Rules, Norms and Shared Definitions: The Management of Professional Systems Around Journalistic Products

Starting from eight in-depth interviews with Romanian media managers, this article explores the institutional resources and institutional draw-backs in creating professional systems around creative journalistic products. In proposing a product, the media company proposes a sub-set of rules for the production, distribution, promotion and consumption of the product. This article shows that the leaders of a creative team can use, while building a professional system, the same instruments that govern an institution (Scott, 2001): work rules, accepted norms, cultural-cognitive definitions. A case study, of an all news television, is used to explain the concept proposed by the paper. Nevertheless, several factors impede this effort of building a professional system: • the background of the leaders and their understanding of the professional world, •the often dual or multi cultural-cognitive definition attached to a journalistic product (defendant of public interest, profit generator, political or business weapon), • external factors, such as a political or an economic crisis, that exacerbate the conflicts among supporters of different cultural-cognitive definitions of journalistic products. The interviews are focused on eight media products that were launched after 1989, in a period of profound institutional changes in Romania. These changes refer to a new economic system (capitalism), a new political system (democracy) a new technological environment (digitalization), a new consumer behavior (fragmented; different journalistic products for different personal needs) and a new professional world (state financing and revenue from sales, before 1989, versus state and private owner financing and revenue from sales and advertising, after 1989).