Knowing in Journalistic Practice

Abstract

This article reports the outcomes of an ethnographic study in a public broadcasting company exploring on-the-job learning and knowing in journalistic practice. We use practice perspective and social learning theory to study how knowing in everyday work is achieved within journalists’ communities of practice and in relation to other practices around journalism. A year-long study involved analysis of 19 on-site observations, 25 interviews, over 30 textual company based documents and over 120 photos. We found that journalists’ communities of practice are actively negotiating a shared understanding of good practice. At the same time, individual journalists are relatively free to choose how they use this collective knowledge resource, enabling a creative tension between shared understanding of good practice and individual performances of that practice. Journalists are also responsive to ongoing and anticipated future changes within the practices they align with—practices that are reported about, journalistic practices of other public broadcasting companies and practices of the audience. We, therefore, argue for an understanding of journalistic practice as open-ended and performative, rather than fixed and routine.

KEYWORDS:

• community of practice
• ethnography
• journalism
• journalistic community
• knowing
• organisational learning
• practice theory
• public broadcasting

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors express gratitude towards two anonymous reviewers, Judit Strömpl, Maaja Vadi, Anne Reino, Mait Metelitsa, Virgo Süsi and Raul Eamets for their helpful comments on the earlier versions of this manuscript.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research [grant number IUT20-49].