The metaphors journalists live by: Journalists’ conceptualisation of newswork

The routinised linguistic practice

Everyday language plays a crucial role in the formation of cultural subjectivities and an analysis of this provides an account of how speakers produce and reproduce particular social identities through their language use (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005). Hence, many efforts have been made within linguistic anthropology to investigate individual subjectivity and social agency in the linguistic construction of selfhood (Ochs and Capps, 1996). This is also the ambition in this study, which examines linguistic metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) in naturally occurring workplace discourse in a particular community of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991).

Traditionally, analysis of media discourse has focused on news products (Bell, 1991, 1998; Fairclough, 1995; Van Dijk, 1998) or on news interviews (Clayman and Heritage, 2002). However, the research focus has recently turned to discursive practices taking place in the news production process in the newsroom (Catenacio et al., 2010; Clayman and Reisner, 1998; Cotter, 2001; Hout and Jacobs, 2008; Jacobs et al., 2008; Perrin, 2010; Peterson, 2001, 2003). These researchers bring together insights from sociology, anthropology and linguistics to study the situated practices of news production, especially the discourse of news management which is one of the few remaining missing links in journalism studies (Catenaccio et al., 2010; Jacobs et al., 2008).

So far, metaphors have been examined within political discourse (Charteris-Black, 2004; Chilton, 1996), education (Cameron, 2003), business media discourse (Koller, 2004a, 2004b) and in conflictual business meetings (Handford and Koester, 2010). ⁴ Recently, we have also seen research on naturally occurring metaphors in everyday workplace discourse (Handford, 2007; Hardie et al., 2007; Koester, 2000, 2006). Only a little research has been done on metaphors occurring in journalists’ language. Two exceptions are Zelizer (2004: 29ff.) and Mindich (1998) who both conduct analyses of how journalists, ⁵ on a more global level, talk about journalism in general. However, none of these studies are based on linguistic anthropological methods.

Journalistic self-understanding

In order to study journalists’ self-understanding and role perceptions, a great number of international surveys of journalists have been conducted (Weaver, 1998). In this research, there is widespread acknowledgement that the journalists’ professional values are emphasised and interpreted differently by journalists operating in different countries (Deuze, 2002; Donsbach and Klett, 1993; Weaver and Wu, 1998). Hence we cannot talk about a coherent global journalistic profession (Weaver, 1998). Simultaneously, many surveys show that, on a national level, there are often strong core agreements among journalists with regard to their professional values (Skovsgaard, 2010; Tsfati et al., 2006). At a national level, journalists belong to communities that are constituted through shared training and socialising processes into common professional values and practices (Breed, 1955; Gravengaard and Rimestad, forthcoming; Plaisance and Skewes, 2003; Zhu et al., 1997).

Regarding the journalists’ self-conceptions of their professional role, researchers have suggested a typology of journalistic roles (Hjarvard, 2010b; Patterson, 1998; Weaver and Wilhoit, 1996) or they have categorised journalists’ role perceptions, for instance referring to dogs as watchdog, lapdog, guarddog (Bro, 2004; Christians et al., 2009). Research has also shown how different roles are given different priority by the journalists (Plaisance and Skewes, 2003; Weaver and Wilhoit, 1996).

The surveys among journalists have been criticised by referring to the fact that answers to questions on professional values are highly normative and thus not informing journalistic practice to any significant extent (Josephi, 2005; Mancini, 2000). Also, it is evident that journalists’ answers in these self-reporting surveys are not actual practice, but rather reflection-on-action (Schön, 1983).

Journalists’ self-understanding has also been investigated through interviews with experienced journalists (Ettema and Glasser, 1998) and editors (Kunelius and Ruusunoksa, 2008). Ettema and Glasser (1998) describe skills not taught in textbooks, thus explicating an important part of the professionals’ tacit expert knowledge. Kunelius and Ruusunoksa (2008) study the professional imagination of journalists, and provide an insight into how the professional discourse modifies the current changes in professionally acceptable ideals. Both interview and survey methods generate data about journalists’ reflection-on-action and their accounts about their routinised practice.

When studying actual practice in the newsroom, journalism research has a long tradition of making sense of professional practices from the perspective of the everyday routines of newswork. As a part of the second wave of news ethnographies (Cottle, 2000) complementing previous findings, we have seen research in Denmark on everyday construction of newsworthiness in journalistic practice (Schultz, 2007) and on the routinised construction of and selection among ideas for potential news stories (Gravengaard, 2008). In this current study, ethnographic work and in-depth interviews are combined with linguistics, thus providing knowledge about both the journalists’ reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action, offering an opportunity to gain an insight into the implicit part of these professionals’ expert knowledge.

Everyday metaphors

The metaphor analyses in this study are inspired by Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) cognitive metaphor theory on metaphors we live by. Cognitive linguistics regards metaphors as being fundamental to language, thought and experience (Gibbs, 1994; Gibbs and Steen, 1999; Hardie et al., 2007; Kövecses, 2002; Lakoff, 1987) and conceptualises them as a ubiquitous part of both ordinary language and everyday cognition, creating human social and cultural reality (Gibbs, 2006; Kövecses, 2002; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999).

In the cognitive linguistic view, a metaphor is defined as understanding one conceptual domain in terms of another conceptual domain, invoking certain attributes of one semantic area and transferring these to another. Consequently, the metaphorical linguistic expressions are manifestations of the underlying conceptual metaphors with which people conceptualise abstract domains of knowledge (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). The conceptual metaphors have psychological reality (Gibbs, 1994) and therefore partly structure what people do and how they understand what they do, while doing it.

Metaphors are linguistic expressions for interpretative strategies socially shared in a group to such an extent that they can be used to give a simple explanation of something that can often be very complex. Fahnestock defines metaphors as condensed arguments and describes how metaphors are ‘linked to corresponding modes of reasoning’ (2002: 24).

Metaphors are conventionalised, hardly noticed and effortlessly used in the routinised linguistic practice. Therefore, analyses of the conceptual basis of these linguistic categories are important, as the conventional metaphorical patterns in authentic everyday language are reflections of general conceptual organisation, categorisation principles, and processing mechanisms (Gibbs, 1994; Hardie et al., 2007). Thus, the metaphor analysis becomes an analytic tool capable of facilitating an understanding of news production seen from the journalists’ point of view. The metaphors voice parts of the tacit expert knowledge that informs the journalists’ actions and therefore contain important information regarding the journalists’ self-understanding.

Cognitive linguistics can be advantageously linked to the essential insight from Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1992; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985; Wetherell et al., 2001) that discourse is an important element in construction of social reality. Language plays an important role in creating this reality and the social identities and relations within it. In other words, metaphors are not just expressions of how journalists perceive reality, metaphors also play an important role in creating the reality in which they are used – and they affect the actors’ perceptions of this reality and the way they act in it. Thus, different language usage creates different frameworks and different identities for the actors to assume.

Research design

This study is primarily based on one month of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the domestic newsroom of a Danish national paid daily, where I followed two journalists, participated in all the newsroom meetings, talked to other journalists in the newsroom and observed conversations between journalists. This was followed up by an interview study conducted among reporters at the three Danish national paid dailies: Berlingske, Politiken and Jyllands-Posten. Furthermore, I have conducted shorter ethnographic fieldwork and interviews at two of the Danish national paid dailies, at the two Danish TV stations (DR and TV2) and at the national Danish news agency, Ritzau.

This research design makes it possible to observe both the professionals’ reflection-in-action (the field studies) and their reflection-on-action (the interviews).

Building on the work of Cameron (1999, 2003) and Handford and Koester (2010), I performed a manual analysis of my data (field notes, transcriptions of meetings and interviews) and identified all the metaphors used by journalists in their routinised practice. I focused on stretches of talk, looking for words or phrases being somehow incongruous within the context of their use – because there was another more literal way of interpreting this word or sentence (Cameron, 1999, 2003). Each metaphorical item within my data was analysed to gain an insight into the realisation of idiomatic language as it occurred in authentic discourse in the routinised practice.

