Journalists worried about economic pressure

The US journalist survey I mentioned in yesterday’s post, has now been published by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in collaboration with the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Committee of Concerned Journalists.

It shows that journalists (66% nationally and 57% locally) think “increased bottom line pressure is seriously hurting the quality of news coverage.”

They report more cases of advertisers and owners breaching the independence of the newsroom.

Advertiser and corporate interference with the news content are similarly high among those who work in online news, where the line between independently produced content and advertising may be harder to detect.

More journalists than five years ago think the Internet is making journalism better. Yet, the Internet is the most likely place in journalism to be suffering staff cuts (62%).

Journalists – especially national journalists – are more likely than in the past to describe themselves as liberal (will we see this “fact” be used in the election campaign by the Bush posse?).