Journalism and intellectual life: the exemplary case of Donald Horne

Amid growing difficulties for professionals generally, media workers in particular are negotiating the increasingly contested boundary space between producers and users in the digital environment. This article, based on a review of the academic literature, explores that larger tension transforming the creative industries by extrapolating from the case of journalism – namely, the ongoing tension between professional control and open participation in the news process. Firstly, the sociology of professions, with its emphasis on boundary maintenance, is used to examine journalism as boundary work, profession, and ideology – each contributing to the formation of journalism's professional logic of control over content. Secondly, by considering the affordances and cultures of digital technologies, the article articulates open participation and its ideology. Thirdly, and against this backdrop of ideological incompatibility, a review of empirical literature finds that journalists have struggled to reconcile this k...

THE TENSION BETWEEN PROFESSIONAL CONTROL AND OPEN PARTICIPATION: Journalism and its boundaries

The fi eld of journalism studies and the subfi eld of sociology that examines professionalization 
and professional systems-the sociology of the professions-have coexisted in a state of mutual 
indifference for decades. Few of the classic professional studies in the sociology of professions 
hazard even a guess as to journalism’s professional status, preferring for the most part to focus 
on the traditional professions of medicine and law (see, for example, Bledstein, 1976; Dingwall 
& Lewis, 1983; Freidson, 1970; Haskell, 1984); most studies of journalistic professionalism, on 
the other hand, forego engagement with the bulk of the sociological literature on professional 
occupations and systems. (For a rare exception, see Tumber & Prentoulis, 2005.) At a time when 
many of the most important scholarly questions about journalism revolve around issues of the 
occupation’s power, authority, and professional status, there is much to be gained, it would seem, 
from revisiting questions of journalism and professionalization from an explicitly sociological 
angle-articulating a deeper understanding of journalism’s troubled professional project, the relationship between the objectivity norm and that project, and the manner in which journalists 
attempt to forge a journalistic jurisdiction out of the link between their everyday work and their 
heavily qualifi ed claim to possess a form of professionalized knowledge.

Objectivity, Professionalism, and Truth Seeking in Journalism

The lucky country : Australia in the sixties

This article offers a theoretical framework for understanding journalistic expertise, based on a revision of Collins and Evans' model. While their model maintains that a small elite of experienced and diligent journalists can become “interactional experts” in the respective specializations of their news sources, the current paper suggests that experienced journalists develop different degrees of bipolar “interactional expertise,” specializing in interactions with their sources on one hand and audiences on the other. The audience pole not only limits their expertise and fits it to the constraints of the news environment but also drives and legitimizes their focus on information that is simple and quick to obtain and convey and is ostensibly interesting and important for their audiences.

Journalism and intellectual life: the exemplary case of Donald Horne

References

THE TENSION BETWEEN PROFESSIONAL CONTROL AND OPEN PARTICIPATION: Journalism and its boundaries

Objectivity, Professionalism, and Truth Seeking in Journalism

The lucky country : Australia in the sixties

Journalism as Bipolar Interactional Expertise

Into the open

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