THE GLOBAL JOURNALIST IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Abstract

This study presents selected findings related to journalistic competencies or skills from surveys of more than 29,000 journalists working in 31 countries or territories, conducted between 1996 and 2011. The data come from survey studies included in Weaver and Willnat's 2012 book, The Global Journalist in the 21st Century. The study focuses on aspects such as journalists' age and education, working conditions, professional values or orientations, opinions about the importance of different aspects of the job, and attitudes toward new reporting skills that are necessary to cope with a multimedia news environment. The study concludes that there are no clear patterns of such competency among the journalists included in this analysis. However, tendencies were observed for some countries to have younger, less experienced, less formally educated journalists who do not highly value the interpretive or analytical role of journalism, who are less satisfied with their work, who have less freedom in their work, and who lack the multimedia skills necessary in the age of online journalism. The study also calls for systematic content analysis studies that investigate whether self-reported competencies of journalists in each nation actually correlate with the quality of the news products they create.

Keywords:

• comparative survey research
• global journalist
• journalism competency
• journalistic roles

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors of this article would like to thank the following scholars for contributing national survey data to this comparative study: Erik Albæk, Jesus Arroyave, Marsha Barber, Marta Milena Barrios, Randal A. Beam, Marc-François Bernier, Peter Bro, Bonnie J. Brownlee, Heinz Bonfadelli, Joseph M. Chan, Mikhail Chernysh, Claes de Vreese, Pedro Farias, Mitsuru Fukuda, Cherian George, Jeremy Ginges, Manimaran Govindasamy, Mark Hanna, Thomas Hanitzsch, Xiaoming Hao, Ari Heinonen, Liesbeth Hermans, Heloiza Golbspan Herscovitz, Dedy N. Hidayat, James Hollings, Beate Josephi, Jyrki Jyrkiäinen, Guido Keel, Jeroen De Keyser, Sung Tae Kim, Mohamed Kirat, Peter Lah, Geoff Lealand, Francis L. F. Lee, Ven-hwei Lo, Maja Malik, Mirko Marr, Aralynn Abare McMane, Claudia Mellado, Oren Meyers, Lars Nord, Jakub Nowak, Shinji Oi, Szymon Ossowski, Svetlana Pasti, Steve Paulussen, Lawrence Pintak, Alexander Pleijter, Lidia Pokrzycka, Karin Raeymaeckers, Sony Jalarajan Raj, Ian Richards, Sergio Roses, Francisco Javier Paniagua Rojano, Shinsuke Sako, Karen Sanders, Armin Scholl, Adam Shehata, Morten Skovsgaard, Agnieszka Stepinska, Jesper Strömbäck, Luiza Svitich, Clement Y. K. So, Young Jun Son, Ezhar Tamam, Yariv Tsfati, Maria Vasarhelyi, Maurice Vergeer, Siegfried Weischenberg, Vinzenz Wyss, Hongzhong Zhang, and Suzana Žilič-Fišer.

Notes

1. In Columbia, two surveys were conducted. In 2006, 300 journalists from the five main Colombian cities (Bogotá, Medellin, Cali, Barranquilla, and Cartagena) were interviewed about perceived personal security, use of new technology, and demographic factors. The sample was drawn with a multi-stage sampling procedure. In 2008, another survey was conducted with a sample of 217 journalists who were identified with the same multi-stage sampling procedure. In Hong Kong, three surveys were conducted among journalists working in mainstream daily newspapers and the news departments of television and radio broadcasters. The questionnaires of all three surveys, which were conducted in 1996, 2001, and 2006, focused on journalists' job satisfaction, professional norms, and beliefs about ethical behavior. In Indonesia, two surveys were conducted. The first survey was fielded between August 2001 and February 2002 with a sample of 385 journalists. The sample was drawn from the provinces of Jakarta and Yogyakarta. The second study is based on a sample of 100 journalists working in 20 news organizations, who were interviewed between November 2007 and January 2008. In Israel, three surveys were conducted: the 2002 (N = 209) and 2004 studies (N = 200) are based on stratified samples of journalists working at Hebrew-language news outlets and alternative media targeting specific populations in Israel. The 2008 survey (N = 333) also included journalists working for local radio stations, foreign-language and financial media, free newspapers, and online media. The focus in all three surveys was on journalists' working conditions, their professional values and ethics, and their perceptions of the Israeli news media. In Switzerland, three surveys were conducted: the first survey (N = 449) contacted journalists working at private broadcasting stations and was carried out between November 2006 and January 2007. The second survey (N = 657) targeted journalists working in the public broadcasting corporation and was carried out between September and October 2007. The third survey (N = 1403) interviewed journalists working in the print media and was conducted between June and July 2008. All three studies used comparable questionnaires, concentrating on aspects such as the journalists' employment situation, role definitions, job satisfaction, and socio-demographics. In the United States, two surveys were conducted: in 2002, a representative survey of 1149 journalists was conducted focusing on journalists' perceptions of their professional roles and values, job satisfaction, and demographic background factors. The second study was based on 400 journalists who participated in the 2002 survey and were interviewed again in 2007.

2. The questions used to assess “job satisfaction” varied slightly from country to country: France: “very happy” to be a journalist; Hong Kong: those scoring 5 on a five-point Likert scale; South Korea: those scoring 9 and 10 on a 11-point satisfaction scale; Israel: “strongly agree” to “I enjoy going to work every day.”

3. The questions used to assess “perceived job autonomy” varied slightly from country to country: Indonesia: “strongly agree” to “I am allowed to take part in decisions that affect my work”; Singapore: percentage of journalists saying they have “almost complete freedom” (8.3 percent) and “considerable freedom” (41.7 percent); Sweden: percentage of journalists answering “almost complete freedom” to the question “How much freedom do you usually have in selecting the stories you work on?”; UAE: journalists saying they are “almost completely free” to select a story to cover; Israel: journalists saying they “strongly agree” with the statement “I feel that my superiors allow me to operate freely.”

4. “Importance of job autonomy” is measured as percentage of journalists saying that job autonomy is a “very important” aspect of their job.