Journalism and its professional challenges
During recent decades, it has become particularly evident that professions do not exist in a vacuum independent of social, economic, political, or technological developments, but rather they experience fundamental structural changes due to the transformation of their contextual conditions. This is even more true of the field of journalism, whose professional status has always been fragile. As journalism has never been able to develop a stable monopoly of jurisdiction, Abbott has described it as a ‘permeable occupation’ (Abbott, 1988, p. 225). Legally, journalism is an ‘open profession’, because preventing anyone from expressing themselves in the media by demanding a licence or a particular qualification would come into conflict with the fundamental right to freedom of expression. Nevertheless, journalism has developed a professional ideology that claims objectivity and autonomy and assumes the role of a publicly legitimized gatekeeping authority in media communication (Lewis, 2012).
From today’s perspective, the professionalization of journalism can be best understood in relation to the development of the mass media during the twentieth century. During that time, journalists established themselves as experts of media communication, and their professionalization was based on controlling content creation, in particular in respect to ‘the news’. Journalism grew as an occupational group and functional role with the technological development and market expansion of the media system, from press to radio broadcasting to television. However, the rise of new media affects journalism much more fundamentally than earlier changes to the media system ever did.
Digital technology has changed newsroom processes and given journalists new tools. New outlets have emerged within the traditional media and in new media production, which are competing and accomplishing conventional types of publication (Witchge and Nygren, 2009, p. 41). Therefore, journalists increasingly have to be able to work in different formats and to handle many types of technology, since internet production requires new working routines and since news selection differs from the traditional outlets. Nevertheless, the principles of new media have further blurred the boundaries of journalism; the relationship between production and consumption and between professionals and amateurs has become highly contested. Moreover, the progressing commercialization of the media challenges the concept of professionalism and professional identity in this field. Journalists are becoming increasingly torn between the contradictory demands of economic profitability, taking political positions, and the imperatives of proper intellectual work. This has been particularly pronounced since the balance between financial and journalistic motives has changed towards global competition in the course of the internationalization of the media system.
This chapter discusses the dimensions of professionalism and the professionalization of journalism, beginning with a brief summary of the various historical pathways of its professionalization in the Western hemisphere (Section 2). Because of the structural openness or permeability of the occupation, journalists refer to professional values in order to legitimize their claim for autonomy and a normative role. Section 3 therefore deals with the ideal-typical traits of the professional ideology. The professionalization of journalism implies the development of an academic discipline in terms of research, building up a theoretical body, and establishing academic education. How academization, professional identity and skill development are interrelated in this process is analysed in Section 4. After dealing with the already mentioned changes resulting from the digitization and commercialization of the media in Section 5, two interpretations of the current development of journalism are discussed (Section 6). What the future perspectives of professional journalism might be is considered in the seventh and final section.
2.Pathways of journalistic professionalization
The development of the journalistic profession in Western democratic societies has followed historically different pathways but has been influenced by the Anglo-American model. Therefore, the historically rooted institutional conditions have served as nation-bound frameworks in which distinct profiles of journalism emerged throughout the twentieth century. In the literature, three to four main historical-institutional concepts of Western journalism are described (Esser and Umbricht, 2013; Mancini, 2005; Polumbaum, 2010; Williams, 2005).
The Anglo-American model is discussed as the dominant model of professional journalism (Mancini, 2005). It is called the ‘liberal’ or ‘social responsibility model’ (Siebert et al., 1956) or the ‘professional model’ (Tunstall, 1977) and has become a reference model for measuring and judging journalistic behaviours in other countries. Authors such as Esser and Umbricht (2013) refer here to the ideal-typical concept of news work, which is outlined in the article ‘Journalism as an Anglo-American invention’ (Chalaby, 1996). From today’s perspective, it is obvious that the ‘objectivity’ that characterizes this model can first be understood in the sense of political neutrality. It emphasizes objectivity, implying that news should be recorded in a detached and neutral way (Schudson, 2001). Concerning journalistic practice, a value orientation is asserted that stresses both objectivity and a reporting style distinct from comment or interpretation (Mancini, 2005). The frame of journalism as a ‘watchdog’ over politics is rooted in the liberal ideology and corresponds with the commercialized structure of the Anglo-American press. Journalism claims professional autonomy but isn’t distinctively concerned with the limitations of journalistic freedom resulting from market regulation and economic dependencies.
