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    Boundaries of Journalism: Professionalism, Practices and Participation

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    Boundaries of Journalism: Professionalism, Practices and Participation

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    21670811.2015.1087734

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    Boundaries of Journalism: Professionalism, Practices and Participation

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    of 4

    Digital Journalism

    ISSN: 2167-0811 (Print) 2167-082X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rdij20

    Boundaries of Journalism: professionalism,


    practices and participation

    Raul Ferrer Conill

    To cite this article: Raul Ferrer Conill (2015): Boundaries of Journalism: professionalism,
    practices and participation, Digital Journalism, DOI: 10.1080/21670811.2015.1087734

    To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2015.1087734

    Published online: 15 Sep 2015.

    Submit your article to this journal

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    Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at


    http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rdij20

    Download by: [Gazi University] Date: 31 December 2015, At: 10:50


    BOOK REVIEW

    Boundaries of Journalism: professionalism, practices and participation


    Matt Carlson and Seth C. Lewis (Eds)
    London and New York: Routledge, 2015
    233 pp., US$43.95, £26.99 (pbk), ISBN 978-1-138-02067-2

    Journalism as a profession, as a commercial endeavour, and as a sociotechni-


    cal phenomenon has long been evolving, leading to a multifaceted journalism
    shaped by these many transformations. In the last two decades the acceleration of
    change has been outstanding, affecting and affected by several practices of every-
    day life. Against this backdrop, a thorough reflection going beyond a simplistic
    study of change is needed to identify the essence of the “what”, “who”, and “how”
    of journalism.
    Downloaded by [Gazi University] at 10:50 31 December 2015

    This is precisely what Matt Carlson and Seth Lewis attempt in their new edited
    volume, Boundaries of Journalism: Professionalism, Practices and Participation. Bringing
    together 16 scholars, this book reflects upon a diverse range of journalistic boundaries.
    Exploring intersections and interactions of newswork across increasingly blurred edges
    of journalism, this book explores tensions between journalistic norms and values, as
    well as with the performance of news-related actors. Only by looking at these bound-
    aries, Carlson and Lewis suggest, can we make sense of what journalism is and under-
    stand who we can call journalists.
    Formally, the book is structured into an introductory chapter, 12 chapters, and
    a final epilogue. Carlson’s introduction provides an explanatory view on how the
    boundaries in journalism are conceptualized; based on Thomas Gieryn’s generic types
    of boundary work—expansion, expulsion, and protection—and three areas of journal-
    ism around which boundary work occurs—participants, practices, and professionalism
    (p. 9).
    The first part, titled “Professionalism, Norms, and Values”, contains seven
    chapters that delve into the core of journalism as a trade, discussing the increas-
    ingly difficult task of delineating what journalism is and what it is supposed to
    be, approaching this consideration of journalism studies from various angles. In
    Chapter 1, Jane Singer illustrates how journalists herald professional norms as
    boundary devices to legitimize their professional authority against the challenge
    posed by new forms of practice such as social journalism or entrepreneurial jour-
    nalism. Similar totems of journalistic values and their use as boundary markers are
    discussed in chapters on verification and allegiance to the truth by Alfred Hermida,
    and by Adriana Amado and Silvio Waisbord who write about the lack of a
    homogenized professional culture in the Argentinian media system (leading to a
    weak boundary that does not provide adequate defence against the incursions of
    political powers). Also included in this section are chapters by Mark Coddington,
    who revisits the editorial and commercial divide of journalism and how contempo-
    rary approaches such as native advertising are increasingly eroding this boundary,
    and by Mike Ananny on the ways “Google Glass” and forms of witnessing are
    used as proxies for journalists and how the constant evolution of technology

    Digital Journalism, 2015


    2 REVIEW

    affects a practice-bound boundary for newspeople. In the latter chapters of this


    section, Helle Sjøvaag looks at boundaries within news content between hard and
    soft news and how the hierarchy of journalistic genres affects the position of jour-
    nalists in the Norwegian news field, and using a similar approach to discuss the
    Swedish context, Jenny Wiik focuses on the different strata of working conditions
    among journalists.
    The second set of chapters explore “Encountering Non-journalistic Actors in
    News-making” in five chapters concerned with the growing number of non-jour-
    nalistic actors involved in the process of news-making. In Chapter 8, David Dom-
    ingo and Florence Le Cam employ actor-network theory to discuss the notion of
    dialogism and the ways a large number of social actors intervene and affect news
    production. A fitting continuation of this analysis, Sue Robinson then considers the
    effects that audience comments on journalistic content may have on journalists. As
    audiences take an increasingly active role in the news, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen
    Downloaded by [Gazi University] at 10:50 31 December 2015

    investigates the ways in which journalists have attempted to normalize user-gener-


    ated content. The final two chapters take a slightly different approach. In the
    penultimate chapter, Matthew Powers argues that non-governmental organizations
    have steadily taken the role of journalistic entities, producing reports that expand
    the range of issues covered by news media. Lastly, Chris Anderson offers a histori-
    cal account on the formation of the contemporary divide between journalists and
    sociologists.
    The topics addressed in this book are not new to journalism studies; most of
    these themes are central to the discipline, and carry a long history of scholarly work
    behind them. However, using the boundaries of journalism as a unifying lens is an
    innovative approach that focuses new light on how we understand journalism. It seems
    obvious that by studying where journalism begins and ends a better understanding of
    newswork and its actors can be reached, but as this book shows, the fuzzy edges of
    journalism are highly malleable and evolving, and often overlap and spill over other
    domains.
    Carlson and Lewis have set out to explore how journalism is demarcated from
    non-journalism. They succeed by compiling a set of contributions that seamlessly por-
    tray a picture of the shaping of those boundaries and how they are transforming today.
    This is the contribution of this collection: the exploration of a complex array of disrup-
    tions that contribute to the multifaceted evolution of journalism. Of course, this volume
    fails to incorporate all the fronts in which journalism experiences friction. This is under-
    standable, expected, and acknowledged. Notably, the list of boundaries is vast and var-
    ies in scope, and inevitably every reader will crave further enquiry on the margins of
    journalism. As Lewis narrates in his concluding epilogue, there is work ahead. Two
    paths are offered: first a finer look into the social and the material and, second, a dee-
    per consideration for emerging stressors of change in news-making, especially technol-
    ogy.
    In the current fast-paced transformative epoch of journalism, this book is a valu-
    able and timely contribution to journalism studies. It allows us to stop focusing on
    change and transformation of journalism exclusively, and instead concentrate on the
    boundaries that shape it. Anyone interested in the study of journalism as a cultural
    REVIEW 3

    activity and, more specifically, those concerned with the demarcations and intersecting
    areas where journalism appears and fades will find this volume fascinating.

    © 2015 Raul Ferrer Conill


    Karlstad University, Sweden
    E-mail: [email protected]
    http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2015.1087734
    ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0501-2217
    Downloaded by [Gazi University] at 10:50 31 December 2015

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