Tinius Digest November

In 2018-2019, UNESCO recorded a total of 156 killings of journalists worldwide. Over the past decade, a journalist has been killed on average every four days.

The year 2019 shows the lowest death toll recorded by UNESCO in the last decade, with 57 deaths. Despite these positive developments, journalism remains a dangerous profession: the threats faced by journalists are many and wide-ranging.

Casualties related to countries experiencing armed conflict have declined. Fatal attacks against journalists covering stories related to corruption, human rights violations, environmental crimes, trafficking, and political wrongdoing have risen in several other countries.

While significantly fewer female journalists are among the victims of fatal attacks, they are mainly targeted by offline and online gender-based attacks that put their safety at risk. These attacks can range from harassment, trolling and doxing to physical and sexual assault.

In 2019, the highest number of fatal attacks occurred in Latin America and the Caribbean, representing 40 percent of the total killings registered worldwide, followed by the Asia and the Pacific region with 26 percent.

Even though only 13 percent of the killings are reported as resolved, this is a slight improvement. In 2019, 12 percent, and in 2018, just 11 percent of the cases were reported as resolved. 

15 percent have experienced problematic interference from the owner (15 percent have experienced this in the past year)​. 4 out of 10 have experienced attempts at editorial influence from advertisers—often several times.​

Nearly 20 percent believe they have too little control and impact over the organization’s financial room for action.

35 percent of editors think their employees have varied, little or no awareness of dual roles and ties—and a significant proportion state that such issues are rarely or never discussed in the editorial office.​

43 percent of the intermediate editors believe that employees have a varying or only a small degree of real freedom of expression about issues relating to the workplace. Only 14 percent of executive editors think the same.​

61 percent of the survey respondents said that their organization has largely implemented hybrid and flexible working with new rules in place for staff. Most leaders who participated in the survey (57 percent) think their organizations are doing a good job with it. 

20 percent of survey respondents report that while their organizations are making some changes, they largely want to return to a pre-pandemic working model. The most common approach, indicated by 49 percent of the survey respondents, sees staff required to be in the office for a compulsory minimum number of days a week/month. 

Having explicit rules, setting clear expectations and communicating them transparently – and, most of all, articulating the purpose of going to the office and ensuring that the benefit of doing so is clear – helps when implementing flexible working models. 

Almost half of the survey respondents (49 percent) think that hybrid and flexible working has made hiring and retaining talent much or somewhat easier, while 65 percent believe that hybrid and flexible working could increase their ability to hire diverse talent and have a positive impact on their diversity, equity and inclusion strategies.

73 percent of female journalists had experienced online violence during their work. Threats of physical violence, including death threats, were identified by 25 percent of the women, and sexual violence was identified by 18 percent.

Threats of online violence against women journalists radiate: 13 percent of female respondents—and several interviewees—described threats of violence against those close to them, including children and infants, as features of attacks.

Racism, religious bigotry, antisemitism, sectarianism, ableism, homophobia and transphobia intersect with misogyny and sexism to produce significantly heightened exposure and more profound impacts for women experiencing multiple forms of discrimination concurrently.

Online violence against women journalists varies from large-scale attacks or extreme threats at the moment to the slow burn of networked gaslighting, which involves constant lower-level abuse. 15 percent reported experiencing image-based abuse (e.g., manipulated photos or video, stolen images, explicit images shared publicly without permission). 

The share of female characters on screen is up, though male characters still occupy about 16 percentage points more screen time. Male characters’ share of screen time in popular programming outpaces female characters’ share of screen time by a large margin, but screen time for female characters is increasing.

Older men and younger women get more screen time. The most common age group on screen for male characters appears to be 33 to 60; for female characters, it seems to be 18 to 33. Women over 60 still receive less than one percent of all available screen time, and have not changed over the last 12 years.

Screen time is increasing for male and female characters with medium and dark skin tones, but male and female characters occupy the majority of screen time with a light skin tone. Speaking time for female characters of dark skin tone rose the most. But they are still the group least likely to talk when shown on screen.

Radio still has a slight lead (39 percent) over mobile devices (34 percent) in spoken word consumption. But: the share of spoken word listening on a mobile device has increased by 278 percent over the last eight years and shows no signs of slowing down.

Spoken word’s share of audio listening has increased by 45 percent over the last eight years. Now 46 percent of Americans listen to spoken word audio daily—which gives it a share of 29 percent of all audio consumption (music has 71 percent of the stake).

While the early morning (6 am-8 am) is the most popular time for listening to spoken word audio, the listening habits have increased throughout the day. The listening has a significant drop from 5 pm.

Younger listeners’ time spent listening to spoken words has increased by 214 percent over the last eight years. Now 22 percent of 13 to 24-year-olds listen to spoken word audio daily.