Journalism studies have long concentrated on facts, content, production, dissemination, mechanisms, and structures, while insufficient attention has been paid to the human element. Photo: TUCHONG

Journalism has long been subject to criticism, both from broader society and from within the academic community itself. In recent years, a major focus of scholarly debate has been journalism’s failure to keep pace with technological change. Yet this diagnosis addresses only the surface of the problem. At a deeper level, the difficulty lies in the discipline’s prolonged inability to renew its mode of inquiry. For journalism to innovate and develop, it must pose new overarching questions that transcend existing paradigms and, on that basis, construct a new paradigm together with a corresponding theoretical framework.

Conventional journalism confined to limited problem domain

The American philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn famously argued that a “paradigm shift” marks revolutionary and discontinuous scientific development, whereas “normal science” refers to incremental problem-solving conducted within the boundaries set by an established paradigm. A paradigm defines a discipline’s overarching question, while normal science addresses specific problems subsumed under that framework.

Viewed from the perspective of the historical stages of scientific development, journalism has long remained in a condition of normal science. Research in the field has persistently concentrated on professional and production contexts, addressing questions such as how news is produced, how news organizations operate, how journalistic identity is constructed, and how journalistic authority is maintained. The narrowness of these guiding questions has inevitably constrained the growth of knowledge. Adherence to paradigms characteristic of normal science cannot generate revolutionary questions. If journalism is to gain sufficient space for expansion, it can no longer rely on gradual, cumulative development alone. Instead, it must suspend established research assumptions, radically change the repetitive mechanism of knowledge production, and move beyond the stage of normal science.

For this reason, journalism must undertake work that “has not been done before”—that is, it must advance a new overarching question. This task requires what the French philosopher Louis Althusser described as a “change of terrain:” thinking from a new position and standpoint in order to perceive what was previously invisible. How, then, does one come to see what was once unseen□ Althusser argued that what a science does not know is not, as empiricist ideology suggests, something external that the science excludes or simply cannot comprehend. Rather, it lies in the weaknesses embedded within the science itself, beneath the appearance of rigorous demonstration—specifically, the silences in its discourse, the gaps in its concepts, and the voids concealed within the seeming strictness of its reasoning.

From this perspective, the search for a new overarching question does not consist in mechanically adding new phenomena to old questions, nor in celebrating problems that resist explanation. Instead, it requires identifying possibilities for transcendence within what has been rendered invisible by existing paradigms—within neglected concepts and underexamined lines of argumentation that current research has overlooked or excluded.

For a long time, journalism studies have focused on facts, content, production, dissemination, mechanisms, and structures, while devoting little attention to a crucial element of journalistic activity: the human being. As a result, humans in journalism have often been treated merely as subjects, components, resources, or producers, while questions of human existence, meaning, and value have rarely received sustained scholarly engagement. This neglect of the human constitutes a serious weakness of journalism as a discipline, producing a structural absence in human-centered argumentation. A new overarching question for journalism must therefore be sought in the human dimension, for any genuinely complete understanding of journalism is intrinsically and fundamentally connected to human beings.

Reconstructing logical starting point of journalism

The new overarching question of journalism—“how journalistic activities can be understood and interpreted in an ontological sense”—establishes the fundamental context for interpreting journalism—namely, human existence and lived experience. It also determines the basic direction of inquiry: Journalism must be examined within the horizon of human existence and survival, so as to probe the relationship between journalism and the human condition and to allow journalism and human existence to function as reciprocal points of reflection. The “communicative paradigm” is formulated precisely in response to this question.

First, at the ontological level, journalism is understood as a form of communicative practice. All journalistic activities are human activities and therefore embody particular modes of human existence. As such, journalistic activity must be clarified and situated within a more primordial mode of being—communication itself.

Second, approaching journalism from the perspective of communication requires relocating journalism studies onto a new foundational ground. Epistemology has long served as the core basis for the construction and development of traditional journalism. By contrast, the communicative paradigm shifts this grounding from epistemology to ontology. This shift enables journalism studies to attend more fully, on an ontological basis, to humans’ being-in-the-world—to questions of existence, meaning, and value.

