This article focuses on journalists’ unions in Québec. It illustrates the main role they played in the self-structuring of professional journalists and the construction of a collective and public identity. It details the challenge posed by the Internet to journalists and their unions. To that effect, it digs into history and revisits different key moments, documents, and discourses of self-recognition and public affirmation of the group. That history is looked at in relation to an “event,” the introduction of the Internet, which forced the unions to deal with the potentially disrupting effects of the new practices being developed.
Résumé : Ce texte repose sur une analyse de la syndicalisation du groupe des journalistes du Québec. Il illustre le rôle central joué par les syndicats dans le processus de structuration du groupe des journalistes professionnels et de la construction publique et collective de leur identité. Il s’attarde sur le défi actuel posé par l’Internet aux journalistes et à leurs syndicats. Le texte propose donc une perspective historique, un rappel des différents moments, documents et discours qui jalonnent le processus de construction et d’affirmation publique du groupe. Celui-ci sert de cadre à l’analyse plus contemporaine d’un ‘événement’, l’introduction d’Internet dans le milieu journalistique, qui a forcé les syndicats à gérer l’émergence de nouvelles pratiques et de nouveaux acteurs.
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted an important paradox: it has reminded us of the importance of the news media and the central place it occupies in the public space in times of crisis. At the same time, it has showed the major difficulties the industry faces in Belgium and elsewhere in the world. The lockdown disrupted the employment and practices of many journalists in ways that may reveal the contemporary tensions between professional identity and working conditions more clearly than in average news cycles. In order to understand what the Belgian French-speaking journalists went through during the first lockdown, we conducted a survey about the implications of the crisis for their employment status and work practices. This survey also covered their perceptions concerning their social role, their journalistic skills and the quality of their work covering the COVID-19 crisis. The responses show a sharp contrast between very challenging working conditions (isolation, lack of expertise and job losses in the worst cases) and the satisfaction that comes from the social contribution of their reporting. In order to interpret the results, we suggest to consider the theory of valuation as a relevant framework to understand the attachment of journalists to their work and how they practise it.
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