Contributions to a history of journalism in Portugal

Coordinated by Carla Batista and Carlos Camponez, this publication highlights key aspects of the historical process that has marked the main changes in journalism.

For more information click here and to read the full publication, click here.

The book Contributos para uma História dos Jornalistas em Portugal highlights key aspects of the historical process that has marked the main changes in journalism. Before there was journalism, journalism had to be imagined. The dynamics of the profession, and its moves towards greater institutionalisation and professionalisation, are based on the relationship it generates with other social fields. We would like to highlight five aspects: the legal sphere, in which a regulatory framework of rights and duties associated with the practice of journalism has been established and stabilised, reflecting a set of social expectations and ethical values; the associative sphere, which revealed the capacity of journalists to organise themselves as a professional class and to define a set of rules of belonging and mutual support that were fundamental to the survival of a profession characterised in its first decades by its fragility, porosity and fluidity; education and training, which were fundamental in defining competences and defining a professional territory; politics, which subjugated journalism in Portugal due to the long dictatorship, but also fostered pockets of resistance that are part of the history of journalists; labour struggles and demands, which organised forms of struggle and enabled rights to be won.

These are some of the lines we propose for reading the history of journalists, condensed here into a few significant moments of a long journey. We seek to capture the social dynamics that run through the history of the profession and the historical events relevant thereto.