Advertising, institutional and audience decline: journalists’ critical look at the problems of the profession
Abstract
This article analyses journalists’ views of the profession in the current context from two different positions: those who have just begun or have been working for a relatively short time (junior, less than 35 years old) and those who are already in the middle of their careers or have started the final stretch (senior, over 40 years old). The methodology used was two focus groups made up of a total of 16 working journalists, who were separated into two blocks by age group. From the reflections of the professionals, a complex and not very optimistic panorama emerged, especially in the agreement about the existence of structural problems in journalism that go beyond the already chronic problems related to working conditions. Some of the participants comment more deeply on what they consider to be a ‘triple contamination’ of journalism today: advertising-, institutional- and audience-based, which makes it possible to establish a current framework of the difficulties faced by professionals in carrying out their work as intermediaries with the public. In addition, they look at some of the consequences they consider to be derived from digital immersion, where factors such as the obligatory immediacy in the dissemination of news, the pressure of social networks, political polarisation, the ‘trincherism’ of news companies and the ‘media illiteracy’ of the audience, contribute to accelerating the attrition of professionals and deterioration in the quality of journalistic information.
Keywords
precariousness, audience, journalistic quality, institutional communication, social mediaReferences
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