433251

2011
JOU0010.1177/1464884911433251GravengaardJournalism

Article

Journalism

The metaphors journalists

1­–19
© The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
live by: Journalists’ co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1464884911433251
conceptualisation of newswork jou.sagepub.com

Gitte Gravengaard
University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Abstract
The aim of this article is to grasp professional journalists’ point of view: the journalists’
self-understanding and their conceptualisation of newswork. The article presents an
analysis of journalists’ everyday language, in particular of their everyday metaphors,
and what these metaphors show about the given suppositions behind the journalists’
conceptualisation of newswork. This analysis is an explication of an important part of
these professional practitioners’ tacit expert knowledge and the conclusion is that several
different metaphors – and thus different conceptualisations of newswork – coexist. These
results provide an opportunity to nuance previous research as it demonstrates how
the journalists’ multi-layered conceptions of newswork are not mutually exclusive but
rather co-present in the journalists’ consciousness. Furthermore, the analysis creates an
opportunity for journalists to gain a more nuanced insight into their routinised linguistic
practice, and thereby makes it possible to discuss and reflect upon this knowledge.

Keywords
Conceptualisation of newswork, journalistic self-understanding, metaphor analysis,
professional practitioners, routinised practice, tacit knowledge

Media sociology forms the theoretical background for this research project; in particular,
the tradition of the sociological organization of newswork (Schudson, 1989), focusing on
the routines and culture of everyday newswork. This tradition has provided journalism
research with important knowledge on how news is produced. For a review of the tradi-
tion see Cottle (2003) and Tuchman (2002). However, my focus on the journalists calls

Corresponding author:
Gitte Gravengaard, Department of Scandinavian Studies and Linguistics, Njalsgade 120, DK-2300
Copenhagen S, Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Email: gravengaard@hum.ku.dk

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2 Journalism

for the involvement of theories of profession. Professional journalists must be consid-

ered an example of what theories of profession conceptualise as reflective practitioners
(Schön, 1983), who have a vast implicit knowledge that is taken for granted, and closely
connected to the professionals’ routinised practice (Giddens, 1984). Theories of pro-
fession perceive journalists as intuitive experts (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1986), whose
tacit expert knowledge (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995; Perrin, 2010; Polanyi, 1966;
Wackerhausen, 1998) is based on a repertoire of experience and cognitively structured
as intuition and therefore not easily articulated (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1986; Ettema and
Glasser, 1998; Schön, 1983). The expert does not constantly reflect upon all options
available for action in a given situation, he reacts as experience has taught him is appro-
priate. This often happens unconsciously, automatically and naturally.
Schön (1983) distinguishes between two different types of reflection performed by the
practitioner: reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action. Reflection-in-action takes
place when the professional in a work situation reflects upon a given work task at hand.
The professional practitioner carries out reflection-on-action when he subsequently
explains what happened in a given situation at work. Therefore the study of a profession
must always take its point of departure in the study of actual professional practice (Abbott,
1988). This rather rare combination of journalism studies and theories of profession
(Schudson and Anderson, 2009)1 creates a theoretical framework aimed at offering a
nuanced description and analysis of the journalists’ self-understanding and conceptualisa-
tion of newswork.
Furthermore, linguistic analyses of journalists’ everyday language can complement
theories of profession and media sociology when the aim is to grasp the professionals’
point of view (Malinowski, 1922). The linguistic practice is a very important part of the
routinised, professional practice because this practice along with the professional iden-
tity (Wackerhausen, 2004) is, to a large extent, discursively created.
Thus, revitalising the ethnographic methods of the 1970s and 1980s and combining
these with linguistic micro-analysis offers a linguistically sensitive, ethnographic approach
to news production (Catenaccio et al., 2010). Studying the discourse in a professional
domain means getting vivid insights into culturally and socially contextualised language
use in order to develop situated knowledge (Gnach and Perrin, 2008; Perrin, 2010); in
this case, knowledge about how the journalists’ tacit knowledge and default assumptions
are manifested linguistically. According to Løgstrup, ‘we do not see the eyes with which
we see’ (1995[1976]),2 but by analysing professionals’ everyday language we can gain
knowledge of their professional practical consciousness (Giddens, 1984), as well as knowl-
edge on how the journalists, from their first-hand perspective (Zahavi, 2004), conceptualise
their social world. Furthermore, these analyses can be based on something tangible – on
the professionals’ actual language usage.3

The routinised linguistic practice

Everyday language plays a crucial role in the formation of cultural subjectivities and an
analysis of this provides an account of how speakers produce and reproduce particular
social identities through their language use (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005). Hence, many efforts

