ABSTRACT
You are reading a special issue of Journalism Practice (Volume 7, Number 2) focused on precisely what it means to be a professional journalist today and in the near future in terms of the journalistic competencies necessary to work as a journalist. Journalism practice has changed rapidly and dramatically in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Digitization has placed considerable pressures on conventional business models, transformed the news production process and redefined the relationship between newsmakers and their audiences. Professional journalism, moreover, has lost its monopoly of news reflecting the impact of the internet, citizen journalism and social media. Unfortunately, news media and professional journalists have reacted rather late to these new technological, economic and audience-specific realities, the major obstacles hampering innovation in the press being its very structure as well as the professional culture that has long dominated the sector. Publishers continue to focus on the production and distribution of a physical newspaper, and this focus is also characteristic of the culture of the sector. There is a strong fear of cannibalization, a very marked feeling of competition and there are few contacts with players outside the newspaper's own field.
