Journalistic professionalism as performance and boundary work: Source relations at the state house

Abstract

In addition to power struggles over representation, negotiations between journalists and news sources represent complex boundary problems. Journalists’ efforts at asserting autonomy and offsetting instances when they give it up all provide valuable insights into their understanding of professionalism. The state house, where political actors attempt to influence media representations every day, provides a strategic research site (Merton, 1987) for studying professionalism in source relations. This ethnographic analysis of the Albany press corps looks at professional meanings that are expressed in these negotiations. In interviews conducted for this study, journalists define and distinguish themselves from each other primarily in terms of their understandings of what dealing with source negotiations professionally means. This article introduces the concept of boundary performance to explore how news workers express journalistic professionalism symbolically in action.

Representing Mass Violence: Conflicting Responses to Human Rights Violations in Darfur

“…The chapter's conclusions address central Bourdieuian arguments regarding the position of journalism in fields of power, specifically journalism's relationship to neighboring fields, forces that must be considered if we want to make sense of variations in reporting about mass violence in Darfur or elsewhere Benson 1998Benson , 2006. The conclusions further add new information to past scholarship about boundaries between political and journalistic fields and debates about the mediatization of politics (Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999;Revers 2014;Strömbeck and Esser 2014). They enrich insights from research and journalistic self-reflections on the reporting about mass violence in Africa (Allen and Seaton 1999;Crilly 2010;McNulty 1999;Mody 2010;Ray 2009;Thompson 2011).…”

“…To the degree that policy decisions are informed by public perceptions of social issues, media thus become important social forces that affect whether and how governments will respond to mass violence in distant places. Recent Bourdieuian work on journalism Benson 1998Benson , 2006Benson , 2014Benson and Neveu 2005), lines of research that explore the boundaries between the journalistic and the political fields (Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999;Revers 2014;Strömbeck and Esser 2014), and culturally inspired work on journalism (Hannerz 2004;Zelizer 1993) provide inspiration for this analysis. In addition, historical and sociological literature contributes theoretical ideas and empirical information on ways in which crime and genocide narratives created in the judicial field are processed in media reports (Pendas 2006;Jardim 2012;Savelsberg and King 2011).…”

Smileys Without Borders. A Critique of Transboundary Interaction Between Politicians, Journalists and PR Practitioners on Social Media

“…At the same time, traditional boundary work (Revers 2014) is still important and highly alive on Twitter and other social media sites. Whether through single posts/statuses or in the context of cross-professional interaction, journalists and politicians do also clearly articulate their different competencies, roles and duties in society (see Olausson 2017); journalists do also demonstrate professional integrity in relation to the PR business (Fredriksson and Johansson 2014); and so forth.…”

“…Simultaneously, from a democratic point of view, there is a need to problematise the deepening of social ties across professional fields and its undermining of boundary work (Revers 2014;cf. Chadwick and Collister 2014), i.e.…”

“…articulations of difference and distance between the professional fields. The stronger the social companionship between actors in politics, media and PR, the thinner the line between professional and unprofessional behaviour (Revers 2014) in which the relations might become "too cozy" (Lewis et al 2008, 2). Democratically speaking, what is at stake is the maintenance of each profession's unique duties or roles in society.…”