Peripheral News Workers’ Autonomy: The Case of a Czech Regional Television Newsroom

ABSTRACT

In this article, we revisit some of the debates about changing journalistic labour that have first emerged when digital technologies became widely available in newsrooms. The terms multiskilling, deskilling, up-skilling and re-skilling have been applied in a variety of contexts and in a range of studies, but explorations of journalistic labour have tended to focus on core (news) workers. The de-skilling debate that originated in Braverman’s work continues to be relevant but we need a more nuanced approach to journalistic labour. Our case study addresses skills and changing work conditions in a regional Czech public service television newsroom and takes into account the experience of core as well as peripheral news workers. We conclude that camera reporters—those at the periphery of journalistic work—have faced the most detrimental loss of professional autonomy. We argue that a holistic approach to the core and the periphery of a newsroom helps us overcome some of the shortcomings of the conceptual variety of understandings of the journalistic field and the journalistic profession as well as the divergent definitions of skills involved in journalistic labour. Our case study is also important because it centres on under-researched public service media.

KEYWORDS:

• Camera reporter
• journalistic labour
• deskilling
• public service television
• journalistic skills
• autonomy

Introduction

In the past two decades, we have seen an increase in scholarship on the changes in the journalistic profession and journalistic labour mainly in connection with the development and adoption of digital technologies. A significant amount of research focuses on changing core skills that have become essential for the conduct of journalistic work and the identified shifts have been discussed within the wider concepts of multiskilling, deskilling, upskilling and re-skilling in a variety of contexts and countries (see, e.g., Nygren 2014; Avilés and León 2002; Wallace 2013 among many others). While these debates have offered significant insights, to garner a more thorough understanding of the dynamics of change we need to broaden the focus and include other than core journalistic roles and broader structures of employment in journalism. Therefore, we advocate a more nuanced approach that enables us to distinguish between occupations that are core to media organizations and those that are on the periphery.

We focus on a regional Czech public service television newsroom and zoom in on how changes in technical production impact those on the various rungs of the newsroom hierarchy. As we explain below we understand these changes not purely as technological but also linked to organizational strategies and management’s economic decisions. These changes are relatively recent, and their impact has been particularly pronounced since the introduction of a 24/7 news channel in 2005 and the increased production of news videos for social media. We demonstrate that in the Czech context, news reporters—who are considered to be core workforce and enjoy permanent contracts and professional development opportunities (see, e.g., Ursell 1998)—are viewed by managers as key for innovation and hence enjoy considerable freedom and support in adopting skills related to digital media production, with organizational support provided for such adoption and consequently benefiting their career prospects. In contrast, camera reporters (a term we prefer to camera operators or cameramen as de-emphasizing their technical skills allows a more nuanced discussion of their role in news production, see Waschková Císařová and Metykova 2020) who find themselves on the journalistic periphery with less secure contracts and behind a boundary wall have experienced a downgrading within the employment structure with a de-valuation of their technical expertise and significantly restricted professional development opportunities.

The Continued Significance of the Deskilling Debate

The publication of Harry Braverman’s Labour and Monopoly Capital in 1974 has been credited with originating the debate about the deskilling of work. Braverman argued that the implementation of scientific management (or Taylorism) and increasing automation led to deskilling in most occupations. “Conceptual control over production shifted to capitalists, undermining traditional sources of work resistance based on work skills and knowledge. Labour had to be impoverished, argued Braverman, before the aims of capitalist production could be met” (Spencer 2000, 225). By the late 1970s, deskilling theory began to dominate discussions of skill and work process and while a range of criticisms has since been raised, it has been developed further and sociologists of work and employment—as well as others—continue to find it pertinent (see, e.g., Attewell 1987 on contemporary critiques; Spenner 1983, 1990 and Vallas 1990 on the concepts of skill and research into skill levels; Fraser 2010, on skill intensity; McNally 2010 on content management systems). McNally notes that the broad range of occupations from nursing, librarianship, journalism to law that are affected by deskilling indicates that it applies to intellectual as well as industrial forms of labour (2010, 359). He goes on to stress that “the primary value of Braverman’s thesis lies not in objective tests of whether it is invariably correct, but as an analytical tool for the examination of the dynamic interaction between management policy, technology and workers’ skill” (ibid., p. 360).

