Elimination of Ideas and Professional Socialisation

Abstract

This article investigates and interprets social and cultural production and reproduction as we turn our attention to an important part of routinised practice in the newsroom: the early newsroom meetings. These meetings are essential sites for the building of the craft ethos and professional vision. Our aim is to study how this building of expertise takes place at meetings with a particular focus on the decision-making process concerning ideas for new news stories. In order to do this, we perform linguistic analysis of news production practices, as we investigate how the journalists' ideas for potential news stories are eliminated by the editor at the daily newsroom meetings. The elimination of ideas for news stories are not just eliminations; they are also corrections of culturally undesirable behaviour producing and reproducing the proper perception of an important object of knowledge*what constitutes ''a good news story''*in this community of practice.

Socializing Journalist Trainees in the Newsroom: On How to Capture the Intangible Parts of the Process1

“…The interactional analyses made it possible to capture some of the intangible and blurred parts of this socialization process and the construction of craft ethos and professional vision, and how this is produced and reproduced through interaction. The findings complement previous research demonstrating how expertise is enacted in newsroom meetings (Cotter 2010;VanPreaet 2011, Gravengaard andRimestad 2011). In the routinized practice in the newsroom, the different ways of "getting an idea" are not explicitly described, nor is the development towards more freedom of action and less interference and control.…”

“…The socialization process is embedded in a specific community of practice (Wenger 1998) in which the professional veterans have common goals and share a repertoire of resources, for instance: attitudes, values, knowledge, assumptions, reference systems and experiences. In the newsroom, the interns, via situated learning (Lave and Wenger 1991), learn about this community of practice -for instance what does and does not constitute "a good news story" -by participating in the actual practice and monitoring acceptance and elimination of ideas (Donsbach 2004;O'Neill and Harcup 2009;Gravengaard and Rimestad 2011). The newcomers learn in practice and from practice -from what is said and what is not said by their superiors, thus becoming an even more competent member of the social group.…”

“…the trained journalists and editors, are perceived by theories of profession as intuitive experts (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1986) with a large degree of tacit expert knowledge, based on their repertoire of experience from the routinized practice, cognitively structured as intuition (Polanyi 1958(Polanyi , 1983Wackerhausen and Wackerhausen 2000;Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1986). Large parts of this tacit, professional knowledge about a particular community of practice and its professional norms are passed on to newcomers in tacit ways (Gravengaard and Rimestad 2011). As Carr (2010) underlines, expertise is transmitted through verbal interaction between master and apprentice, but also through observation, internalization and imitation of patterned behaviours.…”

“…(2010);Cotter (2001Cotter ( , 2010;Perrin (2011Perrin ( , 2013; Van Hout and Jacobs (2008); Van Hout and Van Praet (2011);Gravengaard and Rimestad (2011);Gravengaard (2010Gravengaard ( , 2012.…”

The working conditions of media internships: an empirical study

“…Usually, interns are considered part of the staff, which is observed holistically in journalism studies, so parameters are rarely extracted specifically for this group. Although so far, this type of approach has allowed us to know certain aspects about interns, in our view, they wrongly consider interns as part of the population of professional journalists when, in fact, they are mostly students at an early stage of their professional socialisation (Cotter, 2010;Gravengaard and Rimestad, 2011).…”