Book Review: Will the Last Reporter Please Turn Out the Lights: The Collapse of Journalism and What Can Be Done to Fix It (original) (raw)
Journalism Studies, 2016
Today journalism, as an industry and a profession, is characterised by ever-increasing turbulence and change, for better and for worse. Profound transformations affect every aspect of the instituti...
HesaMag #15 Journalism, an increasingly precarious profession (spring-summer 2017)
In these uncertain times, saying that journalists are getting bad press would be an understatement. Political leaders, whatever their colour, are now starting to publicly pillory them. Press representatives used to be a homogeneous, urbane, trendy caste, pacing the corridors of power, frequenting the cocktail bars. For the last few years, the increased presence of star TV newscasters in glossy magazines and the omnipresence of certain columnists in talk-shows have obviously not helped boost the profession’s image among the public. At the side of this absolute minority of VIP journalists, the vast majority modestly pursue their work of informing the public, well away from the spotlights. Most of them still make a decent living out of it, though a growing minority is not managing to earn a decent wage. The phenomenon of long-term trainees and bogus self-employment is nothing new. For many years now, many budding journalists have seen this as the only way of getting a foot on the career ladder. After all, haven’t they got to earn their spurs? The problem these days is that such “probationary periods” are tending to become a permanent status. To such a point that budding journalists – and not just them – just can’t imagine gaining an open-ended employment contract. Looking specifically at the printed press, the Internet has become synonymous with free access to information, accelerating the decline in sales. The 2008 crisis triggered a collapse in advertising revenues, which newspaper owners and managing editors – more and more of them business school graduates – used as a pretence to “streamline” their operations. The consequence: newsrooms are empty, the “survivors” are on the brink of exhaustion, and much of a newspaper’s content is supplied by an army of invisible freelancers. In Europe, freelancers now constitute one-third of journalist union members. Isolated, having to compete against each other – and even sometimes against the hordes of non-professional unpaid “informers” churned out by the social media –, they are prepared to do everything to build up a reputation and work with certain media in the long term. Despite their extreme precariousness, they are little inclined to join forces. “To work in such professions, you have to pay: you pay for the enjoyment you get out it, you pay for the prestige they give you”, stated two (precarious) authors nearly ten years ago in a book highlighting the impoverishment of certain intellectual professions, including journalism (Les nouveaux intellos précaires, publ. Stock, 2009). Since then, the situation has got a lot worse, to the point that journalists are beginning to question the role and sense of their profession, with a growing percentage of them even thinking about doing something completely different. One cloud more gathering over our democracies … in these uncertain times.