Meyers, O. \u0026 Davidson, R. (2014). The Journalistic Structure of Feeling: An Exploration of Career life Histories of Israeli Journalists, Journalism, 987-1005

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The journalistic structure of feeling: An exploration of career life histories of Israeli journalists

Oren MeyersUniversity of Haifa, Israel

Roei DavidsonUniversity of Haifa, Israel

AbstractThe study explores 33 occupational life histories of current and former Israeli journalists. By doing so, it enables us to better understand how the fundamental changes that the journalistic profession underwent during recent decades shaped and influenced the occupational progression of Israeli journalists. Our interviews validate previous work on the partial professional standing of journalism showing that individuals enter journalism in a protracted and uneven manner. In addition, the analysis of modes of reasoning for entering journalism charts the informal boundaries of overt journalistic political identification. Finally, an exploration of self-narrated occupational highs and lows shows that career highs are always identified as personal achievements while career lows are mostly narrated as outcomes of larger organizational or institutional constraints. The current chaotic nature of journalism organizations, as reflected in our life history corpus, illustrates an environment in which there is a clear disconnect between actions and rewards.

KeywordsLife histories, journalism, narratives, professionalism, crisis in journalism, Israel

Given the inherent significance of journalism in the preservation of a free society and its essential role in monitoring the powers that be (Ettema and Glasser, 1998) the examina-tion of journalistic work and its meaning has been operationalized via a multitude of research strategies and methodologies (Wahl-Jorgensen and Hanitzsch, 2008). Based on

Corresponding author:Oren Meyers, Department of Communication, University of Haifa, Haifa 31905, Israel. Email: [email protected]

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988 Journalism 15(8)

the three traditional foci of communication research (text, reception and production) the exploration of journalists and journalism has been answered through the exploration of texts produced by journalists (e.g. Bird and Dardenne, 2008); via an investigation of the opinions and perceptions of media consumers regarding journalistic values and practices and the social status of journalists (e.g. Tsfati et al., 2006); and by observing journalists and interviewing them (e.g. Tuchman, 2002).

The following study is anchored within the scholarly tradition that aims to explore journalistic work through a focus on how journalists themselves experience and interpret their occupation. The study, therefore explores the occupational life histories of current and former Israeli journalists; by doing so, it enables us to better understand how the fundamental changes that this occupation underwent during recent decades shaped and influenced the occupational progression of Israeli journalists. Many of the studies focus-ing on journalists’ self-perceptions rely on close-ended survey questions (Weaver and Willant, 2012). Such studies provide valuable insights regarding the professional values and norms of journalists worldwide. However, they mostly offer ‘snapshots’ of the cur-rent state of journalistic communities. An exception is Tunstall’s (1971) study, which examined the occupational realities of British print reporters, including their entry into the occupation and their prospective career expectations. The study found these realities to be marked by uncertainty rooted in the uncertain nature of news, the contradictory goals of news organizations and the uncertain structure of journalism careers.

The adoption of a life history approach yields career accounts that provide longitudi-nal perspectives. Furthermore, the design of life history studies allows the interviewees to present their own narratives with minimal intrusion (Smulyan, 2004); hence, the reli-ance on such a methodology enabled us to offer integrative analysis looking at the infor-mation provided by journalists as well as the narrative choices journalists made as they constructed their accounts. Finally, an integrative look at the occupational life histories collected, combined with an analysis of the long-term processes shaping the state of Israeli journalism, enables us to discuss the current journalistic “structure of feeling” (Williams, 1977). That is, to explore the characteristics and intricacies of a particular moment of crisis in the history of a given (occupational) community – taking in account communal values and conventions, alongside structural settings and constraints.

The study recognizes the rather mundane but frequently overlooked fact that jour-nalists are but one occupation among many, and therefore leans on research in the sociology of work and especially studies of culture workers (e.g. Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2009) to interpret the career narratives of journalists. Moreover, the study broadens the scope of journalism studies by including in its target population former journalists who have left the field. Compiling and analyzing the career life histories of former journalists illuminates the factors that draw individuals in and out of the profes-sion and enables the tracking of the interrelations between journalism and interfacing occupations (public relations (PR), media consulting, etc.). This last component of the study is of special significance in this era of crisis in which many journalistic environ-ments are characterized by chronic instability that undermines the ability of journalis-tic outlets to fulfill their civic obligations. We therefore attempt to examine how journalists experience the crisis, an empirical aspect that has been relatively neglected (Siles and Boczkowski, 2012).



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Occupational life histories and communication research

The concept of life history has been formally defined as “any retrospective account by the individual of his life in whole or part, in written or oral form, that has been elicited or prompted by another person” (Watson and Watson-Franke, 1985: 2). Hence, life history research is an interview-based approach that attempts to allow participants to construct an emic and longitudinal narrative of their own life experiences (Bourdon, 2003). The use of life history exploration as a research method dates back to the 1920s. At that time, ethnographers’ aim in collecting life histories was to illuminate cultural, historical and social facts, rather than individual lives (Tedlock, 2000). Later uses of the life history method have been more careful in their generalization claims, explaining that a life his-tory is essentially “a commentary of the individual’s very personal view of his own experience as he understands it” (Watson, 1976: 97).

Following that, the question of generalization has been identified as a major challenge in the study of life histories (Peiperl and Arthur, 2000) regarding researched populations of interviewees, as well as beyond them: at what point can we argue that a ‘pattern’ was identified (internal validity) across the life histories we collected? And how do we estab-lish external validity between the studied group of interviewees and larger populations? In terms of internal validity, our study addresses these concerns by relying on a relatively high number of interviewees, the use of additional sources for triangulation and the application of the saturation logic dictating the creation of a categories structure, rein-forced through a constant re-reading and continuous analysis of the interviews. The study’s external validity is fortified by the random sampling of the interviewed journal-ists (see below). At the same time, the question of generalization is most decisively addressed by our initial choice to focus our study on a specific aspect of the life histories of members of a homogenous community: criticism leveled against the life history meth-od’s inability to capture the totality of an individual’s life span has led to a natural ‘divi-sion of labor’ between scholars looking at more concise segments of the life history spectrum – life histories of members of distinct social groups (Lieblich, 1989), or mem-bers of specific occupational communities – in this case, individuals who work, or have worked as journalists.

Interest in occupational life histories grew with the increased understanding that many of the life-cycle patterns, once attributed solely to age-related influences are, in fact as much or more the result of cohort or period influences (Huberman, 1989). Within this context, a growing body of popular and scholarly literature has aimed to decipher the essential role of work in people’s life histories:

Work is an elemental part of nearly everyone’s life… Along with love and your physical being, work is key to your existential circumstances: who am I? What do I want? What is my place in the world and my status within it? Am I useful? Am I fulfilled? Can I change my circumstances? Work defines, to a large degree, your external identity as part of the social matrix. But it also looms very large in your inner sense of how you’re traveling through life. (Bowe, 2001: xiii)

Within organizational research, stories are increasingly recognized as a powerful research tool since they can serve as a useful instrument in the analysis of careers. Such stories illuminate the ways in which individuals make sense of their careers as they unfold through time and space




(Cohen and Mallon, 2001). The analytical exploration of occupational, or career life histories enables scholars to follow the trajectory of an individual within a larger social structure; doing so provides a better understanding of how individuals’ characteristics affect the social surroundings and are, in turn affected by it.

A career is a path that describes the trajectory of any individual through the world of work whether it is characterized by conventional notions of success or not (Hughes, 1997). Two cardinally different approaches towards the study of career life histories can be identified. The first, objectivist approach, often assumes careers are shaped in a linear form. In contrast, a more subjectivist approach contends that careers as lived by workers cannot be reduced merely to a worker’s affiliation, position and salary but are rather defined by a number of frames through which employees understand and experience their work. This approach suggests that careers consist of multiple frames that co-exist and sometimes endure throughout a worker’s career (Pomson, 2004). In this project, we aspired to meld these two approaches together: at the beginning of each interview, the interviewers administered a short self-filled questionnaire, collecting standard demo-graphic data, including an occupational timeline. The information gathered via the ques-tionnaires was later used to establish the study’s fundamental database and enabled us to explore an initial typology of journalistic occupational trajectories (Davidson and Meyers, 2012). Through the following, extended semi-structured section of the inter-view, the interviewees had a chance to narrate their career by sharing their life histories in journalism, in their own words.

Communication research features a relatively small body of studies that embrace the life history approach. The majority of such studies look at “media memories” focused on audiences’ recollections of the early days of a specific medium, or a specific genre (Bourdon, 2011; Volkmer, 2006). Although such studies offer a longitudinal understand-ing of the changing ways in which audiences experience the media, they are not neces-sarily viewed as an integral part of the study of media history. According to Bourdon (2011: 69), the reason for the relative marginality of life history audience studies stems from the “implicit idea that ‘media history’ is mostly about institutions, programs, tech-nology and politics”. Hence, our work might offer a tentative conceptual bridge between audience-based life history communication studies and institutional-leaning media his-tory research: while the study is anchored within the life history logic, it looks at news professionals, who are essential in the process of media production and have accumu-lated valuable insights regarding the operation of news media institutions.

Contextualizing occupational life histories: Israeli journalism and journalists

Israeli journalism was not invented with the establishment of the State of Israel. Rather, pre-state Hebrew journalism had a pivotal role in the establishment of the Zionist move-ment. Therefore, the Israeli mainstream journalistic community of the 1950s was not only supportive of the Zionist ideal, but rather viewed itself as an integral part of its fulfillment. The adoption of an ideological frame exerted a fundamental influence on how Israeli journalists distinguished between good and bad journalism. Along with this




strong ideological commitment, Israeli journalists of the formative era also engaged in initial efforts to define their independent professional identity (Meyers, 2005).1

During the 1970s and 1980s, Israeli journalism changed due to shifts and crises in Israeli society, the development of new media and the influence of the norms and prac-tices of Western journalism. Through the years, Israeli journalists have become far more critical of the political establishment and in various instances have also leveled harsh criticism against the Israeli security apparatus. At the same time, national security-related criticism is still curbed by (weakening) military censorship and a fundamental sense of identification between mainstream Israeli journalists and the military that is, at times manifested through self-censoring practices (Dor, 2004; Liebes,1997).

