Newsworkers A Comparative European Perspective Henrik Rnebring

Newsworkers A Comparative European Perspective
Henrik Rnebring download
https://ebookbell.com/product/newsworkers-a-comparative-european-
perspective-henrik-rnebring-50222438
Explore and download more ebooks at ebookbell.com

Here are some recommended products that we believe you will be
interested in. You can click the link to download.
For The Record An Oral History Of Rochester Ny Newsworkers Bonnie
Brennen
https://ebookbell.com/product/for-the-record-an-oral-history-of-
rochester-ny-newsworkers-bonnie-brennen-51899736
Cisco Networkers
https://ebookbell.com/product/cisco-networkers-1214884
The Pocket Guide For Nervous Networkers Ash Mashhadi
https://ebookbell.com/product/the-pocket-guide-for-nervous-networkers-
ash-mashhadi-56284230
Translation And Fantasy Literature In Taiwan Translators As Cultural
Brokers And Social Networkers Yuling Chung Auth
https://ebookbell.com/product/translation-and-fantasy-literature-in-
taiwan-translators-as-cultural-brokers-and-social-networkers-yuling-
chung-auth-5377402

Newsworkers

Newsworkers
A Comparative European Perspective
Henrik Örnebring
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
L O N D O N • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • S Y D N E Y

Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square
New York London
NY 10018 WC1B 3DP
USA UK
www.bloomsbury.com
BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published 2016
© Henrik Örnebring, 2016
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission
in writing from the publishers.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining
from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury
or the author.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Örnebring, Henrik, author.
Title: Newsworkers : a comparative European perspective / Henrik Örnebring.
Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Series: Comparative
media, communication and culture
Identifiers: LCCN 2015039240 ISBN 9781780931838 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Journalism–Europe. Reporters and reporting–Europe.
BISAC: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Journalism. SOCIAL SCIENCE / Media
Studies.
Classification: LCC PN5110 .O76 2016 DDC 079/.4—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015039240

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Paperback edition ﬁ rst published 2017
ISBN:
HB: 978-1-7809-3183-8
PB: 978-1-5013-3822-9
ePub: 978-1-7809-3184-5
ePDF: 978-1-7809-3185-2

Acknowledgments vi
1 Journalism as Work and Institution 1
2 Institution, Work, and Professionalism: An Analytical Framework 15
3 Six Countries: Background and Empirical Data 39
4 Technology 65
5 Skill 91
6 Autonomy 117
7 Professionalism 155
8 Newswork in Europe: Continuity and Change 177
Methodological Appendix 193
Bibliography 215
Index 239
Contents

This book has been a long time coming. It is based on research I conducted in
2007–10 as Senior Research Fellow at the Axess Programme for Comparative
European Journalism, hosted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism,
University of Oxford. Life happens and now, some five-
odd years later, the book
is finished. All delays and mistakes are of course my own responsibility, but the book would have been a lot worse if it was not for the help and support of a number of people along the way.
First of all, a sincere thank you to Kurt Almqvist and the Axel and Margaret
Ax:son Johnson Foundation, whose generous donation to the Reuters Institute and the University of Oxford made work on this book possible in the first place.
For the duration of the Comparative European Journalism project, my
institutional home was the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to work in the challenging yet supportive environment that is the Reuters Institute, and I would like to thank all members of staff of the Institute past and present who have been instrumental in helping me make this project a success: Rima Dapous, Kate Hanneford-Smith, Angela Julian, Tori McKee, Trevor Mostyn, James Painter, and Alex Reid. Particular thanks are due to the current and former Directors of the Institute, David Levy (2008–) and Sarmila Bose (2006–08), both of whom showed unflagging support and enthusiasm for the project, and John Lloyd, Director of Journalism at the Institute, who was a tremendous help and inspiration in matters large and small throughout the project. Thanks are also due to a number of people associated with the Reuters Institute in different ways, mainly through membership in the Institute Editorial Subcommittee and the Institute Steering Committee. Their input at different stages of the project has been essential, so thanks to Timothy Garton Ash, Antonis Ellinas, Tim Gardham, Geert Linnebank, and Neil McFarlane.
I finished this book at my new institutional home, the Department of
Geography, Media and Communication at Karlstad University, Sweden. It is a very collegiate environment and my work and personal lives have both benefited enormously from friendships formed and maintained here. Thank you in
Acknowledgments

viiAcknowledgments
particular to Christer Clerwall, Karin Fast, André Jansson, Michael Karlsson, and
Johan Lindell.
Over the course of the project, many people have helped me in different ways:
by reading and commenting on my manuscript or parts thereof, by helping
to get access to interviewees, by contributing to the data gathering in other
ways, by translating texts and research material, by offering general research
advice, and so on. My heartfelt thanks (in alphabetical order) to Stuart Allan,
Peter Bajomi-Lázár, Joakim Bjelkås, George Brock, Glenda Cooper, Martin
Degrell, Roger Dickinson, Boguslawa Dobek-Ostrowska, Wolfgang Donsbach
(who is sorely missed), Iginio Gagliardone, Thomas Hanitzsch, Ellen Helsper,
Bengt Johansson, Christiane Kellner, Epp Lauk, Arno Lauk, Johan Lindell,
Matthew Loveless, Paolo Mancini, Claudia Mellado, Monica Löfgren Nilsson,
Gunnar Nygren, Angela Phillips, Thorsten Quandt, Terhi Rantanen, Kristina
Riegert, Inka Salovaara, Phillip Schlesinger, Václav Štetka, David Weaver, Lennart
Weibull, and Jan Zielonka.
I would also like to reserve a special thanks to my hard-
working research
assistants, who greatly and independently contributed to the high quality of the research interviews on which this project is based. Thank you very much to Alessio Cornia (Italy), Leyla Dogruel (Germany), Maret Einsmann (Estonia), and Katarzyna Kopecka-Piech (Poland). Thanks also to Paul Watts and the staff at Redshift Research who did a tremendous job in managing the email survey so well from beginning to end. And of course thank you to all the journalists who took the time to fill in my survey, and all the journalists that gave generously of their time in the interviews.
To write is human, to edit is divine. I have been gifted with two truly divine
editors, Katie Gallof and Mary Al-Sayed, whose patience has been near-

inexhaustible during this book’s long journey towards publication. Thank you
for your help and support.
Considering when I started working on it, this book is older than my two
children, Charlotte and John. If the eldest (metaphorical) sibling has caused me many headaches, heartaches and sundry problems, the two younger (actual) ones have been nothing but a source of joy and inspiration, and I am humbly thankful for their presence in my life. I am also very grateful for the continuing love and support of my wife and now colleague at Karlstad University, Elizabeth Van Couvering. Yes, it is indeed important to slack off and have fun once in a while.
I dedicate this book to the memory of my grandmother Eva Thåström.
She lived through two World Wars and in her lifetime saw (and heard!) the

viii
introduction of radio, television, Internet, and smartphones before she passed
away, aged 101, in 2011. Her lived experience of changing media landscapes puts
the changes described in this book in perspective.
Karlstad, September, 2015
Henrik Örnebring
Acknowledgments

1
Journalism as Work and Institution
In 1931, C. F. Carr and F. E. Stevens, two British provincial newspaper veterans
(Carr was assistant manager at Southern Newspapers and Stevens editor of the
Hampshire Advertiser), published a guide for aspiring journalists titled Modern
Journalism: A Complete Guide to the Newspaper Craft. The purpose of Carr &
Stevens’ book was to provide some background, career information, and practical
advice for people considering a career in journalism. At the outset, it was made
clear that this was not as straightforward as advising people seeking a career
in, say, business or law (Carr and Stevens’ publisher, Isaac Pitman & Sons, had
published numerous similar guidebooks for those two sectors), because:
[I]t boils down to this: that the term journalist is much too ill-
defined, and one
of the special needs of the profession is that it should be defined with greater
precision, not as a means of restricting entry, but in order that there should be
less looseness in its application.
Carr & Stevens, 1931: 29
And furthermore:
It is obviously true, too, that there are many journalists, using the word in strict
regard to its derivation, who have never practiced writing for the journals at all,
because they could not find their way in through a door, which is, in truth, wide
enough, but which is admittedly difficult to locate.
Carr & Stevens: 30.
From a contemporary perspective, Carr and Stevens’ concerns and characterizations
of the occupation are instantly recognizable. There’s too much looseness regarding
who should be considered a journalist, and you can call yourself a journalist even if
you do not have a job in a journalistic organization (i.e., “writing for the journals”).
Discussions and debates over who should be considered a journalist (and
what types of texts should be considered journalism) resurface continually in
our digital, networked age, but Carr and Stevens remind us that such concerns

Newsworkers2
are not new. In fact, “Journalism is an open profession, and such in all probability
it must and will remain” (Carr & Stevens, 1931: 3). Journalism was always an
attractive profession precisely because the formal barriers to entry were low to
non-
existent.
In reading Carr and Stevens’ remarks on the boundaries (or rather, the lack of
them) of journalism, their text has a contemporary feel. In other key aspects, they are describing a journalistic world that no longer exists. “Don’t neglect handwriting” is a piece of advice for budding journalists (Carr & Stevens, 1931: 17) that seems less than useful in an era of ubiquitous laptops, tablets, and smartphones. On entering into the profession, they write “It is agreed – the opinion is held almost universally – that the best entrance to the profession of journalism is through the doorway of the provincial newspaper” (p. 3). In contemporary Britain, this “universal” career path is virtually closed, as there are hardly any provincial newspapers anymore. Those that do exist have skeletal staff and the majority of content is likely produced in a central office in London or elsewhere rather than in the “province” itself (Hamer, 2006; Williams, 2006). Carr and Stevens also devote a whole section to the technology of newspaper typesetting and printing (“Newspaper production: what the journalist should know,” pp. 154–187), information that no contemporary journalist needs in order to do his or her job.
These are obvious points, but it is useful to remind ourselves that while the
technical and economic conditions of journalistic production change—often profoundly—the fundamentally liminal, boundary-
less character of journalistic
work and journalism as a profession, does not.
Indeed the actual practices of journalistic work are somewhat harder to pin
down in Carr and Stevens’ work. Their book is written as advice to those seeking to enter the profession of journalism but contains little concrete information of what the person, having entered the profession, is expected to do all day except “find news.” Reading between the lines, however, it is possible to learn a great deal about what journalistic work actually consists of. News is fact-
oriented and
the job is to find, confirm, and disseminate these facts according to established principles. In this, Carr and Stevens’ work is typical of its time, as noted by Vos in his study of the construction of objectivity in early journalism education (Vos, 2012: 439f). Journalistic work consists of quickly and accurately taking notes, using shorthand and/or longhand (Carr & Stevens, 1931: 15f), finding information in reference books, catalogs and registers (p. 21f; p. 86), moving about the city and interacting with established sources/sites of news like police, courts, and other public buildings (p. 36; p. 129f), even memorizing key

Journalism as Work and Institution 3
faces and names (p. 120). An important part of the daily work is also meeting
sources, interviewing them, and more generally cultivating them (p. 123f; p. 131):
journalism is a social occupation. Then finally, these assembled facts need to be
written up in an accessible fashion using a correct, simple and inviting style
(p. 136f).
Thus we can see that while many institutional aspects of journalism (e.g.,
market structures, career paths and career opportunities, and technological
production) have changed a great deal since the 1930s, the basic nature of
journalistic work has not. Most journalists today would agree that at heart,
journalistic work as described by Carr and Stevens is not too different today. The
need for note taking may be less thanks to digital recording technology and the
sources of information may be found using Google rather than Whitaker’s
Almanack, but news is still made mainly in interaction with various public
organizations and by talking to sources.
There is, however, a growing concern that as the institutional framework of
journalism is changing, so too is the nature of journalistic practice. More content
has to be produced using fewer resources, inevitably leading to changed or new
practices like cut-
and-paste journalism, increases in single-source news items,
and so on. Yet as we have seen, many aspects of journalistic work are the same today as they were in 1931. The purpose of this book is to delve into and assess this tension between continuity and change in journalism, on the institutional level as well as on the level of working practice.
Definitions and historical starting points
This is a book studying how journalism as work is affected by changes in
journalism as an institution, using a comparative perspective (the nations under
analysis are Britain, Estonia, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Sweden). My use of the term institution merges aspects from political science and economics, i.e., an emphasis on formal organizations, as well as from sociology and history, i.e., an emphasis on organized, shared, and established patterns for action (for overviews on different definitions of the concept of institution, and how it is used in different disciplines, see for example Berger & Luckmann, 1966: 97f; Meyer & Rowan, 1977: 343f; Jepperson, 1991; Ryfe, 2006). I view journalism as an institution as the shared norms and routines of news production as created and
maintained by a specific and historically contingent set of organizations (e.g.,
newspapers, news agencies, broadcasters, but also professional organizations like

Newsworkers4
journalists’ unions and associations). Following a new institutionalist perspective,
the path-dependency and therefore the history of journalism as an institution
are of key importance when analysing and attempting to understand the present (again, see Ryfe, 2006: 137f).
By journalism-
as-work, I refer to the everyday practical activities undertaken
by individuals who produce journalistic content. Commonly, this work takes place within the framework of some type of paid-
for contractual employment, be it
permanent or temporary, but this is not absolutely necessary. In the modern era, some journalistic work is done without direct compensation and outside any contractual agreement between an employer and an employee. This distinction is important as I prefer to start from the notion that journalism is an activity, rather than a particular group of people. That is to say, journalism-
as-work can
be performed (and often is performed) by people who are not employed by news
organizations.
Both of these definitions, the latter one in particular, make some reference
to journalism as content or text. Both definitions thus beg the question of what
it is, exactly, that these institutions are a framework for, and what it is, exactly,
that journalists are thought to work on or with. These are fair questions. Many
different activities fit under the conceptual umbrella “journalism”: long-form
reportage, op-ed pieces, brief and almost purely informational news items (“nibs”
or “news in brief” in British parlance), sports news, entertainment news, features, news photography, literary criticism, and so on.
For the purposes of this study, I equate journalism largely with newsgathering,
and journalism-
as-text largely with news. Journalism-as-work thus includes
finding the news (i.e., consulting and checking relevant sources), selecting the
news (i.e., deciding on what to present and not present to the news consumers), and presenting the news (i.e., the production of actual news items by writing,
editing, filming, and recording, and so on). This definition of journalism-
as-
newsgathering (and thus of journalism as the production of news) is broadly consistent with a large body of work on journalism as a profession where many studies view journalism as an occupation engaged in rule-
bound information
gathering and presentation of said information (Chalaby, 1998; Elliott, 1978; Golding & Elliott, 1979; Schudson, 1978; Tuchman, 1978: 2f). This definition also resonates with self-
definitions among journalists: most journalists, when asked,
state that gathering and presenting information is one of their key professional tasks (Weaver, 1998b; Weaver & Wilhoit, 1986). Returning to Carr and Stevens, it was self-
evident to them that journalism was equivalent to news gathering, and
that this news gathering followed particular routines:

Journalism as Work and Institution 5
The man in the street doesn’t know it, but the unvarnished truth is that journalists
do not happen by chance upon the news which is daily gathered together for the
public edification. It has to be anticipated, prepared for, and followed up, and
the greatest virtue of all in a newsman is anticipation.
Carr & Stevens, 1931: 119
However, while I have mostly interviewed traditional newsgatherers and news
editors as part of this project, I have also made sure to interview other types of
journalists precisely in order to capture the multifaceted nature of journalistic
work—my sample (on which more in Chapter 3) also includes sports journalists,
feature specialists, a journalist specializing in news for children and young
people, and a few columnists. So while the focus is on news and newsgathering,
the scope of the study is such that a somewhat broader view is required. One of
the ongoing changes in journalism-
as-work and in journalism-as-institution is
indeed that forms of journalism other than traditional “hard news” are expanding, and thus more and more journalists are engaged in producing journalism that does not conform to the “ideal” picture of what journalism is and should be.
Continuing the institutionalist analysis, in which initial developments
surrounding the formation of institutions are thought to have greater impact than later developments and events (Ryfe, 2006: 137), we can see that historically there used to be a clear link between journalism as an activity practiced by individuals, and a particular type of organization. Journalism was done in news organizations—daily papers, news agencies, broadcast organizations. Individuals engaged in a set of practices that took place within an organizational framework, and the practice as well as the organizations, were ascribed a societal role—a societal role that was often vague and ambiguous, but was generally understood to have something to do with democracy. In law as well as culture, journalism was enshrined as an institution that fulfilled a key function or set of functions in democratic society. Conferring upon journalism a democratic role gave journalism as an organized practice a measure of social status. This link, however, was and is historically contingent. It was not always in place, it emerged gradually over time, and now it seems like it is gradually disappearing.
Most of the practices and ideas we associate with “journalism” as an occupation
came into being, or began to come into being, in the era of the daily mass newspaper (i.e., the mid-
to-late nineteenth century). The daily mass newspaper relied on
advertising revenue as much as or more than it did on circulation and thus needed a separate advertising department, organizationally separated from editorial, to handle the sales, placement, and administration of advertising. Journalism became embedded within a context of commercial content production for a mass market,

Newsworkers6
and dependent on more complex and multi-layered organizational forms. This is
not to say that journalism became entirely subsumed under this context—indeed,
one of the key goals of early drives to professionalize journalism through the
creation of professional bodies and trade unions was to preserve the occupational
independence or autonomy of journalists. Despite the fact that the daily mass
newspaper was a commercial enterprise, the view was that journalists should to
some extent be isolated and separated from commercial concerns—hence the
emergent and vigorous defense of the separation between advertising and editorial
departments, for example.
The institutional base for journalism that took shape in the Industrial Age still
forms the template for much of the common-
sense understanding of journalism
as an activity—and for the self-understanding of journalists. When broadcasting
came along in the 1920s and 1930s, notions of what journalists should do and not do in Western democracies were already well-
developed. Schudson and
others hold that what we see as the “modern” or even “high modern” view of the role of the journalist (i.e., the watchdog and purveyor of objective facts) was more or less fully developed around this time (Cronin, 1993; Schudson, 1978, 1995). The framework of professionalism developed within the context of the commercial press fit with broadcasting, too. The institutional base was strong and stable enough to accommodate new media forms without the basic work tasks and perceived societal role of journalism changing much. Broadcast journalists had to deal with a different set of format considerations than their print colleagues, but their professional role was not seen as fundamentally different. And there was notably no discussion of whether radio or television journalists were “real” journalists or whether what they were doing constituted “real” journalism.
Newswork in crisis?
Today, this strong and stable institutional base does not exist anymore. Commercial news media, print as well as broadcast, have seen their advertising revenue fall and audiences dwindle. Charging for content online has proven to be at best a stop-
gap measure that works well only for a few, globally recognized
news brands. In many countries there has been what can only be described as massive layoffs in the news industry, particularly in the wake of the global financial crisis in 2008–09. Though over the past 30 or 40 years newsrooms have not necessarily gotten smaller, they have had to produce more and more content

