Labouring the news: Management control strategies and work intensification in the digital newsroom

Abstract

Using a labour process lens, this research focuses on the structured antagonism that characterises the employment relationship. This article seeks to further our understanding of how news organisations employ control strategies to extract the labour power of journalists and achieve organisational objectives, and we pay particular attention to the role of editors in this regard. We also explore the responses of journalists as workers to managerial control which can include accommodation, resistance, compliance, or consent. The findings are based on an empirical case study of a local newspaper incorporating interviews with editors and journalists. The case study reveals how journalists’ work intensified with the turn to digital content, and because of reduced staffing since COVID-19, but editors ensured high levels of productivity through distribution of digital analytics and constant monitoring.

Introduction

This research builds on an emerging body of work in journalism scholarship that places labour at its core, treating journalism as work and journalists as workers (Cohen, 2019; Örnebring, 2010; Neilson, 2020; Petre, 2021). There have been calls for more labour-focused examinations of journalism and for more research on management processes within news organisations (Sylvie and Gade, 2009). Örnebring (2010: 59) notes that journalism studies have generally not used the concept of labour in the analysis of journalism, “focusing instead on social control, professional ideology and similar concepts…”. A greater emphasis on journalists’ labour process is necessary, Petre (2021) argues, to develop a holistic understanding of contemporary news production. Labour process theory provides a critical perspective on employee relations (Chillas and Baluch, 2019) by focusing on the “process for the expansion of capital, the creation of a profit” (Braverman, 1974: 53). Management must engage in control strategies to ensure “maximum advantage” from labour power (Braverman, 1974: 69) leading to structured antagonism arising from the processes of conflict and cooperation between workers and employers (Smith, 2015).

There is a long history of journalists’ work and working conditions being subjected to a myriad of capitalist control strategies directed towards financial success for owners (Salcetti, 1995). Recent research points to the ever-present role of commercialisation and technology in developments in the contemporary news industry with deleterious consequences for workers. Deuze and Witschge (2018: 170) point to the “astounding” number of redundancies in journalism with precarious contractual arrangements and fewer resources for those with employment. Kuehn and Corrigan (2013) coined the term ‘hope labour’ to describe voluntary online social production but it has been more recently applied to journalism where workers are willing to work for free or carry out under compensated work for the possibility of future opportunities (Hayes and Silke, 2018). Freelance journalists, who globally account for an increasing proportion of the journalism workforce, face inferior working conditions while ‘protected salaried’ journalists have also experienced the pressures of organisational cost cutting (Hayes and Silke, 2018, 2019; Hayes, 2021). There is reason to believe that these trends may have intensified given the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on advertising revenue, upon which the news industry is so dependent. García-Avilés’s (2021) study, however, portrayed news managements’ own positive perceptions of their role in supervising journalists during the pandemic. This article explicitly positions managerial actions within a capitalist context and analyses the enduring impact of managerial control since COVID-19, from both management and journalist perspectives.

We pay particular attention to the ways in which editors, as people managers, employ managerial strategies to extract the labour power of journalists and the responses of journalists to those strategies. The study seeks to address the following research questions: how have editors as managers, sought to maximise labour productivity and how have journalists responded? Using a case study approach, the findings are based on interviews with editors and journalists in a small local newspaper in Ireland. The case study illustrates how management used contemporary technology, specifically digital analytics, to gain consent from journalists to work more intensely. The findings also point to the negative impact of management’s focus on reducing labour costs during COVID-19 on workers’ objective and subjective job security.

The article is structured as follows. The first section highlights the scholarly call for a labour-centred analysis of developments in journalism. The subsequent section situates the role of capitalist management within a labour process conceptual frame and, drawing from this, the article underlines the role of editors as managers and the managerial dilemmas they confront. The methodology section explains the research design before findings from the case study and the discussion are presented.

Journalism work as labour

The birth of journalism as a job was accompanied by arduous working conditions involving “long hours, mercurial editors, low wages, and lack of job security” (Salcetti, 1995: 55). Technology was central to the development of newspapers so that journalists worked under “a general predicament of change” (Hardt, 1995: 4). While some research documented the difficult organisational environments faced by journalists historically, “landmark studies of journalistic work practices” made little reference to workers’ contractual conditions, the “degree of management control over labour processes, and conflicts in the workplace” (Örnebring, 2010: 59). Journalism studies were “more concerned with work in the general sense rather than labour” (Örnebring, 2010: 59). There is, however, an emerging body of research that points to the labour experiences of journalists and there is a notable continuity in themes between historical and contemporary research. Financialization continues to influence news organisations with owners basing decisions on profit motives to the detriment of investment in journalistic labour, spurring a growth in precarious jobs (Almiron, 2010). Digitalisation, as the present-day iteration of technological advancement, has been used by management to accelerate the news cycle and the pace of work, increasing pressures on newsroom budgets and staffing resources (Whittaker, 2019). These developments point to the analytical and practical relevance of labour as a concept, in line with Örnebring’s (2010) position.

Labour process studies have illuminated how capitalist organisations transform labour power through the deskilling of labour, intensifying work, and job insecurity but also through using more skilled labour and seeking innovation (Braverman, 1974; Thompson, 2010). There has been some debate about whether changes in media production have involved a de-skilling or an up-skilling of journalistic work, with Nygren (2014) arguing “multiskilling” has been accompanied by greater journalist productivity and autonomy. Studies across industries suggest there has been a “deepening and broadening of managerial controls” (Thompson, 2010: 11). For those engaged in knowledge work, characterised by use of theoretical knowledge, creativity and analytical and social skills, there is evidence to suggest increased use of control based on data objectification (Frenkel et al., 1995). Journalists have been described as knowledge workers and this paper examines the extent of controls in one organisation. The next section examines the centrality of managerial control in the labour process and considers worker agency.

Capitalist control and the labour process

Labour process theory has a strong concern for the capitalist control of the labour process because it is a means by which employers can realise “from the potential inherent in labour power the greatest useful effect of labour” (Braverman, 1974: 56) and it can “obscure and secure” surplus value (Burawoy 1978: 266). Because of the indeterminacy of labour power, capital must “erect structures of control over labour” but also elicit their cooperation which gives rise to several management dilemmas (Littler and Salaman, 1982: 252). Organisations must use workers’ discretion while ensuring workers do not use their discretion against management interests, use surveillance and discipline while not undermining workers cooperation and ensure workers are “both dependable and disposable” (Hyman, 1975: 43). Labour process theory has been criticised for emphasising managerial agency to the detriment of focus on the laws of capitalism; some suggesting the idea that managers do anything other than extract surplus labour value as “absurd” (Blackburn, 1972: 180). Yet evidence suggests that there are a “wide variety of control strategies for managing labour…which implies the structural imperatives of capitalism are not so powerful that they override all or even most discretion” (Jaros, 2005: 10). Management can have their own interests and can work in ways which oppose organisational goals (Jaros, 2005). An abundance of control practices can be used by management including simple informal personal power of the capitalist, technical control offered by technologies (Edwards, 1979), bureaucratic control through the “institutionalisation of hierarchical power” (Edwards, 1976: 55), rational control where management appeal to workers self-interest (Kellogg et al., 2020) and normative control where management shape workers’ internalisation of organisational goals. Even occupations long considered sheltered because they had greater economic power than others to control the conditions of work (Kalleberg and Sorensen, 1979), have increasingly been subjected to greater marketization and managerial control (Thompson, 2010). It should also not be forgotten that management too are subjects of control themselves, holding “structurally ambiguous” positions (Narayan, 2022: 2-3). Organisations can seek to maximise managers labour effort and secure their compliance in a variety of ways including through job insecurity and exploiting their career ambitions (Narayan, 2022).

When workers accept the idea of management, this signals their assent to “many aspects of their domination” (Littler and Salaman, 1982: 259). There can be “trade-offs” in the interactions between management and workers leading to the latter’s acquiescence and cooperation (Littler and Salaman, 1982: 260) but there can also be individual and collective acts of resistance (Edwards, 1979). The inherently exploitative nature of the employment relationship and the need for employers to seek labours’ cooperation mean there is “a continuum of possible, situationally driven, and overlapping worker responses-from resistance to accommodation, compliance, and consent” (Thompson and Smith, 2000: 57).

