background research in journalism

The Center for Media and Journalism Studies: Background Research

• Get Started
• Finding Related News Items
• Background Research
• Public Records
• Independent News
• Watchdog Groups
• Street Newspapers
• Florida Newspapers
• Investigative Journalism

Using CQ Researcher

Gathering background information.

Start your research by reading some background information on the topic. There are tools to help you understand the major points of your topic, what is known about it, and how it relates to other topics.

But you need to be careful! Not all information is created equally. Some background information in newspaper and magazines articles are opinion pieces, editorials and op-eds. They may be written by experts, by reporters who may not be experts, and in some cases (like blog comments on news web sites) anonymous authors. 

So where can I find reliable background information?

Some common resources include dictionaries, encyclopedias, almanacs, and bibliographies. The library has these in both print and electronic forms, and they can be located with the library catalog or databases. Some of these resources can be found in the magazines and newspapers located in the large general databases like Academic Search Premier, OmniFile Full Text , and Academic OneFile. 

There are also specialized databases that have articles and reports with good background information on a wide range of topics. These include CQ Researcher, Opposing Viewpoints, and Issues and Controversies . These databases are particularly good at presenting objective information on social issues currently making headlines. They present well-balanced overviews with analyses of both sides of the argument or issue. 

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• Last Updated: Mar 26, 2024 11:27 AM
• URL: https://irsc.libguides.com/mediajournalism

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Journalism and Creative Nonfiction

• Background Research
• Creative Nonfiction
• Select Books on Writing
• Citation Guides

Reference Sources

• Oxford Bibliographies High-level overviews of scholarship written by top names in the field get researchers and faculty up to speed quickly on topics beyond an area of expertise.
• Oxford Reference Provides web access to more than 100 major Oxford University Press dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference works in the humanities, social sciences, foreign languages, science, technology and medicine, the performing arts, and religion. Works can be searched separately or across the entire databases. Includes over 1.5 million entries.
• Credo Reference Online reference resources from numerous publishers. This reference resource can be searched by individual title, broad subject headings, cross-references, audio and images. Use its research mapper to search for terms and topics that are interconnected and displayed in (a) visual form. Examples of titles are: Bloomsbury Guide to Art, Bridgeman Art Library Archive, Columbia Encyclopedia, Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary, Harvard Dictionary of Music, and the Concise Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology and Behavioral Science. The complete list of titles is available on the CREDO Reference site.
• SAGE Knowledge The SAGE Knowledge platform provides cross-searching of SAGE resources including reference works, ebooks, and CQ Press. Included titles represent many disciplines within the social sciences such as juvenile justice, terrorism, social theory, crime, African American society, social welfare, education and many more themes.

Databases for Scholarly Literature

• Academic Search Premier Multi-disciplinary | Index and some full text | Scholarly literature
• America: History & Life History of United States and Canada | Index and some full text | Scholarly literature
• Arts & Humanities Citation Index Multi-disciplinary | Index and citation tracker | Scholarly literature
• Arts & Humanities Database Multi-disciplinary | Index and some full text | Scholarly literature
• ATLA Religion Religious Studies | Abstracts, index, and some full-text content | Scholarly literature
• Historical abstracts World history excluding North America | Index and some full text | Scholarly literature
• JSTOR Multidisciplinary | Abstracts and full-text content | Scholarly Literature
• MLA International Bibliography Language and literature | Abstracts, index, and some full-text content | Scholarly literature
• Political Science Database Political Science | Abstracts, index, and some full-text content | Scholarly literature
• Sociological Abstracts Sociology | Abstracts and index | Scholarly literature

Social Science Data and Statistics

The following resources are just a select few of data sets available through Tisch Library. For a complete list and help with datasets please visit the Social Science Data and Statistics Resources Guide .

• Social Explorer Social Explorer provides quick and easy access to modern and historical U.S. census data and demographic information. The web interface lets users create maps and reports to help visually analyze and understand demography and social change throughout history.
• Data-Planet Provides access to statistical data produced by U.S. Federal agencies, States, private organizations, and major intergovernmental organizations. There are up to 2 billion charts, maps, views, rankings, time series and tables available for use in the Data-Planet repository. Link to Ready Reference interface.
• Statista Provides access to statistics and studies gathered by market researchers, trade organizations, scientific publications, and government sources on over 600 industries.
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• Last Updated: Mar 6, 2024 5:48 PM
• URL: https://researchguides.library.tufts.edu/c.php?g=1192985

University Libraries

• Ohio University Libraries
• Library Guides
• Background Information
• Job Interview Research
• AP Stylebook Online
• Find Magazines & Trade Publication Articles
• Audience Research
• Feature Writing
• Article Search Tips
• Read the Full Article
• Newspapers: Go to Newspaper Guide This link opens in a new window
• Reference Books
• Children's Magazines
• Research Publishers
• Author Biographical Information
• Data Resources
• Theory Resources
• Journalism books in the stacks
• Safari eBooks
• Strategic Communication Research
• Local Issues
• Journalism Websites
• Historical Newspapers
• Research media by country
• Research Media Organizations
• International News Sources
• Journalism Documentaries
• Contact Your Librarian

Start Your Research with Background Information

Why start with background research.

If you have ever looked at a Wikipedia page, you know the value of a good overview of a topic you need to research.

Wikipedia has its uses, but there are also some great library resources that can help you get started with a journalism research project. A good background source will:

• Give you an overview of the topic and the sub-topics that are often up for debate
• Define important terms (events, people, definitions) that you'll need to know to understand the topic. These terms usually make good words with which to search for further resources.
• Suggest further readings to help you go forward with your research.

Online reference books for background research:

Check these online books for background information on your journalism or media-related topic.

• The International Encyclopedia of Communication by Wolfgang Donsbach (Ed) Publication Date: 2008 If you are research a topic in communication that is new to you, I highly recommend the International Encyclopedia of Communication. You can find descriptions of many communication-related topics as well as suggested further readings.

• Encyclopedia of Communication by Jorge Reina Schement (Ed.) Publication Date: 2003
• Encyclopedia of Politics, the Media, and Popular Culture by Brian Cogan & Tony Kelso (Eds.) Publication Date: 2009 This encyclopedia gives overviews on topics specific to political communication topics. If you're looking at any topic related to political communication or politics in the media, this is the source for you.
• 21st Century Communication: A Reference Handbook by William F. Eadie (Ed.) Publication Date: 2009 This handbook contains 100 chapters that focus on both communication studies and media/journalism topics.

Other online sources for background research in Communication Studies:  

• Oxford Bibliographies - Communication Oxford Bibliographies gives you an overview of many communication-related topics as well as a bibliography of suggested sources for further research. more... less... Example topics: censorship, TV political ads, crisis communication, and family communication.
• Oxford Bibliographies - Cinema & Media Studies Oxford Bibliographies give you an overview of topics in cinema and media studies. Each entry also includes an annotated bibliography of sources to include in your research. more... less... Example topics: American Cinema (1895-1915), African Cinema, Costume & Fashion, Cuban Cinema.
• Gale Virtual Reference Library GVRL is a collection of online books that you can search all at once. There books here are on a wide range of topics, not just communication topics. This is useful for getting background information on historical events or topics that may have a non-communication dimension, such as health issues or political issues.
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Communication and Journalism: Background Information

• Getting Started
• Background Information
• APA Citations

Using background information

You get background information from reference sources, like encyclopedias. They are ideal for learning more about a topic or getting a good overview--you use them just like you use Wikipedia. Because they summarize information you generally can't use them in a research paper, but always check with your professor to be sure. 

Many of the entries in these background sources are written by experts, such as communication professors or practicing journalists, and they can be quite lengthy. Remember to check for recommended / related sources at the end of the entries, as these will often be prominent articles or books that will cover the topic in more detail.

Background information sources in communication and journalism

These reference works cover aspects of communication broadly and have long entries. They are the best place to start learning more about potential topics.

They are all recent and all online.

• Encyclopedia of Media and Communication Synthesizes a wide array of works and perspectives on the making of meaning. The appendix includes timelines covering the whole historical record for each medium, from either antiquity or their inception to the present day. Each entry also features a bibliography linking readers to relevant resources for further reading. --from the publisher
• Encyclopedia of Social Media and Politics Explores how the rise of social media is altering politics both in the United States and in key moments, movements, and places around the world. --from the publisher
• Encyclopedia of Public Relations Explores the evolution of the Public Relations field, with examples from history describing events, changing practices, and the key figures who developed and expanded the profession. --from the publisher
• The Handbook of Global Online Journalism Features a collection of readings from international practitioners and scholars that represent a comprehensive and state-of-the-art overview of the relationship between the internet and journalism around the world. --from the publisher
• Media History Digital Library Open access archive of access to public domain materials (magazines and journals) dealing with media history. Database is largely focused on film, but has radio and television resources.

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• Last Updated: Feb 19, 2024 1:44 PM
• URL: https://uwyo.libguides.com/COJO

Research in Journalism, Media and Culture

Main navigation.

Faculty in Journalism, Culture and Communication analyze emerging and enduring forms of public communication and the institutional and economic conditions that sustain them. They employ a range of research methods, including ethnography, textual and historical analysis, and political economic approaches to media industries. As digital technologies have transformed mediated practices, the faculty has opened a series of new areas of inquiry, including computational journalism, the study of algorithms in institutions, and the cultural history of Silicon Valley.

Angèle Christin  is an associate professor. She is interested in fields and organizations where algorithms and ‘big data’ analytics transform professional values, expertise, and work practices. In her dissertation, she analyzed the growing importance of audience metrics in web journalism in the United States and France. Drawing on ethnographic methods, she examined how American and French journalists make sense of traffic numbers in different ways, which in turn has distinct effects on the production of news in the two countries. In a new project, she studies the construction, institutionalization, and reception of analytics and predictive algorithms in the U.S. criminal justice system.

Ted Glasser  is an emeritus professor.  His teaching and research focus on media practices and performance, with emphasis on questions of press responsibility and accountability. His books include  Normative Theories of the Media: Journalism in Democratic Societies,  written with Clifford Christians, Denis McQuail, Kaarle Nordenstreng, and Robert White, which in 2010 won the Frank Luther Mott-Kappa Tau Alpha award for best research-based book on journalism/mass communication and was one of three finalists for the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s Tankard Book Award;  The Idea of Public Journalism , an edited collection of essays, recently translated into Chinese;  Custodians of Conscience: Investigative Journalism and Public Virtue , written with James S. Ettema, which won the Society of Professional Journalists’ award for best research on journalism, the Bart Richards Award for Media Criticism, and the Frank Luther Mott-Kappa Tau Alpha award for the best research-based book on journalism/mass communication;  Public Opinion and the Communication of Consent , edited with Charles T. Salmon; and  Media Freedom and Accountability , edited with Everette E. Dennis and Donald M. Gillmor.  His research, commentaries and book reviews have appeared in a variety of publications, including the  Journal of Communication, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, Journalism Studies, Policy Sciences, Journal of American History, Quill, Nieman Reports  and  The New York Times Book Review .

James T. Hamilton  is a professor and the director of the Journalism Program. His work on the economics of news focuses on the market failures involved in the production of public affairs coverage and the generation of investigative reporting. Through research in the emerging area of computational journalism, he is exploring how to lower the cost of discovering stories about the operation of political institutions.

Xiaochang Li  is an assistant professor. She is broadly interested in the history of informatics, computation, and related data practices. Drawing upon media history, history of science, and STS, her work is concerned with how information technologies shape the production and circulation of knowledge and the relationship between technical practices and social worlds. Her current research examines the history of speech recognition and natural language processing and how the pursuit of language influenced the development of AI, Machine Learning, and contemporary algorithmic culture. Her work also touches on sound studies and the history of acoustics and she has previously worked on topics concerning transnational media audiences and digital content circulation.

Fred Turner  is a professor and cultural historian of media and media technologies. Trained in both Communication and Science and Technology Studies, he has long been interested in how media and American culture have shaped one another over time. His most recent work has focused on the rise of American technocracy since World War II and on the aesthetic and ideological manifestations of that rise in the digital era. Before earning his Ph.D., Turner worked as a journalist for ten years. He continues to write for newspapers and magazines and strongly supports researchers who seek to have a public impact with their work.

Like all Communication faculty, the members of the Journalism, Communication and Culture group routinely collaborate with colleagues from around the campus. The group enjoys particularly strong collaborations with sociologists, historians, art historians, and computer scientists.

Faculty — Journalism, Media and Culture

Doctoral Students — Journalism, Media and Culture

Selected Graduates

• Sanna Ali, Ph.D. 2023. AI Policy Analyst, Stanford Cyber Policy Center and RegLab
• Jeff Nagy, Ph.D. 2023. Assistant Professor, Communication and Media Studies, York University
• Anna Gibson, Ph.D. 2022. Postdoctoral Fellow, MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing
• Jihye Lee , Ph.D. 2022. Assistant Professor, School of Advertising and Public Relations, UT Austin
• Andreas Katsanevas, Ph.D. 2020. Technology Policy Researcher, Meta
• Sheng Zou,  Ph.D. 2020. Assistant Professor, School of Communication, Hong Kong Baptist University
• Christine Larson , Ph.D. 2017. Assistant Professor, Journalism, University of Colorado, Boulder
• Yeon Joo , Ph.D. 2014. Associate Professor, Department of Digital Media, Myongji University, Seoul
• Morgan G. Ames , Ph.D. 2013. Assistant Adjunct Professor, School of Information, University of California, Berkeley
• Seeta Pena Gangdaharan , Ph.D. 2012. Assistant Professor, Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics
• Mike Ananny , Ph.D. 2011, Associate Professor, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California
• Daniel Kreiss , Ph.D. 2010, Associate Professor, School of Media and Journalism, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
• John Kim , Ph.D. 2009, Associate Professor, Media and Cultural Studies, Macalaster College
• Erica Robles-Anderson , Ph.D. 2009, Associate Professor, Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University
• Isabel Awad , Ph.D. 2007, Associate Professor, Department of Media and Communication, Erasmus University (Netherlands)
• Cherian George , Ph.D. 2003, Professor, Associate Dean, School of Communication, Hong Kong Baptist University
• Francis Lapfung Lee , Ph.D. 2003, Professor, School of Journalism and Communication, City University of Hong Kong

• University of Texas Libraries
• UT Libraries

Journalism & Media

• Background Research & Open Educational Resources
• Journal Article Databases
• News Article Databases & Local News Sources
• Data Journalism
• Specialized Resources and Tools
• Finding Speeches
• Diversity in Journalism
• Research Centers, Write & Cite
• Tools for Accessing Articles

Background Information

Open Educational Resources

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• Last Updated: Mar 15, 2024 10:21 AM
• URL: https://guides.lib.utexas.edu/JOU

Getting Started

Key library research tools, background research, finding a specific newspaper or news article, news & media databases, historical newspaper databases, communication and current affairs databases.

