Abstract
The publication of The American Journalist in the Digital Age: A Half-Century Perspective in late 2017 was both timely and untimely. As the authors suggest in the introductory section, there has been a surge of interest in journalism and the journalist since the 2016 US presidential election – ‘not since the Watergate period of the early 1970s … have journalists have so reviled by some, yet so clearly crucial to the informational “bloodstream” of American democracy’ (p. 1). A book that provides rigorous survey data on the demographics, working conditions, and professional attitudes of American journalists is extremely helpful in extending our knowledge of the state of this crucial part of the democratic fabric. Yet in the rapidly changing technological, economic, and political environment, a 4-year gap between the collection of the data and the publication of the book means the data are addressing questions on journalism from a pre-Trump era.
The study, conducted in 2013, is the fifth comprehensive survey of US journalists, spanning 42 years to provide invaluable data on the changing and unchanging faces of American journalism (Johnstone et al., 1976; Weaver et al., 2006; Weaver and Wilhoit, 1986, 1996). It starts with the demographics of American journalists. Not surprisingly, this was a shrinking group (from about 116,000 in 2002 to about 83,000 in 2013) and an aging one (47 years old on average, 6 years older than in 2002). The good news is that the ‘best and brightest’ did not leave the field, and that women and ethnic and racial minorities were slightly better represented than before, though the profession was still dominated by those who were white (89.2%) and male (62.5%).
In terms of political attitudes, American journalists remained more liberal than the general public, and compared with a decade ago, there were much more journalists claiming to be ‘middle of the road’ and much fewer of them to leaning to the right. Educationally, 92% of them got at least a 4-year college degree. But the authors argue that they were not ‘elites’ if we compare their education level with other professions, and consider their average salaries (the median amount was US$50,028).
The book then continues to present data on the working conditions and professional values of American journalists. One important finding is that the job autonomy eroded since the 1970s and the decline during the last decade was significant. The authors speculate that this might be due to the constrained resources and time, though there is limited data in the survey that could test the hypothesis. The overall rating of the performance of their newsrooms has also declined significantly during the past four decades. Job satisfaction rate also dropped from 2002 to 2013 (83.9% vs 74.6%). Despite these disheartening findings, American journalists still held a strong belief in being a watchdog of government while the recent change is that more journalists considered it important to provide analysis of complex problems. In terms of ethics and reporting practices, one major finding is a significant decline in using aggressive, controversial reporting tactics.
Similar to previous books, the authors further analyze two subsets of the data: women journalists and minority journalists. The chapter on social media use is new to this series of research. It reveals the frequent use of social media among American journalists and the mixed feelings toward its impact on journalism: a large majority of them worried about the declining accuracy and quality related to the use of social media.
The main body of the book is rich and clear. It should be noted that the authors provide not only descriptive data, but also a large amount of regression analyses that reveal the correlations among variables. However, the concluding chapter mainly repeats the numeric findings that have already been summarized and there is a lack of synthesis of the findings and further discussions on theoretical and practical implications.
The appendices provide detailed explanations on methodology as well as the questionnaire used in the survey. The transparency of this series of research has been consistently maintained. Because of the incomparable value of longitudinal data, as each new study being conducted, the value of this series of research increases exponentially. However, the tension between the increasingly changing environment for journalism (in terms of not only technology but also business models and professional practices) and the lengthy academic publishing cycle poses serious challenges to the research team. The mismatch between the data collected and the questions waiting to be answered at the time of publication, as reflected in this book, is not likely to go away in future studies of this series. The research team could consider conducting the studies at a higher frequency, experimenting with other forms of publication, and trying other creative solutions.