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.

Loyalty is a concept that’s invoked quite often when news executives and researchers talk about audiences. We talk about loyal audiences who trust our journalism and are “engaged” with our products, who spend a lot of time on our sites and keep coming back, who are willing to subscribe or donate to our organizations. But it’s not always clear what exactly we mean by loyalty in itself, apart from those actions that it has been tied to.

Is loyalty even a distinct phenomenon apart from the behaviors — like giving continued attention, sharing, and subscribing — that are often thought to characterize it? Researchers Constanza Gajardo and Irene Costera Meijer of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam believe it is. In a new study in Journalism Studies, they argued that, at its core, loyalty to journalism is less about actions than about feelings within a relationship, one that is often obscured as we focus on only its most economically beneficial outcomes.

To determine what loyalty means to news audiences, Gajardo and Meijer used a lengthy, multi-part interview process with 35 regular news users in Chile. They wanted to give people open-ended questions to describe loyalty on their own terms, prompting them to compare their feelings about journalists and news organizations to interpersonal relationships.

One of their most striking findings was that loyalty to a news source was not always tied to regular use. Some interviewees described deep, abiding loyalty for news sources they didn’t regularly use. Said one participant of a Chilean TV journalist: “I don’t listen to him religiously, but when I do, I listen to him. I’m 40 years old and I don’t have to talk to my father every day.” Others described sources they regularly use but feel no loyalty for: “I know…I should say that the news site I visit the most is close to me and that I like it, but this is not the case. This has a purely functional purpose: to know what happened here, there and that’s it.”

In the latter cases, loyalty was inhibited by a lack of political like-mindedness or credibility. But even trust didn’t guarantee loyalty, as some participants described a lack of relationship with trusted investigative or longform news sources they used, characterizing them as too serious or distant or heady.

So what kind of behaviors did mark loyalty for audiences? It wasn’t always the clicks, shares, donations, and subscriptions we might expect. Instead, people discussed their loyalty in terms of adapting to changes those news sources made, tolerating aspects they didn’t enjoy, or forgiving mistakes they made. Perhaps encouragingly for journalists, these were all quite relational actions. But they were more about tolerating and adapting to perceived shortcomings than responding to news with pure enthusiasm.

Other, more direct actions that we often think about as tied to loyalty — liking, subscribing, donating, and so on — weren’t as evident to users as expressions of loyalty. Just as journalists tend to think about loyalty as something audiences possess, audiences in this study saw it as primarily built around what journalists provide. “Users seem to be clear about what to expect from journalism,” Gajardo and Meijer wrote, “but they are somehow unaware of what journalism expects from them.”

This could be a bleak takeaway for journalists — even our most loyal users don’t know how to support us in useful ways! But it could also indicate opportunity for growth, as news organizations try to tap into the deep (and complex) feelings of their loyal audiences to develop mutually beneficial relationships.

Research roundup

“‘They’re making it more democratic’: The normative construction of participatory journalism.” By Tim P. Vos and Ryan J. Thomas, in Digital Journalism. The idea that journalists are obligated to engage with their audiences and allow them to participate in the co-creation of news — well, it has become “something of an article of faith in journalism studies scholarship in the first decades of the twenty-first century,” Vos and Thomas argue in this piece. Such ideas about participatory journalism, which became normalized over recent decades, “synced with broader intellectual currents around ‘participatory culture’ and optimism about the democratizing potential of the internet.”

Optimism about participatory journalism is in retreat these days, as the dark sides of a participatory internet has come fully into view. But it’s worth reflecting, as these authors do, on an enduring question: How did participatory journalism become such a firmly established journalism norm?

Vos and Thomas examine the “metajournalistic discourse” about participatory journalism from 2002 through 2021, focusing on nearly 500 articles representing 20 sites representing journalism discourse that were identified via network analysis. In attempting to trace how participatory journalism came to be a journalistic norm against the backdrop of social, economic, and technological change, the authors find several things.

First, they demonstrate how, over time, key commentators “sought to legitimize audience participation in the news production process by imbuing it with tried-and-tested notions of journalistic mission. Thus, we are confronted with a discourse that addressed something new but is garbed in the normativity of something more traditional.”

Significantly then, they go on to note that “the transformations to the culture unleashed by participatory technologies were treated as both an empirical given and as unquestionably positive. It is, the discourse suggests, simply commonsensical for journalists to embrace these new realities — this has happened, and it is good” (emphasis added).

Notably, however, they find that the discourse about participatory journalism appears to have peaked in 2015 and declined in recent years.

“News can help! The impact of news media and digital platforms on awareness of and belief in misinformation.” By Sacha Altay, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, and Richard Fletcher, in The International Journal of Press/Politics. What should news media do about misinformation? Some researchers have suggested that reporters can inadvertently amplify false claims in their reporting on them — that merely attempting to debunk misinformation can serve to magnify its spread. And it’s true that news media can be manipulated by bad-faith actors masquerading as legitimate sources. But is it true, as some have argued, that “mainstream media are responsible for much of the public attention fake news stories receive”?

No, probably not. That’s the conclusion of this large-scale survey analysis, which involved a two-wave panel study (where the same groups of people are surveyed at Time 1 and Time 2, to check for differences) that was conducted in multiple countries (Brazil, India, and the UK) to avoid problems associated with focusing on one location in isolation. The surveys investigated the impact of media use on awareness of and belief in misinformation about COVID-19.

“We find little support for the idea that the news exacerbates misinformation problems,” the authors write. “News use broadened people’s awareness of false claims but did not increase belief in false claims — in some cases, news use actually weakened false belief acquisition, depending on access mode (online or offline) and outlet type.”

They note that results were not even across countries — “underlining the importance of comparative research to guard against unwarranted generalizations” — nor for all types of news use, but the results were straightforward in the main: “Overall, we find that news can help.”

This research underscores the vital role that news media perform — most of the time, though not always nor everywhere — in “keeping people informed and resilient to misinformation.” Of note as well: the findings suggest that news use via platforms was not associated with greater belief in misinformation, countering somewhat sweeping claims that are often made about platforms and their effects.

“The limits of live fact-checking: Epistemological consequences of introducing a breaking news logic to political fact-checking.” By Steen Steensen, Bente Kalsnes, and Oscar Westlund, in New Media & Society. Political fact-checking has become a global phenomenon during the past decade. Because it often involves going to great lengths to establish evidence-based evaluations of political statements, this form of journalism is assumed to require a lot of “epistemic effort,” or a high degree of time and energy to verify knowledge claims. On the other end of the spectrum of epistemic effort might be another genre of journalism: breaking news. When journalists cover breaking news, especially when they do it from their desk in the newsroom, it’s assumed to involve a lower degree of epistemic effort, because, as noted in this article, “the immediacy of breaking news prevents the journalists from investing time and resources for extensive critical assessments of sources and information.”

So, what happens when fact-checkers attempt to bring a breaking news style to covering political debates with live fact-checks? How do they bridge the gap, as it were, between higher and lower forms of epistemic effort?

Steensen and colleagues, using a variety of research methods, sought to answer this question by investigating the Norwegian fact-checker Faktisk.no and its live fact-checking of political debates during the 2021 parliamentary election campaign in Norway. They found that live fact-checking, at least in the case of Faktisk, mainly involves strategies to reduce complexities in how claims are fact-checked, including a reliance on predefined understandings about the relative credibility of sources.

The upshot: live fact-checking of politics tends toward what the researchers call confirmative epistemology, in which fact-checks confirm rather than critique elite perspectives, reinforcing hegemonic views about what’s important, reliable, and true. This raises the “risk that live political fact-checking…might cater to the political elite more so than to the critical public. A potential consequence of this is that live political fact-checking, as performed by Faktisk, might add fuel to the growing criticism of mainstream media lacking diversity of perspectives and critical distance to elites.”

“‘Saving journalism from Facebook’s death grip’? The implications of content-recommendation platforms on publishers and their audiences.” By Yariv Ratner, Shira Dvir Gvirsman, and Anat Ben-David, in Digital Journalism. You’ve seen them at the bottom of many news sites: sections of “Around the Web” and “Recommended for You” articles that tempt readers with sensational photos and headlines (“37 Child Actors Who Grew Up To Be Ugly”) . These “chumboxes,” as they are derisively called, offer up attention-grabbing fare to lure in readers, and many news publishers allow them to live on their sites because they pay more than other forms of advertising. Research, however, suggests that such content leads people to take a dimmer view of news quality and credibility (no surprise!).

But is there a different way of looking at this phenomenon? For one thing, the clickbait aggregators — Taboola and Outbrain, chief among them — argue that they are sparing journalism from the “death grip” of Facebook’s ad dominance by allowing news organizations to work in revenue partnership with these content recommendation platforms.

So, what is the effect of these chumbox aggregators? Ratner and colleagues offer a large-scale analysis of that question, examining nearly 100,000 stories recommended by Taboola and Outbrain that were scraped from nine Israeli news sites. They find that “the spaces created by these partnerships blur the distinction between editorial and monetization logics” — in effect, muddying the waters between journalism and advertising as well as between news brands, and raising new questions about the role of sponsored content and algorithms in challenging journalism.

Additionally, the researchers discovered certain network effects that undermined some news sites: “While large media groups benefit from the circulation of sponsored content across their websites, smaller publishers pay Taboola and Outbrain as advertisers to drive traffic to their websites. Thus, even though these companies discursively position themselves as ‘gallants of the open web’ — freeing publishers from the grip of walled-garden platforms — they de facto expose the news industry to the influence of the platform economy.”

“Improvisation, economy, and MTV moves: Online news and video production style.” By Mary Angela Bock, Robert J. Richardson, Christopher T. Assaf, and Dariya Tsyrenzhapova, in Electronic News. If you’ve been around the journalism block since the early 2000s, you might remember those early hopes for “convergence” — for print and TV newsrooms to join forces in producing multimedia journalism. Those hopes never materialized, but the centrality of video in the digital news ecology has been profound (“pivot to video,” anyone?), and over the past decade digital-native news sites like Vox have worked to develop distinct styles of video storytelling.

Meanwhile, news consumption, to a large extent, has converged to a single screen (a smartphone). This leaves open an important question: Do newspapers, TV, and digital-native news organizations produce the same kind of video? Are they converging stylistically or, as Bock and colleagues wonder, “staying in their legacy lanes”?

Studying a randomized set of U.S. news outlets, the researchers found that “legacy print organizations continue to produce slower-paced videos without scripted narration; TV organizations use scripted narration with one correspondent; and digital natives produce stories with quick pacing and a mix of narrator types.” They argue that diffusion of innovations theory, which points to the role of culture, values, and other social factors in driving innovation adoption, “helps to explain why these organizations offer distinct production styles that are not converging in form.”

So, why isn’t there more similarity in video style? It appears to be at least partly a function of habit: longstanding, entrenched ways of doing things in legacy media routines. “Just because it is possible to create stories with quick edits, engaging graphics, or quality camera work does not mean all journalists are interested in or able to embrace these techniques,” the authors write. “As organizations turn, turn, and turn again to video, it will be important to consider which of these techniques are esthetic fads and which ones best serve the needs of the news audience.”

“Beyond the freebie mentality: A news user typology of reasonings about paying for online content.” By Arista Beseler, Mara Schwind, Hannah Schmid-Petri, and Christoph Klimmt, in Journalism Practice. With pay models popping up on site after site these days, what do news consumers think about being asked to pay for news that they previously accessed for free? While there have been studies on consumers’ willingness to pay, Beseler and colleagues wanted to go a step further in more holistically investigating people’s general attitudes, behaviors, and motivational reasonings around paid online news content.

Through interviews with 64 adults in Germany, the authors developed a typology of five main approaches: paying subscribers, free riders, promisers (“users who do not pay but announce to do so in the future”), occasional buyers, and convinced deniers. This typology, the authors suggest, is helpful for capturing the “extremely diverse” mindsets that may exist among consumers.

“On one hand, many respondents were skeptical or reluctant to pay for online news,” they write. “Even among the paying subscribers, some participants preferred printed news over online news, highlighting the reluctance to pay for something immaterial. On the other hand, some respondents were strong supporters of paid online news, whereby the majority of them have had experiences with or have been socialized with online or parental print subscriptions.”

Social media platforms present a conundrum for journalists.

On the one hand, journalists rely on social media for so many helpful aspects of their jobs. To name just a few: to connect with potential sources, to interact with audiences, to promote their work, and to find solidarity among fellow journalists.

On the other hand, platforms such as Twitter and Facebook present a dizzying array of problems, from the growing variety and intensity of online harassment — hostility, trolling, doxing, etc. — that especially targets women and journalists of color, to the constant threat that one wrong tweet might incite a mob or cost a journalist their job.

It’s important to ask: What are newsroom leaders doing to support and protect their journalists facing the increasing risks and challenges of social media?

A new study in Digital Journalism examines this question. Its author, Jacob L. Nelson, conducted in-depth interviews with 37 U.S.-based reporters, editors, publishers, freelancers, and social media/audience engagement managers, covering current and former employees at a wide array of outlets (local and national, for-profit and nonprofit, legacy media and digital media). Interviews focused on journalists’ experiences with and thoughts about their newsroom’s social media policies. Women and journalists of color made up a large share of interviewees because such journalists are more likely to encounter online harassment.

So, what did the journalists interviewed say about the value of social media policies and their organizations’ support mechanisms? The research article’s title provides a hint: “Worse than the harassment itself.”

“I find that although journalists face both external and internal pressure to devote considerable time and effort to social media platforms — primarily Twitter — they encounter little in the way of guidance or support when it comes to navigating the dangers inherent within those platforms,” Nelson writes. “On the contrary, journalists feel newsroom social media policies tend to make matters worse, by offering difficult to follow guidelines focused primarily on maintaining an ‘objective’ perception of the organization among the public rather than on protecting journalists from the harassment that many will inevitably receive.”

Journalists interviewed for this study seemed to be “one step ahead of their newsroom managers,” argued Nelson (who, full disclosure, does collaborative research with Seth, though not on this project). The journalists realized, in a way their bosses didn’t, that “the very behavior that social media most encourages and rewards — being active and personal — is the same kind of behavior that brings journalists their biggest frustrations.”

That is, journalists understood that being authentic and acting like a “real” person on social media was more likely to bring more professional opportunities and improved interactions with the public. Sounds good, right? But, at the same time, such an approach to social media, journalists realized, also made them more vulnerable to recurring personal attacks from harassers, and it increased the odds that they would inadvertently say something that would get them accused of bias and thus punished by their managers for failing to abide by strict policies on neutrality.

The overall result is that journalists feel they are walking what Nelson has elsewhere called a “Twitter tightrope”: “They spend a great deal of time engaging with the public on social media platforms, while constantly wondering if and when that engagement will come at their professional peril.” So, what do journalists want? For their managers to do more to help them mitigate the challenges and risks endemic to this work. (Indeed, as other research has found recently, news organizations are doing little to protect their journalists from online harassment.)

The “fluidity” of the social media audience — its unpredictability, particularly when some posts “go viral” and spread widely while others get little attention — was a key part of journalists’ frustrations with their managers.

“Traditional journalistic values privilege audience perceptions of professionalism, independence, and neutrality,” Nelson writes, “each of which is easier to predict when focused on a fixed audience for a specific news outlet than for the much larger, more amorphous audiences found on social media platforms.”

On top of that, some of the study’s interviewees questioned whether audiences were really so firmly committed to old-school ideas about total objectivity and neutrality, “which many journalists see not only as impossible aspirations on their own, but also as wholly inconsistent with the performed authenticity privileged by social media.” Future research could help untangle this puzzle. Because while research suggests that people generally want journalists to present the news without a point of view, it’s still unclear whether rules and expectations apply the same to social media postings as they might, say, for news articles on legacy platforms.

As Nelson writes, “Perhaps news audiences hold seemingly contradictory preferences, where they value both accurate, opinion-free news stories, as well as the political opinions of the journalists behind them. If this is indeed the case, then it might be in newsroom managers’ best interests to give the public a bit more credit when deciding what those audiences want not only from journalism, but from journalists as well.”

Research roundup

“The place of media organizations in the drive for post-pandemic news literacy.” By Fran Yeoman and Kate Morris, in Journalism Practice. How involved should news organizations be in news literacy efforts? And what are the benefits and drawbacks of their involvement? Those have been crucial questions as educators, news industry leaders, nonprofits and governments have implemented news literacy programs over the past decade. Through these programs, journalists can provide distinct insight into the news production process and humanize their work for people. But journalists’ involvement also risks these programs becoming little more than PR disguised as education.

Yeoman and Morris bring an education lens to this question by looking at five news literacy initiatives for children in the U.K. that incorporate news organizations in some form. They observed lessons and interviewed program leaders and the teachers in whose classrooms they ran. They found that there was some element of “pedagogical public relations” throughout the programs, as their leaders expressed desires to revitalize news by capturing young audiences and frequently contrasted the work of trained professional journalists with other forms of news in their sessions.

The program leaders were wary of the perception of this self-interested motive and were careful not to promote their own news organizations specifically. But they still promoted a largely uncritical view of the work of professional journalists. Yeoman and Morris instead advocated a news literacy approach of “informed skepticism” as part of a national curriculum. Journalists should have a role in such programs, they argued, but we need to be cognizant of news organizations’ self-promotional motivations lest we turn news literacy programs into little more than advertisements for traditional news media.

“How propaganda works in the digital era: Soft news as a gateway.” By Yuner Zhu and King-wa Fu, in Digital Journalism. Zhu and Fu’s study is organized around a fascinating conundrum: If we’re in a high-choice media environment in which a more trusted (or at least more entertaining) news source is a tap away, how is authoritarian propaganda still effective? Zhu and Fu note in particular the online success of People’s Daily and CCTV News, China’s premier Communist Party news sources, which each have more than 100 million followers on Sina Weibo (China’s dominant social media platform), garnering unprecedented popularity in an environment where we might think consumer choice might leave them behind.

The authors were especially interested in whether soft news plays a role in maintaining propaganda’s popularity. Does soft news offer an escape to avoid propaganda, or help capture an entertainment-seeking audience to increase the reach and palatability of propaganda? They tested their hypothesis with 5.7 million Sina Weibo posts over seven years from 103 Chinese newspapers.

The answer, in short, was that yes, soft news does serve as an effective gateway to authoritarian propaganda. More than half (58%) of the news that party daily newspapers published on Sina Weibo was soft news — less than than their non-party counterparts, but enough to have a measurable effect on the popularity of propaganda news (in this study, news about Chinese premier Xi Jinping). An increase in the popularity of soft news one month led to a significant increase in the popularity of propaganda in the next. (And notably, that effect didn’t occur in the reverse.)

There were limits to this strategy — softening the propaganda stories themselves with things like videos actually undermined their effectiveness. But on the whole, the authors conclude, “These batches of human-interest content are devoid of propaganda in text yet are instrumental to propaganda in effect,” as party media uses infotainment to lure in an otherwise politically uninterested audience.

“Now hiring social media editors.” By Tai Neilson, Timothy A. Gibson, and Kara Ortiga, in Journalism Studies. The notion that the boundaries are blurring between news and marketing within news organizations — and even within journalists’ own jobs — is hardly news to anyone at this point. Yet few feel the tension between these two realms quite as acutely as social media editors. It’s not clear there’s much difference on social media between publishing news and promoting it, and social media editors are staking out a home in the newsroom on that fault line.

Neilson and his co-authors explored that defining tension of the work of social media editors by looking at 291 American journalism job postings for social media editors (as well as engagement editors, community managers, audience strategists, and other similar titles). They also interviewed 11 social media editors working at American news organizations.

Among the job postings, they found an interesting dichotomy. Job postings rarely explicitly mentioned marketing as a desire skill or part of the job — rather, journalism experience was the top form of experience sought, almost nine times more than marketing experience. But social media editors’ primary tasks, such as analyzing audience data and helping with audience growth, “could only be classified as marketing.” Those jobs, the authors concluded, were being publicly framed as news jobs, but were in fact more commercially oriented jobs in practice.

In the interviews, though, the authors noted that editors didn’t find many of these day-to-day audience (and metrics) monitoring tasks rewarding. Instead, they were working to redefine their own roles as being oriented around newsroom strategy and decision-making, using their data analysis skills as an attempted avenue into more active newsroom leadership. The boundaries between editorial and marketing work for social media editors, the authors conclude, have not so much been blurred as simply redrawn to include marketing functions as central — and as a potential path to a more managerial role.

Information flows from local to national: Evidence from 21 major U.S. cities. By Lei Guo and Yiyan Zhang, in Journalism. It’s become a truism that news, especially in the U.S., has become increasingly national as local journalism has been hollowed out and political dynamics have pushed most debates to the national level. The national media’s preeminence over local media in determining what issues get covered has been demonstrated for decades. But Guo and Zhang’s study tests that notion on local media’s turf, with coverage of urban issues.

