https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884918760669 Journalism 2019, Vol. 20(5) 651–659 © The Author(s) 2018 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1464884918760669 journals.sagepub.com/home/jou Dealing with the mess (we made): Unraveling hybridity, normativity, and complexity in journalism studies Tamara Witschge University of Groningen, The Netherlands CW Anderson University of Leeds, UK David Domingo Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium Alfred Hermida The University of British Columbia, Canada Abstract In this article, we discuss the rise and use of the concept of hybridity in journalism studies. Hybridity afforded a meaningful intervention in a discipline that had the tendency to focus on a stabilized and homogeneous understanding of the field. Nonetheless, we now need to reconsider its deployment, as it only partially allows us to address and understand the developments in journalism. We argue that if scholarship is to move forward in a productive manner, we need, rather than denote everything that is complex as hybrid, to develop new approaches to our object of study. Ultimately, this is an open invitation to the field to adopt experientialist, practice-based approaches that help us overcome the ultimately limited binary dualities that have long governed our theoretical and empirical work in the field. Corresponding author: Tamara Witschge, University of Groningen, P.O. Box 716, 9700 AS Groningen, The Netherlands. Email: t.a.c.witschge@rug.nl 760669JOU 0 0 10.1177/1464884918760669JournalismWitschge et al. research-article 2018 Article