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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Research roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social media platforms present a conundrum for journalists.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Research roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Research roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Research roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strategic media avoidance by the ultra-wealthy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Research roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Research roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Campaign reporters’ cognitive shortcuts on Twitter

One of the most fruitful areas of psychological research over the past several decades has been in the heuristics and biases that serve as cognitive shortcuts for people attempting to evaluate situations and make decisions. The concepts in this area have taken on several different terms — dual processing, heuristics, central and peripheral processing, System 1 and System 2 — but they all illustrate a similar idea.

Our brains have two different modes of thought: One is quick, relatively low-effort, and relies heavily on emotions, habits, and simple shortcuts to make judgments. The other is slower, more deliberate, and relies on more complex analytical processes. (Following Daniel Kahneman, we’ll call the former System 1 and the latter System 2.) Both are prone to cognitive biases like the desire to confirm pre-existing beliefs, but System 1 thinking is much more susceptible to those biases. And being cognitive misers who need to make countless judgments each day, we rely heavily on System 1 for our everyday cognition.

Journalists aren’t any different, and there are studies going back three decades indicating that their cognitive biases affect the way they determine story angles, sources, headlines, and incorporate contradictory information. A new study by Stanford’s Jihye Lee and James T. Hamilton in the prominent scientific journal PLOS ONE tries to deepen our understanding of cognitive bias in journalism by examining journalists’ tweets, news articles, and broadcast transcripts for evidence of it in the language they use.

Looking at journalists covering the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Lee and Hamilton posit that these journalists’ propensity to use System 1 thinking (thanks to tight deadlines and hectic campaigns) is heightened on Twitter, with its relentless speed and emphasis on top-of-mind thoughts. To test this, they compared the Twitter output of 73 journalists covering the 2016 campaign to their professional output in newspaper, magazine, and online articles and broadcast transcripts. In the year leading up to Election Day, they collected 220,000 text samples, encompassing more than 12 million words.

Through automated analysis, they found that journalists’ tweets displayed significantly more linguistic evidence of System 1 thinking than their articles. That is, journalists’ language on Twitter included more emotion, more certainty, more emphasis on the present, and fewer analytic words and numerical terms. Some of these were true of the broadcast sample as well, though broadcast transcripts had even more focus on the present and less analytic language than tweets, and roughly equal levels of certainty to tweets.

Lee and Hamilton also tested for one System 1 cognitive bias in particular: anchoring, or the tendency to estimate uncertainties based on an “anchor” of prior information. They found that journalists who covered previous presidential elections were significantly more likely to refer to those elections in their news reports, even after controlling for age, gender, and type of media. That difference disappeared for references to the 2016 primaries which all journalists had covered, indicating that the increase in references to prior elections could be specifically tied to experience with those elections.

So what does all that mean? We see evidence that campaign reporters rely on cognitive bias in particular — using prior elections as an anchor to influence their perception of current campaigns, potentially distorting their interpretation. But beyond that, we see more evidence that Twitter is where journalists go to process their information heuristically, and their stories (especially for print and online journalists) are where they go to process more systematically.

That shouldn’t surprise anyone who has spent much time following journalists on Twitter. But it’s an important empirical reminder that journalists are quite susceptible to the heightened cognitive biases found on Twitter as they process information in public with unprecedented speed.

An RQ1 read: What’s the Point of News? by Tony Harcup

This is part of an occasional series of summaries by RQ1 readers of notable recent books on news and journalism. This month’s summary is from Zhong (Dan) Zhang, a doctoral student in journalism studies at the University of Sheffield. If there’s a recent research-oriented book on news or journalism that you’d like to write about, let us know!

Fake news, biased news, news fatigue, diminished public trust in news media and not to mention doing journalism in such a polarized world … for journalists and journalism students, this is absolutely not a golden age for doing journalism. However, this can be a right time for someone to stand out and make this statement: news matters.

Tony Harcup’s 2020 book What’s the Point of News reiterates a fundamental but important argument: The value of news is to serve the public good. This is not some sort of meaningless idealistic call or pipe dream from a journalism scholar; rather, drawing on alternative journalism theories and practices in different social circumstances, Harcup clearly states that serving the public good is possible, and also necessary, for news media, and there are definitely some ways to achieve that.

“Twenty ways of making a difference,” “Six criteria for news values” — all the specific tips like these will be helpful for the news industry to make an improvement and for journalists to examine their news reporting, even when facing such a political and economic world that impose various constraints on news production. For pessimistic people in our society who believe journalism is dying, those stories in this book about how theoretical arguments about journalism can be applied in practical work will act as a cardiotonic, sending an inspiring message: Journalists do not quit yet, and you should not either.

Research roundup

“Who, what, and how: Identifying judicial constructions of journalism.” By Jared Schroeder, in Journalism Studies.

Who is a journalist? It’s a question that seems innocuous at first glance, but it gets all kind of complicated when you think about how it has been thrown up in the air in the digitally networked era. And yet, these definitions are crucially important, not simply to scholars (like us) trying to make sense of the shifting boundaries of news and what they mean for the role and practice of journalism in society, but also and especially to the legal system. It is judicial definitions of journalism in U.S. state and federal courts, for example, that shape who gets to enjoy reporter privileges and other press-specific protections.

Schroeder’s article closely examines judges’ efforts to classify what counts as journalism and who qualifies as a journalist — and how those determinations have become increasingly complicated as courts face “a rising tide of cases that have challenged them to interpret laws that have traditionally been reserved for journalists, but are being called upon by all manner of publishers.” For example, can a poster on a message board get shield-law protections? Can political action groups identify as news organizations to receive FOIA fee exemptions? Are bloggers journalists? (OK, you thought that last one was a debate we abandoned lo these many years ago, but the distinction matters in a defamation case.)

Schroder argues that “in articulating rationales for their decisions, jurists, in a very pragmatic sense, have provided a separate and relatively unexplored discourse about journalism in the networked era.” And what does that discourse suggest?

Through close readings of U.S.-based judicial proceedings, Schroeder finds that jurists “constructed a discourse that communicates their understanding of journalism as being defined by the processes and practices newsgatherers follow in creating reports, the nature and public-good intent of the publisher, and the journalistic credentials of those who seek newsgatherer’s protections” (emphasis original). Judges, Schroeder notes, constructed this way of defining journalism not out of a broader worry about its social purpose or its survival in the digital era; rather, theirs was a practical desire to “rationalize decisions in which they had to conclude whether a publisher qualified for protections that have historically been associated with traditional journalism.”

In all, the article contends that these judicial evaluations matter because they reinforce the need to hold fast to journalism’s intent and processes: that is, its public-service orientation (who is it for?) and its basic practices (what does it do?) such as accuracy, fairness in reporting, original content, and sourcing. Importantly, too, the judicial discourse aligned with Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel’s famous book in arguing that journalism is “not defined by technology” — that matters of intent and process are agnostic of the tools involved.

“Forgiving the news: The effects of error corrections on news users’ reactions and the influence of individual characteristics and perceptions.” By Jakob Henke, Stefanie Holtrup, and Wiebke Moehring, in Journalism Studies.

All news organizations make mistakes from time to time, and respectable ones will own up to them and publish corrections accordingly. While there has been research on news accuracy vs. errors for many decades, there has been comparatively less study of news users’ reactions to such errors. This is surprising given the generally low level of trust that people have in news across many countries and the presumably cynical feelings that audiences may develop after spotting errors in news coverage.

In this research paper, the authors not only conducted two experiments to investigate how users respond to errors in the news, but they did so with a twist: They brought into play, among other factors, concepts from the psychology of forgiveness to explore if a person’s willingness to accept apologies and forgive “transgressions” (in this case, a transgression of expectations about news accuracy) might be related to their willingness to forgive journalistic mistakes.

Indeed, the authors found that trait forgiveness — a person’s general ability to forgive transgressors — can serve as a useful predictor of how people engage with news and the errors that appear in the news. However, the paper also notes with some concern that “these results indicate that journalists are, at least partially, at the mercy of their audience: With every error published in the news, there is a non-zero chance that less forgiving news users will lose faith in the news to provide them with an accurate account of current events.”

It’s not all bad news, though. This research discovered that “correcting errors and apologizing for them has positive effects on accepting and excusing errors.” This suggests that journalists could accomplish something just by being more transparent and contrite in the way they approach their audience (e.g., see Jacob L. Nelson’s argument for “journalistic humility”).

“Injecting disinfectants to kill the virus: Media literacy, information gathering sources, and the moderating role of political ideology on misperceptions about Covid-19.” By Porismita Borah, Erica Austin, and Yan Su, in Mass Communication and Society.

Two years into the pandemic, there is no shortage of concern about false information — about fake causes and cures, for example — that continues to circulate widely online. Setting aside for the moment whether “infodemic” is the right term to characterize the situation, it’s nevertheless true that Covid-related fakery has been a key focal point of ongoing research about misinformation and social media.

This study sought to bring together what the authors see as a uniquely important combination of factors that may be connected to people’s susceptibility to fake information about the virus: (1) a person’s methods of gathering information, (2) their media literacy, and (3) their political ideology and its moderating influence on the first two factors.

The authors find that “conservatives, younger individuals, information gathering from social media, conservative media use, and information gathering from Trump were positively associated with Covid-19 misperceptions. On the other hand, information gathering from government organizations such as the CDC and scientists were negatively related to Covid-19 misperceptions.” Perhaps that’s not terribly surprising, given the politicization of the pandemic, and yet it’s worth noting that political ideology couldn’t explain everything: disinformation, the authors note, appeared to “work” on liberals who were not well equipped with media literacy abilities.

“Social media metrics in the digital marketplace of attention: Does journalistic capital matter for social media capital?” By Jieun Shin and Katherine Ognyanova, in Digital Journalism.

This study opens with an important question for news organizations trying to strategize about social media and the unique opportunities and frustrations that it provides: “Is social media a mere popularity contest where clickbait websites have more advantage over reputable news sites? Or is it a marketplace of ideas in which high-quality content rises to the top?”

Taking a cue from Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory and its emphasis on cultural capital, the authors looked at how two different types of “journalistic capital” — brand reputation and site quality — might be connected to “social media capital” (defined here in terms of audience size as well as audience reach through sharing on Twitter).

By analyzing social media metrics drawn from the entire population of Twitter users and a representative sample of U.S. Twitter users, the authors find that a news organization’s journalistic reputation is, indeed, a reasonable predictor of its social media capital.

That’s the good news.

Now for the not-so-good news: “News site quality, however, was not significantly associated with social media metrics. In fact, the quality of news sites was at times related negatively to social media capital” — which meant that, all things being equal, news from low-quality sites tended to get more retweets than news from high-quality competitors. And this pattern was especially evident among politically conservative users.

What does this mean? For one thing, the authors say, “it implies that, like other brands, news media heavily rely on reputation as an important intangible asset” — and such reputations matter when moving to the social media realm.

But reputation also isn’t everything. As the authors sum up, “the finding that news quality does not correspond to social media capital on Twitter is worrisome because it can be a signal that underlying dynamics of social media engagement are polluting the news market.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Research roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No wonder they’re quitting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Testing the real-world impact of partisan news

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

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

Who’s to blame for this state of affairs?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Research roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Mirjam Gollmitzer, a researcher at Université de Montréal, argues in her new Journalism Studies article, “Laboring in journalism’s crowded, precarious entryway: Perceptions of journalism interns,” scholars have often viewed journalism internships as key sites of socialization into the professional norms and values of journalism. This, as scholars typically see it, is where journalists gain access to the tacit knowledge of journalism’s “community of practice” in exchange for low (or no) pay and transient employment.

Gollmitzer has a darker read on what happening sociologically in internships. As she argues, interns’ low/no pay, uncertain status, and long hours aren’t something exchanged for socialization; they are the socialization. That is, internships serve to reinforce to interns the marginal and precarious nature of employment in the industry they’re about to enter. And interns are being acclimated to these journalistic labor conditions all while they grind out their internships in the hope that they’ll lead someday to stable and satisfying jobs.

Gollmitzer bases these conclusions on interviews with 10 young journalists in Canada and Germany who have each completed at least two internships. It’s a relatively small sample, but yields some rich data and fascinating insights. She finds interns who are starved for mentorship and training, with their experiences marred by haphazard interactions with time-strapped colleagues and arbitrary decisions by supervisors. This, she argues, limits the effectiveness of the “community of practice” socialization model for internships, since there often isn’t enough structure for them to meaningfully socialized into journalism’s community norms and values.

Instead, what they’re left with is invitations to self-exploitation, as they assign themselves difficult tasks to fulfill vague employer expectations. “The tacit assumption,” she writes, “is that workers, not employers, are tasked with making the internship a success.” Interns are forced to rely on their own resources to make it through, whether it’s a side job, a car (sometimes without reimbursed expenses), or parents’ help with rent. Lack of access to these resources only widens the already gaping socioeconomic divide between some interns and the industry they hope to enter.

Gollmitzer draws on the concepts of “hope labor” and “aspirational labor” to explain why interns accept such conditions. Stuck in a crowded, demanding entryway to their desired profession, interns hang on because they hope the experience will get them better jobs that have higher pay and greater security. But what Gollmitzer says they’re actually learning in their internships is how to get used to the type of industry conditions in which those desired work situations may never come. It’s a bracing picture of what early careers look like in a creative industry in economic tumult.

Research Roundup

“Is social media killing local news? An examination of engagement and ownership patterns in U.S. community news on Facebook.” By Benjamin Toff and Nick Mathews, in Digital Journalism.

Local news in the United States is in dire straits: even some three-quarters of Americans say they pay attention to local news coverage at least somewhat closely, the supply of (and funding support for) quality local news is rapidly dwindling in many places, leading to “news deserts” in some especially underserved communities. And even while social media open new pathways for news delivery, allowing local news organizations to reach audiences where they are these days, the reality is that the average time spent with news on such platforms is a mere fraction of the total time people spend with digital media.

This study from Toff and Mathews is motivated by a desire to better understand the two forces that are presumed to be driving this diminishment of local news: first, the impact of increasing consolidation in media ownership; and, second, the influence that digital platforms and their economic incentives may have in driving editorial decision-making away from local coverage — or what some have called the “Facebook problem” or the “platformization of news.”

The authors, using a dataset of 2.4 million Facebook posts produced by local U.S. news organizations in 2018 and 2019, found evidence that both forces contribute to shaping how much (and what type of) local news circulates online. For example, they discovered that news organizations owned by publicly traded companies, in comparison to other kinds of local news organizations, are the most active on Facebook and generally are rewarded with more audience engagement.

Incidentally, though, it’s those same news outlets owned by chains and conglomerates that are more likely to post repurposed content, including wire service material, which suggests they may be substituting national content for local fare. What’s more, the study found that “particular types of content — namely national, ‘hard news’ stories — generate relatively higher rates of online engagement, all else equal, compared to local, ‘soft news’ stories, potentially disincentivizing posts about local affairs.” In sum, ownership matters, but so does the unique metric-driven nature of the social media platforms themselves, each of these factors shaping the relative quality and circulation of civically valuable local news and information.

“‘I know which devil I write for’: Two types of autonomy among Czech journalists remaining in and leaving the prime minister’s newspapers.” By Johana Kotisova and Lenka W. Císařová, in The International Journal of Press/Politics.

Speaking of media ownership, when news organizations go through particularly jarring changes at the top — ones with thorny political implications to boot — how do journalists respond? To what extent do they perceive a challenge to their autonomy as journalists, or their ability to act with the independence that is essential for journalism to function?

This study explored two rather different understandings of professional autonomy through a case study of Mafra, a Czech media house bought in 2013 by Andrej Babiš, who several years later the Czech prime minister. The authors interviewed 20 journalists — half of whom stayed with the media house after the acquisition and half who chose to leave.

From the interviews, it became apparent that the two decisions — to stay or to go — reflect two different ideas about autonomy: autonomy-as-a-practice and autonomy-as-a-value. Importantly, this wasn’t an issue of people getting different treatment. As the authors write, “The leavers were neither subjected to influence from the owner more than the remainers nor were the remainers isolated from it. The two groups’ experiences did not differ: both the groups knew that the owner (directly) or his people (indirectly) at times tried to interfere in the newswork.”

So, why did some leave and some stay? It seemed to turn, the authors found, on how the journalists imagined and attempted to enact a sense of autonomy. “The remainers stressed individual, practically construed autonomy and were ready to stand up for it.” Autonomy, for them, was an individual matter and could be engaged even within challenging organizational settings. By contrast, the leavers “valued a more general and abstract notion of autonomy as a principle that distinguishes ‘good’ journalism from ‘bad’ journalism … and their walkouts were gestures of protecting it.”

“News you can use to promote your interests: Media ownership forms and economic instrumentalism.” By Timothy Neff and Rodney Benson, in Journalism Studies.

Continuing a theme of media ownership this month, this next study argues that while ownership arrangements have often been studied, relatively little attention has been paid to a particular aspect of news coverage: “economic instrumentalism.” This type of coverage, the authors say, “directly or indirectly advances the economic interests of the owner, top investors, and allied companies and individuals to the potential detriment of the public.”

In effect, Neff and Benson sought to understand how different forms of media ownership might be connected to the relative frequency and positivity of mentions about owners, donors, and other allied business interests.

Through a sample of 19 U.S. news organizations that allowed them to compare promotional forms of economic instrumentalism, the authors discovered several key things. For one, stock market conglomerate-owned media show off more frequent (and more flattering) promotional economic instrumentalism. But there are exceptions: “Similar to previous studies, CBS, a relatively small conglomerate with an illustrious professional history, mentions and praises its owners far less than almost any other outlet in our sample.”

They also found that competition may provide “a critical counterweight to promotional economic instrumentalism.” As they point out: “Our quantitative and qualitative comparisons of MinnPost–Minneapolis Star Tribune and The New York Times–Washington Post suggest that competing outlets bring to light aspects of their competitor’s ownership that might otherwise remain hidden. Diversity of ownership forms may increase the critical scrutiny provided by competition.”

Finally, this bit of context they note is important to remember: on a day-to-day basis, owners are hardly mentioned at all, and less than 10% of those mentions are positive. And yet… “a few well-timed, prominently placed, and positive mentions may be enough to achieve economically instrumentalist goals.”

“When the right protests: How journalists cover conservative movements.” By Rachel R. Mourão, in Journalism Practice.

Research on how journalists cover social movements and protests has long found that the news media’s norms and routines generally lead to patterns of press coverage that delegitimize activists by disproportionately highlighting spectacle and violence and by defaulting to official viewpoints as compared to more carefully acknowledging marginalized perspectives. This pattern is so enduring that it has been called the “protest paradigm.”

Mourão’s study offers a twist by asking: When, how, and why might protest coverage actually aid in the legitimation of a movement — for example, when a movement takes on a return-to-authoritarianism tone? With the aim of understanding how reporters in the Global South cover right-wing demonstrations, at a moment when conservative populist/nationalist movements are growing around the world, Mourão focused on the case of Brazil.

Through a mixture of methods, combining content analysis and interviews with journalists reflecting on the coverage, this study found three conditions that led to news legitimization of right-wing protests: (1) the movement fit within a broader political clash between elites; (2) it was “sympathetic to the state’s repressive apparatus”; and (3) it had clear leadership and identity. “These conditions, which favor right-wing demands,” the author writes, “drove legitimizing coverage even when reporters viewed the movement with skepticism.”

“Artificial intelligence practices in everyday news production: The case of South Africa’s mainstream newsrooms.” By Allen Munoriyarwa, Sarah Chiumbu, and Gilbert Motsaathebe, in Journalism Practice.

Many newsrooms in North America and Western Europe are adopting forms of artificial intelligence or at least dabbling in what AI might do to automate or argument reporting practices and news products. This has contributed to various debates what all of this means for journalists’ roles in relation to machines, or the extent to which news audiences are aware of — and put their trust in — AI-generated content. But this discussion has largely overlooked whether or how AI has been appropriated by news organizations in Africa or other regions in the Global South.

This study, based on interviews with journalists and editors, found a varied but nevertheless discernible and methodical uptick in the use of AI in South African newsrooms (though, not surprisingly, such technologies were limited to the largest and best-resourced organizations). There is accompanying concern among journalists: “This ‘AI-phobia’ is driven by fear of job losses, ethical issues around AI, its efficacy in the democratic process and the costs of adopting AI for newsrooms in Africa.”

While those sentiments are similar to ones expressed by journalists in other (Global North) studies examining the roll-out of automation and AI in newsrooms, the authors in this case note a key difference in the South African context: Journalists there link the appropriation of AI with their ability to contribute to democracy and accountability, raising important questions about whether (or how) developments in AI help or hinder the democracy-furthering work of journalism.

“Debates about AI in newsrooms,” the authors conclude, “should factor in the peculiar role of journalism in emerging democracies and the unique difficulties of their trade in the Global South.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Research roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Covid-19 news and a new perspective on news avoidance

From the moment the pandemic hit in full force in March 2020, it was clear that its seemingly all-encompassing magnitude was having a seismic impact on many people’s news consumption habits. Conversations on and offline routinely included discussions of how we were either unplugging from the news or being sucked in more deeply than ever. (Or both!) We even began using a new word — doomscrolling — to capture the mesmerizing continual intake of fear- and despair-inducing news on our devices.

The pandemic bores on, but the implications of that initial shift in news consumption remain cloudy. How do we fit what happened to news consumption over the past year and a half into what we’ve known about it for the past several decades? And will the changes in our news habits during those overwhelming first few months have any long-term ramifications?

Two studies published this summer look at exactly those questions. Both studies used remarkably similar methods — open-ended qualitative questionnaires conducted early in the pandemic — to study news consumption patterns during the pandemic. In the first, Dutch scholars Marcel Broersma and Joëlle Swart were interested in the formation of news habits. We know a lot from prior research about how habits shape news consumption, but much less about how they’re formed or changed in the first place.

Broersma and Swart wanted to find out whether a major disruption to everyday life could change news habits or form new ones, and what factors could help determine whether that happened. They used an open-ended questionnaire of 1,293 Dutch news users during April and May 2020, then conducted 22 follow-up interviews later that summer and fall.

They found five groups of users based on their responses to the pandemic. Two reduced news consumption — stable news avoiders and followers turned avoiders — with the latter initially using more news, then avoiding it based on the emotional weight and feeling of helplessness it produced. Two increased news consumption — frequent news users and news junkies — adding new routines that lasted at least a couple of months. (One group, the stable news users, didn’t change its habits.)

So, what determined which people ended up in each group? There were several interconnected factors, led by the degree to which the pandemic affected their everyday routines. That is, those for whom the pandemic continued to obtrusively affect their daily lives were more likely to develop new, increased news habits. Social contexts had an effect as well: Those whose friends and family were discussing the pandemic more often were more likely to stick with new news habits.

Emotions played a major role, too, but more ambiguously. Pandemic-induced anxiety led to both less and more news consumption in different cases, and emotional investment in the news more generally led to new habits. Ultimately, people needed more than just a disruptive event to change their news habits; they needed consistent practical and emotional rewards from consuming Covid-related information to give it staying power as a routine.

Beyond this broad overview of changes in news habits, a second study, by Norwegian scholars Brita Ytre-Arne and Hallvard Moe, dug into patterns of news avoidance prompted by the pandemic and its interplay with news consumption. Ytre-Arne and Moe gave an open-ended questionnaire to 550 Norwegian news users in March and April 2020, looking particularly at their strategies for managing the flood of pandemic news.

Ytre-Arne and Moe found an overall pattern that resembled Broersma and Swart’s followers turned avoiders — a brief period of intensified monitoring of Covid-19 news that simply couldn’t be sustained, prompting both information overload and emotional drain.

Ytre-Arne and Moe were most interested in what people did as they came to terms with the unsustainability of their new news consumption habits. They began to pull away from news, but did so strategically, combining avoidance with periods of more intensive news consumption. Some set time-based parameters for avoidance — avoiding the news except for certain times each day — and others set content-based parameters, limiting themselves to government press conferences or the like.

There’s lots more to both these papers (including our first academic definition of doomscrolling in the latter), but the sharpest takeaway may be Ytre-Arne and Moe’s conclusion regarding news avoidance. They challenge the notion that news avoidance is necessarily problematic, arguing that in this case (and likely others), it’s a thoughtful, strategic part of news consumption more broadly, not its irresponsible or anti-democratic opposite.

“We are all, at times, news avoiders,” they conclude. So it’s time to understand this type of situational news avoidance “as meaningful and situated, as inherently human rather than inherently problematic.”

(On a related note regarding news consumption during the pandemic: Seth and co-author Jacob L. Nelson published this summer an article in New Media & Society — “Only ‘sheep’ trust journalists? How citizens’ self-perceptions shape their approach to news” — that explored how U.S. news consumers made sense of news during April-May 2020. Through interviews with a broad cross-section of 60 American news consumers, they found that people “believe journalism generally suffers from issues of bias, but that they are savvy and independent-minded enough to see through those biases to find the truth.” This inflated sense of confidence can lead people to do their own fact-checking — because they have such little trust in journalists — even if such efforts lead them worse off informationally in some cases. Ultimately, the authors concluded that “people’s approach to and trust in news is as dependent on what they bring to the news as it is on what news brings to them.”)

Research roundup

“What is valuable journalism? Three key experiences and their challenges for journalism scholars and practitioners.” By Irene Costera Meijer, in Digital Journalism.

At a time when news organizations increasingly rely on memberships, donations, subscriptions, and other forms of audience-driven engagement to survive, a critical question looms: What is it about news that is truly valuable — that is worth paying for in time, attention, or both?

There is, perhaps, no better scholar to address that question than Irene Costera Meijer, who has done as much as anyone in the field to shape and chronicle the ongoing “audience turn” in journalism studies and whose research helps us better understand the subtle nature of news experience — as opposed to a counting-based approach to measuring news consumption alone.

In this article, Meijer develops the concept of Valuable Journalism by conducting what she describes as a meta-analysis of more than 20 audience-focused research projects since 2005, which includes input from more than 3,000 respondents. By emphasizing what people experience in news as truly meaningful and valuable — rather than what is recognized as “important” or “quality” or “popular” — Meijer shows how Valuable Journalism can be manifest in three key ways: learning something new, gaining recognition, and enhancing mutual understanding.

What does this mean for journalists? Meijer outlines how reporters and editors, in seeking to facilitate more valuable experiences for readers and viewers, might reflect on what she classifies as “six virtues of audience attentiveness”: accuracy, sincerity, listening, hospitality, being a good friend, and keeping a proper distance.

“Fatigued by ongoing news issues? How repeated exposure to the same news issue affects the audience.” By Gwendolin Gurr and Julia Metag, in Mass Communication and Society.

Keeping with the theme of how audiences experience news — and avoid it as a coping mechanism in some cases — this study considers the impact of extensive news coverage on a particular issue over a prolonged period. What happens when people are exposed to a single, seemingly never-ending news topic for weeks, months, or years?

The authors used a triangulation of methods — involving having people record their feelings in diaries as well as interviews with the same people — to explore how Swiss news consumers experienced the ceaseless coverage of Brexit in 2019. The results reveal just how maddening the experience of Brexit drama was for many news consumers (and I’m sure many of us can relate): the redundancy of the coverage led to feelings of annoyance, anger, and boredom that led to negative evaluations of the news media (for lacking depth or novelty, for its sensationalized quality, etc.). These reactions, in turn, were associated with behaviors such as news avoidance.

The authors conclude that such news fatigue from overly repetitive coverage can have downstream consequences on political engagement, such as what people know about politics and how willing they are to trust the press.

“Writer movements between news outlets reflect political polarization in media.” By Nick Hagar, Johannes Wachs, and Emőke-Ágnes Horvát, in New Media & Society.

The question of political polarization in digital news consumption has long been a hot-button question surrounding so-called filter bubbles and how to “burst” them by tweaking algorithms, developing improved recommendation systems, or encouraging different user behavior (even as evidence, we should point out, strongly indicates that social media filter bubbles aren’t really so concerning as conventional wisdom would suggest). This study takes an intriguing twist by sidestepping questions of media consumption or distribution and instead focusing on production: namely, “structural production forces driving partisan leanings.”

Analyzing thousands of stories from 13 digital news outlets (some left-leaning, others right-leaning, etc.), the authors track the “movement patterns” of contributors (journalists, freelancers, and political actors who wrote the stories) as well as the nature of the content they produce. “By constructing a cross-outlet network purely based on contributor movement patterns,” they write, “we show a clear partisan divide within the digital news ecosystem.” Even for journalists who ostensibly adhere to professional codes of impartiality, they often stay true to the partisan bounds of the organizations they are writing for, the authors find.

Why does this occur? “Somewhere within the editorial process of pitching, selecting contributors, assigning stories, and producing news coverage,” the authors suggest, “a dynamic arises that structurally prefers contributors whose publishing histories ideologically align with a publication’s own. This may arise from institutional policies, from individual editors’ preferences, or from the pitching process of individual contributors.”

Among other intriguing findings: much like Yochai Benkler and colleagues discovered, the authors here encountered a similar network structure of news media — “a loosely connected group of left- or center-leaning outlets, a dense core of right-leaning outlets, and a very little activity between.” And, they found that topics less related to politics were more common for contributors who moved between various clusters, which might suggest that more politically neutral topics could be a more effective entry point for eventually facilitating more cross-cutting political exposure.

“Independent or a political pawn? How recipients perceive influences on journalistic work compared to journalists and what explains their perceptions.” By Magdalena Obermaier, Nina Steindl, & Nayla Fawzi, in Journalism.

Journalists in most Western democracies believe they are largely autonomous; in their view, there are rather few political or economic agendas shaping their coverage. But do audiences see it the same way? There is evidence to suggest that many readers and viewers actually assume the reverse: that journalism is driven by political interests or a desire to make money. In such a situation, it’s little wonder trust in media is so low.

This study evaluated the degree to which audience members perceive influences on what journalists do, how those attitudes compare to those of journalists, and which variables might explain such (mis)understandings. A survey of German news consumers, in combination with the Worlds of Journalism study that maps journalist attitudes across many countries, indeed found that audiences imagine stronger effects on reporting than journalists do, especially with regard to economics and politics.

Interestingly, these differences between news audiences and journalists “became more distinct as recipients displayed higher levels of anti-elitism, selective exposure and media literacy.” This suggests that a variety of influences — one’s anti-elite populist attitudes, or a preference for self-confirming media sources — can play a part in how one comes to skeptically perceive the press and its relative autonomy.

