This thesis is about the subtle ways in which discourses on the individual professionalisation of journalists have been fetishised and used since the neoliberal turn to narrow international debates on imbalances in global flows of information and communication; prevent reform of increasingly inegalitarian media systems, and more importantly to dismantle organised resistance and politically divide reporters. The study focuses on how, under the liberal theory of press freedom, journalists publicly talk and think about themselves as “lone wolves” – depoliticised and objective professionals, ideally segregated from lay society, fiercely competitive and insular in their knowledge and authority. This dissertation is the first systematic analysis of “lone wolf” discursive practices in the journalistic world and it addresses the following questions: where and how was this discourse created and enforced historically as a benchmark of professionalism? What are the political uses and epistemic blinders of this neoliberal professional gaze? Does the “lone wolf” discourse ignore or distort important parts of everyday journalistic practice? What are the limitations and lessons to be learnt from instances in the Global South in which journalistic networks and practices have tried to resist the “lone wolf” worldview? I employ historical sociology to show how this professionalisation project was articulated by the North Atlantic coalition of neoliberal governments and the Western media industry, which aggressively opposed the New International Information Order and UNESCO’s MacBride Report. I use the case of Mexico to analyse how this project and discourse was adapted in the Global South, in particular how the Mexican media system and journalism pass from being regarded as a Latin American hub for a “new world order” in the 1970s to being presented by Anglo-centric scholarship as a textbook example of press liberalisation and so-called “media opening” (apertura) in the 1990s-2000s. Drawing on over 53 qualitative semi-structured interviews with 39 practitioners and ten months of multisited ethnographic fieldwork, I argue, using Beckerian network analysis, that the neoliberal professional gaze (epitomised in the ideal subject of the “lone wolf”) obscures and makes taboo half of the journalistic world, full of overlapping practices with other occupations and realms of expertise, liminal interspaces and efforts at cooperation, collaboration, and reciprocity in and outside the guild. In the empirical chapters I analyse three Mexican collaborative networks built around Méxicoleaks, the Panama Papers and La Estafa Maestra. This study shows how journalists are beginning to realise that in order to get the work done, build trust, and survive against new threats and risks, journalism needs support from allies: activists, auditors, lawyers, fiscal experts, programmers, academics, to name just a few. Furthermore, I demonstrate how these alliances transcend mere survival tactics or the discursive techno-optimism behind a new era of radical sharing. In order to gradually start creating new conventions oriented towards collegiality and solidarity, these collaborations rely on conceptual and material exchanges of knowledge, practice, and technologies (notably databases and other digital tools), among nascent networks of expertise. Using the case of the journalistic world, I argue more broadly that in order to fully understand practices of collaboration and interdisciplinarity among institutions of knowledge and cultural production, we need a paradigm shift from a sociology of professions to a sociology of networked expertise. To this end, my work draws together new trends in scholarship from the sociology of expertise, science and technology studies, and de-Westernised media studies.