Abstract
As mobility is becoming a distinctive feature of 21st century journalists, this theoretical article proposes a mobility turn in journalism studies. Drawing on sociological perspectives on mobilities, individualization, and turnover, it puts forward a shift from the analysis of news workers as static and fixed to the organizations that employ them to their analysis as mobility agents. By stressing that their capacity to move is transforming their employment and identities, it invites contemporary journalism scholars to recognize how this bottom-up disruption is reshaping the institution, the organizations and the labor of journalism. Since journalism’s corporate and industrial structures have not fully crumbled, this article’s emphasis on labor, physical and virtual mobilities offers an alternative to current theorizations of change in journalism.
Introduction
Around the world, mobility is becoming a distinctive feature of 21st century journalists. Along with the physical and virtual mobilities that mobile technologies allow and compel, news workers are moving in and out of their employment (Davidson and Meyers, 2016; Reinardy, 2016; Reyna, 2021), shifting their identities from organizational to individualized identities (Lassila-Merisalo, 2018; Nygren, 2011; Wiik, 2009), and experimenting with new organizational forms (Anderson et al., 2014; Deuze & Witschge, 2020; Hepp & Loosen, 2021).
As these phenomena are changing the way journalists perceive and experience their labor trajectories, journalism scholars are beginning to address them. However, they have examined them through specific frameworks and case studies. This has prevented them from grasping what they have in common and has led them to underestimate the relation between mobilities, identities, and organizations. In order to reverse this trend and to study these phenomena as a whole, this theoretical article proposes a mobility turn in journalism studies by conceptualizing news workers as mobility agents.
Drawing on sociological perspectives on mobilities, individualization, and turnover, it suggests a shift from the study of journalists as static and fixed to the news organizations that employ them to their analysis as agents of mobility. For journalism scholars, this implies acknowledging that the news workers that they observe, interview, or survey have different capacities of movement (motilities) in different social spaces, and that they might (mobilities) or might not (immobilities) strategically act upon them to move beyond their scholarly representation.
In this sense, it means recognizing that if mobilities are reshaping the institution, the organizations and the labor of journalism, contemporary journalism scholars ought to assume the task of researching them. This entails not only paying more attention to different forms of movement but becoming aware of the epistemological and methodological limitations of traditional research techniques, as they merely take of a picture of a moment when the phenomena that they are addressing are on the move. Put bluntly, it questions any depiction that does not acknowledge its “until further notice” character.
The article is divided into three sections. In the first section, it reviews the studies that are challenging journalists’ portrayal as static and fixed, but without yet detecting the intertwinement between their labor, physical and virtual mobilities. In the second section, it proposes a mobility turn in journalism studies by emphasizing the theoretical implications of the sociological perspectives on mobilities, individualization, and turnover. In the third section, it outlines three dimensions that news workers are putting in flux: employment, identities, and organizations.
Literature review
Through diverse theoretical frameworks and case studies, a number of journalism scholars have examined the movement of people, information, and objects that is happening in journalism. In this section, we review four lines of research that address these phenomena: mobile journalism studies, job satisfaction, burnout and turnover studies, professional identities studies, and post-industrial journalism studies. This article is based on the empirical evidence and theoretical perspectives of these lines of research, but reframing them through the concepts of mobilities, individualization, and turnover.
Mobile journalism scholars have drawn on Sheller and Urry’s (2006) new mobilities perspective to inquiry into the physical and virtual mobilities of mobile journalists (Bui & Moran, 2020; Firmino, 2013; Ortiz, 2015). Although both Bui and Moran (2020) and Firmino (2013) are critical of mobility, as they sense that it can be complicit of a culture of work overload, they are concerned with its implications for practice and do not identify additional changes triggered by it. Something similar can be found in mobile news studies (Duffy et al., 2020; Goggin et al., 2015; Linder, 2018).
Kesselring (2006) and Sheller (2015) have also analyzed journalism and its workers through the framework of new mobilities, but they have concentrated on physical and virtual mobility patterns, without paying much attention to other forms of mobility. In Kesselring’s case, this is noteworthy as he explores how freelance news workers move in and out of physical and virtual spaces while they balance their labor with their lives. This means that he spots that mobilities and immobilities are tied to work, but not the movement occurring in the labor market.
