Doctoral Dissertation Research: Working on Deadline: A Study of the Careers of Reporters and Editors at U. S. Daily Newspapers

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SES-0726712Maria KrysanShawn NeiforfUniveristy of Illinois ChicagoThe goal of this project is to determine which factors influence career success or failure for a powerful but rarely studied group of American workers: newspaper journalists. The study will test several sociological theories about influences on career progression, namely, human capital, social capital/networks and tournament mobility theories. The influence of social capital/networks (who one knows) and human capital (what one knows and can do) is coupled with the finding that early success influences later status and that early failure sets a lower ceiling on a caree. It is hypothesized that a journalist's human capital, social capital/network and job-attainment strategy will largely determine the quality of his or her first job. The quality of that job will contribute to the further accrual or dissipation of human capital and social capital, which in turn will influence the quality of the next job, and so on. It also is hypothesized that early career success will influence the quality of jobs later in the journalist's career. The study will examine how human capital, social networks, job-attainment strategies and tournament mobility may function differently for women than for men and for journalists of color than for their white colleagues. Data will be collected from a representative sample of U.S. reporters and editors who will be asked about their career histories and backgrounds through an innovative Web-based survey. The study will incorporate traditional memory prompts into a new format and assess whether lengthy Web surveys can work with populations that are computer and Internet savvy. The present study is retrospective, but it will provide the opportunity to follow the participants and their careers into the future, thereby providing rich longitudinal data for further examination. There are at least three broader impacts of this study. First, with regard to issues of diversity, this study will help explain why newsrooms remain remarkably white and male, even after decades of diversity efforts. This is especially important in light of the implications of such homogeneity for news coverage of a complex world. Second, from a methodological standpoint, this project examines how Web surveys may be used in broader and deeper ways, including using a longer instrument and collecting retrospective data, particularly social-network data. Finally, this study turns attention to how people are hired into and advance in newsrooms, which gets far less research attention than the news itself. Journalists have the power to tell us what is important and how to think about it and, by extension, what is not important. Yet little is known about the people in charge of news, suggesting that we need a much better understanding of journalists and journalism careers. This study will address that need.