Some of the contemporaneous and more recent critiques of Braverman’s deskilling concept are worth exploring in more detail. It has been argued that Braverman over-emphasized the impact of Taylorism and underestimated the expansion of autonomy and cooperation in capitalist production. Writing in 1987, Attewell referred to critics’ scepticism about the extent to which managers can impose their agenda of simplifying the work process or lowering skills in the workforce without resistance. He went on to point out that Braverman faced criticism over the “conceptualization of the consequences of profit making for skill levels … and in his conflating the routinization of work process with the deskilling of workers” (326). However, those in support of Braverman’s work agreed with the basic premise: “Seeking to translate workers’ productive capacity into the maximum amount of labour actually performed, management is forced to loosen workers’ grip on technical knowledge and expertise, which had provided a critical means of resisting managerial controls. What therefore emerges is a sharpening division between the labour of conception (or planning) and execution (doing)” (Vallas 1990, 381).

One area of contention in the debate about deskilling has involved the conceptualization of skill, “the two sides of the debate meant different things by skill. … The argument for deskilling saw the issue primarily in terms of a decline in quality of work. Braverman’s original thesis defined loss of skill effectively as the loss of workers’ control over their work (Braverman 1999), while much of the later work in this tradition drew on Kohn and Schooler’s theories of how work could fulfil psychological needs” (Fraser 2010, 53, original emphasis). Reviewing 20 years of research, Spenner argues that conceptualizations of skill differ in the extent to which they are understood as socially defined and constructed, that is the outcome of contests and exercise of power among the interested parties (1990, 401). Fraser builds on Spenner’s work and argues that to understand the dimensions of innovation and dynamic aspects of skill change, apart from the two dimensions of substantive complexity and autonomy/control, we require “skill-intensity [that] describes the relationship between the skill demands of the job and the skill base of those workers who must perform it; in other words, the extent to which a job exercises, challenges and develops the skills of the person doing it. It applies independently of whether the job requirement or the employee’s skill base is high or low in its own right” (2010, 55).

Although the above suggests why the deskilling debate continues to be applicable and brings new insights, Martinaitis et al. point out that two further views have been advanced in literature: the skill-biased technological change argument and the polarization hypothesis. The proponents of the former argue that “technological progress since the mid-twentieth century has resulted in a higher demand for skills. This is suggested by persistently high education premiums in the face of an increasing supply of skilled workers” (2021, 2). While those who adhere to the polarization hypothesis argue “that routine tasks performed mostly by mid-skilled occupations are increasingly carried out by machines. As a result, technological change has brought a decline in employment in mid-skilled occupations and a growth in low- and high-skilled ones” (ibid.).

Deskilling and the Journalistic Profession

As suggested above, at the heart of the debates about deskilling are productivity and workplace autonomy. In broad terms, journalistic autonomy refers to journalists’ “freedom to speak and publish, and freedom from interference in that activity” (Sjøvaag 2013, 156), at the individual level it involves journalists’ ability to control their work and is understandably affected by workplace hierarchy (see, e.g., Örnebring et al. 2016). Debates about the impact of increasing demands on journalists’ productivity and their loss of professional autonomy certainly predate the converged newsroom, however, the exploration of changes to the skill sets of professional journalists gained significant traction in the late 1990s and has enjoyed much attention since. There is an abundance of studies on the journalistic profession that provide empirical evidence about the ongoing changes in skill levels, quality and autonomy of work and more generally the above-mentioned interplay between management policy, technology and workers’ skill. Studies on skill transformation in journalism continue to explore changes to the quality of work and workers’ control over it.

Initial studies on the adoption of digital technologies in newsrooms focussed on the introduction of videojournalism and explored whether the introduction of multiskilling enskilled or deskilled journalists (Wallace 2013, 111). It was also suggested from the outset that the changes were not the result of technological determinism but rather of management’s economic decisions (Saltzis and Dickinson 2008, 218). In their study on four national UK media organizations Saltzis and Dickinson argue that the efficiency sought by managers did not solely involve cost reduction (redundancies) but is better understood as aiming for a maximum value of outputs for given values of inputs or in other words multiskilling was introduced “to produce more from the same resources, rather than decrease their workforce” (ibid., p. 221). The changes led to concerns about potential decreases in the quality of news outputs (see also García Avilés and León 2002; Higgins-Dobney and Sussman 2013), empirical findings in the 1990s in particular note concerns about the ability of videojournalists to emulate the high standards of specialist camera reporters (Wallace 2013, 111).

Studies from the 1990s and early 2000s also showed that in various countries some journalists associated multiskilling with some positive changes, among those summarized by Wallace are more flexibility, speeding up of tasks, more easily accessible information and increased control over own output (ibid., p. 114). In her study of four US news organizations, Singer found that “though not universally enthusiastic, most journalists perceived convergence as having a number of advantages relative to the long-standing arrangement in which each news organization is independent and, in the case of the newspaper and the television station, competitive”, for some multiskilling was a potential career booster or at least an insurance policy (2004, 7; see also Deuze 2004). It is important to note that while conducting empirical research in the BBC in the early 2000s Saltzis and Dickinson concluded that multiskilling was encouraged but not mandatory and this potentially led to two types of journalists: those valued for high journalistic standards and not multiskilled, and those valued for versatile multiple skills (2008, 222).

