U.S. journalists and news outlets are well aware that political polarization is leading to increasing levels of mistrust in news media. Conservative news media have been developing their own media networks for decades, and they have significant influence, shaping a wide swath of conservative Americans’ understanding of political life. Conservative media outlets present their audiences with distinct understandings of particular issues. Furthermore, historical research, such as Nicole Hemmer’s Messengers of the Right, suggests that conservative journalism introduces ways of knowing and assumptions about truth and legitimacy that can differ markedly from dominant professional journalistic norms.
This study will conduct interviews with journalists, editors, and other workers at conservative news outlets. As part of the study, newsroom visits or opportunities to shadow reports may also be arranged. The goal of the study will be to understand some of the basic news values, news routines, and audience engagement strategies animating different conservative news outlets. The research questions being investigated include:
- How do conservative news outlets make decisions about prioritizing news stories? How do they define what makes a “good story”?
- Which aspects of professional journalistic norms do these outlets accept and which do they reject? What claims do they make about sources of journalistic truth? How do they implement routines for story selection, fact-checking, editorial review, and making corrections when errors are identified?
- What sense do reporters and editors have of their users/audiences? How do audience metrics or other user feedback mechanisms inform the selection and presentation of news?
This study recognizes there is a great variety of approaches among conservative news outlets. While it will not be able to cover the entire range, it will focus on differences and similarities between three types of online conservative outlets: born-digital, commercial outlets; non-profit news sites; and the online reporting of well-established legacy sources.
Project leads: A.J. Bauer, Anthony Nadler
In recent years, social tasks and strategies have been integrated into work processes across newsrooms, and social media-based reporting and sourcing are taking an increasingly central place in journalism work. And yet, news distribution on social media is often discussed in strategic more than editorial terms. Many in legacy news organizations still consider the editorial voice conveyed on social media as extraterritorial and secondary to the core journalistic voice reflected in the full stories published on proprietary news sites.
For the majority of the public, however, social platforms have become a prominent source of news, and social content a significant part of the service offered by news outlets. Stories posted on news organizations’ social feeds are guaranteed enhanced visibility, accessibility, and public resonance, compared to those published only on their proprietary news sites. The editorial decision to distribute a certain story on social media is thus not only a coveted resource in the newsroom, but also a matter of public relevance.
This project examines the stories that news organizations promote on social media from an editorial perspective. The study will offer a comparison of the total body of content that news organizations publish on their own sites with the subset of content they promote on social platforms. By comparing the total body of stories published on leading news sites with the curated content they choose to amplify on social media (and the language used to introduce them), this study provides insight into the news landscape constructed on social platforms, and whether it diverges from the one offered on news organizations’ own proprietary platforms. Interviews with social editors will provide further insight into how they make curatorial decisions on which stories to promote on social media.
Project lead: Efrat Nechushtai
This brief by three PhD candidates at The University of Washington (Michael L. Barthel, Ruth Moon, and William Mari) takes a snapshot of how fifteen political journalists from BuzzFeed, Politico, and The New York Times (representing digital, hybrid, and legacy outlets, respectively) interact. The researchers place those interactions in the context of reporters’ longstanding traditions of gossip, goading, collaboration, and competition.
Project lead: Philip Howard
Team members: Michael Barthel, Ruth Moon, William Mari
The San Francisco Homeless Project, the News Integrity Initiative, and ElectionLand are three major examples of an emerging pattern in journalism: the cooperation of multiple organizations and individuals to address big challenges at a scale that no single organization could by itself. This project will research how the combination of decentralized, networked, and traditional models for news production and distribution are creating new opportunities to support journalism.
Project lead: Carlos Martinez de la Serna
This project explores the way that three news organizations (City Bureau, Hearken, and The Chicago Tribune) conceptualize, implement, and measure audience engagement. At a moment when the news media’s credibility and economic sustainability are in doubt, this project examines what journalists in both traditional and innovative newsrooms believe “success” should look like. In doing so, it attempts to answer the question: Are journalism’s goals changing, or just its methods?
Project lead: Jacob Nelson
A project investigating the degree to which editors and reporters think about audiences as they produce and publish stories—and how it influences their decision-making.
Project lead: James Robinson
This project examines the expert networks of economic news on social media and the ways they are involved in the everyday routines of journalism.
Project lead: Burcu Baykurt
This project investigates the strategic Twitter engagement of political journalists and the corresponding dynamics of newsroom strategies, individual behavior, and the changing conditions of different news climates and socio-political environments. Findings show journalists’ individual approaches to and skills of tweeting vary and range across a broad spectrum, from submitting to the mandates of organizational social media policies, to feeling competitive pressures and “fear of missing out,” or making substantive investments into Twitter because the platform is viewed as a potential career asset in an unstable labor market.
Project lead: Svenja Ottovordemgentschenfelde
This study identifies the patterns of longform readers' story consumption and sharing habits. It found that participants read about half of the stories during the week and half over the weekend. Among the most remarkable findings is that readers finished 94% of the longform pieces they started. This study examines the key contributors to reading completing rates and considers the limitations of analytics in describing reader behavior and engagement.
Project leads: Michelle Levine, Michael Shapiro
This project examined how crowdsourcing transforms newsgathering into more of an iterative process and turns journalism into a conversation instead of a one-way megaphone. Good crowdsourcing efforts are high-touch, labor-intensive efforts, requiring journalists to determine a type of call-out, the communities to target, the method for collecting responses, and the avenues for connecting and giving back to the community of contributors. For digital-first startups, crowdsourcing provides a way to cultivate new audiences from scratch and produce unique journalism.