For journalists, there are numerous reasons why they have complied with poor working conditions. In the early days of journalism, they viewed journalism as a short-term job rather than a long-term profession and initially looked upon collective organisation with scepticism (Salcetti, 1995; Hardt, 1995). Journalists were slower than mechanical workers in newspapers to unionise as they considered it anathema to professionalism, so their poor working conditions were, somewhat harshly, judged by Salcetti (1995: 70) as “self-inflicted and self-perpetuating”. In contemporary labour markets, research suggests journalists can find it difficult to find permanent work but consent to atypical arrangements because of their love for journalism, and they develop coping strategies such having second jobs (Gollmitzer, 2014). Freelancers and interns can simultaneously perceive atypical employment as leading to “independence from direct corporate supervision” and “economic insecurity and high stress” (Gollmitzer, 2014: 832, 837).

The key contributions of this study are to identify the specific ways by which contemporary management in one newspaper achieve “more productivity” (Braverman, 1974: 207). This is with the knowledge that editors are in the challenging position of being contractually required to serve employer needs and must manage journalists’ goodwill. Given this study’s focus on labour, the next section reaffirms news editors’ roles as managers and reviews extant research on their use of emerging digital technologies.

News management

Research on editors has traditionally focused on their decision-making processes in selecting news outputs (White, 1950; Craft and Wanta, 2004) with lesser attention on their role as managers of workers in the labour process. Editors though have always had a role in managing journalists’ performance (Breed, 1955) with Pease (1991: 15) finding that journalists were united in “their unhappiness with the performance of the people set to manage them”. Editors as managers must cope with tensions that emerge when there is a perceived conflict arising between organisations’ drive for profit and cost cutting, and the values of journalism professionalism and autonomy (Sylvie and Moon, 2007). The skills required of editors have expanded particularly as news organisations have become more market-oriented and multimedia (Sylvie and Gade, 2009: 138). Editors face challenges managing staff who feel threatened by uncertainty (Daniels and Hollifield, 2002) and while some suggest editors have become increasingly loyal to corporate profit goals (Underwood, 1995), others point to their low levels of organisational influence (Gade, 2008).

While news organizations “were generally slower than others to adopt modern management approaches…” (Sylvie and Gade, 2009: 137), news managers have increasingly used digital technologies and audience quantification in managing workers (Milosavljević and Vobič, 2021). Cohen (2019: 585) argues how a labour process perspective illustrates that digital technologies do not act on their own to shape journalists’ experiences but are used “usually in the context of capitalist news organizations restructuring to increase profits and lower labour costs”. Research suggests technological changes have not resulted in less work for reporters but have led to longer working hours (Neilson, 2020). While some of these pressures may come in the form of directives from management, journalists often feel an implicit obligation to participate in additional and unpaid digital labour (Hayes, 2021). Audience analytics are one of newsroom managers’ techniques “to more efficiently monitor and discipline their journalists” and “to try to change the reporting priorities of their journalists” (Bunce, 2019: 891, 902). While some newsroom managers use metrics “to punish or incentivise journalists” (Bunce, 2019: 894), this is not a universal strategy and news organisations can differ in this regard (Petre, 2015).

Overall, literature on labour process theory and management control highlights issues worthy of attention. In seeking to examine editor’s efforts to address the indeterminacy of labour power, literature reminds us that while managers have hierarchical authority, they face dilemmas in enforcing this authority. Braverman (1974: 82) had argued that capitalists tried to cheapen labour and destroy “all-around skills”, but this has been highly contested. Managers often require the cooperation and creativity of workers, and this may be even more so the case in challenging work environments where resources are constrained, such as newsrooms settings and where workers have an interest in the viability of organisations. The next section outlines how a qualitative approach was employed in the study to illuminate these issues.

Methods

The empirical data on which this paper is based in drawn from a case study of a local newspaper owned by a media group with several titles in the Republic of Ireland. In Ireland, like elsewhere, there has been a haemorrhaging of newspaper print circulation and organisations have shifted towards digital platforms and increasing online audiences (Hayes and Felle, 2016). The research spotlights editors’ roles as managers and seeks to understand journalists’ perspectives of how they are managed by addressing the following questions: what control strategies were employed by editors to maximise labour productivity? How have journalists perceived and responded to managerial control strategies? The findings are based on in-depth interviews with the entire editorial newsroom workforce. The management team was composed of three editors with responsibility for digital and print content and seven full-time reporting staff. The interviewees were guaranteed anonymity, so it has been necessary to obscure certain information including their age, gender and area of responsibility, and some newspaper details are also not revealed. The demographics of the interviewees in large part reflect the national profile of the workforce. Journalism in Ireland is a relatively young and male dominated profession with almost 70% of those working across media organisations aged between 25 and 44 while men account for over 60% of journalists (Rafter and Dunne, 2016).

