The Aftertaste you Cannot Erase. Career Histories, Emotions and Emotional Management in Local Newsrooms

ABSTRACT

Journalists work in a creative profession and often become emotionally attached to “their” medium. Emotions toward their work are an integral part of journalists’ career histories. At the same time, working conditions within contemporary journalism are in a state of constant change that could lead to job precariousness and general insecurity. Emotions are also understood to be part of the journalists’ engagement with the local media environment: though local newsrooms are experiencing similar changes, peripheral newsrooms have different opportunities to respond. The aim of this article is to investigate local journalists’ emotions toward their work during times of change. Drawing on a longitudinal qualitative case study based on interviews, this article focuses on how journalists manage their emotions throughout their career histories in the local media environment. The study focuses on local journalists in the VLM group, the dominant local press owner in the Czech Republic, which has experienced permanent losses and staff layoffs over the past few years. The interviewed journalists manifest deepening contradictions in their feelings towards work, the media organisation which employs them and the local community. The increasing volatility of their emotional responses has led to a general dissatisfaction and the growing importance of emotional management.

KEYWORDS:

• Journalistic work
• interpretive community
• career history
• life history
• emotion
• emotional management

Introduction

Emotions are part of the fabric of journalists daily work experience. Not only are they intertwined with journalistic practices, but more profound, passionate relationships are established with journalistic work, a medium or a media organisation. Thus, emotions are nothing new for journalists, even if scholars in the journalism studies have only recently started to attend to them. Emotion, which is defined as “the relational interpretation of affect experienced in individual bodies” (Wahl-Jorgensen 2019, 8), has become one of the relevant dynamics of the changing news industry (Kotisova 2019; Beckett and Deuze 2016; Pantti 2010).

The tension between the normative expectations about journalistic work and emotion is challenged by the affective turn across media and journalism studies (Wahl-Jorgensen 2020; Richards and Rees 2011). Researchers no longer perceive emotion in journalism as an “intruder” (Kotisova 2017, 4), a “taboo and stigmatized topic” (Thomson 2018), or irrelevant, soft, and subjective (Kitch 2008; Peters 2011). Moreover, there is a need to understand emotion not as the opposite of rational journalistic work, but as its complement. As Karin Wahl-Jorgensen (2019, 28) puts it, rational decision making “is both inseparable from and inextricably linked to emotion.”

Nevertheless, journalists themselves are not very open in expressing emotions about their professional practices and working conditions. They often understand emotions as a breach of professional expectations (Glück 2016). Difficult working conditions and changes in the very essence of the industry allow journalists not only to express their emotional responses to their changing world, but also to use emotions as a coping strategy (Morini, Carls, and Armano 2014). While journalists may frequently ask their sources “how they feel” (Wahl-Jorgensen 2019, 9), it is both uncommon and difficult for them to answer a similar question about themselves and their lived experiences as professionals.

Emotions are managed by journalists within specific situations and according to certain rules. Arlie Hochschild (1979, 561) depicts emotional management as “the act of evoking or shaping, as well as suppressing, feeling in oneself.” Anne Soronen (2018, 292) adds that it “enables us to concretize how employees use and reflect their own emotions and how they try to influence other people’s emotions as part of production.” According to Chris Peters (2011, 306), emotional management “could be considered one of the crucial foundations of the job” because “journalists traditionally attempt to manage their emotions.”

Emotion and its management emerged as a topic during longitudinal research about changing journalistic working conditions and professional autonomy in local newspapers (Waschková Císařová 2020). The research design, based on journalists’ interpretations of their career histories, consisted of interviews with a small group of respondents, repeated over four successive years. Once the journalists “opened the floodgates” of emotion, it became an inevitable part of the narrative about their work (cf. Bowd 2004).

My research adopts a temporal approach to the study of emotions (cf. Mattley 2002; Spaulding 2014). Using a life history approach which draws on a longitudinal qualitative case study, the article explores an understudied area. It focuses on how journalists interpret and manage their emotions throughout their career histories in local media.

Building Journalistic Career Histories

To capture the key elements of a changing profession, the role that emotions play and how journalists understand themselves, it is helpful to examine the journalists’ self-interpretation within the broader context of their life histories. Zelizer (1993) proposes viewing journalists as an interpretive community. This approach allows me to adequately capture not only the restrictive frame of journalism as a profession, but also the various dimensions of journalism: informal discussions, informal networking, gut feelings, tacit knowledge, and emotions. Through an interpretation of their work and by telling their stories about daily practices, scholars have described the changing contours of journalistic identity in times of flux (cf. Kotisova 2017; Meyers and Davidson 2014; Pantti 2010; Schulz 2007). To understand the role of emotion, one should let the journalists “shape meaning about themselves” because “the shared discourse that they produce is thus a marker of how they see themselves as journalists” (Zelizer 1993, 222, 223).

