Crossroads of Communication: On the Landscape of Career Journalists

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze the links established between the field of Social Communication and the project “University of the Street” as an innovative contribution to academic research in the field of media communication.

The possibility of identifying non-formal learning situations in journalistic activity allows us to shed light on dimensions of analysis that have been little explored by theories of communication and culture. These are “experience-generating behaviors” (J. Magariños, 2006) which, because of their effectiveness in professional practice, condense forms of learning that may be taken up again and updated by subjects in other contexts or situations.

These “acquired experiential forms of knowledge” are generally denied or only scarcely addressed by communication studies. In this sense, the identification and construction of the scenario “Journalists by Trade” posed the challenge of systematizing these non-academic forms of knowledge from a basic methodology.

The identification and description of teachings accumulated by a large number of journalists who have not had access to university education made it possible, initially, to notice the intersections and tensions with the knowledge produced by academia and with which the latter seeks to differentiate itself in its search for labor-market insertion for its graduates.