For curious journalists like me, spending time reading academic research about journalism and democracy reveals a mixed picture.

There’s plenty of research to show that journalism is still a critical part of an engaged society. Decades of evidence–based studies show a correlation between news consumption and political engagement. People who read more news tend to vote more regularly and engage more in their own community.

Newer academic studies tend to look at very specific practices around types of journalism and find insights particular to certain beats or coverage areas — and there’s quite a lot of it. Just a few examples include how journalists use empathy in covering homelessness, whether fact-checking changes false beliefs, and how audiences react to watching coverage of terrorism.

But keeping track of all that academic research across subject areas is no easy task. Here’s where professors Mark Coddington and Seth Lewis have stepped up an email newsletter (hosted on Substack) that aims to showcase the most compelling research published each month. The newsletter is called RQ1, and Nieman Lab republishes it each month.

Coddington and Lewis are both former journalists who became academics. (For several years, Coddington wrote the “Week in Review” column for Nieman Lab.) They now study their former colleagues amid a changing digital news environment, tackling issues of data journalism, social media, news engagement and news aggregation. (Coddington is at Washington and Lee University, while Lewis is at University of Oregon.)

“We’ve had trouble ourselves keeping up with the constant flow of new research on news and journalism, and we want to help you keep up with it as we try to wade through it as well,” they write in the newsletter.

As editor-in-chief of PolitiFact, I have a high interest in keeping up with academic research on fact-checking, and as a Nieman Fellow I’ve been studying research about the connection between journalism and democracy, so I reached out to Coddington and Lewis with a few questions. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Canceling that free trial: Four reasons people are unwilling to subscribe to a news organization

Ask media types about what news organizations need to survive in the future, and almost invariably the conversation these days will emphasize “reader revenue” of some kind: subscriptions, memberships, donations — any means, old or new, of getting people to pay for news more readily than they have in the past.

The need is obvious, particularly for newspapers: As advertising revenues slacken amid the transition from legacy to digital platforms, there is little choice but to offset those losses with greater direct support from audiences.

But many people — indeed, the vast majority — remain stubbornly unwilling to pay for news (especially online news). The 2021 Reuters Institute Digital News Report found that across 20 countries where publishers have been actively pursuing digital subscriptions, only 17% of respondents said they had paid for online news in the past year in some form (through a subscription, donation, or one-off payment). This was, in fact, an improvement from five years earlier (when 12% reported paying), and the numbers do look a bit better in wealthy countries such as the U.S. (where 21% pay for online news, and some have more than one subscription).

The overall uptick, however, isn’t enough to soothe the concerns of media organizations, many of which are stuck in a “purgatorial space” between print and digital: where digital subscriptions aren’t robust enough yet to justify abandoning print altogether, even as those digital subscriptions threaten to cannibalize print all the same.

So, it matters quite a lot to understand why people will pay for news (or not), and what might be done about that.

Thus arrives on the scene this new article in Journalism, “Why people don’t pay for news: A qualitative study.” It’s written by Tim Groot Kormelink of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. While many scholars have long focused on quantifying news consumption (e.g., days per week spent with news) and people’s attitudes toward it (e.g., how people feel about news as expressed via survey questions), Groot Kormelink is a leading researcher in studying how audiences experience the news in their day-to-day lives. And, in this study, 68 participants in the Netherlands were given a three-week subscription to a newspaper of their choice and then interviewed about their experience afterward. “As such, rather than capturing their general attitudes toward paying for news, the study grounds people’s reasons for (not) paying for news in their actual experiences with having access to a news subscription.”

By one basic measure, study participants weren’t impressed with that free trial: after their test subscription ended, none of them explicitly said they would convert to a paid subscription.

Study participants had four primary motivations for not subscribing: price (no surprise there!), adequate news available elsewhere for free, concerns about commitment (i.e., not wanting to bind oneself), and delivery and technical problems.

On the first point (price), one particularly interesting finding popped up: For younger participants, digital subscription services like Spotify and Netflix had set a reference point for digital news. Indeed, “this study suggests these services may even create a rather exact price point in young people’s mind: the price of a shared Netflix or Spotify account.” This led some participants to suggest that paying for news should be more shareable. Intriguingly, this notion comes at a time when many people are wearying of “subscription fatigue” and when the services themselves, like Netflix, are looking to crack down on password sharing.

“Another finding that stands out,” the study notes, “is that when referencing price, participants had a full print subscription in mind, even when their preferred subscription type was a less costly weekend-only or digital subscription. Some were surprised by how affordable these alternative subscription types were, suggesting it could be worthwhile for news media to more strongly advertise these prices.”

With regard to one of the other issues, commitment, participants “were not just wary of being stuck with difficult-to-cancel subscriptions, but also did not want to commit and thus limit themselves to one medium,” Groot Kormelink writes.

There was some ambiguity about this: On the one hand, people felt like the commitment of a subscription would “discipline” them to follow through on something they feel like they should be doing (i.e., reading the news); yet, at the same time, participants, when they had a trial subscription, had a hard time actually getting themselves to read the news. (On that note, Groot Kormelink noted in a Twitter thread that he has a paper-in-progress showing that “when you do get people to subscribe, the next challenge starts: getting them to actually use their subscription.”)

Ultimately, study participants also described future scenarios in which they might be more willing to pay: if a news subscription were cheaper, offered a one-stop source for reliable coverage, brought added value through higher-quality news, and, again, served as a “commitment device” to help them build the habit of reading the news.

Research roundup

“Disconnecting from digital news: News avoidance and the ignored role of social class.” By Johan Lindell & Else Mikkelsen Båge, in Journalism.

All of us likely know people who have made intentional decisions to avoid the news over the past several years, and perhaps some of us have been those people during particularly upsetting news cycles or difficult personal circumstances. Scholars have been looking to determine who doesn’t consume news and why — what scholars call news avoidance — through a variety of lenses, including one we’ve covered in the past.

Johan Lindell and Mikkelsen Båge have a close eye on one of those lenses in particular: social class. Lindell’s previous work, like that of other scholars, has suggested that people in more precarious economic positions are more likely to avoid news. Here, he and Båge put social class into sharper focus, looking at different dimensions of class — economic capital (income) and cultural capital (education and class upbringing) — and avoidance of different types of news (“quality” and “popular” press).

Using an annual mail-in survey of 10,000 Swedes, they found that making distinctions in those dimensions is significant. Both low economic and cultural capital predicted greater news avoidance overall, but only cultural capital was significantly related to quality vs. popular news avoidance. Specifically, people with lower cultural capital were more likely to avoid a quality newspaper (Dagens Nyheter) but less likely to avoid a popular or tabloid newspaper (Aftonbladet). Based on those results, the authors called for more nuance in our discussions of class and news avoidance. They also drew on sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to conclude that news avoidance habits are shaped not just by our objective cultural positions, but also by the subjective cultural dispositions (that is, the attitudes and tastes, like tabloids vs. “quality” newspapers) that those positions shape.

“Alternative media and mainstream politics: The case of mediated political fusion.” By Joshua D. Atkinson, Blessy McWan, Jewel White, and Rafsanul Hoque, in Digital Journalism.

The use of alternative media on the left and the right has been a major part of the political story of the past decade, especially in the U.S. and Europe, as right-wing populism has surged. When we talk about how alternative (or partisan) media shape our politics, though, we’re often talking about the national and individual levels. In other words, we tend to think about how consumption of nationally oriented partisan media (like Breitbart or Occupy Democrats) might influence your uncle Larry’s political beliefs or his voting habits.

But Atkinson and his colleagues at Bowling Green State University take a different approach: local and structural. They interviewed 11 party leaders in a pseudonymous suburban/rural county in the Midwestern U.S. about what role alternative media play in their political habits and work. They found a wide range of roles (as is usually the case), but noted that in some cases, political leaders are spreading news from alternative media specifically to agitate party members — as one party leader put it, to “stoke the fire” and “capitalize on some of that existing anger.”

Those party leaders were either oblivious to, or content with, the nature of the local political environment, but the ones who didn’t use alternative media felt frustrated and isolated by the nastiness and confrontation they saw in local politics. The authors suggested that what they were observing was mediated political fusion — an amalgam of mainstream and activist politics, fueled by alternative media, that was good at incorporating outrage into political mobilization but also alienated more traditional, mainstream-oriented political leaders (and potentially voters).

“Political identity and the therapeutic work of U.S. conservative media.” By Anthony Nadler, in International Journal of Communication.

Nadler has been one of the premier scholars looking at the culture and influence of American conservative media, and in this open-access essay, he offers a useful paradigm for understanding the role those media play in their audiences’ lives. His approach pairs well with the Atkinson study above, taking a deeper look at what’s going on internally for people who are regularly consuming and reacting to the media that’s “stoking the fire.”

Nadler draws on dozens of interviews he’s conducted with conservative news consumers across three different studies, finding a thread running through them related to the role media have in projecting and reinforcing social identity. Nadler notes a strong sense among almost all his interviewees that liberals hold deep contempt for them, drawing on both personal experiences and things they’ve heard about in conservative media. Building this sense of victimization and disrespect, he argues, is a key part of the way conservative media build emotional attachment to group identity. The result, he says, is that audiences feel the media sources’ stories of persecution as their own.

This strong, emotional group identity draws people closer into conservative media, Nadler argues, especially when those media figures then “position themselves as the defenders of their audiences’ besieged identities.” He describes a process in which conservative media engage in therapeutic identity repair, offering to salve the pain (of ostracism and stigma) that they themselves have sought to continually bring before their audiences. Thus, he says, the anger that other commentators and opponents have attributed to the modern right-wing is not spontaneous or solely arising from loss of privilege, but is rooted in a deep sense of the threat and fear of stigma, something continually invoked by conservative media.

“Black Lives Matter to media (finally): A content analysis of news coverage during summer 2020.” By Jennifer Brannock Cox, in Newspaper Research Journal.

One of the enduring ideas regarding media coverage of protests is the “protest paradigm” — the notion that journalists tend to marginalize and delegitimize protests by adhering to routines that emphasize the voices of official sources over protesters and highlight conflict. Those conventions ultimately serve to endorse the status quo and sideline protesters’ concerns, and we’ve seen the pattern play out repeatedly in a variety of contexts.

Cox’s study examines the protest paradigm in the coverage of the protests of racial injustice and police brutality across the U.S. after George Floyd’s death in May 2020. She comes away with a picture of “a shift-in-progress away from the protest paradigm.” In a study of 286 news stories posted to Facebook by six major American news organizations, she finds that about three-quarters of them portrayed protesters and the Black Lives Matter movement positively, with similar proportions framing the police negatively. The most common term used to refer to the events was “protest,” with the words “riot” and “looting” being largely limited to Fox News and The Wall Street Journal.

Fox News was, predictably, the only organization that framed the protesters mostly negatively. Other organization-specific indicators also emerged: CNN emphasized an entertainment/celebrity frame much more than others, MSNBC a political frame, and The Wall Street Journal a culture frame. Across all the findings, Cox concludes that the protest paradigm certainly wasn’t gone from the coverage of these protests, but that perhaps in response to the increased legitimacy their audiences were giving protesters, news organizations may have pivoted away from it in this case.

“How news organizations sell native advertising: Discourses of integration and separation on in-house content studio web sites.” By Matt Carlson and Andrew Locke, in Journalism Studies.

Over the past decade, native advertising has endured the initial blitz of ethical concern and discourse in the profession to settle in and become more or less an accepted — if uneasy — part of the news industry. Quite a bit of research has examined the effects of native advertising — whether audiences recognize it, and how it affects the site’s credibility — and at how journalists wrestle with its relationship with their autonomy.

Carlson and Locke drill in on that tense, ambiguous relationship between news and advertising inherent in native advertising by looking at the ad side. Specifically, they analyze how the websites of 17 American in-house native advertising content studios present themselves. They find what they call an “underlying centrality of obfuscation” that revolves around two themes: The use of the word “story” as a key identity marker connecting journalism and advertising, and the use of some creative language to imply ties with their organization’s newsroom, without explicitly saying it.

As we’ve seen from other recent research, journalists have often embraced “story” as well, though audiences are skeptical. The other language involved a range of verbs like “inspired by,” “share,” “apply,” and “draft off of” to imply that the native advertising studio shared the values and techniques of their newsroom counterparts, while being careful not to claim any explicit collaboration. (Only The Washington Post was explicit about their disavowal of any collaboration.) Carlson and Locke conclude by noting a self-limiting irony in invoking the trust in their organizations’ newsrooms, which is built in part on their reputations for independence: “The autonomy that native advertising threatens is precisely what these content studio sites celebrate when they invoke the reputation of the news brand.”

