Toward a Typology of Journalism Careers: Conceptualizing Israeli Journalists' Occupational Trajectories

Abstract

Journalism studies scholarship tends to emphasize professionalism as an occupational ideal, while scholarship on the culture industries stresses the salience of insecure careers. We argue that an exhaustive typology of journalism careers is needed to capture the potential variability in the structure of journalistic labor. This typology distinguishes professional, bureaucratic, entrepreneurial, unwillingly entrepreneurial, and nonemployed careers, and is relevant to a broader set of occupations in the culture industries. We illustrate this typology through an analysis of the occupational life histories of 60 Israeli journalists. This allows us to explain the dual nature of professionalism in journalism as a rhetoric nested within particular institutional contexts and this occupational rhetoric's splitting into “tribes of professionalism.”

The journalistic structure of feeling: An exploration of career life histories of Israeli journalists

“…This is borne out by the overwhelming reliance on hands-on training, the low number of interviewees with formal journalism/communication education (10 out of 33), and the murkiness of journalistic careers' starting point, despite an abundance of Israeli communication programs. Indeed, these findings complement our previous conceptual work showing that while Israeli journalists tend to embrace a discourse of journalistic professionalism, their actual bureaucratic, entrepreneurial, or even non-employed occupational career trajectories rarely enable them to realize a professional career path (Davidson and Meyers, 2012).…”

“…In this project, we aspired to meld these two approaches together: at the beginning of each interview, the interviewers administered a short self-filled questionnaire, collecting standard demographic data, including an occupational timeline. The information gathered via the questionnaires was later used to establish the study's fundamental database and enabled us to explore an initial typology of journalistic occupational trajectories (Davidson and Meyers, 2012). Through the following, extended semi-structured section of the interview, the interviewees had a chance to narrate their career by sharing their life histories in journalism, in their own words.…”

Prosopografía y career research en la historia del periodismo (y una propuesta de aplicación).

“…Una historia si se quiere social, pues tiene en cuenta también las relaciones sociales y laborales (Cohen, 2015;Randle et al, 2015) de los miembros de esos colectivos. Un estudio, en definitiva, de la profesión de periodista (Popkin, 1990o Cuxac, 2015, para otro momento histórico, y para época más actual, Fontenelle e Silva y Gastal Grill, 2014, Davidson y Meyers, 2016), y en este caso, digital, como ejemplo de la capacidad de transformación (también de resiliencia) de estructuras sociales que se toman como punto de partida. En cuanto a la presentación de resultados, es importante insistir en la necesidad de confeccionar bases de datos para explotar el material.…”

Conceptualizing Journalistic Careers: Between Interpretive Community and Tribes of Professionalism

“…In practice, journalism is a general definition for an activity that takes place within extremely varied occupational circumstances. Hence, Davidson and Meyers () offer a typology of journalistic careers that aims to capture the current variability in the structure of journalistic labor by distinguishing between professional, bureaucratic, entrepreneurial, unwillingly entrepreneurial, and non‐employed career types. Note that according to this typology, a professional career is one out of five existing journalistic career types: it can only exist in particular bureaucratic and entrepreneurial contexts, sometimes temporarily and sometimes over sustained periods of time.…”

“…What entrepreneur journalists perceive and manifest as professionalism is inherently different from what the latter group refers to as professionalism. As demonstrated by Davidson and Meyers (), some entrepreneur journalists do not view the concept of professionalism as tied to a specific occupation: professionalism, according to their perception, is centered on personal skills and the ability to manipulate those skills and resources in journalism but also in related occupational fields such as PR, politics, or business. Hence, the difference between the perceptions of veteran journalists viewing professionalism as a manifestation of a communal occupational ideology and the perceptions of entrepreneurial journalists might lead to the creation of “tribes of professionalism.”…”