Source: rabble.ca

Last week the Toronto Starannounced a couple of things. First, they laid off 11 full-time page editors. Second, they announced the creation of a new department, torstar.ca and its intention to hire 17 new digital staff including video editors, digital producers and social media assistants. This is the first time folks in the torstar.ca wing of the company have actually been journalists. Historically torstar.ca been staffed by production folks and was, for a few years, jobbed out to another company completely.

The odd thing is, the new hires will be paid a good deal less than their compatriots in the print newsroom. According to a memo sent by the paper’s editor-in-chief Michael Cooke and its managing editor, Jane Davenport, the Star will pay the new hires the same kind of money they could make at Bell Media, Huffpo or Facebook. They called the lower salaries (over $200 per week lower, in some cases) “market-based rates.” The memo states: “… new digital jobs cannot be rated on print business legacy rates of pay.”

This is an odd position, especially in a unionized shop that is in the print business. A digital journalist is still a journalist and must be doing the same work as a print journalist. So why is one employee paid less just because his or her work doesn’t end up as ink on cellulose?

And, the new positions are in a different department from the main newsroom, which means that although they are unionized jobs, the new hires won’t be bumped, if there are layoffs. And, of course, that means that print journalists don’t roll into the torstar.ca positions. They could, of course, apply for the 17 new slots, but they’d have to take a cut in pay.

According to Unifor unit chair for the Star, Liz Marzari, the union is worried that the digital journalists are getting substantially lower pay for the same work. And, since, in the near future almost all journalism work will be digital, that means the new hires will set a new low bar for journalists working at the Star. “We object to the company trying to take an end-run around hard-won seniority,” says Marzari. “We understand that if there were lay-offs the new digital journalist hires would be vulnerable, but let’s have a conversation about it, not just isolate them.”

She says Unifor can take legal action and wants to continue discussing the situation withStar management.

Of course, in an ideal world Star staff would have already acquired the digital skills they need to be capable online journalists. And, in that same ideal world, they would be paid the same no matter what kind of journalism they practiced. But clearly, that’s not the case. TheStar has historically treated online work as production work, not journalism.

Back in the late ’90s I visited the Toronto Star to see how they tackled online news. My hosts directed me to a sprawling space full of eager young faces, all illuminated by monitors that still gave off the nerd-attracting pheromones of fresh packaging. But this was not the newsroom of the Toronto Star. This was a whole other team, the web team. They were not journalists, not part of the Guild and they were not paid on the same wage scale as the ink-stained folks nearby. In fact, they weren’t even allowed to alter copy from the newsroom. What went in the paper went on the site, no rewritten headlines, no new subheads, no grabber quotes. Certainly no video or new photos. Nothing. The people in the room were just web jockeys, there only to shovel the print edition online. The Toronto Star wanted to keep these young people as far away from journalism and as far away from the Guild as they could.

But now, even though the new torstar.ca team will be doing journalism, the old ideas of the print view of the worth of digital journalism seem to prevail. It is devalued. And the Starseems to want it both ways. They want the cachet of being an elder statesman of print journalism in Toronto, but when it suits them, they expect to behave like a nimble, digital native, despite having far more overhead, legacy equipment and legacy union agreements.

That’s not fair. It’s not fair to long-time Star journalists who will be bought out, retire or move on without truly participating in digital journalism. It’s not fair to the new hires who will be blamed for setting a new low in journalism wages and who will lack the deep experience of the Star culture and maybe of serious journalism and still be expected to publish quality work. And, it’s not fair to the publication’s readers, who should expect both the best journalism and the most modern delivery of that news and not have to settle for one or other because the Star wants to cavort around as mutton dressed like lamb.

Wayne MacPhail has been a print and online journalist for 25 years, and is a long-time writer for rabble.ca on technology and the Internet.

Source: thestar.com

Source: rsf.org/

The International Partnership Mission on safety and protection of journalists and press freedom in Ukraine, currently in Kiev, strongly condemns the violence that today claimed the life of Vesticorrespondent Vyacheslav Veremyi and left at least 27 journalists injured.

The delegation of national and international freedom of expression and media support groups, which includes Reporters Without Borders, calls on the Ukrainian authorities to allow an immediate, independent, and transparent investigation and to bring those responsible to justice.

