- Title
- Creativity: a keyword in print journalism
- Creator
- Fulton, Janet; McIntyre, Phillip
- Relation
- 59th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association. 59th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association (Chicago, IL 21-25 May, 2009)
- Relation
- http://www.icahdq.org/conf/2009confprogram.asp
- Publisher
- International Communication Association
- Resource Type
- conference paper
- Date
- 2009
- Description
- Rather than focusing on the core ideas in journalism’s domain, such as news, media, and journalism, or keywords that represent journalism’s ideals, like objectivity, watchdog and truth, this paper argues that creativity is a keyword that should be investigated more fully within the print journalism domain. Journalism, particularly hard news, is a form of writing that is seldom thought of as a creative activity. The cultural and social structures journalists work within are seen as constraints on how journalists produce their texts. This is an example of the Romantic view of creativity where an artist must be free from constraints in order to be creative. However, if a rationalist approach is used, it can be demonstrated that it is these very structures, and the knowledge of these structures, that actually enable a journalist to produce their work. By using Csikszentmihalyi’s systems model of creativity, a rationalist approach, as the principal theory, this paper provides evidence that by investigating print journalism within a rationalist framework, a print journalist can be seen as a producer of creative cultural texts. Furthermore, by acknowledging that different genres of print journalism have different structures, it can also be argued that a journalist working in any genre has the capacity to produce creative texts. This paper is part of a wider qualitative study into the creative practices of the print journalist in Australia that is examining the individual journalist’s production within cultural and social contexts. Analysis of the literature has demonstrated that by marrying theories and definitions from the creativity research domain with literature from the print journalism domain, creativity can be found and explained within the print journalism domain. Furthermore data analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted with print journalists in Australia demonstrated that they are very aware of the devices used, and the requirements of the field, to produce texts that are both novel and appropriate: a creative text.
- Subject
- creativity; journalism; print media; print journalists
- Identifier
- uon:8991
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/919821
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