With the spread of converged work practices and newsrooms and the emergence of digital-only news media, the definitions of multiskilling also evolved. In the early 2000s, Domingo et al. (2007) identified three types of multiskilling: media (journalists produce content for different media); issue (they report on news related to different subject areas) and technical multiskilling (reporters perform most of the technical production tasks). Their study of 58 Spanish newsrooms concluded that media multiskilling was most common, followed by issue, with technical multiskilling the least common. In addition, very few media companies in their study adopted all three forms of professional convergence at once. In a more recent study, Nygren (2014) argues that there is no commonly accepted definition of multiskilling and suggests that in the Swedish context, two definitions can be offered that are often—but not necessarily—connected. One covers the handling of the entire process from gathering material to its delivery (as in the above case of videojournalists) and the second covers work for different platforms either at the same time or on separate occasions (77).

Apart from deskilling and multiskilling, literature on the changes in the journalistic profession also explores re-skilling and up-skilling. Some argue that this gives a more precise picture than multiskilling, according to Nygren “in general multiskilling is more correctly defined as a re-skilling or an up-skilling” (ibid., p. 93). However, some empirical studies offer a complex picture that involves deskilling, re-skilling as well as multiskilling. In their exploration of the new workflow model introduced at the Danish Broadcasting Corporation Bro et al. consider the management’s ongoing efforts at separating workplace conception from execution and conclude that “news reporters in general have experienced a loss of being part of—or solely responsible for—the entire creative process of working with all facets of a single complete news story. … However, at the same time, correspondents and presenters have become more visible and audible to the readers, listeners and viewers than ever” (2016, 1016).

Skill Transformation, The Boundaries of the Journalistic Profession and Changing Audience Expectations

The above-mentioned studies involved those roles and individuals who are easily recognized as being part of the core journalistic workforce, however, we and others (see, e.g., Waschková Císařová and Metykova 2020; Örnebring 2010; Zelizer 2004 and 2009) have made a case for broadening the scope to include peripheral news workers, i.e., exploring journalistic labour and the various professionals that conduct it more broadly and include those outside the readily recognized journalistic field. By focusing on the labour processes that characterize the production and dissemination of journalistic contents one can explore roles and skills that fall beyond the readily recognisable core journalistic professions and may also involve boundary work. The terminology and definitions for such contributors to journalistic labour include peripheral actors (Maares and Hanusch 2020), in-betweeners (Ahva 2017), semi-affiliated professionals (Deuze 2009), journalistic strangers and intralopers (Belair-Gagnon and Holton 2018), second-class journalistic citizens (Zelizer 2004) and unworthy others (Hanitzsch and Vos 2018). We should be cognisant of the fact that newswork is characterized by a range of employment and contract types, with those working on the periphery employed “to protect the core from numerical fluctuations. The periphery, by comparison, comprises other workers undertaking non-essential activities and brought into employment only on temporary and fixed-term contracts at the employer’s behest” (Ursell 1998, 130). Mark Deuze and Tamara Witschge argue powerfully that under these precarious labour conditions “to be a professional, working journalist means having to go and perform beyond journalism” (2018, 176, original emphasis). At the conceptual level, the study of the transformation of journalistic skills is complicated by the different conceptualizations of journalism and by the lack of systematic studies of journalistic skills. Örnebring and Mellado frame the question in terms of a distinction between a “field” and a “desk” occupation or “as something else entirely—some scholars have, for example, suggested the rise of a view of journalism as process-oriented and collaborative, a view that mixes “field” and “desk” aspects of the job and adds additional dimensions of audience interactivity as well” (2018, 446).

It is, however, not only journalistic skills and the value attributed to them within a news organization that we need to take into account when trying to understand changes in skills and professional autonomy in news production (cf. Higgins-Dobney 2021). As we already mentioned, the emergence of videojournalism raised questions about the technical standard of video news and studies also suggest that technical multiskilling is less prevalent than other forms. The skills of camera reporters have been designated as technical rather than journalistic and they have experienced de-skilling and limitations on workplace autonomy that are more significant than in the case of core workers. We argue that this de-skilling is also linked to a shift in the expected and acceptable technical standards of professionally produced news videos which relate to changing audience expectations and demand as well as news organizations’ strategies (that are often profit driven and can have a disempowering effect, see, e.g., Higgins-Dobney 2021). News videos have become ubiquitous across all news media and as Kalogeropoulos and Kleis Nielsen (2018) argue news organizations are motivated to invest in online news videos because of perceived audience demand and higher advertising rates rather than due to editorial or journalistic ambitions (2208). Hadland, Borges-Rey, and Cameron (2019) argue that since the mid-2000s the use of mobile phone footage was expected to bring lasting changes to journalistic practices related to the production and dissemination of news, however, “almost a decade after the phenomenon first emerged, mobile phones accounted for only a tiny fraction of airtime on UK broadcasters’ flagship news bulletins” and even that involved short clips in stories on crime, violence or conflict (429–430). As we already noted, skills complexity and autonomy/control are key to innovation and we can hardly expect innovation in news videos if those with technical expertise lack complex skills and autonomy/control.

Cummings (2014) argues that despite local news journalists’ perception to the contrary, news structure has not been significantly influenced by technological change, and the characteristics of the news package—such as length, elements (edits) and structure—have remained largely consistent over 40 years, “technology does not change the format of news stories, nor does it indicate the process of producing the story is superficially affected by the technology itself. From examining the relationships of traditional and converged news crews, it appears that technology has no bearing on the meaning of a news story” (205). He goes on to demonstrate that between the 1970s and 2010, TV news stories shifted to an increased number of edits and shorter sound bites and concludes that rather than suggesting that technology changes content, it creates new forms of presentation, affecting patterns and structures of the news story (210).

We should, however, draw attention to some differences between professional broadcast videos and footage produced with hand-held mobile phones as these are “two, quite different forms of content. One is produced according to professional values and is supported by the training, budgets and sensibilities of corporate broadcasters and their correspondents. The other is the consequence of massification of mobile phone technology and the willingness of amateur witnesses to capture what they can see on their device” (Hadland, Borges-Rey, and Cameron 2019, 434).

Daly (2009) argues that in cinema, the adoption of digital video was initially linked to low production costs, but gradually digital video has developed into a format that offers distinct aesthetic options and means for technical innovation. News reporters who use mobile phones when producing news content are by no means amateurs, journalistic education itself has undergone significant changes to become “digital first” (see, e.g., Kirchhoff 2022 for an overview), however, journalists’ technical skills and equipment do not necessarily comply with the standards that camera reporters would consider adequate for professional news videos (Wallace 2013). In addition, as already mentioned, there is little evidence that news reporters engage in aesthetic or technical innovation.

The shift from viewing news on television to consuming videos online, has according to Beatty (2016) resulted in a new culture of viewing online video news and “online video audiences bring different expectations based on the viewing context, their demographic and cultural backgrounds, including their exposure to, and participation in video environments such as MTV and YouTube^TM and other sites of online user-shared video” (126). He goes on to argue that new types of aesthetics are established that deviate from “standard” news aesthetics and are closer to YouTube^TM and MTV video styles which are particularly popular among young people. Peer and Ksiazek (2011) have also argued that YouTube^TM presents a challenge to traditional news organizations and their analysis of online news videos concluded that successful news videos—those most viewed—“adhere to most traditional standards when it comes to production elements, but display more relaxed standards when it comes to their content. Interestingly, we find that departures from quality journalism, especially with regard to the objectivity norm, are rewarded with a higher number of views, while adherence to production standards has no relationship with popularity” (56).

Based on our literature review, the main research question that we addressed was: How do core and peripheral news workers understand changes to their workplace autonomy following increased news video production for CT24 and for social media? We also explored two sub-questions: How do news workers link their experience of autonomy to changes in technical aspects of production? How do news workers understand the material conditions of their work in relation to workplace autonomy?

Method

The literature on journalistic skills and their transformation has focused mainly on what constitutes core workers in newsrooms, leaving aside those on the profession’s periphery. Additionally, it has covered major European public service media (PSM), however, smaller-scale studies focusing on regional or local newsrooms in less populous European countries are scarce. We believe that understanding journalistic labour conducted in public service media organizations is important as

[p]ublic service media organisations, arguably the most important digital journalism organisations in Western democracies, face a series of unique challenges. Much like their commercial neighbours, PSMs must respond to changing audience consumption patterns and make use of new distribution methods to refashion themselves as truly digital organisations who produce findable, accessible, and relevant content for their audiences. However, PSMs must manage this change while also maintaining their (legislated) commitment to public value and universality and dealing with an unstable funding environment. (Herzog and Meese 2021, 291)

PSMs were introduced in the Czech Republic after regime change in 1989 and a special regulatory framework applies to them due to their cultural and democratic roles (see https://www.ceskatelevize.cz/english/ct-code/).

