Job Satisfaction of Minority Journalists at U.S. Daily Newspapers
By Edward C. Pease (©1991)
Doctoral Dissertation
E.W Scripps School of Journalism
Ohio University • Athens, Ohio
CHAPTER 4: Methodology
This study sought not only to update the Institute for Journalism Education’s 1985 “Quiet Crisis” study of 329 newspaper journalists,1 but to expand those benchmark data with an eye toward providing a yardstick for individual news organizations interested in assessing the climate for minority employees in their own workplaces. The study also was intended to replicate some portions of the 1971 national survey of 1,328 print and broadcast journalists by John Johnstone and his colleagues2 and the 1982-83 replication of the Johnstone study by David H. Weaver and G. Cleveland Wilhoit of Indiana University of 1,001 print and broadcast journalists.3 As a further guide, this study examined many of the areas covered by a 1982 study of 489 journalists at eight U.S. newspapers by Judee Burgoon, Michael Burgoon and Charles Atkin.4 While the Johnstone, Weaver and Wilhoit, and Burgoon, Burgoon and Atkin studies did not focus primarily on the question of race in newspaper newsrooms, this study did. The object of this study was to provide the most complete and comprehensive information to date on how issues of race and ethnicity affect job aspirations, satisfaction and retention, and how factors of race affect the climate for nonwhite journalists in U.S. daily newspaper newsrooms.
Population: Both the Johnstone study and the Weaver and Wilhoit replication a decade later defined their populations as “the full-time editorial manpower responsible for the information content of English-language mass communications in the United States.”5 In other words, those studies covered all publicly owned mass news media industries: daily and weekly newspapers, news magazines, radio and television stations and wire services.6 The 1985 IJE study focused entirely on newspapers.7
This study also examined only daily newspapers, defining the population as all employees of the news-editorial departments of the country’s 1,545 general-circulation daily newspapers. Those personnel were defined as all employees with direct or supervisory responsibilities for news coverage and content, defined by the newspaper industry as newsroom professionals. All newspaper personnel from publisher down, if they had direct involvement in the news product and the newsroom workforce, were included as eligible participants – all full-time reporters, copy editors, desk editors, columnists and editorial writers, newsroom managers and executives, photographers, graphics artists and any others involved in regular, daily preparation of news content. As in the Johnstone and Weaver and Wilhoit studies, editorial cartoonists were eligible participants, but comic strip artists were not.8 Unlike the previous studies, newsroom photographers, librarians and graphics personnel who were routinely involved in news operations as part of their jobs were included; “back-shop” technicians and other none editorial staff were not.
Sampling: A modified version of the sampling scheme used by the previous two studies was employed in this instance to draw a national sample of 30 daily newspapers, from which a random sample of newsroom professionals was drawn.
The listing of U.S. daily newspapers contained in the most recent edition of the Editor & Publisher International Yearbook 9 was used as the population of eligible newspaper organizations from which to draw the sample. Realities within the newspaper business and at the country’s 1,545 daily newspapers required some purposive manipulation of a purely random sample of newspapers to provide a sample responsive to the needs of the study; that is, newspapers employing both white and nonwhite journalists for whom questions regarding race within the context of job performance and advancement have some relevance. Of the 1,545 daily newspapers in the United States,10 51 percent – 788 newspapers – employ no persons of color in their newsrooms. According to 1991 American Society of Newspaper Editors figures, all U.S. daily newspapers with circulations of 100,000 and more, and 93 percent of newspapers with between 50,000 and 100,000 circulation employed minorities in their newsrooms in 1990.11 Further, more than 80 percent – or 630 – of the newspapers that have no minorities in their newsrooms are smaller than 25,000. Newspapers in this circulation category constitute 69.2 percent of all the U.S. dailies, but only 25.3 percent of total U.S. daily newspaper circulation and employ just 24 percent of the total newsroom workforce.12 In other words, although nearly seven of 10 U.S. daily newspapers are of this smaller circulation category, taken together they constitute only one quarter of total U.S. daily newspaper employment and circulation.