Nevertheless, to make sense of individual experiences in the context of a professional community, understanding the role of emotions is essential. Stacy Spaulding (2014, 14) suggests understanding nostalgia “as a means of transporting the eyewitness into the mode of historian in a first attempt to draw out larger meanings and create a first draft of history.” Karin Wahl-Jorgensen proposes the life histories approach to capture the changes in journalists’ practices and professional identities over a longer period of time. It is an:

approach that tells us much about the nitty-gritty of everyday lived experience, which may often be unglamorous and unworthy of note, but is intrinsically tied to broader social, political, economical, and technological transformations. (2018, 3)

Ivor Goodson (2001) shows that life histories take into account the interpretation of the broadest social and historical context, they differentiate lived experience, and they provide different interpretative layers. Therefore, life history interviews with journalists enable us to focus on the broadest range of professional practices, as well as journalists’ interpretations of those practices. Ultimately, this facilitates insight into emotions and emotional management as part of their life histories (cf. Meyers and Davidson 2014). Focusing on journalists’ professional work, I refer their life histories as their career histories.

Journalists’ Emotions and Emotional Management

To paint a complete picture of journalistic career histories, we need to understand the role of emotions and emotional management in journalistic work during changes in the media organisation, particularly in the local media environment. We can understand journalists’ emotions as directed towards various objects (cf. Moran and Usher 2020). Russo (1998, 74) points out that “journalists have potential affective attachments both to their profession and its mission of discovering and presenting news to readers, and to the organization that makes that presentation possible.” Therefore, we can distinguish journalists’ emotions as directed towards (1) their work; (2) their media organisation; and in case of local journalists (3) their local community. These attachments can differ from and even contradict each other.

First, journalists are traditionally committed to their work based on both emotional and pragmatic considerations (cf. Reinardy 2011; Glück 2016; Hopper and Huxford 2015). Scott Reinardy (2011, 34) enumerates loyalty, pride in their work, getting facts correct, providing multiple sides of a story, and playing the role of governmental watchdog. Wahl-Jorgensen (2018, 5–6) adds “work as a calling” and “journalism as a public service.” At the same time, journalistic working conditions are in a state of constant change affected by financial and technological developments. This may lead to job dissatisfaction, stress, burn-out, job precariousness deriving from uncertainty, and insecurity (Goyanes and Rodríguez-Gómez 2018; Reinardy 2011; MacDonald et al. 2016). Reinardy sums it up:

Plummeting circulation, declining revenues, new technology, convergence, conglomerate ownership, and layoffs paint a bleak picture for anyone pursuing a career in newspapers. And, along with the quagmire of issues, the readers, the investors, the publishers, and the editors want more – more information, more revenue, and more forums to present the news. (2011, 33)

Second, scholarship has shown a broader attachment to the news organisations for which journalists work, particularly “to their co-workers, their readers, and to the values and tasks of a journalist” (Russo 1998, 99) or to their medium. The authors list the following as factors that lead to journalists’ satisfaction: perceived organisational support, autonomy, the perception of work quality, and reasonable workload. On the other hand, the factors connected to the possibility of dissatisfaction include the lack of organisational support, work-family conflict, deadlines, pressures to produce good work, low pay, media competition, implementing new technology, increasing the physical separation of employees, and the loss of autonomy and creativity (MacDonald et al. 2016; Reinardy 2014; Morini, Carls, and Armano 2014; Reinardy 2011; Cushion 2007; Russo 1998).

In the case of local journalists, the third emotional object is their local community (Waschková Císařová 2017a; Kitch 2008). Several authors have pointed out the emotional resonance of the local. As Michael Conniff (1995) points out, “the local is no longer where you live but who you are and what you care about.” John Pauly and Melissa Eckert (2002) add that the term “local” remains emotionally resonant. Kristy Hess (2013) defines the sense of place as the social, emotional, and economic foundations of a particular location. Similarly, Gregory Shepherd and Eric Rothenbuhler (2001, 166) stress that “affective, cognitive, and behavioural ties are all things that people feel, think, or do and all are interpreted as things that build community.” Kathryn Bowd’s research (2005, 114) showed that “most of the journalists interviewed agreed on the importance of ‘connection’ with the communities in which they worked.”

