Newspaper journalism in crisis: Burnout on the rise, eroding young

journalists’ career commitment

 

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Methodology

The Editor & Publisher International Yearbook (2006) was used to extract e-mail contacts at 1,452 U.S. daily newspapers. Most of the contacts were managing editors. An e-mail was then sent to the managing editors in January 2007, explaining the study and requesting the staff e-mail lists of their full-time newspaper employees. If e-mail addresses of managing editors were not available, 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, 74 newspaper representatives responded and provided access to their staffs’ e-mail lists. From that list, a database of 2,791 journalists was established.

Procedures for the survey and the study was approved by the Ball State University Institutional Review Board. The 73-question survey consisted of six sections but only two will be used in this study, including job relationship and background. The “job relationship” section included the 16-question MBI-GS, which uses a Likert-type scale (0 = never to 6 = every day). In the “background” section, demographic questions such as experience, age, gender, race, job title, newspaper circulation size, salary, marital status, parental responsibilities, intention to leave journalism and work hours per week were included. The section also included questions regarding newsroom staff reductions, online responsibilities and newspaper ownership group.

An explanatory e-mail was sent to 2,791 full-time newsroom staffers in February 2007. The e-mail included a Web link to a freeonlinesurvey.com survey. The survey was voluntary and anonymous. Of the 2,791 staffers, 120 were dead accounts, leaving 2,671. A reminder e-mail was sent in March 2007.

Of the 2,671, 770 respondents completed the survey, providing a response rate of 29 percent, which is similar to Web survey response rates in other studies (Reinardy, 2006a; Asch, as cited in Schonlau, Fricker & Elliott, 2002; Everingham, as cited in Schonlau, et al., 2002; Jones & Pitt, 1999).

 

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