Journalism and Media Crossing Field Boundaries: the case of Denmark

Journalism and media have been fitted together for decades fulfilling each other needs. However, due to some main drivers as new communication technology and the societal medialization process media and journalism have changed dramatically and in the case of Denmark this symbiosis is broken.
This article explores such changes in Denmark by using key concepts of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in a historical study of media and journalism in the last four decades. Based on data of journalist functions in society and the emergence and distribution of new types of media, combined with the positioning of media and journalists and the existing knowledge in the media and journalism literature, this paper analyze media and journalism as two distinct analytic objects representing respectively media organization and the journalist profession.
Firstly, this paper thus constructs synchronic interrelated fields in media and journalism in order to understand the recent crossing of boundaries in both fields of media and journalism. Secondly, this paper proposes diachronic fields in media and journalism, which are separated by structural breaks due to the emergence of free news and of strategic public relation journalism in the last decade in Denmark. In a Bourdieuian sense journalism has become generalized capital, recognized and used as a weapon in the symbolic struggles between powerful elites in the news discourse. The paper contributes to the understanding of the impact of changes in media and journalism structures on in dispositions for daily practice.