Throughout the last two decades the Israeli media system has further changed, in ways that make it far more similar to Western media systems. Since the beginning of the 1990s, a state monopoly over electronic broadcasting has ended with the introduction of broadcast, cable and satellite television channels, local commercial radio stations and ubiquitous Internet usage. The neo-liberalization of the Israeli political economy (Nitzan and Bichler, 2007) has manifested itself in journalism in increased corporatization of news organizations. The Israeli commercial media industry is characterized by high con-centration and cross-media conglomeration within a national corporate system that is itself highly concentrated. In addition, some corporate groups hold news-related media assets within a more diversified set of holdings, creating dependencies between media firms and other financial and non-financial corporations. And so, the growing involve-ment of commercial conglomerates in the production of news has resulted, at least in some cases, in self-censorship that helps news outlets preserve their relations with adver-tisers and advances the financial interests of media owners (Tausig, 2006).

The demographic and occupational landscape of Israeli journalism of the last two decades has been characterized by several major trends (Tsfati and Meyers, 2012). Among them is the increased rating-driven competition between news outlets that has led to the development of crowd-pleasing ‘infotainment’ journalism. The dominance of the commercial media model has also led to a sharp decline in the number of unionized journalists and the elimination of journalistic tenure. In turn, the decrease in the number of unionized journalists has increased the rapid turnover in the profession and increased journalists’ vulnerability to internal and external pressures.

In recent years, Israeli Hebrew-language journalism has been operating in a continu-ous crisis mode due to a combination of technological, economic and political-economic factors that have influenced news media across the Western world (see McChesney and Pickard, 2011, on the American case) alongside factors that are specific to the Israeli context. The acceleration of the pace of Israeli media convergence has blurred the lines between journalism and other forms of media production; it has also further intensified the pressures put on news media outlets by owners and shareholders to provide revenues similar to those generated by the non-news components of media conglomerates. In par-allel, the rise of online advertising platforms such as search engines, social networks and dedicated classified advertising sites has cut the advertising revenues of news media, and especially the print press. Finally, the recent global economic crisis has affected the Israeli economy as well, leading to yet further decline in advertising revenues (Kershner, 2012) with low expenditures on advertising in comparison to other developed economies




(Agmon and Zadik, 2011). The glaring exception to the decline in the domestic printed press is the publication of a free national daily Yisrael Hayom (Israel Today, established in 2007) that has become, since 2011, the most popular newspaper in Israel on weekdays. The daily, funded by an American Jewish supporter of the current prime minister, is clearly advancing the PM’s agendas.

Research design

The life history approach is useful in understanding how people “share their experiential solutions to common problems, and thus, create culture: shared understandings of their common situations and agreed-upon ways of acting in them” (McCall and Wittner, 1990: 59).Therefore, we aimed to probe the characteristics of life in Israeli journalism and to illuminate the ways in which such occupational narratives reflect and correspond with the major dilemmas facing this community of workers. In order to do so, we first con-tacted active Israeli journalists randomly sampled from an existing sampling frame constructed for recent survey projects (Meyers and Cohen, 2011). Implementing a matching logic, each interviewee was asked to suggest names of former journalists who had started their work in journalism around the same time as the interviewee and in a similar position, but had since left journalism. The recommended former journalists were then contacted and interviewed (the procedure was reversed with interviewees who had already left journalism by the time of the interview).

At the beginning of each interview, each of the interviewees signed an informed con-sent form affirming their participation and assuring them that their identity will be kept anonymous and their organizational affiliation will be masked. Following that, inter-views started with the administration of the abovementioned self-filled questionnaire. Next, the interviewers conducted a semi-structured interview, mostly ranging between one and two hours. The interview protocol addresses themes such as the journalistic life cycle, the types of external and internal pressures exerted on the journalists and their influence on news work, the influence of a journalistic career on interviewees’ private lives, and more. The protocol used in interviews with former journalists includes an additional section addressing the reasons and motivations for leaving journalism. Next, the interviews were categorized using Narralizer software (Kibbutz Yakum, Israel), allowing us to construct analytical categories based on the systematic identification of recurring thematic patterns in the texts. The analysis process ended once we reached a theoretical saturation of the developed analytical categories (Glaser and Strauss, 2009: 61–62).

Probing journalists’ occupational life histories

The following analysis is based on a close reading of 33 occupational life histories. By choosing these interviewees we aimed to represent a variety of journalistic outlets, dif-fering organizational statuses and career spans, gender differences and, of course, both active and former journalists. Of the interviewees 21 are men and 12 are women; 19 are active journalists, while 14 are former journalists; 31 of the interviewees are Israeli Jews and two are Israeli Arabs. Twenty define themselves as secular, three define themselves




as religious and five of the interviewees chose the ‘traditionalist’ self-definition;2 23 interviewees have earned an undergraduate degree, while six interviewees have not attended a university or college, or have not completed their studies. The interviewees’ scope of journalistic experience ranges from three to 42 years of journalistic work; this variation among our interviewees is of special significance given the present-centric orientation of the study of the current crisis in journalism (Siles and Boczkowski, 2012: 1386). Veteran reporters and editors, who initiated their careers in journalism long before the invention of Twitter and blogging, provide the study with a much-needed longitudi-nal perspective. Such a perspective is especially significant in the case of journalism, an occupational field that tends to operate (or, at least perceive itself to be) in a perpetual crisis mode.

The majority of interviewees (20) are employed (or were employed) via a personal contract with their journalistic employer, while only four interviewees are employed (or were employed) through a collective agreement, brokered by a journalists’ union (the rest of the interviewees were employed via other arrangements such as freelance pay-ments); when asked about the news outlet for which they currently do most of their journalistic work (or, in case of former journalists, the outlet for which they did most of their work) 16 interviewees mentioned a daily newspaper, seven mentioned television, five mentioned radio, one mentioned online news and four interviewees chose to men-tion two or three news media (online and print news, etc.)