Journalism studies have stressed the contrast between Anglo-American professionalism and continental European traditions in journalism. However, the Anglo-American ideal of journalistic professionalism has been progressively imported and adapted in newsrooms throughout continental Europe. The general picture has also changed with the expansion and internationalization of media production in recent decades. In order to understand the similarities and differences of the journalistic field, the systems of media production and the social and political preconditions for professionalization in Europe are still of interest. One line of differentiation is drawn between a highly politicized literary style in south or central Europe and a corporatist style allocated to the more northern European countries (Hallin and Mancini, 2004).
France and Italy are labelled typical representatives of the southern European pathway and are characterized by a greater emphasis on interpretation and commentary than on factual reporting. A mix of ‘news and views’ is typical of these journalistic traditions, implying that opinion is prioritized over reportage (Chalaby, 1996). This style is based on deep-seated literary roots that have continued to exist in a context of elite orientation and limited readership. It corresponds with newspapers’ chronically weak financial situation and a greater dependency on state aid and political favouring (Mancini, 2000; Esser and Umbricht, 2013, 991f.). Strong press–party ties and a comparatively late development of journalism as an independent profession are the reason that the professional culture of ‘watchdog reporting’ has not been able to prosper properly in this context. The literature also indicates that the media’s intricate involvement in this polarized context tends towards its misuse in political disputes.
The corporatist model is based on the principle of consensus democracies with an emphasis on compromise and power sharing. This model spans the German-speaking, Benelux, and Scandinavian countries. With some variation, the political system in these countries is characterized by a wider range of political parties and organized groups that ideally resolve their differences in partnership and come to consensual decisions through bargaining and negotiation. This socio-political framework has supported the development of strong ties between newspapers, political parties, and organized social forces, and thus also a partisan reporting style. Though press partisanship might have weakened over recent decades, this political structure and ‘offshoots of the literary tradition stemming from southern countries’ has featured opinionated reporting (Esser and Umbricht, 2013, p. 991; Mancini, 2005). Different from the more polarized Mediterranean system, the literary tradition is less pronounced here, and the connections to politics are explained with a consensus around welfare state democracy instead of instrumentalization. In other words, the ideal of a neutral professionalism and information-oriented journalism has prevailed in these corporatist news systems against the background of a moderate degree of external pluralism and a legacy of commentary-orientated journalism. Switzerland and Germany are typical representatives of the liberal version of corporatism, with an intermediate position between the central European model and the Anglo-American system. This could be explained by Switzerland and Germany’s geographic proximity to France and Italy and the direct American influence on German media politics after the Second World War (Esser and Umbricht, 2013, p. 992).
Last but not least, the British model is also differentiated from the type of professional journalism developed in the United States. It is described as a mixed model that apparently incorporates elements from more than one historical-institutional pathway. A relatively strong segment of sensational, negative, and interpretative journalism is considered to characterize the British case. Therefore, the idea of pure journalistic professionalism is traditionally relativized and has led to a rather partisan national press (Hallin and Mancini, 2004).
This brief overview indicates how journalistic cultures have been influenced by the interplay between society, political frameworks, and the media system. The concept of professionalized journalism was born within the context of the Anglo-American system, and the professionalization of the journalistic occupation during the twentieth century was characterized by the merging of the standards of professional journalism in the varying media systems. The ideology of journalism as an independent profession was established in the Western hemisphere, in particular, between the 1960s and the 1990s (Schnell, 2007). Regarding the external and internal understanding of journalistic professionalism, the core values of this role model are still the reference points. They justify the special social status of journalists and even the current challenges of professional journalism due to the ongoing changes of media production and consumption and are evaluated related to these values.
