A Business of One or Nurturing the Craft: Who are You?

Media workers have always adopted branding tactics for themselves: creating and managing a certain persona, doing the emotional labour necessary in largely informal and reputation-driven working environments to suggest a persona, performing this identity dutifully in order to make it work. However, branding is not an inevitable practice -- it is not even all that measurably effective. In this chapter, we argue that the notion of branding accompanied a shift in how people understood what it meant to work for others. They now view the self as metaphorically a business., and if a business, then something to be branded