"People have probably offered to buy me a dictionary 20 times since I've been here": Risk management within a community of journalists in francophone Canada

Abstract

Gathering and writing news in a bilingual context increases the complexity of a practice already characterised by multitasking. Does this situation create particular risks? How do journalists deal with hazards? This article discusses the strategies of risk management that reporters develop as a community of practice and investigates what these strategies reveal about reporters' conception of language. To discover these strategies, I carried out fieldwork in a newsroom situated in Canada's National Capital Region: Ici Radio-Canada Ottawa–Gatineau, which is the francophone public service broadcaster that publishes multimodal content in French on various platforms (radio, television, a website and social media). I conducted semi-structured interviews, sessions of non-participant observation and gathered documents in the field. Participants are especially concerned by the risk of linguistic interference (Anglicisms) because they align with Ici-Radio Canada's model of linguistic prestige and, therefore, fear complaints from their audience. They mainly share these risks with their direct French-speaking colleagues on an ongoing basis and with the speech community of educated French speakers in a context where French is seen as a minority language and English is seen as a threat.