News

At a conference on Mapping changes of employment in the journalism and media sectors, members of the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) and UNI Global Union - Media Entertainment & Arts (UNI MEI) discussed the state of play of professions in the industry and the challenges for unions to organise in an evolving environment.



The conference was the main activity of a project aiming at identifying ‘who is doing what' in the journalism and media sector and to identify gaps in trade union representation. The discussions were introduced by an intervention of French media academic and head of digitalization for France televisions, Bruno Patino.



However the main basis for discussion was a survey carried out by researcher Gary Herman on "mapping change" in France and the UK as test countries. An online questionnaire (in English or French) already collected over 700 entries and it will be kept active until the end of the summer for contributions from any country across Europe.



The preliminary results of the survey showed that journalists and media workers are increasingly isolated and multiskilled. The key words for unions were: adapt, response and change in order to organise members with new professional profiles.



More precisely, the conference found out that:



- Unions should communicate better and integrate all kind of members

- Education for professional transition should be developed

- Unions need to reply to the high expectations from members in terms of personal services in a fragmented media industry

- Unions should trust young journalists and media workers: leadership of unions should integrate more new and young journalists and media workers in order to reflect the changes and make the organisations more attractive

- Unions should be reactive or even change their traditional way of operating through formal yearly decisions: unions have to adapt to new workers, and not the other way round

- Transnational dialogue between unions and federations should be reinforced in situations where national unions cannot tackle issues properly on their own



Affiliates of the EFJ and UNI-MEI are asked to promote the online questionnaire in order to collect as many data as possible before the end of the summer and the end of the project.



The project is co-funded by the European Commission and its Directorate General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion



The EFJ is the European group of the International Federation of Journalists

The EFJ represents over 260,000 journalists in 30 countries

 For more information contact the EFJ at +32 2 235.2200

http://europe.ifj.org/en



UNI MEI represents 140 unions and guilds and 300 000 workers in the media and entertainment industries in over 70 countries worldwide

For more information contact UNI MEI at +32 2 234 56 58

www.uniglobalunion.org/mei