Interview questions for the editors centred on three general areas: achieving organisational objectives (owner influence, level of autonomy in decision making process); their role as a manager (objectives, impact of changing ownership structures, manging competitive nature of the business); workforce management (performance management, financial controls, challenges). Questions for journalists centred on the following areas: working environment (typical day, deadlines, targets, output expectations); how their job has changed (social media; analytics and how they make them feel, innovative technologies, remote working); how staff were managed (communication access to a union, complaints process, general levels of security). Nine interviews took place face-to-face in 2022 and one was conducted over Zoom. All the interviews were digitally recorded, with an average length of 50 min per interview. Transcripts were subjected to thematic analysis, in which we searched for recurring themes within the data in line with Braun and Clarke’s (2008) framework. The following sections present the findings on the following themes: management control strategies and digital analytics, intensification of work and staff monitoring, and COVID cuts and job insecurity.

Management control and digital analytics

There was consensus amongst journalists and editors that a key driver of management goals was the development of a ‘digital first’ strategy that prioritised online content over the print newspaper reflective of a changing product market. The new company owner was described as having a strong influence in steering this digital drive, but staff also internalised the objective of increasing digital readership. For example, one Editor had their own “personal target” of 1 million hits per week on the news site (E1). Enablers of the digital first strategy were managements’ introduction of digital analytics to monitor online audience figures and an algorithm that dictated the page run for the printed paper based on advertising spend to control printing costs. Digital analytics detailing the top performing online stories across the organisation’s titles were shared twice weekly with all staff while employees in the individual news titles received analytics on their top 10 performing stories for the previous 4 days. While every employee was updated on web traffic figures, only the managing editors of each title were provided data on print newspaper sales, indicative of the managerial priority attached to web reporting. The importance of the online content was confirmed by an Editor:

At the end of the day, the biggest thing for me is just to hammer home what is making the company money, so right now, it’s not newspaper sales. It’s online revenue. And, sadly, an Iliad of a story or a Pulitzer Prize winning piece of quality journalism is not going to drive revenue for websites. (E1)

From one Editor’s perspective, there were benefits and risks to sharing online figures with staff. One the one hand, they acted as a performance incentive for reporters who “get a kick” out of seeing their stories having high readership. On the other hand, using metrics more extensively was viewed as potentially jeopardising operations. According to interviewees, the organisation owner had considered plans to link journalist salaries to high performing stories. Analysis had been undertaken on high performing journalists in terms of website clicks generated and the data was presented at a meeting of senior editors from all the company’s titles. An Editor stated they were the only dissenting voice opposed to the performance pay plan, on the basis that multiple staff were responsible for the development and publication of a story and the move might prove counterproductive:

Assigning clicks to people individually and ranking journalists against each other based on how many clicks they got, is absolutely counterproductive ….If you’re on holidays, and you got a great tip off, and you put it into the WhatsApp group and someone got a million views off it, at the end of the year if that was going to incentivize their wages and not yours, then you wouldn't send the message. (E1)

There were mixed views amongst editors about the existing treatment of analytics. For one Editor, they were concerned about the impact on journalists, believing they caused anxiousness or disillusionment, and had consequences for journalism quality:

I find with some reporters; they feel that they’re probably being watched to a point to see are they producing enough? Is their job safe? I have heard them say that they feel that they’re not producing enough content; that the top bosses could be watching and could be counting their stories.. I think then, what falls behind then is...accuracy and .. balance because they’re rushing stories. (E3)

For a journalist, metrics were a crude measure, but they provided an opportunity for news outlets to evolve and to “give the public what they want” (J1).A long serving Editor insisted that analytics were not used to measure individual performances, but served to highlight the type of content that engaged audiences and provided a rationale for the prioritisation of stories.