What work is required to build public trust in journalism?

Journalism faces a well-documented crisis of trust. This long-running decline in public confidence in the press is part of a broader skepticism that has developed about the trustworthiness of institutions more generally — leading to an overall trust recession that worries observers who speculate about the endgame of this downward spiral.

But might we see these issues of news and trust in a new light if we reconsidered our assumptions about what actually leads people to develop trust in journalism?

Consider, for example, how journalists for decades have sought to establish trust and confidence by focusing on their democratic responsibility to provide objective information — in which case, trust is presumed to be a product of faithfully adhering to standards and neutrality. In that case, reclaiming trust could be a matter of “getting back to basics,” as it were, and reporting facts in a way that more clearly communicates what people need to know, with the independence and distance that people have come to expect from journalists.

But if, in fact, journalists were to switch their mindset and understand their primary role differently as the facilitation of public deliberation, community connection, and democratic participation — of working with civil society as opposed to apart from it — what would that mean for the overall orientation of journalism and how it works?

A new study in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly — by Megan L. Zahay, Kelly Jensen, Yiping Xia, and Sue Robinson, all of the University of Wisconsin-Madison — offers some essential insights on this question. The team, led by Robinson and applying Zahay’s training as a rhetorician, interviewed 42 journalists, about half of them designated “engagement-oriented” and the others “traditionally oriented.” Based on a rhetorical analysis of what these journalists said (via the interviews) as well as what they did (via hundreds of pages of website materials and social media conversation threads), the authors developed a picture of two camps of journalists — both deeply concerned about the crisis of trust in journalism, but each with very divergent ideas about what should be done about it.

For traditionally oriented journalists, trust is achieved by transmitting facts and helping people perform their democratic duties, without any particular public participation involved in that process. Fixing the trust problem, in this view, means doubling down on objectivity, transparency, and accuracy — but in a way that helps citizens to more readily recognize the value that such things provide. By contrast, rather than focusing on institutionalized norms as the defining elements of journalism, “engagement-oriented journalists view [journalism] as a set of relationships, prone to complexity and messiness, and they expect this in the contexts in which they work.”

What’s especially striking about the engagement view, Zahay and colleagues argue, is that it implies not just a different mindset about one’s role but also a transformation in one’s work—the stuff of day-to-day labor, or what they call “the labor of building trust.” A focus on building and maintaining relationships thus suggests “entirely new kinds of journalistic labor that reorient reporters’ attention toward collaboration and facilitation.” From this perspective, public trust in news flows out of efforts that emphasize mutual understanding and empathy with communities — and which may be inherently slow, gradual, and long-term by nature. In the words of a cofounder of an engagement organization who was interviewed, “[I]t’s ineffective to double down on ‘Trust me, I’m a journalist’ … If you’re not in a relationship with someone, if you haven’t proved your value to them … then you don’t have trust.”

By now, there is a large and growing body of research about the possibilities and challenges of engaged journalism. These approaches, in fact, have a long history, going back to the public and citizen journalism movements of the 1990s. But what sets this latest study apart is in how it carefully charts what appears to be a key inflection point in the profession — one that even seems, in the authors’ conclusion, “paradigmatic.” Indeed, this piece is the first to be published out of Robinson’s multi-phased, ongoing book project about how journalists trust “regular people” according to their various identities.

To the extent that we’re beginning to see a decisive split in how journalists define and enact their democratic role — and to the degree that news organizations give individual journalists the freedom and encouragement to act this way and engage trust-building experiments — we may be witnessing a meaningful movement away from the institutional model of critical distance and toward an engagement model of facilitating discussion, building community, and partnering with the public.

Research roundup

Here are some other studies that caught our eye this month:

Life in a news desert: The perceived impact of a newspaper closure on community members. By Nick Mathews, in Journalism.

As scores of weekly and small daily newspapers close across the U.S., scholars and journalists have sounded the alarm about the expansion of news deserts — areas without any dedicated news coverage via a local newspaper. We’ve presumed that news deserts are damaging to democracy, that they hamper public oversight of local government and weaken the fabric of community that are essential to the civic life of these areas.

Mathews supports those premises with a vivid and detailed picture of one of those news deserts — Caroline County in rural Virginia. Using the concept of “sense of community,” Mathews interviews residents of the county after their weekly paper has been shut down. He finds that residents of the county not only feel more in the dark about what their local government is doing, but that they feel more disconnected from each other without a common forum to promote and celebrate community events. “Without the Caroline Progress, I am more isolated,” one resident tells Mathews. “I think we all are. I think the paper was the one thing that kept us together.”

Gendered news coverage and women as heads of government. By Melanee Thomas, Allison Harell, Sanne A.M. Rijkhoff, and Tania Gosselin, in Political Communication.

Media coverage of women politicians, and especially the gendered differences with its coverage of men, has long been a subject of great scholarly interest, with some excellent research on the subject coming out lately. This Canadian study adds nuance to our understanding of it with an automated analysis of more than 11,000 news articles of provincial premiers.

Thomas and her colleagues’ findings are mixed and complex: They find that fewer articles are written about women-led governments than men’s, and that coverage of women features more gendered language and more references to clothing. Other findings, though, run counter to our common assumptions. There are fewer references to women’s families and private lives, and more positive references to their character and competence, than there are for men. Women are referred to with more feminine terms, but there are no differences in the proportion of masculine language used. They conclude that gendered news coverage certainly hasn’t gone away, but we need to think of it in more multi-faceted, fully mediated terms.

How to report on elections? The effects of game, issue and negative coverage on reader engagement and incivility. By João Gonçalves, Sara Pereira, and Marisa Torres da Silva, in Journalism.

There are few aspects of journalism that scholars and media observers criticize as frequently as political journalists’ framing of news stories as a game, or with relentless negativity. And there are few things that journalists criticize as frequently as toxic comment sections under their work. This Portuguese study combines those two elements, trying to determine to what degree game frames influence the civility of news comments.

The authors found that stories that are negative as well as those that are positive toward political actors led to more uncivil comments. Game framing by itself didn’t lead to more uncivil comments overall, but it did predict more incivility among more polarized commenters. Perhaps most practically pertinent to many news organizations, both negative and game-framed articles led to more comments overall, suggesting they may be easy to justify as “drivers of engagement.”

Platforms, journalists and their digital selves. By Claudia Mellado & Amaranta Alfaro, in Digital Journalism.

There’s been plenty of research over the past decade that examines how journalists use Twitter, though quite a bit less looking at their use of Instagram. Mellado and Alfaro explore journalists’ use of both platforms in an illuminating way by looking through the prism of journalists’ identities and perception of their professional roles. In interviews with 31 Chilean journalists, they find three approaches by which journalists see their journalistic identities on Twitter and Instagram: The adapted, skeptical, and redefiner approaches.

The adapted approach involves fully incorporating the routines and features of social media into journalists’ work, but without adjusting their traditional roles and identity. The skeptical approach goes further in defending traditional journalistic identity, seeing those tools as an encroachment on it and something that shouldn’t be validated as journalistically legitimate. Only the redefiners are willing to allow social media to reshape their professional identities, focusing less on strict professional/personal boundaries and more on social media as a self-branding and professional development opportunity. These approaches aren’t mutually exclusive, they argue, but are divergent ways for journalists to reconcile their professional, organizational, and personal identities online.

Anticipatory news infrastructures: Seeing journalism’s expectations of future publics in its sociotechnical systems. By Mike Ananny and Megan Finn, in New Media & Society.

We often talk about news in terms of trying to represent what has happened, or what is happening, but in this creative and intriguing theoretical paper Ananny and Finn are interested in journalism’s approach to what’s about to happen. “Where do journalists get their authority to report on the future?” they ask, and the place they’re led to as they answer that question and others like it is the concept of anticipatory news infrastructures.

Ananny and Finn characterize anticipatory news infrastructures as sociotechnical systems — that is, they’re made up of both material and technological objects as well as the social relationships that shape them. They use examples like the Los Angeles Times’ Quakebot system, NPR’s automated transcription-driven real-time debate fact-checking, and the analytics dashboards meant to help journalists determine what’s about to become news soon to illustrate how these infrastructures allow journalists to manage uncertainty and limit risk in a work environment tightly bound by immediacy and time.

These infrastructures ultimately create their own “anticipatory publics,” Ananny and Finn argue, by planning for and expecting particular relationships between people, data, and issues. This pushes journalists away from their familiar territory of detached objectivity and toward an arena in which their own efforts to anticipate news envision and create new social relationships.

Mob censorship: Online harassment of US journalists in times of digital hate and populism. By Silvio Waisbord, in Digital Journalism.

Online harassment and its implications for the journalist–audience relationship. By Seth Lewis, Rodrigo Zamith, and Mark Coddington, in Digital Journalism.

Online harassment has become a chillingly regular part of the job for far too many journalists around the world. In an important conceptual article, Silvio Waisbord argues that such harassment — often motivated by populism and directed against women, journalists of color, and LGBTQ journalists — is more than trolling, and doesn’t qualify as press criticism. Instead, he frames it as a “political struggle to control speech,” and specifically as a form of mob censorship.

As mob censorship, he argues, it’s part of collective, violent (verbally and/or physically) action to silence journalists, distinct from censorship efforts by the state, markets, or parastate groups. In its use of violent discourse to control journalistic speech, he says, it complicates the already fraught relationship between hate speech and democratic rights.

And if you’ll permit us a bit of self-promotion at the end of this month’s newsletter, we published a study examining some of the effects of this online harassment. In surveying American journalists, we found that journalists who’ve been harassed by audiences online are less likely to view audiences as rational or like themselves. That’s a significant fracture in the journalist-audience relationship, and one that causes us to rethink the optimism that’s often surrounded scholarship around journalists’ reciprocal relationships with audiences, a concept we’ve espoused ourselves.

I’ve never met an editor who was as eager as Jennifer was to show me one of her organization’s worst stories.

Jennifer (not her real name) was the senior editor of VidNews, my pseudonym for a news organization that, at the time of my visit in 2015, was largely producing short, aggregated videos on daily news events using brief third-party video clips, motion graphics, and original narration.

Jennifer was trying to demonstrate to me how much VidNews had grown by showing me a hastily produced video from 2013, about a baby accidentally flushed down a toilet in China. She pulled up the video on a desktop computer and breathlessly talked me through it, pausing every few seconds to annotate it disparagingly. The video was a haphazard mashup of lengthy excerpts from American local TV news stations and English-language Chinese publications, devoid of context. The source material served as a “backdoor way to show someone else’s pictures,” in Jennifer’s words, and the video cribbed from its sources so extensively as to render them superfluous.

Jennifer turned to me after the video ended. “We would never do anything like that again,” she said. “Ever. One, there’s no glory or honor in it. But two, it’s not a legally viable business strategy.” There was nothing specifically illegal about it, though it skirted the edges of what’s considered fair use of copyrighted material.

I was intrigued, though, by the invocation of “glory or honor.” We might not think of glory and honor as important elements in understanding news aggregation. Aggregation — the work of assembling and repackaging news from content that has already been published — is routine desk work, recycling the material of other journalists to fulfill a company’s economic goals that might feel distant and exploitative. Where, one might wonder, is the glory and honor in that, whether it’s done well or poorly?

But in my research on news aggregation for my book, Aggregating the News: Secondhand Knowledge and the Erosion of Journalistic Authority (Columbia University Press), I found that the professional status encoded in this idea of “glory and honor” is central to who aggregators are and how they do their work — precisely because it’s in such short supply. Without that sense of identity, work tended to become rote, cynicism ruled, and burnout was high. In organizations that cultivated it, aggregators produced stronger work and showed more satisfaction. But the importance of professional identity isn’t limited to aggregators. In an era in which trust in news is fractured and employment is precarious, we need to look more closely at the ways that journalists’ sense of their own professional value — or lack thereof — influences the work they do and the environment in which they do it.

What makes journalists feel like journalists

The notion of professionalism has for decades been central for scholars seeking to understand the role journalists play in society and why they do what they do. As the sociologist Max Weber conceived of it, professionalism is about controlling knowledge and converting it into authority. Journalists lack many of the classic traits of a profession — they aren’t licensed (in America), they have no required education, and the primary skills they claim aren’t exclusive. But their social utility hinges on their ability to produce a certain kind of knowledge — timely, understandable explanation of important public events — and have that knowledge taken to be authoritative.

Since journalists don’t check many of the traditional professional boxes, scholars have often examined professionalism’s significance to journalism by determining the ways journalists think of themselves as — and seek to become — professionals. This approach puts professional identity at the forefront of what it means to practice journalism. Journalists have a very strong sense of this identity; they conceive of themselves as being oriented around a high calling of public service. They believe this gives their work great social value, and they fight fiercely to maintain their autonomy over it.