“The familiarity paradox: Why has digital sourcing not democratized the news?” By Aviv Barnoy and Zvi Reich, in Digital Journalism.

“Making sources visible: Representation of evidence in news texts, 2007–2019.” By Mark Coddington and Logan Molyneux, in Journalism Practice.

“Sourcing pandemic news: A cross-national computational analysis of mainstream media coverage of Covid-19 on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.” By Claudia Mellado, Daniel Hallin, Luis Cárcamo, Rodrigo Alfaro, Daniel Jackson, María Luisa Humanes, Mireya Márquez-Ramírez, Jacques Mick, Cornelia Mothes, Christi I-Hsuan Lin, Misook Lee, Amaranta Alfaro, Jose Isbej, and Andrés Ramos, in Digital Journalism.

We conclude with a three-part look at the nature of news sources — how they have changed (or not) in the digital era as well as in the recent pandemic period.

First, Barnoy and Reich take up a question that remains unresolved in the research literature: Amid all the transformations brought on by social media, smartphones, and other digital developments, to what degree do journalists rely on new types of sources? And, if so, are these sources verified in new kinds of ways, and with what kind of consequences? (Etc.)

The authors present what they call first-of-its-kind longitudinal evidence about the role that digital news sources have played during the past 15 years. (“To be considered digital, a source must follow two requirements: (1) it must be an informative entity that cannot be identified as a specific person (by the reporter) and (2) this entity is accessed via the Internet [the world-wide-web, email, social networks etc.].”) Their study focuses on reconstructions of 1,594 news items, produced by a representative sample of Israeli journalists, and categorizes the more than 5,000 sources in those stories.

The result: “We found that digital sourcing did not open the gates for alternative voices. Moreover, digital sources are verified less than non-digital ones and are mentioned less often in final publications.” But — and this is important — follow-up interviews with journalists found that this was because of “the traceable footprints of digital sources that can protect journalists against future attacks, thus making these sources reliable.” Ultimately, they suggest that until journalists overcome a “familiarity paradox” that leads them to prioritize longstanding elite sources, it is unlikely that technology alone will lead to meaningful widespread change in democratizing news sourcing.

The next article, by Mark and co-author Logan Molyneux, examines a related but rather different question about sourcing in the digital age: How much of it is aggregation versus other types of so-called “original reporting,” and how have things changed over time? They conduct a content analysis that compares newspapers to digital-native news sites at three time points (2007, 2013, and 2019), and find that while “non-mediated attributed speech” (i.e., interviews) remains the most widespread form of evidence, it has become less and less common over time — even among newspapers that so commonly rely on interviews for data.

What is increasing is the use of mediated speech appearing elsewhere (e.g., social media, documents, press releases, etc.). “The result,” they write, “is a news text that is more visibly assembled from other published texts. Given this greater distance from evidence, journalistic claims of originality are more contested than in the recent past.”

Interestingly, they find that newspapers and digital news sites, once quite different from each other in sourcing habits, are increasingly behaving like the other: e.g., newspapers more readily cite social media posts as evidence, and digital sites are mimicking newspapers’ use of firsthand and secondhand evidence as opposed to heavy aggregation of other news organizations as sources.

Finally, the article by Mellado and colleagues examines how sources were used in coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic, based on an analysis of social media posts by mainstream news organizations in several countries (Brazil, Chile, Germany, Mexico, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S.). Mellado’s team conducted a computational content analysis of nearly 1 million posts published to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter by 78 sampled news outlets during 2020.

One important question they sought to address had shades of the Barnoy and Reich study above: “whether news organizations might pivot towards greater pluralism in the kind of voices represented in their posts in social media, adapting to a more popular, participatory logic commonly assumed to characterize social as opposed to traditional media.”

The answer, it turns out, was no. “One finding,” they write, “stands out as particularly striking: the dominance of political sources across countries and platforms,” reinforcing a longstanding orientation toward elites as well as a strong role for the state in influencing pandemic-related news. Health sources were also prominent, and the composition of sourcing varied by country and in connection with pandemic intensity. Notably, a “significant diversity of sources, including citizen sources, emerged as the pandemic went on.”

How journalists decide when to trust numbers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Research roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wenzel and Crittenden combined an ongoing ethnography of the two projects with online focus groups of 26 community residents and leaders conducted last April, during the early days of the pandemic. Among the community members, they found frustration with sensational news and a lack of actionable information in local media, even as they consumed more local news during the pandemic. Community members also expected local journalists to act as advocates for the community, holding authorities to account on the community’s behalf.

Both Germantown Info Hub and Kensington Voice did much of what community members were calling for. Kensington Voice, located in a predominantly Latinx neighborhood, asked local news organizations if they could translate important Covid-19-related stories into Spanish and post them on their website or distribute them through community organizations, focusing on actionable information. Local media enthusiastically allowed them to translate and republish stories, thanks to a local news collaborative project called Resolve Philly already in place.

In the predominantly Black neighborhood of Germantown, Info Hub held a virtual town hall for representatives of community organizations to brainstorm collaboration possibilities to meet community needs amid social distancing requirements. In doing so, they acted more directly as a connector than news organizations typically do, connecting organizations to each other rather than simply to themselves.

In both examples (and in other citywide collaborations the study describes), Wenzel and Crittenden offer concrete instances of the value of having newsroom staff that reflect the populations an organization covers (for example, the idea for Kensington Voice’s translation project came from a Latina staff member who was translating Covid-19 stories for her father). They also note that this kind of direct collaboration with community organizations challenges journalists’ traditional notions of objectivity.

But most of all, they find that it’s crucial to have community-centered, collaborative structures already in place when a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic arises. The roots for those collaborations need to run deep, Wenzel and Crittenden argue, and they truly need to have the community’s needs at their heart.

Research roundup

The head and heart of news avoidance: How attitudes about the news media relate to levels of news consumption. By Stephanie Edgerly, in Journalism.

News avoidance is a hot topic in research and something we’ve covered previously. It’s the apparently growing phenomenon of people sidestepping news despite the plentiful choices that abound. In this study based on a survey of U.S. adults, Edgerly seeks to uncover why some people have especially low levels of news consumption and what might be done about it. For example, she asks, are news avoiders simply uninterested, do they not understand how news works, or is avoidance driven by emotion?

First, news has to matter to people. Edgerly finds that people’s level of interest in politics is “highly predictive” of their overall news use. While this is not surprising, and is not something easily remedied by news organizations alone, “one approach to slowing the growth of news avoidance is for journalists to learn how to tell newsworthy stories (about politics, for example) in ways that better convey its impact on certain segments of the population — like young adults and individuals from lower socio-economic backgrounds.” (See Edgerly’s previous research on seeking and avoiding news among young people.)

Second, news is a turn-off for people who lack self-confidence in navigating an increasingly abundant and complicated media environment, the study finds. If the “cognitive costs” of navigating information seem too high, people check out. This, too, may be challenging for journalists to address, but it points to opportunities for simply improving the presentation of news: How can news be organized and packaged in a way that is less daunting and more inviting?

One curious finding: “Perhaps surprisingly, the emotional toll of news (e.g., news fatigue, upset feelings) did not explain variation in overall levels of news consumption.” This suggests that trying to reduce these feelings among audiences may not really move the needle on overall news consumption, or that perhaps regular news consumers have developed ways of managing (e.g., through occasional detox) what is an inevitable feature of our current high-choice media environment.

How does local TV news change viewers’ attitudes? The case of Sinclair Broadcasting. By Matthew S. Levendusky, in Political Communication.

This study takes up an intriguing question: Can local television news — still some of the most-watched and most-trusted form of news for many Americans — shift viewers’ views on national politics?

The growth of Sinclair Broadcasting, which reaches roughly 40% of U.S. households as the second-largest owner of TV stations, offers a chance to test this question because it focuses more on national topics than its local TV counterparts. And, of course, because of Sinclair’s decidedly right-wing political slant — a bias made infamous with a variety of “must run” segments that local stations must air regardless of their misgivings about the conservative messaging from corporate.

The results are fairly straightforward: “Using data on Sinclair’s acquisition of local TV stations between 2008 and 2018, I show that living in an area with a Sinclair-owned TV station lowers viewers’ approval of President Obama during his tenure in office, and makes viewers less likely to vote for the Democratic nominee for president.” That is, even though viewers’ underlying predispositions and liberal-vs.-conservative self-identifications didn’t appear to change during the period, the mere presence of Sinclair in a market seems to have persuaded roughly 6% of the local audience to disapprove of Obama and become less likely to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. This “persuasion rate,” which the author presumes is an undercount, is about half the effect of Fox News availability — but still notable because it is occurring via local rather than national media.

The trust gap: Young people’s tactics for assessing the reliability of political news. By Joëlle Swart and Marcel Broersma, in The International Journal of Press/Politics.

What does it mean to trust the news? Anyone reading this is well aware of the many studies documenting the decline of public trust in journalism happening in many countries, in part linked to withering trust in institutions generally as well as increasingly fractured political climates (for a good overview, see these reports from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism). But there’s still so much we don’t fully understand — for example, as this study notes, “the apparent paradox of why people may consume news that they do not trust and may not trust the news that they use.”

Swart and Broersma’s study, based on interviews with 55 young people from 10 nationalities living in the Netherlands, offers a window onto the everyday tactics and thought processes that go into how people — and young people in particular — approach political news and make sense of the complexity surrounding what to trust and why.

Based on the results, the authors develop a taxonomy of nine tactics that came up again and again — consistent across gender and cultural backgrounds — for assessing the reliability of political news. These ranged from prior knowledge and endorsements by others to factors such as news design/tone/format and one’s gut feeling. Overall, the results suggest that “rather than critically evaluating news through comparing and checking sources, users often employ more pragmatic shortcuts to approximate the trustworthiness of news.” And young people were more apt to see trust as nonbinary: for them, it was not a matter of figuring out if a source could or couldn’t be trusted, but rather whether it was “trustworthy enough.”

One sobering finding: “Our interviews confirm that increasing youth’s media literacy and awareness of misinformation may actually be countereffective,” which reinforces danah boyd’s argument about the misguided way that media literacy is being taught to today’s youth. “Emphasizing the risks of trusting what might be misinformation led some of our interviewees to conclude that no source of political information could be trusted.”

Changing the beat? Local online newsmaking in Finland, France, Germany, Portugal, and the U.K.. By Joy Jenkins and Pedro Jerónimo, in Journalism Practice.

Audience perspectives on paying for local news: A regional qualitative case study. By Angela Ross, Libby Lester, and Claire Konkes, in Journalism Studies.

While the shift from legacy to digital has been challenging for legacy news providers of all kinds, it has been especially hard for local media — their business models undercut by shrinking advertising revenue, less direct access to readers in a disaggregated media environment, and a precarious transition to a digital subscriber base that can offset losses elsewhere. Two recent studies offer a view of these dynamics both from inside and outside the news organization.

First, Jenkins and Jerónimo, in their study based on interviews with managers, editors, and journalists in five countries (Finland, France, Germany, Portugal, and the U.K.), show how local news media appear to be defying their innovation-averse tendencies and (finally) gaining traction in shifting their newsroom structures and cultures to adapt to digital-centric needs. This includes developing new beats, positions, and mind-sets. The upshot is that newsrooms now “increasingly prioritize products that do not mimic other digital platforms but are differentiated at the local level.” Finding and cultivating such distinctiveness in an increasingly crowded information market will be key to the future success of any news media.

Second, in their case study of regional Australian media, Ross and colleagues examine the factors that contribute to people being unwilling to subscribe to their local news organization. They zero in on a particular dilemma: Because audiences can too readily bypass the paywall and aren’t convinced that the cost and hassle of a subscription is worth it, news organizations need to fundamentally rethink their relationship with their community in light of what is known about successful brand marketing.

“We argue people need to feel they are a partner in an interdependent relationship where they receive something they value in return for committing to the ‘brand,’” the authors write. “We identified several obstacles to the development of such a relationship. Some participants said the news stories lacked context or quality. Some were disappointed in the lack of diversity of perspectives and others bemoaned what they perceived as content of reduced quality. It was not viewed as ‘extra’ to what they could access for free.”

In an echo of the community-centered journalism we described earlier, Ross et al. conclude that local news publishers need to realize that primarily covering community elites and assuming that qualifies as community advocacy isn’t going to cut it anymore. “They must make courageous attempts to connect with the broader base to understand people’s problems, concerns, fears and triumphs.”

Willing but wary: Australian women experts’ attitudes to engaging with the news media. By Kathryn Shine, in Journalism.

Research has consistently found that women are under-represented as sources in news coverage. The picture looks especially dire in the realm of “expert communicators,” where women can make up less than 1 in 5 of the sources in areas such as science and medicine. But while previous studies have focused on the quantitative tallying up of representation in the news, they haven’t offered a close-up picture of the qualitative experience of women who are cited in the news. As such, Shine’s study, based on interviews with 30 women professors in Australia, seeks to uncover: What do expert women think about being interviewed as sources?

While nearly all of the women experts in the group were willing to be interviewed by a journalist and generally described having positive experiences with reporters, “they referred to various factors that may act as deterrents,” the study found. “These included a lack of confidence, a reluctance to appear on camera, time constraints and a lack of understanding about how the news media operates.”

Such difficulties can rather easily be minimized by journalists with a bit of proactive work in setting up interviews, Shine suggests, which will ultimately lead to greater representation for women experts as one interview leads to follow-up opportunities. This could mean providing more detail up front about the nature of the interview, the time investment involved, and the likelihood of the expert being quoted. “Although many journalists are reluctant to provide questions in advance,” Shine writes, “this is a strategy that is likely to make female sources more comfortable about agreeing to an interview. Even a brief sample of questions would give the source a better understanding of the nature of the interview and what the journalist was seeking.”

The imagined audience for news: Where does a journalist’s perception of the audience come from? By Mark Coddington, Seth C. Lewis, and Valerie Belair-Gagnon, in Journalism Studies.

We talk a lot in this newsletter about how journalists think about their audiences, and about how, from the flip side, people think about the press. Perhaps it’s because we care a lot about these concerns as researchers ourselves. In this study we just published, we tried to bring some clarity to this question: If journalists produce news with a certain image of the audience in their mind, where does that image come from?

Previous research suggests that journalists often use people they know (e.g., family, friends, bosses, frequent sources) as stand-ins for the “imagined audience” they have in mind when they envision who they’re writing for. But digital media present new and different ways of knowing audiences, whether through audience metrics that aggregate and signal reader tastes or in more direct encounters with people on social media. Through a survey of 544 U.S. journalists, we found that journalists’ views of their audience spring from a complex variety of sources, each carrying different consequences for how journalists evaluate their audiences — e.g., whether they imagine their audience as smart/rational or similar to them. Why does this matter? Because, for example, the type of low-brow content often derided as clickbait rests on a view of the audience as irrational masses motivated by emotion, so it’s important to untangle how journalists working for commercial media, let’s say, may come to envision the audience differently than those working for nonprofit outlets.

The persistence of print — and why it matters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Research roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Caliphate and the limits of performative transparency

Transparency is one of those journalistic values that’s tough to argue against. It’s been championed in Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel’s The Elements of Journalism, numerous academic studies, and waves of journalism discourse on social media and the conference circuit.

And there’s a lot to like about transparency. It can give the audience new insight into what has long been an unnecessarily opaque news production process, and at a time when trust in media is cratering, it can be an effective way to establish the authority of journalists’ methods.