Project leads: Jeanne Brooks, Mimi Onuoha, Jan Schaffer
This report illustrates responses to systemic social problems in underrepresented and stigmatized communities at the local level. The research shows that residents often use alternative digital sources to cross-check stories and seek other information to help navigate and critically interpret mainstream local coverage. Participants said they would be more likely to seek out news and share stories if solutions journalism were more common. In communities with a long history of overwhelmingly negative coverage, stories featuring community perspectives that take a critical look at responses to social problems offer an opportunity to strengthen connections between residents, media, and community organizations.
Project leads: Daniela Gerson, Evelyn Moreno, Andrea Wenzel
This project investigates the role of influencers—people with large and devoted social media followings—in the digital media ecosystem. It will track online publishers’ evolving partnerships with influencers, as well as the phenomenon of journalists as influencers. Finally, it will examine how the position of influencers (and creators, in the parlance of social media platforms) as neither brands nor traditional users complicates their role in advertising, and what that means for emerging business models in journalism.
Project lead: George Tsiveriotis
Algorithms are playing a growing role in determining which news stories reach audiences as they increasingly assist or replace humans in the distribution and curation of news. This development begs the question: What kind of information landscapes are algorithmic platforms creating for individuals and communities as they direct millions of people to news via recommendation engines and search interfaces? Indeed, such engines and interfaces are currently among the main sources of traffic to news sites, making them crucial objects for study.
This study will compare thousands of real-world news searches conducted by a large and diverse set of participants across different digital services (e.g., Google, YouTube and Facebook) in order to gain insight into patterns of news distribution on the most popular algorithmically driven gatekeeping platforms. It will examine if news search algorithms promote filter bubbles and fragmented audiences as feared by some scholars and in popular media—or, alternatively, if they perhaps construct relatively homogeneous and uniform news landscapes online.
The authors' previous study with the Tow Center indicated that, on Google News, people of different political leanings and backgrounds were recommended highly similar news diets regarding the 2016 U.S. presidential election, sourced primarily from a small number of mainstream national outlets. This challenged the assumption that algorithms invariably encourage echo chambers while disrupting power structures within media industries. This follow-up project expands these research questions into a broader set of platforms and topics on the news, paying special attention to the role that local news sources are assigned in these environments.
Project leads: Seth C. Lewis, Efrat Nechushtai, Rodrigo Zamith
Over the past few years, a growing number of journalism stakeholders and researchers have argued that newsrooms should make “audience engagement” one of their chief pursuits. The term is increasingly portrayed as a cure-all for the news industry’s ails – audience engagement will increase audience loyalty, build audience trust, and make journalists’ work more relevant. Those who hope to make audience engagement both normative and measurable face enormous barriers to success. They need to convince news industry stakeholders, each with their own interests and opinions, to rally around a novel interpretation of journalistic practice. They also need to settle an internal debate surrounding how audience engagement itself should be defined and evaluated. Because the term currently lacks an agreed upon meaning—let alone metric—it has become an object of contestation. The efforts to make audience engagement central to news production therefore present an opportunity to learn how journalism is changing, and who within the field has the power to change it.
This project will investigate these efforts by drawing on interviews with and observations of news publishers, foundations, and audience analytics firms that are currently playing key roles in the ongoing conversation surrounding audience engagement. The pursuit of a shared definition of audience engagement is a question of agency: how much power do its advocates have to change what news production looks like? And how powerful are the structures obstructing their efforts? This project will attempt to answer these questions. In doing so, it will reveal how and why news industry stakeholders are attempting to change what form journalism takes, how its produced, and where the audience fits into that process.
Project lead: Jacob L. Nelson
Democracy Fund White Papers
Over the summer of 2016, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism partnered with the Democracy Fund Voice to develop a series of white papers that looked at the effect the election cycle had on amplifying false fears about terrorist attacks and Muslims in America. The Tow Center delivered three thought-provoking papers and a series of events ahead of the U.S. presidential election cycle.
Fear and the Ballot Box by Burhan Wazir examines how actions taken by politicians and members of the media have shaped recent elections in the wake of acts of terrorism and how the growth of social media platforms and web-based news has become part of the picture. Findings show elections conducted against a backdrop of both terrorism and the fear of terrorism frequently drive voters to elect leaders who are seen to be tough on security; allegations of political and media collusion in the aftermath of a terrorist attack lead to long-lasting and institutional failures; and the increasingly pivotal role the media and social platforms play in shaping how the public reacts to terrorism.
Project lead: Burhan Wazir
In Fanning the Flames, Charlie Beckett identifies trends, problems, and best practices for more constructive journalism about terror. Journalism can be created in ways that reduce the propaganda effect for either the terrorist or the panicked politician. The technology companies that provide platforms for the public and journalists to discuss and debate terrorism must do much more to improve how they filter and distribute information, which means there must be a more productive dialogue between the platforms and the news media about how their relationship can work better for the public good.
Project lead: Charlie Beckett
In Hate & Incriminate, Rafia Zakaria unpacks the demonization of Muslim Americans in the 2016 U.S. election. The report recommends developing and implementing a better reporting and enforcement system for hate speech and hate crimes against American Muslims. Additionally, social media platforms must do a better job of implementing their own guidelines that already prohibit the posting of hate material against a particular group.
Project lead: Rafia Zakaria