Print journalism and the creative process: the social organisation of journalism and its influence on print journalists' creative practices

There has been little emphasis in journalism research on the creativity of the individual journalist. Investigating how journalists produce fresh news items every working day by examining the social and cultural forces that influence them could give a different perspective to the daily tasks a journalist engages in. This paper explores how the social structure of print journalism, what creativity research Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the field, influences creativity in journalism as well as journalists’ interaction with the field and what effect this interaction has on journalists’ creative practices. The paper is generated from the results of a PhD research project that is investigating the creative practices of print journalists in Australia. The project is using Csikszentmihalyi’s creativity theory, the systems model, as the principal theory to examine how cultural, social and individual influences affect how print journalists produce, or create, their work. Csikszentmihalyi suggests that creativity can be found in the confluence of three elements: a structured body of knowledge (domain), a social system that understands the domain (field) and an individual. These three elements make up his systems model of creativity and each are equally important for creativity to occur. Data analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted with journalists and editors has indicated that, as per Csikszentmihalyi’s contention, the field is a crucial element in the production of creative media texts.