But Gabriela Perdomo and Philippe Rodrigues-Rouleau argue that this strategic use of transparency to establish authority isn’t necessarily in service of good journalism. This “self-celebratory transparency,” they say, omits as much as it conceals, carefully constructing a form of faux-revelation that’s meant not so much to let the audience into the newsmaking process as to construct an appearance of legitimacy.

Perdomo and Rodrigues-Rouleau, both scholars at the University of Ottawa, turned out to have picked a chef’s-kiss perfect example for this phenomenon: The New York Times’ Caliphate podcast, which was largely retracted in December after its main character was charged in Canada with lying about the narrative (becoming an executioner for the Islamic State) at the podcast’s heart.

For their new study in the journal Journalism, “Transparency as Metajournalistic Performance: The New York Times’ Caliphate Podcast and New Ways to Claim Journalistic Authority,” Perdomo and Rodrigues-Rouleau conducted their analysis of Caliphate’s transparency strategies before that scandal emerged. But this fall’s revelations fit perfectly into the model of transparency they described — more a performance meant to reinforce the journalists’ cultural primacy as truth-tellers than an exercise in accountability or self-critique.

The authors broke down three different types of transparency performances in the podcast: revealing the journalistic process, constructing the reporter’s persona, and reaffirming the journalistic culture. They argue that the inclusion of bits of process, from sound checks to sorting through documents to tracking down a source, are meant to reinforce the hard work behind the journalistic process and set a boundary between themselves and interlopers. The construction of the reporter’s persona through emotion and personal anecdote are meant to humanize, authenticate, and soften the professional authority being established. And the reaffirmation of journalistic culture invokes professional standards at key moments to reassure audiences that Caliphate’s journalists belong to that culture and to allow them “to define the journalistic principles, norms and performances they wish to be judged by.”

Perdomo and Rodrigues-Rouleau conclude that those elements add up to a strategy that purports to bring the Caliphate’s journalists closer to their audiences, but instead serves to elevate themselves above those audiences. Performative transparency does this, they argue, by reasserting the journalists’ expertise while concealing the type of narrow vision and lack of editorial oversight that ultimately doomed the project.

This study is not the first to take a skeptical view of journalists’ incorporation of transparency — others have made similar arguments — but Perdomo and Rodrigues-Rouleau add an important element to our understanding of how transparency is deployed. They make the case that journalists use transparency to access their own professional culture and reaffirm it both to justify their decisions to themselves and to establish their authority to the public.

Those strategies can be effective — at least they seemed that way for Caliphate for a while. But as the Caliphate case’s conclusion illustrates, their ultimate effectiveness in building authority “is out of the hands of those performing transparency,” the authors argue. “It is for the public — including other journalistic actors — to grant that authority.”

Research roundup

Here are some other stories that caught our eye this month.

The news expectation predicament: Comparing and explaining what audiences expect from the roles and reporting practices of reporters on right-wing extremism. By Philip Baugut and Sebastian Scherr, in Journalism.

What do people expect of journalists? That question is at the heart of a long line of research and public discussion about journalism, expressed in works like Jay Rosen’s 1999 book What Are Journalists For?, and in research such as Paula Poindexter et al.’s 2006 study that explored whether local news consumers expected journalists to be a “watchdog” or a “good neighbor.”

Philip Baugut and Sebastian Scherr add an important dimension to this research in two ways: first, by examining audience expectations when it comes to news coverage of right-wing extremism, and, second, by doing so with a novel set of methods involving a representative sample of the German population in combination with an independent sample of Muslims living in Germany to identify potential differences in perceptions among the groups.

They find that Muslims, who are more likely to be threatened by right-wing extremists, “expect a more active role from journalists and even accept controversial reporting practices to combat right-wing extremism.” These controversial practices included disguising one’s identity, using wiretapped conversations, and paying or pressuring informants for information. But, as the authors note, “if journalists exclusively followed their Muslim audience’s expectations, they would run the risk of ignoring (non-Muslim) mainstream society’s expectations of a moderate and less active political role for journalism, thus putting journalists in a predicament in terms of role expectations.”

Meanwhile, like those in the Muslim sample, more left-leaning respondents also expressed an expectation for more controversial reporting practices, but that only went so far. Among left-leaning people who were afraid of right-wing extremism affecting them personally, they actually expressed a seemingly paradoxical desire for journalists to hold fast to their traditional approaches of reporting. “Among these more left individuals,” the authors write, “fear of terrorism seems to activate the argument that a democratic society should not give up its core principles, including the professional autonomy of its journalists and ethical reporting practices.”

Following and avoiding fear-inducing news topics: Fear intensity, perceived news topic importance, self-efficacy, and news overload. By Carin Tunney, Esther Thorson, and Weiyue Chen, in Journalism Studies.

Evolutionary psychology suggests that humans make sense of the world through mental models guiding emotional responses and behaviors, and these are adapted to circumstances over time and passed along through genes. One of the most important of these “modules” of thinking and reacting is based around fear, triggering how people attend to fear-inducing stimuli — which, in the case of news consumption, could be particularly distressing news about terrorism, pandemics, plane crashes, and the like. While fear can attract attention (we inherently want to understand the threats around us), it can also repel, as we turn away from particularly upsetting information. This may help explain, in part, the kind of “news avoidance” described in the research literature as a growing body of scholarship focuses on how and why people tune out news in the era of smartphones and social media.

Against this backdrop, Tunney and colleagues applied an evolutionary psychology approach to examining when people follow fear-inducing news issues and when they avoid them. The results of a U.S. national survey show that fear is an important factor in both following and avoiding behaviors, but “so is the perceived significance of the threat, perceived personal efficacy to cope with the threat, perceived news overload, and news consumption habits.” Unsurprisingly, one’s sense of fear is strongly associated with news avoidance, even if fear appears to be mostly unrelated to one’s following fear-inducing topics such as news coverage of mass shootings. “This suggests that fear fails to affect following scary topics,” the authors note, “but it strongly increases avoiding them, which may explain why people report increased news avoidance.”

But Tunney and colleagues offer a new wrinkle to the study of news avoidance, the research around which suggests that there are heavy news users and light news users and that avoidance, naturally, is more often prominent among the latter. In this study, though, it was the heavy news consumers who reported both following and avoiding fear-inducing topics, which might suggest that these people are more aware of and intentional about how they seek out or steer clear of news depending on the issue.

Audiences behind the paywall: News navigation among established versus newly added subscribers. By Ingela Wadbring and Lovisa Bergström, in Digital Journalism.

A key problem has afflicted scholarly research on news audiences: Media organizations and analytics companies like Chartbeat have truckloads of data about how people behave on their sites — how long they spend, what they read, what they share, etc. — and yet very little of this information is ever shared with academic researchers, for reasons involving privacy, proprietary secrets, and the lack of trust that too often exists between the industry and the academy in journalism.

It’s refreshing to see, then, how Ingela Wadbring and Lovisa Bergström were able to peek behind the paywall curtain and offer an important study of audience activity among subscribers by drawing on commercial data not usually available to researchers (“traffic data generated from tracking scripts and stored in Amazon Redshift”).

The results, based on a case study of the Swedish national quality newspaper Dagens Nyheter, are rather clear: Whether someone pays for a subscription or is taking advantage of a free trial offer makes a big difference. “Readers with a paid subscription show a higher degree of activity, greater involvement, and more varied usage than do newly added readers with a free subscription, independent of age.” By contrast, subscribers on free offers show a lower degree of activity, and this is particularly true among younger people.

And, given the growing interest these days in understanding the nature of subscriber “churn” as news organizations seek to maximize reader revenue amid declining support from advertising, this study offers at least one key clue: Transitioning trial subscribers into paid subscribers requires helping them establish a habit of regular news reading activity early on; a low degree of activity almost certainly means they will drop off when the trial runs out. This is not especially surprising, of course, and yet it underscores the precarity of trying to make news business models work in an era of rapidly expanding subscription expectations and competition across apps, streaming platforms, and other media services.

Journalists on Covid-19 journalism: Communication ecology of pandemic reporting. By Mildred F. Perreault and Gregory P. Perreault, in American Behavioral Scientist.

A year into the Covid-19 pandemic, we can take a moment to reflect on how all of our lives have changed in the past 12 months. For journalists, as for many of us, day-to-day routines have been adapted to fit work-at-home constraints, even as restrictions begin to ease in various states and regions. But beyond emptying out newsrooms and upending the logistics of making news, how has the pandemic influenced the wider “discursive construction” of journalism — that is, the way in which journalists talk about their work, situate themselves relative to others in society, and articulate the essence of what they do to (and for) the public?

This study explores this question by examining how journalists talk about covering Covid-19, based on interviews conducted in the early and later phases of the pandemic in combination with a close reading of trade-press accounts (which, in full disclosure, included some articles in Nieman Lab, where this newsletter is republished). In particular, the authors used the framework of “disaster communication ecology” and focused on “how journalists discursively constructed their ecological relationships during the Covid-19 pandemic (with sources, their communities, information, and personal networks) as well as how they placed themselves within the ecology in relation to crisis information.”

Taking this ecological approach, the authors emphasize the multi-faceted nature of journalists’ path through the pandemic — from the personal vulnerability and fear they experienced to shifts in how they managed sources to the heightened struggles to combat misinformation. For example, the study found that journalists “saw the pandemic as laying bare the endangered nature of journalism, which was a result of pressure from access to sources as well as market forces. This jeopardized journalists’ ability to fulfill their responsibility to society.”

At the same time, though, journalists felt a renewed sense of personal responsibility to provide the public health information that would keep people safe, and to do so against skepticism and misinformation. To be a journalist during Covid-19, one of the interviewees put it, is “to stump for the truth and to stump for critical thinking and to try to teach the importance of those things.” Moreover, the authors describe how journalists imagined their work in relation to that of other experts seeking to communicate clearly and authoritatively amid the crisis. “Journalists remind each other that they must be scientific in their process,” the authors write, “just as the scientists and doctors are with the disease.”

The promoter, celebrity, and joker roles in journalists’ social media performance. By Claudia Mellado and Alfred Hermida, in Social Media + Society.

At the mention of “journalistic ego,” one might think of a particularly puffed-up anchor or celebrity journalist. But in this study, Claudia Mellado and Alfred Hermida describe this notion in light of scientific notions of the “self,” and how we come to develop an opinion about ourselves and our importance in the world. We each perform that self, or that ego, for others through carefully crafted presentations. Perhaps nowhere is one’s self-image more assiduously staged than on social media, which, in this case, provide a space for individual journalists to show their identities (or ego) more readily than they can do so via traditional media forms.

Taking the “journalistic ego” as a starting point, Mellado and Hermida offer a useful framework for examining and measuring how journalists perform three distinct roles on social media: promoter, celebrity, and joker. “While these roles are independent, they can overlap in practice, allowing journalists to perform multiple roles simultaneously. They can also be present alongside more traditional professional roles that can be expressed on social media, with journalists switching or combining roles depending on the circumstances and the specific moment in time.”

The role dimensions that Mellado and Hermida propose can be used in future research to examine patterns in how journalists use social media, even down to “the presence of specific performances within a single social media post.” For example, consider how social media is increasingly understood as an “influencer economy”; as such, they say, “it is important to investigate whether and how far established journalism is losing ground to influencer-driven information, and what this means for how audiences receive, interpret, and trust content on social media. Such research would help to identify how established journalistic practices are shaped or are shaping an influencer-driven media space, as well as considering the consequences on journalistic practices.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Research roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Panama Papers and the process of journalistic impact

The notion that journalism is important to democracy because it holds powerful officials accountable to the public is one of those Journalism 101 ideas that’s so familiar that it becomes taken for granted in how journalists think about and justify their work. Of course journalism’s watchdog role is crucial, we say, because…Watergate, and remember that City Hall scandal a few years ago, and if journalists didn’t keep an eye on public officials, who would?

But thanks to the increased influence of foundation funding, some parts of journalism have been forced to make the case for their democratic role more explicit, as “impact” has become a watchword in nonprofit journalism. But as many news organizations become more concrete in how they document their impact, one question has still received relatively little attention: How exactly does that impact happen?

Here’s the standard way we think about it: Journalists (often investigative) produce evidence of malfeasance by public officials, which leads the public to demand action at the ballot box or public forums, which in turn pushes institutions and officials toward change. That folk theory has been termed the “mobilization model,” but how often does it work that way in practice?

That’s the question that Magda Konieczna and Lucas Graves are out to answer in a study out this month in the journal Journalism Studies. They examine what seems to be a perfect example of the mobilization model at work: In 2016, the Panama Papers revealed that Iceland’s prime minister, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, had had an offshore shell account set up on his behalf which had been a secret creditor to failed Icelandic banks. Massive public protests ensued, and Gunnlaugsson resigned within days of the story breaking.

But even in an apparent textbook case of journalistic impact like this one, Konieczna and Graves find that the mobilization model wasn’t a great explanation for what happened. The mobilization model, they argue, is embraced by journalists because it’s a way for them to reconcile two competing values: the detachment they feel is necessary to adhere to the objectivity norm, and the ideal that their journalism should move the public to keep its leaders accountable. So in this model, journalists only present the facts of misbehavior to the public, and the public produces the accountability.

But in piecing together the investigation’s full timeline through interviews, Konieczna and Graves find that the journalists involved made proactive decisions at various points before publication that were meant to maximize the story’s impact. This happened most notably in the decision to confront Gunnlaugsson in a dramatic TV interview, but also in more structural decisions about how to report the story and whom to partner with.

It’s not new for journalists to structure stories to maximize impact; every editor who’s held a bombshell story for the Sunday A1 slot in the paper knows this. But Konieczna and Graves argue that journalists do more to try to engineer a story’s impact than they’re comfortable acknowledging. They also find that our notions of journalistic impact tend to overemphasize the role of public opinion, and underemphasize the behind-the-scenes actions of political officials — in this case, even before the public was aware of the story. And the Icelandic journalists involved noted the limits of the impact for even a story like this: Gunnlaugsson has since been re-elected to Parliament, and no public officials have served jail time as a result of the story.

That’s not to say this type of work isn’t incredibly important. But Konieczna and Graves argue that especially through the rise of nonprofit journalism, journalists have begun to more actively try to produce and account for impact in their work. Their study is a call for journalists’ and scholars’ thinking about how that impact plays out to catch up with those changes.

Research roundup

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

“Interlocking among American newspaper organizations revisited: ‘Pressure from the top’ and its influence on newsroom and content.” By Adam Saffer, Deborah Dwyer, Jennifer L. Harker, Christopher Etheridge, Mariam Turner, and Daniel Riffe, in Mass Communication and Society.

Corporations are believed to become “interlocked” when a person from one organization joins the board of directors of another. This facilitates collaboration, knowledge sharing, the mutual influencing of practices and policies in organizations — and a degree of “environmental stability,” which, Adam Saffer and colleagues note in their study, can be a desirable thing in an uncertain climate.

But interlocks in the media industry, in particular, raise concerns about the independence of journalists who work within corporate structures that may become more monolithic as interlocks grow in number and influence. “Today’s media companies,” Saffer et al. note, “seem to be more intertwined than ever. But are they? Do these ‘interlocks’ affect editors and the content journalists produce?”

