Toward a Typology of Journalism Careers: Conceptualizing Israeli Journalists' Occupational Trajectories

Abstract

Journalism studies scholarship tends to emphasize professionalism as an occupational ideal, while scholarship on the culture industries stresses the salience of insecure careers. We argue that an exhaustive typology of journalism careers is needed to capture the potential variability in the structure of journalistic labor. This typology distinguishes professional, bureaucratic, entrepreneurial, unwillingly entrepreneurial, and nonemployed careers, and is relevant to a broader set of occupations in the culture industries. We illustrate this typology through an analysis of the occupational life histories of 60 Israeli journalists. This allows us to explain the dual nature of professionalism in journalism as a rhetoric nested within particular institutional contexts and this occupational rhetoric's splitting into “tribes of professionalism.”