The current special issue of the journal “Journalism Studies”, titled “Journalism and Emotional Work” and edited by Mervi Pantti and Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, calls for an understanding of journalism as a profession and practice that are profoundly shaped by multifaceted emotional work. This view implicitly draws attention to the necessity of developing a context-sensitive understanding of emotional work in journalism as a profession.

In their contribution “Journalism as an affective institution. Emotional labor and the discourse on fraud at Der Spiegel”, Margreth Lünenborg and Débora Medeiros explore the underlying aspects surrounding emotional labor in everyday life inside newsrooms and how these aspects contribute to discursively (de)stabilize journalism as an institution. In order to do this, they apply the literature on affect and emotion in journalism as well as on discursive institutionalism to the analysis of a particular moment of crisis: the fraud scandal around Claas Relotius, an award-winning German reporter for the news magazine Der Spiegel.