Study investigates changes in journalism and profile of journalists

The new professional is young, writes for multiple platforms, and has a market-based view of journalism.

By Jussara Mangini

Agência FAPESP – The transformations in communications as a result of new technologies and the culture of media convergence have profoundly affected the production processes of journalism and, consequently, the profile of journalists. This is the conclusion of a study that evaluated the profile of journalists and changes in the workplace.

“Print, television, and radio products are made in a completely different manner than they were 20 years ago,” said Roseli Fígaro, coordinator of the Communications and Work Research Center at the Arts and Communications School at Universidade de São Paulo (ECA/USP).

Responsible for the FAPESP-funded study “The profile of the journalist and the discourse about journalism: a study of changes in the working world of the professional journalist,” Fígaro highlights a series of functions that have disappeared from the routine work of journalists.

“Time and space, compromised by the capabilities of information and communication technologies, were assimilated into production processes, reducing the time for reflection, inquiry, and research in journalism. The workspace shrank and, at the same time, diversified, transforming large newsrooms into production cells that can be set up anywhere with an internet connection and a computer. Real-time online journalism, blogs, and social network tools are innovations in the routines of professionals,” she adds.

In the study concluded in 2013 under Fígaro’s supervision, a group of researchers from the Communications and Work Research Center sought to discover what these transformations mean in terms of changes in the profile of professionals and what journalists think about work and journalism. The study is the result of an analysis of the responses of 538 journalists. The data are also included in the e-book Changes in the work world of the journalist (Editora Salta), launched in the second half of 2013.

The 538 journalists are from São Paulo, a state that is home to 30% of Brazilian professionals in this field. The journalists were consulted in two methodological phases: the quantitative phase, with the use of a closed-ended multiple choice questionnaire, and the qualitative phase, with face-to-face interviews including a list of open-ended questions and a discussion group with a list of the most controversial questions from previous instruments.

Four sample groups responded to the questionnaires in different periods. Two groups were queried in 2009; one consisted of 30 journalists from different media and lines of work who were selected in a random manner from social networks, and the other comprised 340 journalists from the São Paulo State Professional Journalist Union, also from different media and lines of work, and with different functions.

A group of 90 freelance journalists working across different media was consulted in 2010, and a group of 82 journalists from a publishing group in São Paulo (selected as part of a previous study conducted in 2007) constituted the fourth sample.

In the qualitative phase of individual interviews with 20 journalists and discussions in two focus group sessions with a total of 16 journalists, the researchers chose 36 of the 538 journalists who responded to questionnaires in the quantitative phase.

In general, the majority of journalists had a middle-class socioeconomic profile; were young (up to age 30), white, and female; did not have children; worked across multiple platforms; and were college graduates with some specialized graduate education. Other common characteristics were an average of eight to ten work hours per day and a salary ranging from R$ 2,000 to R$ 6,000.

The predominance of women coincides with the data released by the National Federation of Journalists (FENAJ), which reported at the end of 2012 that Brazilian journalists are largely single white women under age 30. Men only predominate in the unionized group of professionals that are older and have been on the job longer.

Precarious employment

The restructuring of the journalistic workplace has mostly occurred since the 1990s and has transformed workplace relations, the researcher affirmed in the introduction to her book. It was in this decade that the number of journalists who were hired without professional licenses increased, paving the way for new forms of hiring, such as outsourcing and the use of short-term contracts , as well as hiring companies, cooperatives, and freelancers.

This so-called “flexibility” ultimately transferred the weight of market uncertainties to workers. “As malleable labor in terms of schedule, work day, and formal employment, these professionals cannot plan their lives economically or romantically,” said Fígaro.

Freelancers work full time for several companies from the comfort of their homes and alone. They have begun to see themselves as entrepreneurs who apply their knowledge of journalism to other activities, such as the revision of academic theses or even selling press communications packages to politicians.

The younger journalists and freelancers are least able to plan their professional lives beyond the short term, according to the researcher. “They work today to consume today and do not know how their work will be next year. I imagine that this causes great stress in the lives of these individuals,” affirmed Fígaro.

The study also found that the new generation is less likely to unionize. One possible explanation for this, according to Fígaro, is that professionals who face financial instability and have difficulty relating to the work world are not seeking collective solutions, such as unionizing or organizing to demand better work conditions, but rather individual solutions, such as finding a job.

“They have a professional profile that is distant from collective values, are individualistic, and are very concerned with their own business. They pursue clients and consider information a product.” She stressed, however, that this does not mean that the journalist is not concerned with collective causes or society but that there is an individual pursuit of solutions.

Professionals in the area know that one common characteristic is high job turnover. People change from one company or communication vehicle to another. In Fígaro’s assessment, “If, on the one hand, the experience could enrich the professional, on the other hand, it is always a new beginning, or a not so new beginning because they stay on the same hierarchical level.”

According to Fígaro, journalists today are required to be constantly up-to-date on digital tools for finding, verifying, and editing information. It is necessary to have abilities and competencies that allow work across diverse platforms, such as print, TV, radio, and the internet, and in different ‘languages’, including verbal, written, sound, photographic, audiovisual, and hypertextual. “They also must have notions of marketing and management because the profession prioritizes the business/merchandising perspective in cultural products through the treatment given to assignments and the segmentation into target audiences,” commented Fígaro.

Differences in generations and professional training

Although most young people in the profession work outside newsrooms in precarious jobs, older journalists migrate toward the coordination of PR offices.

The coordinator of the study comments that there are many conflicting cases of disrespect and intolerance in relation to older professionals and the inexperienced, technology-oriented youth. “The companies, in their rush to change their culture and make their businesses dynamic, broke a very important rule in the world of labor: the transfer of professional knowledge from one generation to another. This causes losses not only for the company but also for all of society. There is a social cost to pay,” Fígaro opines.

According to the researcher, journalists today must have great dexterity with technology that did not previously exist. Did journalists previously have less dexterity? Not in Fígaro’s opinion: “Multitasking and being conversant in multiple platforms are requirements that emphasize different human abilities and have different professional implications.”

Roughly 5% of the sample did not complete an undergraduate degree. The majority had an undergraduate degree and, on average, 65% had some specialized graduate-level education.

The operational change is so evident that journalism courses at colleges and universities have begun to include technical, practical and operational content over the past decade. In the researcher’s opinion, this fact should not override a broad cultural and humanities education for future professionals. “This is what has been happening with support from the client/student because the majority of investigative journalists are educated at private colleges,” Fígaro says.

Another striking characteristic is that journalists begin to work much earlier in their learning. Even before graduating from college, students are encouraged to obtain their first job. Fígaro recognized that there is a certain disdain for college, as if on-the-job training were all that was needed.

In the researcher’s assessment, some of the professionals from the sample have had “weak” training when it comes to the capacity to interrelate facts, data, and occurrences in a politically, socially, and historically contextualized manner. “In reality, this is the capacity that I consider to be fundamental for engaging in the profession,” Fígaro says.