Learning to be an Online Journalist in French Online Newsrooms
Résumé
Online newsrooms have changed the way young journalists learn their craft. They are compelled, as their senior colleagues, to accomplish more and more different tasks with computer systems to fill the need to maintain a more intense permanent flow of news and to manage audio, video and visual items in a convergent environment (Paterson & Domingo, 2008). This communication will examine the socialization of journalists in two French Online Newsrooms: lefigaro.fr (site belonging to the famous print newspaper Le Figaro) and Slate.fr (created on the model of Slate.com in United States). It will summarize a research based upon twenty-five biographic interviews (Dubar & Demazière, 1997) with new online journalists and upon ethnographic observations of those two newsrooms. It will focus on the learning processes and ritualization of professional practices (Lahire, 2002). What seems to be relevant is that the individual paths of a majority of online journalists interviewed are based upon a double socialization: through an early interest in computer and through a training in a School of journalism. Observations and interviews show different processes of socialization, a feature already predictable by the fact that training in online journalism (Le Cam & Trédan, 2008), practices in online newsrooms and collective representations of what online journalism should be are still a construction in progress. By imitating others, by learning from mistakes, by proposing and trying new ways of producing news, young online journalists seem to be in an unstable position. They face several challenges (Le Cam, 2005): they must build their own legitimacy in a world already occupied by traditional journalists, learn to manage online communities, produce permanent and multimedia information in online newsrooms managed by senior editors but in which the majority of journalists is as young as them. This allows us to describe processes by which socialization in these newsrooms changes professional representations and participate to the construction of a specific professional identity.