ABSTRACT
This paper is offered in celebration by a practising journalist, a friend, collaborator (Tunstall 1977: 7; Tunstall and Walker 1981) and admirer of Jeremy Tunstall. Yet it falls to me to register failure. In his research career — productive even by the exacting latter-day standards of higher education's army of number-fixated auditors — Jeremy Tunstall must have interviewed many hundreds of journalists, in the electronic as well as print media, at home and abroad. Books such as Journalists At Work (1971) and Television Producers (1993) bespeak a detailed engagement with the work of media professionals and offer at least the beginnings of a critical conversation between two groups, journalists and social scientists, with much in common and much to learn from one another. If journalism is a kind of ethnography, all the more reason why its practitioners should warm to a student of their work, habitats and power structures.
