What audiences really want: For journalists to connect with them as people

Plus: How newsrooms are using generative AI, what makes news seem authentic on social media, and how to bridge the divide between academics and journalists

Welcome to another edition of RQ1! For those who are new, we are Mark Coddington and Seth Lewis — two former journalists turned academics, now teaching and researching at Washington and Lee University (Mark) and the University of Oregon (Seth).

In trying to keep pace with all the new research about news and journalism, we hope to give you each month a quick breakdown of a notable piece of new research, and also to highlight other interesting work you might want to check out. We can’t cover it all, of course, so consider this a sampling of some of the most interesting findings in news research.

If you have ideas or suggestions, please shoot us a reply — we’d love to hear from you. And if you enjoy this, please share the newsletter with your colleagues so they can sign up. If someone has shared this email with you, then you can subscribe here:

The gap between journalists’ and audiences’ professional values

Ask journalists about the core professional values that define good journalism, and the answers have been pretty consistent across the decades and even, to a large extent, around much of the world: factuality, impartiality, public service, autonomy, and ethics. These values are settled and foundational enough to constitute what Dutch media scholar Mark Deuze once called “the occupational ideology of journalism.”

But journalists aren’t the only ones with a stake in what those values are. Especially if journalists see their work as a public service, the opinions of the public they’re serving about what makes good journalism should be important as well. Several studies over the years have examined what the public sees as good journalism, though as they measure audience opinions, those studies have often drawn from established journalistic values and roles — that is, the values that journalists have outlined for themselves. So, if audiences got to name their journalistic values from scratch, what would they could up with?

That’s the premise of a new study in Journalism Practice by two Chilean scholars, Claudia Mellado and Constanza Gajardo. They interviewed 30 journalists and 64 audience members in Chile about their ideas on what constitutes good journalism and how journalists and their audiences think of each other. (As the authors argue, though Chile obviously can’t be generalized to global journalism at large, its media system does have a number of characteristics that may overlap with many other countries: high news consumption, low media trust, heavy private ownership and commercial orientation among news organizations, and a strong value of autonomy among journalists.)

Journalists emphasized exactly the values that you would expect: objectivity, independence, accuracy, and newsworthiness, or covering news in the public interest. Journalists also said they thought these were characteristics that audiences expected of them. “I get the impression that people tend to expect from journalism, especially the kind that deals with current affairs and politics, basically the same things as always,” one journalist said.

Based on this study, at least, that impression was wrong. Instead of the journalists’ traditional professional values, audiences emphasized human elements: approachability, empathy, and skills in communicating clearly and in ways that emotionally resonate. One audience member summarized these values succinctly: “I think that a journalist has to be a very approachable person, especially when it comes to interviews. The journalist has to build trust to be able to address all the topics. So, above all, I think a journalist has to be very empathetic, a person very open to listening as well.”

Mellado and Gajardo argued that both of these sets of values should be considered essential and complementary elements of professional journalism. The traditional values do address important elements of technical proficiency and expertise, they concluded, but the audience’s expectations constitute a set of affective, relational, humanistic values that add necessary depth and resonance to technically proficient journalism.

So why do journalists differ so widely from their audiences on what they consider good journalism, and why do journalists tend to misread their audience’s values? Mellado and Gajardo pointed to three factors: First, they said, journalists are defending their professionalism against a sense that audiences only want activist journalism, or journalism that supports their viewpoints. Second, journalists tend to see audiences through an instrumental lens defined by metrics, rather than understanding them as central to journalism. And third, journalists think audiences simply don’t understand what they do.

Mellado and Gajardo argued that this understanding can’t be created — and these two sets of professional values can’t be fused — unless journalists begin to align with their audiences beyond a utilitarian approach. “This alignment must stem not only from conviction but also from a place of honesty,” they wrote. “Incorporating the audience as a legitimate and valued stakeholder seems essential for fostering a symbiotic relationship.”

Research roundup

Uses of generative AI in the newsroom: Mapping journalists’ perceptions of perils and possibilities
Hannes Cools and Nicholas Diakopoulos
Journalism Practice

In the nearly two years since OpenAI released ChatGPT to much public fanfare, there has been no shortage of hype and hysteria associated with generative AI (so called because it refers to technology capable of producing new content — such as text, images, video, audio, code, and more — with unprecedented ease and scale). And while artificial intelligence has been around for decades in various forms, and has been applied to news production for at least a decade or more, the GenAI moment, marked by the likes of Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s DALL-E, and Microsoft’s Copilot, has been especially captivating to journalists and other observers for what it portends about the future of media work in a world infused by AI.

In that sense, consider this study one of the first of many that are likely to appear in the coming months — ones that seek to address not just the impact of AI broadly on journalism but of generative AI in particular.