For example, we know that weather stories and storms are very popular with our readers. So therefore, if there is a storm warning, that would be prioritized over a business story or over a council story. That’s not to say that they are less important, but we have to be aware of the likely engagement from users. (E2)

Despite their insistence that metrics did not link to individuals, the views of another Editor challenged this. Management communications with analytics did not name individual journalists, but identities were easily attained because emails provided links to stories:

All the bosses will see is the top 10 lists and who wrote them. Now the name isn’t beside them but if you click into the story, you will know, so the people that could be doing all the dirty work behind the scenes.. they’re not being recognized .. that’s why you’d worry about the competitive nature of lists. I know they have to be given out and people have to know, but I would not like to see it going down too competitive a road because of people’s mental health and pressure. (E3)

There were similarly diverse views amongst journalists on the use of metrics. Some feared that focusing on analytics such as website traffic would spoil journalistic values and lead to rewarding of those who produced the highest performing stories. A senior journalist said they tried not to let the website figures influence their editorial judgement:

I still feel a story has to be done because it’s a story. When I’m on a rant to one of my bosses, I will suggest that.. a dancing cat is going to get 30,000 hits on a website. It does not mean that.. we should be populating our website with dancing cats. There is an awful lot of stories that.. I would feel have to be covered because they still have a news sense and there is still a news value to them. (J2)

A journalist compared the use of metrics to “league tables”. They believed the use of digital analytics was a divisive tactic by the owner of the company to pit news titles against each other. An experienced journalist who had been with the company for over a decade believed the weekly website figures placed reporting staff under significant pressure.

I am being constantly told, it is not all about the hits that someone gets on a story… but if I do a story that only gets a certain number of views… you do get worried. Especially when you do get these weekly analytics emails… the person who has got the most hits their name is up in lights and.., it’s raised at meetings that such and such a person got 15,000 hits for that story, you know, and they are praised to the hilt and yeah, it’s been me at times and I have been praised but it does add a pressure. (J4)

The same journalist felt obliged to make stories more “click baity” by writing headlines to lure readers (J4). They found it demoralising to publish stories with strong news value but little audience attraction (J4) and so there was a balance to be struck between “getting the clicks and looking after the stories that don’t perform well online” (J3). A reporter described property stories, particularly those involving celebrities, as “property porn” and said they attracted huge online audiences even though, for them, they encompassed little news value (J3). The impact of the analytics on the work of journalists was confirmed by one of the newspaper’s newest recruits who welcomed the metrics as it helped them to understand “what audience wants and what they do not want. There has been stories I have spent so long on and then I see the analytics and I am like ok, maybe people weren’t interested in that” (J7).

Overall, journalists and editors recognised the conflicting tensions for the labour-employer relationship arising from the use of analytics. They were generally resigned to the inevitability of management’s handling of metrics, and some accepted that there was an editorial and business case to organising news activity around stories popular with the public. Despite an editor’s argument that metrics were not linked to individuals; other staff believed that journalists were de facto ranked. Amongst journalists, only the youngest seemed to view the metrics in an entirely positive light; providing valuable feedback to them on their work.

Work intensification and staff monitoring

To achieve the company’s digital first strategy, journalists were expected to produce more stories with less resources, to be “a master of everything” and be more “flexible” than in the past when the newspaper was print only (E3). An Editor expected staff to both produce multiple daily stories and be able to react to breaking news stories, for example, two reporters in one department produced an average of 10–12 stories a day. For an Editor, the demand for online content had changed what was required of reporting staff.

You now need content creators as opposed to journalists, there’s a big difference. So a journalist would chase the story years ago for a week, a month…one journalist said to me when they joined, they used to write three stories a week. Now, if they wrote three stories a day I would be on to them saying: ‘what’s the story?’. (E1)

Staff at the newspaper had worked from home during the COVID-19 pandemic and many continued to do so either entirely or for several days a week. According to the editorial team, the owner of the company preferred in-person attendance at the office but the editors were unconcerned about the impact of home working on journalist productivity because they could monitor work output.

I think there is a paranoia that people aren’t working hard .. it is Big Brother like how do you know if they are working if they are working from home? We would be asked that. We just say because we know by the WhatsApp. We know by what they're producing… You can’t hide even if you’re at home, you can’t hide in the [name of newspaper] because if the stories aren’t being done, you're clearly not working. (E3)

Editors used emails and the WhatsApp instant messaging application to communicate with reporters and expected more “minute detail” from journalists about their work than when office working was the norm (E3). All newsroom staff were members of the group chat on WhatsApp, and it allowed editors to monitor journalists’ engagement by tracking the time a text message was delivered, and two blue ticks appeared as soon as the person at the receiving end read their message, unless the user had deactivated this facility. Editors expected journalists to log onto the WhatsApp chat group from 9a.m. 6 days a week and at 8a.m. on the day the main weekly broadsheet newspaper was produced.

