Trust us, we are local journalists: How the desire to be trusted shapes early career practitioners' understanding of ethical journalism in the UK legacy press

The workplace in the UK legacy press is an important learning environment for early career journalists where they are exposed to formal and informal learning opportunities. However, in the learning of ethical journalism there is an emergent tension between the formally facilitated workbased training schemes which frame ethics through the lens of a code of practice, and informal learning through social interactions with colleagues and members of their local community where the desire to be trusted is an important driver. This paper draws on an analysis of semi-structured interviews with early career journalists and training managers in the British legacy press, working for local weekly and daily titles. In applying the social learning construct of communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner 2015) as an evaluative framework, the data indicated that while early career journalists’ learning was shaped in part by training schemes, their desire to be perceived as trusted by their community of interest, their imagined reader, as they sought to gain membership of that community, was powerful in shaping their understanding of
occupational ethics.