• Internet Resources
• Statistical and Data Sources Guide
• Search Tips
• Cite Sources
• News Literacy Toolkit
• For Faculty: Instructional Support

Subject Librarian

This Journalism Research Guide features library and Internet resources and research guidance. Use the main navigation menu, or view the starting points below.

Librarian Andrea Baer is also available for research and instruction help, whether via email , phone, or a research consultation .

Below are library resources that provide access to news and media sources, scholarly articles, and other resources that are often unavailable on the open web.

• Databases: See the subject-focused databases listed in this page, or search the Database Finder .
• Journal Finder : Find journals by title, ISSN, or keyword.
• BrowZine : Search for or browse select scholarly online journals to which the Libraries subscribe.
• Citation Linker : Use to find and access a specific  journal article, journal or book .

If the Libraries do not have access to the article, please submit an interlibrary loan request by clicking the "Go to ILLiad" link on the Interlibrary Loan page .

These background sources are good places to get an overview of a topic and different perspectives on it. Background research can help you focus your research and identify effective search terms and strategies.

• Britannica Academic This link opens in a new window Comprehensive college-level encyclopedia.
• CQ Press Library This link opens in a new window Collection of reference works on American government, current affairs, politics and public policy. more... less... Contains resources on American government, current affairs, history, politics, public policy, and data analysis for the social sciences. Individual resources available in the Library include the following: CQ Almanac; CQ Researcher Plus Archives; CQ Weekly; Political Handbook of the World; Politics in America; and the Supreme Court Yearbook.
• Credo Reference This link opens in a new window Comprehensive reference collection (dictionaries, encyclopedias, biographies etc.) for all academic disciplines. more... less... Credo Reference provides a complete reference collection from over 50 publishers, powered by a network of cross-references that cut across topics, titles and publishers to provide answers - and new connections - in context. It includes encyclopedias, dictionaries, biographies, quotation books, bilingual dictionaries, measurement conversions, and more.
• Opposing Viewpoints (Gale in Context) This link opens in a new window Cross-curricular research tool providing pro/con perspectives on current social issues.
• Points of View Reference Source This link opens in a new window Contains over 380 core topics, each with an overview (objective background / description), point (argument) and counterpoint (opposing argument). more... less... Each topic features a Guide to Critical Analysis which helps the reader evaluate the controversy and enhances students’ ability to read critically, develop their own perspective on the issues, and write or debate an effective argument on the topic.
• Journalist's Resource (Harvard Kennedy School) Summarizes academic research on current issues in an accessible way in order to help connect academia and journalism. A project of Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.

Within Rowan Library

Specific Newspaper Publications:

• Most newspapers and news magazines to which the library has access can be located via the Journal Finder (within Library Search). When you locate the correct title, check the publication dates and where the item is available.
• Historical newspaper titles that are provided through library databases like Historical Newspapers (Proquest) and Accessible Archives are NOT usually indexed in Journal Finder. If you are looking for an historical newspaper and do not find it in Journal Finder, please also search Historical Newspapers (ProQuest) under the "Publications" tab.

Specific Newspaper Articles:  

• Try a Newspapers search in Library Search  to locate a specific newspaper article (not the entire publication).
• If you do not find a specific newspaper article in Library Search, try searching for the specific newspaper publication (see instructions in the paragraph above). (Some newspapers are not indexed in Library Search. This includes some articles from Newsbank Access World News and Historical Newspapers (ProQuest) ).

Beyond the Library

For those items you don't find available through the Library, you may wish first to see if they’re freely available online (search the Google News Archive or do a general Google search ).

If they are not freely available online, search in WorldCat for other libraries that have the item (do a title search and limit the format to newspapers). You can then request a specific item via interlibrary loan, or you may wish visit the library or archive that houses the materials.

• Canadian Newsstream This link opens in a new window Articles from nearly 300 Canadian newspapers. more... less... Offers unparalleled access to the full text of nearly 300 newspapers from Canada's leading publishers, including The Globe and Mail. This full text database includes the complete available electronic backfile for most newspapers, providing full access to the articles, columns, editorials, and features. Some backfiles date as far back as the late 1970s and 1980s. Canadian Newsstand content is updated daily so researchers always have timely access to new information.
• Chronicle of Higher Education This link opens in a new window Online subscription to the Chronicle of Higher Education newspaper. more... less... The No. 1 source of news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty members and administrators.
• Ethnic NewsWatch This link opens in a new window News, magazine, and journal articles from the ethnic, minority and native press. more... less... An interdisciplinary, bilingual (English and Spanish) comprehensive full text database of the newspapers, magazines and journals of the ethnic, minority and native press. Coverage begins in 1990. (ProQuest)
• Global Issues (Gale in Context) This link opens in a new window Integrates news, global viewpoints, reference materials, country information, primary source documents, videos, statistics, pertaining to Global Issues. more... less... Offers 250 country pages and 400+ issue pages.Over 6,000 viewpoint commentaries provide background on topics such as Food Security, Genocide, Human Rights, Extreme Weather, and more.
• International Newsstream This link opens in a new window Provides the most recent news content outside of the US and Canada, with archives stretching back decades featuring newspapers, newswires, and news sites in active full-text format. more... less... ProQuest International Newsstream provides information from more than 660 of the world's top newspapers, including The Times (London), The Bangkok Post, El Norte, Financial Times, The Guardian, Jerusalem Post, South China Morning Post, The Daily Telegraph, Asian Wall Street Journal, and the BBC Monitoring series of publications.
• News (Gale OneFile) This link opens in a new window Access to 2,300+ major U.S. regional, national, and local newspapers, as well as leading titles from around the world. more... less... Also includes thousands of images, radio and TV broadcasts and transcripts.
• NewsBank Access World News This link opens in a new window Articles from a large collection of newspapers worldwide. more... less... NewsBank provides full-text information and perspectives from U.S. and international sources, including The Washington Post, Miami Herald, Philadelphia Inquirer, Trenton Times, USA Today, London Times, The Economist China Daily (Beijing).
• Newspaper Source Plus This link opens in a new window Provides a full-text digital collection of the world's major news content including nearly 500 U.S, and over 700 international newspapers. more... less... Also includes millions of articles from newspapers and newswires and offers television and radio transcripts and ongoing daily updates from popular news sources.
• New York Times (current) This link opens in a new window Full text access to articles in The New York Times Late Edition (East Coast). more... less... New York Times Late Edition (East Coast). Full text access to the newspaper’s articles (1980 – present) is within the ProQuest Newsstand database; there are no graphics available.
• Regional Business News This link opens in a new window News articles from regional business publications. more... less... Daily updates provide comprehensive full text for regional business publications including titles from Crain Communications. (Ebsco)
• U.S. Newsstream (1980-current) This link opens in a new window Articles from over 1300 newspapers and news content sites worldwide. more... less... Provides access to the full text of over 1300 newspapers, news websites and blogs from leading publishers throughout the world. Backfiles for most newspapers are included, providing access to articles, columns, editorials, obituaries and additional features. Includes New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, The Guardian and many other national and regional titles.
• Wall Street Journal (Online) This link opens in a new window Online e-news content from the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones more... less... Coverage 2010-current; the same coverage is available in the comprehensive business database ABI. (ProQuest). Older issues can be accessed through the full image database Wall Street Journal Historical.
• Washington Post (1974 - current) This link opens in a new window Online access to The Washington Post newspaper. more... less... The Washington Post Newspaper is available through ProQuest Newspapers, with coverage from 1974 through current. To search the Washington Post for articles prior to this beginning date, go to The Washington Post Historical, which include articles from the beginning of the news paper in 1877 through 1997.
• Historical Newspapers (Proquest) This link opens in a new window Newspaper digital archive of many significant U.S. and some international newspapers dating back to the 18th Century.
• New York Times (ProQuest Historical Newspapers) This link opens in a new window Access to The New York Times (1851 - 2017). more... less... Presents PDF pages of the newspaper, preserving the visual sense of the publication. This online format replaces the microfiche archival coverage.
• Philadelphia Inquirer (ProQuest Historical Newspapers) This link opens in a new window Access to the Philadelphia Inquirer (1860 -2001)
• Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (ProQuest Historical Newspapers) This link opens in a new window Access to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and predecessors (1786-2003)
• Wall Street Journal (ProQuest Historical Newspapers) This link opens in a new window Online access to back issues of the Wall Street Journal, 1889 - 1999. more... less... Newspaper coverage is from 1889 through 1996. For more recent issues of the Wall Street Journal, select the Wall Street Journal (current) link.
• Washington Post (ProQuest Historical Newspapers) This link opens in a new window Online access to back issues of The Washington Post, 1877-1999. more... less... Includes PDF images of nearly all content published in the Washington Post from the beginning, 1877, through 1997. Search the Washington Post Current edition for information after this end date.

The library databases listed below provide access to find scholarly articles, as well as other types of information. If you don't see a  Full Text  link below the article citation, look for a button labeled " Get it !" This application will check for access to the full text of the article within the library's subscriptions.

If you see a message that we don't have access, choose the Campbell Library  Interlibrary Loan Request  link to order the article from another library. Often we can get an electronic copy of the article quickly.

• PAIS Index This link opens in a new window Articles, papers and reports on international public affairs topics. more... less... PAIS (originally, the Public Affairs Information Service) was established in 1914 with several similar databases which over the years have been merged to create the current version. The PAIS International database contains continually updated records for over half a million journal articles, books, government documents, statistical directories, grey literature, research reports, conference papers, web content, and more. Newspapers and newsletters are not indexed. PAIS International includes publications from over 120 countries throughout the world. In addition to English, some of the indexed materials are published in French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and other languages. It is updated quarterly with over 17,000 current records added in total each year.
• Communication & Mass Media Complete This link opens in a new window Journal and news articles for the study of communications and mass media. more... less... A research and reference resource encompassing the breadth of the communication discipline. CMMC offers cover-to-cover (“core”) indexing and abstracts for more than 570 journals, and selected (“priority”) coverage of nearly 200 more, for a combined coverage of more than 770 titles; Full text for over 450 journals. (Ebsco)
• ABI/INFORM Collection This link opens in a new window Scholarly journal and news articles on business and economics topics. more... less... Full-text articles covering business and economic conditions, corporate strategies, management techniques, as well as competitive and product information. Its international coverage gives researchers a complete picture of companies and business trends around the world. The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times are also part of this database. Historical Wall Street Journal coverage is a separate database providing image coverage from 1889-1993.
• Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window Journal, magazine and news articles in all academic disciplines. more... less... This multi-disciplinary database provides full text for more than 6,600 journals.
• Business Source Elite This link opens in a new window Journal articles in all areas of business. more... less... Provides full text for more than 2,300 business journals, including full text for more than 1,100 peer-reviewed titles. This database provides full text back to 1886, and searchable cited references back to 1998. (Ebsco)
• Columbia International Affairs Online (CIAO) This link opens in a new window Collection of documents on international affairs from wide variety of sources. more... less... Resources on international affairs covering more than 180 research institutes, publishers, government agencies, e-books and journals worldwide. Also includes working papers, policy briefs, and case studies. Includes maps, data and stats compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit, the world’s foremost provider of country, industry and management analysis for about 201 countries.
• PolicyMap This link opens in a new window PolicyMap is a US-National web-based Geographic Information System used to understand communities. more... less... With easy-to-use menus, PolicyMap is a “GIS tool for non-GIS experts” for those who need to visualize large amounts of data quickly and easily, often down to the census tract or block group level. It is used in the social sciences, urban studies and regional planning, real estate and housing analysis, community and economic development, public administration and policy, public health, political science, education, environmental studies, business and finance, economics, statistics and geography, among other areas. Included in the tool is access to PolicyMap’s extensive data collection, with 15,000+ indicators used to understand communities, organized into general categories including demographics, income and spending, housing, lending activity, quality of life, economy, education, health, federal guidelines, and other analysis. In addition, students and faculty can easily upload and incorporate their data into and leverage it against the thousands of indicators already available in PolicyMap.
• Telecommunications Database This link opens in a new window Coverage of over 140 telecommunications journals, with more than 115 available in full text.
• HeinOnline This link opens in a new window Comprehensive coverage of more than 2,000 journals and the Congressional Record... more... less... complete coverage of the U.S. Reports back to 1754, constitutions for every country in the world, classic books from the 18th & 19th centuries, all United States Treaties, the Federal Register and CFR from inception
• Policy File Index This link opens in a new window Covers 75 U.S. domestic and foreign public policy research topics. more... less... Timely information from over 350 public policy think tanks, nongovernmental organizations, research institutes, university centers, advocacy groups, and other entities. Over 75 public policy topics are covered, from foreign policy to domestic policy.
• WestlawNext Campus Research This link opens in a new window Database of sources for news and legal information. more... less... Campus Research is an easy-to-use online research service that provides college and university students with access to a comprehensive collection of news and business information and law-related resources. Includes the New Jersey Administrative Code
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• Last Updated: Apr 16, 2024 12:14 PM
• URL: https://libguides.rowan.edu/journalism

• Research Articles
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• AP Daybook access via AP Newsroom

Associated Press Stylebook online

Biographies, country information and profiles, encyclopedias, directories.

