Between the university and the practice in journalism education: The contributions of the sociology of professions about the construction of the journalists' professional identity

In the matter of Sociology of Professions’ studies, in general, the approaches are dedicated to understanding how the professions have been built and consolidated, analyzing how they have changed along this trajectory, and investigating how a particular profession or professional group obtained social status, and how it can socially construct its professional identity. Facing the new occupational structure of labor markets, in the last decades, the new Sociology of Professions’ approaches are rethinking the bureaucratic professional model, according to which the professional value was built upon the diploma. In this level of research, regarding the relation established between the academic education and profession, Dubar’s perspective becomes relevant, according to which professional identities are constructed in social interaction and the diploma is no longer seen as fundamental for the formation of professional identities. In debates about the role of universities in teaching journalism, some of the arguments support that the journalism career has a specific status as the social prestige of journalists is not achieved through regular diplomas or selective courses, but through other sources (“vocational skills”, “quality of speech”, “credibility of the comments”, “the art of handling an article”, “social visibility” and “proximity to the power”), which exceed the contents of the standardized academic programs. The reflections proposed in this presentation intend to answer the following questions: What are the criteria that indicate a professional value within the profession of journalists? What are the requirements regarding the admission control for this profession? In order to think about these questions, in this paper, the aim is to consider the contributions of the professions’ studies to comprehend the profession of journalism, analyzing how this professional career, built in university courses of journalism, represents a significant feature of the social identity of professionals.