A History of the International Movement of Journalists

Professionalism Versus Politics

Kaarle Nordenstreng, Ulf Jonas Björk, Frank Beyersdorf, Svennik Høyer, Epp Lauk

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137530554
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

This study presents a general history of how journalism as an emerging profession became internationally organized over the past one hundred and twenty years, seen mainly through the associations founded to promote the interests of journalists around the world.

1

Frames and Contradictions of the Journalistic Profession

Svennik Høyer and Epp Lauk

Introduction

In his essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism Oscar Wilde wrote: ‘In old days men had the rack. Now they have the press’. His words reflect the noticeable power the press had acquired in society already by the end of the 19th century. Journalism began to obtain characteristics of a profession, developing from craft towards an occupation demanding certain specific qualities.

The central effort of this chapter is to shed light on some focal points of the development of journalism as a profession throughout history and across nations.

We shall explore three fields that all relate to the process of professionalization. First, we will look at, how journalism became a fulltime occupation with some social prestige and with a professional ethics in the 19th and 20th centuries.¹ Then, we will examine how a new text emerged that was distinctly journalistic and finally we will highlight some essential aspects of how education and university studies in journalism started to grow. In the end we will discuss some paradigmatic changes related to professionalism emerging in 21st-century journalism.

The diversified nature of journalism produces many sorts of chronologies when studied cross-nationally. Media technology has its own chronology. Media markets are of widely different sizes and demographics. The number of journalists will also differ widely, compared across markets and over time. Accordingly, the composition of a national press is often unique in many respects, but may not be so in all aspects. Certain factors that are influential in some countries may be marginal or absent in others. The speed of developments in the media systems is uneven. Thus the many chronologies criss-cross – they sometimes overlap and sometimes are delayed relative to each other. This makes a narrative that is not history in the usual sense, but gives us a lot of examples, which illustrate the many conditions under which the journalism profession developed. Being aware of this, the reader may find it easier to understand the logic of our text.

From craft to occupation

No common agreement exists between scholars whether journalism is a profession, an occupation or simply a craft.² ‘Hands-on-learning’ – usually typical to a craft, is quite frequent in journalism. This differs from doctors or IT specialist, architects and other specialized occupations that are categorized as professions. In liberal media systems, journalism is a ‘free’ occupation, which does not require the proof of expertise through passing an exam for a license. On the other hand, journalism resembles professions in many ways; as they all share a certain professional ideology that includes codes of ethics, a certain work autonomy and standards of professional excellence. Journalism schools provide specialized training based on research and journalists have professional and trade associations.

As Kevin Barnhurst argues, ‘sociologists have considered “professions” either a bundle of traits that characterize certain occupations or a way of organizing occupations that tends to enhance their power’.³ The central quality of a profession is the relationship of professional workers to knowledge ‘that colors their relations with the state, institutions, other groups, and individuals in society. In social communication, news-work is a central case in the history of professionalism’.⁴

Barnhurst’s statement echoes the tradition in sociology of professions seeing occupations developing towards professionalism in similar stages, that is, evolving through a ‘natural history’,⁵ along which particular characteristics or traits typical to a profession are emerging.⁶ Working from this premise, Lenore O’Boyle assumes that these ‘natural histories’ are likely to repeat themselves within different countries as they modernize.⁷ Geoffrey Millerson’s definition captures the core of ‘professional work’ as: ‘a service provided with a variety of specialized skills on the bases of theoretical or scientific knowledge, given by the individual professional according to a given practice controlled by the professional organization’.⁸

Professionalization, however, cannot be depicted only as a linear or unbroken progress of events repeating itself from one country to another because the very idea of a separate journalistic profession is likely to be challenged differently from one political system to another. Journalism research has challenged almost all elements of the definition of a ‘classical profession’.⁹ Journalists can hardly practice their occupation as ‘individual professionals’ (even when working as freelancers), but they are always related to institutional settings – to news organizations.¹⁰ The norms and standards of journalistic work differ largely across countries and also among news organizations. For example, Plaisance et al. confirm that ideological, cultural and societal factors are critical, and influence how ‘journalists around the globe approach ethical dilemmas’.¹¹ Furthermore, while the codes of ethics are mostly addressed to journalists as individuals, social and political institutions articulate responsibilities for the media organizations. When complaints are taken to court or to a self-regulation body (e.g. Press Council), personal responsibilities easily become collective or institutional, the publisher and the editor having the ultimate responsibility for the content.

Journalists’ relationship with their audience is definitely not a client–service provider relationship. The tasks of journalists consist of understanding society and knowing where important information and relevant opinions are found, and then of knowing how to make this information public and easily understandable. This is the core of professionalism in journalism, which no other profession can perform better. The late professor James W. Carey writes that the true obligation of journalism is to ‘provide a common focus of discussion and conversation’¹² and to bring it to a public space where everyone can share it.

