Writing for Digital News: The Social Organization of News Stories about HIV Criminalization in an Age of Convergence Journalism

This dissertation is an institutional ethnographic study of the social organization of news production about HIV criminalization in Canada. HIV criminalization is a global HIV activist concern. Broadly, HIV criminalization refers to the use of the criminal law to charge and/or prosecute people living with HIV who, allegedly, have exposed their sex partners to HIV, failed to disclose to their HIV-positive status, or transmitted HIV sexually. This study extends the sociological study of HIV criminalization, particularly research on mainstream news representations of HIV non-disclosure criminal cases. Critical social science research on HIV criminalization and media has called attention to the sensational and stigmatizing character of news reports, however, social scientists have yet to explore how such a news discourse happens. To correct for that gap, I employ institutional ethnographic research methods to investigate the work practices of people who are variously situated in a digital news environment. By bringing into view the actual practices of journalists who produce news accounts of HIV criminalization, this institutional ethnographic project illuminates a new range of social actors whose activities can be understood to shape, and be shaped by, the social relations of HIV criminalization. This project adds to sociological understandings of newswork by illuminating a practice that I call writing for digital news. Writing for digital news is comprised of reporters work to activate existing digital texts and process them into multiple news formats as quickly as possible. My central argument in this dissertation, is that the social organization of reporters writing for digital news creates conditions that make it challenging for journalists to disrupt patterns of sensational reporting about HIV criminalization.
Interviews with reporters revealed that police news releases are a central part of news production routines. I draw on studies of recontextualization to make visible how reporters work with these documents makes it possible for the polices accounts of crime, danger, risk, and security to circulate widely in news discourse about HIV criminalization. Of course, news coverage of HIV criminalization is not univocal. Social movements are a significant source of counter discourse. As interviews with HIV activists illustrate, activists shape public knowledge about HIV criminalization in the press by strategically leveraging the conventions of the news interview, producing quantified representations of the issue, and developing relationships with reporters. Overall this dissertation adds to understandings of the social organization of media discourse about HIV criminalization. At the same time, it also provides space to reflect on broader analytic sociological questions. In particular, in this work I complicate the way that social relations are conceptualized in institutional ethnography, trouble the way that scholars understand the relationship between crime news and health news, and position this work within a trajectory of politically engaged institutional ethnography.