The magic of the printed word
The need for information is undoubtedly one of the most important development elements of any type of social life designed by man. Transmitting accumulated knowledge, history and events to future generations, in an appropriate and lasting format, has been a determining concern of all human communities.
The most distant antecedents of journalism are found in the ancestral tradition of oral communication that in the primitive human communities transmitted their knowledge from generation to generation. At a certain point in ancient history, the clay tablets with cuneiform writing - the world's first alphabet - used by the Sumerians in the region of the valley of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, in the city of Babylon, began to be used. Later the arrival of paper, parchment and papyrus in the ancient civilizations of the Far East and Africa, represented by the Chinese, the Persians and the Egyptians, revolutionized the communication of the time and allowed the lights of past events to reach our time..
In Ancient Rome, the most distant antecedents of periodical publications are identified: the "Public Act" and the "Daytime Act", the latter was identified as "an official handwritten sheet that was placed in the Forum (public square) and it was sent to all the provinces by order of the emperor Julio César in the 1st century ”(Ortega 2005: 13-14). In Roman society, communication not only implied the publication of edicts, laws, public acts and historical memories, but news of society, comments and events of general interest were disseminated throughout the Empire.
In these classical societies practically all the arts were used to record what happened and to communicate past ideas, concepts and events. Architecture, sculpture, coins, wall inscriptions, religious signs, festivals, ceramics, painting, and literature, both oral and written, served these purposes. Examples of this were the poems sung by the Greek Aedas - Homer and his renowned Iliad and Odyssey -, the writings of the first Ionian and Arab philosophers and the wall ruins of the city of Pompeii.
In the late Middle Ages (6th-13th centuries) the practice of writing fell into disuse, and it was useful practically only for religious service, although some kings and nobles, on rare occasions, wrote the exploits of their wars and conquests. The great Emperor Charlemagne never knew how to write, despite receiving instructions from his advisers to the Christian clergy.
In the Middle Ages, minstrels appear, mixed characters of musician, poet and journalist, who from town to town told the stories of warriors, miracles of faith and the main events of the time, accompanied by a large dose of inventiveness and resources. own.
It is not until the thirteenth century that it returns to the written forms of capturing what happens in all areas of feudal society. Thanks to the appearance of the “Nouvelle manuscrite” and the “Journal d´un burgeois” in the city of Paris in the 15th century this tradition begins. "These media were insufficient for the intellectual revolution that was announced under the lights of the Renaissance, so its popularity was low and its duration was short-lived" (Troyano 1999: 36).
Undoubtedly the invention of the movable type printing (historians differ by a date around the years 1450-1456) by the German blacksmith Johannes Gutenberg - a printing process already known to the Chinese, Koreans and Japanese several centuries ago - represented a revolution in communication, and one of the most important inventions of man.
Through the printing of words, knowledge ceased to be individual property, and the great events and discoveries of the time, the new way of thinking driven by the other revolution that represented the Renaissance, were popular knowledge.
The rise of the printing press gave rise to journalism. With its use arises in Germany in 1457 what is considered the first printed newspaper, with the title of Nurenberg Zeitung (Weill Georges en Ortega 2005). In this way, the so-called gazzetas were born in Venice, Italy, and all kinds of serial publications began to proliferate throughout Europe that intellectuals, politicians and incipient journalists wrote and edited in the form of magazines, weeklies and newspapers, reaching a particular development in England. and distinctive to the rest of the continent.
"On May 14, 1622, with the printing of A Current of General News, in England, what is considered a truly newspaper arises, by Nicholas Bourne and Thomas Archer" (Martínez Ricardo in Ortega 2005: 17). As of 1710 in this country there was a great publishing activity and a large number of publications of variable periodicity appear. It was in England, where the first bourgeois press law, the Libel Act, was passed in 1792 and where the business press appeared at the end of the century. “News outlets introduced technical innovations, established an information infrastructure for news gathering, and improved distribution systems as rail networks developed. Entrepreneurs with a new mentality appeared who, for profit, modernized their companies,they reduced costs and increased production capacity. An example of all this was the newspaper The Times, founded in 1785 ”. (Bernabéu 2010: 2)
In 1690 Benjamin Harris, a London printer who had come to America two years earlier, persecuted in Europe for being a liberal publicist, published the Publick Occurrences in Boston. This is considered the first American newspaper.
