Journalism has enjoyed a rich and relatively stable history of professionalization. Scholars coming from a variety of disciplines have theorized this history, forming a consistent body of knowledge codified in national and international handbooks and canonical readers. However, recent work and analysis suggest that the supposed core of journalism and the assumed consistency of the inner workings of news organizations are problematic starting points for journalism studies. In this article, we challenge the consensual (self-)presentation of journalism – in terms of its occupational ideology, its professional culture, and its sedimentation in routines and organizational structures (cf. the newsroom) in the context of its reconfiguration as a post-industrial, entrepreneurial, and atypical way of working and of being at work. We outline a way beyond individualist or institutional approaches to do justice to the current complex transformation of the profession. We propose a framework to bring together these approaches in a dialectic 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 of practices that make up journalism.
In this article, we discuss the rise and use of the concept of hybridity in journalism studies. Hybridity afforded a meaningful intervention in a discipline that had the tendency to focus on a stabilized and homogeneous understanding of the field. Nonetheless, we now need to reconsider its deployment, as it only partially allows us to address and understand the developments in journalism. We argue that if scholarship is to move forward in a productive manner, we need, rather than denote everything that is complex as hybrid, to develop new approaches to our object of study. Ultimately, this is an open invitation to the field to adopt experientialist, practice-based approaches that help us overcome the ultimately limited binary dualities that have long governed our theoretical and empirical work in the field.
The emergence of a startup culture in the field of journalism is global: since the early years of the twenty-first century, new independent journalism companies have formed around the world. Although setting up one's own journalistic practice is not particularly novel in the news industry, the last couple of years have witnessed exponential growth in the startup space. In this context we chose to look more closely at one of the more successful recent online news startups: the French site Mediapart. We were interested in the factors involved in creating and running a journalism startup, and how the professionals involved give meaning to what they do in the fast-changing journalism field. We found that, although one of the main unique selling points of the journalism professed at Mediapart is that it challenges and provides an alternative to mainstream French press, at the heart of it is a strong traditional journalism ideology. While Mediapart has in many ways challenged and inspired the ways in which other French news organizations operate, it does not challenge our understanding of journalism, but rather reinforces a traditional and homogenous definition.
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