Moreover, as we can see from the aforementioned scholarship on emotional responses to described objects, labelled mostly as those of satisfaction or dissatisfaction, the important characteristic of journalists’ emotions is their different orientation. Psychologists (e.g., Feldman Barrett 2006) label the two dimensions of emotions – positive and negative, or pleasant and unpleasant – as their valence (cf. Wahl-Jorgensen 2019). The development of emotional objects also brings a change in the emotional responses of journalists over time, which can lead to a volatility of emotions. Journalists can either feel differently oriented emotions towards different objects at the same time or change their feelings quickly as a response to the objects’ development (Russo 1998; Goyanes and Rodríguez-Gómez 2018).

These potentially conflicting emotional directions and their changes over time demand the exercise of emotional management. Hochschild (1979, 563) states, that “emotion work becomes an object of awareness most often, perhaps, when the individual’s feelings do not fit the situation, that is, when the latter does not account for or legitimate feelings in the situation.” I use emotional management as a synonym for “emotion work” or “emotional labor.” In line with this definition, emotional management can be understood as

the act of trying to change in degree or quality an emotion or feeling. To “work on” an emotion or feeling is, for our purposes, the same as “to manage” an emotion or to do “deep acting”. Note that “emotion work” refers to the effort – the act of trying – and not to the outcome, which may or may not be successful. (Hochschild 1979, 561)

There are different processes and actors in emotional management. Hochschild (1979, 561) speaks about two types of emotion work: “evocation, in which the cognitive focus is on a desired feeling which is initially absent, and suppression, in which the cognitive focus is on an undesired feeling which is initially present.” She points out that “emotion work can be done by the self upon the self, by the self upon others, and by others upon oneself” (Hochschild 1979, 562). TJ Thomson (2018, 4) adds, that therefore “one can regulate one’s own emotions, regulate someone else’s emotions through societal pressure, or have one’s emotions influenced by external influences.” Similarly to Soronen (2018, 291), I focus on “emotions that people are aware of or at least try to control in their own actions or sustain in others.” In other words on how journalists “use and reflect their own emotions and how they try to influence other people’s emotions as part of production” (Soronen 2018, 292).

We can assume that the journalists’ emotional responses and emotional management will change with time and differing circumstances. This provides further impetus to examine these factors over the longer-term span of their career histories (cf. Wahl-Jorgensen 2018). Hochschild (1979, 562) adds that “both the sense of [emotional] discrepancy and the response to it can vary in time. The managing act, for example, can be a five-minute stopgap measure, or it can be a more long-range gradual effort suggested by the term ‘working through’.”

Local Journalists’ Emotions

The relationship which binds together local audiences, local media, and local journalists is one which encompasses an emotional dimension and is characterised by closeness (for more about closeness, see Waschková Císařová 2017a). The journalists’ emotional attachment arises from their proximity to the stories they cover, as well as their sources and readers.

Nevertheless, the emotional attachments to different objects and their valence can sometimes be in contradiction. Whilst journalists’ emotions towards their work are (at least at the beginning of their careers) primarily positive, their emotions towards the news organisation and the local community may develop differently. For example, research into metropolitan newspaper journalists shows that they have a higher identification with their work than with their actual newspaper (Russo 1998; cf. Goyanes and Rodríguez-Gómez 2018). These contradictions can throw the journalists into a passion trap, a “mechanism of forced availability and forced acceptance of given conditions within an ever less participatory and more hierarchical work organization” (Morini, Carls, and Armano 2014).

Journalists who work in local newsrooms are experiencing similar upheaval to their colleagues in national newsrooms, but smaller newsrooms have different opportunities to respond to these changes. For example, MacDonald et al. (2016, 41) find that “journalists working at newspapers with smaller circulation sizes have greater levels of emotional exhaustion.” At the local level, the changes to journalistic practice, caused mainly by economic and technological trends, can bring particular problems. These include a decrease in the local content in local media, the diminishing presence of local journalists, difficult access to the local audience, and the relocations or closures of local newsrooms (Waschková Císařová 2017b; Kleinsteuber 1992). These changes lead to delocalisation (Waschková Císařová 2017b; Waschková Císařová 2016), which erases local characteristics from the local media and significantly impacts on the work satisfaction of local journalists.

The changing conditions of work, the changing performance of a media organisation (Goyanes and Rodríguez-Gómez 2018) and the developing crisis caused by a weakening connection of local media with local communities (Conniff 1995) all combine to destabilise the emotional responses of journalists and the ways in which they manage them. A volatility of emotions can lead to a deepening of negative emotions and a growing need for emotional management, resulting in a vicious circle (Reinardy 2011; Goyanes and Rodríguez-Gómez 2018). Goyanes and Rodríguez-Gómez show that as problems accumulate, journalists may come to “think that the causes of the lack of job security are beyond their individual responsibility (and therefore there is no need to change).” This shows that emotional management can lead to “passivity instead of professional impetus and passion” (2018, 13). On the other hand, volatility can lead to a strengthening of positive emotions, such as a passion for work. But as Morini, Carls, and Armano add, journalists can cope with work frustration by directing their passion somewhere other than to their jobs:

Emotions, desires and passion associated with the act of writing, producing texts and transmitting ideas thus remain a central element in these journalists’ self-representations and sense of self-realisation. But they are no longer collocated and achieved in the workplace. (2014)

Method

The aim of this article is to focus on how journalists interpret their emotions and develop emotional management throughout their career histories in the local media environment. Specifically, the research questions are:

RQ1: What are local journalists’ everyday emotional responses toward their work, media organisation and local community during a time of change?

