The arrival of new actors in the journalistic field increasingly necessitates new conceptual approaches to better understand journalistic work in the digital age. Social network sites have played an important role in these processes, with the rapid emergence of non-traditional actors engaging in activities that may be classified as journalism. Yet, while scholarship on Twitter and Facebook has continually expanded, the visual platform Instagram has received comparatively little attention, despite being an important venue for new forms, particularly in lifestyle journalism. Through an examination of professional lifestyle Instagrammers’ discursive constructions of journalistic boundaries and their role perceptions, this article suggests that in their key values and functional understanding their approach resembles traditional journalistic occupational ideologies, and their role perceptions are very similar to those of lifestyle journalists. The findings contribute to our understanding of transformative processes in journalism more broadly, and their implications for journalistic values, ideals, and practices.

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The growth of advertising and PR industries in recent years, combined with the economic downturn in many news organizations has led to renewed debates about the influence of commercial pressures on journalistic work. While the relationship has frequently been studied in relation to hard news journalism, less attention has been paid to other beats, especially those which have always had a closer relationship with commercial interests. Focusing on the field of lifestyle journalism, this article presents the results of a survey of more than 600 Australian lifestyle journalists. It examines in detail how these journalists experience working with advertising and PR interests, as well as the provision of free products and services. It finds that lifestyle journalists broadly deny being influenced too much by these pressures, however, regression analysis suggests that, in particular, younger journalists experience more pressure, as do magazine journalists, as well as those working in the areas of travel, fashion and beauty journalism.

As a consequence of digitization and other environmental trends, journalism is changing its forms and arguably also its functions—both in fundamental ways. While ‘legacy’ news media continue to be easily distinguishable by set characteristics, new content providers operating in an increasingly dense, chaotic, interactive, and participatory information environment still remain somewhat understudied. However, at a time when non-traditional formats account for an ever-growing portion of journalistic or para-journalistic work, there is an urgent need to better understand these new peripheral actors and the ways they may be transforming the journalistic field. While journalism scholarship has begun to examine peripheral actors’ motivations and conceptualizations of their roles, our understanding is still fairly limited. This relates particularly to comparative studies of peripheral actors, of which there have been very few, despite peripheral journalism being a global phenomenon. This study aims to address this gap by presenting evidence from 18 in-depth interviews with journalists in Australia, Germany, and the UK. In particular, it examines how novel journalistic actors working for a range of organisations discursively contrast their work from that of others. The findings indicate that journalists’ motivations to engage in journalism in spite of the rise of precarious labour were profoundly altruistic: Indeed, journalists pledged allegiance to an ideology of journalism still rooted in a pre-crisis era—one which sees journalism as serving a public good by providing an interpretative, sense-making role.

Like many fields of communication research, journalism scholarship draws on theories from other disciplines and mostly applies social theories to make sense of journalistic practices. One theory that has gained immense popularity in recent years is Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory. However, while there are now numerous studies using his concepts, we have little comprehensive understanding of how scholarship applies them. To this end, this study conducts a systematic analysis of 249 articles, using content analysis, textual analysis and citation analysis to examine how field theory is adopted and adapted, as well as who has interpretative authority in shaping Bourdieusian thought in journalism research. The findings suggest a selective in-depth use of field theory and that the appropriation of some concepts is still ambiguous. Moreover, it highlights once more the dominance of Western scholarship in the academic field.