Traditional approaches to understanding the professionalisation of occupational groups tend to focus on the "success stories" of professions like medicine and law, which display certain "professional traits" such as compulsory licensing, and have a monopoly over their work, its knowledge base and the entry of new members. However, because the professionalising efforts of journalists in liberal democracies do not conform to the precedent established by doctors and lawyers, the occupation of journalism has been neglected as worthy of study within the sociology of professions. However, much is to be gained from analysing the "failed" professionalising efforts of journalists as a means of understanding the occupation's evolution. This paper argues that to understand New Zealand journalism's "failed" professionalising efforts, insight can be gained from the "intra-occupation conflict" that existed during the period from 1890 until the mid-1950s. It is shown that although "professionalism" provided journalists with a model on which to organise themselves along professional lines, their efforts were undermined by the ambiguity surrounding the status of journalism as a profession, with implications for the contemporary configuration of the occupation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]