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In its eagerness both to prepare students for jobs in the news industry and to understand and explain journalism’s functioning in (the service of) democratic societies (while consistently framing this function as being under threat, thereby collapsing concerns about news as an industry with journalism as a profession), journalism studies and education have constructed a theoretical framework that considers the profession in terms of its more or less consensual news values, dominant frames, routinized operations, gatekeeping functions, and industrial arrangements. This is not to say scholars of journalism have not studied nonmainstream, oppositional, grassroots, or any other kind of nontraditional form of journalism in the past. Such “journalisms,” however, were generally reined in and tamed in theoretical frameworks emphasizing inside/outside binaries – for example, between mainstream and alternative journalism, between hard versus soft news, or between information and entertainment functions of the press. In doing so, a certain way of doing (and thinking about) journalism has prevailed – providing a benchmark of sorts.

At the same time, when journalism educators, students, and researchers talk about journalism, they cannot help but recognize the enormous diversity of the field. Professionals, amateurs, and hybrid variations of such identities, many institutions, many technologies, are all involved in the production of journalism across diverse channels and platforms. With so many actors involved of so many types, our conceptualizations of journalism as a single (more or less consensual) entity are challenged. When we revert to the same old dualisms, we risk explaining this complexity away, reflexively suggesting there is a core to the profession that continually reflects on itself vis-à-vis the developments in and challenges of the periphery, in a continuous circling of the wagons to keep truly original, edgy, pioneering, creative, nonformulaic, nontraditional ways of newsgathering, storytelling, and audience engagement at the perimeter. In keeping with this center/periphery distinction, anything not fitting preconceived notions of coherence is labeled as diverse, complex, or hybridized. Such approach does not acknowledge the messiness intrinsic to the object of study, a messiness amplified and accelerated by changes in working conditions, in information and communication technologies, and challenges to established business models: “we need to be ready to see the conceptual mess that we made through neatly fitting everything in categories that never quite fit” (Witschge et al. 2019: 657).

The conceptual and theoretical building blocks of journalism studies, news values, framing and agenda setting, and occupational ideology can all be considered examples of routines, conventions, and formulas that developed (and continue to develop) – arising out of conversations in workplaces, debates in newsrooms, choices by individuals in a variety of circumstances. That is, these concepts and theories are continually contingent on practices. The ongoing and dynamic discursive construction of journalism as an idea as well as a praxis tends to be dictated by casuistry (rather than a strict principle-based approach) and everydayness. In Heideggerian (1927) terms, everydayness in journalism manifests in journalists’ generally pragmatic way of engaging the daily challenges of newswork. Lefebvre’s (1987) use of the concept of everydayness is relevant as well: how those engagements over time have a tendency to become repetitive, routinized, even monotonous – quite possibly soon to be replaced by automation and robot (or algorithmic) journalism (Carlson 2015).

Although this would suggest that one could equate “journalism” with the sum of routines, conventions, and formulas emerging from the newsroom-centric construction of the profession, we want to pinpoint and highlight all the other ways of understanding and doing journalism, being a journalist, that aren’t necessarily “peripheral” or even exceptional but simply also make up the essence of the profession. It can be argued that well-established patterned behaviors are what students and scholars may have focused on, and they may be what journalism education is structured around. Such behaviors may be what the major news institutions use to standardize work. In everyday practices, though, there is always what Robert Chia and Robin Holt call “wayfinding,” which they characterize “not as a plotted sequence of static positions but as the coming-into-sight and passing-out-of-sight of various contoured and textured aspects of the environment” (2009: 163). We run the risk of ignoring the many opportunistic, unplanned, improvised, intimate, and curious acts that make up journalism if we consistently attempt to solidify these into the well-worn concepts of our handbooks and canonical works (Chia and Holt label the models, maps, and classifications as the “navigational” behavior of professionals in organizations). Accessing practices through the lens of wayfinding underscores how institutional journalism is becoming a different place. Internally these institutions are reshuffling, being repopulated by a wide variety of new actors – often with only temporary assignments, working on a per-project basis. Journalism is increasingly practiced outside of such institutions. It is crucial to expand upon the exclusivity of journalism studies and education, to move beyond binaries, and seek out the stories and conversations of journalists elsewhere.

