Understanding Journalism as Newswork: How It Changes, and How It Remains the Same

Abstract

For a media profession so central to society’s sense of self, it is of crucial importance to understand the influences of changing labour conditions, professional cultures, and the appropriation of technologies on the nature of work in journalism. In this paper, the various strands of international research on the changing nature of journalism as a profession are synthesized, using media logic as developed by Altheide and Snow (1979 and 1991) and updated by Dahlgren (1996) as a conceptual framework. A theoretical key to understanding and explaining journalism as a profession is furthermore to focus on the complexities of concurrent disruptive developments affecting its performance from the distinct perspective of its practitioners – for without them, there is no news.