Using an automated analysis of thousands of news articles from 21 of the largest cities in the U.S., Guo and Zhang measured coverage over time of 16 locally based issues ranging from taxes to the environment to religion and morality. They found that in only three cities the local media predominantly led the national media in covering these urban issues — Chicago, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. (In about half the cities, there was no significant relationship between local and national coverage.) Across all cities, local media tended to lead on taxes, politics, and media and the internet, and national media led on gun control and crime.

Larger cities were not more likely than smaller ones to lead the national media in coverage of urban issues. Instead, cities’ GDP and number of local news organizations were the strongest factors in predicting whether a city’s local media would lead national media. “Affluent cities with more journalistic resources are more likely to control the information flows,” the authors concluded. This leads to more power for those cities to control their images while leaving less affluent cities even more marginalized.

The push to reinvigorate local news, they said, should center more on those less affluent (and therefore less powerful) cities, though of course their relative lack of wealth makes it more difficult for them to support new or expanded local news initiatives.

“‘Voices from the island’: Informational annexation of Crimea and transformations of journalistic practices.” By Ksenia Ermoshina, in Journalism. / “‘Keeping an eye on the other side’: RT, Sputnik, and their peculiar appeal in democratic societies.” By Charlotte Wagnsson, Torsten Blad, and Aiden Hoyle, in The International Journal of Press/Politics. The power of Russian media has been widely observed, particularly since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began last year. But two notable recent studies have given us insight into Russia’s media influence through some less-understood avenues. The first of those studies, by Ksenia Ermoshina, examines the process by which Russia asserted its dominance in the media sphere after it began occupying the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in 2014.

Along with a year of fieldwork in Crimea, Ermoshina interviewed 45 Crimean journalists, NGO workers, information security experts, and others. She found that while they all engaged in individual strategies to adapt to Russian rule, those strategies are best understood against the background of infrastructural changes — the ownership of cables and cell towers, and the quality of internet connections. She coins the term “informational annexation” to refer to the process of controlling access and circulation of information that occurred.

While policing content was certainly involved in Russia’s information control strategy, Ermoshina draws attention to the structural elements involved, like choking off internet traffic to turn Crimea into an “informational island” and by making it much more burdensome to travel to and from Crimea, cutting off institutional support and increasing journalists’ perception of the risk involved with reporting.

In the second study, Charlotte Wagnsson and her colleagues sought to determine who watches the Russian state-sponsored propaganda outlets RT and Sputnik outside of Russia and why. They interviewed 43 Swedish consumers of RT or Sputnik and found that while there were many who fit what might be the stereotypical Russian propaganda consumer — right-wing, with strong anti-establishment media beliefs — there were even more who didn’t fit that profile.

Some were more centrist pragmatists, and others were progressive and directly disagreed with views put forward by RT and Sputnik. So why were they consuming that media? The authors broke down a typology of four types of motivations, three of which involved some distance from RT and Sputnik’s positions.

Some (“media nihilists”) distrusted establishment and alternative media but were confident in their ability to consume them skeptically. Others (“reluctant consumers” and “distant observers”) consume media counter to their own ideas more out of curiosity or a pride in keeping tabs on opposing ideas. But all types, the authors concluded, contribute to those organizations’ goal of establishing international influence, since RT and Sputnik “do not need to be seen as legitimate; only as legitimate enough.”

There is perhaps no more studied — or worried-about — dimension of news over the past five to ten years than the decline of media trust. It’s extremely well-documented at this point, across virtually all corners of the globe. And we now have hundreds of studies examining just about every facet of this decline — its causes, its effects, and its many proposed solutions.

But there’s one less-studied group of people for whom a declining trust in the news media might be particularly damaging for journalists: whistleblowers. Journalists have depended on whistleblowers for some of their most consequential stories of the past several decades. But since whistleblowers often initiate an interaction with journalists, their act is a leap of faith that requires significant trust in both the journalist individually and the professional standards and impact of the news media more generally.

That’s the argument that undergirds a new study by the University of Georgia’s Karin Assmann, published late last month in Journalism Practice. If whistleblowing to a journalist is about the greatest act of trust one can put in the media, Assmann wondered, what were whistleblowers’ criteria for that trust, and how do they evaluate journalists’ performance in light of those criteria? And more broadly, might the decline in media trust generally make it less likely that individual whistleblowers choose to trust journalists with their secrets?

Assmann interviewed 16 American whistleblowers who contacted journalists between the 1970s and 2010s. Nearly all of them worked for U.S. government agencies, and several were quite prominent, including Daniel Ellsberg and Jeff Wigand.

Assmann analyzed these interviews through the lens of institutional logics, the set of practices, assumptions, and values that govern a particular social sphere. She noted that whistleblowers are news consumers just like anyone else — they have an outside understanding of journalism’s institutional logic, one that they must see as substantially more valuable and trustworthy their own institution’s logic in order to use the former to expose the latter.

She found that whistleblowers were drawn to journalists because of the overlap between their own motives and their perception of journalists’ motives — keeping the powerful in check and advocating for the public interest. Their goal was to produce social change, so the name recognition and status of the journalist they approached played an outsized role in their criteria for trust.

Two other criteria were unsurprisingly significant: a commitment to protect their identity and substantial subject matter expertise. What’s more surprising is that many of them — about half — now see the news media as antagonistic and much less likely to fulfill the role they had hoped for when they blew the whistle. They variously described the news media as “corrupt, biased, politicized, self-serving, beholden to the government and neglectful of their sources,” Assmann wrote.

Some of their misgivings are rooted in specific failures of the journalists they worked with — in one case, journalists named the whistleblower at a press conference without his consent. Others were based on a more generally cynical disposition toward the press.

Many of the whistleblowers said they would attempt to circumvent the news media when releasing similar information today, given the ease of self-publishing and their perception of declining specialized expertise among journalists. Yet they were wary of this strategy too, citing the sophistication of government surveillance tools (especially in cases like that of Reality Winner) and susceptibility to censorship by social media platforms.

These whistleblowers have heavily bought into the institutional logic of journalism, with its self-regard for its watchdog role and strong professional standards, Assmann concluded. But even as they continue to reach out to the news media, their trust in journalists to hold up those standards has eroded. “Their expectations are increasingly difficult to meet in the U.S. media environment, where newsrooms cannot afford dedicated beat reporters with the expertise and resources necessary to be discovered and trusted by the next whistleblower as a reliable collaborator,” she wrote.

Research roundup

Examining podcast listeners’ perceptions of the journalistic functions of podcasts. By Kelsey Whipple, Ivy Ashe, and Lourdes M. Cueva Chacón, in Electronic News.

Podcasting, as this study notes, “is both new and old, confident but still coming into its own” — a teenager of a medium, having been born around 2004.

The audience for podcasts has grown tremendously in recent years (consider: how many podcasts have you listened to just in the past week?), so it’s a thoroughly established element of digital storytelling — and yet one without clearly established boundaries, practices, or normative expectations. And when it comes to news on podcasts, should we describe it, as various observers have, as “confessional” or “personal” journalism,” as “audio nonfiction novels,” as “soundworks” — or something else entirely? Moreover, what do people want and expect of podcasts as a form of journalism?

This study explored those questions through a representative national survey of U.S. internet users, about half of whom reported being podcast listeners. The results seemed, on the surface, somewhat contradictory: There was “notably low trust in podcasts as a source of news” and yet also “strong support for the perception that podcasts are a form of journalism and information-sharing.” That is, podcast listeners indicated that they trusted it less as a source of information than radio and other traditional forms of news…and yet they also very much saw podcasting as an important vehicle for journalism.

What might explain this gap? While the study couldn’t say for certain, it seems plausible, the authors suggest, that at least part of it is that creators and listeners are still working out what ethical standards and storytelling norms should look like (er, sound like) in this emerging medium.

Perhaps it’s also a matter of exposure and of developing greater media literacy. Survey results indicate that “people who listen to podcasts more frequently trust them more as a source of information and are more likely to agree with the statement that podcasts are journalism — and that podcast hosts and creators are journalists,” the authors write. “Similarly, consistent (daily or monthly) listening to a podcast could provide listeners more insight into the podcast production process, and this could influence listeners’ perceptions of podcasts as a form of journalism.”

The researchers also looked at how podcast listening was connected with different perceptions about core journalistic functions (e.g., should the press be adversarial like a watchdog? more of an interpreter of events? etc.). They found that listening was most strongly correlated with the idea that journalists should “provide entertainment and relaxation” as one of their roles. “Podcast listeners may indeed understand podcasts to be a form of journalism,” the authors conclude, “but they may tune in to these shows to unwind and be entertained.”

“News for life: improving the quality of journalistic news reporting to prevent suicides.” By Florian Arendt, Antonia Markiewitz, and Sebastian Scherr, in Journal of Communication.

Covering suicide is complicated terrain for journalists. Debates about the relative quality of such coverage have often focused on how truly poor it can be, and why that’s so significant. After all, sensationalistic reporting on suicide — particularly when specific details are provided about the method and location of suicide, etc. — has been shown to increase the likelihood of “copycat” suicides. But it’s not all bad: News coverage that eschews such details and instead emphasizes hope and recovery can be associated with a decrease in suicides.

But how strong is the evidence for such impact on society? Can we really draw such a linear connection between better news coverage and better social outcomes, both in general and on this important issue in particular?

The study here offers a unique approach. First, the authors made an intervention, launching a web-based campaign to promote higher-quality suicide reporting and offering this training to newsrooms in Germany. Ultimately, 22 newsrooms participated in the training, which included having journalists watch videos and also help in spreading awareness to their colleagues. Then, the researchers tested the effects of the intervention on changes in news content (did reporting improve?) and on the rate of actual suicides (did the numbers go down?).

The results are rather heartening: A content analysis of more than 4,000 articles indicated that reporting on suicides improved in quality, and a subsequent time-series analysis found “tentative evidence” for an actual reduction in suicides.

“Acknowledging limitations in terms of causal interpretations,” the authors write, “the findings support the claim that high-quality news can save lives. Similar newsroom interventions run elsewhere may contribute to preventing suicides globally.”

Signaling news outlet trust in a Google Knowledge Panel: A conjoint experiment in Brazil, Germany, and the United States. By Gina M. Masullo, Claudia Wilhelm, Taeyoung Lee, João Gonçalves, Martin J. Riedl, and Natalie J. Stroud, in New Media & Society.

What to do about the crisis of trust in news that we described at the top? Among the many proposals, some have suggested that greater journalistic transparency — that is, pulling back the curtain on who journalists are, how they do their work, and so forth — might facilitate greater audience trust, as news processes and practices come more fully into public view. But does that really work? Generally, the evidence has been inconsistent, these researchers note.

This study attempts to study journalistic transparency in a slightly different way. It uses a conjoint experiment (which allows for the manipulation of many more variables than usual experimental designs, offering a finer level of assessment and causality), and does so in three countries: Brazil, Germany, and the United States, with more than 6,000 participants in total. This more sophisticated approach, the authors argue, allows them to “parse more precisely whether a particular transparency attribute signals to the public that a news outlet is trustworthy.”

Importantly, too, the researchers treated transparently a bit differently than other studies by focusing on a Knowledge Panel-like box of information that people would come across about a news organization when they search for it on Google. They found that, indeed, “journalistic transparency can cue trust when it is done at the level of the entire news outlet, or the domain level, and comes from an external source, Google, as opposed to the outlet itself.”

The study also finds that, at least in Brazil and the U.S., two pieces of information in a Knowledge Panel offer particularly strong indications that a news outlet is trustworthy: “a brief description of the news outlet and an explanation of other sites accessed by people who frequent that news outlet’s website.” In Germany, meanwhile, “information about journalists and the description of the news outlet were the strongest cues.”

In all, the study offers vital clues about the importance of Knowledge Panels in cueing heuristics that ultimately influence whether people trust news organizations.

“Just a ‘mouthpiece of biased elites?’ Populist party sympathizers and trust in Czech public service media.” By Klára Smejkal, Jakub Macek, Lukáš Slavík, and Jan Šerek, in The International Journal of Press/Politics.

There’s so much interest in studying trust in news that it’s worth highlighting just one more study in this vein — this time from the Czech Republic.

You won’t be surprised to learn that people with populist attitudes tend to have lower trust in the press. This is especially true when talking about public service media (PSM). Despite the fact that in European countries with strong democracies, such government-supported media tend to be highly professional as well as fairly autonomous from outside influence, the drumbeat of criticism about them has continued to grow in recent decades, and particularly from populist politicians and those supporting them. However, exactly why trust in PSM tends to be so lacking among populist-leaning citizens has remained less clear, this study suggests. Is it simply an ideological mismatch, or something more?

The authors address that here by exploring “how populist party sympathizers differ from the sympathizers of other, non-populist political parties in terms of what they expect from the news media they trust, and how this difference affects their trust in PSM.” In particular, the study tests two types of expectations that could predict trust: first, the expectation that trusted media are impartial, and second, the expectation that trusted media tend to look out for “us” and serve “our” in-group accordingly.

A representative survey of the adult Czech population finds that, for populist party sympathizers, trust in PSM links exclusively to their assumption that media should “conform to their worldview,” while those supporting other political parties “expect normative standards [of journalism] to be maintained.” To be clear, what the authors call “cohesive trust” and “normative trust” are both important and can co-occur for people. What’s significant is that the path to engendering trust in PSM among populist party sympathizers appears to flow only through the former and not the latter — which underscores the overall challenge of improving trust in the press, particularly in Europe but elsewhere as well.

“Government eyewitness: Considering new approaches to political coverage through local TV’s greatest strengths.” By Brian Calfano, Costas Panagopoulos, and Elisa Raffa, in Journalism & Communication Monographs.

For television as a form of news, its visual qualities as well as the personal connection that people may feel toward the journalists and personalities involved can be one of its greatest strengths. And yet, as these authors note, the same things “also expose the medium’s glaring weaknesses in support of democratic governance. To the extent that visual aesthetics, production techniques, sensationalism, and conflictual framing of political issues overshadow informative journalism, TV’s bad tendencies may make American politics worse, not better.”

So, what might be done about this? Calfano and colleagues offer a monograph — which is like a journal article, but much longer and more elaborate — that brings together insights from sociology, political science, and communication “to focus on how best to bring political coverage of value to TV audiences.”

They begin by tracing the development of the Eyewitness News model that is now universal in local television, and then, using a combination of survey and field experiments, investigate how audiences react to eyewitness reporters, particularly when modifying the use of a policy vs. partisan frame by reporters.

“Across these experiments,” they find, “audiences, and especially Republicans, respond more favorably to local than to national reporters and to the use of a policy than a partisan frame.”

A second set of experiments, among others they provide, examines “false balance and truth-telling in local TV stories about the 2020 presidential election” — and again finds that the local reporter wins out against a national counterpart when it comes to audience response, especially for Republicans.

Ultimately, the authors argue that local TV, being less encumbered by the partisan feelings associated with national networks, has more leeway to adapt and make a difference for people. In their view, “local TV news has the most latitude to demonstrate the kind of political reporting approach that offers the most audience value in keeping with the media’s characterization as the Fourth Estate. We hope that a local TV approach to political reporting (i.e., reducing the strategy and partisan conflict reporting, expanding the scope of topics that count as ‘political’), will influence a reform movement among national outlets.”

First, it’s important to note that the researchers in this study tried to tease apart the positive as well as negative experiences that journalists reported having with law enforcement and with demonstrators. And the picture that emerges from that mix is slightly complicated. For example, “journalists who had negative experiences with law enforcement and positive experiences with protesters were more likely to experience positive effects of covering protests, like their ‘professional identity was strengthened’ and they ‘felt inspired to take action.'”

It would thus be unfair to suggest that covering a protest is inherently a bad experience, but it is noteworthy that nearly half of all journalists surveyed said they experienced fear and also felt unsafe while covering protests. While few journalists reported serious physical injury, about 12% said they had minor physical injuries and some 22% said their mental health suffered as a result of covering demonstrations.

In particular, the researchers found that the more often a journalist experienced something negative (abuse, hostility, etc.) from protesters, and the less often they had negative experiences with police, the more likely they were to report trying to alter their professional situation — such as by asking to no longer cover protests or to consider leaving the journalism profession entirely.

Indeed, 1 in 10 journalists surveyed said they had considered leaving journalism because of their experience covering protests, and a similar number reported seeking mental health services because of what they encountered. While those may seem to some like relatively small numbers, the authors contend that “organizations and scholars alike must begin to consider what this means for democracy if the most pressing and dangerous place to be as a journalist in the U.S. is also the place with some of the most important news for society.”

Additionally, there is a gendered component to this as well: By a 2-to-1 margin, women were more likely than men to consider leaving journalism as a result of covering protests, and, by an even greater margin, women were more likely to seek mental health services for the same reason. What does it mean for the marketplace of ideas, the authors ask, if in-the-field harassment at protests is disproportionately burdening women and making it more likely that they might leave a profession that already may seem stacked against them (see the lead roundup item below)?

Finally, this paper offers some indication that journalists who experienced trauma after covering a protest may see journalism and its “role conceptions” differently than other journalists, which raises questions for future study: How might a less-safe world for doing journalism lead to different kinds of journalism being produced — and what might that mean for how we think about journalism’s idealized role in society?

Reading roundup

“Why are women journalists leaving the newsroom in South Korea? Gendered and emerging factors that influence the intention to leave.” By Na Yeon Lee and Changsook Kim, in Journalism Practice. Professional journalism has always had a gender gap across a wide range of local and national contexts, but the shape of that gap has changed in recent decades. The number of women entering the industry has accelerated, but newsroom leadership remains dominated by men. Scholars have found a variety of reasons that women journalists leave the industry — such as discrimination in beat assignments, male-dominated newsroom culture, and employers’ inflexibility in the face of work-family conflicts.

But other factors have emerged to drive many journalists’ departure from the profession, both men and women: Reduced resources that lead to lower pay and overwork, reduced social status for journalists, and online harassment (which disproportionately affects women). Lee & Kim set out to examine the relative prominence of both sets of factors (traditional gendered and emerging factors) in influencing women’s decisions to leave journalism. They surveyed nearly 700 women journalists in South Korea who were still working in newsrooms about those factors and their intentions to leave their jobs.

The single biggest factor associated with women journalists’ intention to leave was, perhaps surprisingly, the reduced social status of journalists. The next two most significant factors were masculine newsroom cultures and additional workloads associated with digital publication. Age also played a notable role: Younger journalists were more likely to be considering leaving, with weakened social status and masculine culture playing a particularly strong role for them. Work-family conflict was a strong factor for women at a particular career stage (10-20 years in), but not a factor outside of that. On the whole, emerging factors played a bigger role in women’s intention to leave journalism, though several traditional gendered factors remained persistent problems.

“The effects of transparency cues on news source credibility online: An investigation of ‘opinion labels'” By Andrew Otis, in Journalism. Virtually every journalist — not to mention non-journalists — has thrown up their hands at audiences’ seeming inability to determine the difference between news and opinion content. And the indication is that Americans, at least, aren’t so good at it, though different subgroups do better. Media critics have called for clearer labeling of opinion articles, and some news organizations have begun to do so. Otis’s study presents a straightforward test of one of the primary purposes of such labeling: Do they increase credibility?

In an experiment with U.S. participants, Otis created Google News-style summaries of articles labeled as news or opinion, using CNN and Fox News as the mock sources and articles with headlines framed as both conservative and liberal. He found that opinion labels do significantly increase credibility of news sources, even controlling for prior perception of credibility.

There were a few notable conditions, though. Credibility was only increased if the sources were unbranded — that is, if they weren’t shown as being from CNN and Fox News. When the source names were included, their existing images were too strong for opinion labels to make a difference. But the labels did increase credibility when participants faced oppositional content — if liberal participants saw conservative-leaning headlines, or vice versa. The results suggest some potential positive effects for labeling opinion content as such, as long as their brands don’t already create strong, widespread emotional reactions.

“Nobody-fools-me perception: Influence of age and education on overconfidence about spotting disinformation.” By Maria-Pilar Martínez-Costa, Fernando López-Pan, Nataly Buslón, and Ramón Salaverría, in Journalism Practice. The third-person effect is a long-established phenomenon in which people tend to overestimate media’s effects on other people and underestimate their effects on themselves. We’re very concerned about the way media bias will affect our imagined “them,” but we’re pretty confident in our own ability to see through it.

As you might imagine, this effect has been shown to be quite prominent in detecting disinformation. Numerous studies have shown that we overestimate other people’s susceptibility to disinformation but are overconfident in our own ability to spot it. Martínez-Costa and her colleagues were interested in a particular dimension of that effect: age.

Through focus groups with Spanish news consumers, they found that both younger adults and older adults saw each other as particularly vulnerable to disinformation. The older adults believed younger adults had grown up blindly trusting social and digital media, and the younger adults believed older adults did not understand digital information environments. Both believed the other group would fall for just about anything, but saw themselves as savvy media consumers who understood contemporary media systems. In the end, the authors suggested, this version of the third-person effect may be more of a collective, generationally based feeling — perhaps more “nobody fools us” than “nobody fools me.”

