Journalism, as a profession, has enjoyed a long and stable development in most countries around the world. Whether working under conditions of censorship, pressures of nation building, or with expectations of providing a society with social cement, journalism is widely recognized and seen as a set of values, principles, and practices enacted in different ways and settings with a ‘sense of wholenessness and seamlessness’ (Hallin, 1992: 14) around the world. Similarly, the field of journalism studies – the scholarly pursuit of knowledge about journalism – developed alongside its object into an increasingly sophisticated and consensual body of knowledge, range of research methodologies, and theoretical developments.
This modernist dream of coherence and consensus is a fallacy. In the late or, with Zygmunt Bauman (Deuze, 2007a), liquid modern era, the field of journalism studies and education recognizes how journalism is more than a neat sum of its parts, instead accommodating a more dynamic and indeed unruly consideration of the profession. Journalism is transitioning from a more or less coherent industry to a highly varied and diverse range of practices. As Anderson et al. (2012) write in a review of the profession at the start of the 21st century, ‘the journalism industry is dead but … journalism exists in many places’ (p. 76).
Scholars and educators tend to respond to this shift in two ways. One is to rally the troops, close ranks, and put significant effort in bringing coherence and stability (back) to the field. This gets established by producing impressive handbooks, canonical anthologies, readers, and companion volumes (and corresponding special issues of scholarly journals and conferences). Empirical approaches in this tradition center on comprehensive surveys and content analyses of journalists and journalism based on narrow definitions of the news industry offering conclusions about what journalism does and who journalists are (see Hanitzsch et al., 2011; Hellmueller and Mellado, 2015; Willnat et al., 2013).[1](javascript:popRef('fn1-1464884916688550'))
A second trend in the field is to dive, head first, into the chaos. This proves to be an often exciting and bewildering experience, leading to a wide variety of studies and conceptualizations of journalism in a post-industrial era, often featuring particularistic work on emerging genres, formats, and types of journalism. Theoretically, journalism research in this context enthusiastically explores the boundaries of the field (Carlson and Lewis, 2015) or shows through a surge in ethnographic fieldwork how even the traditional ‘inside’ of the profession – the newsroom – is not as coherent as it is generally made out to be (Domingo and Paterson, 2011).
In this intervention, we bring together these approaches in a dialectic attempt to move beyond journalism, allowing for a broader definition and understanding of the field. We critically interrogate first the normative expectations of what journalism should be and do according to dominant conceptualizations of the profession. Next, epistemologically we follow up on the newsroom-centricity of journalism studies (section ‘Toward a dynamic definition of journalism’) while recognizing that newsrooms continue to be important anchoring points for newswork (section ‘Understanding news as work’). However, the newsroom is not necessarily a solid or coherent entity in today’s post-industrial journalism (section ‘Considering the organization of post-industrial journalism’), nor is newswork outside of the newsroom necessarily free of the constraints and structures traditionally provided by the institutional arrangement of journalism (section ‘Enter entrepreneurialism’). Newsrooms and newswork are part of a profession that can best be seen as a self-organizing social system through which shifting coalitions of participants are linked, and that is interdependent on a variety of other systems (such as sales, marketing, design, programming and coding, publishing, and distribution services). It is also a field with a distinct materiality of praxis (Sartre, 1976: 79) – as what journalism is and what journalists do cannot be meaningfully separated from their material context (cf. technologies, work environments). We discuss how, in this context, we can understand the role of the media professional as an enterprising individual beyond the limited conceptualization of entrepreneurship as a strictly economic endeavor (section ‘Beyond journalism’). In the concluding section, we push for an ontology of journalism beyond individuals and institutions.
Students and scholars coming from a wide variety of disciplines have researched and theorized journalism, resulting in a more or less coherent conceptualization of what journalism is (Zelizer, 2004). The general approach to understanding, studying, teaching, and practicing journalism articulates the profession with a specific occupational ideology and culture. Journalists tend to benchmark their actions and attitudes self-referentially using ideal-typical standards, seeing themselves as providing a public service; being objective, fair, and (therefore) trustworthy; working autonomously, committed to an operational logic of actuality and speed (preeminent in concepts such as reporting on breaking news, getting the story first); and having a social responsibility and ethical sensibility (Deuze, 2005). This conceptualization is still strong within the field today and seems to endure even in the midst of profound changes and challenges to the profession.
