Negotiated autonomy: A typology of negotiation strategies in podcast-based entrepreneurial journalism in Turkey

This study examines how entrepreneurial journalists producing podcasts negotiate neoliberal entrepreneurial demands within a precarious, platform-based media environment. Existing scholarship has conceptualized journalists’ responses to precarious and neoliberal labor conditions through concepts such as resistance, coping, and resilience. This study proposes negotiation as a distinct strategic response that captures how journalists selectively recalibrate the terms and boundaries of their engagement with structural demands through conditional acceptance, refusal, modification, and boundary-setting. The study is based on in-depth interviews with 10 entrepreneurial journalists producing podcasts in Türkiye, with the interview data analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. The findings identify four interrelated negotiation strategies embedded in the everyday production practices of podcast-based entrepreneurial journalism: ethical negotiation, temporal negotiation, visibility negotiation, and collective negotiation. These strategies respond respectively to neoliberal pressures associated with commercialization, continuous productivity, personal branding, and the individualization of labor; however, they remain constrained by financial precarity, platform visibility pressures, and fragile conditions of sustainability. The findings show that entrepreneurial journalists producing podcasts selectively recalibrate the terms and boundaries of their engagement with neoliberal demands while remaining embedded within structural constraints and preserving limited spaces of professional autonomy. By conceptualizing negotiation as a distinct form of strategic response and identifying its four empirical forms, the study contributes a typology for explaining how bounded and provisional professional autonomy is produced under persistent structural constraints in podcast-based entrepreneurial journalism.