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).