Jan Fredrik Hovden

JOURNALISTS IN THE MAKING

This article examines Norwegian journalism students’ views about their profession and education at different phases in their career and also outlines the social background of the new generation of journalists. The article presents key findings from several surveys of students conducted at the two most popular and prestigious journalism schools in Norway between 2000 and 2004. The main aim is to investigate any development in attitudes to different professional values between the beginning of students’ studies through to their first years as working journalists. What do the journalists of tomorrow consider to be the most important tasks for journalism in society? What motivates them to study journalism? What kind of knowledge, skills and traits are seen as crucial for journalists? And to what extent do the J-schools actually make a difference in the shaping of the next generation of journalists? An important finding is that most professional attitudes seem to stay quite stable from the beginning of studies until early career, though the results also indicate a general decline in classical journalistic professional idealism after entering the newsroom.

A Journalistic Cosmology

Abstract Can Norwegian journalism be meaningfully understood as constituting a social field in Pierre Bourdieu´s sense? And if so, how did this field emerge historically, and what is its fundamental structure? Following a structural history of the rise of journalism in Norway, a model of this field in 2005 is sketched through correspondence analysis using survey data on Norwegian journalists and editors. The analysis suggest a bipolar structure: a first dimension of capital volume that is closely linked to age, gender and medium type, and a second dimension that opposes agents with different degrees of internal recognition (symbolic capital), which in particular separates specialized news journalists in national and larger regional journalistic publications from journalists in the local press and magazines. Special attention is given to the link between this social cosmos and a specific cosmology of journalistic beliefs and position-takings, the relation between journalistic power and social class, and the intertwinedness of symbolic and economic dominance in this field.

Doubly Dominated: Cultural journalists in the fields of journalism and culture

Based on comprehensive surveys in 2005 and 2013 among journalists, professional critics, and artists in Norway, this article analyses the cultural journalists’ position within the fields of journalism and culture. Although increasingly adhering to journalistic ideals and becoming more similar to other journalists through education and social recruitment, cultural journalism is still not the place to gain prestige and honour in the journalistic field. As cultural journalists tend to be recruited more from journalism schools than from higher education in the humanities, they also lack the skills and knowledge to be properly recognized within the cultural field. Cultural journalists seem to occupy a subordinated position in both fields—they are doubly dominated. The analysis also shows increasing differences between cultural journalists and professional critics. Cultural journalists are more anti-elite and populist in their view on culture than critics (and artists), and they are more likely than these groups to be supportive of the idea of culture as a private realm of leisure that should be guided more strongly by economic interests. There are signs of a division of labour where critique and high culture are left to professional critics, while employed cultural journalists with less formal competence adopt an advisory role in the realm of popular culture. With increasing coverage of popular culture and traditional criticism under pressure, these are signs of a less-critical cultural journalism that falls short of the idea of a cultural public sphere as a site for acquiring intellectual and cultural resources to (better) cope with the complexities of modern life.

A welfare state of mind?: nordic journalists’ conception of their role and autonomy in international context

The development of journalism in the Nordic countries has been shaped by two interconnected ideologies: the welfare state and democratic corporatism. International reviews have repeatedly emphasized the similarities of the media systems in these countries. However, less work has been done on the professional identity of individual journalists working within these systems. In this article, the similarities and differences between journalists’ professional values and perceptions in the Nordic countries are explored based on survey data from the Worlds of Journalism Study. The results indicate that despite country-specific variance, Nordic journalists share a vision of their professional identity especially in terms of seeing themselves as detached watchdogs and renouncing the role of opportunist facilitator. Another Nordic characteristic is the low level of experienced economic influence on journalistic work. In important ways, thus, Nordic journalists’ professional views appear to reflect central characteristics of the political culture and media systems in which they work.

A sociocultural approach to study public connection across and beyond media: The example of Norway

This article presents an approach to cross-media use analysis suited to answering the question of how citizens from different sociocultural groups experience their freedom of information. The approach is based on normative democratic theory, is attentive to the dimensions of culture and media that lie beyond a predefined political dimension and is designed to analyse, from a citizen’s perspective, how people experience a public world in which shared problems are addressed. To illustrate the approach, the article draws on the analysis of two empirical examples: one of a representative sample of the Norwegian citizenry (N = 3660) and one of Norwegian students (N = 1223). We conduct latent class analysis as well as multiple correspondence analysis to help improve our understanding of the consequences of fragmented and personalized media use by shedding light on the implications of changing patterns of public connection.

A Welfare State of Mind

The development of journalism in the Nordic countries has been shaped by two interconnected ideologies: the welfare state and democratic corporatism. International reviews have repeatedly emphasized the similarities of the media systems in these countries. However, less work has been done on the professional identity of individual journalists working within these systems. In this article, the similarities and differences between journalists’ professional values and perceptions in the Nordic countries are explored based on survey data from the Worlds of Journalism Study. The results indicate that despite country-specific variance, Nordic journalists share a vision of their professional identity especially in terms of seeing themselves as detached watchdogs and renouncing the role of opportunist facilitator. Another Nordic characteristic is the low level of experienced economic influence on journalistic work. In important ways, thus, Nordic journalists’ professional views appear to reflect central characteristics of the political culture and media systems in which they work.

Distinctions in the media welfare state: audience fragmentation in post-egalitarian Sweden:

This study draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of culture in order to shed new light on the ongoing fragmentation of media audiences and users. We use a multiple correspondence analysis on national survey data (n = 1604) collected in Sweden in 2015–2016 to (1) create a statistical representation of the contemporary Swedish class structure and proceed to (2) analyze the distribution of a broad range of media practices and media preferences in that space. Results show that social groups reproduce their social status by monopolizing distinct media repertoires. We are able to show that class matters for how people orient themselves in an increasingly high-choice media environment – even in a so-called media welfare state. Following the results of our media-sociological approach, we introduce the concept of audience islands which promotes a non-media-centric understanding of the fragmentation of society and media audiences.

The Norwegian journalism education landscape

Journalism is one of the most popular study programmes in Norway. There are several pathways into the Norwegian news industry for young people seeking a career in journalism, but it is increasingly common for aspiring journalists to start off with a journalism education. In this article the landscape of Norwegian journalism education is presented, including a closer look at the content of the studies, the connection to the industry and the students of journalism themselves. The description of the students is based on a dataset from a series of questionnaires administered between 2000 and 2004 to three complete cohorts of Norwegian journalism students at Oslo University College and Volda University College, the largest and oldest J-schools in Norway. Norwegian journalism education can be described as working quite well as measured by both the students’ success in the job market and their expressed satisfaction with their studies. The fact that the application rate for several years has been among the very highest compared with other university programmes also validates this point. Keywords: Norway, journalism education, relation between industry and j-schools. p>

The cultural journalist around the globe: A comparative study of characteristics, role perceptions, and perceived influences:

This article presents a global-comparative study of journalists reporting about art and culture, that is, cultural journalists. In the literature, this particular group is said to be different from other types of journalists, because their professional work is guided more by an aesthetic logic than a news logic. Until now, however, this difference has mainly been studied in national contexts. Applying a global-comparative perspective by using data from The Worlds of Journalism Study, this article shows that cultural journalists around the globe do in fact differ systematically from other types of journalists in their social and professional characteristics, and also in terms of perceptions of influences on daily work and professional role perceptions. Even though media systemic contexts play a role, cultural journalists do have distinct characteristics worldwide. This is the first study to apply such a global-comparative perspective to the role perceptions of this particular group of journalists.