This professional identity holds a lot of value for journalists. In the absence of formal enforcement, it provides a central motivation for upholding ethical norms and standards. It reinforces a sense of community that helps sustain journalists’ commitment and strengthens their standing when interacting with other social groups, like politicians. And, most relevant to news aggregators, journalists’ image of themselves as savvy and noble (if unruly) guardians of democracy helps them cope with the increasingly routine, constrained nature of their work.

Professional identity comes from several places — socialization through journalism school and news organizations, discussion about journalism on Twitter and in publications like this one, and ideological values of the idealized roles journalism should play in society. But what I found in my research on news aggregators is that a primary wellspring of professional identity is the work of journalism itself — and when that work becomes more monotonous and less reliable as a source of knowledge, journalists’ identity is fractured with it.

Monotony and marginalization

I interviewed more than 80 aggregators and their editors in 2015 and 2016 and observed journalists doing aggregation in five news organizations. Most were under 30, and almost all of them spent their days at a desk, processing a torrent of information from TweetDeck, Slack, and various browser tabs at a bewildering pace to keep up with the demands of continuous publication. One told me that at the end of the workday: “You just walk away like a zombie, because you’re just focused, straight-on.”

That intense informational stimulation often produces more of a sense of monotony than a rush, in part because aggregators are working with other people’s information, not their own. Editors recognize this, and they see its effects in high turnover and low morale. Many of them adjust for it by building in on-location reporting assignments to function in part as “breaks” from aggregation. “If that was your full-time job, then I think you’d get real bored,” said one journalist who alternated shifts of reporting and aggregation. “I’d feel like I wasn’t using enough skills, almost.”

The work of aggregation is defined by a relentless pace and a juxtaposition between the constant activity and immobility of what one scholar calls “screenwork.” It tends to be exhausting, but without many of the psychic rewards of reporting — visiting new places, talking to people, observing important events, finding out things that no journalist has found out before.

This stultifying work fed a sense of inferiority that was compounded by the way aggregators knew they were viewed within their profession, and sometimes, within their own organization. Aggregation has long been derided in the news industry as cheap and ethically dubious and only marginally considered journalism, if at all. While many organizations have worked to ensure that all of their journalists feel their work is valued, that root sense of marginality continues to seep through in the way aggregators are talked to by their colleagues and the way they perceive themselves.

Consider one journalist’s contrast of the way his good aggregated and reported work was talked about in his organization:

“You’re going to get kudos for a really well-reported, smart, and well-read story. For a story that does really, really well [in drawing traffic] that you just aggregated, the most you’ll maybe get, if it’s really getting a lot of attention, is like, ‘Ha ha, hey, that story is doing really well.'”

That journalist didn’t resent the condescension toward aggregation; he shared it too. “Nobody graduates from journalism school and wants to do aggregation,” he told me. Even if he did aggregation well, it simply wasn’t fully “real” journalism, in his mind or in those of his colleagues.

Reporting and journalistic identity

So what did they consider real journalism? The answer, both to many aggregators and to the broader journalistic profession, is reporting. For decades, journalists have elevated reporting as journalism’s purest and most crucial form of work, a central part of their professional identity. “Good Old Fashioned Shoe Leather Reporting is the one god an American journalist can officially pray to,” media critic Jay Rosen observed in 2015. “There can never be enough of it. Only good derives from it. Anything that eclipses it is bad. Anything that eludes it is suspect. Anything that permits more of it is holy.”

Many of the aggregators in this study seemed to believe this, too — even as it relegated them to the margins of their own profession. “You look at people who are reporting from the ground in Syria or are doing really in-depth stories about Detroit or something, and you think, ‘Wow, that’s real journalism,'” said the editor of one social news site.

Sentiments such as this evoked two main reasons that reporting has such a hold on journalists’ professional identity — and that aggregation is such a weak foundation for that identity. This editor’s statement evokes a powerful cultural myth of the intrepid reporter risking his or her safety in far-off locales. But it also expresses a wistfulness for a type of knowledge based on direct observation rather than reading others’ reports and the authority that comes with that knowledge. In journalists’ minds, reporting allows them to know and tell stories that no one has told before, something that’s central to their sense of their own social value. Aggregation deprives journalists of this sense of professional confidence. The result, especially when combined with the monotony of the work itself, is a mixture of boredom, inferiority, and even shame in some cases — a cocktail that can poison efforts to improve aggregation as a practice.

The inferiority cycle

That’s not to say aggregation is doomed to apathetic decay. Many of the aggregators I observed and talked to believed their work had substantial value, did that work the best they could, and had strong opinions about what they considered the responsible and irresponsible ways of doing it. But because of their lack of cachet within the profession and the lack of professional infrastructure built up around their work — how many j-school classes in aggregation have you heard of? — the norms they espoused had little ability to serve as a foundation for authority and professional status.

The aggregation I observed and heard about seemed stuck in a stagnant cycle. The monotonous and derivative work fed a professional ennui, and coupled with the disdain for that work in the news industry, formed a weak professional identity that led aggregators to see the avenues to fulfillment and status lying elsewhere. This, in turn, led people out of aggregation work, so that they never invested enough in it to see its standards and status improved. Which, of course, will leave it ensconced as derivative, second-class work, as the cycle continues.

This cycle is broken when news organizations make an effort to invest more value in the work and the people doing it — give it recognition, talk together about how to make it better, make it a path through which journalists can gain status in the newsroom and the profession. That starts with recognizing the importance of professional identity and its inherent connection to the work journalists do. Especially as the forms of work journalists do multiply and evolve, it’s important to consider the “glory and honor” we attach (or don’t attach) to that work, and how that esteem might influence the future of the practice itself.

The paper is meant as both a reality check for local news organizations and as a how-to for dealing with certain realities, namely: “The typical local newspaper gets about five minutes per capita per month in Web user attention, less than a local TV station earns in a single hour. Local newspaper traffic is just a rounding error on the larger Web.” Hindman notes that the “bottom line is that any successful strategy for digital local news requires sites to grow their audience…Audience growth is just as essential for plans that rely on selling subscriptions.” His recommendations including focusing on load times and personalized recommendation engines, as well as practicing A/B testing and optimizing content for social media. “The plight of newspapers is far worse than many journalists and editors realize,” Hindman concludes. Overall, his prescription is to focus on how to build consistent, repeat visitors, the idea of compounding “stickiness”: “Newspapers…need to rethink what they are optimizing for: not raw traffic, but audience growth. Small gains in stickiness can compound enormously over time.”

“Beyond Memorability: Visualization Recognition and Recall”: From Harvard, MIT and the University of Michigan, published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. By Michelle A. Borkin, Zoya Bylinskii, Nam Wook Kim, Constance May Bainbridge, Chelsea S. Yeh, Daniel Borkin, Hanspeter Pfister, and Aude Oliva.

The study provides some useful insights for news data visualization, and it serves as a good reminder that audiences need some help when interpreting visual information. The researchers conduct lab experiments with a variety of real-world graphics, including many from news organizations, and find that titles and text really help viewers interpret visuals and then recall information afterwards. Like them or not, pictograms — when done well — also facilitate recognition and recall. The keys to good data viz, according to the study, are: “having a good and clear presentation, making effective use of text and annotations, drawing a viewer’s attention to the important details, providing effective visual hooks for recall, and guiding the viewer through a visualization using effective composition and visual narrative.”

“Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion on Facebook”: From Facebook and the University of Michigan, published in Science. By Eytan Bakshy, Solomon Messing, and Lada Adamic.

This paper speaks to the ongoing debate over the power of algorithms and audience “filter bubbles.” It might seem strange for a company to need to study its own algorithm, but it’s a dynamic, complex software system. The researchers find that, although the algorithm does tailor news based on liberal or conservative leanings (and prior behavioral patterns), the filtering problem is minimal: “After [algorithmic] ranking, there is on average slightly less cross-cutting content: conservatives see approximately 5% less cross-cutting content compared to what friends share, while liberals see about 8% less ideologically diverse content.” The study took some heat for its methodological design and approach. See here and here for critiques. But overall, it stood as an important contribution that set the agenda for more discussion of algorithms and impacts.

“Tweeting From Left to Right: Is Online Political Communication More Than an Echo Chamber?”: From New York University, published in Psychological Science. By Pablo Barberá, John T. Jost, Jonathan Nagler, Joshua A. Tucker, and Richard Bonneau.

This big data study joins a conversation about ideological segregation on Twitter that has taken place for several years now (see this column last year.) The sample size is enormous: almost 4 million Twitter users and 150 million tweets. The researchers find that ideological segregation — the proverbial “birds of a feather” phenomenon — is much more visible with explicitly political issues, and that on other national events, left and right often speak with one another. Two important other findings: “With respect to both political and nonpolitical issues, liberals were more likely than conservatives to engage in cross-ideological dissemination,” and “previous work may have overestimated the degree of ideological segregation in social-media usage.”

“Interacting Is Believing: Interactivity, Social Cue, and Perceptions of Journalistic Credibility on Twitter”: From Hope College and Lehigh University, published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. By Mi Rosie Jahng and Jeremy Littau.

This study, which is based on an experiment involving about 150 students, suggests that journalists who engage more with audiences on Twitter increase their perceived credibility. Obviously, the results are limited by the experiment’s sample demographic. But it’s intriguing to contemplate how the very act of replying to the audience itself may bolster the standing of journalists. However, another 2015 study of journalist interactivity on Facebook — by Jayeon Lee of Lehigh, published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication — produced somewhat contradictory findings and finds it can be a “double-edged sword”: In terms of professional dimensions, audience engagement diminished perceptions of journalists and associated news products.

“Changing deliberative norms on news organizations’ Facebook sites”: From the University of Texas at Austin, Purdue University, and the University of Wyoming, published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. By Natalie Jomini Stroud, Joshua M. Scacco, Ashley Muddiman, and Alexander L. Curry.

This study looks at how journalists might promote better, richer, and more reasoned civic discourse about news by playing a stronger role in comment threads. The strength of the research is that it leverages a real-world field study and randomization to pinpoint effects. The researchers found that “reporter involvement was related to lower levels of incivility and greater use of evidence from commenters.” Overall, the study “provides evidence that an individual can affect norms in online comment spaces. And to a goal of promoting deliberative discussion online, this study offers support for a practice that can be enacted — engaging with commenters.” The research is part of the Engaging News Project’s important ongoing investigation of comment threads and the effects of journalistic engagement on civics and democracy.

But the omission of the link, though intentional, made some people grumpy in part because of the Times’ (and, to be fair, many traditional news organizations’) spotty record for linking out to sources.

The @NYTimes Media desk may have just jumped the shark on its penchant for not linking > http://t.co/B1dQcBQ7je cc @jktrotter

— Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) July 20, 2015

Give credit give credit give credit give credit stop pissing off your audiences and the people who did the work show your work give credit

— stacy-marie ishmael (@s_m_i) July 22, 2015

In her post, Sullivan acknowledges that the Times is still consistently inconsistent when it comes to linking out to sources. More than a year ago, standards editor Philip B. Corbett told Sullivan that the Times should “routinely be linking to background information, to other news reports, to stories our competitors broke,” not just because crediting properly is just good practice, but because readers “want and value those links.”

For professional newsrooms, settling on the “right” standards for linking out can be a bit of a tug-of-war between the culture of web-based writing (which strongly encourages it), a news site’s desire to keep reader traffic within its site, and in some cases the constraints of a janky CMS. In a 2013 study on the changing culture of hyperlinking, Nieman Lab contributor Mark Coddington writes:

Alongside cultural norms from the political blogosphere discussed above, the institutional setting of news organizations also played a significant role in shaping journalists’ linking practices. This setting manifested itself primarily through the institutional forces shaping the bureaucratized process by which those links are added. One of the fundamental elements of that process — and one of the sharpest differences between linking in more and less institutional contexts — is who performs the task of adding the links.

In less institutional settings such as a single or dual-authored blog, writers of a post almost always added links themselves. A variety of arrangements existed in more institutional news organizations, but links were most commonly added by the author, with editors checking, suggesting, and adding links…

In general, however, the more institutional the setting, the more likely links were to be subject to extra layers of organizational oversight, and the less likely they were to be tied to a single individual’s judgment, values, and practices.

