Nieman Journalism Lab |
- Sure, journalists need to know digital tools, but they really need to know how to do digital research
- New Pew study: Where you live helps shape your news diet
- New York Times, Washington Post developers team up to create Open Elections database
| Posted: 26 Sep 2012 09:15 AM PDT
Editor’s Note: It’s the start of the school year, which means students are returning to journalism programs around the country. As the media industry continues to evolve, how well is new talent being trained, and how well are schools preparing them for the real world? We asked an array of people — hiring editors, recent graduates, professors, technologists, deans — to evaluate the job j-schools are doing and to offer ideas for how they might improve. Here’s John Wihbey, managing editor of the Shorenstein Center research portal Journalist’s Resource, argues that journalism schools need to do a better job of training journalists to research and go deeper into their subjects. Anyone who’s been to j-school remembers the initial jitters — and the bundle of nerves — that came with heading out on assignments and to beats unknown in those dizzying first months. Journalism schools have generally been good at steadying those nerves, giving students the confidence to explore new neighborhoods and challenging issues, and to ask tough questions. Throw in some sharpened writing skills and storytelling techniques, and we walked out with that traditional toolkit ready to go in the old media world. But in a wired age, where knowledge on all topics is accumulating and proliferating, a new kind of fear should be persistent for journalists: Not knowing what you're talking about. Or put more practically, not doing your research. There is little excuse these days for being uninformed and caught unaware. Expectations are being raised all around us.
Scholar-bloggers (and a legion of wonky twittizens) are now out in force. Statistics and data can be quickly located and brought to bear on most topics. Government agencies are creating research-oriented apps and APIs and uploading data sets fairly regularly. Unlike a decade ago — when much of the world's deepest knowledge sat on dusty library shelves — targeted search engines and databases such as Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, PubMed, and the Social Science Research Network now make access to scholarship easy. One-fifth of all scholarship is "open access" (translation: no paywalls) and that trend is accelerating, according to the Peter Suber, director of Harvard’s Open Access Project. There's peril in not capitalizing on this flood of knowledge. Any smart group of readers will call you out on ignorance in the comment thread (or just deploy the #clueless hashtag) and then float away forever to other sites. At stake for journalists is this: having enough credibility with one's audience and being competent enough to convene readers/viewers who now have an overabundance of choices and alternatives. Otherwise, journalism loses its hard-won capacity to focus attention and define the contours of the public interest. In an overcrowded marketplace, it's ultimately about turning out the highest-value work on a given news topic. With the democratization of knowledge accelerating online, the bar is higher for young journalists. Outlets like The New York Times, The Atlantic, and others, with their suites of specialized blogs, are already reflecting as much. At the same time, the great anxiety for many journalism schools — and their central debate — is about how to merge traditional reporting skills with new tech tools and modes of delivery. Looming in the background is this issue of rising knowledge, even as schools struggle to figure out how to embed deeper research content into their classrooms. In our networked, crowdsourced media environment, the value of basic "reporting" on events and issues is diminished. Deep context and added-value knowledge around news, however, will remain scarce commodities. But how? The good news is that innovation, both in terms of tech tools and research capacity, can flourish in j-schools. Even at the 200- or 300-level of undergraduate courses, students can get accustomed to using academic sites such as Google Scholar, survey-oriented sites such as the Pew Research Center, and paid repositories like Academic Search Premier. JSTOR is another example. Reporting on vacant lots and redevelopment? You might want to know about this study. Exploring dynamics of overbearing parents in schools? This one might be useful. Backgrounding a piece on tax breaks for businesses? Take a look here. A new baseball stadium? Catch this. A smart search through key databases can yield a wealth of such information on deadline, which can then be leveraged for coverage of news events. Journalism educators should press students to mine such knowledge and be as aggressive in its pursuit online as they are of leads in the real world. This is not to suggest there is always some perfect study or dataset to inform every one-off local story. Establishing the habit is the thing. The same analytical skills embedded in the research review habit will make for better questions, more rigorous scrutiny of assumptions, higher-level journalism. Scholars perform a literature review as they approach questions; most topics have been studied for decades. Why neglect all of that accumulated knowledge? Even within difficult disciplines, journalists can obtain a reasonable fluency — enough to be well informed, know the deeper debates within issues, and ask more penetrating questions when engaging with experts (and avoid all of those blind phone calls for quotes). For journalism schools, this means not segregating "research skills" in a single seminar. It means every j-school instructor emphasizing sophisticated web search skills, some knowledge of statistical concepts, a familiarity with research databases, and fostering the strong desire for a non-anecdotal, contextual understanding of things. For the many brilliant career journalists who are now working in academia, this is not that heavy a lift. But it requires rebalancing. It's all a matter of reorienting j-school time and energy. And it means turning back toward the wealth of resources within universities — the experts in economics, sociology, political science, and many other departments — while teaching students to engage with those disciplines in a distinctively journalistic way. How many journalism classes have ever, for instance, read an original academic paper from a scholar on campus and then had a vigorous conversation with that scholar? (The News21 initiatives have pioneered some of this cross-disciplinary work.) Journalism education should move a little closer to the academic research world, using its resources to elevate and distinguish the reporting profession again in our new, more competitive information marketplace. Journalist's Resource — from Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center, where I work — is but one player in an emerging movement along these lines that comes out of the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education. We hope it grows. Across the nation's journalism schools, we're seeing huge steps in this direction already. All this comes at a crucial moment, when the profession's momentum can be recaptured. Imagine journalism that is as smart as the giant pool of available knowledge now online. Then imagine it brought to bear through new, more-personalized social streams and rendered through more engaging platforms and applications. If educators rise to the challenge of forging that future, journalism schools will have little to fear in the coming decades. Photo by David Michael Morris used under a Creative Commons license. |
| New Pew study: Where you live helps shape your news diet Posted: 26 Sep 2012 09:10 AM PDT
Residents of cities, suburbs, small towns, and rural areas have distinctly different news consumption habits, according to a study out today from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and Internet & American Life Project. Pew found that while those surveyed in different communities reported similarly high levels of interest about most of the same topics, their habits differ based on where they live.
