MAPPING PROFESSIONAL IMAGINATION

Abstract

Journalism research has a long tradition of making sense of professional practices from the perspective of the everyday routines of news work. This article seeks to make a contribution to this literature by mapping out how the professional community of journalists interprets the current change and future challenges of their trade. The paper uses the conceptual framework offered by Bourdieu's field theory, but moves beyond it by suggesting that symbolic capital in the journalistic field is also connected to broader social imaginaries, beyond the limits of the field. Against this background, the article maps out empirically some of the limits of the “professional imagination” of journalistic culture by a close reading of interviews with mid-level managing editors in Finnish newspapers. The article describes the professional journalistic field as a culture, i.e. as a sense-making system which adapts journalism to contextual changes but which cannot be seen as simple reflection of these changes.

Keywords:

• journalistic field
• newspaper future
• newsroom culture
• professionalism
• social imaginaries

Acknowledgements

This study is part of a research project “Journalism: Public Profession and Late Modernity” funded by the Academy of Finland. Interviews were conducted by Pekko Ylönen and Tuomo Tamminen.

Notes

1. On the history of Finnish journalism, see for instance Tommila (2001) and Salokangas (1999).

2. For another attempt to connect imaginaries to professional identities, see Heikkilä and Kunelius (2006).

3. Our claims about the rank and file journalists are based on our earlier empirical findings: interviews with some 60 Finnish journalists of all kinds of media at all ranks from 2004 to 2005 (Seppi et al., 2007).