Saffer’s team took on these questions through a series of methods to explore connections among newspaper organizations and corporations: first, a network analysis to study the interlocks among newspaper companies’ directors; second, a survey of editors of newspapers owned by those companies to evaluate the possible downstream influence on the newsroom from the board and parent company; and, third, a study of news coverage of directors and their affiliated organizations for newspapers where editors perceived a degree of pressure from the top.

What they found is not encouraging. As the authors write, “The network analysis results suggest a monolithic interlocking structure that previous scholars feared. For one third of survey respondents, corporate parents and the boardroom were seen as influencing the newsroom.” These “pressured editors,” they say, sensed stronger influence from above — in the form of the board, owners/managers, and business interests — in comparison with editors who did not perceive such constraints. “So, how did pressured newsrooms cover ownership and directors? Routine coverage of directors and their affiliated organizations was lacking. Disclosure of a relationship between a director or affiliated organization and the newspaper was disclosed half of the time and traditional journalistic scrutiny was applied less than half of the time.”

Yikes. Clearly, there is room for improvement.

“The ‘Serial effect’ and the true crime podcast ecosystem.” By Lindsey A. Sherrill, in Journalism Practice.

If you’re into podcasts, you’ve likely come across the “true crime” genre that has exploded in popularity since the hit show Serial first arrived in our earbuds in late 2014. That show, which came at a time when podcasting was still finding its way into the mainstream, revisited a murder trial and conviction through a series of episodes that were downloaded millions of times, and Serial remained in the iTunes Top 100 for more than three years. The show’s acclaim contributed to a so-called “Serial effect,” as producers churned out many similar true-crime dramas for listeners, as part of a larger wave of true-crime genre offerings via books, documentaries, and streaming platforms.

This cluster (or “population”) of true-crime podcasts, Lindsey A. Sherrill argues in this study, represents a media genre that operates as a kind of ecological system in its own right — a “niche” in the broader media environment that helps shape “the evolution of [these podcasts’] organizational form and the way they are perceived by their creators, fans, and other media outlets.” Sherrill’s study, based on organizational ecology theory, therefore offers two contributions: a population analysis to assess the “demography” of the true-crime podcast genre and the breadth of this phenomenon (including founding dates and failures), plus a content analysis to examine how news media may grant public legitimacy to these podcasts over time.

One key finding: For all the talk about Serial and its influence, Sherrill’s population analysis suggests that a more nuanced set of environmental factors were at work — such as the inclusion of a separate Apple podcast app becoming native to iOS 8 in 2014. At the same time, Sherrill’s qualitative analysis of news content about true-crime podcasts suggests another twist: “While Serial may not have been as important as one might be led to expect from a population growth perspective, it appears to have been a major factor in the legitimation of the true crime podcast from a fringe, ‘salacious’ sub-genre to a mainstream force.”

“Platform civics: Facebook in the local information infrastructure.” By Kjerstin Thorson, Mel Medeiros, Kelley Cotter, Yingying Chen, Kourtnie Rodgers, Arram Bae, and Sevgi Baykaldai, in Digital Journalism.

Our next study this month draws attention to the ways that digital platforms are rapidly changing how information about politics is produced and circulated in local communities. Kjerstin Thorson and colleagues do this by developing a concept they call local political information infrastructure. This notion captures two key dynamics: (1) the expanding set of actors who play an increasingly central role in producing political information at the local level, beyond the news media alone, and (2) the influence of algorithms and networks that shape everyday practices of posting and sharing — for example, by encouraging media producers to focus on vitality and engagement in order to ensure visibility and reach on social media.

Much of this, of course, is happening on Facebook, where nonprofits, neighborhood groups, local governments, and a variety of related actors are working outside of local news media to connect with audiences directly. This is, in effect, rewiring the path by which many people learn about local politics. Through a two-part study that brings together a topic-modeling analysis of Facebook posts from news and non-news actors in a mid-sized Midwestern city in the U.S. in combination with interviews with communication managers for libraries, city services, local nonprofits, etc., the authors illustrate “the ways in which local news media are increasingly displaced from the centre of local political information infrastructures, while Facebook moves to take up a central infrastructural role.”

One troubling finding that emerges: As these local government agencies and civic organizations become increasingly dependent on Facebook for communicating with their local audiences, “the platform shapes the kinds of content that they produce, producing a bias away from posts about potentially challenging local policy and politics topics.” This suggests the need for more research about the “platformatization” of politics, not just at the national level that gets so much attention but also at the community level where the infrastructure for local information about politics in one’s own backyard seems up for grabs as never before.

“Trump, Mueller investigation, and alleged Russian election meddling: Russian media coverage in 2017-2019.” By Dmitrii Gavra and Pavel Slutskiy, in American Behavioral Scientist.

At this point, the Special Counsel investigation of into the 2016 U.S. presidential election and Robert Mueller’s subsequent report on Russian interference that was made public in 2019 may seem like a lifetime ago because it happened in a pre-pandemic time. But given the stakes involved in the investigation, including the impeachment proceedings that followed after them, it’s important to capture how such matters were covered in the news — particularly when examined through the lens of the Russian press. Recognizing that Russian journalists are not entirely independent of the state and are likely to take certain cues from the government, what can we learn from the Russian media discourse about these events?

Dmitrii Gavra and Pavel Slutskiy offer some answers through a content analysis of three widely followed daily newspapers and one official TV channel. Their first note in the conclusion section may surprise some people: In the context of the Mueller accusations, the Russian press expressed “no obvious sympathies for Trump … or, if there were any, they came to naught. The positive nomination of Trump in the provided publications is minimal.”

But if Russian news media were mostly indifferent toward Trump, they were emphatic in rejecting any idea of Russian interference in the election, painting the whole scenario as a domestic political struggle among U.S. elites they saw as caught up in Russophobic paranoia. The authors note: “One of the strong rhetorical denial strategies used by Russian media to convince their audience of the groundlessness and absurdity of claims of Russia’s interference in the U.S. elections was negation by mockery, irony, dismissive humor, and sarcasm.” Even more, Gavra and Slutskiy show how the media portrayed the U.S. political system not only as irrational and ridiculous but also dangerous to Russia and the rest of the world, contributing to a public-opinion climate in Russia that is increasingly hostile in its attitudes toward the U.S.

“Perceptions versus performance: How routines, norms and values influence journalists’ protest coverage decisions.” By Summer Harlow and Danielle K. Kilgo, in Journalism.

Protests against racism and police brutality were a key feature of 2020, and news coverage of such protests across the United States served to highlight what researchers have called the protest paradigm — or the longstanding tendency among mainstream journalists to marginalize protesters and their concerns, frame activists in mostly unflattering ways, and generally uphold the status quo. Not every protest is covered this way. For example, research found that stories about women’s marches and anti-Trump protests tend to give more voice to protesters than those about Black Lives Matter or indigenous people’s rights. But the protest paradigm remains an enduring feature, as we’ve discussed in previous editions of this newsletter.

Yet, there are questions as to exactly how journalists’ newsmaking routines, values, norms, and so forth might contribute to the negative patterns seen in the protest paradigm. While most research on news coverage of protests focuses rightly on the content of that coverage, Summer Harlow and Danielle K. Kilgo went a step further in this study by combining a survey of newspaper journalists with a content analysis of their reporting on protests, looking for possible connections between journalists’ perceptions and behaviors.

Among other things, Harlow and Kilgo found that journalists did not emphasize a protest’s underlying cause or its potential impact on society as factors that influence their decisions regarding how to cover the protest. “This is noteworthy,” they write, “because it implies a journalistic blindness — in the name of objectivity — so that all protests, in theory, would be covered the same, regardless of the cause, as long as they met the threshold for newsworthiness and as long as there weren’t other more important news events occurring at the same time.” This was one of several gaps between perceptions and practices that Harlow and Kilgo found. “Even as respondents suggested their coverage decisions were not made according to protest topic, the content analysis indicated otherwise.”

Indeed, in line with the authors’ other research, there was a “hierarchy of social struggle” evident in the coverage, with protests about racial injustice, for example, receiving more delegitimizing coverage (e.g., more use of the riot frame or an emphasis on confrontation). Overall, journalists thought they did a better job covering protests than the content analysis demonstrated, suggesting the need for greater self-reflection about what protest coverage should look like moving forward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Research roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What work is required to build public trust in journalism?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Research roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new test of the influence of national news coverage

It’s clear that in the U.S., the news industry is steadily becoming more national. Local news continues to be hollowed out, and national news organizations are taking an ever-greater share of news revenue and audience attention. But the most prominent national news organizations’ spot at the center of journalists’ vision of their own profession isn’t new at all. When scholars began looking sociologically at the process of news production in the 1950s, they found local journalists taking their cues on news judgment from the national news. Timothy Crouse’s classic portrayal of the 1972 campaign press corps, The Boys on the Bus, depicts a handful of national news organizations with an almost comically outsized influence on the rest of the field.

We’ve seen journalists follow the national leaders for long enough that few scholars have stopped to ask why. Does national news coverage give a story the imprimatur of newsworthiness in journalists’ eyes? Or is it more of a competitive instinct that drives the pack? Perhaps the largest news organizations’ influence is overstated, and they simply have more resources to get there first to stories that other journalists would’ve found newsworthy anyway.

Those are the ideas that drive Hans J.G. Hassell’s new study, “What makes news newsworthy,” published this month in The International Journal of Press/Politics. Hassell conducted a survey-based experiment with 1,510 American newspaper journalists to find out whether journalists considered a story more or less newsworthy based on whether they were told that it was published by a national newspaper, a mid-sized metro, a local newspaper, or nowhere at all.

Hassell found that journalists saw a story published by a national newspaper as being no more newsworthy than the same story having gone unpublished, or published by a mid-sized paper. This held true whether journalists were asked about newsworthiness in the eyes of their audiences or their editors — the latter intended as a measurement of competitively motivated perception.

But while national publication didn’t give stories a newsworthiness boost, local newspapers fared even worse. A story published by a local newspaper was seen as less newsworthy than one that hadn’t been published at all. Not surprisingly, this effect was stronger among journalists who didn’t work for small, local papers.

The study’s findings suggest that journalists’ follow-the-leader approach to national news may not be driven by the fact that it was covered by national news organizations as a sort of newsworthiness “stamp of approval.” Instead, Hassell posits that mimicry of national news may simply be because national news organizations have more resources to lead the way on stories that journalists broadly consider newsworthy, or because those organizations operate under a broader sense of newsworthiness that will resonate with a greater share of journalists.

The scope of newsworthiness may also help explain journalists’ apparently low view of newsworthiness of local newspapers’ stories. Since those newspapers’ sense of newsworthiness tends to be more narrowly defined by geography, journalists may be conditioned to view local newspapers’ stories as irrelevant to their own organizations’ goals. This would especially be the case as national politics increases its dominance over local politics in the American imagination.

Hassell’s study does provide an encouraging indication that journalists’ perception of newsworthiness leans less on the publication decisions of their more prominent colleagues than we’ve thought. But for local newspapers facing an existential crisis, other journalists’ apparent low regard for the newsworthiness of the work they publish could be read as a stinging reminder of their place near the periphery of a field they once were a more prominent part of.

Research roundup

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

“Sourcing diversity, shifting culture: Building ‘cultural competence’ in public media.” By Andrea Wenzel, in Digital Journalism.”

There has been a years-long conversation, intensified in recent months, about how news organizations can make a meaningful difference in diversifying their staffs, addressing race and the newsroom, and more fully including marginalized voices. In this study, Wenzel makes an essential contribution to that discussion by examining — through a year and a half of interviews and ethnography — how a U.S. public media station sought to “shift a culture of whiteness and increase the representation of people of color within both staffing and online and broadcast coverage.”

Wenzel finds some mixed success. Of course, any single initiative, like this foundation-supported effort to help Philadelphia-based WHYY to build “cultural competency,” is unlikely to transform things by itself, but there were some tangible changes. For example, the process of auditing and monitoring sources quoted in local stories allowed journalists to evaluate their routinized forms of quoting traditional authority figures (such as university professors) — practices that tended to over-represent white voices at the expense of a broader range of experts within communities.

At the same time, though, the enduring structures, patterns, and path dependencies of WHYY made it difficult for the cultural competency initiative to institutionalize change. “Many traditional journalistic practices remained in place, along with much of the white editorial leadership and largely white newsroom,” Wenzel writes. Citing French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s theory about fields and how they change (or not), she goes on to write, “For cultural competency practices to undertake the work of ‘transforming the structure of relations of forces’ in the journalism field, the practices would need to become routinized and the structures and positions that support them will need to be strengthened.”

“The voice of the people in the news: A content analysis of public opinion displays in routine and election news.” By Kathleen Beckers, in Journalism Studies.

An important part of news is attempting to reflect public opinion, which journalists do in a wide variety of ways — from polls to person-on-the-street interviews to embedded tweets and more. “These public opinion displays,” Beckers writes, “vary in how explicitly they refer to public opinion, how representative they are of the larger population and how active the role of citizens is.” So, what can be learned from studying a broad sweep of how public opinion is portrayed in the news?

Analyzing nearly 4,000 items in Flemish (Belgian) print and television news media, representing both routine and election periods, Beckers found that journalists take seriously their responsibility to describe public sentiment: about 1 in 5 news items overall and almost half of all election coverage had one or more references to public opinion in some form or another.

But there are a few qualifiers to this finding: First, citizens seem to have little say in this process. “Proactive expressions of public opinion taking place in the real world” — such as protests — receive little coverage, and are covered even less frequently in election news, Beckers notes. Second, journalists’ most common methods for sourcing public opinion vary by media type — vox pops are preferred for television, and general inferences (i.e., claims without precise evidence) are most common in print news — and both of these approaches give journalists “quite some leeway in how to cover public opinion.” Plus, vox pops and general inferences, while certainly convenient, aren’t exactly the most representative ways of expressing the public’s mood.

“The temporal nature of mobile push notification alerts: A study of European news outlets’ dissemination patterns.” By Dawn Wheatley and Raul Ferrer-Conill, in Digital Journalism.

If you’re reading this, odds are that you get news alerts on your phone. Maybe even a lot of them.

Mobile push notifications are a vital (if overlooked) element of news distribution. They offer the chance to reach readers instantaneously and directly (without social media getting in the way), and at various time points to suit people’s on-the-go preferences for getting news during lulls in the day. Such notifications are under-researched in journalism studies, so Wheatley and Ferrer-Conill offer an important accounting — one that focuses especially on whether news organizations “attempt to integrate with existing mobile-user behavior patterns or seek to be a disruptive element, garnering attention when audiences are not typically using devices.”

They analyzed more than 7,000 push notifications from 34 news outlets in nine European countries. They found that, although news organizations do tend to emphasize reliably key moments for news consumption — such as first thing in the morning during commutes or when users have more downtime in the evening — they also tend to spread notifications throughout the day. In this way, they seek to embed themselves in users’ habitual “checking cycles,” capitalizing on how people turn to their phones repeatedly during the in-between periods of the day.

They also found that for-profit publishers tend to use push notifications more often, suggesting a market-focused element to notifications (no surprise there), and the same was true of print outlets compared to online-only ones — indicating, perhaps, a more concerted effort to win back newspaper audiences that were lost in recent decades. Regardless, there is much yet to learn about the rhythms of news notifications and how they figure into the evolving picture of news consumption today.

“Engagement moderation: What journalists should say to improve online discussions.” By Gina M. Masullo, Martin J. Riedl, and Q. Elyse Huang, in Journalism Practice.

