From gardeners to revolutionaries: The rise of the liquid ethos in political journalism

Abstract

In many newsrooms, journalistic work has increasingly been reorganized in ways that make it more flexible, multi-skilled and assertive, or even ‘liquid’. Empirical studies on liquid journalism, however, are scarce. This article examines how the rise of liquidity can be seen in the work-related ethos of Finnish political journalists. The article is based on 25 in-depth interviews of political journalists. In the findings, three generational groups – the solid moderns, the liquefying moderns, and the liquid moderns – emerge divided roughly by age. These differences reflect a more general change, whereby the organizations of the solid industrial modernity have been flattened and decentralized and, in many professions, the expertise and career prospects have been questioned. In the course of this change, political journalists are developing an anti-institutional and flexible ethos accentuated by opinionated assertiveness – in effect, an ethos of liquid revolutionaries.