Despite this preponderance of smaller newspapers, it was decided, based on the goals of this project, to focus on larger newspapers – 50,000 daily circulation or more. Clearly, issues of race and ethnicity are more likely at larger newspapers to have meaning in terms of workforce, newspaper performance and content in than in newsrooms where few or no journalists of color ever had worked and where minorities represent only a small percentage of the newsroom population. Newspapers with 50,000 circulation or more constitute the great majority of the 49 percent of U.S. dailies that employ minority journalists, so respondents selected from these papers would be more likely to have first-hand knowledge of issues of race and ethnicity in the newsroom. In addition, these larger papers publish in communities with more diverse populations and, assumedly, a concomitantly higher consciousness of issues of diversity in coverage and newspaper content.
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TABLE 1: Data on U.S. Daily Newspapers, by Circulation Category
No. of No. of % Total % Sample No. Papers Mean
Employees Papers Workforce Workforce in Sample Staff Size
I. 500,000+ 6,080 15 11% 15.5% 4 405
II. 250,000-500,000 4,975 22 9% 21.1% 5 226
III. 100,000-250,000 11,984 76 22% 32.2% 9 158
IV. 50,000-100,000 9,728 134 18% 31.1% 9 73
Subtotals 32,767 247* 60% 100% 27 --
Less than 50,000 21,913 1,348 40% -- -- 16
TOTALS 54,680 1,545 100% -- -- 34
* The 247 largest newspaper in the country constitute 15.5% of all newspapers but employ 60% of newsroom professions.
Source: 1990 Editor & Publisher Yearbook & American Society of Newspaper Editors
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The 247 newspapers of circulations of 50,000 or more represent just 15.5 percent of all U.S. dailies, but account for 74.7 percent of the total daily newspaper circulation and employ 60 percent of the newspaper industry’s news-editorial workforce, 58,680 in 1990.13 Within those 247 daily newspapers, four size categories were selected, based on categories employed by the annual Editor & Publisher International Yearbook and the American Society of Newspaper Editors: Category I: 500,000 daily circulation or more; Category II: 250,000-500,000 circulation; Category III: 100,000-250,000 circula-tion; Category IV: 50,000-100,000 circulation.14 (See Table 1.)
Within Circulation Category I (500,000+) were 15 eligible U.S. newspapers, contributing 21.9 percent of the total U.S. daily newspaper circulation and employing 11 percent of its newsroom workforce but 18 percent of the news-editorial employees at newspapers with circulations of 50,000 or more. For this reason, 17 percent, or 5, of the 30 newspapers surveyed were selected from this circulation category (see Table 2). There are 22 U.S. newspapers in Circulation Category II (250,000-500,000), representing 12.1 percent of total U.S. newspaper circulation and employing 9 percent of total news-editorial workforce, 15 percent of the 50,000+ workforce; 17 percent (5) of the newspapers surveyed came from this size category. There are 76 newspapers in Category III (100,000-250,000), representing 28.8 percent of total newspaper circulation and employing 22 percent of the total U.S. daily newsroom workforce but 37 percent of the 50,000+ circulation workforce; thus, 37 percent of the 30 papers of this circulation category in the sample, or 11 newspapers, were selected for the study. Category IV (50,000-100,000) includes 134 newspapers, representing 11.9 percent of total daily newspaper circulation and employing 18 percent of U.S. daily newspaper newsroom employees but 30 percent of those included in the sample; 30 percent of the 30-newspaper sample, or nine papers, were selected from this circulation category.15.
TABLE 2 Here
Individual newspapers within each size category were selected randomly, although care was taken to ensure geographic representation among four equally sized quadrants of the country. The names of the 247 newspapers with 50,000 circulation or more, written on slips of paper, were drawn at random to fill each size category; in cases where the final configuration in each category did not offer geographic representation, the entire size category sample was redrawn.
