Journalism And Journalists Research Paper

Journalistic work is primarily based on the symbolic manipulation of the content (sense making) in contrast to those, like typographers, responsible for the mechanical production of the newspaper or other news medium. In large and complex electronic media systems, journalism is contextualized and co-determined by other media output and occupations. Several groups of employees, who are occupied with symbolic manipulation or involved in administrative and organizational tasks, are conventionally not considered journalists. The development of electronic production and distribution of media contents, and the growth of new forms of journalism (e.g., tabloids and talk shows, the Internet) brought about numerous occupational groups (technicians and other employees in broadcasting, documentary production, audio-visual workers, computer programmers, designers) whose work cannot be classified exclusively into either side, i.e., they participate both in symbolic and technical (re)production of contents. The boundaries between journalism and nonjournalism, and between full-time and part-time journalists become even more problematic in the cyberspace dominated by a constant flux of information produced, reproduced, and distributed by millions of Internet ‘visitors.’

There is no uniform ‘journalistic culture’ or concerted form of professional operation of journalists that would lead to a single concept of journalistic work and norms. In contrast to the rather technical meaning of journalism in English and most other languages of Western civilization referring to the workforce in institutionalized forms of (mass) communication, the Greek concept of journalism, δηµοσιογραφια (demosiografıa), means ‘writing about for the people’ and is focused on the social substance of journalism by emphasizing people rather than a particular class, or nature. Since demos means more than population but citizenship, journalism implies political relevance, which indeed was its most significant common trait until very recently. A critical labor perspective in the 1960s led to the concept of news-workers, suggesting a distinction between news, and entertainment or fiction without solving the problem of a clear sociological referent of the concept. In the Muslim world, journalists are required, similarly to those in the West, not to ‘mix truth with falsehood’ and to verify news, but reporting is not allowed to be conceived on suspicion, to ruin people’s reputation or to mock them, and most importantly, news must have a ‘use value’ in that it must provide benefit (Nafa’) to the people. The latter idea was central to ‘development journalism’ emerging in the 1960s in developing countries, emphasizing that reporting should contribute to national development of the country concerned. Similarly, ‘public’ or ‘civic journalism’ movements in the West in the 1990s suggest that journalists should not merely report, but discover a community’s ‘relevance’ by meeting the people and experiencing their lives.

People have always passed on information from one to the next, but journalism as a distinctive occupational task did not begin until the seventeenth century, when it became a supplementary, part-time occupation of otherwise professionally committed individuals in the social communication process—e.g., printers, postmen, or tradesmen. Modern journalism, as a result of industrial and bourgeois revolutions, became fully institutionalized with the mass media. During that period, the press was largely liberated from censorship and party subservience. R. Park noted that the rise of the reporter had been one of the most important events in the ‘age of news.’ While in earlier centuries journalists largely belonged to self-sustained free professions of the middle class, with industrialization they joined the class of workers employed by the press publishers. The separation between the occupations of publisher and journalist was followed by the establishment of national and international professional organizations and trade unions of journalists.

During the nineteenth century, newspapers were generally still closely linked to political parties and journalists subject to the political credo of newspapers. The idea of objectivity represented an alternative to partisan journalism and a way to legitimate the professional status of journalists. The quest for objectivity was related to the need to establish a sort of professional, scientifically validated method for journalists to ensure their professional autonomy based on a ‘standard’ university education, also typical of traditional professions. The idea of journalistic objectivity as a professional norm was not widely recognized until the end of the First World War. In the early 1900s, the demand for objective reporting was embedded in the broader cultural movement of ‘scientific naturalism,’ which stressed the importance of methods in giving evidence of facts.

The conflict between subjective storytelling (the blending of facts and opinions, real events and trivial fictional material, news, and entertainment into a tightly packaged story) and ‘objective news’ (the classic function of journalism to sort out factual and reliable accounts of daily, particularly politically relevant events) was never solved. The growing number of journalistic codes of ethics since the beginning of the twentieth century to mark professional standards in journalism has never resulted in a single code that would universally define the standard of ‘objectivity,’ including the professional standards adopted by International Federation of Journalists (IFJ). There are two main reasons: (a) the two tendencies of storytelling and objective reporting are not mutually exclusive but intermingling extreme strategies in reporting events; (b) the competition for consumers causes competition for the latest news and makes journalists vulnerable to politics. Political authorities enter journalism either directly through interviews and press conferences or indirectly through ‘information subsidies’ (making information available to journalists on a quid-pro-quo basis), influence the journalistic agenda setting, if not attitudes and actions, and eventually make journalism subsidiary to public relations. For example, in Japan, news sections of newspapers are produced in close cooperation with powerful news sources in government, industry, and the civil service, organized through the ‘press club’ system.

