Digital Information Ecosystems by Augey Dominique; Alcaraz Marina;

Author:Augey, Dominique; Alcaraz, Marina; [Augey, Dominique]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated
Published: 2019-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

5.4.1. Absorbing the negative effects of the Web on print

An important consequence of the partial or total transition from print to the Web has been a decrease in the number of journalists in editorial offices. Clémence Aubert-Tarby, research professor at the Paris School of Economics, Octavio Escobar, associate professor at ESG Management School, and Thierry Rayna, researcher at Polytechnique (Aubert-Tarby et al. 2018), are interested in the impact of digitalization on employment in the French press. They note that between 2003 and 2012, 16,200 journalists’ jobs were eliminated in the daily press and 38,000 in the magazine press in the United States, while online employment only accounts for 10% of that destruction, illustrating a strongly negative balance of the switchover to digital press (5,400 jobs). Concerning the French press, they analyze professional data for 2011 and 2012. To do this, they use two separate databases: the database of the CCIPJ (Commission de la Carte d’Identité des Journalistes Professionnels23), an organization that issues a professional press card to journalists and whose data serve as raw material for the Observatoire des Métiers de la Presse24; the OJD database, which includes print and web editions of a large number of press titles in France (481 press titles). By crossing these two databases, it is therefore possible to know how many journalists are employed by a newspaper and how this figure has changed. Journalists working in the press represent about 70% of journalists.

The results of the study are particularly interesting. Overall, the transition to digitalization has destroyed jobs. The net balance between creation and destruction is negative. However, the destruction was greater in small structures and less so in large structures that quickly and massively switched to digitalization, in which the creation of new jobs was the most dynamic. The people recruited are generally young and on fixed-term contracts, while those dismissed are generally older and on permanent contracts. Fixed-term contracts are more frequent in small structures, while permanent contracts remain common in large newspapers. Salaries also change according to the degree of digitalization (10% of digitalization leads to a 1% increase in remuneration). The pay difference persists among employees with a 5% gender difference in favor of men.

Other recent data on media employment come from the Pew Research Center in 2018, recalling that the media have had to significantly “cut” their staff in recent years. Between 2008 and 2017, the number of employees in various media (including television, etc.) fell by 23%, according to the Pew Research Center25. Of these, it is the press that has suffered the most with a 45% drop in employees from 71,000 to 39,000 people.

Although editorial offices of the digital media created jobs (+79%), this represented a total of 6,000 additional jobs. This was not enough to compensate for the decline in the paper media.

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