KEY POINTS

• Two self-referential aspects of news-practitioner habit (and habitus) are key to understanding journalistic discourse: their professional (internal) identity enacted through a craft ethos, and their public (external) commitments.

• Craft is important in creating a self-identity: the practice of journalism means mastering a craft and subscribing to values that the group maintains through an apprenticeship dynamic.

• Community is an important framing concept: the news media sees itself in relationship to the community they cover, as responsive and responsible, as a friend and as an authority.

Journalists are taught to approach their work in particular ways that both influence the shape of the text and reinforce their identities and professional roles. Their work is motivated discursively in terms of craft and ideologically in terms of press freedoms and a commitment to the public – in other words, in terms of responsibilities to a larger community as well as to their own. Writing and reporting well, and attending to an audience or community for whom the craft is intended to serve, are organizing principles that create coherence within the profession. Understanding this relationship creates alternative ways of understanding journalistic practitioner dynamics, a key step in understanding the shape of journalistic language.

In this chapter, I focus on the craft ethos that circumscribes one's identity as a reporter or editor, and on the community factor, which frames journalistic behaviors on many levels – discursive, ideological, and interactional.