Professor Javier Díaz-Noci, coordinator of the DigiDoc research group of the UPF Department of Communication, and researcher of the News, networks, and users in the hybrid media system project. Transformation of media industries and the news in the post-industrial era (RTI2018-095775-B-C43), has published, openly, his research on how journalists have shaped their craft throughout history. Head of the subject on History of Journalism at UPF journalism studies, Díaz-Noci tries in this research to adopt a decidedly social historiographic point of view, focused on the importance of people, social and professional groups, in the formation of the social activity that we call journalism.

The book, which can be found within the DigiDoc Reports collection, takes a journey through the profession of journalism from its well-known origins: Cicero's Rome, in which, to keep informed, the emperor hired the services of a certain Cresto, the first salaried “journalist” of a known name. From there, the volume explains the main traits of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries' journalists, how newspapers are being created as institutions and what is the importance of their workers, until they reach the institutionalization of their profession, with its contemporary features, during the 19th and 20th centuries. The research continues in this century, with the appearance of a new disruptive medium that is blowing away media as we knew it, and redefining the profession of an informant: the Internet.

Reference

Díaz-Noci J. El Oficio de periodista a través de la historia. Barcelona: Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Departament de Comunicació, 2021. 103 p. (Serie Editorial DigiDoc. DigiDoc Reports).