Journalism as Work and Institution 7
for more and more platforms. Outside the commercial sector, public service
broadcasting has also seen resources diminish in the wake of long-running
deregulation programs and increased competition from commercial providers. Media provision in general has exploded across a range of platforms and the general media landscape of today can best be described as hyper-
competitive:
alongside the traditional outlets of commercial daily newspaper and terrestrial broadcasting (public and private, radio and TV), there is now satellite broadcasting, cable networks, daily freesheets, and of course the many and varied news outlets available online. On the advertising market, news organizations now compete with companies outside the traditional media sector—and lose. According to 2010 estimates, Google’s share of the global online advertising market is 44 percent (Zenith OptiMedia, 2011). The institution of journalism is no longer by necessity tied to specific organizations, and nor can it rely on the business models that have sustained it in the past. Subsidy by advertisers (the business model of privately owned news organizations) is increasingly unstable and the subsidies available cannot cover costs. Subsidy by government (the model of public service broadcasting) is increasingly under question and by many viewed as politically unsustainable.
All these developments have led observers to talk of a crisis in the news
industry. The shift in the institutional base of journalism has certainly had consequences for journalism as an occupation. While journalism was often viewed as a bohemian occupation, most journalists could count on a relatively high degree of job and career security. Many journalists spent their entire professional life within one and the same news organization. In many countries, particularly in Western Europe, journalist unions and associations were strong and influential and helped guarantee a measure of professional stability and continuity. Again focusing on Western Europe, both commercial news organizations and public service broadcasters were strong actors with a great degree of autonomy from the state, often able to exert a strong influence over policymaking in the media field.
Today, news is increasingly produced by freelancers and stringers (Walters,
Warren, & Dobbie, 2006) and membership numbers in unions and associations are falling. Careers and jobs are uncertain and precarious rather than secure. Free labor at entry level to the profession is increasingly demanded. In many countries—the UK in particular—a traditional career path into journalism, where you would start at a small local newspaper at a young age and then work your way up to the national dailies or national broadcasting, has all but disappeared, as noted earlier in this chapter. Outsourcing, something that has

Newsworkers8
always existed in the news industry (mainly in the shape of freelancing and
various news and photo agencies), is now becoming increasingly extensive
as news organizations move some content production overseas where labor is
cheap—Journatic, a company which specializes in producing local content for
many US newspapers, employs many writers and researchers based in the
Philippines (Tarkov, 2012).
The changes in the institutional base of journalism have not only led to
extensive changes in the occupation of journalism as a whole but are also
generally considered to have changed the nature and character of journalistic
practice, i.e., the work of journalism. Scholars and practitioners alike have debated
these changes extensively in recent years—the following is a non-
exhaustive list
of concerns over changes in journalistic work commonly seen as directly caused by the aforementioned changes in the institutional base of journalism:
l the concern over decreasing spending on “hard news.” In the UK, the Daily Mirror did away with the post of foreign editor a few years ago (Brook, 2008), for example, and in general many news organizations no longer have the resources for in-
depth reporting (Currah, 2009: 129f).
l the rise of PR and its power over the news (Curtin, 1999; Davis, 2002, 2008; Lewis, Williams, & Franklin, 2008)—as newsroom resources dwindle, news organizations will be more dependent on PR material.
l the rise of so-
called “churnalism,” where journalists are required to produce
more content with fewer resources and to repackage it for many different media platforms (Davies, 2008).
l the concern that journalists are being transformed into general “content providers” rather than active newsgatherers (Nygren, 2008; Ursell, 2004).
l the casualization of labor in journalism and rise of freelance journalism— where many journalists may produce news one day and PR material the next (Krašovec & Žagar, 2009; Storey, Salaman, & Platman, 2005; Walters, Warren, & Dobbie, 2006).
l the concern that in an online environment, amateurism pushes out professionalism, opinion pushes out facts and objectivity, insult and aggressiveness push out rational debate, and that “clickable” content pushes out quality journalism (Barton, 2005; Karlsson & Clerwall, 2013; Keen, 2007).
l the concern that the diminished resources of news organizations will effectively mean the end of investigative reporting and the watchdog

Journalism as Work and Institution 9
function performed by journalism (Currah, 2009; Downie & Schudson,
2009; Greenwald & Bernt, 2000).
l the concern that mobile and mobilizing technologies in fact seem to lead to
an increase in “desk-
bound” journalism, where many journalists never leave
the office in search for stories (Deuze & Fortunati, 2010; Paulussen, 2012).
And yet despite these concerns we are still left to wonder how much journalism has really changed. Hampton describes an obsession with time compression and a speed-
over-quality mindset in journalism stretching as far back as the late
nineteenth century (Hampton, 2004). Rosten was concerned about the over-
reliance on PR material among Washington journalists as early as the 1930s
(Rosten, 1937). And journalism has to a large degree always been desk-bound;
the early mass press relied on clippings from other newspapers, assembled at the editor’s desk, a job not too dissimilar from the one done by David Manning White’s likewise desk-
bound wire editor Mr. Gates (White, 1950). And so on. In
the end, the question of how journalistic work has changed is empirical rather than normative, and a lot of the data available is anecdotal rather than systematic. There is still a need of empirical data on journalistic work and work practices in the face of institutional change.
The case for cross-
national comparison
Importantly, the studies cited in the list of concerns in the preceding section also come from different countries and therefore different media contexts and landscapes. The dismantling of the institutional base of journalism has arguably gone the farthest in the US (extrapolating from figures in the 2013 State of
the News Media survey from Pew, US daily newspapers alone—not counting television, weeklies, and other news organizations—have lost about 30 percent of their workforce between 1989 and 2012; see Pew, 2013), and thus concerns over concomitant deterioration of journalistic working standards are often voiced much more strongly in the US debate. Few other countries are seeing the fast and wholesale disappearance of a particular news medium, the metropolitan daily newspaper.
In other parts of the world, news organizations—in particular daily
newspapers—are thriving. India is the world’s largest newspaper market in terms of circulation and also has the highest number of paid-
for daily newspapers (over
2,000) of any country in the world (WAN, 2011). In fact, newspaper markets in

Newsworkers10
most so-c
South Africa, and Indonesia, are growing (OECD, 2010). The trend of erosion of
the institutional base of journalism is a largely Western one.
Yet there is still plenty of variance even within the Western context. An
example: Swedish and Finnish journalists and media observers have the same
debates about the (economic) crisis of news organizations as in the UK, yet
compared to the UK, things are not as gloomy. Both Sweden and Finland have
seen an estimated drop in newspaper revenue: of 7 percent in the 2007–09
period, whereas the UK has experienced thrice that drop, or 21 percent (Nielsen
& Levy, 2010: 6). As mentioned earlier, local and regional media, in particular
daily newspapers, are weakening and even disappearing in the UK, but continue
to exist (if not flourish) as important institutions of local and regional journalism
in Scandinavia.
In short, what is true about journalism as work and institution in one country
may not necessarily be true in another. While many of the trends described here
are transnational (casualization of labor, rise of cross-
platform production,
decrease in “hard news,” etc.), they manifest differently in different national and regional contexts. This is only to be expected considering that the “institutional base” of journalism has been historically constituted in quite different ways across the world.
The historical developments described in the preceding section (the emergence
of journalism as a distinct occupation working within a particular normative framework and using a specific set of practices, all linked to the emergence of the mass press in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries) are broadly “Western.” But as noted, there is considerable variation within “The West.” This book follows a recent spate of interest in comparative European studies of media in general and journalism in particular (for overviews of such research, see Örnebring, 2009, 2012) that more or less originated with Hallin & Mancini’s much-
quoted and
influential work on comparing media systems in the Western European and North American context (Hallin & Mancini, 2004). When tracing the differences between media systems in these regions, Hallin and Mancini take the different historical trajectories of the nations under analysis as their starting point. While it is journalism as an institution that is the focus of Hallin and Mancini’s analysis, their findings also have implications for how changes in journalistic working practices should be interpreted.
Briefly, Hallin and Mancini identify three distinct media systems in Western
Europe and North America: an Anglo-American or Liberal system, a Northern European or Democratic-
corporatist system, and a Southern European or

Journalism as Work and Institution 11
Polarized pluralist system (the following characterizations are based largely
on Hallin & Mancini, 2004: 66–86). The Anglo-American system, with a focus
on media competition, liberal ideology, and a strong focus on factual/objective
reporting (see also Chalaby, 1998), is strongly linked to the early emergence
of a vigorous, independent, and above all profitable mass press. The Northern
European system is likewise based on an early, strong mass press, but where
capitalist competition was tempered by likewise strong links between the press
and other organized societal interests, notably political parties. This in turn
led to a somewhat different understanding of the journalistic mission, i.e., a
stronger emphasis on the societal responsibility of the journalist. The Southern
European system, finally, is based on a relatively weak and late-
emerging mass
press where news organizations, and therefore journalism, were to a great degree instrumentalized by political interests. While Northern European party papers could be and still are reasonably neutral in terms of news selection, within the polarized pluralist system there is a much higher acceptance of journalists as partisan actors.
There are, of course, many more differences than these—Hallin and Mancini
also point out, for example, that journalism in the Southern European tradition is much more of a literary and cultural profession than elsewhere, with an emphasis on the essay style and personal commentary rather than distanced reporting focused on factuality (Hallin & Mancini, 2004: 90–97; again, also see Chalaby, 1998).
Based just on this simple tripartite ideal type model, we can therefore expect
differences between “Western” countries in how journalism may be affected by the continued weakening of an institutional base where the mass market newspaper historically was the dominant organizational form. For example, in the Anglo-American system the institutional independence of journalism has historically been very strongly associated with being a successful actor on a competitive market. One possible difference may be that ideals and notions of independence become more difficult to sustain or even articulate as the market itself begins to collapse; whereas Northern European countries may be more insulated against this trend thanks to a construction of independence that more explicitly recognizes journalism as a political entity, part of a network of other political institutions rather than outside it. It may also be that concerns over an increase in desk-
bound journalism are less marked in countries where
desk-bound journalism (i.e., commentary, debate, editorials) historically has
been more valued and more prominent than reporting, e.g., in Southern Europe. And so on.

Newsworkers12
A comparative European study of newswork
This book presents a comparative European perspective on contemporary
newswork. Following Przeworski and Teune, the comparative strategy is thus
a most-similar systems design, i.e., one where the aim is to discover and analyze
features and factors that are different among similar cases (Przeworski & Teune, 1970: 31f). Since the analytical concern is with how journalistic work has been affected by changes in the institutional base of journalism, it makes sense to select cases where the institutional base has followed similar historical trajectories, and where the political context in general terms is similar.
Compared to the US or the BRICS countries, “Europe” may in these regards
be viewed as a homogeneous entity, a region suitable for selection of cases for a most-
similar system design. If we further limit ourselves to the nations that
are members of the EU (thus sharing an important transnational framework for cooperation and legislation), the basic political similarities become more obvious: all twenty-eight EU members are stable parliamentary democracies with far-
reaching media freedoms, often enshrined in the nations’ respective
constitutions, where such exist.
In terms of media institutions and media landscapes, the differences are
greater but as a region, Europe also exhibits some key common features. Print media are organized according to free-
market principles and have great de jure as
well as de facto freedom from state interference. Alongside the press and online
offerings there are also (partly or fully) state-funded public service broadcasters
that historically have played a great role in defining journalism as a societal institution. This strong position of public service broadcasting differentiates Europe from the USA, where public broadcasting is marginal, and the BRICS countries, where it is either marginal and/or heavily compromised by direct state influence. Finally, it may also be argued that Europe shares a kind of “normative heritage” when it comes to defining the societal role of journalism. The idea that journalism “has something to do with democracy,” as I asserted earlier in this text, is a Western idea—a desirable one, perhaps, and one that holds currency far outside the part of the world where it originated, but one that has a specific geographical provenance nevertheless. In the bare-
bones version, this societal
role consists of providing information to the citizenry, fulfilling some type of watchdog function, and also functioning as a kind of public arena for debate and discussion. While this conception of journalism’s societal role is arguably Anglo- American (rather than generically “Western”) in origin, there is now ample evidence that demonstrates that this normative heritage is shared by journalists

Journalism as Work and Institution 13
globally and by European journalists specifically (see for example Hanitzsch
et al., 2011).
It is true that in roughly half of Europe, journalism was largely a form of
propaganda as late as 20 years ago. The impact of the shared normative heritage
on post-
communist Europe is however clearly evident in media policy decisions
during the transition years: the policy goal was to create a “Western” media system with a competitive press complemented by a state-
funded but formally
independent public broadcaster. It may well be argued that this transition has been less than successful (as many have done, e.g., Balcytiene, 2012; Dobek- Ostrowska, 2012; Jakubowicz, 2007), but the fact remains that policymakers by and large wished to be part of this Western shared normative heritage of
journalism, and attempted to mold their media systems to fit it.
In the end, six European nations have been selected for comparative analysis.
These are, in alphabetical order, Britain, Estonia, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Sweden. Using Hallin and Mancini’s terms, Britain represents the Anglo-American media system, Germany and Sweden the Northern European media system, and Italy the Southern European system. Estonia and Poland are Eastern European and thus were not included in Hallin & Mancini’s original model, but as I have argued, a most-
similar systems design based on contemporary Europe should
also include post-communist Europe. These nations are part of the same
supranational political framework, they share the same basic system of democratic government, and the legislative framework for media is guided by similar normative principles.
The six nations thus share key basic similarities in terms of political framework
and media landscapes but, as noted, we may also expect some variance in the dimensions under analysis. Between them, the six countries represent North and South, East and West, large and small. They provide a rich and varied picture of the current state of the relationship between journalism-
as-work and journalism-
as-institution in Europe.
Outline of the book
This introduction has laid out the scope and thrust of the book, and presented the key issues to be investigated. The next chapter, Institution, Work, and
Professionalism: An Analytical Framework, will present the four theoretical and
empirical dimensions used to connect journalism-
as-institution to journalism-as-
work: technology, skill, autonomy, and professionalism. Chapter 3, Six Countries:

Newsworkers14
Background and Empirical Data, provides an introduction to journalism and
media landscapes in the six nations studied for the reader who may not be familiar
with the media contexts of these countries. This chapter also contains a brief
presentation of the empirical material on which the book is based.
The following four chapters are empirical chapters that each describe and
analyze a key aspect of the context of newswork. Chapter 4, on technology, deals
with how information and communication technologies are used (and not used)
in journalistic work and how journalists in different countries, different positions,
and on different beats integrate technology in their working practices. Chapter 5
is on skill and analyzes the skill demands on journalists in a rapidly changing
media landscape, as well as looking at the skills valued by journalists themselves
and how these valued skills differ between countries. Chapter 6 tackles the issue
of autonomy, focusing in particular on the processes of “politicization” and
“commercialization,” the autonomy to select and cover the news, and on the issue
of journalistic corruption. Chapter 7 focuses on professionalism and attempts to
deconstruct journalistic accounts of professionalism by comparing quantitative
findings on journalists’ perceptions of their professional role with qualitative
findings on how the notion of “professional” is defined by journalists, among
other things in relation to “citizen journalists” and other amateur producers of
news material.
Finally Chapter 8, the concluding chapter, draws on the findings from the
previous four chapters to present some conclusions about the nature and character
of the changes in journalistic work, and assess in which areas national differences
are salient and in which areas they are not.
At the end of the book, there is also a Methodological Appendix that presents
in detail how the interviews and the email survey were conducted, along with a
brief discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of a multi-
method approach.

2
Institution, Work, and Professionalism:
An Analytical Framework
Journalism-
as-institution, to reiterate, is the shared norms and routines of news
production as created and maintained by a set of organizations, and journalism-
as-work are the everyday practical activities undertaken by individuals who
produce journalistic content. Using a quantitative terminology, I treat journalism-
as-institution as my independent variable and journalism-as-work as the
dependent variable: it is the latter variable that is to be explained with reference
to the former. The institutional side of journalism broadly refers to the social,
economic, and cultural context in which journalistic work takes place. The social
context in turn refers to the different established ways in which journalists are
socialized as members of the institution (e.g., education, workplace socialization);
the economic context refers to the financial–structural conditions under which
the set of organizations that form journalism-
as-institution operate (i.e., a shared
framework of capitalist production characterized by intense competition, but with some space and legitimacy for public funding models); and the cultural context refers to the shared norms regarding journalisms’ role in society and to the way in which journalists are represented in and through various cultural forms.
Linking institution and work
When you are hired as a journalist by a news organization, you do not come into your new workplace “naked,” i.e., without any idea about what you are expected to do. Education, media representations, and previous experience have exposed every new employee to the established patterns of action and shared norms that constitute journalism-
as-institution, and these established patterns and shared
norms may already have been naturalized. There is an expectation not only of what you are to do, but also of what you are expected to be (in relation to

Newsworkers16
co-w
institutionally bounded work is a key explanation for why journalists often
report high workplace autonomy (see Weaver & Willnat, 2012 for some recent
comparative examples), yet journalistic content ends up being so similar across
different media outlets (see for example Jönsson, 2004). If journalists are allowed
to do what they want at work, how come they all choose to do the same things?
The explanation is of course that if journalism-
as-institution is strong, i.e., if
there are strong established practices, norms, and routines, then journalists can be given a great degree of workplace autonomy because they can be trusted to “do the job”. They know the institutionalized routines and will not lightly act against existing norms or use wildly divergent practices. Key values (e.g., on what constitutes news) and routines (e.g., of fact checking through extensive reliance on official, bureaucratic sources) are shared. The new employee will (normally) not just disappear from the newsroom for six weeks in order to work on his or her dream story on corruption in the Guatemalan aviation sector but instead attend morning meetings, pitch stories that have at least a chance of being accepted by the editor, cover what he or she is told to cover as he or she agrees that it is news and therefore should be covered, and so on. The idea that journalism-
as-institution explains journalism-as-work and not the other way
around is well known and well grounded in research that stretches back decades (e.g., Bantz, 1985; Breed, 1955; Cottle & Ashton, 1999; Preston, 2009; Ryfe, 2006; Sigelman, 1973; Tuchman, 1978; Tunstall, 1971).
The argument often advanced by practitioners as well as scholars is that
institutional change in journalism also has led to changes in working practices (as exemplified by the list of concerns presented in Chapter 1). On a very basic level, this is of course true. For example, one key institutional change in journalism over the past 20 years is the introduction of various new technologies (e.g., Internet, mobile devices, highly portable digital recorders for audio and video), and journalists have had to learn how to use tools that simply did not exist before. This change is perceived by many—scholars and practitioners alike—to be perhaps the central challenge to professional journalism as
traditionally understood. New technologies have changed the way news is distributed (Newman, 2011); changed the structure of the advertising market on which many news organizations relied for a large portion of their revenue (Picard, 2008); changed the way news products and individual news items are produced (Singer, 2004a), requiring journalists to be skilled in a variety of production technologies (Avilés, León, Sanders, & Harrison, 2004); created new affordances, possibilities and limitations for traditional journalistic work tasks

Institution, Work, and Professionalism 17
such as research (Machill & Beiler, 2009); created entirely new work tasks and
work areas in journalism (Bakker, 2014)—and so on.
Note that I am talking here about the very pervasive perception that
technology has fundamentally changed newswork in and of itself; such a view is
highly deterministic and ignores all the social, cultural, and economic factors
that affect technology adoption and use. But it is still clear that the introduction
of new technologies is an institutional change affecting working practices in a
very straightforward way: before, something did not exist (or at least was not
widely diffused), and now, it does exist and journalists have to learn how to use
it. In this sense there is no fundamental difference between the introduction of
the Internet into the journalistic workplace and the introduction of the ballpoint
pen or typewriter. But of course scholarship and debate goes beyond this basic
level. The assumption is that the introduction of new technologies also alters the
very nature of journalistic work in some way. Regardless of how we view and
understand the role technology plays in relation to journalism-
as-institution
and journalism-as-work, we can agree that the notion of technology as a strong
agent of change is widespread, and we will return to this notion later.
In a similar fashion, another area where institutional change impacts on
working practices in a very obvious way is the previously mentioned massive decrease in the number of people employed by news organizations on a full-
time
permanent basis. Many of the organizations that make up the institution of journalism have experienced severe financial problems and therefore cut staff. The impact on working practices is immediate and obvious: there are fewer people being paid full-
time salaries doing journalistic work. And again,
researchers and commentators see further implications: as fewer people are being paid full-
time salaries, so too are more people being paid tiny sums, often
on a per-item basis, to produce content that is packaged and sold as journalism
(this is the business model of the US company Demand Media; for example, see
Spangler, 2010; also Bakker, 2012; Deuze, 2009), leading in turn to the devaluation of journalistic work as a whole (Witschge & Nygren, 2009).
The causal link between institutional change and changes in working practices
in journalism is thus obvious—but also dubious. For example, a common trope in the analysis of these changes is the compression of time: that various institutional changes (notably the introduction of new technologies, but also the increased competition on the media market) have created more hectic working conditions, where journalists have to produce more content in less time than before. The work of Preston (2009) can be seen as typical in this regard: “The one aspect which was almost universally emphasized by our interviewees concerned

Newsworkers18
the extent to which technology changes had contributed to a marked quickening
in the pace of news gathering and dissemination, with some suggesting that this
had changed almost beyond recognition in a relatively short period” (Preston,
2009: 69, see also p. 66, 166f). I do not suggest that we should doubt what these
interviewees are saying, but it is also striking how this concern over technology
leading to increased time pressures has always been a part of journalistic
discourse (again, see for example Hampton, 2004: 90f on the late nineteenth
century, or Schlesinger’s characterization of the “stopwatch culture” at the BBC
in the 1970s and 1980s, Schlesinger 1987: 93). Indeed in a commentary on
Hampton’s work, media historian Joel Wiener points out that the demand for
speed largely has been internal to journalism-
as-institution rather than imposed
by any external factor, technological or otherwise (Wiener in Hampton et al., 2006: 81f); i.e., it was a demand that had more to do with how the institution viewed itself and how it worked to address its various audiences.
Thus, while on some level it is obvious that institutional change causes
changes in work practices, it is also true that there are many things described by journalism scholars as “drastic, all-
encompassing change” (cf. Preston, 2009) that
would more accurately be described as “intensification (or slowing down) of long-
established patterns.” The time frame of comparison is in historical terms
often rather short. Concern over cut-and-paste practices in contemporary news
production (as in Davies, 2008: 52f, based on Lewis, Williams & Franklin, 2008), legitimate though it is, also ignores that cutting and pasting from other sources for a long time simply was what journalists did (see for example Jarlbrink, 2009, 2015). Cutting and pasting from other sources was a practice that was once central to journalistic work, then gradually became less central (or perhaps just less transparent), and which is now coming to the fore again.
These central interactions between the institutional and workplace levels of
journalism—the evolution of professional training and professional socialization that ensures standardization and predictability; the role of technology as a mediator between these two levels; the impact of the collapse/weakening of established business models on industry employment structures; the institutionalized character of time pressures in the journalistic workplace—all converge in the concept of professionalism. What does it mean to be a professional
(i.e., to work in a way that is considered “professional” by your peers and by the surrounding society) at a time when the institutional framework of the professional collective is shifting?
The concept of professionalism links the institutional and workplace levels of
journalism in several different ways and is the central organizing concept of this

Institution, Work, and Professionalism 19
book. The notion of professionalism has indeed been one of the most popular
and enduring in journalism research, and the following section will explicate its
continued relevance but also attempt to critique and develop it.
The two professionalisms of journalism
There is a wealth of literature on journalistic professionalism; in fact, the concept
of “professionalism” (and related concepts such as “professionalization” and
“professional roles”) has been one of the dominant ways in which journalism
scholarship has made sense of its object of study (e.g., Bantz, 1985; Beam, 1990;
Deuze, 2005; Donsbach & Patterson, 2004; Fishman, 1980; Johnstone, Slawski, &
Bowman, 1976; Schiller, 1979; Schudson & Anderson, 2008; Sigelman, 1973;
Singer, 2003; Soloski, 1989; Splichal & Sparks, 1994; Tuchman, 1978; Tumber &
Prentoulis, 2005; Tunstall, 1971). Both professionalism and professionalization
have commonly been used explicitly as concepts linking journalism-
as-
institution to journalism-as-work; see in particular Beam (1990), Fishman
(1980), Soloski (1989), and Tumber & Prentoulis (2005) for scholarship linking professionalization of journalism on the institutional and/or organizational level to working practices and individual/workplace behaviors and established patterns of action. Many historical works on journalism also share this basic analytical thrust, i.e., linking historical processes of professionalization to the emergence and reification of certain working practices and ways of organizing journalistic work (e.g., Baldasty, 1992; Cronin, 1993; Schudson, 1978; Elliott, 1978; Örnebring, 2007; Schiller, 1979).
To call an occupation a “profession,” or to classify a certain set of established
practices as “professional,” is to make both a descriptive and a normative judgment (Waisbord, 2013: 8). A key element of almost all studies of professions and professionalism (not just journalism) is the notion that a profession is “more than just a job,” i.e., that it has some kind of duty to the public, a duty that can (and should) sometimes trump the duty one might have to an employer— professions have some kind of public role or function, and professionalism means (in part) to fulfill this public role to the best of one’s ability (e.g., Abbott, 1988; Annandale, 1998; Burrage & Torstendahl, 1990; Freidson, 1994, 2001). This does not mean that professionalism research uncritically accepts the profession’s own notions, rather the opposite—many studies of journalism have highlighted the “mythological” character of journalistic professional ideology (Elliott, 1978) as well as how the process of professionalization of journalism can be seen as a

Newsworkers20
conscious strategy of key actors to achieve and then control a privileged societal
position, as well as a process for controlling and disciplining journalistic labor
(e.g., Carey, 2000; Golding & Elliott, 1979; Hardt & Brennen, 1995; McChesney,
2005; Schudson, 2005). Depending on who is looking, professionalism can be a
bulwark against both excessive partisanship and rampant commercialization, or
a tool used to achieve societal power without accountability and to ensure a
steady supply of docile employees.
Sociologist Julia Evetts’ model of two competing forms of professionalism
captures this dual nature of professionalism. Her perspective is particularly
relevant for the study of journalism as it explicitly places professionalism within
an overall changing context of work. Most journalism research conducted at least
up until the late 1990s generally implicitly or explicitly assumes that journalistic
work is done within the framework of large, centralized organizations and that
those doing the work generally do so under stable, long-
term employment
contracts. As noted in Chapter 1, this is simply not the case anymore: atypical, short-
term and casual labor is now widespread in journalism, and many do
journalistic work without any expectation or hope of remuneration. Evetts specifically discusses the meaning of professionalism in a context of increased labor precarity (e.g., labor market deregulation, rise in short-
term contracts and
project-based work). She describes the two competing forms of professionalism at
work in journalism and many other occupations as organizational professionalism
and occupational professionalism (Evetts, 2003: 407ff, 2006: 140f):
Organizational professionalism is a discourse of control used increasingly by
managers in work organizations. It incorporates rational-
legal forms of decision-
making, hierarchical structures of authority, the standardization of work
practices, accountability, target-setting and performance review and is based on
occupational training and certification. In contrast, occupational professionalism is the more traditional, historical form. This involves a discourse constructed within professional groups themselves that involves discretionary decision-

making in complex cases, collegial authority, the occupational control of the
work and is based on trust in the practitioner by both clients and employers. It is operationalized and controlled by practitioners themselves and is based on shared education and training, a strong socialization process, work culture and occupational identity, and codes of ethics that are monitored and operationalized by professional institutes and associations.
Evetts, 2006: 140–141
The key analytical point here is that within organizational settings (and therefore,
in my definition, also in an institutional context), different actors or groups of

Institution, Work, and Professionalism 21
actors start from different definitions of “professionalism.” Manager and
managed very likely have different ideas about what professionalism means.
For the manager, being professional may mean complying with regulations,
accepting standardized work practices, hitting performance targets, and so on.
For the managed, being professional may then even occasionally be in opposition
to the notion of “being professional” espoused by managers, focusing instead on
autonomy, compliance with a code of ethics decided on by professional groups
or bodies rather than employers’ organizations, and so on.
Applied to journalism, this view conjures up images of heroic journalists
standing against bean-
counter managers to report the story regardless of
attempts to control or quash them. Needless to say, the equation of organizational professionalism = bad, occupational professionalism = good, is a gross simplification. Evetts in fact can rather be placed in the “critical” tradition of professionalism research; in another piece she and Aldridge are very critical of elements of journalistic occupational professionalism, using the word “mythology” to describe it (Aldridge & Evetts, 2003: 561f). Occupational professionalism may have the positive effects described by some scholars, e.g.,
working against increased managerial surveillance, hierarchical structures, standardization of labor (again, see Annandale, 1998; Freidson, 2001), but it may also work in a conservative fashion, as highlighted by others. Breed showed that conformity and social control in the newsroom was the result of colleagues’ expectations rather than managerial decrees (Breed, 1955); Sigelman found that journalists were unusually conformist and complied with organizational goals to minimize conflict (Sigelman, 1973); and Soloski demonstrated how professional ideology also worked as a useful management tool to control the professional behavior of journalists (Soloski, 1989). Likewise, while organizational professionalism may have the negative effects of standardizing labor, increasing
workplace surveillance, and edging out public duties in favor of organizational goals of profitability and efficient workplace organization, it may also increase workplace transparency and fairness, make professionals more accountable to the public, act as a check on group-
think type workplace behavior, and so on.
Theoretically, it is clear that the two notions of professionalism compete on the institutional level, but the workplace-
level consequences of having one or the
other discourse dominate must be studied empirically before they can be assessed normatively. It is also the case that while these two discourses of professionalism to some extent are mutually exclusive, in other regards there is great scope for “negotiation,” i.e., over time, values of organizational professionalism may be absorbed by and incorporated into occupational

Newsworkers22
definitions of professionalism, and similarly aspects of occupational
professionalism may over time become shared and defended by the organization
as a whole. Incorporating the organizational imperative for speedy news
dissemination as a key constituent of occupational ideology (as described in the
previous chapter) is one example of such negotiation. The reverse causality may
be seen in cases where news organizations decide to publish stories even if it
would have been in the economic or political interests of the organization not to
do so (for example when publishing a critical investigative story on a major
advertiser).
Table 2.1 clarifies the relationship between occupational and organizational
professionalism on the one hand, and the relationship between journalism-
as-
institution and journalism-as-work on the other. Functionalist and critical
accounts of professionalism alike emphasize the needs fulfilled by
professionalism—e.g., in the case of functionalism needs to maintain and ensure quality in professional work, and in the case of critical accounts needs to achieve professional closure and control entry to the profession—and this figure expresses the relationship between the two analytical dimensions in terms of what needs “professionalism” (of both the organizational and occupational variety) meets at the different analytical levels. As noted in Chapter 1, the institutional level consists both of (employer) news organizations (the main conduit of organizational professionalism) and of professional organizations like unions and associations as well as the occupational collective as a whole (the main conduit of occupational professionalism).
On the institutional level, organizational professionalism primarily meets the
need for predictability (of recruitment, of the legal framework of journalism, of
Table 2.1
N
analytical levels
FORM OF PROFESSIONALISM
Organizational Occupational
ANALYTICAL LEVEL
Journalism-
as-institution • Need for predictability
• Need for infrastructure
• Need for societal status
• Need for social legitimacy
Journalism-as-work • Need for employees who
are . . .
• s
killed
• replaceable • “autonomous enough”
• Need for peer recognition •
Need for practices that can
maintain status and legitimacy

Institution, Work, and Professionalism 23
the market—to the extent the latter is possible) and infrastructure (i.e., making
aspiring professionals accept the basic infrastructure of news production as
centered on news being a good on a market, that it is possible to outsource
production under certain circumstances, etc.); hence the emphasis (in Evetts’
characterization) on standardization and hierarchical control in this form of
professionalism. On the same level, occupational professionalism addresses
the need of the professional collective to achieve and maintain societal status
and legitimacy (following Wilensky, 1964, and others); this need can be
achieved both through laying claims to a particular expertise or expert skill and
through the rhetorical construction of a societal duty for the profession (Sarfatti
Larson, 1977).
On the micro-
level of work, the need for standardization on the institutional
level is expressed in organizational professionalism as the need for employees to meet certain characteristics. First, they should have a certain level and set of skills (ensuring that they can be immediately used by the organization and that minimal resources have to be devoted to training new employees). Second, they should be replaceable, i.e., there should be a steady supply of other potential employees who have the same skill set and share the same basic values and ideas about newswork, in case an employee leaves. Third, professionalism should create practitioners who are “autonomous enough,” i.e., so self-
directed that they can be
trusted to do their work without much direct supervision and make reasonable work-
related decisions in the absence of such supervision, but not so self-directed
that they go against the basic values and ideas about newswork. Essentially, at this level and in this form of professionalism, being professional means being a good
worker (this is very similar to the contention of Soloski, 1989). The occupational
side of the equation conversely meets needs of peer recognition (and thus also peer socialization) that support professional identity formation and ensure some measure of control over/maintenance of professional values and norms; as well as more pragmatic needs for practices that can be seen as guaranteeing a level of quality of work and by extension maintaining societal status and legitimacy (e.g., practices of verification, fact checking, critical questioning of elite sources) and which also can function in a day-
to-day workplace setting.
Structure of the analysis
The purpose of this book is thus to analyze the ways in which journalism-
as-
institution explains journalism-as-work in a comparative context, using the

Newsworkers24
conceptual pairing of organizational/occupational professionalism as the main
analytical lens. How do these two forms of professionalism interact in the
shaping of journalism-
as-work, which form is the dominant one, and are there
salient differences between countries? These are the overarching questions of this book.
Specifically, these questions will be addressed in four ways. First, the
analysis will tackle the previously mentioned pervasive issue of the role of technology in newswork, particularly as it applies to organizational and occupational understandings of professionalism (Chapter 4). This chapter dissects how technology and technology use functions as a locus of contestation and negotiation between the two forms of professionalism, and how institutional frames shape how technology is adopted and used on the workplace level.
The analysis will then turn to two key aspects of professionalism and the
professional project: first, the notion of skill or expertise (Chapter 5) and second, the notion of autonomy (Chapter 6). In the literature on professionalism in general and journalistic professionalism in particular, three core elements of professionalism and its constitution can be found: expertise, autonomy,
and duty (drawing mainly on the overviews by Aldridge & Evetts, 2003;
Allison, 1986; Anderson, 2008; and Schudson, 1995 in the field of journalism studies and on the more general overviews of the sociology of professions found in Abbott, 1988; Burrage & Thorstendal, 1990; Evetts, 2003; Freidson, 1990, 2001; Sarfatti Larson, 1977; MacDonald, 1995; Sciulli, 2005; and Wilensky, 1964). Chapters 5 and 6 analyze the first two of these three aspects of professionalism.
These two empirical chapters will then feed into the further analysis of
professionalism (Chapter 7), particularly the notion of professional role or duty in journalism (i.e., the idea that journalism plays some kind of wider role in a democratic system), but also an analysis of what journalists actually mean when they talk about professionalism and when they attempt to draw borders between their own activities as professionals and the activities of “amateurs” or “non-
professionals” (i.e., citizen journalists). To that end, the analytical
framework of the study must be further expanded by explaining how the three areas of technology, skill, and autonomy work as mediators between the institutional and workplace levels of journalism. This is followed by a return to the discussion of professionalism with specific reference to professional roles and the different ways in which practitioners actually understand the meaning of the concept.

Institution, Work, and Professionalism 25
Professionalism and technology
In journalists’ own accounts of changes in their work, technology occupies a
central place—even the central place. Journalists in general view technology as
an inevitable, impersonal force that directly causes many of the changes taking
place within journalism. This is demonstrated in a number of studies of
journalists and how they relate to change in general and technological change in
particular (Avilés et al., 2004; Deuze and Paulussen, 2002; Duhe et al., 2004;
Huang, 2006; Liu, 2006; Preston, 2009; Quinn, 2006). A big part of the explanation
for the persistent tendency among journalists to attribute great power and
independent agency to technology of course has to do with the proximity and
integration of technology in the everyday working life of journalists. Many
explanatory factors used by journalism scholars, such as “commercialization,”
“professional socialization,” and “organizational structure,” are for most
journalists abstract and it is often difficult to see how they translate into everyday
working practice. But when the entire newsroom has to change to a new content
management system, or when journalists are required to learn digital production
techniques in order to create content for different media platforms, that
represents tangible changes in their working lives, changes that are readily
perceived as being “caused” by technology.
Thus for journalists, the role of technology in the relationship between
journalism-
as-institution and journalism-as-work is clear: as an exogenous
factor that directly affects, even controls, both institution and work. But even a cursory examination of the examples above demonstrates that it is more accurate to consider technology something that is introduced on the institutional level and then adopted and used on the level of work (Barnhurst & Nerone, 2001; Boczkowski, 2004; McKercher, 2002; Marjoribanks, 2000a, 2000b). A newsroom does not introduce a content management system simply because content management systems have been invented, but because an organizational decision is made that this system (rather than that one) will fit the needs of the organization better, be easier to use, cheaper, etc. Journalists are not required to learn digital production techniques simply because they exist but because their employers generally demand it—and certain techniques are viewed as more central to learn than others. New technologies are rarely if ever introduced into news organizations as grassroots initiatives, based on needs and demands from journalists, but rather imposed (often for the best of reasons) by owners and management—again reinforcing the perception that technological change is something that “just happens.”

Newsworkers26
Information and communication technologies (ICTs)—defined as the
combination of microelectronic and computing technologies with
telecommunications to manipulate human information—have had an impact on
virtually all occupations, skilled and unskilled. Journalists are far from unique in
experiencing often wide-
ranging technological change in their everyday working
lives. The impact of ICTs extends to many aspects of journalistic work: information gathering, content production and presentation, and not least distribution, i.e., how the end product of journalism is made available to audiences. However, it could be argued that the greatest impact of ICTs lies not in any individual aspect or area but rather in how technology has been used to integrate what has previously been treated as separate areas (Watson, 2003: 124f), or even in collapsing the distinction between manual and mental labor (Zuboff, 1988).
Most sociologists of work as well as most analysts of the social aspects of
technology agree that the impact of ICTs on work is dual: technologization has the potential both to routinize and eliminate jobs; to increase managerial control and surveillance; and to centralize the organizations in which work takes place, as well as the potential to enhance creative processes and the mental aspects of work; to increase worker control of the work process; and to create new, decentralized forms of work organizations (Boddy & Buchanan, 1986; Boddy & Gunson, 1997; Child, 1984; Deuze, 2007: 73f; Watson, 2003: 124ff; Woodfield, 2000).
Thus technology adoption, diffusion and use do not take place in a vacuum.
Previous research has shown that factors (“competitive effects”) within the technology consumer’s industry (in this case the media/news industry) such as competitive intensity, demand uncertainty, professionalism, and cosmopolitanism will impact the adoption and diffusion of technology on the industry/institutional level (Robertson & Gatignon, 1986)—using these criteria, the news industry would be predisposed towards quick and wholesale adoption of technologies as all these competitive effects are in place (the news industry is highly competitive, demand is uncertain, there is a high degree of both professionalism and cosmopolitanism). Yet research if anything demonstrates that the news industry has mostly been a reluctant late adopter of many new technologies (Nguyen, 2008; Singer et al., 2011). On the organizational level, many of the technologies used by news organizations (content management systems, indexing/archiving systems, search engine optimization tools, etc.) must fit within organizational routines and thus any individual’s use of technology will be circumscribed by larger organizational processes (Nelson & Winter, 1982). In summary, various

Institution, Work, and Professionalism 27
institutional aspects will provide the framework for how technologies are
adopted in the workplace and in the everyday working practices of those who
use them (again, see Marjoribanks, 2000a; McKercher, 2002).
Besides market/industry characteristics and organizational demands, culture
is also an important institutional factor influencing the adoption of technology
and how technologies are put to use. Institutional values and norms create
templates for technology adoption: despite appearances to the contrary,
technologies are usually not adopted in order to effect wholesale transformation
of an institution but rather to help the institution carry out established practices
“better” in some way (quicker, more effectively, with higher quality, etc.). In the
case of journalism, one such template is the discourse of speed (a term derived
from the work of Hampton, 2004): existing journalistic work practices have
grown out of a culture where speed is both the main measure of competitive
success in the news industry, and a key professional value (for historical studies
on this phenomenon, see Read, 1992: 34f; Rydén & Gustafsson, 2001: 182;
Winston, 1998: 28). “Productivity” in the case of news is taken to be synonymous
with “more news faster” or even preferably “more news first.” Sommerville argues
that the increased periodicity of the press as early as the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries formed the first roots of this cultural obsession with
speed—“A ‘news culture’ will tilt steeply in the direction of change for its own
sake and maintain a periodical tempo that is literally mindless” (Sommerville,
1996: 10). This link between news, periodicity, and speed only became more
marked in the interplay between technology and liberal capitalism that was the
industrial revolution (Blondheim, 1994; Turner, 2002), more marked still with
the emergence of broadcasting (Schlesinger, as noted, refers to it as “stopwatch
culture,” 1987: 84) and accelerated even further with the introduction of online
news provision (Avilés et al., 2004). Sanders and Bale (2000) describe the new
24-hour news cycle as one where time has always run out and everything must
be broadcast immediately. In short, the discourse of speed, understood as both a
capitalist logic of competition using technology to increase productivity, and a
professional logic placing great value on the timely provision of news, is a wholly
naturalized element of journalism and forms a template for how journalists
understand new technologies: the prime function of any new technology is to
speed up the news process (see also Karlsson, 2011: 286–289 for an overview of
research on immediacy and speed in news).
This template, while powerful, is not all-
encompassing. As noted earlier, new
technologies can also be used to change institutional practices that may be considered ossified by certain institutional actors; technologies can be used as

Newsworkers28
creative tools, making possible new practices and creating new cultural forms;
technologies may be used by practitioners to increase autonomy and control
over their own work; technologies—in particular network-
based digital
technologies—may be used to disperse working practices and undermine hierarchical control, and so on. From the point of view of the autonomous, reflexive practitioner, new technologies will be viewed as “good” and “professional” if they can be used to: (a) support occupational autonomy and creativity on the group and individual level (for example by enabling new and “better” ways to tell news stories and engage the audience); and (b) rationalize the everyday working lives of individual journalists by reducing (or removing altogether) time spent on tasks that are not considered to be “core tasks” of the occupation, as well as helping journalists to deal with routine tasks (like information gathering and research) more efficiently.
Professionalism and skill
Sarfatti Larson (1977) and others (e.g., Abbott, 1988; Abel 1988; Brint, 1994) note that one of the key elements of the professional project is defining, and maintaining control over, the core knowledge of the profession. The word expertise
is also often used to refer to the domain of specialist, often technical, knowledge that is associated with a profession. Here, I have chosen the word skill rather than
expertise because skill carries more explicit connotations of action and practical use; in journalism, as in most other occupations, knowing something in effect
means being able to do something. Skill or expertise is generally seen as more
straightforward in traditional professions such as medicine and law, whereas journalism has found it more difficult to lay claim to a unique and specific domain of knowledge. However, accounts of journalistic professionalization do point to the emergence of journalism schools and journalism programs at universities as evidence that there is some kind of body of specialist knowledge associated with journalism (Nolan, 2008; Folkerts, 2014; Vos, 2012), even though it is not as exclusive as that of doctors or lawyers.
While expertise and skill are central to most definitions of professionalism
and professionalization, journalism research accounts often begin and end with an assertion of how difficult it is to define a core knowledge or set of core skills for journalists. As such, skill has been surprisingly little investigated in journalism studies. It is mostly treated as a given that journalists today need to be multi-

skilled, i.e., proficient in a variety of production technologies and multiplatform

Institution, Work, and Professionalism 29
news production (Avilés et al., 2004; Chung, 2007; Cottle & Ashton, 1999; Deuze,
2007; Duhe et al., 2004; Lowery & Becker, 2001; Seelig, 2002; Singer, 2003, 2004a),
with little in the way of critical examination of what “multi-
skilled” (or even
“skilled”) is taken to mean in a sociological sense, or of who gets to define what this “multi-
skilling” should consist of. In contrast to the lack of definitions of
core skills available in scholarly work on journalism, accreditation bodies have to have a very clear and explicit view on what the core skills of journalism should be. For example, the US Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (ACEJMC) has a list of twelve core “values and competencies” that educational programs must provide to their graduates if they want to be accredited, which range from writing skills (number 9) and numeracy skills (number 11) to understanding of and commitment to values of diversity and tolerance (numbers 3 and 4) (ACEJMC 2014: 14–15). The explicit link between values and skills in the US accreditation guidelines is in contrast to the much more strongly skill-
focused UK accreditation program National Council
for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ), which focuses on imparting skills in news interviewing, reporting (with both a strong emphasis on facticity, attribution, and source checking), media law, and reflexive practice (NCTJ 2015: 5–7) and does not address the issue of values explicitly at all. So even in the cases when explicit definitions of journalistic skills do exist, they differ between countries.
Scholarly interest in journalistic skills to date has had a lot to do with a
perceived change in skill demands where above all various technical/production skills are considered to be ever-
more important. As noted, these “new” skills are
often contrasted with “old” or “traditional” journalistic skills without properly defining exactly what these skills would be. Studies of journalistic skills and changes in skill demands are also time-
sensitive and context-dependent. A case
in point is Lowery & Becker’s 2001 study, which found that skill with Web presentation software was the strongest predictor of success for journalism/ communication graduates applying for jobs (in the USA), more important than all other aspects of their education (Lowery & Becker, 2001). In hindsight, this of course says a lot about the changes taking place in journalism at that time, and how they were interpreted by and acted upon by employers. Presumably, skill with Web presentation software would not be as important a predictor of job application success in 2016. Fahmy’s 2008 study of current and future skill needs related to online journalism (based on a survey of online journalists) distinguished between “traditional” skills, “digital journalism” skills, and “Web-

coding” skills (Fahmy, 2008: 31) and found that “digital journalism” skills (which

Newsworkers30
included multimedia delivery, capturing audio/video, digital photography and
image production, graphics and layout, animation/Flash, and podcasting) were
perceived as of increasing importance, but “traditional” skills (e.g., “writing,”
“spelling,” “interviewing,” and “research”) were still considered the most
important and the more technical skills of coding were considered very
important right now but likely of decreasing importance (Fahmy, 2008: 31–32).
It is somewhat striking that skill has not been very comprehensively theorized
in journalism studies, or indeed theorized at all. If skill is addressed in journalism
research, it is usually from an industry or educator perspective, focusing on what
skills employers need journalists to have. This is the case in Watson & Flintham’s
(2008) UK industry survey funded by Skillset, a UK quasi-
governmental council
set up to coordinate the various industry training councils in the creative industries (the study unsurprisingly found that radio presentation was ranked as more important among journalists who work in radio, and that feature writing was considered more important by magazine journalists) (Watson & Flintham, 2008: 5); and in d’Haenens, Opgenhaffen & Corten’s (2013) special issue of Journalism Practice devoted to the comparative analysis of views on journalistic skills in the digital age—the articles in this issue are still largely applied and descriptive in character. The research agenda is simply identifying what journalistic skill demands look like across a number of nations, now and in the future (with the exception of Fourie’s contribution to the same volume, where skill demands and debates on which skills journalists should have in South Africa are analyzed based on contexts of gender, race, identity, development, and democracy—see Fourie, 2013).
In sociology (and the sociology of work in particular), by contrast, there is an
extensive debate on how skill should be defined that draws upon diverse theoretical traditions, from Marxist to ethnographic (for overviews and key texts, see for example Attewell, 1990; Hilton, 2008; Schwalbe, 2010; Steiger, 1993; Steinberg, 1990). A key issue in this line of research (e.g., Steiger, 1993) is precisely the institutional framework of skill: how is skill constructed institutionally, who gets to define what the “core skills” of an occupation are, and what is actually required for an individual to be considered a “good” and “skilled” member of their occupation?
A key issue from the sociological analysis of skill that has gained some
traction in journalism studies is the notion of deskilling, as introduced by
Braverman (1974). For Braverman, skill is envisaged as a kind of zero-
sum game
where skills in technological production edge out traditional craft skills (Braverman himself was a welder and metalworker turned social scientist).

Institution, Work, and Professionalism 31
Braverman’s notion of deskilling, i.e., that the capitalist drive to reduce labor
costs leads to a systematic degeneration of craft skills in the workforce, is
contradicted by empirical findings from large-
scale surveys: the general trend is
upskilling, not deskilling, as skill demands in most jobs increase (Ashton et al., 1999; Gallie et al., 1998). However, later developments of Braverman’s labor process theory have found evidence for increasing management control and fragmentation of work tasks (Burawoy, 1979, 1985; Frances, 1993; Knights & Wilmott, 1990). Other researchers claim that the deskilling/upskilling dichotomy is too simplified and that polarization of skill is a better description of what is
occurring (Edgell, 2006: 68f): some groups are more likely to experience deskilling and some groups are more likely to experience upskilling (see also Gallie, 1991). Unsurprisingly, this polarization occurs along already-
existing
lines of inequality: those already in poorly paid, relatively less skilled jobs are experiencing further deskilling, while a smaller, elite group of workers already highly skilled and with high job autonomy experience further upskilling (de Witte & Steijn, 2000; Milkman & Pullman, 1991; Reich, 1991). A gender-
based
difference has also been observed: men are more likely to experience upskilling than women (Gallie, 1991; Gallie et al., 1998).
Regardless of the actual view of deskilling per se, this research taken together
demonstrates that skill, like technology, bridges institutional values and everyday work experience. A common trope in current debate and research on journalism is that new skill demands are making “traditional” skills of journalism less valued. Technology in particular takes time from the “real” journalism (for examples, see Bromley, 1997; Huang, 2006; Liu, 2006; MacGregor, 1997; Nygren, 2008). New skill demands, like the demand for familiarity with cross-
platform production,
make journalism into a more factory-type job, where the emphasis is on
churning out a lot of content quickly. However, if the overall empirical contention is that most occupations have experienced a general upskilling in the past decades, this begs the question of why journalism should be the only exception to this trend.
Professionalism and autonomy
Autonomy, like skill, is viewed as a key element of professionalism, and professionalization processes are often characterized as struggles for autonomy (again, see Sarfatti Larson, 1977; Wilensky, 1964). The concept itself refers to the degree of self-
governance within a profession, and the extent to which the

Newsworkers32
profession is independent of other societal institutions, primarily the state and
the market. In a functionalist account, autonomy is closely linked to duty or
altruism, as self-
determination and self-governance are viewed as the best
guarantees that professionals will be able to fulfill their duties. Critical accounts instead focus on autonomy as power: independence from other institutions means that the profession can control entry and exclusion much more effectively, and it also maintains the societal status of the profession.
Autonomy has been central to the understanding of the societal role of
journalism. In order to fulfill its democratic functions (however defined), it has been viewed as central that journalism-
as-institution should be independent
from other institutions, notably the state and the market (see for example Bourdieu, 2005; Glasser & Gunther, 2005; Hampton, 2010; Merrill, 1989; Schudson, 2005; Waisbord, 2013). Empirical research has conclusively demonstrated that this normative ideal rarely is borne out in reality. There is a rich vein of research examining the limits of journalistic autonomy on the institutional level, in particular the limits imposed by the market (e.g., Curran & Seaton, 2003; Murdock, 1983; McManus, 1994; Underwood, 1993) and the state and other bureaucratic organizations (e.g., Bennet, Lawrence, & Livingston, 2007; Fishman, 1980; Sigal, 1973; Soloski, 1989). Nevertheless, the ideal remains a forceful one—many of the concerns voiced about journalism in the contemporary era are in essence concerns about the declining autonomy of journalism vis-à-
vis other institutions, as exemplified by for example
debates on journalism’s increasing reliance on PR material (Gandy, 1982; Lewis, Williams, & Franklin, 2008) or even, in some contexts, the functional merging of journalism and PR (Erjavec & Kovačič, 2010; Krašovec & Žagar, 2009). Furthermore, a lot of the research cited earlier specifically deals with how the lack of institutional autonomy translates into an effective lack of workplace autonomy (e.g., Murdock, 1983; McManus, 1994; Fishman, 1980; Sigal, 1973; Soloski, 1989).
In this body of research, we can see how many, even most, observers of
journalism see autonomy on the institutional level being reflected in the individual workplace autonomy of journalists, i.e., autonomy is viewed as a concept bridging the institutional and individual/workplace levels of journalism. In light of most sociology of work, it is indeed to be expected that workplace autonomy should in some way be linked to institutional autonomy. But returning to an earlier observation, it is then somewhat surprising that while many if not most contemporary studies of journalism so strongly emphasize the decrease of institutional autonomy in journalism, in particular vis-à-
vis market forces (see

