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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Research roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What work is required to build public trust in journalism?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Research roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— The top recommendations were consistently identical for conservatives and liberals
— 41 publishers (99.9 percent of recommendations) reached both conservatives and liberals
— On average, 69 percent of all recommendations were to five news organizations
— The most-recommended five publishers accounted for 49 percent of the links collected.

The research, using MTurk, was conducted before Google redesigned Google News this past spring; “since May 2018, the platform also offers a service of customized five story news briefings; yet Google News said that the top two stories will be identical for all users, and only the bottom three personalized.”

That’s not to say that there was no customization whatsoever:

Searchers of various political leanings, across the country, were offered a largely unified body of news from a small number of national publications. Neither ideological bias nor geographic bias were evident in the search results. And, when controlling for other individual-level variables, such as gender, age and location, no significant differences were evident in the news recommended to different participants.

A certain degree of personalization was identified in a minuscule subset of the results. In the first experiment, only conservatives were recommended stories from Fox News, and only liberals were recommended stories from The Daily Mail, New York Daily News, Salon and The Daily Beast. In the second experiment, only conservatives were recommended stories from The New York Post, Business Insider, and Jezebel, and only liberals were recommended stories from The Washington Times, People, U.S. News & World Report and US Weekly. These results were counterintuitive and in fact contradict the typical concern over filter bubbles: While The New York Post is known to lean right, Jezebel is anything but conservative in its politics, and likewise The Washington Times is anything but targeting liberals. Either way, the differences were marginal, representing less than 0.01% of the data collected.

Note that mention of news “from a small number of national publications.” Here’s what respondents were seeing:

Across the four searches, fourteen news organizations ranked in the top five: CNN, Politico, Fortune, The Chicago Tribune, Business Insider, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, CNBC, ABC, Time, The Los Angeles Times, HuffPost, and USA Today. Together, these outlets made up 79 percent of the total number of news recommendations suggested to searchers.

The number of recommendations was unevenly distributed among these organizations as well, with the five most prominent outlets — The New York Times, CNN, Politico, The Washington Post and HuffPost — making up half (49 percent) of the 1,653 total recommended links. In other words, while Google News indexes many thousands of English-language news sources, every time our participants searched for news, they had a 49% chance of being directed to one of these five outlets.

There is some degree of diversity among the fourteen news organizations that occupied the top spots in the two experiments. Some are legacy print media, some are digital-native, and others are television networks and magazines. Some are general interest outlets, and others are focused on the political world. But almost all of them are large national organizations, and 79 percent of them are based in only two metro areas: New York City and Washington, D.C. (with the exceptions headquartered in the Atlanta, Chicago, and Los Angeles areas). These findings indicate that more than dissecting the public conversation into fragmented silos, digital distribution of news might narrow the conversation around a small set of national outlets.

The findings are largely in line with another recent study, and they suggest that at least when it came to a pre-redesign Google News, people were seeing “top” articles from a fairly mainstream set of sources. Or — well, they were when they searched in 2016. Would an experiment repeated now — in an arguably more polarized media environment than we were in even in 2016 — look different? Would it look different if you were Googling terms more specific than “Donald Trump” and “Hillary Clinton”? It might.

Facebook fails to combat hate speech in Myanmar. For Reuters, Steve Stecklow investigated how Facebook is dealing with hate speech in Myanmar — and in the process of doing so, turned up more than 1,000 posts, comments and pornographic images attacking the Rohingya and other Muslims. All of these posts, in case it needs to be said, violate Facebook’s hate speech policy; some of the posts Reuters found had been on the site for as long as six years, and Reuters extensively documents the many, many warnings Facebook has received from many concerned experts in the space. Some bits from its investigation:

— “In early 2015, there were only two people at Facebook who could speak Burmese reviewing problematic posts. Before that, most of the people reviewing Burmese content spoke English.” Facebook hired its first two Burmese speakers, based in Manila, three years ago; as of June, Facebook’s about 60 people were reviewing reports of hate speech in Myanmar, which has 18 million active Facebook users. The moderation work is largely outsourced.

— Burmese mobile phone operators let users use Facebook without paying data charges, and “in Myanmar today, the government itself uses Facebook to make major announcements, including the resignation of the president in March.”

— How this is hard:

Many of the millions of items flagged globally each week — including violent diatribes and lurid sexual imagery — are detected by automated systems, Facebook says. But a company official acknowledged to Reuters that its systems have difficulty interpreting Burmese script because of the way the fonts are often rendered on computer screens, making it difficult to identify racial slurs and other hate speech.

Facebook’s troubles are evident in a new feature that allows users to translate Burmese content into English. Consider a post Reuters found from August of last year.

In Burmese, the post says: “Kill all the kalars that you see in Myanmar; none of them should be left alive.”

Facebook’s translation into English: “I shouldn’t have a rainbow in Myanmar.”

In response, Facebook said: “Our translations team is actively working on new ways to ensure that translations are accurate.” The company said it uses a different system to detect hate speech.

After the report came out, Facebook responded and said that it’s hiring more Burmese speakers.

Written by friend-of-Nieman-Lab Seth Lewis and Oscar Westlund, it argues that academics who study journalism should do more to include the role of technology, audiences, and other factors in how they study news production and news organizations. Rather than a simplified view that sees journalism institutions as mostly self-contained engines of production, they call for a more integrated, systems-based approach:

The scholarly study of contemporary journalism, and cross-media news work specifically, is a complicated endeavor. The roles, boundaries, and processes of news work become increasingly hard to detect apart from other components in the same system. Traditional theories and concepts for unpacking journalism can take scholars only so far; what is still needed is a more comprehensive framework through which to account for the full array of actors, actants, audiences, and activities in crossmedia news work.

As Charlie Beckett put it:

OK. Impenetrable academic jargon to some, but this is absolutely on the button. https://t.co/TbS5ynHYEx

— Charlie Beckett (@CharlieBeckett) February 16, 2016

You can find the abstract here, but non-academics might find this from the paper’s conclusion more enlightening:

By adding a sociotechnical element to the sociocultural perspective of mainline research in journalism studies, this approach may help reveal new insights into the relationships among human actors inside the organization, human actors and audiences beyond it, and the nonhuman actants that cross-mediate their interplay. This approach better acknowledges how journalism is becoming interconnected with technological tools, processes, and ways of thinking.

In the paper, Lewis and Westlund consider actors to be the humans involved in the creation of journalism (journalists, yes, but also product managers, coders, marketers, data analysts, and more); actants as the technological forces and players involved (a CMS, iPhones, email newsletters, Facebook, APIs, search engines); audiences as, well, audiences (whether viewed as passive recipients, commodities for advertisers, or co-creators of content); and activities as “the patterns of action through which an organization’s institutional logic is made manifest through media.”

(If you hunger for more intersection of journalism research and actor-network theory, check out this 2013 paper from C.W. Anderson and Daniel Kreiss, summarized here.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recent papers from academe have continued to highlight tensions over letting citizens into the news process, as well as the need to be more open and transparent with the public. Many of the papers below have insights on related themes. In addition, several think tanks have published some important new reports. “Social Media and the ‘Spiral of Silence,’” from the Pew Research Center, highlights the sociological factors that inhibit robust discussion of controversial issues on notionally “open” platforms, while the American Press Institute has a paper advising news organizations on how to find extra money through shows, conferences, expos, and more: “The Best Strategies for Generating Revenue through Events.”

