“Acutely Precarious? Detecting Objective Precarity in Journalism”, 2024-01-11 (; similar):
Journalism often gets described as a profession of ‘precarity’. However, there is a lack of quantitative research on the topic, since the question remains open how many journalists actually work under precarious conditions. This paper offers a systematic empirical approach to the phenomenon of precarity by identifying the objective precariousness in journalism.
Looking at 3 key parameters of precarity research on the substantial level, contractual level, and legal-institutional level, the study can be seen as the first attempt to measure precarity in journalism. Based on the analysis of previous research on precarity in journalism and a literature review of the sociology of work, an operationalization of precarity in journalistic employment was developed and applied to a sample of an online survey of professional journalists in Germany (n = 861).
The intensity of precarity was measured in 3 groups, classifying a quarter of the respondents as acutely precarious. Findings demonstrate that journalists’ precarious status is related to factors like age, gender, employment relationships, and media type.
[Keywords: precarity, atypical work, journalistic labor, freelance journalism, pandemic]