Is All Journalism Research Depressing?
It's me, hi, I'm the problem (right?)
Hi there! This is TITLE-ABS-KEY(“science journalism“), a newsletter about science journalism research. In the previous issue, I willingly walked into a trap of reading a study on the quality of journalism around mindfulness apps. TLDR the reporting is not very mindful.
Somehow most of my recent commentary here — which follows the research, of course – has been bleak. So this time, hopefully for a quick break from misery, I decided to read an interview of two other people doing a similar thing and see whether they also just get upset by reading academic research on journalism.
Today’s not a paper: Searching for gold: Making sense of academic research about journalism (Angie Drobnic Holan, Nieman Lab, April 27, 2023)
Why: I hope to know whether it’s just me with my focus on science content in media or whether all journalism research is not making journalists look good.
Lede: Do academics know secrets about journalism that working reporters and editors don’t know? For curious journalists like me, spending time reading academic research about journalism and democracy reveals a mixed picture.
The first question there has always fascinated me as well. Much like science journalists, being professional outsiders, are able to notice things that are invisible to scientists, researchers looking at journalism should be able to provide insight. Right? I also have a dear colleague with a much more extensive research and academic experience who has always gently mocked me for believing that.
There is quite a lot of journalism research out there, in part I think because journalism is just really interesting. The pull to do what counts as journalism is so strong humans can’t seem to refrain from it even when they get threatened and harshly punished. Similarly, the allure of the label ‘journalism’ itself is so strong that many content creators and professionals in other comms fields want to use it. So conceivably one could build a whole research career just by studying what journalism is and is not (although this line of study would be popular with approximately zero journalists).
That is why Nieman Lab republishes RQ1 newsletter content, and Angie Drobnic Holan, a 2023 Nieman Fellow and a fellow journalism research aficionado, decided to interview the coauthors, professors Mark Coddington and Seth Lewis.
Now, before I start drawing any parallels, a disclaimer: Coddington and Lewis are both former journalists who became academics. (For several years, Coddington wrote the “Week in Review” column for Nieman Lab.) They now study their former colleagues amid a changing digital news environment, tackling issues of data journalism, social media, news engagement and news aggregation. (Coddington is at Washington and Lee University, while Lewis is at University of Oregon.)
In other words, following the central analogy of this newsletter, the two professors are former meerkats who have done the hard work, put on lab coats and now do their own meerkat research. They need to keep up with the studies for academic purposes, which affects how they approach this task I’m sure, but I’m still curious to know what they think. So I’ll go through some of the questions and responses in the interview.
ANGIE DROBNIC HOLAN: When you’re putting together the newsletter each month, is there just a gusher of research to go through? And have you noticed changes in the research over the years?
MARK CODDINGTON: I feel at times overwhelmed by the gusher of research that is out there. Almost every major journal that regularly publishes sends out email alerts when they publish a study, so I subscribe to all of those. And then there are others that I check regularly as well. Any new research goes into a spreadsheet, and that spreadsheet runs to about 75 to 80 articles a month. And that’s a lot of research — a lot. For the newsletter, we select the ones that we think would be of most interest to journalists or researchers.
SETH LEWIS: The study of communication has been around for about 100 years, but the focused study of journalism in this field that we now call journalism studies is really only about two decades old. And in fact, that began with the founding of the journals Journalism and Journalism Studies, which both appeared in 2000. The journal Journalism Practice came out in 2007, and then Digital Journalism was launched in 2013… So there has been a real flourishing of research about news in the last two decades, which, of course, kind of ironically tracks the period in which newspapers have contracted. The news industry has seen its fortunes crumble in the last couple of decades, while space and attention given to research about journalism has grown dramatically.
Okay, two things. First, I can’t help but notice how, in this origin story, journalism studies begin with the (recent) founding of two academic journals. To me, this sounds a bit like saying explanatory journalism began with Vox: it would be a neat but incomplete story. Of course, journalism studies became infinitely easier to follow now that there was a journal called Journalism Studies, and of course, having a journal where people presumably would not start by questioning the legitimacy of your field really helps drive publications.
Second, assuming the field did come of age about two decades ago, it is true, then, that journalism studies have only seen journalism in slow and painful decline. So perhaps it’s not me, it’s the subject matter itself? (Also, the time when the news industry’s fortunes were not crumbling sounds awesome if increasingly unreal.)
HOLAN: Do you think it’s helpful for working journalists to read this research?
LEWIS: When I worked at the Miami Herald, I remember that sometimes I would wander over to different parts of the newsroom, and near the executive editor’s office there was a coffee table with various reading materials, probably for people who were waiting to meet with the editor. And on that coffee table was a copy of Newspaper Research Journal, which is another journal that covers research about news. And I remember, as a journalist, picking this up and flipping through it and thinking, “What is the purpose of this research? None of this seems very relevant to what we do.” It was a flippant response, and now it’s sort of ironic that I do research about news. But there is research about journalism that, depending on how it’s framed and conducted, can feel pretty detached from the actual working realities of journalism. As journalism research has become more established academically, it’s tended toward specialization and some degree of jargon and terminology that’s opaque.
But strong research does exist, and it has a lot of relevance for journalists. And nowadays, given all of the kinds of networks and social media and email alerts that exist, the opportunities for journalists to come into contact with that good research and find value from it are much greater than ever before.
