Making the news: print journalism and the creative process

This research applies the systems model of creativity, developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, to an investigation of the creative practices of print journalists in Australia. Rather than the traditional view of creativity, where the individual is seen as paramount, Csikszentmihalyi argues that creativity is generated through the interaction of a system of three elements at work: a domain of knowledge (the cultural structure), a field (the social structure) who understands the rules and traditions of the domain, and an individual. In applying these ideas to print journalism, it is possible to see that a journalist, as the individual in the system, acquires the knowledges and traditions existent in the domain of print journalism and uses this knowledge to produce a novel variation of this information. In the case of print journalism, this variation would be constituted by a news article. The print journalist presents their variation to the field of experts who understand the domain, seeking acknowledgement that the variation is a novel and appropriate contribution. By using the systems model to examine the creative practices of print journalists, this thesis aims to demonstrate that the structures a journalist interacts with not only constrain but also enable production and it is through their agency, or ability to choose the possibilities within these structures, that journalists produce creative media texts. Rather than a view of creativity that focuses on the individual as the primary producer of a creative contribution, or conversely a largely deterministic view, where an individual is constrained or determined by the structures they work within, this thesis is arguing that print journalists and the structures they work within interact with each other. The ethnographic research was conducted using a triangulated set of methods. Interviews were conducted with thirty-six journalists and editors who work in the Australian print media industry. Observation of three newsrooms was also undertaken. Document and artefact analysis was used as the third method and analysis of the data obtained from these methods, as well as an examination of creativity and journalism literature, shows that there is a link between the cultural structure, the social structure and the individual print journalist in the creation of a media text, illustrating the veracity of the systems model of creativity in action.