Journalists' professional identity : a resource to cope with uncertainty?

Abstract

The Internet, Social Media in particular, brought far-reaching change to journalism, asking journalists’ traditional role concepts into question. In this paper, we introduce Social Identity Theory as an alternative perspective to research journalistic role change, and propose a qualitative approach to study journalists’ professional identity and relate it to their interpre-tation of change in the newsroom. We interviewed 26 journalists of a daily newspaper and investigated their professional self-concept. We identified a group of elitist journalists who act on traditional role scripts and feel threatened by online journalism and related principles. They see status and quality journalism endangered. A second group of service- and user-oriented journalists strives for the improvement of online journalism but lacks shared values and adapted role scripts. The paper shows the reciprocal interaction between journalists’ ac-tivities and professional role concepts and affirms the question, if professional identity can serve as a resource to cope with uncertainty