Professionalism

Origins

The traditional or “original” professions are widely recognized to be medicine and law with the clergy and university teaching sometimes added. The first two historically have been distinguished by long periods of specialized education, self-regulation of membership and boundaries, and an ethos of public service. of this trinity of attributes, journalism generally claims only one—fulfillment of a public mission. While college journalism programs abound, being a journalist in the United States requires neither degree nor license. Unlike the American Medical Association, the American Bar Association, or testing and certification agencies across a spectrum of other fields, no organization wields such clout for journalists.

Nevertheless, the concept of professionalism has proved elastic enough to encompass many sorts of work besides medicine, law, preaching, and teaching, especially in its applications to twentieth- to twenty-first-century occupations. Ways of assessing and studying professionalism are likewise pliable, with diverse intellectual approaches producing varying interpretations. Building on a base of descriptive studies enumerating professional traits, historians have focused on monopoly, elitism, and exclusion as dynamics in the emergence of professions, while sociologists have construed professions as a socially organized method, grounded in political economy, for organizing and controlling work. Underlying these disparate academic perspectives, however, is a common interest in understanding institutional arrangements for the use of expertise. As a team of scholars from education and management who study socially beneficial work observe: “Being a professional involves a bargain between a person and the community. People agree to provide needed services; the community agrees to compensate them for the services and recognize their right to perform those” (Gardner et al. 2001, 16).

In the United States, the idea of journalism as a profession emerged in late-nineteenth-century discourse surrounding the growth of the mass-market press, and with it the idea of “objective” news coverage separate from partisan politics that would appeal to broad audiences. By this time, journalists were shedding the moniker of “ink-stained wretches” closely associated with the printing trades and [Page 1139]acquiring distinct roles in the processing of news. Further, they no longer were tied to the promotion of political party lines as characterized newspapers of the preceding era. Skill, accuracy, fairness, and integrity came to be seen as synonymous with good business for the modern mainstream press. This was even the case with William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, pioneers of sensationalism as a marketing device in what became known as “yellow journalism.” Pulitzer was later the chief benefactor of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, key to his vision for legitimizing the practice of journalism and an early model for comprehensive university journalism education.

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