• What Do I Do When I Graduate?
• AP Stylebook This link opens in a new window The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law, or AP Stylebook, is an essential style and usage guide for American English grammar created by journalists working for the Associated Press. Updated annually, it includes entries on standards for punctuation, abbreviations, photo captions, statistics and professional titles as well as overviews of media law, business reporting, inclusive storytelling, and other relevant topics. More information less... This database is limited to 100 concurrent users.
• Biography Reference Bank This link opens in a new window Excellent starting point for substantial biographies with links to recent relevant news articles, interviews, reviews, etc.
• American National Biography (ANB) This link opens in a new window If your subject is a deceased, prominent American, this database is an excellent source for a substantial, authored biography with useful details on additional resources. More information less... There are specially selected collections covering American Indian Heritage, Asian Pacific American Heritage, Black History, Hispanic Heritage, Women's History.
• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography This link opens in a new window Very similar to the ANB, if your subject is a deceased, prominent citizen of the United Kingdom.
• Europa World Yearbook This link opens in a new window Includes substantial histories and overviews, along with details on countries' governments, media systems, vital stats, etc.
• Oxford Reference Online This link opens in a new window Collection of specialized encyclopedias across a wide range of subject areas, from Food and Drink in America to Climate and Weather.
• Credo Reference This link opens in a new window Collection of reference works from a variety of publishers, including specialized encyclopedias and dictionaries. Entries include substantial bibliographies.
• Gale eBooks (formerly Gale Virtual Reference Library) This link opens in a new window More specialized encyclopedias! Some highlights include Encyclopedia of Major Marketing Campaigns, Encyclopedia Judaica, and the Acronyms, Initialisms, and Abbreviations Dictionary.
• Essay & General Literature Index Use this tool to find out which anthologies essays are printed in. Indexes 65,000 essays contained in some 5,300 anthologies and collections. Dates of coverage: 1985 to present.
• Essay & General Literature Index Retrospective Use this tool to find out which anthologies essays are printed in. Indexes 65,000 essays contained in some 5,300 anthologies and collections. Dates of coverage: 1900-1984.
• NYC Green Book The free, online version of the city's official directory. Includes listings for city, state, and federal agencies and courts, as well as a listing of national and international agencies and contacts.
• Encyclopedia of Associations: National Organizations Great source for descriptions and contact information for various organizations and associations. Search by region, city, or keyword. This resource is part of a larger platform, the Gale Directory Library, that includes additional helpful directories.
• Encyclopedia of Associations: Regional, State, and Local Organizations Provides information on more than 100, 000 associations and societies that are organized and function at the regional (both interstate and intrastate), state, county, city, neighborhood, and local levels. Coverage includes all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. territories of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands.
• ReferenceUSA This link opens in a new window Directory of businesses; search by type, business classification, or location. More information less... ReferenceUSA allows users to create personal accounts for saving searches and search criteria. Annual data available for download beginning in 1997 for research and analysis purposes. (Log in first with your NYU credentials to view).
• Washington Information Directory The Washington Information Directory is the essential one-stop source for information on U.S. governmental and nongovernmental agencies and organizations. This thoroughly researched guide provides capsule descriptions that help users quickly and easily find the right person at the right organization.
• Hoovers This link opens in a new window Find company overviews, histories, family trees, and financial statements. Includes some industry analysis as well.

• ReferenceUSA This link opens in a new window ReferenceUSA contains detailed information on millions US businesses, including historical, closed, and new businesses, along with a standard white pages for access to data on millions of US residents, including new movers and new homeowners. More information less... ReferenceUSA allows users to create personal accounts for saving searches and search criteria. Annual data available for download beginning in 1997 for research and analysis purposes. (Log in first with your NYU credentials to view).
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Journalism & News Media: Background Research

• Background Research
• Scholarly Articles & Databases
• Newspapers (Current and Historical)
• Reports & Statistics
• Company & Industry Research
• Government Information
• Advertising
• Communications
• Public Relations

Background Information

Online Encyclopedia

• Britannica Online This link opens in a new window Comprehensive online encyclopedia with more than 80,000 entries and 17,000 illustrations, maps, and graphics. Continually updated.

U.S. Census Data

• Social Explorer This link opens in a new window Online research tool designed to provide quick and easy access to current and historical U.S. Census data and demographic information. The easy-to-use web interface lets users create maps and reports to better illustrate, analyze and understand demography and social change.
• U.S. Census Bureau Data This link opens in a new window U.S. Census Bureau's American FactFinder can create custom tabulations from micro data files, compute simple statistics, and create a thematic map for a specific geographic place. Features video tutorials.

In-Depth Background Resources

• Gale Virtual Reference Library (GVRL) This link opens in a new window Use keywords to search encyclopedias, almanacs, and dictionaries on a wide range of topics.
• Oxford Handbooks This link opens in a new window Dive into details of topics in business, philosophy, political science, education, and religion.

Archived Websites

Archived websites offer a glimpse of the recent past. Try the Internet Archive's  Wayback Machine , an archive of millions of website snapshots from the 1990s through today.

Use the Wayback Machine to (for example):

1. Explore websites from the 1990s and 2000s

2. Examine how organizational priorities change over time

a. How has online coverage of BYU athletics changed from the earliest byucougars.com site ( 1998-1999 ) to today ?

Specialized Research

Now that you are grounded in your subject matter, use these resources to dig deeper.

Finding E-Books and Print Books

• BYU Library Search for print and electronic materials. Use filters to find narrow results by item type and availability.

Filtering Search Results for E-Books

When searching the Harold B. Lee Library for e-books, use the left-side filters to help. Under "Resource Type," select "E-books" to see resources you can access remotely. 

• WorldCat Discovery This link opens in a new window Unified catalog of research libraries and public libraries throughout the world. Includes books, serials, sound recordings, data files, musical scores, and visual materials. Search using Library Catalog commands. Updated daily. Interlibrary loan database. Look up book, and order it from interlibrary loan. Formerly FirstSearch.

Resources ABOUT Journalism & News Media

Books about communication, mass media, and journalism have the following call numbers: 

• P87 - P96: Communication and Mass Media
• PN4699 - PN5650: Journalism

These books are all found on the library's 5th floor . You can search for materials by keyword, subject term, author, or call number.

Ask a Librarian

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Journalism and Media Research Guide: Background/Getting Started

• Finding Sources
• Source Types
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• Google Scholar Search Tips

Reference Sources

• CQ Researcher This link opens in a new window Search a collection of reports covering political and social issues, with regular reports on topics in health, international affairs, education, the environment, technology and the U.S. economy from 1991 to the present.
• International Encyclopedia of Communication A comprehensive reference source written by established experts and researchers. Covers broad subject areas of media; communication; theory and philosophy; feminist and gender studies; research methods; rhetorical studies; public relations and advertising; journalism; and others.
• Encyclo: An Encyclopedia of the Future of the News From the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard.

• Pew Research Center
• State of the News Media 2014 Provided by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.
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• Journalism Resources

Journalism Resources: Background

• Getting Started
• News/Articles
• Alternative News Sources
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• Citing Sources This link opens in a new window
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Using Background Information

Let's say you're assigned a paper topic that you know almost nothing about, and Wikipedia isn't helping. What do you do? Find a subject encyclopedia!

Background sources (encyclopedias, dictionaries, etc.) provide summary and factual information. They generally contain well-established knowledge and can provide a basic understanding on which to build. Use background sources to:

• find basic concepts and viewpoints of the topic
• get the historical context and relationships to other topics
• identify and define specialized terms used to discuss the topic
• find or verify data, facts, formulas, etc.

In other words, these are resources for getting started with a subject about which you know very little.

Encyclopedias & Dictionaries

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MC 4386: Journalism Project: Background Research

• Background Research
• Finding Books
• Public Records

Reading for Background

Okay, you have a topic. Now what? Learn everything you can!

Gathering background information on a person or learning the history of an association or cultural event will help you create a better story. You will be able to ask more informed questions of your sources, understand the context of what/who you are reporting on, and be a more informed citizen. 

Depending on your topic you may need to delve deep into county records, submit an open records request, or simply read a few articles to become better informed. Give yourself time to brainstorm the different avenues you could pursue. 

This page provides specific databases that may help you in your research. Not finding what you're looking for? Search Research Databases for additional options.

Start your research

Search multiple databases and different types of content together. Databases searched include the library's catalog, Texas State Digital Collections repository, and many but not all Texas State licensed databases.

Not all content retrieved in a search is available full-text.

This database (located on the main library website in the large search box) combines the library catalog with several of the most commonly used databases. This search is provided by EBSCO and serves as an efficient starting place for research. If your search results are not as relevant to your topic as you would like, try utilizing specific Research Databases. 

Biographies

Information about people throughout history, around the world, and across all disciplines. Dates vary.

Public Opinion Polls

• Gallop Polls
• New York Times
• Pew Research Center
• PollingReport.com
• Washington Post

Journalist's Toolbox

News articles

• NewsBank - America's and World News This link opens in a new window Thousands of U.S. and international news sources from around the world. It features most major U.S. news sources, including Texas newspapers, and many local and regional titles. Dates vary by title.

Background on current and hot topics

The following databases focus on current issues and trends in various disciplines. These databases provide articles on broad topics but are helpful in gaining context on particular topics. From there, you can use what you learn to conduct further research.

• CQ Researcher This link opens in a new window Reports with overviews, background and timeline of a topic; an assessment of the current situation; tables and maps; pro/con statements from opposing positions. Topics include health, social trends, criminal justice, international affairs, education, the environment, technology, economy, and global affairs. 1923 to present.

• Credo Reference This link opens in a new window Over 600 reference books, including encyclopedias, dictionaries (English and foreign language), thesauri, books of quotations, as well as a range of subject-specific reference books.
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• Last Updated: May 23, 2024 4:17 PM
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Overview of Journalism

News and popular press, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and guides, online resources about journalism, statistics and polling data.

• Scholarly Articles and Books
• Primary Sources
• Citing Sources

American History Librarian and Curator

Hesburgh Library Rare Books and Special Collections 102 Hesburgh Library University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, IN 46556

(574) 631-1575 [email protected]

Journalism is the production and distribution of reports on the interaction of events, facts, ideas, and people that are the "news of the day" and that impacts society to at least some degree. The word applies to the occupation (professional or not), the methods of gathering information, and the organizing literary styles. Journalistic media include: print, television, radio, Internet, and, in the past, newsreels.

Related subjects include: American Studies ,  English Language and literature , Film, Television, and Theatre , History (Western Europe) ,  Latin American Studies , Newspapers , and  Political Science .

Other Related Guides

• Social Sciences Datasets and Statistics by Michael Deike Last Updated Feb 9, 2024 182 views this year
• Regional business news This link opens in a new window Provides comprehensive full text coverage of regional business publications from all metropolitan and rural areas within the United States.
• CQ researcher This link opens in a new window Covers the most current and controversial issues of the day with summaries, pros and cons, bibliographies and more, with a United States focus. Includes news covered in print issues of: Editorial research reports (1924-1986), Congressional quarterly's editorial research reports (1987-1991) and CQ researcher (1991-).
• Factiva This link opens in a new window Successor to Dow Jones News Service, Factiva provides access to global news and business information, including newspapers, same-day newswires, company reports, and media programs. Usage info: Licensed for 4 simultaneous users. Access info: Historically Factiva only worked with IE version 5 or higher. Since then, several other browser options have been added.
• Global Sports Matter GlobalSport Matters is a multimedia content hub that delivers information on issues affecting sport. It is a joint initiative between Arizona State University’s Global Sport Institute and the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
• Keesing's world news archive This link opens in a new window Provides access to archive of original, accurate and objective news articles providing digestible but detailed summaries of world events, drawn from a wide range of press and other sources in a variety of languages. Digitized version of Keesing's contemporary archives, 1931-1986, and Keesing's record of world events, 1987-
• Nexis Uni (formerly LexisNexis Academic) This link opens in a new window Nexis Uni offers print and online journals, television and radio broadcasts, newswires and blogs, as well as local, regional, national and international newspapers with deep archives.
• New America Media New America Media (NAM) is a national collaboration and advocate of 3,000 ethnic news organizations. Founded by the nonprofit Pacific News Service in 1996, NAM is is dedicated to bringing the voices of the marginalized--ethnic minorities, immigrants, young people, elderly--into the national discourse.
• Newspaper source plus This link opens in a new window Provides full text for more than 40 national (U.S.) and international newspapers, including USA Today, The Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Post, The Times (London), The Toronto Star, etc. Selected full text for more than 200 regional (U.S.) newspapers, including The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The Detroit Free Press, The Miami Herald, The New York Daily News, etc. Full text television and radio news transcripts are also provided.
• World news connection This link opens in a new window Provides English translations of news sources prepared by the U.S. government from around the world. Successor to the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS). Current only through 2013.
• Battleground: The Media It examines the most significant of the topics currently being debated in today's media system. It offers background, definitions, notable programs, significant media events and their historical significance, and important future trends.
• CQ Press Political reference suite of online editions This link opens in a new window Cross-searchable, full-text access to reference titles on government and politics. Includes: Congress and the Nation, Encyclopedia of Political Science, Encyclopedia of U.S. Political History, Guide to Congress, Guide to Political Campaigns in America, Guide to the Presidency, Guide to U.S. Elections, Guide to the U.S. Supreme Court, Historic Documents Series, Political Handbook of the World, [CQ's] Politics in America, Supreme Court Yearbook, Vital Statistics on American Politics, and Washington Information Directory.
• Dictionary of Media and Communication The Dictionary of Media and Communication is an authoritative and wide-ranging A-Z providing over 2,200 entries on terms used in media and communication, from concepts and theories to technical terms, across subject areas that include advertising, digital culture, journalism, new media, radio studies, and telecommunications. It also covers relevant terminology from related disciplines such as literary theory, semiotics, cultural studies, and philosophy.
• Encyclopedia of American Journalism It explores the distinctions found in print media, radio, television, and the internet. It documents the role of these different forms of journalism in the formation of America's understanding and reaction to political campaigns, war, peace, protest, slavery, consumer rights, civil rights, immigration, unionism, feminism, environmentalism, globalization, and more.
• Encyclopedia of Social Media and Politics It explores how the rise of social media is altering politics both in the United States and in key moments, movement, and places around the world. Its scope encompasses the disruptive technologies and activities that are changing basic patterns in American politics.
• Media Law Handbook Published by the Bureau of International Information Programs in the US Department of State.
• FAIR A national media watch group that focuses on strengthening the First Amendment by advocating for greater diversity in the press. They also scrutinize media practices that marginalize public interest, minority and dissenting viewpoints.
• Media Cloud Media Cloud is a joint project by the MIT Center for Civic Media and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. They track millions of stories published online and offer a suite of tools that allows researchers to track how stories and ideas spread through media.
• On the Media This radio series, produced by WNYC, investigates how the media shapes our worldview.
• Pew Research Center's Journalism and Media site assesses the state of news and information in a changing society
• State of the News Media The Pew Research Center's annual report on audience and economic indicators in the news media in the United States. Past reports are available.
• American national biography This link opens in a new window A standard biographical resource for more than 17,000 notable people in American history.
• Ancestry library edition This link opens in a new window Searchable genealogical information on billions of names across thousands of census and related collections.
• Biography and genealogy master index This link opens in a new window Indexes hundreds of biographical sources covering individuals, living and dead, from every field of activity worldwide.
• Biography Reference Center This link opens in a new window Offers a collection of full-text biographies, including the complete run of Biography Today and Biography.
• Complete dictionary of scientific biography This link opens in a new window This reference source contains biographies of mathematicians and natural scientists from all countries and from all historical periods. It presents an accurate and reliable narrative of the development of science, not as a mere accumulation of technical information but as the collective accomplishment that has ordered our understanding of nature.
• Contemporary Hispanic Biography This link opens in a new window Biographies of Latinos and Latinas in the international Hispanic community.
• Dictionary of Political Biography It covers all the major figures in world politics of the twentieth century.
• Oxford dictionary of national biography This link opens in a new window The classic, authoritative biographical source for British history. Usage info: Licensed for 3 simultaneous users.
• Who's Who in the Twentieth Century It provides biographies of men and women from different countries and cultures who have contributed to the thought as well as the action of the twentieth century.
• Who's who on the web This link opens in a new window Biographies of over a million people of note, world wide. All Marquis' Who's Who biographies published since 1985 are included.
• World's Who's Who It offers current biographical information on about 70,000 of the most influential men and women in all fields.

