ABSTRACT
The Fourth Estate model requires a particular type of journalistic organization and culture in order to function with any real sense of purpose. For most of the 20th century the organization and culture of journalism was bound up with the mass-industrial model of news production that we’ve seen is now failing, if not in terminal decline. As journalism emerged as a distinct discipline of labour in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a systematic pattern of ‘how to do journalism’ developed within the social relations of the news industry. Traditional work practices and routines in the field of journalism and news-gathering developed in the context of a need for newspaper owners to guarantee a return on their investment and a political return—a complacent working class. The hegemonic ideology of ‘professionalism’ in the media’s ranks would suggest that journalists are part of the ‘middle class’ and perhaps some well-paid hacks are close to being members of the ‘elite’.