During the twentieth century, journalism developed as an academic-based discipline and an object of systematic self-reflection. A consensual body of knowledge and a widely shared understanding of key theories and methods emerged. Reconstructing the relation between media and society, the functional role of journalism was interpreted as a gatekeeping authority in the media system. Journalists drew upon their expert role and their responsibility for ‘what the world needs to know’ as an important feature of democracy.
Even though a lack of coherence is problematized and discussed in the literature, the conceptualization of journalists as representatives of the public is the main legitimization for journalists’ claims of professional autonomy (Breen, 1998; Löffelholz, 2000; McNair, 2003; Deuze, 2004). As the boundaries of journalism are ‘permeable’ and not institutionally secured, journalists tend to refer to professional standards to distinguish themselves from other occupational groups and sustain some operational closure, thereby keeping outside forces at bay (Deuze, 2005, p. 447). Moreover, the ideology of professionalism has been identified as an instrument in the hands of journalists to neutralize the hierarchy in news-organization and media corporations (Soloski, 1990).
The paradoxical consequence of the absence of institutional boundaries in journalism has been a very distinct and narrow definition of what a ‘real’ journalist is and what parts of media production are considered examples of ‘real’ journalism. As journalism developed with the industrialization and emergence of the press as the first mass medium, the ideal of journalism refers to news work and newspaper journalism and more or less ignores the diversity of journalistic work, which often includes editorials, comments, reviews, consumer advice, and also domains outside that of ‘hard news’, such as entertainment, celebrity and everyday life. Most scholarly work on journalism has focused on institutional news journalism, and even the research on so-called ‘alternative’ journalism suggests that journalists across genres and media types invoke more or less the same ideal-typical value system when discussing and reflecting on their work (Van Zoonen, 1998; Sparks, 1992). These evaluations have shifted subtly over time yet have always served to maintain the dominant sense of what journalism is (and should be) (Deuze, 2005, p. 444; McNair, 2003).
Therefore, five discursively constructed ideal-typical traits that form the core values of the professional ideology of journalism can be identified (Deuze 2005, pp. 447ff.; Golding and Elliott 1979; Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2001): the public service ideal, objectivity, autonomy, immediacy, and ethics.
The public service ideal is the main legitimizing feature of journalism, implying that journalists share a sense of ‘doing it for the public’. The figure of the ‘watchdog’ or the claim of a fourth estate stands for this self-perception. Overall, journalistic work is interpreted as important to the public – as consumers but even more as citizens – insofar as journalism’s public task is conceptualized as promoting democratic deliberation (Deuze, 2005; Merritt, 1995).
Objectivity is a key element, particularly in Anglo-American professional self-perception (Mindich, 1998). Although recent approaches question whether any information is objective in the sense of value neutrality, academics and journalists revisit this value through synonymous concepts such as fairness, professional distance, detachment, and impartiality in order to define and legitimize what media practitioners do. The claim of objectivity makes professionals immune to critique, but, as Deuze (2005) reports, the critical reappraisal of objectivity also supports it as an ‘ideological cornerstone of journalism’ (p. 448).
Of course, the claim of professional autonomy plays an important role in the field of journalism. As in the established professions, autonomy is demanded in different directions and encompasses freedom of opinion, free media, and protection from censorship as well as the independence of journalistic work from market forces and newsroom hierarchies. Whereas the general claim for autonomy unifies editors, media companies, and journalists, it is supposed to defend the interests of journalists within their working environment so that they will not have to subordinate themselves to editors’ expectations. Instead, this autonomy could strengthen journalists’ need to be adequately supported in their work, probably through further training and education (Weaver, 1998). Because of the fragility of editorial autonomy, changing working conditions resulting from technological innovations tend to be met with doubts (Singer, 2004).
Immediacy has always played an important role in the journalistic working culture. Fast decision-making and hastiness are part of the professional habitus, corresponding with the defining principle of ‘news’ – the novelty of information. With regard to the technological development and the emergence of real-time publishing in the so-called ‘non-stop’ 24/7 digital environment, the notion of speed has become more ambivalent as it increases the conflict between prudence and fact (Deuze, 2005; Hall, 2001).
