Journalistic profession, in the form established after the Second World War, is facing a paradigmatic change which is usually preceded by a state of crisis. This process has been affecting Czech journalists as well. The book Czech Journalists in Comparative Perspective characterizes Czech journalists’ values and professional attitudes and the transmutations of these in the last post-transformational phase of post-November building of the new media system. The study is based on five quantitative and qualitative analysis realised between 2003 and 2016 and it is composed in the form of two comparative perspectives. It does both, compares the attitudes of Czech journalists in the last 15 years, and it compares them to their selected foreign colleagues. The text describes Czech journalists in seven chapters, linked together by the aim to capture the causes of the professional crisis as well as the potential for its solution. Thus, it looks for the roots of the credibility loss of Czech journalists, but it also relates to the whole process of their professional socialization coming about under the influence of media system oligarchization, as well as hybridization and virtualization of professional practice and relations. Both of which deepen the professional identity split of Czech journalists. The study depicts Czech journalists in generational perspective and poses a question whether the post-transitional phase brings generational differentiation, and to what extent the performance of journalistic role is being formed by generational experience viewed in historical-power perspective. These processes are discernible already with domestic journalism students who have been compared to their Polish and Swedish counterparts. Towards the end, the text proposes to conclude a new symbolic contract between journalists and the Czech public.