Here is a sampling of recent academic studies:

“Citizen Participation in News: An analysis of the landscape of online journalism”: From the University of Southampton, published in Digital Journalism. By Jonathan Scott, David Millard, and Pauline Leonard.

The paper examines how much citizen participation there really is in the realm of news by looking at the dynamics of 32 “systems” — from Reddit and Slashdot to YouTube, CNN iReport and The Guardian — and analyzing four case studies in how stories developed and were reported. Scott, Millard, and Leonard suggest that, despite hype around greater citizen participation, the reality is more disappointing; the “news outlets’ use of social networks does not create more openness as they use these outlets only as an additional distribution channel, and even the news outlets’ attempts at open news systems are still relatively closed.” Further, the researchers find “no real route for citizen news to move into traditional outlets…Even looking at systems such as iReport and uReport that were established specifically to create a route for citizen news to get into the mainstream, the results seem to be very limited.”

“Accuracy, Independence and Impartiality: How Legacy Media and Digital Natives Approach Standards in the Digital Age”: From Reuters Institute at Oxford University, by Kellie Riordan.

Riordan examines the ethical and transparency-related practices of six outlets — The Guardian, The New York Times, the BBC, Quartz, BuzzFeed, and Vice News. She praises emerging models of transparency embodied by the likes of Quartz — with its links to primary sources, and “swift, native correction of mistakes, with context” — but also warns that “speed and virality can threaten fairness and accuracy.” Further, she advocates that “native advertising should be labeled and distinguished from editorial content, even via search.” The paper highlights an important “third way” emerging in the world of journalism standards, a hybrid of old norms and new possibilities for transparency enabled by digital technology.

“Cynics and Skeptics: Evaluating the Credibility of Mainstream and Citizen Journalism”: From Susquehanna University and University of Wisconsin-Madison, published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. By D. Jasun Carr, Matthew Barnidge, Byung Gu Lee, and Stephanie Jean Tsang.

The authors analyze results from an experiment embedded in a web survey conducted via Mechanical Turk, which yielded 184 responses. Not surprisingly, the degree to which respondents trust what they read comes down to their pre-existing attitudes: “[C]ynics and skeptics found citizen journalism more credible than mainstream journalism, while non-cynics and non-skeptics expressed the opposite.” Ultimately, the researchers conclude that “in an era of proliferating sources of news and information, especially on the Internet, people may distinguish less and less between mainstream and alternative sources of news and information, at least on the aggregate level.” But they concede that the citizen journalism they tested “remained relatively close to traditional news presentation formats.” In any case, the idea that cynics and skeptics might re engage with news, albeit produced by amateurs and non-traditional sources, sounds a hopeful note, the scholars suggest.

“Code, Collaboration and the Future of Journalism”: A case study of the Hacks/Hackers global network: From the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and George Washington University, published in Digital Journalism. By Seth C. Lewis and Nikki Usher.

The researchers performed a two-year qualitative study of the group Hacks/Hackers in order to derive some insights about the intersection of journalism and technology. They interviewed people from dozens of chapters to examine the group’s sociology and culture. Occasionally, Lewis and Usher detected sticking points: “A number of chapters found it difficult to develop a common language for translating that purpose toward productive ends, converting talk into action. Some of the problems related to technical jargon that developers knew and journalists did not; others were about differences in thinking — such as journalists’ concern with short-term, one-off stories compared to developers’ interest in long-term, ongoing software development.” Where there were structured activities and regular meetings, it seemed, increased understanding prevailed, and some chapters saw lots of “common ground of mutual appreciation.” Institutional backing from local media outlets and technology organizations promotes more active meetings. “News innovation may be a common cause,” the scholars conclude, “but what that means and how it serves as a rallying cry is quite complicated, and it is important to hold back on some of the unbridled enthusiasm for the potential fusion of technologists sharing with journalists, despite the clear potential this may offer to journalism.”

“Data Journalism in the United States: Beyond the ‘Usual Suspects’”: From Pace University and College of Staten Island (CUNY), published in Journalism Studies. By Katherine Fink and C. W. Anderson.

Fink and Anderson conducted 23 interviews with people involved in data journalism. Although they found some thematically linked sets of skills and roles, they also “discovered that there were some fairly profound differences between the way that data journalism was practiced at larger, more resource rich news organizations and the compromises required to practice data journalism at smaller newspapers.” Data journalism positions could be high- or low-ranking within news organizations; journalists might function in teams, or mostly alone — “one-man bands.” Time pressures can shape data story selection, interviewees say. So, on occasion, do the pressures of management: “Three out of the 23 journalists we interviewed said they felt pressured to make story choices based on what they thought would drive online traffic. One journalist said his newsroom was highly focused on generating pageviews.” Small and medium outlets have had trouble dedicating the necessary resources to keep data journalists on staff, the researchers found, noting, “economic downturn at many American news organizations has had a deleterious impact on the production of data journalism.”

“Of Big Birds and Bayonets: Hybrid Twitter interactivity in the 2012 presidential debates”: From American University and George Washington University, published in Information, Communication & Society. By Deen Freelon and David Karpf.

Freelon and Karpf analyze patterns across 1.9 million tweets during the most recent presidential debates to see how certain memes (“Big Bird” and “horses and bayonets”) proliferated across the Twitter-sphere. The study feeds into questions and debates about how social media networks behave during times of mass events, and how elites and average users interact. The scholars coin the term “bridging elite” to describe persons with large audiences who enable messages to be broadcast beyond narrow cliques and filter bubbles. (An example in the study is a former wrestler whose funny tweet happened to cascade across network hubs.) “[W]e see evidence that during media spectacles, political elites are not the only commentators that matter,” Freelon and Karpf conclude. “Political Twitter is not solely the reserve of ‘hyperactive reporters and short attention-span political junkies.’ It is also where actors, comedians, athletes, hip-hop artists and ordinary citizens come to opine on politics.” Moreover, humor plays a unique role in information sharing in this new “hybrid” media environment.

“Infoboxes and cleanup tags: Artifacts of Wikipedia newsmaking”: From the University of Oxford, published in Journalism. By Heather Ford.

If we take journalism’s job to be explaining what just happened, few “outlets” have bigger scale and more visibility than a given Wikipedia page on an event. Given that, it’s perhaps not a stretch to study Wikipedia as the locus of a novel newsmaking process — and an important one. Ford looks at the practices and mechanisms (e.g., infoboxes and cleanup tags) of contributions and editing by studying the construction of the “2011 Egyptian Revolution” page and interviewing some of the editors involved. Internal turf battles unfolded, and the newsmaking and documentary process were quite messy. “Editors continuously added cleanup tags relating to the instability of the article due to its current event status and what they believed to be attacks against NPOV [neutral point of view] at a time when the article was highly unstable,” Ford writes. “Cleanup tags were consistently removed because editors argued that they ‘were already working on the issues’ noted in the tags. Yet the removal of such tags to the casual reader may give the illusion of a return to stability before such stability had been reached. In the context of this article, battle over the visibility of cleanup tags could be seen as reflective of personal battles between editors, and less about warning readers of possible problems.”

