Satisfaction of Australian newspaper journalists during organizational change

International Journal of Communication, July-Dec, 2007 by Brian L. Massey, Jacqui Ewart

ABSTRACT

This article reports a secondary analysis of survey data on the attitudes of Australian newspaper journalists during organizational change. Over a two-year period, they kept marginally positive attitudes toward a corporate program aimed at reversing circulation declines by changing journalistic values and routines. The data show positive impacts on overall job satisfaction and performance, but mostly for reporters and photographers. Support slipped somewhat for the program itself, mostly among sub-editors and newsroom managers. Contrary to some of the literature, this study shows that journalists do not always resist organizational change.

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Scholars have poured a great deal of energy into the question of how satisfied journalists are with their jobs. (1) A common thread running through this body of work is the normative assumption that job satisfaction affects job performance. Happy newsworkers do better work, to put it simply. They are presumed to be more efficient and productive, and more committed to their employers. Clearly this is a universal concept: it would apply to any employee in any profession or trade. Still, job satisfaction stands a greater chance of helping or harming enterprises such as the news media, "where product quality is largely dependent on the individual talents and motivations of key personnel" (Daniels and Hollifield 2002). It is worth worrying about product quality. It is the key to the enterprise's journalistic and commercial success.

Much of the scholarship on job satisfaction focuses on how journalists feel about their everyday work and workplace climates. It has been generally less common to probe their satisfaction during times of planned organizational change. During change, uncertainty about new work routines and expectations can run high. That runs the risk of dampening the morale and, in turn, performance of workers who implement the change. Relatively strong job satisfaction by itself will not ensure the success of the change initiative. But it surely would help move it toward that. Dwindling satisfaction by itself may not doom the change. But it surely would make it harder to achieve.

In this article, we take the fairly less traveled path by investigating job satisfaction during a time of planned change. We do that work within a larger gap in the literature. Most job-satisfaction studies focus on U.S. journalists. Our focus, however, is on Australia and judging by the popular research-abstract databases, few studies have systematically tested the job satisfaction of its journalists.

Specifically, this is a secondary analysis of data from two surveys of journalists conducted for APN News & Media on its "Readers First" program. APN implemented the program in 2004 across its 14 regional dailies in Australia to turnaround their declining circulations. These data offer a limited longitudinal assessment of how satisfied APN journalists felt toward "Readers First," and the effect they believed it had on their newsrooms and job performances.

RESEARCH OF JOURNALISTS' JOB SATISFACTION

Defining the construct

Pollard (1995) notes that when researchers ask journalists about job satisfaction, they typically do that with a one-off, Likert-scale survey question. Weaver, Beam, Brownlee, Voakes, & Wilhoit (2007: 264) put it this way in their 2002 nationwide survey of U.S. journalists: "All things considered, how satisfied are you with your present job?" Many job-satisfaction studies have adopted that question or used a similarly phrased one. However, there is more to it than a broad liking of the job overall.

Demers (1995: 93) defines job satisfaction as "a psychological condition that exists when an individual's wants, wishes or desires are fulfilled". That frames it as a phenomenon that cannot be observed or measured directly. Instead, it comes about indirectly. It exists as the outcome of the worker's judgment of whether or how much the job imparts a sense of fulfillment. Coming to that judgment involves the worker in a mental "synthesis of the social and work-related attributes, values, attitudes, experiences, and perceptions that determine the meaning of and motivation for work" (Pollard 1995: 682).

In short, job satisfaction is a multidimensional construct. It appears as the direction of the worker's affective response toward the job broadly and toward specific aspects of it, including the workplace climate. Think of it this way: If a job was broken down into its constituent elements of work and workplace, what would they be? What is the worker's affective orientation toward each? Moreover, which elements could be reliably grouped together to make for a multidimensional test of satisfaction?

Elements of job satisfaction

In the United States, Johnstone, Slawski, & Bowman (1976), Weaver and Wilhoit (1991, 1996), and Weaver et al. (2007) have tracked the job satisfaction of journalists at 10-year intervals, starting in the early 1970s. Their national samples include newspaper, magazine, radio, TV and wire service journalists, and of late, online journalists. The latest installment of the survey was conducted in 2002 by Weaver and colleagues. It found that nearly 84% of the surveyed journalists felt "very" or "somewhat" satisfied with the overall nature of their jobs.