A live read on the roles you play.
You'll rate 50 short signals about your work on a five-point scale. The console decodes your answers against the full taxonomy of journalistic roles across two domains, political life and everyday life, then returns a full readout and your primary role. Every role is also browsable on its own, in the Registry, whether or not you run the scan. For the theory behind the taxonomy, see the Framework tab.
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In my work, it is important to…
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Eighteen roles across six functions. Longer spokes mean stronger orientation. Click a name below the wheel to open it in the Registry.
All eighteen, ordered by your score. Click any row to read its full entry.
Seven roles across consumption, identity, and emotion.
Your strongest orientations, with definitions from the framework.
A 1080×1080 image with your primary role and top 5, sized for Instagram, X, or LinkedIn.
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Twenty-five roles journalists occupy across political and everyday life, drawn from the Hanitzsch & Vos framework. Filter by domain or function, search by name, or open a card to read the full entry.
Click any role in either diagram to jump straight to its entry.
18 roles · 6 functions
7 roles · 3 areas
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ROLESCAN's taxonomy is not an arbitrary checklist. It operationalizes a specific theory of what a journalistic role even is. This page summarizes that theory, largely as developed by Thomas Hanitzsch and Tim P. Vos, so the readout you get elsewhere on this site can be read with its assumptions in view.
Hanitzsch and Vos (2017) argue that journalistic roles have no fixed essence sitting outside of language. A role exists because journalists, sources, audiences, and critics keep talking about it, arguing over it, and acting it out. This is the core claim of discursive institutionalism: institutions are real constraints on behavior, but they are also constantly reproduced, reinterpreted, and contested through discourse (Schmidt, as cited in Hanitzsch & Vos, 2017).
Journalism, in this view, is a discursive institution: a set of shared norms and informal rules, learned through socialization rather than written down as law, that tell journalists what counts as legitimate practice (Cook, 1998, as cited in Hanitzsch & Vos, 2017). Those norms only hold together because they are continually rearticulated. Nothing about "the watchdog role" or "the disseminator role" is permanent; each is a discursive construction of journalism's identity that could, in principle, be renegotiated.
Roles are also positioned relative to one another in what Hanitzsch and Vos (2017), drawing on Bourdieu, call the discursive field: a space of competing positions where journalists, outlets, and institutions struggle over the authority to define what journalism is for. A newsroom that valorizes detachment and a newsroom that valorizes advocacy are not simply doing journalism differently; they are staking out different, competing claims within the same field.
Because roles are discursive, Hanitzsch and Vos (2017) argue they need to be studied on two levels, split into four analytically distinct categories. Confusing these categories, they note, is one of the main reasons role research has stayed "thin on theory."
Role orientations are attitudinal. Normative roles describe what journalists believe society expects of them; cognitive roles describe what individual journalists personally want to do, internalized through training and newsroom socialization. Role performance is behavioral. Practiced roles are what journalists actually do, visible in their output; narrated roles are the story journalists tell about what they did, which is not always the same thing.
The process model of journalistic roles · after Hanitzsch & Vos (2017, Figure 1)
The four categories connect in a loop rather than a line. Normative expectations are internalized into cognitive aspirations; cognitive roles are enacted into practice; practice is reflected on and turned into narrated accounts; and those narrated accounts feed back in two directions, either normalizing into revised normative expectations, or negotiating a shift in what individual journalists cognitively aspire to. A journalist who discovers, in practice, that the "detached bystander" ideal does not survive contact with an unfolding crisis may renegotiate their own cognitive role well before the norm itself changes.
The 25-role catalogue used throughout this site is the empirical extension of this theory, developed in Hanitzsch and Vos (2018) and revisited in Hanitzsch and Örnebring (2020). Roles that had accumulated in the literature as a "cacophony of partly overlapping and often very disparate catalogues" (Hanitzsch & Örnebring, 2020) are organized into two domains: political life, where journalism addresses audiences as citizens, and everyday life, where journalism addresses audiences as consumers, selves, and feeling subjects. Political life maps onto six functions — informational-instructive, analytical-deliberative, critical-monitorial, advocative-radical, developmental-educative, and collaborative-facilitative — each holding three roles. Everyday life maps onto three areas — consumption, identity, and emotion — whose overlaps generate seven roles.
A methodological note. The 50-item questionnaire in this tool asks how important each behavior feels to you personally. That is a measure of cognitive role orientation only, one of the four categories above. It says nothing directly about what society expects of you (normative), what you actually publish (practiced), or how you would characterize your own past work if asked (narrated). Treat your readout as a snapshot of aspiration, not a verdict on performance.
An institution whose norms and rules are not fixed by law but are learned, reproduced, and revised through ongoing talk, practice, and socialization among its members (Cook, 1998; Sparrow, 1999, as cited in Hanitzsch & Vos, 2017).
A relational space of competing positions in which journalists, outlets, and institutions struggle over the authority to define journalism's meaning and place in society (Hanitzsch & Vos, 2017, drawing on Bourdieu, 1999).
The attitudinal layer of a role: normative expectations plus the cognitive aspirations individual journalists internalize from them (Hanitzsch & Vos, 2017).
The behavioral layer of a role: what is actually practiced, and how that practice is subsequently narrated by the journalist (Hanitzsch & Vos, 2017).
Injunctive norms are beliefs about what journalists should do in a given context; descriptive norms are beliefs about what most other journalists actually do (Lapinski & Rimal, 2005, as cited in Hanitzsch & Vos, 2017).
Hanitzsch, T., & Örnebring, H. (2020). Professionalism, professional identity, and journalistic roles. In K. Wahl-Jorgensen & T. Hanitzsch (Eds.), The handbook of journalism studies (2nd ed., pp. 105–122). Routledge.
Hanitzsch, T., & Vos, T. P. (2017). Journalistic roles and the struggle over institutional identity: The discursive constitution of journalism. Communication Theory, 27(2), 115–135. https://doi.org/10.1111/comt.12112
Hanitzsch, T., & Vos, T. P. (2018). Journalism beyond democracy: A new look into journalistic roles in political and everyday life. Journalism, 19(2), 146–164. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884916673386