Although journalism in Switzerland is an “open” profession with no formal requirements, the educational background of Swiss journalists has improved steadily. Almost 70 per cent of the journalists surveyed in 2015 had an academic degree, of which half had received their degree in journalism, communications or a related field (Dingerkus et al., 2018). They had taken advantage of educational opportunities in journalism, such as those at the Institute for Applied Linguistics, at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences ZHAW in Winterthur, the HTW Chur with a BA in Multimedia Production, or the Media Education Centre MAZ in Lucerne, with its diploma course in journalism. Still, journalists themselves complained about their colleagues, not least because experienced and older journalists had to leave their job in their last years or, more journalists switched to better-payed jobs in corporate communication. Several journalists in our actual study complained that there existed no conceptions, incentives or obligations for further journalistic education in most editorial offices. At least, in the Worlds of Journalism Study conducted between 2012 and 2016, Swiss journalists had a mean of 16.6 years of professional experience, and 58 per cent of the Swiss journalists who were asked reported that “Journalism Education” has become stronger in the past five years.
In 2019, there was a short controversial public discourse about a possible future certification of journalists in Switzerland, initiated by the Federal Media Commission EMEK under guidance of former university professor Otfried Jarren (Altwegg, 2019). The underlying idea was to create a quality label for journalistic texts, largely because a loss of monopoly in producing and disseminating media texts based on journalistic quality, is under severe threat by the new social media. Of many discussed problems, a main question was: who would decide over the award of this label? As an alternative, it was suggested that it would be better if the media itself would inform its public actively and in a more transparent way about how their journalists work, as a guarantee of the quality of its journalistic products. Thus, the discussion ended as abruptly as it had started.
Yet, journalists cannot be made the only ones to blame. Under constraints caused by today’s media crisis, the quality of journalism inevitably suffers. As a consequence of increased economic pressures in editorial offices of most newspapers, journalistic staff and budgets have been shortened; there is less time for investigations and the production of journalistic contributions, competitions between media houses have increased, and significance of the so-called click-rates have progressively got stronger (Puppis et al., 2017). But despite these negative tendencies, job satisfaction of journalists remained stable at a reasonably high level (Dingerkus et al., 2018). To conclude: professionalism can be better safeguarded if resources are assured.