The Czech Television is a relative newcomer to 24-hour news and its foray into social media is even more recent. It established its online 24-hour news channel CT24 in 2005 (cf. BBC that launched its 24-hour news channel in 1997) and the beta version of its iVysilani [iBroadcast] in 2008. Facebook^TM was introduced in the Czech Republic in 2004, however, it took years for it to gain significant numbers of users (in 2019 it had about 5.3 million Czech users), with the Czech Television joining in 2009. At the time of writing it has almost 200,000 followers for its main page and almost 800,000 followers for the 24-hour news channel page. Regional newsrooms have separate Facebook^TM presence, e.g., for their main news programmes. The Czech version of YouTube^TM was launched in 2008 and of Twitter^TM in 2012.

We conducted 17 semi-structured in-depth interviews (cf. Bowd 2004) in 2018 and 2019 in a Czech public service television newsroom and we treat our research as an exploratory single-case study. We designed our research as a case study because we aimed to focus on a single case and to gather and analyse a large number of its features. In addition, the quantification of the data was not a priority, indeed qualitative data were superior for our purposes. Furthermore, we focused on the in-depth understanding of our case rather than on its generalizability (see, e.g., Gomm, Hammersley, and Foster 2000 and Donmoyer’s chapter therein specifically on generalizability and the case study method). We anonymized interviewees as the newsroom and the Czech public service media sector in general are small and inter-connected. To ensure anonymity, all interviewees are identified only by a job title. We also anonymized the location of the newsroom, when the name of the town came up in interviews, we substituted it with X.

The small size of the regional newsroom made it an ideal choice for holistic exploratory research that involved all roles and skills. We cannot provide granular detail about our sample as that would make it possible to identify our interviewees. At the time of our research, fewer than 30 members of staff were directly involved in news production and they included a mix of editors, newsreaders, producers, reporters and camera reporters. Our sample included four camera reporters who formed a distinct group—as we explain below—and a total of thirteen editors, producers and reporters. We included the interviews with managers (responsible for the news and technical divisions) in our analysis because we believe—in line with the literature review—that management/management policy, skills and technology are best considered as inter-related. We do not, however, claim that our exploratory study provides an in-depth view of managerial control in this particular newsroom, rather we understand the managers’ views (and references to their goals) as beneficial for additional complexity.

We should note that camera reporters were a distinct group of employees because of their contract type (freelancers with diminished bargaining power through trade union representation) and also because of their age, length of employment and qualifications. While overall our interviewees tended to be younger (under 40) and with a university degree in journalism, camera reporters were older on average, employed at the public service television newsroom for longer and they lacked university-level education. The interviews were conducted in Czech, we transcribed and translated them into English and conducted a theme analysis. The small sample size made it possible for one researcher to manually code and analyse the transcribed interviews.

Findings and Discussion

Productivity and Autonomy in the Context of 24/7 News and Social Media

We expected that the introduction of 24-hour news and the expansion into social media had exerted pressures on workloads and the skills of all those employed in the regional public service television newsroom. As noted in the literature review, we expected that these demands are not connected only to technological changes but also to organizational strategy and economic decisions. The goal of producing more with the existing staff came across in the interviews, core news workers identified content production for social media as the main factor. In contrast, camera reporters—who are not involved in video production for social media—linked it to the 24-hour news channel.

However, similarly to Bro, Reinecke Hansen, and Andersson’s (2016) findings, the dynamics around changes in skills proved to be more complex. News reporters benefit from opportunities for re- or indeed up-skilling when it comes to professional practices for social media. Their professional development has been supported to reflect the new realities of their work, various reporters and editors confirmed that specialist training is available, one of the reporters told us that their newsroom was “in the lead” and that

our superiors are, I think, progressive in this, they have a positive attitude. It is also visible in broadcasting, they approve of it, they have no problem with it. When you arrive somewhere, typically there is a live broadcast, the camera reporter is busy with that and something happens so you get your mobile and record a video. But we mainly do it for social media. (News Reporter 8)

We found a strict division of labour in the production of video contents: camera reporters work on television/online news broadcasts and news reporters on social media videos. One of the camera reporters (2) argued with strong conviction that news reporters did not possess sufficient technical skills to produce videos of the required quality. He contrasted the practices in the regional studio to those of the national one where camera reporters work on social media contents.

As suggested in the literature review, we also found that for some news reporters, the production of contents for social media provides an increased sense of autonomy and satisfaction with their work.