« Over 167 journalists have been injured since the beginning of the political crisis in Ukraine in late November 2013. Many of these journalists were deliberately targeted and none of their cases have been properly investigated. This state of impunity is unacceptable and fuels more violence. We call on all parties to facilitate de-escalation of the situation and show respect for the work and the physical integrity of media personnel, and we remind the Ukrainian authorities of their responsibility to ensure journalists’ safety. We call on the international community to use all leverage possible to facilitate these aims », said the mission members.

33-year-old journalist Vyacheslav Veremyi died of gunshot wounds in a Kiev hospital today, in the early morning. He was dragged out of his taxi by unknown assailants in the city centre, while returning home from Maidan Square. The journalist was violently beaten up, and according to witness accounts, he was shot in the stomach after he showed his press card.

At least 27 journalists were injured while covering the violent clashes in Kiev on 18 and 19 February. Most of them were attacked by members of the « Berkut » special forces and unidentified assailants.

The International Partnership Mission is also very concerned by censorship attempts such as the blocking of Channel 5 broadcasts across the country since 18 February.

The International Partnership Mission on safety and protection of journalists and press freedom in Ukraine includes representatives of the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine (NUJU), the Independent Media Trade Union of Ukraine (IMTU), the Ukrainian Association of Press Publishers, the European and International Federations of Journalists (EFJ/IFJ), International Media Support (IMS), Open Society Foundation, WAN/IFRA, Article19, Reporters Without Borders and the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media. The delegation’s 19-20 February 2014 visit to Kiev aims to gather first-hand information about current press freedom violations in Ukraine, to show solidarity with journalists at risk, and to coordinate further responses.

Source: j-source.ca

By Kathleen Kuehn

Last March, an editor from The Atlantic approached freelance journalist Nate Thayer about repurposing an article he’d published elsewhere for the news magazine’s website. Unfortunately, the editor informed him, freelance funds had run out. In lieu of payment, the opportunity would offer Thayer “exposure” to The Atlantic’s 13 million monthly readers.

Outraged by the proposition that a 25-year professional veteran journalist with decades of experience as a foreign correspondent would write for nothing, Thayer refused the offer, then publicly posted the email exchange on his blog, which quickly went viral. The post received over 100,000 hits on its first day and inspired thousands of online discussions, blogs and tweets about the politics of writing for free in the age of digital culture. While some criticized Thayer’s handling of the offer, much of the discourse supported his concerns about the relationship between working for “exposure” and the decline of paid writing and professional journalism.

Perhaps indicative of just how common the practice of writing for free has become, an overwhelming number of sympathizers related their own stories about being solicited for and/or accepting unpaid work. Others questioned the value of such opportunities; those who had learned their lesson from doing so encouraged the rebuttal that “people die from exposure.” (Some defended The Atlantic’s practice, including contributors, Alexis C. Madrigal and Ta-Nehisi Coates and Slate’s Matthew Yglesias).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, much of the commentary blamed the digital army of amateur bloggers and citizen journalists for collectively devaluing the written word by saturating the market with free content. Many argued that if more professional writers would heed Thayer’s “just say no” approach, then perhaps the demand for quality content would eventually tip the scales away from the oversupply of (presumably lower-quality) amateurism back in favour of those professionally trained in the craft.

Rather than considering whether or not these so-called amateurs are “ruining journalism,” I’m interested in understanding why so many people willingly work for free in the first place—a question that, surprisingly, rarely enters the debate.

Based on research I conducted with T.C. Corrigan on bloggers and online consumer reviewers, we found that many people voluntarily invest their time, energy and creativity into unpaid writing not just for fun or to build social networks (although those remain key motivators) but as a potential stepping-stone for securing future work. We call this motivation “hope labour”: un- or under-compensated work, often performed in exchange for experience and exposure in the hopes that future work will follow.

Hope labour motivates the willingness to write for free. In many ways, it’s a no-brainer: the seduction of unpaid work as a future-oriented investment offsets the risks and anxieties associated with a precarious labour market. Transformations in the global economy since the 1970s (including massive economic restructuring, globalization, technological innovation and the subsequent reorganization of labour) have replaced stable, long-term contracts with a landscape of temporary and contingent work. Un- and under-employment are on the rise; over 40 per cent of American workers now classify themselves as “free agents,” and half of all surveyed new university undergraduates believe self-employment is more secure than a full-time job—even as they leave university with unprecedented student loan debt and repayment rates.