Our main task was not to portray a journalistic career as an abstraction or an ideal-type, but rather to illuminate the ways in which a given journalistic community, operat-ing within given social and cultural contexts negotiates the meaning of a career in journalism. Following that, we paid special attention to three critical themes that play a fundamental role in the construction of all of the career life histories we collected – reasons and motivations for entering the field of journalism, career highs and lows, and reasons and motivations for leaving journalism. The focus on these specific interview themes enabled us to shed light on the common features of the professional ethos guiding Israeli journalists, as well as the obstacles that hinder its realization in the day-to-day practice of journalism. The choice of themes pointing at the reasons why journalists enter and exit the occupation illuminate the interface between journalism and related occupa-tional fields. Within this context and, as can be seen later, our exploration, exposed the ‘blurriness’ of the boundaries distinguishing between journalism and other professional realms, especially at the points of entry and exit.

Entering journalism

The first theme we looked at aimed to answer a seemingly straightforward query: when does a journalistic career start? Occupational life histories are, naturally, interested in this question: in scholarship that addresses occupations such as nursing or school teach-ing (Huberman, 1989) the answer is usually fairly clear-cut – in most of those cases, careers start at the end of the interviewees’ formal training at a college or a vocational school and, in many instances, following a formal procedure of certification. The only partial parallels found in the life histories we collected are the career initiations of some of the journalists working for Israel’s (Public) Broadcasting Authority (IBA). For




example, Alon,3 a public radio reporter and editor,4 applied in the late 1990s to an IBA reporters’ course and was admitted following a series of interviews and exams. The course lasted three and half months and provided him with fundamental reporting skills.

In contrast, in the vast majority of cases, entering journalism did not require a certifi-cation procedure, or formal training. Moreover, many of the studied career trajectories did not feature a clear career entry moment, but rather a gradual immersion.5 This theme was highlighted by a number of interviewees who seemed to have a hard time pinpoint-ing the beginning of their journalistic career. Asked when she started her career in jour-nalism, Idit, a former print journalist, answered: “in 2003, I think. It’s like, when I lived abroad I wrote, and then when I came back to Israel, I started freelancing a bit for [a Tel Aviv weekly]”.6 Follow-up questions revealed that, prior to the Tel Aviv freelance job, Idit wrote restaurant reviews for an English-language East Asian publication; and further probing surfaced an earlier journalistic engagement, as Idit wrote for her hometown newspaper while in high school. And so, while Idit first worked as a (paid) journalist when she was a teenager, according to her self-reported written account her career in journalism only really started when she approached the editor of the larger and more prestigious Tel Aviv weekly. Similar discrepancies between the self-filled questionnaire and the interview narrative were common. In such cases, the more formal, written account opened with a position at a local newspaper, or a local radio station, while the parallel interview question yielded answers that positioned the beginning of work in journalism in school newspapers, or in unpaid media work. In some cases, the murkiness regarding the question when a journalistic career started was not manifested through the distinction between different media outlets, but rather via the distinction between differ-ent positions within the same organization. Noga, a former IBA radio journalist initially worked for 14 years as a news radio announcer and later became a news editor and anchorwoman: “I was a news radio announcer, but someone else wrote what I read. I was not involved… it was a very diverse [job], but it wasn’t journalistic work.”

A professional pattern of work has traditionally referred to occupational communities that have managed to secure a measure of autonomy and monopoly over a realm of exper-tise, coupled with a public service ethos. Such occupational communities usually share a reservoir of accepted professional knowledge and tend to establish formal mechanisms that enable them to monitor the professional and ethical behavior of group members (Becker, 1971). And so, throughout the 20th century ‘professionalism’ has become the default setting (or rather, defining narrative) for understanding the operation of American journalism (Zelizer, 1993). Beyond the US, evidence of professionalism can be found in the identification of a set of enduring values common to journalists working in news organizations across various national cultures (Weaver and Willant, 2012). Singer (2003) defines journalism as an “emergent profession” because it lacks many of a profession’s defining institutional characteristics (see also Carr-Saunders and Wilson, 1993).

Within the context of the conceptual debate over journalistic professionalism and against the background of the current crisis in the journalism industry, our findings emphasize that, rather than being an emergent profession, journalism might actually be a declining profession. This is borne out by the overwhelming reliance on hands-on train-ing, the low number of interviewees with formal journalism/communication education (10 out of 33), and the murkiness of journalistic careers’ starting point, despite an




abundance of Israeli communication programs. Indeed, these findings complement our previous conceptual work showing that while Israeli journalists tend to embrace a dis-course of journalistic professionalism, their actual bureaucratic, entrepreneurial, or even non-employed occupational career trajectories rarely enable them to realize a profes-sional career path (Davidson and Meyers, 2012).

The second, complementing query regarding the initiation of a journalistic career aimed to find out why does one become a journalist? Or rather: how do journalists explain their occupational choice? Previous studies have pointed at curiosity, a progressive lean-ing and “the wish to view the inside of things” as some of the character traits that lure young men and women to the field (Willis, 2010); as could be expected, in the case of alternative media, political convictions played a far more central role in the journalists’ stated motivations (Harcup, 2005). In general, questioning our interviewees why they became journalists yielded two main types of answers: the first, ‘internal’ pattern of rea-soning referred to an assumed correlation between the interviewee’s personal traits and talents and the assumed nature of the journalistic profession. The second, ‘external’ pat-tern of reasoning addressed themes pertaining to public service and to the media’s social influence. ‘Character correlation’ narratives emphasized, as mentioned above, the assumed similarities between the qualities of the interviewee and those of the journalistic profession. Hence, a number of interviewees mentioned their writing talent, curiosity or unconventional way of thinking as traits that fit the nature of news work:

People always said [about me] “she will be a journalist.” That’s something, you know that is in your blood… it’s something that is engraved in me – to dig, to investigate, to question, to know things; especially to know things… it’s a job that fits someone with my kind of personality. (Shira, a former print journalist)

The second pattern of reasoning locates the motivation for becoming a journalist at the assumed ability of journalism to influence the social world. Interviewees mentioned the news media’s ability to expose wrongdoings and described their work as “a mission”; but in most cases they talked about the power and reach of the news media in very gen-eral terms, while not addressing any specific social goals that will be advanced by using that influence. Ari, a former print journalist conveyed a typical incidental initiation nar-rative, leading to a plot twist, caused by a realization of journalism’s power:

I was an army driver. As a driver, the only connection I had to journalism was that when I fueled the car, I would get a free newspaper and use it to clean the car’s windows… But once, my army commander went missing. I was her driver… One day we woke up and saw that Ma’ariv [a Hebrew daily] published a story about the officer who went AWOL for 180 days. The entire base cut the newspaper story clip and hung it all over the place… Everyone hung it, and so in two weeks I reached the conclusion that this is the profession in which I want to work. So the first thing I did was to volunteer [in a local news organization].

The use of the unspecified and vague ‘influence’ discourse, ignoring the major debates shaping the Israeli political map (left/right, doves/hawks) might reflect the persistence of the objective ethos in current Western journalism (Schudson, 2001). At the same time, in a few cases, a complementing variation of the influence narrative did address specific social goals that could be advanced through journalistic work. The most salient




examples, echoing “advocacy journalism” sensitivities (Janowitz, 1975) were conveyed by journalists who are members of disenfranchised ethnic and social minorities. David, a tel-evision journalist who emigrated with his family from Ethiopia to Israel explained: “I saw a need. Israeli channels that speak in Hebrew, they filter [the news], you know they filter… I saw the need to voice the [Israeli-Ethiopian] community. I saw the need to let them speak freely.” Oded, a radio reporter and editor, echoed a similar sentiment regarding the lacking media representation of the gay community. Another deviation from the unspecified influ-ence narrative could be found in the narratives of journalists who anchored their occupa-tional choice in disappointing personal encounters with lacking journalistic coverage and their wish for better journalism: “During my military service… I had some very unpleasant encounters with the media. So I said, they [journalists] interest me and when I’ll be there, I’ll do things differently” (Idan, an editor in a daily newspaper).

In sum, an integrative look at manifestations of internal and external modes of reason-ing for entering journalism charts the informal boundaries of overt political identification, in the context of current mainstream Israeli journalism: the wish to advance a clearly defined social agenda via journalism is most acceptable when this agenda pertains to a clearly disenfranchised social sector, or to the improvement of journalism itself rather than to goals clearly associated with the traditional cleavages cutting through Israeli soci-ety. This distinction echoes, to some extent, current tendencies in the Israeli mainstream (manifested in the 2011 wave of social protest) that denigrate ‘traditional politics.’

Career highs and lows

Career life history interviews enable workers to compose their own “occupational auto-biographies” (Zussman, 2000). Among the essential components of these longitudinal narratives are interviewees’ career highest and lowest points. The immediate insight gained after just a brief glance over the aggregated texts of self-narrated highs and lows is that occupational highs are always identified as personal achievements; in contrast, career lows are mostly narrated as events and phenomena that are not personal failures, but rather outcomes of larger organizational or institutional constraints and changes. This point brings to the forefront of the analytical process one of the fundamental concerns challenging life history scholarship: naturally, life history interviewees – like all narra-tors – tend to remember their stories in a selective manner. As shown in this case, inter-viewees might neglect to mention relevant occurrences, due to personal hesitations or conventional social constraints (Bourdon, 2011). Our study does not view such narrative disregards or inconstancies as necessarily inherent faults (Lindlof, 1995: 175–184). Since the study aims to provide a holistic probe of the collected narratives, we see phe-nomena such as the tendency to disregard personal professional failures as significant indicators of the ways in which interviewees elect to narrate their careers in journalism.

The narrated career peaks could be categorized according to their positioning with regard to three interrelated dimensions of journalistic work – the journalist herself, the news organization for which she works and the covered event. Career peaks of the first kind focus on the individual achievement of the journalist; they are anchored within accepted professional perceptions of what constitutes good journalism: inves-tigative reporting that was initiated by the journalist and exposed misdeeds and




instances in which the narrator was the first journalist to report the event. Among the career peaks narrated within this context were the exposé of a sexual abuse scandal that took place in a middle school and led to its closing; a report pointing at contrac-tors’ negligence in building sidewalks as the cause of the running over and death of a child; and a first report on the living conditions of work immigrants residing in a Tel Aviv slum.