In interviews with a range of bloggers inside and outside traditional news organizations, as well as web editors in those news organizations, Coddington found that clunky content management systems built primarily to produce a print newspaper were also a hindrance to adopting more widespread linking practices. Moreover, some journalists were confused about what exactly their newsroom’s standards were. Such roadblocks, though, have been falling away, albeit slowly and incrementally:

Because the processes of linking are so routinized and the values that constrain it so culturally bound, changes in linking practices within news organizations have had to take place at the routine and cultural levels as well. Several journalists described a cultural resistance to linking in newsrooms in past years built around a desire to keep readers within the organization’s website. But all of them also said that deep-seated resistance to linking had begun to fall away, largely because of two factors: the infusion of the Web’s cultural values discussed earlier, and a concerted effort by particular editors to institutionalize linking by incorporating it into the workflow of writing for the Web.

At least for the Times, as Sullivan wrote in her post, “the decision on Gawker aside, routine linking is not quite there yet.”

After hearing about the topic of our new book Boundaries of Journalism, one of Matt’s colleagues stopped in to chat. He had just had a hotly contested debate over whether television sports reporters counted as journalists. He was making the argument that they did, and he looked to Matt apparently to sort things out.

If only it were as simple as consulting some master table to provide a yes-or-no, in-or-out kind of answer! But playing referee is not what is interesting about studying the boundaries of journalism. Instead, what’s much more vital is looking at the messiness and asking: Just what are we fighting over?

We came to the book because we were both interested in the same questions about boundaries. Readers of Nieman Lab are well familiar with the parade of new faces and ideas about journalism accompanying the rise of digital media. But what does it all mean? And how can we study it?

We saw the need to clarify how to think about boundaries, and we enlisted an international cast of journalism scholars to help. Before getting into what we wrote, it is important to start with why we wrote it. Exploring the boundaries of journalism is not an intellectual exercise relevant only to those of us in the academy. Definitions matter, because how we think about the issue of boundaries has real consequences. Matt makes this case in the introduction to the book:

Gains in symbolic resources translate into material rewards. Being deemed a “legitimate” journalist accords prestige and credibility, but also access to news sources, audiences, funding, legal rights, and other institutionalized perquisites.

To take one prominent example: Resistance to including blogging under the umbrella of journalism seems as much an artifact of the early 2000s as Nelly’s “Hot in Herre.” But even now, the issue is not settled. The merits of blogging have become a current topic of debate in Australia as a matter of who is eligible for legal protections ordinarily afforded to journalists. Closer to home, the indispensable SCOTUSblog continues to have its Supreme Court accreditation blocked by the panel of journalists who handle credentialing for the U.S. Senate (to which the high court defers). Despite its reputation, the sites lacks basic privileges — like guaranteed access and office space — given to other news agencies.

Certainly, boundaries have practical consequences, but they’re also important on a deeper level. After all, boundaries organize our world for us; we rely on distinctions to make sense of how we know about reality. Or, as Seth puts in the epilogue to the book:

To set the boundaries of a particular place, process or, in this case, profession is to claim a kind of mapmaking authority: to succeed in marshaling the resources necessary to lay claim to a certain space and impose a particular vision about the character, meaning, and distinctiveness of that space.

In other words, the study of boundaries provides a cartography of society. From this viewpoint, questions quickly spring forth: Where are boundaries around journalism drawn? Who makes these distinctions? How do boundaries get made? What are their consequences?

To look at boundaries in a systematic way, we take as a starting point Thomas Gieryn’s pioneering work in the sociology of science. To Gieryn, the boundaries of science emerge out of conflicts that he calls “credibility contests” in which the establishment of borders relates, at core, to the question of legitimacy. Take, for example, the once-admired discipline of phrenology: Its ousting from Science with a capital S both diminishes its practice while protecting other scientific practices. All of this takes place through what Gieryn calls boundary work.

Boundary work is complicated, Gieryn’s work shows. It doesn’t just cut one way. In his book Cultural Boundaries of Science, Gieryn breaks boundary work down into the three categories. In the realm of expansion, one field invades another, taking over its domain. For example, childbirth was long the province of midwifes before being brought under the tent of traditional medicine. By contrast, expulsion leads to the shrinking of boundaries to cast out some practice considered to be unscientific — phrenology, again. The third category, protection of autonomy, concerns the maintenance of control against would-be intruders. In our present age, this can be seen in Congress’s meddling with the affairs of the National Science Foundation.

So, how do we use Gieryn’s ideas to talk about journalism? First, we have to admit that journalism is not science. News has always been more porous, with few formal mechanisms to draw a line between insiders and outsiders. Once we accept this, we can find use for Gieryn’s model. The introductory chapter of Boundaries of Journalism includes the following table, which combine’s Gieryn’s categories with our own topics relevant for studying journalism: participants, practices, and professionalism.

The first two columns differentiate between people and their practices. They get to the who and the what questions. Much of what we think about journalism is really about journalists — who is it that we call upon to report the news? To be a journalist is to be accorded certain rights and recognition. But journalists are also expelled too, as the history of journalism’s scandals shows. Meanwhile, debates swirl around acceptable practices regardless of who is doing them. This can been seen in the questions surrounding how journalists use social media.

The third column, professionalism, gets to the heart of what makes journalism legitimate. By and large, the dominant model of responsible news is that of the professional journalist beholden to ethical norms, rules of practice, and expectations of autonomy. This column gets to the beating heart of journalism; it is where its core identity is forged and contested.

Taken together, this table demonstrates the wide range of activities falling under the umbrella of the “boundaries of journalism.” The chapters in the book explore these and other dimensions, including boundary questions connected with everything from entrepreneurial journalism and native advertising to social media verification and wearable technologies — all toward advancing our thinking about how journalism is changing and what it means. The only clear conclusion is that boundaries will continue to be drawn, erased, and redrawn, each iteration altering how we think about news.

More than one in five comments (22 percent) contained incivility of some kind, and as a whole “55.5% of the article discussions contained at least some Incivility”; further, “The most prevalent form of incivility was name-calling, which took place in 14.0% of all comments.” Those who commented only once over the period were more likely to demonstrate incivility than those commenting most frequently. Looking at associations with article content, the researchers found that “serious, ‘hard news’ topics appear to garner greater incivility. For example, articles about the economy, politics, law and order, taxes and foreign affairs all received roughly one uncivil comment for every four comments posted.” One-third of articles containing a quotation from President Obama had an uncivil comment attached. However, when incivility was present, it was also more likely that someone in the discussion thread would cite evidence for her argument, suggesting that incivility can push debate in constructive ways, too.

“[C]ontrary to popular perceptions,” Coe, Kenski, and Rains state, “those individuals who commented most frequently were not the ones proportionally most inclined to make uncivil remarks. Our data suggest that stereotypes of frequent posters dominating news sites with barrages of incivility are, if not unfounded, at least overstated.”

“Fact Checking the Campaign: How Political Reporters Use Twitter to Set the Record Straight (Or Not)”: From the University of Texas at Austin, published in the International Journal of Press/Politics. By Mark Coddington, Logan Molyneux, and Regina G. Lawrence.

The study analyzes how some 400 reporters used Twitter to assess campaign claims during the 2012 U.S. election cycle. Coddington, Molyneux, and Lawrence narrow the sample down to about 1,900 randomly selected tweets from those journalists, with 1,700 relating directly to campaign claims. For fans of the emerging fact-checking approach, the results are disappointing: “Among the tweets that referenced claims made by the presidential candidates, at least some of which were eligible for fact checking, almost two-thirds (60 percent) reflected traditional practices of ‘professional’ objectivity: stenography — simply passing along a claim made by a politician — and ‘he said, she said’ repetition of a politician’s claims and his opponent’s counterclaim. A small but not insignificant portion (15 percent) reflected the ‘scientific’ approach to objectivity that underlies the emergent fact-checking genre, by referencing evidence for or against the claim and, in a few cases, rendering an explicit judgment about the validity of the claim — though such tweets were more likely to come from commentators than from news reporters.”

However, a quarter of the tweets showed neither the traditional “he said, she said” approach nor evidence-citing scientific fact-checking; instead, these “either passed judgment on a claim without providing evidence for that judgment or pushed back against the politician’s claim with the journalist’s own counterclaim, again without reference to external evidence.”

Coddington, Molyneux, and Lawrence conclude that the “findings suggest that the campaign was hardly ‘dictated by fact checkers,’ as the Romney campaign famously suggested, because most political reporters on Twitter relied mostly on traditional ‘stenography’ and ‘he said, she said’ forms of coverage and commentary — even during presidential debates that were identified as the most-tweeted and the most fact checked in history.”

“Can We ‘Snowfall’ This? Digital longform and the race for the tablet market”: From the University of Iowa, published in Digital Journalism. By David Dowling and Travis Vogan.

In a thoughtful and deep examination of a new genre being born, Dowling and Vogan look at three case studies in innovative story treatment — The New York Times’ “Snow Fall,” ESPN’s “Out in the Great Alone”, and Sports Illustrated’s “Lost Soul” — to see how each outlet leveraged new opportunities in digital long-form storytelling.

The researchers note that, as with New Journalism in the 1960s, we are seeing a new form that breaks significantly with journalism’s past. The visual attributes, multimedia features and layout of each — as well as branding strategy and overall outcomes for the media companies involved — are reviewed in detail. These long-form pieces “function as opportunities for these prominent media organizations to build a branded sense of renown in an increasingly competitive market,” Dowling and Vogan write, noting that they are as much story-as-advertising as story-as-story. Indeed, such dramatically appealing and elaborately produced stories “encourage reader-driven circulation via social media, a process that expands the products’ reach and allows consumers to cultivate their own identities by associating with such artifacts.” Moreover, “Digital long-form…represents a major shift away from brief breaking news toward a business model built on a carefully crafted multimedia product sensitive to users’ appreciation of multimedia narrative aesthetics.”

“What is a flag for? Social media reporting tools and the vocabulary of complaint”: From Microsoft Research and Cornell, published in New Media & Society. By Kate Crawford and Tarleton Gillespie.

This paper critiques the common mechanism for reporting (or flagging) offensive content on social networking sites, calling the flag feature “a complex interplay between users and platforms, humans and algorithms, and the social norms and regulatory structures of social media.” Crawford and Gillespie worry that the available options for flagging are too limited, thus inhibiting the robust and fair governance of social platforms of all kinds — “Facebook, Twitter, Vine, Flickr, YouTube, Instagram and Foursquare, as well as in the comments sections on most blogs and news sites.” They note that the “vocabulary” that users can employ to express concerns varies according to the site — some have only “thin” features, while others allow for the designation of mature content, abusive content, self-harm/suicide, or copyright infringement, etc.

YouTube earns praise for allowing users to provide granular feedback about offending sequences within uploaded videos; Facebook is singled out for having the best “process transparency.” Crawford and Gillespie explore the possibility of more sites creating “backstage” records of why things are deleted, i.e., Wikipedia-style discussion threads: “[V]isible traces of how and why a decision was made could help avoid the appearance that one perspective has simply won, in a contest of what are in fact inherently conflicting worldviews. A flag-and-delete policy obscures or eradicates any evidence that the conflict ever existed.” Ultimately, the authors have concerns that our global discourse is being diminished: “The combination of proprietary algorithms assessing relevance, opaque processes of human adjudication and the lack of any visible public discussion leaves critical decisions about difficult content in the hands of a few unknown figures at social media companies.”

Note: This summer, New Media & Society has published a series of studies about various Facebook-related issues and themes.

“New Media, New Civics?”: From MIT, published in Policy and Internet. By Ethan Zuckerman.

Adopted from Zuckerman’s lecture last year at the Oxford Internet Institute, this 16-page essay is well worth reading as a new perspective on where democratic participation is going in the digital age. It attempts to get past the now familiar debate about online activism versus traditional activism (the argument over “slactivism”) and to look more broadly to what Zuckerman calls “participatory civics.” By this, he means “forms of civic engagement that use digital media as a core component and embrace a post-‘informed citizen’ model of civic participation.”

This includes the trend of direct participation through online campaigns — crowdfunding and the like — and embodies an increased desire on the part of the public, especially young people, to get personally closer to the causes about which they are passionate. Zuckerman sets out a useful analytical matrix/framework for looking at activism and participation — “thick” versus “thin,” “instrumental” versus “voice,” and the whole spectrum in between. “[I]f we believe in the importance of deliberation,” he concludes, “not just about individual issues but about what issues merit deliberation, we need original thinking about how millions of points of individual and group interest resolve into an intelligible picture.”

This issue of Policy and Internet also contains a variety of responses to and critiques of Zuckerman’s ideas; these include essays by Jennifer Earl, Henry Farrell, Zeynep Tufekci, and Deen Freelon, among others.