Across the board, residents track local news more than other kinds of news. Weather is the most popular kind of news, followed by breaking news and politics. Most residents in large cities, small cities, and rural areas reported relying on word-of-mouth for news. Suburban residents are more interested in national news than are residents of cities, small towns, and rural areas. Other distinguishing factors come down to choice: People generally want similar kinds of news and information, but they don’t always have access to the same news resources. Large-city dwellers and suburban residents, for example, are more likely to have multiple devices like tablets and smartphones. Here’s a look at how news habits differed by community, according to Pew’s survey of 2,251 adults in January (including 750 calls to cell phones): City dwellers
Suburbanites
Small towns
Rural America
Photo by Dennis Yang used under a Creative Commons license. |
| New York Times, Washington Post developers team up to create Open Elections database Posted: 26 Sep 2012 07:43 AM PDT
Calling all data hounds! Senior developers from The New York Times and The Washington Post are looking for volunteers to help collect more than 10 years of federal elections data from each state. With their help — and $200,000 in Knight News Challenge funding — Serdar Tumgoren and Derek Willis are working on creating a free, comprehensive source of official U.S. election results. The goal is to end up with electoral data that can then be linked to different types of data sets — campaign finance, voter demographics, legislative histories, and so on — in ways that previously haven’t been possible on this scale. Tumgoren, of The Washington Post, says the idea for Open Elections came from “mutual frustration that there is no single, free source of data — and more importantly, nicely standardized data.” Soothing this frustration isn’t necessarily going to be pretty. The task of finding state elections data — at least some of which will be a godawful, inextricable mess — will require some “brute-forcing,” Tumgoren says. “If you look at Mississippi’s data, they make me not very happy — they make me sad, in fact,” Tumgoren said. “Just a sampling of a few states I randomly picked, they run the gambit from pretty good to oh-my-God-how-are-we-going-to-get-this-data.” Tumgoren estimates it will take about two years to get to where he wants Open Elections to be, but the entire process will be open to the public. As data comes in, the team will clean it up, put it in a standardized format, and share it. What that format will be is still up in the air — as are many of the details, which Tumgoren says they’ll have to figure out as they begin to get a better sense of the state of the data they’ll get. “There are going to be some states like Virginia that are wonderful and have very clean data,” Tumgoren said. “Other places — we don’t even know which ones yet — data is going to be less accessible because it’s not centralized or it’s in formats like image PDF.” For now, Open Elections is building the infrastructure to begin collecting and sorting data. As they recruit volunteers, they’ll be looking for people who can dig up U.S. Senate, House, presidential, and gubernatorial elections results from the past 10 years or so. “This is such a big project we’re limiting the scope initially,” Tumgoren said. “Governor, Senate, House, president: Whatever else we can get, we’re not going to turn our noses up at it.” While they may not be able to clean up, link, and standardize data from other races, Tumgoren says his team will still work to centralize it. “It’s just an untapped resource,” Tumgoren said. “The ability to do this is very limited right now. We almost don’t know what we don’t know. I have a vague sense of some of the questions I’d like to ask but I bet there are tons of journalists and developers who are going to think of things that never even occurred to me. The possibilities for so-called data mashups are limitless.” Photo by DonkeyHotey used under a Creative Commons license. |
Some of the findings are intuitive — like how suburban residents, many of whom commute to work, are more likely than their urban counterparts to listen to the radio. Another example: Residents of large cities tend to be less interested in issues related to taxes, which could be because city-dwellers are likely to be younger and renters. Urban residents were also least likely to pay for a subscription to a local newspaper. Fewer than half of those surveyed in any type of community said they rely on a print newspaper.
| You are subscribed to email updates from Nieman Journalism Lab To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |