A typology of the Albanian journalist today

In contrast with the other countries of Eastern Europe, the journalists1 who had operated within the norms and the frame of the ruling ideology of the old system in Albania were forced to abandon the profession immediately after the fall of the regime. A new generation of journalists replaced them and started operating in a legislative vacuum, ignoring both legal and moral norms. This radical behavior marked the whole Albanian transition, as this study suggests. The local development of journalism in the last twenty years reflects clearly the efforts to fuse imported Western values into the existing cultural and traditional bed. Specifically this paper raises two fundamental questions: What is the profile of the Albanian journalist today? Which are the features of the Albanian journalism? As “professional culture” we are going to understand ‘the characteristic or presentation of journalism as an independent institution, as a profession and discourse within a concrete political, economic and cultural context’2. According to this definition, we cannot reduce the complex dynamic of the journalistic culture into simply ethical, theoretical and systemic norms of a given profession