Abstract
In view of the difficult period professional journalism is going through and the challenges facing journalists in their day-to-day work, this paper seeks to identify the main problems affecting professional Spanish journalists from the perspective of journalists, citizens and experts. To this end, the research presents results obtained through surveys of Spanish journalists, citizen focus groups and in-depth interviews with experts. The findings derived from the survey of journalists conducted in 2018 are compared with those from a survey of Spanish and European journalists conducted in 2012, both of which used the same parameters. The inclusion of findings from an additional survey carried out in 2008 by the researchers of this paper allow us to plot the evolution of the problems faced by the profession in Spain, highlighting those that have remained unchanged and become more deeply entrenched over a decade marked by the global economic crisis. The results show that Spanish journalists identified job insecurity as the main problem of their profession, while economic and political pressures came in second and third place respectively.
Highlights
An analysis in 2012 by the research project MediaAcT, whose results were based on a survey of 1,762 journalists from the United Kingdom, Finland, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Estonia, Romania, Tunisia and Jordan, revealed that the chief problems affecting European journalism were economic pressures and the influence of sensationalism, while the main problems cited in Spain were remuneration, followed by economic pressures (Fengler et al, 2015)
As mentioned in the APM’s 2018 Annual Report on Professional Journalism, the first and second problems facing Spanish journalists were identified as unemployment and job insecurity respectively, since 30% of the journalists on a contract and 50% of the freelancers working in journalism and communication earned less than 1,500 euros a month
The information gathered was compared with the views of citizens and experts in journalism to confirm whether the three perceptions tally
Summary
Studies on professional journalism in Spain over the last 20 years (Humanes, 1998; Rodríguez, 2003; Soriano et al, 2005; Nosty, 2011; Mauri-Rios, 2020) highlight a decline in journalistic standards and call into question the professional values of journalism These conclusions emerge from survey-based research on communication professionals (Alsius, 2010; Soengas Pérez et al, 2014; Aceituno et al, 2014; Mauri Ríos et al, 2018), reporting on this state of the profession before the onset of the global economic downturn of 2008, when the press lost much of its advertising revenue, resulting in mass layoffs and, and lower standards in the quality of news products (Farias Batlle & Gómez Aguilar, 2011). In third and fourth place respectively were problems regarding the media’s lack of political and economic independence
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