“The campaign disinformation divide: Believing and sharing news in the 2019 U.K. general election.” By Cristian Vaccari, Andrew Chadwick, and Johannes Kaiser, in Political Communication. Age may not be the determining factor in detecting disinformation that Martínez-Costa and her colleagues’ participants believe it to be. But this study from the U.K. found another significant factor in disinformation belief — where we get our campaign news.

Journalists certainly see some of their role as disinformation inoculation: Giving people regular doses of quality political information so that they’re more able to understand what’s false or misleading when they see it. Vaccari and his co-authors put this notion to the test, using survey-based experiments to give 4,000 people actual headlines from the 2019 U.K. General Election that were either true or false (along with a few “placebo” false headlines fabricated by the researchers) and determine whether they could tell what was true, and whether they would want to share it.

Their findings were pretty strong confirmation of journalists’ intended role. Those who used professional media for campaign information were significantly more likely to recognize disinformation and less likely to want to share it, and those who relied on social media for campaign information were just the opposite. Within those straightforward (and rather heartening) findings, there were two notable exceptions. Those who relied on the U.K.’s tabloid newspapers apart from any broader diet of professional news were worse at recognizing disinformation, and those who relied on Twitter apart from other social media use were better.

“Facing the competition: Gender differences in facial emotion and prominence in visual news coverage of Democratic presidential primary candidates.” By Mike Gruszczynski, Danielle K. Brown, Haley Pierce, and Maria E. Grabe, in Mass Communication Quarterly. The inequitable and stereotyped media treatment of women running for political office has been scrutinized for decades, as has the use of visual framing and image selection in political news coverage. Gruszczynski and his colleagues put the two together in a methodologically innovative way that tested how men and women’s emotions are depicted in a presidential campaign.

The authors used Microsoft Azure’s cloud-based automated facial emotion recognition program to determine the emotional orientation of more than 19,000 news images of candidates in the 2020 U.S. Democratic presidential primary. To ensure its accuracy, they had a human analyze 1,000 of those images, finding the two coding methods reliable.

The images were analyzed along two dimensions: emotion type (anger, happiness, and neutrality) and proximity (face shots and body shots). They found that although anger made up a small portion of the emotions depicted, women were significantly more likely to be shown as angry (80% more likely, before controlling for polling average) and as happy. Men, by contrast, were more often shown as neutral, with an overall effect of presenting men as being more emotionally regulated. The researchers found that depictions of women as angry were more likely to be at a distance — possibly because “there might be growing awareness in newsrooms about negative depictions of female leaders as feisty and cold” — though those shots were still disproportionately negative framings of women candidates.

“News is ‘toxic’: Exploring the non-sharing of news online.” By Nick Mathews, Valérie Bélair-Gagnon, and Seth C. Lewis, in New Media & Society. (As you can see, Seth co-authored this study, but Mark decided to write about it just because it looked really interesting.) Researchers (and news executives, and journalists, and…) have spent quite a bit of time over the past decade trying to determine what motivates people to share news online. Mathews and his co-authors stumbled upon the opposite question: What motivates people not to share news online? They were interviewing 52 Americans as a part of a larger study (not about news sharing) and found that non-sharing emerged as a key feature for almost half the group.

The answer to this question was fairly simple: Not sharing was an act meant to protect their online reputation and their relationships. Participants did acknowledge that not sharing left them feeling silenced, but they simply didn’t see any positive outcomes from sharing. They didn’t see any possibility for influencing opinion, they saw productive conversation as too complex for social media, and they viewed the risk of offending someone or being misunderstood as too great. So while news organizations are intent on creating news that gets people to share it widely on social media, they may need to account for the fact that doing so could be against those audiences’ own perceived reputational and relational best interests.

Ever since the earliest days of the Covid-19 pandemic, we — and we do mean “we” as in “literally all of us” — have been deeply concerned about the quality of information that people were consuming on the issue. Conspiracy theories have abounded since spring 2020, and despite the urgings of the UN secretary-general and the WHO, among others, information about the pandemic in general and vaccines in particular has continued to resemble a minefield.

But the availability of junk information by itself does not an “infodemic” make. There are other steps in the influence of low-quality information that have often been assumed but perhaps not yet sufficiently empirically tested: To what degree are people consuming that junk information compared with higher-quality news? To what extent are people being cocooned in echo chambers reaffirming existing Covid-19 beliefs? And what influence is that information having on their support for pandemic mitigation efforts?

We’re starting to get some solid initial data to answer those questions, with three studies on those issues published in the past six weeks. The answers from those studies are complex and nuanced (as always), but on the whole, things may not have been quite as bad as we feared.

First, Sacha Altay and two colleagues at Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen and Richard Fletcher, published a paper (available for free from the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media) that sought to quantify the share of web traffic that went to untrustworthy versus trustworthy news sites in the pandemic’s early days.

They tracked web traffic and Facebook engagement in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and France before and after the pandemic began and found that a vanishingly small proportion of traffic went to untrustworthy sites (as rated by NewsGuard). Those untrustworthy sites drew much more engagement on Facebook, but were still dominated by trustworthy sources there as well. Facebook engagement and traffic to news sites were up about a quarter from 2019 to 2020 overall, with most of that increase going to trustworthy sites, rather than untrustworthy ones.

There were some asterisks to that good news: The study didn’t measure traffic or engagement for non-news organizations, which may have been a major source of untrustworthy Covid-19 information. And the reach of untrustworthy information was significantly higher in the U.S. and France than in the U.K. and Germany.

In a second study, a team of 19 international researchers led by Alon Zoizner looked at COVID-19 information consumption as it related to like-minded information. In a study published in the journal Political Communication, they used a massive two-wave survey of 14,000 people across 16 European countries plus Israel to determine whether and why people were people were consuming information that challenged their political views.

Zoizner and his colleagues reasoned that the uncertainty produced by a crisis like the pandemic would lead to a more acute need for useful information, which would increase consumption of information countering one’s political views (i.e., “cross-cutting information”). The results of the study bore that rationale out: Both like-minded and cross-cutting information consumption increased after the pandemic, especially for those among whom concern about the pandemic was greatest.

The connection between pandemic concern and cross-cutting information consumption was higher in countries where Covid was more severe, where the government response was more permissive, and where democratic institutions were weaker. This, the authors suggested, indicated that when the need for quality information was truly greatest, people were most willing to go beyond their like-minded sources.

Finally, Andrew Anderson and Joshua Scacco published a study in American Behavioral Scientist looking at the effects of all this Covid information consumption. Specifically, how did people’s Covid information sources influence their level of support for Covid mitigation policies?

To find out, they surveyed 600 Florida residents in April 2020, measuring their consumption of COVID-19 information from legacy news, cable news, Facebook, government sources, and personal sources. They found that, even after controlling for partisanship, TV news consumption played a significant role in support for mitigation strategies — Fox News viewership was associated with opposition to Covid mitigation, and CNN, MSNBC, and network news were associated with support.

The control for partisanship is a key factor here. It indicates that the influence of Fox News is not simply a product of conservatives being more likely to oppose mitigation and also more likely to watch Fox News. It suggests, instead, that the cable channels (and network TV news) may have had an influence apart from simple partisan audience self-selection. On the flip side, neither Facebook nor government communication (e.g., press conferences by Donald Trump and other elected officials) were significantly associated with views on mitigation.

Taken together, the studies present a handful of emerging data points in our picture of what information consumption looked like in the early days of the pandemic. And the picture they paint isn’t as bleak as we’ve tended to fear: News consumption was way up (as we might have expected, and as other studies have shown), but it was largely trustworthy sources, and often cross-cutting sources, that got much of the attention. It may be, though, that as we’ve seen previously, the greater effect on attitudes may have been Fox News viewership than social media sources.

Research roundup

“Stories that don’t make the news: Navigating a white newsroom as a Black female reporter.” By Tyra L. Jackson, in Journalism Practice. This powerful article tells a vital story, critically examines newsroom culture, and demonstrates why we need autoethnographies in journalism and media studies. How rare are autoethnographies, such as Jackson’s? A search on the website for Journalism Practice finds just two autoethnographies, Jackson’s and another from 2007, the journal’s debut year. Jackson writes that the purpose of her autoethnography is to tell her story of workplace bullying to “better white newsroom culture” and to ask “newsrooms to consider how the actions and culture of white newsrooms can negatively affect Black female reporters.”

Explaining her methodological choice, Jackson writes that autoethnographies “help me and others share our encounters with discrimination.” Autoethnographies permit researchers to view oneself in relation to culture. As Jackson writes, “my experiences might be applicable to similar experiences Black female journalists have in white newsrooms, as my emotional recollections can help others provide meaning to their experiences via this method.”

Jackson uses the lens of critical race theory to examine her experiences in a southern newsroom. She weaves relevant literature and personal reflection to provide an inside story about unethical behavior, workplace bullying, and discrimination (including racial microaggressions). “Although the bullying I experienced was not explicitly racist (i.e., the bullies did not use racial slurs, hate speech, or have a blatant disregard for Blacks), it engaged my position as a Black woman in a white newsroom,” Jackson writes. “This type of bullying can be understood as racially motivated, even when the perpetrators may not perceive themselves as ‘racist.’”

Jackson progresses through her experiences, first recalling her enthusiasm in starting at the organization. Early on, she felt that her new co-workers “would run into battle with me.” Soon, though, it just became a fight. Jackson writes about how two white female colleagues bullied her, lied to and about her, and claimed she stole their story ideas and assignments. They called her unapproachable and played to the stereotype of the angry Black woman. The managing editor, a white man and friend of the two white female colleagues, ignored the bullying and dismissed Jackson’s attempt at diplomatically resolving the issue. Jackson felt isolated.

One of the most poignant anecdotes from the piece is when Jackson writes about sitting silently during a story meeting. She had ideas flowing through her mind, but she knew it was pointless to open her mouth. “I isolated myself because I did not feel welcomed,” she writes. Even a meeting with the editor-in-chief about her colleagues’ behavior did not resolve the issue. Jackson eventually left for a public relations job: “I was happy to have a stable job and leave the newspaper behind.”

“An intersectional analysis of U.S. journalists’ experiences with hostile sources.” By Kelsey Mesmer, in Journalism & Communication Monographs. Hostility toward journalists and journalism has long been a challenge around the world, including in the United States. As the author notes in this piece, newspaper offices in the 19th and early 20th centuries often were ransacked or destroyed. However, incidents of animosity and violence against individual journalists have increased in recent years, and so has the academic attention to these issues. Studies have examined online and offline harassment of journalists, but mostly from people outside the journalistic process (e.g., social media users, television viewers, etc.). Less is known about hostility directly from journalists’ sources — the people the journalists interview for news stories.

For this study, Mesmer draws on 38 in-depth interviews with journalists who have faced hostility from sources. Using the theory of intersectionality, she categories four forms of hostility from news sources and examines editor/manager responses to the hostility and how the hostility affected journalistic routines and news products. She identifies four forms of source-based hostility as (1) stemming from a general distrust of the news media, (2) source boundary crossing, (3) safety-violating hostility, and (4) microaggressions.

First, hostility stemming from general distrust was experienced by all by one participant, a 67-year-old white freelance writer who conducts most of his reporting remotely. Examples included claims of “fake news,” accusations of bias, and having interview requests denied because sources did not trust the media. Second, participants experienced situations of boundary crossing that broke professional norms of engagement and made them feel uncomfortable and vulnerable. Such hostility only happened to female participants in Mesmer’s sample. Examples included sources repeatedly calling the journalists on their personal phones, going above the journalists to complain to their bosses, and posting defamatory content about the journalists on social media. Third, participants experienced cases of safety-violating hostility, either causing the journalists direct physical and/or emotional harm or threatening physical harm. Though rare, these were the most intense and dangerous examples of hostility. One female reporter faced unwanted sexual touching and advances, and another female journalist had a phone slapped out of her hand twice by a source. Fourth, journalists faced numerous examples of microaggressions, including condescending tone or being treated as inferior.

Mesmer also examined the journalists’ editors’ responses, which too often were a lack of response. Participants even said that when they reported threats and verbal abuses to their superiors, the leaders verbalized support but then did not take action or follow up on situations. In general, Mesmer found the news leaders did not “protect and defend their reporters” and that they “valued the story” more than the personal safety of the employees.

“How people integrate news into their everyday routines: A context-centered approach to news habits.” By Tim Groot Kormelink, in Digital Journalism. Since Bernard Berelson’s landmark 1949 study on what “missing the newspaper” means, the importance of audience habit has been explored by researchers. For instance, scholars have studied what compels people to subscribe to news, what news organizations do to promote habits, and how audience members’ habits change over time (for instance, during the pandemic). However, less is understood about the critical early days of a user’s new subscription and what that pivotal period means for potential habit creation.

Groot Kormelink, working with students from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, used a novel qualitative approach to address this issue. He conducted a qualitative study of 66 participants in the Netherlands who received a free three-week subscription (either print or digital) to a publication (ranging from national to regional publications) of their choice. Specifically, the study explores how participants adopt (or not) new subscriptions into their everyday habits and what assists or hinders this adoption in the early days of subscription. Or, put another way, Groot Kormelink explored why participants receive a free subscription yet do not use it.

The study’s key finding reveals visibility is vital. The study found participants, even those with positive initial experiences, tended to forget about their new subscription and that visibility, which generates repetition, is requisite for habit formation. Visual cues — app notifications, open browser tabs, social media posts, emails, or the printed newspaper — reminded participants to read their subscriptions. This was especially important for the digital formats, which lacked the obvious visual reminder of the printed newspaper itself.

Groot Kormelink found additional key obstacles for the participants in converting the free subscription into a habit. One obstacle is theirotherhabits. For instance, participants expressed a desire to form a new habit with the subscription but failed to do so because their existing habits (watching television or videos, etc.) were too strong and won their attention and time.

Another obstacle found was the cognitive commitment, the sheer mental work, of reading the newspaper — or even motivating yourself tostartreading the newspaper. Participants considered reading the newspaper a mental hurdle, viewing the process as a full commitment or one not to even attempt at all. In short, they found it hard to commit their time and energy to their free subscription. Ultimately, this research offers an insightful inside look at why initial news use either falters or fosters a potential news habit.

“War of the words: How individuals respond to ‘fake news,’ ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘online falsehoods.'” By Edson C. Tandoc and Seth Kai Seet, in Journalism Practice. As the authors write in this brilliantly straightforward and important piece of research, “the terms people use matter.” That idea is at the heart of this survey-based approach to studying “fake news” and similar terms.

The term “fake news” peaked in usage (per Google search) in November 2016, around the time that Donald Trump was elected U.S. president. The term remains widely used, but academics have argued that it lost its meaning as it became politicized and weaponized. This study examines “fake news” as a concept and how the public reacts to it compared with other terms, such as “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “online falsehoods.” The latter term is particularly important in Singapore, where the government uses the term “online falsehoods” and defines them as “false statements of facts.”

The authors, both from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, used an online survey of 1,015 people with a nationally representative adult sample. The participants were randomly assigned to one of four groups based on the wording used in the questionnaire, split virtually equally between fake news, misinformation, disinformation and online falsehoods. The participants answered the same set of questions (with the different terms) based on their perceptions of falsity, intentionality, general concern, seriousness and need for solutions.

The study found that the term “fake news” had the highest level of perceptions of falsity and intentionality and also rated the highest in level of concern, perceived severity, and requiring a solution. “Disinformation” was rated the lowest across the board in all five categories.

“Running up against a brick wall: U.S. metajournalistic discourse of gender equality in newsrooms.” By Margaretha Geertsema-Sligh and Tim P. Vos, in Journalism Studies. Journalism literature, both mainstream and academic, long has chronicled the industry’s failures with gender equality. An endless stream of stories highlight the lowlights — for example, that women journalists are underrepresented and marginalized in U.S. newsrooms, in particular in leadership positions.

However, as the authors here argue, there is “much we do not know about how journalists process this knowledge.” To address that, Geertsema-Sligh and Vos, drawing on institutional theory and feminist critiques, examine more than 500 online articles and blog posts in U.S. news industry publications during a 17-year period (2002-2019). Overall, the authors argue that “knowing how journalists make sense of journalism’s poor record on gender equality tells us much about the institution of journalism itself.”

The findings confirm ongoing concerns about the disadvantaged status of women journalists — attributed predominantly to workplace culture and inflexible hours. The texts analyzed do signal a need for organizational change, but the study also shows how an underlying stress is placed on individual women journalists to play the most important role in this change. As Geertsema-Sligh and Vos write, “newsroom culture was recognized as a problem, yet some of the solutions read like individual self-help advice suggesting that women have to change, not the organizations.”

Encouragingly, the analysis found that authors of industry-focused online articles and blog posts, in general, tend to challenge the institution of journalism for perpetuating gender inequality in newsrooms. They tie gender equality to larger audiences, higher revenue possibilities, and a reflection of more diverse societies. However, as Geertsema-Sligh and Vos also write, “despite these calls for change, journalism as an institution seems limited in its response to gender inequality in newsrooms.”

An RQ1 Read: Journalistic Autonomy: A Genealogy of a Concept, by Henrik Örnebring and Michael Karlsson

This is part of an occasional series of summaries by RQ1 readers of notable recent books on news and journalism. This month’s summary is from Will Mari, an assistant professor at the Manship School of Mass Communication at LSU. If there’s a recent research-oriented book on news or journalism that you’d like to write about, let us know!

In Henrik Örnebring and Michael Karlsson’s Journalistic Autonomy: The Genealogy of a Concept (University of Missouri Press, 2022), both authors tackle a tricky topic that has heretofore been either elusive or, at best, secondary to most journalism studies scholars and media historians. And while Örnebring and Karlsson point to some noteworthy exceptions (Helle Sjøvaag, Michael Schudson, Theodore Glasser and Marc Gunther, Michael McDevitt and John C. Merrill, among others), they are — though they would be reticent to say this themselves — exceptionally bold and clever (and winsome) in the hard work of carving out a new genealogical media history of the idea of autonomy — independence — for journalism and journalists.

They successfully make the case for its inclusion in the oldest Ur-terms (the “god-term” status of notions such as “facts,” “truth,” “reality,” “the public,” the “Fourth Estate” and, of course, “objectivity”) in journalism, building on the important scholarship of Barbie Zelizer, James Carey, David Mindich, and others. They are careful and historically grounded in making their case, and do so in intellectually rewarding and consistent ways. Their analytical approach is based on four vital ideas about the way autonomy works in journalism today, namely 1) that autonomy is relational, that 2) autonomy requires boundaries, 3) autonomy implies agency (and the use of that agency) and 4) that autonomy must have a reason — a purpose — for its existence, both within and without newsrooms, and in and out of the broader democratic, Western-centric, capitalism-funded context that it is often found.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of Örnebring and Karlsson’s project. They engage with autonomy in relation to what they identify as its key attributes or aspects, including independence from the state, political interests and the market, but also from sources, how it acts in the workplace and what it means for and in relation to journalism’s audiences, along with how it functions with regards to technology — but also, crucially, they talk about what that independence should be for or to what end it should act in a world where privilege is uneven and power often wielded by elites at the expense of the weak.

In this effort, they are inspired by Isaiah Berlin. Journalism and its practitioners, its scholars and its audiences, and even, if they were more honest, its enemies, should pay attention to what will be regarded, rightly so, as a seminal work in journalism studies.

The researchers point to a few caveats: their findings are limited to a subset of news outlets in greater Philadelphia, and they could not measure some demographic variables for the city’s major TV affiliates. But the general finding is still highly significant: the data “paint a multi-dimensional portrait of Philadelphia’s media system that strongly suggests that differences in audience size and staffing levels, ownership structures (commercial vs. noncommercial), and format (print vs. television vs. digital-only) together work to underserve socioeconomically marginalized populations.”

What’s more, their results point to a possible concern — one warranting further research — about what they call “digital news deserts.” These are situations where “online-only outlets devote their already small staffs to reaching the same higher socioeconomic audiences served by large, legacy outlets and online-only outlets reaching lower socioeconomic audiences lack the capacity to significantly change this broader trend.”

As for the news content provided, the researchers found that more affluent and older audiences tended to receive proportionally more Covid-19 coverage, while less affluent, less educated, and younger audiences encountered a stronger emphasis on breaking-news crime coverage.

Finally, on the question of whether ownership has an impact on critical information needs, the study finds that “public-funded and nonprofit media produce more COVID-19 coverage relative to crime stories than their commercial counterparts.” In particular, the authors point out that hedge fund ownership, which has been criticized for a “vulture capitalism” approach that drains journalism resources for profit rather than public service, and other forms of private investment are associated with low ratios of pandemic vs. crime coverage.

In all, these findings may not be all that surprising — and yet they provide important empirical weight to arguments that there are concerning inequalities in news provision that need attention. More concerning still, these results suggest that such gaps and disparities can emerge even in metropolitan areas with “robust and thriving” media systems like Philadelphia’s.

