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Methodology
E-mail addresses from 1,452 U.S. daily newspapers were collected from The Editor & Publisher International Yearbook (2006). The contacts were mostly editors or managing editors, who then received an e-mail in January 2007 that explained the study and requested the staff e-mail lists of their full-time newspaper employees. Because some newspapers did not list an e-mail address for an editor or managing editor in the E&P Yearbook, the recruitment e-mail was sent to a general news mailbox.
Of the 1,452 e-mails, 338 were dead accounts. Of the remaining 1,114 newspapers, representatives from 74 responded and provided access to their staff e-mail lists. A database of 2,791 e-mail addresses of newsroom journalists was created.
Six sections were included in the 73-question Web survey but only five of those sections will be examined in this study. Those sections include job satisfaction, work and family life, job demands, social support and background. The “job satisfaction” section included the three-question MOAQ job satisfaction scale, and nine-question perceived organizational support scale, which asked respondents to answer using a Likert-type scale (1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree). The “work and family life” section included the five-question work-family conflict scale, which used a Likert-type scale (1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree). The seven-question “job demands” section asked respondents to respond on a Likert-type scale (1 = never to 5 = extremely often). The “social support” section included the 12-question social support scale (1 = not at all to 4 very much) and the three-question role overload scale (1 = definitely false to 4 = definitely true). In the final section, “background,” demographic information was collected, including gender, age, journalism experience, job title, race, newspaper circulation size, salary, marital status, parental responsibilities, intention to leave journalism and work hours per week. Questions about newsroom staff reductions within the past year, online responsibilities, intentions to leave journalism and newspaper ownership group were included in this section as well.
In February 2007, 2,791 full-time newspaper journalists were sent an explanatory e-mail and a Web link to the voluntary and anonymous survey, which was made available on freeonlinesurvey.com. After discarding 120 dead e-mail accounts, the sample was reduced to 2,671. The respondents received a reminder e-mail in March 2007.
Of the 2,671 journalists, 715 completed the survey for a response rate of 26.7 percent, which aligns with Web survey response rates in other studies (Reinardy, 2006; Asch, as cited in Schonlau, Fricker & Elliott, 2002; Jones & Pitt, 1999).