RQ2: How do local journalists develop emotional management in the course of their career histories?

This study focuses on local journalists who are employed by the dominant local press owner of the Czech Republic, the Vltava Labe Media group, which has experienced permanent losses and staff layoffs during the past several years (Waschková Císařová 2017b).

Local media in the Czech Republic are traditionally newspapers. There were 100 titles in the Czech Republic in 2019 (Waschková Císařová 2013), 70 of them owned by the Vltava Labe Media (VLM) media company (Vltava Labe Media 2019). VLM has a dominant position in the market and, as a chain, its dailies show a strong trend toward delocalisation (Waschková Císařová 2017b; Waschková Císařová 2016). Moreover, there were significant changes in the operation of the media company when, in 2015, it was sold by its German owner, Verlagsgruppe Passau, to a regional (Czech and Slovak) financial group, Penta (Waschková Císařová 2020; Waschková Císařová and Metyková 2015). Among national dailies in the Czech Republic, the VLM papers have the third highest sales, the second largest readership and lead in advertising revenues (Publishers Union Yearbook 2017).

Nevertheless, the company has suffered sustained losses in the past several years (178 million CZK in 2016; almost 18 million CZK in 2017; 83 million CZK in 2018; see Vltava Labe Media Annual Report 2016; 2017; 2018; Vltava Labe Media Final Accounts 2019). Along with these, staff numbers are continually decreasing (46 managers and 1,134 other employees in 2015; 15 managers and 933 other employees in 2017; 15 managers and 885 other employees in 2018; see Vltava Labe Media Annual Report 2016; 2017; 2018; Vltava Labe Media Final Accounts 2019; cf. Waschková Císařová 2013).

The analysis draws on data collected through long-term qualitative research and consists of a series of qualitative in-depth interviews conducted over four years (2015–2018) with nine late-career journalists who work(ed) in the local newsrooms of the Vltava Labe Media group. Interviewees were recruited through personal contacts and snowball sampling according to a quota scheme to find late-career journalists who work(ed) in different organisational units of VLM for at least 10 years. Interviewees had extensive professional experience and were able to reflect upon the changing environment of local journalists. Because of the relatively small newsrooms, experienced journalists also tend to have managerial roles. In this study I was looking for journalists with similar professional profiles (cf. Meyers and Davidson 2014). Therefore, the sample consists of six men and three women who had worked as journalists for at least 17 years, mainly in the lowest management positions (i.e., local editor-in-chief or editor). They were from nine different organisational units (called divisions) of the VLM group, which enabled the identification of the degree of homogenisation and centralisation across the company. To ensure anonymity, the interviewees were given fictitious first names.

I adopted a longitudinal approach to the research to capture a broader picture and longer time-span of the subjects’ life (Meyers and Davidson 2014). The first round of interviews placed a stronger emphasis on the long-term career histories of particular respondents and their changing daily working practices. For example, I asked questions about their education and job background and their career history in the VLM media organisation. The following rounds focused more on everyday working practices and changes in the organisation over the past year. They also explored the outlook for the coming year. The interviews were originally conducted because of the anticipated change of ownership in 2015 and the consequent alteration of working conditions within the company. The topic of emotion emerged during the first round of interviews and later became a staple of the interviews.

A total of 34 interviews was conducted. All nine respondents were interviewed in 2015, 2016, and 2017. In 2018 only seven respondents were interviewed because two of them had left the company in 2017. Another two respondents left shortly before the last round of interviews. The respondents who left the media organisation were willing to participate in the research just as they were leaving or within a year after they left. Later they asserted that they had nothing to say on the subject and refused to be interviewed because they had left the profession for good (cf. Meyers and Davidson 2014).

The first wave of nine interviews took place in 2015, shortly before the company’s change of ownership. Interviews lasted between 30 min and two hours. The interviews were transcribed and thematic analysis was conducted. I first familiarised myself with the data, then coded the text, searched for themes with broader patterns of meaning, and defined and named each of them.