The studies addressing job satisfaction, burnout, and turnover in journalism partially fill this gap in research. Highlighting employment over practice, these works dissect how journalists involuntarily (O’Donnell, 2017; Örnebring & Möller, 2018; Ricketson et al., 2020) or voluntarily (Davidson and Meyers, 2016; Reinardy, 2016; Reyna, 2021) move in and out of their jobs. However important, these contributions have been developed through the frameworks of job satisfaction, burnout, and turnover. Therefore, their attention to mobility has been mostly limited to actual or potential labor mobility.
Lassila-Merisalo’s (2018) usage of the concept of protean career—a career driven by the individual, and not by the organization that employs him or her—is perhaps the closest theorization that journalism studies have of the emerging forms of labor mobilities. Nevertheless, the focal point of this notion—originally developed by Hall, 1976 close to Handy’s (1994) conceptualization of portfolio career—is on labor trajectories and denotes individualistic, voluntary, and successful labor mobility, neglecting not only the complexity behind career decision-making but its intertwinement with physical and virtual mobilities.
If news workers’ careers are driven by individual career decision-making and not by the news organizations that they work for, the concepts of organizational commitment and professional identities might help us explain this transformation. Over a decade ago, Nygren (2011) and Wiik (2009) observed an alarming erosion of professional identities in journalism and established a link between it and turnover intentions. In response to Nygren, Wiik, (2009) argued that we should not understand this process as de-professionalization on an ideological level, as some values are consolidating and others are reforming.
Through Evetts’ (2006) distinction between occupational and organizational spheres, imported to journalism studies by Örnebring (2009), we can recast Wiik’s (2009) argument as a decline of organizational commitment, but not necessarily as the end of journalism as some journalists reinforce their occupational identities and continue in or return to this field. This is consistent with the studies centered on how news workers rejoin journalism (Lassila-Merisalo, 2018; O’Donnell, 2017; O’Donnell et al., 2016) and can contribute to question Reinardy’s (2016) “lost generation” as even quitters can eventually come back.
The movement of people is also implicitly or explicitly present in what we term as post-industrial journalism studies, a body of works that theorizes potential or actual structural change in 21st century journalism. Despite their conceptual and methodological differences, we group together McChesney and Nichols’ (2010) post-corporate newspapers, Anderson, Bell and Shirky’s (2014) account of the experimentation outside of industrial journalism as post-industrial journalism, Deuze and Witschge’s (2020) definition of digital-born news organizations as beyond journalism, or Hepp and Loosen’s (2021) pioneer journalism.
Beyond their interpretation of the collapse of journalism’s corporate and industrial structures, these studies introduce notions that come close to the above-mentioned. While McChesney and Nichols (2010) are concerned about the costs of job loss and envision post-corporate newspapers as a solution, Anderson, Bell and Shirky’s (2014) stress the blurring boundaries between amateurs and professionals. On the other hand, Deuze and Witschge (2020) do engage with patchwork careers, and Hepp and Loosen (2021) use personal mobility to describe “mobility across […] different spheres of work” (p. 587).
Overall, the lines of research reviewed challenge journalists’ portrayal as static and fixed, but without yet fully detecting that the bottom-up disruption that they are producing is imprinted by the intertwinement of their labor, physical and virtual mobilities. From Kesselring’s (2006) study on the physical and virtual mobility patterns of freelance news workers to Hepp and Loosen’s (2021) theorization of “being personally mobile,” there are some loose ends that can be tied by putting these contributions together and by reframing them through sociological perspectives on mobilities, individualization and turnover.
Towards a mobility turn in journalism studies
We are not particularly fond of advancing new descriptions of journalism or journalists. Instead of labeling 21st century journalists as mobile or motile journalists, we theorize them as mobility agents, as agents with diverse capacities to move. We draw on Kaufmann, Bergman and Joye’s (2004) definition of motility 1 as mobility capital and on Kesselring’s (2006) representation of new mobilities’ early entrants as mobility pioneers. Instead of opting for one of these theorizations, we develop a synthesis between them to define news workers as agents of mobility, as we are not focused on a specific group of journalists.