The navigational (Chia and Holt 2009) ties that bind journalism are the ones most efficiently theorized by the field of journalism studies, and consist of what journalists (and academics) know and understand to be the cornerstones of the profession: role perceptions and news values, ways of framing information that assist audiences to make sense of (particularly) the world of politics and the economy, and its purpose and corresponding privileged position in democratic society (Hanitzsch and Vos 2017). The theory and research falls short in that it conceptualizes these ties as necessarily operationally coupled with the structure of the news outlets and media organizations as an industry, and designates the institutional arrangement of news as work. Second, it does not allow enough space for understanding the many ways that journalistic practices and self-understandings defy these conceptualizations. In this book we thus call for acknowledging how our theoretical frameworks and empirical analyses exclude a great number of the practices, emotions, values, and definitions currently constituting journalism. We hope to contribute to the telling of multiple and multiperspectival (Gans 2011) stories about journalism so that we can contribute to the development of definitions and research frameworks that “do not foreclose on rearrangements suggested by new forms of social and natural knowledge” (Bowker and Star quoted in Timmermans 2015: 7).

Throughout its history, the general notion or idea of journalism has stayed more or less the same. Its core values and ideals remain intact. Its commitment to public service, truth-seeking, and providing information on the basis of professional and independent verification has been presumed and widely affirmed. In other words: when looking at journalism writ large, the tendency to see coherence is strong. When one switches to individual journalists – when the unit of analysis becomes what newsworkers do and under what conditions they do it – a messy reality emerges. Scholars such as Thomas Hanitzsch and Tim Vos acknowledge how the discussion about “what journalism is” changes when we take into account the profound and dramatic changes in journalists’ working environments. The question remains of how this could be, given the cognitive consensus about journalism and the continual “testing” of more or less new journalisms vis-à-vis a supposed core.

What is interesting (and what needs to be challenged) is not so much the question of what journalism is but how it has so successfully remained similar in the context of continuous internal and external transformations, changes, challenges, evolutions, and revolutions. It is revealing how the scholarly (and all too human) proclivity for closure and coherence has preferred to conflate the various levels of analysis when making sense of media work. This is most explicitly and famously articulated in several models: John Dimmick and Philip Coit’s (1982) taxonomy of mass media decisionmaking, Armin Scholl and Siegfried Weischenberg’s (1998) onion model, and Stephen Reese and Pamela Shoemaker’s (2016) hierarchy-of-influences framework. Instead of working through how the various stages of newswork change under individualized, fragmented, networked, and altogether precarious conditions, as educators and researchers we have tended to focus on consistency across levels, proclaiming more or less “universal” theories of journalism, its culture, and its role conceptions. In doing so, we have accepted explanations of newswork that assume journalists get their ideas of who they are and what they are (supposed to be) doing largely through occupational socialization and occupational context, leading to homogeneous understandings of what journalism is.

Whereas influential, multinational comparative research projects such as Worlds of Journalism (worldsofjournalism.org) and Journalistic Role Performance (journalisticperformance.org) started out with universalist ambitions, their most recent reports and publications suggest otherwise, emphasizing “multilayered hybridization in journalistic cultures” (Mellado et al. 2017: 961) and a world populated by a rich diversity of journalistic cultures (Hanitzsch et al. 2019). What these remarkable projects do not do, however, is to offer an explanation for all this diversity, hybridity, and complexity.

To provide insight into the many variations, seemingly contradictory definitions, activities, values, and aims that all exist under the banner of journalism, we suggest turning our attention to the affective dimension of news as work, of journalism as a profession. This affective dimension points to the strong affiliation that practitioners have to ideals of journalism, irrespective of the medium they produce for, their contract, or type of working arrangement. They can be quite critical of management, of industry, even of specific routines and practices associated with newswork – but they somehow see such criticisms as separate from their loyalty to – their passion for, even – the notion of doing journalistic work as a professional. In writing this book we have seen this most clearly among those who invent “journalism” from the ground up, sticking to quite traditional notions of newswork while making entire new companies, ventures, and collectives work. In this context legacy news organizations and newsrooms – while valuable and important – can also be a major distraction from reflecting on what exactly is (or also is) journalism. Once inside, the relative stability of the institutional setting absolves most journalists from actively questioning who they are, why they are doing what they are doing, and who they are doing it for. Consistently, those journalists operating in emerging or otherwise peripheral areas of the profession are challenged to be more reflective, deliberate, and articulate about what it is that they are doing. Those working on the inside, within the confines of the newsroom, have their positions governed by the institutional authority of their employer, and, though they are certainly involved in boundary work, can be considered to be less challenged to continuously legitimate what it is they are doing. This attitude is something Ellen Ullman once documented as the inherent blindness of being “close to the machine” (1997) – the machine in our case being the core of institutionalized newswork.

