Investigating and Identifying the Dimensions of Difficulty and Challenges of Work in the Media Industry: A Meta-synthesis Study

Objective
Talent is the main source of value in the media industry. As the management of financial assets is important for a bank, the effective management of employees is important for media companies. There are nearly 30 million media and culture employees in the world and their work is effective in the social and economic development of countries. If we consider creativity as an important feature of the media industry and creativity is affected by the mind of the human agent in the media organization, then human resources are very important in such organizations.
For the successful management of the media, it is important to know the problems, injuries, threats, and challenges of human resources in the media, focusing on the dimensions of the difficulty of working in the media. Several pieces of research have been done on identifying the injuries and challenges of work in the media industry, but these studies are not complete and scattered. For example, some research studies consider "stress and anxiety" as one of the important challenges of working in the media industry, and others consider "uncertainty and job stability" as an important challenge. Other studies deal with the issue that online media workers in various fields of entertainment, digital games, and journalism are threatened and humiliated by racist or sexist expressions during their work. Another challenge of working in the media and most digital media is full-time work, and for that, they use the term 24-hour standby of employees during working hours.
Therefore, it is necessary to look closely at the exact composition of these challenges and explain their various dimensions. On the one hand, the prominent importance of human resources in the media industries and on the other hand, the difficulty and challenges of media jobs, make it necessary to study and deal with this issue in the form of coherent content. The main goal of this research is to qualitatively analyze the results of research related to the dimensions of work difficulty in the media industry with a meta-synthesis approach so that media organizations can achieve effective planning and management of human resources in the media industry.
 
Research Methodology
This research is a fundamental study whose nature and method is descriptive-analytical. In this research, the meta-synthesis method has been used. Meta-synthesis is a type of qualitative study that uses the findings of other qualitative research in the field of a subject as data.
The meta-synthesis strategy used in this research is the seven-step meta-synthesis method of Sandlovski and Barroso (2007): 1. Specifying the goal and setting the research questions 2. Systematic study of literature 3. Searching and choosing suitable articles 4. Extracting information from article 5. Analysis and synthesis of findings from qualitative studies 6. quality control and 7 presentation of findings.
First, databases and sources of scientific data such as "Emerald", "Absco", "Taylor & Francis", "Normex", "Research Gate" as well as journalistic articles, related materials in this field, related books, and articles The convention is subject to the availability of data between 2010 and 2022 in a semi-systematic way. 162 sources were identified and then, to determine the appropriateness of the articles with the research questions, the selected studies were examined and reviewed in terms of the relevance of the title to the purpose of the research, relevance of the abstract, relevance of the content and finally evaluation of the methodology. A number of articles were rejected in each review. Based on the screening, a total of 45 studies were used as the basis of this study. In the next step, the content of the articles was checked and the indicators that were related to the keywords were selected and concepts and categories were extracted and formed based on them and with the thematic analysis method. After that, according to the thematic analysis and the use of open coding, indicators are identified, and by analyzing them in the central coding stage, concepts and categories are explained focusing on the dimensions of difficulty and challenges of work in the media industry. In the coding stage, 93 indicators (codes) were produced, and then in the axial coding, 35 concepts were produced, and finally, 11 main categories and 5 themes were reached.
In the next step, to control the quality of extracted concepts, a comparison of the researcher's opinion with an expert was used. Cohen's kappa index was used to evaluate the agreement between the researcher and the expert. The Kappa coefficient value obtained is 0.643, which shows the good agreement between the researcher and the expert, and the quality indicators extracted by the researcher reached partial modifications, and the final model, and finally the findings were presented.
Findings
In this research, with a meta-synthesis approach, data was collected and after setting the research questions, various sources related to the challenges and dimensions of the difficulty of working in the media were examined between 2010 and 2022, and 163 sources were found. is identified; After that, the quality of the resources was evaluated using the critical evaluation skills program, and finally, 45 sources were approved. After extracting 93 indicators, finally, 35 concepts, 11 categories, and 5 main themes were extracted and conceptualized. In this research, 5 main themes of "health and hygiene challenges", "job nature challenges", "economic challenges", "social-cultural challenges" and "strategic challenges" were explained.
"Difficult job conditions dimension" has the highest frequency in the nature of the job challenge. Difficult working conditions in the media industry are related to things that other industries generally do not face, for example, one of the indicators of the difficulty of working in the media industry in the dimension of difficult working conditions is the difficulty of measuring productivity. The reason for the difficulty of measuring productivity in the media industry is largely due to the intangible nature of work and a high-risk work environment, as well as unstable work relationships.
One of the highlighted indicators in the social-cultural challenge is the "lobby and personal communication network". Networking and personal communication It is very important for career advancement and employment in media industries.
"Low income and salary" has been assigned the most frequency in the economic challenge of media work. This issue is caused by the nature of the media job, part-time jobs, unstable and low job security, and on the other hand, the growing workforce in the media industry faces few job opportunities.
"Psychosocial issues" in health and hygiene challenges were the most frequent in the difficulties of working in the media industry.
"The difficulty of adapting to the constantly changing conditions affected by technology, the Internet, and digitalization" has the highest frequency in the strategic challenges of the difficulty of working in the media industry.
Discussion & Conclusion
This qualitative study is about recognizing the challenges and dimensions of the difficulty of working in the media industry. The findings of the research showed that the existing indicators of work difficulty in the media industries under the 5 big challenges are "health and hygiene", "the nature of the job", "strategic challenges", "social-cultural challenges" and "Economic challenges" are defined. The challenges of "the nature of the job" with a frequency of 157, have received the most attention and focus of the researchers of the researches produced in the field of the challenges of the difficulty of working in the media industry. The dimensions of "job security", "difficult time conditions" and "difficult job conditions" are among the important and prominent challenges of working in the media industry.
This research helps managers in the media industry to have a comprehensive and general look at the challenges of hard work for media workers such as journalists, writers, filmmakers, actors, musicians, female workers, migrant workers, and active children. In the field of media and so on, they can have flexible planning for their human capital in human resource management, to overcome and control their internal weaknesses by achieving the highest level of productivity; Accurately identifying and understanding the problems and challenges of work in the media is the first and important step to solve the crisis and human resources problem in the structure of the media industry.