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Gravengaard 3

have been made within linguistic anthropology to investigate individual subjectivity and
social agency in the linguistic construction of selfhood (Ochs and Capps, 1996). This is
also the ambition in this study, which examines linguistic metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson,
1980) in naturally occurring workplace discourse in a particular community of practice
(Lave and Wenger, 1991).
Traditionally, analysis of media discourse has focused on news products (Bell, 1991,
1998; Fairclough, 1995; Van Dijk, 1998) or on news interviews (Clayman and Heritage,
2002). However, the research focus has recently turned to discursive practices taking
place in the news production process in the newsroom (Catenacio et al., 2010; Clayman
and Reisner, 1998; Cotter, 2001; Hout and Jacobs, 2008; Jacobs et al., 2008; Perrin, 2010;
Peterson, 2001, 2003). These researchers bring together insights from sociology, anthro-
pology and linguistics to study the situated practices of news production, especially the
discourse of news management which is one of the few remaining missing links in jour-
nalism studies (Catenaccio et al., 2010; Jacobs et al., 2008).
So far, metaphors have been examined within political discourse (Charteris-Black,
2004; Chilton, 1996), education (Cameron, 2003), business media discourse (Koller,
2004a, 2004b) and in conflictual business meetings (Handford and Koester, 2010).4
Recently, we have also seen research on naturally occurring metaphors in everyday
workplace discourse (Handford, 2007; Hardie et al., 2007; Koester, 2000, 2006). Only a
little research has been done on metaphors occurring in journalists’ language. Two excep-
tions are Zelizer (2004: 29ff.) and Mindich (1998) who both conduct analyses of how
journalists,5 on a more global level, talk about journalism in general. However, none of
these studies are based on linguistic anthropological methods.

Journalistic self-understanding
In order to study journalists’ self-understanding and role perceptions, a great number of
international surveys of journalists have been conducted (Weaver, 1998). In this
research, there is widespread acknowledgement that the journalists’ professional values
are emphasised and interpreted differently by journalists operating in different countries
(Deuze, 2002; Donsbach and Klett, 1993; Weaver and Wu, 1998). Hence we cannot talk
about a coherent global journalistic profession (Weaver, 1998). Simultaneously, many
surveys show that, on a national level, there are often strong core agreements among
journalists with regard to their professional values (Skovsgaard, 2010; Tsfati et al.,
2006). At a national level, journalists belong to communities that are constituted through
shared training and socialising processes into common professional values and prac-
tices (Breed, 1955; Gravengaard and Rimestad, forthcoming; Plaisance and Skewes,
2003; Zhu et al., 1997).
Regarding the journalists’ self-conceptions of their professional role, researchers have
suggested a typology of journalistic roles (Hjarvard, 2010b; Patterson, 1998; Weaver and
Wilhoit, 1996) or they have categorised journalists’ role perceptions, for instance refer-
ring to dogs as watchdog, lapdog, guarddog (Bro, 2004; Christians et al., 2009). Research
has also shown how different roles are given different priority by the journalists (Plaisance
and Skewes, 2003; Weaver and Wilhoit, 1996).

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4 Journalism

The surveys among journalists have been criticised by referring to the fact that
answers to questions on professional values are highly normative and thus not informing
journalistic practice to any significant extent (Josephi, 2005; Mancini, 2000). Also, it is
evident that journalists’ answers in these self-reporting surveys are not actual practice,
but rather reflection-on-action (Schön, 1983).
Journalists’ self-understanding has also been investigated through interviews with
experienced journalists (Ettema and Glasser, 1998) and editors (Kunelius and Ruusunoksa,
2008). Ettema and Glasser (1998) describe skills not taught in textbooks, thus explicating
an important part of the professionals’ tacit expert knowledge. Kunelius and Ruusunoksa
(2008) study the professional imagination of journalists, and provide an insight into
how the professional discourse modifies the current changes in professionally
acceptable ideals. Both interview and survey methods generate data about journalists’
reflection-on-action and their accounts about their routinised practice.
When studying actual practice in the newsroom, journalism research has a long tradi-
tion of making sense of professional practices from the perspective of the everyday rou-
tines of newswork. As a part of the second wave of news ethnographies (Cottle, 2000)
complementing previous findings, we have seen research in Denmark on everyday con-
struction of newsworthiness in journalistic practice (Schultz, 2007) and on the routinised
construction of and selection among ideas for potential news stories (Gravengaard,
2008). In this current study, ethnographic work and in-depth interviews are combined
with linguistics, thus providing knowledge about both the journalists’ reflection-in-
action and reflection-on-action, offering an opportunity to gain an insight into the
implicit part of these professionals’ expert knowledge.

