The News Professionals

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the journalistic corps of Hong Kong: their formation, working conditions, political attitudes, professional ethos, and interaction with the media market and civil society before and after Hong Kong’s handover in 1997. The chapter pictures journalists in Hong Kong by three layers of understanding: as organisational workers in news media industry (shifting working conditions, educational level, job satisfaction, payment, for examples), as a professional cohort (social status of journalists in Hong Kong, news values, self-perceived social roles, perceived media self-censorship, for instances), and as citizens in Hong Kong society (their political attitudes in view of significant political changes in Hong Kong, responses to public opinion, and conception of public representativeness, for instances). While upholding liberal-democratic paradigm of news values and professional ethos, journalists have been enduring with low payment, harsh working condition, and media self-censorship in post-handover Hong Kong. The unfavourable working condition resulted in brain drain of the news industry, which paradoxically facilitated the exercise of newsroom control by the leaders in media organisations. After Hong Kong’s eventful moment in 2019–2020, the main bulwark of journalistic corps—the liberal-democratic news values and professional ethos—seems to be less viable when the city’s status as a liberal enclave under Chinese sovereignty becomes problematic.