Throughout the seventeenth century, flyers were proliferating in Latin America, especially in Mexico and Lima, in which the most relevant events that occurred in the Viceroyalties were published. "It is stated that the first of them appeared in Mexico, in the year 1542 and refers to a seismic catastrophe that occurred in Guatemala, in September 1541." (Ortega 2005)
A century later, periodicals with different sections are established throughout the subcontinent, of which the oldest are the Gaceta de México and Noticias de España (1722).
Modern journalism was born in the nineteenth century when journalists acquired the category of professionals and began to give way to advertising as a means of financing. Many newspapers around the world, mainly in the United States of America, lowered their prices, increased their pages and began to finance themselves through the entry of advertisements, accessing them a much greater number of readers.
It is in this century when journalism and the control and transmission of information began to emerge as the "fourth estate" of the bourgeois state. Journalism was becoming a mass media and opinion control, in the mass media, and little by little, the great media consortiums would begin to emerge, led by the Americans Gordon Bennet, Joseph Pulitzer and William R. Hearst.
“With the economic, political and social boom of the 19th century, journalism in the United States underwent a process of quantitative and technical expansion, driven by the need of the nascent imperialism to argue and defend its postulates within and beyond its borders, (…) Since then, the fusion of financial capital with media ownership, together with the intensive use of modern technologies and the development of journalistic techniques, have made the American press, plagued with lies, sensationalism and commercialization, dominate the global news universe ”. (Ortega 2005: 22).
Arrival of the printed word in Cuba
In Cuba, the use of the printing press has been known since the beginning of the 18th century, however this did not mean that it was immediately used for journalistic purposes. At first it was destined to the printing of commercial bands and other matters like that.
In the middle of the 18th century, Ambrosio de Funes, Count of Ricla, arrived in Cuba as Captain General. This governor sponsors the boom in printing presses and introduces the periodic press on the island. Historian Jacobo de la Pezuela refers that in the streets of Havana a print entitled El Pensador circulated, sponsored by this captain general, and that they published approximately in the year 1764 the lawyers Gabriel Beltrán de Santa Cruz and Ignacio José Urrutia. "Some historians believe that El Pensador was not a Cuban publication, but a Spanish one, because in 1762 a publication of the same name began to circulate in Madrid, which could have been the one referred to by Pezuela, which was received in Havana." (Marrero 2003: 25)
In 1782, under the authorization of Funes, it emerged from the Printing Office of the Captaincy General, owned by Blas de los Olivos, La Gaceta de La Havana. This publication, which came out on Mondays with four pages, contained some political and commercial news, among them, international news such as the uprising of the Thirteen English Colonies, records of entries and exits of ships in the port of Havana, grocery fees and provisions of the government of the Count of Ricla. Despite being the first publication of its kind on record in Cuba, La Gaceta… is not considered the first newspaper in Cuba, due to its little durability and limited impact on the society of the time.
This credit goes to the Papel Periódico de La Havana. On October 24, 1790, its first issue came to light, becoming over time a way to overturn the wishes of Creole society in the process of national formation.
Its creation was largely due to the initiative and encouragement of Captain General Don Luis de las Casas and in its pages he wrote the most select of the Cuban intelligentsia of the time: Manuel de Zequeira y Arango, José Agustín Caballero, Francisco de Arango and Parreño, Nicolás Calvo de la Puerta and Antonio del Valle Hernández.
