Many Colombian journalists want to or are considering leaving the profession. Low salaries, contractual instability and the gender gap are some factors that are driving more and more press professionals in that country to seek employment alternatives in other sectors.
This was revealed by the study “Working conditions of journalists in Colombia,” prepared by research journalists from Rosario University, Diego García, Paulina Morales and Óscar Parra, and published in January in the journal Doxa Comunicación.
Just over half of a group of journalists surveyed said they wanted to leave journalism to dedicate themselves to other work, compared to 36.9 percent who responded that they did not intend to leave the profession, according to the research.
Paulina Morales and Diego García (left) and Óscar Parra (right) were awarded the National Journalism Award of Bogotá Journalists’ Circle to the Best Academic Research for their work on the working conditions of Colombian journalists. (Photo: Courtesy CPB and Óscar Parra)
These figures show the journalists’ degree of dissatisfaction with their working conditions and with the profession in Colombia, the authors said.
“I am very amazed that people are willing to leave the profession. I know of several cases [of journalists] who have ended up doing totally different things to be able to fund their lives because they know that journalism is not enough,” Parra told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR).
The desire to leave journalism is present among both men and women and at all income levels, according to the survey. Likewise, the intention to leave the profession does not change significantly depending on years of experience. Only journalists with more than 21 years of experience expressed an equitable disposition between continuing to practice and retiring from the profession.
“I know several colleagues who have left journalism who also have a career of many years and great prestige,” Parra said. “But they preferred to leave it because they couldn't take it anymore in terms of mental health, access to good salaries and working conditions.”
The research revealed that the salaries of journalists in Colombia are mostly low and unequal. Only 20% of respondents earn more than 5 million Colombian pesos per month (US$1,225). Another 20% earn between 4 and 5 million (US$980 and US$1,225), and 17% earn between 3 and 4 million (US$735 and US$980).
The remaining 43% said they earned less than 3 million pesos (US$735) a month. For 4% of these, journalism does not create an income.
The reality of these figures is especially evident in small, independent newsrooms, said Parra, who is also director of Rutas del Conflicto, an investigative journalism outlet focused on the armed conflict in Colombia.
“It is very common to see colleagues who are working in media like this, smaller and niche media that are suffering a lot to be able to finance their media and their salaries,” he said.
There is also a gender gap in the remuneration of journalists in Colombia. The research showed that men not only tend to earn more than women, but also have better working conditions. Twenty-five percent of male respondents have an indefinite-term employment contract, while for women this figure is 19.1%. The most common types of contracts among the women surveyed are for the provision of services and for a fixed term.
This, according to the authors, causes greater job instability for women journalists.
“It is very contradictory because in the Schools of Communication and Journalism the ratio [of students] is more or less 60 percent women, 40 percent men, perhaps even higher,” García told LJR. “And it turns out that it is more difficult for women to join the working world, and when they do, they do so under different conditions compared to men.”
When faced with a multiple choice question about what factors they thought might improve their working conditions, the most frequent answers among the journalists surveyed were salaries, better contractual conditions, defined working hours and provision of tools to do their work.
The least popular option was having collective representation before employers. That is, those surveyed do not see unions or guild associations as a way to improve their working conditions.
For García, this has to do with the fact that, historically, the journalistic guild in Colombia has been fragmented.
“Here the big media brands, the owners of the media, have associated more easily than the journalists themselves,” García said. “And I believe that this fragmentation is a very weak point for the guild itself.”
The upper graph shows the factors that journalists think could improve their working conditions. The lower graph shows the proportion of journalists who wish to leave the profession. (Photo: D. García, P. Morales and O. Parra, under CC BY-NC 4.0 license)
There is the Colombian Federation of Journalists (Fecolper, for its initials in Spanish), an organization that brings together 31 associations of journalists, and more than 1,200 communicators and media workers in Colombia, according to its website.
In a 2020 survey on the working conditions of Colombian journalists, Fecolper found that the unionization rate among journalists is very low. Only 1.5 percent of respondents are part of a union. A larger percentage belongs to guild organizations, but not unions, according to that survey.
Fecolper indicated that, therefore, collective bargaining of journalists' working conditions in Colombia is almost non-existent.
“It seems that the way out or one of the ways out is individual and not collective negotiation,” García said. “The same journalist does not see in unionization and collective work a form of defense, as has happened in other Latin American countries, such as Brazil or Argentina.”
Parra said that, although there are several journalism associations and organizations in Colombia, most focus on improving the practice of the profession, but they do little about the employment situation of those who practice it.
“In Colombia, a union or association that works specifically on working conditions has not been consolidated,” Parra said. “People feel that if they talk about unionizing, the company will automatically view them negatively. Or it can be very dangerous, because even in various areas of the country there are many union members murdered.”
Between 1973 and 2019, more than 3,000 Colombian trade unionists were murdered, according to the National Trade Union School (ENS). This violence is one of the factors that have generated the low popularity and stigmatization of unions in that country. Only 4.28 percent of the almost 20 million Colombian workers belong to a union, according to the latest ENS census.
“The idea of unionization may be one of the factors that allows us to improve some of the aspects related to the working conditions of those who practice journalism,” Jonathan Bock, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom of the Press (FLIP), told LJR. "However, we must also understand why the attempts that have sought to rebuild those bonds of union, which have been largely broken by war and violence, and also by proximity to political interests, have repeatedly failed."
The directors of Proclama del Pacífico, a media group in the department of Cauca, in southwestern Colombia, believe that, although the alliance of journalists in a strong and organized union would be very helpful, there are other ways to improve the guild's working conditions.
Although the group is affiliated with the Corporación de Periodistas del Pacífico, a subsidiary organization of Fecolper, its director, Alfonso Luna, said that journalists and the media where they work could take a more proactive approach in defending their working conditions.
“It is essential that journalists themselves and their organizations take the initiative to create opportunities and generate value through their work. The key is to strengthen journalism organizations, transforming them into true companies that offer quality services and generate income for their associates,” Luna told LJR. “In this way, journalists’ working situations can be improved from within, without depending exclusively on union action.”
Luna said that Proclama del Pacífico is working to build an organizational model that allows journalists to develop professionally, generate a decent income and defend their rights in order to achieve a real and sustainable improvement in the conditions of its workers.
The job insecurity, violence and stigmatization suffered by journalists in Colombia is creating more and more spaces without access to quality news in the country, García and Parra said. This situation could worsen if, as their research indicated, more journalists decide to leave the profession to improve their quality of life.
“The lack of information already exists in many places where there are no media, there are no journalists. As other organizations have previously mentioned, they are news deserts,” García said. “Being pessimistic, I believe that this will continue to worsen to the extent that there are no decent conditions to practice journalism and these non-journalistic factors continue to influence the type of journalism that is done in certain places and regions.”
García said that actions must be taken by both the journalists' guild and the media industry, the State and academia to improve the working conditions of press workers.
The Proclama del Pacífico media group, from Cauca, Colombia, seeks to build an organizational model that will allow journalists to generate a decent income and improve their working conditions. (Photo: Courtesy of Proclama del Pacífico).
“We have to go from describing the phenomenon and understanding it to action,” García said. “I think we have to continue delving deeper and joining efforts to carry out systematic studies with a certain frequency to also see how situations change, if they tend to get worse or better.”
García said that last year they shared the results of their investigation with the Ministry of the Interior with the intention that they would be taken into account in the creation of the new public policy to protect journalistic practice that the Colombian government plans to build.
The research from Rosario University was chosen as Best Teaching Research in the last edition of the National Journalism Award from the Bogotá Journalists' Circle, on Feb. 7.
