Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjop20 Download by: [67.161.213.47] Date: 20 April 2016, At: 10:27 Journalism Practice ISSN: 1751-2786 (Print) 1751-2794 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjop20 Intrapreneurial Informants Avery E. Holton To cite this article: Avery E. Holton (2016): Intrapreneurial Informants, Journalism Practice, DOI: 10.1080/17512786.2016.1166069 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2016.1166069 Published online: 19 Apr 2016. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data
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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjop20
Download by: [67.161.213.47] Date: 20 April 2016, At: 10:27
Amidst a prolonged transition for news organizations from traditional modes of deliv-ery to digital and mobile platforms—one that has resulted in the shrinkage of nearly 40percent of editorial staffs at US newspapers (Edmonds 2015)—many organizations haverelaxed their typical professional norms to include atypical resources as a means to keepup with audience demand and engagement. Freelance journalists, or those journalistswho are not fully employed by news organizations but nonetheless supply publishedcontent in “piecemeal” fashion (Massey and Elmore 2011), represent an emerging slice ofthese atypical resources. They are fast becoming an integral part of the news process(Ladendorf and Edstrom 2012; Solomon 2015), helping to alleviate some of the burdenplaced on news organizations’ reserves with nominal financial expectations (Bristol andDonnelly 2011; Kaufman 2010). In particular, they have been used with greater frequencyin areas of specialty reporting that have been among the hardest hit by newsroom cut-backs, including science and health journalism.
This shift calls into question the historically staid boundaries of journalism professio-nalization, which have established and maintained distinctions between news producersand consumers as well as professional and amateur forms of news production (Domingo2011; Lewis 2012a, 2012b). Freelancers have struggled to free themselves from thestigma of amateur or outsider, recently gaining ground through socialization with newspa-per editors and newsroom managers while upholding the tenets of journalism includingtruth-telling, objectivity, and ethical storytelling (Gollmitzer 2014; Solomon 2015). Theyare increasingly present in digital spaces where newspapers have struggled to engageaudiences, navigating new forms of immersive storytelling with the ambient dialoguebetween journalists and audiences created by social media (Hermida 2011, 2014; Lee 2015).
Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 19 freelance journalists and nine news-paper editors in the United States, this study focuses on the latter, asking freelancers howthey perceive themselves in a profession that now demands the incorporation of audienceengagement, particularly through social media. The findings indicate freelancers have incor-porated social media to build and maintain audiences and individual brands and identitieswhile constructing and repairing norms. The findings also suggest that editors have begunchanging their views of freelancers, seeing them less as professional outsiders and moreas exemplars of journalistic innovation. In particular, editors may be relying on freelancersfor a certain level of intrapreneurial guidance, specifically in terms of social media engage-ment, suggesting freelancers may in fact be emerging as intrapreneurial informants.
Evolving Journalistic Norms and Role Conceptions
The rise of digital storytelling and audience participation in the news process throughdigital channels and social network sites (SNSs) has challenged the professional norms ofjournalists and raised questions about how they see themselves and the work they under-take (Mellado and Van Dalen 2014; Tandoc, Hellmueller, and Vos 2013; Singer, 2015).Lasorsa, Lewis, and Holton (2012) noted that journalists’ use of Twitter challenges thenorm of objectivity by encouraging journalists to include opinion and humor alongsidenews content. Other studies have demonstrated increases in transparency related to pro-fessional work and sources, reliance on audiences for news and news-related information,partisan news coverage, speed of news content delivery over accuracy, and the inclusion ofpersonal and professional branding in news work (Broersma and Graham 2013; Lasorsa,Lewis, and Holton 2012; Lee 2015; Molyneux 2015).
While they wrestle with evolving professional norms, journalists are undergoing anintense period of role conception reconsideration. Role conceptions, or how journalistsand news organizations describe the work they do or ought to do (Mellado and Lagos2014; Mellado and Van Dalen 2014), are sometimes explained through examinations ofthe professional norms and values of journalists and how those norms and valuesappear in professional practice. Weaver and Wilhoit (1996) determined four role types—dis-seminator, adversary, interpreter-investigator, and populist mobilizer. Hanitzsch (2011)added the roles of critical change agent and opportunist facilitator. Mellado and her col-leagues (Mellado and Lagos, 2014; Mellado and Van Dalen, 2014) operationalized six dis-tinct roles journalists perform: disseminator-interventionist, loyalist, watchdog, civic,service, and infotainment.
