Limited journalistic resources do not allow for high professional ethos. The journalism profession in Greece presents a number of chronic features, given that journalists have persistently served the model of advocacy, reporting under the influence of the news organisations’ interests. However, journalism has been a profession with an active social and political role, particularly after media commercialisation and market expansion taking place after 1989 (Papathanassopoulos, 2001). Therefore, it can be argued that in the period of prosperity (1990s and early 2000s), journalism used to be quite solid and sufficient, in the sense that journalists were governed by high level of competence and resourcefulness in implementing their reporting tasks, enjoying freedom from pressure in terms of time and resources and sharing some fundamental norms and standards of journalistic work.
However, the recent economic recession has brought about the financial collapse of the media market, as well as the demise of journalists’ labour rights, affecting adversely the quality and level of their professionalism. This situation seems to worsen in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has heavily affected all sectors of the economy, principally the media.
The main factors contributing to the distortion of the journalism profession are described by a representative of JUADN, highlighting,
the level of journalistic professionalism has always been very high in Greece […]. Nonetheless, the financial crisis and the special crisis afflicting the media industry in recent years, and the various pathogens that characterise the way media owners grow and invest, have induced a significant blow to the industry, sometimes distorting the image of the profession itself.
During the economic crisis (2010–2018), the decline of the media market was reflected, as noted, in the bankruptcy of numerous media outlets: four historical media groups (DOL, Pegasus Publishing S.A., Imako Media S.A., and Liberis Publications). Moreover, 84 national newspapers, including newspaper inserts, 4 newspapers in Thessalonica, 4 national or Attica television channels, 55 regional channels, 3 satellite channels, 1 digital subscription-based platform (Alpha Digital), and 9 Attica radio stations closed down, forcing the media market to shrink.
At the same time, more than 50 magazines, either autonomous editions or inserts, suspended their edition, shaping the tragic account of the financial crisis. The market presented signs of recovery only to a limited extent through the replacement of certain losses. For instance, DOL passed to the jurisdiction of Alter Ego, while at the same time Ethnos Newspaper, Sunday Ethnos Newspaper (of Pegasus Publishing), as well as Epsilon television channel, now known as Open, came under Dimera’s control.
The transition to the digital age has raised new challenges to the journalism profession. It relates to multitasking practices that journalists can cope with through constant training. According to a representative of JUADN, “the Journalists’ Union is worried about the pathogens favoured by the digital environment (plagiarism, copy–paste phenomenon in news websites, aggregators – robot journalism and fake news) and evaluates the need to inform and train its members as very important”.
Generally, in Greece, media is characterised by the lack of a strong journalism culture, a weakness that has deteriorated over the years during the financial crisis. In the networked environment, the partisan culture is interacting with new technologies under the pressure of the financial recession, leading journalists to search for alternative practices and funding models (Touri et al., 2017).