Journalism lacks the objective criteria—stressing the importance of universal norms, service to clients or altruism, intellectual activity and scientifically based expertise, autonomy and responsibility, and ethics—that would place it in the same social position as ‘true’ professions such as medicine or law. Although the social influence of journalism is rising, journalists in many countries have no specific professional standards to meet. Nevertheless, national codes of ethics share some common aims such as prohibiting editorial advertising and misleading audiences, and protecting individuals against invasion of privacy, defamation, and damaging publicity in general. Specific forms of (self-)regulation such as courts of honor, press or media councils, or press or media ombudsmen exist in a great number of countries to supervise the implementation of ethical standards by journalists and the media. They may be composed of journalists alone (as in the case of courts of honor within journalist associations) or representatives of the general public and media organizations.

There are invariably controversies between scholars, media workers, and media industries about the structure of journalism studies and the type of education needed for journalists. Early courses in journalism were mostly practical or vocational and connected with on-the-job training. In the 1920s and later, journalism curricula expanded into social sciences and included courses such as communication theories, public opinion, history of journalism, and ethics. The number of educational institutions in journalism has grown throughout the twentieth century, starting with the University of Missouri in 1908 in the United States (which at present has 350 schools of journalism) and soon followed by other regions in the world, where educational programs and materials were largely based on those from the USA and Europe. One of the first journalism schools linked to universities was set up in 1918 at the National Peking University in China. In Latin America the number of journalism faculties and schools increased from 13 in 1950 to almost 300 by the end of the century. There is no ‘typical’ journalism curriculum, but it usually combines journalistic and nonjournalistic courses, with the prevalence of the latter (e.g., in the USA in a ratio 25:75). Many schools offer specialization in print, radio and television journalism, public relations, and advertising; fewer have more specialized programs, e.g. in photojournalism, magazine journalism, or television documentary. Generally, two seemingly contradictory trends may be found in the development of journalism programs: more and more specialized and even fragmented curricula in different fields of journalism on the one hand, and on the other a more ‘generic’ approach to journalism, stressing the need for instruction in communication skills cutting across specific job demands and combined with nonjournalistic specialization such as arts, agriculture, economics, law, or politics. Both trends are restricted to larger and developed countries where many universities and schools can compete to ‘supply’ journalists to widely differentiated media.

In the developed world, a large proportion (often exceeding 50 percent) of newcomers to the profession graduate in journalism at a university or its equivalent. An international comparative study indicates that on average students choose journalism as senior teenagers, primarily because they believe that the work of journalists is interesting and useful for society, and that they personally are talented for this job. However, many of those who graduate in journalism never enter a journalistic career but rather other communication-related or even noncommunication occupations. Neither is specific education a condition for entering a journalistic occupation. The lack of entry conditions such as agreed upon professional qualifications and licensing may be related to the liberal idea that freedom of expression and press freedom should not be restricted, in order not to violate fundamental citizens’ freedoms. Almost all countries outside the United States have a body of press or media law, but journalists have no special legal status other than as defined by the constitutional rights and freedoms of citizens and, in some countries, some minor state legislation, e.g., the protection of information sources. However, this ‘ideology of nonprofessionalism’ is under threat from reality, in which media owners and editors may define specific qualities and conditions that candidates for journalism must fulfil, and journalists may use mechanisms such as codes of ethics and forms of self-regulation to protect not only group autonomy but also monopoly in the labor market.

The lack of formal education in terms of theoretically grounded knowledge within a particular field contributes to the controversy about professionalism in journalism. Acquisition of such knowledge is central to the selection processes (search for the ‘right’ person for a job), and instrumental (skills) and expressive socialization (norms, ethics) by which entry into a profession may be controlled. The latter dimension of socialization gives primacy to the intellectual component of professionalism and to the production of expert knowledge resulting from research. In 1922, W. Lippmann complained that no research had been conducted in the field of journalism despite its immense impact on democratic life. Although the German Zeitungswissenschaft studied systematically the press beginning in the nineteenth century (e.g., journalistic genres, economics of newspapers), M. Weber was the first to suggest in 1910 to pay attention to journalism as a profession. He explained that a sociology of newspapers ought to include the study of journalists, part-time journalists, and other newspapers employees, ‘collectivism and individualism in the creation of the content of the newspaper,’ ‘the anonymity of newspaper’ and its effects upon journalists, cultural specificities influencing journalism and the social functions of the press, and ‘the fate and the situation of journalism as a profession’ (particularly the questions of education and professional demands upon the journalist). Weber’s ambitious research program was not systematically carried out until the 1950s, when during the rise of ‘mass communication as a scientific discipline’ in the United States journalists became the subject of empirical research. Similarly to university education, however, studies in media occupations and professionals were not always well received by working journalists.

In most countries journalists are closer to lawyers and politicians than teachers or public servants in terms of prestige and salaries. They are part of local and national elites although they are on average much younger if compared to other professions. Particularly journalists in developing countries begin with rather high social status. Generally, however, the journalists’ opportunity for internal promotion within the profession is limited. Studies indicate a tendency to work in the field for a relatively short time and then move on to other activities because of comparatively low pay, inadequate work conditions, routine work, and limited opportunities for vertical mobility. Journalists often move to other media fields such as public relations or advertising, and less frequently they leave the field of mass media, e.g., by moving to politics. A strong professional mobility between the worlds of journalism and politics, which was particularly characteristic of the former socialist countries, and a too-close relationship of journalists with advertising, entertainment, and public relations may severely endanger the autonomy of journalists and mute their critical voices.

