This Research Notes piece explores how journalists use digital platforms to shift conversations about a single event into broader critiques about their industry. In this paper, we document this shift in the case of Audie Cornish’s departure from National Public Radio. We analyze a corpus of 7886 tweets related to her 2022 move from public radio to CNN. How did journalists respond to the event via digital platforms? And what prompted a shift to critical metajournalistic discourse? We find that alongside well wishes for Cornish as an individual, journalists in this context leveraged this individual event occurring within the industry space to call attention to a structural issue in the industry: an inability to retain journalists of color. This initial critical metadiscourse occurring on Twitter gained traction through a tweet by an insider with high cultural capital: Audie Cornish’s co host, Ari Shapiro. The industry critique angle got picked up by traditional news media outlets; it was further amplified by a larger group of journalists on social media. These journalists were then able to further nuance and complicate the issue of diversity and inclusion in the public radio by calling attention to the experiences of less prominent people of color in the industry. Analyzing this discourse offers a case of how critical metajournalistic discourse may emerge on digital platforms, get consolidated and legitimated through traditional news sources, and then get amplified and further nuanced through these same digital platforms.

中文翻译：

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“如果 NPR 不将此视为一场危机，我不知道会怎样”：记者如何使用数字平台进行行业批评

这篇 Research Notes 文章探讨了记者如何使用数字平台将关于单个事件的对话转变为对其行业的更广泛批评。在本文中，我们记录了 Audie Cornish 离开国家公共广播电台的这一转变。我们分析了 7886 条推文的语料库，这些推文与她 2022 年从公共广播转向 CNN 有关。记者如何通过数字平台应对此次活动？是什么促使人们转向批判性的元新闻话语呢？我们发现，除了对 Cornish 个人的良好祝愿外，在这种情况下，记者还利用行业空间内发生的这一个人事件来引起人们对行业结构性问题的关注：无法留住有色人种记者。这个最初发生在 Twitter 上的批判性元话语通过一位拥有高文化资本的内部人士的推文获得了关注：Audie Cornish 的联合主持人 Ari Shapiro。行业批评的角度被传统新闻媒体所采用;社交媒体上更大的记者群体进一步放大了这种情绪。然后，这些记者能够通过引起人们对行业中不太突出的有色人种的经历的关注，进一步细微差别和复杂化公共广播中的多样性和包容性问题。分析这种话语提供了一个案例，说明批判性的元新闻话语如何出现在数字平台上，通过传统新闻来源得到整合和合法化，然后通过这些相同的数字平台被放大和进一步细致。