Institution, Work, and Professionalism 33
for example Boczkowski, 2010; Davies, 2008; Fenton, 2010; Hallin & Mancini,
2004; Lee-Wright, Phillips & Witschge, 2012; Preston, 2009), in surveys
journalists generally report a relatively high degree of workplace autonomy (e.g.,
Löfgren Nilsson, 2007; Weaver, 1998b; Weaver & Willnat, 2012). We clearly need
to look a bit closer at how journalists themselves understand workplace
autonomy.
One of the surveys quoted in the previous section (on Swedish journalists)
provides more detail. In the period 1989–2007, Swedish journalists overall agree
that journalism in general has become more stressful, but they also agree that
their own job has not become more stressful (Löfgren Nilsson, 2007: 77). Swedish
journalists also agree that management control has increased in journalism
overall, but the share of journalists reporting a very low degree of workplace
autonomy (i.e., little control over which stories to work on and high direct
management influence) is relatively low (between 5 and 10 percent depending
on media type) and near-
constant over the time period (Löfgren Nilsson, 2007:
73). There is clearly a third-person effect at work here: decreased workplace
autonomy is something that happens to other journalists but not to me. The observation that perceived workplace autonomy varies by media type (the journalists in the Swedish study who report the lowest perceived workplace autonomy are those working for tabloid newspapers and for public service television) is also borne out in the UK context, where a recent study provides numerous examples of how journalists on tabloid newspapers are kept on a short leash using short-
term employment contracts and very authoritarian
management strategies (Phillips, Couldry, & Freedman, 2010: 56f). It may well be that surveys and interview studies alike self-
select journalists who do in fact
have a higher degree of workplace autonomy; those with a low degree of workplace autonomy may not even be allowed to respond to surveys or participate in interviews (for example, the author experienced great difficulty in booking interviews with any British tabloid newspaper journalist, even on strict conditions of anonymity—there are no British tabloid journalists in the interview respondent sample of this present study).
What Phillips, Couldry, & Freedman describe is a very active strategy (using
both the stick and the carrot) on the part of editorial management to get journalists to accept the rules of the game:
Each time they [i.e., young journalists; author’s note] move in the wrong
direction they can be restrained so that, in the end, in order to gain a measure of
employment protection, journalists are expected to “internalize” the requirements

Newsworkers34
of the newsroom and produce news according to the style and political inflection
of the newspaper.
Phillips, Couldry, & Freedman, 2010: 56
While most journalistic workplaces may not be as nakedly authoritarian as
British tabloid newspapers (see also the account of Peppiatt, 2011), there are
clearly also socialization factors at work when journalists assess workplace
autonomy. From the vantage point of journalism scholars, the fact that news
values and news selection criteria are so widely shared among journalists (and
also accord with commercial imperatives) is a clear limit on workplace autonomy,
but working journalists do not see it as such: it is simply the way the job is done,
where norms, values, and practices have been internalized through education as
well as work. As discussed in the first part of this chapter, obvious violations of
institutional norms (e.g., a journalist wanting to work on a story that does not at
all fit with accepted news values and news selection criteria) are in fact rare and
thus excessive workplace control is not necessary.
Thus paraphrasing Herbert Simon’s well-
known concept of bounded
rationality (Simon, 1957), journalists work under a regime of “bounded autonomy.” Within the bounds of autonomy, journalists are generally given great freedom to select stories and choose how they want to work on them, but they also know—and to a great extent have internalized—the limits of this freedom. There is no point in selecting a story you feel sure the desk editor will say no to, you cannot work on a single story for too long because it will take time from all the other stories you have to work on, you cannot use up too many organizational resources working on a single story because that will be difficult for your immediate superior to justify to his/her immediate superiors, and so on (see Schudson, 2003; Soloski, 1989).
We thus know fairly well what these boundaries of autonomy are (as expressed
for example in shared news values, norms about journalism’s societal role, and accepted practices of news production), but what remains is the question of what institutional factors determine them. The most popular (and well-

supported) explanation, as already noted, is that journalism-as-institution
particularly lacks autonomy in relation to the market/commercial forces. However, another important determinant of autonomy boundaries seems to be the sphere of politics: not in the sense of direct state or political control but more as agreements on what constitutes politics, how politics should be conducted, and on how politics should be reported (see for example Cook, 1998; Kaplan, 2006). The contention in this strand of research is that journalism generally

Institution, Work, and Professionalism 35
accepts the framings of processes and events that are provided by political power
holders, and that journalism also has to play by the “rules of politics” as it is itself
a political actor (e.g., Cook, 1998; Gans, 2011; Schudson, 2007; Sparrow, 1999).
It is worth noting that most of this research is based on the US case, though of
course Bourdieu also considers lack of autonomy from the political sphere a
characteristic of the journalism he studied, i.e., French journalism (Bourdieu,
2005).
While market forces work in more or less the same way everywhere,
politics is different (in particular meta-
notions on what politics is and
should be) and thus we may expect to see national differences in journalistic autonomy depending on what the political system in the nations in question is. This is, of course, one of the central tenets of Hallin & Mancini’s influential comparative work: political system differences have a direct causal link to differences in journalistic autonomy (e.g., Hallin & Mancini, 2004: 113f, 176, 222f).
Professionalism and duty: Professional roles
Despite the popularity and influence of the concept, journalism has proven to be a problematic case of “professionalism” and “professionalization.” There has always been a strong strand of anti-
professionalism within journalism where
many journalists prefer the term “trade” or “craft” when describing their occupation (Kimball, 1965; Josephi, 2009; Tumber & Prentoulis, 2005: 58). The sociology of professions uses the term semi-
profession (Etzioni, 1969) to describe
those occupations that may have realized parts but not their entire “professional project” (e.g., nurses, teachers), and that term (or something similar to it) frequently has been applied to journalism (Schiller, 1979; Tumber & Prentoulis, 2005; Tunstall, 1971).
Still, besides skill and autonomy, another key element of professionalism is
that of duty or societal role, i.e., the idea that the profession is more than just a job
(as pointed out in Chapter 1), but also fulfills some kind of normative societal function and that practitioners of the profession have a duty to uphold this societal function (e.g., Abbott, 1988; Burrage & Thorstendal, 1990; Freidson, 1990, 2001; Sarfatti Larson, 1977; MacDonald, 1995; Sciulli, 2005). Using a different but related concept, practitioners have a particular professional role that goes beyond just doing their job. In the case of journalism, there is a rich field of research on the professional roles of journalists, particularly from a

Newsworkers36
comparative perspective (e.g., Donsbach & Patterson, 2004; Hanitzsch; 2011;
Hanitzsch et al., 2011; Weaver & Willnat, 2012). The notion of duty is central
to professional self-
understanding, as demonstrated by this large body of
research on journalistic role perceptions. There is always a debate to be had about the gap between ideal and reality, but the notion of a societal duty, whatever it may be, is very much alive in contemporary debates about journalism and media, as well as central to professional self-
understanding. A discourse of duty,
societal role, and professionalism is also increasingly mobilized by journalists and media organizations in order to differentiate themselves from citizen journalists and citizen participation in the news (Örnebring, 2013)—despite the fact that citizen journalists rarely fulfill the same societal functions as legacy journalists (Karlsson & Holt, 2014).
Though there may be some antipathy among journalists towards the notion
of journalism as a profession, most journalists would agree that they aspire to a level of professionalism in their everyday work (Aldridge & Evetts, 2003), and
duty or adherence to a professional role is commonly seen as the most important element of this professionalism. However, most studies of journalists’ professional roles are based on surveys that ask journalists to rate or rank a set of predefined possible duties. It is entirely possible that professional roles and duties in fact might not at all be the first thing that comes to journalists’ minds when asked about what constitutes professionalism, and a key part of this present study is therefore to look at how the practitioners themselves define professionalism, what they think “acting professionally” means, and in general what they think constitutes “good journalism” and “good journalists.”
Research questions
The theoretical framework presented here thus proposes to address the overarching question of how journalism-
as-work is affected by changes in journalism-as-
institution, using the dual concepts of organizational and occupational professionalism as the key heuristic to understand ongoing negotiations, conflicts, and transformation.
More specifically, in relation to technology and technology use, the main
questions are:
l How are technologies used?
l Why are they used in certain ways and not in others?

Institution, Work, and Professionalism 37
l How do existing templates for technology use influence the ways in which
various technologies are integrated into the everyday practices of
journalists?
l What templates are dominant, and why?
In relation to skill and expertise, the main questions are:
l What do you need to know in order to be a journalist?
l What skills do you need to have if you want to be a good journalist?
l Who gets to define what these “good journalism skills” are?
l What institutional purpose do they serve?
l How come that what on the face of it looks like a massive institutional
upskilling process (journalists learning about new production and
presentation technologies that they previously did not know about) is
described by many as de facto deskilling?
Regarding autonomy, the main questions are:
l How is workplace autonomy perceived and constituted in different
countries?
l What is the nature and character of the “bounded autonomy” under which
journalists work?
l To what extent are the boundaries of autonomy internalized, and to what
extent are they questioned and/or renegotiated?
Finally, on the issue of professional roles and professionalism in general, the
main questions are:
l What do European journalists see as their key societal roles and duties?
l How do they define what “professionalism” is, which manner of definition is
dominant, and why?
l What is the balance between organizational and occupational
professionalism in contemporary European journalism?
l Why does this balance look the way it looks?
And, as this is a comparative study, all these questions are also comparative,
meaning that the analysis will also attempt to define and explain salient national
differences, where such exist. Background on the six nations, including
identifying possible sources and explanations of difference in the four parts of
the analysis, follows in the next chapter, along with a brief discussion of the
empirical material on which the study is based.

As noted in Chapter 1, this study draws upon a most-similar systems comparative
design: the countries included are all stable European parliamentary democracies
where media freedoms are enshrined in law and journalists and news
organizations are accorded strong legal privileges. In terms of media landscapes,
all six countries have a national broadsheet or “quality” daily press as well as a set
of more tabloid-
style newspapers (or “popular” press) which taken together
consists of five to ten major titles. Alongside the commercial press all six countries also have an important public service broadcast organization taking a central position in the media landscape. While all public service broadcasters in these six countries do not command the same resources, in terms of audience shares they are all the most important or second most important broadcast outlet in their respective country. There is also, in each country, a commercial broadcasting sector consisting of a handful of players. All countries have a well-
developed Internet infrastructure and all major media organizations
(print and broadcast, public and private) engage in online news provision as a matter of course.
These similarities may at first seem superficial but it is worth noting that
many countries do not really have national daily newspapers of the European type (e.g., the USA), and nor do all countries have strong public service broadcasters (again, the USA would be the prime example, but the same holds true for many Latin American countries). This type of media landscape, i.e., essentially free and democratic, and where a strong commercial press exists alongside a likewise strong, often dominant, public broadcaster, could in international comparison be considered typically (Western) European.
That said, there are of course notable differences between the countries in this
study. Population size, for example, is an important determinant of market size and as such to a great extent determines the overall size of the media landscape: the 62 million inhabitants of the UK can support twelve national-
circulation
paid-for dailies, whereas Estonia’s 1.3 million can sustain four. Similarly,
3
Six Countries: Background and Empirical Data

Newsworkers40
according to estimates, there are about 40,000 journalists working in the UK and
around 1,000 in Estonia, which of course creates very different conditions for
specialist correspondents, among other things—Estonia has one person working
more or less full time as a science journalist (Örnebring & Lauk, 2010), whereas
the UK can sustain a 250-member Association of British Science Writers
(ABSW, 2013). Of course, as these figures hint, size is not all—the UK has
roughly forty-
seven times the population of Estonia, but only three times the
number of national paid-for dailies. Clearly Estonians are a more newspaper-
reading people than Britons. Still, by the simple measure of number of outlets,
the media landscapes in populous nations like Germany, the UK, Italy, and Poland are much more diverse than those in Sweden and Estonia.
A note must also be made about the time frame of the country presentations
and the empirical data. The interviews were conducted from October 2008 to June 2009, and the survey was in the field July to August, 2009 (more on the empirical data can be found at the end of this chapter and in the Methodological Appendix at the end of the book). Few things date more quickly than media landscape overviews, as media outlets close and merge and new ones open (and then close and merge). In the following country presentations, I have attempted to focus on general characteristics of the media landscape as well as those characteristics that stand out in international comparison; the ambition has not been to present a totally up-
to-date overview of the news media landscape. The presentations also
mostly focus on what the landscape looked like in 2008–09, at the time of the empirical data gathering (with some exceptions where the only relevant data available was either older or newer). This means, for example, that there is no comparative background data on social media use and penetration in the country presentations, since social media was not the key facet of journalism-
as-institution
and journalism-as-work six-odd years ago that it is today. It also means that the
data was gathered in the aftermath of the global financial crisis in 2007–08, something that conceivably could have influenced the tenor and content of responses. However, as it turned out, in almost all of the countries studied the news industry had at that point either not yet been hit by the financial crisis (as in Sweden, for example), or was already in a perceived crisis well before the global financial crisis (as in the UK). The only country where respondents even mentioned news industry layoffs and news outlet closures as part of their everyday context of work was Estonia. In this aspect both the survey and the interviews were less context-
dependent than expected.
In the following sections, the media landscapes of the six nations studied are
presented, with a particular focus on what characterizes the respective media

Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:

usual method, obtained a constant loss of 7 p.c., and was thus led
to search for a new element. The presence of arsenic and antimony
in the accompanying minerals also impeded the separation of the
new metal. After fusion with sulphur and sodium carbonate,
argyrodite gives a solution of a sulphide which is precipitated by an
excess of hydrochloric acid; germanium sulphide is soluble in
ammonia and then precipitated by hydrochloric acid, as a white
precipitate, which is dissolved (or decomposed) by water. After being
oxidised by nitric acid, dried and ignited germanium sulphide leaves
the oxide GeO
2
, which is reduced to the metal when ignited in a
stream of hydrogen.
[30] G. Kobb determined the spectrum of germanium, when the
metal was taken as one of the electrodes of a powerful Ruhmkorff's
coil. The wave-lengths of the most distinct lines are 602, 583, 518,
513, 481, 474, millionths of a millimetre.
[31] If germanium or germanium sulphide be heated in a stream
of hydrochloric acid, it forms a volatile liquid, boiling at 72°, which
Winkler regarded as germanium chloride, GeCl
2
, or germanium
chloroform, GeHCl
3
. It is decomposed by water, forming a white
substance, which may perhaps be the hydrate of germanious oxide,
GeO, and acts as a powerfully reducing agent in a hydrochloric acid
solution.
[32] Under certain circumstances germanium gives a blue
coloration like that of ultramarine, as Winkler showed, which might
have been expected from the analogy of germanium with silicon.
[33] Winkler expressed this in the following words (Jour. f. pract.
Chemie, 1886 [2], 34, 182–183): ‘… es kann keinem Zweifel mehr
unterliegen, dass das neue Element nichts Anderes, als das vor
fünfzehn Jahren von Mendeléeff prognosticirte Ekasilicium ist.’
‘Denn einen schlagenderen Beweis für die Richtigkeit der Lehre
von der Periodicität der Elemente, als den, welchen die
Verkörperung des bisher hypothetischen “Ekasilicium” in sich
schliesst, kann es kaum geben, und er bildet in Wahrheit mehr, als

die blosse Bestätigung einer kühn aufgestellten Theorie, er bedeutet
eine eminente Erweiterung des chemischen Gesichtfeldes, einen
mächtigen Schritt in's Reich der Erkenntniss.’
[33 bis] Emilianoff (1890) states that in the cold of the Russian
winter 30 out of 200 tin moulds for candles were spoilt through
becoming quite brittle.
[34] The tin deposited by an electric current from a neutral
solution of SnCl
2
easily oxidises and becomes coated with SnO
(Vignon, 1889).
[34 bis] If after this the coating of tin be rapidly cooled—for
instance, by dashing water over it—it crystallises into diverse star-
shaped figures, which become visible when the sheets are first
immersed in dilute aqua regia and then in a solution of caustic soda.
The coating of iron by tin, guards it against the direct access of
air, but it only preserves the iron from oxidation so long as it forms a
perfectly continuous coating. If the iron is left bare in certain places,
it will be powerfully oxidised at these spots, because the tin is
electro-negative with respect to the iron, and thus the oxidation is
confined entirely to the iron in the presence of tin. Hence a coating
of tin over iron objects only partially preserves them from rusting. In
this respect a coating of zinc is more effectual. However, a dense
and invariable alloy is formed over the surface of contact of the iron
and tin, which binds the coating of tin to the remaining mass of the
iron. Tin may be fused with cast iron, and gives a greyish-white
alloy, which is very easily cast, and is used for casting many objects
for which iron by itself would be unsuitable owing to its ready
oxidisability and porosity. The coating of copper objects by tin is
generally done to preserve the copper from the action of acid
liquids, which would attack the copper in the presence of air and
convert it into soluble salts. Tin is not acted on in this manner, and
therefore copper vessels for the preparation of food should be
tinned.

