| Newspaper journalism in the early 21st century is experiencing economic predicaments and a crisis of professional authority, both connected to technological changes of public communication. This is the backdrop of this study of political journalism. It is based on three years of qualitative field research on political press corps in Albany, New York and Munich, Germany, encompassing 72 interviews with reporters (from 31 news organization) and spokespeople (across all political parties and branches of government) as well as about 350 hours of observation. It also draws on professional discourses, including news stories about journalism (meta-journalism), obituaries of journalists as well as journalism award statements.;The main question this research addresses is what defines professional cultures of US and German political journalism and how are they expressed in professional discourse and performances. It also examines how professional culture affects competition and autonomy maintenance towards politics. Accounting for technological changes, it also asks how the adoption of online media is mediated by established notions of professionalism and how professional culture is reshaped by new practices in turn.;Although there are tendencies towards more subjective assessments in the news (e.g. analysis) in both contexts, opinion is still a taboo for US journalists, engendering complex purification rituals. Professional role conceptions also differ regarding interventionism. While obedient reproduction of political messages is uniformly obsolete, the German press culture seemed more reserved in terms of changing the political status quo, exposing the private lives of politicians and honoring more aggressive journalistic efforts in this regard. The US press corps champions a competitive culture, which is not free from collegiality, while the German press corps is rooted in an associational culture defined by formal and informal solidarity. Corresponding to the taboo of opinion (and thus partisanship), the professional performance of reporters needs to assert more distance to the political realm in the US than in Germany. Finally, the German press culture is much less affected by news digitization and seized by social media. This is explicable by the relative vitality of the news industry, strong privacy concerns in Germany and the professional culture's inertia to change. |