Findings

The structure of the findings section is chronological, to highlight the journalists’ career histories. Moreover, it mirrors my approach to the journalists’ emotions – their direction towards various objects, valence and volatility – and the journalists’ emotional management. I depict the journalists’ emotional career history in the three chronological stages of the media organisation’s development: from the beginning in 2015, the time of the change of ownership; through the times of deepening differences in valence and direction of the journalists’ emotions; and finally, to the journalists’ resignation and departure.

The First Stage: Journalists’ Emotions During a Time of Change

The working conditions of the respondents were already problematic at the beginning of the research in 2015, because the company was undergoing a fundamental change. After years of increasing losses within the media organisation, the owner was preparing the company for sale. These conditions occasioned a change in the everyday emotional experiences of the respondents. On a daily basis, the emotional responses to their work were mainly resignation and tiredness (Josef 2015; Anna 2015). As a result of the way they saw their profession changing around them, their interpretation of their work as important and emotionally positive gradually frayed. But whilst the economic changes were mostly linear, the journalists’ emotional reflections followed a vicious cycle of ups and downs, and, as the main everyday emotion, a deepening weariness.

During the period before the sale, growing job dissatisfaction and insecurity meant that the journalists experienced mainly negative emotions towards the media organisation. Moreover, the company was cutting costs. This influenced both the amount of local content in the dailies and the number of journalists in the local newsrooms. Journalists experienced resignation, routinisation, and imminent burn-out (Anna 2015). Others were afraid of future changes. Still others feared that nothing would change.

People are tired and pissed off. We are scared of the future. (Josef 2015)

It can’t be worse. (Petr 2015)

I hope something changes and we will be motivated to work again. (Anna 2015)

Nevertheless, the actual change produced inconsistent emotional responses. At first, rumours about the successful sale of the company elicited both hope that working conditions would finally improve (e.g., Adam 2015) and a suspicion that nothing would change. Moreover, there was a gradual weariness of the changes that were introduced (Josef 2015). This volatility of emotion became part of the respondents’ career histories and a subject for their emotional management.

During the first year of my research, the respondents’ emotional management was focused on both an evocation of pleasant feelings towards the new owner and a suppression of unpleasant feelings towards the media organisation per se. Despite their growing dissatisfaction and sense of insecurity, a new beginning with a new owner obliged the journalists to manage their negative emotions and wait for further developments. Negative emotions grew among journalists as an understandable consequence of the development of their career histories, their past experiences of both owners and media organisations.

The Second Stage: Emerging Differences Between Emotional Direction and Valence

In the years following the sale, the interviewees’ emotional responses related to how their expectations and hopes from the initial stage were reflected in the reality of everyday work.

The professional identity of the local journalists was formed by an attachment to the locality, a closeness to all of the participants within the local community, and by the positive emotions which represent their understanding of their “work as a calling” (Wahl-Jorgensen 2018). Even if their everyday responses to the changing media organisation featured fewer positive emotions, the journalists still reflected upon their attachment to their work, the loyalty, pride, and love that it generated. As Josef (2017) said, “I have loved newspapers my whole life.” Local journalists reflect upon themselves (Zelizer 1993) as devoted professionals who are able to do their hard work with passion.

The respondents became, after years of work, the faces of their newspapers (Jana 2016). They were proud of and happy to embody this role. As Josef (2016) said, to “be the face of the newspaper suits me, I enjoy the work, and this encourages me.” Journalists expressed an enjoyment of their work even when they criticised the direction that the company and its newspapers were taking.

To reconcile these divergent feelings posed a challenge to their emotional management and demanded new coping strategies. Journalists summoned their positive emotions – a passion for the job, an identification with the rationale of their profession – and suppressed their negative emotions: These negative emotions reflected poor working conditions within the organisation and their crumbling identity as local journalists. Some decided to divert their passion and creativity and take second jobs (e.g., Anna 2018) as a public relations specialist, web page designer, and even a bistro owner.

With the passage of time, respondents named more passive coping strategies (cf. Goyanes and Rodríguez-Gómez 2018), which can be understood as opposite from the initially positive coping strategies. Among the coping strategies were resignation and a detached rationality – some emphasised the importance of finding new topics, informing and educate the readers, but they mostly recounted that they simply continued to do their job.

In a way, I still enjoy it. I don’t care how the product looks ... I enjoy being able to get to places, I didn't know. (Adam 2018)

I enjoy going to interesting sources or witnesses because you feel there is still something to pass on. (Petr 2018)

What is more striking is that these emotions can be understood as a misappropriation of such professional journalistic norms as activity, interest, and critical scrutiny. At the same time, they reflect a gradual resignation which affects the journalists’ emotional management. They were no longer able to cope with the media organisation’s transformation by simply evoking desirable emotions and suppressing undesirable ones.

