ABSTRACT
Employee newspapers, magazines, and newsletters are generally edited, financed, and produced by a firm’s management and, in most instances, are distributed without charge to the readership. They constitute a means of communicating with employees and furthering specific company aims. As a journalistic form, employee newspapers or magazines (Werkzeitschriften) are distinguished by regular but relatively infrequent publication intervals (weekly or quarterly), by being targeted at regular employees working within a single firm and affiliated with that firm’s professional specialty, by recent but not upto-the-minute coverage, and by a multifaceted but limited scope (encompassing not only the diversity of a particular company but also its procedures and practices). A rather contrary view holds that publications for employees are neither journals nor newspapers, but constitute a unique journalistic form of their own.1 As a medium of information, employee magazines act (as does informal communication between employees) to shape attitudes and influence socio-economic outlooks. The magazines replicate, round out, and intensify information and promote certain interpretations of it. Employees surveyed in the 1980s rated a number of topics covered by their
internal company newsletter as important. These included commentaries by management, inflation, stagnation, and the economy generally, planned rationalizations, wages and how they were determined, hiring, layoffs, personal stories, and employee suggestions. Sports, business, nature, politics, and entertainment were mentioned by those surveyed as non-professional areas of interest of other print media such as employee letters, bulletins, flyers, employee handbooks, etc. as well as internal communication methods such as display windows, posters, bulletin boards, letters by pneumatic tube and public address systems, the employee magazine or newspaper rates as the most important and heavily used internal information medium.2