Polling Data

• Pew Research Center Nonpartisan think tank conducting public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research.
• Polling the Nations This link opens in a new window More than 12,000 national, state, local and special surveys, conducted by 700 polling organizations in the United States and 70 other countries from 1986 through the present. Usage info: Licensed for 4 simultaneous users.
• Rasmussen Reports Provides public opinion polling information.
• Roper iPoll This link opens in a new window A comprehensive, up-to-date source for US nationwide public opinion. A full-text retrieval system, the iPoll online database is organized at the question level, providing the tools to sift through nearly a half million questions asked on national public opinion surveys, 1935 to present. Surveys archived in the Roper Catalog were originally gathered by academic, commercial and media survey organizations such as Gallup Organization, Harris Interactive, Pew Research Associates, and many more.

Other Data Resources

• Economics Data Sources From the Economics libguide.
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Expert Commentary

Academic research and studies: How they work and why journalists should care

Overview article that provides an introduction to the academic research world and explains how it can be leveraged by journalists.

Republish this article

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

by The Journalist's Resource, The Journalist's Resource August 7, 2014

This <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org/home/introduction-studies-academic-research-journalists/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org">The Journalist's Resource</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.<img src="https://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/cropped-jr-favicon-150x150.png" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

To newcomers the world of academic studies can seem like a foreign land. But as with traveling, one can become quite comfortable over time by learning some of the language and basic customs. The following provides an overview of how studies are produced, their relevance and how they might be used.

What is a scholarly study?

When professors and researchers are not teaching, they are often working on academic studies. These are the basic unit of work in higher education, and are typically a paper of anywhere from several pages up to 50 pages or more. These studies help advance knowledge in a particular field, from AIDS research to the understanding of racial issues in America.

Unlike most journalistic stories or blogs, academic studies are the product of months or years of work; they can include analysis of large sets of data or carefully conducted experiments. A scholar might finish just a few important studies in his or her career, contributing incremental knowledge on a question that may have been studied for decades. Studies aspire to say as much as can definitively be known on a particular question, be it complex or seemingly self-evident. Does money in politics cause corruption? You may consider that an obvious question, but for scholars the answer — not just yes or no, but also why and how — has to be proven with precise weighing of evidence. The essence of the scientific method is to come up with a hypothesis, test it, and then make sure it can be repeated — and that no external factors skewed the results.

Many corporations, commercial research firms, advocacy groups and consulting firms also produce studies and in-depth reports. While these can have news value, bear in mind that the findings of such work are not always independently fact-checked prior to publication, whereas studies produced by academic scholars typically are.

In a world overflowing with information of uncertain quality, it’s hard to find knowledge that is as unbiased, thoughtful and reliable as that contained in the best academic studies. This is why journalists should be familiar with how to read them. Studies can provide a baseline of solid fact where reporting can begin. When journalists call experts to hear their views, having familiarity with the basic research allows for more enlightening conversations and makes stories deeper. Studies almost always suggest a wealth of new angles for journalists to pursue. Further, journalists are connection points between information and the public; it is a journalist’s job to make things clear to the public that are often hidden. Sometimes this means misdeeds by public officials or large corporations. But sometimes important insights can be locked away in research studies and journals. Understanding how to read studies can allow you to bring sunlight to issues and knowledge that might otherwise remain obscure.

Where can I find studies?

Nearly every college and university provides access to research databases such as JSTOR . (Be aware, though, that databases such as JSTOR may not provide access to the latest research.) If you want to look for good studies on the Internet, searching at Google Scholar is another typical route; that can also lead you to the latest research, provided you search by date with the advanced scholar search feature. If you find a study you don’t have access to, you can usually ask your college librarian to help you get access through Academic Search Premier or similar resources. Libraries pay a lot of money for this access — use it. Scholars are also increasingly posting early versions of their studies on their websites. These can typically be downloaded for free, but should be checked against the final versions after publication.

There are an increasing number of “open access” databases that freely offer studies to the public. These include Social Science Research Network (SSRN), Harvard’s DASH repository and the Public Library of Science (PLoS). Such sites are part of the debate about whether studies and the knowledge they contain should remain costly and inaccessible or be freely available. This primer provides an overview of online databases ; you should become familiar with many of them. Whatever the outcome of this debate, as a journalist your instinct should be to hunt for the full version of studies and if necessary contact scholars to obtain them. Be aggressive in your pursuit of information. This is the essence of journalism.

How do I read a study?

Studies often have the following structure: abstract; introduction; methods; results; discussion. As tempting as it may be, don’t just read the abstract or summary at the beginning. The more studies you read, the more you’ll get the hang of the language. In fact, the vocabulary and analytical frameworks themselves can become useful for framing stories. Example: Imagine you are reporting on women in the workplace. Is there a “glass ceiling” or a “glass escalator” problem ? In the introduction, you’ll generally find that authors review previous scholarship on a particular question. An example is: How does a family’s income relate to a child’s brain development? The literature review tells the reader what has been learned so far and where questions remain.

In the methods and results sections, the researchers describe what data they used, how they analyzed it, and the results. Don’t be intimidated by mathematical jargon; as complicated as it may sound, there’s often a common-sense way to think about it . For example, “regression” basically means trying to figure out how strong the relationship is between the two things — in our example, income and children’s brain development. Ultimately, the researchers are trying to prove not just that the two things are correlated — that they move in parallel — but that there is causation — one thing causes the other.

In the study above, this might mean that a poor child’s development suffers because of lack of parental income. There may be no correlation between the two things or the relationship may be explained by some other factors, such as geography or lack of medical care. The scholar has to sort this all out. Before studies are published in academic journals, they go through a process called “peer review” — other scholars look at the findings to verify that there aren’t any errors. This system ensures that the study is of the highest possible quality, and is the basis on which all good research rests.

While there are an infinite number of questions in the world that can be studied, most research falls into a number of basic types. Below are a few of the categories and loose genres that you should be familiar with:

Data analysis: Social scientists tend to analyze existing datasets, many of them from governmental sources — census data, health information, transportation data and more. This information can be current as well as historical. For example, if you’re interested in education rates among African-American men and women , it’s useful to compare recent and historical levels.

Longitudinal: Long-term datasets can be useful for what are known as longitudinal studies. For example, Social Security data is gathered over long periods, and so can provide insight into the how U.S. residents’ incomes and locations evolve over time . Select groups can also be tracked for years, and thus allow one to understand the relationship between pre-school education and well-being later in life .

Experimental, observational: Studies can also be based on experiments conducted by the scholars themselves; this is often the case in the “hard sciences” such as medicine, chemistry, biology or botany. But they are also used in fields such as psychology and human cognition: For example, medical researchers might want to understand how having Google at our fingertips might affect our memory . The scholars devise and run an experiment — in this case, a memory test of a group of study subjects — and then analyze the results. When studying medical questions (say, the impact of a new HIV/AIDS treatment ) it’s essential to have a what’s known as a control group — subjects who are given a placebo rather than the substance under study. If the control group is under the control of the researchers, the study is known as experimental; if they’re not, it’s observational. Social scientists are also running more controlled trials in the field: For example, how hearing the Spanish language in America affects perceptions and political attitudes.

Metastudies: These are, in essence, studies of studies. These can be helpful when there is a lot of research on a particular topic — for example, how studying at a diverse college might affect civic engagement later in life . Using meta-analysis, the researchers take the results of the previous studies and combine them, looking for patterns and, in essence, finding “the truth” on a particular question.

Survey-based research reports: While not technically studies, surveys frequently contain valuable information for journalists. They’re often conducted by organizations with a longstanding expertise in the area such as the Pew Research Center, a gold standard for this sort of study. Questions can range from the American public’s changing views of government to the rise of women in higher education .

Reports: Governmental and nonprofit research organizations often produce reports that synthesize a wide variety of data and look at particular questions — for example, the importance of infrastructure investment , the disparities faced by minorities in California , or trends in college spending . Reports can be supported by an organization with a particular mission or point of view, but that doesn’t necessarily invalidate their findings, particularly if they’re published by a credible organization.

Papers: While there’s no precise definition, papers tend to be written by a smaller number of researchers — often just one or two — on broader societal questions. Examples include a rethinking of economic development in poor countries or the case for banning subprime mortgages . Papers are often produced by think tanks such as the Brookings Institution or the RAND Corporation, but can also come out of academia.

How can I use a study in my journalism?

The reading of scholarly studies can be important to get context — to know what smart people have thought about a particular issue. But they can also be cited and summarized in your story or blog. You might strongly consider sending the author of a study an email inquiry or calling him or her to be sure you correctly understand the findings of the study. No matter what, be sure to give the scholar full credit by mentioning the institutions the study came from and the journal in which it was published. And link to the study so your audience can go further into the question. It will improve the depth of your journalism and demonstrate transparency and respect for your audience.

You might first think about how to localize a study. Here are 10 examples of such study-based ideas . Furthermore, the following are examples of high-level stories that use research in a variety of different ways. You’ll see that study findings can be used for context or background; for the purpose of providing alternative perspective on issues; or as hooks for stories themselves.

• “Wasting Time Is New Divide in Digital Era,” The New York Times
• “The Killing Agency: Wildlife Services’ Brutal Methods Leave a Trail of Animal Death,” Sacramento Bee
• “The Unpersuaded: Who Listens to a President?” The New Yorker
• “Whole Food Blues: Why Organic Agriculture May Not Be So Sustainable,” Time

Studies can also be used to provide crucial context and fact-check claims.

Take, for example, the 2012 story about a congressman’s explosive comments casting doubt on the possibility of pregnancy from rape (he was asked about abortions in such situations.) An initial online article such as this one at NPR includes reaction quotes and reporting on the outrage stirred up. But a reporter could also, in theory, quickly search the PubMed database and locate this peer-reviewed study giving the facts behind the issue. “Rape-related pregnancy occurs with significant frequency,” the study notes, putting the figure at 5% and estimating more than 32,000 rape-related pregnancies across the population annually. This Pacific Standard blog post — written shortly after the story broke — performed that research. The data highlighted in the study can then be used to anchor all subsequent reports on the controversy, improving public understanding and not allowing the discussion to revolve around simple “he said, she said” exchanges between partisan sources.

What are the hazards of using studies?

The greatest danger of using studies in journalism is through oversimplifying the findings or misinterpreting them altogether. Researchers often present their findings with many, many reservations — they want to get things right, and so if they have any doubts or see areas for future research, they’ll mention them. You might wish that they’d made a direct, unqualified assertion that fits in a headline, but it’s often not that simple. As a journalist, you may find that there is no way to accurately state the study’s conclusions in a few sentences. In those cases, it is essential that you tell your audience that the study’s findings are limited by certain factors.

By all means, call or email the author and ask questions until you are satisfied that you understand the study’s findings and implications. Researchers are often very helpful to media members, as they have every interest in seeing their work presented accurately to the public.

Keep in mind that scholars consider research to be a process that is constantly unfolding. While some questions can be definitively answered — for example, that certain drugs can slow the spread of HIV — on almost all subjects there is always more research to be done.

As a journalist, it is crucial to avoid what some call the “single-study syndrome” — basing a story entirely on the results of one study, without exploring alternative research angles. While the peer-review process should ensure that only the best and most reliable research is published, some studies can be “outliers” and not necessarily represent general facts about an issue. This is most often a problem with studies based on experiments, because their precise design can greatly influence the results obtained. So if you see an experiment-based study that has produced unusual results, proceed with caution.

Finally, there are always questions about potential bias, particularly as a consequence of who funded the research. This can be difficult for non-experts to assess. Typically, scholars will disclose any conflicts of interest at the bottom of the study. You should be especially wary of research that does not appear in a peer-reviewed journal, or research that is funded by commercial firms that might have a vested interest in the results.

What should a journalist do after reading the study?

You should make every effort to get in touch with the author. But that may not be the end of your follow-up. One thing you can do to assess the validity of the findings independently is to go to the study’s citations — all of the footnotes contained in the bibliography at the bottom — and contact the authors of the other studies that are cited. You might email them and say, “You are cited in this study. What do you think of the findings?” If you are going to be reporting in this area over time, you might also begin signing up for email alerts for the journals that are related to this field. That way you can stay up to date with what the academic community is saying about aspects of your beat.

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GU-Q INAF-100: Proseminar - Women in/and Journalism

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• GU-Q: Reference Resources by Paschalia Terzi Last Updated Aug 1, 2023 638 views this year

What is Background Research

Background research is:

• Exploring a topic with reference resources  and/or introductory books. It's done to get more familiar with a topic.
• From background research you can learn things like:
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Background research can help you begin to answer who , what , when , and where  (answering why usually requires more work and thought).

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Pre-Interview Investigation in Journalism: A Comprehensive Overview

• Published: December 9, 2023
• By: Yellowbrick

Importance of Pre-Interview Investigation

In the fast-paced world of journalism, conducting thorough pre-interview investigations is of paramount importance for reporters and journalists. Pre-interview investigation not only help journalists gain a deeper understanding of the subject matter but also aids in establishing credibility and trust with their interviewees. Equipped with these aspects, journalists can provide insightful and well-informed content to their readers.

Gathering Information and Conducting Background Research

The first step towards a successful pre-interview investigation is gathering extensive information about the topic at hand. A deeper understanding can be achieved by reading relevant articles, reports, and studies, and following up on the latest developments and trends. Journalists should also conduct thorough background research on the interviewee, understanding their expertise, previous work or statements related to the subject. This information helps journalists to craft well-informed questions adding depth to their investigation while also establishing credibility and professionalism during the interview.