The second type of narrated career peak contextualizes the achievement in reference to the news organization in which the journalist works, or worked. Hence, several inter-viewees mentioned as their career peak their employment by a major and respectable news organization. Other interviewees related their identity to the news organization as their reported career high: “undoubtedly, my appointment as the editor of [—] is my peak. No doubt. I’m the first [member of ethnic group] that got to such a position” (Nabil, editor of a local newspaper). Other interviewees chose as their career high instances in which they managed to mobilize changes in existing patterns of media work in their news organization. Hillel, a veteran public television reporter and editor illu-minated this variant by describing his contribution to the easing of the stiff and non-personal character of early Israeli television broadcasts:

I think that the show [—] was another peak… because the viewers suddenly saw people sitting, talking person to person, or telling their life stories. The goal of the program was to bring people’s life stories and to learn from these stories about social and psychological difficulties they struggle with. This was the first program to deal with such topics…. And today, there are many programs that are copies of this theme, including the morning shows.

In other cases, the narrated changes in newswork patterns reflected a heightened aware-ness of the social and political dimensions of journalistic decision making: Zohar, a for-mer print reporter and editor, took pride in his contribution to a sea change in the coverage of the gay community in his newspaper; and Dana, a television journalist explained that her most important achievement was a report on the hardships of Palestinian villagers under Israeli occupation: “and all of this, in Channel 2 [Israel’s leading television chan-nel]… prime time, where they are not willing to show Arabs, and certainly not when they are, you know attacked.”

The third type of narrated career peak refers to unscheduled and prescheduled events (Tuchman, 1973) of a magnitude that erodes, or totally diminishes the media’s control over the flow of coverage. Within this context, interviewees mentioned as their career highs the coverage of events and processes such as the Oslo peace process, King Hussein’s funeral, the Israeli disengagement from Gaza and the Second Lebanon war. What designates such events as occupational peaks is the opportunity they provide for journalists to become first-hand witnesses to the making of history. And so, the narration of such coverage as a career peak did not usually entail a discussion of any unique fea-tures that characterized the reporting conducted by the interviewees. Daniel, a veteran radio and television reporter mentioned two career peaks of the witnessing genre: the first was his on-site coverage of the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall. The second reported career peak stresses the notion that journalistic ‘witnessing’ is not necessarily limited to on the ground, shoe-leather journalism:




Not everyone can broadcast during a terror attack, so I was part of this rotation during those years, between 2001 and 2004. And every time I’d be traumatized by those broadcasts. You need to sit in the studio wearing a suit and a tie with your make-up on and the earphone in place and wait for the terror attack.

As mentioned, only a few interviewees chose to narrate career lows that were clearly of their own making. Ari reported an erroneous accusation against the head of a non-profit organization that made its way to his newspaper’s front page and later forced the news-paper to publish a front-page apology; Zohar regrets some of the more offensive items he published while editing a daily gossip column; and Yoel, a reporter for a sectorial news-paper confessed that he missed an opportunity to expose Ariel Sharon’s plan to withdraw from the Gaza strip.

Beyond the few reported personal failures, most narrated career lows can be catego-rized, in broad terms, as either attributed to mismanagement, poor decision making and the influence of internal politics within the journalistic organization or to structural, tech-nological and economic macro-factors that influence the [Israeli] news media industry in its entirety. Among the career lows attributed to workplace dynamics and organizational factors were narratives about offensive and dismissive editors, misguided managerial budgetary decisions and the overbearing influence of office politics. Rami, a veteran print and online national security correspondent demonstrated this theme in a description of his failed attempt to capitalize on his high public profile:

It’s that sense of not being appreciated… I’ll give you an example: six years ago, the newspaper ordered a secret survey from [—]…They asked the readers of [—] all kinds of questions. And one of the questions was who are the best, or most interesting reporters? Those you read most often. And I was among the top five. The newspaper’s management did not reveal the survey results, but they were leaked to me. So, at some stage… I went to [the publisher]… and told him “[—], the salary is just not high enough...” and I hinted that I’m aware of the results of the survey. He replied: “look, if you want to go, just go. I’m not holding you here.”

Reported career lows that were narratively anchored within the context of economic and technological factors addressed, among other themes, the closing of news outlets, drastic lay-offs and pay cuts: “my lowest point was when the publisher of [—] told me that our economic situation is bad; he said: ‘you have to start delivering newspapers. I do it, and so will you.’ I was not willing to sink that low” (Nabil). In other cases, career lows were attributed to failures to publish stories due to external pressures. In general, the theme of external pressures exerted upon news outlets by PR firms and other interested agents was frequently mentioned as a reason for personal distress, as well as a characteristic of the current state of Israeli journalism:

My lowest point was when I was sent [abroad] to cover that show that was arriving to Israel. I wrote that the show is not good… I didn’t write “garbage,” but, it’s like, you could understand that it isn’t a good show… and following that, I got hammered… I decided that my integrity is more important, but I knew that after I’ll publish that I’ll never be sent by this PR firm. They’ll simply erase me. And indeed, they sent a letter to the newspaper detailing all my expenses, and demanded that the newspaper cover them… They said: “we didn’t send him [abroad] to get such coverage!”… I must say that the newspaper did back me, but… we had to write a new




piece. Another one, that didn’t say it’s [the show] charming, but somehow managed to get us out of the whole thing. (Ron, a former culture reporter for a daily newspaper)

Interestingly, the Israeli security apparatus was not identified by our interviewees as a major source of external pressure exerted upon them, as demonstrated by Dafna, a for-mer senior editor in the print and electronic news media:

You know, I can make deals. If the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] spokesperson wants me to do something, then in turn I will get something from him, something that I want… I don’t consider such things as pressures. I must tell you that I never encountered a situation in which I was told: “if you will write this, you will not get something else [you want]”. Never. I was not told so by [well-known PR agent], or by the army, or by anyone else…. The only pressures I “count” as such are in-house pressures; and those are mostly [internal] demands to publish certain stories.