Therefore, even if Kesselring’s (2006) notion of mobility pioneers is not particularly useful to theorize the distinctive character of contemporary news workers as they are no longer early entrants, his emphasis on mobility management can help us accentuate the diversity and strategic use of their mobilities. In the same sense, Kaufmann, Bergman and Joye’s (2004) theory is suitable not only because it introduces motility to the social sciences as a link between physical and social mobility, but because it stresses that—depending on context—individuals and organizations might have or not the ability to move.
Following Bourdieu (1986), Kaufmann et al. (2004) describe motility as mobility capital. They argue that this capital can be exchanged for other forms of cultural, economic, and social capital. This leads them to recognize that the diversity in the enactment of the ability to move is marked by the inequalities in its access (range of possible mobilities), competence (skills and abilities), and appropriation (how agents interpret and enact motility). This theorization decouples mobility capital from economic capital, as the former might be possessed by the economically dispossessed and exchanged for other forms of capital.
The case of platform workers is quite illustrative. They are economically dispossessed and exchange their capacity to move in the social space (mobility capital) for economic capital. In contrast, platform users possess enough economic capital to exchange for platform workers’ mobility capital; they might have the ability to move in the social space (motilities), but choose not to in particular situations (immobilities). As Kaufmann et al. (2004) claim, inequalities in the range of possible mobilities typify the relationship between platform users and workers, as the latter might not be able to access the service they provide.
Drawing on Kaufmann et al. (2004), Kesselring (2006) and Sheller and Urry (2006), we understand new mobilities as a grand theory, and pioneering mobilities and mobility capital as mid-range theories. We are interested in the study of how new mobilities manifest in 21st century journalists through their conceptualization as mobility agents that have diverse capacities to move. Stressing the varieties of mobilities, we aim at transcending the ideal-typification of news workers as mobile or immobile subject to their use of mobile technologies. Our goal is to examine their mobilities beyond technological determinism.
Although it is developed through or with the mobile technologies that enhance new mobilities, mobile journalism refers to a set of practices, norms, and standards that are not necessarily shared by the global community of journalists. In sharp contrast, moving in and out of newsrooms, adopting individualized identities in detriment of organizational identities, or building new forms of formal and informal organization—from mobile communities of journalists to digital-born news organizations—can be practically done by any news worker, depending on his or her capacity to move.
We do not assert that journalists around the world—or in a country or continent, for that matter—move or have the same capacity to move. Quite the opposite, depending on diverse socioeconomic factors ranging from age, class, gender, race, rank, and organizational prestige, we stress that they can develop and act upon their turnover intentions, as well as come together with their peers. As with platform users and workers, inequalities in the access, competence, and appropriation of mobilities persist: some journalists might want to leave their jobs, but are not able to because of their age, class, gender, race, or rank.
As Kaufmann, Bergman and Joye (2004) and Kesselring (2006) theorize, the diversity in the strategic use of mobilities and immobilities in journalism is characterized by many inequalities. Among them are what journalism scholars term as journalistic capital, a form of capital driven by prestige that works as a “powerful force of inertia” (Benson, 1999: p. 468). When they are fired or when they quit, news workers exchange this form of capital for other forms of capital as they return to the labor market. Therefore, journalistic capital is closely linked to mobility capital in journalism, as it enables labor mobility.
We contend that notwithstanding the state of journalism’s corporate and industrial structures, journalists as mobility agents are creating a bottom-up disruption not only because of their capacities to move in the labor, physical and virtual spaces, but because the diverse processes of change that are occurring in the journalism industry—from technological convergence to layoffs—are compelling them to keep on moving. In this sense, mobilities can dialog with Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s (2002) individualization theory as they can produce intended and unintended consequences to contradict news workers’ expectations.
Unlike postmodern theories, both new mobilities and individualization theories can aid the theorization of how certain corporate and industrial structures are losing their meaning in journalism and how journalists are regrouping through their mobilities and individualized identities. This is because they are not only focused on a process of detachment but also on a process of reattachment. By drawing on them, we can begin to overcome some clean slate perspectives that have been gaining prominence in our field. Furthermore, we can recognize the dialectic between mobilities and risks in news workers’ labor trajectories.
As such, we are not backing journalists as mobility agents as a solution to journalism’s crisis. Rather, we are trying to understand the bottom-up disruption that they are producing, at times to enact their professional ideals beyond journalism’s corporate and industrial structures and at times to face labor uncertainty (Beck, 2000). Therefore, we are not interested in developing a business model, a normative theory, or a prescriptive pattern for them to follow. Instead, our objective is much more modest in terms of providing a solution, but much more ambitious in terms of challenging their depiction as static and fixed.
A mobility turn in journalism studies.
Source, own elaboration.
Journalists as mobility agents
Our literature review and our experience studying the labor of journalism have allowed us to identify three dimensions that journalists as mobility agents are putting in flux: employment, identities, and organizations. As these dimensions are usually studied through the frameworks of the sociology of work and the sociology of professions, we aim at mobilizing them through the sociological perspectives on mobilities and individualization discussed in the previous section, as well as through the turnover perspectives that already inform our field. This could help us reframe current debates on change in journalism.
Employment
Until the 2008 financial recession, a professional journalist was generally defined as a full-time worker that was employed by a consolidated news organization to perform reporting or editing tasks. In the latest edition of the Cambridge English Dictionary, a journalist is described as “a person who writes news stories or articles for a newspaper or magazine or broadcasts them on radio or television” (Cambridge English Dictionary, 2020). A similar definition can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary (2020): “One who earns his or her living by editing or writing for a public journal or journals.”
Directly or indirectly, these definitions have coupled news workers to employment and to organizations, sidelining practices that are beyond their realm. With the 2008 financial recession and the still incipient labor turn in journalism studies, this is slowly changing as journalism scholars are acknowledging that journalism is a social practice that might or might not be developed as a full-time employment (Ryan, 2009), in exchange for a payment (Fast et al., 2016), through classical job descriptions (Hoxha & Andresen, 2019) or in a traditional organizational setting (Deuze & Witschge, 2020).
These studies invite us to rethink journalism beyond employment and organizations. Particularly the literature on job satisfaction, burnout, and turnover has given us elements to question the conception of journalists as static and fixed to the organizations that employ them, as it has revealed that they are moving in and out of them at an unusual pace (Davidson and Meyers, 2016; Reinardy, 2016; Reyna, 2021). By stressing labor mobility, this body of works overcomes the emphasis on job loss of previous research (Downie & Schudson, 2009; McChesney & Nichols, 2010; McChesney & Pickard, 2011).
In a recent report, Pew Research Center estimated that newsroom employment in the United States registered a 26% decrease between 2008 and 2020, losing around 30,000 jobs, from 114,000 to 85,000 (Walker, 2021). This decline has been a byproduct of newspaper cuts and closures, as this industry’s employment fell 57%, from about 71,000 to 31,000 jobs, and has been compensated by the growth of 144% of digital-born news organizations, from approximately 7,400 workers to 18,000. As similar data from other countries is not available, we cannot compare them.
Beyond job loss, Pew Research Center’s report allows us to note a process of change: in the United States and perhaps around the world, a shift in newsroom employment is arising as news workers are involuntarily or voluntarily leaving newspapers (and radio and television stations) to join or found digital-born news organizations. What this report impedes us to see is the structural transformation of journalists’ labor trajectories behind the redistribution of newsroom employment. To delve into this phenomenon, we need to recourse to the literature on job satisfaction, burnout, and turnover.
Through diverse case studies, this line of research has uncovered that 21st century news workers are leaving behind the goal of developing a long-term career in a single organization (Goyanes & Rodríguez, 2021; Lassila-Merisalo, 2018; Reyna, 2019). Instead, their empirical evidence attests that those who remain in journalism are inclined to develop individualized labor trajectories by moving from one organization to another. Although it is nearly impossible to contrast current turnover rates with those of the past, as these records do not tend to be publicly available, this is a noteworthy trend.