Cools and Diakopoulos explored how journalists perceive both the risks and opportunities associated with using generative AI tools through interviews with journalists from the Netherlands and Denmark. They focused on early adopters of generative AI in the newsroom, but you could rightly argue that such professionals offer leading indicators of where things are likely to go in the future.

The researchers found that journalists were using GenAI across all phases of the news reporting process, though their enthusiasm for its “efficiency and versatility” was focused mostly on “areas that do not compromise the core of journalistic labor.” When asked to define that core of journalism, interviewees talked about things like political analysis, handling scoops from sources, and breaking news — but the precise threshold for what counts as central to the heart of journalism, and what can be outsourced at the periphery, remains a murky and debated question.

Additionally, the researchers observed “a growing apprehension [among journalists] that, rather than mitigating online biases, AI might unintentionally reinforce them, especially if the data it is trained on contains those very biases.” Naturally, too, study participants worried about “AI-induced hallucinations leading to misinformation, potential reputational damage, and a loss of unique journalistic voice.”

And, while the journalists stressed the need for comprehensive AI literacy among all media professionals (from editors and reporters to marketers) to ensure the scrutiny of AI-generated content, they also saw a bright side as well: a future of “modular journalism” that could extend and augment the variety and reach of news.

What makes news (seem) authentic on social media? Indicators from a qualitative study of young adults
Marília Gehrke, Johanna Eggers, Claes de Vreese, and David Nicolas Hopmann
Digital Journalism

We’ve written a lot about the relationship between journalism and younger news audiences — from why news subscriptions feel like a burden to many young people to whether one’s Instagram feed feels like news to how news will almost never find you on TikTok (which is a problem given that platform’s outsized role in the lives of 18-24 year-olds).

This study from Denmark adds some new dimensions to this line of research and brings together a couple of interesting questions: How do people attempt to authenticate what they see online? And how do young adults, in particular, make sense of news through various mental heuristics (or cues)? That last question is especially relevant as many people, and especially younger people, most often encounter news via social media and sometimes almost by accident, rather than going directly to a news source. This leads to snap judgments about the trustworthiness of the news encountered.

Gehrke and colleagues asked young adults to keep a diary of their news consumption (by taking screenshots on their phones) for several days, and then later engaged them in a discussion to explore their experiences and perceptions. Drawing on 300 entries and interviews with 20 participants, the researchers identified three primary cues these young Danes rely on: reputation, endorsement, and consistency.

Reputation is about “the authority of a source, meaning that a familiar brand tends to be more trusted over a less familiar one” — and for the people in this study, national news brands were trusted almost instinctively, as compared to foreign news sources. Blue verification badges, like those on Instagram and X, also played a key part in signaling reputation.

The second go-to heuristic is endorsement, “which suggests that people tend to believe information and sources if others do as well” — and in this case, study participants tended to see the volume of likes and comments as being more crucial for gauging reliability than whether something had been recommended by family and friends.

The third heuristic, consistency, refers to people’s routinized approach for assessing the credibility of information — and in this instance, the young Danes in this study did not feel they needed to do much to authenticate the news (no double-checking or googling required) because they had significant trust in public media, especially, and in their own perceived abilities to figure out what was true based on a quick look at the headline, photo, and tone of the news.

Politicized and paranoid? Assessing attitudinal predictors of alternative news consumption
Cornelius Puschmann, Sebastian Stier, Patrick Zerrer, and Helena Rauxloh
Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media

We know that right-wing alternative news sources can appeal to people by offering extreme political views that might not be found in mainstream news, or by playing off people’s mistrust of traditional journalism in many countries. Such alternative news sources range from obvious state-subsidized propaganda (e.g., Russia’s RT, formerly Russia Today) to brands built around today’s populist politics (e.g., Epoch Times) to click-driven sites that play on fears and grievances to stoke traffic and ad revenue more so than pursue obvious political purposes.

But what exactly are the predictors that might help explain what leads people to seek out right-wing alternative sources as part of their news diet?

This study by Puschmann and colleagues offers some valuable clues through a study that combined online tracking with survey data from more than 2,000 German participants. First, they found that someone who expresses conspiratorial thinking is more likely to consume right-wing alternative news — which may seem obvious, but the authors note that this connection had only been assumed and never fully tested before.

Second, they found that people with pro-Russia views, particularly about the invasion of Ukraine, were connected to more consumption of alternative news. This connection seems plausible given the “close connection — financially, logistically and ideologically — between many German-language alternative media outlets and the Russian state,” revealing the power and influence of Russian propaganda in Germany.