The comment sections for news stories are notorious for being dens of vitriol and hostility, particularly when poorly managed or left unattended. When the discussion among readers goes awry, as it so often does on hot-button topics, what are moderators — or journalists, as the case may be at many news organizations — supposed to do in trying to intervene?

In this study, Masullo and team propose the idea of engagement moderation, which they define as “community managers or journalists interacting with commenters to improve the comment threads, rather than deleting comments.” They tested the utility of this concept using an experiment involving a mock Facebook page (because news organizations are increasingly shifting their commenting spaces there), built to appear as if it belonged to the ostensibly unbiased Associated Press. They found that such engagement could help in dealing with incivility, particularly when journalists or community managers used “high-person-centered messages” — that is, messages that acknowledge people’s apparent emotional pain or frustration. Such interventions, they found, led news readers to have “more positive attitudes toward the news outlet’s Facebook page, online community, and handling of incivility.”

“‘Friending’ journalists on social media: Effects on perceived objectivity and intention to consume news.” By Jayeon Lee, in Journalism Studies.

By now, we’re accustomed to journalists revealing more and more of their personal as well as professional selves on social media. It’s a gradual process of transparency, branding, and self-disclosure that has its pluses and minuses, and which raises a host of questions about how news audiences perceive and respond to such behavior.

Lee’s study, based on an experiment with 267 college students, explored how a journalist’s self-disclosure on social media affected the audience’s intentions to follow that journalist’s news updates as well as perceptions about that journalist’s objectivity. When journalists self-disclosed and interacted directly with users, that had the strongest direct effect on people’s likelihood to consume the news they produced. But that intention to follow the journalist was tempered somewhat by negative attitudes that these participants — yes, even young adults — had about the journalist’s objectivity, despite the personal disclosures avoiding partisan politics.

Still, the study’s overall assessment is that the negative influence of weakened perceived objectivity doesn’t offset the positive impact of a journalist’s self-disclosure. This suggests, Lee writes, that “general expectations about professional journalism have shifted, or at least the norms are expanding to accommodate diverse activities happening on social media.” Perhaps that’s true, but exactly how that gets translated into newsrooms’ social media guidelines of the future is yet to be determined.

Much of this research focuses on how the protests are conveyed, explained, and framed by news media. Is it a riot or a matter of resistance? As Danielle K. Kilgo has noted recently, journalists have great power in developing the narrative that comes to define how people perceive social movements.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the “protest paradigm,” a concept that scholars have used to describe how mainstream media tend to “demonize protesters and delegitimize protests,” largely because journalists, out of longstanding routine, often rely on official sources rather than voices of protesters and often use narrative devices that emphasize conflict and the status quo, ultimately marginalizing protesters’ concerns. Much of this research is based on particular countries or contexts, like the episode in Brazil that we noted last month, which has also been the subject of excellent recent research by Rachel R. Mourão. But what can we learn about the protest paradigm around the world more broadly, particularly in a social media era that might counter older patterns of news coverage?

Recently, a team of researchers — Summer Harlow, Danielle K. Kilgo, Ramón Salaverría, and Víctor García-Perdomo — published an article in Journalism Studies that examined 1,438 English- and Spanish-language news stories about global protests shared on social media to develop a typology for making sense of how the protest paradigm works internationally. They found that whether coverage on social media follows or challenges the protest paradigm can be explained by a combination of factors such as type of protest, location of protest, and type of media outlet.

For example, Harlow and team’s typology predicts that alternative media organizations will continue to diverge from their mainstream counterparts in disrupting the paradigm. But they also note that, overall, “protests around the world continue to fight the stigmas associated with marginalizing coverage — media coverage of protests in every region showed few significant differences in patterns of overall adherence to the paradigm and individual frames, devices and sourcing patterns, indicating that protest coverage shared on social media is similar to protest coverage generally.”

This research builds on other recent work by Kilgo and Harlow, based on their analysis of U.S. newspapers, that found a “hierarchy of social struggle” — a pattern by which protests related to racial injustice are more likely to receive negative, delegitimizing, trivializing coverage in comparison to protests about other issues.

Research roundup

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

“Outbreak news production as a site of tension: Journalists’ news-making of global infectious disease.” By Youngrim Kim, in Journalism.

Journalists’ coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic has been under a microscope this year, and this study provides some valuable insights on the journalists’ perspective of this kind of work. Two to three years before the current pandemic, Kim interviewed journalists from the U.S., U.K., and South Korea who covered the Ebola, Zika, and MERS epidemics during the 2010s. She found that the practice of covering global infectious diseases is defined by a series of tensions, perhaps the most significant of which is the tension between ethnocentric values that define newsworthiness based on cultural proximity to the audience on the one hand, and a desire to represent a global disease accurately and focus attention on areas most deeply affected, on the other.

Kim’s study portrays journalists who are often mindful of the need to portray infectious diseases as a global issue, but are constrained by their organizations’ idea of what their audience will find interesting, as well as how diseases have been covered in the past. And as we’ve seen in sharp relief over the past five months, journalists also described a tension between portraying the evidence-based risks of a disease and contributing to an alarmist tendency.

“Improving trust in news: Audience solutions.” By Caroline Fisher, Terry Flew, Sora Park, Jee Young Lee, and Uwe Dulleck, in Journalism Practice.

Journalists and researchers have put a lot of energy into how to resolve the crisis of trust in much of the Western news media find themselves, with some studies indicating that media distrust is rooted largely in partisanship, and others finding that audiences identify their own concerns as being based on inaccuracy and bias. This study, a survey of Australian news consumers, echoes some of latter findings, while adding a few new details.

Fisher and her colleagues asked their respondents about things news organizations could do to improve trust, and found that the most popular solutions involve increasing transparency, especially around conflicts of interest. Reducing bias and opinion in news stories was also popular, but more so among older audiences than younger ones. And in a possible indicator of the intransigence of this problem, those those whose trust in media was low were less open to possible solutions than those who already trusted the media.

“News consumption across media platforms and content: A typology of young news users.” By Sabine Geers, in Public Opinion Quarterly.

The research on “news repertoires” often tries to classify news consumers into groups based on the nature of their news use across platforms. That’s what Geers was doing here, focusing exclusively on young news users, based on a survey of Dutch high school and university students. She found four groups of young news users: Two that have been found in previous studies, news minimalists and omnivores, plus two other types she labeled traditionalists and online news users.

Not surprisingly, she found that minimalists make up the largest portion of young news users, and omnivores are relatively rare. But she also found that a surprisingly large share (around a third) of young people were traditionalists who tended to prefer traditional news platforms like TV and radio. Those traditionalists also consumed online news, but it came via news websites and apps, rather than social media, which were more the preference of the “online news users” group. These traditionalists tended to be men, and to have a higher interest in politics, while the more social media-based “online news users” were more likely to be women and showed more interest in entertainment news. Gender and political interest, Geers found, were larger factors in news consumption than education level.

“Why don’t we learn from social media? Studying effects of and mechanisms behind social media news use on general surveillance political knowledge.” By Patrick F.A. van Erkel and Peter Van Aelst, in Political Communication.

The notion that people who consume news learn something from it is a fundamental assumption to modern journalism, and one with a lot of empirical support (though to varying degrees depending on several factors) over the decades. But that doesn’t necessarily hold for news consumed via social media. As van Erkel and Van Aelst wrote, the evidence so far is ambiguous but not positive for learning from news on social media.

In a survey of Belgian news consumers, they found that consuming news on social media didn’t lead to greater political knowledge, and that news consumption on Facebook was negatively related to political knowledge. But beyond that, they found that more personalized news consumption on social media had no effect on political knowledge, while those who reported more indicators of information overload had lower political knowledge.

The implication, they argued, is that when it comes to knowledge, information overload may be more damaging than often-derided filter bubbles. Neither phenomenon explained the lack of knowledge for people who almost exclusively use Facebook for news, however — van Erkel and Van Aelst suggested that group simply isn’t getting enough news in their diet.

“Precarious professionalism: Journalism and the fragility of professional practice in the Global South.” By Julian Matthews and Kelechi Onyemaobi, in Journalism Studies.

Over the past decade, precarity has emerged as a useful concept to make sense of journalists’ current work environment, marked by threats of layoffs and the instability of freelancing. Matthews and Onyemaobi argue that precarity has largely been deployed as a Western concept, and without much explanation of how it affects journalists’ professional practices. To address those gaps, they interviewed journalists from Nigerian newspapers and developed the concept of “precarious professionalism” to illustrate what happens when precarity meets journalists’ professional ideals.

They found that precarity is more of a permanent state than a recent development for Nigerian journalists — an “ingrained instability,” as they described it. Beyond the instability of work that others have found in the West, they found very low pay, regular harassment (especially of women journalists), and a lack of training or access to technology form the backdrop for work as a journalist. Still, Nigerian journalists continue to hold very high ideals for themselves as professionals, though precarity represents an ever-present challenge to maintaining those ideals, such as when low pay increases the temptation to take bribes.

“Google, Facebook and what else? Measuring the hybridity of Italian journalists by their use of sources.” By Marco Delmastro and Sergio Splendore, in European Journal of Communication.

Delmastro and Splendore set out to measure the level of hybridity in journalism — the degree to which journalists have lost distinction and differentiation among them regarding professional roles and practices. That’s a complex concept to measure, but Delmastro and Splendore looked at it through the lens of journalists’ sources, using a survey to ask Italian journalists about what kinds of sources they typically use.

They found that some pretty strong differentiating factors remain. Journalists who write for less established and digital news organizations were much more reliant on online sources, as were journalists who cover “soft news” topics as well as science and tech. Overall, the use of social media as a source was, as the authors put it, “massive.” TV journalists were more likely to rate Twitter as a heavily used source than even personal contacts. The data, the authors wrote, was additional evidence of journalists’ growing reliance on enormous tech platforms not just for distribution, but information gathering as well.

“Algorithms and journalism: Exploring (re)configurations.” “Journalism from above: Drones, the media, and the transformation of journalistic practice.” By various authors in Media and Communication.

Finally, the open-access journal Media and Communication published two special issues this month that contain a lot of insight for anyone interested in the intersection between journalism and technology. The first, focused on algorithmic journalism, includes papers on social media algorithms’ influence on journalists’ decisions about newsworthiness, audiences’ perceptions of automated news compared with its human-written counterpart, and the work that journalists do to defend their professional roles in the face of increased automation.

The second issue is devoted to drones and journalism, and includes a study of interviews with journalistic drone operators, a survey of public openness to and trust in drones in journalism, and a study of how drones are actually used in journalism now that the hype has (largely) subsided. There’s a lot more to check out in both special issues as well, with some thoughtful work on both topics from conceptual and practical perspectives, and they’re all free to read.

The protest paradigm (as this recent Nieman Lab piece explained well) refers to a mode of coverage in which (predominantly mainstream) news organizations portray protests as illegitimate by emphasizing violence and attributing it to the protesters, and marginalizing the protesters’ grievances. It’s been a useful framework for understanding news coverage of protests, but in an article published last month in The International Journal of Press/Politics, César Jiménez-Martínez complicated the paradigm a bit, in some helpful and thought-provoking ways.

Jiménez-Martínez studied media coverage of Brazil’s widespread protests of 2013, also known as the “June Journeys,” through 43 interviews with journalists from mainstream Brazilian media, alternative media, and foreign outlets. His analysis centered on the attention to violence in that coverage — what he called “mediated visibility of violence.” He argued that media attention to violence isn’t necessarily damaging to protesters, or even a deviation from an idealized peaceful norm of protests. Instead, he showed how mediated violence is an instrument that can be used in a variety of ways. It can undermine the protesters and reinforce the authorities, yes, but it can also be used to question the status quo and support the protesters’ legitimacy.

In the case of Brazil’s 2013 protests, the main factor was who was committing the violence. As Jiménez-Martínez documented, media coverage of the protests shifted toward the protesters’ favor not because of anything the protesters did or didn’t do, but because of violence done to them — widespread videos and photos on social media and traditional media of violent eruptions by military police. In this case, Jiménez-Martínez argued, mainstream journalists used the violence involving the protest not to undermine the protesters and shift blame away from authorities, but to draw sympathy for the protesters.

That’s the kind of thing we’ve come to expect from alternative media, but a real surprise coming from mainstream media — though Jiménez-Martínez said that sympathy was ultimately co-opted by those mainstream outlets’ criticism of the center-left government of the time. Jiménez-Martínez also argued that the protest-supporting alternative media wasn’t as helpful as we might think: Its singular focus on highlighting images of violence by police pulled it toward the same type of sensationalism that has typically plagued mainstream coverage, submerging the protesters’ grievances.

Jiménez-Martínez ultimately found what he called a reversed protest paradigm, in which the news media (especially alternative media, in this case) focus on sensationalism and violence in their protest coverage, crowding out the protesters’ concerns — just as in the traditional protest paradigm. But in this case, the violence was by police, not protesters, so the paradigm was reversed and the protest was elevated rather than marginalized. Still, because of the focus on violence, protesters’ grievances received limited (and confused) media attention.

As Jiménez-Martínez found, the news media’s approach to the 2013 Brazil protests showed that media coverage of the protests can be much more complicated than the common assumption of a demonizing mainstream media and empowering alternative media. Violence, in particular, is a powerful tool that news media can employ for any number of purposes, both constructive and destructive.

Research roundup

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

Subscribing to transparency: Trust-building within virtual newsrooms on Slack. By Rachel E. Moran, in Journalism Practice.

Slack is familiar (perhaps too familiar?) to journalists as the coordination software tool of choice in many newsrooms. In recent years, guided by the assumption that improved consumer trust in news could be achieved through more transparency about news-making processes, news organizations have begun to open their Slack channels — in effect, allowing subscribers or other community members to listen in on the virtual newsroom, in hopes that such efforts lead to enhanced audience engagement. Moran’s article asks: Does this actually work as a trust-building mechanism?

Her case study of the digital news outlet Rantt Media, which opened its Slack channel to subscribers in 2018, showed that “while Rantt argue that their public Slack channels exist as their actual virtual newsroom, the reality of its use (i.e., limited conversations regarding the actualities of news making) suggests differently.” Nevertheless, even if Rantt wasn’t giving subscribers a true view behind the curtain of news decisions, its open newsroom approach was giving readers a clearer idea of who its writers are, particularly in terms of their biases, perspectives, and expertise. This is a successful strategy for Rantt, she said, for two reasons: “(1) it leads to relationship-building, which they have been able to leverage for financial gain, and (2) it appears there does not exist within readers an explicit desire for radical newsroom transparency.”

The upshot is that such experiments — public-facing, virtual modes of news transparency — might have promise for capitalizing on highly engaged “fans” and developing new revenue opportunities. But, as Moran notes, the “price” (in time and resources) of newsroom transparency might be too high for the typical news consumer, who is neither a news junkie nor may have the wherewithal to navigate the information overload pouring from a platform like Slack.

‘We are a neeeew generation’: Early adolescents’ views on news and news literacy. By Sanne L. Tamboer, Mariska Kleemans, and Serena Daalmans, in Journalism.

For decades, scholars have been studying how young adults feel about news. By various accounts, many 20-somethings perceive news — especially newspapers — to be too inconvenient, too time-consuming, or simply requiring too much effort. But what about even younger people, such as early adolescents who are 12-16 years old, a group far less studied in the research literature? What can we learn about their level of news use and news literacy?