Research roundup

“Journalism as historical repair work: addressing present injustice through the second draft of history” by Nikki Usher and Matt Carlson in Journal of Communication.

American journalism’s history of racism and exclusion is a long and ugly one, and against the backdrop of recent racial justice protests and reforms, many publications have apologized for and revisited the injustices done by their historical coverage (or sometimes lack thereof). Some Southern newspapers began interrogating their own racist pasts in the 2000s, but the number and depth of these apologies has accelerated in recent years.

Usher and Carlson take a deep dive into these re-interrogations, dubbing them “second draft of history” journalism and examining three prominent cases at The New York Times (The 1619 Project), the Los Angeles Times, and The Kansas City Star. Second draft of history journalism, they argue, is set apart from other journalistic attempts to revisit the past and shape collective memory by being “deliberate and explicit in its effort to address past harms in the public record” — a more advocacy-oriented approach that challenges journalism’s dominant mode of presentism and neutrality.

Usher and Carlson identify four components of second draft of history journalism: discursive consciousness (a belief that discourses have power to shape reality), moral consciousness (a belief that ideas and practices that were once considered acceptable now aren’t), institutional consciousness (a sense of collective responsibility for these moral failings as an organization), and past-orientation. They show how each of their three case studies embody these characteristics while ranging in approach from active (re-reporting the past) to reflective (looking inward at the organization’s failings).

They find places where these kinds of components of second draft of history journalism clash with journalistic norms of objectivity and smoothing over past oversights rather than highlighting them. But on the whole, they find that this emergent practice is aiming to accomplish one of the same primary tasks that virtually all of journalism is doing — casting itself (in this case, by “repairing” the past) as a legitimate authority to help society define reality.

“Questioning fact-checking in the fight against disinformation: An audience perspective” by Maria Kyriakidou, Stephen Cushion, Ceri Hughes, and Marina Morani in Journalism Practice.

Journalistic fact-checking has waxed and waned in popularity over the past decade, alternatively being celebrated as a check on political obfuscation and pilloried as an ineffectual default to moderatism. Researchers have published dozens of studies aiming to determine precisely how useful fact-checking is, with mixed and nuanced results. The upshot: Fact-checking can help correct mistaken political beliefs, but with a lot of limiting factors — audiences’ pre-existing beliefs, ideology, and knowledge; and fact-checkers’ truth scales, equivocal rulings, and reliance on campaign claims. In particular, conservatives tend to be more resistant to fact-checking than liberals and progressives.

But there are a couple of key limitations in many of the existing studies on fact-checking, which Kyriakidou and her colleagues at Wales’ Cardiff University identified. They’re heavy on the U.S. context, with its low media trust and highly politicized opinions about the media. And they overwhelmingly rely on experiments, which rarely take into account how people encounter fact-checking in their daily lives.

Kyriakidou & Co. sought to fill in these gaps with a study of U.K. news consumers through 14 focus groups and two qualitative surveys, gauging their attitudes toward, and practical use of, fact-checking operations. First, the bad news: Participants rarely used — and were seldom even familiar with — the fact-checking operations of major U.K. news organizations like the BBC and Channel 4. They saw fact-checking as something they did themselves — “independent research” that only came into play on occasional issues that greatly interested them. For many, professional fact-checking just wasn’t on the radar.

But there was good news, too. Participants were quite amenable to idea of fact-checking, especially in broadcast television. There was little partisan gap in these attitudes, as many consumers saw it as a necessary check against lying politicians. And when focus groups were shown examples of fact-checking, they clearly preferred it to a non-fact-checked version of the same claim. The researchers concluded that in this (non-American) media environment, one key may simply be greater awareness: “for fact-checking to play the revolutionary role imparted to it by practitioners and academics alike, it needs greater visibility.”

“Protesting the protest paradigm: TikTok as a space for media criticism” by Ioana Literat, Lillian Boxman-Shabtai, and Neta Kligler-Vilenchik in The International Journal of Press/Politics.

We’ve looked in a couple of past issues at some of the fascinating recent research on the protest paradigm — the notion that journalists often delegitimize protests and marginalize protesters by emphasizing conflict and relying on official sources. But of course, in a media environment defined by the ability to post and critique media content for oneself and connect with like-minded audiences, mainstream journalists don’t get the ability to unilaterally define protests in the public’s mind.

That kind of remixing and interrogating news coverage is happening continually on TikTok, especially in the wake of prominent protests. Literat and her colleagues wanted to see how TikTok is used as a space for this kind of personal media criticism of protest coverage by comparing videos around 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests and the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot.

The authors were clear that they didn’t consider these equivalent events — one a protest of racial injustice and the other an insurrection aimed at undermining democracy. But they provided a useful contrast to note how a platform’s tools, styles, and logic could be used to critique media protest coverage in both pro-social and anti-democratic ways.

In a qualitative analysis of 115 top TikTok videos (plus the thousands of comments on them), Literat and her colleagues found some particular TikTok-based practices, including annotating news coverage with TikTok’s editing features and distinct visual grammar, and providing footage from among protesters and positioning it as a challenge to media narratives. They concluded that TikTok does provide users new ways to counter established media narratives of protests, but not always for socially beneficial purposes. “TikTok may be democratizing the act of media criticism,” they wrote, “but it does so for both democratic and non-democratic ends.”

“The role of news media knowledge for how people use social media for news in five countries” by Anne Schulz, Richard Fletcher, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen in New Media & Society.

If you’ve spent much time reading about and discussing misinformation and disinformation over the past several years, you’ve heard (or talked about) news literacy as a key tool for fighting it. There’s been some research indicating that, indeed, news literacy can be effective in helping people identify and resist disinformation and conspiracy theories.

But beyond disinformation, our knowledge of the influence of news literacy on people’s actual news consumption is rather thin. Schulz and her colleagues helped elaborate one dimension of this relationship with their study on its role in how people use social media as a news source.

Schulz and her co-authors focused on news media knowledge, which is the “head-knowledge” element of news literacy (the other being the ability to assert control over one’s relationship with news). Using a large international 2018 survey, they looked at how social media fit in with other dimensions of news consumption and how people determined what news was worth their time on social media.

The results were quite similar across the five countries they examined (the U.K., Spain, Germany, Sweden, and the U.S.). People with greater news media knowledge were more likely to use social media for news, but less likely to use it as their main source. They also were more likely to use a variety of cues in determining news’ importance on social media, such as photos, headlines, news brands, or the person who shared the story. They were less likely, though, to be influenced by the number likes, comments, or shares a story had.

The takeaway: Contrary to prevailing public opinion, people who know more about how the news is made understand that social media actually can be a useful news source, but they’re more careful to combine with other sources of information and diligently evaluate the news they see there.

“Attacking the gatekeepers: A survey experiment on the effects of elite criticism on the media” by Patrick F.A. Van Erkel and Karolin Soontjens in International Journal of Communication.

Criticizing the news media has been a central part of the communication strategy of politicians for about a half-century at this point. It typically has two intended targets: the news media itself, as a way to pressure journalists into friendlier coverage (what media critic Jay Rosen has called “working the refs”), and the public, as a way to inoculate audiences against negative coverage.

Politicians and scholars have tended to assume that such attacks are quite effective — politicians, in continuing to use them, and scholars, in flagging them as democratically dangerous. But Van Erkel and Soontjens posed a question that hasn’t been tested as often as you might think: Do those attacks actually work?

Their answer: Yes, sort of. They used a survey experiment in Belgium (a country with relatively high trust in media) to test the effect of hypothetical tweets by political leaders criticizing a public-service broadcaster’s news item. Tweets calling the broadcaster biased did lead audiences to perceive it as more biased, if the politician was in the participant’s favored party.

Which makes sense, of course. But those tweets didn’t affect people’s trust in the outlet, nor did they lead people to see the news media as a whole as biased. When politicians criticized the broadcaster as inaccurate, it had no effect at all. So, Van Erkel and Soontjens concluded, politicians can feed like-minded citizens’ perception of a media outlet as hostile, but trust, as well as people’s perceptions of the news media as a whole, take more than just a few tweets to dislodge. (Though a massive, years-long campaign may exert rather more force.)

Strategic media avoidance by the ultra-wealthy

Few subjects have captivated both journalism critics and scholars over the past half-century like the ability for powerful individuals to influence the news media. Much of our attention in this area goes to politicians and media owners, as characters like Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch have flaunted their ability to steer media priorities toward their interests. The research on political and ownership influence has been robust for decades, too.

The public often talks about the role of the ultra-wealthy more generally in shaping news, but that group is much less understood by scholars. Sure, there are several of the richest people in many societies who make their feelings about media well known, and often eventually work to buy or financially support media sources or initiatives (see Bezos, Jeff; Musk, Elon; Newmark, Craig). But the large majority of the world’s wealthiest people tend to keep their views of the media (and their strategies for it) to themselves.

So how do they actually interact with the news media? Given their reticence, that’s been a tough question for scholars to answer. But two Finnish scholars, Anu Kantola and Juho Vesa, have given us some of the most direct data yet on this issue, in their new study in the European Journal of Communication, “Silence of the wealthy: How the wealthiest 0.1% avoid the media and resort to hidden strategies of advocacy.”

Kantola and Vesa interviewed 90 of the 5,000 richest people in Finland — the wealthiest 0.1% — using tax records and other public data to identify them. They zeroed in on three groups of wealthy elites: business executives, entrepreneurs, and heirs.

They built their study around the concept of mediatization — an idea that has been especially popular in European news scholarship over the past decade or two — which holds that the media’s power to shape social and political processes is growing, requiring public actors (like politicians and businesspeople) to adapt their behavior to a ‘media logic.’ In other words, if the media increasingly run the game, other sectors are being forced to change to play by their rules.

That premise would seem to entail that the ultra-wealthy need to increasingly use media to influence society. But Kantola and Vesa found the opposite at work. Most of the people they interviewed remained reserved toward the media, expressing a desire to stay invisible. They tended to view media logic as sensationalistic, motivated by clicks, politically hostile and biased against them — in other words, they saw the media a lot like the rest of the public does.

But unlike the rest of the public, they didn’t feel they needed the media in order to see their interests advanced. They saw it as irrelevant and unhelpful: “I don’t know what I’d do there” and “no need to share anything with a larger group of people at all” were typical quotes. And perhaps most centrally, they saw the news media as uncontrollable, with most of its possible effects strongly negative for them, such as political scandals.

In its place, they largely relied on direct advocacy to influence politics — calling well-placed friends and serving on the boards of lobbying groups rather than backing media campaigns or astroturf efforts. There were exceptions, of course — notably, executives of consumer-facing businesses — but these were rare.

These findings, Kantola and Vesa argued, don’t undermine mediatization’s basic claim: These wealthy elites still saw the news media as salient and powerful, which was why they were so wary of it. They simply saw its power only playing out in negative ways for them. In most cases, their astronomical wealth bought them not so much the ability to manipulate the media as the privilege to ignore it.

Research roundup

“Misinformation and professional news on largely unmoderated platforms: The case of Telegram.” By Aliaksandr Herasimenka, Jonathan Bright, Aleksi Knuutila, and Philip N. Howard, in Journal of Information Technology & Politics.

Misinformation on social media and digital platforms is such a sprawling challenge — hard to grasp in its entirety because it may be so context-dependent by place and platform (e.g., when it comes to encouraging conspiracy theories). And while ample attention has been paid to the Facebooks and Twitters of the world, only in recent years has scrutiny shifted to more alternative, niche apps and services where misinformation has been presumed to thrive more readily, in the absence of greater moderation oversight.

Such is the case of Telegram, which by various estimates has more than 500 million users (bigger than Twitter) and which has become in several countries a leading source of news sharing and discussion. Telegram has been known as a haven for far-right extremist groups, and, like other apps of its ilk (such as Gab and Parler), has less developed or less stringent forms of content moderation.

But the researchers in this study wanted to know more precisely: How big of a problem, really, is misinformation on Telegram compared to the spread of professional news on the platform?

The results, based on an examination of 200,000 Telegram posts, came as something of a surprise.

“Rather than finding that Telegram is simply awash with misinformation,” the authors write, “our analysis instead suggests a more nuanced picture, showing how a largely unmoderated platform has been integrated into professional media ecologies where leading media organizations appear to be able to compete for wider audiences with misleading sources and to win this competition. We show that trusted professional news content can dominate political information compared to sources that occasionally spread misleading content even when moderation is minimal.”

“‘It’s not hate but…’: Marginal categories in rural journalism.” By Gregory Perreault, Ruth Moon, Jessica Fargen Walsh, and Mildred F. Perreault, in Journalism Practice.

The state of rural journalism in the U.S. has received more attention lately amid concerns about “news deserts” and diminishing resources for journalism in many communities, particularly rural ones. These structural challenges for rural news organizations are complicating efforts by journalists to provide vitally important news and civic information — perhaps “the only nuanced local coverage [that] community members will encounter,” as this study notes.

This study by Perreault and colleagues adds a novel dimension to this line of research by examining how rural journalists navigate the tricky business of covering hate groups and hate activity in their communities. Amid growing concern about extremist hate groups in the United States, including in rural areas where hate activity may tend to be higher, how do journalists deal with this complicated aspect of reporting?

The authors describe how, for the journalists they interviewed, “hate speech” operates as a kind of “boundary object” — something with a widely agreed-upon meaning, and yet also with a high degree of localized interpretation.

“The journalists we interviewed articulated a clear definition for hate speech but struggled to apply that definition to the events they articulated within their communities,” Perreault and team write. “Using the common refrain of ‘We don’t have any hate groups, but … ,‘ journalists nevertheless articulated acts of hate in their communities, which were not always associated explicitly with hate groups.”

Being more closely connected to their audiences, rural journalists were more reluctant to label such people and activities in their communities as hate — at least in part because of the fear of repercussion that would arise from such declarations in coverage. Indeed, as the authors note, “Journalists in some cases felt pressure from their audience to apply false balance in their work through labeling groups like Black Lives Matter as a hate group.”

Why the media gets it wrong when it comes to North Korea: Cases of ‘dead’ North Koreans in the Kim Jong-un era.” By Soomin Seo, in Journalism.

When it comes to prominent North Koreans and how they are portrayed in global news media, at least this much is clear: the reports of their deaths are, at times, greatly exaggerated.

Since Kim Jong-un rose to power in 2012, this study notes, “Major outlets have reported that generals, diplomats, and artists have been shot, poisoned, or even fed to dogs. However, many of those individuals later emerged very much alive.” What might explain these all-too-frequent journalistic errors, particularly at a time when the resources for reporting on faraway places that journalists may never visit are presumably better than ever?

Seo’s study examines the ultimately erroneous death reports of seven high-profile North Koreans between 2012 and 2019, through a combination of tracing the evolution of these news stories as well as reconstructing them through interviews with journalists.

The study found “a widespread practice to ‘report first, verify later,’ seeing North Korea as unworthy of proper journalistic scrutiny” because of its role as a despotic regime defying international norms. “Such relaxation of basic journalistic standards,” Seo writes, “meant journalists would quote each other’s stories without additional verification, contributing to a global cascade of errors. The violation of basic professional principles extended all the way to the absence of corrections.” What’s more, the “clicks and revenue generated by salacious North Korea-related stories make them especially susceptible to distortion.”

“Maintaining a freelance career: How journalists generate and evaluate freelance work.” By Maria Norbäck, in Journalism Studies.

From a career perspective, journalistic work has become increasingly “precarious.” Think: the shift from longer-term, full-time positions to a growing array of shorter-term, part-time, freelance-based contracts, in addition to the heightened intensification of the work cycle and its associated stress and burnout.

As a result, growing numbers of freelance journalists are working harder to make ends meet — but “more research is needed on how freelance journalists negotiate precarity to maintain a career, and on how career progression can be achieved.”

Norbäck’s article offers a useful window into these dynamics. Based on interviews with 52 Swedish freelancers, it illustrates the stunted career possibilities for the average freelance journalist. “There are a limited number of ways for senior, established freelancers to progress to more strategic, complex, or qualified jobs,” the author writes. “Hence, the freelancer’s position along the production chain, where he/she has little strategic control over the content being produced, made it difficult to achieve career progression over time.”

Instead, the study found that most freelance journalists had to settle for an emphasis on “networking, bundling jobs, and being a jack of all trades,” with some freelancers finding enhanced career progression opportunities, in terms of more strategic and better-compensated work, by working as an editor. As such, the author concludes that “much of what the freelancers did to source, generate and evaluate their jobs could be described as career maintenance, whereby their focus and efforts were directed at avoiding a downward movement rather than achieving upward mobility.”

The study wraps up by considering how the Covid pandemic exacerbated inequalities for freelancers (e.g., many national relief programs did not include them) and why it remains difficult for freelancers to achieve greater power through collective action.

“An ‘assumption of bad faith’: Using fake news rhetoric to create journalistic teaching moments.” By Kelsey R. Mesmer, in Journalism Practice.

Journalists have long encountered hostility from sources, strangers, and a host of others, but anti-press conditions, including in supposedly “safe” places for journalists like the U.S., have worsened dramatically in recent years. This is, in part, because populist politicians like Trump have normalized attacks against journalists as “fake news” and an “enemy of the people.” Even worse, of course, is the epidemic of violence against journalists in Mexico, as well as similar assaults by authoritarian regimes around the world.

Amid this rising tide of hate toward the news media, this study examines how journalists respond to this social climate. Mesmer focuses particularly on the experiences of 38 U.S.-based journalists who frequently find themselves on the receiving end of anti-media rhetoric from the sources they approach for stories. How do these reporters negotiate these encounters and seek to manage such lack of trust?

Mesmer discovered that journalists tend to use one of three strategies: “reframing the situation by flipping the fake news script in their favor and/or choosing to use hostile content to color their stories; accepting the distrust as part of their new normal on the job and disengaging with it whenever possible; and transforming the situation by reframing the distrust as an opportunity for journalistic teaching moments.”

The “teaching moments” strategy is the most adaptive and intriguing approach, and it points to some interesting implications for journalists.

For example, the author finds that reporters employing this approach tended to have a ready “script” they could draw on to explain to skeptical sources how news works. Such a script would include “a description of the story being reported, a brief list of the type of people being interviewed for the story, an explanation of how the interview would be conducted (audio recorded or on video), what is required of the source to be interviewed (such as their name, demographic information and consent to be on the record) and a disclaimer that only a short part of their interview may make it into the final version of the story,” among other things.

By creating these journalistic moments, Mesmer argues, journalists might begin to slowly transform the climate of mistrust they encounter, one source at a time — and, in the process, introduce a degree of news literacy into the conversation that is lacking in many communities.

“Although this strategy requires more time and effort on the part of the reporter,” the author writes, “it has the potential to create long-term change. Sources who have a positive experience with a reporter might be more likely to speak to future reporters. They may also develop more positive feelings about the press, which they might share with others who believe in fake news rhetoric.”

An RQ1 read: Journalism, Data and Technology in Latin America, edited by Ramón Salaverría and Mathias-Felipe de-Lima-Santos

This is part of an occasional series of summaries by RQ1 readers of notable recent books on news and journalism. This month’s summary is from Olga Lopes, a researcher at Instituto Nacional do Semiárido in Brazil who recently completed a master’s degree in journalism at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. If there’s a recent research-oriented book on news or journalism that you’d like to write about, let us know!

“We are what we do, especially what we do to change what we are,” wrote Eduardo Galeano in Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. A deep dive into the state of the journalism practiced in that particular region, often overlooked or incorrectly homogenized by Western scholarship tradition, is the subject of Journalism, Data and Technology in Latin America, edited by Ramón Salaverría and Mathias-Felipe de-Lima-Santos, part of the Palgrave Studies in Journalism and the Global South book series.

Besides the editors, other five authors present, in eight chapters, investigations based on surveys, semi-structured interviews, and case studies covering topics like audience participation, revenue sources diversification, the strategic value of collaborative transnational projects in efforts to dodge censorship, and distribution systems adapted to citizens deeply reliant on restricted mobile internet access.

While discussing the challenges that emerge from the adoption of technology-driven practices, like automated journalism and the use of social media platforms to reach a broader audience, the researchers examine the intersections between past and present economic inequalities, which is refreshing to see being done considering internal power dynamics.

The book offers an overview of the diversity of media landscapes and journalistic cultures across some of Latin America’s countries and, simultaneously, highlights common traits shared by them, such as the prevalence of media ownership concentration and constant violations of press freedom principles. Understanding all of these tensions helps us to see journalism “as it is,” besides the pursuit of an ideal practice, in all its possibilities, disputes, and contradictions.

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.”

A bleak look at journalism careers in one U.S. city

It’s been almost an entire generation since the recession of the late 2000s helped accelerate a years-long flood of layoffs and cuts across the news industry. The old archetypal journalism career of steadily moving up to more prestigious beats and organizations is so far gone that even stating that it’s long gone has itself become a truism.

