Doug Underwood

Balancing Business with Journalism: Newsroom Policies at 12 West Coast Newspapers

Journalists from 12 daily newspapers, surveyed on-site, confirmed what newspaper industry analysts have noted: Newspapers are becoming more reader-oriented and market driven. This is particularly true of group newspapers which, on nearly every level of measurement, showed a stronger market-oriented management. But there are some indications that greater devotion to business principles does not always come at the expense of good journalism and that business-oriented policies are not always viewed as disruptive to sound newsroom policy.

Computers and Editing: Pagination's Impact on the Newsroom

Though it is seen as an advance, many respondents in Washington state survey are accepting computerized pagination with ambivalence and concern about its impact on the traditional journalistic mission.

How Pagination Affects Job Satisfaction of Editors

A survey of 187 editors at 13 Northwest newspapers found, contrary to anecdotal reports, that pagination is not responsible for widespread anger and unhappiness in newsrooms. The study found that pagination makes both positive and negative contributions to job satisfaction. Most of the editors still took pride in their newspapers and found editing a satisfying line of work despite changes in editing tasks brought on by pagination.

Are Journalists Really Irreligious? A Multidimensional Analysis

The notion of religion defined as moral activism is embraced by journalists of all stripes, regardless of whether they identify themselves as people of faith or not. The finding is based upon a nationwide survey of American and Canadian journalists who were asked about their religious beliefs and how they put those beliefs into action in their professional lives. The study found that journalists surveyed indicated a strong general religious orientation. But even nonreligious journalists responded strongly to fundamental calls for moral action as long as they were framed as part of a journalistic, rather than a religious, mission.

The Problem With Paul: Seeds of the Culture Wars and the Dilemma for Journalists

The Apostle Paul was a person of many contradictions. Amid his revolutionary exhortations that the genuine Christian must ignore external religious law and look within for spiritual direction, Paul also laid out explicit guidelines for accepted Christian belief that have been used to establish Christian orthodoxy, punish heretics, and lay the foundation for church authority. For journalists trying to negotiate their way through the hostilities of the Christian right, the liberal left, and the polarization of American cultural and political life, there is no better historical source than Paul to understand how Christianity can be interpreted so differently by people of divergent political, social, and moral views. Journalists cannot expect to understand the dissension among conservative and liberal Christians, as well as the broader divisions between Christians and non-Christians, without examining Paul as a major source of the double-mindedness that characterizes Christianitys outlook on the questions of modern life.

A review of: Imaginary friends: Representing Quakers in American culture 1650–1950, By J. E. Ryan

Stereotyping is generally thought of as a bad thing, but as James Emmett Ryan demonstrates, this can work to a group’s benefit, as it has with the Quakers in the United States. In his book, Imaginary Friends: Representing Quakers in American Culture 1650–1950, Ryan documents the favorable ways that Quakers have been portrayed in the written literature of the United States and held up by liberal and intellectual non-Quakers as models of moral rectitude, humanistic conscience, individualistic spiritual principle, and political courage in resisting pressures to conform to mainstream American cultural values. Ryan acknowledges that the focus of his book is not Quakers as they are or historically have been—but the image of Quakers as it has been transmitted in journalism, history, biography, literature, and on stage and screen. Although Quaker writers and spiritual figures show up in Imaginary Friends, Ryan bases his analysis largely on the ways that non-Quakers have framed Quaker figures—often by using a Quaker as the “typically idealized and admired : : : virtuous” individual in their fiction and other writings. Many American novelists—among them Harriet Beecher Stowe and Theodore Dreiser—have “found it useful to deploy either mild or virtuous Quakers” in their stories, Ryan says, and nonfiction writers, such as Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, have made the study of Quakerism and Quaker figures an important feature of their cultural commentary (pp. 21–23). Ryan, an associate professor of English at Auburn University who has attended Quaker meetings but is not Quaker himself, said he set out to study the image of Quakerism because of his recognition that Quakers, although a small group today (120,000 members in the United States), have articulated a “distinctive religious vision in American culture” and served as an important “counterpoint” (p. 6) to the commonly held religious and political values of Christianity in the United States. Quakers have been an object of continuing fascination by non-Quakers, especially during those historical moments when Quaker beliefs have come into conflict with the nation’s moral, political, and social agenda, Ryan writes. “This persistent fascination with Quaker lives and Quaker values therefore offers an example of sustained ‘outsider’ group religious influence on the national culture that is unmatched within American history” (p. 8).