Mid Sweden University

Bourdieu-inspired journalism scholarship, and journalism studies at large, could benefit from an approach that can holistically explain how journalists make sense of technology-related change in the journalistic field. By merging key insights from field theory with philosophy of technology, and by analyzing 40 qualitative interviews with agents across a wide range of positions in the Swedish journalistic field, we uncover how journalists view technological change in relation to the field's autonomy, capitals and habitus. At the macro-level, the analysis shows how technology is constructed in the journalistic field at large, indicating a digital heteronomy. At the meso-level, findings indicate that positions become rearranged when new skills such as metrics and engagement management become collectively recognized as capital. Field-specific, journalistic, capital is supplemented with a virality capital. At the micro-level, we unravel an emerging journalistic habitus formed in relation to structural transformations in the field – the feel for engagement.

In a changed media landscape, where anyone with an internet connection and a smartphone can become a journalist or a photojournalist, the professional boundaries of journalism and its practitioners have increasingly attracted the attention of media scholars in recent years. Although comprehensive, this body of research has mostly focused on the boundaries of journalism and the reactions towards the encroachment of outside forces. It would benefit from the analysis of how practitioners, especially the often-overlooked group of photojournalists, in digital media are struggling over boundaries. By combining Gieryn’s and Bourdieu’s analytical frameworks and analysing 40 interviews with agents in the Swedish newspaper media, this study seeks to contribute to existing research by showing how professional boundaries and the logic of photojournalism practice are being reshaped. The results show that while photojournalism has become an increasingly valuable product for the field, it has also become a contested boundary object. This has increased the exclusion of photojournalists and expanded photojournalistic practices into other agents’ professional roles. In particular, multiskilled journalists backed by media managers have, in recent years, successfully conducted boundary work, redrawing the professional boundaries of the Swedish newspaper media.

The restructuring of Swedish newspapers due to technological and economic changes in the last decade has hit journalists, and especially photojournalists, very hard. In 2017, Sweden's 165 daily newspapers only employed a total of 60 photojournalists combined, with 70 newspapers left with no photojournalist on staff at all. However, during the same time period the use of images in Swedish newspapers increased.

Using Bourdieu’s field theory, the purpose of this dissertation is to analyse the positions of photojournalism and photojournalists in the Swedish journalistic field during a crucial and important time for the media industry, through 40 interviews with respondents in swedish newspaper as well as with freelancers in the field. The actors varied in age, gender and number of years in the field, and most importantly through different amounts of symbolic capital, in accordance with Bourdieu’s theory.

The study shows that Swedish photojournalists’ ideal was to document the world and produce in-depth visual news stories. However, these time-consuming ideals comes into conflict with emerging market-oriented ideals described by other actors in the Swedish journalistic field. This also meant that although photojournalism itself is described as having an increased importance in the field, the photojournalists hadn’t received a correspondingly higher status.

The study concludes that the commercial importance of photojournalism to the market-oriented journalistic field, as described by actors in the field, shows how it has become a professional boundary object which in turn exposes an on-going professional boundary work and symbolic power struggles between, on the one side, media managers, reporters and multi-skilled journalists and on the other side, photojournalists, concerning the doxa and ethos of photojournalism which in turn is affecting the professional position of photojournalists in the Swedish journalistic field.

In recent years many Swedish photojournalists have been laid off or forced to become so called “multi-skilled” journalists to keep their jobs (Bock 2011a, 2011b, Nygren 2014) These changes in Swedish newspaper media has impacted journalism practice and its ideals in many ways. However, media scholars have mostly focused on how this has had effects on journalism ideals and norms (Compton 2010) and less attention on specialists’ ideals and norms, such as photojournalists (Busst 2012, Greenwood & Reinardy 2011, Hadland, Lambert, & Campbell 2016). The aim of this study has been to contribute to the small but increasing understanding of photojournalism practice, ideals and norms of in a changing newspaper media landscape, through the theoretical framework of Bourdieu (Benson 2006, Bourdieu 1990, 1992, 1993, 1998).

The results from in-depth interviews with 40 informants, shows that while photojournalist agents emphasized ideals of objectivity, autonomy and ethics, reporters, multi-skilled journalists, reporters and especially media managers and editors were more inclined to state their more market-oriented ideals and norms.

