(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
covering clashes between residents on August 2010 (Yunita, 2010), it showed that the
contributor did not understand the technique of covering the conflict areas.
If journalism is carried out in that conditions continuously, public will lose the golden
moment of democracy, because professional journalism is one of the supporting pillars
of the establishment of democracy. “Democracy needs the media to provide citizens
with good, independent information to function well” (Croteau & Hoynes, 2006, p.
250).
This study examined: first, how did the contributors work for TV station?. Second, how
did the contributors understand the professionalism of journalistic work? Third, how
did the contributors apply the professional principles in journalistic work?
The goals of the study are: first, to know the professionalism of the news contributors.
Second, to know the contributor’s understanding about professionalism in journalism.
Third, to know the application of professionalism principles in journalism work.
The study applied case study method with a qualitative approach. Data was collected by
using in-depth interview method with the news contributors. They were generally
assigned as contributors since 3-5 years ago. There were six informants who came from
Jakarta and other cities. All informants were men and they were more than 29 years
old.
Literature Review
Journalists are people who work convey information through mass media. According to
International Federation of Journalist, “a journalist is one who devotes the greater part
of his/her working time to the profession of journalism and who derives from it most of
his/her income being employed or working as a freelance” (as cited in Josephi, 2009, p.
143). Many journalist organizations require that if someone wants to be a journalist, so
journalism must be a main job (Josephi, 2009, p. 143). If somebody dedicated to
journalism and he/she got income from that job, so he/she could be called a journalist.
The key is if someone put activity of journalism as the main job, then that person could
be categorized as a journalist.
Whatever the definition of journalist, according to Josephi, it is focused on the
“function and form” of the activities. “The function is defined as the collection,
preparation, and distribution of news and related commentary and feature materials. Its
form is through channels that reach an audience, such as the mass media” (Josephi,
2009, p.143).
The following question that frequently asked by people whether journalist is a
profession or not? There are many different arguments about the profession of
journalist. It is not easy to classify (Tumber & Prentoulis, 2005, p. 58). Meanwhile
Weaver (2005) mentioned that journalist was not a clear profession. He argued for his
opinion, “first, in most countries journalist themselves do not want to be restricted by
having to be licensed as so-called professionals, and second, there is no one distinct
educational pathway to becoming a journalist” (Weaver, 2005, p. 165). Meanwhile
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