When performing an exploratory and inductive categorisation of the metaphors, I identified five groups of conceptual metaphors conceptualising newswork, the journalists’ role and news stories in different ways. In the following, I describe these five groups and lay out the important correspondences between constituent elements of the source and the target domain, thus characterising each conceptual metaphor and the chain of reasoning behind it.

Newswork described in metaphors

The five most often used conceptual metaphors in the journalists’ routinised linguistic practice are:

It is important to note that these metaphors – and hence different conceptualisations of newswork, of the journalists’ role and of news stories – coexist in the journalists’ everyday language and in their self-understanding.

Conceptual metaphors and interpretive repertoires

All these metaphors are continuously employed in the journalists’ routinised linguistic practice. Newswork is all these things at the same time. The journalists select news stories, they create news stories, they try to win; defeating the other journalists and other media by writing the newest stories, they buy and sell stories, and they struggle to control this entire process. The conceptual metaphors coexist – and so do the conceptualisations of newswork. Consequently, a large number of metaphorical source domains jointly produce this particular target concept: news production (Kövecses, 2002).

My analysis did not reveal any difference between the involved media organisations when it comes to the journalists’ linguistic practice. Neither did I experience any significant difference in the metaphors used in the journalists’ reflections ‘in’ and ‘on’ action. All five conceptual metaphors appeared in both types of reflection. In the journalists’ reflection-in-action, metaphors are used naturally and never explained or elaborated upon, functioning as unmarked language in the routinised linguistic practice involving cultural insiders. In the journalists’ reflection-on-action, when I interviewed them, they sometimes explained parts of the meaning of their metaphorical expressions, signalling that they did not expect a cultural outsider to automatically understand all this. This difference in reflection-in-action and on-action was never voiced by the journalists, thereby demonstrating how their tacit expert knowledge – what vocabulary to use when talking to a cultural insider/outsider – is visible in their linguistic practice.

As mentioned, metaphors are not just expressions of how the journalists conceptualise reality, they also have important consequences for how the social world and the identities and relations in this world are constructed (Potter and Wetherell, 1987). Consequently, the analyses reveal important interpretive repertoires and show how each of the conceptual metaphors constitutes objects, subjects, processes and events in certain ways in different narratives about reality, and each of these narratives installs blind spots by constructing a given field (news production) in a certain way and accentuating or concealing certain aspects in this particular field (Kövecses, 2002; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). Hence, the variety in these metaphors accentuates the fundamental fact that journalistic self-understanding is complex and contradictory at times.

One of the most important discussions here is the dominant conceptualisation of newswork as selection. News stories do not exist as finished products, and news does not write itself (Darnton, 1975; Mindich, 1998). Furthermore, only a very small proportion of all the occurrences that take place in the world every day end up in news stories in the media (Fishman, 1980; Molotch and Lester, 1974). The metaphors conceptualising the journalist as the one selecting news stories conceal the construction aspect in newswork. The metaphors create the image of the active news story wanting to defeat the other news stories. However, it is the journalists, not the stories, who are active in this process. It is the journalists who construct and assess the ideas for news stories and who fight against other journalists in order to write the news first. What happens is a metonymical transfer of the journalists’ own goals and ambitions to the objects they work with, hence creating a possibility for the journalists to legitimise their work. The metaphors tend to objectify the news stories written by the journalists: reality is out there, and we uncover it. However, by employing these metaphors the journalists disclaim their responsibility as story constructors and appear as independent observers who are relaying transparent and objective media describing reality. Thus, the professional self-understanding logically succeeding from this is dominated by a transmission perspective (Epstein, 1973; Tunstall, 1971) blind to the insight that journalists function both as participants and as story creators in the production of news (Bennett, 1982; Darnton, 1975; Fiske and Hartley, 1978; Hackett, 1984; Hall, 1982). This could be a sign that journalists in their routinised practice are not aware of the role they actually have. If a journalist does not consider newswork to be construction as well, it may become superfluous to ask oneself what techniques one uses when constructing news stories that end up as articles in the newspaper.