For many aspiring writers, hope is the operative term when it comes to justifying unpaid work. Philosophers who have written about hope have long claimed that the human condition is a work-in-progress that involves the projection of the present into the future of a better or different state of being. Importantly, hope labourers draw on some condition of the past or present—some experience, event or idea—when they project their desires into the future. From this standpoint, it makes sense, for instance, that the exposure gained upon moving from one’s personal blog to an unpaid gig at someone else’s blog is regarded as immaterial currency to be potentially cashed in down the line. And we can’t fault people for this; everyone wants a job they love. The problem is that making a living at something you love in precarious times is hardly a matter of choice. We lack agency, so we hope.

Within this context, hope labour is an increasingly central and rational motivation for accepting unpaid gigs; and importantly, it’s been largely normalized by some of the very institutions we might have previously expected would challenge its more exploitative dynamics. Media, education and politics are all complicit in normalizing hope labour opportunities. Newsrooms effectively downsize by obtaining cheap content via user contributions, social media or crowdsourcing campaigns, and do so under the premise that this is the only financially viable way of preserving the fourth estate in an era where no one wants to pay for content (the conversation rarely suggests that perhaps the commercial news model no longer meets contemporary economic or cultural demands).

The media also support hope labour narratives in the regular circulation of success stories about individuals who have parlayed their 15 minutes of fame into high-profile permanent gigs, suggesting this is evidence that working-for-exposure is a proof-positive means of achieving stability in unstable times. See, for example, The Atlantic’s decision to hire Northwestern graduate Robinson Meyer because of “how good he was on Twitter.” Three years, 21,549 tweets and one Atlantic internship (presumably unpaid) later, Meyer proved he had “the right instincts” for audience engagement, satisfying editorial needs not just for good writers (no longer enough to meet the timely and niche-based demands of today’s production schedules), but “good readers and connectors.” (Incidentally, Meyer landed the job just months after editors refused to pay Thayer for one story.)

As its own form of unpaid work, social media platforms like Twitter now compete with formal education as a training ground for aspiring writers. As Meyer’s hiring editor noted: “I know a lot more about Rob from his Twitter usage than I could ever locate on his college transcript or resume.” In keeping up with rapidly changing times, tertiary institutions are moving away from the traditional liberal arts model of intellectual exploration towards building “practical knowledge” that also supports the free labour economy. One needs to look no further than the extent to which colleges, universities and even some high schools have rolled out unpaid internship programs, often mandatory and unregulated, at unprecedented rates in the past decade. As of 2008, 80 per cent of U.S. universities offer courses on “entrepreneurship,” while new majors in social media teach students how to better brand their digital selves. Indeed, the institutions that would likely have the greatest ability to disrupt the normalization of hope labour are those most likely to rely upon, or promote, hope labour arrangements.

To criticize those who accept unpaid writing gigs fails to acknowledge the larger economic realities that aspiring writers must navigate in making themselves employable. To blame the hopeful for the state of the writing industries does little but lock aspiring writers into a double bind. On the one hand, free writing (supposedly) diminishes the trade as it paradoxically undermines the very profession many of these same people hope to enter. Yet at the same time, working for exposure is precisely what traditional social institutions now promote as the primary means of making it in an otherwise precarious economy. Generating self-exposure or building one’s “soft assets” (skills, knowledge, digital literacy) through unpaid writing reflects dominant Western beliefs concerning individual self-reliance and entrepreneurialism; it’s about getting a leg up in a competitive market by using the tools available to “make do” in a world where no one owes you anything.

Admittedly, the antagonism between professionals and amateurs around the devaluation of culture is not new, nor is the solicitation of free labour specific to professional writers. But while there are no easy answers to resolving the contradictions of accepting free labour, blaming “amateurs” for trying to make themselves employable fails to account for the reasons they accept unpaid work in the first place.

As experience and exposure are now their own form of currency, accepting unpaid work is thus a logical, rational investment in one’s own professional aspirations. At minimum, it also explains why The Atlantic—and so many publications like it—can obtain stories without paying for them, even as writers like Thayer publicly protest the grounds on which such offers exist.

Kathleen Kuehn is a lecturer in media studies at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. Her teaching and research interests focus on digital media, cultural production and critical studies of consumer culture. Her work has been published in academic journals such as Political Economy of Communication, International Journal of Communication, Communication, Culture & Critique, Electronic Journal of Communication, Journal of Information Ethics and Democratic Communiqué.