Journalism historians have described similar employment patterns in the 19th century (Cross, 1988; Fahs, 2011; Weber, 1997). Back then, when journalism was in an early phase of institutionalization, newspaper writers usually had literary ambitions and strategically entered and left journalism. This means that they enacted their capacity to move in the labor market, much like contemporary news workers. The difference is not only that 19th century newspaper writers had developed skills and identities as writers rather than as journalists, but that from the 20th century and on journalism was coupled to news organizations.
As in the 19th century, in the 21st century a series of structural and individual factors push news workers away from journalism. First the redundancies that became the new normal from the 2008 financial recession and on (O’Donnell et al., 2016), second the uncertainty of job continuity (Reyna, 2019), and finally the rise of presentism as an individual propensity to focus on the present and not to envision a future in one organization (Goyanes & Rodríguez, 2021). Hence, we can question the division between voluntary and involuntary turnover, as the structural conditions of employment drive labor mobility.
Labor mobility is usually defined as “changes in the location of workers both across physical space (geographic mobility) and across a set of jobs (occupational mobility)” (Long & Ferrie, 2003: p. 248). Geographically, it can be subdivided into short-distance and long-distance mobility. Occupationally, it can be lateral or vertical, depending if the move is in a similar socioeconomic status or to a different one. And organizationally, it can be intra-firm, within the same organization, as an upgrade or downgrade, or inter-firm, within the same industry, but from one organization to another (Mincer & Jovanovic, 1979).
What previous and our own studies have allowed us to appreciate is that contemporary journalists are not leaving a newsroom employment to dwell in another (inter-firm mobility). Rather than a movement from one point to another, they appear to be permanently on the move. In contrast to the labor trajectories described by the conceptualizations of protean or portfolio careers, we stress (a) the relevance of perpetual and potential mobility as a disruptor of journalism’s institution, organizations, and labor, (b) its intertwinement with physical and virtual mobilities, and (c) the coerced individualism behind it.
If labor mobility scholars are concerned about the determinants of voluntary turnover, they cannot ignore the context in which it occurs. This means not only acknowledging that behind every decision to leave a job are circumstances particular to each employee but to discern that each labor market has its particularities. In the case of contemporary journalism, the context is a depressed labor market and the omnipresence of mobile technologies both in the labor and in the lives of journalists. As we argue in the next sections, this is transforming how news workers perceive and experience their labor trajectories.
Drawing on Kaufmann et al. (2004), Kesselring (2006) and Sheller and Urry (2006), we propose reframing the study journalists’ labor mobility through the notions of motilities, mobilities, and immobilities. These concepts could improve our understanding of voluntary turnover in journalism, as they could help us emphasize the diverse capacities to move, the inequalities in the strategic enactment of mobilities and the factors that enable or disable them. In addition, following Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002), we can underline the uncertainty and the risk of unemployment that can tag along with voluntary turnover.
In this sense, we understand labor mobilities as the actual and potential movement of workers in the labor market, whether voluntary or coerced, lateral or vertical, or intra-firm or inter-firm, that happens in an era of hyper-connectivity, always-on Internet access and virtual mobilities, but also of employment insecurity and uncertainty. Unlike the notions of protean or portfolio careers, we theorize voluntary turnover as structurally compelled to make sense of the compulsion to move of contemporary news workers. We believe that this is timely as the exodus from legacy media to digital-born news organizations is not ending this impulse.
Identities
21st century journalists’ mobilities are relevant in at least two ways. First, as they decouple their labor trajectories from the news organizations that employ them. Second, as they erode their organizational identities and prompt the rise of individualized identities. If they are moving in and out of newsrooms, one of the causes and effects of this phenomenon might be their deficit of identification with the organizations that they work for, either because of their adverse working conditions or simply because they do not ambition a long-term career in one workplace. This gives a “until further notice” character to their organizational depictions.