CODDINGTON: I think it’s partly a question of the level of engagement. As far as deep engagement with journalism research, I’m not sure that’s the best investment of time for an incredibly busy journalist. Because it’s hard for me, on top of my job that actually includes this, to deeply engage with and read and fully understand multiple news studies a month — and to actually understand what they’re saying and how they’re engaging with other areas of research. That’s beyond what a journalist should reasonably be expected to do, and I’m not sure it’s the best investment of their time, because it takes a long time to really thoroughly read and understand an academic study.
But I think some familiarity with research in the field is helpful for journalists to just understand and think a little bit more deeply about what they’re doing.
If you can get an introduction to at least some of the ideas of how people have thought about how journalists do their jobs, it can really help you think from a different angle of what is actually going on in your job, and potentially how to do it better.
So for me, I think this issue is less about the jargon and the limited relevance and more about some of the underlying assumptions in a lot of this research. My favourite example has to do with the publicity effect, ie. studying whether merely getting featured in news media boosts academic citation counts for a study. I get where the authors were coming from, but I still laughed out loud when, as an alternative explanation for the effect, I read that journalists might just be good at picking good papers (so it’s not the media attention boosting performance, it’s the intrinsically better papers getting picked up by journalists). I can’t even type or read the previous sentence without going OH HONEY; that someone was able to seriously entertain the idea kind of betrays the fact they have never been in a newsroom. That’s my colleague’s point, I think: being an outsider often just means you can’t tell what’s realistic. And then there’s Professor Coddington’s point: it’s quite hard to engage with research, so a journalist needs to be strategic with their time.
HOLAN: I see a lot of research about journalism coming from a lot of different academic fields, from computer scientists or librarians or philosophers. It can be research that crosses a lot of academic borders. Do you see that?
LEWIS: I would say that journalism has become more interesting precisely because its fortunes have become more uncertain. It’s the inherent instability in the space that makes it so fascinating to many researchers. Whether they’re coming from sociology, political science, economics, or computer science, each of them can find in this a highly dynamic space where there’s a lot of uncertainty as to what it’s going to look like in five years or 10 years, and what will happen to legacy players compared to emerging upstarts, and what will be the knock on-effects of losing newspapers in communities, and what the loss of news media means for declines in civic participation, and so on. I think there’s a growing interest in fields to look at the changing dynamics of journalism as a way to examine larger patterns in society.
CODDINGTON: Fundamentally, it can be easy for academics in journalism studies to forget that journalism is actually an object of study rather than a field academically in itself. There is a field of journalism studies, but fundamentally, that’s not an academic discipline, like sociology or anthropology, or philosophy, or something like that. Journalism is an object of study. And I think the more disciplinary lenses through which we can look at it the better. And yes, most often it’s been looked at through a social scientific lens that is housed within communication as a field. But it’s equally legitimate to study it through an economic lens, or a political science lens, or an historical lens.
All good points, although reading that journalism “has become more interesting precisely because its fortunes have become more uncertain” – a claim I don’t dispute at all – made me want to yell at a cloud. Our misery is your fascination, got it! (In all seriousness, I don’t think academics actually revel in the job insecurity and anxiety of journalists.)
The interview goes on to discuss influential books that have shaped research-curious journalists, so I’ll just list those with links, in part for my own reading list:
The Sociology of News, by Michael Schudson,
Gaye Tuchman’s Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality,
Herbert Gans’s book, Deciding What’s News,
How Journalists Engage: A Theory of Trust Building, Identities, and Care by Sue Robinson.
I can’t help but notice a recurring theme here: how meerkats do their meerkat-ting, ie. how journalists decide what news is and then turn those decisions into our shared reality. I agree that is a pertinent question where an informed outsider’s perspective may be of use. Sometimes you need a trainer or at least a bystander with some knowledge of technique to watch you lift and notice that something is consistently off (yep, it’s gym day, hence the metaphors).
HOLAN: Final question: Why do you call the newsletter RQ1?
CODDINGTON: When writing research papers, RQ1 is the shorthand for the first research question. So when you have multiple research questions you will shorten it to say, RQ1, RQ2, RQ3, and then hypotheses are H1, H2, H3. So it is a bit of academic shorthand that almost any academic in our field would get. And for anybody else, at least it wouldn’t turn them off.
LEWIS: I think it’s appropriate we call it RQ1 and not H1, because in the field of journalism research, we tend to ask research questions rather than pose hypotheses. Hypotheses work well for studies of things that are well-established, where things feel stable and you’re looking for incremental forms of change. But the study of journalism tends to involve more exploratory, inductive forms of qualitative analysis. That generally begins with research questions as opposed to hypotheses. And that really speaks to the nature of this work right now, that the future of journalism is very much in flux. It’s very much this open-ended question. Our purpose is to point to the research questions that are being asked and answered, and to gesture to more questions yet to be explored.
That’s a pretty cool thought about research questions vs hypotheses; I am glad it came from a former meerkat journalist-turned-researcher. This newsletter, naturally, is called TITLE-ABS-KEY(“science journalism“) because that’s my literal search query for following this topic.
I’ve now subscribed to RQ1 and will have to read the archive for relevant gems such as this study on something science journalists tend to hate with a burning passion: the ‘interesting-if-true’ factor in news. Overall I’d say reading the interview and some of the newsletter editions has made me slightly less upset – a) at least the researchers are having fun with all this instability, and b) much like there’s a journalistic bias towards ‘things going wrong;’ academics may be focusing specifically on what’s obviously broken in the field.
So it’s actually not me, I’m not the problem.
That’s it! If you enjoyed this issue, let me know. If you also have opinions 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! 👩🔬