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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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