A reporter that has been in an out of journalism several times, recently told us that he and his peers did not develop a sense of identification with the organizations that employ them because these organizations do not make them feel like they belong. Instead, he claimed that their working conditions and hierarchical chains of command made them understand that they could only “pass through” them, as Nygren (2011) observed a decade ago, as dwelling in them is no longer possible or desirable. That is why he and his peers have chosen to seek refuge in individualized identities, in an identity with their own labor: There is no longer any identity with the media or with newsrooms, whatever you want to call them… because (news organizations) are very (abusive), they keep you in a precarious situation… There are no contracts…! So, (rather than being part of a newsroom), you feel like a reporter, rather, of your subjects, of your projects, or your interests, and that is what you go around defending and bragging about. How are you going to feel part of a media outlet, of a newsroom, if they don’t give you social security, if they don’t give you (anything)? (Journalist 1, personal communication).
In Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s 2002 (Beck, 1992, 2000) theory, individualization is regarded as an unintended consequence of uncertainty. As the involuntary institutionalization of individualism, individualization has two facets in the world of work: first, the traditional biography in which education guaranteed a long-term career is replaced by a permanent state of adaptation to the new realities of the labor market; and second, labor relations, usually mediated by unions, are increasingly between employee and employer. This individualizes employment and unemployment, as workers perceive and experience them on their own.
The individualization of employment and unemployment individualizes professional identities and labor trajectories as both become decoupled from organizations. Through their individualized mobility capital (Kaufmann et al., 2004) and mobility strategies (Kesselring, 2006), workers can anticipate unemployment risk by moving in and out of their workplaces. In the past, at the height of organizations, strong ties with the workplace were a factor that inhibited turnover. As these ties are crumbling, workers are facing less obstacles in the enactment of their turnover intentions.
Previous studies have suggested that a decline of organizational commitment could be linked to a rise of turnover intentions in journalism (Reinardy, 2011, 2012; Reinardy & Zion, 2020). Wiik’s (2009) argument, recast through Evetts’ (2006) distinction between occupational and organizational spheres, could lead us to think that organizational identities are giving way to occupational identities. The concept of individualized identities goes beyond this dichotomy and can explain why, regardless of the type of labor mobility that they enact, journalists’ identities are increasingly with themselves.
New mobilities, we argue, are key in this transformation not only because of the labor mobilities discussed in the previous section but also because of the virtual mobilities that are enabling news workers to cohabit the physical space of their newsrooms and the virtual space of mobile communities of journalists. These communities, created and sustained through the use of instant messaging applications are disruptive because they can escape organizational control, thus potentially leading to new collective identities to erode organizational identities even more. Furthermore, they can become spaces for career decision-making.
In this sense, labor and virtual mobilities might be heavily intertwined. A journalist, irrespective of his or her practice through or with mobile technologies, could be part of these mobile communities of news workers beyond his or her employment status. This means that he or she could move in the labor market, but dwell in the virtual space to develop a sense of identification with other journalists and former journalists. These ties could prevent him or her from developing a strong sense of identification with his or her new workplace, but could also keep him or her in journalism, developing individualized labor trajectories.
In Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002), individualization is what compels individuals to live their own life, in their own terms rather than following pre-established patterns. In an era of end of journalism narratives, but also of personal branding and self-employment, living their own life for journalists might be the possibility of enacting their professional ideals and developing an identity with their own labor. Even if they do not have the ability to move or strategically choose not to, their identities could be increasingly with themselves and their portfolio as they realize that it will be their main resource if they get fired or quit.
We insist that these individualized identities resemble, but also differ from protean or portfolio identities, as they are a byproduct of a depressed labor market, a series of waves of newsroom cuts and closures, and a widespread uncertainty about the future of journalism. By emphasizing these structural factors, we want to underplay the individualistic, voluntary and certain character of these organizationally detached identities to make sense of the context in which they occur. In a sense, this could help us explain why they are rising now and not prior to the 2008 financial recession.
Organizations
Labor mobilities and individualized identities produce detachment and reattachment between journalists and news organizations. First, they prompt detachment by enabling news workers to move from one workplace to another. Second, they induce detachment from organizations and reattachment to the journalism collective by allowing journalists to regroup as mobile communities. Third, they engender reattachment as news workers strike on their own collectively to found new news organizations, generally as digital-born news organizations. That is how labor mobilities and individualized identities disrupt and reconstruct journalism.