Beginning in the 19th century, the period between 1812 and 1832 when freedom of the press was decreed in Cuba stood out, newspapers of different classes and interests proliferated throughout the island. They do it, mainly, as "instruments for the promotion and defense of the contradictions existing at the time, such as slavery or abolition, reformism or annexation, autonomy or independence, conservatism or liberalism." (Ortega 2005: 26) They circulated in Havana, Matanzas, Santa Clara, Santiago de Cuba, Bayamo, Puerto Príncipe, Trinidad, Cienfuegos and even in the smallest towns in the country. They were printed with a limited edition, even up to 15 copies.
At the beginning of the Wars of Independence in 1868, some twenty newspapers emerged in the bush, among them El Cubano Libre, directed by José Joaquín Palma, printed on October 17 in Bayamo. This newspaper ceased in 1871, but when the war of 1895 broke out, Antonio Maceo made it reappear after the capture of an existing printing press in the Nipe warehouses.
And to Matanzas… when did you arrive?
As of the year 1813, due to the Constitution of Cádiz, in Spain, which in 1812 endorsed the freedom of the press for the Kingdom and its colonies, 3 newspapers circulated in the city of Matanzas, which although they had a limited periodicity and ephemeral existence, marked the beginning of the periodical press in the territory.
Matanzas intellectuals, inspired by the new possibility, founded in 1813, from the offices of Francisco Camero, the first Matanzas newspaper, called El Diario de Matanzas. This had four pages in its editions and four months of existence - its last issue came out on April 8, 1813.
In it, materials referring to the administration of the Matanzas party were published along with political and economic materials, according to the historian Urbano Martínez.
In July 1813 El Package was published and on September 22 of that same year Matanzas readers accessed El Patriota, in one of whose issues the first Matanzas historiographic work appears under the title Historical geographical description of the city and district of Matanzas. written by the frigate captain Juan M. O'Farrill.
In 1821, Juan Justo Jiménez published La Gaceta de Matanzas and on September 22, 1822, El Semanario de Matanzas began to be printed, a publication that had the collaboration of the first Cuban romantic poet: José María Heredia. According to Romero 2011, in 1824 the American Tomas Federico Kid founded the Government Printing Office and with this he began to publish La Gaceta del Gobierno de Matanzas.
On September 2, 1828, the newspaper La Aurora began to be published, owned by the Patriotic Council of the city of Matanzas. This publication is considered, due to its magnificent printing and vast information, one of the most select jewels of Cuban and Latin American journalism. Its pages are a source of decisive importance for the study of local history during much of the 19th century. The prominent Cuban intellectual Antonio Bachiller y Morales, referring to La Aurora, pointed out that it was the best political and literary newspaper on the island up to that date, since it visibly contributed to the advancement in journalism with the beauty of its typography and edition, along with the news accuracy. (Díaz, 2011)
With the establishment in Cuba of the neocolonial republic, publications related to the different political factions began to be developed that began to coexist in the environment of Cuban society at the time and in Matanzas, emerging, among others, in 1899 and under the guidance of Fernando Romero Fajardo, The Voice of Matanzas. On January 2, 1900, El Republicano Federal was founded and in 1901 El Jején began to be printed, and in 1903 El Liberal and El Moderado.
In 1909 El Yucayo, a newspaper directed by the Matanzas poet Bonifacio Byrne, was founded and in 1912 El Imparcial began to be published, a publication that achieved some notoriety in the city.
The Girón newspaper: witness to the Revolution
When the Cuban Revolution triumphed in January 1959, in the city of Matanzas four important newspapers coexisted. El Republicano, owned by Orlando Soles, and Noticias, owned by Pablo Sánchez Bencomo, were handed over to the Cuban revolutionary cause.
Another of the local newspapers, El Imparcial, owned by Guillermo Gómez Furiach, ran a different path from the previous ones. This had to be intervened by the power of the people in the face of the constant attacks - veiled or open - against the Revolution, mainly in the Denim section, written by his wife, Nélida Santana.
