Belgian Journalists in Lockdown: Survey on Employment and Working Conditions and Representations of Their Role

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted an important paradox: it has reminded us of the importance of the news media and the central place it occupies in the public space in times of crisis. At the same time, it has showed the major difficulties the industry faces in Belgium and elsewhere in the world. The lockdown disrupted the employment and practices of many journalists in ways that may reveal the contemporary tensions between professional identity and working conditions more clearly than in average news cycles. In order to understand what the Belgian French-speaking journalists went through during the first lockdown, we conducted a survey about the implications of the crisis for their employment status and work practices. This survey also covered their perceptions concerning their social role, their journalistic skills and the quality of their work covering the COVID-19 crisis. The responses show a sharp contrast between challenging working conditions (isolation, lack of expertise and job losses in worst cases) and the satisfaction that comes from the social contribution of their reporting. In order to interpret the results, we consider the theory of valuation as a framework to understand the attachment of journalists to their work and how they practise it.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19 crisis
• Dewey
• valuation
• employment
• working conditions
• professional role

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank AJP and Smart for their collaboration in the distribution of the survey. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions on a preliminary version of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Between 18 March and 4 May 2020. A list of essential sectors and general restrictions were described in: Arrêté ministériel portant des mesures d’urgence pour limiter la propagation du coronavirus COVID-19. Available online: http://www.ejustice.just.fgov.be/eli/arrete/2020/03/18/2020030331/moniteur.

2 In this article the “interim” status refers to journalists who are hired through temp agencies (Agence d’interim in French). We have chosen to maintain the use of this word to avoid confusion by referring to the journalists as “temporary journalists”, as their interim work does indeed represent their full-time or main activity, and they do not have the status of employee that other respondents have (either with fixed-term or permanent contracts), and therefore none of the job benefits associated to such contracts.

3 This disparity between AJP and Smart data must be observed in the light of two important factors: on the one hand, the number of freelance journalists using the services of Smart has been steadily increasing for several years; on the other hand, these journalists are mainly young people under the age of 35, with a majority being women. These two factors reveal the precariousness for journalists at the beginning of their careers (Dujardin et al. 2015) and the specific employment situation for women (Le Cam, Libert, and Ménalque 2021). The fact that women are more represented among the journalists affiliated to Smart is therefore not insignificant.

4 In the survey, 18.4% of the respondents were under 30 years old, 13.1% between 30 and 34 years old, 19.6% between 35 and 44 years old, almost a quarter (23.3%) were between 45 and 54 years old, 13.8% were between 55 and 59 years old and finally, 11.8% were 60 years old or older.

5 It is important to note that the incomes presented are calculated based on the responses of all respondents, whether they worked full-time or part-time.

6 The survey invited respondents to position themselves in relation to income classes. We took the central value of each of these classes in order to calculate an approximate average net income.

7 In Belgium, journalism was considered as part of the essential sectors, so teleworking was not obligatory. However, it has become the norm for many journalists and some newsrooms have chosen to make it the rule. AJP (17 March 2020). Covid-19 : les mesures prises par chaque rédaction. http://www.ajp.be/covid-19-les-mesures-prises-par-chaque-redaction/.