Studies of job burnout have been popular in recent years, most appearing in the fields involved with "people work" such as social work, education, library science, to name just a few. But whether or not the newspaper professionals perceive the similar burnout in work have not been explored frequently yet.
The purpose of this study is then to examine how strong the news reporters feel about job burnout, and what are some factors relating to their burnout, if any, including personal, organizational, and contextual attributes. Finally, this study asks how the relationship is between job burnout and news professionals ’ commitment or whether the more burnout a journalist perceives, the more possible that he/she tries to change the job or even career?
By using the questionnaires developed after reviewing the literature, a total of 92 question items were designed, in which the Likert-type five-point scale was adopted to measure the subjects ’ perception about job burnout. These questionnaires were then distributed to the 300 beat reporters currently working at different newspapers in Taiwan, and 180 were returned with a successful rate of 60%. The results show that the mean of job burnout was 2.473, generally fallen between "sometimes" so and "somewhat" so, meaning that most respondents feel a mild burnout condition in their daily job. But the data also indicate that reporters who are young, junior in the career ladder, and unmarried are more possible to report the suffering of the syndrome.
As to the attributing factors, this study found that job burnout has high and positive correlation with job stress. The result also confirms that the stronger a person perceives burnout, the less commitment he will carry out to the profession.
Overall, the study does not confirm that news reporters in Taiwan were bothered by job burnout, but this might be resulted from the timing of survey when most subjects were not experiencing any heavy stress. The study then suggests future research to pay attention to the pressure of deadline in news people ’s daily assignment.