Notwithstanding the economic situation for media in general, these findings are interpreted as a underlying social structure in the field and could be part of an explanation to the many layoffs by photojournalist as well as the increased multi-skilling professionalization amongst agents in the Swedish newspaper media field.

Photojournalism is maybe the media practice experiencing the fastest technical and economical change in contemporary media (Hvitfelt & Nygren 2008, Newton 1998, Nygren 2014, Weibull & Wadbring 2014) and as the media responds to these challenges, staff photographers are laid-off and photo departments in newspapers have been diminished or even closed down (Compton 2010). Yet photojournalism have been historically and is still an integral part of journalistic reporting and has even increased in media in the recent decades (Barnhurst, 2001, Nerone & Barnhurst 2003, Sternvik, 2007, Nilsson & Wadbring, forthcoming). 

Scholarly research into the division of media labour has a longstanding history and predominantly been anglo-american (Brennan & Hardt 1995, Langton 2009, Lowrey 2002, Tuchman, 1978, Zelizer, 1993) as well the changing practices of photojournalism (Bock, 2011a & 2011b). But while scholars in Scandinavia have focused on the image content (Andén-Papadopoulos 2000, Becker 1996, Becker, Ekecrantz, Olsson 2000, Pantti, 2013) or images reception amongst the audience (Andén-Papadopoulos & Pantii, 2011), only recently the practice of photojournalism have come into focus (Johansson 2008, Mäenpää & Seppänen 2010, Mäenpää, 2014, Åker 2012) and whilst the practice, status and ideals in the field in general have been studied (Hovden 2012, Schultz 2007, Willig 2012) this study aims to contribute to the growing research into photojournalists and their practice, ideals and status position, viewed through the theoretical framework of Pierre Bourdieu and Andrew Abbott.

The research questions in this study are therefore, what are the working conditions for photojournalism and photojournalists in the changing media field today? Secondly, what are the ideals surrounding photojournalism today? Thirdly, what are the views amongst agents in and outside the media field regarding the quality of photojournalism and its practice?

And finally, what’s the social status of photojournalism, precived by agents in the media field today?

The research questions were operationalized into in-depth interviews exploring four themes, the working conditions, the quality, the status and the future of photojournalism and journalism, in turn divided into more than 20 semi-structured questions.

In total 35 hours of Skype-interviews was recorded with 25 photojournalists, journalists, and middle managers and editor-in-chefs. 13 of the informants were strategically selected and seven of the informants were added through snowball sampling. Informants represented practitioners in larger national newspapers, regional papers and smaller local papers and differed in age and gender. Some had 30 years of work experience and others were freelancers with only a few years of experience. Five of the informants were selected from outside the media field representing a small “control group” of well-informed media interested citizens.

The interviews was analysed and coded in Nvivo, a software for coding and analyzing qualitative, textual and audiovisual information, through the theoretical framework of Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, habitus and capital (Benson 2006, Bourdieu 1984, 1990, 1992, 1999, Broady 1991) and Andrew Abbott’s professionalization and de-professionalization theories (Abbott, 1988).

The results from in-depth interviews with 40 informants, shows that while photojournalist agents emphasized ideals of objectivity, autonomy and ethics, reporters, multi-skilled journalists, reporters and especially media managers and editors were more inclined to state their more market-oriented ideals and norms. Notwithstanding the economic situation for media in general, these findings are interpreted as a underlying social structure in the field and could be part of an explanation to the many layoffs by photojournalist as well as the increased multi-skilling professionalization amongst agents in the Swedish newspaper media field.

Photojournalism might be the media practice experiencing the fastest technical,normative and ideological change in the field of journalism today. At the same time,photojournalism practitioners seem to have become the proverbial canary-bird in themedia, as staff photographers are laid-off and photo departments in both Swedish andinternational newspapers have been diminished or even closed down. Yet hitherto,much of the scholarly in-depth research on the on-going changes in journalism hasfocused on changes in journalist’s practice, norms and ideals. Thus, this pilot study willtry to identify which photojournalistic routines, values, norms, and ideals might still bein use and examine how and if they have changed within the evolving field ofjournalism. Trying to fulfil this aim, a series of semi-structured interviews with in totalsix photojournalists where conducted, in addition to two mail interviews based on theinterview questions and a one-day participant observation with a collective of Swedishfreelance photojournalists in photo agency.The findings were later categorized to facilitate a deeper understanding, studied throughBourdieu’s sociological concepts, to identify the field’s different structures, struggles andideologies.