Abstract

GARCIA, José Luís; MATOS, José Nuno  and  SILVA, Pedro Alcântara da. Journalism in State of Emergency: An Analysis of the Effects of the Covid-19 Pandemics on Journalists’ Employment Relationships. Comunicação e Sociedade [online]. 2021, vol.39, pp.269-285.  Epub June 30, 2021. ISSN 1645-2089.  https://doi.org/10.17231/comsoc.39(2021).3177.

The socio-professional condition of journalists has undergone profound changes over the past few decades. These result from a succession of crises that have affected the media in the context of a combined process of liberalization and digitalization. In addition to changes in production routines, newsrooms underwent restructuring operations, responsible for the recomposition of their workforce. Between collective redundancies, increased unemployment, fixed-term contracts, “green receipts”, discontinuous and intermittent forms of work, low wages, free work and low cost of interns, precariousness began, step by step, to characterize the journalistic condition. Based on the results of the “Study on the Effects of the State of Emergency on Journalism in the Context of Pandemic Covid-19”, this article aims to analyse the implications of these policies on journalists’ employment relations. The main objective is to understand to what extent media companies’ response to this new reality represents a setback of the logic behind precariousness or, on the contrary, its acceleration. The study aims, firstly, to produce a diagnosis on employment relationships before the state of emergency declaration (SED) - between March and April 2020 -, namely the incidence of temporary modalities and their relationship with factors such as gender or age. At a second step, the consequences of SED at this level will be analysed, mainly with regard to the use of temporary contracts, dismissals or lay-offs.

Keywords : unemployment; journalism; lay-off; pandemic covid-19; precariousness.

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