But what’s replaced it? What does the typical journalistic career look like now? Is there one? We know, of course, that some journalists are leaving the profession while others are continuing to forge on and finding success. But how many are in each group, and how are those divergent trajectories reflecting (or potentially reshaping) the news industry’s longstanding inequities around race and gender?

Those are a pertinent (and often personal) set of questions for anyone trying to make their way in the news industry, as well as those training new journalists to enter the field. In a new study in the journal Journalism Studies, the University of Washington’s Matthew Powers gives us some initial answers: At least in the medium term, the typical local journalism career is likely to be more characterized by inertia or departure than advancement, especially for women and journalists of color.

Powers examined the career trajectories of local journalists in Seattle over six years — 2015-2021, a relatively stable time for journalism in the city on the macro level. Using publicly available information, he put together a database of every local non-freelance journalist in Seattle he could find (430 in total) in 2015, then determined their professional status in 2021, to find out whether they had advanced, maintained their current professional level, declined, or left the industry. He particularly examined differences across race and ethnicity, gender, education levels, years of experience, medium, and type of work.

His top-line numbers were striking: Nearly 40% had the same job after six years, while about 30% had left the news industry entirely. Just 16%, by contrast, had advanced in their careers within journalism. (About 3% had declined, and about 10% had retired or died.) The differences along gender and race/ethnicity lines were sadly unsurprising: White journalists and men were more likely to stay in their jobs, while women and journalists of color were more likely to leave the industry.

The rates of journalists advancing were similar across gender and race/ethnicity groups. Notably, however, the women and journalists of color who advanced were more likely to advance through less prestigious beats and through positions of “functional specialization” — data, analytics, audience work, and copy editing.

Journalists with graduate education or degrees from prestigious universities were less likely to maintain their current jobs — more likely, instead, to either advance or leave the industry entirely. And early-career journalists left the industry at an alarmingly high rate: More than 70% of those with fewer than 10 years of experience were gone within the six-year sample. (The same went for half of those at online-only news organizations.)

Powers’ data, of course, is descriptive — we can’t determine from it why the trends it indicated occurred as they did. Still, it paints an arresting (if unsurprising) picture of what the trajectory of journalistic careers looks like in one mid-sized local journalism ecosystem. Many of the less experienced journalists are on their way out of the industry altogether, and the more experienced ones are simply maintaining their current status, rather than advancing in the medium term.

For women and journalists of color, their picture broadly mirrors the larger one but is more bracing: In both groups, more people were out of the industry within six years than maintained their current professional level. And when they advanced, it was through more marginalized channels than their white male counterparts. Powers concludes by positing that perhaps “the expansion of journalism to include historically-marginalized groups might also sort those individuals into less prestigious and potentially more precarious jobs.” Instead of generally invoking the notion of a “crisis” in journalism, Powers says, we need to ask more directly, “crisis for whom?”

An RQ1 read: News for the Rich, White, and Blue by Nikki Usher

This is the first of what we hope will be occasional summaries by RQ1 readers of notable recent books on news and journalism. Our first summary is from Jihii Jolly, who is a journalist and currently writes the newsletter Time Spent. If there’s a recent research-oriented book on news or journalism that you’d like to write about, let us know!

Journalism faces an extraordinary predicament, one threatening the democratic project itself, according to Nikki Usher’s extensive analysis of the decline of metropolitan newspapers in News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism, based on 13 years of fieldwork.

National journalism cannot tell the stories of place as well or as often as local news media, and yet, American political power is tied to geography.

Originally imagined as a book about news buildings and the power they hold, Usher’s News for the Rich, White, and Blue turned into a far more alarming and extensive interrogation of how the loss of place-based journalism has undermined trust in journalism and exacerbated inequality in America.

She begins by exposing the falsely nostalgic view that local news has served democracy, outlining the consequences of losing — or never having — adequate local journalism, and then analyzes in great detail how the financial constraints faced by metropolitan papers has worsened these pre-existing structural challenges.

Namely, last-ditch efforts to build a digital subscription base has led to a journalism that serves predominantly rich, white, and blue (liberal) readers, one in which D.C. journalism is deeply disconnected from the rest of the United States and the audiences of likely national survivors like the New York Times are increasingly global, placeless, and elite. On top of this, she warns, well-intentioned news philanthropy going to journalism that can no longer be supported by the market could further undermine trust in quality journalism.

Ultimately, Usher lands on a series of proposals for journalism’s future, which reinstitute place as the building block of identity and power in the United States, and which unbundle the core functions of journalism to allow civic information to serve more Americans where they are.

In her words: “We get the democracy we deserve based on the core functions we demand from the news media.”

Research roundup

“Does the ideology of the newsroom affect the provision of media slant?” By Hans J. G. Hassell, Matthew R. Miles, and Kevin Reuning, in Political Communication.

Ask people what they think about the news media, and almost inevitably you will hear talk about political bias — the idea that news organizations, including the individual journalists working for them, are often too slanted in their partisan judgments to offer fair coverage. This is a well-worn line of critique.

Yet, as these authors note, while the public often criticizes the media for such perceived bias in news coverage, most of the research on this topic has more often focused on the consumer demand for ideological news (think: Fox News giving conservatives what they want), or it has looked at structural factors like media ownership or editorial boards — rather than taking a closer look at the newsroom and the ideology of journalists in it.

In that sense, Hassell and team bring a fresh perspective. They develop a new measure of the ideology of newspapers based on a large survey of U.S. political journalists in which the journalists are asked to place their own newspaper on an ideological scale in comparison to seven nationally known media organizations (The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Breitbart.com, MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN). They find that newsroom ideology has a substantial impact on the ideological lean in news coverage, even after accounting for the slant that certain audiences may prefer.

“Our results show that newspaper content is not solely a reflection of consumer demand,” they write. “The ideological norms of the newsroom shape the responsiveness of newspapers to the ideological content demands of their readership.”

Also, in response to the idea that journalists are irredeemably biased (and presumably in a liberal direction), the study notes this in its conclusion: “Our findings show that the vast majority of newspapers are politically moderate relative to cable and national media. Importantly, we find that in its presently constituted state, very few outlets among the larger set of newspapers in the United States are clearly identifiable as conservative or liberal.”

“‘Why I quit journalism’: Former journalists’ advice giving as a way to regain control.” By Nick Mathews, Valérie Bélair-Gagnon, and Matt Carlson, in Journalism.
Amid so much talk about the Great Resignation among U.S. workers, and given the findings that we highlighted about how many Seattle journalists leave the profession, it’s useful to consider: Why do journalists quit their jobs? Or, more to the point, what do journalists say about the decision when they choose to step away from journalism, and what might that reveal about the state of working in the profession today?

This study by Matthews and colleagues offers an important clue by examining 27 first-person, public-facing narratives by former journalists. It provides an update, in a sense, to a 2010 study by Nikki Usher that examined how laid-off journalists and others leaving the fold said “goodbye to the news” in their departing memos — and what that indicated about the enduring quality of news values in a new media world that was unfolding at that time. (Full disclosure: Seth has ongoing research collaborations with these authors, including the recently published book News After Trump led by Matt Carlson.)

Now, in this 2022 study, what emerges is a sobering picture of journalists feeling powerless, stuck, and burned out as they give out advice on their way out the door. These individuals originally saw journalism as a dream job and a path to empower people in their communities — but they became haunted by ceaseless demands of market pressures and work that never seemed to end. “This study,” the authors conclude, “shows that the lack of institutional support on work-life balance and mental health paired with the institutional demands to be ‘all in’ and always-on, and the consequential lack of professional–personal life balance, led journalists to have a sense of disconnection from both their personal and professional lives.”

No wonder they’re quitting.

“Social campaigns to social change? Sexual violence framing in U.S. news before and after #metoo.” By Selina Noetzel, Maria F. Mussalem Gentile, Gianna Lowery, Sona Zemanova, Sophie Lecheler, and Christina Peter, in Journalism.

In October 2017, in the wake of allegations of widespread sexual abuse by Harvey Weinstein, actress Alyssa Milano posted on Twitter, “If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me too’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.” The #metoo hashtag spread rapidly and a global movement against sexual violence was born, prompting months of extensive media coverage.

All of which raises the question: How did journalists frame sexual violence in the news before and after the movement went viral?

Noetzel and colleagues conducted a quantitative content analysis of news articles in four U.S. newspapers, covering a period of one year before and one year after the #metoo tweet. They found a discernible change, as news accounts moved away from “straightforward, single-incident reports to broader discussions.”

While some research suggests that news stories tend to focus on individual blame in cases of sexual abuse, this study finds little presence of victim-blaming in the news before or after the MeToo movement began. “Rather, blame placed upon perpetrators was present in all frames and increased after #metoo.”

While it’s a positive development that the study did not find victim-focused blame, the authors acknowledged that an increased emphasis on perpetrator-focused blame may foster an “individualization” of the sexual violence problem, rather than situating it more squarely as a societal-level concern.

“‘The boundaries are blurry…’: How comment moderators in Germany see and respond to hate comments.” By Sünje Paasch-Colberg and Christian Strippel, in Journalism Studies.

“Comment sections are poison,” The Guardian declared in 2014 — and many would argue that little has changed since that time. The commenting sections on many news sites (and on discussion boards and elsewhere online) too often seem to devolve into slugfests of incivility, toxicity, and name-calling. While researchers for years now have analyzed content moderation strategies and best practices for dealing with unruly commenters — an ongoing challenge for many news organizations, not to mention social media providers — there has been little study of what types of comments are actually considered a problem by moderators: “that is, which working definitions of hate comments guide moderation decisions in newsrooms.”

Drawing on interviews with content moderators in Germany, this study finds there is a strong agreement on extreme cases of hateful comments — which are, in fact, quite rare, they say — but it’s in the more common and troublesome “gray area” where things quickly become complicated. Different moderators coming from different organizational environments or backgrounds struggle with comments that blur boundaries of aggression by using irony, word play, rhetorical questions, or “disparaging modifications of people’s names.”

What factors seem to influence how differently content moderators discern hate in comments? They range from individual differences in sensitivity to the types of software being used to moderate to the ways that political orientation, business models, and target audiences seem to influence moderation choices — not to mention matters of legislation and cultural-historical context (e.g., surrounding the case of Holocaust denial).

In short, at a time when many believe automation can solve the problem of hateful comments, this study suggests we still have much to learn about how different people in different contexts struggle to define and moderate away incivility in the muddy middle of “gray areas.”

“Innovating online journalism: New ways of storytelling.” By Shirish Kulkarni, Richard Thomas, Marlen Komorowski, and Justin Lewis, in Journalism Practice.

Finally, we close by considering whether the tried-and-true “inverted pyramid” model of news writing is, in fact, the most effective means of conveying information online. Digital media offer so many interactive opportunities to tell stories, after all, and younger audiences seemed less inclined to traditional-sounding news. So is the inverted pyramid structure — arranging facts in descending order of importance — still the best way to go?

This study used workshops and expert consultations to develop a series of new prototypes for online news storytelling, and then tested these new approaches in an audience survey of 1,268 people.

The authors found that “linear forms of storytelling — rarely used in news — are more effective in transferring knowledge to news consumers and are seen as more engaging, convenient and useful than the traditional inverted pyramid.” They offer and describe five key principles for building more effective online stories, with utmost emphasis on narrative — telling a story linearly rather than in an inverted-pyramid structure that some focus group participants found to be “confusing” and “backward.”

Additionally, the authors noted that their test audiences were surprisingly quick to embrace the non-pyramid approach to news. “The fact that users responded immediately to some of these new formats is … indicative of their potential,” Kulkarni and colleagues write. “Even in the brief time available to craft new forms of storytelling, some of our prototypes performed significantly better than the classic, tried and tested pyramid version.”

Testing the real-world impact of partisan news

If there is one thing we all can agree on, it’s that Americans with strong political opinions can’t seem to agree with anyone on the other side of the partisan divide. Polarization runs deep.

Republican or Democrat, right or left, or some variation thereof — strong partisans of various stripes hold a distressingly dark view of their political opponents, see them as idiotic, and would prefer not to interact them, thank you very much. While not everyone or every issue is so riven, there’s little question that relations between the two major political sides have grown more rancorous.

Who’s to blame for this state of affairs?

While research generally suggests that “elite behavior, rather than communication, is driving political polarization” — that is, it’s especially the fault of politicians and other high-profile figures who stoke division — many people say it’s a media problem: that partisan news outlets, in particular, so thoroughly favor one side and demonize the other that it naturally accelerates polarization among the populace. Seems logical enough, right? But most evidence about the impact of partisan news on the American electorate has been based on surveys (which are inherently limited snapshots of self-reporting) and experiments (which can measure short-term effects but are less useful in detecting long-term, more enduring impact).

To develop a clearer picture of whether (and how) partisan news contributes to American political polarization, a team of researchers — Magdalena Wojcieszak, Sjifra de Leeuw, Ericka Menchen-Trevino, Seungsu Lee, Ke M. Huang-Isherwood, and Brian Weeks — conducted a massive study of “real-world” data that was recently published in The International Journal of Press/Politics, a leading venue for research on journalism and political communication.

The scope of this study is impressive. The project combined two two-wave panel surveys, which capture attitudes at Time 1 and allow researchers to query the same people at Time 2, looking for differences based on media exposure in between. To get around the limitations of people’s self-reported recollections of media use, each set of survey-takers had agreed in advance to allow the researchers to get access to three months of their browsing history. In total, then, the researchers had a year’s worth of browsing history from a diverse sample of more than 1,200 Americans — or about 38 million site visits in all. The researchers then teased out how much of that online activity focused on news domains — whether partisan or centrist sites — and, using a machine learning classifier, assessed how much of that news exposure was about politics in particular.

The study’s title unmistakably spells out the headline finding: “No polarization from partisan news.”

That is, actual online exposure to partisan news, whether congenial (e.g., Fox News for conservatives) or dissimilar (e.g., Fox News for liberals), didn’t appear to make participants’ policy attitudes any more extreme, didn’t lead people to hold more contempt toward supporters of the other party, and seemed to have no polarizing impact on Democrats or Republicans or even those who are strongly partisan. Similar things were true for exposure to political stories within partisan or centrist news websites.

“Taken together, these null results run counter to the popular narrative that partisan news is to blame for the ills of contemporary U.S. politics,” the authors write. “Although not aligned with past evidence, we argue that our null findings portray the reality of (very limited) effects of partisan news in the real world more accurately.”

Speaking of that real world and why news (however partisan) may not make much of a discernible difference: In what may be a reality check for journalists and media scholars, this study found that news is a tiny fraction of what people engage with online. About 1.69% of the web tracking data involved visits to news domains; of those, more than half were visits to centrist news sites, with liberal and conservative sites accounting for about 26% and 18% of all news browsing, respectively. An even smaller share of the overall news visits was focused on political news articles. In fact, even on partisan news sites, more than half of what people consumed was nonpolitical content such as sports analysis or cooking recipes.

“Ultimately,” the authors concluded, “an average participant encountered only one partisan political news article for every 200 sites they visited!”

The “powerful partisan news” narrative, the authors argue, is inaccurate “primarily because politics is a small drop in the overall ocean of what citizens do online. Theoretically, people use media that satisfy their needs and desires. Because politics is perceived as complex, boring, or overly divisive, people may avoid it altogether, especially as they have nearly unlimited entertainment and nonpolitical content at their disposal.” (Read: a bottomless well of Netflix, YouTube, etc.)

Partisan news, it should be noted, is an even smaller drop in that ocean of online content — less than 1% of all the URLs accessed by participants in this study.

What can we take away from this research? For one thing, it could be slightly concerning that so little news is being consumed relative to everything else, leaving citizens less informed about politics and public affairs. On the other hand, though, this study indicates that partisan news, in a real-world test, may not be nearly as polarization-fueling as conventional wisdom might suggest — even if, say, Fox News and other partisan outlets, along with the political elites who make frequent appearances via such outlets, are no doubt consequential as agenda-setters for the larger conversation about contentious politics.

Research roundup

“A sadness bias in political news sharing? The role of discrete emotions in the engagement and dissemination of political news on Facebook.”. By Ernesto de León and Damian Trilling, in Social Media + Society.

For the better part of a decade, we’ve understood emotion as a key to news sharing. BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti long ago argued that understanding emotion was key to his company’s social media success, and scholars have measured that idea in numerous ways. Sometimes they’ve found that arousing positive emotions leads to more sharing, sometimes that negative emotions are the key, and sometimes that just arousing strong emotions is more important than what type.

De León and Trilling add some useful shading to this discussion in a study of news articles on Facebook during the 2018 Mexican elections. They looked at the Facebook reactions (i.e., Like, Love, Wow, Angry, etc.) and shares of more than 16,000 news articles posted on Facebook during the election. One of their main contributions was to examine the different roles of the Angry and Sad reactions, as well as the Wow reaction. Sadness and anger have long been distinguished in emotional and information processing research, but as signals of emotion on Facebook, the two reactions have often been grouped together.

De León and Trilling found, as they expected, that negative news articles were shared more often than positive ones. But they were surprised to find out that sadness, not anger, was associated with greater sharing in news articles. They proposed a few possible explanations for this finding, including a desire to avoid conflict among close ties on Facebook and a use of news sharing as a way to collectively express grief.

They also found that Facebook’s Wow reaction was more negatively than positively associated (suggesting disbelief rather than amazement) and that Wow was significantly more strongly related with sharing than the Love reaction. On the whole, negative emotions ruled when it came to political news sharing, but we may want to look more closely at sadness as a key emotion in news consumption beyond the far better publicized anger.

“Conservative news nonprofits: Claiming legitimacy without transparency.” By Michael Buozis and Magda Konieczna, in Journalism.

The past few years have brought a trove of excellent research on both nonprofit journalism and conservative news as important niches within the modern news ecosystem. But until now, little work had been done on the overlap between the two — the small but potentially influential world of conservative news nonprofits. Buozis and Konieczna analyzed the discourse from and about many of these organizations to produce an insightful study on their relationship to mainstream journalism’s structures and norms.

Using the sociological concept of boundary work, Buozis and Konieczna revealed a delicate dance in which conservative news nonprofits seek to expand journalism’s boundaries to include themselves while flouting some of its key norms. The most prominent of those is funding: Almost none of the organizations they examined were transparent about their funding, something that is considered an ethical standard throughout the rest of nonprofit journalism.

These organizations often rhetorically committed to nonpartisanship and political independence, aligning themselves with journalistic norms. But Buozis and Konieczna argued that by obscuring their funding sources, they quietly undermined those commitments by failing to acknowledge the threat that private funding might pose to their journalistic independence.

The organizations employed a similar ambiguity in characterizing their relationship to the mainstream news media. They touted their associations with professional news associations and mainstream news organizations while also presenting their own work as a critique of mainstream journalism, saying most news organizations had abandoned the ideal of objectivity. The norms and structures of mainstream journalism, the authors conclude, are both integral to their journalistic aims but also serve “an important symbolic role representing the failures of journalism that these organizations claim to correct.”

“You are fake news! Factors impacting journalists’ debunking behaviors on social media.” By Magdalena Saldaña and Hong Tien Vu, in Digital Journalism.

We’ve all been on high alert about online misinformation for quite a while now, but journalists may be in a position to see more of it than many others, simply because they spend so much of their team scanning, collecting, and organizing information online. But what should journalists do about that misinformation? Should they ignore it? Debunk it on social media? Write about it as part of their work? There’s no clear guide for journalists who are encountering it each day.

Saldaña and Vu set out to find out what journalists do when they encounter misinformation on social media, and what factors make them more likely to intervene. They surveyed a random sample of 405 U.S. journalists to examine their opinions about misinformation and its relationship with their practices when they encounter it on social media.

They found an interesting, though perhaps unsurprising, paradox. Journalists did say they deeply cared about misinformation and its impact on journalism, democracy, and audiences. But they rarely did anything to respond to it when they found it on social media, other than ignoring it. Saldaña and Vu proposed a few possible reasons: Increasing workloads mean they don’t have time to deal with it, they don’t want to antagonize polarized audiences, they don’t want to give the misinformation oxygen, or they see that as the job of fact-checking teams or social media platforms.

But they also found a few notable factors that led journalists to debunk misinformation. Those who felt a stronger sense of obligation toward their followers were more likely to publicly debunk, as were women. And those who felt social media companies should be held responsible for misinformation were more likely to intervene, but privately. The norm, however, was simply letting it go, for better or worse.

“Journalists’ misjudgment of audience opinion.” By David Nicolas Hopmann and Andreas R.T. Schuck, in The International Journal of Press/Politics.

As Hopmann and Schuck described it, their study was prompted by a puzzle: Journalists have been shown to portray conservative opinions more often than liberal or progressive ones. Why? Hopmann and Schuck hypothesized that it’s because journalists actually believe public opinion is further to the right than it is, as another recent study has shown.