Further recommendations: For a take-no-prisoners approach to securing the media future, see Robert W. McChesney’s “Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible: Three Radically Democratic Internet Policies,” published in Critical Studies in Media Communication. Seth C. Lewis and Oscar Westlund propose deeper inquiry into how technology itself plays a role in media production and decision-making in their new Digital Journalism article “Actors, Actants, Audiences and Activities in Cross-Media News Work.” Further, Amy Schmitz Weiss’s article in Digital Journalism looks at the increasing importance of place and geography for journalism and our understanding of it in the 21st century, while Daniel Kreiss in the Sociological Quarterly explores the nature of politics and party networks in the new millennium and discusses the “virtues of participation without power.”

The academic community is out of the gates this new year with some intriguing findings — from the limits of funding stories through micropayments to the importance of social media for people’s news diets. Many big thoughts, some data-driven takeaways and a whole lot more are below. If you’re just joining us, our “best of” of 2013 is here; and the 2012 year-end review is here. Hope you’ll tweet suggestions this year to @JournoResource if you know of a good study.

“Crowd-Funded Journalism”: From George Washington University and the University of Southern California, published in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. By Lian Jian and Nikki Usher.

The researchers examine a database of story projects crowdfunded through Spot.Us, a nonprofit news platform that allows for ideas to be funded by micropayments. Usher and Jian set out to establish patterns of funding preferences and how these affected the stories produced. The data they examined included the 234 pitches approved by editors, 102 stories produced, and 10,227 donations, as well as both reporter data about their qualifications and internal surveys with the donors.

It turns out that “compared to reporters, consumers favor stories that would provide them with practical guidance for daily living (e.g., public health or city infrastructure), as opposed to stories from which they gain a general awareness of the world (e.g., government and politics).” Surprisingly, Usher and Jian found that “reporters with less experience working with traditional news organizations tended to be more successful in raising funds from the crowd.”

The researchers conclude that crowd-funding may have a mixed future. It can be successful, and some public affairs stories do get supported; but this method of funding typically supports one kind of news: “This result seems to justify some scholars’ concern that if consumers, who are well known to prefer non-public affairs news, play an important role in news production, coverage of general public affairs news would decrease.”

“Industries in Turmoil: Driving Transformation During Periods of Disruption”: From Rutgers and the University of Southern California, published in Communication Research. By Matthew S. Weber and Peter R. Monge.

Examining 487 newspapers over the period 1997 to 2007, the study establishes an association between newsroom adoption of hyperlinking and organizational disruption. Essentially, the practice of hyperlinking to outside content, which many news organizations were slow to embrace, serves as a proxy for progress on digital strategy. Weber and Monge crawled the relevant news sites through the Internet Archive and did some interviews for qualitative context. As a measure of disruption, they looked at Editor & Publisher International Yearbook, which showed that, over that period, there were 905 changes in editors, 467 changes in publisher, and 92 changes in ownership. (A sample of these was checked, and it was determined that only 13 percent were due to retirements or planned departures.) The scholars note that they use “changes in management or ownership as an indication of major organizational disruption; this is not directly a failure, but is likely to indicate a change in direction.”

In any case, the researchers conclude that “organizations that adopted the most aggressive hyperlinking strategies significantly reduced their likelihood of failure. Results for less aggressive strategies were not nearly as strong, further emphasizing the results of this finding.”

“The Relative Importance of Social Media for Accessing, Finding and Engaging with News”: From Roskilde University, Denmark, published in Digital Journalism. By Rasmus Kleis Nielsen and Kim Christian Schrøder.

The study analyzes data from the 2013 Reuters Digital News Survey of media consumers in eight countries: Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. (Samples in each country ranged from about 1,000 to 2,000 persons.) Nielsen and Schrøder conclude that “social media at this point still play a relatively limited role as sources of news — less widely used and less important than printed newspapers in all eight countries; that they in some cases play a somewhat larger role as a way of finding news; and that only a minority use them to engage in more participatory forms of news use like sharing, commenting on, or publishing their own stories.”

U.S.-specific data points include: 27 percent of online news users said social media was their most important source of news, though among 18- to 24-year-olds that figure was 45 percent; in terms of finding news online, 20 percent of Americans surveyed said news websites were the most important, while 33 percent said social media and 30 percent cited search engines. Nielsen and Schrøder note that “Germany and Japan have relatively low levels of social media use for news purposes, Italy, Spain, and to some extent the United States have higher levels, and Denmark, France, and the United Kingdom lie somewhere in between.”

The broader takeaway here regarding the importance of social media: “It is simply that sometimes both academic and public discussions of their relative importance for contemporary media users suggest that the glass is full to the brim when in fact the data suggest more of a glass-half-full–half-empty situation.”

“Reciprocal Journalism: A Concept of Mutual Exchange between Journalists and Audiences”: Study from the University of Minnesota, the University of Utah, and the University of Texas at Austin, published in Journalism Practice. By Seth C. Lewis, Avery E. Holton, and Mark Coddington. (Pre-print open version here.)

This study sketches out a new theory that is something like “audience engagement 3.0,” or “participation plus.” The specific coinage here, “reciprocal journalism,” seeks to advance the endless discussion among journalism circles about community engagement and go even a step further.

Despite its more democratic feel, participatory journalism as we know it is still mostly one-way: serving the news organization’s needs more so than the audience’s. Lewis, Holton, and Coddington focus on how Twitter, Facebook, and other social media can facilitate more reciprocal forms of journalism, whether directly (e.g., journalists exchanging tweets with followers one-to-one), indirectly (e.g., journalists returning favors not to particular individuals but to their communities as a whole, by encouraging discussion around certain hashtags), or sustained (e.g., journalists creating Facebook community pages where audiences can expect longer-lasting exchanges of goodwill among journalists and audiences).

This means journalists seeing their role as quasi-organizers of democracy, or “community-builders who can forge connections with and among community members by establishing patterns of reciprocal exchange.” Ultimately, the authors argue, “reciprocal journalism” isn’t describing some entirely new kind of journalism, but rather “points to the unrealized potential for a participatory journalism that has mutual benefit in mind, that is not merely fashioned to suit a news organization’s interests but also takes citizens’ concerns to heart.”

“Syria’s Socially Mediated Civil War”: From George Washington University and American University, published by the United States Institute of Peace. By Marc Lynch, Deen Freelon and Sean Aday.

This paper provides important notes of skepticism for discourse around the issue of social media and its role in conflict zones. It moves past many of the preliminary research findings with respect to the early stages of the Arab Spring. Lynch, Freelon, and Aday analyze patterns of Twitter conversation, looking at how information flows around certain hashtags and key users or “hubs.” They conclude that looking at patterns of English-language tweets is increasingly insufficient, as the Arabic-language Twitterverse grows more complex.

Their findings should prompt everyone to be cautious about definitive claims regarding influence and trends. The researchers state that “social media create a dangerous illusion of unmediated information flows,” as “key curation hubs within networks may now play a gatekeeping role as powerful as that of television producers and newspaper editors.” Other key points in the report include: “We need to study more carefully the extent to which the network insularity we observe allows videos or messages to be ‘narrowcast’ online — that is, jihadist messages in Arabic reach one audience and moderate messages in English reach another.” Further, “Journalists and analysts must think more carefully about how to correct for the systematic over or underrepresentation of particular viewpoints or data and how to check online information against offline developments.”

“The Great Equalizer? Patterns of Social Media Use and Youth Political Engagement in Three Advanced Democracies”: From the University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Sydney and University of York, published in Information, Communication & Society. By Michael Xenos, Ariadne Vromen and Brian D. Loader.

The study provides some reasons for optimism on two long-standing worries: Both political disengagement among youth and patterns of political inequality. The authors look at dynamics in the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Xenos, Vromen, and Loader oversaw original survey research in the three countries, totaling 3,685 people ages 16 to 29 — 1,241 in the U.S., 1,216 in Australia, and 1,228 in Britain.

Respondents were asked about social media usage as well as acts of civic and political engagement (but not voting). The researchers state that the analysis “offers the most comprehensive study of social media use and political engagement among contemporary youth to date.” Their findings are striking: “[W]e find a strong, significant, and robust positive relationship between social media use and political engagement.” Further, it appears that socioeconomic status (SES) — which scholars have long known is a big predictor of civic/political engagement — appears to be a less powerful factor with this generation: “Stated plainly, our results suggest that if one were seeking an efficient single indicator of political engagement among young people in the countries studied here, social media use would appear to be as good as, or better than, SES.”

The scholars don’t get into the exact “why,” or causal explanations. And they concede that their measurements of social media use and engagement are more “broadly cast than most others used in the [prior scholarly] literature.”

“Discourse architecture, ideology, and democratic norms in online political discussion”: From American University, published in New Media & Society. By Deen Freelon.

The paper looks at how the platform design of Twitter and comment threads of news sites influences how political discussions unfold. Freelon analyzes data around certain hot-button issues — climate change, immigration, gays in the military — during 2010; the Washington Post and Seattle Times sites were used as representative samples.

He finds that people use different political expression styles in different online spaces across issues: For example, Twitter leans toward a more “communitarian” style, with users making more frequent group appeals and calls to action; by contrast, news site comments lean more “liberal individualist,” with less replying to others and more insults, although there were lots of reasons given for arguments and questions asked across ideological lines — in essence, news comments had both reasoned debate and incivility in the same space. Overall, the data provide “robust evidence that the common features in each space are facilitating particular patterns of communication norms.”

Related: Another recent study specifically on comment threads, “Virtuous or Vitriolic: The effect of anonymity on civility in online newspaper reader comment boards,” finds that “there is a dramatic improvement in the level of civility in online conversations when anonymity is removed.” The research, by Arthur D. Santana of the University of Houston, was published in Journalism Practice.

“Multitasking on a Single Device: Arousal and the Frequency, Anticipation, and Prediction of Switching Between Media Content on a Computer”: From Stanford University, published in Journal of Communication. By Leo Yeykelis, James J. Cummings, and Byron Reeves.

The study looks at multitasking from a slightly different angle than many prior studies do — namely, the toggling between content on just one device (as opposed to multiple device usage). The researchers experimented on 12 undergraduates using their personal laptop in a natural setting, generating “396,000 data points equaling 110 hours of moment-by-moment changes in switching and arousal over 10 hours during a normal weekday.” Arousal was measured by “skin conductance levels” determined through wrist censors, which measure activation levels through the sympathetic nervous system.

Yeykelis, Cummings, and Reeves determine that, on average, subjects switched content every 19 seconds — faster than expected based on prior literature. In fact, “One-fifth of all content was viewed for 5 seconds or less, with 75 percent viewed for less than a minute.” Email and Facebook took up a quarter of all subjects’ time online. Further, they “discovered that people have an anticipatory arousal spike 12 seconds before switching to [other] content.” The findings, the authors suggest, give some support both to those who argue the positives of multitasking and those who focus on the negatives.

“The Emergence of a Freedom of Information Movement: Anonymous, WikiLeaks, the Pirate Party, and Iceland”: From the University of Washington, published in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. By Jessica L. Beyer.

Global rhetoric around freedom of information is “becoming increasingly similar across sites” worldwide, this paper says. Beyer reviews activist sites and movements over the period 2007-2011 to look for converging patterns. “The idea of ‘freedom of information’ expressed online,” she writes, “appears to be a cross-national online norm of freedom of information that is related to, but also often in conflict with, domestic legal practices.” This is playing out even as intellectual property rights advocates and government security concerns are being asserted and pushing back. Beyer notes that the “ability of groups such as Anonymous to channel the power of like-minded, but not tech savvy, allies is increasing. Whatever the future of this newly forming ‘freedom of information’ movement, its emergence from the online world offers evidence for the power of the Internet and online communities in shaping participants’ political beliefs and actions. Young people online are willing to mobilize on behalf of abstract rights claims, and that willingness spreads quickly across the social spaces online.”

Photo by Anna Creech used under a Creative Commons license.

If you’ve been in the digital news business for a while, it’s likely you have fond memories of OJR, the Online Journalism Review, based at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School. Starting way back in 1998, OJR was perhaps the best online chronicler of the changes coming to journalism online; as its mission statement put it back then: “Our purpose is to be useful to journalists and anyone interested in where journalism is going in cyberspace.”

paidContent had the business deals, and Romenesko had the memos and job moves, but OJR was great at analyzing what this new medium meant to our old craft. When I started Nieman Lab back in 2008, OJR in its heyday was one of the models I had in mind.

I say “in its heyday” because, at some point along the way, OJR started to feel a little abandoned. The publishing frequency dropped off; the articles became a bit more tips-and-tricks and a bit less analytical. By the end of 2012, the site was posting only one or two new articles a month and it was unclear where it was headed.

