6

‪Through empirical study of the ‘Sport’ department of the French regional daily press newspaper Le Progrès, we examine the tensions which characterize the professional ethos of sports journalists. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with five journalists in order to understand how interviewees perceive their dual identity as sports journalists and as regional daily press journalists in the context of their professional practices and careers. These self-narratives show that professional identities are constantly renegotiated by journalists in attempts to relegitimize, symbolically, a professional ethos under pressure from socio-economic constraints affecting the field of journalism in general and the regional daily press in particular.‪