This article explores the aftermath of job loss for a sample of Australian journalists who were made redundant in 2012, a year of dramatic press industry restructuring. It reports the findings of a pilot study of 95 redundant journalists, undertaken as part of the New Beats project, a five-year longitudinal study of job loss in journalism. Three related questions drive the analysis: Where do journalists go after job cuts? How do they make sense of job loss? What happens to professional identity? In contrast to a recent study of journalists laid-off from the British press, and the literature on the aftermath of job loss for older professionals, this study finds Australian journalists who lost their jobs in 2012 had traumatic but relatively better than expected post-job loss experiences. All but two of the survey respondents seeking re-employment found some form of work within one year, and, thanks to union-enforced redundancy agreements, most left newsrooms with severance payments that smoothed an otherwise traumatic experience. Nevertheless, the article argues the sense of leaving a newspaper industry in seemingly terminal decline amplified feelings of anxiety about journalism work and lost identity, prompting many to leave the profession and seek jobs elsewhere.
A number of studies have examined why students choose to study journalism at university, but overall, this area is still relatively underexplored. Yet, understanding why students choose journalism, and what career expectations they hold, is important not only for educators but also for wider society and public debates about the future of journalism and the value of tertiary journalism education. This article examines the motivations of 1884 Australian journalism students enrolled across 10 universities. It finds that hopes for a varied lifestyle and opportunities to express their creativity are the most dominant motivations among students. Public service ideals are somewhat less important, while financial concerns and fame are least important. These motivations also find expression in students' preferred areas of specialisation (referred to in Australia as rounds): lifestyle rounds are far more popular than politics and business rounds or science and development rounds.
This article reports on job loss among Canadian journalists between 2012 and 2016. Building on Australian research on the aftermath of job loss in journalism, this article examines the experiences of 197 journalists who were laid off or who took a buyout, voluntarily or not, due to corporate restructuring in Canadian media (both French and English). To date, no scholarly research in Canada has examined what happens to journalists after they are laid off, including the personal and professional experiences journalists undergo when they lose their job and seek a new one, or the implications of these experiences for Canadian journalism in general. Overall, in a result that mirrors laid-off Australian journalists' experiences of re-employment, we find a dramatic shift among journalists' employment status and a decline in incomes after job loss. The majority of our survey participants moved from full-time, secure, and well remunerated work to more precarious forms of employment in and out of journalism, including freelance, contract and part-time. This shift in employment status demonstrates underlying precariousness in Canadian journalism. We argue that job loss in journalism has implications for broader social life and for journalism as an institution vital for participation in democratic life.
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.