“The Twitterization of News Making: Transparency and Journalistic Professionalism”: From the University of Graz, published in the Journal of Communication. By Matthias Revers.

Revers conducted hundreds of hours of observation at the New York State Capitol between 2009 and 2011, focusing on journalistic tweeting habits as they developed. He also interviewed media members and political communications persons as part of the case study. He details the widely differing views among journalists about professional boundaries and notions of serving the public. Traditional norms gave way before the researcher’s eyes. “Journalists of this study felt less bound to keep themselves, their appreciation of others and assessments out of tweets, contrary to requirements of authoritative distance, competitive lines of division and stringent notions of objectivity,” Revers writes. “The faceless gatekeeper has given way to a more human and status-equal interlocutor who shares expertise and informed judgments.”

“The Future of Breaking News Online? A Study of Live Blogs Through Surveys of Their Consumption, and of Readers’ Attitudes and Participation”: From City University London, published in Journalism Studies. By Neil Thurman and Nic Newman.

Thurman and Newman set out to analyze the significance of live blogs for news organizations and to examine audience responses to them. They base their analysis on a survey involving more than 11,000 respondents across nine countries, as well as analytics data from Guardian.co.uk and ScribbleLive. The survey suggests that about 15 percent of news consumers access live blogs on a weekly basis; a “clear majority” of respondents said that live blogs are more balanced than regular news articles. However, “close to a third of readers found that live blogs’ formatting could make them difficult to understand.” In terms of citizen participation, the web analytics yielded mixed results: “Live blogs hosted by ScribbleLive and analysed for this article show 21 percent to 50 percent reader contributions compared with live blogs at Guardian.co.uk where tweets and ‘above the line’ comments from readers make up just 7.5 percent of the total number of live blog updates.” These differences, Thurman and Newman write, may suggest that two distinct models of live blogging are emerging, with the degree of crowdsourced participation as the key variable. However, despite the innovations around this “new news format,” it’s unclear how long the trend can last, as “a key question for mainstream media in their development of live blogs is how to keep up with social media platforms like Twitter, not just in terms of speed, but also in terms of the inclusion of images and video.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related: This all feeds into a larger recent conversation also joined by Chartbeat’s Tony Haile and others at Upworthy about the relative importance of social sharing and the need to measure quality engagement in new ways, perhaps through “attention minutes.” Meanwhile, a new report covering January 2014 by analytics platform Parse.ly suggests that Facebook is becoming an increasingly big part of driving traffic to news sites (26 percent in that period), while Google’s share of referrals to news sites is dropping (38 percent).

“Sourcing the Arab Spring: A Case Study of Andy Carvin’s Sources on Twitter During the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions”: From University of British Columbia and University of Minnesota, published in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. By Alfred Hermida, Seth C. Lewis, and Rodrigo Zamith.

The study looks at the mix of sources Andy Carvin used during his social media-focused reporting for NPR. Hermida, Lewis and Zamith examine the mix of “elite” sources and “alternative voices” in a dataset of 60,000 tweets during 2010-11; they plug this data into a wider debate over how the new network ecosystem is changing the mix of media voices and sources. The researchers conclude that “nonaffiliated activists accounted for the greatest single share of tweet mentions, overall (35.3%) and for Egypt (37.5%).” However, “in the overall population of individual sources, mainstream media employees accounted for the largest group by far (26.7%).” This general mix of evidence, the study concludes, suggests of a “new paradigm of sourcing at play.”

Other noteworthy papers in brief

“Networked Press Freedom and Social Media: Tracing Historical and Contemporary Forces in Press-Public Relations”: From the Annenberg School, USC, published in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. By Mike Ananny.

Ananny argues that the contemporary social media policies of some news organizations still fit into an age-old “defensive” and “conservative” pattern of distancing media members and institutions from their audiences and mitigating risks. The audience is seen in utilitarian terms — as a way of generating traffic or merely producing more efficient sourcing. Thus, old gatekeeping customs emerge in new clothes.

“Twitter in Politics: A Comprehensive Literature Review”: From the University of Bamburg (Germany). By Andreas Jungherr.

This giant literature review — 115 studies, from around the globe, across many election cycles — finds that research typically falls into one of three categories: “the use of Twitter by politicians and campaigners, the use of Twitter by publics in election and issue campaigns and the use of Twitter by various users to comment on mediated campaign events — such as televised debates, party conventions or election day coverage.” Jungherr concludes that despite the somewhat haphazard and emerging nature of the field, there are some “stable findings” being arrived at. For example, “candidates belonging to opposition parties take more frequently to Twitter than candidates from parties in government.”

“Seeking and Sharing Health Information Online: Comparing Search Engines and Social Media”: From Microsoft Research. By Munmun De Choudhury, Meredith Ringel Morris, and Ryen W. White.

This study examines what kinds/amounts of health information people publicly disclose on Twitter (and compares and contrasts with search engine use for health-related inquiries). It turns out people share a lot of health information publicly on Twitter, although “high-stigma” conditions are not as frequently shared. Based on this evidence, the researchers hypothesize some needed digital innovations: “New kinds of health information search systems may be built that support standing queries over search and/or social media to keep users apprised of new developments related to different common health concerns , since seeking new research about conditions and diversity of health content were the goals of many respondents.”

Also see a related Microsoft Research/Carnegie Mellon/University of Washington/MIT paper “Is There Anyone Out There? Unpacking Q-and-A Hashtags on Twitter.”

“Network Issue Agendas on Twitter During the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election”: From the University of Alabama, University of Texas at Austin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, published in the Journal of Communication. By Chris J. Vargo, Lei Guo, Maxwell McCombs, and Donald L. Shaw.

This “Big Data” study (38 million tweets analyzed) looks at how Republicans and Democrats operated differently on Twitter and how they responded to different forms of media — both “vertical,” or traditional media, and “horizontal,” or niche forms of media that target like-minded communities. The researchers conclude that “although vertical media could best predict Obama supporters’ behaviors on Twitter, the Republican horizontal media offered the greatest predictor power in explaining Romney supporters’ network agenda.”

“Political performance, boundary spaces, and active spectatorship: Media production at the 2012 Democratic National Convention”: From the University of North Carolina, published in Journalism. By Daniel Kreiss, Laura Meadows, and John Remensperger.

An ethnographic look at the 2012 DNC and media produced there, this paper provides some interesting insights into how conventions — now so ritualized and scripted that journalists find them impossible to cover — can actually empower attendees as “active spectators.” Social media at a convention now allow non-elite participants opportunities for “public critique and accountability over both political and journalistic actors.”

“Siren songs or path to salvation? Interpreting the visions of Web technology at a UK regional newspaper in crisis, 2006–2011”: From Bournemouth University (U.K.), published in Convergence. By Phil MacGregor.

This five-year case study on Britain’s Northern Echo newspaper shows how technological adoption in a media organization is not “unidirectional”: rather, it is “neither smooth nor uniform and is marked by uncertainty as to which of several actions is rational. Doubt is spread throughout the hierarchy.” The observations will be familiar to many in news organizations, but for scholars it’s another good data point showing a complex transition to the web.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Anna Creech used under a Creative Commons license.

