Existing Decision-Making Practices on American Dailies

TLDR: In this article, the authors report the decision-making practices within American daily newsrooms as perceived by city and county reporters, and assess the influence of organization size on decision making practices.

Abstract: Reporter alienation is evident in some daily newspaper newsrooms in America.' One of the reasons for the alienation could be a bureaucratic system where management makes most decisions and excludes reporters from meaningful participation. One classic solution to eliminating such alienation, according to social psychologists Argyris, Maslow, Likert, McGregor and Katz, is decentralization. Such increased participation in decisions for workers will, according to these theorists, increase the mental health of the individual and the organizational health. It is possible, though, that reporters are participating in many decisions. The primary objective of this exploratory research is to report the decision-making practices within American daily newsrooms as perceived by city and county reporters. A secondary goal is to assess the influence of organization size on decision-making practices. There is no literature on decision-making activities of city and county reporters. There is also very little recent data on participative practices of other daily reporters. There is limited evidence that some investigative,^ foreign,^ science/ sports, women,-̂ veteran^ and \"star\"'' reporters have considerable influence over some job-related decisions. Some reporters even help select their supervisors^ while others offer suggestions through consultative committees.^ A Minneapolis/St. Paul survey of reporters notes that 33% of them had a \"strong\" voice in news decisions affecting their own work; 30%