European Journalists Views on Their Profession

Cardiff.
Finally for this session at Future of Journalism 2009 we move to Henrik Örnebring, presenting some preliminary findings on newswork across Europe that are coming out of a Swedish study. The countries targetted here were Sweden, the UK, Italy, Poland, and Estonia, as they are representative of a range of different media systems. The study conducted 61 semi-structured interviews with journalists involved in daily news production in various media, contexts, and institutional settings, and an email survey with some 2200 journalists across these six countries.

The focus here, then, is on journalistic culture (i.e. the journalists' working practices, their values, communication practices, and artefacts), and this research takes place in the context of a changing work environment for professional journalists: a general deregulation of labour markets (with attendant deunionisation and derecognition), a rise of flexible, precarious employment (with freelancing, short-term contracts, and outsourcing), a technologisation of the workplace, and changing skill demands for journalists. Journalism deals with this through strategies of organisational (according to the needs of the organisation) and occupational (according to the needs of the profession) professionalism.

The technologisation of the workplace leads to many journalists stating that their job has become substantially easier - but this translates almost immediately to 'faster', and thereby also inherently adds more pressures for the journalist. Technologisation is also perceived as coming from above - blogs and content management systems are introduced by employers, and click rates are available for each article, creating new professional challenges for journalists. Most of this is now an almost entirely naturalised part of production processes, in fact - content management systems are now commonly seen to be neither good nor bad, but to be simply inevitable, for example.

Flexible and precarious labour challenges now mean that young journalists entering the profession no longer even expect to get paid; this also acts as a kind of 'sorting mechanism' separating out those who are not prepared to persist under these conditions. Freelancing is seen by some to have positive aspects, but most would prefer not to have to do it. Skills required of journalists are perceived to have remained the same at their core: it remains important to be able to tell a good story.

Some country-specific findings to end on: the sharing of editorial responsibilities (e.g. through regular rotation of tasks within a team) is common in Sweden, and to some extent in Germany, but not elsewhere; hierarchical workplace organisation is more common in Italy and Poland, and possibly also more common in specific types of news organisations (e.g. in tabloids).

Technorati : Europe, FoJ 2009, change, industry, journalism, news, profession, technology
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