Everyday metaphors
The metaphor analyses in this study are inspired by Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) cogni-
tive metaphor theory on metaphors we live by. Cognitive linguistics regards metaphors
as being fundamental to language, thought and experience (Gibbs, 1994; Gibbs and
Steen, 1999; Hardie et al., 2007; Kövecses, 2002; Lakoff, 1987) and conceptualises them
as a ubiquitous part of both ordinary language and everyday cognition, creating human
social and cultural reality (Gibbs, 2006; Kövecses, 2002; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999).
In the cognitive linguistic view, a metaphor is defined as understanding one con-
ceptual domain in terms of another conceptual domain, invoking certain attributes of
one semantic area and transferring these to another. Consequently, the metaphorical
linguistic expressions are manifestations of the underlying conceptual metaphors with
which people conceptualise abstract domains of knowledge (Lakoff and Johnson,
1980). The conceptual metaphors have psychological reality (Gibbs, 1994) and there-
fore partly structure what people do and how they understand what they do, while
doing it.
Metaphors are linguistic expressions for interpretative strategies socially shared in
a group to such an extent that they can be used to give a simple explanation of some-
thing that can often be very complex. Fahnestock defines metaphors as condensed
arguments and describes how metaphors are ‘linked to corresponding modes of reason-
ing’ (2002: 24).

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Gravengaard 5

Metaphors are conventionalised, hardly noticed and effortlessly used in the routinised
linguistic practice. Therefore, analyses of the conceptual basis of these linguistic categories
are important, as the conventional metaphorical patterns in authentic everyday language
are reflections of general conceptual organisation, categorisation principles, and process-
ing mechanisms (Gibbs, 1994; Hardie et al., 2007). Thus, the metaphor analysis becomes
an analytic tool capable of facilitating an understanding of news production seen from
the journalists’ point of view. The metaphors voice parts of the tacit expert knowledge
that informs the journalists’ actions and therefore contain important information regard-
ing the journalists’ self-understanding.
Cognitive linguistics can be advantageously linked to the essential insight from
Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1992; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985; Wetherell et al., 2001)
that discourse is an important element in construction of social reality. Language plays
an important role in creating this reality and the social identities and relations within it.
In other words, metaphors are not just expressions of how journalists perceive reality,
metaphors also play an important role in creating the reality in which they are used –
and they affect the actors’ perceptions of this reality and the way they act in it. Thus,
different language usage creates different frameworks and different identities for the
actors to assume.

Research design
This study is primarily based on one month of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the
domestic newsroom of a Danish national paid daily, where I followed two journalists,
participated in all the newsroom meetings, talked to other journalists in the newsroom and
observed conversations between journalists. This was followed up by an interview study
conducted among reporters at the three Danish national paid dailies: Berlingske, Politiken
and Jyllands-Posten. Furthermore, I have conducted shorter ethnographic fieldwork and
interviews at two of the Danish national paid dailies, at the two Danish TV stations (DR
and TV2) and at the national Danish news agency, Ritzau.
This research design makes it possible to observe both the professionals’ reflection-
in-action (the field studies) and their reflection-on-action (the interviews).
Building on the work of Cameron (1999, 2003) and Handford and Koester (2010),
I performed a manual analysis of my data (field notes, transcriptions of meetings and
interviews) and identified all the metaphors used by journalists in their routinised
practice. I focused on stretches of talk, looking for words or phrases being somehow
incongruous within the context of their use – because there was another more literal way
of interpreting this word or sentence (Cameron, 1999, 2003). Each metaphorical item
within my data was analysed to gain an insight into the realisation of idiomatic language
as it occurred in authentic discourse in the routinised practice.
When performing an exploratory and inductive categorisation of the metaphors,
I identified five groups of conceptual metaphors conceptualising newswork, the journal-
ists’ role and news stories in different ways. In the following, I describe these five groups
and lay out the important correspondences between constituent elements of the source
and the target domain, thus characterising each conceptual metaphor and the chain of
reasoning behind it.

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6 Journalism

Newswork described in metaphors

The five most often used conceptual metaphors in the journalists’ routinised linguistic
practice are:

1 NEWSWORK IS SELECTION
2 NEWSWORK IS CONSTRUCTION
3 NEWSWORK IS A RACE
4 NEWSWORK IS TRADING
5 NEWSWORK IS A POWER GAME

It is important to note that these metaphors – and hence different conceptualisations of

newswork, of the journalists’ role and of news stories – coexist in the journalists’ everyday
language and in their self-understanding.

