Financial problems in news organisations have reached a crisis level, and are now journalists' top concern, even over editorial problems, such as quality of news coverage and credibility, according to the Pew Research Center's latest survey, out Monday.

Sixty-two percent of U.S. journalists say journalism is “going in the wrong direction” and 49 percent have a “negative view about the state of their profession,” the survey states, noting that “soaring economic worries underlie these sour assessments.”

In an open-ended survey, 55 percent of respondents at national news organisations stated that financial or economic worry is the biggest problem facing journalism today, up from 30 percent who stated so in 2004, according to the Pew Research Center.

In 2004, 35 percent local journalists cited economic problems as a top problem. Today, 52 percent said so. Meanwhile, 62 percent of national journalists said journalism is going in the wrong direction, up from 51 percent who said so in 2004. That concern is also echoed in online journalism, where 48 percent who work for Web-only organisations, or the Web sites of a news outlet (print, broadcast or cable news), said financial concerns are the profession's greatest problems.

The survey was conducted Sept. 17 – Dec. 3, 2007, among 585 reporters, editors and news executives by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Project for Excellence in Journalism.