In February, OJR announced it was relaunching and shifting towards more of an audience-submission model:

OJR opens a new chapter today with a fresh look and even more of the content you’ve come to trust. Not only that, but we’re looking to involve the greater journalism community in the discussion. We are now accepting submissions from reporters and media observers who can offer keen insight into the future of news.

After that note, though, there were just 12 more posts over the following four months. And after a June 26 piece on The Texas Tribune — silence.

A near-death experience

I can’t truthfully say I noticed at the time — OJR had fallen off my radar some time ago. But when Mark Coddington tweeted September 17 that the site appeared to have disappeared, I felt more than a little sad.

So apparently last week, the Online Journalism Review disappeared: http://t.co/odlvGm9Jnn Too bad – some great writing was housed there.

— Mark Coddington (@markcoddington) September 17, 2013

I checked the domain registry for ojr.org and found that the domain name had expired a few days earlier, on September 11. I emailed someone at USC Annenberg Digital News to alert him about the situation if he didn’t already know — and to say that if USC wasn’t interested in running OJR any more, I’d be interested in helping figure out an afterlife for the site’s archives, which have a lot of really interesting historical material.

“I’d just hate for OJR.org to point to some spam blog or porn site,” I wrote, saying “there are still people who think there’s a big legacy to be kept behind those three letters.”

He wrote back a quick note to say they were working on the situation. For a brief time, the site seemed to come back — but then it disappeared again.

Comic Sans?!

Fast forward to Friday night, when I thought to check in again and see how OJR.org was doing. (Why yes, my life is that interesting, thank you!) The news wasn’t good:

I have no idea how to deal with the fact that the once great @ojr has apparently relaunched with a Comic Sans logo. http://t.co/UPxg0orVkP

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) November 16, 2013

The site was up and even had a new article posted — but for some reason it had screwed around with its previous design, switching out its old masthead font (Vast Shadow) for what looked to be the much mocked Comic Sans. It appeared that OJR was going to drag on as a sad ghost of its past. The new article, which I didn’t bother to read, seemed to be something about a Pinterest tool.

OJR logos, from 1998 to the present. That last one looks odd, doesn’t it?

Then, for some reason yesterday — in case it wasn’t yet clear that I care about this old website more than I should — I decided to go back for another look. I looked at that new article, which leads off this way:

If you are familiar with Pinterest and got your attention, today One Flare unveiled its very first, one-of-a-kind Australian version: Home Design Ideas — a design inspiration tool powered by 37,000 Australian home servicing businesses.

Oneflare takes advantage of the technology of the worldwide web to introduce to clients the quickest solutions. The link allows signing-up an account to its official homepage — Oneflare Scrapbooks. With over 90,000 users Oneflare Scrapbooks is launching a web-based scrapbook to the largest community of design enthusiasts in Australia.

My first thought, as an editor, was: “Seriously, guys, it’s either One Flare or Oneflare. Can’t be both.” My second was: “I think you’re missing a word in that first clause.” But my third was: “I know we’re past OJR’s heyday, but this seems unusually lame. And a strange topic for OJR to be dealing with.”

So on a whim, I decided to look up the domain registry information again, just to see how that got resolved. And I saw this:

Someone named Marcus Lim in Australia appeared to have taken over control of OJR.org. Wait — what was in that goofy new story on OJR?

“We’re truly excited about launching Oneflare Scrapbooks”, says Marcus Lim, CEO and co-founder of Oneflare. It represents the next step in home design and home improvement. It combines inspiration with action, allowing users to plan, design and execute their projects, safe in the knowledge that they can do thorough research on any trade professionals they are considering to hire. Every user has access to an extensive network of Australian local businesses they can hire to complete jobs around the home.”

Indeed, Marcus Lim is listed on Oneflare’s website as the company’s CEO and founder. (“Marcus is constantly enhancing Oneflare’s online strategy and product development” — I’ll say!)

Signs of subterfuge

So it appeared that Lim (or someone working for him) had obtained control of OJR.org — presumably just by buying the domain once it had expired, although we don’t know that — and created as close of a facsimile of the old site as he could, with a lot of the old content. Then he’d added one new fresh “article” on November 12 that promoted his product — and hoped that no one would notice.

Once you realize something’s amiss, you can there are plenty of other pieces of evidence something’s wrong with OJR.org. The middle column of the site’s homepage has disappeared; the background has moved from white to gray. All author names have been turned into “admin,” the WordPress default login. Looking under the hood, you find that the USC Annenberg and USC logos at the top of the page have URLs like http://ojr.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/usc-logo.png. That /2013/11/ directory structure makes it clear they were uploaded to WordPress just this month, not when the redesign launched in February.

The last legitimate version of OJR.org (left) and the current site (right). (The old site’s masthead was served up using webfonts, which is why the version at the Internet Archive displays it incorrectly.)

Some of the old OJR archives are there, but not all of them. This article from October 2011 is the oldest one on the new, fake OJR.org; the real OJR.org had workable archives back to November 2004. (The stuff pre-2004 existed on the old OJR server, but wasn’t in the WordPress install — you had to go hunting for it separately through Google. This 2002 Staci D. Kramer piece on The New York Times’ e-edition — “a viable option for folks who can’t get the Times easily and have Internet access at 128 bps or higher”! — was live until Lim’s switcheroo.)

Interestingly, when I tried to look up OJR.org’s domain information again a couple hours after my first look, Lim’s name had already been scrubbed using WhoisGuard, which allows domain registrants to hide their identities via a service in Panama. (Don’t worry: I got screenshots.) At this writing, you can still see Lim’s registration info for OJR.org here, although that may change with time, as Google’s cache refreshes.

In it for the PageRank

So why would someone do this? I have to think there’s only one big reason: search engine optimization. OJR.org, because it’s been around forever, has a good reputation in Google’s eyes; it has a PageRank of 7 out of 10, which gives anything on OJR.org a leg up in search over pages on lesser sites, all else equal. (And they rarely are equal.) Oneflare’s own website, for instance, only has a PageRank of 4. It’s doubtful OJR.org in its previous state was getting much web traffic through anything other than search.

There’s nothing morally wrong about grabbing onto an expired domain name and using it for different purposes. (Another great media-about-media site from the old days, Inside.com, will soon be reborn as something new, for instance.) It’s up to Google to realize what’s happened and adjust PageRank accordingly.

But Lim’s doing far more than reusing a domain name. He’s clearly wrong to pretend that his version of OJR.org is actually the Online Journalism Review. Putting those USC and USC Annenberg logos on the site is clearly intended to mislead, and almost certainly legally actionable should USC want to send a cease and desist. And Lim certainly does not own the copyright of those hundreds of old articles that he’s copied and reprinted whole.

It’s scummy.

Lessons learned

I called USC Annenberg’s public relations office earlier this afternoon. I was told the key people are traveling and not immediately available; I’ll be sure to update here when I hear back. UPDATE, 9:45 p.m.: I did hear back from USC Annenberg; here’s their statement:

USC Annenberg is taking steps to regain control of Online Journalism Review, after the domain of OJR.org was allowed to lapse earlier this month. We’re proud of the investment we’ve made into the news outlet over the years — and of all the work so many talented writers and editors have put into it — and hope to continue ownership of it in the future.

I hope, if they can’t wrestle back control of OJR.org, they push out notice through their Twitter and Facebook pages (last updated June 14) that OJR.org is no longer under their control and that new content there isn’t to be trusted.

I also tried to call Marcus Lim; I couldn’t get through at the number he left for the domain, but I did reach the Oneflare office. The woman who answered the phone there said Lim and another person who often deals with the press were both unavailable. At her suggestion, I sent them both an email; I’ll be happy to update here if they respond.

UPDATE, 9:45 p.m.: Soon after this post went up, OJR.org underwent a sudden redesign — removing the OJR archive stories and the USC logos and changing the site name from “Online Journalism Review” to “Online Journal Review.” (I guess they’ll review Moleskines now?) Smart moves! Those take care of the obvious legal problems. They also changed the Comic Sans logo — which was just an aesthetic complaint, not a legal one. They still haven’t return my email or acknowledged their actions. And the site is now solely a spamblog, rather than a spamblog cloaked in an old journalism website. Progress, I guess?

So what can we learn from this debacle?

— Renew your domain names. Back in the early days of the web, domain names cost a fair chunk of change. Now they’re $20 at the most, under $10 if you shop around. If you control any domains, do me a favor and go see when they expire. If you want them to live, go to your registrar and (a) buy up a few years of renewal and/or (b) set them to autorenew with a credit card. If USC had done this with OJR.org, all of this could have been avoided.

— Value your archives. There’s often a good financial reason to value what’s in there; Robert Cottrell was right when he said: “I suspect that the wisest new hire for any long-established newspaper or magazine would be a smart, disruptive archive editor. Why just sit on a mountain of classic content, when you could be digging into it and finding buried treasure?”

But beyond the business case, there’s something like a moral responsibility to keep past work on the web as available as we can. So much of the web I remember from the mid 1990s to the mid 2000s is just gone, forever. Brewster Kahle and his essential team at the Internet Archive are basically the only thing keeping our web history alive, and any number of news sites block it from keeping copies of their work. (They just had a fire; give them money.)

If news organizations are going to take their responsibility to inform the public seriously, they can’t be cavalier about letting old stories disappear with every redesign. Breaking old links is a jerk move; erasing years of history is worse. (My offer still stands: I’d be happy to give a good permanent home to the OJR archives, which will have a lot of value to people who study that period in journalism history.)

— Don’t be a jerk. That’s Lim’s lesson, hopefully.

It’s hard to keep up with the increasing deluge of scholarship in digital media — and even harder to tie academic work directly to news industry decisions. But in one notable recent instance, scholarship has had a real influence on editorial policy — albeit in controversial fashion.

Popular Science announced that it is shutting down its comments section to push back against a perceived “war on expertise.” Debate over the move has been heated. The decision was partly informed by media research published earlier this year, in particular, the study “The ‘Nasty Effect:’ Online Incivility and Risk Perceptions of Emerging Technologies,” in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Do its findings trouble you enough to shut off comments? Judge for yourself (open versions here). One of the co-authors on that paper, Dominique Brossard of the University of Wisconsin, also just published an important paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “New media landscapes and the science information consumer.” Though aimed at scientists and science communicators, the paper offers insights useful to journalists reporting on difficult and complex technical issues such as biotechnology and climate change — certainly relevant as the new United Nations IPCC report is rolled out.

Other new scholarship might inform ongoing newsroom debates over comments, too. For example, a 2013 report “Journalist Involvement in Comment Sections,” from the Engaging News Project, run by the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life at the University of Texas at Austin, analyzes issues of participation and incivility. The research project, directed by Natalie Jomini Stroud, produces some empirical evidence that reporter involvement can reduce incivility.

In other news, a new paper, “Did Twitter Kill the Boys on the Bus? Searching for a better way to cover a campaign,” by CNN’s Peter Hamby, from the Shorenstein Center (disclosure: I work there) has been generating discussion about political journalism all month. And finally, many saw Mark Coddington’s interesting writeup this week here at the Lab of his new study, but in case you didn’t, check it out. It’s about how journalists define “original reporting” — and how they might define their work over and against the likes of WikiLeaks.

“The Absence of Structural Americanization: Media System Developments in Six Affluent Democracies, 2000–2009”: Study from Oxford University/Roskilde University, published in The International Journal of Press/Politics. By Rasmus Kleis Nielsen.

The paper examines media industry patterns in the United States, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Despite predictions that we would see an increasingly homogenous media system across Western countries — convergence around a similar “Americanized” model — Nielsen finds surprising levels of divergence among media structures in different nations. He analyzes newspaper revenue, degree of emphasis on web platforms, changes in TV, and levels of public support for journalism, among other variables.

The paper offers many fascinating insights within the field of comparative media research, but for American readers, the big thing you might take away is U.S. exceptionalism: “The U.S. newspaper industry has suffered much more than its counterparts elsewhere. The U.S. commercial broadcasting industry is not only much stronger, in relative terms, than its European counterparts, but it has also grown at a faster pace. Internet use in the United States developed earlier than in many European countries, but dissemination seems to have stalled at a lower level than in other affluent democracies, and forms of use differ. Nonprofit and online-only news organizations have found some sustainable niches in the huge U.S. market, but few even in large Western European countries like France, Germany, and Italy…The American media system remains exceptionally exceptional (Hardy 2008) — there are no other systems like it, or even becoming very much more like it.”

The study is part of a special issue of the journal, which also includes another noteworthy global media study, “More of the Same or Marketplace of Opinions? A Cross-National Comparison of Diversity in Online News Reporting,” by Edda Humprecht and Florin Buchel of the University of Zurich. Also of note on this comparative theme: a new study in First Monday, “Rational reflections: An illustrative examination of news Web sites in two countries as workers reach towards digitally mediated changes,” by Phil M. MacGregor of Bournemouth University.

