Doing media information: when conflicting journalistic identities have to collaborate

Marcel Burger

The presentation focuses on the way journalists have to manage paradoxical constraints that emerge and at the same time are constructed at the workplace through dialogue and interaction.

We will examine in detail how a journalist and a cutter do collaborate orally to achieve a written short media report (1min20) for the Swiss news broadcast (public service). Our case study shows conflicting “styles” at work concerning a tragic event (an aircraft crash in Indonesia, 2007).

On the one hand, an experienced journalist is showing ethical concerns. In the morning, he has received a film of the crash from a press agency. The images are quite violent (the plane has touched down in a paddy field and survivors, covered in blood, seek a shelter before a possible explosion of the aircraft). According to the journalist, such images are not relevant to the issue of informing an audience of citizens interested in the ongoing of the public affairs.

On the other hand, the cutter is showing aesthetic concerns (a priori opposite to the ethical concerns of the journalist). According to him, the images of the amateur video-clip are amazing: the meaning of the event is quite obvious (there is nothing essential to add verbally to the visual text) and the images are relevant to address an audience of “watchers” as they involve them at the heart of the event.

The paper focuses on a short phase of the dialogic negotiation where antagonistic media norms and rules of what a news report is or should be emerge and are therefore (re)constructed by media employees. In this sense the study of interaction and dialogue helps to improve our understanding of being multi-competent.

The point of view is that of an ethnographic and discourse analytic approach to news media processes and products. The paper is part of a broad research project (2006-2009) conducted at the Télévision Suisse romande (Departement de l’actualité), the French-speaking public broadcast service of Switzerland. The project aimed at describing the journalistic expectations manifest in newsmaking processes and products. A large set of data was collected: 5 journalists were under analysis for 5 weeks taking into account their daily activities.