These and other studies tend to rely on individual levels of media psychology to oper-ationalize and explain role conceptions (Shoemaker and Reese 2014), capturing how jour-nalists believe they should be acting as professionals without considering the nuancedinternal and external drivers of those beliefs (Tandoc, Hellmueller, and Vos 2013).Further, studies have focused almost exclusively on traditional definitions of professionaljournalists, leaving opportunities to explore role conceptions of other emergent journalisticcontributors such as freelancers.
The Role of the Freelancer
Once kept at arm’s length by the very news organizations they served, freelancers arepart of a rise in media entrepreneurship that is renewing “journalism’s relevance and
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reinvigorate[ing] stagnating business models” (Cohen 2015, 514). By balancing the pro-fessional norms of journalism with deviations necessary to sustain their autonomouslyentrepreneurial employment (Obermaier and Koch 2014; Solomon 2015), freelancers arepositioning themselves as part of a profession that is undergoing paradigmatic changesthat include an erosion of the boundary between news producers and users.
Historically, few media scholars have given them attention as key actors in the newsprocess, though that began to change as increasing numbers of news organizations—newspapers in particular—turned to freelancers to fill voids in content left by a depletionof resources that began in the 1990s and has yet to see a reversal. This as they transition todigital and social media platforms, where audiences expect more opportunities for partici-pation in the news process and socialization with news producers (Hermida 2014).
Despite these expectations, studies continue to show traditional journalists may notbe all that interested in connecting with audiences (Broersma and Graham 2013; Lee 2015).While journalists working in newsrooms make use of social media for news work, theyremain hesitant to exchanging information or building conversations with individualsoutside of their professional circles (Lee 2015; Lee, Lewis, and Powers 2014). Freelancers,though, engage audiences and report seeing them as opportunities to spread build theirprofessional brands though public conversations on SNSs (Molyneux and Holton 2015).They are also guided by autonomous privilege, allowing them more freedoms todevelop individual approaches to audience interactions where other journalists mayoperate under organizational policies.
Such independence has largely kept freelancers out of newsrooms where they mightbe seen and heard, though recent studies indicate that freelancers and newsroom editorsand managers are socializing more often and more frequently in person (Gollmitzer 2014;Obermaier and Koch 2014). This positions freelancers less as newsroom outsiders and moreas professionals increasingly being included within considerations of news organizations.
This is perhaps best illustrated in areas of news coverage that have been hardest hitby financial cutbacks. These are often specialty beats that are considered expendableamong local and regional news organizations, most notably topics related to science andhealth. Health journalists in particular are disappearing from newsrooms more rapidlythan other journalistic specializations in part because of a prevailing belief among news-room chieftains that health news is expendable and because health information is morereadily available from a wider breadth of sources than ever before (Bristol and Donnelly2011). As freelancers continue to help address content reductions, they may also bringwith them informative practices that better suit the norms under which they operate.
Problem Statement
Noting emerging scholarship that examines the evolving norms and role conceptionsof traditional journalism professionals, as well as the rise in the reliance of newsrooms onnontraditional journalism professionals (i.e., freelancers), this study sought to elucidate howfreelancers perceive themselves and their work, paying particular attention to their relianceon social media. This study also took up the call of Tandoc, Hellmueller, and Vos (2013), con-sidering how key influentials such as editors might reinforce or negate certain role con-ceptions by asking them about the work of freelancers and where they fit into today’snewsrooms.
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Method
This study began by seeking out a sample of freelance journalists and editors forsemi-structured interviews. Given that the United States does not have a unionized laborforce of freelance journalists, finding such a list can be cumbersome. By focusing in onan area of specialized reporting that makes use of freelancers such as those coveringhealth and science, cultivation of a sample was achievable. With more than 1100members, the Association of Healthcare Journalists (AHCJ) offers a rich sampling poolthat includes journalists working for news organizations, freelance journalists, andeditors. An e-mail invitation for interview participants was distributed through the AHCJin March 2013, resulting in an initial pool of 58 newspaper journalists and 12 newspapereditors. For this study, only those journalists who had been active as freelancers for atleast one year were included, as were editors who reported working with freelancers ona regular basis. These criteria narrowed the sample to 19 freelancers and nine editors.
Through a series of phone and digital interviews (i.e., Skype, Google Hangout), eachof the 28 participants was asked a series of open-ended questions that followed a semi-structured format. Media scholars have suggested interviews that allow responses toguide questions rather than a strict set of queries can provide unique insider viewpointsand illuminate personal and professional norms and routines (Amend and Secko 2012;Humphreys, Von Pope, and Karnowski 2013). Thus, this study relied on open-ended ques-tions and allowed conversations to develop somewhat organically. Freelancers were askedabout their personal and professional routines and norms, their perceptions of themselvesas professionals and as journalists, how they engaged with other journalists and their audi-ences, and how they made use of social and digital media in their work. Editors were askedabout their perceptions of freelancers, how those perceptions were formed and how theyhave changed, if at all, and how they believed freelancers’ routines and norms compared tothose of journalists within their newsrooms.
