[My-ci] The People Formerly Known as the Employers

[Mark Deuze]

http://deuze.blogspot.com/2008/10/people-formerly-known-as-employers.html

with apologies for crosspostings, just wanted to share this piece as a 
riff on Jay Rosen's imfamous line from 2006 as a reminder what, in a 
cultural and creative industries context, generally tends to happen to 
the "creative" part of "industries". more details, updates, edits, and 
links can be found at the original post, including acknowledgment of 
Leopoldina Fortunati, who inspired this piece in the first place.

The People Formerly Known as the Employers
http://deuze.blogspot.com/2008/10/people-formerly-known-as-employers.html

TPFKATA

In 2006, NYU professor Jay Rosen penned an astute observation about the 
changing power relationships in the media industries - and more 
specifically, the world of journalism - regarding the impact of 
internet. His analysis had the catchy title "The People Formerly Known 
as the Audience", and pointed towards a shift in access to reporting 
tools (news gathering, editing, and publishing) to what used to be 
imagined by newsworkers as the audience. Importantly, it is not just 
the tools of reporting now being available to "We the Media" (such as 
blogging, podcasting, vodcasting, and other forms of social or "our" 
media), but also emerging forms of legal protection (Creative Commons 
licensing), and increasing uses of users by professional media 
organizations, thereby giving the former audience the semi-official 
status as competitor-colleagues.

Examples of deliberately turning the media consumer into (co-) producer 
across different creative industries are viral and word-of-mouth (or: 
"social") marketing, interactive advertising, computer and videogame 
modification SDKs (Software Development Kits such as the Source SDK of 
Valve), and citizen journalism, where news organizations indeed call 
upon their audiences to reconstitute themselves as journalists - such 
as Yo Periodista at Spanish newspaper El Pais, iReport at American 
broadcaster CNN, and so on.

Flat Hierarchies

At the heart of this argument is the recognition of a new or modified 
power relationship between news users and producers, between amateur 
and professional journalists. It can be heralded as a democratization 
of media access, as an opening up of the conversation society has with 
itself, as a way to get more voices heard in an otherwise rather 
hierarchical and exclusive public sphere. In this scenario, some of the 
traditional and generally uncontested social power of journalists now 
flows towards publics, and potentially makes for a flatter hierarchy in 
the publication and dissemination of news and information.
By all means, this is an important intervention on the audience side. 
But what Rosen tends to neglect, is another equally if not more 
powerful redistribution of power taking place in the contemporary media 
ecosystem: a sapping of economic and cultural power away from 
professional journalists to what I like to call The People Formerly 
known as the Employers.

TPFKATE

Employers in the news industry traditionally offered most of their 
workers permanent contracts, included healthcare and other benefits (at 
the end of the 20th century sometimes even including maternal leave), 
pension plans, and in most cases even provisions sponsoring reporters 
to retrain themselves, participate in workshops, and serve on boards 
that gave them a formal voice in future planning and strategies of the 
firm. Today, most if not all of that has disappeared - especially when 
we consider the youngest journalists at work.
Today, the international news industry is contractually governed by 
what the International Federation of Journalists euphemistically 
describes as "atypical work", which means all kinds of freelance, 
casualized, informal, and otherwise contingent labor arrangements that 
effectively individualize each and every workers' rights or claims 
regarding any of the services offered by employers in the traditional 
sense as mentioned. This, in effect, has workers compete for 
(projectized, one-off, per-story) jobs rather than employers compete 
for (the best, brightest, most talented) employees.

Furthermore, newswork in particularly English, Spanish, and 
German-speaking countries gets increasingly outsourced: to 
subcontracted temporary workers or even offshored to other countries, 
where the People Formerly Known as the Employers practice what has been 
called "Remote Control Journalism." Journalists today have to fight 
with their employers to keep the little protections they still have, 
and do so in a cultural context of declining trust and credibility in 
the eyes of audiences (the few "audiences" that still exist given the 
Rosen formula), a battle for hearts and minds that they have to wage 
without support from those who they traditionally relied on: their 
employers.

Powershift

So what we see happening in the context of todays new media ecology and 
the emerging global creative economy is power slowly but surely 
slipping away from those who we rely on for our entertainment (ex.: the 
recent writers' and actor's labor disputes in Canada and the US), our 
advertising (ex.: the widely reported power shift occuring in agencies 
from creative towards account managers, media planners, and digital 
consultants), and - perhaps most disturbingly, our news.

For all the brilliance of those advocating a more democrative media 
system, there is generally nothing in their analysis that acknowledges 
this erosion of power, this wholesale redistribution of agency away 
from those who tend to crave only one thing: creative and editorial 
autonomy. No matter how excited I can get about user-generated content 
and the collective intelligence of cyberspace, this power shift erodes 
the very foundation of the way we know (and thus interact with) the 
world, and our ability to truly function in it autonomously, and on our 
own terms.

Perhaps we should take this analysis even further: the only way we can 
live in the world as this power shift continues, is to rely exclusively 
on our own terms. This in turn inevitably leads to mass solipsism and 
paranoia - as the only truth we can still believe in has to be strictly 
our own, and nothing or nobody can (or should) still be trusted. It is 
the perfect storm.

Paraphrasing Zygmunt Bauman: I am writing this down in the hope of 
preventing an inevitable disaster.