Abstract
Amid an estimated 4.1million days lost to strike action in Britain in the year to June 2023 – the highest since the late 1980s – a small but significant fraction could be attributed to journalism. At Reach, where staff downed tools for one day in August 2022, and at National World, not included in these figures as its three days of action took place in September 2023, the headline issue was pay. At the BBC, it was the transition to a “digital first” model and a re-structuring that would break up respected local newsgathering and investigative teams.
But lurking in the wings were the grim realities of job insecurity and the expectation to do more with less, amid dramatic headcount reductions since the 2008 financial crash. The New Beats project, initiated in 2014 by Australian media academics following a mass wave of redundancies down under, has sought to explore the impact of these layoffs on their victims. The project subsequently expanded to study patterns of change in journalistic work, identity and livelihood in countries as varied as Canada, Finland, Indonesia, South Africa and the UK.
It has now culminated in Journalists and Job Loss, which showcases an impressive array of qualitative and quantitative data, based on surveys and interviews in numerous countries. “The emergence of new platforms… has fundamentally disrupted the traditional news media model, which was an exclusive right to deliver the news, and attract the associated advertising dollars attached to the news audience,” the editors write in their lively introduction. In the subsequent chapters, assorted academics dissect not only the careers thrown on the scrapheap as a result, but also how losing this “exclusive right” has led journalists to fundamentally alter their self-conception.
This is not just an academic book, but a book that seems to anticipate an exclusively academic readership: meticulously referenced, full of repetition and cluttered with purple prose. Its anthological nature allows for perspectives from vastly different settings, but also results in huge variations in quality and clarity. Penny O’Donnell’s chapter on trade unions in journalism, for instance, frustratingly concludes just as it is getting going. Having identified the weaknesses of traditional union models and reported a “new culture” of “recruitment, growth and activism” in Australia’s Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance union, O’Donnell fails to interrogate the mechanics and impact of this and merely proposes “new research pathways” in the field. A study of Indonesian women journalists, meanwhile, obsesses over research methods and reaches conclusions far too obvious for any news agenda.
Nor does the book’s approach encourage transnational comparisons, other than with the Australian baseline. Nonetheless, interesting patterns can’t help but emerge: most obviously, the continuing disintegration of distinctions between journalism and PR, as an increasingly precarious workforce looks for business opportunities on both sides of the fence. There is a valuable discussion of the new phenomenon of workers switching back and forth between the two disciplines, as well as journalists’ feelings of betrayal and remorse after crossing over.
Another common theme is that post-redundancy journalists prefer the “freedom” of freelancing to the constraints of a staff contract – but if they remain committed to journalism, they earn significantly less. As Mark Deuze writes, “almost half of Dutch freelance journalists today also depend on the income of their partner”. Though still thoroughly professional in its academic credentials, his chapter is the most inquisitive – and journalistic – in this volume, pausing to ask not just how journalists perceive their roles, but also why. Though a strong professional identity is normally celebrated in the media, Deuze argues that when journalists conflate it with their work, it “leads to a profound depoliticisation, as news workers are more likely to blame themselves and their professional inadequacies when jobs fail or opportunities dwindle”. The “structural inequalities and exploitative tendencies of the media as an industry”, meanwhile, remain intact to catch out the next generation.
Structural issues can also lead journalists to conclude they have no choice but to leave the profession, after which their jobs are deleted from the payroll. Women and minority groups are disproportionately affected by redundancies, and Henrik Örnebring and Cecilia Möller conclude that the concept of livelihood – accounting for gendered roles across life – makes for a better understanding of journalistic work than paid labour on its own.
In an enlightening chapter on Finland, Ari Heinonen, Kari Koljonen and Auli Harju distinguish between two coping strategies for redundant journalists: “survival by holding on” and “survival by clinging on”. But both, surely, point to a thoroughly disempowered profession that has accepted a managed decline with profound effects for democracy. There are no easy answers as to how an alternative strategy of resistance could be built, but it is disappointing that such a comprehensive study barely asks the question.