“Effects of gender and tie strength on Twitter interactions”: Study from Rutgers, Google, and Cornell NYC Tech, published in First Monday. By Funda Kivran-Swaine, Samuel Brody, and Mor Naaman.

The researchers set out to study gender differences in behavior on Twitter by analyzing some 78,000 messages among more than 1,700 pairs of persons. They conclude: “Gender differences revealed in our analysis have mostly confirmed observations in traditional settings; women use higher levels of [first person plural, or “we,”] [first person singular, or “I”], intensifiers, and emoticons in their speech, with levels escalating even more when they converse with other women, hinting at accommodation.”

The study catalogues the words that most distinctively characterize — that are most predictive of — female-to-female messages (“love”) and male-to-male interactions (“dude” or “man.”) Many of the old Venus and Mars clichés are at work, with some nuances: “These results suggest that, in their Twitter interactions, women tend to reference both themselves and others, more than men do…In general, the female linguistic style that was manifested in our study is more socially aware than linguistic style exhibited by men. This may be due to the fact that even when conversing with those they feel close to, in Twitter, women’s interactions are more about people and social happenings, whereas men prefer a style that is less personal.”

“Hunting corrupt officials online: the human flesh search engine and the search for justice in China”: Study from Loughborough University, published in Information, Communication & Society. By Li Gao and James Stanyer.

The study provides a window into just how rough-and-tumble the web is in China in terms of vigilante collective action — sometimes straight-up bullying — in pursuit of ostensibly “just” causes. The researchers look at four different varieties of activity within the “human flesh search engine” (HFSE) — really just a colorfully shocking metaphor for the no-holds-barred Chinese web as it does “target-punishing” of citizens and “fact-checking” of officials. Among the cases examined, Gao and Stanyer write, “Each starts with a trigger that emerged offline, presenting a certain kind of transgressive behaviour, followed by the revelation of the transgression — this is usually some form of hard evidence, a sound recording, photograph, document — or a questionable statement by an official.”

The study provides a fascinating window into brutally “democratic” tactics amid an authoritarian atmosphere, like a user-generated version of Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate. Any moral calculus is complicated by the weird mix of genuine citizen grievance and state acquiescence: “[T]hough there is strict control in Chinese cyberspace the Internet policy in China is fluid and calculating; the Chinese central government generally lets HFSE exist because it views the Internet as a channel to monitor and discipline its local departments and cadres. Of course if its legitimacy and stability are challenged by an HFSE then its response would be different…[B]ased on the HFSE we examined and as far we can tell, HFSEs were not organized by central government and participants were not enlisted in response to a central government call for action. Underlying them is a genuine citizen anger and resentment at the transgression of particular norms by public officials and a desire to bring about some resolution.”

“Social Networking Site Use by Mothers of Young Children”: Study from Microsoft Research. By Meredith Ringel Morris.

The study is among the first empirical examinations of exactly how new mothers use social media to communicate about their infants and experiences. It draws on data from 412 online surveys. The research provides insight into how mothers deal with communicating amid difficult issues such as postpartum depression and child developmental delays, and it debunks one big cultural stereotype. “Although pop-culture sensibilities, exemplified by the Facebook app unbaby.me…suggest that new mothers post incessantly and exclusively about their offspring, our findings indicate that this is a greatly exaggerated perception,” Morris writes. “Indeed, mothers of young children post far less often than they did before their child’s birth (at only half of their prior rate), and posts mentioning the child comprise only a small portion of their total posts.”

“Framing Bouazizi: ‘White lies’, hybrid network, and collective/connective action in the 2010–11 Tunisian uprising”: Study from the University of Arizona, published in Journalism. By Merlyna Lim.

This column has already covered a fair amount of the scholarship on the Arab Spring and the Internet, but this new study adds important further nuance. It suggests that the facts around the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, which touched off waves of revolutionary protest both in Tunisia and around the region, were bent by activists for public relations purposes — to create more accessible online narratives. Lim looks at why Bouazizi’s death and the demonstrations that followed weren’t as easily dismissed by the authorities as earlier events had been: In particular, his suicide was filmed; and his story was adjusted to frame the death in a way that appealed to a broad range of Tunisians.

The author makes a careful study of the diffusion of messages through a “hybrid” network: “The making of this network reflects the logic of media convergence which embodies not only a technological process where different types of media forms — old and new — collide, but also a cultural process with blurring lines between production and consumption, between makers and users, between formal and informal memberships, and between active or passive spectators.”

Bookish footnote: Of course, a fair amount of digital scholarship is still published in book form (a format this monthly Lab column intentionally neglects). But a quick way to catch up is a new review for Perspectives on Politics by Daniel Kreiss at the University of North Carolina. He rounds up several of the most important books in recent years about digital politics. They are: Collective Action in Organizations: Interaction and Engagement in an Era of Technological Change by Bruce Bimber, Andrew J. Flanagin, and Cynthia Stohl; iPolitics: Citizens, Elections, and Governing in the New Media Era edited by Richard L. Fox and Jennifer M. Ramos; and Rebooting American Politics: The Internet Revolution by Jason Gainous and Kevin M. Wagner.

Photo by Anna Creech used under a Creative Commons license.

This month’s edition of What’s New In Digital Scholarship rounds up the findings of eight reports and studies that touch on many of the major themes scholars are exploring: how the media business can survive financially and maintain editorial integrity; how standards are shifting with respect to the use of non-professional sources for news; and how newsrooms are still feeling their way toward best practices in an online world that has different cultural expectations. And there’s some fresh data about how Americans are engaging with political news on social media. Also featured here are studies that relate to some technical issues — Internet surveillance and the mobile “revolution” in the developing world — that are of general concern to global media.

“Responsibilities of the state: Rethinking the case and possibilities for public support of journalism”: Study from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication, published in First Monday. By Daniel Kreiss and Mike Ananny.

The authors take a nuanced look at the history of indirect government supports that have allowed the press to flourish in past eras and imagine new ways that the state can help a media industry now going through disruptive change. “Given the state’s continued role in realizing and fostering the public sphere,” the authors write, “it is time to move beyond the debate of whether the state should subsidize the press to consider how we can better design supportive policies appropriate for the digital age.” They argue that the state can and should play a role in supporting journalism, while at the same time preserving editorial independence and journalism’s “watchdog” role.

The scholars propose: making more information and data available for the press, in effect providing a “subsidy” by furnishing more material to report and add value to; redoubling support for public broadcasting; helping more nonprofit news organizations such as ProPublica come into being through tax and regulatory policies; and funding more internships and training experiences for young journalists. Interestingly, they also float the idea of rebooting normal copyright procedures in order to help the press: “One idea is to provide financial compensation to journalists and news outlets that allow others in the public sphere to access, use, and remix it as they wish. For example, if the intent of copyright is ‘to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,’ we should reverse its specific mechanism of granting creators exclusive rights to control the use, dissemination, and derivations of their work and provide fiscal incentives instead for journalism that is produced for the public domain.”

“Normalizing the hyperlink: How bloggers, professional journalists, and institutions shape linking values”: Study from University of Texas at Austin, published in Digital Journalism. By Mark Coddington.

How did it come to be proper “etiquette” to provide an outbound link to an external source when referencing other online media? And why do we now basically accept this as a best practice? This study looks at how such norms developed; it is based on 21 in-depth interviews in 2011 with political bloggers affiliated with traditional news organizations and non-traditional outlets. The practice, it seems, is rooted not only in notions of “courtesy” but in ideas that links build and strengthen communal ties and establish credibility, according to the study’s sources. Still, within news organizations, content management systems have sometimes made the practice difficult, and journalists and bloggers are not always sure there are institutional guidelines and best practices for linking within their own media outlets, it turns out.

Of course, there is the issue of ensuring maximum time-on-site, but philosophies and values are now changing: “Several journalists described a cultural resistance to linking in newsrooms in past years built around a desire to keep readers within the organization’s website. But all of them also said that deep-seated resistance to linking had begun to fall away, largely because of two factors: the infusion of the Web’s cultural values…and a concerted effort by particular editors to institutionalize linking by incorporating it into the workflow of writing for the Web.” At root, it’s a story of how digital norms have changed newsrooms: “In the case of linking, professional journalism has shown a real willingness to adopt and absorb Web-based cultural values, using links as tools for transparency and networked connection.”

“When Retweets Attack: Are Twitter Users Liable for Republishing the Defamatory Tweets of Others?”: Paper from Schieffer School of Journalism at Texas Christian University, published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. By Daxton R. “Chip” Stewart.

The paper reviews various legal precedents and laws such as the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA) and extends their implications to the microblogging platform Twitter. The author concludes firmly that “it could not be more clear that the ‘naked retweet’ — that is, pushing the ‘Retweet’ button to circulate somebody else’s tweet to one’s own followers … would not trigger republisher liability for defamation.” Previous court rulings on aspects of the CDA suggest the law “protects social media users when they share defamatory information with others.” However, there is also the issue of modifying retweets or providing additional commentary on the original tweet. Here there is some legal gray area. It may be the case that “retweets with added content would be protected as long as the republisher does not add new content that is independently defamatory,” but there is a 2008 Ninth Circuit decision, in the Roommates.com case, that could open the door to a libel prosecution in certain situations. Twitter users should be aware that a “hat tip” (h/t) technique, when “preceded by the Twitter user’s own thoughts, comments, or assertions, is less likely to be granted immunity under” the CDA. Much of this comes down to whether a court would consider a given Twitter user a true “content provider” or merely a “user,” though that distinction has yet to be fully developed in legal theory and case law.

“Civic Engagement in the Digital Age”: Report from Pew Internet & American Life Project. By Aaron Smith.

Based on a survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults conducted in mid-2012, Pew finds that engagement with social networking sites has nearly doubled over the past four years among those who are already online (33 percent in 2008, 69 percent in 2012.) Many more people say they posted links to political news on social sites: 17 percent of all adults in 2012, compared to just 3 percent in 2008. And among online adults in 2012, 28 percent reported posting political stories or articles on social networking sites, compared to 11 percent among that population in 2008. The data generally show an income gap, with higher-income persons reporting higher levels of engagement with and on social media. Partisan affiliation did not strongly predict levels of online political engagement in most cases, though liberals were more slightly more likely to report social networking site usage and engagement with issues because of social media chatter. The report has a range of useful data for anyone interested in how Americans engage in politics.

“Societal and Ideological Impacts of Deep Packet Inspection Internet Surveillance”: Paper from University of Westminster’s Communication and Media Research Institute, published in Information, Communication & Society. By Christian Fuchs.

Surveying the practices of various European technology security firms as well as information from a variety of research papers and interest groups, the author takes a broad look at the practices of observation and analysis of content data passing through the tubes and nodes of the Internet (called Deep Packet Inspection, or DPI.) Of course, this is being carried out in an increasingly security-conscious era in which private firms are empowered to perform some state-security functions, the paper notes. There is a certain potential creepiness that is spelled out by the author — the idea that there may be DPI “function creep,” as more and more entities want to conduct this type of surveillance. Issues of net neutrality, political repression, overly intrusive advertising, and file-sharing are discussed. The technological possibilities are only increasing, the author asserts: “The security-industrial complex on the one hand wants to make a business out of developing military and surveillance technologies and on the other hand advances the large-scale application of surveillance technologies and the belief in managing crime, terrorism and crises by technological means. DPI Internet surveillance is part of this political economic complex that combines profit interests, a culture of fear and security concerns, and surveillance technologies.” The author advocates that, in order to combat these Big Brother-oriented dangers, a “paradigm shift is needed from the conservative ideology of crime and terror and the fetishism of crime fighting by technology towards a realist view of crime that focuses on causes that are grounded in society and the lived realities of humans and power structures…”

“Journalism in the age of global media: The evolving practices of foreign correspondents in London”: Study from the University of Salford, published in Journalism. By Cristina Archetti.

The author conducted interviews with 25 journalists from outlets around the globe who are based in Britain. She compares her data to that of the last substantial study of London-based foreign correspondents, which took place 1978-81. Many correspondents now are younger and operate without an office; many are “one-man bands” — they operate without news organization peers in-country; and most do not report having stable contracts with a single news outlet. As you would expect, technology has changed this game to some extent: “All correspondents mention that the development of communication technologies makes their work easier, even if it is problematic to sift through the information tide to check its accuracy.” Although the article doesn’t dispute the fact that there are challenges and likely a thinning of the ranks, the role of the foreign correspondent remains a relatively more creative one, as reporters still must find distinctive story angles that connect with their home country audiences and can’t do mere lazy “churnalism”: “While all journalists need information to feed into their reports, the interviews suggest that there is possibly a high degree of reinterpretation of the material journalists get from their sources. This happens to a greater extent than in domestic journalism and is related to the very nature of the foreign correspondent’s assignment.”

