ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the self-reflective discourse on journalism's fundamental significance for modern German society had reached a high point in both quantitative and qualitative terms. Practitioners and theorists of journalism alike were deeply convinced of the crucial role journalists played in providing knowledge about the everyday world for a wide audience across social, political, and economic boundaries. But there was little consensus on who journalists were, what they did, and how they worked in order to justify their epistemic authority. This chapter investigates how journalistic practices and identity practices were interlinked and implicated in the journalistic self-reflection of the first decades of the twentieth century. To this end, I use the concept of “personae” and apply it to one particular case, a 1929 survey conducted by the Deutsche Presse , the German publishers’ journal, on “how we became journalists.” This chapter looks at how journalists defined themselves, what skills they needed to justify their work, and what role the idea of an epistemic community played. It shows how journalists relied on naturalized categories of a “born journalist,” talent, and gender to justify their particular journalistic authority, and how an idealized imaginary of the journalist in society emerged at the dawn of the Weimar Republic.
