Journalism ethics with Foucault: Casually employed journalists’ constructions of professional integrity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines how journalists in non-permanent employment respond to their growing precarity. It is based on in-depth interviews with freelance journalists and interns who find that their working lives increasingly require entrepreneurial efforts. To work towards continuous access to journalistic work, these casually employed journalists engage in self-management and self-branding. To be able to make a living, they subsidize their income with work for clients outside of journalism that frequently offer better working conditions than news organizations but pursue narrow, strategic goals. The article develops a typology of non-journalistic work that illustrates that some non-journalistic jobs, but not others, cause these precarious news workers to defend their journalistic professional integrity. Furthermore, the study introduces Michel Foucault’s notions of the ‘entrepreneurial self’ and the ‘ethical self’ to interpret the different registers of professionalism between which journalists move today, identified as counter-, conforming and coping subjectivity. Thereby, the article uses a novel conceptual lens to make sense of resilience and change in journalistic professional identities under conditions of precarity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.113 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".