The topic on how news content creators and journalists navigate their professional lives amid platformized labor was looked at by Valérie Bélair-Gagnon and Errol Salamon from University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and Monica Crawford from University of Stirling. 19 in-depth interviews formed the empirical basis of the study.
Increasingly, the job of a journalist resembles that of a content creator, rather than that of a traditional reporter. At the same time, the institutional erosion has led news organizations to place the responsibility to regulate emotions, manage safety, and bolster productivity on individual workers under precarious conditions.
Coping mechanisms have been documented in literature, and they include: diversifying income generation, scheduling social posts, reducing reliance on metrics, self-censoring, blocking or ignoring online comments, limiting online interactions, taking breaks from social media, and self-guided learning. They are more prominent for women and for those with English as a second language.
The interviews with the 19 participants included journalists, social media editors employed by news organizations, and unaffiliated news content creators. The average length of an interview was 41 minutes. There were 11 affiliated and 8 independent participants, 9 identified as women and 10 as men, aged 22-50.
A typology of coping was revealed through the responses: Institutional, Boundary, Emotional, and Strategic (IBES). Institutional coping was linked with self-socialization and community-building, against institutional abandonment. The interviewees adopted an entrepreneurial approach to their careers. Union support and trauma-informed HR policies were conspicuously absent. Non-professional networks such as friends provided a counter to the toxic digital labor.
They also negotiated professional boundaries, actively managing their professional selves while embracing the platforms’ presentation. Maintaining journalistic principles such as objectivity, accuracy, and public service was paired with adopting the self-branded presentation that the platforms require. Accuracy and fact-checking were central in platformized labor. They also rhetorically distanced themselves from news influencers, and thus legitimized their journalistic boundaries, as noted by Örnebring (2019).
Emotional coping referred to competence in emotional regulation and the maintenance of safety nets, in order to maintain productivity. The participants relied on relational safety nets, social support from peers, family, and friends. Sometimes tactics like digital detox were used in lieu of organizational support.
Internal coping mechanisms were used to deal with digital harassment and information overload. However, when emotional regulation was internalized as production maintenance, the precarious workers internalized the costs of platform instability and perceived burnout as personal, rather than responsibility of the employer.
Finally, strategic coping involved operational self-management and platform-specific navigation, and included developing deploying technical skills to protect against platform instability. Improvisation was seen as innovation and resilience, and to the authors, this highlighted the amount of digital labor offloaded onto individuals. The privatization of technical skill development illustrated neoliberal entrepreneurialism.
In conclusion, the authors argued against the consensus that saw coping mechanisms as reactions to stress or individual or institutional deficits, and saw coping as a core professional competence required for job survival and sustainability. The IBES classification was new to the literature. Future studies could further investigate the intersection of competencies in the production of power, or extend the research to other countries.
The article “Coping as a competency: A typology of journalists and news creators work on platforms” by Valérie Bélair-Gagnon, Errol Salamon, and Monica Crawford is in Journalism. (Free abstract).
Picture: Survive by Denny Ryanto.
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