Abstract
The first thing that comes to my mind when reading Karin Assmann’s excellent monograph on U.S. journalists’ experiences of the recent wave of newsroom unionization and its effects is that it appears that U.S. exceptionalism in this area is still going strong, but that its historical trajectory has taken a 180-degree turn. For at least a hundred years, scholars have tried to explain the relative weakness of the labor movement and late and limited unionization in the United States, when compared with the industrialized nations of Europe. Some scholars (notably historian Sean Wilentz and sociologist Judith Stepan-Norris) have long pointed to flaws in such comparisons and critiqued the notion of U.S. exceptionalism in regard to unionization and working-class organization. Yet the fact remains that it was not until the 1930s and the New Deal that U.S. unions gained a measure of sociopolitical power comparable to that of their European counterparts. Even so, the United States seems to be the exception again, as U.S. newsrooms have seen a veritable wave of unionization; meanwhile, European journalists’ unions are steadily losing members and influence.
Assmann hints that the lateness and weakness of unionization efforts in the U.S. news industry may have resulted from the strength of the employer side more than (or at least as much as) the weakness of the worker side of the labor organization equation. The historical U.S. dominance of local and regional newspaper monopolies (or at least rather limited competition), often with owners who had interests in other industries, made it easier for said owners to use their own media resources to promote anti-union and pro-business discourse. Assmann shows how, when this ossified market structure is breaking down and newspaper owners are losing power, unions and unionization advocates can more easily use their own media savvy and communication resources to challenge news outlet owners’ anti-unionism and instead promote new narratives of solidarity and diversity.
The strong historical and theoretical anchoring of Assmann’s text creates an excellent foundation for a wider consideration of the relationship between unionization and journalistic professionalism. I also think it is important to begin by framing such a consideration in terms of what I believe is the key empirical contribution of Assmann’s study, namely a very welcome emphasis on the affective dimensions of journalistic work and newsroom experience (with specific reference to the effects of unionization).
The Effect Is Affect: The Emotional Aspects of Unionization
One of the great strengths of Assmann’s work is that it so clearly draws out the affective aspects of journalistic work (in general, not just in relation to unionization). Her empirical material abounds with quotes from journalists talking about how forming a union has deepened their sense of belonging and community, how unionization has engendered greater feelings of trust inside and outside the newsroom, and how unionization has even made them feel more empathetic.
Although Assmann does not directly frame her results in this way, one of the key empirical findings of her work is surely that unionization makes journalists feel better—not only about their job, but frequently about themselves as individuals. This is a very important area for future research. As journalism scholar Karin Wahl-Jorgensen has pointed out, emotion has long been journalism’s Other: the emotional labor involved in the production of news is often ignored. The dominant ideal of journalism has been one of cool objective detachment. Excessive emotion on the job or expressed in journalistic texts runs counter to this ideal. To be sure, some journalism, notably the tabloid kind, has always centered emotion—and been able to create strong connections with audiences because of it—but mainstream normative arbiters have viewed such practices with suspicion. Emotional journalism apparently equals bad journalism. This sidelining of emotion is also visible in many studies of journalistic workplaces and journalistic work. Scholars of journalistic work often observe that journalists like their job, that they can be fiercely committed to their ideals, and that they frequently feel stress, to mention just a few examples of the affective dimensions of journalistic work. Yet such observations are rarely understood as manifestations of an overarching emotional dimension of journalistic work. Assmann’s work regarding this is a most welcome corrective. The people she has interviewed frequently explicitly express that journalism makes them feel things, and that unionizing (usually) has made them feel good, both by mitigating against negative feelings (like stress) and by providing a source of and outlet for positive feelings of connection, belonging, and friendship.
Quantitative survey-based studies of journalists have long showed what seems like a paradox in journalistic work. On one hand, journalists who are surveyed frequently assess the current state and future of journalism negatively (e.g., journalism is going in the wrong direction; work is frequently stressful; newsroom managers increasingly emphasize the wrong things). On the other hand, they generally report high levels of job satisfaction. Scholars generally explain this as a so-called third-person effect: current trends in the news business may negatively affect other journalists, but my job is still fine. However, this paradox is also an emotional one. Precisely because many journalists are highly committed to the democratic ideals of journalism on an emotional level, they are concerned with what they see as negative developments that engender negative feelings (e.g., stress, guilt, a feeling of powerlessness in relation to economic and technological developments seen as out of one’s own hands). These negative feelings about macrolevel developments must consistently be balanced against the positive affect (e.g., pride, sense of meaningfulness, sense of community) created within the context of the individual workplace and working conditions. The aforementioned surveys indicate that at least so far and at least for most journalists, positive affect outweighs negative. It is well known in the sociology of work that job satisfaction and work well-being have strong emotional components, but this insight has for some reason not seeped into journalism studies until recently. Assmann’s study is very much part of this emotional turn in journalism studies (more on which later) and this is something she could explore in future work.
Professionalism Versus Class Consciousness
The emphasis on feeling and affect is also apparent when Assmann discusses the increased class consciousness among unionized journalists. She describes this not only in terms of an increased sense of community and belonging to an occupational collective, but also an increased feeling of solidarity with audiences—particularly audience groups that historically have not been well-served by mainstream, commercial news outlets. Unionization and class consciousness also seem to encourage a wider feeling of solidarity and more positive attitudes to a diversity of perspectives within journalism.