Each newspaper was contacted, first by telephone and then with a follow-up letter and packet of sample materials describing the study and the requirements of each newspaper. During this process, six of the originally selected newspapers declined to participate and replacements were drawn using the same random selection process. One newspaper editor said he had a policy not to permit surveying of his staff; another said, “We didn’t like that survey.” Two papers, members of the same newspaper group, were already undergoing a proprietary newsroom study. One publisher said budget cuts were about to be announced to the newsroom, and suggested that it would be a bad time for a job satisfaction study; another, after reviewing the draft questionnaire, said it gave employees too many reasons to blame others for lack of advancement.
Once the study was well underway, two other newspaper publishers decided not to permit their staffs to participate and withdrew. As it was too late in the process to replace them, the number of respondents in their circulation categories were adjusted to maintain representativeness by circulation. Finally, one other newspaper was dropped from the study after it was learned that management had not followed random distribution procedures in the newsroom and that, in fact, the questionnaires had been
FIGURE 1 Here
withdrawn from the newsroom. Six questionnaires returned from that newspaper – all from whites, five from male managers – were discarded. The resulting final sample of 27 participating newspapers, ranging in circulation size from 55,000 to more than 1.3 million, is listed in Table 2; the geographic representation is indicated in Figure 1.
Respondent selection: After respondent newspapers were selected, a target number of respondents was set at each circulation size to ensure that the final mix of respondents would be proportional by circulation to that of the total U.S. newsroom workforce. The respondent sample size – 2,000 respondents – was selected to permit subsamples large enough for statistical significance. The distribution of the respondent sample is described in Table 3.
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TABLE 3: Distribution of Respondents by Circulation Category
Circulation Proportion No. Respondents No. Papers No. Respondents
Category of Total N per Category in Sample per Paper
in Sample
500,000+ 18.0% 360 4 80
250,000-500,000 20.0% 400 5 76
100,000-250,000 31.0% 620 9 58
50,000-100,000 31.0% 620 9 58
TOTALS 100.0% 2,000 27 --
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Within the 500,000+ circulation category were four participating newspapers: USA Today (1,325,507), the Washington Post (772,749), Newsday (700,174) and the San Francisco Chronicle (560,460) (see Table 2). (Note: the original sample was five newspapers, but one dropped out; the number of respondents at the remaining papers was adjusted to compensate.) In order for the respondent sample to reflect the study population of the 247 papers of 50,000 circulation or more, the number of survey participants selected in each circulation category was weighted. Papers of 500,000 circulation or more employ about 18 percent of the total newsroom workforce, so 18 percent of the respondents were drawn from the papers in this category – 360, or 80 for each of the four newspapers in this size sample.
In the second size category – 250,000 to 500,000 – there are five newspapers: the Houston Chronicle (437,481), the Minneapolis Star-Tribune (406,292), the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (376,888), the Portland Oregonian (310,446) and the San Jose Mercury-News (274,848); 20 percent of the respondent pool – 400 news-editorial employees, or 76 per newspaper – was selected at random from these newspapers.
There were nine papers in the third circulation category, 100,000-250,000: the Seattle Times (233,106), the Pittsburgh Press (232,282), the Memphis Commercial Appeal (209,205), the Arkansas Gazette (154,001), the Akron Beacon Journal (153,550), the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (150,190), the Riverside Press-Enterprise (147,424), the Nashville Tennessean (126,092) and the Omaha World-Herald (121,985). Thirty-one percent of the respondents – 620 newsroom employees, or about 68 at each of the nine newspapers – were selected at random from these papers.