NEWSWORK IS SELECTION
Journalists very often talk about newswork as selection. This conceptual metaphor is the
most common among journalists. A very dominant metaphor is the one concerning the
personified news stories fighting against each other. In these metaphors the news stories
fight against each other on four different levels.
On the first level, a news story can ‘be pressing’ or can ‘intrude’.6 In these metaphors,
the news story is portrayed as the active element intruding in relation to the journalist.
Here the news stories are brought to life and one almost imagines news stories persistently
knocking on the journalist’s door because they want to be written in the newspaper.
On the second level, news stories fight with other news stories in order to be selected
by the journalist. For instance, a journalist can say: ‘This news story can beat the other
story’ and the journalists can describe an idea for a news story as being part of ‘a field
of ideas’. Both metaphors refer to fights or competitions where the goal is to win, and
the word ‘field’ connotes a sporting event, such as a bicycle race in which the racing
cyclists – here the news stories – all want to finish first and win; that is, want to be cho-
sen by the journalist.
However, when the news story is selected by the journalist, the fight is not over. The
journalists are interested in choosing the best news story and ‘try to select a news story
that can make its way to the front page’. At this third level, the news stories fight with the
other stories chosen by the journalists in order to be placed on the most desirable page in
the newspaper – the front page.
On the fourth level, the news stories fight against all the other news stories in the
media on a given day. An exclusive story fights to ‘become a part of the news flow’, to
become cited in the other media. These types of metaphors conceptualise newswork and
news production as selection – and news stories as autonomous beings. The journalists
are assigned a role as story selectors.
Another important metaphor conceptualising newswork as selection concerns the
journalists’ way of talking about the news stories and the media agenda of which these
stories become a part. To understand these metaphors, one can imagine journalists from

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Gravengaard 7

different media stationed at a river bank. This river is the ‘news flow’, and it is always
‘moving forward’. On the river, news stories are floating like rafts, and the journalists
can choose to ‘get on’ or ‘keep out of’ these stories. There is no middle position. The
journalist can consider: ‘Should we get on it, or not?’ That means, should we write this
story or not? The news stories that several journalists from different media write about at
the same time are called ‘the common stories’. These are news stories that several jour-
nalists have ‘got on’ – and figuratively speaking several journalists now stand side by
side on this news story raft in the news flow river.
The conceptualisation in these metaphors of news stories as finished products floating
like rafts, and of the journalists as the ones choosing to get on them or not, signal that the
journalists select the news stories. At the same time, the metaphors support the line of
thought that ideas for news stories exist as entities in the world independent of the jour-
nalists as observers.

NEWSWORK IS CONSTRUCTION
A journalist can ‘put a good news story together’ or ‘create a news story’. If an idea is not
considered to be ‘a news story’, the journalist ‘can make it a news story’. The metaphors
in this category conceptualise newswork as construction and place the journalists in the
role of constructors. Hence, the news stories are conceptualised as products made by the
journalists.
Even though the selection perspective occurs more often than the construction perspec-
tive in the journalists’ everyday language, the metaphor analysis shows that these two
conceptualisations coexist. A journalist can describe how he can ‘create several ideas for
news stories’ from the same event and ‘rewrite the same material from numerous news
angles’, and, in this manner, the journalist’s active role is accentuated. If a particular idea
is not categorised as a news story, the journalists can ‘transform it into a news story’. This
expression presupposes that the news story does not exist yet, but that the idea can become
a news story. A journalist explained how he could ‘create a news story’:

I could easily call the National Health Service now and ask: ‘Could you tell me how many
people are taking anti-depressants? Could you also give me the figures from last year?’ […]
Then I could ask: ‘Could you give me the figures for different age groups for example? How
many 15–17-year-olds?’ […] Then you could say: ‘Damn, all of a sudden 25 per cent more
15–17-year-olds are treated with anti-depressants’ […] Thus, a news story is created.

Journalists might also discuss the following: ‘How can we make this a good story?’
and ‘How can you make the best of a news story?’ In these utterances, the construction
work is also accentuated. The news story does not just exist in final form beforehand.

NEWSWORK IS A RACE
Journalists compete against other journalists; media organisations compete against other
media organisations. The journalists’ aim is to be the first to write the newest news
stories – and to not write stories identical to other media’s stories. The ideal is ‘the exclusive