Newswork – not just selection

However, my analyses demonstrate that the journalists also voice and even accentuate the construction aspect in newswork. Hence, the journalists also recognise the doubleness of selection and construction in newswork; a trend seen around the world (Hackett, 1984; Hindman, 2005; Tsfati et al., 2006). This happens in their reflection both ‘in’ and ‘on’ action. The Danish journalists are not, as for instance proposed by Schudson (1989), refusing the construction perspective.

Furthermore, conceptualisations of newswork as a race, as trading and as a power game also exist. Thus, different discourses coexist, all attempting to organise the same social world. Hence the journalists are over-determined; that is, positioned in several conflicting discourses at the same time (Carpentier, 2005; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). This reveals that the journalists’ self-understanding is complex and richly faceted as well as conflictual. One of the consistent findings in surveys examining journalistic role perceptions is that these are not one-dimensional since journalists often adhere to several more or less contradictory role perceptions at the same time (Deuze, 2002; Latila, 1995; Plaisance and Skewes, 2003; Tsfati et al., 2006; Weaver and Wilhoit, 1996; Weaver et al., 2007). The present study shows that this is also the case when examining journalists’ conceptualisation of news production. These multi-layered conceptions of newswork are not mutually exclusive but rather co-present in the journalists’ consciousness. I shall elaborate on this.

The race metaphors and the image of journalists and media organisations in constant competition imply a professional role and self-understanding as a career maker. The aim with the exclusive news stories is precisely to position oneself as better than the others (Gans, 1979; Schultz, 2007). This social identity is in opposition to the often proclaimed journalistic ideal to pass on what the journalists regard as the ‘most important’ information about society to the readers. Thus, a possible danger in the career maker identity is that the journalists’ focus on exclusive news stories and personal positioning now and then can be given higher priority than the demand for what the journalists would label ‘an important news story’ – important for society and for the citizens. Potentially this might become a democratic problem.

Furthermore, the metaphors conceptualising newswork as trading uncover the conflictual relation between, on the one hand, the journalists’ desire ‘not to be in anybody’s pocket’ and not to be controlled by either external or internal actors and, on the other hand, the necessity of the journalists actually adapting and adjusting to external as well as internal actors – and thereby giving up some control. Externally, the relations with the sources mean that the journalists have the opportunity to write exclusives and therefore ‘the trade’ is desirable to them despite their knowledge that the source at the same time uses the journalist to place a certain issue on the media agenda (Carlson, 2009; Darnton, 1975; Eason, 1988; Gans, 1979). Internally in the newsroom, a hierarchic organisation and fixed conditions of production also affect the journalists’ work as they need to adapt the values and goals of the organisation in order to be able to ‘sell’ their ideas to their editors (Cook, 1998; Gans, 1979; Shoemaker and Reese, 1996). The journalists’ dependence on access to the public through employment in news organisations (Aldridge and Evett, 2003) and their embeddedness in these hierarchic organisations are important constraints on the individual journalist (Shomaker and Reese, 1996).

This conflict is also important in the metaphors conceptualising newswork as a power game. Here the journalists’ ideal ambition about being powerful in the newswork (Carlson, 2009; Eason, 1988; Skovsgaard, 2010) and the notion of the autonomous journalist (Gravengaard, 2008) are contrasted by all the stakeholders (Mintzberg, 1963) that journalists act in relation to as a part of their routinised practice (see also Darnton, 1975):

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

The journalist’s stakeholders (Gravengaard, 2008)

In their routinised everyday practice, journalists have to navigate in this field of conflicting forces, and all these stakeholders can make competing and even contradictory demands on the journalists. Furthermore, journalists also operate in a particular society (Hallin and Mancini, 2004) where ideological, cultural and economic structures also function as constraining forces (Giddens, 1984; Shoemaker and Reese, 1996).

