Organizational and territorial cultures in Chilean journalism

Abstract

On the basis of survey responses of 570 journalists from 114 newspapers, radio, newswires, television, and internet news organizations, this paper describes the role conceptions, epistemological underpinning, and ethical values of the Chilean news media workers, comparing the differences that exist among media types and between the capital and the rest of the country. The findings show territorial cultures of journalism, with differences between the capital and provincial regions, mostly classifiable, because of the country’s centralization and sociocultural characteristics. Likewise, the results indicate that the Chilean journalists’ professional culture is not a substantial function of the type of media in which they work, and that the effects that “region” and “media type” factors have on journalism culture are independent from each other.

Keywords

• Journalism cultures
• institutional roles
• epistemological orientations
• ethical values
• journalists
• Chile.