There were nine newspapers in the fourth circulation category, 50,000-100,000: the Jackson Clarion-Ledger (99,830), the Spokane Spokesman-Review (97,128), the San Bernadino Sun (87,012), the Arizona Daily Star (81,869), the Oakland Press (Michigan) (74,028), the Springfield (Mo.) News-Leader (61,900), the Pensacola News-Journal (59,337), the Fargo Forum (54,726) and the Charleston Gazette (55,673). The final 30 percent – 620 – were selected from these newspapers.
Survey administration: Contacts in each of participating newspaper’s newsroom agreed to administer the survey in-house. The administrator was instructed to divide the total number of eligible respondents by the number of respondents requested from his or her paper, and then to select every nth name from an alphabetical personnel list. Each of these employees was given a copy of the questionnaire and an attached instruction sheet, along with a postage-paid return envelope. The cover letter explained the nature of the study and stressed that respondent confidentiality would be closely guarded, pointing out that the postage-paid envelope permitted respondents to bypass supervisors and return completed forms directly to the researchers at Ohio University. In the case of a newsroom employee who was selected but declined to participate, the next name on the alphabetized newsroom personnel list was picked as replacement.
Because the object of this study was to explore the attitudes of minority journalists about job satisfaction and workplace conditions, and to compare these responses with those of their white co-workers, two additional sampling procedures were undertaken to bolster the number of minority journalist participants. In a random sample of these newsrooms, the best that could have been hoped for would have been that 7.86 percent of respondents – the proportion of minority journalists in all U.S. newspaper newsrooms when the study took place – would be nonwhite. This would have been too small a number (157) to yield much by way of either statistical or qualitative data about minorities in the newspaper business. For this reason, participating newspapers were asked to provide questionnaires packets to all nonwhite newsroom employees who had not been selected in the random selection process. In addition, 210 more questionnaire packets were mailed to newspaper journalists randomly selected from the membership lists of the four major national minority journalists associations: The Asian American Journalists Association, the Native American Press Association, the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
Thus, a total of 2,209 randomly selected journalists received survey questionnaires. The participating newspapers distributed their questionnaires in November 1990, and the randomly selected minority association members received theirs by first class mail by mid-December. Each newspaper was called three weeks after the packets of questionnaires had been mailed to see if they had ben distributed, and again three weeks later to ask administrators to circulate newsroom memos urging laggards to complete and return the forms. Returned questionnaires were accepted through March 1991, with a total of 1,328 valid questionnaires arriving in time to be counted; another 27 questionnaires arriving after the cut-off date were too late to be counted.
The return rate for the entire project was 60.1 percent; Table 4 indicates the return rates by newspaper, circulation category and gender.
TABLE 4
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NOTES: CHAPTER 4—Methodology
1. Ellis Cose, The Quiet Crisis: Minority Journalists and Newsroom Opportunity. (Berkeley, Calif.: Institute for Journalism Education, 1985).
2. John W.C. Johnstone, Edward J. Slawski and William W. Bowman, The News People: A Sociological Portrait of American Journalists and Their Work. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976).
3. David H. Weaver and G. Cleveland Wilhoit, The American Journalist: A Portrait of U.S. News People and Their Work. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).
4. Judee K. Burgoon, Michael Burgoon and Charles K. Atkin, The World of the Working Journalist. (NY: Newspaper Advertising Bureau, 1982).
5. Johnstone, et al., op. cit., p. 5; Weaver and Wilhoit, op. cit., p. 168.
6. Weaver and Wilhoit, ibid.
7. Cose, op. cit., p. 11.
8. Weaver and Wilhoit., op. cit., p. 169.
9. 1991 Editor & Publisher International Yearbook. (New York: Editor & Publisher Co., 1991).
10. Ibid.
11. American Society of Newspaper Editors, “1990 Newspaper Employment Survey,” April 1991, pp. 1, 5; Table E.
12. Ibid; E&P Yearbook, op. cit.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. See ASNE, The Changing Face of the Newsroom. (Reston, VA: American Society of Newspaper Editors, 1987), p. 105.
• Chapter 5.
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