Last but not least, the development of a professional code of ethics has been another central element of the professionalization of journalism. Regardless of contextual differences, the commitment to truth and objectivity are key dimensions of ethical guidelines as they legitimize the claim of autonomy and societal trust and recognition (Hafez, 2002; Ryan, 2001). Historically, this process took place in the first half of the twentieth century. After the emergence of professional associations of journalists in many countries during the nineteenth century, first efforts were made to organize the journalistic field on an international level. In 1896 the ‘Union Internationale des Associations de Presse’ (UIAP) was founded in Budapest (Kutsch, 2008). The first formalization of a professional code of ethics was the adoption of the Code of Bordeaux by the International Federation of Journalists in 1956 (Nordenstreng and Topuz, 1989).
4.Academization and skill development
Academization has been another important aspect of the professionalization of journalism, starting in the late nineteenth century, but mainly taking place in the second half of the twentieth century. Journalism studies have evolved principles of teaching, learning, and researching journalism, which were adopted at an international level (Deuze, 2005, p. 443). However, a persistent scepticism against academic journalism could be observed in the field until recently. To hold a university degree has been relatively common for journalists for quite some time, but often it would be from other academic areas, such as social or political science, that were meant to build up their analytical skills or to widen their intellectual horizons without directly preparing students for journalistic practice (Schnell, 2007). Journalism studies show evidence of the shift from a ‘profession of talent’ to a ‘profession of qualification’, whereas established journalists still tend to doubt that universities could prepare new entrants for the ‘realities’ of journalistic work (Donsbach, 2014; Kepplinger, 2011). For the former generation of journalists, which was socialized within the ‘old industry model’, journalism was understood as a craftwork that was learned in the environment of the newsroom (Bromley, 2013). In the continental European context, the critical stance against a presumably just-technically-prepared ‘graduate journalism’ originated from the traditional idea of journalists as intellectuals and independent writer personalities (Marr, 2004). However, there has, in fact, been a steady increase in the number of university courses and degrees, and journalism has become a graduate occupation during recent decades. As Frith and Meech conclude,
by the end of the 1990s there had developed a peculiar disjunction between the reality of how people did become journalists and the ideology of how they should become journalists, between the empirical evidence that journalism was now a career for graduates and the editorial suggestion that it should not be.
(Frith and Meech, 2007, p. 139)
In contrast to established professions, the relation between society and journalism is in a constant process of redefinition, and the profession is in a more reactive than proactive role of defining its position in relation to society. In the UK, for example, the role of journalism has also been discussed in respect to social closeness and how journalism might keep in touch with the ‘ordinary people’, implying that the academic elite would not be able to communicate the right things in the right way and represent their reality (ibid.). In Germany, the idea of an intellectual avant-garde was much more accepted in the second half on the twentieth century, but the need for practical learning and socialization in the field was emphasized as well.
In terms of professionalization, academization mirrors the development of a theoretical body of journalistic knowledge and an attempt at the self-regulation of the occupational field. Therefore, priority has been given to education and socialization in a professional culture, which is conducted by the described values and principles. On the other hand, academization has not been an instrument of social closure, but rather the opposite. Against the background of changing market conditions, the growth of journalistic university programmes and degrees has contributed to enhanced competition in the journalistic labour market. As a result, academization has not stabilized the social status of journalists even though a university degree has more or less become a standard, if not a formal, requirement within the field over time. An interpretation of the academization of journalism as a successful collective upwards mobilization would be misleading. A more adequate interpretation seems to be that academic education and training have taken over parts of the reproduction of journalistic culture and offered training that is no longer provided within the general journalistic working conditions (Schnell, 2008; De Burgh, 2005).
Another important transformation that takes place within the frame of academization results from the technological development that is summarized by the term digitization. Technological innovations have always influenced journalism and led to new specializations, but new media have generated an unprecedented and widespread proliferation of new technologies, new genres, platforms, and industries. As a result of this development, technical skills have grown in importance in relation to the traditional core skills of writing and information gathering. It is claimed that journalists need to be more skilled at doing technical tasks and that more working time is being taken up in dealing with technical problems. Whether this should be interpreted as a de-skilling, a change, or an extension of professional skills is controversial. According to Örnebring (2010), re-skilling, multi-skilling, and de-skilling occur simultaneously. New training programmes have been designed to teach journalism in the new media environment, considering that a broader skill base is needed within these segments of the news-gathering process from investigation to production (Deuze, 2005). Despite the need for qualification and acquiring new skills, new media has led to a redesigning of journalism. Taking over parts of the production leads to an expanding control over more stages of production but is also time-consuming; therefore, writing and investigating tend to take a backseat (p. 67) (Örnebring, 2010).
