Becoming entrepreneurial: Crisis, ethics and marketization in the field of travel journalism

• Explores the marketization process of professional ethics in travel journalism.
• Journalists access income sources through cooperation with marketing and travel industry.
• Crisis narratives justify new entrepreneurial practices across field boundaries.
• Journalistic ethics turn from normative ends into means of economic production.
• Journalistic ethics remain tools for professional boundary-drawing and autonomy.

This article analyzes emerging entrepreneurial practices of travel journalists in the USA as a qualitative case study of the marketization of fields of cultural production. Today, the journalistic field is undergoing a radical transformation of practice and organization collectively framed as crisis. As a result, formerly solid lines separating business and editorial departments, print and online publishing spaces, professional journalists and amateur content are blurring. Drawing on interviewing and discourse analysis, this article analyzes how travel journalists react to these changes and the threats posed to their economic subsistence by folding publications, mass-layoffs and declining pay for freelancers. Situated at the intersection of the Sociology of Culture and Economic Sociology, this research shows how new opportunity structures significantly change the meaning of journalistic practice; how travel journalists today generate income and resources through entrepreneurial practices that have been previously deemed unethical. They do so by bridging the existing boundaries to publishing, marketing and travel industry. This article argues that travel journalists instrumentalize crisis narratives to justify shifting professional ethics as means of economic production, while they simultaneously maintain an order of prestige and create closure to outside challengers based on these ethics.