Through the occupational ideology of journalism, we can define the field from the inside out, helping us to understand how the profession makes sense of itself. External definitions of journalism tend to be more functional and instrumental, where the profession is considered to provide a particular function for (democratic) society, ‘informing citizens in a way that enables them to act as citizens’ (Costera Meijer, 2001: 13). Seen from such a function-specific perspective, journalism gets identified distinct from other media professions (such as public relations) ‘as a societal system providing society with fact-based, relevant and current information’ (Görke and Scholl, 2007: 651). Beyond systems theory – with its reluctance to be normative about what journalism could or should be – democratic theories of the profession attribute it a seminal status, as Michael Schudson (2003), for example, defines ‘journalism [a]s the business or practice of producing and disseminating information about contemporary affairs of general public interest and importance’ (p. 11). Schudson (2008) sees journalism in terms of what it ‘can do for democracy’ (p. 11), where journalism informs, investigates, analyzes, mobilizes, provides multiple perspectives and a public forum, and publicizes representative democracy.
From this point of departure, the literature diverges, one strand embracing universalist notions of journalism, showing how it gives meaning to itself in its culture – where culture is seen as the way in which a particular group (i.e. journalists working at a specific project or within a particular context, such as a newsroom, a medium, a country or region) works and how group members make sense of this. Thomas Hanitzsch (2007) defines this ‘universal’ culture of journalism as constituted by its institutional role in society, its epistemology, and its ethical ideology. Surveys of (and interviews with) journalists, almost always sampled from within legacy news organizations, fuel such claims by asking journalists a set of standardized questions about role perceptions and professional values. They suggest consensus and add coherence to a ‘global’ journalism that is as aspirational as it is universal among working journalists (Löffelholz and Weaver, 2008; Weaver and Willnat, 2012).
While popular, there is also much critical debate both among newsworkers and journalism students and scholars about an assumed homogeneity of the profession. The discussion on the elements of journalism (Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2014) tends to assume a more or less stable core of news values and professional standards. This is a problematic assumption in the case of journalism, as the reference to a consensual core (of ‘elements’) excludes marginalized and minority voices, practices, and forms of journalism. Generally lacking formal boundaries and therefore relying on communication about itself to define and validate its privileged position in society, journalism recently has been reconceptualized in terms of its continuous boundary work, consisting of ‘efforts to establish and enlarge the limits of one domain’s institutional authority relative to outsiders, thus creating social boundaries that yield greater cultural and material resources for insiders’ (Lewis, 2012: 841). Research among journalists working for organizations, companies, or units both within mainstream news media and those on the sidelines shows how they engage repeatedly in boundary work, intensely debating what journalism is and who can be considered to be a (‘real’) journalist – and that such discussions have always been intrinsic to the profession and its associated praxis (Carlson and Lewis, 2015).
Even journalism’s assumed significance for the functioning of democracies has come under serious scrutiny. Beate Josephi (2013) argues that such a corollary is ‘too limiting and distorting a lens through which journalism can be viewed in the 21st century’ (p. 445). The consolidation of journalism studies in the literature mainly serves the modern project of bringing an inherently unruly object under control (Steensen and Ahva, 2015: 3). It is crucial to recognize that the supposed core of journalism as well as the assumed consistency of the inner workings of news organizations is anything but consensual, nor is it necessarily the norm. At the same time, it would be a mistake to assume that the types of journalism emerging outside and alongside legacy news organizations are necessarily different or oppositional to the core values, ideals, and practices of the profession. We propose to widen journalistic conceptualizations beyond the false core–periphery dichotomy, understanding that the core is no more homogeneous than the so-called periphery, while neither necessarily represents the other’s antithesis.
We have to revisit the question of what journalism is for conceptual considerations – the normative construction of journalism through ideology and culture as reinforced in both scholarly work and professional publications – and practical propriety – given the increasingly fragmented, networked, and atypical nature of the labor market for newswork. When answering this question, theory needs to move beyond the limitations framing this discussion: An overreliance on journalism as an inherently stable institution, distinct from other social systems, and beyond its validation as uniquely necessary for democracy. These notions, however important, have over-extended their shelf life (Zelizer, 2013). We argue for theorizing journalism from the ground up – focusing on where, how, by whom, and why ‘the lost labour of reporting’ (Compton and Benedetti, 2010: 487) is done.
Until recently, the participation of journalists in the discursive construction of journalism was governed by being employed in (or as a student, intern, or scholar: Observing) a newsroom. The newsroom was the dominant form of employment and organization of work in journalism throughout the 20th century. This arrangement served to stabilize the industry, going hand in hand with the shaping of consensual practices in journalism studies and education. The newsroom was the site to be a journalist, to be recognized as such, and scholars validated this process by pursuing empirical approaches dedicated to newsrooms and the newswork therein. Throughout the history of journalism studies, high-profile and much-cited newsroom studies have appeared, from David Manning-White’s (1950) work on the gatekeeping selections at a metropolitan newspaper via seminal work by Jeremy Tunstall (1971) and Gaye Tuchman (1978) to more recent newsroom studies by David Ryfe (2012) and Nikki Usher (2014), to name but a few.
