roughly coincides with the rise of new technologies (notably internet, smartphones, and various forms of automation), the shift of nation-based politics toward more complex supranational relations (as well as its return under the guise of populism), and a rapid glocalization of social, cultural, and economic affairs. The news industry, in response to such changes and challenges, has generally sought answers in consolidating its core business and streamlining existing operations. This meant laying off employees (including many journalists) and cutting budgets. The budgets for exploratory innovation projects, specialized beats (such as science reporting), and a range of correspondents were all trimmed. Journalism was once mostly organized in formal institutions where contracted laborers would produce content under informal yet highly structured working conditions generally arranged within the physical environment of a newsroom. Today the lived experience of professional journalists is much more precarious, fragmented, and networked.
Our starting point is that journalism is much more than its traditional definition: an activity operationally coupled with institutions of newswork. The boundaries between journalism and other forms of public communication – public relations, marketing, and corporate communication to the (generally unpaid) practices of mass self-communication online (via weblogs, videoblogs and podcasts, or simply through posts on social media) – are porous and often meaningless, particularly for media users. The digital environment has blurred the once clear distinction between the various phases of the news production process – including the gathering, verifying, reporting, editing, designing, distributing, publicizing, and promoting of information. This digital environment also sees a disruption of the unity of production, content, and distribution within each separate medium in favor of the development of new storytelling formats across multiple media (e.g. transmedia), new ways of delivering the news (increasingly via mobile and social media), and most significantly new ways of being a journalist. All of these developments require us to tell new stories about journalism: what it is, how it can be practiced, and what roles it plays in communities.
With Joep Cornelissen (2017: 369), we argue that any field of studies is generally “best served by a combination of styles of theorizing and the different explanatory programmes associated with them, so that different questions get asked and different modes of knowing sit alongside each other in a complementary fashion.” Both of us feel that the dominant tools of researching and telling stories in journalism studies are too restricted. Content analyses of high-profile national newspapers (and sometimes television newscasts) and surveys among journalists working in the newsrooms of legacy media organizations tell part of the story. Dominant theories such as news values, framing and agenda-setting, and journalism professionalization are necessary but limited. We question the lack of inclusivity of the diversity of voices heard in the field – as local, community, grassroots, minority, and independent media organizations tend to be all too often ignored in both journalism studies and education. The socialization effect of the dominant ways of thinking and writing about our object of study may mean that “particular ways of knowing” become suppressed (Cornelissen 2017: 370). The corresponding homogeneity in the field “has the potential to undermine variety, novelty, and innovation in research” (Corbett et al. 2014: 4). Although this homogenization can have benefits, providing a common ground for engaging in academic discussion of issues across diverse regions, for example, this move to conformity also has the potential to undermine creativity and the widest possible range of insights.
This is not to say there is no diversity in journalism studies. In fact, quite the opposite could be argued: the field has proliferated, opening up plentiful ways to investigate, theorize, and rethink journalism. Interestingly, the response to this diversification has largely been to test the merits of any novel or innovative approach against the dominant model and mode of journalism, which in effect colonized the intervention, making it subject to the rules established at the center.
Our aim is to tell new stories, and expand our storytelling format (what we choose to tell our stories about) as well as what we understand journalism to be. Much like William Gartner’s ambition for organization studies, we are not interested in providing a “one best way” model for journalism, as we are much more interested in highlighting the “need for mid-range theories that reflect contingent relationships” (1993: 236). Like Gartner, we are interested in specificities rather than generalities in the field at this stage. The field tends to understand journalism through a framework that suggests a homogenous entity as the object of study (or as an internally consistent reference point). We would like to consider the differences that truly make a difference, and recognize new or emerging voices as legitimate participants in setting the discourse about what journalism is, can, and should be.
The state of the field
Journalism has enjoyed a rich and relatively stable history of professionalization. This has contributed to a more or less consensual notion of its core values and ideals, often grounded in the practices and routines of newswork as organized within legacy media organizations, and shared among journalists and the public alike (Karlsson and Clerwall 2018). Scholars coming from a variety of disciplines have theorized this history, forming a relatively consistent body of knowledge codified in national and international handbooks and canonical readers. However, recent work and analysis suggests that the supposed core of journalism, as well as the assumed consistency of the inner workings of news organizations, are problematic starting points for journalism studies. In this project we challenge the operational coupling of journalism’s occupational ideology, professional culture, and sedimentation in routines and organizational structures (the newsroom) in the context of its reconfiguration as an increasingly post-industrial, entrepreneurial, and atypical way of working and of being at work.1 We aim to outline a way beyond individualist and institutionalist approaches to do justice to the current complex transformation of the profession. We propose a framework to bring together these approaches in a dialectical attempt to move through and beyond journalism as it has traditionally been conceptualized and practiced, allowing for a broader definition and understanding of the myriad practices that make up journalism.
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 wholeness 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 focus on coherence and consensus does not do justice to the insight that journalism is more than a neat sum of its parts, and to the need to accommodate a more dynamic and indeed unruly consideration of the profession. Journalism is transitioning from a coherent industry (largely organized around sedimented practices and ways of working) to a highly varied arrangement of journalistic practices and a diverse range of opportunities to be a journalist.
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 is and who journalists are (see Willnat, Weaver, and Choi 2013; Hanitzsch et al. 2011; Hellmueller and Mellado 2015).
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 and more or less innovative 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
