Digitalizing the Journalistic Field: Journalists’ Views on Changes in Journalistic Autonomy, Capital and Habitus

Abstract

Bourdieu-inspired journalism scholarship, and journalism studies at large, could benefit from an approach that can holistically explain how journalists make sense of technology-related change in the journalistic field. By merging key insights from field theory with philosophy of technology, and by analyzing 40 qualitative interviews with agents across a wide range of positions in the Swedish journalistic field, we uncover how journalists view technological change in relation to the field's autonomy, capitals and habitus. At the macro-level, the analysis shows how technology is constructed in the journalistic field at large, indicating a digital heteronomy. At the meso-level, findings indicate that positions become rearranged when new skills such as metrics and engagement management become collectively recognized as capital. Field-specific, journalistic, capital is supplemented with a virality capital. At the micro-level, we unravel an emerging journalistic habitus formed in relation to structural transformations in the field–the feel for engagement.