However, when journalists are critical to political and commercial events and actors, as in ‘investigative journalism,’ they are often exposed to intimidation and harassment by the elites, and even assassinations are used to silence unwanted journalistic voices not only in wartime or against war correspondents. During the 1990s, 662 journalists and media staff were killed or murdered in the course of their work, and many other disappearances were listed as under investigation by the IFJ and the International Press Institute. The killings are only the tip of an iceberg of physical assaults and jailings which affect journalists every year. However, the most widespread and epidemic peril of independent journalism in many countries is an increasing number of lawsuits against journalists, based on the legal provisions that the media should not harm the rights to privacy and reputation of individuals (including public officials); libel actions may be a disguised way of preventing journalists from performing a ‘watchdog function’ in society. Civil libel compensations became a sword of Damocles particularly in Eastern Europe and Russia in the 1990s, but prosecutions of journalists and high compensations threaten the media with bankruptcy and generally dampen investigative journalism in many other countries with a longer democratic tradition.

In terms of social and demographic characteristics journalists do not represent the population of citizens who rely on their reporting and interpretations, but are expected—like other professions—to carry out their work in the interests of the audiences rather than their own interests. Such expectations may be disputed by the facts that professional journalists disproportionately originate from the families in which professional and white-collar occupations prevail, live in elite neighborhoods, are disproportionately male (although this disparity is lessening during the last few decades), and their views of the world commonly depart from those of an ‘average citizen,’ usually leaning toward more liberal and democratic political views, in contrast to technical staff in media organizations who are usually more conservative. For example, in a 2000 Los Angeles Times survey, 82 percent of US journalists were found to back abortion compared to only 49 percent of the general population. This is not to argue that journalists are a politically coherent population. In some countries, such as Italy, journalists are clearly ‘divided’ among different political affiliations, a tendency advocated by some contemporary regulatory measures supporting (in the case of press also subsidizing, e.g., in Norway and Sweden) diversity and political plurality of the media.

The composition of the journalistic workforce is generally becoming more diversified in terms of gender, but men still represent the majority of the journalistic workforce. The increase in the number of female journalists indicates that journalism is no more a male preserve, but it also reflects a tendency of the intimization that permeates journalism. Yet the proportion of female journalists is still lower than the proportion of female students of journalism; female journalists are concentrated in the junior posts and in the non-news sector (e.g., magazines), and they tend to be paid less than men despite the fact that they are, on average, better educated than their male counterparts. The differences may be partly a consequence of the fact that female journalists relatively recently entered the profession, but they also may have to do with discrimination against women in journalism.

The least ambiguous mark of ‘professionalism’ in journalism is the establishment of professional organizations. Journalists are commonly associated nationally either into trade unions or professional associations; frequently, their organizations combine both these functions. Yet a long-term tension exists between professional associations, which stress the professional status of journalists (and usually also include employers and managers), and trade unions, concerned primarily with collective negotiations on behalf of working journalists (news-workers) with employers. Journalists often tend to define themselves as experts claiming to be above politics, but in some countries, journalistic associations also pursue political goals. The criteria for membership of journalists’ trade unions and professional associations are fluid, particularly in relation to part-time journalists and ‘boundary occupations’ such as public relations. Trade unions of journalists negotiate for salaries, working conditions, and fringe benefits, and in some cases they also protect journalists’ independence, e.g., by financial support to journalists penalized for refusing to do work incompatible with the professional standards (NUJ, National Union of Journalists in the UK) or, as in France, by effectuating the same benefits to journalists who would leave jobs because of the substantial political changes in the editorial policy as to those who lose their jobs involuntarily. In many situations unions also serve as ‘tools of the employer’ because an imbalance in power exists between unions and employers, due to the lack of unity among unions and guilds, their weak economic position, and goals narrowed to individuals’ rewards.

The largest international associations of journalists and media staff are the IFJ and the Media and Entertainment International (MEI). First established in 1926 and relaunched in 1946 and 1952, IFJ is the largest international journalistic organization, with 460,000 members and 140 member-unions in 103 countries on all continents (July 2000). The aims of IFJ include the promotion of international actions to defend press freedom through autonomous national trade unions or (as in the USA) guilds of journalists and other ‘authors,’ representation of journalists in the international trade union movement, and assistance to journalists and their unions in fighting for their professional and industrial rights. Journalists from socialist and some other countries established in 1946 the International Organization of Journalists (IOJ) as the counterpart to the IFJ. The IOJ, which also claimed the IFJ of 1926 as its predecessor, was dissolved in 1991 after the collapse of communism. Members of ‘technical’ occupations in the arts, audiovisual, cultural, entertainment, and mass media sector represent the bulk of the membership of Media and Entertainment International which includes 130 trade unions around the world.

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