A national survey of 834 working journalists in Taiwan was conducted in 1996. In this survey, we followed the definition of "journalist" used by Weaver and Wilhoit. (11)
Following Weaver and Wilhoit, we defined journalists as those "who have editorial responsibility for the preparation or transmission of news stories or other information." Unlike Weaver and Wilhoit, however, our definition of journalists includes researchers, photographers and camera operators. In other words, the population of our survey is the full-time editorial personnel including all reporters, editors, wire editors and translators, correspondents, columnists, researchers news announcers, photographers and camera operator employed by the Chinese-language radio and television stations and daily newspapers in Taiwan.
This study used a multi-stage-sampling plan. In the first stage, we compiled a list of Chinese-language daily newspapers, radio and television stations in Taiwan. In December 1996, there were three television stations, nine cable television stations and 47 radio stations, which broadcast regular news programs, and there were 25 general circulation daily newspapers in Taiwan. Through the Government Information Office's media source book, we were able to obtain a list of the above mentioned Chinese-language news media.
The second stage was to estimate the numbers of journalists employed by each of these daily newspapers, radio and television stations. The directors of personnel departments of all these news organization, were called explaining the survey and asking them to tell the total number of journalists working in their organizations. By so doing, it was possible to estimate that the total full-time journalists in Chinese-language daily newspapers, radio and television stations in Taiwan in 1996 to be around 6,400 with 88 percent of them employed by daily newspapers.
The third stage was to draw a random sample of individual newspapers. The sampling process was based on the following.
First, these 25 daily newspapers were divided into four strata based on the number of editorial personnel: those with more than 500, those with 200 to 499, those with 100 to 199, and those less than 100. The largest newspapers in the first stratum, the China Times and the United Daily News, were arbitrarily included. Then, four newspapers were randomly selected from each of the four remaining strata. In total, 15 newspapers were selected in our sample.
The television stations were divided into broadcast television and cable television stations. The three broadcast television stations were arbitrarily included. Then five cable television stations were randomly selected from the nine cable stations. In total, eight television stations were selected in our sample.