In the past … I had signs of some kind of a burn-out, it did not fulfil me completely. And I always tried to make newswork more pleasant, more varied with shooting on the mobile, I went on my own and recorded some coverage. It was something different. I had the feeling that I created the whole thing all by myself. That made me energized. Or sometimes training abroad or some trips. I actually needed that so that it is not like a stereotype, always the same. (News Reporter 4)

We also found that although the newsroom has dedicated specialists who work on social media-related contents, proficient social media skills can open up new career opportunities for news reporters (an example mentioned by News Reporter 7), this is in line with Singer’s (2004) finding that for some multiskilling can be a career booster or even an insurance policy. It thus appears that the increased satisfaction with the quality of work is closely linked to being in control of planning (conception) as well execution (doing), the opposite of de-skilling in which the division between the two increases (Vallas 1990). In addition, for some news reporters production for social media is not meaningful only because it connects conception and execution but also because opportunities for bridging the two are otherwise rare and creative aspects of the work are left to the fewest number of people (as demonstrated in Higgins-Dobney and Sussman’s research from 2013; cf. Higgins-Dobney 2021).

While news reporters told us about training opportunities, including the example above, camera reporters talked about a complete lack of training. Camera reporter 4 said outright that not getting any training was wrong, while another thought that training was not necessary but then described how he informally asked around for advice which suggests a lack of an organizational strategy in relation to professional development for these particular employees:

No [training] because it is de facto always the same. When they give us a new camera, you will figure out where to switch it on yourself, the menu is the same, we will find what we need so no training. When we need something, a technician can tell us. … With the transmission backpack, we got a new one and there was no training. I just asked colleagues how it is with the new backpack. Young guys can work with GoPro, I guess they all have it at home but I don’t. … We wouldn’t go and get training, not at all but I think that we don’t need it either. (Camera Reporter 1)

While technical support is mentioned above, we learned that one technician supported three news production teams which were characterized as inadequate by Camera Reporter 4. Feedback on one’s work plays an important role in skills development and career progression, a camera reporter (1) mentioned that he received feedback on the quality of his work only in about 20% of the cases and it came from a news reporter rather than a senior camera reporter who would have more relevant expertise (as also mentioned by Camera Reporter 4). The specialist feedback was in place until a few years ago.

News reporters enjoy more control over the production process, from conception to post-production and their authorship is recognized. This is in contrast with camera reporters who are involved solely in the execution of filming (and driving). When asked about inputs into planning and more conceptual aspects of the work, camera reporters recognized the boundaries of their involvement and the limitations of workplace hierarchies, however, individual relationships with news reporters sometimes enable them to share story ideas or advice about video content production. Camera reporter 2 was particularly vocal about the work of camera reporters not being recognized in the programme’s credits which he found not only disappointing but an outright insult.

In the literature review we devoted attention to the new type of online news video aesthetic and related audience expectations. The literature suggests that technological change has not significantly impacted the characteristics of the news package, rather the formal aspects of the presentation may have changed. It has also been argued convincingly that news reporters have not engaged in aesthetic or technical innovation. One of our interviewees suggested that creativity/innovation is mainly linked to the formal features of the news report

because modern technologies enable all sorts of stuff. If you watch foreign television, they do it wonderfully. People here can apply that, if they want. And we kind of push them to do it, to have an idea, to come up with it, the visual concept has to be thought out, we are also on television. So a visual concept, a script, playfulness in news reports in order to be attractive for the viewer. And ideas for social media, concepts that are very visual … and at the editorial level as well, we basically conceptualize the news programme. … It cannot just be a routine. I always say it, the kind of funny rule that we want a firework of ideas in a news report. The news report must have a concept. You can’t do a news report without an idea. And that is the basis of journalistic work, the idea, right? (Editor 1)

It is also worth noting that the editor refers to inputs from core news workers—those responsible for the conceptualization of visuals—rather than camera reporters who execute these although some of the camera reporters were keen on the more “artistic” aspects of their work, provided that “there was relatively enough time and we can think, conceive, take time doing it” (Camera Reporter 3). Saltzis and Dickinson (2008) expected that in the medium term, the BBC workforce will be comprised of single-skilled specialists valued for their high journalistic standards (not for technical knowledge and expertise) and multiskilled specialists valued for versatility and adaptability. This prediction also applies in this case, however, only if we operate with a narrow definition of journalistic skills and expertise and single out the core workforce.

Technical Equipment, Innovation and Quality

Control over one’s work involves the conditions in which the work is carried out, its material aspects and also support structures. While news reporters did not voice issues about equipment, camera reporters expressed some frustration although a solution was reached eventually. “When it comes to technical equipment, we were fighting for lenses, last year we were making the rounds with one of my colleagues asking for new lenses. … Luckily, I now got the new lenses, and the work really feels different, I enjoy it more” (Camera Reporter 2). For this particular camera reporter, the “joy” (job satisfaction) is very much connected to having the most appropriate equipment. According to Camera Reporter 4 “we can complain about something not working but they often do not take it into account, depending on whether they have money.” Budgetary restrictions were brought up by other camera reporters too, mainly about their contracts and lack of benefits but also about support structures. Camera Reporter 2 mentioned that the licence fee has not been increased for years, since 2008 to be precise, but costs keep growing.

