Where do journalists go after newsroom job cuts?

Abstract

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.

Working for less: the aftermath for journalists made redundant in Australia between 2012 and 2014

“…This second strategy had a disproportionate effect on older journalists, meaning that newsrooms also lost significant expertise and knowledge. This mirrors the work of O'Donnell et al (2015) in the Australian context, which found that redundancy processes led to a loss of journalistic corporate memory from newsrooms. Given that this paper addresses the Australian context, this study is relevant and timely.…”

“…The survey rationale and design drew directly on insights gained from an exploratory pilot study undertaken in 2013 (see O'Donnell et al, 2015). Three insights were particularly helpful.…”

“…This article by the New Beats research team follows a previous examination of the aftermath of 2012 redundancies in our 2013 pilot survey (O'Donnell, Zion, & Sherwood, 2015) by extending our inquiry to those affected by redundancies across the three years from 2012 to 2014.…”

Bots, reality shows and Greek political parties: Tracking bots and their political propaganda in Greece

“…The concept of propaganda is not a recent invention, but it is ever-present throughout history (Bazerman, 2016). However, during the last 10-15 years we have witnessed enormous changes: an ever-faster pace of news dissemination (John and Silberstein-Loeb, 2015), a massive volume of digital information, a growing mistrust in traditional media (Nicolaou and Giles, 2017), a worsening of journalists' work conditions (O'Donnell et al, 2016) and a spectacular rise of information on the Internet. According to a scientific report by the Joint Research Center of the European Commission (Martens et al, 2018), two out of three Internet users prefer to access the news through platforms based on algorithms, such as search engines, news aggregators and especially so-cial networks.…”

Smileys Without Borders. A Critique of Transboundary Interaction Between Politicians, Journalists and PR Practitioners on Social Media

“…In Sweden, which will serve as a national example in this article, the expansion of commercial media, media management, and the PR industry (Garsten et al 2015) in recent decades has led to fewer barriers between politics, media and PR in the workforce. In Sweden, but also elsewhere (O'Donnell et al 2016;Macnamara 2016, 133), many unemployed or freelancing journalists, as well as politicians, are increasingly finding the PR business a lucrative option and therefore migrate to the commercial sector (Tyllström 2010), but the traffic might also go in the other direction (Allern 2011;Garsten et al 2015). A growing number of professionals with 'ex'-prefixes are becoming important agents of convergence culture, be they ex-journalists, now active in PR; ex-PR practitioners, now active in politics; or 'both/and' practitioners who are active in several fields simultaneously.…”