Journalist essentials: A love of desks, power of bilocation and no ‘off’ button

Newsgroups are in the grip of a long-term battle to retain their audiences, according to the latest Reuters Institute digital news report shows, so how much fun is this for the journalists caught up this struggle? Not a lot, suggests separate academic research on work practices in Irish media.

Journalists “feel they have no option but to leave the industry”, the quality of content has been weakened and the public is not informed about meaningful issues to the extent that it should or could be, concludes Emer Connolly in a PhD recently completed at University of Limerick.

Connolly, who has herself worked as a journalist, conducted in-depth interviews with 25 media professionals, including six media owners, and found a bleak pattern of diminished labour resources, particularly within regional media.

Newsroom resources are so stretched that one regional broadcast news editor told Connolly that if there were two meetings on at the same day at the same time, it was a case of having “to flip a coin almost and decide which to cover” as it was impossible be in two places at once.

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Although journalists have yet to master the in-demand art of bilocation, those who find themselves out and about anywhere have already managed a trick their peers find increasingly difficult. Escaping the confines of their desk has become rarer for reporters. All of Connolly’s interviewees said there was not enough time for “field” work, despite agreeing that covering events and meeting sources was an essential part of the job.

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With media owners whittling down their staffs to the barest of minimums, the remaining reporters find intensive social media promotion and tasks previously completed by subeditors are now part of their workloads, too. The 24/7 news cycle has also led to an expectation that journalists will be available to work 24/7 and that they will do so, not for additional payment, but out of goodwill.

Not only is investigative reporting a casualty of this short-term newsroom firefighting, but some journalists interviewed by Connolly felt that in the tension between accuracy and immediacy, “being first” was triumphing over “being right”.

Elsewhere, a fall in standards is attributed to mid-career journalists leaving the industry and being replaced by less experienced people, who are often hired under less secure employment terms. If this pattern continues, the wealth of experience lost will, Connolly notes, have “a major impact” on the industry left behind.

In the 46-country Reuters Institute study, Irish trust levels in the news compared favourably to those in the UK, the US and Europe. It would be a shame, indeed, to see this relative outperformance eroded.