Utilizing Online Resources and Tools

In today’s times, journalists have a plethora of online resources and tools at their disposal to aid their pre-interview investigation. Platforms such as Twitter and LinkedIn can offer valuable insights into the subject or professional background of the interviewee. In addition, online databases like LexisNexis and ProQuest can be invaluable for searching past interviews, articles, or speeches given by the interviewee. Lastly, journalists can gain specialized knowledge and skills through online courses such as those offered by Yellowbrick .

Developing Insightful and Thought-Provoking Questions

A primary goal of pre-interview investigation is formulating a set of insightful and thought-provoking questions that elicit informative responses from the interviewee. A well-conducted research combined with an understanding of the interviewee’s point of view helps journalists craft questions that go beyond basic information. Encouraging the interviewee with open-ended questions to share their insights and opinions often leads to more engaging and informative interviews.

Building Rapport and Establishing Trust

In addition to gathering information and question formulation, pre-interview investigation also serves as a vehicle to build rapport and establish trust with the interviewee. Approaching an interview with respect and professionalism helps journalists to build a comfortable environment for the interviewee. Showing genuine interest in the interviewee’s work and opinions, journalists can encourage them to share candidly, providing invaluable insights to the readers.

All these aspects combined underline the importance of pre-interview investigation as a vital part of journalism that sets the stage for successful and impactful interviews. So, next time you prepare for an interview, ensure to engaging in thorough pre-interview investigation to elevate your content and enhance your journalism skills.

Key Takeaways:

• Pre-interview investigation is pivotal for a successful interview.
• This process involves gathering information, researching about the interviewee, and crafting insightful questions.
• Pre-interview investigation aids in understanding the subject matter, establishing credibility, and identifying biases.
• Use of online resources and tools such as social media platforms and online databases can streamline the research process.
• Formulation of open-ended questions helps in obtaining detailed and insightful responses.
• Building rapport and trust with the interviewee propels the engagement level of the interview.

To further strengthen your journalism skills and master the art of pre-interview investigation, consider enrolling in the NYU | Modern Journalism online course and certificate program offered by Yellowbrick. Boost your professional growth and climb the stairs of a successful journalism career with the well-curated NYU | Modern Journalism online course.

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Article contents

Journalists’ professional roles and role performance.

• Claudia Mellado Claudia Mellado School of Journalism, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.832
• Published online: 25 February 2019

Professional roles are a key topic in journalism research along with the fundamental elements in defining journalism as a profession. For many decades, scholars have devoted their efforts to analyzing normative standards and journalistic ideals, while their analysis through the lens of professional performance has remained in the background. Nevertheless, considerably more attention has been paid over the past decade to the theorization of the different concepts in play when analyzing professional roles in journalism, especially the study of journalistic role performance (i.e., the manifestation of professional roles in both news decisions and the news outcome that reaches the public). Studies on journalistic role performance are able to tell us how or to what extent news professionals have enough autonomy for their role conceptions or perceptions to be manifested in journalistic practices, as well as in the news product made available to the public.

So far, research on journalistic role performance has systematically found patterns of multilayered hybridization in journalistic cultures across and within advanced, transitional, and non-democratic countries. Several studies have also shown significant discrepancies depending on societal, organizational, and individual factors, as well as a wide gap between journalistic ideals and professional practices. Some of these studies have also found significant discrepancies between journalists’ role conceptions and their perceived role enactments.

Future studies need to address the intrinsic capacity of social media platforms to deinstitutionalize communication through parallel channels, which may turn out to be a crucial element when it comes to performing both traditional and new journalistic roles.

• professional roles
• journalistic role performance
• journalistic cultures
• role conception
• role perception
• perceived role enactment
• comparative journalistic research
• professionalism
• journalism studies

Introduction

As an object of study, professional roles are one of the key topics in journalism research (Mellado, Hellmueller, & Donsbach, 2017a , p. 3). They are also the fundamental elements when it comes to defining journalism as a profession. In this respect, journalistic roles become essential components of journalistic cultures.

Journalistic cultures represent the cultural capital that, as “interpretive communities,” journalists share. They may manifest themselves in values and ideals as well as in journalistic practices (Mellado et al., 2017a ; Schudson, 2003 ; Zelizer, 1993 ).

For many decades, the study of professional roles in journalism was addressed mostly from the perspective of normative standards and journalistic ideals, while their analysis through the lens of professional performance remained in the background.

Through surveys of and interviews with journalists, an extensive array of studies around the globe have analyzed both the different roles that they should normatively fulfill in society (Christians, Glasser, McQuail, Nordenstreng, & White, 2009 ) as well as the roles that journalists consider important for their profession (Hanitzsch, 2011 ; Hanitzsch et al., 2011 ; Patterson & Donsbach, 1996 ; Weaver, Beam, Brownlee, Voakes, & Wilhoit, 2007 ; Weaver & Wilhoit, 1986 , 1996 ; Weaver & Willnat, 2012 ; Weinacht & Spiller, 2014 ; Willnat, Weaver, & Choi, 2013 ). Among the classic empirical typologies of roles are the “neutral” and “participant” roles found by Cohen ( 1963 ); the “neutral,” “watchdog,” and “analytical” roles found by Johnstone, Slawski, and Bowman ( 1976 ); the “disseminator,” the “interpreter,” the “watchdog,” and the “populist mobilizer” roles found by Weaver and his team at Indiana University (Weaver & Wilhoit, 1986 , 1996 ; Weaver et al., 2007 ), or the “bloodhound” and “missionary” functions proposed by Köcher ( 1986 ).

Studies on professional role conceptions have been Western-oriented (Josephi, 2005 ; Hallin & Mellado, 2018 ; Mellado, 2015 ). Most early studies on role conceptions were designed and conducted in advanced democracies (especially the United States). 1 Later, researchers from other regions such as Latin America, Asia, and Africa became interested in applying these surveys to their own journalists to establish which professional roles were most important to them (e.g., Deuze, 2002 ; Herscovitz, 2004 ; Muchtar, Hamada, Hanitzsch, Masduki, & Ullah, 2017 ; Pasti, 2005 ; Ramaprasad, 2001 ; Wilke, 1998 ; Zhu, Weaver, Lo, Chen, & Wu, 1997 ). However, most of them relied on measurements or conceptual approaches developed in the West, basically because they were already available.

Over the past six decades, most of these studies have typically shown that journalists worldwide endorse professional roles and values that emphasize neutrality, objectivity, and the scrutiny of official behavior, holding those in power accountable (e.g., Donsbach & Patterson, 2004 ; Hanitzsch et al., 2011 ; Patterson & Donsbach, 1996 ; Weaver, 1998 ; Weaver & Willnat, 2012 ).

One of the basic assumptions of role conception research is that the way in which journalists understand their roles shapes the news content they produce. This assumption is mostly based on psychological studies that have shown a significant relationship between attitudes and behavior in specific working and personal environments (Kim & Hunter, 1993 ).

Indeed, earlier studies on role conceptions argued that there was a significant relationship between role conceptions and journalistic decisions (Kepplinger, Brosius, & Staab, 1991 ; Patterson & Donsbach, 1996 ; Starck & Soloski, 1977 ). However, those studies did not compare the rhetoric on roles with actual journalistic performance but only journalists’ perceptions of different professional roles, as well as what they thought they actually did. However, as we know, surveys will never measure actual behavior.

Moreover, the extent to which journalistic ideals can manifest themselves in practice in the journalistic field depends on myriad factors that frequently yield differences and sometimes contradictions between what professionals would like to do and what they actually do in their work (Mellado et al., 2017a ; Mellado & Van Dalen, 2014 ; Shoemaker & Reese, 2013 ; Van Dalen, de Vreese, & Albæk, 2012 ).

As far back as the 1930s, Rosten ( 1937 ) had already warned of the tension between professional ideals and practical constraints. Since then, gatekeeping theory and the hierarchy-of-influences approach have analyzed a variety of constraints that might influence how journalists perform their roles, suggesting that explanations of journalistic cultures based solely on role conception research should be questioned rather than assumed (Shoemaker & Reese, 2013 ; Shoemaker & Vos, 2009 ).

Due to the problem of taking survey data as valid measurements of journalistic practice (Patterson & Donsbach, 1996 ; Schudson, 2003 ; Vos, 2002 ) and the lack of theorization of professional roles within the journalistic field (Mellado et al., 2017a ), considerably more attention has been paid over the past decade to the study of journalistic role performance, that is, the manifestation of professional roles in both news decisions and the news outcome that reaches the public (Hallin & Mellado, 2018 ; Humanes & Roses, 2018 ; Mellado, 2015 ; Mellado, Humanes, Scherman, & Ovando, 2018 ; Mellado et al., 2017a , 2017b ; Mellado & Van Dalen, 2014 ; Stępińska, Jurga-Wosik, Adamczewska, Selcer, & Narożna, 2016 ; Vos, 2002 ; Tandoc, Hellmueller, & Vos, 2013 ; Wang, Sparks, Lü, & Huang, 2017 ).

The concept of role performance focuses on the connection between journalists’ beliefs about the role of journalism and the actual practice of producing the news (Mellado, 2015 ). It connects studies on the professionalism of roles with those on news production and the sociology of news.

In accordance with gatekeeping and hierarchy-of-influences studies, more recent research measuring both role conceptions and actual role performance has systematically shown a wide gap between professional ideals and professional practices at different levels (Brüggemann & Engesser, 2014 ; Mellado & Van Dalen, 2014 ; Tandoc et al., 2013 ; Vos, 2002 ).

Different studies assert that although journalistic role conception research is an important component for the study of professionalism, where “ideals and values are the tools and skill sets that set journalism apart from other fields and guarantee its autonomy from heteronymous forces, and serve to legitimatize and define journalism” (Mellado, 2015 , p. 596), the constraints to which they are exposed within the profession limit the possibility of living up to their normative standards (Mellado & Van Dalen, 2014 ), even though journalists may have clear ideas about which professional roles are most important to them.

Research on journalistic role performance has also shown that the practice of the profession seems to vary much more widely than the current findings on journalistic ideals would suggest. The most recent empirical studies have found patterns of multilayered hybridization in professional role performance worldwide, with journalistic cultures displaying multiple “types of journalism” that do not fully resemble ideal typologies of roles or media systems (Humanes & Roses, 2018 ; Mellado et al., 2017b ; Mellado, Márquez-Ramírez, Mick, Oller Alonso, & Olivera, 2017e ; Stępińska et al., 2016 ; Wang et al., 2017 ). In other words, these studies have found that when considering the performance of essential roles of journalism in society, ideal or conventional assumptions about journalistic role conceptions in different societal settings fail to work.

Such results reported by the international literature on journalistic role performance in recent years have undeniably re-opened the opportunity to discuss the extent to which professional roles are contingent upon different levels of influence (Mellado et al., 2017a ). In this context, the concept of journalistic role performance becomes quite valuable since it focuses attention on issues relating to structure, agency, culture, and political economy. These issues are key to the understanding of journalism as a social practice (Esser, 2008 ). Journalistic role performance also raises the problem of the connection between journalism’s normative ideals and practice (Schudson, 2003 ), and encourages us to think about how ideals arise and function within a larger social context and how they relate to journalistic performance.

It is relevant to consider that although this entry is squarely positioned in the quantitative research tradition—as it is the tradition of most role performance, role conception, and role perception studies—there is a lot of newsroom and ethnography research that actually addresses these specific issues using a different conceptual framework. Indeed, reading authors from media sociology like Goffman ( 1959 ) or Tuchman ( 1972 ) clearly shows us that the notion of role performance has been quite close to qualitative and ethnographic research that has dealt with how journalists actually “operationalize” their own ideals in their daily practice.

Professional Roles as Object of Study

One of the main challenges of quantitative studies on journalistic professional roles over time has been the lack of theorization and empirical focus on analyzing the link between role conception and journalistic practice. Basically, journalistic roles have mostly been used as an empirical concept to study the functions on which journalists place more importance in society, while the definitions given to the construct “professional role” have varied quite widely (Mellado, Hellmueller, & Weaver, 2017c ).

Overall, role theory defines a role as the expected behavior of people who occupy a particular social status and position in society (Biddle, 1979 ; Montgomery, 1998 ). In other words, a role has been conceptualized as the function undertaken by an individual in accordance with the normative demands placed upon that individual in his or her position (Goffman, 1961 , p. 85). It should be noted, however, that roles might take different forms depending on the level of analysis applied to them.

Mellado et al. ( 2017a ) distinguished four different concepts within the construct of professional roles in journalism: role conception, role perception, (perceived) role enactment, and role performance (see Table 1 ), taking into account the dual empirical and evaluative aspect thereof. The differences between these concepts are not only about how they are defined but also about how they can be empirically measured (Blumer, 1969 ; Lynch, 2007 ; Turner, 2006 ).

Role conception: The purposes of the profession that a journalist conceives as most important at the individual level, and where the journalists’ evaluation of a specific role is not necessarily related to social consensus.

Role perception: Perceived role expectations in society. Role perceptions do not form a mental picture of a role for a particular journalist and do not necessarily have a location in the conceiver. They may instead follow a script that has been internalized and is located in a larger social structure. For example, journalists who perceive a watchdog role as important may have internalized the way of thinking expected by the media outlet where they work.

Role enactment: The implementation of a journalistic role focusing on the individual journalist only. Here, of course, there is a need for consistency between the journalist’s role conception/perception and his or her behavior. Within journalism studies, role enactment has been addressed mostly at the evaluative level of analysis, referring to what journalists think they do (Culbertson, 1983 ; Oi, Fukuda, & Sako, 2012 ; Patterson & Donsbach, 1996 ; Skovsgaard, Albæk, Bro, & de Vreese, 2013 ; Weischenberg, Malik, & Scholl, 2006 ). Some studies have used the term “role enactment” to analyze the manifestation of journalistic roles in news content (Carpenter, Boehmer, & Fico, 2015 ; Tandoc et al., 2013 ; Vos, 2002 ). Nevertheless, given the internal and external constraints that impact journalism, the concept of role enactment may never be fully applied within the journalistic profession. In this respect, role enactment differs from role performance in that it is more difficult to accomplish in journalism, since it implies that journalists have autonomy and freedom over their work, thereby being able to individually put into practice what they think are the most important roles of their profession.

