ABSTRACT
These notions of occupational culture miss one piece of the puzzle: What if the substance and form are not always in sync? In other words, the sets of shared, taken-for-granted beliefs and values sometimes only describe what journalists aspire to be, not what they really have become. In fact, during my field research, a striking finding is precisely the mismatch between journalists’ practices and what they aspire to do. Instead, there is a gap, a discrepancy, between what they think (and say) they should do and what they actually can accomplish. It is therefore necessary to seek another conceptual framework that fits and works better for the specific situation under investigation, with a grounded theory approach (Glaser & Strauss, 1967).