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8 Journalism

news story’. Exclusives are considered to be good journalism as they demonstrate that
the journalists have ‘eyes and ears wide open’, ‘can think for themselves’ and ‘are capa-
ble of posing their own questions’. When exclusive news stories are good journalism, the
journalists writing the exclusives automatically become good journalists.
The possibility of differentiating oneself from others is important both to the indi-
vidual journalist and to the media organisation. For the individual journalist this means
that he has the possibility of showing his professional skills. The exclusive calls forth
praise and recognition from other journalists and from the editors and therefore means
prestige for the individual journalist. A journalist described how even at the first job
interview he had been presented with this demand from the newspaper’s leading staff:
‘You have to be number one within your specific area. It is expected that you are at the
front line.’ For the media organisation, the exclusives are equally important, as they are
opportunities to differentiate the newspaper from other media and show that this news-
paper is better and faster than the others.
In the prevailing race metaphor, it is desirable to lead. The goal is to finish first and
win. The journalists do not want to ‘run after’ or ‘rush after’ the other newspapers’ stories.
These metaphors connote the image of a running track at an athletics stadium, where a
journalist runs with a news story in his hand, and a group of journalists follow him closely.
Everyone wants to snatch the news story out of the leading journalist’s hand so that they
can become the leading journalist. Journalists can also talk about ‘following in the foot-
steps of others with the one goal: to lead’, and the journalists can try ‘to run ahead of the
others for tomorrow’s newspaper […] Then the next day, when everybody else writes the
same thing, to write something that delves deeper than their stories.’
The race metaphors conceptualise newswork and news production as an internal race
between journalists and between media organisations. The journalists are assigned a role
as race competitors and the news story is the dépêche the runners (the journalists) have
in their hand.

NEWSWORK IS TRADING
When journalists refer to newswork, they might also talk about ‘selling somebody a
news story’. Sources want to ‘sell stories’ to the journalists, and the journalists wish to
‘sell’ their ideas for news stories to their editors and thereby get permission to work with
these ideas.
Often the journalists employ an obvious trading metaphor concerning the sources:
‘They want to sell a news story.’ The metaphor clearly underlines the mutual exchange
of services taking place when the exclusive news story passes into somebody else’s pos-
session – from the source (‘idea salesman’) to the journalist (‘idea buyer’). The journal-
ists’ relations toward the sources are ambivalent. The journalists need the sources in
order to be able to write news stories; at the same time, the journalists are uneasy and
critical towards the thought of being controlled by sources offering them pre-fabricated
news stories. Still, it is exactly these news stories that can give the journalists the oppor-
tunity to present the news first and set the media agenda.
The journalist and the source come to an agreement, in which the source gets a story
on the media agenda and thereby attention to a particular topic. In return, the journalist

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Gravengaard 9

gets the desirable exclusive and thereby an opportunity to differentiate himself and his
newspaper from others.
The trade involving ideas also takes place between the journalists and the editors in the
newsroom. In a bureaucratic and hierarchic media organisation, with different allocation
of power resources, an important goal is for the journalists to convince their editors to
‘buy’ their ideas for news stories. All ideas for news stories have to be approved by the
leading staff and this typically takes place in the staff meetings or in face-to-face conver-
sations (Gravengaard, 2008). The journalist endeavours to present his idea in a way that
gets it approved or ‘bought’ by the editors so that the journalist can continue working on
this particular idea. Because of this demand for approval, several journalists describe how
they anticipate the reactions of their superiors and quickly find out what kind of stories the
different editors like, and consequently hold ideas back if they think that it is more likely
that the editor on duty the following day will be more positive towards the idea.
The metaphors in this group conceptualise newswork as trading and negotiation, and
the journalists are either idea buyers or idea salesmen. The news stories are conceptual-
ised as goods. This conceptualisation suggests a market place in which one aims to make
the best bargain with a satisfying profit.

NEWSWORK IS A POWER GAME

Journalists want to be in control. They want to decide for themselves what news stories
they will write. They do not want to be controlled by others, neither by internal actors
as editors nor by external actors such as sources, other journalists or other media
organisations. The journalists want ‘to set the media agenda’. They want other journalists
and other media to ‘follow them’ – to follow up on their news stories. However, they
themselves do not wish to follow up on other media’s stories. A journalist stated:
‘Personally, I make it a point of honour to be the leading journalist within my area. That
I am the one setting the news agenda.’
Writing exclusive news stories is a victory for the individual journalist. It is a sign
that he has ‘beaten his competitors’: the other journalists. When other journalists and
media follow up on one’s news story, it is considered an acknowledgement of the qual-
ity of the story and thereby an acknowledgement of the newspaper and of the journalist
who wrote it. It gives the journalist and the leading staff a feeling of power, to be in
control in relation to the other media when these feel that they ‘have to get on our news
story’. Both the individual journalist and the media organisation have the ambition to
control the agenda and thereby affect what other journalists write about. The goal is ‘to
be in control and in front’.
When it comes to sources, a journalist can say ‘Berlingeren [the newspaper: Berlingske]
ate it’, when describing how another newspaper has accepted an idea from a source he
himself had turned down the day before. ‘To eat’ is not a positive term in this context.
Rather, this word connotes that the reporting journalist has ‘swallowed the news story
raw’, that he has allowed some external actor to persuade him to ‘eat’ the news story –
without discovering that he was actually being fed by hand. Thus, this utterance becomes
patronising since ‘to eat’ is alluding to a non-reflective way to accept a story; such as
when a fish eats a worm without noticing that there is hook present. And thereby the

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10 Journalism

metaphor connotes that someone has ‘hooked somebody’; that somebody has controlled
the journalist.
In this category of metaphors, newswork is conceptualised as a power game, in which
the journalists fight against others in order to influence and control the newswork. The
news stories are the artefacts everybody wants to control.