It’s back-to-school time, and recently it seems “school” is coming ever-closer to the media. The news that the leading political science blog The Monkey Cage will become part of the Washington Post is the latest sign that academia may play a bigger role in coverage of public affairs.

The hybrid research-communications outfit Futurity — which aggregates university public information articles — continues to build its audience, while startups The Conversation and Footnote, media platforms for academic voices, are pioneering a new template. Of course, more researchers are joining Twitter every month. A new paper in Journalism Studies, “Academic Journalism: A Modest Proposal,” from scholars at CUNY’s Baruch College, looks at the possibility of more direct participation by higher education institutions in the creation of investigative and accountability reporting. And after Labor Day, journalism schools across the country will be churning out greater volumes of community news than ever before, as Knight Foundation, Poynter, and many others encourage change and reform in this general direction.

This latest roundup of digital scholarship highlights a growing number of studies — most brand-new, but a few from earlier this summer — that have strong implications for the news business and the practice of journalism. Papers in this research area can be highly theoretical, so it’s good to see some concrete takeaways offered from academia for a struggling industry. In the coming months, we’ll be tracking the most powerful and useful studies that help bridge this gap.

“Exploring News Apps and Location-Based Services on the Smartphone”: Study from San Diego State University, published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. By Amy Schmitz Weiss.

Are news media missing business and growth opportunities by not offering and utilizing more geolocation functionality in their mobile apps? Weiss analyzes more than 100 native apps from top TV network affiliates and radio stations, as well as other news apps in Apple’s App Store. She combines that content analysis with results from an online survey of young news consumers, who are increasingly likely to employ geolocation “check-ins” and location-based services as part of their mobile experience.

She finds that the “adoption of geo-located news stories is nonexistent among the traditional media examined. Six apps that did offer geo-located news were mainly user-generated apps.” The verdict on news organizations is damning, and the implications are clear: “Legacy news organizations analyzed in this study show that they are failing to keep up with the demand based on what news consumers, particularly young adults, are doing and using on their smartphones. This is supported by the proven hypothesis in this study that found younger adults who use location based services are also likely to consume news on their smartphone.”

“Responses to Entry in Multi-Sided Markets: The Impact of Craigslist on Local Newspapers”: Study from NYU Stern School of Business and Harvard Business School, forthcoming in Management Science. By Robert Seamans and Feng Zhu.

It has become conventional wisdom in journalism circles that the loss of the classified ads — a key part of the newspaper “bundle” that became tragically unbundled as the Internet rose — was a devastating blow to local news. How devastating? Seamans and Zhu estimate that Craigslist alone cost the business $5 billion over the period 2000-2007.

Of course, setting aside media hand-wringing, this might also be seen purely as good market efficiency — as $5 billion in net “savings” for classified ad buyers. In any case, the data suggest that “relative to newspapers without classified ad managers, the effect of Craigslist’s entry on newspapers with classified ad managers leads to a decrease of 20.7% in classified-ad rates, an increase of 3.3% in subscription prices, a decrease of 4.4% in circulation…and a decrease of 3.1% in display-ad rates.” (For some contextual perspective, see Pew’s industry-wide figures, which show that total newspaper classified revenue was about $20 billion annually in 2000, around $13 billion in 2007, and today about $4 billion.)

Seamans and Zhu conclude that the findings help “build an understanding of how media platforms respond to shocks from technologically disruptive entrants from different industries. This issue is important because the boundaries between media industries are blurred today, as advertisers can reach relevant consumers through a variety of channels such as TV, the Internet, and mobile devices. Therefore, platforms are likely to be unprepared for competition if they rely on industry boundaries to identify their competitors.”

“Open source and journalism: toward new frameworks for imagining news innovation”: Paper from the University of Minnesota and George Washington University, published in Media, Culture & Society. By Seth C. Lewis and Nikki Usher.

The paper explores and critiques the so-called “hacks and hackers” movement — the hybrid work being done by journalists and technologists. Lewis and Usher (both frequent Nieman Lab contributors) make a series of observations about different facets of this collaboration, and they review the relevant pre-history. But they focus it all around a note of worry: “Because the focus has been on solving problems for journalism, we feel that less attention has been paid to how the larger culture of how open-source software production might inform journalism’s broader innovation.”

One principle they offer up and explore is “news story as code” — the notion that news might be endlessly annotated and reshaped by the community. Another idea reviewed is “journalism as knowledge management” — the journalist as curator of community contributions. Lewis and Usher assert that all of the collaborations and actors involved to date deserve scrutiny, given the numerous inherent challenges, such as the failure to attract true community participation, the realties that projects need leaders, etc.: “[T]hese problems with open source also point to the need to question its aggressive promotion by the likes of Knight, Mozilla, Google, and other institutions seeking to shape the future of journalism and technology. Issues of power, ideology, and control ought to be part of future studies of this emerging connection between the journalism field, tech communities, and open source.”

The authors conclude: “[W]e should be careful not to fetishize this concept, or any other, as a panacea, particularly at a time when the latest technology invention is too readily seen as the salvation for journalism’s troubled model in the 21st century.”

“What aggregators do: Towards a networked concept of journalistic expertise in the digital age”: Study from CUNY, published in Journalism. By C.W. Anderson.

A paper that blends high theory with empirical, ethnographic research performed in newsrooms and with practitioners of both legacy media and blogs, it attempts to understand the increasingly blurry difference between “original” and aggregated-derivative journalistic work. What actually is “news” these days?

Anderson (a regular Nieman Lab contributor) takes as his starting point ideas from the FCC workshop “The Future of Media and Information Needs of Communities: Serving the Public Interest in the Digital Era” (see the related report). The views of Steve Waldman, Jeff Jarvis, Paul Starr, and other journo-thinker luminaries are all summarized. Ultimately, Anderson tries to reconcile the competing notions and big arguments about news that emerge. If we can’t agree about theory, how about practice? He takes to the streets to do his own journalism and aggregation of the journalists and aggregators. No doubt, the research fieldwork was interesting — “Sitting in a darkened midtown bar that has long been one of the favorite haunts of journalists working for the New York City tabloid New York Post…” — and the author sails off among the likes of Huffington Post (12 aggregation sites in all) and select mainstream media institutions.

Based on these interviews and field observations, conducted between 2008 and 2011, Anderson notes: “If we remain on the level of rhetorical conflict, of course, the lines are clear enough, but the minute we descend into the realm of material practice all manner of complications ensue…[I]t is hard to say which ‘occupational group’ engages in which jurisdictional practices, given the evidence that aggregation is a radically hybrid form of newswork that promiscuously crosses occupational boundaries.”

And Anderson ties it all together with a striking, and very useful, set of fundamental distinctions: “[A]ggregators have accepted the website and the link, and categories of digital evidence more broadly, as valid items which can be rationally processed through the news network. Journalists, on the other hand, remain wedded to analog evidence — quotes, official government sources, first-person observations, analog documents and files — as the primary raw material out of which they build their stories. In part this relates to material practice, but it also relates to journalistic culture. In terms of expertise and authority, it means that aggregators and reporters have, thus far, built themselves distinct news networks, with different black-boxed objects of evidence and different claims about how material interaction with those objects validates their professional authority.”