I was more combative than I am today. (Adam 2017)

We have no motivation. We are resigned. (Anna 2017)

I am more laid back now and some things don’t bother me anymore … . What I cannot influence, I don’t solve. (Oto 2016; 2017)

I can now strictly separate work and private time, which I did not do before. (Jana 2016)

The ongoing changes to the media organisation – its delocalisation and centralisation – were the main reasons for the negative emotions the respondents felt towards it. They named, among other reasons, dissatisfaction and stress along with the damage to the local character of the newspaper, damage to the local characteristics of the newsrooms, the worsening relationships with colleagues and readers, and the loss of professional autonomy for the local journalists and the editors-in-chief.

But there was, at the same time, a less visible, yet more significant problem underpinning these issues: That of the lost identity of the media organisation and a related loss in the identity of the journalists (e.g., Marie 2017). As Jana (2017) put it, “[the organisation] is a mess.” Journalists reacted most emotionally to the wayward direction of the company. They criticised the unclear or missing vision of the organisation (Marie 2017). Josef (2017) called it the “day-to-day boogie.” Journalists were confused and tired as a result of the emotional volatility created by the daily changes, the starting and stopping of new projects, and the alternating support for, and suppression of, the local identity of the media organisation. The long-term experience also played an important role because respondents already knew that the organisation was not so much evolving as going round in small circles.

It goes from one extreme to the other – they change the emphasis from local, to regional, to national topics over and over again … . They cancelled the weekly brand and then put it back. The readers went to the competition. We have different newspapers every month. The readers don’t know their daily any more. (Michal 2015; 2016)

The readers can find almost nothing from the locality in the daily any more. They blame me as the local editor-in-chief, that I damaged the newspaper, that we lost prestige … . The newspapers have a nice layout, but there is nothing to read. (Anna 2017; 2018)

We don’t have secretaries any more. Readers come here and meet a closed door. They can’t order a subscription or pay for a classified ad or a commemoration at the local newsroom. The readers get angry and unsubscribe. (Adam 2017)

There is nobody in the newsroom. It is disgusting towards the readers. (Petr 2017)

When respondents referred to their feelings about work and the organisation which employed them, it was clear that they were caught in the “passion trap” (Morini, Carls, and Armano 2014). They were trapped by the tension between their positive emotional attachment to their work as local journalists, their readers, and their colleagues, on the one hand, and, on the other, by the negative emotional response to the development of the media organisation and the newspaper as a product. This volatility was itself part of the journalists’ emotional responses. To behave professionally they were obliged to manage their negative emotions.

The growing dissatisfaction with the media organisation and developments in the newspaper eventually led to an erosion of the journalists’ emotional attachment to their work. The respondents’ emotional management during the second stage extended and deepened. They continued to suppress their negative emotions towards the owner and the organisation. At the same time, they were obliged to manage their emerging negative emotions towards the job itself.

Readers think of me as the face of the newspaper in our district for X years, so if they now have more and more critical remarks, everything comes down on my head. I am like a lightning rod for their complaints. (Jana 2016; 2018)

It couldn't be any worse … . It goes from the frying pan to the fire … . You cannot erase the aftertaste. (Petr 2015)

The Third Stage: When the Changes Became Personal

The last phase of the analysed period was characterised by a deepening of the changes in the company and a related deterioration of the working conditions of the journalists (e.g., a further reduction of resources; centralisation; an erosion of the autonomy of the employees; a growing threat to job security and an increase of layoffs). Moreover, the interviewees regarded some of the changes, which entailed a questioning of their responsibilities and their position in the newsroom, as too personal in their consequences. This meant that the changes posed a threat to their professional identity and interpersonal relationships. Their emotional responses to these changes were therefore negative and led to a disruption of emotional management: they were no longer willing to keep their emotions under control. It gave some respondents a reason to think about leaving or to actually leave the job.

In 2018, the management of the company took the next step towards centralisation to make further financial savings. As Adam (2018) saw it, “managers in the central newsroom had a vision that the newspapers and newsrooms would be the same in every district. I call it McDonaldization.” The central management decided to divest the local editors-in-chief of all their powers, their day-to-day responsibilities and control over the local newsroom. It meant they were no longer able to make decisions concerning the newspaper’s content, to make budgetary decisions or manage the employees, all of which contributed to the perceived erosion of their autonomy and their professional identity. As Adam (2018) noted, they were no longer even provided with the circulation statistics.

I have been working for the company for more than 20 years and I lost all my power as editor-in-chief. I feel like a pawn without any ability to make a decision. (Anna 2017)

Nevertheless, the local editors-in-chief were still required to maintain the supply of local content for the print edition, to fill the online versions of the title, to complete all the tasks imposed by central headquarters, and to work during weekends. Local managers were closely watched by central management and required to spend more time on bureaucracy, such as filling out reports to demonstrate their productivity. As Petr (2018) put it, “basically, you're doing the regional manager’s job, but he has far more money than you, and you're not being paid for it.”