Conceptual metaphors and interpretive repertoires

All these metaphors are continuously employed in the journalists’ routinised linguistic
practice. Newswork is all these things at the same time. The journalists select news sto-
ries, they create news stories, they try to win; defeating the other journalists and other
media by writing the newest stories, they buy and sell stories, and they struggle to control
this entire process. The conceptual metaphors coexist – and so do the conceptualisations
of newswork. Consequently, a large number of metaphorical source domains jointly pro-
duce this particular target concept: news production (Kövecses, 2002).
My analysis did not reveal any difference between the involved media organisations
when it comes to the journalists’ linguistic practice. Neither did I experience any signifi-
cant difference in the metaphors used in the journalists’ reflections ‘in’ and ‘on’ action. All
five conceptual metaphors appeared in both types of reflection. In the journalists’ reflec-
tion-in-action, metaphors are used naturally and never explained or elaborated upon, func-
tioning as unmarked language in the routinised linguistic practice involving cultural
insiders. In the journalists’ reflection-on-action, when I interviewed them, they sometimes
explained parts of the meaning of their metaphorical expressions, signalling that they did
not expect a cultural outsider to automatically understand all this. This difference in
reflection-in-action and on-action was never voiced by the journalists, thereby demon-
strating how their tacit expert knowledge – what vocabulary to use when talking to a
cultural insider/outsider – is visible in their linguistic practice.
As mentioned, metaphors are not just expressions of how the journalists conceptualise
reality, they also have important consequences for how the social world and the identities
and relations in this world are constructed (Potter and Wetherell, 1987). Consequently, the
analyses reveal important interpretive repertoires and show how each of the conceptual
metaphors constitutes objects, subjects, processes and events in certain ways in different
narratives about reality, and each of these narratives installs blind spots by constructing a
given field (news production) in a certain way and accentuating or concealing certain
aspects in this particular field (Kövecses, 2002; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). Hence, the
variety in these metaphors accentuates the fundamental fact that journalistic self-under-
standing is complex and contradictory at times.
One of the most important discussions here is the dominant conceptualisation of
newswork as selection. News stories do not exist as finished products, and news does
not write itself (Darnton, 1975; Mindich, 1998). Furthermore, only a very small propor-
tion of all the occurrences that take place in the world every day end up in news stories
in the media (Fishman, 1980; Molotch and Lester, 1974). The metaphors conceptualis-
ing the journalist as the one selecting news stories conceal the construction aspect in
newswork. The metaphors create the image of the active news story wanting to defeat
the other news stories. However, it is the journalists, not the stories, who are active in

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Gravengaard 11

this process. It is the journalists who construct and assess the ideas for news stories and
who fight against other journalists in order to write the news first. What happens is a
metonymical transfer of the journalists’ own goals and ambitions to the objects they
work with, hence creating a possibility for the journalists to legitimise their work. The
metaphors tend to objectify the news stories written by the journalists: reality is out
there, and we uncover it. However, by employing these metaphors the journalists dis-
claim their responsibility as story constructors and appear as independent observers
who are relaying transparent and objective media describing reality. Thus, the profes-
sional self-understanding logically succeeding from this is dominated by a transmission
perspective (Epstein, 1973; Tunstall, 1971) blind to the insight that journalists function
both as participants and as story creators in the production of news (Bennett, 1982;
Darnton, 1975; Fiske and Hartley, 1978; Hackett, 1984; Hall, 1982). This could be a
sign that journalists in their routinised practice are not aware of the role they actually
have. If a journalist does not consider newswork to be construction as well, it may
become superfluous to ask oneself what techniques one uses when constructing news
stories that end up as articles in the newspaper.

