My central research interest is how the professional production of news is being changed through its encounter with participatory technologies that open the journalistic process up to people who haven't traditionally considered themselves journalists. That interest has manifested itself in several strains of research:
Aggregation as journalistic work
Aggregation — along with its more sophisticated cousin, curation — has played an increasingly important role in the way we consume news, from the automated results that make up Google News' listings to email newsletters that offer bite-size summaries of major news stories. But despite its increasing prevalence, we still know relatively little about how this aggregated content is produced. Aggregating and curating content originally published elsewhere is moving toward the center of journalistic work, but it's rarely taught in journalism schools or discussed in depth among professionals.
My dissertation was an attempt to understand what goes into this type of work, examining its similarities and divergence from traditional journalistic forms of reporting and editing. I'm working on expanding it into a book (currently under contract with Columbia University Press), and I'm looking into the norms and practices that make up journalistic aggregation work, particularly as a window into the changing epistemology of journalism. More specifically, I see aggregation as part of an ongoing pattern of "granulation" of journalism in which the traditional narrative form that structures both news stories and the way journalists think about news itself is beginning to break down into smaller, more discrete and information-based chunks. I'm also examining how journalists determine the validity of news accounts and sources without some of the key techniques — interviews, eyewitness observation, official documents — on which traditional reporting has been built.
I'm studying all this by interviewing people who work in aggregation and observing them at work, and by examining the things that journalists and aggregators have said publicly about their craft. The project builds on several previous studies that I've undertaken:
New technologies and journalistic forms
Journalists have incorporated a variety of new technologies into their workflows within the last decade or two, and each time they do, they have to try to meld that technology's existing properties and social norms with their own journalistic norms. They've also developed forms of journalism that adapt existing practices for digital contexts. I've done work on a few studies that examine that collision:
— I conducted a content analysis of professional news sites, political bloggers, and blogging professional journalists to see how they used
hyperlinks — not just where they linked to, but how they referred to those links and, using interviews, what they thought those links meant. You can read that study in the open-access
International Journal of Communication and see
Poynter's coverage of it as well. Expanding on that study, I interviewed more bloggers and journalists about where their norms regarding linking came from, and what sorts of processes they used to link. I tied those findings to institutional theory, looking at institutional influences within both news organizations and the political blogosphere. That paper has been published in
Digital Journalism (paywall).
— I wrote a paper, published in
Digital Journalism (paywall) that sought to clarify some of the similarities and differences between
data journalism, computational journalism, and computer-assisted reporting and provided a typology for understanding various forms of quantitatively oriented journalism. I've also written a follow-up to that paper examining recent scholarship in data journalism, set to be published as a book chapter in late 2018. In addition, Northeastern University's
John Wihbey and I used survey data to compare attitudes toward data, statistics, and the use of research in journalism among journalists and journalism educators. That study was published in the open-access
#ISOJ Journal.
— I worked with several colleagues at the University of Texas on two studies using a large data set of political journalists' tweets during the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign to determine how political journalists are normalizing
Twitter within the context of campaign reporting. The first of those studies, published in
Journalism Studies, looked at journalists' use of Twitter to cover the 2012 national conventions, examining the prevalence of horse-race or strategy-oriented journalism, opinions, and personal details. The second, published in
The International Journal of Press/Politics (paywall), examined the use of Twitter to fact-check the presidential debates, finding that journalists used it far more often as a tool for stenography than critical examination of candidates' statements. That study received coverage at
Poynter and the
Columbia Journalism Review. With two of those colleagues, we also published a
book chapter providing an overview of those studies and others from the same data set involving political journalists' use of Twitter.
Journalists' characterization of their own profession
In addition to the changing work professional journalists do, I'm also interested in how they think about their changing role in society, and how they present that role to the public. I've done a couple of related studies into this:
— As
WikiLeaks came to prominence in 2010, I was intrigued by journalists' coldness toward the group and their insistence that it was not a journalistic one. So I examined what the two news organizations that worked most closely with WikiLeaks —
The New York Times and
The Guardian — said about WikiLeaks regarding journalism and what that might tell us about how professional journalists see themselves compared with the networked form of journalism that's evolving online. My study, which touches on institutionality, reporter-source relationships, and objectivity, can be found in
Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly (paywall).
— That study ended up becoming my master's thesis, and expanded to include a variety of other types of news sources, including alternative media and media criticism. I adapted part of that thesis to explore what journalists mean when they refer to
"original reporting," or "boots-on-the-ground reporting," and how that connects with the work that's traditionally been thought of as journalism. That study has been published in
Journalism (paywall).
The role of the users
I'm not only concerned about the professionals — I also want to know about how the users themselves fit into this news ecosystem now that they're taking on an increasing active role. I'm working on a variety of projects on this area, too:
— I've worked on several studies with
Seth Lewis of the University of Oregon and
Avery Holton of the University of Utah on the role of
reciprocity in facilitating collaborative journalism between professionals and citizens. We've published one paper in
Journalism Practice (paywall) outlining the concept of reciprocity in journalism, another in the
International Journal of Communication (with
Homero Gil de Zúñiga)
comparing journalists' and the public's attitudes and behaviors regarding reciprocity, and a third in
Journalism Studies (paywall) on the relationship between journalists' professional role conceptions and their perception of reciprocity. We've also published a
book chapter on our conceptualization of reciprocal journalism.
— I've also worked on a couple of studies on
journalists' perceptions of their audiences. I conducted a survey examining how journalists saw their audiences using particular technologies and connecting that with their adoption of those technologies, which was published in
Electronic News (paywall). I'm also working on a multi-survey project with five other scholars looking at how journalists perceive their audiences, as well as their experiences with online harassment, metrics, and branding on social media.
— Holton and I also conducted a pair of studies examining the
Cleveland Indians' "Social Suite," an initiative that gives the baseball team's social media-savvy fans a luxury-suite view of a game and access to team officials. One study, published in
Mass Communication & Society (paywall), explores the suite as a case study in more public-centric network gatekeeping, while the other, published in the open-access
Case Studies in Strategic Communication, looks at the suite from a public relations perspective.
— I've also co-authored a study, published in
Journalism Practice (paywall), that uses a national survey of the public to examine
views of citizen journalism and professional journalism among those who consume and create online content.