Author Archive

Articles by Michael Schudson and Katherine Fink | Email the Author

 

1. The Research Report

   Innovator’s lament

   November 1, 2012 12:00 AM

   Some months ago, on the Poynter Institute’s website, PolitiFact’s Bill Adair urged: “[L]et’s blow up the news story.” Journalism must be reimagined from the ground up, he argued, starting with its building block, the “story”: “It’s time to rethink... Continue reading

2. The Research Report

   TMI

   October 2, 2012 10:52 AM

   Information overload goes back at least to Ecclesiastes—“of making many books there is no end.” And according to historian Ann Blair, European scholars in the 1500s complained about the “confusing and harmful abundance of books.” By the late 17th century,... Continue reading

3. The Research Report

   Sounds about right

   August 7, 2012 10:56 AM

   Occasional advertising boycotts of Rush Limbaugh’s program notwithstanding, political talk radio has been wildly successful in recent years—in terms of both revenue and ratings. Of course, political talk radio generally means conservative political talk radio, especially since the demise of... Continue reading

4. The Research Report

   Guiding Starr

   May 24, 2012 11:35 AM

   Paul Starr’s short essay, “An Unexpected Crisis: The News Media in Postindustrial Democracies” in the International Journal of Press/Politics (2012), is recommended reading, especially the second paragraph. That’s where Starr, the Princeton sociologist, Pulitzer-winning historian, and the author... Continue reading

5. The Research Report

   Link Think

   April 2, 2012 06:00 AM

   How do online news organizations use hyperlinks? Judging from some websites, not very well. Several journalism researchers have noted that, compared to blogs, online news articles provide few hyperlinks. And most links that do appear in news articles lead to... Continue reading

6. The Research Report

   The Algorithm Method

   January 31, 2012 06:00 AM

   Journalists relate to their audiences differently in the age of online news, according to C. W. Anderson, in recent articles in Journalism and the International Journal of Communication. Both articles are based on research Anderson conducted in... Continue reading

7. The Research Report

   Happy Birthday, Wikipedia!

   August 24, 2011 03:21 PM

   Wikipedia is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, to the surprise of skeptics who never thought a volunteer-written, open-access encyclopedia would make it. To them, the online encyclopedia appeared doomed to suffer from either a lack of participation... Continue reading