Journalism research has a long tradition of making sense of professional practices from the perspective of the everyday routines of news work. This article seeks to make a contribution to this literature by mapping out how the professional community of journalists interprets the current change and future challenges of their trade. The paper uses the conceptual framework offered by Bourdieu's field theory, but moves beyond it by suggesting that symbolic capital in the journalistic field is also connected to broader social imaginaries, beyond the limits of the field. Against this background, the article maps out empirically some of the limits of the “professional imagination” of journalistic culture by a close reading of interviews with mid-level managing editors in Finnish newspapers. The article describes the professional journalistic field as a culture, i.e. as a sense-making system which adapts journalism to contextual changes but which cannot be seen as simple reflection of these changes.