Gerner, Marina
(2015)
Journalists with cosmopolitan skills: how do journalists at the New Yorker and Economist Group perceive themselves, their audience and their work in the age of globalisation?
PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Abstract
Few professions are changing as rapidly or fundamentally as journalism. Core to these changes is the role of globalisation and transformations driven by the interaction between the changing requirements, expectations, audiences and technologies with which journalists now work. In understanding this global dimension to modern journalism, a valuable lens is research into an area in which the international has always mattered, that of foreign correspondents. Hannerz (2004) attributed four features to this group: (1) mobility, (2) the skill of navigating various cultures; (3) the appreciation of difference; and (4) an awareness of diverse audiences. This study explores journalistic transformation in a global age by investigating whether cosmopolitan skills that have previously been attributed to the work of foreign correspondents now apply to journalists more generally.
Traditionally, journalism research has compared journalists within national categories. But the critique of methodological nationalism (Beck, 2008; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2008; Beck and Sznaider, 2006) demands research into journalists that goes beyond national confines. By focusing on London and New York, as global journalistic centers, this thesis examines the views of editors through the conceptual frameworks of identity, autonomy and globalisation, while avoiding national categorisation. Thirty-one in-depth expert interviews were conducted with journalists from a range of genders, backgrounds, levels, ages and positions – to investigate how editors, who are journalists with a degree of autonomy, are negotiating the new global circumstances within which they work.
The working lives of journalists were investigated on three levels: (1) the level of the individual; (2) the level of their news media organisation and (3) the societal level. The study’s findings reflect to the prevalence of cosmopolitan skills, which have previously been attributed to foreign correspondents, among these journalists. However, the use and emergence of these skills are still restricted by identities, lack of autonomy and the general processes of consequences of globalisation.
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