Page 188 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge
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                                                          Sabine Lang

                                radio to carry local news and insofar as it does so there is nothing to pre-
                                vent that local news being bought in from the local newspaper” (British
                                Radio Authority, op.cit. Crisell 1998, 28).



                                Outsourcing in the Local Media Sector
                                   Outsourcingreferstoaprocessbywhichpartsofproductionorservices
                                that were formerly provided by the newspaper company or the station
                                are now contracted out to independent service providers. Traditionally,
                                outsourcing was practiced in fields such as advertisement acquisition
                                or distribution. More recently, however, it has spilled over into the core
                                tasks of journalistic production, thus adding to the already precarious
                                state of journalists’ working conditions and producing an increasing
                                number of independent news bureaus with a set of freelance writers.
                                From the point of view of editors, publishers, and CEOs of media cor-
                                porations, the intentions of outsourcing are efficiency, flexibility of the
                                workforce, as well as increases in cost effectiveness and profits. The ef-
                                fects of outsourcing are especially severe in countries with a traditionally
                                heavily unionized workforce such as the Scandinavian countries, Great
                                Britain, Austria, and Germany (Schaffelt [BDZ] 1999). German jour-
                                nalists who work in outsourced enterprises lack substantial protections
                                in terms of labor rights, insurance, and organizational powers granted
                                under the German Industrial Relations Act. As a result of this lack of
                                organized bargaining power and deregulation we see wage dumping and
                                the lowering of vocational training standards that affect the journalistic
                                profession as a whole.



                                New Media Formats
                                   Established local print media find themselves increasingly in compet-
                                itive struggles with new media formats. At present, commercial dailies
                                in larger urban markets are challenged on two fronts: On one front, they
                                compete with alternative weeklies or monthlies that are mostly free and
                                financedbyadvertisementandthatoftendisplayanimpressivejournalis-
                                tic depth and skill in framing complex local issues. Franklin and Murphy
                                estimate for Western Europe in the mid-1990s approximately 4,000 of
                                these papers with a distribution of about 200 million copies per week
                                (Franklin and Murphy 1991, 10). On the other front, transnationally
                                operating companies aggressively push into the daily “free media” sector




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