What editors talk about when they talk about editors? A public discourse analysis of market and aesthetic logics

•Media discourse by editors focuses on aesthetic values, experience with books and publishers, intellectual status and skills.•Media discourse by editors shows a relative impermeability to market discourse.•Organizational-level characteristics can shape the balance between art and market logics.•At the public discourse level, the found divide reverses Bourdieu's argument of fields of large/restricted production.•Regarding the media, actors may activate discursive strategies, such as silencing and amplifying the elements with which one desires to be the least or most associated. In this paper, we address the topic of the changing relationships between market and aesthetic logics in fields of cultural production with a focus on public discourse. We explore the contemporary Italian literary field and examine editors’ public discursive reconstructions of their work related to the media to understand the particular shape of market and aesthetic logics in their public discourse and explain the influencing factors. Using a text analysis of 87 media interviews combining topic modeling and multiple correspondence analysis, we inductively explore how editors narrate their work. Far from incorporating a market discourse, editors mostly maintain an idiosyncratic discourse focusing on aesthetic values, experience with books and publishers, intellectual status and skills. Surprisingly, publishers’ sizes and geographical locations, but not the industry structure or professional role within the field, are organizational factors that account for the balance between market and aesthetic discourses as editors working for medium-sized publishers are more prone to address aesthetic issues, while editors working for large publishers are more prone to refer to personal experience, and only editors working for small publishers explicitly refer to the market logic.