“The Impact of Technology on News Reporting: A Longitudinal Perspective”: Study from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. By Zvi Reich.

It is commonly assumed that the rise of digital technology has, along with changing news delivery and presentation, fundamentally overturned longstanding newsgathering habits. Not necessarily true, finds Reich, who analyzes up close the daily work of many mainstream Israeli journalists over a 10-year period, from 2001 to 2011.

He finds that “technology did not play a transformative role in news reporting. Although some of the differences are significant, the general picture suggests a remarkable stability.” The daily task of the reporter, at least in these case studies, has not changed much: “Reliance on social networks and on the Internet as news sources is marginal; social networks contributed 0.4% of the information in news gathering…and Internet use did not exceed 4% throughout the decade. The dominant and most remarkably stable technology (even displaying a slight rise in the news discovery phase) is the telephone.”

Reich notes that the findings are consistent with similar studies about journalistic practice in the U.S. and European contexts. (See, for example, a related 2012 study from the University of Georgia, “New technology, old practices: Examining news websites from a professional perspective.”) The author states that “reporters tend to conservatism, even when expected to display maximal receptivity to innovation — an observation that may disappoint scholars who correctly envisioned the vast potential of new technologies to release journalists from their restricted role as sources’ ‘oral relays’ or help them adapt to changes in news environments.”

“Internet Surveillance and Boomerang Routing: A Call for Canadian Network Sovereignty”: Working paper from the University of Toronto and Michigan State. By Jonathan A. Obar and Andrew Clement.

As the debate rages over NSA surveillance practices of Internet traffic routed through the United States — and as Silicon Valley worries over its business implications — this paper underscores the dilemmas even for friends and allies. The authors note that a good deal of Canadian Internet traffic passes through U.S. switching centers or carriers, a phenomenon they call “boomerang routing.” In their dataset sample, about one-quarter of the 25,000 traceroutes appear to boomerang through the Unites States. They assert that this means that the traffic is subject to all kinds of U.S. security surveillance laws, in effect negating Canada’s sovereignty over its citizens’ communications and canceling its ability to control the legal norms to which the Canadian citizenry is subjected. Obar and Clement advocate more investment in public Internet infrastructure, particularly the building of more exchange points, and make a call for greater north-of-the-border digital sovereignty. A related paper, “IXmaps — Tracking your personal data through the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping sites,” also authored by Clement at the Universty of Toronto, is worth checking out.

“Newspaper Consumption in the Digital Age”: Study from City University London, published in Digital Journalism. By Neil Thurman.

Many newspapers now boast of having much larger total audiences, as new web visitors more than make up for losses in print subscribers. But the numbers about audience “reach” can deceive, Thurman finds, if you take careful stock of the actual amount of time people are spending with news institutions. He analyzes various circulation and Nielsen figures relating to 12 British national newspapers; the analysis breaks down the domestic and overseas audiences. Thurman finds that, as of 2011, a “minimum of 96.7 percent of the time spent with newspaper brands by their domestic audience was in print.”

Because online visitors typically visit only extremely briefly, even large numbers of site visitors can produce relatively little overall time with the news product. Even The Guardian was seeing only 7 percent of total time spent with their product from online sources. Further, news appears to be losing out in terms of public attention: “Looking at the results between 2007 and 2011…what is perhaps most concerning for newspaper brands is that for all but one of the titles studied — The Guardian — the total number of minutes spent reading by the aggregated UK print and online readerships has declined. Across the 12 titles the average fall was at least 16.05 percent.”

Still, overseas web visitors were contributing substantially to the overall online time spent with the news entity: For every hour spent by domestic web visitors, 25 more minutes were added by the audience abroad — at least among the five selected publications. The author concedes that the data he analyzes is imperfect (he can’t account for mobile apps, for example), but the takeaway is as follows: “Although some newspapers might take comfort from their increased popularity, because the online visitors who are driving that increase are being relatively frugal with the time they spend with newspapers’ online channels, losses in the time-spent-reading newspapers’ print products have not, with the exception of The Guardian, been offset by gains in online time-spent-reading.”

“‘Not This One’: Social Movements, the Attention Economy, and Microcelebrity Networked Activism”: Paper from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, published in American Behavioral Scientist. By Zeynep Tufekci.

Tufekci, also an engaged academic commentator on Twitter, has previously studied activism dynamics in Tahrir Square. Her latest study presents case studies in how political activists/citizen journalists — so-called “microcelebrity activists,” which she notes “first came to the forefront of international attention in the Arab Spring” — gain and maintain audiences in social media space, and how this helps define emerging notions about media attention and political power.

She examines in great detail the case of Bahraini activist Zainab Al-Khawaja and finds important differences between the former media world, when legacy media predominated, and our present moment: “Perhaps the most important difference that flows from these cases is that the ‘power-dependency’ relationship between media and the social movement actors has been fundamentally altered,” Tufekci writes. “The microcelebrity activist is not monopolistically dependent on mass media for attention of broader publics. In fact, some activists have follower networks that rival readership of large newspapers. Furthermore, since the immediate follower network also acts as propagator, the reach of these activists can easily be tens of millions of people in just one or two degrees out of their core social media networks — and, of course, this kind of reach often also supports mass media appearances, further increasing visibility.”

“Beyond Cognitions: A Longitudinal Study of Online Search Salience and Media Coverage of the President”: Study from DePaul University, published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. By Matthew W. Ragas and Hai Tran.

The paper takes an empirical look at the evolving two-way street of how news coverage can drive online search — and how online search can also drive media coverage. Ragas and Tran use the Associated Press and Reuters as their representative indicators of news coverage and analyze data from the U.S. Search Intelligence database of Experian Hitwise. The study looks at coverage of President Obama during 2009-2010. Predictably, more AP and Reuters coverage — particularly negative coverage — was associated with more online search around Obama. But, interestingly, Ragas and Tran found that “coverage volume was also influenced by search trends, demonstrating an instance of reverse agenda setting with the media seemingly monitoring and taking cues from Internet users. Moreover, the impact of search salience on media salience occurred relatively quickly (starting within a week), while the media-led influence appeared to accumulate over a five-week span.”

The findings validate greater media investment in monitoring of the digital space — they “lend empirical support to recent observations of journalists monitoring, influencing, and reacting to search trends and the rise of the active audience in web environments.” For communications and journalism scholars, the study is particularly interesting because it shows that the traditional dynamics of media “agenda setting” — telling the public what to think about, and how to think about it — is changing and becoming a more dynamic process.

“News Platform Preference as a predictor of political and civic participation”: Study from the University of Texas at Austin and Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, published in Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. By Ingrid Bachmann and Homero Gil de Zuniga.

The study contributes to the growing literature on how news consumption habits, particularly of digital media, may contribute to engagement and participation levels in other parts of democratic life. In general, people who consume news tend to participate in civic affairs more than those citizens who don’t pay much attention. That much should be obvious, and there’s some data to back it up.

But this study — which analyzes 2008-2009 online survey data from 945 participants — finds those who prefer digital media are, on average, more civically active (e.g., volunteering or charity work, attending a public hearing or rally, etc.) in comparison to traditional print news consumers: “And this is the case regardless of whether it refers to online or offline means of participation and beyond the effect of demographic factors, social orientations and people’s levels of news consumption. These results seem to indicate that the Internet may supply a set of characteristics that print journalism may be unable to provide.”