If they are not reading their WhatsApp at ten past eight or a quarter past eight on [the day of the week of print edition] you are asking questions. They are supposed to be up and active from 8, so you’re going to be ringing them saying look, I put on the WhatsApp there about the storm...or you might have to email them back afterwards and say, ‘There was 15 min there, we heard nothing from you’, and that’s a long time when the Internet is waiting or there's been a car crash. (E3)

Respondents portrayed a sense of urgency about reporting deadlines and constant communications because “the website’s constantly hungry and you have to keep feeding it…” (E3). One Editor stressed their awareness of the public nature of the WhatsApp platform, so they often messaged individual reporters privately with tasks. Another Editor said the messaging group was not about making staff feel like they were being monitored but ensuring that the communication channels were clear.

It is about ensuring that we’re able to respond to a story of interest to our readers.. it’s not about micromanagement. It’s not about me looking over people’s shoulders … it's about having a process in place, and making sure everybody is clear on what is expected of them. (E2)

For a senior journalist, the WhatsApp group was indicative of a changed work environment and work relationships since COVID-19. The absence of in-person working meant little opportunity for journalists to “bounce off each other about stories” and story selection was reduced to “yes, no, thumbs up and whatever” on WhatsApp (J2). The communications within the group on WhatsApp suggested some competitiveness between reporters. The same journalist commented on the way younger staff used the forum:

I suppose sometimes I would probably bemoan perhaps some of the younger journalists when you can see it in the WhatsApp groups that, ‘did you see such a story? I just got you know, 15,000 views on the website’ or whatever. And, look, the old crank in me is kind of saying, yeah, that's great....buts that’s also the world we live in. (J2)

Overall, Editors’ use of WhatsApp had increased significantly since the pandemic, and it served multiple functions. They conceived it as either a means of communicating and organising or as a staff monitoring mechanism with real time feedback on journalist activity considered necessary because of remote working. For some journalists, it was a means of organising work or self-promotion.

‘The sword of damocles’: COVID cuts and job insecurity

All interviewees referred to the heightened sense of job insecurity as a result of staff furloughing or redundancies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Between March 2020 and January 2022, the news organisation reduced the number of staff at the newspaper drastically.. This had a lasting impact on journalists; “There was only just [a few of us] ...running the whole show - that hung on to full-time employment - so that that is still in everyone’s psyche” (J3). While there had been significant budget cuts within the organisation before the pandemic, some interviewees suggested the public health crisis presented an opportunity for management to make further savings.

I can’t say for certain, but it could have been taken as an opportunity to shed some staff, and that it just kind of fell at the right time to use it as maybe an excuse to get rid of extra staff. (E3)

An Editor was aware that the cuts had impacted employees’ perceptions of the management approach to employee relations; that journalists had realised “they are just a number on our payroll dockets, as opposed to, you know, a valued member of staff” (E2). A significant challenge for the editors was to balance the editorial requirements of a newspaper and website with the weekly readership targets. This, they said, had become increasingly problematic as older experienced staff were replaced by new recruits and college graduates. These editors felt heightened responsibility to “do the clean-up work” if mistakes were made in editorial content or on complex stories but they did not voice such concerns with the owner of the company.

He would not understand that first, you know because he’s a businessperson and he just wouldn’t get it, he would just say something like keep it simple. He wants, the Aldi shopper and the Lidl shopper, that’s who he’s aiming for. So, if there is something complicated, he could probably say ‘well don’t cover it. dumb it down, you know’. (E3)

The organisational climate was highly influenced by the media group owner who “controls everything” (J4). Employees felt they had little influence in decision making and many had a sense of fear in speaking up but there were some exceptions. A long-tenured journalist who remained employed during the pandemic said the redundancies had influenced their inclination to speak up about workplace problems.

