Conflicts in the newsroom: a theoretical analysis of anticipatory socialization and journalistic creativity

This paper aims at exploring how the conflictual environment of anticipatory socialization (vocational training at school) would contribute to the development of journalistic creativity. Socialization is first identified as a key factor to organization effectiveness (Jablin, 1984). It is crucial to see that journalism students are benefited from learning, but still, we omitted certain aspects that learning at journalism school could not offer to young reporters and even limit themselves for creative thought in journalistic writing. Often, we found that journalistic creativity comes up when they work in the newsroom. Reporters try to probe the mind of the curious readers with interesting content and sometimes even go against editorial policy. Creativity is also defined as intellectual inventiveness and the ability to produce some kind of novelty that could be valuable and applicable for others, regard highly about the originality and novelty in the work. Hereby, we define journalistic creativity as breaking the pattern of what classroom teach us and the news policy that imposes in the working environment also trigger the journalistic creativity. The tension in between the knowledge the reporters learnt and the actual newsroom become the catalyst for the creativity to be formed. They have to invent new terms to get around the ban and publish their ideas. This article applies definitions from previous creativity researches and explained in the context of journalism. This study offers a theoretical contribution by bringing the conflictual aspect of anticipatory socialization and how journalistic creativity is formed in the end together with the domain of journalism.