The Research Report
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November 1, 2012 12:00 AM
Innovator’s lament
Shouldn't trailblazers be allowed to establish new standards of success?
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 the unit of journalism. . . . Let’s tear it up. Let’s reinvent how we tell stories and create some new forms.”
Whether that’s good...
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October 2, 2012 10:52 AM
TMI
How are we managing the daily flood of information?
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, a French observer speculated that the rapid multiplication of books would bring the world to a state “as barbarous as...
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August 7, 2012 10:56 AM
Sounds about right
Talking up talk radio
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 the liberal Air America network in 2010. The most popular political talkers, like Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck, are...
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May 24, 2012 11:35 AM
Guiding Starr
Freedom of expression is not freedom of the press
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 of the far-reaching Creation of the Media (2005), cuts through tons of clutter about the impact of the digital revolution on media...
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April 2, 2012 06:00 AM
Link Think
News organizations and their hyperlinking choices
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 other pages within the organization’s site, which may not provide readers with the most useful information.
Why do news...
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January 31, 2012 06:00 AM
The Algorithm Method
Making news decisions in a clickocracy
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 Philadelphia newsrooms. (Anderson is a professor of media culture at the College of Staten Island and blogs for NiemanLab; he received his PhD at...
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August 24, 2011 03:21 PM
Happy Birthday, Wikipedia!
Ten years of Wikipedia and their neutral point of view policy
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 or, alternatively, the whims of overzealous or malicious users. Yet, Wikipedia has become, as BusinessWeek put it, “the first stop for bar...
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July 5, 2011 08:06 PM
The Climate for Science Reporting
A new report shows a surge in climate change coverage
Early in December 2009, politicians, media representatives, and NGO officials queued up outside the Bella Center from eight in the morning until late in the afternoon for the Copenhagen climate-change summit—in freezing conditions: “Some…gave up, complaining that global warming had not reached Scandinavia.” This may be the only light-hearted moment in James Painter’s “Summoned by Science: Reporting Climate Change at...
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May 1, 2011 08:00 AM
How to Dow
Careless coverage of the Dow Jones Industrial Average can mislead readers
Stock-market indices offer an alluring impression of rigor and certainty. But what do they really mean? The University of Michigan political scientist Arthur Lupia and five colleagues argue in the January 2011 edition of Political Communication that the Dow Jones Industrial Average (though they could have picked the S&P 500, NASDAQ-100, or others) misrepresents the value of stocks relative to...
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February 23, 2011 04:45 PM
The Public Screen
A study on collective viewing experiences
The television set had arrived in the majority of American households by 1955. Inspired by the popular ideals of domesticity, “togetherness,” and a new culture of immense consumer spending, middle-class families rearranged their living rooms, dining rooms, kitchens, dens, and converted garages around the new medium. Like the piano and the fireplace before, television became the center of family gatherings,...
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January 27, 2011 10:15 AM
Any Questions?
Sociolinguists study the changes in presidential press conferences over five decades
Sociolinguists are sociologists who study how people talk to one another. They are typically interested in naturally occurring speech, but unfortunately (for them) the preponderance of such communication disappears into the ether as it’s spoken. So where can the poor sociolinguist, who cannot be surreptitiously recording the couple at the next table at Starbucks, find caches of this naturally occurring...
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December 1, 2010 04:45 PM
In ACORN’s Shadow
A new analysis of the community-organizing group's history shows the media was less than fair
Remember ACORN, the community-organizing group that got caught in the electoral crossfire between one-time community organizer Barack Obama and a highly motivated, conspiracy-minded contingent of conservative activists? The repeated attacks on ACORN for “voter fraud” moved into Sarah Palin’s speeches and inspired John McCain in a televised presidential debate to suggest that ACORN “is now on the verge of maybe...
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September 30, 2010 05:21 PM
Snapshots of War
WikiLeaks isn't the first site to publish controversial material from a war zone
In April, WikiLeaks released a graphic video entitled “Collateral Murder,” which shows U.S. soldiers shooting from a helicopter on a group of Iraqis while making triumphant comments. The WikiLeak triggered heated discussions about who has the right to take and distribute war images and what is the proper language to use when speaking about the violence of war. But “Collateral...
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July 6, 2010 12:36 PM
Philadelphia Story
A study in the City of Brotherly Love suggests what's been lost, and what can be gained
Everybody knows that newspapers have been cutting jobs, cutting services, cutting corners. It is not so widely acknowledged that these cuts seem to be keeping them in the ring. Advertising is down, circulation is down, stories and pages are down, but the boxer keeps getting up again. The fighter still remains.
But how to assess the impact of these losses?
... Continue reading
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Desks
The Audit Business
- Audit Notes: pyramid people, Disney and ABC, no USA Today paywall Roddy Boyd digs into a diet-shake pyramid scheme
- Hot air Rises Above on CNBC An anchor pins a minor dip in stocks on the TV appearance of a minor politician
The Observatory Science
- Dull news from Doha UN climate summit a ho-hum affair for the press
- Highway to the danger zone Following Sandy, HuffPo and NYT dig into the folly of coastal development
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- NBC News sets good example for Medicare reporting People perspective leads to clear explanation of impact of proposed changes
- In Pennsylvania, a niche site with wide reach PoliticsPA drives political conversation in Keystone State
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