By Lisa Thalhamer
I don’t know exactly which story was my tipping point. By 2018, I had spent 10 years writing about car crashes, fires, murders, child abuse, natural disasters and many other forms of violence and death. The weight of all these tragedies had become more than I wanted to carry.
I knew that interacting with stories like these was part of the job for nearly all journalists, including my role as a local television news producer. What I didn’t know then was that there was a growing body of research about the way journalists were affected by covering trauma. Caroline M. Pyevich, Elana Newman, and Eric Daleiden created a scale for measuring how many traumatic stories journalists covered. Gretchen Dworznik-Hoak looked at the connection between the stories that TV journalists covered and their symptoms of post-traumatic stress and compassion fatigue. Marla Buchanan and Patrice Keats wrote about how journalists used strategies like avoidance and black humor to deal with the trauma they were exposed to.
Discovering that research when I enrolled in grad school at Northeastern University in Boston last fall felt like making new friends. Here were the people thinking about the same issues I was. It showed me I wasn’t alone in struggling with the subject matter of the stories I covered. It gave me language to explain the way I had been feeling for years.
But I was also disappointed to realize how much knowledge existed yet didn’t seem to be reaching working journalists. There were so many smart people thinking about ways to strengthen journalism, but so few of those ideas seemed to make it off the page and into practice. Like many fields, journalism suffers from a gap between academic research in the subject and its implementation in workplaces.
Journalism is at a precarious moment and needs every champion it can get. While academics and industry folks might have different approaches to fighting for journalism, everyone is invested in the field’s success. Now is the time for an Avengers-style team-up between all the forces that believe a free press is essential.
To actually do this, we first need everyone on the same page. Tamar Wilner, an assistant professor at the University of Kansas, is trying to do just that. She led fellow academics and working journalists to produce a nearly 40-page report taking stock of the issue, published last fall. Its title aptly sums up the white paper’s mission: “The Research-Practice Gap in Journalism: Why It Exists and How We Can Address It.” One of the paper’s big takeaways was that academic research can be densely worded, long and inaccessible. Plus, working journalists are always strapped for time. So here’s the bite-sized version of that report.
“We go into academia with these high hopes that what we’re going to write is going to have an impact,” said Wilner. “And then we look and we don’t see anything changing…. It’s not like I was despondent, but I was worried a little bit. Why are we doing this?”
Wilner has seen the way research can shape journalistic practices. She started writing about the proliferation of misinformation in 2014 — four years before Dictionary.com would name “misinformation” the “Word of the Year.”
“I felt for a while I was banging a drum and saying, this misinformation is everywhere — take notice of it,” Wilner said. “The reason that I got into academia was because I basically was like, this is a huge problem, and I want to understand it on a more fundamental level.”
Munching on a ‘truth sandwich’
In 2018, a conversation between a journalist and an academic gave us the phrase that has come to represent one of the major ways to defang misinformation: the “truth sandwich.” CNN media reporter Brian Stelter was interviewing George Lakoff, professor emeritus in linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. Lakoff explained that journalists needed to start with facts, then explain the lie or misinformation, and end by looping back to the truth. Stelter dubbed it a truth sandwich — a name that took off among journalists and helped spread the method.
“Most of the time the key findings are not going to boil down to a handy phrase,” said Wilner. But there are useful morsels in most research. Wilner and her team wrote in their report that highlighting the “practical ramifications” of research is one of the ways that academics can help bridge the research gap.
Journalist and audience strategist Heather Muse was recruited to Wilner’s project, in part because of the ways her career has bridged this divide. She worked in magazines, including Seventeen, after getting her undergraduate degree in journalism. But a desire for deeper knowledge about how journalists make decisions sent her back to the academic world for about a decade. She drew on her academic experience when she returned to the industry, working as an editor and an audience development director.
“It was clear that both of these fields have similar goals, almost identical goals, and they’re just talking past each other,” Muse said. “Anything I could do to just make it easier for both practitioners and academics to work together, I was like, ‘I’m in.’”
When we talked, I asked her about the common perception in newsrooms that academics are disconnected from reality in their so-called ivory towers. She pointed out that the slower pace of the academic world could actually be a benefit to journalists, who spend most of their time racing against deadlines.
“Those people in the ivory tower have the luxury of time to really look at something,” Muse said. “While you may not be able to get an exact use case you want for something, there is probably some sort of research that can back up what… you’re trying to figure out or refute it.” She encourages newsrooms to get to know the journalism professors in their communities, saying, “It also just makes these people be people as opposed to someone in an ivory tower.”
One organization trying to make that connection easier is the Engaged Journalism Exchange. Andrea Wenzel, Temple University associate journalism professor, and Jacob Nelson, University of Utah associate communications professor, founded the organization. Its mission is to bring academics and practitioners together.