Of those freelancers interviewed, most reported working for more than one newsorganization and across several platforms including newspapers, magazines, radio pro-grams, websites, and blogs. Two had previously been employed full-time in newsrooms,though only one indicated a desire for a full-time newsroom position. Editors reportedextensive journalistic backgrounds as reporters, copy editors, and section managers. Fourwere employed by metropolitan or national news outlets, two were with smaller or morelocal organizations, and three were working exclusively with online content.
Results
Collectively, the freelancers and editors interviewed here indicated that news organ-izations should be more responsive to audiences who now demand a wide array of parti-cipatory roles in the news process ranging from conversations on social media to theproduction of news content. Freelancers overwhelmingly championed social media plat-forms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as ways to build audiences, create andmaintain personal identities and professional brands, and to construct and repair journal-istic norms. Editors focused more on freelancers’ abilities to fill voids in news content,but noted that freelancers were significantly more attuned to social media. To this point,editors were monitoring freelancers’ social media activities and leaning on insights fromfreelancers to help construct more meaningful forms of audience engagement in the
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newsroom. These findings, which indicate freelancers may now be serving as intrapreneur-ial informants for newsroom editors, provide insights into the self-perceptions and role con-ceptions of freelancers at a time when they are being relied on more than ever.
Freelancers, Social Media, and Authority/Credibility
Freelancers Use Social Media to Build Audiences
All but one freelancer reported using social media daily to “catch up with the news,”“dig up stories,” “find sources,” “gauge reactions to my work,” and “see what everyone elsewas working on.” Most frequently, though, freelancers said they turned to social media tohelp construct and maintain audiences. While some felt that newsrooms hamstrung jour-nalists with restrictive or vaguely threatening guidelines for social media use, all saidthey paid little to no attention to those policies because, as one freelancer put it, “thosearen’t our individual policies.”
In the absence of organizational rules, freelancers were guided by institutional andpersonal regulations. The majority said they followed the tenets of journalism on socialmedia, providing truthful and informative content through an objective lens and in atimely manner. However, those precepts were tempered by individual choices aboutinclusions of opinion, job and life details, and direct engagement with audiences. Morethan half of the freelancers said they coupled news and information with “informedopinions” on social media posts, and all but two freelancers said they included informationand photos about their professional and personal lives. This provided a “connection thathelps people see we’re journalists, and we’re also human beings. We have faces, and wehave dogs, and we have emotions, and we have lives that people can relate to.”
One freelancer called such open connectivity an “absolute must for [freelancers] whowant to stay employed,” arguing that “whoever is looking for us to write a story or create agraphic or whatever is looking at who we are on social media.”Most freelancers shared theperception that connecting with audiences publicly and personally could create more workopportunities. This deviation from social media as only a place for news work to one ofnews work paired with audience work represents the kind of role conception shifts somemedia scholars have argued is necessary for successful navigation of audience engagement(Holton et al. 2015; Lee 2015; Tandoc, Hellmueller, and Vos 2013). If journalists can be archi-tects of networked communities built around news, as some scholars have suggested(Lewis, Holton, and Coddington 2014), then freelancers seem well positioned for the task.
No matter the platform, if there was an opportunity to participate with other users,freelancers said they did their best to incorporate interactions into their daily routines,even if it meant reducing the number of stories they wrote (and assumingly the profitsthose stories might bring). They saw long-term value in creating multi-layered networks(e.g., across different platforms) of individuals who could spread the word about theirwork while improving their own understanding of audience needs and knowledge.Above all else, they saw reciprocation with audiences in the form of information exchangesand public praise as a chance not only to improve their images, but also a means to decon-struct the complexities of information for and with audiences. They welcomed audiences assources, but also as stakeholders in the production of news. They valued their input,answered their critiques, and worked hard to achieve a true measure of what Marchionni(2013) has called the process of “journalism as conversation,” answering, at least in part,
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Lewis’s (2012a, 2012b) suggestion that journalists be more ethically bound to participationwith audiences.
Freelancers Use Social Media to Build Brand/Identity
By personalizing information and loosening their control on content, freelancers saidthey developed themselves as brands specific to their niche topic (i.e., health information),creating a network of potential brand ambassadors along the way. Though they never casttheir connections as brand channels during interviews, they nonetheless reported the roleof branding as part of their professional norms, emphasizing the importance of sustainedengagement with audiences over time.
