Journalism between de-professionalisation and democratisation

Abstract

The article reflects on contemporary processes of de-professionalisation of journalism, its consequences for democratic processes and challenges to citizen journalism. It is argued that both the dilemmas of mainstream journalism and the emergence of citizen journalism are consequences of an array of evolving factors having to do with complex transformations in the media landscape and its industries, professional and ‘leisured’ content creation, employment and technologies, shifting patterns of media use among citizens, as well as broader permutations in social and cultural patterns. In the first section, we briefly address the long-term historical decline of professional journalism; in the second section, we look at some of the attributes of the current crisis; in the third section, we probe some of the key features of what has come to be called citizen journalism, a development that is contradictorily entwined with both the de-professionalisation and the democratisation of journalism. In the conclusion, we turn our eye to some paths for future research.

Networked News Participation: Future Pathways

“…And Hermida suggests we are heading toward a mass collaboration of citizens participating on a large scale with journalists (2010; Garcia de Torres & Hermida, 2017). In this new information-based world, journalism authority and industry control diminish, leading to deprofessionalization (Splichal & Dahlgren, 2016). This section explores what role all of those producing information play in a media ecology.…”

Interrogating the Inverse: Studying the Standardisation of Employment in Newsrooms of the Public Broadcaster RTV Slovenia

“…The study also contributes to critical assessments of the "proletarisation of professionals" in journalism. Unlike the parallel historical processes of "proletarisation" that economically subordinated journalists and professionalisation and its ideologisation which sought to align their interests with those of media owners (Kaul 1986;Hardt 1996), the study indicates the "creative destruction of journalism" in response to the material deterioration of professional journalism, adapting newswork to the evolving commercial modes of digitised communication, re-affirming the ideology of non-professionalism, while exposing newsworkers to pauperisation (Cohen 2015;Splichal and Dahlgren 2016). In this sense, the "re-proletarisation" of journalists has less to do with formal employment arrangements and the "old" ways of economic and technological subordination, and more with "new" larger material conditions in the digitised communication and ideological visions of "de-professionalisation", normalising difficulties in journalists' pursuit of public (cl)aims, maintaining long-term job security, and practising certain skills.…”

Journalistic Legitimacy Revisited

“…Given the complexity of the circumstances discussed above, there has been a concern about the legitimacy of journalism. Splichal and Dahlgren, for example, report that trust in journalism among citizens has been dramatically reduced in many countries such as the United States and the United Kingdoms in the 21 st century and there is a tendency towards the deprofessionalisation of journalism (Splichal and Dahlgren 2016). It is reported from both the United States (Lee 2010) and the UK (Schlesinger 2006;Gaber 2016) that the public has low trust in journalism and there is a lack of the credibility of news media and journalism.…”