The notion of journalism as a form of affective labor is not new, yet remains underarticulated (Beckett and Deuze 2016; Siapera 2019; Cantillon and Baker 2019). The affective nature of newswork gets expressed in the need for reporters to regulate and moderate their emotions and emotional life in order to “make it work” as journalists (for example, to always be amenable and pleasant to work with, to empathize with interviewees and assignment editors, at times to process the trauma of victims or witnesses to accidents and attacks, to nurture relationships with online and offline communities). As an extreme form of affect, journalism can also be seen as a passion project for many involved, at times accepting (or shrugging off) poor working conditions in order to keep doing what one loves doing.

In our project, we aim to go beyond journalism in that our studies articulate the field with those who strike out on their own, while deliberately focusing on the affective dimensions of journalism. The startup journalists we interviewed and observed are not alone in what they do: they are reporters and editors setting up new journalistic entities, starting editorial collectives, building a news business from the ground up, all over the world, across distinctly different journalism traditions and news cultures. In all these instances of entrepreneurial activity and bottom-up initiatives, we looked for the different notions and definitions of what journalism could be, what it means to be a journalist under these conditions, and what issues confront the contemporary journalist operating outside of the institutionalized contours of legacy news organizations.

This book is personal, in the cases and professionals it documents and in our focus on the stories of the heart, as well as in our motivations. Mark is beyond journalism: this is the last major work he will do in relation to journalism. Or so he says. Tamara thinks he is beyond journalism studies, needing to break free of the (perceived) regime of journalism scholars, which seems to leave little space for creative thinking (for a critique of the paradigm see, for instance, Josephi 2013; Zelizer 2013). Any academic work is a balance between “personal creative passion and willingness to submit to tradition and discipline” as Michael Polanyi (1998: 40) puts it. To have our work be recognized as academic work, we play by certain rules. But, as we argue in this book, journalism studies oftentimes can be too limited in scope, resulting in a narrow conceptualization of journalism as a fourth estate (with a subsequent primary focus on national politics and the economy), operated in newsrooms of legacy media institutions, serving a relatively silent and amorphous citizenry. Where Mark experiences a sense of frustration with the recurring debates reinforcing the dogma of the field, the industry, and the profession, and advocates a strategic bypassing of journalism in order to break free, Tamara sees tactical potential through her multiple engagements with the field “elsewhere” and outside the boundaries of established methodological and practical frameworks, and challenges to established ways of seeing (and doing) things.

This then is one of the main aims of the book: to both strategically and tactically affect journalism studies and education, and through that help facilitate more inclusive, diverse, and creative journalism practices. This book can be considered to be both a manifesto and an empirical description of part of the field of journalism. We aim to get journalism studies beyond journalism studies by showing how journalism is beyond (what we have predominantly defined as) journalism. Moving beyond does not – cannot – entail a full divorce from what came before. That which we counter grows from the same intellectual soil that we come from (Ortega y Gasset 1967: 73–4). As José Ortega y Gasset (1967: 74) points out, any creative thought is “shaped in opposition to some other thought, which we believe erroneous, fallacious, and needful of correction.” So, that which we argue against in this book is what at this “particular moment looms above our soil” for us, but our roots are from the same soil, and this book is as much homage to as critique of the very field that we grew up in. And we know that we keep it alive by writing this book as well: as Ortega y Gasset goes on to say, the “adversary is never an ineffectual past: it is always contemporary and seemingly vestigial.” We hope to add as much as transform, and in doing so our actions as academics mirror those of the journalists profiled in this book, especially their hopes and aspirations to both contribute to as well as change journalism.