Such a reference positions the military as yet another source that routinely negotiates with reporters and editors and trades information for media access. At the same time, the relative disregard of the pressures exerted by the military might be attributed, to some extent, to the abovementioned, long-lasting hegemonic tendencies of national security-related reporting.

An analysis of the narrated career lows illuminates the dire state of Israeli journalism and its weakening positioning in relation to neighboring actors such as corporate owners, public relations firms and advertising agencies; it points to the various forms of pressure that shape newswork and illuminates the ways in which journalists experience these constraints as problematic, but do not feel they have the agency to undermine them.

Beyond that, the ways in which the interviewees elect to contextualize these career lows sheds light on one of the major themes delineating the career studies field – the ten-sion between structure and agency: are careers the products of established structures or, rather, are they essentially defined via the actions of the workers who experience those careers and create new structures as they go (Peiperl and Arthur, 2000: 3–6)? Rami, the national security correspondent, and Ron, the culture reporter, demonstrate the negoti-ated and interpretive nature of this tension, as manifested in the life histories we col-lected: Rami’s lowest point was deemed ‘internal’ since it was attributed, by Rami, to the publisher’s unwillingness to acknowledge his achievements and popularity. In contrast, Ron’s low occupational point was deemed ‘external’ because the pressure was exerted by an external factor (the PR firm) and because it reflected the severe economic constraints under which Israeli news media operate, that led them to rely so heavily on “information subsidies” (Berkowitz and Adams, 1990).

But the two narratives could be categorized in an opposite manner: the publisher’s ability to dismiss Rami’s financial demands is directly related to the current bleak state of Israeli journalism, in which Rami faces limited occupational alternatives. Moreover, the correspondence between Rami and the editor could not be fully understood without taking into account the aforementioned structural changes that the Israeli economy underwent through the previous three decades, and especially the collapse of organized labor. Following the same line, Ron’s narrative represents structural constraints along-side the attempt of an individual to challenge the accepted rules of the current journalistic game. And so, structure and individual agency are inherently intertwined.




Exiting journalism

Finally, we aimed to complement our investigation by looking at the process of leaving journalism. An investigation of texts composed by American journalists who have left journalism in recent years revealed a strong nostalgic sentiment – a clear notion that in previous decades journalism was mostly occupied with public service, the exposure of misdeeds and the defense of free speech. According to the analyzed journalists’ accounts the economic crisis, the online revolution and the rise of infotainment culture all lead to the de-professionalization and general demise of journalism (Usher, 2010). The 14 for-mer journalists we interviewed left journalism for various reasons – some were laid off or demoted, while others decided to seek occupational opportunities beyond journalism. Our interviewees’ narratives echoed the ones referenced in Usher’s study – depicting the overall demise of Israeli journalism. Yet, the intimate setting of the interviews (in com-parison to Usher’s exploration of speeches, open letters and blog postings) and the phras-ing of the interview questions (“why did you leave journalism?”, “how did it come about?”) yielded many answers pertaining to the journalist herself, rather than to the mere concept of journalism.

Interviewees mentioned three major, interrelated categories of reasons for leaving jour-nalism, ranging from: (a) professional fatigue; (b) lacking monetary compensation and deteriorating working conditions; and (c) the overall decline in the quality of Israeli jour-nalism. The dissatisfaction with journalists’ salaries and the sense of chronic occupational instability were, by far, the most frequently mentioned reasons for leaving journalism:

The best journalists don’t stay. They want to move onwards, because at some stage they have a family, and they need to make a decent living, and the media, you know, it’s a place in which it’s very hard to accomplish that. (Tali, former radio editor and producer)

In some cases, interviewees narrated a combination of several factors:

At some stage you’re fed up. It’s the feeling of running out of juice, being worn out, it’s the competition. You’re fed up. You stop enjoying it. It’s a profession with no compensation, besides the addiction and enjoying the work itself, there’s nothing else. The money is not worth this kind of work. There’s no appreciation, there’s nothing. (Ari)

The deep skepticism regarding the future of Israeli journalism was shared by former journalists and active journalists alike. Most active journalists interviewed said they like their work and would very much like to continue working in journalism. At the same time, active journalists were extremely doubtful regarding the feasibility of a long-term journalistic career:

Q: Have you ever thought about leaving the profession?

Dana: Of course, many times. It’s so tiring, it can become exhausting. And it’s a very unsafe profession. You have to deal with a lot of hatred, it’s a profes-sion in which you have to pay heavy prices… such as very high occupa-tional insecurity and public personal attacks… There’s a public humiliation aspect.