The last of these publications, the Adelante newspaper, which emerged in 1947, owned by Antonio Pimentel Herrera, a blackmailer journalist who had left the country at the end of September 1960, published in its pages broad support for the counterrevolution until its intervention and transformation., on November 22, 1960, in the heat of the nationalizations, in the revolutionary newspaper Adelante, a direct antecedent of the Girón newspaper.
“The name of Forward Revolutionary expressed something, but it was a very long title, and therefore readers kept calling it Forward simply. All ballast from the past had to be removed. In short, it was necessary to find a short name, in which the antecedents of the people's struggle and its most recent history could be emanated ”. (Ortega 2005: 33)
Thus, on December 5, 1961, the name Girón arose and after a test run on April 23, 1962, on April 25, 3,500 copies were circulated in all municipalities, for the first time with a provincial scope.
In the 1970-80 period, the Girón newspaper was characterized by the operation of teams with reporters specialized in sectors. Opinion journalism was encouraged and the section “Apartado 133” was created to attend to complaints and suggestions from the population. The cultural supplement "Yumurí" also emerged at that time (1975).
Due to the start of the special period, the assigned paper quota was significantly reduced, so that on March 2, 1991 Girón had its last edition as a newspaper. On February 2 of that year, the cultural supplement “Yumurí” stopped circulating for similar reasons.
In homage to the victory of the armed people in Playa Girón, on Friday, April 18, 1997, the first completely digitized edition of the weekly was published and a year later, exactly on Friday, April 17, 1998, the first issue of the supplement Humedal del Sur, dedicated to the inhabitants of the Turquino-Manatí Plan.
Taking advantage of the development of new information and communication technologies to spread their messages throughout the world, and the emergence of hypermedia journalism, on May 12, 2000 the first issue of Girón-Web was placed on the Internet, a version digital that is updated daily.
The weekly Girón is the official organ of the Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba in Matanzas. Its main objective is aimed at satisfying the informative, instructive, mobilizing and educational needs of Matanzas readers, based on values such as responsibility, ethics and industry.
Ideology and mass communication
"Ideologies must be viewed as actively organizing forces that are psychologically 'valid', and that shape the terrain in which men and women act, struggle, and become aware of their social situations."
Antonio Gramsci
The term Ideology immediately leads us to seek its meaning through philosophical studies. The specialized literature consulted agrees by conferring the creation of the term to the philosopher Antoine Destutt de Tracy, at the end of the 18th century during the French Enlightenment. The godfather of ideology in his texts referred to the creation of a science of ideas, where its emergence and function would be investigated in a pragmatic way.
From a materialist conception of history, the philosophers Carlos Marx and Federico Engels, point out that the empirical observation of any phenomenon must show the relationships between the social structure, the political structure and the production structure. In this sense, Karl Marx defined ideology as a "system of representations" that accompanies and legitimizes the political dominance of one social class over others. In this way, the German philosopher considers that the ideologies socially established by the politically dominant class provoke the existence of a “false consciousness”. (Marx and Engels, 1976)
For Lenin, ideologies are nothing more than "ideological motives." In this way the ideology is real, and influences the behavior of men because it contains elements that guide human activity.
They are nothing more than stimulations arising from social practices that depend on their relationship with material production. (Lenin in Compilation, 1979)
“Ideologies were cataloged in the distant past, which came from Napoleon to Marx, as an arbitrary image of the world (…) From Gramsci, until today, we know that this is not the case: ideologies represent ways of knowing reality, they constitute systems of ideas armed with a certain logic around a theoretical nucleus, they support values, principles and norms, they also include beliefs, myths and prejudices, and they propose certain patterns of perception of the surrounding world, patterns of organization and patterns of behavior ”. (García, 2011: 1)
For Louis Althusser, who reinterprets Marxist concepts, ideology is a system (with its own logic and rigor) of representation (images, myths, ideas or concepts depending on the existing case and possessing a historical role within a determined society).
