Panhellenic Federation of Journalists΄ Unions President: Regional media are amongst the most reliable ones
Sotiris Triantafyllou
08 Jun 2023
/ 22:27
CORFU. Enimerosi and the Ionian University are co-organising the presentation of the Panhellenic Federation of Journalists΄ Unions President Sotiris Triantafyllou΄s book, as part of the events for the newspaper΄s 40th anniversary.
The change that has occurred in journalism and the work of journalists in the digital age is described in the book "Media and journalism in transition. The changing working conditions of journalists in the digital age" by the journalist, President of the Panhellenic Federation of Journalists' Unions and member of the Panhellenic Sports Press Association Sotiris Triantafyllou.
The author will be visiting Corfu for the presentation of his book, which will take place on Saturday 10 June at 20:00 at the Bank of Greece, as part of the events being organised for the 40th anniversary of Enimerosi's newspaper. We talked with him about the new landscape formed by the possibilities of technology, the impact of the changes for journalists working in regional media and the dangers created by artificial intelligence for the preservation of jobs.
Your book describes the changes in journalism and the work of journalists in the digital age. Are the possibilities of technology ultimately working to the benefit of journalists or are they becoming a "trap" for their work?
Both, depending on how you use technology at any given time and how you adopt developments. They do work to the benefit of journalists, they make our work much easier, they have given us new tools, but on the other hand they have also created issues which have completely changed the way we work. They have changed the content of our work and this has resulted in a change in the working relationships of journalists for the worse, towards more flexible forms.
How are the implications of the changes and the new communication landscape for journalists working in regional media decoded compared to those working in the central media?
The truth is that with regional journalists there is a distance compared to journalists in the central media. Mainly a salary gap. The changes affect journalists in the central media as well.
The difference is mainly in the issues related to their salary. The differences have to do with the media. The regional media and the central media have different revenues. But the changes affect the journalists of the regional media as well. There is just an opening in their income compared to the big central media, as found in my PhD research. 307 journalists have taken part in it, members of the Unions who were employees at the time of the survey, many of them from regional media.
It turns out that the worst working conditions and the lowest salaries are on the websites and the best paid journalists are on TV. This can be seen through the research and data processing that followed.
How can a more favourable working environment be created for journalists in regional areas? What kind of policies need to be put in place?
Each time it has to do with the general environment in which the media and their employers operate and exist. There is a particular characteristic to be seen in the regional media businesses. They are not the same as in Athens, they have a particular quality characteristic in terms of their ownership. Their owners are mostly traditional publishers or family businesses which means that they don't have the financial standing of media owners in Athens, they don't have the capabilities of the media in Athens. But I think that this, along with the connection of the regional media to the local community, may be one of the reasons why the regional media are considered to be one of the most reliable ones. Whether regional media can reach the same level of revenue as Athens' media has to do with their audience. A regional private station is not licensed to broadcast nationwide so it is not the same, the audience is limited.
A regional newspaper is obviously not aimed at the same audience, which is why costs and salaries are usually lower. But there are also large regional media, TV stations and newspapers that are at the level of Athens. But I don't know what can be done. How well a medium will do and how successful it will be, always depends on the laws of the market.
The new forms of work, as pointed out in your book, want journalists to be multi-taskers. In what way do they threaten the profession?
Journalists do not just do what they used to do, i.e. writing. Journalists now do many, many things - they write, possibly take photos, upload videos, edit. It may be that sometimes with the change in job content the journalists are now no longer part of the publishing process. It may be that these things are done by someone else and there is simply a copying of texts or production of texts by an algorithm and thus jobs are eliminated. That's the threat of technology. One of the threats.
Artificial intelligence is now showing a very large growth and development. There are even news presenters in Greece recently. Perhaps the first appearance of a robot news presenter was in 2018 in China, at the Chinese News Agency. But it has also expanded in Greece and there is an AI news programme both in state television and websites. It's well into Greece.
Is the profession of journalism under threat?
Of course it is threatened, as are working relationships in general. There are great risks. This is why we need to see how changes should be adopted so that they are not against media journalists, because there are also information issues. What kind of content does a machine, a robot produce in relation to a human? There are issues like that. How reliable is the content? On the other hand, of course a machine solves some issues that humans used to do in the past and it makes it easier for us, such as some graphics or tables that a machine does. Caution is required.