“Amateur sources breaking the news, metasources authorizing the news of Gaddafi’s death: New patterns of journalistic information gathering and dissemination in the digital age”: Study from the University of Copenhagen, published in Digital Journalism. By Nete Nørgaard Kristensen and Mette Mortensen.

Distinctive perhaps for its coining the term “metasourcing” — the new role of confirmation that mainstream media often play in the social media sphere — the paper examines the interplay of elite and non-elite sources during the Libyan conflict, using Gaddafi’s death as a case study. The researchers sample Danish media following these breaking events. The authors describe what is by now a familiar set of dynamics: “Firstly, information comes from a variety of non-institutionalized source (amateurs/participants/ eyewitnesses), who more or less become the reporters of the event, while the institutionalized media, to some extent, are relegated to disseminating this multitude of visual fragments and bits of information rather than synthesize it into a coherent narrative. Secondly, speed appears at times to come before verification, and as a response to the constant flow of incoming unconfirmed information, various and even contradictory versions of an event are reported.” The study then attempts to provide a new vocabulary for all of this: “Elite sources and self-referential media positioned in a new role as metasources use their authority, expertise and experience to comment on the validity of the non-conventional sources, and put them into political and social perspective. While amateur sources bring authenticity, immediacy and proximity to war reporting by documenting events as they unfold, metasources are used as sources-on-other-sources.”

“Mobile Leapfrogging and Digital Divide Policy”: Report by Fordham University, Michigan State, and the University of Toronto, published by the New America Foundation. By Philip Napoli and Jonathan Obar.

This research highlights the developing world’s patterns of Internet access and examines the tradeoffs in them. The report notes that “most research on mobile Internet access and usage to date has lacked comparative analyses of any type in which the characteristics or usage patterns of mobile platforms are assessed relative to PC-based platforms.” The scholars comprehensively survey relevant studies to provide a critical framework for evaluating the mobile “revolution” globally. They note that mobile devices are simply not able to store or process as much data as PCs, and this has a variety of consequences: “Mobile-ready Web sites often represent streamlined or watered down versions of the standard Web site. Thus, mobile users often find themselves with access to less information and less functionality than PC-based users when forced to rely on mobile-tailored Web sites.” Further, because mobile devices are typically a much less open platform for Internet access — they often create a “walled garden” environment of apps and design a more constrained experience — the “opportunities, therefore, for mobile users to tap into the full economic potential of the Internet are much more limited. Consider, for instance, the dramatic entrepreneurial opportunities that have been facilitated by PC-based Internet access to develop and launch new online applications, platforms, and services that simply cannot be approximated if a user is limited to access via a mobile device.”

The report’s authors say they are hoping to “inject into the policy conversation a more thorough understanding of how effective such efforts can really be in terms of providing mobile users with the same kind of opportunities to access, produce, and disseminate information as PC users; and to raise a note of caution about the implications of abandoning efforts to promote PC diffusion in light of the potential for mobile leapfrogging. It is important to recognize the potentially significant compromises and shortcomings that come from a policy approach to the digital divide that emphasizes mobile access and largely abandons any emphasis on PC-based access, particularly in light of the fundamental requirement for technology leapfrogging discussed at the outset — that the leapfrogging technology be clearly superior to available alternatives.”

Photo by Anna Creech used under a Creative Commons license.

Given that journalism is a profession centered around the idea of an audience, it’s a little bit disappointing how few journalism academics ever feel much need to engage with the general public. And the names that might come to mind as exceptions to that — Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman — were more fundamentally interested in media than in journalism proper. That’s why Jay has been so valuable to the field and, I’d argue, the profession — he’s an inside-outside voice pricking journalism when it needs to be pricked. His ideas, once shouted down in newsrooms, have become something closer to received wisdom for many. He’s changed the way people think about political reporting in particular, and he’s built an audience of his own for his thinking, both in and out of journalism.

My conversation with Jay touched on a lot of subjects: his entry into first journalism and then the journalism academy; the influence of James Carey, Postman, and McLuhan on his work; the Lippmann-Dewey debate and the changing conception of “the public” in journalism; the rise and quasi-fall of civic journalism; why we need a better horse-race journalism; how the press’ conception of itself evolves; how he’s trying to model a different kind of journalism education; whether I’m too much of a pessimist; and what he’d like to be remembered for. It’s an idea-packed hour; I think you’ll like it.

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Show notes

Jay Rosen’s college yearbook photo, 1978
“Why I am Not a Journalist: A True Story” (2010)
Nat Hentoff — Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Press Clips, Village Voice
Wayne Barrett — Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Neil Postman — Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Monocle, the magazine Postman, Victor Navasky, and others founded
James W. Carey — Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Publics — Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Michael Schudson, “The ‘Lippmann-Dewey Debate’ and the Invention of Walter Lippmann as an Anti-Democrat 1986-1996” (2008)
“Jay Rosen on James Carey: An Appreciation” (2006)
“PressThink: An Introduction” (2003)
The four Twitter accounts that are followed by more than 10 percent of @NiemanLab’s followers
Civic journalism — Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
U.S. newspaper circulation per 100 households, 1945-2009
“The Mutualized Future is Bright,” Alan Rusbridger, CJR (2009)
What Are Journalists For?, Jay’s book (1999)
Jay’s bio: “Rosen wrote and spoke frequently about civic journalism (also called public journalism) over a ten-year period, 1989-99.”
“I Think Mr. McLuhan Is Trying To Tell Us Something,” Sylvan Meyer, Nieman Reports, June 1969
Christopher Lasch — Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“Argument Over Information,” Gerald Graff (2008)
The Church of the Savvy: “This is part of what’s so insidious about press savviness: it tries to hog realism to itself” (2009)
Horse race journalism — Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lucas Graves on the rise of fact-checkers
Romney pollster Neil Newhouse: “we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”
“‘CNN Leaves it There’ is Now Officially a Problem at CNN” (2011)
It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein
New York Times Co. v. Sullivan — Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“Why Political Coverage is Broken” (2011) (“the production of innocence”)
Studio 20 at NYU
The Local East Village at The New York Times
“‘Post-Industrial Journalism’: A new Columbia report examines the disrupted news universe”
C.W. (Chris) Anderson
Mark Coddington
Jonathan Stray
Greg Linch
Daniel Victor
Marshall McLuhan — Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

To get a sense of how I thought these terms were being increasingly lumped together, and some of the problems this might cause, I wanted to highlight the first couple paragraphs from the written materials distributed at the Online Media Legal Network’s “Journalism’s Digital Transition,” which was a conference I attended at Harvard a few weeks ago. The conference, by the way, was great, and I don’t mean to pick on the OLMN. But I did think that the discussion of aggregation included in their CLE (Continuing Legal Education) materials really summed up the issues that I wanted to get at in this post. In the document “News Aggregation and Copyright Fair Use,” conference attendees read:

One of the hottest topics in copyright law these days is the rise of the news aggregator, from Google News to the Huffington Post … debate arises when third-parties get into the act [of] reselling and profiting from information generated by traditional media organizations.

Of course, building a business model around monetizing another’s website content isn’t novel, and methods for doing so have been around for almost as long as the Internet has been considered a viable commercial entity. Consider the practice of framing, or superimposing ads, onto linked websites … News aggregators, which take information from multiple websites and display it on a single page, providing a convenient one-stop resource for readers, are merely the latest flavor-of-the-week.

Though Google News may be the most well known commercial news aggregator, there are many others, such as the Huffington Post and Newser.com. Some use only headlines and links, others copy full (or nearly full) articles and photos. Nearly all receive ad revenue, many based on page views that, copyright owners allege, are being diverted from websites that originate the content.

Are Google News, Huffington Post, and Newser.com the same? How about the other online organizations traditionally tossed into the mix, such as Gawker? If you view the online news ecosystem as basically bifurcated into two categories — content originators and content reusers — than this view of the world might make sense. In the above model, the primary issue isn’t what these sites actually do all day, but the fact that they “receive ad revenue, many based on page views that, copyright owners allege, are being diverted from websites that originate the content.” And yet, as soon as you start to conceptually differentiate between Google News and the Huffington Post, it becomes clear that there’s a much more complex news ecosystem out there.

So what’s actually going on online? I thought it might be interesting to take one of our very own Lab posts, Mark Coddington‘s all around smashing This Week in Review, and parse out how the ways that Mark engages in both what I’d call “aggregation” and “curation.” In essence, I think the upper sections of This Week in Review are fundamentally different from the bottom, concluding section, and the differences between the two sections point to different ways of doing online newswork.

The first dozen paragraphs of TWIR are usually broken down into three or four “hot topics” that are big in the future of journalism world that week. As Mark told me when I emailed him and asked him to explain his thinking behind This Week in Review, the upper sections

explore a discussion — a news development with commentary surrounding it, or ideas that spark responses and thus launch (or, usually, continue) a conversation. With those sections, I see myself as mapping out a discussion — explaining who’s on what side, what each person is saying and where that places them in relation to everyone else…If I see some substantive discourse coalescing around an article, that’s more likely to merit its own section because there are several connections I feel I need to explain (i.e. Person A said this, Person B responded with this, and Person C and D reminded both A and B of this and this).

Let’s take one recent TWIR as an example. The hot topics picked by Mark involved (1) the continuing controversy over Facebook, (2) a discussion of iPad apps, (3) New York Times and Wall Street Journal paywalls, and (4) finally, a good overview of recent pieces on new digital news experiments. I’d call this first, lengthiest section of the Week in Review “content aggregation and analysis.” In the old days I would have just called it “blogging.”

• The topics Mark discusses in This Week in Review emerge from a deep immersion in the conversation about the future of journalism, and a lengthy period of active listening to what people are saying. I follow future-of-journalism news pretty closely, and I’ve almost never disagreed with Mark’s analysis about what the important topics of the week are. In short, I trust his judgment. But it’s a judgment that stems from deep, active engagement in the topic at hand.
• The way Mark highlights the contours of the debate is through linking back to his original sources. The discussion of Facebook contains 17 links in four paragraphs.
• Mark occasionally (but not often) weighs in on one of the debates, but he does it pretty subtly, and the bulk of This Week in Review is definitely taken up with summarizing and translating what others are saying.

The second part of TWIR — and it’s usually just a few paragraphs — is called “Reading Roundup.” I’d call this part of This Week in Review “curation,” and it strikes me as pretty different from the rest of the piece. It’s not as centered around debates, and the links tend to go to online content which is more “think-piecey.” In this section, Mark seems to be listening a little bit less, and exercising a bit more personal judgment. I hear him telling me: “Hey! You’ve followed the piece to the end, which tells me you really care about this issue. Since I think we share similar interests, you might like these pieces too!” Or as Mark put it when I quizzed him about the difference:

You’re right — there is a difference between the “reading roundup” and the rest of the weekly review posts…with the reading roundups, I’m merely pointing the reader toward an interesting link without substantively explaining its connection to the rest of the journalism-in-transition world. Essentially, the reading roundup is like me inviting you to a party, while the main sections are like me walking you through a room at that party, introducing you to people, explaining who’s who, and giving you a sense of who you might enjoy talking to.

Finally, compare both of these forms of writing to something like Google News, which uses complex algorithms to determine what the hot topics of the minute are, what counts as a spotlight story, and how to rank stories in order of originality and importance. If Google News looks like anything, it’s a phone book — or one of those yearly news indexes in the big green binders you used to encounter in libraries, just more up to date. There isn’t the same sense of “listening,” the process of judgment seems different, and most importantly, there isn’t the same kind of interstitial commentary surrounding the links. For me, what Google News and other sites do might productively be called “indexing.”

Because this blog post is already over 1,300 words, I’m not going to get into the question posed by Ken Doctor: Can’t we just call all this stuff “content arbitrage“? Maybe that’s the subject for another post, but the short answer is I don’t think you can. I think we need to begin to compare the new forms of journalistic work that exist online, not just to some imaginary ideal of “content creation” versus an evil “repurposing,” but to each other.

Ultimately, why does all this matter? Is there an ultimate upshot of all this linguistic parsing?

For me, the lesson is simple. Anytime you hear someone talk about Google News, The Huffington Post, Gawker, blogging, aggregating, curation, and indexing as if they are the same phenomenon, ignore them. And if they attach that discussion to a set of policy recommendations, without acknowledging the full complexity of what it is people actually do when they aggregate, curate, and index information — well, then you should put your fingers in your ears and run in the other direction.