Journalists as mobility agents: Labor mobilities, individualized identities, and emerging organizational forms

Abstract

As mobility is becoming a distinctive feature of 21st century journalists, this theoretical article proposes a mobility turn in journalism studies. Drawing on sociological perspectives on mobilities, individualization, and turnover, it puts forward a shift from the analysis of news workers as static and fixed to the organizations that employ them to their analysis as mobility agents. By stressing that their capacity to move is transforming their employment and identities, it invites contemporary journalism scholars to recognize how this bottom-up disruption is reshaping the institution, the organizations and the labor of journalism. Since journalism’s corporate and industrial structures have not fully crumbled, this article’s emphasis on labor, physical and virtual mobilities offers an alternative to current theorizations of change in journalism.

Organizations as Innovations: Examining Changes in Journalism Through the Lens of Newly-Emerging Organizations

“…Moreover, the Covid-19 pandemic called for creative methods of cooperation, virtualized much journalistic work, and dramatically reduced the importance of physical office space (García-Avilés, 2021a). A basic requirement for the virtualization of media work is digitization, which has proven to be an enabler for the dematerialization of newsrooms (Wall, 2022) and the rise of alternative forms of collaboration and new organizational models-something which could even be observed before the global pandemic hit (Bunce et al, 2018;Reyna, 2023). In organization studies, digital tools and technologies are seen as "raw materials available to those who organize firms" (Davis & Sinha, 2021, p. 2), with which they then lay the foundations of new organizing and different forms of media work.…”

Precariedad en el empleo periodístico: dimensiones y factores predictores

“…Sin embargo, debe enfatizarse que los medios nativos digitales tampoco ofrecen condiciones óptimas de trabajo al no ser capaces de cumplir con las expectativas financieras generadas en estos. Los medios digitales han sido la respuesta principal frente al deterioro de la estructura industrial del periodismo (Reyna, 2023) así como el sitio de adopción de la cultura del emprendurismo periodístico, asociada con modalidades atípicas de trabajo, el discurso de autonomía en el trabajo creativo y el surgimiento del teletrabajo (Cohen, 2015).…”

“…Nos referimos a impactos que han tenido entre sus consecuencias cierres de medios informativos, la reconversión digital de estos y despidos masivos de personas trabajadoras de medios. Estas condiciones han dado pie a un mayor interés entre las y los académicos de los estudios del periodismo en analizar el aspecto laboral de la profesión (Reyna, 2023). La tendencia de precarización se suma a las características del empleo periodístico en la región latinoamericana, en donde se observó en el periodo 2007-2017 el aumento de flexibilidad, inestabilidad y multiactividad 1 , así como el descenso de la edad promedio de periodistas (Blanco-Herrero et al, 2020).…”