Variations on a theme: The professional role conceptions of print and online newspaper journalists

Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

Volumn 82, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 264-280

  Cassidy, William P ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN WHITEWATER   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

MEDIA INDUSTRY; PERCEPTION;

EID: 24144476681     PISSN: 10776990     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/107769900508200203     Document Type: Article

References (96)

1. Jane B. Singer and Shayla Thiel, "In Search of the Forest Amid a Growing Number of Trees" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the AEJMC, August 2002, Miami Beach, FL).
2. Pew Research Center, "Public's News Habits Little Changed by September 11," 2002, (11 January 2003).
3. CyberAtlas, "U.S. Internet Population Continues to Grow," 6 February 2002, (17 November 2002).
4. Nielsen/NetRatings, "United States: Average Web Usage Week Ending March 14, 2004," (22 March 2004).
5. Vin Crosbie, "Weak Online Economics Threaten Qaulity of All Journalism, Pew Study Finds," Online Journalism Review (17 March 2004) (22 March 2004)
6. David Carlson, Online Timeline, (22 March 2004).
7. Jane B. Singer, Martha Tharp, and Amonn Haruta, "Online Staffers: Superstars or Second-class Citizens?" Newspaper Research Journal 20 (summer 1999): 29-47.
8. Tanjev Schultz, Interactive options in Online Journalism: A Content Analysis of 100 U S. Newspapers," Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 5 (September 1999) (12 January 2003).
9. Newslink, "Daily Newspapers (17 November 2002).
10. Roger D. Wimmer and Joseph R. Dominick, Mass Media Research: An Introduction, 6th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1999).
11. J. D. Lasica, "A Scorecard for Net News Ethics," Online Journalism Review (2 April 2001) (12 January 2003);
12. Berlinda Nadarajan and Penghwa Ang, Credibility and Journalism on the Internet: How Online Newspapers Handle Errors and Corrections" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the AEJMC, August 1998, New Orleans, LA).
13. Lasica, "A Scorecard for Net News Ethics."
14. Ann M. Brill, "Online Journalist Embrace New Marketing Function," Newspaper Research Journal 22 (spring 2001): 28-40.
15. Andrew J. Flanagin and Miriam J. Metzger, "Perceptions of Internet Information Credibility," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 77 (autumn 2000): 515-40;
16. Spiro Kiousis, "Public Trust or Mistrust? Perceptions of Media Creadibility in the Information Age," Mass Communication and Society 4 (fall 2001): 381-403;
17. Thomas J. Johnson and Barbara K. Kaye, "Cruising is Believing? Comparing Internet and Traditional Sources on Media Credibility Measures," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 75 (summer 1998): 325-40.
18. Singer and Thiel, "In Search of the Forest."
19. Jane B. Singer, "Online Journalists: Foundations for Research Into Their Changing Roles," Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 4 (September 1998), (10 August 2002).
20. Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, The Elements of Journalism (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001), 24.
21. Bill Boyd, "Adopting a Digital Mindset," Poynter Report, 16 February 1999, (11 January 2003);
22. Joann Byrd, "Online Journalism Ethics: A New Frontier," The American Editor 71 (Novermber 1996), 6-7.
23. Brill, "Online Journalists."
24. David H. Weaver and G. Cleveland Wilhoit, The American Journalist in the 1990s: U. S. News People at the End of an Era (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996), xi.
25. See Warren Breed, "Social Control in the Newsroom: A Functional Analysis," Social Forces 33 (June 1955): 326-35;
26. see James Ettema and D. Charles Whitney, "Professional Mass Communicators," in Handbook of Communication Science, ed. Charles H. Berger and Steven H. Chaffee (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1987), 747-80;
27. see Mark Fishman, Manufacturing the News (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1980);
28. see John Soloski, "News Reporting and Professionalism: Some Constraints on the Reporting of the News," Media, Culture and Society 11 (April 1989): 207-228;
29. and Gaye Tuchman, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978).
30. Pamela Shoemaker and Stephen Reese, Mediating the Message: Theories of Influence on Media Content, 2d ed. (White Plains, NY. Longman, 1996).