5.Changing context conditions and new media
Parallel to the development of journalistic professionalism, the structural preconditions of media production changed fundamentally. The manifold dimensions of change are interconnected, and the consequences with regard to journalism are complex. In addition to technological advancement, the literature discusses social change in general (which also includes a transformation of the audience), changing political and legal frameworks, and, of course, structural changes of media systems as concentration processes take place at the national and international levels (Knoche, 2007). In this section, some of the direct effects on journalistic working practice are discussed, along with the profound changes in the concept of journalistic professionalism associated with the ongoing processes of computerization, digitization, multimedia production, and interactivity (Lievrouw and Livingstone, 2002; Wise, 2000).
The emergence of a new type of journalism has been discussed since the 1990s. This new type is often entitled cyber-journalism or network journalism and is adapted to the online media logic (Dahlgren, 1996). In contrast to the traditional ideal of news production, which is characterized by a more or less individualistic top-down process, editorial organization patterns of multimedia journalism are much more team-based and include participatory elements. Moreover, the technique of storytelling differs from mono-media production insofar as multimedia journalists have to organize content differently and produce story ‘packages’ that can be integrated in digital network technologies instead of writing single stories, probably repurposed in multiple formats (Deuze, 2005 p.451). These changes are challenging the traditional self-conception and the professional ideology of journalists and catalysing new tensions in the industry and among journalists. However, the development of new media goes far beyond concrete editorial organization. It is embedded in and interlaced with the transformation of the media economy, which is increasingly being driven by commercialism and market rationality (Dickinson, 2007; Cottle, 2003). In continental Europe, where the cultural landscape (including the media) has traditionally been assumed to be predominantly ‘public territory’, a shift has taken place from public cultural services to a prospering private-commercial domain within progressively internationalizing market structures. Audio-visual media, newspapers and magazines, the book trade, and music are in the hands of globally operating media companies. Overall, capital considerations and ‘shareholder value’ have grown in importance in media production and changed the labour market and working conditions in the journalistic field (Schnell, 2007; Hallin, 1996). Against this background and combined with the 24-hour multimedia news cycle of news media, immediacy has been evolving more and more from a key value in the journalistic culture to a contradiction of journalistic liability and diligence (Blair, 2004). Digitization has accelerated the news process and afforded a ‘discourse of speed’ (Hampton, 2004), which tends to overlap with other criteria of journalistic labour. Many authors criticize the fact that this development has become stronger and more encompassing over time, and journalistic work practices have needed to adapt to the pressure of immediate publication and broadcasting.
After all, the discourse of speed appears as a mechanism of economic competition insofar as the technology is used to rationalize the news process in the very narrow sense of increasing the output and reducing the costs of media production. In effect, this can be interpreted as a devaluation of the traditional principles of journalistic professionalism (i.e. news gathering according to the principles of verification, ethical clarity, and depth) and as a shift in occupational control from journalists to managers (Higgins-Dobney and Sussman, 2013; Ursell, 2003). Instead of using new technologies to support elaborate investigation, many journalists seem to carry out desk jobs and have to take over technical production (Witchge and Nygren, 2009, p. 55). Örnebring (2010, p. 64) sees a risk of a ‘proletarianization’ of journalism in this development in which technology becomes a tool ‘that allows managers to implement organizational changes aimed at making journalistic labour more cost-effective and more easily controlled’.
