In Chilean media, there is no horizontal democratic structure, either for the development of professional careers or for daily work. Editors-in-chief are selected by directors and, very often, approved by the management board. It often happens they were journalists who have had a consistent internal trajectory leading them to higher positions within the organisation, or that their trajectory in other media and the trust from the directors played a role. Through the interviews, a common observation emerged about how different media organisations allowed for such a career to be developed, in order to one day assume decision-making roles. There was no established set of rules or a specific process for hiring at these positions.
Media structure in Chile tends to be vertical, and the interviewed editors-in-chief and directors recognised that especially for contingent topics more relevant for each media, they involved themselves in the production and decisions related to content. In their daily work, journalists had the possibility to propose topics and decide how to cover them, even though they depend on the editors’ dispositions (see Indicator F5 – Company rules against internal influence on newsroom/editorial staff). The mechanisms for this process vary across media forms and organisations, and type of content; daily journalism has less participation from reporters than long-form reporting, where proposals usually come from the journalists themselves.
Regarding daily agenda, what emerged as commonplace is that the editor assigned tasks and supervised the process, without an established formal mechanism. The latter gave this aspect of journalism several variations, depending on the journalists’ experience, the editor’s trust in them, the topic, or even their shift. For instance, according to our interviewees, journalists working on weekends had more chances of taking decisions because editors in those shifts were usually reporters in the rest of the week.
In every case, it was the editor, or even the director, who made decisions for aspects such as titles, cover pages, central issues, and key interviewees, and dealt with the political and social consequences of an article. While this is a hierarchical relationship, they also assumed responsibilities for protecting journalists from complaints that the article might generate, as well as defending reporters and editorial decisions in front of management boards, whose tension with the newsroom staff varied for each individual medium.
Women reporters did not feel a gender gap and observed there was recognition for the individual abilities of each journalist. However, a gender gap was evident for women journalists when it came to reaching editor-in-chief and director positions (see Indicator F8 – Gender equality in media content).
