Rebuilding Trust through Journalism Education

This study details the development of a public affairs reporting course for journalism schools in resource-limited communities offered at a land-grant institution surrounded by a resource-strapped community. This chapter focuses on inequalities related to opportunities for engagement, both when it comes to newsrooms and academic settings. More specifically, we address the challenges of teaching a multimedia-based curriculum while maintaining historical relationships with local citizens in Michigan. Our approach of combining survey, content analysis, in-depth interviews, and a field experiment provides a framework for connecting journalism education with communities surrounding land-grant institutions.

What Is Data Literacy?

Decades after the public journalism movement attempted to redefine the relationship between news outlets and the communities they cover, local journalists are still grappling with how best to cultivate audiences in civic spaces. Community news providers—battling against diminished levels of trust in media institutions—are seeking to counter these sentiments by building closer partnerships with their readers. In this light, data journalism is often heralded for its ability to coalesce fragmented audiences in conversation around salient civic issues. Yet despite its promise, successful storytelling requires basic data literacy skills on behalf of both practitioners and the public. To understand the story, all parties must understand the data. This chapter tackles programmatic efforts to address societal shortfalls in data knowledge and accessibility across the news production/consumption spectrum (with an emphasis on journalism experiments in community news).

What Journalism Researchers Should Be Doing

This is a short commentary from a practice perspective.

The Business of Journalism and Studying the Journalism Business

This chapter challenges the conventional assumption that journalism can be saved through a singular business model. We argue, using examples from the United States, that scholars and journalists need to be more holistically engaged with the economics of media more generally, and different types of journalism beyond newspaper and digital-first outlets. Second, scholars and journalists need to be more intellectually honest about their aims in conducting this research: Is research on news business models aimed at propping up corporate-funded journalism? What is the purpose of critiquing current business models, and are the solutions proposed really tenable or equitable within current political and social landscapes? Third, universities should consider their strengths and limitations in serving as potential “bubbles” for innovation, experimentation, and insulation from commercial pressures.

The Business of Digital News

In news organizations today, editorial strategy is business strategy. The two are entirely intertwined. Understanding either requires studying both. With the shift to digital, the process of publishing the news has transitioned from a series of loosely coupled, sequential, and periodic production tasks to a set of complex, overlapping, and stochastic outputs requiring significant alignment and coordination to succeed. For journalists, these changes are challenging newsroom norms and driving an embrace of human-centered design practices and product thinking. For academics it is an opportunity to study the remaking of organizational roles and relationships in the business of digital news, an effort that is still in its infancy.

Conclusion: Betrothed or Belligerent

This chapter concludes the book by reflecting on the concept of engagement.

Critiquing Ethnocentrism and Hierarchy in International Journalism

This chapter focuses on international journalism research, offering the following suggestions: First, scholarship on international journalism should be prepared to more directly and publicly critique the ethnocentrism that has long plagued international correspondence based in the English-speaking West, and that continues to be a problem in the digital age. Second, scholars of international news work need to be prepared to interrogate the structural inequalities that inform journalistic labor on an international scale, inequalities that have not disappeared with the rise of digital technologies. Third, scholars of international journalism need to more directly engage not only with big-brand correspondents, editors, and news executives, but also with the freelancers, stringers, and local fixers who hold these international news professions on their backs. The chapter ultimately argues that journalism scholars should be building more bridges between journalism research and journalism practice.

Why News Literacy Matters

News literacy efforts address news content, production, consumption, and contexts to holistically explore the role of news in society, with a particular focus on the importance of news for informing self-governing citizens. Although news literacy is not a cure-all, it should be part of a broader solution to developing a media system that provides audiences with news and information that is relevant to their lives. With this in mind, we, as researchers, educators, practitioners, and professionals, need to think about how to teach news literacy and encourage its application. Research and practice should strive to improve news literacy, increase confidence in individuals’ abilities, and convince audiences that news literacy is applicable to their lives.

Recovering the Midwestern Ethos of Journalism Research

This chapter is a reminder that practice and theory have gone hand in hand since the beginning of professional journalism. However, this history and this partnership have been lost somewhat, particularly when it comes to PhD research. By calling back to the land-grant mission at the universities home to the first schools of journalism in the United States (the University of Missouri, the University of Illinois, the University of Wisconsin), the chapter recalls how the focus on skills and on understanding mass communication was aligned with the mission of journalism education. The chapter examines the founding of the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois and its PhD program that focused on applied journalism and mass communication research, explaining the role of legendary journalism scholar James Carey in recentering (and decentering) the tension between practice and research.

Groundwork for the Public

Public-facing research institutions and university centers have played an outsized role in collecting and disseminating knowledge about local news trends in the United States. Philanthropic support, attention by policymakers, and a sense of urgency around the crisis facing local journalism have incentivized the emergence of this particular kind of research that sits adjacent to, but not fully inside, the scholarly environment. This material is well positioned to engage and activate interventions aiming to help address the crisis in local journalism and provide empirical grist for deeper scholarly work. At the same time, however, this line of public scholarship is sometimes unmoored from theoretical considerations, highly descriptive, and exists outside of peer review systems. Many of these institutions setting the agenda for research about local journalism are bound by their own norms and cultures from making robust normative claims about how the industry should respond and adapt to their findings. This chapter traces the brief history of para-scholarly groundwork mapping local news, outlines the strengths and weaknesses of this model, and suggests collaborative practices going forward that connect this important groundwork with theory-driven and peer review practices.