This study, based on focus groups with 55 Dutch early adolescents, found that their news consumption is “predominantly passive, possibly due to a lack of intrinsic motivation.” The authors zero in on this question of motivation. Yes, and not surprisingly, these early adolescents saw news as “important, but often as boring, repetitive and negative, and disconnected from youth.” More concerning, Tamboer and colleagues contend, is that simply being knowledgeable about the news and how it works does not automatically lead early adolescents to be critical news users. So, whereas many media literacy programs focus on building knowledge and awareness — helpful as those things might be — the authors argue that actually motivating critical news consumption, helping early adolescents move from passive to active news engagement, is of greater importance.

Dysfunctional information sharing on WhatsApp and Facebook: The role of political talk, cross-cutting exposure and social corrections. By Patrícia Rossini, Jennifer Stromer-Galley, Erica Anita Baptista, and Vanessa Veiga de Oliveira, in New Media & Society.

Political communication scholars have spent a lot of time studying social networking sites and far less examining the role and impact of private messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Facebook Messenger. These chat apps are rapidly growing in use worldwide, but their private nature makes them largely off-limits to researchers, even as these apps have become a notorious hive of misinformation.

In this study of internet users in Brazil — where false and misleading political information circulated widely on WhatsApp in the run-up to the 2018 elections — Rossini and colleagues explored the role of regular users in accidental and purposeful forms of “dysfunctional information sharing” on WhatsApp and Facebook. Their results indicate that on both platforms such sharing occurs frequently (nearly a quarter of people reported sharing misinformation), and yet people also frequently correct one another. However, corrections were more likely to occur on WhatsApp than Facebook, suggesting that the platform — with its privacy, intimacy, and closer social ties — could matter in providing “a sense of safety” that may be necessary for supporting social corrections against misinformation.

Auditing news curation systems: A case study examining algorithmic and editorial logic in Apple News. By Jack Bandy and Nicholas Diakopoulos, in Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media.

Apple News is a widely used news aggregator but one that remains relatively under-studied in research. In this paper, the authors present an audit study of Apple News, with an emphasis on the iPhone app’s algorithmically curated Trending Stories section and its human-curated Top Stories section.

Crowdsourcing data from U.S. users, Bandy and Diakopoulos found relatively minimal personalization of content in the Trending Stories section, and a separate “sock-puppet audit” using a simulator tool showed no location-based forms of content adaptation. Comparing the algorithmic to human approach of organizing news items, the authors discovered that human curation performed better on source diversity and “source evenness.” Additionally, algorithmic curation showcased softer news (e.g., about celebrities and entertainment) while human curation emphasized news about policy and international issues. These differences, the authors said, can be attributed to the “algorithmic and editorial curation logics underpinning the two sections.”

Ordinary citizens in the news. An issue of Journalism Studies edited by Christina Peter and Thomas Zerback.

Finally, this special issue deserves a look for how it sheds light on the role of “ordinary citizens” in the news. This is a topic of growing interest to researchers at a time when journalists increasingly draw on “everyday people” and their voices (think: embedded tweets as vox populi) as source material for news coverage, when comment sections have been shown to influence how people think about popular opinion and news quality, and when populist tensions in media and politics have raised questions about how elites vs. non-elites are included and depicted in the news (and whether such a dichotomy is even helpful to begin with).

In their introduction, Peter and Zerback argue that scholars need a more comprehensive approach for studying how ordinary people are selected and depicted by journalists, considering how such representations connect with things such as the purposes of journalism, the media visibility of citizens, and the role of politics, populism, and democratic or authoritarian regimes. Articles in the special issue focus on, among other things, sourcing strategies of journalists, how citizens are portrayed across international media, the role of citizens in letters to the editor, and how transgender people felt about their interactions with journalists.

Confronting racism through news and activism

We are deeply saddened by recent episodes of murder and violence against black men and women perpetuated by police, reflecting enduring injustices against the African-American community that have been at the center of recent protests in cities large and small around the United States and beyond. In light of these events, we’d like to begin this month’s newsletter by pointing to a new book that is particularly timely and illuminating, one that adds an historical dimension to understanding current issues around race, journalism, and technology.

Last month, Oxford University Press published Allissa V. Richardson‘s Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones, and the New Protest #Journalism. The book introduces the concept of “black witnessing” by exploring the Black Lives Matter movement through the eyes of activists who documented it through cellphones and Twitter, and by connecting BLM to a longer history of African-Americans using news in combination with activism as a vehicle for confronting racism.

If BLM has benefited from a “perfect storm of smartphones, social media, and social justice” empowering activists to expose police brutality that disproportionately affects blacks, the movement also can be seen as part of a broader tradition of media-infused witnessing. Richardson, who is known for her work in mobile and citizen journalism and as an educator who has trained journalists in the U.S. and Africa to report using only mobile technologies, draws together three overlapping phases of terror against African-Americans: slavery, lynching, and police violence. She shows how “storytellers during each period documented its atrocities through journalism,” from 1700s slave narratives that helped inspire the Abolitionist movement, to 1800s black newspapers that furthered the anti-lynching and Civil Rights movements, to today’s use of smartphones to hold police to account.

But even while images and videos can serve a vital role in catalyzing social change, as they have done recently, they also need to be handled with care, Richardson argues. “I call for Americans to stop viewing footage of black people dying so casually,” she said last week in writing about her new book. “Instead, cellphone videos of vigilante violence and fatal police encounters should be viewed like lynching photographs — with solemn reserve and careful circulation.” That is, just as previous generations of activists used graphic images briefly and in the particular context of their social justice activism, “airing the tragic footage on TV, in auto-play videos on websites and social media is no longer serving its social justice purpose, and is now simply exploitative.”

(Elsewhere, you can find a special collection of studies about news coverage of protests that has just been published by The International Journal of Press/Politics; all of the studies are available with free access for the next two weeks.)

Read with reflection, Richardson’s book and many related accounts — such as these studies on Black Lives Matter and journalism published in the past several years — should help us all become more aware about previously unquestioned assumptions, blind spots, or misunderstandings that we may have personally or that may be evident collectively in our society surrounding race, inequalities, and media representations.

Research roundup

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

Do online, offline, and multiplatform journalists differ in their professional principles and practices? Findings from a multinational study. By Imke Henkel, Neil Thurman, Judith Möller, and Damian Trilling, in Journalism Studies.

For a couple of decades, journalists and academics have wrestled with the question of whether online journalists are a different breed from their offline counterparts — and if so, how. Henkel and her colleagues used the massive international survey of journalists called Worlds of Journalism to provide us with the most comprehensive answer to that question yet.

They looked at four areas of journalistic values — public service, objectivity, autonomy, and ethics — and found that online and offline journalists largely hold the same professional ideology. There were a few key differences within that picture: Journalists at digital-native news organizations found the watchdog role less important, but felt more freedom to select and frame news stories. Journalists at online branches of legacy news organizations also described an entertainment role as more prominent and saw influencing public opinion as less important than their offline counterparts did.

A first-person promise? A content-analysis of immersive journalistic productions. By Kiki de Bruin, Yael de Haan, Sanne Kruikemeier, Sophie Lecheler, and Nele Goutier, in Journalism.

Immersive journalism — often associated with virtual reality, augmented reality, and 360-degree video — has attracted a lot of enthusiasm in the industry and the academy, but this study highlights the sizable gap between the promise of this form of news and its actual practice. De Bruin and her colleagues identified the unifying elements of immersive journalism as immersive technology, immersive narratives, the possibility of user interaction, and sense of presence. They then looked at about 200 immersive journalism examples from around the world to find out how many of them had those qualities.

It turned out that very few of those projects included the core elements the researchers had identified. The only interactive element in the vast majority of productions was to change the viewpoint, and the user only had anything other than a strict observer role in 8% of the projects. Right now, they concluded, “technologies seem to be developing at a faster rate than journalistic norms and routines connected to their use, leading to immersive productions that do not fulfill the promise of first-person experiences.”

Fake news practices in Indonesian newsrooms during and after the Palu earthquake: A hierarchy-of-influences approach. By Febbie Austina Kwanda and Trisha T.C. Lin in Information, Communication and Society.

When journalists are debunking disinformation (or “fake news”), how do their practices during that debunking process compare with their journalistic routines during ordinary time? Kwanda & Lin asked that question regarding Indonesian journalists, looking in particular at two disinformation stories that arose in the aftermath of the 2018 Palu earthquake and tsunami.

Kwanda and Lin analyzed news content and interviewed journalists to find that while Indonesian journalists say they adhere to Western values like independence and serving as a watchdog, they tended to rely heavily on official government statements about disinformation. This was especially the case for more traditional news outlets. Journalists at independent media sources typically took a more nuanced and multi-sourced approach to disinformation, suggesting that the organization has more influence on disinformation-debunking routines than individual beliefs do.

Asymmetry of partisan media effects?: Examining the reinforcing process of conservative and liberal media with political beliefs. By Jay D. Hmielowski, Myiah J. Hutchens, and Michael A. Beam, in Political Communication.

The reinforcing spirals model proposes the partisan echo chamber effect as a circle: Partisan beliefs lead to more partisan media consumption, which reinforces more partisan beliefs. Hmielowski and his colleagues predicted, as many of us have, that this effect is greater among conservatives than liberals. Using a three-wave survey of the same participants during the 2016 U.S. campaign, they found their prediction was…correct-ish.

On one half of the circle, they found no differences: Conservative and liberal media were equally likely to lead to more polarized political beliefs. But on the other half of the circle, conservative beliefs were significantly more likely to lead to more conservative media consumption than liberal beliefs led to more liberal media consumption. The authors suggest that the difference may be because conservative media may have a sort of “head start” of a couple of decades on liberal media in its prominence and extremism.

Curbing journalistic gender bias: How activating awareness of gender bias in Indian journalists affects their reporting. By Priyanka Kalra and Mark Boukes, in Journalism Practice.

Scholars have long established widespread gender biases in various areas of news coverage, but Kalra and Boukes dug a bit deeper to get at a couple of questions: Are there demographic factors that influence journalists’ gender bias? And does being made aware of their own biases reduce the bias in their work?

Through an experiment with young Indian journalists, they found that there were no significant differences between men and women in levels of gender bias, or in any other major demographic category. But they did find that when journalists were made aware of their gender bias through an implicit-association test, their bias on a subsequent set of editing tasks was significantly reduced. Kalra and Boukes concluded by highlighting the importance of self-awareness exercises in newsroom and j-school bias training.

Soft power, hard news: How journalists at state-funded transnational media legitimize their work. By Kate Wright, Martin Scott, and Mel Bunce, in The International Journal of Press/Politics.

State-funded transnational news organizations such as Al Jazeera, Xinhua, and BBC News World Service are primary sources of international news for much of the Global South, but the relationship of their journalists with the governments that employ them has always been a complex one. Wright and her colleagues looked at how those journalists justified their relationships with those governments and when they might resist their governments’ diplomatic aims.

They interviewed 52 journalists at those organizations (with a particular focus on journalists in Nairobi) and found that journalists like to contrast themselves with the “propaganda” of their governments as well as outlets they see as compromised, such as Russia’s RT. They also emphasize their day-to-day autonomy and argue that their state backing allows them more freedom to cover hard-to-reach or easy-to-ignore news because they’re not constrained by commercial pressures. But they very rarely use that autonomy to exercise any resistance against their governments’ diplomatic efforts.

Embedding, quoting, or paraphrasing? Investigating the effects of political leaders’ tweets in online news articles: The case of Donald Trump. By Delia Dumitrescu and Andrew R.N. Ross, in New Media & Society.

As social media has become an increasingly typical source in news stories, journalists have wrestled with what to do about one person’s tweets more than any other: Donald Trump. Dumitrescu and Ross used an experiment to test the effects on Republican and Democratic readers of embedding, quoting, and paraphrasing incendiary Trump tweets. They were most interested in the effects those tweets had on readers’ perceptions of Trump, and of the article itself.

They found that Trump’s tweets had a favorable effect on Republicans’ attitudes toward him, but only when embedded, and only indirectly, by activating their emotions. (The tweets had no effect on Democrats’ attitudes toward Trump, which were as dismal as you’d expect in all conditions.) Republicans were more distrustful of articles when tweets were quoted, and Democrats were more skeptical when they were quoted or embedded. The results were ambiguous, but the general conclusion was that Republicans liked seeing Trump’s tweets in their original form (perhaps because they could see the likes, retweets, and profile photo), though both parties’ followers seemed to accept paraphrases of tweets as a legitimate journalistic practice.

Journalists’ shortcuts to determine what to trust

Who and what journalists trust determines a substantial amount of what makes it through the journalistic filter to audience — what leads they pursue, who they talk to, how they frame a story. But given the importance of trust, we know relatively little about why journalists trust certain sources or information.

Media sociologists have overwhelmingly determined that journalists rely heavily on official sources. But we know less about how journalists actually evaluate the information they get, how they determine whether to verify something or take a news tip seriously.

Now, Israeli scholars Aviv Barnoy and Zvi Reich have given us the closest look yet at how journalists determine what information to trust when reporting a story in their new article, “Trusting Others: A Pareto Distribution of Source and Message Credibility Among News Reporters,” in the journal Communication Research.

Barnoy and Reich were interested in two dimensions of trust: source credibility (whether the journalist considers the source credible) and message credibility (whether the journalist considers the information itself credible). Do journalists actually distinguish between these two things, they wondered, or do they just trust information by default that comes from a source they find trustworthy? In addition, they wanted to know what kinds of factors most influence journalists’ trust.

To determine this, they asked Israeli journalists in interviews to go through all the sources in a sample of their recent news stories and explain why they trusted (or didn’t trust) each one. They ended up with quantitative data on 1,307 sources and additional qualitative data on 50 full news stories.

The results aren’t particularly flattering to journalists. In the large majority of cases, source credibility takes over: If a source seems credible, they essentially trust whatever that source’s message is. As Barnoy and Reich describe it, this is journalists’ “autopilot” mode that functions more than two-thirds of the time. In a minority of cases, they switch into “manual mode” and actually try to evaluate or verify the message’s credibility — often when an official source is out of their depth or sensible information comes from a dubious source.

And what factors lead journalists to determine whether a source (or message) is credible? The No. 1 component was — surprise, surprise — the source’s “officialness” or organizational role. The top secondary factors were a source’s potentially biasing self-interest and whether the information conflicted with messages from other sources.

So Barnoy and Reich found that if journalists have sources they trust, they’ll generally trust most anything the source tells them. And the most reliable way to become one of those trusted sources is to have an authoritative official role. It’s a fairly damning finding for journalists, though Barnoy and Reich point out that it’s essentially the same way that the rest of us (and even experts) decide to trust information, too.

Barnoy and Reich argue that journalists’ default posture should be much more skeptical than this, though it’s clear that journalists are forced into these cognitive shortcuts because they simply don’t have the time to evaluate and verify things more thoroughly before trusting them. Still, this reflexive source-based trust rooted in “official” authority leaves them vulnerable to being misled and leaves out valuable alternative or marginalized voices as well.

Research roundup

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

Exploring genetic contributions to news use motives and frequency of news consumption: A study of identical and fraternal twins. By Chance York and Paul Haridakis, in Mass Communication and Society.

