Television news operations are increasingly turning to freelance workers for newsroom staffing. This article traces the economic and industry conditions that led to the rise of a non-staff workforce. It proposes that US freelancers operate under a different paradigm from European or other freelancers, and analyzes results from a survey of news workers (freelance and staff) conducted in summer 2007. The survey uses intrinsic and extrinsic factors to measure overall job satisfaction. While there is little overall difference between either group of workers, freelancers do report greater satisfaction in certain areas, especially those relating to worker autonomy and freedom. The article argues that these results demonstrate how freelancers use adaptive strategies to react to temporary or per diem labor patterns in American news. By complicating the assumptions about freelancing, this article offers a more realistic perspective about the desires of the workers and the jobs which they perform.
Popular culture has critiqued ‘vertical video syndrome’, or video shot on smartphones in the portrait rather than landscape orientation, as something aesthetically unpleasing which should be avoided. But the design of smartphones seems to encourage shooting vertical video. This article examines the aesthetic desirability of vertical videos through applied media aesthetics. It traces the history of horizontal film and television orientations, as well as the image-centric orientation model found in still photography. It argues that vertical video, rather than a syndrome to be avoided, instead takes advantage of the technological innovations and embodied pleasures offered by the smartphone to rupture the visual paradigms and create a new visual aesthetic for phone-based moving images.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.