Interesting, but it’s certainly not the last word on the subject, as there is also a competing academic research thread that suggests more digital media choice may actually contribute to participatory inequality. (See, for example, the work of Princeton’s Markus Prior.)

“Emergence and predictors of alcohol reference displays on Facebook during the first year of college”: Study from the University of Washington, Seattle Children’s Research Institute and University of Wisconsin-Madison, published in Computers in Human Behavior. By Megan A. Moreno, Jonathan D’Angelo, Lauren E. Kacvinsky, Bradley Kerr, Chong Zhang and Jens Eickhoff.

A profitable back-to-school read for incoming college freshman. Despite the laughs the topic might generate — “Awesome selfie with Natty Ice!” — the researchers are dead serious about the public health implications and they focus on the consequences of a widespread problem: The escalation of drinking consumption among late teens who find themselves suddenly free from the shackles of Mom and Dad.

The researchers conduct a comprehensive survey of 338 young persons from two different universities and determine that “over the first year of college, alcohol displays on Facebook dramatically increased in a variety of multimedia formats.” There were significant differences over time between students at the two universities studied, suggesting that it is college-specific norms that “may impact both alcohol behaviors as well as what material is socially acceptable to display on Facebook at that school.”

The researchers propose that “it is worth considering whether universities should play a role in discouraging displayed alcohol content on Facebook by their students. Students may underestimate the potential implications for employment or future educational opportunities that could be impacted by displayed alcohol content on Facebook.”

Photo by Anna Creech used under a Creative Commons license.

Below are predictions from Andrew Golis, Dan Gillmor, Joe Grimm, Om Malik, Jim Brady, Seth Lewis, David Cohn, Jeff Israely, Barry Sussman, Evan Smith, and Joe Bergantino. Plus, to round things off, a few not-so-serious predictions from Dan Kennedy and Bob Garfield.

So, the question is: how much will journalism and media change in 2011? My answer: not much, actually. I know that’s a contrarian view, at a time when so much seems to be in flux, so let me try to explain.

I think we tend to overestimate the volume of change that actually occurs in a given year, and at the same time underestimate the obduracy of individual and societal habits, routines, values, and bureaucratic systems. This doesn’t mean change doesn’t occur — of course it does! — but rather that it tends to be more incremental, more subtle, and even more glacial than we sometimes like to imagine. And I’m not trying to be a kill-joy here, for I love tracking the exciting future of journalism as much as anyone and have no particular fondness for the past. Rather, I’m coming at this question as a former journalist and present academic who studies the extent to which (professional) journalism’s core identity — its ethics, worldview, fundamental practices, etc. — is evolving in the digital age. The research out there suggests that change does come, yes, but not without considerable resistance and reluctance on the part of professions and institutions.

So, what does this mean for 2011? Well, that we’re more likely to see change occurring by degree rather than by kind. There will be more iPad news apps; more journalism crafted to take advantage of the social, viral, and “spreadable” nature of networked media; and more newsrooms experimenting with Big Data, both of the WikiLeaks and less sensational variety. There may even be some business-model breakthroughs as newspapers figure out a Groupon-like strategy for local advertising. But to see truly significant changes in kind — changes to the very DNA of journalism and how it gets accomplished — we may have to look beyond 2011, toward something like a five-year or even a ten-year time horizon. Just as we can see rather significant changes in news work as we look back over the past decade, it may be a long while yet before we appreciate what’s really happening under our feet, and its impact (or lack thereof), in any particular year.

When I sit down and think about the future of media, I see two core problems with the media business at large. Most media entities tend to define themselves by features — magazines, newspapers, television and radio — while the audience aka the customers see media entities as “information” resources.

I think we are going to see the continuous destruction of value in the media industry because folks refuse to look beyond what is obvious and comfortable. That is precisely why we are going to see media industry lose a shirt on ill-conceived mobile applications, mostly because publishers want to replicate what they know best — an ambiguous, non-measurable advertising paradigm — on digital devices.

Similarly, the media entities will all come to a realization that chasing pageviews is a zero-sum game, and they are playing with a losing hand against zero-cost pageview-generation megafarms like Facebook, especially at a time when the modes of content consumption and discovery are changing. Content farms like Demand Media and Associated Content are commoditizing the value of banner ads and pageviews.

In 2011, I expect following to happen:

— Bloomberg will continue its march and become one of the most powerful media entities in the U.S. It has television assets to go along with web, print offerings (Bloomberg BusinessWeek), and data terminals — making it a company in the business of selling information.

— We will see continued implosion of large-scale media barring a handful of national/transnational brands such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. 2011 is going to be particularly hard for companies that have cut back on their core competency — journalism.

— MSNBC make a serious bid to acquire The Huffington Post.

— The Discovery Group will become one of the major media groups. The company has done a good job of merging its cable television and web businesses with a thriving e-commerce business, making it less reliant on pure advertising revenues. In 2011, Oprah joins the Discover family. What’s good for Oprah is good for Om!

2011 will be the year online journalistic innovation reaches scale.

For the first time, a critical mass of journalists — not just a handful of early-adopters — have moved beyond learning the core skill set or figuring out the inherent incentives of the web. They’ve mastered the craft and the medium and are primed to push boundaries and innovate.

At the same time, those who have been experimenting — be it startup, nonprofit, amateur, or otherwise — are coming away from their projects with lessons learned. Now their ambitions and ideas are less abstract, more tangible and ready to be implemented.

And add to that the fact that major news organizations have stopped playing defense and are pivoting to invest in things that will excite their fickle, fragmenting audiences.

2011, then, will be the year millions of Americans see the kind of experimentation and innovation Nieman Lab readers have been following.

The “woe is us” crowd, which dominated the conversation for the past several years, will be largely supplanted by the “wow, let’s try new things” multitudes who are experimenting with a huge variety of journalism and business models. We’ll also stop looking for magic solutions to the “problem” of replacing monopoly and oligopoly profits, recognizing that the emerging media ecosystem will be diverse and, in the end, more robust. The outlines of tomorrow’s ecosystem will begin to emerge as a small percentage of the experiments show signs of financial sustainability.

As we are flooded with more and more information, much of which is garbage, we’ll see a strong move toward trusted sources. This will take many forms. One will be a classic retreat to quality, as the best news providers retain or earn positions of trust. Another will be progress toward increasingly sophisticated combinations of human and machine intelligence, where aggregation and curation are melded so that people and communities can sort out what they need and want based on quality, popularity and reputation. But we’re also in the early days of this shift, so it won’t happen in a mere 12 months.

Overhanging all this will be who controls the ecosystem. Will it be us, the users, or will it be powerful interests that clamp down on what we can do? I fear that 2011 will be more of the latter, as media and communications incumbents, aided by a government that increasingly wants to control what we can see and do online, erect more and more barriers to innovation. The people who favor a diverse and robust media ecosystem will realize they need to become more political — and as they do they’ll help the public understand what’s at stake.

Local will be the next hot thing. The continued rise of mobile and location-based services will be major factors in that emergence, and will help drive major innovations in local journalism. I predict a steady rise in locally based startups.