Note: Mr. Triantafyllou's book is a university textbook and it is taught for the second year at the Department of Sports Organisation and Management of the University of the Peloponnese, based in Sparta.
The author will be visiting Corfu for the presentation of his book, which will take place on Saturday 10 June at 20:00 at the Bank of Greece, as part of the events being organised for the 40th anniversary of Enimerosi's newspaper. We talked with him about the new landscape formed by the possibilities of technology, the impact of the changes for journalists working in regional media and the dangers created by artificial intelligence for the preservation of jobs.
Your book describes the changes in journalism and the work of journalists in the digital age. Are the possibilities of technology ultimately working to the benefit of journalists or are they becoming a "trap" for their work?
Both, depending on how you use technology at any given time and how you adopt developments. They do work to the benefit of journalists, they make our work much easier, they have given us new tools, but on the other hand they have also created issues which have completely changed the way we work. They have changed the content of our work and this has resulted in a change in the working relationships of journalists for the worse, towards more flexible forms.
How are the implications of the changes and the new communication landscape for journalists working in regional media decoded compared to those working in the central media?
The truth is that with regional journalists there is a distance compared to journalists in the central media. Mainly a salary gap. The changes affect journalists in the central media as well.
The difference is mainly in the issues related to their salary. The differences have to do with the media. The regional media and the central media have different revenues. But the changes affect the journalists of the regional media as well. There is just an opening in their income compared to the big central media, as found in my PhD research. 307 journalists have taken part in it, members of the Unions who were employees at the time of the survey, many of them from regional media.
It turns out that the worst working conditions and the lowest salaries are on the websites and the best paid journalists are on TV. This can be seen through the research and data processing that followed.
How can a more favourable working environment be created for journalists in regional areas? What kind of policies need to be put in place?
Each time it has to do with the general environment in which the media and their employers operate and exist. There is a particular characteristic to be seen in the regional media businesses. They are not the same as in Athens, they have a particular quality characteristic in terms of their ownership. Their owners are mostly traditional publishers or family businesses which means that they don't have the financial standing of media owners in Athens, they don't have the capabilities of the media in Athens. But I think that this, along with the connection of the regional media to the local community, may be one of the reasons why the regional media are considered to be one of the most reliable ones. Whether regional media can reach the same level of revenue as Athens' media has to do with their audience. A regional private station is not licensed to broadcast nationwide so it is not the same, the audience is limited.
A regional newspaper is obviously not aimed at the same audience, which is why costs and salaries are usually lower. But there are also large regional media, TV stations and newspapers that are at the level of Athens. But I don't know what can be done. How well a medium will do and how successful it will be, always depends on the laws of the market.
The new forms of work, as pointed out in your book, want journalists to be multi-taskers. In what way do they threaten the profession?
Journalists do not just do what they used to do, i.e. writing. Journalists now do many, many things - they write, possibly take photos, upload videos, edit. It may be that sometimes with the change in job content the journalists are now no longer part of the publishing process. It may be that these things are done by someone else and there is simply a copying of texts or production of texts by an algorithm and thus jobs are eliminated. That's the threat of technology. One of the threats.
Artificial intelligence is now showing a very large growth and development. There are even news presenters in Greece recently. Perhaps the first appearance of a robot news presenter was in 2018 in China, at the Chinese News Agency. But it has also expanded in Greece and there is an AI news programme both in state television and websites. It's well into Greece.
Is the profession of journalism under threat?
Of course it is threatened, as are working relationships in general. There are great risks. This is why we need to see how changes should be adopted so that they are not against media journalists, because there are also information issues. What kind of content does a machine, a robot produce in relation to a human? There are issues like that. How reliable is the content? On the other hand, of course a machine solves some issues that humans used to do in the past and it makes it easier for us, such as some graphics or tables that a machine does. Caution is required.
Note: Mr. Triantafyllou's book is a university textbook and it is taught for the second year at the Department of Sports Organisation and Management of the University of the Peloponnese, based in Sparta.