[35] The ancient Chinese alloys, containing about 20 p.c. of tin
(specific gravity of alloys about 8·9), which have been rapidly
cooled, are distinguished for their resonance and elasticity. These
alloys were formerly manufactured in large quantities in China for
the musical instruments known as tom-toms. Owing to their
hardness, alloys of this nature are also employed for casting guns,
bearings, &c., and an alloy containing about 11 p.c. of tin
(corresponding with the ratio Cu
15
Sn) is known as gun-metal. The
addition of a small quantity of phosphorus, up to 2 p.c., renders
bronze still harder and more elastic, and the alloy so formed is now
used under the name of phosphor-bronze.
The alloy SnCu
3
is brittle, of a bluish colour, and has nothing in
common with either copper or tin in its appearance or properties. It
remains perfectly homogeneous on cooling, and acquires a
crystalline structure (Riche). All these signs clearly indicate that the
alloy SnCu
3
is a product of chemical combination, which is also seen
to be the case from its density, 8·91. Had there been no contraction,
the density of the alloy would be 8·21. It is the heaviest of all the
alloys of tin and copper, because the density of tin is 7·29 and of
copper 8·8. The alloy SnCu
4
, specific gravity 8·77, has similar
properties. All the alloys except SnCu
3
and SnCu
4
split up on
cooling; a portion richer in copper solidifies first (this phenomenon is
termed the liquation of an alloy), but the above two alloys do not
split up on cooling. In these and many similar facts we can clearly
distinguish a chemical union between the metals forming an alloy.
The alloys of tin and copper were known in very remote ages,
before iron was used. The alloys of zinc and tin are less used, but
alloys composed of zinc, tin, and copper frequently replace the more
costly bronze. Concerning the alloys of lead see Note 46.
[36] An excellent proof of the fact that alloys and solutions are
subject to law is given, amongst others, by the application of
Raoult's method (Chapter I., Note 49) to solutions of different
metals in tin. Thus Heycock and Neville (1889) showed that the
temperature of solidification of molten tin (226°·4) is lowered by the

presence of a small quantity of other metals in proportion to the
concentration of the solution. The following were the reductions of
the temperature of solidification of tin obtained by dissolving in it
atomic proportions of different metals (for example, 65 parts of zinc
in 11,800 parts of tin); Zn 2°·53, Cu 2°·47, Ag 2°·67, Cd 2°·16, Pb
2°·22, Hg 2°·3, Sb 2° [rise], Al 1°·34. As Raoult's method (Chapter
VII.) enables the molecular weight to be determined, the almost
perfect identity of the resultant figures (except for aluminium) shows
that the molecules of copper, silver, lead, and antimony contain one
atom in the molecule, like zinc, mercury, and cadmium. They
obtained the same result (1890) for Mg, Na, Ni, Au, Pd, Bi and In. It
should here be mentioned that Ramsay (1889) for the same purpose
(the determination of the molecular weight of metals on the basis of
their mutual solution) took advantage of the variation of the vapour
tension of mercury (see Vol. I., p. 134), containing various metals in
solution, and he also found that the above-mentioned metals
contain but one atom in the molecule.
[36 bis] The action of a mixture of hydrochloric acid and tin forms
an excellent means of reducing, wherein both the hydrogen
liberated by the mixture (at the moment of separation) and the
stannous chloride act as powerful reducing and deoxidising agents.
Thus, for instance, by this mixture nitro-compounds are transformed
into amido-compounds—that is, the elements of the group NO
2
are
reduced to NH
2
.
[37] Many volatile compounds of tin are known, whose molecular
weights can therefore be established from their vapour densities.
Among these may be mentioned stannic chloride, SnCl
4
, and stannic
ethide, Sn(C
2
H
5
)
4
(the latter boils at about 150°). But V. Meyer
found the vapour density of stannous chloride, SnCl
2
, to be variable
between its boiling point (606°) and 1100°, owing, it would seem, to
the fact that the molecule then varies from Sn
2
Cl
4
to SnCl
2
, but the
vapour density proved to be less than that indicated by the first and
greater than that shown by the second formula, although it
approaches to the latter as the temperature rises—that is, it

presents a similar phenomenon to that observed in the passage of
N
2
O
4
into NO
2
.
[38] When rapidly boiled, an alkaline solution of stannous oxide
deposits tin and forms stannic oxide, 2SnO = Sn + SnO
4
, which
remains in the alkaline solution.
[39] Weber (1882) by precipitating a solution of stannous chloride
with sodium sulphite (this salt as a reducing agent prevents the
oxidation of the stannous compound) and dissolving the washed
precipitate in nitric acid, obtained crystals of stannous nitrate,
Sn(NO
3
)
2
,20H
2
O, on refrigerating the solution. This crystallo-hydrate
easily melts, and is deliquescent. Besides this, a more stable
anhydrous basic salt, Sn(NO
3
)
2
,SnO, is easily formed. In general,
stannous oxide as a feeble base easily forms basic salts, just as
cupric and lead oxides do. For the same reason SnX
2
easily forms
double salts. Thus a potassium salt, SnK
2
Cl
4
,H
2
O, and especially an
ammonium salt, Sn(NH
4
)
2
Cl
4
,H
2
O, called pink salt, are known. Some
of these salts are used in the arts, owing to their being more stable
than tin salts alone. Stannous bromide and iodide, SnBr
2
and SnI
2
,
resemble the chloride in many respects.
Among other stannous salts a sulphate, SnSO
4
, is known. It is
formed as a crystalline powder when a solution of stannous oxide in
sulphuric acid is evaporated under the receiver of an air-pump. The
feeble basic character of the stannous oxide is clearly seen in this
salt. It decomposes with extreme facility, when heated, into stannic
oxide and sulphurous anhydride, but it easily forms double salts with
the salts of the alkali metals.
In gaseous hydrochloric acid, stannous chloride, SnCl
2
,2H
2
O,
forms a liquid having the composition SnCl
2
,HCl,3H
2
O (sp gr. 2·2,
freezes at -27°), and a solid salt, SnCl
2
,H
2
O (Engel).
[40] Frémy supposes the cause of the difference to consist in a
difference of polymerisation, and considers that the ordinary acid

corresponds with the oxide SnO
2
, and the meta-acid with the oxide
Sn
5
O
10
, but it is more probable that both are polymeric but in a
different degree. Stannic acid with sodium carbonate gives a salt of
the composition Na
2
SnO
3
. The same salt is also obtained by fusing
metastannic acid with sodium hydroxide, whilst metastannic acid
gives a salt, Na
2
SnO
3
,4SnO
2
(Frémy), when treated with a dilute
solution of alkali; moreover, stannic acid is also soluble in the
ordinary stannate, Na
2
SnO
3
(Weber), so that both stannic acids (like
both forms of silica) are capable of polymerisation, and probably
only differ in its degree. In general, there is here a great
resemblance to silica, and Graham obtained a solution of stannic
acid by the direct dialysis of its alkaline solution. The main difference
between these acids is that the meta-acid is soluble in hydrochloric
acid, and gives a precipitate with sulphuric acid and stannous
chloride, which do not precipitate the ordinary acid. Vignon (1889)
found that more heat is evolved in dissolving stannic acid in KHO
than metastannic.
[41] The formation of the compound SnCl
4
,3H
2
O is accompanied
by so great a contraction that these crystals, although they contain
water, are heavier than the anhydrous chloride SnCl
4
. The penta-
hydrated crystallo-hydrate absorbs dry hydrochloric acid, and gives a
liquid of specific gravity 1·971, which at 0° yields crystals of the
compound SnCl
4
,2HCl,6H
2
O (it corresponds with the similar
platinum compound), which melt at 20° into a liquid of specific
gravity 1·925 (Engel).
Stannic chloride combines with ammonia (SnCl
4
,4NH
3
),
hydrocyanic acid, phosphoretted hydrogen, phosphorus
pentachloride (SnCl
4
,PCl
5
), nitrous anhydride and its chloranhydride
(SnCl
4
,N
2
O
3
and SnCl
4
,2NOCl), and with metallic chlorides (for
example, K
2
SnCl
6
, (NH
4
)
2
SnCl
6
, &c.) In general, a highly-developed
faculty for combination is observed in it.

Tin does not combine directly with iodine, but if its filings be
heated in a closed tube with a solution of iodine in carbon
bisulphide, it forms stannic iodide, SnI
4
, in the form of red octahedra
which fuse at 142° and volatilise at 295°. The fluorine compounds of
tin have a special interest in the history of chemistry, because they
give a series of double salts which are isomorphous with the salts of
hydrofluosilicic acid, SiR
2
F
6
, and this fact served to confirm the
formula SiO
2
for silica, as the formula SnO
2
was indubitable.
Although stannic fluoride, SnF
4
, is almost unknown in the free state,
its corresponding double salts are very easily formed by the action
of hydrofluoric acid on alkaline solutions of stannic oxide; thus, for
example, a crystalline salt of the composition SnK
2
F
6
,H
2
O is
obtained by dissolving stannic oxide in potassium hydroxide and
then adding hydrofluoric acid to the solution. The barium salt,
SnBaF
6
,3H
2
O, is sparingly soluble like its corresponding
silicofluoride. The more soluble salt of strontium, SnSrF
6
,2H
2
O,
crystallises very well, and is therefore more important for the
purposes of research; it is isomorphous with the corresponding salt
of silicon (and titanium); the magnesium salt contains 6H
2
O.
Stannic sulphide, SnS
2
, is formed, as a yellow precipitate, by the
action of sulphuretted hydrogen on acid solutions of stannic salts; it
is easily soluble in ammonium and potassium sulphides, because it
has an acid character, and then forms thiostannates (see Chapter
XX.). In an anhydrous state it has the form of brilliant golden yellow
plates, which may be obtained by heating a mixture of finely-divided
tin, sulphur, and sal-ammoniac for a considerable time. It is
sometimes used in this form under the name of mosaic gold, as a
cheap substitute for gold-leaf in gilding wood articles. On ignition it
parts with a portion of its sulphur, and is converted into stannous
sulphide SnS. It is soluble in caustic alkalis. Hydrochloric acid does
not dissolve the anhydrous crystalline compound, but the
precipitated powdery sulphide is soluble in boiling strong
hydrochloric acid, with the evolution of hydrogen sulphide.

[41 bis] Although this has long been generally recognised from
the resemblance between the two metals, still from a chemical point
of view it has only been demonstrated by means of the periodic law.
[42] Mixed ores of copper compounds together with PbS and ZnS
are frequently found in the most ancient primary rocks. As the
separation of the metals themselves is difficult, the ores are
separated by a method of selection or mechanical sorting. Such
mixed ores occur in Russia, in many parts of the Caucasus, and in
the Donetz district (at Nagolchik).
[42 bis] Lead sulphide in the presence of zinc and hydrochloric
acid is completely reduced to metallic lead, all the sulphur being
given off as hydrogen sulphide.
[43] Lead sulphate, PbSO
4
, occurs in nature (anglesite) in
transparent brilliant crystals which are isomorphous with barium
sulphate, and have a specific gravity of 6·3. The same salt is formed
on mixing sulphuric acid or its soluble salts with solutions of lead
salts, as a heavy white precipitate, which is insoluble in water and
acids, but dissolves in a solution of ammonium tartrate in the
presence of an excess of ammonia. This test serves to distinguish
this salt from the similar salts of strontium and barium.
[44] According to J. B. Hannay (1894) the last named
decomposition (PbS + PbSO
4
= 2Pb + 2SO
2
) is really much more
complicated, and in fact a portion of the PbS is dissolved in the Pb,
forming a slag containing PbO, PbS and PbSO
4
, whilst a portion of
the lead volatilises with the SO
2
in the form of a compound PbS
2
O
2
,
which is also formed in other cases, but has not yet been thoroughly
studied.
Besides these methods for extracting lead from PBS in its ores,
roasting (the removal of the S in the form of SO
2
) and smelting with
charcoal with a blast in the same manner as in the manufacture of
pig iron (Chapter XXII.) are also employed.

We may add that PbS in contact with Zn and hydrochloric acid
(which has no action upon PbS alone) entirely decomposes, forming
H
2
S and metallic lead: PbS + Zn + 2HCl = Pb + ZnCl
2
+ H
2
S.
As lead is easily reduced from its ores, and the ore itself has a
metallic appearance, it is not surprising that it was known to the
ancients, and that its properties were familiar to the alchemists, who
called it ‘Saturn.’ Hence metallic lead, reduced from its salts in
solution by zinc, having the appearance of a tree-like mass of
crystals, is called ‘arbor saturni,’ &c.
[45] Freshly laid new lead pipes contaminate the water with a
certain amount of lead salts, arising from the presence of oxygen,
carbonic acid, &c., in the water. But the lead pipes under the action
of running water soon become coated with a film of salts—lead
sulphate, carbonate, chloride, &c.—which are insoluble in water, and
the water pipes then become harmless.
[46] Lead is used in the arts, and owing to its considerable
density, it is cast, mixed with small quantities of other metals, into
shot. A considerable amount is employed (together with mercury) in
extracting gold and silver from poor ores, and in the manufacture of
chemical reagents, and especially of lead chromate. Lead chromate,
PbCrO
4
, is distinguished for its brilliant yellow colour, owing to which
it is employed in considerable quantities as a dye, mainly for dyeing
cotton tissues yellow. It is formed on the tissue itself, by causing a
soluble salt of lead to react on potassium chromate. Lead chromate
is met with in nature as ‘red lead ore.’ It is insoluble in water and
acetic acid, hut it dissolves in aqueous potash. The so-called pewter
vessels often consist of an alloy of 5 parts of tin and 1 part of lead,
and solder is composed of 1 to 2 parts of tin with ½ part of lead.
Amongst the alloys of lead and tin, Rudberg states that the alloy
PbSn
3
stands out from the rest, since, according to his observations,
the temperature of solidification of the alloy is 187°.
[47] The normal lead acetate, known in trade as sugar of lead,
owing to its having a sweetish taste, has the formula

Pb(C
2
H
3
O
2
)
2
,3H
2
O. This salt only crystallises from acid solutions. It
is capable of dissolving a further quantity of lead oxide or of metallic
lead in the presence of air. A basic salt of the composition
Pb(C
2
H
3
O
2
)
2
,PbH
2
O
2
is then formed which is soluble in water and
alcohol. As in this salt the number of atoms is even and the same as
in the hydrate of acetic acid, C
2
H
4
O
2
,H
2
O = C
2
H
3
(OH)
3
, it may be
represented as this hydrate in which two of hydrogen are replaced
by lead—that is, as C
2
H
3
(OH)(O
2
Pb). This basic salt is used in
medicine as a remedy for inflammation, for bandaging wounds, &c.,
and also in the manufacture of white lead. Other basic acetates of
lead, containing a still greater amount of lead oxide, are known.
According to the above representation of the composition of the
preceding lead acetate, a basic salt of the composition
(C
2
H
3
)
2
(O
2
Pb)
3
would be also possible, but what appear to be still
more basic salts are known. As the character of a salt also depends
on the property of the base from which it is formed, it would seem
that lead forms a hydroxide of the composition HOPbOH, containing
two water residues, one or both of which may be replaced by the
acid residues. If both water residues are replaced, a normal salt,
XPbX, is obtained, whilst if only one is replaced a basic salt, XPbOH,
is formed. But lead does not only give this normal hydroxide, but
also polyhydroxides, Pb(OH),nPbO, and if we may imagine that in
these polyhydroxides there is a substitution of both the water
residues by acid residues, then the power of lead for forming basic
salts is explained by the properties of the base which enters into
their composition.
[48] Few compounds are known of the lower type PbX, and still
fewer of the intermediate type PbX
3
. To the first type belongs the
so-called lead suboxide, Pb
2
O, obtained by the ignition of lead
oxalate, C
2
PbO
4
, without access of air. It is a black powder, which
easily breaks up under the action of acids, and even by the simple
action of heat, into metallic lead and lead oxide. This is the
character of all suboxides. They cannot be regarded as independent
salt-forming oxides, neither can those forms of oxidation of lead

which contain more oxygen than the oxide of lead, PbO, and less
than the dioxide, PbO
2
. As we shall see, at least two such
compounds are formed. Thus, for example, an oxide having the
composition Pb
2
O
3
is known, but it is decomposed by the action of
acids into lead oxide, which passes into solution, and lead dioxide,
which remains behind. Such is red lead. (See further on.)
[49] In the boiling of drying oils, the lead oxide partially passes
into solution, forming a saponified compound capable of attracting
oxygen and solidifying into a tar-like mass, which forms the oil paint.
Perhaps, however, glycerine partially acts in the process.
Ossovetsky by saturating drying oil with the salts of certain metals
obtained oil colours of great durability.
A mixture of very finely-divided litharge with glycerine (50 parts of
litharge to 5 c.c. of anhydrous glycerine) forms a very quick (two
minutes) setting cement, which is insoluble in water and oils, and is
very useful in setting up chemical apparatus. The hardening is based
on the reaction of the lead oxide with glycerine (Moraffsky).
[50] It is very instructive to observe that lead not only easily
forms basic salts, but also salts containing several acid groups.
Thus, for example, lead carbonate occurs in nature and forms
compounds with lead chloride and sulphate. The first compound,
known as corneous lead, phosgenite, has the composition
PbCO
3
,PbCl
2
; it occurs in nature in bright cubical crystals, and is
prepared artificially by simply boiling lead chloride with lead
carbonate. A similar compound of normal salts, PbSO
4
,PbCO
3
,
occurs in nature as lanarkite in monoclinic crystals. Leadhillite
contains PbSO
4
,3PbCO
3
, and also occurs in yellowish, monoclinic,
tabular crystals. We will turn our attention to these salts of lead,
because it is very probable that their formation is allied to the
formation of the basic salts, and the following considerations may
lead to the explanation of the existence of both. In describing silica
we carefully developed the conception of polymerisation, which it is
also indispensable to recognise in the composition of many other

oxides. Thus it may be supposed that PbO
2
is a similar polymerised
compound to SiO
2
—i.e. that the composition of lead peroxide will be
Pb
n
O
2n
, because lead methyl, PbMe
4
, and lead ethyl, PbEt
4
, are
volatile compounds, whilst PbO
2
is non-volatile, and is very like silica
in this respect, and not in the least like carbonic anhydride. Still
more should a polymeric structure, Pb
n
O
n
, be ascribed to lead oxide,
since it differs as little from lead dioxide in its physical properties as
carbonic oxide does from carbonic anhydride, and being an
unsaturated compound is more likely to be capable of
intercombination (polymerisation) than lead dioxide. These
considerations respecting the complexity of lead oxide could have no
real significance, and could not be accepted, were it not for the
existence of the above-mentioned basic and mixed salts. The oxide
apparently corresponds with the composition Pb
n
X
2n
, and since,
according to this representation, the number of X's in the salts of
lead is considerable, it is obvious that they may be diverse. When a
part of these X's is replaced by the water residue (OH) or by oxygen,
X
2
= O, and the other parts by an acid residue, X, then basic salts
are obtained, but if a part of the X's is replaced by acid residues of
one kind, and the other part by acid residues of another kind, then
those mixed salts about which we are now speaking are formed.
Thus, for example, we may suppose, for a comparison of the
composition of the majority of the salts of lead, that n = 12, and
then the above-mentioned compounds will present themselves in
the following form:—Lead oxide, Pb
12
O
12
, its crystalline hydrate,
Pb
12
O
8
(OH)
8
, lead chloride, Pb
12
Cl
24
, lead oxychloride, Pb
12
Cl
12
O
6
,
the other oxychloride, Pb
12
(OH)
8
Cl
6
O
6
, mendipite (see Note 51),
Pb
12
Cl
8
O
8
, normal lead carbonate, Pb
12
(CO
3
)
12
, crystalline basic
salt, Pb
12
(OH)
6
(CO
3
)
6
, white lead, Pb
12
(CO
3
)
8
(HO)
8
, corneous lead,
Pb
12
Cl
12
(CO
3
)
6
, lanarkite, Pb
12
(CO
3
)
6
(SO
4
)
6
, leadhillite,
Pb
12
(CO
3
)
9
(SO
4
)
3
, &c. The number 12 is only taken to avoid
fractional quantities. Possibly the polymerisation is much higher than
this. The theory of the polymerisation of oxides introduced by me in

the first edition of this work (1869) is now beginning to be generally
accepted.
[51] A similar basic salt having a white colour, and therefore used
as a substitute for white lead, is also obtained by mixing a solution
of basic lead acetate with a solution of lead chloride. Its formation is
expressed by the equation: 2PbX(OH),PbO + PbCl
2
=
2Pb(OH)Cl,PbO + PbX
2
. Similar basic compounds of lead are met
with in nature—for instance, mendipite, PbCl,2PbO, which appears in
brilliant yellowish-white masses. The ignition of red lead with sal-
ammoniac results in similar polybasic compounds of lead chloride,
forming the Cassel's, or mineral yellow of the composition
PbCl
2
nPbO. Lead iodide, PbI
2
, is still less soluble than the chloride,
and is therefore obtained by mixing potassium iodide with a solution
of a lead salt. It separates as a yellow powder, which may be
dissolved in boiling water, and on cooling separates in very brilliant
crystalline scales of a golden yellow colour. The salts PbBr
2
, PbF
2
,
Pb(CN)
2
, Pb
2
Fe(CN)
6
are also insoluble in water, and form white
precipitates.
[52] It is remarkable that a peculiar kind of attraction exists
between boiled linseed oil and white lead, as is seen from the
following experiments. White lead is triturated in water. Although it
is heavier than water, it remains in suspension in it for some time
and is thoroughly moistened by it, so that the trituration may be
made perfect; boiled linseed oil is then added, and shaken up with
it. A mixture of the oil and white lead is then found to settle at the
bottom of the vessel. Although the oil is much lighter than the water
it does not float on the top, but is retained by the white lead and
sinks under the water together with it. There is not, however, any
more perfect combination nor even any solution. If the resultant
mass be then treated with ether or any other liquid capable of
dissolving the oil, the latter passes into solution and leaves the white
lead unaltered.

