Outsourced information: identity and unpaid work in the age of digital journalism

Abstract

The Age of Information has been extensively studied by Castells, in the late 1980’s. Several of the implications discussed by this author at the time are observable nowadays, specially the ones concerning the tendencies to precariousness that labor activities related to information production present. Due to an increasingly accentuated demand for information, communication companies (such as TV stations and printed and online newspapers) have developed outsourcing methods of production of content. Said methods consist, basically, on the recruitment of a literate elite of professionals, originated from other countries, to produce quality “local news”. In this article, we analyze a concrete case of outsourcing of information, performed by a French blog platform that mainly recruits contributors from Africa. Based on the analysis of the interviews carried out with ten of these bloggers, we show, albeit in an exploratory way, the emerging conflicts that the process of outsourced production of information generates. During the discussion of this subject, we mobilized concepts developed within the field of sociology of work and other recent theoretical productions on the precariousness of informational work.