Gravitation et dispersion dans les carrières des journalistes passés par la presse quotidienne nationale

In this article we try to describe and analyze the careers of journalists in the worlds of communication since the 1980s. We make the assumption that those worlds are structured by gravitational laws and that the national daily press has a powerful attractiveness for young professional journalists. The study is based on the statistical analysis of the first ten years of the career of 875 journalists who had worked at least one month in the National Daily Press (PQN). First, we introduce our methodology, based on data gathered on the social network LinkedIn. Second, we show that PQN is indeed at the heart of the information universe because of its superior attractiveness for journalists by comparison to other types of media. Third, we characterize the careers of journalists since the 1980s and show the increasing fragmentation of these careers due to frequent shifts between periods of stable employment and self-employment. It finally appears that the attractiveness of this central part of the Information universe is weakened by two factors: the increasing importance of freelancing and the diminishing importance of any specific training in journalism in order to access it