[53] It may be regarded as a salt corresponding with the normal
hydrate of carbonic acid, C(OH)
4
, in which three-quarters of the
hydrogen is replaced by lead. A salt is also known in which all the
hydrogen of this hydrate of carbonic acid is replaced by lead—
namely, the salt containing CO
4
Pb
2
. This salt is obtained as a white
crystalline substance by the action of water and carbonic acid on
lead. The normal salt, PbCO
3
, occurs in nature under the name of
white lead ore (sp. gr. 6·47), in crystals, isomorphous with
aragonite, and is formed by the double decomposition of lead nitrate
with sodium carbonate, as a heavy white precipitate. Thus both
these salts resemble white lead, but the first-named salt is
exclusively used in practice, owing to its being very conveniently
prepared, and being characterised by its great covering capacity, or
‘body,’ due to its fine state of division.
[53 bis] One of the many methods by which white lead is
prepared consists in mixing massicot with acetic acid or sugar of
lead, and leaving the mixture exposed to air (and re-mixing from
time to time), containing carbonic acid, which is absorbed from the
surface by the basic salt formed. After repeated mixings (with the
addition of water), the entire mass is converted into white lead,
which is thus obtained very finely divided.
[54] If lead hydroxide be dissolved in potash and sodium
hypochlorite be added to the solution, the oxygen of the latter acts
on the dissolved lead oxide, and partially converts it into dioxide, so
that the so-called lead sesquioxide is obtained; its empirical formula
is Pb
2
O
3
. Probably it is nothing but a lead salt—i.e. is referable to
the type of dioxide of lead, or its hydroxide, PbO(OH)
2
, in which two
atoms of hydrogen are replaced by lead, PbO(O
2
Pb). The brown
compound precipitated by the action of dilute acids—for example,
nitric—splits up, even at the ordinary temperature, into insoluble
lead dioxide and a solution of a lead salt. This compound evolves
oxygen when it is heated. It dissolves in hydrochloric acid, forming a
yellow liquid, which probably contains compounds of the

composition PbCl
2
and PbCl
4
, but even at the ordinary temperature
the latter soon loses the excess of chlorine, and then only lead
chloride, PbCl
2
, remains. In order to see the relation between red
lead and lead sesquioxide, it must be observed that they only differ
by an extra quantity of lead oxide—that is, red lead is a basic salt of
the preceding compound, and if the compound Pb
2
O
3
may be
regarded as PbO
3
Pb, then red lead should be looked on as
PbO
3
Pb,PbO—that is, as basic lead plumbate.
[54 bis] Frémy obtained potassium plumbate in the following
manner. Pure lead dioxide is placed in a silver crucible, and a strong
solution of pure caustic potash is poured over it. The mixture is
heated and small quantities are removed from time to time for
testing, which consists in dissolving in a small quantity of water and
decomposing the resultant solution with nitric acid. There is a
certain moment during the heating when a considerable amount of
insoluble lead dioxide is precipitated on the addition of the nitric
acid; the solution then contains the salt in question, and the heating
must be stopped, and a small amount of water added to dissolve the
potassium plumbate formed. On cooling the salt separates in
somewhat large crystals, which have the same composition as the
stannate—that is, PbO(KO)
2
,3H
2
O.
[55] Lead dioxide is often called lead peroxide, but this name
leads to error, because PbO
2
does not show the properties of true
peroxides, like hydrogen or barium peroxides, but is endowed with
acid properties—that is, it is able to form true salts with bases,
which is not the case with true peroxides. Lead dioxide is a normal
salt-forming compound of lead, as Bi
2
O
5
is for bismuth, CeO
2
for
cerium, and TeO
3
for tellurium, &c. They all evolve chlorine when
treated with hydrochloric acid, whilst true peroxides form hydrogen
peroxide. The true lead peroxide, if it were obtained, would probably
have the composition Pb
2
O
5
, or, in combination with peroxide of
hydrogen, H
2
Pb
2
O
7
= H
2
O
2
+ Pb
2
O
5
, judging from the peroxides

corresponding with sulphuric, chromic, and other acids, which we
shall afterwards consider.
As a proof of the fact, that the form PbO
2
, or PbX
4
, is the highest
normal form of any combination of lead, it is most important to
remark that it might be expected that the action of lead chloride,
PbCl
2
, on zinc-ethyl, ZnEt
2
, would result in the formation of zinc
chloride, ZnCl
2
, and lead-ethyl, PbEt
2
, but that in reality the reaction
proceeds otherwise. Half of the lead is set free, and lead tetrethyl,
PbEt
4
, is formed as a colourless liquid, boiling at about 200°
(Butleroff, Frankland, Buckton, Cahours, and others). The type PbX
4
is not only expressed in PbEt
4
and PbO
2
, but also in PbF
4
, obtained
by Brauner.
[56] According to Carnelley and Walker, the hydrate (PbO
2
)
3
,H
2
O
is then formed; it loses water at 230°. The anhydrous dioxide
remains unchanged up to 280°, and is then converted into the
sesquioxide, Pb
2
O
3
, which again loses oxygen at about 400°, and
forms red lead, Pb
3
O
4
. Red lead also loses oxygen at about 550°,
forming lead oxide, PbO, which fuses without change at about 600°,
and remains constant as far as the limit of the observations made
(about 800°).
The best method for preparing pure lead dioxide consists in
mixing a hot solution of lead chloride with a solution of bleaching
powder (Fehrman).
[56 bis] The plumbates of Ca and other similar metals, mentioned
in Chapter III., Note 7, also belong to the form PbX
4
.
[57] The compounds of titanium are generally obtained from
rutile; the finely-ground ore is fused with a considerable amount of
acid potassium sulphate, until the titanic anhydride, as a feeble
base, passes into solution. After cooling, the resultant mass is
ground up, dissolved in cold water, and treated with ammonium
hydrosulphide; a black precipitate then separates out from the
solution. This precipitate contains TiO
2
(as hydrate) and various

metallic sulphides—for example, iron sulphide. It is first washed with
water and then with a solution of sulphurous anhydride until it
becomes colourless. This is due to the iron sulphide contained in the
precipitate, and rendering it black, being converted into dithionate
by the action of the sulphurous acid. The titanic acid left behind is
nearly pure. The considerable volatility of titanium chloride may also
be taken advantage of in preparing the compounds of titanium from
rutile. It is formed by heating a mixture of rutile and charcoal in dry
chlorine; the distillate then contains titanium chloride, TiCl
4
. It may
be easily purified, owing to its having a constant boiling point of
136°. Its specific gravity is 1·76; it is a colourless liquid, which
fumes in the air, and is perfectly soluble in water if it be not heated.
When hot water acts on titanic chloride, a large proportion of titanic
acid separates out from the solution and passes into metatitanic
acid. A similar decomposition of acid solutions of titanic acid is
accomplished whenever they are heated, and especially in the
presence of sulphuric acid, just as with metastannic acid, which
titanic acid resembles in many respects. On igniting the titanic acid a
colourless powder of the anhydride, TiO
2
, is obtained. In this form it
is no longer soluble in acids or alkalis, and only fuses in the
oxyhydrogen flame; but, like silica, it dissolves when fused with
alkalis and their carbonates; as already mentioned, it dissolves when
fused with a considerable excess of acid potassium sulphate—that is,
it then reacts as a feeble base. This shows the basic character of
titanic anhydride; it has at once, although feebly developed, both
basic and acid properties. The fused mass, obtained from titanic
anhydride and alkali when treated with water, parts with its alkali,
and a residue is obtained of a sparingly-soluble poly-titanate,
K
2
TiO
3
nTiO
2
. The hydrate, which is precipitated by ammonia from
the solutions obtained by the fusion of TiO
2
with acid potassium
sulphate, when dried forms an amorphous mass of the composition
Ti(OH)
4
. But it loses water over sulphuric acid, gradually passing
into a hydrate of the composition TiO(OH)
2
, and when heated it
parts with a still larger proportion of water; at 100° the hydrate

Ti
2
O
3
(OH)
2
is obtained, and at 300° the anhydride itself. The higher
hydrate, Ti(OH)
4
, is soluble in dilute acid, and the solution may be
diluted with water; but on boiling the sulphuric acid solution (though
not the solution in hydrochloric acid), all the titanic acid separates in
a modified form, which is, however, not only insoluble in dilute acids,
but even in strong sulphuric acid. This hydrate has the composition
Ti
2
O
3
(OH)
2
, but shows different properties from those of the
hydrate of the same composition described above, and therefore this
modified hydrate is called metatitanic acid. It is most important to
note the property of the ordinary gelatinous hydrate (that
precipitated from acid solutions by ammonia) of dissolving in acids,
the more so since silica does not show this property. In this property
a transition apparently appears between the cases of common
solution (based on a capacity for unstable combination) and the
case of the formation of a hydrosol (the solubility of germanium
oxide, GeO
2
, perhaps presents another such instance). If titanium
chloride be added drop by drop to a dilute solution of alcohol and
hydrogen peroxide, and then ammonia be added to the resultant
solution, a yellow precipitate of titanium trioxide, TiO
3
H
2
O,
separates out, as Piccini, Weller, and Classen showed. This
substance apparently belongs to the category of true peroxides.
Titanium chloride absorbs ammonia and forms a compound,
TiCl
4
,4NH
3
, as a red-brown powder which attracts moisture from the
air and when ignited forms titanium nitride, Ti
3
N
4
. Phosphuretted
hydrogen, hydrocyanic acid, and many similar compounds are also
absorbed by titanium chloride, with the evolution of a considerable
amount of heat. Thus, for example, a yellow crystalline powder of
the composition TiCl
4
,2HCN is obtained by passing dry hydrocyanic
acid vapour into cold titanium chloride. Titanium chloride combines
in a similar manner with cyanogen chloride, phosphorus
pentachloride, and phosphorus oxychloride, forming molecular
compounds, for example TiCl
4
,POCl
3
. This faculty for further
combination probably stands in connection, on the one hand, with

the capacity of titanium oxide to give polytitanates, TiO(MO)
2
,nTiO
2
;
on the other hand, it corresponds with the kindred faculty of stannic
chloride for the formation of poly-compounds (Note 41), and lastly it
is probably related to the remarkable behaviour of titanium towards
nitrogen. Metallic titanium, obtained as a grey powder by reducing
potassium titanofluoride, K
2
TiF
6
, (sp. gr. 3·55 K. Hofman 1893), with
iron in a charcoal crucible, combines directly with nitrogen at a red
heat. If titanic anhydride be ignited in a stream of ammonia, all the
oxygen of the titanic oxide is disengaged, and the compound TiN
2
is
formed as a dark violet substance having a copper-red lustre. A
compound Ti
5
N
6
is also known; it is obtained by igniting the
compound Ti
3
N
4
in a stream of hydrogen, and is of a golden-yellow
colour with a metallic lustre. To this order of compounds also
belongs the well-known and chemically historical compound known
as titanium nitrocyanide; its composition is Ti
5
CN
4
. This substance
appears as infusible, sometimes well-formed, cubical crystals of sp.
gr, 4·3, and having a red copper colour and metallic lustre; it is
found in blast furnace slag. It is insoluble in acids but is acted on by
chlorine at a red heat, forming titanium chloride. It was at first
regarded as metallic titanium; it is formed in the blast furnace at the
expense of those cyanogen compounds (potassium cyanide and
others) which are always present, and at the expense of the
titanium compounds which accompany the ores of iron. Wöhler, who
investigated this compound, obtained it artificially by heating a
mixture of titanic oxide with a small quantity of charcoal, in a stream
of nitrogen, and thus proved the direct power for combination
between nitrogen and titanium. When fused with caustic potash, all
the nitrogen compounds of titanium evolve ammonia and form
potassium titanate. Like metals they are able to reduce many oxides
—for example, oxides of copper—at a red heat. Among the alloys of
titanium, the crystalline compound Al
4
Ti is remarkable. It is obtained
by directly dissolving titanium in fused aluminium; its specific gravity
is 3·11. The crystals are very stable, and are only soluble in aqua
regia and alkalis.

[58] The formula ZrO was first given to the oxide of zirconium as
a base, in this case Zr = 45 whilst the present atomic weight is Zr =
90—that is, the formula of the oxide is now recognised as being
ZrO
2
. The reasons for ascribing this formula to the compounds of
zirconium are as follows. In the first place, the investigation of the
crystalline forms of the zirconofluorides—for example, K
2
ZrF
6
,
MgZrF
6
,5H
2
O—which proved to be analogous in composition and
crystalline form with the corresponding compounds of titanium, tin,
and silicon. In the second place, the specific heat of Zr is 0·067,
which corresponds with the combining weight 90. The third and
most important reason for doubling the combining weight of
zirconium was given by Deville's determination of the vapour density
of zirconium chloride, ZrCl
4
. This substance is obtained by igniting
zirconium oxide mixed with charcoal in a stream of dry chlorine, and
is a colourless, saline substance which is easily volatile at 440°. Its
density referred to air was found to be 8·15, that is 117 in relation
to hydrogen, as it should be according to the molecular formula of
this substance above-cited. It exhibits, however, in many respects, a
saline character and that of an acid chloranhydride, for zirconium
oxide itself presents very feebly developed acid properties but
clearly marked basic properties. Thus zirconium chloride dissolves in
water, and on evaporation the solution only partially disengages
hydrochloric acid—resembling magnesium chloride, for example.
Zirconium was discovered and characterised as an individual element
by Klaproth.
Pure compounds of zirconium are generally prepared from zircon,
which is finely ground, but as it is very hard it is first heated and
thrown into cold water, by which means it is disintegrated. Zircon is
decomposed or dissolved when fused with acid potassium sulphate,
or still more easily when fused with acid potassium fluoride (a
double soluble salt, K
2
ZrF
6
, is then formed); however, zirconium
compounds are generally prepared from powdered zircon by fusing
it with sodium carbonate and then boiling in water. An insoluble
white residue is obtained consisting of a compound of the oxides of

sodium and zirconium, which is then treated with hydrochloric acid
and the solution evaporated to dryness. The silica is thus converted
into an insoluble form, and zirconium chloride obtained in solution.
Ammonia precipitates zirconium hydroxide from this solution, as a
white gelatinous precipitate, ZrO(OH)
2
. When ignited this hydroxide
loses water and in so doing undergoes a spontaneous recalescence
and leaves a white infusible and exceedingly hard mass of zirconium
oxide, ZrO
2
, having a specific gravity of 5·4 (in the electrical furnace
ZrO
2
fuses and volatilises like SiO
2
, Moissan). Owing to its
infusibility, zirconium oxide is used as a substitute for lime and
magnesia in the Drummond light. This oxide, in contradistinction to
titanium oxide, is soluble, even after prolonged ignition, in hot
strong sulphuric acid. The hydroxide is easily soluble in acids. The
composition of the salts is ZrX
4
, or ZrOX
2
, or ZrOX
2
,ZrO
2
, just as
with those of its analogues. But although zirconium oxide forms salts
in the same way with acids, it also gives salts with bases. Thus it
liberates carbonic anhydride when fused with sodium carbonate,
forming the salts Zr(NaO)
4
, ZrO(NaO)
2
, &c. Water, however,
destroys these salts and extracts the soda.
[59] Thorium has also been found in the form of oxide in certain
pyrochlores, euxenites, monazites, and other rare minerals
containing salts of niobium and phosphates. The compounds of
thorium are prepared by decomposing thorite or orangeite with
strong sulphuric acid at its boiling point; this renders the silica
insoluble, and the thorium oxide passes into solution when the
residue is treated with cold water, after having been previously
boiled with water (boiling water does not dissolve the oxide of
thorium). Lead and other impurities are separated by passing
sulphuretted hydrogen through the solution, and the thorium
hydroxide is then precipitated by ammonia. If this hydroxide be
dissolved in the smallest possible amount of hydrochloric acid, and
oxalic acid be then added, thorium oxalate is obtained as a white
precipitate, which is insoluble in an excess of oxalic acid; this
reaction is taken advantage of for separating this metal from many

others. It, however, resembles the cerite metals (Chapter XVII., Note
43) in this and many other respects. The thorium hydroxide is
gelatinous; on ignition it leaves an infusible oxide, ThO
2
, which,
when fused with borax, gives crystals of the same form as stannic
oxide or titanic anhydride; sp. gr. 9·86. But the basic properties are
much more developed in thorium oxide than in the preceding oxides,
and it does not even disengage carbonic acid when fused with
sodium carbonate—that is, it is a much more energetic base than
zirconium oxide. The hydrate, ThO
2
, however, is soluble in a solution
of Na
2
CO
3
(Chapter XVII., Note 43). Thorium chloride, ThCl
4
is
obtained as a distinctly crystalline sublimate when thorium oxide,
mixed with charcoal, is ignited in a stream of dry chlorine. When
heated with potassium, thorium chloride gives a metallic powder of
thorium having a sp. gr. 11·1. It burns in air, and is but slightly
soluble in dilute acids. The atomic weight of thorium was established
by Chydenius and Delafontaine on the basis of the ismorphism of
the double fluorides.