31. Fishman, Manufacturing the News, 14.
32. Shoemaker and Reese, Mediating the Message.
33. Daniel Berkowitz, "Organizing News: News as a Workplace Product," in Social Meanings of News: A Text Reader, ed. Danel Berkowitz (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997), 105-106.
34. Tuchman, Making News.
35. Soloski, "News Reporting and Professionalism."
36. Soloski, "News Reporting and Professionalism."
37. Breed, "Social Control in the Newsroom."
38. John W.C. Johnstone, Edward J. Slawski, and William W. Bowman, The News People: A Sociological Portrait of American Journalists and Their Work (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1976).
39. Johnstone, Slawski, and Bowman, The News People, 114.
40. David H. Weaver and G. Cleveland Wilhoit, The American Journalist: A Portrait of U.S. News People and Their Work (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986).
41. Weaver and Wilhoit, The American Journalist in the 1990s.
42. David M. Arant and Janna Q. Anderson, "Newspaper Online Editors Support Traditional Ethics," Newspaper Research Journal 22 (fall 2001): 57-69.
43. Jane B. Singer, "Still Guarding the Gate? The Newspaper Journalist's Role in an Online World," Convergence: The Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies 3 (spring 1997): 72-89;
44. Jane B. Singer, "The Metro Wide Web: Changes in Newspapers' Gatekeeping Role Online," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 78 (spring 2001): 65-80.
45. Singer, "Still Guarding the Gate?"
46. Singer, "The Metro Wide Web."
47. Singer, "The Metro Wide Web," 78.
48. Brill, "Online Journalists."
49. Weaver and Wilhoit, The American Journalist in the 1990s.
50. Singer, "Still Guarding the Gate?"
51. Weaver and Wilhoit, The American Journalist in the 1990s.
52. Weaver and Wilhoit, The American Journalist in the 1990s.
53. Weaver and Wilhoit, The American Journalist in the 1990s, 248.
54. Mark Deuze, "Online Journalism: Modeling the First Generation of News Media on the World Wide Web," First Monday 3 (December 2001), (15 November 2002).
55. Weaver and Wilhoit, The American Journalist in the 1990s.
56. Weaver and Wilhoit, The American Journalist in the 1990s.
57. McAdams interviewed online newspaper staff members and found that those holding job titles of "editor" and "producer" made the types of journalistic decisions in keeping with this study's definition of a journalist. See Mindy J. McAdams, "Report on Editorial-Advertising Roles in Online Newspaper Staffs," American Society of Newspaper Editors (1 January 2000), < http://www.asne.org/print.cfm?printer_pagen%2Findex%2Ecfm%3Faction%3D404%2601> (12 January 2003).
58. Weaver and Wilhoit, The American Journalist in the 1990s.
59. Brian L. Massey and Mark R. Levy, "Interactivity, Online Journalism and English-language Web Newspapers in Asia," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 76 (spring 1999): 138-51.
60. Arant and Meyer [Mark D. Arant and Philip Meyer, "Changing Values in the Newsroom: A Survey of Daily Newspaper Staff Members," Nieman Reports 51 (fall 1997): 55-62] argue that conducting a purely random sample of newspapers over-represents the readers of smaller newspapers and excludes many who read larger newspapers. In order to best represent readers with the sampling design, this study, employing Arant and Meyer's methods, took the 2 September 2002 weekday circulation figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulation of the 1,191 dailies listed in Newslink and hypothetically "stacked" all the issues on top of each other for a total weekday circulation of 52,870,276. A random starting point was chosen, and then after consulting studies to determine the print newspaper and online newspaper journalist population see American Society of Newspaper Editors, Newsroom Employment Drops Sharply;
61. Diversity Increases, 8 April 2002, http://www.asne.org/ index.cfm?id=3432> (1 July 2003);
62. see Arant and Anderson, "Newspaper Online Editors," and McAdams, "Report on Editorial-Advertising Roles," a newspaper from the "stack" was pulled at every 25,790 copy for the print journalist sample and every 30,211th newspaper to yield the online journalist sample.
63. and McAdams, "Report on Editorial-Advertising Roles," a newspaper from the "stack" was pulled at every 25,790 copy for the print journalist sample and every 30,211th newspaper to yield the online journalist sample.
