The 2008 Journalist Survey, conducted by the Pew project for excellence in Journalism and the
It’s not, as in years past, that journalists are resisting the expansion of the Web. It’s not that journalists see bloggers taking over the role of journalism and diminishing the values at the same time. It's not that consumers have more options on how to get their news.
What journalists see as the crisis in the industry is the influence of economics: staffing cuts in the newsrooms; covering fewer things; and what journalists perceive as a broken economic model.
The real problem for the industry is that their executives don’t agree. The survey shows reporters give their leaders a very different ranking than they give themselves. “Just 12 percent of national reporters and six percent of local gave their leaders a rating of excellent. Over half of executives offered this highest mark about themselves.”
“Even greater divides exist over the influence of corporate owners in story selection. Reporters were five to six times as likely to say that corporate owners had a great deal of influence over coverage versus not a single national executive and 2 percent of local executives.”
Divisions between management and its workers is not new. And, it’s long been known that journalists are a skeptic lot and naturally distrust their employers more than normal. But the spate of corporate takeovers and monopolies in the industry has amplified that division. The sacredness of the bottom line is in direct conflict with the sacredness of journalistic values and serving the public.
If the public is going to be served by the efforts of the news media in the way the media purports to want to serve the public, then management and worker bees better find ways not only to bridge these emotional divides but work together to bring innovation to their newsrooms that all can be proud of.
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