But they also tested three hypotheses about why journalists might misjudge audience opinion: (1) Decades of being told they’re liberal has led journalists to believe audiences are to their right politically; (2) conservative local governments lead to more conservative estimates of audience opinion; and (3) journalists interact most often with the most conservative parts of their audience.

Hopmann and Schuck tested these ideas with historical data from two parallel sets of surveys of German journalists and the German public, from 1993/1994 and 2005. They found support for the first two but not the third. Over both time periods, journalists misjudged their audiences as being more conservative than the audiences saw themselves. That effect was present for journalists across the political spectrum but greater for more liberal journalists. It was also greater for journalists in more conservative local governments, but showed no differences based on amounts of audience interaction.

As the authors noted, the data came from before the social media era, but they offer an interesting glimpse into the possible drivers of journalists’ perception of their audiences’ political opinions, and especially their misperceptions of those audiences as more conservative than they are.

“Journalists on Instagram: Presenting professional identity and role on image-focused social media.” By Diana Bossio, in Journalism Practice.

Journalists’ presence on social media (often Twitter) has been found to be a somewhat odd amalgam of personal branding, promotion of their own or their organization’s work, and guarded interaction with often angry audiences. Bossio took some of the questions behind those findings — what do journalists do on social media, and how do their professional roles impact their use of it? — to Instagram, which has received less scholarly attention than other platforms.

Bossio analyzed the Instagram accounts of 50 Australian journalists and interviewed 20 of those journalists. She found Instagram use that tended run along two tracks simultaneously: The first was self-branding, built heavily on Instagram’s “culture of microcelebrity,” with large amounts of behind-the-scenes photos and many aspirational images that balanced a more personal tone with subject matter that still largely revolved around professional settings.

The second was perhaps more notable, as Bossio found a strong theme of emotional and relational labor running throughout journalists’ Instagram practices. Particularly in their interviews, journalists suggested that much of what they did on Instagram was intended to relate to audiences, make them feel included, and build community. Bossio concluded that while researchers have tended to emphasize tension and burnout from social media among journalists, they have “often ignored the reciprocity of care and belonging forms of online expression bring to journalists” and the pleasure those practices bring journalists.

A note before we start: We want to write about books, too, and we need your help! We’re interested in including short summaries of books based on academic research into news and journalism, and we’d love to have our readers contribute. So if you’ve read an academic book on news or journalism that’s come out in the past year or two — not your own — that you’d like to tell others about by writing a short summary, please let us know!

News, fake news, and interesting-if-true news

Is there a journalist among us who has not been tempted by a hot story tip that sounds slightly implausible but, hey, would be deliciously fascinating if true?

Imagining that, you can get an idea of why social media users might be inclined to share a news story with their friends that may not be clearly true news or false news but which, either way, would be really interesting if true.

A new study in Digital Journalism explores that hypothetical by introducing this concept of interestingness-if-true — the quality of how interesting a piece of news would be if it were true — and testing how it might be connected to other factors (such as the perceived accuracy of a news item) that help explain why people might share news online, true or otherwise.

The authors — the Paris-based team of Sacha Altay, Emma de Araujo, and Hugo Mercier — conducted three experiments. In each, participants in the U.S. were shown 10 news stories (five true, five fake) in random order and asked to rate their accuracy and interestingness-if-true. They were also asked to signal how willing they would be to share those stories.

First, this may seem like a minor point, but it’s an important element of the study: The authors were able to validate that interestingness-if-true is, in fact, a distinct factor of its own — different from the more generic “interestingness.” As the authors explain: “the interestingness of a piece of news takes into account its accuracy, which is maximal if the news is deemed true, and can only decrease from there.”

So, if a story is believed to be true, its interestingness and interestingness-if-true converge — both are deemed relatively strong because of the confidence in the accuracy of the news item. By contrast, however, if a story is seen as being implausible, its interestingness suffers (because it’s fake, which makes it less relevant overall), even as its interestingness-if-true is likely to be higher.

Now, for some good news: In all three experiments, study participants saw the fake stories as being less accurate than the real ones. This confirms previous studies suggesting that laypeople on average can distinguish fake news from the real stuff. Additionally, in all three experiments, participants were more willing to share the true news items as well as news they perceived to be more accurate.

At the same time, however, participants across the studies also found fake news to be more interesting-if-true than fake news. Perhaps this is not that surprising; after all, it would be pretty interesting if it were true that “Bill Gates will use microchip implants to fight coronavirus” (as one of the fake news stories used in the experiment suggested).

In the end, the study sought to capture what motivates individuals to share news, all things being equal. And although people were more willing to share information they believed to be accurate, they were also clearly willing to share stories that were interesting-if-true. So, even though fake news was recognized by participants as being less accurate than true news (and therefore to some degree less relevant and shareworthy), the interesting-if-true factor complicated the calculation around sharing. It explained why “people did not intend to share fake news much less than true news.”

The upshot here: People may not always share news of dubious quality simply because they mistake it for real news; instead, maybe they decide that a story’s level of interestingness-if-true outweighs whatever concerns they have about accuracy before they hit the “share” button. In effect, certain fake stories may have “qualities that compensate for (their) potential inaccuracy, such as being interesting-if-true.”

Now, we should conclude, as the authors do, by putting all of this into its larger context. Fake news stories, as they note, represent at most 1% of people’s news diets, largely because most news consumers still rely fairly heavily on mainstream media. And yet, as the authors point out, how do we explain that in experiments such as the ones described here, participants often “declare a willingness to share fake news that is barely inferior to their willingness to share true news”?

There is, it seems clear, much still to learn about how people’s perceptions of relevance — in this case, not only what it’s interesting, but also what’s interesting-if-true — may drive their decision-making around what to read, what to believe, and what to share. And, more broadly, we should care to know how perceptions of relevance are influenced by the degree of quality, rigor, and overall “reality” (rather than fakery) that appears in the legacy press on which many people still rely.

Research roundup

“Between structures and identities: Newsroom policies, division of labor and journalists’ commitment to investigative reporting.” By Pauline Cancela, in Journalism Practice.

As much of the news industry continues to retrench and the amount of resources for reporting shrinks, investigative journalism has retained — or perhaps even enhanced — its venerated place in journalism’s professional imagination. Investigative journalism is, as the common thinking goes, rarer than it’s been in decades, which only increases its value as journalists try to justify their work to an increasingly skeptical public.

As Cancela’s study shows, it’s not only those dwindling resources that make investigative journalism difficult to sustain within modern news organizations, but it’s also investigative journalism’s venerated position within the profession. Cancela observed and conducted interviews at three Swiss news organizations with different models to incorporate investigative journalism, and, well, none of the models worked very well.

The reasons were different in each case, but all of them wrestled with the tensions between structures and policies meant to encourage investigative work on the one hand, and the inevitable tensions and constraints they produced on the other. When investigative reporters were put on their own team, resentment toward their privileged status festered throughout the newsroom.

When individual reporters were designated with the status to undertake investigative work in addition to their day-to-day reporting, they produced similar animosity — but they never got time to do the investigative work anyway. And more individual, ad hoc efforts at investigative work tended to fizzle without managerial support. Managers, Cancela concluded, need to ensure they’re fostering professional legitimacy and individual agency throughout the newsroom in order to make investigative journalism logistically and culturally sustainable.

“‘Crisis coverage gap’: The divide between public interest and local news’ Facebook posts about Covid-19 in the United States.” By Gina M. Masullo, Jay Jennings, and Natalie Jomini Stroud, in Digital Journalism.

Coverage of Covid-19 in the early days of the pandemic was ubiquitous (to the point that it led many consumers to pull back from news because they felt overwhelmed), but that doesn’t mean audiences were getting all the news they wanted. There’s a term for this mismatch in news coverage between journalists and their audiences: the “news gap,” a concept developed by Argentine scholars Pablo Boczkowski and Eugenia Mitchelstein.

Drawing on the notion of the news gap, Masullo and her co-authors wanted to find out how well the distribution of topics among Covid-19 news coverage matched audiences’ interest. Using a three-wave survey of Americans and an analysis of Facebook content posted by news organizations, they found that journalists outpaced public interest in economic and business news in the early days of the pandemic, and underplayed more practical community news, such as what people could expect at their local grocery stores, as well as fact-checking claims about the pandemic.

Masullo and her colleagues used the data to develop the concept of the “crisis coverage gap,” inspired by the news gap. These discrepancies reinforced a core principle of the crisis coverage gap: “It reinforces existing power structures by covering topics that interest elites.” Still, there were positive signs as well; the gap narrowed over the first few months of the pandemic, and news organizations matched the public’s high demand for news about death rates and particular affected groups.

“The monitorial role of crowdsourced journalism: Audience engagement in corruption reporting in nonprofit newsrooms.” By Lindita Camaj, in Journalism Practice.

Against the backdrop of today’s media environment, the citizen journalism wave of the late 2000s can seem like a naive, idealistic relic of a simpler time when the audience’s input into journalism was believed to be an uncomplicatedly desirable thing. And researchers have certainly wrestled with whether we need to rethink the concept from the ground up.

But Camaj’s study offers a refreshing example of citizen-powered journalism that makes a real democratic difference. Camaj examines Kallxo.com, a nonprofit news organization in Kosovo that relies on the thousands of citizen reports it gets each year. The site is oriented around combating corruption, and it uses these tips as the “dough starter” for all of its reporting, in the words of its editor. All tips are verified by the site’s staff and vetted by its legal department, but the organization also engages in explicit advocacy on behalf of its stories post-publication. Its staff meets regularly with anti-corruption bodies to push for accountability on the issues it’s raised.

The result is an organization that is seen as an ally by citizens, a rarity in Kosovo’s low-trust media environment. As Camaj notes, the site isn’t perfect — it tends to privilege the concerns of more elite bureaucratic leakers over its more blue-collar submissions. But it stands as a fascinating testament to the potential effectiveness of a citizen-driven news organization that combines traditional professional values with a more explicit advocate’s role within a young democracy.

“Polarized platforms? How partisanship shapes perceptions of ‘algorithmic news bias.'” By Mikhaila N. Calice et al., in New Media & Society.

Politicians’ and partisans’ complaints about the news media being biased against them have been around for about as long as the news media. But over the past couple of years, we’ve seen political discourse about media bias spill over into social media platforms, as political figures (particularly on the right) loudly protest what they see as those platforms’ algorithmic bias against their views.

The hostile media effect is a well-established, decades-old theory that explains why we’re predisposed to see media as opposing our views. In this study, Calice and her colleagues from the University of Wisconsin extend that idea to accusations of algorithmic news bias. Using an experiment with faux-complaints by Mike Pence and Joe Biden about biased algorithms, they measured the attitudes of Republicans and Democrats in response to partisan cues.

They found that the hostile media effect is very much alive when it comes to algorithms: Republicans were significantly more likely to believe that algorithms were politically biased, and that partisans on both sides were more likely to affirm that belief after reading an argument from a political figure on their own side. But they also found that Democrats were more likely than Republicans to have their beliefs shaped negatively by the views of an opposing politician. While Democrats were more responsive to partisan cues, the authors reasoned, Republicans’ views may have been more stable because algorithmic bias has already been a much more prominent subject among conservative media.

Justifying the news: The role of evidence in daily reporting. By Zvi Reich and Aviv Barnoy, in Journalism.

For many journalists, the notion that they use evidence to build their news stories feels like an obvious, common-sense element of their work. Of course — what else would we make our stories out of? But the question of whether journalists’ stories are actually predominantly built on evidence (as opposed to assertion by sources) has been an open one among journalism scholars for decades.

Reich and Barnoy used a sophisticated research design — two waves of interviews with journalists, including one asking for reporters to reconstruct the sourcing of some of their specific stories — and found a pattern of “frequent but inconsistent reliance on evidence.” Just under half of stories used some sort of evidence beyond the assertion of sources, with the most common (and most venerated) being documents and eyewitness sources. Video, audio, photos, and first-person observation were rarer and more secondary forms of evidence.

Reich and Barnoy also found that use of evidence increases where knowledge is more challenging to determine: When sources conflict factually, when covering unscheduled events, or when publication is risky. Use of evidence, they concluded, is part of an “economy of effort” through which journalists ration their reporting energies.

The (ir)relevance of audience studies in journalism education. By Jacob L. Nelson and Stephanie Edgerly, in Journalism & Mass Communication Educator.

The fact that journalism is a far more audience-centric profession than it has been in previous generations is hardly news. We’re now more than a decade into a journalistic era defined by the prevalence of audience analytics and the ability of audiences to interact with journalists and participate in the news process. But to what degree has that reality seeped into journalism education?

That’s the question Nelson (who recently published a book on journalists’ perceptions of their audiences) and Edgerly set out to answer. They studied the course titles, descriptions, and syllabi at 26 top American journalism schools, looking to see how often they were addressing news audiences, and how they were conceiving of those audiences.

They found that audiences are fairly rarely the subject of J-school courses, and when they are, the focus is heavily on the technical skills of measuring them through analytics. Faculty almost exclusively make the case for the value of these skills in professional terms — as a way for students to get jobs.

These courses, Nelson and Edgerly conclude, narrowly conceive of audiences as “digital, passive, [and] can be manipulated by media professionals with audience data savvy.” What’s missing are broader ideas about audiences as active contributors to the news media environment, as well as attention to marginalized and underserved audiences. Instead, they conclude, journalism students would benefit from learning about what analytics exclude just as much as what they reveal.

How journalists decide when to trust numbers

Numerical information is a central piece of journalism. Just look at how often stories rely on quantitative data — from Covid case numbers to public opinion polling to economics statistics — as their evidentiary backbone. The rise of data journalism, with its slick visualizations and interactives, has reinforced the role and influence of numbers in the news.

But, as B.T. Lawson reminds us in a new article in Journalism Practice, though we have plenty of research on this decade-long boom in data journalism, much of the research “overstates the significance of the data journalist within the news media. Yes, data journalists are now a mainstay of most news organizations, but they are not the only journalists using numbers. Far from it.”

Indeed, in contrast to the 1960s and 70s era of computer-assisted reporting, when a small minority of specialized reporters worked with data but most reporters did not, nowadays virtually all journalists are expected to engage with numbers as part of their work. Which brings up a potential problem: Some research suggests that journalists rarely challenge the numbers they receive, leading them to accept and reproduce the discourse around those numbers from their sources.

To get a clearer picture of how journalists draw on numbers and narratives about them, Lawson examined reporters’ use of numbers in their coverage of seven humanitarian crises in 2017. The author did this in two ways: first through a content analysis of 978 news articles from U.K. news media (to look for some direct or indirect form of challenging statistics, cross-verifying one claim relative to another, etc.), and then through interviews with 16 journalists involved in at least one of those stories, to gain additional insights into the process of receiving and reporting on numbers.

The title of the resulting article — “Hiding Behind Databases, Institutions and Actors: How Journalists Use Statistics in Reporting Humanitarian Crises” — indicates something about one of its findings: namely, that journalists covering humanitarian crises rely heavily on numbers, often provided by NGOs or the UN, but they seldom verify the numbers they use, mainly because they see it as outside their role to do such work and because they “hide behind” the perceived credibility of their sources.

Instead, Lawson writes, “when it comes to verifying numbers in reporting humanitarian crises, journalists perceive their role to be limited to the assessment of trustworthy sources rather than the direct interrogation of the number itself” (emphasis added). So, journalists were found to develop, with remarkable consistency across media organizations, a practice of gathering “evidence of evidence.” This was a way of determining which people and institutions they believed they could trust, based on three criteria: a group’s track record with accuracy, how much it engaged in advocacy work, and whether the journalist had personal experience working with that source “on the ground” in some way.

But more than any NGO or other institution, it was public databases that journalists believed to be the most trustworthy source of numerical information. Reporters imagined such databases — provided by groups such as the OECD — as apolitical (non-controversial) and rational (non-emotional).

What happens, then, when something about the data is wrong? “How do journalists maintain their credibility,” Lawson asks, “when a number turns out to be inaccurate, unreliable or misleading?”

This study suggests that journalists hide behind their sources to protect themselves from the threat of criticism. This happens in two stages: “if the statistic turns out to be misleading, [journalists] can refer to the trustworthy institutional source, and, if that is not enough, they can point to the quantitative realism of the database from which the statistic was derived.”

Finally, a sobering finding emerged from the interviews. Lawson found that in their use of numbers to cover humanitarian crises, journalists rarely relied on the traditional “two-source rule” of journalism; instead, presumably because they were pressed for time, reporters “did not speak of checking any facts and mainly relied on one source. Therefore, the ‘actual’ checking of numbers was almost always inexistent, replaced almost entirely by the ‘evidence of evidence’ approach.”

Research roundup

“Terrorist organizations in the news: A computational approach to measure media attention towards terrorism.” By Lea Hellmueller, Valerie Hase, and Peggy Lindner, in Mass Communication and Society.

“What is terrorism (according to the news)? How the German press selectively labels political violence as ‘terrorism.'” By Valerie Hase, in Journalism.

The news media’s coverage of terrorism has been extensively examined by scholars across a variety of platforms and lenses. Given the ground that has already been covered, it’s notable when two large-scale studies that push our understanding of the issue forward land in the same month. Valerie Hase of the University of Zurich is an author on both studies, but they cover different data sets — one on U.S. and U.K. media, and the other on German news — as well as different questions.

In the first study, Hellmueller and her colleagues examined what factors lead to greater media coverage of terrorist attacks. They looked at American and British news between 2014 and 2016 and found an inordinate, almost exclusive, focus on the Islamic State. They also found that greater fatalities and attacks on civilians and tourists led to greater media attention. Continuity — i.e., whether the media organization had covered the perpetrating group previously — was also a significant factor. The coverage dynamics they found create a conundrum for journalists: Larger and more violent attacks naturally are seen as deserving more coverage, but since terrorist groups are seeking media coverage, those patterns actually encourage more brutal attacks.

In the second study, Hase looked at when the German press chooses to label acts of political violence as “terrorism.” Using a set of more than 5,000 German articles about violent incidents between 2012 and 2018, Hase compared various factors as predictors of the incidents being labeled as terrorism.

She found that the terrorism label was applied not based on the incident’s victims (there was no difference if civilians or tourists were targeted as opposed to combatants), but based much more on its location (in Western countries) and its perpetrator (Islamic extremists as opposed to nationalist or left- or right-wing extremists; groups as opposed to individuals; attacks on perpetrators’ own soil as opposed to international incidents). Hase posits that journalists’ national identity comes to the fore as a factor explaining when and why they choose to describe attacks as terrorism, especially when in-group members are threatened by out-group members.

“Changing journalistic information-gathering practices? Reliability in everyday information gathering in high-speed newsrooms.” By Els Diekerhof, in Journalism Practice.

Journalists have been talking about the tension between immediacy and accuracy (as we often hear it, “getting it first” vs. “getting it right”) since time immemorial. The conventional wisdom is that journalists are getting it right less often during the digital journalism age because an accelerating news cycle has made getting it first an overwhelming priority — and there’s some good evidence for parts of this idea.

Diekerhof took a closer look at this relationship between immediacy and accuracy by making detailed observations of journalists at eight high-speed Dutch newsrooms. She found that the immediacy/accuracy tension isn’t quite the dichotomy we’ve thought of it as. In the everyday information gathering she observed, the speed of journalists’ work didn’t hinder its accuracy because most of the basic information for the story had already been gathered by the time it came to them, through wire services, news feeds, and social media. Their information gathering was primarily additional information gathering — adding context, checking facts, filling out additional facts — that was less factually precarious than developing an original story.

In these cases, Diekerhof argued, journalists were working quickly because their verification work was simple: “Information practices in high-speed newsrooms are not characterized by hard to find and complicated information.” They certainly cared about getting it right; they were just able to do that in a way that fulfilled their organizations’ demand for speed because they were building on information others had already gathered. It’s a shift in newswork that we’ve seen across journalism, but Diekerhof argues it’s perhaps not as much of a threat to the reliability of news as we might think.

“Data journalism in favela: Made by, for, and about forgotten and marginalized communities.” By Mathias-Felipe de-Lima-Santos and Lucia Mesquita, in Journalism Practice.

A mountain of research has been produced on data journalism over the past eight years or so, but as some scholars have noted and is so often the case in our field, that research has been disproportionately focused on Western and often wealthy societies. But there is, of course, a robust practice of data journalism in a variety of contexts in the Global South, and this study looks at a particularly interesting context: the marginalized communities of Brazil’s favelas.

As the authors note, official data about marginalized people such as those living in the favelas is scarce, and its use (and non-use) often serves to perpetuate historical inequities. De-Lima-Santos and Mesquita examined three organizations dedicated to journalism for and about these communities, and found four strategies that allowed these organizations to produce data stories despite these challenges. The first was citizen participation, in which journalists used technological tools (like WhatsApp and Google Forms) to help marginalized groups produce their own data to fill in the gaps in official data.

