ABSTRACT

The demise of apartheid in South Africa brought important shifts in the composition

of the country’s media industry as well as to the professional practices of journalists. South

African journalists found themselves having to reorient their professional practices and

occupational ideologies*the sum of ideas and views on social and political issues through which journalists validate and give meaning to their work (Deuze, 2005, p. 446)*in an environment that was undergoing rapid socio-political changes. Coupled with the tectonic

shifts in the local socio-political landscape were radical changes in the news industry

globally. These global shifts occurred partly as a result of advances in new media

technologies that redefined journalism practices, and partly as a result of global flows and

contraflows in media capital and content that allowed new relationships between the local

and the global to emerge (cf. Thussu, 2007).