‘Old journalists’ in a ‘new media’ environment? A study on the career choices of digital journalists

ABSTRACT

This article examines the careers of ‘old media journalists’ who currently work in the new media sector. In our examination, we interviewed 11 ‘old journalists’ from five countries (Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, and Portugal), all of whom held positions in new media between 2015 and 2018. Using a symbolic interactionist approach, this article describes the careers and choices these journalists have made throughout their lives. It describes how these journalists have had to adapt to the events and obstacles that the collectivity in journalism presents and, over time, has reassessed the way career projects and journalism are done. What's more, these journalists have made a number of recurring choices that help identify key moments in their careers: entrance into journalism, recognising digital technology, deciding whether to become a digital journalist, and the choices made to remain journalists in a universe of new media. All in all, there is a duality present in these careers: there are those who learn new skills and gain experience over time, perhaps due to a preference for technology; and there are those who make the move to digital because they need to adapt to the labour market.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital journalists
• new media
• transnational professional identity
• career
• symbolic interactionism
• interviews

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Fábio Henrique Pereira is associate professor at the Faculty of Communication, University of Brasilia. He is the author of the bookJornalistas intelectuais no Brasil (Intellectual-journalists in Brazil). His research focuses on the theory of journalism, the sociology ofjournalists, and professional identity. He is co-editor of Sur le journalisme journal and executive-editor of the Brazilian Journalism Researchjournal.

ORCID

Fábio Henrique Pereira http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2867-0167

Notes

1 The authors conducted a study on the profile of Brazilian journalists, published in 2013. They kindly provided unpublished data for the sample of online journalists used in this study.

2 In Canada and, on a lesser scale, in continental Europe, public media plays an important role in national media systems and is considered a good career opportunity. In Brazil, because of a lack of tradition in this segment (national public TV in Brazil was only created in 2006), these media outlets shape the labour market in journalism much less.

3 Recognising online production as a journalistic activity and building a collective meaning varies from country to country. In France, it was only in 2004 when online journalists were given the right to apply for a carte de presse. In Canada, despite a lack of mechanisms and control for obtaining journalist status, the recognition of online journalists is dependent on a reconstruction process of journalism within a professional group (Le Cam 2005). In Brazil, even though the first people responsible for web production were hired as ‘content producers’ – denied the status of professional journalist – the unions quickly demanded that the practice be considered ‘journalistic’, enforced by Law 972/69 which was in effect until 2009. These different processes reveal the dynamics of national management and the expansion of the professional boundaries of journalism, a debate that goes beyond the scope of this article. For more on this topic, see Ruellan (1993, 1998) and Le Cam and Ruellan (2004).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico: [Grant Number PQ Scholarship].