It struck us that working with expensive equipment creates worries for some, in the words of Camera Reporter 1: “[New technologies] are not complicated but you work harder and are responsible for more complex equipment and that is also bad, you go shooting, you can’t drag the backpack with you all the time. You leave it in the car and you are in a forest and worry if the car gets broken into. In that respect, it is psychologically more demanding.” In addition to concerns about equipment, all the camera reporters whom we interviewed mentioned occupational health, particularly health issues arising from carrying heavy equipment (often weighing up to 20 kg) with limited access to assistants.

From the interviews, we gathered that the regional as well as national managements put much emphasis on social media presence and on the latest trends. However, as suggested in the literature review about mobile journalism and the television news package itself, this does not necessarily mean that management decisions lead to editorial/journalistic innovation. Some of our interviewees—regardless of their role—felt uneasy or outright questioned the approach, suggesting that it merely involved following trends and buying the latest gadgets for the sake of appearing to be in the lead. According to Camera Reporter 1

Go Pro, we have it, you can get it but … it is useless for me. I try to do it all on one camera. Or I tell an editor that if they need an image, we will use the image from the mobile. … I am used to what you give me, I will shoot using those lenses and the viewer cannot see a difference. (Camera Reporter 1)

Some news reporters were particularly vocal in questioning the underlying principles of engagement with mobile journalism and social media, the pressure for immediate content production in the 24-hour cycle was mentioned (e.g., News Reporter 11) and also concerns about a decrease in the quality of contents (in line with the literature review). The latter was linked to the expansion of public service media into the realm of social networks, with an interviewee referring to the tabloidization of news:

With the social networks … it seems to me that there are no limits. Like it got, I don’t want to say very tabloid-like. Well, actually yes. The kind of stuff that we would not have sent a team out to cover ten years ago, now it happens normally as it is shot on a mobile because it drives the social media. … Like triplets are born. Previously we would have laughed about it, that it is a great story for Nova [a commercial competitor] and now we don’t actually cover it in Události v regionech [the main regional television news bulletin] but we get it to social media as soon as possible. (Editor 2)

As predictable, those in the core workforce were concerned about journalistic standards and the overall ethos of public service media, for example:

Certain topics are selected for social media that viewers can find there, that are interesting, often they are the lightest topics. Twitter^TM, those are journalists, politicians, a bit of intelligent stuff. Facebook^TM, the intelligence of those people, I know that some people do not respond but actually those who respond and the comments that are written, it really insults news reporting. To be exposed to this, it is unnecessary. (News Reporter 11)

In comparison, Camera Reporter 2 expressed concerns about the technical quality of the videos made for social networks and he also referred to resource implications that improvements would require:

It is not quality footage. The journalist is, after all, a news reporter and understands the content side of things and then the visual side in terms of how to edit it etc. but in terms of the technical side there is the camera reporter. … It can be done better, the camera reporter would do it, but we don’t get paid extra for it. I suspect they [news reporters] don’t get paid extra. … The question is whether we want a quality news item or some kind of a pseudo live input. Live input for the sake of a live input, there simply isn’t much journalistic value to it and no visual value at all. … We are not an amateur television station, clearly, we are a serious television station and that is what the coverage should reflect.

The literature review referred to the unfulfilled expectation that public service media in particular will lead in digital innovation and that the use of mobile phones and mobile journalism practices will become prevalent.

There was a short period when we recorded whole news reports on mobiles but there simply kind of isn’t time for that. Because there is so much other production, for [national 24-hour news channel] CT24 and for us [the regional newsroom], we produce so much. And these things [recorded on mobiles] need a day or two. So that you can record it one day, edit without rush the next and the topic has to be suitable. And, of course, those who can do it are the good news reporters. So you block the good one … when I need him. (Editor 1)

At the same time, the above-quoted editor and others among our interviewees understand the medium-specific nature of video footage and they treat news packages along well-established lines, as argued by Cummings (2014). We would, however, like to introduce more nuance as to the medium-specific nature of news videos. While Hadland, Borges-Rey, and Cameron (2019) distinguish between two quite different forms—the professional and the amateur—we would argue that the content “produced according to professional values and is supported by the training, budgets and sensibilities of corporate broadcasters and their correspondents” needs to be further unpacked. Our interviews suggest a further distinction between video content produced according to the professional values and practices of news reporters and of camera reporters. It appears that much of the existing literature focuses on the values and practices of news reporters and leaves aside or conflates these with the values and practices of camera reporters. However, we argue that this is an important distinction, particularly within the context of discussions about skills involved in news production.