Another aspect of change resulting from digitization and convergence is the conceptualization of the producer–consumer relationship (Bardoel and Deuze, 2001; Neuberger and Quandt, 2010). With the increase of interactivity, the hierarchical relationship between producers and users is blurring, which is discussed in the literature of journalism studies as a challenge of ‘one of the most fundamental “truths” in journalism: the professional journalist is the one who determines what publics see, hear, and read about the world’ (Deuze, 2005, p. 451; Singer, 1998; Löffelholz, 2000; Hall, 2001; Pavlik, 2001). The more or less unlimited access to information in the digital era is changing the jurisdiction of journalistic professionalism from the level of the generation of information to the level of supporting consumers to cope with the flood of information (Schnell, 2008). At the same time, journalists have to consider a rising social complexity resulting from changes in the social structure and multiculturalism (Deuze, 2005). This is identified as another problem of journalists’ role perception in contemporary society by authors of journalism studies because the active awareness of social diversity contradicts the valued detachment of society that has been the traditional ideal of journalistic professionalism (Golding, 1994; MacGregor, 1997; Quandt and Schweiger, 2008).
In sum, these brief discussions of the technical, economic, and social dimensions of new media affect the core values of journalistic professionalism. As described, the public service ideal in a multimedia context is ‘not the same safe value to hide behind like it used to be in days of print and broadcast mass media’ (Deuze, 2005, p. 455). It is much more difficult to meet a general public interest and therefore to legitimize professional authority in a public that is characterized by individualization and an audience considered to be becoming increasingly fragmented. This seems to be even truer since new media also imply a further loss of control in respect to the reception of information in the face of surfing the internet and shrinking attention spans. As a consequence of this development, theories of journalism indicate a shift towards a notion of serving the public that is increasingly based on a bottom-up principle. Instead of pretending to be responsible for what people need to know (or not), journalism has to take over the role of the moderator of the ‘conversations society has with itself’ and offer filters and interpretations with regard of the overload of accessible information (Deuze, 2005; Carey, 1989 [1975]).
Additionally, the value of journalistic objectivity is being questioned insofar as it follows the common understanding of ‘getting both sides of the story’ (Deuze, 2005). The increasing similarities of different media cultures in new-media production, combined with news platforms that support interactivity and direct feedback from the audience, are challenging journalists more than ever before with a plurality of interpretations of reality. As a result, the core value of objectivity appears much more against the background of social complexity. Moreover, the value of autonomy, which was developed as a concept at the individual level, now has to be reflected in a more transparent and sometimes even participatory news environment. Obviously, as argued before, immediacy potentially turns from a value to a menace of journalistic professionalism, in particular if the quality and depth of news and information are not adequately valued in the context of online publishing. Last but not least, journalists might refer to ethics to defend against structural changes or commercial, audience-driven, or managerial encroachment, but they will need to rethink their ethical standards in order to be able to deal with new conditions of working and publishing.
These very general aspects of change do not sufficiently reflect the diversity of journalistic genres and practices but summarize the challenges of new media for the concept of professional journalism. The concept of journalists as a social authority and representatives of the public, which was developed within the expansion of mass media, has lost power against the background of changing technical, economic, and social preconditions (Bardoel, 1996). Compared with traditional professions, journalism is not institutionalized as a profession, but it has to react to these developments. Despite this, a rethinking of what journalism is or could be is claimed by journalism studies and also from a general perspective of the sociology of professionalism (Claussen, 2012).
6.Structural heteronomy and new identities
Regarding the interpretation of the current developments in the field of journalism, at least two general directions can be differentiated. One analysis refers to the structural changes of the media with regard to the precariousness and heteronomy with which journalists are increasingly being confronted. The other strand of argumentation focuses on new movements aiming at a redefinition of the role of journalism in contemporary society. Both interpretations assume that the ideology of professional journalism has functioned as social cement and kept the field together in the past but is beginning to crumble and generate new factions and subgroups.