All these changes in the responsibilities of local management led to a growing animosity between local journalists and the regional and central managers, and also among the colleagues in the local newsroom. Simply put, journalists were not sure who decided what. They wrongly blamed their closest colleagues – the powerless local editors-in-chief – for the illogical decisions they were actually unable to make but were also powerless to prevent. This situation had a further impact on the journalists’ emotional management, which focused on both the summoning and suppression of their emotions towards their close colleagues as well as towards the remote owners of the paper and the central and regional managers.

Later, the central management further undermined the local managers’ authority by making decisions which my respondents perceived as dishonest:

I asked a regional manager if there would be any layoffs. He said no and the next day he fired our secretary. He deliberately lied to my face. (Jana 2017)

It was an imposition. I had to choose if I would have more people for less money in the newsroom or vice versa. I chose more money, but they didn't give me any money. (Petr 2017)

Further developments were seen by my interviewees as resulting in a deterioration of interpersonal relationships within the newsrooms and in the degrading of their professional identity. They spoke about hostility, dirty tricks, divided colleagues and destroyed relationships. The restructuring meant that local newsrooms would have only two journalists (compared to what had previously been four or five, cf. Waschková Císařová 2013). This meant that even if there were still one editor-in-chief in the local newsroom, the management decided to discriminate between the two colleagues by treating one as a superior and the other as an inferior. The insensitivity of the managers was symbolised by the official names of the positions in the local newsrooms – the more important of the two was a reporter and the less important was a community editor. The relationship of the local journalist to the local community would suggest that the expression “community” should be valued rather than debased (Waschková Císařová 2017a). In practice, the reporter was the one who was positioned as a professional journalist. Reporters could, for example, write their own pieces and produce investigative articles. By contrast, the community editor was only authorised to copy and paste invitations, press releases, and edit service information. The respondents sometimes ironically referred to the higher-level employee as a first category devil (the allusion is to a traditional Czech fairy tale, which sarcastically reflects the hierarchy in hell) or an eagle (the allusion is to the lofty, all-seeing role of a journalist) and the lower-level employee as a second category devil or a quail. The public use of these metaphors

was banned by the company.

They have fomented such a strange hostility between us. I am angry with a colleague and he is angry with me. It seems terrible to me to create such a gap between two people who must be together in the newsroom. (Anna 2018)

We are becoming inhuman. We are isolated here. Without colleagues, we have nobody to talk to about the job any more. (Oto 2018)

Interestingly enough, after this restructuring of the local newsrooms, some of the former editors-in-chief became inferiors and their former subordinates became superiors. And these former editors-in-chief, who were often considered to be the face of the newspaper, understood it as a breach of their long-established professional identity (cf. Anna 2017 above).

I can’t look the readers in the eye. [The central management] completely took away our responsibilities, the position of the local editor-in-chief existed only as a title in the paper. I wanted severance pay when they decided I would be a second category devil. That surprised them and they reconsidered very quickly: they retained the positions of editors-in-chief but just took away our powers so that they didn’t have to give us severance pay. (Jana 2018)

For my respondents, emotional management was ultimately a struggle not only to maintain professionalism, but also to contain the volatility of changing and conflicting emotions over a longer period of time within the career histories of the journalists. It had two important aspects: temporality and proximity. With respect to the career histories of the journalists, the higher the respondents’ expectations, the deeper was their disillusionment and the greater the need to work on managing their emotions. For example, Josef reflected on his fears for the future, going back to 2015. Over time, he became more optimistic: but by 2018 he was once again worried. This was because the company’s promises to follow a clearer path were not fulfilled and uncertainty that characterised the situation in 2015 once again prevailed. The difference was that in 2018 Josef identified less with the organisation, and was tired of the constant alternations of hope and despair: “I am annoyed. I am scared. Although they keep promising us things at regional meetings, none of them materialise.” Another journalist, Anna (2018), compared the former and current owner of the company and admitted her own emotions: “I swore at the Germans on our first meeting, but now I think they were saintly. These owners act disgustingly – work, work, work, you haven’t got enough yet, we’ll give you another project.” Moreover, changes in journalists’ responsibilities and organisational hierarchy disrupted relationships in the newsroom. Respondents’ emotional management extended over time from the suppression of undesired emotions towards the owner and the media organisation to the suppression of unpleasant emotions felt for those much closer: colleagues.