Newswork – not just selection

However, my analyses demonstrate that the journalists also voice and even accentuate
the construction aspect in newswork. Hence, the journalists also recognise the double-
ness of selection and construction in newswork; a trend seen around the world (Hackett,
1984; Hindman, 2005; Tsfati et al., 2006). This happens in their reflection both ‘in’ and
‘on’ action. The Danish journalists are not, as for instance proposed by Schudson (1989),
refusing the construction perspective.
Furthermore, conceptualisations of newswork as a race, as trading and as a power
game also exist. Thus, different discourses coexist, all attempting to organise the same
social world. Hence the journalists are over-determined; that is, positioned in several
conflicting discourses at the same time (Carpentier, 2005; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985).
This reveals that the journalists’ self-understanding is complex and richly faceted as
well as conflictual. One of the consistent findings in surveys examining journalistic role
perceptions is that these are not one-dimensional since journalists often adhere to sev-
eral more or less contradictory role perceptions at the same time (Deuze, 2002; Latila,
1995; Plaisance and Skewes, 2003; Tsfati et al., 2006; Weaver and Wilhoit, 1996;
Weaver et al., 2007). The present study shows that this is also the case when examining
journalists’ conceptualisation of news production. These multi-layered conceptions of
newswork are not mutually exclusive but rather co-present in the journalists’ conscious-
ness. I shall elaborate on this.
The race metaphors and the image of journalists and media organisations in constant
competition imply a professional role and self-understanding as a career maker. The aim
with the exclusive news stories is precisely to position oneself as better than the others
(Gans, 1979; Schultz, 2007). This social identity is in opposition to the often proclaimed
journalistic ideal to pass on what the journalists regard as the ‘most important’ informa-
tion about society to the readers. Thus, a possible danger in the career maker identity is
that the journalists’ focus on exclusive news stories and personal positioning now and

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12 Journalism

then can be given higher priority than the demand for what the journalists would label
‘an important news story’ – important for society and for the citizens. Potentially this
might become a democratic problem.
Furthermore, the metaphors conceptualising newswork as trading uncover the con-
flictual relation between, on the one hand, the journalists’ desire ‘not to be in anybody’s
pocket’ and not to be controlled by either external or internal actors and, on the other
hand, the necessity of the journalists actually adapting and adjusting to external as well
as internal actors – and thereby giving up some control. Externally, the relations with the
sources mean that the journalists have the opportunity to write exclusives and therefore
‘the trade’ is desirable to them despite their knowledge that the source at the same time
uses the journalist to place a certain issue on the media agenda (Carlson, 2009; Darnton,
1975; Eason, 1988; Gans, 1979). Internally in the newsroom, a hierarchic organisation
and fixed conditions of production also affect the journalists’ work as they need to adapt
the values and goals of the organisation in order to be able to ‘sell’ their ideas to their
editors (Cook, 1998; Gans, 1979; Shoemaker and Reese, 1996). The journalists’ depend-
ence on access to the public through employment in news organisations (Aldridge and
Evett, 2003) and their embeddedness in these hierarchic organisations are important con-
straints on the individual journalist (Shomaker and Reese, 1996).
This conflict is also important in the metaphors conceptualising newswork as a
power game. Here the journalists’ ideal ambition about being powerful in the news-
work (Carlson, 2009; Eason, 1988; Skovsgaard, 2010) and the notion of the autono-
mous journalist (Gravengaard, 2008) are contrasted by all the stakeholders (Mintzberg,
1963) that journalists act in relation to as a part of their routinised practice (see also
Darnton, 1975):

The leading
staff/The
media
organisation

The sources Other media

The
journalist

Other
The readers
journalists
The public

Figure 1.  The journalist’s stakeholders (Gravengaard, 2008)

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Gravengaard 13

In their routinised everyday practice, journalists have to navigate in this field of con-
flicting forces, and all these stakeholders can make competing and even contradictory
demands on the journalists. Furthermore, journalists also operate in a particular society
(Hallin and Mancini, 2004) where ideological, cultural and economic structures also
function as constraining forces (Giddens, 1984; Shoemaker and Reese, 1996).
In this way, when analysing the discursive level of the routinised practice, important
contradictions occurring in everyday practice in the newsroom are materialised in differ-
ent conceptual metaphors. Furthermore, the conceptual metaphors and their tensions are
also manifestations of the changes and tensions within contemporary news media and
journalism; in Denmark and in general. Journalism’s permanent state of flux (Carlson,
2009; Hjarvard, 2010a) is characterised by a growing influence from the internet, free
content on the web and in free newspapers, increased commercial pressure (Hallin and
Mancini, 2004), and an increased focus on the audience (Eide, 2010; Hjarvard, 2010a;
Willig, 2010). Simultaneously, we see a severe decline in circulation and advertising rev-
enues, especially for national paid newspapers. These changes challenge the business mod-
els of existing media, and Hjarvard (2010a) describes this as an over-determined process
encouraged by several factors, which each has its own rationale and direction. The current
study demonstrates how this overdetermination of practice is also present in the mind of
the individual journalists (see also Kunelius and Ruusunoksa, 2008) and thereby resem-
bles research showing how, for instance, technical transformations can challenge and
change occupational identities among groups of journalists (e.g. Boczkowski, 2004).
Taking point of departure in the journalists’ self-understanding as well as perceiving
journalists as intuitive experts, this study of news management discourse allows us to
nuance our knowledge on journalistic self-understanding as opposed to the ethnogra-
phies of the 1970s where several researchers pointed out that journalists generally think
of news production from a selection perspective (Epstein, 1973; Tuchman, 1978;
Tunstall, 1971) and are dismissive of the construction perspective (Schudson, 1989).

