News

The laws and technologies that govern today’s digital communication systems have dramatically affected journalists’ ability to protect sources. This report offers an overview of how these systems developed, and how their intersection exposes all digital communications to scrutiny. It also explores strategies for reducing this exposure for journalists.

Project lead: Susan McGregor

Read on Academic Commons (pdf download)

This project is the first comprehensive report on the use of user-generated content among broadcast news channels. It finds an increased dependence on user-generated content among international broadcast news channels, often used only when other imagery is not available. The report calls for the necessity of training newsroom staff to discover, verify, and properly credit the rights for user-generated content as well as address its impact on their staff, their audiences, and the people who are creating the content in the first place. 

Project leads: Pete Brown, Sam Dubberley, Claire Wardle

This report explores the journalistic uses of data from a variety of sensor systems and ethical standards for doing so. Journalists can serve audiences by researching which public and private sensor systems monitor their communities’ lives, not just because those systems are potential sources, but because it is newsworthy to investigate what sensor systems produce, how they are used, and who stands to benefit (or lose) from their data. Once journalists and the public start to understand more about the sensor systems that monitor our societies, the next step will be to work through the practical, legal, and ethical questions that should inform how much of the produced data can become public. 

Project lead: Fergus Pitt

This study looks how video journalism is defined and produced by newsrooms across the U.S., as well as its subsequent return on investments. The report finds that none of the participating newspapers make a profit on their videos and most describe themselves as in a state of investment and development. The newsrooms do earn some revenue on pre-roll advertising, but they are operating at a deficit when compared to the total cost of video production. Along with building their under-resourced production teams with the intention of increasing content production, news organizations are also heavily focused on increasing traffic.

Project lead: Duy Linh Tu

This report examines the current wide-sweeping trend of newsrooms downsizing into smaller spaces and how it will impact the future for post-industrial journalism in the digital age. While they can and do work from home, most journalists still find value in coming to a set, physical place. The creation of news hubs offers some insight into the industry-wide approach to thinking about digital workflow. Drawing upon six newsroom visits and over 120 interviews, the project highlights the value of physical newsrooms and hubs in the support of breaking news production and collaboration among journalists.

Project lead: Nikki Usher

Following four years of interviews with hundreds of editors, professors, reporters, technologists, government officials, and “hacker journalists,” this project details best practices of using data in journalism and offers solutions to remaining significant cultural, fiscal, and technical barriers to the adoption of data journalism and digital skills. The report suggests professional development along with statistical and scientific instruction for journalists, increased security practices around journalism, and a raised standard for accuracy and corrections. In addition, newsrooms must diversify their staff, and data journalists need to go beyond acquiring and cleaning data to understanding its provenance and source. Journalists must consider when it is appropriate to scrape data, access data, store it, or not—and understand that sensitive data will need to be protected with the same vigor that journalists have protected confidential sources.

Project lead: Alexander Howard

Team member: Jonathan Stray

This report examines the operating biases of the new power brokers in society—algorithms—and the potential for accountability practices. Given the challenges to effectively employing transparency for algorithms—namely trade secrets, the consequences of manipulation, and the cognitive overhead of complexity—journalists might effectively engage with algorithms through a process of reverse engineering to understand the input-output relationships of an algorithm and develop stories about how that algorithm operates. This report proposes a practical method by which journalists can investigate algorithms, and develops best practices around exposing algorithmic bias and making algorithms transparent.

Project lead: Nicholas Diakopoulos

Team member: Jennifer Stark

This analysis of news publishers focused on a single subject and their methods of engagement with niche audiences. The study finds that in order to thrive, news publishers will need a fusion of reporting experience and startup savvy—essentially the skills of small business management. Single-subject news accelerates the trend of “unbundling” the newsroom: Bleacher Report as a spun-off sports desk, FactCheck.org as the outsourced function of a political desk, and Education News Network (Chalkbeat) as a specialized bureau on local schools. Journalists can create new content where they see a deficit because the demand for in-depth news coverage by niche audiences is spawning new products for the digital marketplace.

Project leads: Kristin Nolan, Lara Setrakian

This essay is part survey and part manifesto, one that concerns itself with the practice of journalism and the practices of journalists in the United States.

Project leads: Chris Anderson, Emily Bell, Clay Shirky

"The Future of Digital Longform" seeks to define the new format “digital longform,” articulate criteria by which digital longform journalism is judged and valued, and layout and discuss successful models for soliciting, editing, publishing, and disseminating—and, of course, monetizing—longform content in the digital ecosystem.

Project lead: Anna Hiatt

What kinds of digitally-based journalism in the U.S. is the commercial market likely to support, and how?

This report focuses on news organizations that do original journalism, defined for our purposes as independent fact-finding undertaken for the benefit of communities of citizens. Those communities can be defined in the traditional way, by geography, but can also be brought together by topics or commonalities of interest. We also look into media companies that aggregate content and generate traffic in the process.

This report focuses mostly on for-profit news enterprises. The authors recognize the outstanding work done by such national organizations as ProPublica and the Center for Investigative Reporting, as well as local sites like Voice of San Diego and MinnPost. But for the purposes of this study, the authors felt it was more valuable to spend time examining organizations that rely as much as possible on the commercial market.

Project leads: Lucas Graves, Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave