UK journalists are more likely to be in stable, permanent employment than engaged in temporary, part-time or freelance work, but the latter, more precarious, positions still make up a significant part of employment in the sector, and are likely to grow as economic pressures on traditional news organizations increase. Instability and precarity in employment is also worse for women, who are more likely to be in temporary or part-time employment. Labour law in the UK offers a range of employment rights and protections, and journalists have the same minimum rights as employees in any other sector. Following the Leveson Inquiry, the newspaper industry has also taken steps to ensure that journalists have a degree of protection if they refuse to engage in activity that is in breach of standards codes or the law.
Protections for Journalists
In the UK newspaper industry, whistleblowing mechanisms and contractual protections have been put in place following the 2012 report of the Leveson Inquiry. In setting out 47 recommendations for a new self-regulatory system the report recommended that “[a] regulatory body should establish a whistleblowing hotline for those who feel that they are being asked to do things which are contrary to the code” (Leveson Inquiry, 2012c, p.1809). Although the industry’s regulator IPSO was largely created in order to circumvent the Leveson recommendations, this was incorporated into IPSO’s articles of association. A further recommendation of the Leveson report specified that regulated news organizations should ensure that employment contracts should include “a clause to the effect that no disciplinary action would be taken against a journalist as a result of a refusal to act in a manner which is contrary to the code of practice” (Leveson Inquiry, 2012c, p.1809). This too was incorporated into the IPSO system. The independent regulator for print and online journalism, IMPRESS, includes the Leveson recommendations in its articles and regulations as a condition of its recognized status (See Section E8).
Employment Conditions
The majority of UK journalists are in permanent employment: surveys of journalists in 2015 by the Reuters Institute and in 2018 by the NCTJ found 74 per cent of journalists across all sectors had permanent contracts (Thurman, Cornia & Kunert, 2016, p.15; Spilsbury, 2018, p.31). 7 per cent of journalists surveyed in 2015 and 4 per cent in 2018 were on temporary fixed-term contracts, while the proportion working as freelancers was 17 per cent in 2015 and 12 per cent in 2018. Some caution should be maintained when interpreting these figures, however, due to different definitions of ‘freelance’ work in different studies: for example, the UK Office of National Statistics Labour Force Survey (LFS) recorded 37 per cent of journalists as ‘self-employed’, more than double the proportion recorded as ‘freelance’ by the Reuters Institute in the same year (cited in Thurman, Cornia & Kunert, 2016, p.15). LFS data from 2018 was also found to differ significantly from the 2018 NCTJ survey in a similar manner: It is suggested that this is due to survey sampling skewing towards mainstream journalists (Spilsbury, 2018, pp.29-30). Regardless of the proportion, it can be said that permanent contracts are significantly more common in UK journalism employment than temporary or freelance work.
Employment conditions in UK journalism are not equal for women and men. The Journalism at Work survey found that men were more likely than women to have a permanent contract (78 per cent compared with 71 per cent), and that men are far less likely to work part-time (15 per cent) than women (41 per cent). The two outcomes are related, as only one-third of part-time workers were found to have a permanent contract, compared with 79 per cent of full-time employees (Spilsbury, 2018, pp.28-31).
As noted in Section F8 above, in recent years news organizations such as the Telegraph and Guardian, as well as the BBC, have acknowledged the need for more appropriate employment and workplace policies to account for differences in working patterns for men and women, and to reduce the barriers to full-time employment.
