Becoming Real (chapter in 'Newswork and Precarity')

Although precarity in journalism is usually understood in terms of economic precarity, this chapter focuses on professional precarity. It critically interrogates how the independent nature of work in entrepreneurial journalism, and in particular the self-reliance in terms of funding for their work, go hand in hand with a type of professional vulnerability. Ultimately, a sense of self-worth is at stake. The chapter draws on auto-ethnographic and interview data to reveal how entrepreneurial journalists deal with the fact that their work may or may not be appreciated or even recognized by colleagues or external parties as actual journalism. Interviews show that participants have an ambivalent relationship to the label of “entrepreneurial journalist.