Paper short abstract:

Our contribution tackles the question of professionalism using both a historical and a contemporary setting for the investigation of entrepreneurship and innovation in journalism.

Paper long abstract:

Given the profoundly precarious condition of the news industry and the corresponding casualization of the journalism labor market, it should come as no surprise that a significant focus in the field of journalism studies is directed toward innovation and entrepreneurialism. This focus runs the risk of ignoring the past, as innovation has been key to structural developments in journalism. It also tends to come with a barely contained normative agenda, in that innovation and professionals becoming entrepreneurial tends to be seen as a good thing. The research focus tends to align with a treatment of entrepreneurialism and innovation in strictly managerial, economic and business terms, following a neatly boundaried institutional agenda, focusing largely on legacy news organizations and the content they produce. What gets lost in the shuffle is a dimension of research that is central to the object of journalism studies: professionalization, the development of a professional identity, a news culture (particular to a country, a news organization, or division), and of an occupational ideology that works in different ways for a wide variety of practitioners professionally involved with gathering, selecting, editing, publishing and publicizing news. Our contribution tackles these questions using both a historical and a contemporary setting for the investigation of entrepreneurship and innovation in journalism. The emergence of a new journalistic genre on television in the fifties and sixties is compared with the emergence of the current startup culture in journalism. This comparison is used to highlight particular challenges and opportunities for doing journalism studies in a dynamic field.