Freelancers seemed unabashed in the inclusion of branding into their norms, arguingthat just as engagement with audiences served opened more work opportunities, so didbranding empower them as individual entrepreneurs. While all said they lacked thefunds, or even the need, to consistently promote themselves with traditional forms ofadvertising (i.e., banner ads, job-seeking announcements, etc.), most freelancers saidthey branded themselves by “more organic means.” Branding developed through socialmedia bios that displayed their areas of expertise through visuals, hashtags, or keywords.These, along with a consistent sharing of published works through links posted to socialmedia, allowed freelancers to display their professional prowess.
Some media scholars have observed that journalists face a certain degree of anxietywhen attempting to brand themselves through social media, often struggling with how tobalance their personal identities with their professional ones (Molyneux and Holton 2015).However, that sentiment rarely came up in the interviews here. Instead, freelancers seemedto welcome such a challenge, with the vast majority arguing that minus a blend of theirprofessional and personal lives, they would seem “just like every other journalist out there.”
Freelancers Use Social Media to Construct and Repair Norms
Not all journalists took such utopian approaches to social media. Several noted thatby questioning or going against traditional journalism tenets, freelancers risked being seenas disrupters rather than innovators. “There’s an authority in every newsroom,” one freelan-cer argued,
and whether that’s a section editor, a managing editor, or a publisher, that person decideswhat flies and what doesn’t. So if you’re out there pushing boundaries and taking risks onsocial media, and if that authority thinks that doesn’t reflect too well on such and suchpublication, well you’re probably out of luck.
Yet, even that freelancer suggested a certain necessity to test such boundaries,saying, “every time journalism hits a wall, it takes a few lone wolves to pick up thepieces and challenge the old ways.” That sentiment rang true for many of the freelancershere, who said that by listening to and engaging with audiences, they were able to putinto practice more of what news consumers wanted. Time and again, they relied on trans-parency as a norm they were quicker to take up than news organizations. Freelancers saidthat while they believed most journalists, themselves included, sought truthful reportingthrough several means of verification, they were able to use social media to be more trans-parent than others.
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Arguing that not all journalists practice transparency, and emphasizing the sheerlack of engagement in social media they perceived among news organizations, freelancerssaid that they have gravitated toward full transparency by including links to externalinformation and original sources, providing names of contacts and pathways for reachingthem, disclosing any conflicts of interest that might impact their reporting, and answeringquestions about the content of their stories truthfully, accurately, and quickly. To thelatter action, several freelancers said they had more opportunities to confront theirmistakes and correct them publicly ahead of traditional news outlets. Explained by onefreelancer:
I goofed up on this tiny little detail about a lawsuit against the makers of a pacemaker.I told my editor, who got to work on the correction, and hours before I heard backfrom him, I’d posted a correction on my blog and on my Twitter feed. No one reallysaid much, but when I told some other freelancers about it, they said they’d donesimilar things.
Using Freelancers as an Organizational Strategy
Editors Use Freelancers to Fill Gaps
Editors interviewed here all agreed that freelancers had taken on more prominentroles in the news process, helping provide content that would have otherwise been lostto a reduction of resources. Most also agreed that while they initially turned to wire servicesfor content, freelancers were better suited to explore the nuances of specialized areas ofreporting such as health and science. As one editor explained:
You can only squeeze so much out of [those] services before you start seeing the samecontent showing up across the board. That’s where freelancers come into play. The costisn’t really the concern; it’s how do we find unique, engrossing stuff.
This finding is certainly nothing new, and many media scholars have noted the sig-nificant role freelancers have in filling news holes (Ladendorf and Edstrom 2012; Masseyand Elmore 2011). However, the assertion of confidence in freelancers—one enhancedby the consideration that most editors referred to freelancers more inclusively as “journal-ists”—hints as perceptional change among editors. While they have historically been per-ceived as atypical workers, freelancers may be experiencing what Gollmitzer (2014)observed as an institutional turn that positions freelancers and other entrepreneurially spir-ited news professionals as typical workers in the news process.
Editors Use Freelancers Internally as Exemplars
Such a shift helps to explain why editors, or at least those interviewed here, arebeginning to use the work of freelancers as standards for journalists working in theirnewsrooms. For example, editors, who pointed out that many journalists in their news-rooms laud the use of social media as a vehicle for audience engagement withoutnecessarily putting such praise to action, saw the softening of social media anxietyamong freelancers as an informative approach. By pointing to the work of freelancers,editors said they were able to encourage journalists in their newsrooms to follow suit.According to one editor,
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even those traditionalists who say they don’t have time or shouldn’t be asked to take onmore work with audiences don’t put up reasonable arguments when shown [a freelancers]tweeting back and forth with a user who asked a question.