The first analysis regards the ideology of professional journalism as a discourse that extenuates deprofessionalizing working conditions and an economically driven rationalization of media production. Traditionally, journalistic professionalism was embedded in working structures in which journalists and utilizers were seen as a symbiosis with regard to the autonomy of media production (Schnell, 2008). Instead of this community with a shared culture, journalistic labour is being increasingly regulated by singular and temporary commitments that are based on project work and mostly comply with pragmatic rules. The traditional figure of the publisher, as fulfilling a dual role of media entrepreneur and publicist personality, has vanished. Now journalists are being hired by managers who are often educated in business administration and think in economic categories. As a result of economic rationality and the logic of multimedia production, journalism can be seen as being partly deinstitutionalized and confronted with market regulation in terms of daily journalistic practices, labour market conditions, and also careers (Manske and Schnell, 2010). Thus, the traditional career ladder, which assumed a regulated upgrading from local to regional to national press, has also lost reliability and become ‘chaotic’, while competition between aspirants has grown tremendously (Frith and Meech, 2007; Tunstall, 1996).
Against the backdrop of working conditions whose social and moral foundations seem to be already undermined, the call for journalistic professionalism can be reconstructed as an ideological façade. Analyses are based on a Foucauldian interpretation, relating in particular to how work is controlled by the appeal of professionalism. The attractive and identity-giving professional ideal becomes a mechanism of control to the benefit of the employer if journalists anticipate the call for self-control as professional working behaviour despite growing heteronomy and social precariousness (Aldridge and Evetts, 2003; Fournier, 1999). In this perspective, journalistic ideology is understood as a stable concept that is adequate for the small elite of established journalists who work for the rare renowned high-standard publications. Beyond that, the ‘discourse of professionalism’ merely feigns the relevance, autonomy, and responsibility of professional work and animates new ‘media workers’ to fulfil what they are expected to. A transformation or adaption of the concept of journalism does not fall under this analytical perspective. The ideology developed in the twentieth century seems to survive as a sacrilege.
The second analytical perspective also refers to journalistic ideology but focuses more on the redefinition of the role of journalism in society. Journalistic professionalism is not only regarded as a discourse that gives individual orientation, but also as a basis for the definition of professional jurisdiction and collective boundaries (Zelizer, 2004, p. 33). Therefore, the professional core of journalism serves a collection of shared and continuously contested values that define how proper journalists should act and what they should aim towards (Ahava, 2013). In this approach, not only are external influences such as economic, socio-cultural, technological, and political developments taken into consideration, but so too are internal influences within the professional culture of journalism, which deliberately aim to shape and challenge the classical values. One of these internal drivers has, for example, been the public or civic journalism movement.
Public journalism is a reform movement that aims to build a new relationship between journalism and society, particularly by encouraging active deliberation and public discussion. The peak of the movement was between 1990 and 2003 in the United States, but some elements of the participatory practice are still being conducted in the non-American context (Haas, 2007). Even before new media featured interactivity, there were experiments with media communication to improve comprehension and to involve the audience in the journalistic process. The movement of civic or public journalism was intended to be a critique of the traditional concept of professional journalism, which is based on detachment and separation and a view of the public from above. The critique formulated by public journalism was that the traditional interpretation of professional ethics tended to fail in the aim of supporting social deliberation and democratic discourse. The debate concerning public journalism is interesting with regard to the development of the occupational field in general because it reveals that the ideology of professionalism could also work as a source of professional reflexivity and change. Of course, the movement emerged historically before, or rather, at the beginning of the era of digitization, but it exemplifies how journalism proactively responds to social changes or to a rising awareness of the complexity of the public discourse. The movement of public journalism was built by a subgroup within the journalistic field that could be seen as a ‘new moral community’ from within the occupational field (Schnell, 2009).
Journalism went through a process of professionalization against the background of the development of the mass media during the twentieth century. The ideology of professional journalism, stemming from the Anglo-American context, has now merged into different media systems in Western industrialized societies. On the one hand, the concept of professionalism was initially very similar to those of established professions, but on the other hand, journalism could not institutionalize as a classic profession because the paradigm of the freedom of expression counteracts professional exclusivity. Within the expansion of the media industries, journalism has nevertheless become a relatively strong occupational group and has pursued its further professionalization, in particular by building systematic knowledge and developing academic training.
