ABSTRACT
In the section of his book Career Counseling on how to compose a life portrait, Savickas (2011) addresses the issue of setting, or the 'social niche and preferred environment in which the client wishes to situate the self (124). Self and setting are integrated through the stories clients tell themselves (scripts), and are drawn from a community's master narratives. But what happens when a setting becomes unstable within the master narrative because of social and economic pressures? To study this question, we conducted a textual analysis and replicated a day's search for micro narratives about the authorial career of journalism on Twitter. While multiple themes emerge that reflect the profession in a disrupted state, we also find examples of journalists performing nuanced and complex roles that resist contemporary master narratives. We feature one day's worth of tweets from one journalist to display narratives of work life that reimagine an authorial career. While the preferred environment may not exist day to day, a job seeker would find journalists who construct the best environments that they can. We suggest that a client's exploration of setting must become more innovative, and the tools for coping with change more robust, as fields such as journalism face greater uncertainty.