I completely agree with Assmann that this is a very hopeful development. Historically, one of the explanations for the late unionization of journalism compared to industrial workers (print workers and typographers unionized long before journalists did, in most countries) has to do with the sociocultural obstacles to developing a class consciousness among journalists—something Assmann’s study foregrounds. I have written about the dual historical roots of journalism as an occupation (see my 2020 Australian Journalism Review article, “A social history of precarity in journalism: Penny-a-liners, Bohemians, and larrikins”). One root is older, linked to the literary sphere, and associated with socioeconomic privilege. Writing—including for newspapers and other print publications—was an activity you undertook in your spare time, for creative or possibly political purposes, because you could support yourself by other means. The landed and rentier classes viewed writing for money as vulgar, the province of hacks rather than artists. The other root of journalism is newer, historically speaking, and linked to the joint emergence of the mass press and the rise of a “paying trade of letters” (as literary historian Nigel Cross puts it)—a trade that was attractive to people who needed to work for a living because it had no barriers to entry.
The people who began entering this new newswriting occupation in the second half of the 19th century rarely came from dire Dickensian poverty, however. Rather, they were men (and sometimes women) of an increasingly differentiated middle class who had some education and aimed to improve their lot in life. The historical section of Assmann’s text describes how these men did not self-identify as “workers.” They felt themselves to have more in common with the owners and publishers of newspapers (who often were men of privilege) than with the laborers printing the newspaper. This feeling was not-so-incidentally encouraged by the newspaper owners who, as Assmann writes, had everything to gain by promoting a strict division between blue-collar and white-collar workers in the news industry (obviously placing the aspirational, new middle-class journalists on the white-collar side).
For this emergent group of middle-class newsworkers, improving their reputation was sometimes more important than bettering their salaries and working conditions. Forming guilds instead of unions became a way to achieve higher social status without resorting to the unseemly militancy associated with trade unions (an association that publishers of course supported, as already noted). The individual hope of rising through the ranks, and thereby in status, replaced the desire to improve working conditions for all. Media historian William Solomon, in a 1995 text, characterizes the affective orientation of late 19th- and early 20th-century U.S. journalists as “grudging accommodation to unpleasant circumstances.” This acceptance—often even valorization—of poor working conditions, coupled with a desire for respectability, made guild-type professional associations an attractive alternative to unions for many journalists. Guilds and associations focused on conviviality and networking; essential if you wanted to improve your individual working conditions without collective organization. These associations often included both employers and employees as members, something that also encouraged the emergence of a cross-class professional identity, as opposed to class consciousness (noted by sociologist of the press Alfred McClung Lee already in 1937).
The primacy of professional fellowship over class consciousness has exerted a strong influence over journalism since these early days. Indeed, Assmann’s findings make clear that this affective structure persists. Some of her interviewees remained reluctant to identify as workers and were suspicious of collective rather than individual action to improve one’s conditions. For example, self-branding practices (an individualized response to limited and irregular career options in the news industry) can make individual journalists quite attractive on the labor market and therefore powerful; these journalists are understandably reluctant to give up this power for collective security they do not need. Yet although some individuals resist unionization efforts, the dominant theme of the interviews is still the ways in which collective action improves individual well-being, often by reinforcing a positive affective structure built on community and sense of belonging.
A new class consciousness thus does seem to be taking shape within journalism as part of this new wave of unionization; again, I hope that this class consciousness also encompasses audiences. This is an important shift in the professional culture away from identification with owners and publishers. I may be crass, but I do not think it is by accident that this shift only has occurred (or begun to occur) when the hyper-capitalist regime of the contemporary press simply has made working in journalism so precarious and so horrible (viz. mass layoffs, wholesale precarity, extreme individualization of responsibility) that it is almost impossible not to unionize. In fact, another recurring theme among Assmann’s interviewees is the failure of employers to live up to their side of the workplace contract: HR services are shoddy or non-existent, onboarding processes and mentorship programs conspicuously absent, the internal bureaucratic systems of news organizations barely function. Unions step in to provide services and information that workers in many other sectors get from employers.
Back when newspapers were profitable—extremely profitable even, compared with many other businesses—journalists could easily turn their backs on collective action because individual-level negotiation and career management was still a viable option for many. Yet the existence of this option—geared as it was toward individual upward class mobility—was arguably something that drove journalists further away from their audiences, both in terms of class interests and in other respects. The new era of perpetual financial crisis in the news industry renders institutional hypocrisy more visible: news organizations nominally espouse values of democracy and fairness yet deny their own workers influence and fair compensation.
Late 19th- and early 20th-century journalists of the aspiring middle classes were concerned with increased “respectability”—the affective dimension of improved social status for the profession. The labor movement saw unionization as the means to achieve the satisfaction of a different affective dimension: that of dignity, that is, the belief and attendant feeling of the inherent and intrinsic worth of all humans. To me, this desire for dignity seems to be what underlies many of the emotional responses found among Assmann’s interviewees, for example, a feeling of community and mutual respect, that you are not alone, that there are other people respecting you and taking care of you. It seems only natural that this underlying affective structure would also align journalists more with (diverse) audiences—or at least would have the potential to do so. In fact, similar tendencies have been observed by other authors of recent works that can be seen as part of the emotional turn in journalism studies—Sue Robinson’s How Journalists Engage: A Theory of Trust Building, Identities and Care and the edited collection Happiness in Journalism (by Valérie Bélair-Gagnon, Avery Holton, Mark Deuze, and Claudia Mellado) immediately come to mind. Karin Assmann contribution to this emotional turn is innovative, well-crafted, and important.