Journalism has always had blurry boundaries and a weak definition of who is allowed to call him- or herself a journalist. However, there is a strong element of journalistic professionalism within the ideology of journalism that has both worked as a legitimization and provided a hierarchical structure within the field. The ideal-typical professional journalist has always worked in the domain of institutionalized news. As long as news production has been understood to be a unique genre and a core task of media communication, this ideology has quite successfully worked as a regulatory feature and allowed the concept of professional journalism to reproduce over time. The vast spectrum of social positions between the privileged and the precarious, which has always characterized the field of journalism, has not hindered but rather strengthened the concept of professional journalism because it has functioned as a culture with blurred inequalities, hierarchies, and economic dependency to a certain extent.
As a consequence of the rapid revolutionary development of digitization and the accelerated economic dynamics of market expansion, internationalization, and concentration, journalism has been fundamentally challenged. On the one hand, the true flexibility of journalistic skills and potential roles has allowed for an efficient adaption to new technologies and working structures; on the other hand, the already-existing ambivalence of the ideology of journalistic professionalism has apparently been reinforced. While professional values such as autonomy, objectivity, diligence, and the claim that journalism is a service to the public are still of relevance – indeed they seem to be becoming more important as a stronghold against a fully commercialized media industry – it also seems that the dazzling appeal of journalism is to some degree detracting from the disintegration of contemporary media production.
Compared with other occupational groups within the media sector, journalism established its functional role at the beginning of mass-media communication, when information was a much more restricted good that was difficult to reproduce and share. The importance of journalism to society was thereby historically more or less manifest, even though autonomy and public legitimization had been contested continuously throughout history. In the world of new media, journalistic control over the mediated public sphere seems to fade, and it appears as if professional journalism has to be redefined or might already be redesigned by the commercial forces that are currently governing the media industries. Journalists are trying to strengthen the demarcation against other online news sources, but the more that news is generated outside the established structures, the more they are running the risk of becoming one of many actors within the public sphere. While they still have a privileged access to many sources of information, the expectation that journalists act as representatives of the public is fundamentally affected by the transformation of the media (Witschge and Nygren, 2009, p. 55).
The historical pathway of professionalization that the classic professions have followed will obviously not be repeatable in contemporary societies. Hence, the attempt to organize the developments of the journalistic field in a system of de- and re-professionalization only makes sense in the framework of an empirical approach that focuses on a concrete section within the whole complex. Nevertheless, the journalistic field is interesting for the debate on the challenges to professionalism in general. In particular, in connection with the development of an information or knowledge society, the consequences for journalism, an occupation that operates in the centre of information production, will be significant (Hesmondhalgh, 2006). Furthermore, journalism foreshadows a general change in the knowledge–power nexus that will also have an effect on the traditional professions. Two dimensions of the new requirements of professionalization that are currently appearing within journalism are particularly important here.
First is the understanding of professional expertise as not based on a monopoly of knowledge as claimed by the traditional professions, but rather on a particular competence of filtering, selection, and interpretation of knowledge. Therefore, the functional role of journalism could be described as that of a ‘navigator’ or a ‘compass’ in the everyday flood of information that has become all too nebulous for the consumer. With regard to the concept of the knowledge society, the underlying idea is that journalism contributes to the transformation of information into knowledge, but now in a less hierarchical and more cooperative or discursive relation to the public, the collective client of journalists (Schnell, 2008).
Second, journalism traditionally derives from individual commitment to the concept of self-reliant work and from the anticipation and defence of moral maxims. This intangible bond inherent in journalistic work can be interpreted as a concealed potential for exploitation. The reliance on intrinsic motivation and symbolically loaded offers of identification tends to induce self-discipline and voluntary self-exploitation, especially in the highly commercialized fields of the media industries. As a consequence, containing such developments is becoming (and also must become) a requirement of individual and collective professionalization. Therefore, defining professional jurisdiction involves the protection of workers against unreasonable demands and more or less forced self-exploitation. Furthermore, professional values, which reflect the tension between normative requirements and the structural pressures of media production, could provide individual professionals with guidelines for selective action between competing structural, moral, and social expectations and targets. A final decision has yet to be reached whether this emerging model of journalism reflects a framework for a new type of professionalism.
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