Over a decade ago, at the peak of the newspaper industry’s recession, Wahl-Jorgensen (2009) made a call for journalism scholars to leave behind their newsroom-centrism and their focus on the “routinized and controlled forms and aspects of news work” (p. 25). She claimed that by overstressing the “factory floors” of news organizations, they were not paying enough attention to other aspects of news production and consumption. The processes of detachment and reattachment that labor mobilities and individualized identities generate make this shift from newsroom-centrism to non-newsroom-centrism not an alternative, but an imperative.
Although journalism scholars have directly or indirectly answered Wahl-Jorgensen’s call by displacing the centrality of newsrooms and by highlighting journalists as agents of change (Anderson et al., 2014; Deuze & Witschge, 2020; Hepp & Loosen, 2021), they have not conceptualized the latter as agents with diverse capacities to move in and out of organizational settings. This has not allowed them to acknowledge that their actual or potential mobilities disrupt both traditional and new organizational forms as they perceive and experience them as temporary labor dwellings.
Other studies have examined the use of instant messaging applications as tools for news production and consumption (Agur, 2019; Boczek & Koppers, 2020; Dodds, 2019), but not as spaces of social interaction beyond organizational control. As newsrooms lose their identitarian and relational sense, and as journalists build and sustain networks through instant messaging, researchers should not focus exclusively on the production and consumption of news through mobile technologies. Instead, they ought to also inspect these emerging informal organizations of news workers as spaces of social interaction and identity building.
In contrast to Meltzer and Martik’s (2017) theorization of journalists as communities of practice, approaching journalists as mobile communities means overcoming the emphasis on practice to pay more attention to how instant messaging is being used to develop more horizontal and meaningful relations among news workers. Unlike Zelizer’s (1993) notion of journalists as interpretative communities, this conceptualization stresses the perpetual, 24/7, character of news workers’ social interactions. Through them, journalists interpret key events and can embark on career decision-making.
Journalism historians have found similar patterns of socialization in the press clubs of the 19th century (Banning, 2008; Bundy, 2008; McClung, 2000). Through their works, we can establish some differences with the mobile communities that we describe: (a) not all news workers had access to 19th century press clubs, as they had barriers of class, gender and race (Bundy, 2008), (b) they were oriented towards the professionalization of journalism (Banning, 2008), (c) they required face-to-face interaction, and (d) journalists could not be part of them on the move or while dwelling in different spaces.
Through interviews, we have realized that 21st century mobile communities of news workers operate on different platforms and spheres, and that they can have diverse functions. As they can be organizational or occupational, centered on news beats or not, local, regional, national or transnational, their focus can be on news production, identity building, career decision-making or simply social interaction. Unlike the press clubs of the 19th century, these communities can be created and dissolved within minutes, regardless of the consensus of the journalists that conform them. These features make them both boundless and temporary.
The assemblage of news workers as mobile communities can lead to turnover and to the development of individualized labor trajectories, but also to paradigm repair through the foundation of new news organizations. These new organizations are usually digital due to the reduction of production costs, and are a way for journalists to continue in the field and to enact their professional ideals. Anderson, Bell and Shirky (2014), Deuze and Witschge (2020) and Hepp and Loosen (2021) have recognized how these new organizational forms inspire innovate practices, but they have not termed them as paradigm repair.
Journalism scholars have used the concept of paradigm repair to describe how news workers and news organizations try to reform or redirect journalism practice when they detect that it has deviated from its normative functions, or when its normative functions have been overtaken by social reality (Bennett et al., 1985; Carlson & Usher, 2016; Vos & Moore, 2020). If labor mobilities and individualized identities are the means, paradigm repair would be the ends for the journalists that remain in journalism by founding or joining new organizations.
