Journalistic roles and journalistic performance : findings from a Swiss research project

Professional roles are one of the key topics in journalism research and are also fundamental elements when it comes to defining journalism as a profession (Hanitzsch, 2011; Keel, 2011). For many decades, journalism scholars devoted their efforts to analyzing normative standards and journalistic ideals. However, due to the lack of theorization of professional roles within the journalistic field, it remained often unclear how the role conceptions relate to and influence the journalistic role performance (Mellado and Dalen, 2014; Patterson and Donsbach, 1996; Schudson, 2003). Specifically, it remained unclear how professional roles relate to news decisions and the news outcome that reaches the public (Mellado et al., 2016; Weischenberg and Scholl, 1998, pp. 157–180). The concept of role performance focuses on the connection between journalists’ beliefs about the role of journalism and the actual practice of producing the news. It connects studies on the professionalism of roles with those on news production and the sociology of news, and it draws its specific value from focusing attention on issues relating to structure, agency, culture, and political economy. In accordance with gatekeeping and hierarchy-of-influences studies, results from a previous study in Switzerland have shown a wide gap between professional ideals and professional practices at different levels (Raemy et al., 2019). With reference to the concept of hypocrisy brought forward by Nils Brunsson (1995), this can be explained by the assumption that hypocrisy is benefitting news organizations – like any other organization – more than is generally assumed, as these organizations have to serve contradicting expectations (Wyss 2008). Our research project focuses on this question by addressing the (dis)connection between ideals and practice in journalism, analyzing how different dimensions of professional roles materialize in the news product in different organizational, institutional, political and social settings. In order to do that, this research project analyzes 4200 articles and reports from 10 different media outlets of all media types in Switzerland, to see which of six pre-defined journalistic orientation is prevalent, and compares these results with the findings from interviews with 160 journalists who are responsible for the articles and reports