A report from the Valencian Institute of Economic Research, IVIE, released yesterday, warns that employment in the media has fallen by 11% in the last 15 years, despite the recovery experienced after COVID-19. In 2008, in Spain there were 121,000 people working in the media, an employment figure that has fallen by 11% to stand at 108,000 in 2022. The added value of these activities - which include newspaper and magazine editing, film production and distribution and TV, radio and TV programming and broadcasting, and news agencies and information portals - was close to 6.2 billion euros in 2020 (latest data available), 9% less than in 2008.
Overall, the weight of the sector in the economy is lower in Spain than it represents in the EU-27 and it is far from countries such as the United Kingdom or the United States. The publishing of newspapers and magazines has been the most punished subsector, and its weight in the total media represents 15% in added value and 21% in employment, percentages much lower than those of 2008 (25% and 33 %). At the same time, other subsectors such as news agencies and information portals have doubled their weight, reaching 11% in both added value and employment.
The report, which can be consulted on the IVIE website, analyzes the impact that digitalization is having in a sector that is very sensitive to technological advances. Since the 2008 crisis, the acceleration of changes has been constant, influencing the conditions in which the media perform their functions, "with a notable impact on the added value generated and employment, noticing a transformation of their tasks and new demands of training and technological skills", according to the Valencian institute.
It is detailed that three phases can be seen in the evolution of the sector: a reduction during the great recession, between 2008 and 2013; a recovery until 2019; and a strong impact in 2020, attributed to COVID, in which GVA fell by 12%, in line with the general economic contraction (-11%). Employment in the media has followed a similar pattern, but with a steeper initial decline and a recovery phase postponed beyond 2015, as it continued to decline while production was already experiencing two years of recovery. COVID had a strong impact on employment in the media, with a drop in 2020 of 9%, much higher than that of the entire economy (-4%).
Other features of working conditions in the media are that there are hardly any differences with the rest of the economy in terms of temporality (about 80% have a permanent contract) or the percentage of people employed with part-time work (12%). But recent data indicate a rebound in self-employed workers, who represent 14% of employed workers (4 points more than in previous years), influenced by the change in labor relations that digitalization has brought about. They reflect the migration towards models based on commercial relationships with self-employed or freelance professionals, who sometimes compete with amateurs.
The IVIE concludes that companies in the sector face a change in the communication model that affects their income because it has expanded the spectrum of dissemination channels (omnichannel) and suffers from greater generation of noise (e.g. fake news). But the media have played an important role in modern societies and their value transcends their economic dimensions.
For this reason, "how companies achieve their survival and in what regulatory framework they do so will depend on whether the media remains at the center of the communication ecosystem and continues to play a main role in the elaboration and transmission of information about reality, in the formation of public opinion and critical thinking, in the communication and dissemination of political messages, or in entertainment."
