Introduction

Journalism is a strange industry. It is hard to think of another occupation that encompasses so many different forms of prior experience and training, which counts among its contributors so many people who maintain separate, outside jobs, or who even only partake infrequently as a means of gaining extra income and prominence. The very term ‘journalist’ is a contested one, and in its broadest sense it can be used to refer to anybody that regularly contributes material to the news media– though even here, the distinction between a ‘journalist’ and a ‘contributor’ is blurry.

Even regarding those who are employed within newsrooms, there has always been a large variety of disparate figures. This became especially noticeable in the twentieth-century British press, as the growing size of newspapers and the organisations that produced them, alongside the emergence of increasing specialisation and clearly demarcated specialist content, led to the inclusion of journalists from many different backgrounds, and with lots of different forms of expertise. Newspapers were– and are– melting pots. Throughout the twentieth century, within the newsrooms of many newspapers, especially of the larger national titles, there could be found those who had gone directly into the industry and trained within journalism's professional bodies, cartoonists, academics, literary figures, current and ex-politicians, those with experience in the public relations industry, figures with prior experience in other professions, and even spies and those connected to the intelligence services. These varied figures filled a large variety of roles, from editors to reporters, opinion column ists to subeditors, sports writers to photojournalists, and many more besides.

Despite this complex situation, images of ‘the journalist’ have been apparent since the role first began to solidify in the seventeenth century. Such images evolved over time as the industry and those who populated it changed. The construction of a professional identity for journalists has come from both larger, industry-wide institutional efforts, and from the interjections of myriad individual journalists and media organisations. As Mark Hampton has shown, journalists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries provided self-presentations in a variety of publications, including ‘elite opinion reviews, professional handbooks, trade periodicals, and journalists’ memoirs’– though many of these sources have only started to receive sustained attention from historians in recent decades (Hampton 2005: 139).