Financial journalists’ expertise: The JCK tango of journalism and economics

This paper examines economic journalists’ expertise by integrating a theoretical model, Journalistic Content Knowledge (JCK), with a new research method, News Sorting. JCK proposes that beat journalists’ expertise lies in the merger of domain-specific knowledge and journalistic know-how. News Sorting tests this proposition by having journalists rank both subject-matter and journalistic challenges they encountered in producing samples of their publications. Based on News Sorting sessions in which 20 Israeli financial journalists ranked 498 items, the study reveals how economic and journalistic knowledge interact in specific cases of economic reporting. The findings show that JCK operates slightly asymmetrically in economic news: economic challenges are somewhat higher than journalistic ones, especially in items involving macroeconomics, finance, taxation, and intersections between economics, politics, and law. Rather than forming a single, homogeneous expertise, economic journalists’ expertise takes shape around three epistemic orientations that prioritize information gathering, news analysis, or the clear presentation of economic information.