Interestingly, the authors stress that several factors that presumably lead to alternative news consumption actually turned out to be non-factors. “Among these,” they write, “were political orientation on a left-right scale, satisfaction with democracy, political efficacy [i.e., one’s perceived ability to make a difference in politics] and education.” For one thing, this shows how the “left vs. right” framing that is often used to describe media and politics may not be especially helpful in this context (indeed, there’s evidence that left-right political framing is simply a myth). And there could be people who self-describe as political moderates but who hold otherwise “extreme” views about conspiracies or other topics.

Playful citizens: How children develop and integrate news-related practices in their daily lives
Denise Mensonides, Anna Van Cauwenberge, Joëlle Swart, and Marcel Broersma
Journalism Studies

We talk a lot in this newsletter about young people and news (see above), and for good reason: Much of the most interesting research on news audiences being done these days focuses on the beliefs and behaviors of such consumers. But what about an even younger group — what clues might we learn from how children develop news-related practices in their lives?

This study by Mensonides and colleagues explored how children ages 8-12 — a group that is increasingly surrounded by media and information because of more time spent online and more of them with phones at their disposal — engage with news and then, in connection, learn to figure out what “lived citizenship” means to them. Even if such kids can’t vote, they can still form ideas about public life and their relationship to it, so the researchers wanted to develop a ground-up perspective on this by examining how children learn about and make sense of current affairs and societal issues.

Using a three-part method — observing kids at afterschool care locations, observing them during lessons about news at elementary schools, and interviewing teachers, all of this taking place in Groningen, Netherlands — the researchers found that “children employ a wide range of playful news-related practices that allow for light-hearted explorations of news and create opportunities for acts of lived citizenship.”

Such play involved a preference for “funny” videos and memes about news topics or even things such as making a Ukrainian flag in Minecraft to register support for the country after it was discussed in the news, and it also involved offline interactions with their peers.

Importantly, the researchers found that children enjoyed learning about and discussing current affairs, but that there was a “disconnect” between children’s playful approach to news and the more serious and structured news-related practices that are expected of them in school.

The authors argue that “playful, informal, and personally meaningful news-related practices allow children [to] give meaning to their environment and explore the world around them, rendering play a crucial aspect of the continuous learning process of citizenship. Children’s news-related practices go beyond a mere introduction to the adult world. It is important for parents, afterschool care employees, and teachers should consider children's own ideas, emotions, and questions that arise after engaging with news. This can be supported by incorporating teaching strategies that support playful learning, such as guided play, co-opted play, or playful instruction.”

The research-practice gap in journalism: Why it exists and how we can address it
Tamar Wilner et al.
Journalism Bridging Project

Academia and journalism: Two different worlds? How scientific institutions can successfully collaborate with journalistic organizations
Leonie Wunderlich, Sascha Hölig, and Meinolf Ellers
Journalism

We close with two reports about the divide that exists between the academic world and the journalistic one, and how we might foster more dialogue and collaboration between the two — which, as will be clear to any long-term reader of this newsletter, is one of the main reasons that we started RQ1 almost five years ago.

The first is a white paper by a new initiative called the Journalism Bridging Project that was published in partnership with the American Press Institute and features a large cast of journalists and academics as contributors (full disclosure: we both were involved in this initiative — Mark as a section editor, and Seth as an editor-at-large). The report seeks to clarify why there is such “palpable disconnect” between academics and journalists, and why it matters to learn from other fields and build new mechanisms and incentives for cross-pollination and coordination to overcome such a persistent and problematic research/practice divide.

“The simplest way to bridge the gap,” the authors suggest, among other recommendations, “is by making sure journalists and academics spend time in the same rooms. Conferences can bring professionals from both worlds together to exchange ideas. Programming could include panels that mix scholars and journalists, summaries of research insights and ask-me-anythings between journalists and researchers on key topics. Universities can leverage relationships with alumni and neighboring newsrooms to bring research and practice together more.”

The second item in this vein is a study by Wunderlich and colleagues. It takes up “the question of how scientific institutions can establish long-term collaborations with journalistic organizations,” toward the goal of improving knowledge transfer between the two fields. The authors describe an initiative (#UseTheNews) that aimed to encourage news use and news literacy among young people, but rather than focus on the content of the initiative, the researchers wanted to investigate how the relationship unfolded between the scientific and journalistic partners.

Overall, they found that fruitful cooperation could occur under the right conditions, and they highlighted four main pieces of advice for how researchers can broker long-term relationships with newsrooms: (1) Build a core team that manages the organizational and communication-related aspects of the collaboration (including team leaders representing both the academic and practice sides); (2) establish core values that will guide how roles are defined and managed (e.g., what principles around transparency, data quality, etc., are sacrosanct to one or both sides?); (3) ensure regular exchange between all partners to maintain initial momentum over a long period; and (4) clarify how success is defined and measured.

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