… perhaps it could put a target on my back and put me in the firing line if there were ever a round of redundancies again, because that is always the Sword of Damocles hanging over for you… I’ve been here [a long time], but it’s still in the back of my mind that one day, this could all come to an end. (J4)

One Editor interviewee also indicated a new reluctance to voice concerns with more senior management and the owner. They recalled feeling “muzzled” (E3) after they spoke up about a workplace problem and was told by the owner that they had undermined him in front of staff and that they should contact him directly if they problems to discuss in future. The Editor said they no longer had the confidence to speak up since staff had been laid off and furloughed, “We’re very much standing on our own two feet with I suppose little protection, little rights really like the union is literally non-existent” (E3). This feeling of a lack of protection was exacerbated by the owner’s attitude to unions which was considered hostile by interviewees. For example, an Editor revealed how they were told by senior management to remove references to the National Union of Journalists (the largest union for journalists) in a story because there “was a fear factor that if the owner saw it, there could be repercussions down the line, you know” (E3). Employee perceptions of the newspaper owner’s behaviours suggest a typically authoritarian unitarist approach. This manifested itself through the owner’s rejection of independent employee representation and attempts to individualise workplace problems can be a means of blocking the opportunity for employees to express grievances in a collective manner.

Discussion and conclusion

This study sought to deepen our understanding of how management in news media maximise labour productivity to achieve organisational objectives as well as journalists’ responses. Multiple forms of management control were evident in the case study. Indirect control was evident where the energies of editors and journalists focused on meeting the public’s predilection for particular stories. The public acted to some extent as a ‘phantom player’ for editors. A phantom player is a common negotiating tool that allows a party to maintain a tough stance justified on the basis they are representing some other party who “can make demands but cannot be questioned” (Goodpaster, 1996: 361). In this instance, the public was such a player in the labour-employer relationship and management could point to the publics’ preferences in justifying and normalising the increased pace of work and the production of certain types of journalism output. Due to the anonymity of the public in an online environment, journalists (and editors) had no opportunity to personally influence their ‘customers’ unlike in service work where there are employee-customer exchanges.

Management’s use of technology had multiple control functions in the newspaper. Their use of the website was a form of technical control determining the pace of work. Editors and journalists accepted that online news provision required more content than print and this led to increased intensity of work for staff with higher frequency of deadlines. Editors used output controls to monitor the quantity of stories journalists produced and the quality of their writing. Because of the need to feed the “hungry” website, and in combination with the shift to remote work, editors’ communications with journalists intensified. The former became increasingly focused on receiving instant communication from journalists on their activities and they questioned journalists’ engagement if they did not respond quickly enough to WhatsApp messages. Compliant workers are those who demonstrate the “habits of predictability and dependability” (Edwards, 1976: 58) and journalists were now expected to be even more predictable and dependable.

Braverman’s (1974) argument about the deskilling of work has been long debated. The evidence from this newspaper suggests contested understandings amongst interviewees on the meaning of skills for journalists. Editors argued that website news production necessitated journalists to have a broader range of skills to the extent that one questioned the appropriateness of the occupational title ‘journalist’. For some reporters, stories about pop culture required less application of traditional journalistic skills, aligning with research on the links between technological change and the “trivialisation” of journalistic work (Liu, 2006: 709). These perspectives suggest in a contemporary news organisation, journalist skills can simultaneously be expected to be of greater breadth and lesser depth.

Knowledge workers may be more likely to be subjected to ‘info-normative control’ where technology is used by management to produce “objective” data and to “encourage worker commitment to achieve performance standards” (Frenkel et al., 1995: 787). There is some evidence of this form of control for journalists in this study. While management in print newspapers have always had a concern with readership numbers, digital content creation enables them to more easily capture this data. Analytics on high performing stories reinforced employees’ acceptance not just of the increased workload but also the nature of journalism work they carried out. Junior staff had been socialised into a work environment where metrics were normalised and it increased their commitment to produce more stories that satisfied readers and, in turn, management. For more senior journalists, they accepted that business shaped story content and it was difficult for them “to argue the cold heart figures in front of you” where data showed linkages between stories and advertising revenue (J2). Management did not need to use the data to either punish or reward journalists; the mere publication of them provided effective tools of worker surveillance and control.

