Make Slot not Art: Creativity and Burnout in U.S. Local Television Newsrooms. Journalism Practice. Online first.

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Journalism is considered a creative industry, but newsroom workers can only incorporate creativity into their stories if they have the time, tools and support for such endeavors. The structural conditions of capitalism, however, often leave workers without creative opportunities as ownership focuses on increased output and income expectations over storytelling. Instead, many workers find “one more thing” continually being added to their workloads, contributing to role overload and increasing levels of burnout. Using a labor process theory lens, this study seeks to explore the role of creativity in news gathering and distribution and its relationship with burnout in local television newsrooms. Through semi-structured interviews, forty-seven large market newsroom workers in the United States share their experiences with creative support, role overload and burnout. Those with the ability to “make art” and incorporate creativity into their routines generally speak more positively about their jobs than those who simply “make slot” to get their story on air or online. In a time of increasing newsroom worker attrition, recognizing the potential positive impact of creativity in news routines can influence how newsrooms handle staffing and storytelling into the future.

Unions strike a balance of power between newsroom workers and newsroom owners. Journalism & Communication Monographs, 26(2), 169-172

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Response to Karin Assmann's monograph "We have a union, now what?" in Journalism & Communication Monographs. 

Producing in precarity: A focus on freelancing in U.S. local television newsrooms. In Chadha, K. & L. Steiner (Eds.) Newswork and Precarity (pp. 71-83). Routledge.  

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This paper focuses on the precarity experiences of local broadcast television news workers in the United States, who work for the most popular sources of local news in the country. As fewer publicly owned corporate conglomerates add greater numbers of local television stations to their portfolios, they often look for ways to boost profits while downsizing expenditures. One way to do this is through manipulating labor. For instance, according to the most recent RTDNA/Hofstra University Survey, even as raw numbers of those working in local tv newsrooms is increasing, traditional full-time employment numbers are decreasing. Many companies are turning to freelance, temporary, vacation-relief, or otherwise non-permanent, and/or non-full-time workers to fill the labor voids. These workers do the same jobs as their permanent counterparts but with no promise of job security. This affects not only the worker, but also potentially the communities they serve.

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Not on air, but online: The labor conditions of the digital journalist in U.S. local television newsrooms. Electronic News, 15(3-4). 

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As American news preferences shift from broadcast to digital platforms, corporate-owned local television stations have hired digital teams to keep a growing array of mobile, social, web, and over-the-top platforms updated with revenue-generating and audience-friendly information. Yet, these workers are currently missing from the labor literature. Therefore, this exploratory study uses a political economy framework with a labor focus to begin to understand the day-to-day working conditions of these employees. Interviews outline workload issues including long hours of multitasking and nearly-constant connectivity even when off the clock, sped-up production expectations with a commodified information focus, and limited worker protections. The findings here aim to provide a starting point for digital journalism labor studies moving forward. 

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News work: The impact of corporate-implemented technology on local television newsroom labor. Journalism Practice, 15(8), 1054-1071.

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By virtue of their licenses, local television stations in the United States must serve in the public interest of their communities. Because many stations’ ownership is by corporate conglomerates, however, that public interest is often considered secondary to revenue maximization. Labor is exploited to meet this goal, with technology deployed in newsrooms to consolidate job descriptions, replace human labor with computers, and add sales-ready content platforms, while drawing as much surplus value from workers as possible. This study sought out newsroom employees, including rarely-studied behind the scenes personnel, in the 25 largest metropolitan areas of the country to find out how this utilization of technology affected their journalistic work routines and output. Their responses via online surveys and semi-structured interviews highlight the challenges of juggling ever-increasing tech-enabled job responsibilities while still providing quality reports for their audiences in a corporate ownership environment focused on profits.

The planned obsolescence of tv journalism. In R. Maxwell (Ed.) The Routledge Companion to Labor & Media (pp. 230-241).

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Overwhelmed by an intensification of commercialism by corporate broadcasters and an essentialist marketplace definition of the “public interest," broadcast news in America has largely degenerated into “infotainment”—a representation of society flushed in promotion, consumerism, and celebrity worship—while abjuring collective public values. The commodity culture of news media is a microcosm of the larger economic, financial, techno-industrial, military-industrial, and bureaucrat-capitalist forces that coalesced during the Reagan years in support of a globalizing neoliberal corporate agenda, with consolidated transnational institutions as the dominant actors. Transnationalization sent manufacturing jobs abroad and at “home” focused on information-based services (entertainment, advertising, PR, marketing) and the selling of consumerist ideology with easy credit lines.

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The growth of TV news, the demise of the journalism profession.  Media, Culture & Society, 35(7), 847-863.

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In response to the dearth of critical literature on the transformation of local news ownership structure and the impacts of technological reorganization of news production on the television profession and local communities, we analyze the consolidation of local news and the paradox of expanded news hours in times of shrinking staffs and less trusting audiences. Focused on Portland, Oregon, characterized as one of America’s most civically active cities and a top-25 market, we interviewed many key workers from among the city’s four television newsrooms. Despite having union representation, once discrete news production professionals and functions have been radically integrated,

resulting in a multitasked news staff forced to provide fast-turnaround for multiple platforms, while seriously weakening investigative reporting, the quality of news production, and the utility of local news for the community.

Plugola: News for profit, entertainment, and network consolidation. In T.A. Gibson & M. Lowes (Eds.) Urban Communication: Production, Text, Context (pp. 141-164).  

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Against the backdrop of a city that Putnam and Feldstein described as having steadily expanded the ranks of civic activists since the 1970s, we investigate how Portland, Oregon's commercial television practices comport with the metropolitan area’s public orientation in planning and policy making. In particular, we are interested in television news practices, which, we believe, reflect TV stations’ overall broadcast values, and juxtapose such values against those of local urban planning, identity, and civic participation. To what extent do affiliate news stations act as genuinely local agents and resist the commercializing and culturally homogenizing influences of “world city” network programming, support a vigorous public sphere, and inform and encourage an active, place-conscious, engaged citizenry? Is local television news responsive to and respectful of the unique public culture for which Portland is well known?