The theoretical references that Pamela Shoemaker offers in one of her studies on the subject are very pertinent. For this researcher, ideology is a symbolic mechanism that "serves to unite and integrate the actors of a certain society" (Shoemaker, 1990: 55) while for John B. Thompson to refer to ideologies is to speak of "meanings placed at the service of the power ”(Thompson, 1991: 3).
Meanwhile, Anthony Guiddens proposes a relationship that starts from the identification of ideology as a force “capable of reproducing and maintaining existing power relations”. He points out three closely related categories: discourse, power, and ideology; where discourse reproduces, creates, at the same time that it challenges existing power relations, while ideology, according to her, is the factor that mediates this relationship, providing a framework of interpretation, through which discourse receives its meaning. (Guiddens in Castro, 2009: 11)
Using these studies as a basis, ideology can be defined as a system of representations, conceptions and ideas that -in the political, legal, moral, aesthetic, religious order as a philosophical category- reflects, ultimately, the relationships economic. It can also be defined as the main ideas that characterize the subjectivity of a person, a community or a time.
Returning to Thompson's postulates, he points out the importance of also understanding communication and the mass media, as a social process controlled by the ruling class, as a means of reproduction of ideologies that, together with the teaching of collective values and beliefs, maintain social stability and economic relations. “Ideology is a system of representations that serves to maintain existing relations of class domination by orienting individuals towards the past rather than the future, or towards images or ideals that hide class relations and deviate from the search collective of social change ”. (Thompson 1991: 27)
In this defined situation, the media are the most effective mechanism –the family, the school, the ethical-moral regulations, the legal entities, etc. also exist in any given social context. - capable of creating, or modifying the images associated with the dominant ideology. It is the responsibility of the media to maintain the myths, beliefs, and situations that preserve the meaning of the discourse according to the requirements of the ruling class.
For Thompson, the relationship between the media and the study of ideology is essential. He argues that this can be done in two ways: formal and discursive analysis. This perspective is part of the structure of symbolic constructions that make possible the mobilization of the sense of ideology in its dual function: creation of identity and support of relations of domination.
What differentiates this approach, according to Thompson, is the interest in detailing the ways in which the objects and statements of mass communication can be understood as "ideological." To achieve this result, it is vitally important to take into account the conflicts related to the reception and appropriation of messages from the media by socially differentiated individuals and groups.
To delve into this topic, it is necessary to refer to the studies of the communication of the so-called agenda-setting hypothesis, which generally state that the mass media do not have the intention, nor probably the possibility of inducing the recipients to act or think in a certain way, but they do manage to provide you with a group of topics to think about. It is precisely in this capacity that the effectiveness of informative journalistic discourses lies, in making known, not in persuasion or manipulation. Hence its potential for the creation and reproduction of ideologies.
The agenda-setting hypothesis maintains that as a result of the action of the media, the public knows or does not know, attends or neglects, emphasizes or ignores, specific elements of public settings. It also states that the public has the ability to include or exclude from their own knowledge and interests what the media include or exclude from their own content. Furthermore, the public tends to assign a certain importance to what the mass media emphatically reflects. The importance given by the public to the event, according to these studies, will be determined by the protagonist of the event or by the development of the event itself. But it must be borne in mind that if the event is never published, it will not really reach social significance.
Professional ideologies of journalists
When the time has come to theorize about professional ideologies in journalism, it is necessary at first to conceptualize everything related to professions and their relationships with journalism.
According to Edgar H. Schein, professions constitute “sets of occupations that have developed a normative system derived from their essential role in society, which makes it possible to differentiate the professional from the amateur, for the reason of being linked full time to an occupation that means their source of income ”. (Schein, 1988: 6)
While for J. Fernández a profession is defined as "an occupation that regulated itself through systematic training in a university setting, based on specialized and technical knowledge and, of course, oriented more to material remuneration." (Fernández, 2001: 3)
In this context, the profession is considered as a sociocultural phenomenon in which a limited number of knowledge and skills, traditions, customs and practices take part that can be developed with scientific-practical improvement. Consequently, a profession, seen from the perspective of modernity, summarizes processes and elements that cannot be divorced from the social, political and ideological reality in which it takes place.