This does not mean that there was consensus amongst editors about how best to use these tools. Some appeared concerned about the disciplining and isolating effects of the metrics and the WhatsApp communications on some staff, and this emanated from the fact they were utilised in a public fashion. Some editors considered the metrics a performance motivator, while others believed there was a negative emotional impact on journalists. Even the editor who considered the metrics a positive inducement for staff recognised that the proposal to link story metrics with pay could be overly coercive and they recognised the need for journalist cooperation. The WhatsApp group chat can be considered an online equivalent to the mechanical ‘Tannoy’ public address systems common in manufacturing, warehousing, retail and newspaper printing. It was up to editors to subjectively decide on the most appropriate use of the WhatsApp and when they considered that other editors had impinged on the well-being and cooperation of journalists, they moved their personal communications, temporarily, into a private space. Neilson (2020) cautions against the dangers of purely focusing on changing technologies in the industry and emphasises the need to analyse how power and subjectivity operate within these networks (Anderson and De Maeyer, 2015: 4-5). The media company in this case study reported story performance analytics to all staff but not newspaper sales. This, as the literature suggests, could be considered a strategic move by management who restrict access to some metrics but invoke others in the process of managing journalistic labour (Bunce, 2019; Petre, 2021).

The journalists were full-time employees so had objective security of work, and this was a means by which management could elicit cooperation as opposed to the alternative coercive forms of precarious employment. Management decisions during COVID-19, however, to furlough or make staff redundant during the public health crisis heightened employees’ sense of job insecurity. This insecurity had contributed to employee silence, with journalists focusing on ‘getting on’ with their employment experience through cooperation (see Nechanska et al., 2020). There was also a resigned acceptance amongst older journalists that it might prove difficult to get a job elsewhere. The pandemic was viewed by some as an opportunity exploited by the organisation to reduce headcount and this had a disciplining effect, impacting staff productivity and their capacity to voice concerns.

The decision of employees to voice or remain silent is influenced by managerial control of voice opportunities and their feelings of psychological safety (Morrison, 2014). The was little evidence of any collective resistance to managerial practices amongst journalists and some editors recognised their own subjugated position in the employment relationship. A senior editor had on an individual basis resisted the pay/clicks plan but they felt alone in this regard and other editors feared being “too mouthy” that could make them an “easy target” in future job cuts (E3). In this way, managers are used “as control” and are subject “to controls” (Thompson and van Den Broek, 2010: 3). Indeed, control strategies engaged in by editors operated in the shadow of a demanding owner, reminiscent of Edwards’ (1979) simple control though as a less extreme form. The hostility of the news owner to unions and the sense from staff that union representation was no longer available is problematic for workers’ sense of justice and resolution of grievances. In non-union organisations, workers may not recognise their “treatment as problematic” or recognise it and remain silent (Turner and O’Sullivan, 2013: 156). Where employee silence becomes normalised, the outcome can be a ‘climate of silence’ (Morrison, 2014).

Editors and journalists commented on how COVID had changed the way in which remote working had changed work relationships. For some, WhatsApp and emails had made work time more efficient but there was a recognition that the lack of office working had reduced the social interactions amongst staff. The dilution of formal and informal spaces for discussion can negatively impact the opportunity for collective dialogue and solidarity amongst workers about workplace problems (Edwards, 2009). Research on larger organisations suggests that changes in the labour process including increased workload and management control of communicative spaces can erode the opportunity for workers to engage collectively (Edwards, 2009). In the newspaper, the WhatsApp group chat was managed by editors and there was little indication that journalists had created alternative communicative spaces to the physical interactions pre-COVID. The consequences can be stark where “...high work intensity and close supervisor monitoring” can prevent “the formation of even islands of solidarity among small groups of workers” (O’Sullivan and Turner, 2013: 704). Overall, employee relations in the newspaper sat somewhere between Wilkinson’s (1999) two ‘ideal’ types prevalent in small firms: the ‘small is beautiful’ type with little bureaucracy and low levels of overt conflict and the ‘bleak house’ type characterised by authoritarianism, low unionisation and poor working conditions.

This study points to several areas warranting further research. First, indications from interviews were that many of the managerial strategies in this news outlet were being implemented across titles in the wider group. A future study could examine ownership models and the execution of management strategies across multiple titles. This is important given the potential implications for lack of diversity in a small media market with limited scope for extensive commercially funded media. A second area would be a wider inquiry into the relationship between senior management and editors who occupy the dual roles of line manager and employee. While senior managers determine the organisations’ direction regarding digitalization, editors are often responsible for contributing to this expectation and at the same time they experience the pressures that arise from it. Thirdly, societal developments and expectations regarding the availability of news are influential in discussions about work processes. Further research could explore the extent to which news organizations are using these societal expectations to their advantage; as a rationale for increasing productivity.