BOOKS
Standards and Practices

BY TOM GOLDSTEIN

GOOD WORK: WHEN EXCELLENCE AND ETHICS MEET
By Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, William Damon, and Howard Gardner
Basic Books 288 pages. $26.00

This intriguing book offers important insights for journalists, who all too often wrap themselves in their own cocoons, reveling in a specialness that sets them apart from other professionals.

In an unusual collaboration that has lasted for five years and promises to continue on for an even longer period, three prominent psychologists, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of Claremont Graduate University, William Damon of Stanford, and Howard Gardner of Harvard, examine the professional conditions that promote good work -- defined as work in which practitioners maintain moral and ethical standards -- in an increasingly market-driven world.

Since 1995, the authors have conducted hundreds of interviews with people in a variety of disciplines, including business, philanthropy, jazz music, theater, and education. In Good Work, the first book to emerge from these studies, the authors make an original and ingenious connection between genetics and journalism, "the two domains that, in our time, have principal responsibilities for shaping the information inside our bodies and our minds."

The contrasts between the two fields, teased out in more than 200 open-ended, in-depth interviews, are instructive. Geneticists reported that doing good work was relatively easy, while journalists struggled to integrate professional performance and personal ethics.

Geneticists are upbeat in a profession that the authors call exceptionally "well aligned." That is, all the stakeholders -- the shareholders, the company owners, the geneticists, and the public at large -- want the same things: research that results in improved health and longer lives.

In sharp contrast, the journalists, who have the "power to shape our culture and our minds," despaired of being allowed to pursue the mission that inspired them to enter the field in the first place. The authors find that journalism is "poorly aligned," wracked by tension, with stakeholders "threatening the core values and the principal roles." The journalists felt that the audience wanted celebrity-based news and that management was preoccupied with the next quarter's bottom line.

In their interviews, journalists said they were pessimistic because of "growing demands to comply with the business goals of the industry" and the "perceived decline in value and ethics within the field."

Some of those who were interviewed, including Ray Suarez, Bill Kurtis, and Tom Brokaw, agreed to be named. But most were not named, leaving the reader to accept on faith that the researchers had selected leading practitioners for their semi-structured interviews.

These journalists also lamented that technology had undercut their effectiveness. "Of all the resources in a newsroom it is time that is coveted frequently by journalists," the authors report. "'Too little time' was by far the most common complaint mentioned by our informants. Journalists speak of time pressure as a barrier to reflection, in-depth reporting, and accuracy of coverage. There is now an acute sense, shared by most journalists, that modern technology has escalated deadline demands to the point where even the most rapidly executed work can no longer fare adequately."

In attitudinal studies such as this one, the past is not necessarily a map for the future. The "euphoric" sense of alignment felt by geneticists may shift, the authors speculate, particularly if genetics continues to be practiced as an unregulated commercial undertaking or if the field becomes more politicized.
Journalism, too, may shift. The researchers were heartened by the idealism of journalists in their commitment to inform the public.

Given the timing of the interviews, the "misalignment" that the authors find so decidedly characterizing journalism has a distinctly dated quality to it.
Many of these interviews were conducted during a period in which the biggest running story was the exploits of Monica Lewinsky, and the interviewees presumably assumed that the public "craved news of celebrities." Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, journalists have risen to the occasion, a sentiment underscored by Howard Gardner, who in a recent interview in the Harvard University Gazette noted that "September 11 has given journalists a new lease on what they should be doing."

Journalists have another chance. As the authors conclude in their book, this is a "pivotal moment" for journalism in which "the scales are hanging in a precarious balance."
 
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Tom Goldstein is dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism.