Post-Crisis Journalism

This article is concerned with the crisis in Greek journalism and with the potential for critiques to lead to a renewal. Drawing on the pragmatic sociology of critique and using the notion of critical juncture, it argues that the role played by critiques coming from journalists themselves has been overlooked. Such critiques, emerging organically from the field, open up new opportunities and feed into practices and new journalistic initiatives. Documenting the state of journalism in Greece, the empirical part of the article traces three critiques developed by the “rank and file” of journalism: the critique of decline, which suggests the construction of a new regulatory body that will oversee journalistic practice, ethics and standards; the critique of the creative force of the crisis, which suggests that journalism adopts the logics of new media, including collaboration, sharing and witnessing; and the radical critique, which seeks to rehabilitate journalism through placing it in the midst of society and removing it from the business of selling news. The latter critique has led to the formulation of some radical new journalistic cooperative projects. While the success of these critiques, and the ideas they contain, depends on how they become articulated with broader socio-political, economic and technological developments, their formulation and circulation in the field is crucial as it helps shape post-crisis journalism from the bottom up.