Journalistic Labor

Dr. Tai Neilson, Senior Lecturer in Media at Macquarie University

Thursday, March 14, 2024 4:30 PM to 6:00 PM EDT
Online Location

The technological changes and ongoing collapse of publishing business models that continue to destabilize the news industry are borne most immediately by workers. As a result, terms like precarity, surveillance, and intensification have become familiar concepts for describing the experiences of journalists. My goal in this paper is to outline labor process theory (LPT) as a systematic approach to study these trends in journalism work. The great strength of LPT is that it provides a framework to marry ethnographic and interpretive research with a political economic understanding of media industries. With its Marxist roots, LPT is a critical and normative approach to conflicts between labor and capital. At the same time, LPT has been expanded through insights from feminist and Foucauldian theory to highlight issues of affect and control, and identify how changes to media work are experienced unevenly across gendered and ethnic lines. Focusing on its relevance to media work, I will provide a critical overview of the history, contemporary applications, and debates in LPT.
 
Bio: Tai Neilson is a Senior Lecturer in Media at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. His areas of expertise include the political economy of digital media, critical cultural theory, and journalism. Tai is the author of Journalism and Digital Labor: Experiences of Online News Production and co-edited Research Methods for the Digital Humanities. He has also published work on journalism and digital media in Journalism Studies, Digital Journalism, Media International Australia, Journalism, Triple-C, Fast Capitalism, and Global Media Journal. Tai’s current research investigates journalists’ work practices, professional ideologies, and the technologies and power relations that impact their work. This includes critical approaches to AI, digital platforms, data collection, and new modes of capital accumulation. 

This event will be hosted via Zoom. Register Here