SABEW to assess 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.

“We’ve heard anecdotal evidence that jobs in business journalism are becoming more readily available,” said Rob Reuteman, SABEW’s president and the former business editor of the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News and now a freelance business journalist. “But we want to quantify whether that’s happening, and to what degree.”

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/79Q3DMF.

For questions, about the survey, e-mail Roush at croush@email.unc.edu.