Even though these studies have been important in shedding light onto newsrooms, they focus on ‘problematic sites of fieldwork as well’, as Anderson (2011: 152) notes. Anderson points out that the traditional newsrooms ‘cannot serve as our only model for fieldwork’ as ‘the very definition of journalism is being contested on a daily basis’ (Anderson, 2011). This is not simply an operational problem in the current climate of newswork destabilization. Our critique is more fundamental: Throughout its history, scholars of journalism and the news have supported the dominance of certain interpretations of (the role of) journalism by focusing on specific institutional arrangements within particular privileged settings. As Karin Wahl-Jorgensen (2009) puts it, the newsroom-centricity in journalism studies has meant that
scholars have tended to focus on journalists’ culture as it emerges within the limited areas of newsrooms and other centralized sites for news production, usually paying scant attention to places, spaces, practices and people at the margins of this spatially delimited news production universe. (p. 23)
Such newsroom-centricity has implications beyond the mere privileging of some actors and exclusion of others: It has also led to an emphasis on ‘routinized and controlled forms and aspects of newswork’ (Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, 2009: 25). The scholarly consensus on professional routines that make up newswork in newsrooms has been consolidated in journalism education where such routines become fixed elements in the coursework for print, broadcast, and online sequences. Cottle (2007) notes how such a focus on ‘organizational functionalism’ (p. 10) privileges routines and patterned ways of doing newswork over differentiation and divergence. What is more, even within newsroom-centered research, scholars have privileged print over other media, further limiting the range of understanding and definition of journalism. Moreover, the scholarly focus on elite, prestige, and glamorous institutions located in large cities of the capitalist Western world serves to solidify such places as the only ones deemed worthy of a voice to articulate what is journalism and who counts as a journalist (Nerone, 2013).
As much of newsgathering, editing, and packaging take place elsewhere, outside of the newsroom, and with organizations virtualizing their workflow delegating work to stringers and correspondents on the road, Wahl-Jorgensen (2009) notes how the newsroom is disappearing. Anderson (2011) advocates ‘blowing up the newsroom’ when conducting contemporary newswork studies, proposing an approach that would consider news production as a network that transcends organizational boundaries. And yet, Anderson (2011) concludes, ‘The newsroom is not extinct. In many ways, it is more important than ever, for it remains, even now, a central locus in which a variety of fragmented actor-networks find themselves tied together to create an occupation’ (p. 160).
It is a challenge to consider journalism as a networked practice (Russell, 2015) involving a distributed variety of actors and actants (including co-creating audiences as well as robots producing news), including an emerging global startup scene of newswork (Küng, 2015) while recognizing the permanence of meaning-giving structures, such as the newsroom. The more or less formal (and professional) arrangement of journalism requires an awareness of the inhabited nature (Hallett and Ventresca, 2006) of the spaces where newswork takes place. The newsroom as an inhabited institution, on one hand, provides the raw materials and guidelines for the way people work, and on the other hand, the various people moving in and out of the newsroom through their interactions produce the institution, putting it into motion. The focus in this conceptualization of newswork is on ‘institutional complexity’ (Delbridge and Edwards, 2013: 927) and heterogeneous understandings of occupational membership (Bechky, 2011: 1157). The point is not to say that contemporary news institutions are inhabited, and those in the past were not. As Matt Carlson suggests, journalism has always already been ‘a varied cultural practice embedded within a complicated social landscape. Journalism is not a solid, stable thing to point to, but a constantly shifting denotation applied differently depending on context’ (Carlson, 2015: 2).
The roles of institutions in newswork are dynamic and changing, opening our eyes to movement rather than stability, to what journalism becomes rather than what journalism is (Deuze and Witschge, 2016).
If we assume for a moment that in some ways the newsroom is still important and key to understanding what contemporary journalism is, what would we in fact see inside one located in a legacy media organization? For one, we would observe a lot of empty chairs. The number of layoffs in journalism – especially in print – has been nothing but astounding over the last decade. Reports of journalism unions and associations, such as the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance in Australia, the Society of Professional Journalists in the United States, the National Association of Journalists in The Netherlands, and the National Union of Journalists in the United Kingdom in recent years, suggest their members see their colleagues being fired and not replaced, as journalists working in newsrooms consistently report having to do more with fewer colleagues and less resources. Long-term planning and ‘moving up the ladder’ have been replaced by job-hopping and a portfolio work life as news professionals increasingly have contracts, not careers in journalism. As a consequence, stress and burnout are on the rise among newsworkers, with many journalists considering to leave the profession altogether (O’Donnell et al., 2015; Reinardy, 2011). Precarity and a ‘culture of job insecurity’ (Ekdale et al., 2015) have come to define the lived experience for many inside the contemporary newsroom.