Amanda Brouwers: Entrepreneurship at work: analysing practice, labour, and creativity in journalism

Amanda Brouwers  | University of Groningen, Journalism and Media Studies | Promotor: prof. dr Tamara C. Witschge, supervisor: dr Dana Mustata | 01-02-2016 — 31-01-2020 | a.d.brouwer[at]rug.nl

Entrepreneurship at work: analysing practice, labour, and creativity in journalism
overarching project: Entrepreneurship at Work

The overall aim of the larger project, initiated by Tamara Witschge, is to theorise emerging shared understandings, everyday work activities, and material contexts of entrepreneurial journalism, in a time when established legacy media face significant challenges and new forms of journalism are emerging. The aim of the sub-project is to provide detailed observations of everyday activities in entrepreneurial journalism.

This PhD tries to accomplish that by letting the researcher practice and participate in the different phases of entrepreneurial journalism, and write an auto-ethnography about the process. Reflection on this process will include different components constituting previous practices, including: everyday work activities; professional self‐understandings; short and longer term aims; emotions (excitement and/or anxiety about the creative and precarious process); personal and professional network relations; material and economic context. Important in the process of reflection will be the concept of practice theory as previously described by Nick Couldry (2004) and Bengt Johannisson (2009), thereby defining journalism as practice.

The project is currently midway, and has so far focused on tacit knowing and a variety of implicit norms in (entrepreneurial) journalism, such as norms surrounding failure, the long working hours culture, and conceptualisations of audiences.