Higher Seminar in Journalism and Media and Communication

Boundaries of labour in creative industries: Many shades of precarity among Czech journalists.

With Hana Řičicová, ICSJ Charles University Prague (Czech Republic)

The issue of employment relations among journalists and gender-balanced newsrooms has become a widely discussed topic in Czech public discourse in the last two years, and it has also become the subject of media research (Urbániková, 2024). Journalists' employment relationships should not only be transparent, but also fair and legal.
Practices such as the false self-employment keep journalists in uncertain, precarized positions. For example, by making journalists freelance entrepreneurs rather than parts of the newsroom and lacking employment protections such as severance pay or legal notice.
The profession of journalism also faces gender stereotypes and barriers in newsrooms globally (1) and the field is generally geared more towards men and those who are not caregivers. Some women, then, do not stay in the field or remain in rank-and-file positions (Urbániková and Čaladi, 2024).
While the need to be active on social media and to "build one's own brand" (2) is increasingly a required practice, it is often not paid or enshrined in the employment contract – such work can be described as immaterial (Negri & Hardt, 1999).
Women journalists in particular have pointed out that they are repeatedly targeted by online violence (Claesson, 2022; Tandoc, 2021) (3), which forces them to avoid social media or potentially problematic topics such as social issues altogether. Since not a single media outlet in Czechia offers systemic support/guidelines for such situations, journalists are forced to build a privatized resilience.



Hana Řičicová is a 3rd year PhD student at the Department of Media Studies ICSJ Charles University Prague, Czech Republic where she also teaches. Her research focuses on precarization of Czech journalists, mainly in the intersection with working conditions, gender and immaterial labor. She is currently visiting the Department of Journalism at Södertörn University.