Researchers have long explored the social and psychological characteristics that motivate people to get news — but could there be more fundamental drivers, even biological ones at the level of one’s genes? From data on 334 identical and fraternal twins, York and Haridakis find that latent genetic traits explain at least some of the differences in the motives for news use and the frequency that one uses news. “Genetic traits,” they write, “were particularly influential in explaining frequency of using sources commonly characterized as ideological, such as Fox News and CNN.”

The paper is quick to note that there is no “news gene.” But it does suggest that scholars need to take a closer look at genetic propensities that, in the context of certain social and environmental factors, might lead people to be more or less interested in news. For example, a large body of research has shown that children learn to follow news by watching their parents — and there is recent evidence that avoiding the news might follow related patterns of socialization. This raises the question: Is news use, to some extent, a function of nature as well as nurture?

Public beliefs about falsehoods in news. By Karolina Koc-Michalska, Bruce Bimber, Daniel Gomez, Matthew Jenkins, and Shelley Boulianne, in The International Journal of Press/Politics.

The amount of research about “fake news” probably far outweighs the actual problem that misinformation plays in the world (as research, naturally, has shown). But that doesn’t mean there aren’t new things to learn about the complicated ways in which people encounter and make sense of falsehoods, including how people attempt to verify information that seems suspect to them.

Using a comparative election survey in the U.S., the U.K., and France, the authors find three key predictors of whether people believe they’ve been exposed to false news: talking about news with others, using social media for political purposes, and being exposed to “counter-attitudinal information” (or, a diverse set of political ideas).

The nexus among these three factors, the researchers argue, suggest a pattern that likely holds in other countries. However, drawing on differences apparent among 2016 Trump supporters in the U.S., they also point to the role that “a single political figure can in a period of just months shape public beliefs about the validity of news.”

From novelty to normalization? How journalists use the term “fake news” in their reporting. By Jana Laura Egelhofer, Loes Aaldering, Jakob-Moritz Eberl, Sebastian Galyga, and Sophie Lecheler, in Journalism Studies.

Speaking of “fake news,” how do journalists themselves use the term? Noting that it’s a highly controversial but “arguably effective buzzword in news coverage,” the authors conducted a quantitative content analysis of all news stories that included a reference to “fake news” in major Austrian daily newspapers between 2015 and 2018. They found what might be an expected shift over time, as “fake news” moves from primarily describing disinformation online to a broader reflection of attacks against the legacy press.

What’s particularly notable, however, is that journalists increasingly used the term in contexts that were totally unrelated to either disinformation or media attacks. By using the term this way, the authors conclude, journalists not only give more attention to “fake news” than the term may deserve, but they also trivialize and normalize it as a routine way of describing anything false — which, of course, could further undermine how people come to trust and make associations about news.

Evolving data teams: Tensions between organisational structure and professional subculture. By Florian Stalph in Big Data & Society.

On the one hand, data journalism is old news — it has been around for decades in various forms and, if it were once on the margins of newsrooms, it’s now much more fully institutionalized and accepted. And yet, on the other hand, data journalism still remains unevenly consolidated in many news outlets: There’s no consensus on the right organizational structure for it, or how, over time, it should best grow, expand, and become more formalized within newsroom work structures.

Against that uncertainty, this paper offers a window onto tensions that emerge as newsrooms attempt to structurally integrate data journalism teams, which can possess their own professional subculture built around certain ideas about norms, values, and beliefs. Through interviews with the data teams at The Guardian, Spiegel Online, and Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Stalph shows how some organizational structures accommodated data teams, leading to their growth, formalization, and complexity — while in other cases incompatibilities arose around, in part because of disagreements among individuals about the role and meaning of data journalism.

Stalph emphasizes that the impact of individuals and how their definitions and cultural expectations align: “It stands out across all three cases that how data journalism is being practiced, is closely tied to the agency and mindset of individual journalists.”

Postcolonial reflexivity in the news industry: The case of foreign correspondents in Kenya and South Africa. By Toussaint Nothias, in Journal of Communication.

Over the past several decades, a wide array of scholars — anthropologists, historians, political scientists, sociologists, and more — have criticized the stereotypes that Western news media tend to use in misrepresenting and marginalizing Africa. Such coverage has developed a “narrative of conflict, unrest, and violence [that] reproduces dehumanizing and racist stereotypes and is in direct continuity with colonial discourses and racialized representations of Africa as the ‘dark continent.'”

So, what do foreign correspondents think about this? How do those on the front lines of producing Africa’s media image feel about this criticism?

Nothias interviewed 35 foreign correspondents and found that, contrary to previous studies where journalists deny being complicit in such problems, they agree with the core elements of the critique. The journalists display what Nothias calls a “postcolonial reflexivity” — that is, a capacity to recognize the harmful impact of the news industry in “representational Othering.” The article examines the sources and impact of this critical self-reflection among journalists and what it could mean for improved media portrayals, while also acknowledging the work that remains to be done.

The digital spotlight: Applying a connective action framework of political protest to global watchdog reporting. By Andrea Carson, in The International Journal of Press/Politics.

Globalization has amped up opportunities for crime, corruption, and other wrongdoing to transcend traditional nation-state borders. Accordingly, investigative journalists — normally used to working on problems in their local geographic area — have increasingly been collaborating with their colleagues around the globe in large-scale, network-based investigations, such as those involving massive data leaks in the case of the Paradise Papers. But to date, there hasn’t been a scholarly approach for advancing a theoretical understanding of global watchdog reporting — a way to map the different varieties of multi-newsroom investigations.

Carson’s analysis applies the “logic of connective action,” developed previously to study large-scale political protest movements, to draw out key differences between the collaborative investigative reporting efforts of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), WikiLeaks, and Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency (NSA) leaks.

Trump, Twitter, and news media responsiveness: A media systems approach. By Chris Wells, Dhavan Shah, Josephine Lukito, Ayellet Pelled, Jon CW Pevehouse, and JungHwan Yang, in New Media & Society.

This paper explores how different dimensions of the U.S. media system — from far-left to far-right sources to plenty in between — allocated their attention among the four leading candidates (Trump, Cruz, Clinton, Sanders) during the primaries for the 2016 election. This is not about how the candidates were covered, but rather their ability to muster media attention.

For all the talk about media fragmentation these days, the authors found a surprising level of uniformity in how organizations across the political spectrum allocated attention to the candidates. Of note, they also found a likewise surprising consistency in the factors that drove Trump’s attention advantage, with the volume of his retweets playing a particularly outsized role — even though other candidates saw no comparable boost in coverage from retweets. What’s more, “Trump tweeted more at times when he had recently garnered less of a relative advantage in news attention, suggesting he strategically used Twitter to trigger coverage.”

Overall, these findings reinforce problems that others have found in the balance and proportion in 2016 election coverage, and they point to the growing role of audience metrics in influencing news judgment and the attention economy as a whole.

Welcome to the third edition of RQ1. For those who are new, we are Mark Coddington and Seth Lewis — two former journalists turned academics, now teaching and researching at Washington and Lee University (Mark) and the University of Oregon (Seth).

In trying to keep pace with all the new research about news and journalism, we hope to give you each month a quick breakdown of a notable piece of new research, and also to highlight some other interesting work you might want to check out. We can’t cover it all, of course, so consider this a good-faith sampling of some of the most interesting findings in news research. If you have ideas or suggestions, please shoot us a reply — we’d love to hear from you.

Here’s what we found in this month’s news research.

A persistent pursuit to reform U.S. journalism

For decades, critics have argued that journalists and news organizations (particularly in the U.S.) are too disconnected from their audiences. Journalists, these critics have said, struggle to fully appreciate people’s concerns, dismiss opportunities to involve them in news-making, and altogether fail to develop a more mutually beneficial relationship with the communities that journalism is expected to serve in the first place. In recent years, this critique and its push to reform journalism has taken the form of “engaged journalism,” which, broadly speaking, suggests that public trust in news will improve as the public has a more active, rather than passive, part to play in the news agenda. But where did this concept of engaged journalism come from, and why does it sound so familiar to the similarly styled “public journalism” movement that emerged in the 1990s but failed to take hold in American journalism?

A new (open-access) paper in the International Journal of Communication offers some answers. To better understand how the journalism community has explained (to itself) the need first for public journalism and later for engaged journalism — as well as how journalists have come to envision their audiences through both reform movements — the authors conducted a close reading of dozens of trade-press articles published during the public journalism period (1992-2001) and the rise of engaged journalism (2005-2018).

In their analysis, Patrick Ferrucci, Jacob L. Nelson, and Miles P. Davis identify three key themes about the apparent need for public journalism and engaged journalism, as championed by their advocates in trade magazines: “First, journalism is in trouble and needs fixing; second, there is a need to remodel how journalists think and act; and third, the industry needs a market-driven or nakedly capitalistic approach due to an economic downturn.”

Then, looking at how the public journalism and engaged journalism movements imagine the news audience, they point to three assumptions that are consistent in the trade-press discourse of both time periods: “First, the audience includes marginalized populations who want to contribute to the news production process, yet are traditionally not allowed to do so. Second, the audience knows more about its needs than journalists do. And third, the audience is disdainful of journalists’ elitist approach to their work.”

There’s a striking similarity between the diagnoses of and prescriptions for what ails journalism in both cases: namely, allow audiences to participate because they want to as civically minded people who can help improve news quality in the process, and because doing so may help the bottom line at the same time — a win-win. This belief has “an obvious, intuitive appeal,” the authors write, “because it suggests that the news industry has a great deal of autonomy when it comes to solving its profession’s most pressing problems.”

Overall, the consistent ethos of these reform efforts indicates that even if public journalism failed in its 1990s form, its spirit lives on in engaged journalism today. And it suggests that the debate about the role of the audience in news — a debate at least as old as the “Lippmann-Dewey Debate” more than a century ago — will persist for some time, even if it’s unlikely to be resolved anytime soon or, perhaps, lead to the kind of significant change in the way news is produced that reformers hope.

Even more, the authors wonder, reformers’ focus on the audience relationship and their assumption that journalists can fix things on their own may be misleading, particularly at a time when larger structural forces — such as the economics of digital advertising and the power of platform companies — may pose more existential problems for the future of journalism.

Research roundup

Here are some other studies that caught our eye this past month.

Gender differences in political media coverage: A meta-analysis. By Daphne Joanna Van der Pas and Loes Aaldering, in Journal of Communication.

It might seem self-evident that political news coverage is unfair to female politicians, but research in this area has been divided, with some scholars concluding that women receive less attention than their male counterparts and others arguing that we’ve moved toward gender parity in political news. Van der Pas and Aaldering analyze a massive amount of data (90 quantitative studies covering 750,000 media stories over decades) and find that women in politics do indeed get less media attention than men — 17 percentage points less on the whole. The numerous secondary factors they examine are fascinating: In one particularly surprising finding, the gender bias in amount of coverage virtually disappears in majoritarian political systems where politics is more personal than party-oriented.

The culture of free: Construct explication and democratic ramifications for readers’ willingness to pay for public affairs news. By Manuel Goyanes, Marton Demeter, and Laura de Grado, in Journalism.

Goyanes and his colleagues pose a question that has vexed most of the world’s newsrooms over the past decade — Why won’t more people pay for news? — by interviewing several dozen digital news consumers in Spain. Their answer is encompassed in a concept they call “the culture of free,” which has four characteristics: A belief that news is a public good that should be free, habits of consuming news for free, freely available competition among news sources, and a notion of news consumption as a sort of mindless free-time filler. A key aspect of the study’s argument is that these news non-payers don’t believe the news they consume is low-quality; they just believe it must be available for free. That view has been encouraged by the homogenization and commodification of news in recent years, the authors argue.

Protecting news companies and their readers: Exploring social media policies in Latin American newsrooms. By Summer Harlow, in Digital Journalism.

As journalists move into their second decade of widespread professional social media use, guidelines from their employers continue to be one of the main places where the tensions over what that use should look like play out. In a survey of journalists across 20 Latin American countries, Harlow finds that most Latin American journalists don’t have social media guidelines in their newsrooms, suggesting that social media still isn’t very institutionalized in many of those countries. As journalists understand them, those policies are focused on what not to do, as a way to protect professional norms and the news organization’s image. This defensive mindset does extend to emphasizing respect for readers and sources, but not to protecting journalists themselves from harassment.

Populist attitudes and selective exposure to online news: A cross-country analysis combining web tracking and surveys. By Sebastian Stier, Nora Kirkizh, Caterina Froio, and Ralph Schroeder, in The International Journal of Press/Politics.

Stier and his colleagues address a longstanding issue of interest to researchers — where partisans, in this case populists, get their news — through a remarkably comprehensive method. They collect web tracking data from more than 7,000 people across Europe and the U.S. and tie it to survey data from the same people, so they can make precise connections between their political attitudes and their actual news consumption habits. It turns out populists do indeed consume less legacy news media than others, but they still consume a lot more legacy news than they do hyperpartisan news. The results also vary widely by country: Populists only consume more hyperpartisan news in countries (like the U.S. and Germany) where the hyperpartisan news ecosystem is very strong and where such attitudes aren’t found in legacy media (as they are in the U.K. tabloids).

Computational news discovery: Towards design considerations for editorial orientation algorithms in journalism. By Nicholas Diakopoulos, in Digital Journalism.

Through interviews with journalists, Diakopoulos goes deep into how newsrooms use what he calls “computational news discovery”: tools that use algorithms to flag potentially newsworthy events or information. He finds that despite the algorithmic intervention, the process of turning those leads into news is still a deeply human and variable one. The tools are still subject to the immense demands on journalists’ attention, at some times helping direct that attention but at others merely diverting it. The tools also highlight the extreme complexity and, as Diakopoulos calls it, “configurability” of newsworthiness, as journalists’ sense of what is actually newsworthy depends heavily on idiosyncratic factors and organizational influences.

Sorting the news: How ranking by popularity polarizes our politics. By Yotam Shmargad and Samara Klar, in Political Communication.

Shmargad and Klar are interested in the role that algorithmic rankings based on social inputs (like the ones on Facebook and Reddit) have in users’ news attitudes toward the news they’re consuming — specifically, whether those rankings have a politically polarizing effect. They use an experiment to build rankings based on popularity among Republicans and Democrats, and find that when users are given rankings based on cues from a un-like-minded network (e.g., conservatives with a liberal-ranked list), they actually express support for some articles that oppose their own views. But the good news ends there: Those participants show less political engagement and more frustration with media representativeness as a result, and the participants who get algorithms that support their own views find their partisan reactions to news heightened.

Electoral reckonings: Press criticism of presidential campaign coverage, 2000-2016. By Elizabeth Bent, Kimberly Kelling, and Ryan J. Thomas, in Journal of Media Ethics.

One of the longstanding routines of U.S. presidential campaign coverage is the news media’s criticism of its own coverage, especially as critics grapple with the election’s results after the fact. This trio of University of Missouri researchers examine this press criticism over the last five election cycles to find trends in the coverage itself. They find that many of the critiques circle around a few recurring themes, most prominently a failure to exercise independent judgment, especially as it relates to use and misuse of polling data. They also found repeated criticism of the news media’s failure to properly represent the electorate, whether “values voters” in 2004, a more diverse voting base in 2008, or white working-class voters in 2016. Notably, they see a dramatic shift in the tone of criticism in 2016, as the change called for went from incremental to an overhaul, and the rhetoric around the role of technology turned negative for the first time.

If you want to go deeper, there’s a lot more where these studies came from. Journalism Research News has a comprehensive list of journalism research published in March.