Search

Journalism's once-neglected periphery has been a focus of academic research in recent years and the urge to make sense of interlopers from the periphery has brought about many approaches to understanding these changes. In this essay I reflect on an ongoing research agenda examining one particular category of interlopers: provocative media actors who have openly challenged the boundaries of the journalistic field. These actors raise questions as to how to account for interlopers at the edges of the journalistic field, including whether we should extend the field to include them. In this essay I argue we should continue to see the field as complex, and maybe now a bit more so. Reflecting on field and practice theories and understandings of boundaries, I reengage the complexity that is a core demand of conceptualizing the journalistic field, while offering ways to consider interlopers' journalistic identities within its boundaries. Emphasizing similarities over differences, I argue we can move beyond binary distinctions between a field's core members and interlopers on the periphery by focusing on the nature of interloper work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that despite an appearance of rupture, journalism is in an era of good fortune. While it would be both premature and historically naïve to point at a new “golden era”, there is reason to see a strengthening of journalism's sense of core responsibilities emerging from the challenges and opportunities which new technologies present. With an eye towards journalism's history as a force with the potential to feed contemporary debate, this paper briefly surveys the relationship between technological innovation and role perceptions of journalism. Against this backdrop, it evaluates the discourses of professional ideals and norms within the elite press in Britain in 2011 and 2012, in the context of new media technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Researching what Silvio Waisbord (2013) calls the ambiguities of the profession of journalism requires confronting changes and challenges to journalism, addressing the self-proclaimed assertions of those who see themselves as journalists, and doing so with an eye to changing landscapes. To understand journalism's professional identity in a digital era requires an equally agile approach, one that assesses professional adherence and identifies ways these aspects of identity translate and transpire in traditional understandings and forms, and how they relate to digitally native forms of mediated communication. Steeped in reflexive approaches born out of critical enquiry, this article advocates textual analysis and a discourse analysis methodology for analysing this identity, and posits that evaluating discourses of professional identity in texts serves as a gauge of journalism's 'threat perception' towards new entities in the digital era. Pairing this approach with an engaged discussion of concepts of journalism allows for a broader understanding of how journalism's professional identity is performed. First, this method better utilizes the way identity serves as a point around which tenets of 'being' journalism can be explored and, second, it engenders a more nuanced understanding of perceived threats to journalism's primacy in the digital era. For educators, exploring how 'different answers to journalistic problems are emerging in the online environment' (Singer 2005: 180), reflexive analysis assuages disputes over journalism's ambiguous professionalism, and moves towards a view of digital possibilities that discounts threats, and advances understandings towards a more reflexive space that better addresses the nexus between traditional concepts of journalism and new media opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]