SABEW surveying about business journalism job market

The Society of American Business Editors and Writers is conducting an anonymous survey of news organizations throughout the country to determine current and future job prospects for business reporters and editors.

The results of the survey will be made available to all SABEW members by the end of March on the organization’s web site. The data will be updated annually to determine whether hiring conditions for business journalists are changing.

To do that, we need the help of business editors and others who are in charge of personnel decisions in news organizations. If you are one of these people, please go to the link at the end of this message and click on it. Answering the questions will take less than a minute, but the results will provide valuable data for business journalists.

“The rebound in business journalism jobs appears to be happening in many news organizations,” said Kevin Noblet, SABEW’s president and a managing editor at Dow Jones Newswires. “We’d like to measure by how much and whether there are plans to continue hiring this year and in 2013.”

Last year’s survey discovered that just one out of five business news operations planned to add staffers in 2011, while one out of 12 were cutting positions.

The survey results will be analyzed by SABEW’s research director, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill journalism professor Chris Roush, and will be broken out by position, the number of jobs, how and where media organizations plan to recruit, and whether anyone is cutting business journalism jobs.

The survey can be found at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/VTD5RSD.