Journalists’ Discursive Construction of Boundaries

The next speaker in our ECREA 2018 panel is Folker Hanusch, who shifts our focus to how journalists construct and uphold their professional boundaries through discursive means. Such boundary work remains prominent because of the entry of a range of new journalistic or para-journalistic outlets and amateur or semi-amateur practitioners into the field of news coverage, and rather than developing normative theoretical definitions of journalism it is important to examine how journalists themselves draw the line between themselves and other professional and non-professional news workers, and how they themselves reflect on the ideologies of journalism.

To date the project has conducted several dozen interviews with journalists mainly at mainstream news organisations in Australia, Germany, the U.K., and Austria, from both legacy and online-only outlets; these cover from a range of sociodemographic and professional variables. A number of key themes emerge from these interviews.

First, they have come to realise that the changing environment for the news demands format innovation, and some of them have relatively surprising positive views of new entrants like Buzzfeed, at least to a point; they may still look down on the listicles and other ‘frivolous’ content, but also understand how such elements are able to sustain the serious, ‘hard’ journalism that such sites now also do. Some go as far as saying that journalism does not need to be produced by news media, in fact.

However, some boundary discourse persists: while some new entrants have been accepted into the field, journalists continue to look down onto independent bloggers, user-generated content, and other less inherently ‘journalistic’ forms and formats. Journalists articulated seven main markers of boundaries for journalism: journalism as a set of practices for researching, selecting, editing, and producing the news; journalism as a profession that covers hard news, engages in objective reporting, is informed by formal journalism education, and serves as “an aorta of democracy”; journalism as providing a service, and therefore requiring an audience and needing to provide relevant news to attract it; journalism as a vocation, requiring a passion for writing but also implying full-time employment as a journalist; journalism as an autonomous knowledge transfer that is independent of business and/or state interests; journalism as a textual form, that is, as a printed newspaper or an online format closely resembling it; and journalism as factual content that is clearly distinct from opinion or fiction, especially in the context of the current moral panic about ‘fake news’.

The emerging acceptance of at least some new forms in spite of such boundary work, then, may be in part the result of the continuing precarious economic environment for journalism; journalists see that sites like Buzzfeed have found at least one model for sustaining serious journalism through novel means. Still, long-held boundaries of what can be considered journalism persist.