The frustration of my respondents was aggravated by the fact that in most of the Czech regions local newspapers have no competition, so there was nowhere else for them to go (Adam 2017; Petr 2017). Journalists felt trapped in their present newsrooms. Job dissatisfaction and the feeling of being stuck in jobs they no longer liked was, for some respondents, a cause of serious psychological and physical problems and/or the reason for leaving the profession. Four out of the nine respondents left journalism during my research.

We can just leave, nothing else. But at my age, I can’t do anything else. So, I’d rather shut up. … When I almost got a heart attack, I thought that ... I can’t take the job so seriously. I have to get this job out of my heart. (Anna 2018)

The people in my newsroom are on the edge of collapse. (Oto 2016)

Nevertheless, there were still some respondents for whom the passionate attachment to the work was more important than the dissatisfaction caused by their jobs. Part of their emotional management was to speak about leaving their job even though they were not intending to do so.

I will love newspapers for ever, but in their present state, I wouldn't mind leaving … I always thought I'd die doing this job, but I'm sick of it, I should retire, so I'll do it. (Josef 2017; 2018)

Conclusion

This article has explored the emotional responses of local journalists throughout their career histories in relation to their work, media organisation and local community. The journalists I interviewed reflected a changing emotional valence and deepening emotional volatility (Feldman Barrett 2006; Wahl-Jorgensen 2018). The research caught them at a moment of significant change – working for a media organisation which was about to be sold. It meant months of cost cuttings and a steady worsening of working conditions (Conniff 1995). When the research began, they were already resigned and exhausted (MacDonald et al. 2016). After the arrival of the new owner, the journalists reluctantly gave optimism a chance. This led to a vicious circle of constantly changing emotional responses. They began in 2015, when the respondents were already tired of budget cuts and fearful of the future, and continued through the times of hope, of a measure of relief, and a gradual awareness of the changes to their identity as local journalists. Later the respondents were wearied by the wayward direction of the company, the repeated changes of direction, the errors, the delocalisation, and by a loss of identification with the media organisation. They finally turned to resignation in 2018 or expressed an intention to leave (Goyanes and Rodríguez-Gómez 2018; Reinardy 2011).

The volatility was deepened by a growing emotional ambivalence towards work, the media organisation and the local community. The journalists’ emotions towards their work and the local community were mostly positive. They understood the work as a calling (Wahl-Jorgensen 2018) and saw themselves as committed journalists who personified the local newspapers (Kleinsteuber 1992). On the other hand, their emotions toward the media organisation were negative, focusing mainly on the discrepancy between the local presence and identity of the journalist, and the systematic delocalisation of the organisation. Key elements in these emotional responses were the volatility of the changes and therefore the journalists’ emotional responses to them; and a reduction of the journalists’ professional autonomy.

A major reason for the negative emotions which journalists felt towards the media organisation was its impact on their professional identity. As their long-established positions in the newsroom and in the locality changed, they were unable to maintain their emotional management and found themselves in a passion trap (Morini, Carls, and Armano 2014). They reflected on how they felt in this difficult situation, making comments like “You cannot erase the aftertaste” and “We are losing our humanity.” The development of these responses thus demonstrates that emotions are shaped by the extent to which individuals can retain their professional autonomy and identity. Yet as a result of their dissatisfaction with the changes in working conditions, some left the news organisation and, ultimately, the profession. Those who remain either still value their work more highly than the conditions within which they have to perform it, or they have resigned themselves to the conditions because they have no other job opportunities to work as local journalists.

In the course of their career histories, the local journalists’ strategies of emotional management developed significantly (Hochschild 1979; Soronen 2018). They evolved from an initial evocation of positive feelings towards the new owner and a suppression of negative feelings towards the media organisation; through a growing necessity to suppress negative feelings towards the media organisation, and emerging need of evocation/suppression of emotions directed to the journalistic work; and to an extended and eventually disrupted emotional management aimed at all the above-mentioned objects together with a newly emergent need to manage emotions relating to colleagues.

This longitudinal research, which focused on the career histories of the journalists (Wahl-Jorgensen 2018), was able to track the detailed changes in emotions and emotional management. The life history approach can be particularly important in the research of the journalistic profession undergoing rapid change. It made it possible to identify the point at which the journalists’ emotional management strategies were no longer sufficient to cope with the threats to their local and professional identity, along with the destruction of their relationships with their closest colleagues. This approach, which has emphasised the temporal character of emotions (Mattley 2002), offers avenues for further research on the temporality of emotion. Future research in the area could benefit from a focus on the question of how journalists use their pasts in reflecting on and constructing their present emotions.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The writing of this article was supported by the OeAD-GmbH, Austrian Agency for International Cooperation in Education & Research, via the Aktion Österreich-Tschechien, AÖCZ-Habilitationsstipendium (ICM-2019-13710).