Formation of a collective identity of journalism

Until the last decades of the 19th century, newspapers usually employed few if any journalists in middle-sized cities, and only a few editors fulltime. For contributions the printers depended on correspondents and a milieu of freelancing writers, which most often belonged to the intellectual upper class: professional people, writers, civil servants, teachers, professors, politicians and the most renowned – the authors. For example, of the authors mentioned in the histories of Norwegian literature for the period 1814–49, 94 per cent were active contributors to the press, and served as editors or sometimes even as publishers. This number fell to 69 per cent for the period of 1870–88.¹³ During the first five decades of the 19th century, half of the 114 Finnish editors were university teachers or schoolmasters.¹⁴ Among 38 fully employed journalists in Germany between 1800 and 1848, 27 had worked as lawyers, officers, teachers, diplomats and so on, before becoming journalists. All had academic degrees and among the 25 part-time employees, five were professors, four rectors, three clergymen, three lawyers and so on.¹⁵ In smaller cities you could find a group of trusted citizens who had a deal with the printer/publisher/editor to contribute to newspapers and journals regularly.

Slowly freelancers got more regular positions, especially in the larger cities. By 1850, the New York Tribune employed 12 editors and reporters and bought material from 17 outside reporters. In 1854, the editorial staff had grown to ten associate editors, four fulltime reporters and 38 correspondents. Within the next 20 years, the newspaper craft remarkably diversified, and by 1870, the editorial department included a night editor, a city editor who directed local reporters, a financial editor, a literary editor and a drama and opera critic.¹⁶

In Europe at this time, London was the most advanced city in newspaper publishing with The Times as the leading daily. The number of regular contributors of the major newspapers exceeded 100 in the 1850s. The most numerous contributors were court reporters and foreign and provincial correspondents. The contributors worked from outside the editorial offices, borrowing a desk from where they reported – in Parliament, with the courts, the stock exchange, the police station or the fire department. Literary editors worked where it was most convenient, at home, in public libraries, at school or in the university. The editorial office was reserved for the senior editorial management, working with leading articles, with political and contemporary comments and with organizing the content. Few of the contributors worked for only one newspaper and almost none had journalism as their only income.¹⁷

The London scenes in the 1850s may be compared to Oslo, the small Norwegian capital, and to Morgenbladet as the leading Norwegian daily at the time. The owner and manager’s office was on the first floor. The editorial office was a small room adjoining the print office on the ground floor where one of the two tables was reserved for the editor for a few hours until 4 p.m. to meet contributors. In the morning he was available at the public library, and in late afternoon he visited leading civil servants and politicians to collect their manuscripts, which were ordered in advance.¹⁸

Industrialization of the press

At the turn of the 19th century, in the US and in many European countries, the press became a regular newspaper industry addressed to a mass market with the help of a new and fabulously efficient technology. The rotary press, made practicably useful in 1846 was improved by The Times in London, which could print 11,000 copies per hour in 1848. The invention of newsprint made of pulp and produced in large rolls to be used in rotary presses, further increased the speed and volume of newspaper production.

Falling copy prices opened the market for many new competitors and started a boom in circulation.¹⁹ After a while the threshold of entry into the market was gradually raised by the amount of investments needed in new technology and to meet the payroll of an increased number of journalists. Investments in the metropolitan press intensified to a level where only wealthy businessmen could own newspapers. The start-up investments for newspapers in London increased from approximately £20,000 in 1855 to £150,000 in the 1870s, to £300,000 in 1906–08 and to £750,000 in the 1920s.²⁰ William S. Solomon concludes similarly for New York: in the space of some 53 years – from 1841 to 1894 – start-up costs had risen from a few thousand dollars to one million.²¹ In 1871, Horace Greeley claimed that the production of an issue of his Tribune needed between four and five hundred workers at the cost of approximately $20,000.²²

Low priced newspapers – the so-called penny papers or yellow press – pioneered the more volatile mass market, and eventually developed the sensational and visually oriented tabloid journalism. As low copy prices made it possible to reach new layers of society, a new kind of journalism became both possible and necessary. Tabloids or boulevard newspapers popped up everywhere, for example in New York, London, Paris, Berlin and Copenhagen. In Paris the Petit Journal reached a circulation of one million in 1887.

The first business entrepreneur in the Scandinavian press was J. C. Ferslew in Copenhagen who operated in the 1860s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Frames and Contradictions of the Journalistic Profession
• 2. First Internationals: IUPA and PCW (1894–1936)
• 3. First Professional International: FIJ (1926–40)
• 4. Embroiled in Cold War Politics: IOJ and IFJ (1946–)
• Conclusion
• Appendix I: Timeline (1893–2013)
• Appendix II: Membership Data
• Appendix III: Consultative Meetings of International and Regional Organizations of Journalists (1978–90)
• Bibliography
• Index