You’ll see more longtime digital types abandoning their legacy roots and either going to web-only companies or starting their own things.

Social media will establish itself firmly as something that every media company will need to have a strategy and staff for. This isn’t a fad.

Partnerships will be a strong theme. Companies that once would never have considered even talking to each other will begin forming partnerships in order to allow each to focus on its strengths. As a result, news sites will continue to become more niche.

The number of niche news startups employing fewer than 20 people will begin to increase, and begin to cause grief for larger, more general-interest news sites.

The paywall debate will drone on for another year, and at the end of it, there will still be equally dug-in camps on both extremes of the issue. (That’s the prediction I feel most comfortable about).

In 2011, I expect to see some shakeout of traditional and innovative newsrooms. Some of the new ones will have hit the wall that tells them they don’t have the right model to go forward. Legacy newsrooms seem to gaining traction with digital advertising and are feeling some traditional advertisers come back, but they have been substantially weakened and devalued. With the amount of cash that is sitting idle, I expect we will see some acquisitions among traditional media companies. The prize in those deals will be the content parts of the operations, of course.

I would not surprised if some traditional newsrooms are absorbed by digital companies looking to build credibly news-oriented footprints fast. Watch Yahoo! and Facebook in 2011 to see how they try to grow their reputations as news sources.

Mobile and tablets will continue to boom, with some shakeout among devices and a real gold rush to build apps, backed up by original news and news aggregation. Individualized services or services curated by friends will grow.

The WikiLeaks phenomenon will continue. As Julian Assange has recently said, he’ll move out of military leaks and into Wall Street. Instead of being unpatriotic, there will be new legal claims blasted at them (copyright, IP, privacy). The ongoing drama of Julian Assange will come to a head in some way shape or form (arrested, killed, stepping down), but WikiLeaks or another organization with the same ethos will remain. Somehow it must move beyond Julian Assange and just be WikiLeaks, or another leak-esque organization that doesn’t have a cult of personality.

The New York Times pay ramp will launch. It will neither be a huge success or a huge failure. The nature of the pay ramp means that the vast majority of people will still get free content from the Times. They’ll only be able to ask people who come to the site regularly to pony up some money. And that amount of money will have to be high enough to compensate for the loss in advertising dollars (when X percent of readers leave) and low enough that the X percent is as low as possible.

As a result, it’ll work. It might even make them some money. But the margin of error is so small here — if they charge too early or too much — that it won’t really solve the problem of print dollars to digital dimes.

Next year will mark the end of the pay vs. free debate as we’ve known it. In 2011, those on either side of the question who speak about it in ideological/philosophical/historical terms will begin to sound, like, so 2000s. We can all now agree that information neither “wants to be free” nor is a consumer good like any other. The confluence of more and cheaper tablets on the market, the Times’ metered-model rollout and Murdoch’s continued (and intentional) overplaying of his hand with thick paywalls will combine to help close the black-or-white era of this debate.

This doesn’t mean that next to the barrel-chested Murdoch, The New York Times will not look a bit, er, wimpy in its halting moves to charge for some of its content. But even if it has trouble finding the sweet spot on the meter (or communicating its intentions), it will become clear rather quickly in 2011 that for a quality/global news gathering organization like The New York Times, there is no turning back to the days of all free access. This is also does not mean that the Guardian or Des Moines Register or Twitter for that matter can’t have another approach. But from now on, they’ll always have to explain their choice in strategic terms.

Meanwhile, Julian Assange has shown that there are still plenty of religious battle lines to be drawn around the Internet and information, without having to debate whether it is right or wrong to charge people (who can afford it) for news and let those who would rather spend their money elsewhere find the free stuff.

Stories by nonprofit, online news organizations already have a foothold in elite national newspapers — but nothing like the prominence they’ll have in 2011. They will produce strong watchdog reporting and, as a result, they’ll draw sharply increased funding from individual large donors.

More meaningful collaborations between nonprofits and for-profits!

Public TV and public radio will take a much more proactive role in helping fill the investigative reporting void that’s resulted from cutbacks at commercial media outlets.

Many more newspapers will attempt to monetize their websites with paywalls for “exclusive” content.

The experiments to pool, among local TV stations, more types of news coverage, will accelerate over the next year —leading eventually to the end of an era in which most major cities have at least three or four TV stations airing several newscasts.

AOL executives, despairing at the dearth of advertising on their hyperlocal Patch.com sites will hit upon a bold new strategy: print. “We believe that publishing weekly community newspapers will prove to be the hottest new media idea since Twitter,” AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong will say. “A study we conducted shows that local businesses such as hardware stores, funeral homes, and nail salons are far more likely to advertise in a newspaper than online. Our goal is nothing less than to revolutionize local journalism and the business model that supports it.” Kirk Davis, president of GateHouse Media, which publishes nearly 400 weekly and daily community newspapers across the United States, will not be reachable for comment.

Time magazine will name Google’s ruling troika its Persons of the Year for 2011. In singling out chairman Eric Schmidt and co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the magazine will explain: “In a digital media world in which most consumers are all too willing to live under Apple’s semi-benign dictatorship, Google has kept the flame of openness alive, selling tablet computers and smartphones for which anyone can write applications without fear of censorship. The spirit of the garage-based startup lives.” In response, Apple CEO Steve Jobs will order Time’s iPad app to be removed from the App Store.

Rupert Murdoch’s “The Daily” debuts. Both subscribers are extremely satisfied.

In August, after months of crushing losses, The Daily Beast/Newsweek folds. In November, Howard Kurtz stops filing stories.

Glenn Beck shoots at two black helicopters hovering near his home, killing a Medevac pilot and a Fox 5 traffic babe.

Katie Couric steps down as anchor of CBS Evening News to join 60 Minutes, lowering the average correspondent age by 28 years. Kim Kardashian assumes Couric’s role reading the news.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, on trial in Sweden, is asked by prosecutor where he pays taxes. “None of your beeswax,” Assange replies.

On March 1, Steve Jobs introduces the iPatch, a tablet designed for content piracy. More than 30 million units sold on first day.

On April 1, 100 million iPatches explode, maiming the entire US population between 15 and 29.

Fearing revenue declines at its Kaplan Education subsidiary, the Washington Post Co. buys 49 percent of the Mafia.

Comcast, under FCC scrutiny for first time, sells NBC Universal to Barry Diller. Tina Brown brought in to run it.

Paul Krugman loses his sense of outrage. Universe contracts.

A gaggle of Google news items: Unlike the past several weeks with their paywall and iPad revelations, this week wasn’t dominated by one giant future-of-media story. But there were quite a few incremental happenings that proved to be interesting, and several of them involved Google. We’ll start with those.

— The Google story that could prove to be the biggest over the long term actually happened last week, in the midst of our iPad euphoria: Google unveiled a beta form of Social Search, which allows you to search your “social circle” in addition to the standard results served up for you by Google’s magic algorithm. (CNN has some more details.) I’m a bit surprised at how little chatter this rollout is getting (then again, given the timing, probably not), but tech pioneer Dave Winer loves the idea — not so much for its sociality but because it “puts all social services on the same open playing field”; you decide how important your contacts from Twitter or Facebook are, not Google’s algorithm.

