What’s RQ1?

RQ1 is a monthly newsletter meant to bring you up to speed on the latest research on news and journalism. Our goal is to give you each month a brief but meaningful overview of a key piece of research from the past month, and also to point you to a rundown on other important work you might want to check out.

Who writes it?

RQ1 is written by Mark Coddington, Seth Lewis, Tamar Wilner, and Nick Mathews, four former journalists who became academics. Mark and Seth, RQ1’s co-founders, met through our Ph.D. program at the University of Texas at Austin, and now we teach and research at Washington and Lee University (Mark) and the University of Oregon (Seth). Tamar teaches and researches at the University of Kansas, and Nick is at the University of Missouri. We both study how journalists do their jobs in a changing digital environment, looking at subjects like data journalism, social media, news engagement, news aggregation, and a whole lot of other areas, too.

We created RQ1 because we’ve had trouble ourselves keeping up with the constant flow of new research on news and journalism, and we want to help you keep up with it as we try to wade through it as well.

Who is it for?

Busy academics, busy journalists, busy students, and anyone else who wants to know what researchers are finding out about news and journalism.

How often does it come out?

Once a month or so, if we’re running on schedule. It’s a bit less frequent in the summer and during particularly busy parts of the semester, but we aim for about once a month.