The American Journalist survey -- conducted by researchers at Indiana University's School of Journalism and sponsored by the Knight Foundation -- continues the series of major national studies of U.S. journalists begun in 1971 by sociologist John Johnstone, and continued in 1982 and 1992 by David Weaver and G. Cleveland Wilhoit. Much as the U.S. Census does for the general population, these studies provide an important decennial measure of the pulse of American journalism.
The latest study, based on extended telephone interviews with 1,149 U.S. print and broadcast journalists during the summer and fall of 2002, updates these findings and adds new ones concerning the role of the Internet, and attitudes about business pressures and civic journalism.
Because this study was designed to be a follow-up to the three earlier ones, the researchers closely followed the definitions of a journalist and the sampling methods of the previous surveys. This was necessary to be able to make direct comparisons with the findings from 1971, 1982, and 1992. The researchers also used many of the same questions asked in these earlier surveys, but added some to reflect the changes in journalism during the past decade.
As in the 1992 study, the researchers deliberately added separate samples of journalists from the four main minority journalism associations -- the
Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA), the
National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), the
National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ), and the
Native American Journalists Association (NAJA) -- to ensure adequate numbers for comparison with each other and with majority white journalists. Also added was a separate sample of online or Internet journalists from the
Online News Association (ONA) to make sure there were enough of this kind of journalist to analyze separately. These separate samples were not included with the main random sample when making comparisons with the earlier studies.
The findings reported here come from 50-minute telephone interviews with 1,149 journalists working full time for a wide variety of daily and weekly newspapers, radio and television stations, and wire services and news magazines throughout the United States. Interviews were conducted from July 12 to November 30, 2002, by trained interviewers at the
Center for Survey Research at Indiana University's Bloomington campus.
Journalists in the main sample were chosen randomly from news organizations that were also selected at random from listings in various directories of U.S. news media. The adjusted response rate (eliminating respondents who were never available, could not be located, or were not eligible) for this main sample was 79 percent, and the maximum sampling error at the 95 percent level of confidence is plus or minus 3 percentage points. It is higher for the individual media groups because the size of the sample for each news medium is smaller than the overall sample, especially the wire service and newsmagazine samples.
In drawing the main random sample, we first had to make estimates of how many full-time journalists were working in traditional general-interest mainstream English-language news media in the United States (daily and weekly newspapers, radio and television stations, news magazines, and major wire services). We compared our final main sample percentages with the overall workforce percentages from these estimates and found a close match for all six different media. The largest difference was for the major wire services of AP, UPI, and Reuters (5.5 percentage points) and for news magazines (4.4 percentage points), which we over-sampled because of their relatively small numbers. In the end, the main random sample of 1,149 included 571 daily newspaper journalists, 179 from weekly or less-than-daily newspapers, 163 from television stations and networks, 105 from radio, 69 from the wire services, and 62 from news magazines.
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