Professional reflexivity
As the analyses of the metaphors provide an opportunity to transform parts of the jour-
nalists’ tacit expert knowledge into a voiced knowledge, this creates an opportunity for
journalists to gain a more nuanced insight into their routinised practice. Furthermore, it
makes it possible for them to discuss and reflect on this knowledge. Being in the role of
the outsider, it has been my ambition to deliver a workable and relevant outsight (Toulmin,
1963) and thereby create a creative disturbance (Gleerup, 2004) in the journalists’ profes-
sional identity. Journalists need to have an awareness of, and to reflect on, their routi-
nised linguistic practice, not only in their media texts (Eide, 1999), but also in the
processes in which these texts are constructed. These given suppositions already tacitly
guide journalistic practice and therefore they have to be explicated and discussed (Ettema
and Glasser, 1998; Schön, 1983). This reflexivity empowers journalists to better control
parts of their professional autonomy. If journalists fail to recognise the diversity of pro-
fessional identities and the conflicting roles and ideals existing in their practice and in
their self-understanding they severely restrict their reflexive potential (Kunelius and
Ruusunoksa, 2008). Furthermore, they deny themselves a powerful moral vocabulary

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14 Journalism

(Ettema and Glasser, 1998) with which to conduct self-reflection and legitimate their
professional work in a new media environment (Eide, 2010). Therefore, it is important to
make these research results available to the practitioners aiming to facilitate a common
language, understanding (Bro, 2004; Kunelius, 1999), and discussion between journal-
ists and journalism researchers creating a more public scholarship (Rosen, 1995) and a
knowledge-creating relation where both journalists and journalism researchers acknowl-
edge each others’ knowledge of journalism practice.
This study is based on Danish journalists, which means that a comparison with jour-
nalists bred in other news cultures is not possible (Deuze, 2002). This leaves the question
of generalisability of the results rather open. Research has shown that role perceptions of
journalists vary considerably across countries (Patterson, 1998; Weaver, 1998), and that
the national political context exceeds the influence of the organisational level and the
individual level (Zhu et al., 1997). However, Yu (1998) suggests that many conceptual
metaphors underlie conventional expressions across different languages and therefore a
working hypothesis for further research would be to expect results somewhat similar to
the ones from the Danish study if this was repeated in countries also belonging to the
North European model of media systems (Hallin and Mancini, 2004). Obviously, gener-
alisability across different news cultures and media systems is one of the questions that
need to be addressed in future research.
The linking of media sociology, theories of profession and linguistics creates a rele-
vant and workable theoretical framework for analysing professionals’ self-understand-
ing. By taking the professional practice as the point of departure, it becomes possible to
explicate important parts of the tacit professional knowledge that is normally taken for
granted in the routinised practice. As pointed out, the results are relevant to both research-
ers and professional practitioners when aiming to nuance their understanding of practice
as the explication provides a foundation for reflection and discussion. Hence, this theo-
retical framework is also to a large extent applicable when studying professionals in
other professions.

Acknowledgements
I would like to express sincere gratitude for valuable comments and constructive suggestions from
Mie Femø Nielsen, John Christian Jørgensen, Anne Gry Haugland and Christine Isager, University
of Copenhagen; Professor Daniel Perrin and Alexandra Gnach, Zurich University of Applied
Sciences, School of Applied Linguistics; Professor Barbie Zelizer, Annenberg School for
Communication, University of Pennsylvania; Professor Martin Eide, University of Bergen; and
Heidi Jønch-Clausen, University of Southern Denmark. Also, I am very grateful for the critical and
perceptive readings offered by the two reviewers commissioned by Journalism.

Notes

1 For two rare examples see Tumber and Prentoulis (2005) and Skovsgaard (2010).
2 This is my translation from Danish into English.
3 See Peräkylä and Vehviläinen (2003) for a similar argumentation for using Conversation
Analysis in studies of professional practice.
4 See Gibbs (1994) for a review of the study of metaphors.

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Gravengaard 15

5 And some journalism researchers (Mindich, 1998).

6 All quotations in this article are my translations into English of what journalists have said in
Danish.

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Biographical note
Gitte Gravengaard, PhD, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Scandinavian Studies and
Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She has written several articles and a book
on professional practice and professional self-understanding among journalists. In a number of arti-
cles and papers she has argued that combining media sociology with linguistic analysis is one of the
most fruitful ways in which to study professional practice and professional self-understanding.

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