In this way, when analysing the discursive level of the routinised practice, important contradictions occurring in everyday practice in the newsroom are materialised in different conceptual metaphors. Furthermore, the conceptual metaphors and their tensions are also manifestations of the changes and tensions within contemporary news media and journalism; in Denmark and in general. Journalism’s permanent state of flux (Carlson, 2009; Hjarvard, 2010a) is characterised by a growing influence from the internet, free content on the web and in free newspapers, increased commercial pressure (Hallin and Mancini, 2004), and an increased focus on the audience (Eide, 2010; Hjarvard, 2010a; Willig, 2010). Simultaneously, we see a severe decline in circulation and advertising revenues, especially for national paid newspapers. These changes challenge the business models of existing media, and Hjarvard (2010a) describes this as an over-determined process encouraged by several factors, which each has its own rationale and direction. The current study demonstrates how this overdetermination of practice is also present in the mind of the individual journalists (see also Kunelius and Ruusunoksa, 2008) and thereby resembles research showing how, for instance, technical transformations can challenge and change occupational identities among groups of journalists (e.g. Boczkowski, 2004).

Taking point of departure in the journalists’ self-understanding as well as perceiving journalists as intuitive experts, this study of news management discourse allows us to nuance our knowledge on journalistic self-understanding as opposed to the ethnographies of the 1970s where several researchers pointed out that journalists generally think of news production from a selection perspective (Epstein, 1973; Tuchman, 1978; Tunstall, 1971) and are dismissive of the construction perspective (Schudson, 1989).

Professional reflexivity

As the analyses of the metaphors provide an opportunity to transform parts of the journalists’ tacit expert knowledge into a voiced knowledge, this creates an opportunity for journalists to gain a more nuanced insight into their routinised practice. Furthermore, it makes it possible for them to discuss and reflect on this knowledge. Being in the role of the outsider, it has been my ambition to deliver a workable and relevant outsight (Toulmin, 1963) and thereby create a creative disturbance (Gleerup, 2004) in the journalists’ professional identity. Journalists need to have an awareness of, and to reflect on, their routinised linguistic practice, not only in their media texts (Eide, 1999), but also in the processes in which these texts are constructed. These given suppositions already tacitly guide journalistic practice and therefore they have to be explicated and discussed (Ettema and Glasser, 1998; Schön, 1983). This reflexivity empowers journalists to better control parts of their professional autonomy. If journalists fail to recognise the diversity of professional identities and the conflicting roles and ideals existing in their practice and in their self-understanding they severely restrict their reflexive potential (Kunelius and Ruusunoksa, 2008). Furthermore, they deny themselves a powerful moral vocabulary (Ettema and Glasser, 1998) with which to conduct self-reflection and legitimate their professional work in a new media environment (Eide, 2010). Therefore, it is important to make these research results available to the practitioners aiming to facilitate a common language, understanding (Bro, 2004; Kunelius, 1999), and discussion between journalists and journalism researchers creating a more public scholarship (Rosen, 1995) and a knowledge-creating relation where both journalists and journalism researchers acknowledge each others’ knowledge of journalism practice.

This study is based on Danish journalists, which means that a comparison with journalists bred in other news cultures is not possible (Deuze, 2002). This leaves the question of generalisability of the results rather open. Research has shown that role perceptions of journalists vary considerably across countries (Patterson, 1998; Weaver, 1998), and that the national political context exceeds the influence of the organisational level and the individual level (Zhu et al., 1997). However, Yu (1998) suggests that many conceptual metaphors underlie conventional expressions across different languages and therefore a working hypothesis for further research would be to expect results somewhat similar to the ones from the Danish study if this was repeated in countries also belonging to the North European model of media systems (Hallin and Mancini, 2004). Obviously, generalisability across different news cultures and media systems is one of the questions that need to be addressed in future research.

The linking of media sociology, theories of profession and linguistics creates a relevant and workable theoretical framework for analysing professionals’ self-understanding. By taking the professional practice as the point of departure, it becomes possible to explicate important parts of the tacit professional knowledge that is normally taken for granted in the routinised practice. As pointed out, the results are relevant to both researchers and professional practitioners when aiming to nuance their understanding of practice as the explication provides a foundation for reflection and discussion. Hence, this theoretical framework is also to a large extent applicable when studying professionals in other professions.