide space of possibility atop the field.