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Not Good News For the Media

(Andy Zipser, Guild Reporter)

By Andy Zipser, Editor, The Guild Reporter

A trio of unrelated studies of the mass media, all released within recent weeks, reinforce several of each others' most disturbing findings. Among them:

• Having a union in the media workplace correlates with significantly higher wages – but unions represent an increasingly small share of the media workforce.  
• Job growth in the communications and media sector of the economy significantly lags growth in overall employment. And the newspaper segment is actually contracting, with a 19% decline in employment over the past 15 years.  
• Wage disparities for women and minorities persist across all media, and are lowest for newspaper workers.  
• The media in general, and newspapers in particular, are overwhelmingly white.  

An international context for many of these conclusions was provided in April by the International Federation of Journalists in a study titled The Changing Nature of Work: A global survey and case study of atypical work in the media industry. Based on a survey distributed to its worldwide affiliates last September, the IFJ concludes that media employment has become more precarious, less secure and more intense in recent years.

In the last five years, there has been a trend away from collective bargaining, and toward individual negotiations, the IFJ observes, seeing also a trend toward replacing experienced senior journalists with younger freelancers or other atypical workers, including subcontractors and employees on short-term contracts. While these new fresh faces are taking up jobs in media, journalists' average rate of pay appears to be declining in real terms, or at best, standing still, over the past five years, the federation reports.

While the journalists represented by the IFJ affiliates – including TNG-CWA – work in all media, slightly more than half are in newspapers.

Roughly a third of the responding affiliates' members are now classified as atypical, paid by time, word or story at rates typically set by the employer; only a quarter of the unions said pay rates for such workers are established through negotiations. The study also found that atypical workers get shorted on benefits, with sick leave, pensions and vacations all but nonexistent for freelancers and only a bit less rare for others.

These aren't just signs of deteriorating job quality, the IFJ points out: they also suggest a deterioration in news coverage, with three-fourths of the IFJ respondents agreeing that low wages and employment insecurity result in timid reporting and, at the extremes, in a corruption of journalists that may be jeopardizing the medias role as a watchdog for society.

The IFJ study has its weaknesses, not least its reliance on self-reporting by its affiliates rather than a survey of randomly selected individual journalists. So it may come as a surprise to learn that a far more rigorous statistical analysis of the U.S. media sector, released last month by the Institute for Women's Policy Research, not only confirms the IFJ's findings but goes beyond them to raise numerous additional concerns. Specifically, Making the Right Call: Jobs and diversity in the communications and media sector concludes that an economic sector that once provided a middle class lifestyle is in serious decline.

That may seem counterintuitive, given the explosion in new information technologies and their associated hype. But the IWPR study, which analyzes employment in the seven largest communications and media industries – wired and wireless telecom, radio/TV/cable, newspapers, movies and video production, internet service providers and other – finds that sector job growth over the past 15 years was 14%, compared with a 22% growth rate in the U.S. economy overall. Moreover, the lower-paying industries within the sector have grown more quickly than the traditionally higher-paying ones.

Newspaper payrolls, as already noted, have contracted over that period, shedding 87,000 jobs. But the picture is even darker than that number suggests, as one-third of newspaper employees work fewer than 35 hours a weekthe highest percentage of any of the seven industries analyzed, and roughly twice the overall average. One result is a downward pressure on wages: the median newspaper wage for nonsupervisory full-time employees is lower than in any other media industry, at $505 a weekless than the $520 median for all other U.S. industries.

Given the low pay, it's hard to determine whether the low level of minority employees at newspapers is a sign of institutional racismor minority workers' good common sense. But what the IWPR study also found is that while a third of non-supervisory workers throughout the communications sector are minorities, a level roughly comparable to the rest of the U.S. economy, they have not been successfully integrated into the newspaper industry, where they make up 23.6% of the workforce – and have a median weekly wage of just $450. The story is even more dismal higher up the food chain, with publishers doing an especially poor job of integrating managerial positions: 15.7% are minority members.

The study may be seen at www.iwpr.org.

Yet another piece of the puzzle was provided Aug. 4 by the Annual Survey of Journalism & Mass Communication Graduates, a product of the Grady College of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. Despite its decidedly upbeat spin – the survey stresses that beginning wages were higher in 2005 than in 2004 and that a higher percentage of grads had landed jobs – the numbers themselves reveal two basic truths: media school graduates still get paid significantly less than the average liberal arts major, and despite wage growth the industry is still paying less – after adjusting for inflation – than it did just five years ago.

Moreover, in keeping with the IWPR study's findings, the Grady College survey confirms not only that journalism isn't hospitable to minorities, but is becoming ever less so. Since 2001, members of racial and ethnic minorities have had less success in finding a job in the field of communication, and that was true in 2005 as well, the survey observes. In both of the last two years, the gap was 10 percentage points – larger than it has been at any point since 1988.

For those wondering what the return on all those college loans might be, the survey discloses that the median salary of $29,000 for last year's college grads majoring in journalism or mass communications was nearly $2,000 less than was paid to liberal arts students as a group. That's virtually unchanged since 1985, once inflation is factored in: that year the median wage was $15,386, compared with last year's $15,404 in 1985 dollars. Freshly-hired workers at daily newspapers actually did a little less well: they were paid $28,000 last year, or $14,900 in 1985 dollars.

This and earlier surveys may be found at www.grady.uga.edu/annualsurveys.

The most notable factor in opposing these downward trends, captured by both the IWPR study and the Grady College survey, is unionization. Recent graduates who were union members, the college survey reported, had a median salary that was $5,000 more than graduates who were not in unions – a gap that was greater in 2005 than it has ever been in the survey. The union effect was even more notable in the IWPR analysis: Union workers earn $17,600 a year more than non-union workers in wireless telecommunications, $15,600 more in wired telecommunications, $16,000 more in motion pictures and video, $15,100 more in newspaper publishing and $5,700 more in radio/TV/cable. Among the most advantaged are newspaper journalists, where unions boost earnings 56 percent, or $20,700 annually.

The cloud behind that silver lining, alas, is the small and still shrinking proportion of media workers who still have union representation. In the Grady College survey, whose subjects may be expected to have a disproportionately large number of jobs in small media operations, only 3.5% were in unions. The IWPR study, meanwhile, found that the unionization rate across the entire communications and media sector is higher than in the U.S. overall, 24% vs. 15.2 % in 2004, but with the former percentage skewed by the exceptionally high rate of unionization in the telecom segment. The unionization rate for newspaper publishers is 16.2%, compared with 17.5% in motion pictures and video and 9.9% in radio/TV/cable.

Although none of the three studies attempts to pinpoint underlying causes for the trends it describes, others are making the connection between consolidation of media ownership on one hand and loss of jobs and workplace diversity on the other. A study released August 10 by the Future of Music Coalition, for example, concludes that the vast majority of major U.S. cities has experienced layoffs and lower wage growth within the radio profession as a result of ownership consolidation over the past decade. Moreover, the study adds, radio job losses impede federal policy mandates to promote media localism and diversity.

A similar concern has been voiced by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund, which responded to the IWPR study by averring that the increased concentration of media ownership has had an impact on the diversity of employment and quality of jobs in these industries. The fund worries that membership in the middle class for minority and female workers in these sectors may soon be a much more elusive dream, and proposes several remedies – starting with support for greater diversity of media ownership and for the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively, including passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.