— Also late last week, several media folks got some extended time with Google execs at Davos. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger posted his summary, focusing largely on Google’s faceoff with China. “What Would Google Do?” author Jeff Jarvis posted his summary, with lots of Google minutiae. (Jeff Sonderman also further summarized Jarvis’ summary.) Among the notable points from Jarvis: Google is “working on making news as compelling as possible” and CEO Eric Schmidt gets in a slam on the iPad in passing.

— Another Google feature was launched this week: Starring on Google News stories. The stars let you highlight stories (that’s story clusters, not individual articles) to save and return to them later. Two major tech blogs, ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch, gave the feature their seal of approval, with ReadWriteWeb pointing to this development as the first of many ways Google can personalize its algorithm when it comes to news. It’s an intriguing concept, though woefully lacking in functionality at this point, as TechCrunch notes: I can’t even star individual stories to highlight or organize coverage of a particular issue. I sure hope at least that feature is coming.

Also in the Google-and-news department: Google economist Hal Varian expressed skepticism about news paywalls, arguing that reading news for many is a worktime distraction. And two Google folks, including Google News creator Krishna Bharat, give bunches of interesting details about Google News in a MediaShift interview, including some conciliatory words for publishers.

— Meanwhile billionaire tech entrepreneur Mark Cuban officially jumped on the Google-News-is-evil train, calling Google a “vampire” and urging news organizations not to index their content there. Not surprisingly, this wasn’t well-received in media-futurist circles: GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram, a former newspaperman himself, said Cuban and his anti-Google comrade, Rupert Murdoch, ignore the growing search traffic at news sites. Several other bloggers noted that Cuban has expressed a desire in the past to invest in other news aggregators and currently invests in Mahalo, which does some Google News-esque “sucking” of its own.

— Finally, after not carrying AP stories since December, Google struck some sort of quasi-deal that allows it to host AP content — but it’s still choosing not to do so. Search engine guru Danny Sullivan wonders what it might mean, given the AP and Google’s icy relations. Oh yeah, and Google demoed some ideas of what a Chrome OS tablet — read: iPad competitor — might look like.

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What the iPad will do (and what to do with it): Commentary continued to trickle out this week about Apple’s newly announced iPad, with much of talk shifting from the device’s particulars to its implications on technology and how news organizations should develop for it.

Three most essential pieces all make similar points: Former McClatchy exec Howard Weaver likens the iPad to the newspaper in its physical simplicity and thinks it “will enrich human beings by removing technological barriers.” In incredibly thoughtful posts, software developers Steven Frank and Fraser Speirs take a programming-oriented tack, arguing that the iPad simplifies computing, bringing it home for normal (non-geek) people.

Frank compares it to an automatic transmission vs. the traditional manual one, and Speirs says it frees people from tedious tasks like “formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS” to do the real work of living life. In another interesting debate, interaction designer Sarah G. Mitchell argues that without multitasking or a camera (maybe?), the iPad is an antisocial device, and developer Edd Dumbill counters that it’s “real-life social” — made for passing around with friends and family.

Plenty of folks have ideas about what news organizations should do with the iPad: Poynter’s Bill Mitchell and news designer Joe Zeff both propose that newspapers and magazines could partially or totally subsidize iPads with subscriptions. Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt says that wouldn’t work, and Zeff gives a rebuttal. Publish2’s Ryan Sholin has an idea for a newsstand app for the iPad, and Frederic Filloux at The Monday Note has a great picture of what the iPad experience could look like by next year if news orgs act quickly.

And of course, Robert Niles of The Online Journalism Review and BusinessWeek’s Rich Jaroslovsky remind us what several others said (rightly, I think) last week: The iPad is what content producers make of it.

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Facebook as a news reader: Last Friday, Facebook encouraged its users to make their own personalized news channel by creating a list of all the news outlets of which they’ve become a fan. The tech blog ReadWriteWeb — which has been remarkably perceptive on the implications of Facebook’s statements lately — noted that while a Facebook news feed couldn’t hold up to a news junkie’s RSS feed, it has the potential to become a “world-changing subscription platform” for mainstream users because of its ubiquity, sociality and accessibility. (He makes a pretty compelling case.)

Then came the numbers from Hitwise to back ReadWriteWeb up: Facebook was the No. 4 source of visits to news sites last week, behind only Google, Yahoo and MSN. It also accounts for more than double the amount of news media traffic as Google News and more than 300 times that of the web’s largest RSS program, Google Reader. ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick responded with a note that most news-site traffic still comes through search, and offered a challenge to Facebook to “encourage its giant nation of users to add subscriptions to diverse news sources to their news feeds of updates from friends and family.”

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This week in (somewhat) depressing journalism statistics: Starting with the most cringe-inducing: Rick Edmonds of Poynter calculates that newspaper classified revenue is down 70 percent in the last decade. He does see one bright spot, though: Revenue from paid obituaries remains strong. Yup, people are still dying, and their families are still using the newspaper to tell people about it. In the magazine world, Advertising Age found that publishers are still reporting further declines in newsstand sales, though not as steep as last year.

In the world of web statistics, a Pew study found that blogging is steady among adults and significantly down among teens. In other words, “Blogging is for old people.” Of course, social media use was way up for both teens and adults.

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A paywall step, and some suggestions: Steven Brill’s new Journalism Online paid-content service has its first newspaper, The Intelligencer Journal-Lancaster New Era in Pennsylvania. In reporting the news, The New York Times noted that the folks behind both groups were trying to lower expectations for the service. The news business expert Alan Mutter didn’t interpret the news well, concluding that “newspapers lost their last chance to hang together when it became clear yesterday that the wheels seemingly have come off Journalism Online.”

In a comically profane post, Silicon Valley veteran Dave McClure makes the strangely persuasive argument that the fundamental business model of the web is about to switch from cost-per-click ads to subscriptions and transactions, and that because people have trouble remembering passwords, they’ll login and pay through Gmail, iTunes or Facebook. (Mathew Ingram says McClure’s got a point.) Crowdfunding advocate David Cohn proposes a crowdfunded twist on micropayments at news sites.

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Reading roundup: Two interesting discussions, and then three quick thought-provoking pieces. First, here at the Lab, future Minnesota j-prof Seth Lewis asks for input about what the journalism school of the future should look like, adding that he believes its core value should be adaptability. Citizen journalism pioneer Dan Gillmor gave a remarkably thorough, well-thought-out picture of his ideal j-school. His piece and Steve Buttry’s proposal in November are must-reads if you’re thinking about media education or involved in j-school.

Second, the discussion about objectivity in journalism continues to smolder several weeks after it was triggered by journalists’ behavior in Haiti. This week, two broadsides against objectivity — one by Publish2’s Paul Korr calling it pathological, and another by former foreign correspondent Chris Hedges saying it “killed the news.” Both arguments are certainly strident ones, but thoughtful and worth considering.

Finally, two interesting concepts: At the Huffington Post, MTV’s Maya Baratz calls for newspapers to think of themselves as apps, commanding them to “Be fruitful and multiply. Elsewhere.” And at the National Sports Journalism Center, former Wall Street Journal journalist Jason Fry has a sharp piece on long-form journalism, including a dirty little secret (“most of it doesn’t work in any medium”) and giving some tips to make it work anyway.