In the 1970s, it appeared ‘the golden age’ of the sociology of news production. After the frst wave, there lacked distinguished studies in this feld. This paper aims to explain why related studies seldom appeared after the 1980s based on the impossibility of research methods. Due to the limitation to access, the crisis of traditional media, the pressure of academic production, as well as the ethic paradox, participatory ethnography has been replaced by the text-based news production study with a cultural approach. Facing with the challenge from the Internet, news production studies turned away from the organizational approach to the cultural approach. At last, this paper suggests that in the new media era we need to go back to the site of media production, seek for the similarity and difference between media production and other production, develop more ?exible and valid theoretical concept.