This signals a possible for solution for what Lee (2015) and others have observed as adisconnect between the understanding of social media’s importance and its uses in prac-tice. While journalists have taken up social media for news work, they have been slow toimmerse themselves more fully with audiences—this despite encouragement from theirnews organizations (Lee 2015). Enter freelancers, who can operate in social media spacesand with audiences without fear of organizational repercussion. In this way, they serveas commercial risk assessment tools, providing editors with a means of exploring whatdoes (and does not) work in terms of engagement with little or no cost to newsrooms.
Editors Use Freelancers Externally to Build Audiences
With that in mind, editors said they valued freelancers’ work with audience engage-ment. At a time when metrics and crowd-tracking tools have helped to attract and maintainlarger digital audiences, editors said they continue to struggle with best practices in termsof engagement through SNSs. Here again, freelancers provided a low-cost approach toeasing that concern. Not only did editors take note of how freelancers worked with audi-ences on SNSs, they also encouraged freelancers to link to work housed by their newsorganizations and, in some cases, to promote those organizations through tweets and Face-book posts. Some editors anticipated pushback by offering monetary incentives or thepromise of future work, but others said freelancers required no extra enticements. “Theysee us a way to get their work out there,” said one editor, “so they want to point to it,which points to us. They do great work, they link to us. They do bad work, they typicallydon’t post it.”
Editors also noted the importance of audiences to freelancers. Because freelancershave to answer to audiences who “can alienate them fast enough to cost them a career,”as one editor said, they take time to engage those audiences. Editors reported seeing free-lancers begin or respond to conversations and providing follow-up information or praise totheir followers. Editors argued that these forms of engagement, combined with innovativeefforts with content and storytelling, positioned freelancers as potential solutions to whatmay be a long-term crisis facing newsrooms. According to the editors, if there were gaps incoverage, and if those could be filled by freelancers who were willing to include layeredlevels of audience engagement in their work, then perhaps freelancers might fortify criticalareas of journalism that have withered under a lack of resources in recent years. Further still,they might cultivate larger and more digitally networked audiences at a time when news-rooms are struggling to do so.
Conclusion
This study took up questions about freelance journalists’ norms and role conceptions,paying particular attention to their social media practices and giving voice to editors whomonitor and financially back their work. The findings indicate that freelancers see them-selves as social media engagers, using SNSs to build audiences and brands while reinfor-cing and repairing journalistic norms, including transparency. Editors see these role
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conceptions and enactments as informative, taking lessons from freelancers and applyingthem as exemplars for newsroom journalists and as pathways to enhance engagement withaudiences.
While the results here are notably limited in scope—they consider only the work offreelancers covering a particular specialty (i.e., health) and do not fully examine role enact-ments that are best illustrated through the content freelancers might produce and post tosocial media—they nonetheless uncover important findings about how freelancers seethemselves and exhibit their work and indicate significant shifts in the perceptions ofeditors. Notably, the freelancers in this study were seen as potential innovators in a dramati-cally changing news process, helping to apprise editors, and in turn journalists, of appropri-ate ways to approach social media as a vehicle for news creation and audienceparticipation. This situates freelancers more as intrapreneurial informants—as professionalswho might be informing organizational work and policies.
Whether covering topics of health and science or other areas that have beenimpacted by diminishing resources, freelancers appear to be more receptive than otherjournalists when it comes to facing the challenges presented by social media. Whileother journalists and news organizations continue sluggish approaches to audienceengagement (Lee 2015), freelancers are making use of audiences for traditional newswork and more innovative extensions of brand reinforcement and proof of identity.Rather than rebuke audiences, they appear to be embracing them. This suggests freelan-cers may be catalysts for richer connections with audiences and may be more suitedthan other journalists to become architects of digital networks built around news.
Future studies should work to deepen these results, perhaps by considering how therole conceptions and enactments of freelance journalists are influencing change amongother journalists and news producers. Such studies might give more attention to thetension freelance journalists face when balancing multiple professions and expectationsof editors and news organizations that may be changing in light of more scrutiny. If free-lancers truly are becoming intrapreneurial informants, then undoubtedly their roles as pro-fessional journalists will receive more attention from editors and other newsroominfluentials. How they and those news producers around them respond remains to be seen.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author would like to thank Sue Robinson (University of Wisconsin-Madison) andAngela M. Lee (University of Texas-Dallas) for their valuable input during the development ofthis article.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
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