As news workers develop individualized labor trajectories, these formal organizations become significant because they rationalize how specific goals can be achieved. Furthermore, they provide organizational continuity to those goals. In contrast, the informal organizations built and sustained through instant messaging applications do not necessarily establish goals nor the means to reach them, as they are centered on social interaction, identity building, and career decision-making. This is what makes the latter more disruptive than constructive and the former more reconstructive than disruptive.
However, as with the mobile communities of journalists, these emerging digital-born news organizations have a “until further notice” character and they can be easily created and dissolved. A news worker turned entrepreneur told us that she has never imagined the digital-born organization that she founded as a dwelling space, and that it would be part of her career as long as it fits her “individual journalistic path” (Journalist 2, personal communication). In this sense, these organizational forms are not only produced but also affected by journalists’ labor mobilities, forming a circle of innovation, uncertainty and temporality.
Conclusions
At the midst of the 2008 financial recession, journalism scholars feared that newsroom cuts and closures could diminish the quality of democracy, as they implied a reduction of the number of working reporters (Downie & Schudson, 2009; McChesney & Nichols, 2010; McChesney & Pickard, 2011). As they began to approach journalists through surveys and interviews, they found out that these professionals were not only being fired, but that they were also developing turnover intentions, voluntarily leaving their newsrooms and in some cases even quitting journalism (Davidson and Meyers, 2016; Reinardy, 2016; Reyna, 2021).
This body of works, which has produced evidence from Australia (O’Donnell, 2017), Finland (Lassila-Merisalo, 2018), Israel (Davidson & Meyers, 2016), Mexico (Reyna, 2021), Spain (Goyanes & Rodríguez, 2021), Sweden (Nygren, 2011), and the United States (Reinardy, 2016), to name the studies cited in this article, is part of an incipient labor turn in journalism studies. Collectively, they display the relevance of studying journalism as labor—with emphasis on potential and actual labor mobility—to understand how the actors of this field are perceiving and experiencing the widespread uncertainty about the future of journalism.
Another relevant line of research has focused on the rise of new organizational forms in response to the gradual collapse of journalism’s corporate and industrial structures. Their authors have described these emerging forms as post-industrial (Anderson et al., 2014), beyond (Deuze & Witschge, 2020) and pioneer journalism (Hepp & Loosen, 2021). Despite their attention on organizational forms and innovative practices, these studies have also provided evidence on what happens to the news workers that choose to leave but not to rejoin corporate or industrial journalism: they found or join digital-born news organizations.
This theoretical article does not aim at unifying these perspectives, nor at reducing the diversity that they bring to the field of journalism studies. It also does not imply that labor mobility from a new mobilities perspective is the only phenomenon that journalism scholars should address. Rather, its objective is to show how the bottom-up disruption that journalists are creating through their labor, physical and virtual mobilities is reshaping journalism. By focusing on employment, identities and organizations, it outlines what are the implications of characterizing news workers as mobility agents.
As journalism’s corporate and industrial structures have not fully crumbled, as legacy news organizations continue to be influential in consolidated and transitional democracies, we might not need a clean slate approach, but one that tries to capture the general trends of change beyond the dichotomy of traditional and new organizations. This article argues that a way to capture those trends is through the sociological perspectives on mobilities and individualization, as well as through the turnover perspectives that already inform our field. This is because contemporary journalists are disrupting, but also reconstructing journalism.
Future studies could refine the hypotheses presented by this article and could establish a link between the new mobilities framework and other sociological perspectives to address relevant phenomena in journalism. We focused on labor mobilities, individualized identities and new organizational forms as we understand that they are driving change in this field, but there might be other phenomena that we were not able to notice. In an era of end of journalism narratives, journalists are no longer waiting for institutional or organizational fixes, and are enacting their capacity to move to reimagine their practice beyond pre-established patterns.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Note
Author Biographies
Víctor Hugo Reyna is a full-time research professor at the Faculty of Communication and Marketing of the Universidad De La Salle Bajío. He holds a PhD in Social Sciences from El Colegio de Sonora and is a member of Mexico’s Sistema Nacional de Investigadores, level 1. He has published a book and multiple articles and book chapters on Mexican journalism, addressing phenomena as turnover and risk reporting. He is currently developing a project on Mexican digital-born news organizations.