64. Jane B. Singer, "Campaign Contribution: Online Newspaper Coverage of Election 2000," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 80 (spring 2003): 39-56.
65. Jane B. Singer, "Click to Contact: Online Newspaper Accountability," Media Ethics 12 (spring 2001): 21-23;
66. Singer, "Campaign Contributions."
67. In all cases where this was necessary, the contact information for the reporter was provided. Arant and Meyer (Arant and Meyer, "Changing Values in the Newsroom,") utilized this method in selecting a portion of newspaper journalists sampled in their study. In the hopes of obtaining responses from online staff members of these papers, a generic e-mail was sent to the organization asking for the message to be forwarded to the newspaper's online staff. This procedure did not result in an oversampling of reporters. A 2002 census of daily newspaper workers (ASNE, Newsroom Employment Drops Sharply; Diversity Increases) found 42.4% of respondents were reporters, compared to 43.6% for this study.
68. Don A. Dillman, Mail and Internet Surveys: The Tailored Design Method, 2d ed. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1999)
69. When drawing the online sample, it became very apparent that there was significant variation in the number of online staff members at newspapers. Further compounding this problem is that earlier research made no distinction between online staffers whose jobs were journalistic in nature and those in other types of positions. As a result, some newspapers, because they had small online journalistic staffs in relation to print circulation, were unable to fulfill the number of survey recipients accorded them in the sampling design of the study. In addition, there were some cases where a number of newspapers shared a single Web site manned by a small staff. Examples of this include suburban newspapers in the Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco metropolitan areas. As a result the number in the online sample was only 1,280.
70. ASNE, Newsroom Employment Drops Sharply, Diversity Increases.
71. Weaver and Wilhoit, The American Journalist in the 1990s;
72. and Paul Voakes, "The Newspaper Journalists of the '90s," American Society of Newspaper Editors, 31 October 1997, (12 January 2003)
73. William P. Cassidy, "May the Force be With You: The Influence of Gatekeeping Forces on the Professional Role Conceptions of Print and Online Newspaper Journalists" (Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon, 2003).
74. Weaver and Wilhoit, The American Journalist in the 1990s, 263.
75. Weaver and Wilhoit, The American Journalist in the 1990s.
76. Weaver and Wilhoit, The American Journalist in the 1990s.
77. To aid interpretation of Table 2, means and standard deviations were divided by the number of items in each index, so all are based on a 7-point scale.
78. Weaver and Wilhoit, The American Journalist in the 1990s.
79. Weaver and Wilhoit, The American Journalist in the 1990s.
80. Pablo J. Boczkowski, Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005), 184.
81. David Shaw, "New Media Playing Field Opens Way to More Errors," Los Angeles Times, 6 August 1998, sec. B, p. 4;
82. Lasica, "A Scorecard for Net News Ethics."
83. Howard J. Finberg, Martha L. Stone, and Diane Lynch, "Digital Journalism Credibility Study," Online News Association, 31 January 2002, (11 January 2003);
84. Thomas E. Ruggiero, "Perceptions of Traditional American Journalists Towards the Internet as a News Source" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the AEJMC, Baltimore, MD, August 1998).
85. Finberg, Stone, and Lynch, "Digital Journalism Credibility Study";
86. Johnson and Kaye, "Cruising is Believing?"
87. Lasica, "A Scorecard for Net News Ethics."
88. Julia Keller, "How to Keep the Watchdogs Watching," Nieman Reports 52 (summer 1998): 52-53;
89. Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, "Are Watchdogs an Endangered Species?" Columbia Journalism Review 40 (January/February 2001): 50-51.
90. Weaver and Wilhoit, The American Journalist in the 1900s.
91. Weaver and Wilhoit, The American Journalist in the 1990s, 140.
92. Kim Bartel Sheehan, "E-mail Survey Response Rates: A Review," Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 6 (January 2001), (10 November 2002).
93. Arant and Anderson, "Newspaper Online Editors";
94. Singer Tharp, and Haruta, "Online Staffers."
95. Arant and Meyer, "Changing Values in the Newsroom."
96. Boczkowski, Digitizing the News.