“Journalism researchers are not often actually in conversation with journalists. Many of us come from journalism. We are in this academic world in an effort to improve the news industry,” Nelson said. “It’s really hard to figure out how to be helpful. It’s really hard to figure out how to maintain a discourse with journalists that doesn’t just sound like we’re telling them how to do their jobs or telling them that we know better than they do.”
The Engaged Journalism Exchange hosts one-day gatherings, often adjacent to major journalism education conferences, that are focused on creating conversation among people from all corners of the industry. Its next event will be held this summer in San Francisco, leading up to the annual conference for the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.
Nelson wants newsrooms to know that the professors in their communities would likely be eager collaborators in any innovative work they’re taking on, ranging from boosting revenue to improving their interactions with their audience. He said there are benefits for both groups. “Scholars get to use the data for their academic work and for hopefully writing some public facing pieces, and the organization gets some sort of analysis that they won’t be able to put together on their own.”
Industry partnerships are the foundation of research that I’ve been working on at Northeastern. I was recruited to the Reinventing Local TV News Project by Mike Beaudet, who splits his time between Northeastern, where he’s a professor of the practice, and WCVB-TV (Channel 5), where he’s an investigative reporter. The most recent phase of the project placed digital-first video storytellers in three newsrooms across the country in an effort to figure out how TV newsrooms can most effectively reach people online. Findings included the value of authenticity and the importance of matching the tone and format of your video to the platform where it will be posted.
“Being in a newsroom, that’s where you want to experiment,” Beaudet said. “That is the lab, the newsroom, and to be able to see in real time what’s resonating and what’s not.” In this phase of the research, Beaudet’s grant from the Stanton Foundation covered the salaries of the three video storytellers, as well as an animator who worked with all three newsrooms. In exchange, Beaudet got access to data from the partner newsrooms on how different stories performed. “There weren’t these positions before. And so to pilot them as an example of what other places can do… we wouldn’t be able to do if we didn’t actually have this happening inside newsrooms.”
Those relationships with newsrooms can take time to build. “It’s kind of like in journalism, you got to develop the sources and earn the trust, and then it becomes easier,” said Beaudet. He recommended bringing newsrooms into the research discussions early and thinking of those conversations as a “sounding board.”
Making research accessible
Like Beaudet, and every other academic I interviewed for this story, Mark Coddington is a journalist-turned-professor. Today, he teaches at Washington & Lee in Virginia. But the road to get there involved a lot of school — and a lot of academic reading.
“I found it was really hard to keep up with what is going on in this field,” Coddington said. While he was in his Ph.D. program, he and colleague Seth Lewis founded RQ1, a newsletter recapping recent journalism research. “I was basically writing what I wished somebody had written for me.”
Coddington said the audience for RQ1 is academics, grad students, working journalists, and the people on the business side of journalism. And there’s a lot of research that’s meaningful for that last group. “There’s whole areas of research that are just really focused on how do news organizations make money,” he said. “Everybody wants that kind of research.”
Coddington told me there’s a reason many professors aim their work at their academic colleagues. “Those are the people who determine the future of your career. Those are the people who are determining your pay, your promotion, if you ever get hired at another job, et cetera,” he said. But he encouraged researchers to think expansively about who might be interested in their work: “maybe it’s news consumers if you’re trying to help with media literacy.”
That exact issue is one of the major systemic changes that Tamar Wilner and her colleagues pointed to in their paper on the research gap. But with every problem they noted, ranging from “small potatoes” to “big fish to fry,” they highlighted the people working on solutions. And it takes everyone involved — those working in academia and those working in industry — to implement these changes. If researchers write about their work in Nieman Lab or the Columbia Journalism Review or Poynter, working journalists should read those articles. Professors and journalists should look for opportunities to go to the other’s turf – classroom and newsroom visits can lead to new ideas, new interns, and potentially new story sources.
Journalism research has made a difference in the industry in big ways and small. Climate change reporting evolved after researchers showed the way that “balanced” reporting gave life to false claims. The organization Trusting News developed a checklist to help newsroom avoid polarizing political reporting. Newsrooms that used the list said it made their stories better and helped them “focus on commonalities instead of differences.” Researchers have repeatedly highlighted the gender imbalance in expert sources, leading to resources that compile lists of experts who are women and people of color.
These success stories are meaningful. And by working together, journalists and academics have the opportunity to create more of them. Both groups care about journalism and want their work to contribute to making the world a better place. In this version of the Avengers, no one has to be exposed to gamma rays or injected with super soldier serum. We’re not up against a big purple guy with a magic glove, but the current stakes are still high.
It’s an essential time to draw on all of our resources to support quality journalism and the people who make it. Bridging the research gap in journalism is key in this effort.
Lisa Thalhamer is a graduate student in the School of Journalism at Northeastern University. She also writes the newsletter Journalist Brain.
