This paper explores the blurring boundaries between local journalism, strategic and marketing communications and civic information. The study at hand produces new knowledge regarding the conceptions and practices that are emerging in the middle ground between local journalism and communications. The data consist of 10 thematic in-depth interviews with writers, owners and other key personnel from Finnish local communications operations applying journalistic practices in their content production, conceptualised here as interloper media practitioners. By applying the concept of boundary work, the study sheds light on the discursive contest over the forms and vocabulary of journalism and news media. The study also explores the ethical guidelines interloper media apply and how their representatives reflect on their ethical code of practice. The results are condensed into five rationales the practitioners use to justify the legitimacy of the interloper media outlets and the use of journalistic methods in strategic or commercial communications and civic information. The practitioners experience the boundaries between journalism and various types of communications as blurring. They borrow and apply journalistic styles and ethical guidelines selectively to lend their media attractivity and credibility. They face ethical conflicts in their work particularly regarding their relationship to power holders and decision-makers. Yet a culture of profound ethical reflection is markedly absent from their accounts.
The article examines Finnish news professionals’ views on the ethical challenges that ensue from emerging and intertwining forms of local professional journalism and communications. Besides describing the current situation, the article employs data from a survey of editors-in-chief to investigate how news professionals anticipate the relationship between journalism and communications evolving in the future. Respondents perceived a blurring of the boundary between local journalism and communications. They observed economic pressures creating incentives for news media to compromise their journalistic ethics and ethical concerns arising from professional communications’ adoption of journalistic practices. Editors-in-chief maintained that the boundaries between journalism and other forms of communication are clear in their media but indistinct in other local news media outlets and in society in general. They predicted an ambiguous, even grim, future of local news media in Finland. However, local news media may have a positive future if they become distinct, attractive and relevant again to citizens.
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