If any of the soon-to-be-fired staff of The Kansas City Star make it over to the Angry Journalist Web site to vent -- and lord knows they deserve to vent -- they'll see a plea from University of Kansas assistant professor Scott Reinardy to become part of his study. If they e-mail the j-school prof, they'll be part of a rigorous scientific process to test a bold thesis: Firing a newspaper's staff will change news coverage and depress journalists.
Take a second to pick yourself off the floor, and I'll explain more after the jump.
As the solicitation puts it: This is an invitation for those who have lost their newspaper job. University of Kansas researchers are conducting a study of U.S. newspaper journalists who have been laid off. We want to know how you have adapted in your personal and professional life since leaving the newspaper. The survey is voluntary and confidential. Results cannot be attributed to a specific individual unless the individual chooses to reveal himself or herself. You also can refuse to answer any question. The survey will take 10 to 15 minutes to complete.
If you are interested in participating in the study, please contact University of Kansas Assistant Professor Scott Reinardy at reinardy@ku.edu. He will forward the Web survey to you.
Reinardy tells us that he wanted to do the study -- which should take five years -- to see how people who survive layoffs act after the cuts and to see what happens to the people who get cut, many of whom are middle-aged professionals who have lost not just a job but a career.
"It's what I'm calling the lost generation of journalists," Reinardy said. "With the transition happening in newsrooms, we're going to have a different product on the other end. When you change the dynamics of the newsroom and lose people with vast institutional experience, you change the coverage and the dimension of quality."
Reinardy hopes to have some preliminary results ready in the next month to discuss at national academic conferences and get a jump start on publishing in academic journals. That's moving pretty fast, considering he started the study a week ago with a pilot outreach to the Star, which he said resulted in only a few dozen responses.
"Of course it's a turbulent time there so there's some reluctance," he says. "Even though it's totally anonymous, the people who haven't been laid off don't want to be seen as giving the company a reason. And for those that have been, it's often hard to find them. They get scattered."
Reinardy, who worked in the industry for 18 years before getting his Ph.D. from Columbia, has made a decent academic career from the misery of journalists. His fields of research include the stress and burnout rates of newsroom employees, which are, for some reason, high lately. In 2007, he did a study charting burnout and found that exhaustion leads to cynicism, which in turn leads to a decrease in personal satisfaction with your job. It took 800 respondents to reach that conclusion, by the way. Also, apparently the younger generation of journalism students isn't interested in 50-hour work weeks and sacrificing time with their family for an uncertain future.
Does the professor believe that younger journalists have lower satisfaction rates because they're tied to crippling debt incurred to get a degree in order to land a job with a starting pay scale that hasn't risen in a couple of decades? "We don't know," he says. "The two big questions I get asked by my students are 'Can I get a job when I graduate?' and 'Will it pay anything?' "
Layoffs and possible bankruptcy aside, Reinardy still thinks it's a great time to be a journalist. "Much of what's being done on the Web isn't very good. You need to set yourself apart from all that noise out there," he says. "As a whole, if you do a search for anything you'll get a lot of stuff that's useless and if you want accurate information your best source is still likely going to be a professional journalist. Not that there isn't some great blog work being done, but like I said, there's a lot of stuff that's just noise." Ha! Take that, bloggers!
Asked if the idea that the loss of experienced staff will hurt the final product might be self-evident, and perhaps not the best use of research time, Reinardy's response is pure journalist: "I don't dispute that it's a common-sense thing. But by documenting it, we'll know exactly where the problems are occurring. I ask survivors how they've changed their work and what they've changed and if people are working under fear of whether they're going to lose their jobs. Right now is sort of a flash point, and we need to record it."
Personally, I always knew this wasn't going to be a way to get rich. Most reporters do from the start, and they're still cool with that because they love their jobs. And even if they could learn to do something else, they don't have much interest. That includes dealing with all the bullshit Reinardy has recorded, such as family problems. Working journalists at dailies are on call as often as doctors, and they have high stress levels, face public scorn and receive not-so-great pay. They're like Robert De Niro in Heat, without the nice clothes, hot girlfriend or automatic weapons. Most would rather fight the good fight during an extraordinarily rough patch, take the hits as they come and hopefully come out better for it on the other end. But if the press completely disintegrates, I'm going to try and become a professor.
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I read the comment about how lazy reporters are. I guess it depends on the location and on the employer. I spent about half of my working career as a reporter. I guess my employers weren't "big time." I spent 3 years as a weekly newspaper editor. I don't every remember putting in a 40 hour week. I always gave much more than I ever got (or got paid for) because I felt I owed it to the readers, the folks who subscribed and bought the newspaper. As a weekly newspaper editor, I regularly put in 100 to 120-hour weeks -- no overtime. I NEVER had time for computer games. I was always working the phone, talking to sources, and/or reading/researching story ideas. I'm not writing this to nominate myself for sainthood. Maybe what Mr. Rugg writes about is the way it is -- more correctly the way it used to be -- at larger newspapers. What is sad now is that we seem to be heading toward a situation where one inexperienced writer will be covering a story and that story will be picked up by all of the newspapers that have "agreements." Or there will be a reliance on "citizen journalists" sharing their biases and not reporting the facts or trying to communicate a complete story.
I would like to speak to the myth of the "exhausted," overworked newsroom employee.
During the 33 years I was a columnist for a major metropolitan newspaper, I was appalled by the large number of reporters and editors I observed goofing off -- particularly after the Internet came to the newsroom. (I have seen newsroomers spend hours playing games on their computers.)
I realized I wasn't the only one who noted the goof-off phenomenon when I heard another columnist say: "Somedays it seems like the major question in the newsroom is: "Where are we going to lunch?"
If a time-and-motion expert had ever been hired to study the newsroom's work habits, at least 25 percent of the staff would have been given the heave-ho.
Are there occasional 10/12-hour days and bursts of intense activity? Sure. But overall, day-in and day-out, newspaper journalists are the laziest, most procrastinating group of professionals on the planet.
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