CHAPTER XIX
PHOSPHORUS AND THE OTHER ELEMENTS OF
THE FIFTH GROUP
Nitrogen is the lightest and most widely distributed
representative of the elements of the fifth group,
which form a higher saline oxide of the form R
2O
5,
and a hydrogen compound of the form RH
3.
Phosphorus, arsenic, bismuth, and antimony belong
to the uneven series of this group. Phosphorus is the
most widely distributed of these elements. There is
hardly any mineral substance composing the mass of
the earth's crust which does not contain some—it
may be a small—amount of phosphorus compounds
in the form of the salts of phosphoric acid. The soil
and earthy substances in general usually contain
from one to ten parts of phosphoric acid in 10,000
parts. This amount, which appears so small, has,
however, a very important significance in nature. No
plant can attain its natural growth if it be planted in
an artificial soil completely free from phosphoric acid.
Plants equally require the presence of potash,
magnesia, lime, and ferric oxide, among basic, and
of carbonic, sulphuric, nitric, and phosphoric

anhydrides, among acid oxides. In order to increase
the fertility of a more or less poor soil, the above-
named nutritive elements are introduced into it by
means of fertilisers. Direct experiment has proved
that these substances are undoubtedly necessary to
plants, but that they must be all present
simultaneously and in small quantities, and that an
excess, like an insufficiency, of one of these elements
is necessarily followed by a bad harvest, or an
imperfect growth, even if all the other conditions
(light, heat, water, air) are normal. The phosphoric
compounds of the soil accumulated by plants pass
into the organism of animals, in which these
substances are assimilated in many instances in large
quantities. Thus the chief component part of bones is
calcium phosphate, Ca
3P
2O
8, and it is on this that
their hardness depends.
[1]
Phosphorus was first extracted by Brand in 1669,
by the ignition of evaporated urine. After the lapse of
a century Scheele, who knew of the existence of a
more abundant source of phosphorus in bones,
pointed out the method which is now employed for
the extraction of this element. Calcium phosphate in
bones permeates a nitrogenous organic substance,
which is called ossein, and forms a gelatin. When
bones are treated exclusively for the extraction of
phosphorus, neglecting the gelatin, they are burnt, in

which case all the ossein is burnt away. When,
however, it is desired to preserve the gelatin, the
bones are immersed in cold dilute hydrochloric acid,
which dissolves the calcium phosphate and leaves
the gelatin untouched; calcium chloride and acid
calcium phosphate, CaH
4(PO
4)
2, are then obtained in
the solution. When the bones are directly burnt in an
open fire their mineral components only are left as
an ash, containing about 90 per cent. of calcium
phosphate, Ca
3(PO
4)
2, mixed with a small amount of
calcium carbonate and other salts. This mass is
treated with sulphuric acid, and then the same
substance is obtained in the solution as was obtained
from the unburnt bones immersed in hydrochloric
acid—i.e. the acid calcium phosphate soluble in
water, in which reaction naturally the chief part of
the sulphuric acid is converted into calcium sulphate:
Ca
3(PO
4)
2 + 2H
2SO
4 = 2CaSO
4 + CaH
4(PO
4)
2.
Ca
3(PO
4)
2 + 4HCl = 2CaCl
2 + CaH
4(PO
4)
2.
On evaporating the solution, crystallisable acid
calcium phosphate is obtained. The extraction of the
phosphorus from this salt consists in heating it with
charcoal to a white heat. When heated, the acid
phosphate, CaH
4(PO
4)
2, first parts with water, and
forms the metaphosphate, Ca(PO
3)
2, which for the
sake of simplicity may be regarded, like the acid salt,

as composed of pyrophosphate and phosphoric
anhydride, 2Ca(PO
3)
2 = Ca
2P
2O
7 + P
2O
5. The latter,
with charcoal, gives phosphorus and carbonic oxide,
P
2O
5 + 5C = P
2 + 5CO. So that in reality a somewhat
complicated process takes place here, yielding
ultimately products according to the following
equation:
2CaH
4(PO
4)
2 + 5C = 4H
2O + Ca
2P
2O
7 + P
2 + 5CO.
After the steam has come over, phosphorus and
carbonic oxide distil over from the retort and calcium
pyrophosphate remains behind.
[1 bis]
As phosphorus melts at about 40°, it condenses at
the bottom of the receiver in a molten liquid mass,
which is cast under water in tubes, and is sold in the
form of sticks. This is common or yellow phosphorus.
It is a transparent, yellowish, waxy substance, which
is not brittle, almost insoluble in water, and easily
undergoes change in its external appearance and
properties under the action of light, heat, and of
various substances. It crystallises (by sublimation or
from its solution in carbon bisulphide) in the regular
system, and
[2]
(in contradistinction to the other
varieties) is easily soluble in carbon bisulphide, and
also partially in other oily liquids. In this it recalls
common sulphur. Its specific gravity is 1·84. It fuses
at 44°, and passes into vapour at 290°; it is easily

inflammable, and must therefore be handled with
great caution; careless rubbing is enough to cause
phosphorus to ignite. Its application in the
manufacture of matches is based on this.
[2 bis]
It
emits light in the air owing to its slow
[3]
oxidation,
and is therefore kept under water (such water is
phosphorescent in the dark, like phosphorus itself).
It is also very easily oxidised by various oxidising
agents and takes up the oxygen from many
substances.
[3 bis]
Phosphorus enters into direct
combination with many metals and with sulphur,
chlorine, &c., with development of a considerable
amount of heat. It is very poisonous although not
soluble in water.
Besides this, there is a red variety of phosphorus,
which differs considerably from the above. Red
phosphorus (sometimes wrongly called amorphous
phosphorus) is partially formed when ordinary
phosphorus remains exposed to the action of light
for a long time. It is also formed in many reactions;
for example, when ordinary phosphorus combines
with chlorine, bromine, iodine, or oxygen, a portion
of it is converted into red phosphorus. Schrötter, in
Vienna, investigated this variety of phosphorus, and
pointed out by what methods it may be produced in
considerable quantities. Red phosphorus is a
powdery red-brown opaque substance of specific

gravity 2·14. It does not combine so energetically
with oxygen and other substances as yellow
phosphorus, and evolves less heat in combining with
them.
[4]
Common phosphorus easily oxidises in the
air; red phosphorus does not oxidise at all at the
ordinary temperature; hence it does not
phosphoresce in the air, and may be very
conveniently kept in the form of powder. It does not,
like yellow phosphorus, fuse at 44°. After being
converted into vapour at 290° or 300°, it again
passes into the ordinary variety when slowly cooled.
Red phosphorus is not soluble in carbon bisulphide
and other oily liquids, which permits of its being
freed from any admixture of the ordinary
phosphorus. It is not poisonous, and is used in many
cases for which the ordinary phosphorus is
unsuitable or dangerous; for example, in the
manufacture of matches, which are then not
poisonous or inflammable by accidental friction, and
therefore the red variety has now replaced the
ordinary phosphorus.
[4 bis]
The heads of the ‘safety’ matches do not contain
any phosphorus, but only substances capable of
burning and of supporting combustion. Red
phosphorus is spread over a surface on the box, and
it is the friction against this phosphorus which ignites
the matches. There is no danger of the matches

taking fire accidentally, nor are they poisonous.
[5]
This red phosphorus is prepared by heating the
ordinary phosphorus at 230° to 270°; it is evident
that this must be done in an atmosphere incapable
of supporting combustion—for example, in nitrogen,
carbonic anhydride, steam, &c. On a large scale,
ordinary phosphorus is placed in closed iron vessels,
[5 bis]
and immersed in a bath of different proportions
of tin and lead, by which means the temperature of
250° necessary for the conversion is easily attained.
It is kept at this temperature for some time. The
temperature is at first cautiously raised, and the air is
thus partially expelled by the heat, and also by the
evolution of steam (the phosphorus is damp when
put in), whilst the remaining oxygen is also partially
absorbed by the phosphorus, so that an atmosphere
of nitrogen is produced in the iron vessel. Red
phosphorus enters into all the reactions proper to
yellow phosphorus, only with greater difficulty and
more slowly;
[6]
and, as its vapour tension (volatility)
is less than that of the yellow variety, it may be
supposed that a polymerisation takes place in the
passage of the yellow into the red modification, just
as in the passage of cyanogen into paracyanogen, or
of cyanic acid into cyanuric acid (Chapter IX. Notes
39 bis and 48).

The vapour of phosphorus is colourless; its density
remains constant between 300° and 1000° (Dumas,
1833; Mitscherlich, Deville, and Troost, 1859, and
others). The density with respect to air has been
determined as from 4·3 to 4·5. Hence, referred to
hydrogen, it is 4·4 × 14·4 = 63, corresponding with
a molecular weight 124, i.e. the molecule of
phosphorus in a state of vapour contains P
4. The
reader will remember that the molecule of nitrogen
contains N
2, of sulphur S
6 or S
2, and of oxygen O
2 or
O
3.
The chemical energy of phosphorus in a free state
more nearly approaches that of sulphur than
nitrogen. Phosphorus is combustible and inflames at
60°; but having in the act of combination parted with
a portion of its energy in the form of heat it becomes
analogous to nitrogen, so long as there is no
question of its reduction back again into phosphorus.
Nitric acid is easily reduced to nitrogen, whilst
phosphoric acid is reduced with very much greater
difficulty. All the compounds of phosphorus are less
volatile than those of nitrogen. Nitric acid, HNO
3, is
easily distilled; metaphosphoric acid, HPO
3, is
generally said to be non-volatile; triethylamine,
N(C
2H
5)
3, boils at 90°, and triethylphosphine,
P(C
2H
5)
3, at 127°.

Phosphorus not only combines easily and directly
with oxygen, but also with chlorine, bromine, iodine,
sulphur, and with certain metals, and red phosphorus
when heated combines with hydrogen also.
[6 bis]
So,
for instance, when fused with sodium under naphtha,
phosphorus gives the compound Na
3P
2. Zinc,
absorbing the vapour of phosphorus, gives the
phosphide Zn
3P
2 (sp. gr. 4·76); tin, SnP; copper,
Cu
2P; even platinum combines with phosphorus
(PtP
2, sp. gr. 8·77).
[6 tri]
Iron, when combined even
with a small quantity of phosphorus, becomes brittle.
[7]
Some of these compounds of phosphorus are
obtained by the action of phosphorus on the
solutions of metallic salts, and by the ignition of
metallic oxides in the vapour of phosphorus, or by
heating mixtures of phosphates with charcoal and
metals. Phosphides do not exhibit the external
properties of salts, which are so clearly seen in the
chlorides and still distinctly observable in the
sulphides. The phosphides of the metals of the
alkalis and of the alkaline earths are even
immediately and very easily decomposed by water,
whereas this is found to be the case with only a very
few sulphides, and still more rarely and indistinctly
with the chlorides. We may take calcium phosphide
as an example.
[7 bis]
Phosphorus is laid in a deep
crucible, and covered with a clay plug, over which

lime is strewn. At a red heat the vapours of
phosphorus combine with the oxygen of the lime and
form phosphoric anhydride, which forms a salt with
another portion of the lime, whilst the liberated
calcium combines with the phosphorus and forms
calcium phosphide. Its composition is not quite
certain; it may be CaP (corresponding with liquid
phosphuretted hydrogen). This substance is
remarkable for the following reaction: if we take
water—or, better still, a dilute solution of hydrochloric
acid—and throw calcium phosphide into it, bubbles
of gas are evolved, which take fire spontaneously in
the air and form white rings. This is owing to the fact
that the liquid hydrogen phosphide, PH
2, is first
formed, thus, CaP + 2HCl = CaCl
2 + PH
2, which,
owing to its instability, very easily splits up into the
solid phosphide, P
2H, and gaseous phosphide, PH
3;
5PH
2 = P
2H + 3PH
3; the latter corresponds with
ammonia. The mixture of the gaseous and liquid
phosphides takes fire spontaneously in the air,
forming phosphoric acid. The same hydrogen
phosphides are formed when water acts on sodium
phosphide (P
2Na
3). A similar mixture of gaseous
liquid and solid phosphuretted hydrogen (Retgers
1894) is formed by heating (in a glass tube) red
phosphorus in a stream of dry hydrogen. Hence we
see that there are three compounds of phosphorus

with hydrogen. (1) The first or solid yellow
phosphide, P
2H (more probably P
4H
2), is obtained by
the action of strong hydrochloric acid on sodium
phosphide; it takes fire when struck or at 175°. (2)
The liquid, PH
2, or more correctly expressed as the
molecule, P
2H
4, is a colourless liquid which takes fire
spontaneously in the air, boils at 30°, is very
unstable, and is easily decomposed (by light or
hydrochloric acid) into the two other phosphides of
hydrogen. It is prepared by passing the gases
evolved by the action of water on calcium phosphide
through a freezing mixture.
[8]
And, lastly, (3),
gaseous hydrogen phosphide, phosphine, PH
3, which
is distinguished as being the most stable. It is a
colourless gas, which does not take fire in the air. It
has an odour of garlic, and is very poisonous. It
resembles ammonia in many of its properties.
[8 bis]
It
is easily decomposed by heat, like ammonia, forming
phosphorus and hydrogen; but it is very slightly
soluble in water, and does not saturate acids,
although it forms compounds with some of them
which resemble ammonium salts in their form and
properties. Among them the compound with
hydriodic acid, PH
4I, analogous to ammonium iodide,
is remarkable. This compound crystallises on
sublimation in well-formed cubes, like sal-ammoniac,
which it resembles in many respects. However, this

compound does not enter into those reactions of
double decomposition which are proper to sal-
ammoniac, because its saline properties are very
feebly developed. Phosphuretted hydrogen also
combines, like ammonia, with certain
chloranhydrides; but they are decomposed by water,
with the evolution of phosphine. Ogier (1880)
showed that hydrochloric acid also combines with
phosphine under a pressure of 20 atmospheres at
+18°, and under the ordinary pressure at -35°,
forming the crystalline phosphonium chloride PH
4Cl,
corresponding to sal-ammoniac. Hydrobromic acid
does the same with greater ease, and hydriodic acid
with still greater facility, forming phosphonium
iodide, PH
4I.
[9]
Phosphuretted hydrogen, or phosphine, PH
3, is
generally prepared by the action of caustic potash on
phosphorus.
[10]
Small pieces of phosphorus are
dropped into a flask containing a strong solution of
caustic potash and heated. Potassium
hypophosphite, H
2KPO
2, is then obtained in solution;
gaseous phosphuretted hydrogen is evolved:
P
4 + 3KHO + 3H
2O = 3(KH
2PO
2) + PH
3.
Liquid phosphuretted hydrogen (and free
hydrogen) is also formed, together with the

phosphine, so that the gaseous product, on escaping
from the water into the air, takes fire spontaneously,
forming beautiful white rings of phosphoric acid. In
this experiment, as in that with calcium phosphide, it
is the liquid, P
2H
4, that takes fire; but the phosphine
set light to by it also burns, PH
3 + O
4 = PH
3O
4. The
same phosphuretted hydrogen, PH
3, may be
obtained pure, and not spontaneously combustible,
by igniting the hydrates of phosphorous acid (4PH
3O
3
= PH
3 + 3PH
3O
4) and hypophosphorous acid (2PH
3O
2
= PH
3 + PH
3O
4); or, more simply, by the
decomposition of calcium phosphide by hydrochloric
acid, because then all the liquid phosphide, P
2H
4, is
decomposed into non-volatile P
2H and gaseous PH
3.
Pure phosphine liquefies when cooled to -90°, boils
at -85°, and solidifies at -135° (Olszewski). When
phosphorus burns in an excess
[10 bis]
of dry oxygen,
then only phosphoric anhydride, P
2O
5 is formed. It is
prepared by dropping pieces of phosphorus through
a wide tube, fixed into the upper neck of a large
glass globe, on to a cup suspended in the centre of
the globe. These lumps are set alight by touching
them with a hot wire, and the phosphorus burns into
P
2O
5. The dry air necessary for its combustion is
forced into the globe through a lateral neck, and the
white flakes of phosphoric anhydride formed are

Welcome to our website – the perfect destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. We believe that every book holds a new world,
offering opportunities for learning, discovery, and personal growth.
That’s why we are dedicated to bringing you a diverse collection of
books, ranging from classic literature and specialized publications to
self-development guides and children's books.
More than just a book-buying platform, we strive to be a bridge
connecting you with timeless cultural and intellectual values. With an
elegant, user-friendly interface and a smart search system, you can
quickly find the books that best suit your interests. Additionally,
our special promotions and home delivery services help you save time
and fully enjoy the joy of reading.
Join us on a journey of knowledge exploration, passion nurturing, and
personal growth every day!
ebookbell.com

Newsworkers A Comparative European Perspective Henrik Rnebring

About This Presentation

Slide Content

Tags

Categories

Download

Quick Actions

Statistics

Related Slideshows

Newsworkers A Comparative European Perspective Henrik Rnebring

About This Presentation

Slide Content

Slide 1

Slide 2

Slide 6

Slide 8

Slide 9

Slide 10

Slide 11

Slide 12

Slide 13

Slide 14

Slide 15

Slide 16

Slide 17

Slide 18

Slide 19

Slide 20

Slide 21

Slide 22

Slide 23

Slide 24

Slide 25

Slide 26

Slide 27

Slide 28

Slide 29

Slide 30

Slide 31

Slide 32

Slide 33

Slide 34

Slide 35

Slide 36

Slide 37

Slide 38

Slide 39

Slide 40

Slide 41

Slide 42

Slide 43

Slide 44

Slide 45

Slide 46

Slide 47

Slide 48

Slide 49

Slide 50

Slide 52

Slide 53

Slide 54

Slide 55

Slide 56

Slide 57

Slide 58

Slide 59

Slide 60

Slide 61

Slide 62

Slide 63

Slide 64

Slide 65

Slide 66

Slide 67

Slide 68

Slide 69

Slide 70

Slide 71

Slide 72

Slide 73

Slide 74

Slide 75

Slide 76

Slide 77

Slide 78

Slide 79

Slide 80

Slide 81

Slide 82