As Lewis et al. (2006) have observed, data about employment within the UK media are ‘notoriously difficult to gather’. Nonetheless, drawing on annual accounts filed at Companies House for national newspaper groups between 1985-2004, the Cardiff University researchers have drawn a detailed picture of employment, workload and commercial pressures in the UK national press. The sector saw a decline in total numbers of employees from over 4000 in 1985 to less than a quarter of that in 1990, since when the figure has remained more or less stable. This reflected largely the impact of new production techniques and the laying off of large numbers of printworkers. However, the figures for editorial employees remained stable through the period: the national press had 786 editorial employees in 1985, and 741 in 2004. The Cardiff team also discovered that national newspapers had generally retained fairly healthy levels of turnover and profits during the twenty-year period, though the aggregate figures hid a variety of performances both between years and across newspaper groups. In general, the popular ‘tabloid’ groups ‘demonstrated the most consistent and highest levels of profitability’, the most lucrative titles being the News International (Murdoch controlled) titles The Sun and the News of the World.
The Cardiff researchers show how this ‘fairly rosy picture’ disguised a significant increase in journalistic productivity, measured in terms of pagination over the period 1985-2006. By the end of this period, national newspapers had, on average, two and half times as many pages as twenty years earlier. Whilst
‘the proportion of total newspaper content taken up by advertising ha[d] actually fallen slightly…..the average number of editorial/news pages across national newspapers had almost tripled, rising from a 14.6 page average in 1985 to 41 pages by 2006’ (p. 11).
Their quantitative research was backed up by qualitative research (interviews with journalists), from which they concluded that journalists were required to ‘do more with less time, a trend that inevitably increases their dependence on “ready made” news [see F3 above] and limits the opportunities for independent journalism’ (p. 3).
The employment situation has certainly worsened since 2006 because of the impact of an advertising recession, competition from the Internet, declining circulations, and most lately, the financial crisis – the impact of the resultant productivity pressures can only be assumed to be becoming even more negative. The degree of legal protection for journalists’ job security is no greater than it is for any other employee, whose rights are protected by the UK’s general labour law. There is no UK clause de conscience law for journalists. Moreover, a National Union of Journalists report (NUJ 2007) complained that the UK ‘media industry ha[d] gone through a long period of increasing casualisation leading to greater insecurity of employment’.