Role performance: The collective outcome of concrete newsroom decisions and the style of journalistic reporting, taking into consideration the different factors that influence journalism as a professional practice (Mellado et al., 2017a , p. 5). Role performance deals with behaviors (Biddle, 1979 ; Burke & Reitzes, 1981 ), and it can be seen as an outcome of dynamic negotiations influenced by different internal and external constraints that potentially inhibit, but may also enable, the practice of journalism (Mellado, 2015 ; Vos, 2005 ). Within this context, role performance can explain the extent to which journalists’ news decisions and reporting styles are influenced by a journalist’s specific role conception, perception, or perceived enactment, or by other variables that are not in the mix of expectations perceived as legitimate.

The performative level of professional roles is the level most likely to be observed by the public and different reference groups through the outcome of newsroom decisions (e.g., the news story). Nevertheless, the study of role performance also enables an analysis that captures the so-called backstage of news production, that is, the negotiations with different reference groups, the search for sources, styles of data gathering, and the verification process.

It should be borne in mind that although its relevant components are inevitably determined by normative criteria, the concept of role performance is not a normative one (Mellado, 2015 ; Mellado et al., 2017a ).

Indeed, roles are not universal, so they are not good or bad per se. They are historical, are situational, and can be mediated constantly depending on the specific contexts. Journalists in advanced democracies, for example, may perform a more detached watchdog role or a more adversarial watchdog role, as happens in the cases of the United States and Spain. Likewise, journalists from transitional democracies may perform a more civic role or stick to performing a disseminator role if, for example, they are still fearful of a dictatorship regime. At the same time, journalists working for a very commercialized media outlet or in specific news beats may use the infotainment role in a much more prominent way, while in non-democratic countries the adversarial role or the loyal-facilitator role (depending on what type of dictatorship it is, of course) would be more appropriate.

Table 1. Role Conception, Perception, Enactment, and Performance in Journalism

Source: Mellado et al. ( 2017a , p. 7).

The differences in the way roles are conceptualized are limited by the applied perspective. The functionalist approach—the one used for most studies on professional role conceptions—sees a role as the set of expectations that a society places on an individual, creating regular rules and patterns of behavior. This definition stresses normative expectations and social consensus, where the performance of a role tends to be taken for granted. 2

This excess of normativism has meant that most research is still limited to “hard” news, giving the impression that journalistic professional roles are more relevant to specific groups of the profession that interact with the power elites, while ignoring those that report on other issues or topics. Indeed, the emphasis that the field has put on the link between politics and journalism has diminished other areas and elements of journalism that do not belong to this relationship (Zelizer, 2011 ). This has certainly affected the configuration of professional roles that are now addressed from both the normative and the empirical levels, and the way in which they have been studied. For example, social media raises important questions about journalists’ roles and their identity in a shared media space (Duggan, 2015 ; Hermida, 2014 ).

Meanwhile, the interactionism perspective—the one used by studies on role performance—does not see roles as being fixed but instead as negotiated and changeable within a particular social context (Blumer, 1969 ; Lynch, 2007 ; Mellado, 2015 ; Vos, 2005 , 2017 ). As it has been already mentioned, role performance studies conceptualize professional roles as flexible, situational, and independent sets of functions that can be combined in various ways across space and time, often subject to adaptation and combination (Hallin & Mellado, 2018 , p. 28). This approach is closer to the one used by earlier research that tackled some of these issues using a different methodology, e.g., newsroom ethnography studies.

The Gap Between Professional Ideals and Journalistic Performance

The gap between ideals of roles or normative values and role performance is measured as the degree of congruence or discrepancy between role conception, role perception, or perceived role enactment and professional performance (Mellado & Van Dalen, 2014 ).

Understanding the gap and the relationship between what journalists want to do (or think they ought to do) and what they and the media actually perform is crucial to the analysis of forces affecting news production.

Journalists may see their main role as that of providing information that citizens need in order to be active in political life, yet they may be unable to perform that role because political stories do not necessarily attract large audiences. They may also see their main role as that of acting as a “watchdog” over those in power, yet they may be unable to perform that role in most countries due to obstacles such as government control, corporate control over the media (e.g., owners have veiled corporate interests that might become compromised by watchdog stories), among others constraints. For journalists, this situation is the rule rather than the exception. Moreover, the threats and harassment that these professionals face are a global challenge, even for advanced democracies (Löfgren & Örnebring, 2016 ).

In this respect, it is important to bear in mind that when the performance of individual journalists differs from the characteristics of their role conception or perception, it is not necessarily an indicator of a malfunctioning news organization. Indeed, such journalists may perform roles that conflict with those they think they do or like or ought to do with those their colleagues perform, those expected by the media outlet where they work, and even those embedded within the macro-organizational structure in which the media is located.

While systematic studies dedicated to measuring the gap are relatively recent and evidence of the forces explaining such a gap is still insufficient, I discuss here several reasons that may explain the distance between professional ideals and journalistic practice.

Professional roles are not mutually exclusive (Mellado, 2015 ); they are historically constructed and sometimes conflicting (Vos, 2017 ), so journalists have to combine them in various ways when they produce a news story. They may praise specific ideals of the profession, but their practices are guided by roles that are context specific and not fixed, which can be applied in different ways, as already exemplified in the section “ Professional Roles as Object of Study ” (Mellado, 2015 ).

Traditional approaches assume that professional roles are fully contracted by behavior and categorized by norms, values, and beliefs (Ashforth, 2001 ). Nevertheless, previous studies have suggested that journalistic roles cannot be considered discrete categories (Mellado, 2015 ; Vos, 2005 ). Indeed, while at the normative level it is possible to talk about ideal types of roles in journalism, in practice this becomes impossible, since professional roles at all stages (conception, perception, perceived enactment, and performance) may overlap in practice (Lynch, 2007 ). In this respect, unlike ideals and values that are easier to transfer, and unlike media system characteristics that have shown more discernible patterns in comparative studies, such as legal frameworks, the size and scope of their media markets, the nature of state intervention, or the extent to which political instrumentalization and parallelism are present, the actual manifestation of journalistic roles is more difficult to fit into existing ideal typologies, since they are constantly changing, being mediated not only by social, organizational, and individual factors, but also by the local context of the news (Mellado et al., 2017b ).

The existence of multiple roles partly reflects the institutional context within which journalists work. Also, since news professionals write for many different audiences simultaneously, journalistic role ideals are often rooted in conceptions of the audience, which often means that several roles overlap when writing a single story.

The gap may also be partly due to differences in the conceptualization of the ideal–practice connection. While some research focuses on the ideal–practice connection as a relationship (Scholl & Weischenberg, 1998 ) (e.g., studying whether journalists who place more importance on the infotainment role of journalism are more likely to perform that role), other studies address the connection between ideals and practice as a gap, by focusing on the distance between the two. Of course, different conclusions may be drawn depending on which of the two approaches are used (Mellado & Van Dalen, 2014 ).

Another possibility is that the gap is, in part, a methodological artifact that may be due to the fact that previous research has not measured role conceptions correctly. For example, in the surveys typically used to measure role conception, the wording of the questions might be too abstract, meaning that journalists do not actually have a common basis on which to reply, thus resulting in non-comparable responses. Another flaw of survey-based research is that journalists might give socially desirable responses that fit normative expectations. Their responses therefore might be about what they would like or are expected to do instead of what they actually do. It is also common for journalists from different contexts to understand concepts differently or give different meanings to concepts such as neutrality or partisanship. For example, the translation of Western ideals such as truth and freedom does not really capture the ways in which those norms are articulated within other contexts. Thus, the fact that they are implemented and understood according to local realities suggests that there are no straightforward universal journalistic practices with unanimous and stable meanings.

It may also be the case that journalists interviewed for studies measuring role conceptions do or do not have great influence over the most important decisions on news content and that the gap should be also addressed at the organizational level (Mellado, Mothes, Hallin, Humanes, 2019 ). Finally, the lack of validation of some of the scales used to measure professional roles at the evaluative level (e.g., Hanitzsch et al., 2011 ) may have contributed to such a methodological artifact too.

There is no doubt that the gap also reflects the heterogeneity of the profession. Not all journalists, media organizations, or news beats embrace the same journalistic role conceptions and/or perceptions, and often there are struggles within the field over which role conceptions should prevail. Advising the consumer, for instance, is a paramount role in soft news and sections such as lifestyle or travel, as much as infotainment is a paramount role for sports or gossip. But even the so-called hard news sections are subject to forces of commercialization, and the inclusion of elements of roles like the infotainment one is becoming more and more common (Mellado, López-Rabadán, & Elórtegui, 2017d ; Uribe & Gunter, 2007 ).

The size of the gap obviously varies by situation, historical period, and social context, resulting in journalistic role conceptions being more or less coupled with role performance in different contexts (Vos, 2017 ). This is undeniably one of the most important advantages of the concept of role performance over the concept of role conception, since it focuses attention on the sources of such variation.

Studying Professional Roles

An important issue when studying not only every stage of professional roles but also the gap between ideals and practice is the way in which these concepts are empirically measured.

The very first studies to measure professional roles by content analysis were important efforts that laid the foundations for the study of journalistic role performance. Nevertheless, most of those studies were not clear about the operationalization of their measurements and were dependent on subjective interpretations rather than an investigation into specific practices that could potentially reveal professional roles in news content. For example, Weaver and Wilhoit ( 1996 ) and Vos ( 2002 ) studied role conceptions and separately evaluated news stories written by the surveyed reporters. However, the operational definition of roles in news content comprises several statements that are the same as the questions put to those journalists (Mellado, 2015 ).

Other studies on reporting styles that indirectly address different functions of the media tended to focus on isolated indicators (Benson & Hallin, 2007 ; Esser, 2008 ; Van Dalen, de Vreese, & Albæk, 2012 ), making it difficult to establish the reliability and validity of scales.

In order to overcome these serious limitations, initiatives like the international Journalistic Role Performance Around the Globe (JRP) Project have generated a common methodology, with valid scales to measure journalistic role performance in news content. Using these scales, scholars are able to analyze different dimensions of journalistic performance in different contextual settings to enable cross-national comparative research.

The performative level of journalistic cultures represents the level most likely to be observed by the public and different reference groups through the analysis of the outcome of newsroom decisions (e.g., the news story). Journalistic role performance as a product, then, is normally measured by content analysis.

Nevertheless, the performance of roles can also take the form of actions performed prior to the output, the so-called backstage of news production (Goffman, 1959 ), where the negotiations with different reference groups, the search for sources, and the verification process are crucial. Journalistic role performance as a process, then, should be measured by techniques such as ethnography and/or in-depth interviews.

The JRP Project focuses on the final output, analyzing how different dimensions of professional roles manifest themselves in news content across different countries and cultures. This project has been the starting point for other related studies, which have also addressed the disconnect between journalists’ norms and professional performance (e.g., Mellado & Van Dalen, 2014 ), as well as comparisons of role performance among media platforms (e.g., Hallin & Mellado, 2018 ).

Based on standardized content-based measures (Mellado, 2015 ), different studies have looked at the practice of six journalistic roles that run along the presence of the journalistic voice in the news, the relationship between journalism and those in power, and the way journalism approaches the audience. Relevant literature has previously suggested similar perspectives as three dimensions to be used for the analysis of journalistic roles (Donsbach, 2008 ; Hanitzsch, 2007 ). Based on this previous work, studies on role performance have indicated and then corroborated (e.g., Mellado et al., 2017b ; Mellado et al., 2013 ; Mellado & Van Dalen, 2017 ; Mellado & Vos, 2017f ; Mellado, Hanusch, Humanes et al., 2013 ) that, instead of dimensions, these are three interrelated domains from which six independent roles emerge: the interventionist, watchdog, loyal-facilitator, service, civic, and infotainment roles.

Following role theory research, studies on role performance also emphasize that these are not the only domains from which role performance can be studied, nor are they the only possible roles that can emerge from these domains (Mellado, 2015 ). Indeed, recent studies on journalistic performance analyze specific sub-dimensions that emerge from those roles (e.g., Márquez-Ramírez et al., 2019 ) as well as new domains of journalistic roles in social media spaces (Hermida & Mellado, 2019 ).

The measures used to analyze the manifestation of different journalistic roles in the news in different political, historical, and cultural contexts, have been inspired by both content analysis on journalistic practices mentioned throughout the text and important qualitative studies of newsroom practices (Bantz, McCorkle, & Baade, 1980 ; Bogaerts, 2011 ; Tuchman, 1972 ; Usher, 2014 ).

The journalistic voice domain deals with the presence of the journalists’ voice in the news. The passive stance of journalists in their reporting has been associated with the neutral and disseminator roles (Cohen, 1963 ; Weaver & Wilhoit, 1986 ), while the active stance has been linked to the participant (Donsbach & Patterson, 2004 ; Johnstone et al., 1976 ), advocate (Janowitz, 1975 ), and missionary roles (Köcher, 1986 ).

The power relations domain deals with the relationship between journalists and those in power. Journalists might defend the idea of monitoring de facto powers and denouncing wrongdoings (Waisbord, 2000 ), but, at the same time, they may see their role as acting as loyal spokespersons for those in power, conveying a positive image of them, supporting official policies, and portraying a positive image of one’s country, thereby encouraging the sense of belonging (Donohue, Tichenor, & Olien, 1995 ; Donsbach, 1995 ; Pasti, 2005 ; Mellado, 2015 ).

The audience approach domain deals with the way in which journalists address the audience. Based on this different understanding of the audience, they can be addressed as citizens, clients, or spectators (Eide & Knight, 1999 ; Rosen, 1996 ; Weaver et al., 2007 ).

Within each of these domains, professional roles can be measured in the news by specific indicators that resemble specific reporting styles. The journalistic voice domain involves the role of the journalist as interventionist vis-à-vis disseminator . The power relations domain involves the watchdog and the loyal-facilitator roles. Finally, the different understanding of the audience can be associated with three independent dimensions of professional roles: the civic, the infotainment, and the service roles.

All these roles—with the exception of the interventionist and the disseminator roles, which are part of a one-dimensional structure (Mellado, 2015 )—have been proved to be independent but relate to each other to some extent (Mellado et al. 2017b ; Mellado et al., 2013 ; Mellado & Van Dalen, 2017 ; Mellado & Vos, 2017 ; Mellado, Hanusch, Humanes et al., 2013 ). A news story may include, for example, elements from the watchdog role and from the loyal role at the same time. They cannot, therefore, be considered poles of a continuum as previous studies have suggested (Hanitzsch, 2007 ).

Each of the six dimensions of role performance is operationalized in terms of its practical manifestations in news content.

