Becoming a Journalist. A Case Study of a Career as a Young Journalist

LAURA ROSENBERG

Montreal

Encuentro; Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. Annual Meeting 2017; 2017

Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction

This paper analyzes the beginning of the journalistic career of the youngest members of Página/12 and Tiempo Argentino newspapers. The ethnographic research took place in the newsrooms between 2011 and 2015 in order to study the socialization process of young reporters and interns in media press. With this goal in mind, it explores in depth how they learn the values and practical rules of the journalistic world, starting with the interactions they engage on with other members of that environment, such as their colleagues and managers, as well as how they deal with the sources. The research was structured in five dimensions of analysis that contributed to explain the socialization process: 1) The channels and strategies to enter the journalistic field, 2) the newcomers? rites de passage (Hughes, 2012), 3) the forms of socialization within the newsrooms, 4) the identification processes, and 5) the strategies that these young people implement in the medium term in order to stay in the journalistic world.