Hi there! This is TITLE-ABS-KEY(“science journalism“), a newsletter about science journalism research. In the previous issue, I explored negative attitudes towards science and journalism on Reddit and had fun with a truly great paper title.
This time, I am sticking to my slightly wider scope (consider this a summer thing) and looking into whether the real demands of the journalistic profession have changed that much since one had to send their reports by carrier pigeon.
Today’s paper: Jackman, O., & Reich, Z. (2023). The Journalistic Wishlist: Exploring Reporters’ Desired Skills Using Delphi Method. International Journal of Communication, 17, 24. Full text available here.
Why: I barely get to make any Taken jokes, so I won’t pass up my chance here. But I’m also genuinely interested in the skills wishlist and how many of the skills I think I already have.
Abstract: Research shows that journalists are expected to develop new skills in the innovative peripheries of journalism, such as data and multimedia journalism. However, the extent to which new skills are expected for its core activity, news reporting, remains disputed. This study aims to determine whether news reporters are expected to master new skills following a series of transformations in news environments. To allow ego-free and anonymous negotiations of reporters’ desired skills, we organized a Delphi panel of news executives and experts. Findings show that reporters are expected to prioritize traditional skills: be knowledgeable about their beat, think critically about raw materials, and be swift but accurate. However, they are expected to utilize databases and prioritize story detection over storytelling. These findings raise opposing views regarding the survival strategy of news reporting in changing news environments: must reporting adopt brand new skill sets or rediscover traditional ones?
First of all, props for calling the shiny new things what they truly are – innovative peripheries of journalism. I was part of a really cool 360-video project around 2017-18, and we were told this tech, as well as AR/VR, is on the brink of truly taking off. Well, I feel like I’m a thousand years older in 2023, and they are all still on that brink apparently (although now Apple is involved, so maybe we should fasten our seatbelts.)
Second, as someone who was raised by a pack of wild newswire reporters, I appreciate the focus on news and the skills needed there. Shiny new things are really shiny, and I too get distracted by their allure, but someone still needs to get the scoops. Side note: boy do I irrationally hate that word when applied to journalism.
Anyway, apparently while I was hating the word scoop and learning to get scoops, two camps of scholars coalesced around their positions on whether new skills have truly infiltrated the news core of journalism. According to the paper, reformist scholars think new skills “are mandatory for the survival of news reporting since journalists are increasingly expected to perform new tasks: integrate information from different knowledge areas, enhance reasoning, contextualize reports, apply historical thinking, interpret and evaluate the issues at hand, and harness new technology to develop their networking skills.”
*hand* Hey, I’m really sorry for incoming caps and rage punctuation, but how are ANY OF THESE TASKS NEW FOR JOURNALISTS?!?
Right. Apparently I’m in the “more traditionalist camp” of people who think we are rediscovering and maintaining traditional skills to keep up with “transformative changes such as the acceleration of reporting cycles.” To maintain these core skills, you need enduring professional norms and practices of truth seeking, change-resistant sourcing practices, and long-lasting structure and division of labor.
All I have to add here is hell yeah!
But here’s the thing: turns out research findings about the expected skills of reporters today are inconclusive,
and there aren’t that many studies asking anyone but reporters themselves about the skills they are expected to have. I had a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to this first — in line with the overall tone of this newsletter section, of course, who else would you ask about reporters’ skills! — but then I thought back to all my teaching and realized outsiders such as journalism instructors and media critics do have something to say here.
So to bridge this gap, the authors conducted a Delphi panel of 31 Israeli experts, just 20 of whom were journalists and editors. Basically the Delphi method is a peculiarly structured conversation that lets you tease out an informed expert consensus (I need to learn more about this method as I am a avowed process design nerd.)
To get to the questions for this panel, the authors looked at five areas in the core journalistic practice that “have undergone transformative changes”:
Speed vs accuracy: indeed, the stakes in this tradeoff have definitely gone up from the pigeon times, so you would think the skills balance has also changed;
New skills versus traditional newsgathering: this is somewhat mushier but you could say it’s about whether, for the next breaking news story, you want your reporters to be able to scrape social media or to call 10 hostile strangers in a row without flinching. Or, alternatively, are they good at social networking or can they get through government documents without losing their sanity?
Interpreting over reporting, or stenography of information vs interpretation and sense making. As the world is getting insanely more complex, do you want reporters to capture its state as accurately as possible, even if hardly anybody actually understands what that reporting means, or do you want them to explain things?
Generalism over beat specialism: broad but inevitably shallow, or deep but just in one particular topic?
Story detection over storytelling: a version of this is known as the two kinds of journalists, ones who hate reporting and ones who hate writing. What is more important, finding a compelling story or doing it justice in your writing/video/whatever?
So far all astute and pertinent questions, quite keen to know where the panel ended up on these tradeoffs and recent changes! The whole Delphi process sounds quite laborious to be honest, but 45% of the initial panel still made it to the third round, so big thanks to them as I get to dive into the results.
On speed vs accuracy, it is understandably not either/or but both please and thank you. And of all 40-something skills in the study, the only one that got a 100% consensus level – so absolutely everyone agreed it was highly desirable – was… drumroll… meeting deadlines.
Oof. I can tell you, based on my writing career and my brief editor stints, there’s so much pain behind that number.
On new vs old skills, it’s definitely old skills. Interviewing and research beat social media, design and coding all day, every day. Although I suspect listing the overly broad “information gathering” as a traditional skill will raise some eyebrows.
On interpreting over reporting, reporting wins, although the authors suspect this may be typical of the Israeli case, where analysis and opinions are very clearly someone else’s job (the commentators).
On generalism vs beats, it’s actually beats, somewhat contrary to the economic reality of disappearing staff positions and a global shift to freelancing (which usually restricts one’s ability to develop a clear beat and stick to it).
Finally, on finding vs telling stories, it sure looks like most journalism experts prefer journalists to be able to uncover the story. Perhaps it’s part reflection on not being able to fix grave newsfinding errors in “post-production,” part expectation that if you find the story these days, then an LLM can “write” it for you or at least clean up your poor writing.
The list of desired skills seems to work against the grain of recent trends. Despite transformative changes in news environments, news reporters are expected to master mainly traditional skills, such as interviewing, researching, curiosity, and fact identification.
This is possible due to both human nature (skilled professionals do not like to reskill, humans crave stability in uncertain times) and the nature of journalism and specifically news. Accurate, timely and reliable news is basically the carbon we need to build everything else in our media organism; journalism is a news-based life form.
There are caveats, of course: Delphi panels are always prone to selection bias, retention rate in a complex process is poor, and these were Israeli experts only, so the study needs to be replicated in other news markets and cultures.
And still, it makes me think back to all those times I did not push back against a very common perception, at least in the Russian media landscape, that journalism schools can’t keep up with journalism. Eh, maybe they shouldn’t be chasing the shiny new things?
After all, ChatGPT can probably craft a great prompt for DALL-E, but it definitely can’t corner a newsmaker on their way out of the restroom (based on a true story.)
P.S. So, how many of these skills do I have? Well, this paper made me think of something interesting for the Russian section of the newsletter, stay tuned for a readout here later.
That’s it! If you enjoyed this issue, let me know. If you also have opinions on science journalism research or would like to suggest a paper for me to read in one of the next issues, you can leave a comment or just respond to the email.
Cheers! 👩🔬