Paper short abstract:

This article studies the multiple valuation practices in newsmaking at Valor Economico, an economic journal in Brazil. Valor promises to produce news that generates value. Different valuation practices compete within the newsroom to define value, reflecting diverse journalistic and economic visions.

Paper long abstract:

This article explores the multiple valuation practices that pervade news-production at Valor Economico, the leading economic journal in Brazil. Valor institutional promise is to produce news that generates value. This promise suggests that journalists mediate and transform the events that they report in a manner that produces value for certain economic stake-holders or for Brazil as a whole. How journalists at Valor understand their performative role in producing value of this kind? It is contended that different orders of worth and valuation practices compete within the newsroom to define 'value' itself, reflecting different visions of journalism, different understanding of economy and society, and different conceptions of what reporting is good for. The article is based on a 10-month ethnography of Valor Economico's newsroom in São Paulo conducted between 2013, 2014 and 2015.

First, it explores the journalistic principles of access and accountability which are in tension in defining Valor's coverage - i.e. reporting information about powerful actors versus accounting the actions of powerful actors themselves. Second, it explores how political positions play-out among journalists, finding a clash between liberal and developmentalist views that currently divide Brazilian society. Third, it investigates the competing valuations of economic coverage itself, as this struggle is reflected in the experts and sources that are privileged. Journalists' conceptions of the real and the financial economy are up for grabs here. The article concludes that despite frictions and disputes between different valuation practices, the plurality of modes of evaluation is possibly Valor's greatest capital.