Figure 1. Dimensions of journalistic role performance.

As a template for empirical studies, roles are seen as empirical constructs to study role performance in news content within different cultural contexts. However, these are not the only perspectives from which role performance can be analyzed in the news, nor are they the only dimensions of journalistic performance that can be found in news content, particularly in the new media landscape. Moreover, taking into account that several concepts are inevitably culturally bound, it is likely that not all the indicators emerging from the literature will work in the same way in all societies, especially when considering that professional roles can be seen as reflective measurement models, in which the dimensions exist independently from the measures used, and where adding or removing an item does not change the conceptual domain of the dimension (Wirth & Kolb, 2012 ).

Professional Role Conception, Perception, and Perceived Enactment

While it may be true that measuring professional role performance by content analysis or ethnographic work is far more complex than measuring professional roles by surveys of journalists, the challenge of measuring role conceptions/perceptions or perceived role enactment properly is also very big.

Looking at the studies on role conception, role perception, and perceived enactment carried out over the past decades, the operational definition of roles mostly takes the form of abstract statements—such as being a detached observer—that journalists are asked to rate by indicating the extent to which such statements are important to them or to their media outlets, or the extent to which they believe they accomplish those functions. However, they do not take the form of specific practices—such as taking sides in a news story—that journalists may find easier to understand. Of course, what it means “to be a detached observer” for an Indian journalist, for example, is not necessarily the same for an American journalist. In contrast, the terms “opinion” or “interpretation” are globally shared. The same may happen among colleagues from different, or even the same newsroom or news beat. Indeed, the preliminary results of the JRP Project have shown, first, that there is more consistency in journalists’ responses to the questions addressing specific practices than those on abstract aspects of the profession, and second, that abstract and empirical indicators of role conceptions do not belong to the same role dimensions, that is, they do not measure the same thing (Mellado & Helmueller, 2015 ). I mentioned this issue in the section “ The Gap between Professional Ideals and Journalistic Performance ,” when remarking that the gap was a possible methodological artifact.

This critical aspect suggests that (a) possibly, role conceptions have not been measured correctly, and (b) the lack of clarity on the meaning of professional roles at the normative level leads to confusion between role conception, role perception, and perceived role enactment in studies on journalistic professional roles.

Finally, measuring the gap between role ideals and professional practices requires a combination of methods (e.g., surveys or interviews for role ideals and content analysis and/or newsroom observation or ethnography for role performance). The impact of other variables on news decisions and reporting styles can also be assessed through the interviews or data collected at the organizational and/or societal level.

Studying journalistic professional roles through the lens of not only evaluations of journalists’ work but also the way in which they perform their professional roles is far from being a mere academic exercise, since the way in which journalists cover news has a profound impact on shaping public and private spheres, on citizens, on governance, and on the democratic construction of a specific national system.

Studies on journalistic role performance move things a step forward because they are able to tell us how or to what extent news professionals have enough autonomy for their role conceptions to be manifested in journalistic practices as well as in the news product made available to the public. Indeed, one of the advantages of studying the performative level of journalistic roles is that it can help to measure journalistic autonomy in a more indirect yet objective way, by analyzing the extent to which journalists are able to put their professional roles and ideals into practice (Mellado & Van Dalen, 2014 ).

In this respect, unlike studies on professional role conceptions alone, journalistic role performance studies appear to offer different perspectives on the practice of journalism around the world, particularly in countries where evaluative elements are less articulated in practice (Mellado et al., 2017a ).

So far, while international studies on professional role conception/perception support the idea that journalists from different media systems conceptualize their roles as expected (Hanitzsch et al., 2011 ; Weaver & Willnat, 2012 ), research on journalistic role performance has systematically found patterns of multilayered hybridization in journalistic cultures across and within advanced, transitional, and non-democratic countries (Mellado et al., 2017b ). Several studies have also shown a significant gap between journalistic ideals and professional practices, particularly in roles more closely related to the professional ideal of the Fourth Estate; in countries with less press freedom; among journalists who cover “hard” news topics and those who feel more economic and political pressures. Also, some of these studies have found discrepancies between journalists’ role conceptions and their perceived role enactments (Mellado & Van Dalen, 2014 ; Roses & Humanes, 2019 ).

Likewise, studies on role performance have found significant differences in the performance of a variety of professional roles depending on the media platform (Hallin & Mellado, 2018 ), although the latest research suggests that the thematic beat and media audience orientation are more crucial variables in explaining differences in role performance (Humanes & Roses, 2018 ; Márquez- Ramírez et al., 2018 ; Mellado et al., 2018 ). Similar studies have also revealed a significant correlation between the prevalence of different sources and journalistic roles in news (Márquez- Ramírez et al., 2018 ).

One of the main challenges of studying journalistic roles, and, specifically, the performance of such roles today, is that the conceptual boundaries of journalism have become increasingly blurred in the current digital ecosystem. Social media’s intrinsic capacity to deinstitutionalize communication through parallel channels may turn out to be a crucial element when it comes to performing both traditional and new journalistic roles. Professional roles can certainly evolve and be redefined—in both discourse and practice—since their emergence and development not only have historical and contextual components but also a strong grounding in the logic that journalists use to communicate with the audience, and in the expectations of various reference groups. Future studies need to address all these elements.

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1. As Western journalists developed high levels of professionalism, their understanding of their roles began to take shape within a context in which individual journalists were believed to have a considerable influence over the news stories they produced.

2. The reliance on normative beliefs is not surprising considering that the journalistic field has been predominantly normative in nature (Hallin & Mancini, 2004 ; Mellado et al., 2017a ; Waisbord, 2013 ; Zelizer, 1993 , 2017 ), thus dictating whether journalism can be considered “good” or “bad” journalism.

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Present-day journalism.

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Recent News

journalism , the collection, preparation, and distribution of news and related commentary and feature materials through such print and electronic media as newspapers , magazines , books , blogs , webcasts, podcasts, social networking and social media sites, and e-mail as well as through radio , motion pictures , and television . The word journalism was originally applied to the reportage of current events in printed form, specifically newspapers, but with the advent of radio, television, and the Internet in the 20th century the use of the term broadened to include all printed and electronic communication dealing with current affairs.

The earliest known journalistic product was a news sheet circulated in ancient Rome: the Acta Diurna , said to date from before 59 bce . The Acta Diurna recorded important daily events such as public speeches. It was published daily and hung in prominent places. In China during the Tang dynasty , a court circular called a bao , or “report,” was issued to government officials. This gazette appeared in various forms and under various names more or less continually to the end of the Qing dynasty in 1911. The first regularly published newspapers appeared in German cities and in Antwerp about 1609. The first English newspaper, the Weekly Newes , was published in 1622. One of the first daily newspapers, The Daily Courant , appeared in 1702.

At first hindered by government-imposed censorship , taxes, and other restrictions, newspapers in the 18th century came to enjoy the reportorial freedom and indispensable function that they have retained to the present day. The growing demand for newspapers owing to the spread of literacy and the introduction of steam- and then electric-driven presses caused the daily circulation of newspapers to rise from the thousands to the hundreds of thousands and eventually to the millions.

Magazines , which had started in the 17th century as learned journals, began to feature opinion-forming articles on current affairs, such as those in the Tatler (1709–11) and the Spectator (1711–12). Appearing in the 1830s were cheap mass-circulation magazines aimed at a wider and less well-educated public, as well as illustrated and women’s magazines. The cost of large-scale news gathering led to the formation of news agencies , organizations that sold their international journalistic reporting to many different individual newspapers and magazines. The invention of the telegraph and then radio and television brought about a great increase in the speed and timeliness of journalistic activity and, at the same time, provided massive new outlets and audiences for their electronically distributed products. In the late 20th century, satellites and later the Internet were used for the long-distance transmission of journalistic information.

Journalism in the 20th century was marked by a growing sense of professionalism . There were four important factors in this trend: (1) the increasing organization of working journalists, (2) specialized education for journalism, (3) a growing literature dealing with the history , problems, and techniques of mass communication , and (4) an increasing sense of social responsibility on the part of journalists.

An organization of journalists began as early as 1883, with the foundation of England’s chartered Institute of Journalists. Like the American Newspaper Guild, organized in 1933, and the Fédération Nationale de la Presse Française, the institute functioned as both a trade union and a professional organization.

Before the latter part of the 19th century, most journalists learned their craft as apprentices, beginning as copyboys or cub reporters. The first university course in journalism was given at the University of Missouri (Columbia) in 1879–84. In 1912 Columbia University in New York City established the first graduate program in journalism, endowed by a grant from the New York City editor and publisher Joseph Pulitzer . It was recognized that the growing complexity of news reporting and newspaper operation required a great deal of specialized training. Editors also found that in-depth reporting of special types of news, such as political affairs, business, economics , and science , often demanded reporters with education in these areas. The advent of motion pictures, radio, and television as news media called for an ever-increasing battery of new skills and techniques in gathering and presenting the news. By the 1950s, courses in journalism or communications were commonly offered in colleges.

The literature of the subject—which in 1900 was limited to two textbooks, a few collections of lectures and essays, and a small number of histories and biographies—became copious and varied by the late 20th century. It ranged from histories of journalism to texts for reporters and photographers and books of conviction and debate by journalists on journalistic capabilities, methods, and ethics .

Concern for social responsibility in journalism was largely a product of the late 19th and 20th centuries. The earliest newspapers and journals were generally violently partisan in politics and considered that the fulfillment of their social responsibility lay in proselytizing their own party’s position and denouncing that of the opposition. As the reading public grew, however, the newspapers grew in size and wealth and became increasingly independent. Newspapers began to mount their own popular and sensational “crusades” in order to increase their circulation. The culmination of this trend was the competition between two New York City papers, the World and the Journal , in the 1890s ( see yellow journalism ).

The sense of social responsibility made notable growth as a result of specialized education and widespread discussion of press responsibilities in books and periodicals and at the meetings of the associations. Such reports as that of the Royal Commission on the Press (1949) in Great Britain and the less extensive A Free and Responsible Press (1947) by an unofficial Commission on the Freedom of the Press in the United States did much to stimulate self-examination on the part of practicing journalists.

By the late 20th century, studies showed that journalists as a group were generally idealistic about their role in bringing the facts to the public in an impartial manner. Various societies of journalists issued statements of ethics, of which that of the American Society of Newspaper Editors is perhaps best known.

Although the core of journalism has always been the news, the latter word has acquired so many secondary meanings that the term “ hard news ” gained currency to distinguish items of definite news value from others of marginal significance. This was largely a consequence of the advent of radio and television reporting, which brought news bulletins to the public with a speed that the press could not hope to match. To hold their audience, newspapers provided increasing quantities of interpretive material—articles on the background of the news, personality sketches, and columns of timely comment by writers skilled in presenting opinion in readable form. By the mid-1960s most newspapers, particularly evening and Sunday editions, were relying heavily on magazine techniques, except for their content of “hard news,” where the traditional rule of objectivity still applied. Newsmagazines in much of their reporting were blending news with editorial comment.

Journalism in book form has a short but vivid history. The proliferation of paperback books during the decades after World War II gave impetus to the journalistic book, exemplified by works reporting and analyzing election campaigns, political scandals, and world affairs in general, and the “new journalism” of such authors as Truman Capote , Tom Wolfe , and Norman Mailer .

The 20th century saw a renewal of the strictures and limitations imposed upon the press by governments. In countries with communist governments, the press was owned by the state, and journalists and editors were government employees. Under such a system, the prime function of the press to report the news was combined with the duty to uphold and support the national ideology and the declared goals of the state. This led to a situation in which the positive achievements of communist states were stressed by the media, while their failings were underreported or ignored. This rigorous censorship pervaded journalism in communist countries.

In noncommunist developing countries , the press enjoyed varying degrees of freedom, ranging from the discreet and occasional use of self-censorship on matters embarrassing to the home government to a strict and omnipresent censorship akin to that of communist countries. The press enjoyed the maximum amount of freedom in most English-speaking countries and in the countries of western Europe.

Whereas traditional journalism originated during a time when information was scarce and thus highly in demand, 21st-century journalism faced an information-saturated market in which news had been, to some degree , devalued by its overabundance. Advances such as satellite and digital technology and the Internet made information more plentiful and accessible and thereby stiffened journalistic competition. To meet increasing consumer demand for up-to-the-minute and highly detailed reporting, media outlets developed alternative channels of dissemination, such as online distribution, electronic mailings, and direct interaction with the public via forums, blogs, user-generated content, and social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter .

In the second decade of the 21st century, social media platforms in particular facilitated the spread of politically oriented “fake news,” a kind of disinformation produced by for-profit Web sites posing as legitimate news organizations and designed to attract (and mislead) certain readers by exploiting entrenched partisan biases. During the campaign for the U.S. presidential election of 2016 and after his election as president in that year, Donald J. Trump regularly used the term “fake news” to disparage news reports, including by established and reputable media organizations, that contained negative information about him.

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Opinion | ‘On background’ is common journalism lingo. What does it mean?

Reporting ‘on background’ can be especially tricky, which led the verge to change its policy..

Here are two phrases that often come up in journalism — in fact, they come up so often that even non-journalists have heard of them.

Off the record . And … On background .

What do they mean, exactly?

First, off the record. I wrote about this recently , but let’s go over it again real quick. Here’s how it’s supposed to work:

A source should ask a reporter first if something can be off the record. Then the reporter can agree or refuse. The source then can decide whether or not they want to share that information. If the reporter agrees to an off-the-record request, the ethical thing to do is not report or even repeat that information. Off-the-record comments are supposed to remain strictly between the source and the reporter.

Now, what about “on background?” Typically, that means a source shares information that a journalist is free to use with one caveat: The journalist should not attribute that information to a specific or named person. Again, the agreement should be made before the source reveals the information.

“On background” can be especially tricky, which led The Verge to change its policy regarding reporting “on background.” Editor-in-chief Nilay Patel wrote about it in a story published Wednesday on The Verge’s website .

Patel wrote, “We’re doing this because big tech companies in particular have hired a dizzying array of communications staff who routinely push the boundaries of acceptable sourcing in an effort to deflect accountability, pass the burden of truth to the media, and generally control the narratives around the companies they work for while being annoying as hell to deal with.”

Perhaps here it should be noted that The Verge is a blog mostly about technology and it writes a lot about gadgets, electronics, products and that sort of stuff. Oftentimes, that means The Verge hears from PR types who pitch those various gadgets and products. Is that a bit different than the kind of sources, say, The New York Times or Washington Post or CNN deal with covering news stories? Perhaps. But it’s interesting to see what The Verge is doing.