The second and third strategies were activism and collaboration, which involved pressing public officials for greater data access and better representation, and working with civic tech organizations and foundations to support their novel approaches. Finally, they worked to humanize their data and present it in ways that connected with their communities, including radio and sound-equipped cars for those without smartphones. These strategies together, the authors argued, served to de-Westernize their data journalism practice and turn it into a tool to advocate for an underserved public.

“Appreciating news algorithms: Examining audiences’ perceptions to different news selection mechanisms.” By Glen Joris, Frederik De Grove, Kristin Van Damme, and Lieven De Marez, in Digital Journalism.

The role of algorithmic recommendation systems in feeding people an endless stream of like-minded information is one of those concerns that has taken hold not just among scholars or media professionals, but among ordinary media consumers as well. Tell people that you work in (or study) media, and you’ll likely hear a complaint at some point about how our news feeds and apps keep shoveling more and more of whatever viewpoints we’ve expressed an interest in at us.

It’s easy to say we’re sick of having algorithms recommend more of the same news to us, but do we actually want anything different? That’s the question driving this study. Joris and his colleagues surveyed Belgian adults to find out about their preferences among three types of news recommendation systems: content-based similarity (more news like what you’ve already read), collaborative similarity (news like what’s popular among your friends or other users), and content-based diversity (news from viewpoints or on topics you don’t usually read).

Content-based similarity came out the clear favorite, which probably shouldn’t surprise us, though the researchers did find some possible affinity for a more personalized and carefully selected news diversity. They also looked at factors influencing overall openness to algorithmic news recommendation systems and found that the strongest influence was a feeling of information overload, more than any demographic factors.

“Local newspapers’ transition to online publishing and video use: Experiences from Norway.” By Roel Puijk, Eli Beate Hestnes, Simon Holm, Andrea Jakobsen, and Marianne Myrdal, in Journalism Studies.

Researchers have been writing about local newspapers’ transitions to digital media for two decades now, with distinct phases in the heady early days of the late 1990s and early 2000s and the mid- and post-apocalyptic environment of the late 2000s and early 2010s. Puijk and his co-authors documented an intriguing evolution in this process: Small local newspapers who have been online since the 2000s, but only begin focusing their attention on the web in the mid-2010s, as their papers abandoned the free-content model for a paywall.

As a grad school class project, Puijk and his students interviewed editors at five newspapers in a single Norwegian county. They focused on the role of video in particular, and found a sharp turn from the more TV-style multiplatform video efforts of the early 2010s toward a heavy emphasis on live streaming video.

The shortform, story-based video was tied to an advertising-based model and didn’t hold much value in the world of digital subscriptions. (It also required a level of craft that couldn’t be sustained at these papers.) But the popularity of live streaming video, especially local sports, in driving subscriptions, has made local broadcast rights especially valuable for these Norwegian papers. The upshot of those video changes, along with others, is greater local differentiation, even among newspapers within the same conglomerate.

The persistence of print — and why it matters

In a digital era dominated by mobile and social media, why do people still get print newspapers?

A new study in the journal New Media & Society — involving interviews with 488 news consumers in Argentina, Finland, Israel, Japan, and the United States, representing one of the largest interview-based studies of its kind — suggests that we have been thinking about this question the wrong way.

In much of communication research (and, we would add, much of the industry conversation about the transformation of news), a lot of emphasis is placed on “media-centric” factors such as content and technology — for example, on how people respond to different types of information, or on how various tools and platforms might influence the experiences people have and the preferences they express about media use. But, as the authors argue based on their extensive set of interviews, a “media-centric” focus is missing the point of how media are actually experienced by people in the day to day — and by recognizing that, by “de-centering” the media from our analysis, those who study journalism and communication can better appreciate exactly how media processes and everyday life are interwoven.

Also, by focusing on the tactile, social, and ritual experience of the print newspaper product rather than focusing on shiny digital replacements that get most of the attention these days, this study offers an important reminder: that there’s value in examining how and why “old” media (and the rituals and practices connected to them) tend to be stubbornly persistent — yes, even during periods when “new” media are ascendant. After all, the study notes, “there is still a sizable portion of the population who read newspapers in print and consume broadcast media. Understanding their practices can help illuminate valuable media reception dynamics.”

The authors — a multi-country team composed of Pablo J. Boczkowski, Facundo Suenzo, Eugenia Mitchelstein, Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt, Kaori Hayashi, and Mikko Villi — open their article with anecdotes about two men, one in Argentina and the other in Finland, who regularly get the newspaper, but not really for the news: instead, it’s to start up a fire for the barbecue (in Argentina) or to begin warming the wood-fired sauna stove (in Finland). “Despite the almost 13,000 km that (separates them),” the authors write, “there is a commonality between the practices by José and Antero: appropriating the newspaper is tied to non-news practices which are meaningful to the actors although they might seem trivial to some scholars. This commonality is crucial to answering the question of how and why people still get print newspapers in this age of mobile communication and social media.” [Ed. note: From Cook’s Illustrated a couple years back: “In our May/June 2016 issue, we included a note about how to properly pack the bottom of a charcoal chimney starter with newspaper, but some readers reported a problem: They no longer get a paper. One option: buy starters. We also wondered if there wasn’t a suitable alternative in the recycling bin.”]

The study was designed to cover five countries with key cultural, geographic, and linguistic differences and yet ones also with democratic governments and relatively high internet penetration. The resulting analysis was organized around three dimensions of media reception that stood out from the interviews: access, sociality, and ritualization.

First, access to the print newspaper ranged widely from country to country. “At one end, interviewees in Israel did not commonly mention either having a subscription or habitually purchasing single copies at the newsstand. Instead, they have newspapers brought in by someone else or access them freely as part of undertaking a non-media activity. At the other end, interviewees in Japan described an array of access options often tied to purchasing newspapers, including multiple home-based subscriptions, omnipresent in workplaces, and ease of access in ‘third spaces.’” Meanwhile, participants in Argentina, Finland, and the U.S. fell somewhere between those extremes. But the authors found these issues of access to be separate from issues of content and technology. Rather, they were connected to larger cultural habits, market dynamics, or other structural patterns not linked to the media themselves. Again, not “media-centric.”

With regard to the second dimension — sociality — the study revealed “the presence of generational and gender dynamics concerning choice, and the prevalence of individual reading.” Once again, these patterns are not the result of differences in content or technology. Rather, the authors write, they are byproducts of structural forces such as family traditions, national cultures, and, in some cases, “the persistence of larger patriarchal tendencies that shape media selection” (e.g., children reading what their father gives them to read). “This, in turn, helps put into broader conceptual perspective the common finding that age and gender influence newspaper consumption: the explanatory power of these factors derives from how they help structure daily life in general, instead of media reception in particular” (emphasis added).

Finally, with regard to ritualization, the authors find that interviewees have “highly ritualized everyday lives.” This is no real surprise on its own, but it serves as a reminder that people “fold their media reception into these rituals.” As the study makes clear: “people visit coffee shops and read newspapers they encounter there as part of the experience — but they do not go to coffee shops primarily to do this. Similarly, young interviewees visit their parents as part of family routines and read the newspaper they encounter in their households — but do not visit their parents primarily to get the news.” Notably, however, it was older interviewees who were more likely to have “sedimented” in their everyday rituals certain routinized ways of feeling, touching, and reading newspapers, which indicates how the interplay of everyday ritual and media practice may become embedded over time.

Overall, for media both old and new, by shifting attention away from content and technology features and instead looking at the broader experiences and understandings of people, we can pick up on cues that media-centric research may have missed about the essential features of media in everyday living.

Research roundup

“Making #BlackLivesMatter in the shadow of Selma: Collective memory and racial justice activism in U.S. news.” By Sarah J. Jackson, in Communication, Culture & Critique.

The media conversation around race and Black activism in the U.S. tends to be drenched in nostalgia for the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Media and political discourse around the movement, as many scholars have found, oversimplifies it and tends to gloss over its more radical dimensions, treating it as a clean solution to racial problems that are safely in the past.

Jackson examines this facile memory of the civil rights movement in media coverage in 2014 and 2015 of the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches, the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act, and the release of Ava DuVernay’s film “Selma.” Specifically, she looks at the ways this memory is used to delegitimize contemporary Black activism (in this case, the protests of Michael Brown’s killing by police).

Through her analysis, Jackson develops the concept of palliative neglect, in which past racism and the activism fighting it is ritualistically alluded to through vague phrases like “difficult history” without actually exploring it. Palliative neglect, she argues, is “a form of informational deprivation, a shrug at history, that leaves the public without the kinds of memory required to understand the cultural and political linkages between past and present.” She finds that it’s used to undermine today’s Black activism, but she also discusses the ways Black creators, scholars, and activists (like DuVernay and Melissa Harris-Perry) create counter-memory that offers a corrective to the oversimplified history of the dominant narrative.

“Reporting the unsayable: Scandalous talk by right-wing populist politicians and the challenge for journalism.” By Mats Ekström, Marianna Patrona, and Joanna Thornborrow, in Journalism.

Over the past decade, the question of how to report on scandalous or offensive remarks by right-wing politicians or commentators has been a seemingly ubiquitous one for journalists, particularly in places like Europe, Brazil, and the U.S. We’ve seen a tendency for those comments to be covered in an explicitly negative frame, but Ekström and colleagues argue that there are more dimensions to be analyzed, even within negative coverage.

They look at media coverage of these scandalous utterances through the concept of the spheres of consensus, legitimate controversy, and deviance that the news media use to structure political discourse. Looking at five case studies from across Europe, they find a range of responses — all negative, but differing in the degree to which they place the comments in the sphere of legitimate controversy.

Ekström and his colleagues find that journalists can inadvertently normalize these comments, even as they criticize them, in two ways: First, they juxtapose them with a (supposedly) balanced quote from a member of an opposing party condemning the language, and second, they sidestep the ethical dimensions of the comments by framing them as simply strategically provocative talk.

“Defining and measuring news media quality: Comparing the content perspective and the audience perspective.” By Philipp Bachmann, Mark Eisenegger, and Diana Ingenhoff, in The International Journal of Press/Politics.

“News gap in a digital news environment: Calibrating editorial importance from user-rated news quality and identifying user characteristics that close the news gap.” By Sujin Choi, in New Media & Society.

Many parts of the news industry have spent the last decade agonizing over the gaps between the kind of news they and their audiences prefer (thanks in part to increased reliance on metrics) and between the kind of news they and their audiences think is high-quality (thanks in part to the erosion of trust in the media). Two new studies have examined the latter element, exploring different angles of what we think of as news quality and finding that the gap in perceived news quality may be a bit smaller than we fear.

Bachmann and colleagues took a broad approach to news quality, working to develop a comprehensive definition of what it is and how we might measure it. They identified four dimensions: Relevance (a preference for broad, societal implications), contextualization, professionalism (objectivity, transparency of sources, independent reporting), and diversity (in content and geography). In a study of Swiss media, they found that audiences’ and media scholars’ assessments of news quality were largely similar. This, they suggested, could be evidence that scholars’ notions of news quality rooted in a deliberative ideal of democracy may have some purchase among the public as well.

Choi looked more closely at the comparison between audiences’ perceptions of news quality and the importance editors place on news items. Choi surveyed South Koreans about the quality of 1,500 news articles, and had two editors evaluate the importance they were given based on cues like headline and print placement. She found that audiences’ news quality judgments tracked closely with the articles’ editorial importance, and closer still when audiences had prior knowledge of the issue at hand. The relationship was also closer when audiences had strong ideological attitudes, but those attitudes tended to operate independently of issue knowledge when evaluating news quality.

“What makes gun violence a (less) prominent issue? A computational analysis of compelling arguments and selective agenda setting.” By Lei Guo, Kate Mays, Yiyan Zhang, Derry Wijaya, and Margrit Betke, in Mass Communication and Society.

In the U.S. in particular, media coverage of — and public interest in — gun violence is notorious for peaking after each mass shooting and then quickly subsiding thereafter. The reasons for this waxing and waning are complex, ranging from the ideological (a purposeful downplaying by a significant part of the political sphere) to the structural (the news media’s attention span is famously short regarding many other issues as well). But Guo and her colleagues were particularly interested in the attributes of the coverage itself: What type of media framing of the issue makes it more prominent in the public’s mind?

One of the concepts around which Guo and company organized this study is that of episodic and thematic framing — the idea that framing an issue as an individual episode or as connected to larger thematic issues have different effects on audience perceptions of the issue. Scholars have often seen thematic framing as a more responsible and illuminating way of covering an issue by tying it to structural and systemic factors, though episodic framing can pack a larger emotional punch.

Through a computational analysis of U.S. coverage of gun violence and a survey of the American public, Guo and her colleagues found that mainstream media’s episodic framing of gun violence was more effective than thematic framing at influencing audiences to perceive the issue as important — but only for conservatives. (Liberals, they found, already overwhelmingly saw the issue as important, so there wasn’t much news coverage could do to move the needle further.) But when conservatives saw conservative media framing gun violence episodically, they saw it as less important. The authors posited that the emotional power of episodic framing works in both directions — to frame it as either an important or unimportant issue.

“Journalism’s backstage players: The development of journalism professional associations and their roles in a troubled field.” By Lindsey Sherrill, Jiehua Zhang, Danielle Deavours, Nathan Towery, Yuanwei Lyu, William Singleton, Keqing Kuang, and Wilson Lowrey, in Journal of Media Business Studies.

Journalism isn’t quite a profession in the same way that, say, doctors and lawyers are, but journalists do maintain one core aspect of professions: They love to form and join professional organizations. From massive organizations such as WAN-IFRA and the U.S.’ National Association of Broadcasters to tiny regional groups, professional organizations play a significant role in structuring the journalistic field. Sherrill and a group of University of Alabama researchers took a historical and contemporary look at precisely how that role has manifested itself, particularly in light of the state of crisis in the news business.

Sherrill and her colleagues conducted a population ecology of U.S. journalism professional associations, looking at the historical development of 470 past and current associations, and analyzed the websites of 84 associations. They found that by their own description, associations play a largely internal role, focusing on educating and training journalists, rather than centering on bigger-picture issues or on bolstering the profession’s relationship with other areas of society through public messaging or lobbying.

They concluded that the financial disruption of the news business has narrowed many associations’ focus to the day-to-day necessities of saving money, navigating unfamiliar technologies, and understanding audience behavior. “Metaphorically,” they wrote, “the priority is spotting life-rafts rather than envisioning better systems for shipping.” One encouraging secondary trend, though, is the spike in recent decades in the stated importance of diversity, owing largely to the founding of identity-oriented associations in the 1970s through 1990s and their continued growth.

“The monitored watchdogs: Journalists’ surveillance and its repercussions for their professional and personal lives in Pakistan.” By Sadia Jamil, in Journalism Studies.

Surveillance is a fact of life for many journalists around the world, one that deeply affects both how they’re able to do their jobs as well as their physical safety and psychological well-being. Through 50 interviews with Pakistani journalists, Jamil provided an in-depth look at how surveillance plays out in their professional and personal worlds.

Jamil used Foucault’s concept of panopticism as a framework, explaining how Pakistani officials use surveillance as an instrument of discipline and control. The journalists she spoke with were all surveilled by the government and intelligence agencies, as well as political parties and other organizations. Much of that surveillance was in the open, meant to intimidate, but much was also covert. Notably, there was little difference in experiences of surveillance across coverage area or specialty. Though panopticism allows for a positive dimension of surveillance in increased adherence to journalistic norms as a response, Jamil found that its effects on journalists’ work and lives are deeply damaging and troubling.

Adapting to the misinformation era, journalists emphasize transparency in their daily practices

“Fake news” is an unfortunate phrase. It is so casually invoked and widely deployed as to be almost devoid of meaning. And, most infamously, it has been weaponized by politicians (one former president in particular) as both a ready tool to dismiss inconvenient truths in the moment and also, more perniciously, to cast doubt on the legitimacy of journalism as a whole.

Yet, “fake news” captures for many people a defining set of features about our information environment: from declining trust in news media to concerns about the seemingly supercharged spread of misinformation on social media to the general unease with the level of fakery that seems to fight for our precious attention at every turn online. This creates a conundrum for journalists: Given how directly the “fake news” phenomenon and the discourse surrounding it challenges the authority behind producing “real” news, what are journalists to do? How should they respond and adapt?

A new article in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly offers some initial answers. Researchers Hong Tien Vu and Magdalena Saldaña use a nationally representative survey of U.S. journalists to examine how newsroom practices have changed (or not) amid the rise of misinformation and the rhetoric of “fake news.” Specifically, the authors focused on whether journalists reported having either adopted new approaches or intensified existing ones as a way of “preventing” misinformation and thereby avoiding complaints of spreading fake news.

First, Vu and Saldaña found that “journalists were most likely to cross-check with sources more often, limit the use of anonymity, and make it as clear as possible where the information comes from.” On the other hand, journalists did not report substantially increasing their involvement in vetting information with lawyers or training on fact-checking platforms — though it’s possible that, particularly in the case of fact-checking tactics, they were already habitually doing these things. No intensification of such activities was needed.

Second, the researchers tested for differences between two types of professional practices that are core to journalism: accountability and transparency. The former emphasizes traditional fact-checking and verification, while the latter points to emergent forms of opening up the journalistic process to audience view — e.g., by providing raw footage, limiting the use of anonymous sources, making it clear how information was obtained, and disclosing details about a journalist’s background.

Survey results suggest that, against the current backdrop of misinformation and how it challenges the news industry, journalists have more readily adopted or intensified practices that promote transparency in their work. This may be seen as part of a larger effort among journalists to better understand and connect with their audiences, or it may simply reflect that transparency practices are being taken up increasingly as a means of delivering on journalistic accountability, just in a new way.

Regardless, it’s noteworthy that journalists who saw the rise in fake news as a threat to democracy were more likely to report using transparency-oriented practices — perhaps because they saw transparency as a solution to the misinformation problem.

Another key finding, the authors note, is that “those who felt responsible for providing accurate information to their social media followers were more likely to adopt/intensify both accountability and transparency practices.” A possible explanation for this is that journalists with a clearly perceived audience base online might feel compelled, in an accountability sense, “to do something to improve the information environment for their audience.” And, at the same time, social media, in their design and culture, encourage the kind of self-disclosure and relational exchanges that are indicative of the transparency approach to journalism.

In all, Vu and Saldaña offer an important step forward in understanding how journalists, depending on their background, role, and attitudes, may perceive and respond to the misinformation moment in ways that contribute to larger transformations taking place in the field today.

Research roundup

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

Polarization continues to be one of the dominant themes of contemporary Western political analysis, and one of the primary axes along which that polarization has run is geography — that is, rural and urban settings. But the rural-urban political dynamic is much more complex than the simple binary of popular imagination, with many geographical nooks and crannies, from the exurbs to small cities, complicating the picture. This team of University of Wisconsin researchers used their state as a case to examine the rural-urban divide in relation to three factors: News consumption, political talk networks, and anti-elitism.

They found that those in small towns, small cities, and the suburbs reported more politically diverse discussion partners than those in urban areas, particularly the state’s capital, Madison. And while rural residents consumed less centrist/liberal and prestige media than others, they also consumed less conservative media than urban residents, when controlling for other variables. Anti-elitism was strongest on the left from Madison and on the right from rural areas, but lowest in conservative suburbs.

The results don’t indicate a clean rural-urban split that we might be tempted to imagine. And the researchers note that for all the differences they found, one similarity was striking: Across the board, the top news source was local TV news and local newspapers, which attract only a fraction of the scholarly attention of cable news and Facebook. “This is an important reminder for our field,” the authors wrote, “not to neglect mundane news media, even as they wane in popularity.”

When journalists see themselves as villains: The power of negative discourse by Ruth Moon, in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly.

In much of the world, we expect journalists to reflexively defend themselves against external criticism and encroachment from the state and from competing spheres of influence. Dozens of studies on concepts like boundary work, paradigm repair, and metajournalistic discourse explore the ways journalists use their public discourse to protect their own autonomy and jockey for cultural legitimacy. For many journalists, defending yourself is just part of the job.

That’s why Moon’s study of Rwandan journalists is so remarkable. In interviews with 40 Rwandan journalists as part of an ethnography of the country’s newsrooms, Moon found that their professional identity is dominated by a metanarrative in which they are untrustworthy, too powerful, and need to be reined in by other social institutions. This narrative stems from Rwandan journalists’ deeply rooted sense of complicity and guilt in helping foment the genocide of the 1990s. As a result, they’re treated extremely skeptically by audiences, sources, and policymakers, and in their eyes, they deserve it. It’s a haunting and fascinating picture of the power of negative discourse to shape professional identity in post-conflict journalism, fueled by collective guilt.

Legitimating a platform: Evidence of journalists’ role in transferring authority to Twitter by Logan Molyneux and Shannon C. McGregor, in Information, Communication & Society.

