Surprise: Web Staffs to the Right of the Main Newsroom

By: Carl Sullivan What about newspaper Web staffs? That weird group in the corner with all the young people wearing arty eyeglasses and constantly plugged in to their iPods? They're probably more liberal than the main newsroom, right?

Well, maybe not. There isn't much research on the ideology of online journalists, but the recent Pew survey, which included a sample of 68 journalists working for the online outlets of national and local news organizations, didn't show much difference between old and new media.

Most Web journalists (57%) in that study classify their political thinking as "moderate." And a smaller percentage of the Internet group call themselves "liberal" than the old-media groups (25% Web, vs. 36% national print and 28% local print). While 10% of the Web group considered themselves "conservative," 8% of the national print group and 11% of the local print group did so.

One area where differences are pronounced: the online group was less likely to view the press as being too cynical. Only 24% of the Pew sample agreed with the statement that the press is too cynical, while 76% said this wasn't a valid criticism. But 38% of national print and 42% of local print finds the press too cynical, according to Pew.

Bill Cassidy, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, found similar results in an online survey that he conducted for his dissertation last summer at the University of Oregon. "Since the online folks that I looked at were affiliated with traditional media organizations, I wasn't expecting to see much difference," said Cassidy, who surveyed 456 print and 199 online journalists.

The cliches about the "weird, young" dot-com people also didn't show up in the Pew survey. Among the respondents, the average age of the Internet group was 42, compared with 46 for the rest of the sample. And several commentators have remarked that recent newspaper new-media conventions have been dominated by men "of a certain age." Consultant Peter M. Zollman calls them "FOWMs" ? fat, old white males.

Steve Outing, a longtime commentator on the online news industry for E&P, The Poynter Institute and other outlets, notes that "as online media has grown up, more traditional-media journalists have made the transition to working in online media. So while I have no evidence one way of the other, my gut instinct is that political leanings are pretty much the same between old- and new-media journalists."