It is, of course, necessary to address the proverbial elephant in the room: Does news reporters’ training in the use of mobile phones for video coverage encroach upon camera workers’ professional autonomy and position in the newsroom hierarchy? The responses from camera reporters were mixed. As mentioned above, one of the camera reporters (2) was vocal about the need for technical expertise when it came to social media videos to maintain the quality expected from a professional broadcaster. Two others were not concerned, “because it is something completely different. Because they make content for Facebook^TM and Twitter^TM, I think that it doesn’t overlap, it is a completely different thing” (Camera Reporter 3). We consider it important, however, to consider the views of those higher up in the workplace hierarchy who have more influence on managerial decisions:

I see it like this: we have management here … who put pressure on new media and we have accomplished news reporters who shoot videos on mobiles and you won’t know that these were shot on a mobile. And camera reporters have a bit of a problem with it. The news reporter can thus work independently. (Producer 5)

However, as we suggested earlier, changes to skills are only one part of the story about diminishing autonomy. Our interviewees describe economic decisions and organizational strategies which benefit news reporters who once equipped with social media skills become more versatile and flexible multi-skilled core workers while camera reporters remain part of the single-skilled peripheral workforce with limited opportunities for professional development and shrinking control over their work. Camera Reporter 2 characterized his and his colleagues’ situation in no uncertain terms:

It sometimes feels like I am the last one in the pecking order, like we camera reporters are like some shovels and maybe even the cleaner has a higher status than us. The management look at us camera reporters from high above, but actually we are a team of professionals who can make it and we make it in any kind of weather, under any circumstances and simply we always make it.

Conclusion

The discussion about journalistic skills and their development continues to be an important one if we are to gain a better understanding of changes in journalistic labour and as our case suggests in news production in particular. Since the appearance of Braverman’s influential work, there has been consensus that the deskilling argument relates to the loss of workers’ autonomy. In the field of journalism/media studies, there is an abundance of literature that deals with deskilling (multiskilling, upskilling, reskilling, etc.), however, its prevalent focus is on the core journalistic workforce and it leaves out the various journalistic labourers on the periphery. If, as Deuze and Witschge (2018) argue, we need to go beyond journalism, we need to re-think how we research journalistic labour and skills and we offer our research as a step in this direction. Our case study is exploratory in nature and small in scale, yet it suggests that once the core, as well as the periphery of the news workforce, are taken into account, the deskilling debate becomes more nuanced and complex. We would argue that Fraser’s (2010) dimension of skill intensity can be a useful addition to research on journalistic skills as how our interviewees spoke about how their work challenges and develops—or more often does not—their skill base appears as important as the control that they exercise over their work. There are some aspects that our research did not explore in any significant depth and that may provide interesting avenues for future research. These include generational differences and expectations related to skills sets among peripheral news workers (the camera reporters in this research tended to be older) as well as their unionization and its impact on professional development (e.g., the camera reporters we interviewed did not have the backing of a union that could advocate on their behalf for training opportunities).

In addition to considering the core and the periphery of the journalistic workforce, we also think it important to explore the less researched segments of the media system to get a more holistic picture. We do not suggest that we need to pay the same attention to public service newsrooms as (potential) agents of innovation and change in skills development as in the late 1990s, however, it is fruitful to contrast the expectations and findings of the early studies with very recent developments on the ground. We also believe that moving beyond the national level and focusing on news work and skills development in regional and local journalism opens up potentially overlooked questions.

Our case study also highlights issues with the conceptualization of journalistic skills. Research has long suggested that those in the core of the profession—the ones with the ideas as one of our interviewees put it—have a very distinct understanding of what constitutes journalistic skills and what involves the newsroom hierarchy. While there is growing interest in boundary work and peripheral news workers, empirical research needs to catch up with the broader conceptual task ahead, as also suggested by Örnebring and Mellado (2018). Much of the research on journalistic skills understandably focuses on control/autonomy, however, more work on the substantive complexity of work performed by the core and peripheral workforce is needed.

And finally, we also offer our case study as an exploration of the changing status of technical knowledge and expertise in newswork, particularly in news video production. The emergence of the online news video with its new aesthetic and technical characteristics poses a challenge for the traditional television news package. Our research confirms that news workers understand the news package and its video elements very much in line with long-established professional standards. There are, however, further challenges on the horizon, content on TikTok springs to mind immediately, yet there is a lamentable lack of editorial and technical innovation in news videos produced by well-established mainstream news media. It is worth exploring whether the potential for such innovation can be fulfilled if those on the periphery are given more significant involvement and acknowledgement in newswork.

Disclosure Statement

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