Third, “communication” provides a reservoir of problems and intellectual resources for addressing the new overarching question and for constructing a new theoretical paradigm. The multitude of issues embedded in the history of human communication collectively constitute journalism’s field of inquiry. In the digital age in particular, as communication technologies undergo significant transformation, the individuals, structures, and systemic properties of communicative networks are being rapidly reconfigured, generating a proliferation of real-world problems related to journalistic communication practices.

Tenets of communicative paradigm

The communicative paradigm views journalism as a communicative practice fundamentally linked to human existence, rather than merely as a professional or production-oriented activity. From this perspective, journalism is inseparable from human life, and its study must account for the ways in which humans interact with one another and with the world. Accordingly, the communicative paradigm advances a vision of the world structured through human-to-human and human-to-world interactions. This shift reorients the focus of journalism research away from professional news production alone and toward the broader domain of communicative practices. Within this framework, journalism regains its human dimension, as its role as a communicative practice constitutes a significant mode of human existence.

As a result, the disciplinary character of journalism undergoes a profound transformation. Whereas traditional journalism has long emphasized attention to “things”—including news facts, production outputs, and procedural concerns—the communicative paradigm redirects attention toward human existence itself. Journalism is examined within the context of human interaction and lived experience, making the relationships among journalism, human existence, human meaning, and human value central to scholarly inquiry. It is precisely this deeper concern with human existence that endows journalism with the characteristics of a humanities discipline, establishing it as a genuine study of humans rather than merely a study of news processes or outputs.

Communication is a fundamental mode of human existence. The communicative paradigm therefore holds that journalism should direct its inquiries toward journalistic communicative practices, toward human interaction in the present, and toward the relationships among humans and between humans and the world. The articulation of a new overarching question and the establishment of a new theoretical paradigm exert their greatest academic impact by opening up a wide array of specific research questions. This approach generates a field of inquiry with broad possibilities, enabling scholars to explore dimensions of journalism that were previously overlooked or insufficiently examined. Compared with traditional journalism studies, the communicative paradigm’s human-centered orientation yields a field of inquiry that is broader, deeper, and more multi-layered.

First, the communicative paradigm expands the scope of journalism research. By anchoring inquiry in human existence and lived experience, it opens up a richer range of research directions. Studies conducted within this paradigm can simultaneously address public and everyday news, draw upon both professional practice and lived experience, examine human engagement with the factual world as well as with other people, and explore subject–object relations alongside intersubjective communicative relations. In this way, the paradigm establishes a systematic, multidimensional spectrum of research questions whose scope extends well beyond that of conventional journalism studies.

Second, the communicative paradigm deepens the significance of journalism research questions. By broadening the domain of inquiry to encompass human communicative practices and modes of existence, it creates greater openness and intellectual space, fostering engagement with disciplines such as philosophy, history, sociology, and political science. This shift enhances the analytical depth, conceptual rigor, and imaginative reach of journalism studies, while also transforming the ways in which questions are posed and addressed.

Third, the communicative approach enriches the levels of inquiry. Whereas traditional journalism research has often focused primarily on normative concerns, the communicative paradigm broadens the disciplinary foundation to encompass at least five dimensions: theoretical, historical, structural, normative, and critical. The theoretical dimension examines fundamental relationships among humans, the world, journalism, and communication. The historical dimension situates journalistic communicative practices within the evolution of communicative forms, tracing development patterns and their dynamic connections to human society. The structural dimension analyzes journalism’s role within broader social structures, examining its links to political, economic, cultural, and everyday life systems. The critical dimension assesses how the characteristics of journalistic communicative practices may pose challenges to, or exert negative effects on, human existence. Taken together, these dimensions form a more comprehensive and conceptually coherent system of research questions than traditional journalism offers.

Methodologically, the communicative paradigm adopts an open and flexible stance. Approaches traditionally associated with the humanities—such as speculative analysis, theoretical interpretation, and historical inquiry—can coexist with the empirical approaches valued in the social sciences. At present, the paradigm emphasizes a primarily humanistic orientation, supplemented by empirical research. As the communicative paradigm matures and diversifies at the theoretical level, fine-grained empirical studies are expected to realize their full potential.

Li Hongjiang is an associate professor from the Television School at Communication University of China. This article has been edited and excerpted from Contemporary Communications, Issue 3, 2025.