Throughout its history, the general notion or idea of journalism has stayed more or less the same. Its core values and ideals remain intact. Its commitment to public service, truth-seeking, and providing information on the basis of professional and independent verification has been presumed and widely affirmed. In other words: when looking at journalism writ large, the tendency to see coherence is strong. When one switches to individual journalists – when the unit of analysis becomes what newsworkers do and under what conditions they do it – a messy reality emerges. Scholars such as Thomas Hanitzsch and Tim Vos acknowledge how the discussion about “what journalism is” changes when we take into account the profound and dramatic changes in journalists’ working environments. The question remains of how this could be, given the cognitive consensus about journalism and the continual “testing” of more or less new journalisms vis-à-vis a supposed core.
What is interesting (and what needs to be challenged) is not so much the question of what journalism is but how it has so successfully remained similar in the context of continuous internal and external transformations, changes, challenges, evolutions, and revolutions. It is revealing how the scholarly (and all too human) proclivity for closure and coherence has preferred to conflate the various levels of analysis when making sense of media work. This is most explicitly and famously articulated in several models: John Dimmick and Philip Coit’s (1982) taxonomy of mass media decisionmaking, Armin Scholl and Siegfried Weischenberg’s (1998) onion model, and Stephen Reese and Pamela Shoemaker’s (2016) hierarchy-of-influences framework. Instead of working through how the various stages of newswork change under individualized, fragmented, networked, and altogether precarious conditions, as educators and researchers we have tended to focus on consistency across levels, proclaiming more or less “universal” theories of journalism, its culture, and its role conceptions. In doing so, we have accepted explanations of newswork that assume journalists get their ideas of who they are and what they are (supposed to be) doing largely through occupational socialization and occupational context, leading to homogeneous understandings of what journalism is.
Whereas influential, multinational comparative research projects such as Worlds of Journalism (worldsofjournalism.org) and Journalistic Role Performance (journalisticperformance.org) started out with universalist ambitions, their most recent reports and publications suggest otherwise, emphasizing “multilayered hybridization in journalistic cultures” (Mellado et al. 2017: 961) and a world populated by a rich diversity of journalistic cultures (Hanitzsch et al. 2019). What these remarkable projects do not do, however, is to offer an explanation for all this diversity, hybridity, and complexity.
To provide insight into the many variations, seemingly contradictory definitions, activities, values, and aims that all exist under the banner of journalism, we suggest turning our attention to the affective dimension of news as work, of journalism as a profession. This affective dimension points to the strong affiliation that practitioners have to ideals of journalism, irrespective of the medium they produce for, their contract, or type of working arrangement. They can be quite critical of management, of industry, even of specific routines and practices associated with newswork – but they somehow see such criticisms as separate from their loyalty to – their passion for, even – the notion of doing journalistic work as a professional. In writing this book we have seen this most clearly among those who invent “journalism” from the ground up, sticking to quite traditional notions of newswork while making entire new companies, ventures, and collectives work. In this context legacy news organizations and newsrooms – while valuable and important – can also be a major distraction from reflecting on what exactly is (or also is) journalism. Once inside, the relative stability of the institutional setting absolves most journalists from actively questioning who they are, why they are doing what they are doing, and who they are doing it for. Consistently, those journalists operating in emerging or otherwise peripheral areas of the profession are challenged to be more reflective, deliberate, and articulate about what it is that they are doing. Those working on the inside, within the confines of the newsroom, have their positions governed by the institutional authority of their employer, and, though they are certainly involved in boundary work, can be considered to be less challenged to continuously legitimate what it is they are doing. This attitude is something Ellen Ullman once documented as the inherent blindness of being “close to the machine” (1997) – the machine in our case being the core of institutionalized newswork.
The notion of journalism as a form of affective labor is not new, yet remains underarticulated (Beckett and Deuze 2016; Siapera 2019; Cantillon and Baker 2019). The affective nature of newswork gets expressed in the need for reporters to regulate and moderate their emotions and emotional life in order to “make it work” as journalists (for example, to always be amenable and pleasant to work with, to empathize with interviewees and assignment editors, at times to process the trauma of victims or witnesses to accidents and attacks, to nurture relationships with online and offline communities). As an extreme form of affect, journalism can also be seen as a passion project for many involved, at times accepting (or shrugging off) poor working conditions in order to keep doing what one loves doing.
In our project, we aim to go beyond journalism in that our studies articulate the field with those who strike out on their own, while deliberately focusing on the affective dimensions of journalism. The startup journalists we interviewed and observed are not alone in what they do: they are reporters and editors setting up new journalistic entities, starting editorial collectives, building a news business from the ground up, all over the world, across distinctly different journalism traditions and news cultures. In all these instances of entrepreneurial activity and bottom-up initiatives, we looked for the different notions and definitions of what journalism could be, what it means to be a journalist under these conditions, and what issues confront the contemporary journalist operating outside of the institutionalized contours of legacy news organizations.
This book is personal, in the cases and professionals it documents and in our focus on the stories of the heart, as well as in our motivations. Mark is beyond journalism: this is the last major work he will do in relation to journalism. Or so he says. Tamara thinks he is beyond journalism studies, needing to break free of the (perceived) regime of journalism scholars, which seems to leave little space for creative thinking (for a critique of the paradigm see, for instance, Josephi 2013; Zelizer 2013). Any academic work is a balance between “personal creative passion and willingness to submit to tradition and discipline” as Michael Polanyi (1998: 40) puts it. To have our work be recognized as academic work, we play by certain rules. But, as we argue in this book, journalism studies oftentimes can be too limited in scope, resulting in a narrow conceptualization of journalism as a fourth estate (with a subsequent primary focus on national politics and the economy), operated in newsrooms of legacy media institutions, serving a relatively silent and amorphous citizenry. Where Mark experiences a sense of frustration with the recurring debates reinforcing the dogma of the field, the industry, and the profession, and advocates a strategic bypassing of journalism in order to break free, Tamara sees tactical potential through her multiple engagements with the field “elsewhere” and outside the boundaries of established methodological and practical frameworks, and challenges to established ways of seeing (and doing) things.
This then is one of the main aims of the book: to both strategically and