How are news executives doing leading the enterprise through choppy waters? More than half of top editors rate their performance as excellent. In the trenches it looks different. Only 12% of national reporters and 6% of local reporters give their boss a top mark.
This is but one of a bunch of hard measures of the soft issues of pessimism and morale in a new survey of journalists wrapped into the State of the News Media 2008 report, released earlier this week. The
survey itself is the work of Pew's polling arm -- the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press -- with commentary by Tom Rosenstiel and Amy Mitchell of Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism.
The disconnect goes further than job ratings. While broadly embracing online possibilities, nearly half of the rank-and-file journalists see the harried 24/7 news cycle as a quality problem. The majority of executives and senior editors do not.
At the local level only 23% of reporters felt owners and top editors shared their values. By contrast, 47% of executives and 31% of senior editors felt that way about reporters.
No surprise (but it is nice to see a measure) more than half of those surveyed now see economic pressures as the industry's top problem. As recently as a similar Pew survey three years ago, quality was still rated the top issue. It has fallen from 41% among national reporters and 33 % among local to about 20% for each group. Credibility was rated as high as 30% by national reporters and 34% among locals as a top issue as recently as the 1999 survey. Now it gets only a 9% mention.
"The concern is not just what changing economics
might do," Rosenstiel and Mitchell write. "Journalists believe business cutbacks have already hurt their news organization. About three-quarters of print and online journalists say this."
Nearly nine out of ten print journalists say the economic pressures are getting worse. So do four out of five online journalists (who are also twice as likely as their print counterparts to see direct business pressure shaping content).
The management/troops perception gap narrowed some on job security. Among both reporters and senior editors, just 30% said that it is not likely at all that they will lose their job in the next three years. More than half of the corporate executives thought they would be safe.
The survey was conducted by phone interview and online survey in fall 2007 and drew 585 respondents.