Patel writes, “From now on, the default for communications professionals and people speaking to The Verge in an official capacity will be ‘on the record.’ We will still honor some requests to be on background, but at our discretion and only for specific reasons that we can articulate to readers.”

Patel then made the definitions of “on the record” and “on background” clear.

About “on background,” Patel writes, it “means you can talk to us and we will not specifically identify you, instead using a descriptor like ‘company spokesperson.’”

Patel went on to essentially say that companies simply can’t start an email with “on background” or “off the record” or “not for attribution” and automatically assume that anything that comes after will not be used or specifically sourced. Patel stresses that the terms must be agreed upon before the information is shared.

This is similar to what happened in September when Politico’s West Wing Playbook published an email from Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin. The subject line of Rubin’s email was “OFF THE RECORD,” but Alex Thompson, one of West Wing Playbook’s authors, said he never agreed to the email being off the record and, therefore, anything Rubin wrote could be published.

Was he right? Well, yeah, technically. But was it kind of a crummy thing to do to another journalist? Many thought so.

To avoid confusion and problems, sources and journalists should assume everything is on the record unless there is communication between the two. And to further avoid confusion and problems, yes, any agreements about “on the record” and “on background” should be reached before the source says anything.

But, also, let’s get to the real world for a minute. Every journalist deals with their sources differently. Certainly, it’s always preferable to get the sources on the record all the time. But that isn’t always possible. And journalists, occasionally, have to make a tough call. Sometimes “off the record” and “on background” will be honored by a journalist before an agreement is technically reached depending on the information and the relationship with the source. If it’s a valuable source that a journalist needs for future stories, he or she likely will lean towards keeping the source happy.

But I appreciate The Verge wanting to be completely clear and transparent moving forward. That is never a bad policy.

A Rittenhouse trial explainer

Kyle Rittenhouse is sworn in before he testifies at his trial at the Kenosha County Courthouse on Wednesday. (Mark Hertzberg/Pool Photo via AP)

Fascinating breaking news television on Wednesday as the big cable news networks — as well as several news outlet’s websites — carried Kyle Rittenhouse’s testimony in his trial for homicide. Rittenhouse is on trial for shooting three and killing two during protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in August 2020. Aside from Rittenhouse’s testimony, there were dramatics as the judge in the case, Bruce Schroeder, sent out the jury more than once to scold lead prosecutor Thomas Binger for his line of questioning.

At one point, Schroeder told Binger in a raised voice, “Don’t get brazen with me!”

If you’re like me, you know what the case is about, but you haven’t necessarily followed every moment of the trial. So when it came to Schroeder’s rulings and demeanor, you might have asked, “Is this right? Is the prosecutor crossing a line? Is the judge being deferential to the defense and being mean to the prosecution?”

That’s why CNN’s coverage, especially during Wednesday’s lunch recess, was so valuable. Anchor Ana Cabrera led an excellent discussion with CNN legal analyst Laura Coates and civil rights attorney Areva Martin that helped viewers better understand what was going on, including why, perhaps, the prosecutor was being admonished by the judge. They also did an excellent job talking about the consequences of being on a judge’s bad side and how the jury can sometimes pick up on that.

Both Coates and Martin agreed that, while surprising, the defense’s decision to put Rittenhouse on the stand was effective at times. But, also, both wouldn’t go as far as to say that Rittenhouse would be found not guilty.

All in all, the discussion did what it was supposed to do: It gave viewers more insight into the trial, especially because Coates and Martin know more about these kinds of things than pretty much anyone watching. And credit to Cabrera for asking smart questions — the kind of questions viewers were thinking.

Woof, Blitzer!

CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer got dragged on social media for a tweet he sent out Tuesday regarding gas prices. Blitzer took a photo of gas prices at an Exxon station and tweeted , “FYI. Gas prices today here in Washington DC.” The prices were $4.29 for regular, $4.49 for plus and $4.79 for supreme.

Almost immediately, Blitzer was called out.

Sylvan Lane, who covers finance and economy for The Hill, tweeted , “The average price for a gallon of regular grade gas in DC today was $3.60, according to @AAAnews.”

Martin Austermuhle, a reporter for WAMU, the NPR station in Washington, D.C., tweeted , “@wolfblitzer, please stop this. There’s a handful of comically expensive gas stations around D.C., and that you happen to live or work by one does not mean it is representative! The citywide average for regular gas this week is $3.62, about 20 cents above the national average.”

There were dozens more, but you get the drift. It does feel a tad sloppy to pick out one station and post it online without noticing that other gas stations in the area are not charging as much for gas.

What’s next at MSNBC?

Rachel Maddow. (AP Photo/Steven Senne, File)

Brian Williams announced Tuesday night that he is leaving his MSNBC show and NBC News entirely by year’s end. This news, while not totally shocking given the rumors that Williams was tired of doing a late-night show, throws some more uncertainty into MSNBC.

Already, MSNBC needs to plan ahead to fill Rachel Maddow’s very popular 9 p.m. Eastern slot. Maddow recently signed a contract extension with NBC News, but she is expected to step away from her nightly show for other projects. In addition, NBC News recently watched Kasie Hunt walk out the door to join CNN+. (Williams, by the way, could head there next.)

There’s more. Insider media writer Claire Atkinson reports that “Morning Joe” co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski have been “holding conversations about what’s next for them.” (Hmm, might they head to prime time?)

Whatever the case, fairly new president Rashida Jones has a lot to figure out in the coming weeks/months.

During a conversation Wednesday at the Paley International Council Summit with “NBC Nightly News” anchor Lester Holt, NBCUniversal News Group Chair Cesar Conde said, “Most probably saw the news that was put out (Tuesday) on Brian Williams and you know, we love Brian, and, we are so grateful for all of the incredible contributions that he’s made over the last few decades and we wish him the very, very best in this next chapter. But during those natural transitions, we have incredible opportunities that have opened up for the extraordinary deep bench of journalists that we have at the News Group.”

In case you missed it, here was Williams announcing his departure from NBC News on his MSNBC “11th Hour” show.

Update from Salt Lake

Good stuff here from Salt Lake Tribune executive editor Lauren Gustus, who writes, “From hedge fund ownership to nonprofit status: How we’re investing in 2022.”

To catch you up, Paul Huntsman brought the Tribune in 2016 from hedge fund Alden Global Capital. Since then, the Tribune became the only major metro newspaper to become a nonprofit, left a joint operating agreement and went from printing seven days a week to one.

Gustus wrote, “The Tribune newsroom is 23% larger than it was a year ago. We’ve welcomed a three-member Innovation Lab reporting team, a west Salt Lake Valley reporter and a second southern Utah reporter. We’ve also added to our digital team and our editing ranks. We’ve invested in long-overdue cameras and lenses for photographers, and provided a 401(k) match and parental leave for our employees.”

And more is coming. Gustus said the Tribune will add more journalists in 2022 and bolster “solutions-oriented journalism,” as well as adding to its business and education reporting, reimagining its food and culture journalism and investing in video. The Tribune also will add an e-edition on Sunday (to go along with a printed Sunday edition) and will add another day of print on Wednesdays, which will be delivered by mail.

Gustus wrote, “If you appreciate reading The Tribune, however, and want to support our future growth, we invite you to become a supporting subscriber and to make a tax-deductible donation . Journalism is so critical to the health of our communities that the freedom to practice it is enshrined in our Constitution. We are grateful you have stayed with us through many ups and downs. We are listening. And we are honored you have helped The Tribune reach sustainability.”

Media tidbits

• For the second time in just a few weeks, ESPN NFL reporter Adam Schefter is getting crushed for mishandling a story. This time, it’s all over how he presented a domestic violence allegation involving an NFL player that clearly has more than one side that Schefter initially reported. It’s a really bad look for Schefter and ESPN. The Spun’s Matt Hladik and Awful Announcing’s Jay Rigdon have more details, including an admission from Schefter that he should have done better.
• Wednesday was a big night at Poynter as CBS News and “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl was awarded the Poynter Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Journalism. Poynter’s Angela Fu has the story , and I’ll have more about a conversation that PolitiFact editor-in-chief Angie Drobnic Holan and I had with Stahl in Friday’s newsletter.
• CNN Audio debuted a new limited-series podcast Wednesday called “When Diana Met …” The pod, hosted by Aminatou Sow, takes listeners into Princess Diana’s most notable meetings with various public figures, politicians and celebrities. The first episode is about her first lunch with Camilla Parker Bowles.
• For The Washington Post, Ethan Porter and Thomas J. Wood with “Fact checks actually work, even on Facebook. But not enough people see them.”
• Also in The Washington Post, media reporter Paul Farhi with “How the media missed a New Jersey senate candidate’s racist social media posts — until he’d already won.”
• The New York Times’ Ben Smith and Ben Protess with “Ozy Media Faces Federal Investigations.”
• Writing about a former NBA player, The Undefeated’s Marc J. Spears with “Randy Livingston no longer hides his story of gambling addiction.”
• For Politico, Jessica Pishko with “She Wants to Fix One of Louisiana’s Deadliest Jails. She Needs to Beat the Sheriff First.”
• People magazine named its “Sexiest Man Alive.” Here’s your winner .

Have feedback or a tip? Email Poynter senior media writer Tom Jones at [email protected] .

More resources for journalists

• Every day, PolitiFact journalists pore over statements to hold the people in power accountable. Subscribe to their newsletter for the week’s top fact-checks .
• Trans in Sport (Webinar) — Nov. 16 at 2 p.m. Eastern
• Leadership Academy for Women in Media – 2022 (Seminar) — Apply between Oct. 25-Nov. 30, 2021

The Poynter Report is our daily media newsletter. To have it delivered to your inbox Monday-Friday, sign up here .

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Opinion | More chaos at The Washington Post as the publisher’s ethics are questioned

Publisher Will Lewis’ credibility with staff was already on shaky ground. News of his attempts to squash coverage makes it all the more unsettled.

Opinion | How Trump abuses language to push for an American ethnicity

The news media has violated its covenant with the people, enabling Trump to redefine what it means to be American.

Did Fauci say he ‘made up’ COVID-19 rules on social distancing, masks? Let’s look at the transcript.

Headlines have distorted what the transcript shows Fauci telling members of the House in a January meeting

Opinion | The Wall Street Journal’s story on Biden’s mental fitness: fair or foul?

Is it an honestly reported story on a pertinent topic? Or is it a pointed piece built on quotes from those who don’t want to see Biden reelected?

Can felony convictions hinder Trump’s international travel? Here’s what we know

Many countries have rules barring people convicted of felonies from entering. However, those rules vary widely and many leave room for exemptions.

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• Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Go to the "Internet & Tech" tab for data about internet and social media use among different demographic groups.
• Statista Statista aggregates statistics and studies from market researchers, organizations, specialist publications, and government sources.
• Statistical Insight Comprehensive index for local, state, national, and international statistics. Contains interdisciplinary data and reports, and indexes older statistical publications held on microfiche (1973-present).
• Social Explorer Statistics about people, social characteristics, and the economy of the U.S., with Census data from 1790 to the present.
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Polls & Public Opinion Data

• Roper Center for Public Opinion, including Roper Express Oldest and most comprehensive collection of public opinion survey datasets in the world, from 1935 to present. Focus is on the U.S., but many surveys from Europe, Latin America, and Asia have been acquired, some dating back to the 1940s and 1950s. Access note: Log in required for some functions. Register for a free account with your colorado.edu email address.
• Gallup Analytics Analyze data from the U.S. and over 160 countries on topics related to economics, politics, and well-being. Data spans many decades and includes U.S. daily tracking and the Gallup Poll Social Series. Microdata from the World Poll not included with subscription. Access note: Access limited to 1 concurrent user.
• Roper iPoll U.S. public opinion data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, 1935-present.

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Santul Nerkar

Santul nerkar was a reporter for the new york times covering business and sports and a member of the 2023-24 times fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers. he left the times in may 2024. below is the last version of his times bio., what i cover.

I write on a range of topics, including the economy, real estate and sports leagues. I am a member of the 2023-24 New York Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their career.

My Background

I previously worked as an editor and writer for FiveThirtyEight, a data journalism site, reporting on the economy, sports and politics. I am a graduate of Georgetown University, where I studied economics, government and Arabic and wrote for the school’s newsmagazine, The Georgetown Voice.

Journalistic Ethics

As a Times journalist, I am committed to embodying the integrity outlined in our Ethical Journalism Handbook . I strive for fairness and impartiality in my reporting, and I try to write clearly and for all readers, not just other journalists.

How Media Outlets on the Left and Right Covered Biden’s Immigration Order

Conservative media outlets criticized the executive order as being too lenient, while the liberal outlets that covered it said it was harmful to migrants.

By Santul Nerkar

The European Central Bank’s new interest rate, its first cut in five years.

Trading Glitch Sends Some Shares on a Wild Ride

Berkshire Hathaway showed a drop of 99 percent before trading was halted and the technical problem corrected.

The Big Number: $6 Billion

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, announced last Sunday that it had raised $6 billion, which would go toward developing new products and research and development efforts.

How Partisan Media Outlets Covered Trump’s Guilty Verdict

Conservative outlets blasted former President Donald J. Trump’s criminal conviction as a sham, while liberal outlets divided on the import.

U.S. Accuses Hyundai and Two Other Companies of Using Child Labor

The Labor Department filed a lawsuit accusing Hyundai, one of its suppliers and a staffing company of jointly employing a 13-year-old on an auto body parts assembly line in Alabama.

The N.C.A.A. Agreed to Pay Players. It Won’t Call Them Employees.

The argument is the organization’s attempt to maintain the last vestiges of its amateur model and to prevent college athletes from collectively bargaining.

Raw Milk’s Risks Don’t Stop Right-Wing Commentators From Defiantly Pushing It

On sites like Infowars, Gab and Rumble, federal concerns about raw milk are seen as overreach, but there are serious health risks and no scientifically proven benefits.

How Media Outlets Are Covering Justice Merchan in Trump’s Criminal Trial

Conservative outlets have criticized Justice Juan M. Merchan as politically motivated, while some liberal media organizations have praised him for muzzling Mr. Trump.

Caitlin Clark Is Here. Can the Business of the W.N.B.A. Flourish?

Clark’s arrival has many betting on the W.N.B.A.’s success. But certain structural disadvantages persist, including how much the players earn.

By Jacob Meschke and Santul Nerkar