Growing media practitioner mobility, as well as the migration of transnational media corporations across borders and media cultures, gives rise to new questions about how journalistic professionalism travels, write Mei Li and Naren Chitty, both of Macquarie University.

The authors study the case of CCTV-NEWS, a Chinese state-owned transnational media corporation that recruits Western journalists. The focus of the study is on the question how journalistic professional norms and values travel and become contextualised through journalist mobility.

The study is based on in-depth interviews of eight Western media practitioners working in CCTV-NEWS.

According to the interviewees, CCTV-NEWS is an information disseminator about China and other countries that are neglected by Western international broadcasters. The media workers see themselves as disseminators with the professional values of objectivity, balance, fairness and inclusivity.

The article “Paradox of professionalism: The professional identity of journalists who work across media cultures” was published by Journalism and it can be found here (abstract public).

Picture: Corner of East-West and North-South by Chris Collins, licence: CC BY-SA 2.0