Conclusion

In his call for the study of the “structure of feeling” within large-scale social and cultural settings Williams (1977: 128) argued that:

If the social is always past, in the sense that it is always formed, we have indeed to find other terms for the undeniable experience of the present: not only the temporal present, the realization of this and this instant, but the specificity of present being, the inalienably physical, within which we may indeed discern and acknowledge institutions, formations, positions, but not always as fixed products, defining products.

Echoing a similar notion, within the specific context of the limitations of existing lit-erature on the current “newspaper crisis” Siles and Boczkowski (2012) noted the reliance on publicly available industry accounts as opposed to the dearth of qualitative analyses based on original data collection. In response, this study answers the call “to examine how actors have experienced the crisis” (Siles and Boczkowski (2012: 1386); it therefore illuminates the ways in which journalists operate within the context of, and in response to, rapidly changing institutional configurations and habitual occupational uncertainty. Our interviews suggest that individuals enter journalism in a protracted and uneven man-ner. This validates previous work on the partial professional standing of journalism as an occupational group. The journalists’ tendency to associate career lows with structural factors while attributing highs to individual actions could be partly explained by self-serving bias – the well-documented tendency of individuals to attribute success to their own actions while attributing failure to situational factors as a result of cognitive or motivational processes (Aronson, 1991: 165–169). The journalists’ narratives and espe-cially their discussion of leaving journalism suggest that they experience their career like those of other contemporary workers in the culture industries (e.g. Neff, 2012) as tran-sient and fluid. Rather than reflecting some approaches that champion the freedom embodied in “boundaryless careers” (Defilippi and Arthur, 1994), the life histories we collected suggest that many journalists feel their careers are constrained by institutional forces they cannot control.

At the same time, the chaotic nature of journalism organizations and the overall sense of crisis, as reflected in our life history corpus, might have contributed to these tendencies through the development of a sense of learned helplessness (Peterson, 1993). This psy-chological phenomenon is the result of a situation in which actors experience an environ-ment where there is a disconnect between actions and rewards. In those situations they tend to adopt a passive stance towards their environment. The analog to this in our research field is either acceptance of existing flawed journalistic practices or exit from the journal-ism field. Remaining to battle and change the field from within is a less prominent strat-egy in the corpus, as reflected in Idan’s account of news editing for a major daily:

It’s a daily war, this need to balance between what’s important on the one hand, and doing stuff that will sell [newspapers] on the other hand. And there are all kinds of interests you have to take in account, all kinds of sensitivities from within the newspaper and from the outside. You never go to sleep saying you did everything perfectly. This will never happen. You always need to lie, you always regret some things.




Idan’s account expresses a sense of resignation – the feeling that, given the complex web of external pressures and attendant daily compromises demanded of the journalist, together with the seemingly chronic economic decline of the industry of which the inter-viewee is acutely aware, as stated in another part of the interview, the reporter must “keep on keepin’ on” (Dylan, 1974)7 within the system as it currently operates or exit it for greener pastures. Hence, our study suggests that the crisis is manifested in an occu-pational sense of passive resignation – “crisis means indecision” (Siles and Boczkowski, 2012: 1376) and this analysis of journalists’ own accounts shows this indecision runs deep and leads many, at least in the Israeli case, to consider alternative occupations. This is especially worrisome in an occupational group whose contribution to society rests on its capacity for proactivity and long-term engagement with powerful social actors.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Eran Tamir and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful, helpful com-ments on earlier versions of this article. We wish to thank Yael Oppenheim, Oshrat Sassoni Bar Lev, Sharon Ringel and Liron Aharonson for their research assistance.

Funding

This work was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant number 307/11).

Notes

1. The scope and analytical focus of this study does not allow us to discuss in detail the specific histories of non-mainstream and non-Hebrew Israeli journalism. For an elaborate account see Tsfati and Meyers (2012).

2. In five of the early interviews some of the data regarding religious self-definition, type of employment and academic education are missing.

3. All interviewees’ names are masked to preserve their anonymity.4. Unless otherwise mentioned, all occupation descriptions refer to the interviewees’ position at

the time the interview was conducted; for former journalists, occupation descriptions refer to the last journalistic position.

5. Tunstall (1971: 58–64) found that in Britain local newspapers had served traditionally as entry points into the field for many reporters and as major sites for occupational training and socialization. However, by the late 1960s the dominance of this entry path had begun to wane.

6. All translations from Hebrew were made by the authors.7. The passage from the Bob Dylan song, Tangled Up in Blue, is worth quoting at length:

And when finally the bottom fell outI became withdrawnThe only thing I knew how to doWas to keep on keepin’ on like a bird that flewTangled up in blue(Dylan, 1974).

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Author biographies

Oren Meyers is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Communication at the University of Haifa. Among his recent publications (with Eyal Zandberg and Motti Neiger) are: “Tuned to the nation’s mood: Popular music as a mnemonic cultural object” (Media, Culture & Society, 2011), “Past continuous: Newsworthiness and the shaping of collective memory” (Critical Studies in Media Communication, 2012) and the edited volume On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011).

Roei Davidson is a Lecturer in the Department of Communication at the University of Haifa. He studies the culture industries and economic communication. His research has been published in Media, Culture and Society, Public Understanding of Science, Journalism Studies and Journal of Communication.



Documents

Meyers, O. \u0026 Davidson, R. (2014). The Journalistic Structure of Feeling: An Exploration of Career life Histories of Israeli Journalists, Journalism, 987-1005