Is it still possible to build a career that is both morally satisfying and materially rewarding? To do well by doing good?
Professionals and executives in a range of fields grapple with this question as rapid technological change and intense bottom line pressure upends one field after another, transforming how work is done and how people are paid for it.
This heightened tension between moral and material goals may be nowhere as intense as it is in journalism, a field with strong ethical convictions at its core, but whose business model has been decimated by the rise of online advertising and social media.
“In any organization, you want to make the moral and material coexist.”
In a recent paper, Lakshmi Ramarajan, associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, and Erin Reid, a professor at McMaster University, interviewed more than 100 reporters, editors, and other journalists.
Analyzing the responses and drawing upon decades of academic research on institutional dynamics and careers, they detail how journalists have reconciled the moral calling of their profession with the collapse and painfully slow reinvention of the field’s business model, leaning on a few main strategies.
“In any organization, you want to make the moral and material coexist,” Ramarajan says. It can be a challenge, no more so than in the media, and the paper offers lessons for building a morally grounded career in any industry amid growing pressures to prioritize financial gain in an uncertain economy.
Navigating an industry in crisis
Working in the field of journalism has never been financially rewarding or secure. But the field enjoyed a “golden age” from the mid-to-late 20th century, with newspapers, magazines, and TV and radio stations reaping large advertising profits and, by and large, paying a living wage to their editorial employees, the study notes.
That stability also enabled the field’s moral calling to mature and develop like it never had before, with a belief in the mission of journalists to strive to objectively report the truth, without fear or favor.
Rules about acceptable and unacceptable jobs also developed. Journalists grew to view jobs at newspapers and TV stations and other traditional media as within the field’s core mission, or as “pure” in the academic parlance, while looking down at as “impure” jobs in public relations and similar fields, the authors note.
But the rise of the internet over the last few decades pulled the rug out from under old media’s business model. By 2017, 45 percent of all newspaper jobs and 27 percent of all radio broadcast jobs had vanished, according to the study.
A new playbook
In the wake of this industry cataclysm, individual reporters and editors began to redefine or reinvent how they could keep the faith with the field’s moral obligations while also exploring new ways to achieve basic material goals, the study notes.
Some journalists used a “supplemental” strategy, in which they redefined the purpose of related side jobs, such as teaching journalism, in keeping with the “moral claims” of the profession.
Others have taken this process a couple steps further. These reporters and editors have redefined what it means to stay true to the core mission of journalism, with a “reoriented” strategy that turns on its head the old rules about ethically “pure” and “impure” work, according to the study.
Starting up an online news site or freelancing are now seen as “pure” endeavors, enabling journalists to have control over the content they produce. In this view, the dwindling number of jobs in traditional media are now viewed as morally questionable, with a similar take on digital media, with its emphasis on rapidly producing click-bait-style content.
Broader lessons for other industries?
Reid and Ramarajan hope the study brings a renewed focus to an area of academic study that has lain mostly fallow for a few decades: the role of morals in careers.
Once a major area of research in the 1950s and 1960s, it has “receded in focus” since then, the authors note, even as these issues have arguably become even more relevant in a time of rapid economic and social change.
“The guidance people receive from institutions and organizations about which jobs are deemed moral, how they navigate moral quandaries as they advance in their careers, and how they marry moral aims with their other personal aims remain important and pressing questions for organizational scholars,” they write.
The challenges journalists have faced amid the turmoil in the field—and the way they have tried to stay true to the field’s core values—offers potential lessons to other professionals, such as teachers or health care professionals, the authors say.
Treat your employees well
“You want to ensure your pursuit of material concerns as an organization doesn’t crowd out the goal of contributing to the broader welfare,” Ramarajan says.
You’ll likely get better results, too. One journalist told the authors that, “You’re not going to get the best people to do their best work if you’re paying them so little that… they have to live in some crappy apartment with five roommates.”
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Feedback or ideas to share? Email the Working Knowledge team at hbswk@hbs.edu.
Image: iStockphoto/cagkansayin