According to their own statements, all leading Swiss media organisations fundamentally strive to separate their economic objectives from journalistic services. Even though there are no formal rules on the separation of editorial and entrepreneurial functions, all those surveyed paid attention to a more or less rigorous separation and denied any “toxic” interference from owners, shareholders, or boards of directors. For the respondents, journalistic principles always came first.
Although publishers and the extended chief editorial staff met regularly, this exchange was not seen as interference, but as a legitimate perception of entrepreneurial leadership and responsibility. Nowadays, the editor-in-chief seems to be more involved in economic and strategic management than in the past. At the level of editor-in-chief or journalistic management, “cooperation” with owners, shareholder groups, advertising departments, and “commercial editorial departments” is, therefore, almost constitutive.
In any case, entrepreneurial decisions often have a major impact on the organisation of editorial work, especially in the case of nationwide cost-cutting measures in the face of rapidly increasing declines in advertising revenues. Thus, all media workers are constantly confronted with the precarious economic conditions and must consider their consequences in their daily work. The rapid announcement of short-time working by all leading publishers during the lockdown imposed due to Covid-19 drew attention to these dependencies. There are also publishers who explicitly expect media workers to make not only journalistic but also entrepreneurial considerations at work. Not just publishers but media professionals, too, would have to share responsibility for their jobs.
The journalistic director of CH Media and head of over 500 media workers in 11 cantons consults their publisher before taking important editorial and personnel decisions. The publisher is the most important co-owner of his media group, with over 50 per cent of shares, and is also the chairman of the board of directors. The journalistic director is also on the management board and is confronted with development of the advertising market. This cooperation is intended because as a member of the management board, the journalistic director also bears financial responsibility.
At the middle and lower employee level, media professionals work without direct interference from the management, the owner, or the advertising department; possibly, however, with a personally adjusted “pair of scissors” in their heads in accordance with the “prevailing” editorial culture, which can be different in every media organisation. In everyday work, there are constant negotiation processes between pragmatic, entrepreneurial, and socio-political desires or necessities. Media workers are anything but independent, but are primarily wage dependent, and just like the media company itself, they are very strongly and diversely socially embedded in society. A very experienced journalist told us that he usually calls his own publisher and asks for advice when working on a problematic story in which his own company plays a significant role. In the NZZ am Sonntag, too, media representatives maintain informal contacts with management, boards of directors and, if necessary, shareholders, who are widely spread.
The public service provider SRG SSR has a better line of separation between management and journalistic work than in commercial print and broadcasting media. The editorial boards are comparatively less involved in strategic decisions by the eight-member executive board of the SRG Directorate-General, the highest operational management body, which currently comprises seven men and one woman. However, when it comes to cost-cutting measures, their staff are also affected to a great extent by “centralised work locations” and “optimised” work processes.
All wage-earning media workers must first adhere to the respective local working conditions and corporate publishing objectives. They are confronted with specific dependencies that the respective management has decided on and over which they usually have little influence. The media professionals carry out professional journalism primarily on behalf of their media organisations. They have very little operational co-determination, let alone democratic participation. Only after the media professionals have formally and informally adapted to editorial-cultural practices can they even think of practising professional journalism on behalf of civil society.