Harold Wilensky (1964) reflected in a study the inviolable points of a profession. This text is a must, as it groups together the most complete and interesting conceptions within the functionalist paradigm of communication studies. For Wilensky the professions followed a natural line in time that would lead them to meet five parameters in logical order to complete their cycle of total development, these were:
- That the subjects are most of the time linked to professional activity That there is an official institution -university, for example- where students acquire the skills required by professional practice That an association is created -normally in the national context- that groups the performers together, executes a system of norms and serves as a space for articulation for coexistence with other professional groups. to the professional group. That professional practice be regulated by means of a code of ethics, which functions as a filter for the selection of the members of the union.
The sociologist Max Weber in his text "The Protestant Ethic and the Meaning of Capitalism" (1905) points out that professional groups are not only economic entities, "they are also status groups, which inherit or assume cultural resources to try to legitimize their vision of world". This statement is closely related to Marx's notion of "false consciousness" about ideology.
Following the thread of theorization, the researcher Manuel Fernández Esquinas points out that a professional ideology is “a set of ethical and moral considerations around a group of workers that involves reasoning related to the justification of work, the particular interests of the group, its status, privileges and power ”. (Fernández, 2002: 38)
In this sense, we can define the professional ideologies of journalists as “a series of paradigms and professional practices adopted as natural by journalists, that is, they are the values that professionals possess or share in society, as well as of the products news and the modalities that call its preparation. " (Wolf and Garbarino in García, 2008: 20)
These professional ideologies will be conditioned by the socio-political context, the internal circumstances of the media and the organization in which each journalist works.
In addition, the work identity and the productive routines adopted, the material conditions, the professional recognition and the ethical stimuli received from the public and the administration will also influence.
“Ideologies vary according to the press organ, the scope and relevance it has in society. In addition, they differ according to the environment, and above all depend on the country and its socio-political context. This does not mean that they do not share values with their colleagues from other latitudes; But in principle they depend on the socialization process that takes place in the newsroom, on their integration and identification with the workplace, making their own all the values shared by the rest of the journalists regarding the norms, skills, and conceptions of their professionalism, etc ". (García, 2008: 20-21)
There are multiple components that make up these ideologies, because they are formed through long socialization processes that occur not only in media organizations but also in the social sphere. Through this process of socialization - a process of a dialectical nature - journalists acquire a sense of belonging to the media, perfect their productive routines and also endorse the values shared by the rest of the journalists regarding norms, responsibilities, skills and conceptions. about the role as communication professionals.
These socialization processes are in charge of mediating between what journalists require and think they should do and what the norms established in the media establish. It may happen that the norms of a certain organization are not fully shared by journalists, or by some of them, but they do have to be observed, otherwise disorder would reign.
Professional ideologies are closely related to motivation towards the profession. Determined in this case as a guiding tendency of the personality, since when the journalist is able to consciously structure his profession with the requirements of his present and future life, the motives that make up this guiding tendency are adequately expressed in a professional intention. well-founded.
We can assume that sometimes during the activity of journalists some are unaware of topics and techniques, and consider that what is done, bad or good, is enough. They allege that what is published under his name is written with the public in mind, which is really ignored from the beginning, because it is unknown. In these situations, identification with professional ideologies is practically nil. They write on many occasions to please, to fulfill an orientation and in the end almost nobody sees them, because what they publish does not matter at that time.
Productive routines in the media
Once the importance of professional ideologies for the exercise of journalistic dynamics was initially defined, the time has come to establish their relationship with productive routines.
The manufacture of all communicative products, especially the production of news, implies the assumption of certain work rules within the journalistic company. “Social events are not alien to the collecting subject or to the conditions and requirements of the institution that publishes them. This daily chore is translated into the course of the so-called productive routines, that is, in the specific way of organizing work to produce journalistic materials ”. (García, 2007: 33-34)
These productive routines not only include news construction but also refer to all forms of journalistic expression, and even personal work standards in accordance with the mechanisms allowed in the media.
According to Cuban professor Roger Ricardo Luis, productive routines are the set of actions and norms “arising from the demands generated by the productive-editorial-technological dynamics of a media company and the intense objective mediation process present in each of its phases. ”. (Luis in García, 2007: 34)
For his part, Zeus Naya defines them as “the schemes of perception, appreciation and action instilled by the social environment at a given time and place; that is to say, (…) they are all the socially acquired dispositions through learning ”. (Naya in García, 2007: 34)
Many authors consulted conceive productive routines as work models that allow us to generate journalistic work similar to the previous one, while others link them to the transformation of each of our acts into habits. In this way we can understand two paths in the acceptance of productive routines: the voluntary or conscious and the involuntary or unconscious. The first model acts in the confrontation with a new work, at the same time oriented and directed, in which we must display commitment, sagacity, awaken interest and profess dedication. The second begins at the moment in which we undertake this task frequently and gradually becomes a mechanical habit.
But the production routines enable the selection and incorporation of information into the production flow, based on the criteria of newsworthiness and values / news. These do not have to constitute rigid dogmas or formulas, reduced to a technological vision of the news production process. In any case, we can assume them as patterns that help the organization of journalistic work, but leave room for the creativity of the professional.
It is at this moment that the relationship between productive routines and the journalist's professional ideology comes into play. In this sense, it can be highlighted that production routines do not obey only technological requirements, but rather more subjective considerations, which reveal the broad relationship between the media and power and, fundamentally, the trend, already clarified above, of the media. of communication to the preservation of the status quo, as instruments controlled by the politically dominant class.
"Given their normative function, routines become an instrument of social control over the work of journalists in a wide spectrum of their activity where the higher hierarchical levels are present, such as the political system, power entities, media management, relevant sources, fundamentally. At the same time, they outline how the news is produced and, therefore, express the strategies of how to approach the reality that is of interest to journalistic entities in a wide spectrum that goes from the collection to the treatment of the information that is made public. and socially relevant ”. (Luis in García, 2007: 40).
These ideas of Professor Roger Ricardo Luis can easily be related to what has been stated above about the agenda-setting theory and the capacity of the press, as an ideological instrument, to create images and identity habits in any social context.
Direction management in media institutions
The efficient management of human resources is a mechanism of vital importance for the fulfillment of the main objectives of any company or productive or social organization. The media do not escape this, in which the role of the editorial board is vital in the projection and achievements of the publication.
Finding a single, consensual definition of the term management is almost impossible. There are as many concepts as authors have written on the subject.
According to José A. Fernández Arena, it is understood as a social science that pursues the satisfaction of institutional objectives through a structure and through coordinated human effort. (Pérez, 2012)
James A. and Stoner considered as such the process of planning, organizing, leading and controlling the work of the members of a given organization and of using all available resources to achieve proposed organizational objectives. (Pérez, 2012)
Jesús M. Ferré adds in his studies that management is a process of dynamic and continuous action of one man over another, "in order to guide his behavior and professional performance towards the achievement of the company's objectives." (Gutiérrez and Morales in Pérez, 2012: 2)
The specialized bibliography consulted about the development and historical evolution of human resources management indicates that all schools or approaches within the theory of administration allow three stages to be identified before culminating in the current conception:
- Classic personnel management: This points to the human factor as another integral factor of the production process, with fundamentally economic motivations and passive when making business decisions. Their function is work, with more or less efficiency depending on their training and salary remuneration. Modern personnel management: In this, the role of the human factor becomes more active by becoming aware of its importance. It is at this stage that employment, remuneration, training and promotion policies are formed, as well as other tasks in decision-making. Human resources management: This stage goes beyond modern personnel management. Here the human factor has more responsibility in the design and implementation of strategies,thanks to its ability to strengthen the competitiveness and improvement of companies in the difficult context of contemporaneity.
In this sense, it must be ensured by the addresses of the institutions or companies:
- The insertion of the personnel in the company The dynamization and mobilization of the personnel in such a way that their capacities are used to achieve the objectives of the company The advancement of the personnel, where they contribute the knowledge that will be necessary to the members of the company to act at the highest level of competence possible Communication, that is, permanent and consecutive fluid dialogue The quality of life, safety and compensation compatible with the results of the company The image of the company and therefore the image of the human factor". (Garrido and Cedeño, 2011: 2)
In the studies on Journalism the concept of direction has not been sufficiently systematized, although, in some way and responding to own theoretical assumptions referred to by the Information Sciences, Organizational Communication and the Sociology of News Production, definitions and analysis of characteristic elements of management processes in the media. The researcher Dr. Gloria Ponjuán synthesizes four essential components of the management management process in a communication medium, equally applicable to any productive organization: planning, organization, management and control. As he explains, these components are not executed indistinctly but rather form a cycle, promoting a "spiral of development." (Ponjuán, 1998)
Editorial management understood through the planning, organization, direction and control processes contributes to the study of the internal dynamics of media organizations, because it allows to conceive the news production process in a more general way, which examines the responsibilities of others decisive actors in the construction of the news, as well as assessing more precisely the influence of factors of another order such as the administration and distribution of resources, the organization of technical work, management and control policies, etc.
Such articulation allows identifying the news production processes not only as a consequence and / or requirement of the forms of organization of work in the medium, but also from it, in an attempt to integrate all those relative factors into the same analysis plane. to the organization and that define both its performance and organizational culture as well as the information production itself.
In the media, seen as social institutions, companies or economic agents, there are complex relationships and dynamics that have been studied in a biased way. The investigation of these processes imposes a look that transcends the study of information production routines, ideologies and journalists, as the main actors in the news construction processes, and focuses on the processes of media management.
Within these human resources management processes, media managers "need competent and motivated staff in which each person considers how to improve their work and, ultimately, collaborate to increase the information quality of the company." (Sánchez, 1989: 5)
According to Professor Alfonso Sánchez, only a united team, under an efficient leadership of the company, common values and a strong work culture shared by the generality of the editors, managers and workers of the media can promote this spirit of initiative and innovation necessary to achieve set objectives.
For this, it is necessary to adopt a coherent line of direction: access to managers, satisfaction of essential requirements, concern for working conditions and personal situation of journalists and other team members, among other issues.
Within the general system that constitutes Business Management, leadership constitutes a very important factor for the final course of the organization. "Leadership is a management instrument that affects the development of business activity, it is an object of human resources, which are the main strategic factor and competitive advantage that an organization has." (Zayas and Cabrera, 2006: 5)
For an exact definition of the term, the author agrees with the researcher Carnota (1985) that leadership results from the act of “organizing and directing the interests and activities of a group of people united for a project or company, by a person who encourages their cooperation. due to the fact that all of them approve, more or less voluntarily, certain aims and methods ”. (Carnota in Zayas and Cabrera 2006)
Another of the categories to analyze within management is the organizational form. Defined by Vargas Téllez (2011) as a “system of structural variables formed by six dimensions, namely: the number of people who make up the organization; the object of work; the means of work; the division of labor; control and social relations of production in the social and institutional sphere ”.
This new category is the one that allows to abstract the differences and similarities between a company focused on material production and another dedicated to intellectual production, which includes the media. It can be said, then, that this set of productive models or organizational forms are determined more in social aspects; in the management of power structures and in the attention to their human resources than in mere technical matters.
From this it follows that, depending on the organizational form, greater attention to participation and to achieving the confidence of the workers can be appreciated, if the objectives set are to be achieved. For this, it will be crucial to consider the context and the specific characteristics of the company, the leadership, the productive routines and the professional ideologies of the workers.
