Digital Media Habitus, Agency and Structure: Convergence Practices Among Journalists in Indian Newspapers

The field of journalism is being restructured with the adoption of interactive and multimedia technologies. Convergence process has amended the ‘rules of access’ and ‘rules of the game’ for journalists. The new accession rules may include multiskilling, multitasking, multimedia storytelling, knowledge of different apps and tools, critical thinking, coding and designing, adaptability to new environment, social and cultural phenomena and many more. The adoption of technologies results in the journalist gaining symbolic capital or internal recognition. This creates an environment for appropriating professional capital or external recognition in terms of promotion and increment. This paper analysed assimilation of convergence practices into the media field by journalists, changes in journalistic values, changes in doxa of the field and agent’s habitus through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory. The thematic analysis of the data reveals that journalists appropriate new technologies to redefine the habitus and adapt to the contemporary dominant work practices.

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