It’s About Me

Abstract

Media sociology literature supports the assumption that freelancing as a way of life should have an impact on the self-presentation behaviors of journalists. The present research is concerned with how journalists—employed and freelance—frame their identities and disclose relevant information in social media spaces through a quantitative content analysis of Facebook fan pages (N = 468). Freelance journalists, faced with employment instability and fewer organizational constraints, may hypothetically be less guided by journalistic principles. Specifically, we created measures to investigate how their visual (i.e., profile images) and verbal (i.e., self-categorization, textual formality, skills) fronts differed in these settings. The results revealed that freelance journalists communicated a more serious professional self, emphasizing their journalism skills and identifying less with organizational attributes. A separate analysis showed that females were more likely to post an image with a smile and share personal information on social media channels, while men presented a more serious front. These results suggest that freelancers similarly align with employed journalists concerning their journalistic ideals, but the need to secure consistent work likely influences the degree that they share personal content. Overall, however, descriptive results show that most journalists wrote about themselves rather than writing about their connection to journalism or humanity.