The practice of journalism was heavily influenced in the past century by regular employment in news enterprises, hierarchical arrangements and organized beats, trade unions and professional associations, and common values and training.
These created strong institutional influences on journalistic
work from employing organizations and professional colleagues. They provided
institutional support to journalistic practices, journalistic specialization,
and expanded news and information provision. The arrangements provided the foundation on
which better journalistic working conditions and compensation were built.
The newsroom was a construction of the institutional arrangements and became the focus of
journalistic life. The
newsroom developed in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century after
telephony altered the need for journalists to be constantly roaming the city
and it has undergone several conceptual changes since that time.
Ironically, it is the development of better communication
technologies and the digital era that are markedly changing the centrality of
the newsroom in journalistic work. The number of journalists physically located
in newsrooms is diminishing because of the ability to work fully from other
locations and because of the reductions in regular employment.
In the new environment, the number of independent
journalists working as freelancers or journalistic entrepreneurs—or within small
journalistic cooperatives—is growing. There is growing pressure to expand the boundaries of the
definition of a journalist to include non-professionals who regularly create
and disseminate news and informational content.
These developments are changing the context of journalism, its
norms and practices, the organization and direction of journalistic labor,
perceptions of journalists’ identity, and its reward systems and career paths—all
of which are visible signs of the deinstitutionalization of provision of news
and the profession and trade of journalism.
In the twentieth century journalism
was provided by insular news organizations that rarely cooperated with
other news organizations, detached themselves from the society they claimed to
serve, and often relied on news and information clues from elites and official sources. New,
more flexible means of obtaining and providing news are emerging in the deinstitutionalized environment that rely on
public accounts and data previously unavailable to journalists. Where these are
taking us remains to be seen.
The deinstitutionalization
raises a host of questions: How are these changes altering journalism practice? What does deinstitutionalization means to news, information, and an informed
public? How can and does innovation
takes place in non-institutional settings? How do the transformations underway benefit
journalism? How does the declining importance of the newsroom affect
the institutional nature of journalistic ethics and decision making?
These are fascinating questions in an intriguing transformational period.
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