Over the past decade or so, researchers have spent a lot of time — seriously, a lot a lot — studying how journalists use Twitter. That focus has extended to how news organizations use Twitter as a source: How heavily they rely on it, how they verify it (or don’t), how they use it to quote politicians. But Molyneux and McGregor advance that line of research with a provocative argument. Journalists, they say, don’t approach Twitter as a source at all, something to be scrutinized. Instead, they treat it simply as content, an interchangeable, largely unquestioned building block of news.

Molyneux and McGregor (who’ve been looking at this for a while) argue that as they cite tweets in their stories, journalists use the tools they’ve long used to build their own authority to instead transfer that authority to Twitter, an external platform. In a content analysis of 365 articles citing tweets, they found that journalists rarely explain or qualify tweets, simply passing them along without evidence of journalistic processing. In doing so, journalists present Twitter as a news source whose legitimacy is self-evident enough not to need their validation or scrutiny, and they reduce their own authority to merely amplifying the algorithmic judgment of Twitter.

The tragedy of errors: Political ideology, perceived journalistic quality, and media trust by Tamar Wilner, Ryan Wallace, Ivan Lacasa-Mas, and Emily Goldstein, in Journalism Practice.

When audiences are asked why they don’t trust the news media, one of the major reasons they frequently give is accuracy: They say they don’t trust the news media because they regularly see errors in their work. But that response has drawn its own skepticism, as researchers have wondered whether what news consumers call “errors” are really just another form of perceived bias, heavily influenced by political ideology and the hostile media effect.

That’s the question that drives this study, as Wilner and her colleagues used a U.S. survey to look at the relationships between perceptions of various types of errors, media trust, political ideology, and news consumption. They found that economic conservatives perceive more errors in news, but not social conservatives. Overall, though, error perceptions didn’t seem closely tied to ideology.

Some types of perceived errors — inaccurate headlines, factual errors, and missing information — were significantly related to lower media trust, but strangely, those who perceived a lot of misspellings and grammar errors had more trust in the news media. Ultimately, while political ideology (specifically conservatism) was a greater driver of media distrust, errors played a significant role as well, and couldn’t simply be chalked up to partisan attitudes.

‘Forced to report’: Affective proximity and the perils of local reporting on Syria by Omar Al-Ghazzi, in Journalism.

When local or national conflicts escalate into issues that draw global concern, a complex power dynamic emerges between local journalists and the foreign correspondents who come in to cover the conflict. Al-Ghazzi’s study offers a nuanced look at that dynamic, and particularly the tensions at work for local journalists in those situations.

Drawing on 19 interviews with Syrian activist-journalists, Al-Ghazzi vividly illustrates the tug-of-war between those two roles. These media practitioners feel drawn into activism by their strong emotional connection to the place and the cause they are covering. But they also feel “forced to report” — to take on the journalistic norms of objectivity and neutrality in bearing witness, because of their lack of power relative to foreign journalists.

Al-Ghazzi centers on the concept of affective proximity to capture these dynamics. This proximity, he argues, is a form of emotional labor that rather perversely undermines local journalists’ authority rather than bolsters it. Proximity, he says, is “deemed the source of locals’ authority to take part in the news story but also what is held against them since they are deemed too attached to their countries and causes.”

The epistemologies of breaking news by Mats Ekström, Amanda Ramsälv, and Oscar Westlund, in Journalism Studies.

In the past decade, several researchers have sought to answer questions about how journalists balance accuracy and speed in reporting breaking news by looking at it through the lens of epistemology — how journalists establish knowledge about news and communicate it. Ekström and colleagues add a rich study to this line of research with their examination of the continuous news and live broadcast desk of a Swedish for-profit news organization.

In three weeks at the desk, the researchers observed a variety of strategies by which journalists dealt with an environment in which “reporters without much preparation and information are sent to report on events where not much happens.” In the process, Ekström and his co-authors found that journalists did care about accuracy, but developed routines to hedge against the uncertainty of their knowledge and the speed with which they might be proven wrong.

One particularly interesting concept they developed was epistemic dissonance, which occurs when a news item that journalists have structured as important turns out to be a non-story, or one that journalists can know very little about immediately. The authors outline the ways journalists grappled with epistemic dissonance in their coverage, but conclude that it inevitably erodes journalists’ authority by breaking their contract with the audience to produce reliable and proportionate news. (Full disclosure: Seth previously has worked with Ekström and Westlund on studies of journalism and epistemology.)

The audience turn in journalism: from concerns about “quality” to an embrace of “innovation”

By now, it’s a given that news organizations must care (and do care) about understanding and connecting with their audience — much more so than they used to back in the day when journalists could mostly disregard their readers and viewers.

This change in perspective about the audience is everywhere in the industry and in the academy. News executives are focused on growing reader revenue. Journalists are tracking a vast array of digital metrics that provide a real-time window into reader preferences. And many journalism scholars have made an “audience turn” of their own, shifting some research attention away from news production and toward the complexities yet to be understood about news consumption and related questions about, say, how trust in news actually works.

Across the board, there’s a heightened awareness of what has long been obvious but wasn’t such a pressing concern decades ago: the truism that because journalism can’t exist without an audience, it therefore matters to understand how news can be made more meaningful and valuable to more people. This is particularly true at a time when news media are fighting an uphill battle for attention in a digital world offering all manner of YouTube, games, Netflix, and everything else more interesting than, well, traditional news.

But how, exactly, did we arrive at this point? How did the audience go from being something of an afterthought to a front-and-center fixation?

To say it’s simply a matter of the changing economics and technology of news is too simple and only partially true. Instead, we get a more nuanced and well-developed answer from a new study by Irene Costera Meijer, a professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and one of the foremost experts in this area. Costera Meijer was studying news audiences before it was cool. That wealth of experience is apparent in her new article in Journalism Studies, “Understanding the Audience Turn in Journalism: From Quality Discourse to Innovation Discourse as Anchoring Practices 1995–2020.” Partly a personal reflection and renewed synthesis of Costera Meijer’s own two decades of research, this article shows how the journalistic conversation about what counts as “quality” in news is a revealing lens through which to see how journalists have shifted their approach to news users — to the point that, these days, “becoming more audience responsive is no longer automatically condemned as the highway to popularization and sensationalism.”

How is it possible, she asks, “that for a long time, and almost by definition, honoring quality meant excluding audiences from having a say about quality?”

Costera Meijer traces several “tipping points” between 1995 and 2020 that, while grounded in the Dutch journalism context, have broad resonance elsewhere, particularly in countries with strong public broadcasting media. These key moments illustrate a gradual transformation from the 1990s idea that “news is news” and doing quality journalism meant not having to reckon with the audience, to a growing professional emphasis in the early 2000s on “informed citizenship” through quality news, followed by digitalization trends that made the audience trackable and thereby essential to journalism’s survival in moving from print to online. A fourth and final stage has been the recent embrace of audience engagement, which Costera Meijer describes as part of a broader turn in the journalistic discourse away from “quality” and toward “innovation.”

This analysis sets up a way of thinking about where matters of quality fit in a future of journalism increasingly oriented around the audience. “If as scholars we want to keep excellent journalism alive,” Costera Meijer notes in conclusion, “we should … improve our understanding of the experience of quality by news users — when do they actually feel informed — and how such experience changes in relation to time, place, need, habit, mood, device, medium and platform.”

Research roundup

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

“Professionalism as a response to right-wing populism? An analysis of a metajournalistic discourse.” By Benjamin Krämer and Klara Langmann, in International Journal of Communication.

This study dealt with a similar theme to a paper we looked at last month, on journalists’ approach to covering white nationalist rallies: What happens when the journalistic norms of objectivity and professionalism run up against racist extremism? In this, Krämer and Langmann were interested in the challenge to journalism from right-wing populism — specifically, the rise of the German extremist party AfD.

Right-wing populist groups like AfD, Krämer and Langmann argued, present two challenges to journalism: First, there is the question of how much coverage to give these organizations given their growing political influence, without amplifying hateful or racist views. Second, the news media themselves are a central target of these groups’ anti-elite criticism, as they seek to use journalists’ own norms of objectivity against them to delegitimize them.

Krämer and Langmann examined 67 articles in German publications discussing journalistic coverage of AfD (what’s known as “metajournalistic discourse”) and found that journalists advocated doubling down on the norms of objectivity and professionalism in response to AfD. Journalists agreed they should not demonize or ostracize the party, but cover them scrupulously fairly according to the principles of objectivity and let the party leaders’ own words “unmask” themselves. “Critical self-reflection with regard to journalistic norms is virtually nonexistent,” Krämer and Langmann concluded, and journalists not only did not deconstruct the populist criticism of the news media, but in some ways tacitly acknowledged it as containing some truth.

“Testing for the human capital value of daily newspaper journalists in the era of newsroom downsizing.” By Brian L. Massey, in Newspaper Research Journal.

Based on the relentless cuts at U.S. newspapers over the past decade or two and the overworked, underpaid journalists that remain in those newsrooms, it seems evident that the value of newspaper journalists to their organizations is quite low. Brian Massey has taken on the rather macabre task of determining just how low that value is, by surveying their editors.

In a survey of 191 editors of U.S. daily newspapers, Massey used literature on human capital to measure how much worth editors said they saw in the journalists they managed, and how much their organizations invested in that worth by training and rewarding them. The results captured the duality of the position of editor at an under-resourced newspaper: They expressed very high estimations of the value of their journalists in concept, but didn’t indicate a commitment by their organization to train or reward those journalists. The gap between word and deed is likely cold comfort to the journalists those editors oversee. “The question is whether validation by word alone is enough to recharge those reservoirs” of journalists’ draining psychological resources, Massey wrote. “It may well have to be.”

“Proactive ephemerality: How journalists use automated and manual tweet deletion to minimize risk and its consequences for social media as a public archive.” By Sharon Ringel & Roei Davidson, in New Media & Society.

Twitter and its users have long wrestled with the tension between the ephemerality of its form and the permanence. With just 280 characters available, it’s always felt like a place for tossed-off observations, splenetic responses to news, and half-formed theories. Yet those haphazard musings are permanent, preserved for posterity without the intervention of a third-party deletion service or tedious manual deletion. Ringel and Davidson examine this tension as it relates to journalists, who often see their work as a “first draft of history,” but who are also carefully protecting their brands on social media amid a precarious work environment.

In interviews with 17 New York journalists, Ringel and Davidson find that most of them deleted their tweets regularly, many of them en masse with third-party deletion services. For the women interviewed much more so than the men, that deletion was oriented around protection from harassment and “unwanted attention.” Deletion also reflected journalists’ view of the intended ephemerality of their tweets, and their concerns for their own job security and prospects.

But journalists also somewhat ruefully acknowledged the professional norms that might push back against deleting tweets, even as they wiped out their archives. The authors argue that journalists’ mass deletion of their tweets is a form of “individualized platformization” in which journalists mimic the mechanized agency of the platforms they’re using. They call for Twitter to develop more nuanced archiving tools that could allow journalists, for example, to flag tweets they deem worthy of preserving.

“Shared emotion: The social amplification of partisan news on Twitter.” By Ariel Hasell, in Digital Journalism.

For many of us, particularly over the past nine months, consuming news on social media has meant being flooded with wave after wave of posts with intense emotion — anger, sadness, fear, and (very occasionally) joy and relief. As the common complaint goes (and research has also confirmed), social media is also a haven for partisan news sources: The more extreme, it seems, the more likely to go viral.

Ariel Hasell tested those observations in a machine-learning analysis of more than 300,000 tweets and retweets from 2014 and 2015, particularly the relationship between the two. Do partisan news sources, she wondered, elicit more emotion on social media? Is that emotion more likely to be negative? And are they more likely to be shared and tweeted about?

The answer, more or less, was yes, yes, and yes. Tweets from partisan news sources on both the right and left were retweeted and replied to more often, and expressed more emotion. There was one caveat, however: When those outlets were retweeted, only the sharing of conservative outlets was more emotional than “neutral” news sources. Liberal news sources were retweeted about half the time with neutral emotions, and when they were retweeted, they were far more likely to be accompanied by enthusiasm than by anger or anxiety than conservative news sources. This doesn’t necessarily indicate that liberals are happier when sharing news than conservatives: The events Hasell chose (like the legalization of gay marriage in the U.S.) were happier stories for liberals than for most conservatives. But it did suggest, as we’ve likely suspected, that emotion is a significant driver in the spread of partisan news, particularly relative to its more neutral counterparts.

“Examining augmented reality in journalism: Presence, knowledge gain, and perceived visual authenticity.” By Tanja Aitamurto et al., in New Media & Society.

Augmented reality has been one of journalism’s “next big things” for at least a decade, but it has yet to realize its promise. Some of that may be because it can be difficult to produce and clunky to use, but there’s also the question of whether it’s a good medium for producing understanding of news events and stories. It might be immersive, but does it help people grasp things better than interactive or static visualizations?

That was the question Tanja Aitamurto and her five colleagues were attempting to answer through an experiment with users of three New York Times AR visualizations. They found that compared with static or interactive visualizations, AR produced a greater sense of physical presence, as one might expect, but that the impact on users’ learning was more ambiguous. They perceived themselves as learning more in particular ways from AR visualizations, but when their knowledge was objectively measured, there was no difference between the types of visualizations. AR also largely didn’t improve perceptions of authenticity, accuracy, or credibility, possibly because of the disruptive effect of computer-generated images in the AR visualizations. On the whole, despite AR’s engaging potential, the authors concluded that “it may, to some extent, compromise journalism’s informational goals by contributing to an impression of learning instead of actual learning.”

“The winner-loser spiral in political news coverage: Investigating the impact of poll coverage on subsequent party coverage.” By Per Oleskog Tryggvason, in Political Communication.

Oleskog Tryggvason examined the classic critique of political journalism, most prominently made by Harvard’s Thomas Patterson in the 1990s, that it’s dominated by a horse-race frame in which candidates’ and issues’ standing in the polls is a central influence on how they’re covered. That premise has been supported by research in the decades since Patterson’s argument, but that research has centered on the American political context, which is distinct in its two-party system and heavily commercialized media system. Oleskog Tryggvason’s study explored this dynamic in Sweden, a parliamentary democracy with eight parties represented in parliament. What kind of effect, he wondered, does horse-race framing have on political coverage in that environment?

He analyzed 7,500 stories over four years across eight Swedish news organizations, and found that opinion-poll coverage of a party does influence the tone of coverage of that party in the future — but only for positive poll stories, not negative ones. Oleskog Tryggvason posits a couple of possible explanations for this disparity: Journalists may be so used to writing negative political stories that positive polling stories are seen as more deviant and newsworthy, and the horse-race frame may have less of an effect in a less commercialized and more public service-oriented media system such as Sweden’s. Nevertheless, he concludes that political polls are not an indicator but rather a driver of media coverage overall.

Thus we have this new paper from Vázquez-Herrero and colleagues. After an initial process of identifying media-related accounts — of which they discovered 234, mostly of the TV and digital-native variety — they settled on 19 general news media accounts with verified profiles. They found, over time, a gradual incorporation of the aesthetics and expectations of the platform, including popular elements such as filters, stickers, and GIFs. In this way, the authors argue, the news organizations meld uncommon media forms (e.g., funny videos, challenges) with adapted versions of traditional ones (e.g., news segments, fragments of interviews). “Sometimes, the content moves away from journalism to approach young audiences in their natural habitat,” they write. “They do not literally dance the news, but they position the brand and show work behind the scenes in a casual and musical atmosphere that seems appropriate for the TikTok audience. Moreover, they do so with a fun, simple and attractive tone, seeking a balance between factual information and positive emotions and empathy, in line with current trends.”

“Covering hate: Field theory and journalistic role conception in reporting on white nationalist rallies.” By Gregory Perreault, Brett Johnson, and Leslie Klein, in Journalism Practice.

As white nationalist groups have become more active in recent years, both in a racist response to the first Black U.S. president and then emboldened by the rhetoric of his successor, journalists have been presented with a serious dilemma. The rise and rallies of white nationalists are newsworthy issues — not least for the threats they pose to local communities (e.g., Charlottesville, Va., in 2017) — but how should journalists cover such extremism in a way that doesn’t provide a platform for hate speech and thereby lend such movements the “oxygen of amplification”?

For this study, Perreault and colleagues interviewed 18 journalists who have covered white nationalist rallies, and conclude with some best practices for reporters tasked with covering these issues. Overall, they found that journalists worried about walking into an “objectivity trap” and giving too much legitimacy to white nationalists simply by virtue of covering their rallies, particularly given that such hate groups take advantage of journalists’ professional predilections toward fairness and neutrality to convey and mainstream their message.

“To avoid that outcome,” the authors argue, “journalists should seek to resist the tendency to cover [white nationalist] rallies episodically (with conflict as the driving force of the story) and instead look to cover rallies more thematically by placing them in broader social and political contexts.” But achieving that switch in perspective, according to the journalists interviewed, isn’t easy, in large part because conflict is often the reason these rallies are deemed newsworthy in the first place.

“Characterizing communication patterns between audiences and newsbots.” By Diego Gómez-Zará and Nicholas Diakopoulos, in Digital Journalism.

A lot has been said about the nefarious use of social bots — to engage in computational propaganda, spread misinformation, and play up polarization — but what about the potential for more productive, even virtuous use of such tools? One example is the growing variety of “newsbots,” or social bots deployed by news organizations to automate news distribution or develop new forms of engagement on social media. But while we know quite a lot about how news organizations are experimenting with newsbots, we know much less about how audiences are making sense of these interactions: How effective, really, are these newsbots in engaging audiences on social media?

To address this issue, Gómez-Zará and Diakopoulos analyzed a newsbot called Anecbotal NYT, which “listens” to Twitter users who share New York Times news articles and then follows up by sharing with them comments made by Times readers about those articles. The study examined this question in light of the human-machine communication (HMC) framework, an approach that helps scholars better understand the potential “creation of meaning” between humans and machines that may occur when machines are situated not simply as channels through which humans communicate but indeed as communicators that may be sources and recipients of messages (e.g., see how this works in automated journalism).

The authors’ qualitative analysis of messages between Twitter users and Anecbotal NYT indicated that the newsbot was “perceived in different ways by Twitter users, from not being recognized at all, to being considered as a communicative actor.” Likewise, the bot generated a range of emotional reactions from people, from politeness to hostility, in part depending on whether users realized they were engaging with a bot and not a human. Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that “the low response rate — only 366 responses after two years of operation — helps demonstrate how difficult it was for the newsbot to start a conversation with human users and be recognized in their natural environment.” Nevertheless, the study raises important questions about how designers should build newsbots and what roles these tools should play in the process of developing human-like conversation around news.

“‘Anything that causes chaos’: The organizational behavior of Russia Today (RT).” By Mona Elswah and Philip N. Howard, in Journal of Communication.

RT (formerly Russia Today) is, by many accounts, one of the most significant purveyors of disinformation globally. Well-funded by the Russian state, organized in the service of the Kremlin, used as a tool to interfere in the politics of other countries, and widely influential on YouTube (with one of the highest viewership rates for a TV channel), RT is a significant media presence to be reckoned with — and yet scholarly examination of how the channel works has been largely missing.

Elswah and Howard, through a year and half of interviews with current and former RT staff, take on that problem by studying the organizational behavior of the channel rather than its infamous propaganda content alone. Their aim: to illuminate how RT journalists are “recruited, socialized, and controlled.”

Their study shows how RT, though originally conceived to present a positive image of Russia to the world, went through a considerable transformation during the Russia–Georgia conflict in 2008 and has since oriented its operations around sowing doubts about Western governments, media, and ideals, as captured in RT’s oft-repeated phrase, “Question More.” Among the authors’ key findings: “RT promotes the Kremlin’s anti-West ideology, professional journalistic skills are not prioritized, editors are appointed by the government, and the channel is not driven by revenues.”

“Battle of the classes: news consumption inequalities and symbolic boundary work.” By Johan Lindell, in Critical Studies in Media Communication.

What is the connection between social class and news consumption? Studies have repeatedly shown that well-educated, well-paid, highly political engaged people are more likely to spend time with news (and “higher-quality” news at that) in comparison with those of lower social grade. But it’s also quite clear that working-class individuals are at a distinct disadvantage not only in terms of leisure time and job opportunities, but also with regard to the information sources readily available to them. The poor, in effect, are served mostly poor-quality news and information.

Lindell’s study, however, provides an important twist to this narrative: How do perceived differences in the way other people use news serve to mobilize certain class identities and distinctions? Lindell creatively studied this question through separate focus groups with middle-class and working-class youth in Sweden. When asked to describe the typical features of a “news avoider,” for example, middle-class teens conjured up a negative “other” in the form of the working class — “lazy, sedentary and disconnected,” as opposed to the middle-class aspirational notion of being a busy and up-to-date cosmopolitan. Meanwhile, working-class youth “challenged the pretentiousness of the middle class — for instance, by portraying them as ‘proper,’ ‘boring’ ‘news junkies’ who failed to live life at its fullest.” These findings reveal how symbolic boundaries of class can be developed around perceived ideas of what it means to be “informed” and “connected” in the digital era.

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.