In this article, we discuss the precarious labor environment of Brazilian journalists with relation to platformization and the impacts it has had on the profession. This discussion is based on research data conducted on the work of journalists in Brazil, and primarily on the analysis of the results from the Brazilian Journalist Profile 2021 survey. The online survey consisted of a total of 3,100 professionals working in the field of journalism throughout the country. Data reliability is 95%, with a 2.3% margin of error. The study shows that around 60% of journalists work with online media, and more than half work from home – most of whom paid a high price for this as they were placed under a high level of stress with heavy workloads and overtime. Additionally, 50% of professionals in other communications fields have had to develop social networking roles that are unrelated to their job description. The discussion of this data, in view of precariousness and platformization, leads us to conclude that journalism professionals are subject to working conditions that have an impact on the quality of their physical and mental health.
Multi-professional collaboration is assumed to tackle ambiguous and difficult challenges with innovative teamwork. First, expertise from many fields is needed for solving difficult problems in society and organisations, which emerge from a complicated reality. Second, tasks in working life encompass many fields, meaning that multi-professional expertise is needed. Third, the expertise has to be organised as interactive teamwork for approaching ambiguous questions. However, multi-professional collaboration is challenging, due to different knowledge bases and related working methods of each professional grouping involved, but, with digitalization, multi-professional collaboration could become more commonplace, as the technology-mediated work environment is shared by all professional groupings in the workplace. Technology tends to mainstream working patterns and practices, which could be assumed to reshape professional work and multi-professional collaboration. The article studies how multi-professional teamwork is organised in firms with an advanced technology-mediated work environment in the new media and high-technology industry. The methodological approach is qualitative and three case studies are presented. The outcome of the analysis reveals variations in the patterns of organising multi-professional teamwork, which is related to the function and position of the teams and the rationality of the firm.
