What is journalism?

TLDR

Journalism in democratic societies has evolved into a professional identity grounded in occupational ideology, yet scholars often take its foundational assumptions for granted. The article seeks to operationalize journalism’s ideal-typical values and assess how they are challenged by contemporary cultural and technological shifts. The authors operationalize these core values and analyze their transformation in response to cultural and technological developments. They find that multiculturalism and multimedia illustrate such shifts, and that journalists’ self-perceptions now encompass more than a modernist duty to inform.

Abstract

The history of journalism in elective democracies around the world has been described as the emergence of a professional identity of journalists with claims to an exclusive role and status in society, based on and at times fiercely defended by their occupational ideology. Although the conceptualization of journalism as a professional ideology can be traced throughout the literature on journalism studies, scholars tend to take the building blocks of such an ideology more or less for granted. In this article the ideal-typical values of journalism’s ideology are operationalized and investigated in terms of how these values are challenged or changed in the context of current cultural and technological developments. It is argued that multiculturalism and multimedia are similar and poignant examples of such developments. If the professional identity of journalists can be seen as kept together by the social cement of an occupational ideology of journalism, the analysis in this article shows how journalism in the self-perceptions of journalists has come to mean much more than its modernist bias of telling people what they need to know.