Freelance Journalists’ Ethical Boundary Settings in Information Work

Abstract

The borders between the media genres journalism and information or PR are blurring, and this development is especially noticeable among freelance journalists. How does this affect freelance journalists, particularly their ethical reasoning? Thirteen interviews with freelancers living in a peripheral northern county in Sweden were analyzed, using a combination of discourse analysis and narrative theory methods and a virtue ethics theoretical framework. It was found that 11 out of 13 informants worked occasionally or regularly with information-type assignments. To sustain the informants' professional roles and selfidentities of integrity and impartiality, having boundary settings between, first, information/PR and journalist roles and, second, information and journalist type assignments was crucial. It was evident that individual ethics had replaced professional principles. The freelancers reflexively process media industry constraints, together with their everyday working conditions, in a situation where the ideals and norms of the profession constitute the background for their individual action ethics.

Mind the gap: Consequences of inter-role conflicts of freelance journalists with secondary employment in the field of public relations

“…Alternatively, they might develop 'individual ethics' in order to prevent these conflicts in the first place, for example, by separating the issues they work on in journalism and PR (cf. Koch et al, 2012;Ladendorf, 2012). However, as shown here, inter-role conflicts can also arise when participants have internalized the normative standard that journalists should not do PR.…”

What’s the harm in moonlighting? A qualitative survey on the role conflicts of freelance journalists with secondary employment in the field of PR

“…Palmer, 2000;White and Hobsbawm, 2007), it remains widely unclear whether 'PR journalists' (Buckow, 2011: 89) -Schnedler (2011 refers to them as 'cross-border commuters' between two professional worlds -perceive their dual role as conflictual and how they deal with potential conflicts. So far only a single study investigates the topic: in her qualitative survey of 13 Swedish freelance journalists, Ladendorf (2012) asks how they justify also performing PR, whether it affects their self-identities and how they relate to the professional principles of journalism. Her interviewees confirm the blurring of borders between journalism and PR assignments, but at the same time it seemed crucial for them to maintain these borders.…”

De la compétence rare aux métiers atypiques : le journalisme peut-il écrire les relations publiques ?

“…De la complexité à définir l'éthique (Bernier, 2004) à la difficulté de concevoir la convergence entre l'éthique du journaliste et celle du relationniste : l'épineuse question du croisement impossible entre le journalisme et les RP est toujours d'actualité (Macnamara, 2015). Pour certains auteurs (Ladendorf, 2012), les frontières entre les pratiques journalistiques et les RP se sont considérablement estompées. Il existerait ainsi dans les codes éthiques des zones de convergences, notamment lorsqu'il s'agit de la codification de la conduite individuelle et des critères de professionnalisme, des standards moraux et de l'expertise spécifique (Yang, Taylor et Saffer, 2016).…”