My good friend and valued colleague Martina Lettner presented our paper 'Young, female and
journalist: less money, less job opportunities, less fame ‐ and still happy?' in Chile at the end of June 2012.
Because of the terrific Crossroads conference I had no chance to travel to Chile, but as always working with Martina has been a real joy and I hope that our next presentation will give us the chance to finally do one presentation together.
Abstract:
A growing number of people are living in media democracies, which are largely depending on an informed and responsible public. Therefore the media function as a central link between the powerful players within a society and its less powerful members. Yet the contents of the media are created by journalists, who are part of society and individuals themselves, working under specific conditions.
Thus not only their work, but they themselves are crucial for the constitution and well-being of society and the presented paper deals with the case of the Austrian journalistic field. There the sector faced remarkable changes during the last four decades, which not only led to women entering the field, but heavily increasing the inequality within Austrian journalism, up to the point when it became undeniable. Especially young female members of the journalistic field are doubly unprivileged compared to elder male members as a recent empirical research done by the University of Salzburg in 2010 found out. The theory of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is employed to display the structure of the inequality and its reasons. Guided interviews with female journalists in Austria (conducted for this paper) display their knowledge of the inequality, their awareness of the involved risks for the media democracy, and their coping strategies. Thus it becomes necessary to discuss ways to restructure the institutional boundaries that are currently reinforcing inequality. A possible proposal is based on the idea that governmental funds and sponsoring should be specifically tied to providing equal conditions for young journalist within the individual enterprises, while putting less emphasis on creating artificial networks, for the excluded groups.
Conference HP: official Periodismo chile 2012 Homepage
Our presentation: Periodismo chile 2012 Presentation as PDF
(proceedings/paper available on demand)
