Cracking the Code: Creating New Lifelines between Journalists and Academics

A Call for Change

Current Needs

Ev Dennis: “There have been probably hundreds of projects involving universities and news organizations over the years. Most of them come to very little. There’s no record of work that probably goes back 50 to 60 years, where these things have been done with some rigor.

“There’s a need now because organizations like the Newspaper Research Bureau – which used to do first-rate research and had the best scholars in the country, Leo Bogart and company, working for them – is now pretty much gone. The broadcast networks no longer have their big research operations, again with some of the smartest people in the country doing the research.”

Phil Meyer: “Twenty years ago, the newspaper industry tried to solve this problem. Max McCombs published something called the ANPA News Research Reports. He also got a grad student to go around visiting newspaper companies, rifling their research files and looking for proprietary stuff they could be talked into converting to the public domain … Some good stuff came out of that, but it was a lot of trouble. 

“The newspaper business is now a business that doesn’t want to go to much trouble to do stuff that doesn’t have immediate payoff. And that’s why they don’t connect with academics because we think in the very long term and they think in the very near term and our horizons are just too different.”

Ralph Izard: “There are a couple of things I was going to mention. One of them is the Newspaper Research Journal. It’s a publication of the newspaper division of AEJMC. It is a refereed journal. But the most important thing is that the journal was designed initially, 22 years ago, to serve as a bridge between academic researchers and newspapers in all categories – newsrooms, advertising, circulation. The principal focus has been on newsroom activity. 

“One of the things we have done, as editors, is insist that the research be written in standard English in a deliberate effort to communicate with editors who don’t have the kind of methodological background the academics have.

“The circulation is not what it should be, but it is a publication that has a rather distinct following. And it’s amazing how many telephone calls I get from editors saying. ‘We are doing X. Has there been research on that subject that you can direct me to?’ That is the kind of call we love to get.”

Jan Schaffer: “How does an editor learn whether any research has been done on a topic of interest to them? Is there any easy way to find out?”

Ralph Izard: “No, not really. I hate to mention Journalism Quarterly, but it is indexed. Newspaper Research Journal is indexed, so this is one means. When I would get telephone calls asking if there has been research on X, sometimes I knew. If I didn’t, I would make calls to colleagues and usually could find pieces of research on that subject matter.”

Dave Kurpius: “There’s a move afoot at Ball State with several others in the radio-television journalism section of AEJMC to put out a professional research journal like the Newspaper Research Journal. They’re talking about packaging it with the Communicator, the Radio-Television News Directors Association magazine.

“I think we’ve got to think about different ways that we can help get the research into the newsroom and make sure that what gets there is valuable. I mean, if you send crap there, it’s going to get thrown across the newsroom.”

Making Research Readable 

Alex Jones: “Ralph, have you ever tried to say, ‘We like it. We’re going to buy it from you. We’re going to take it; we’re going to publish it; we’re going to rewrite it? And we’ll send it back to you and you can look it over and see if you have comments?’ But basically shift the power?”

Jack Hamilton: “You used some interesting words, Alex, that were completely irrelevant to the process. One is: You say if you ‘buy’ the piece. What you have to keep in mind in an academic setting is that in order to keep your low-paying job, you can only get published in publications that will not pay you anything because otherwise it couldn’t be worth anything if they bought it. So that’s A.

“And B, because it’s a peer-reviewed journal and it’s going to make a difference as to whether or not you get tenure, someone else writing the piece is interfering in that process. I think that is important for people who are not in the academy to understand it is a different world.”

Jan Schaffer: “Can’t somebody commit some journalism on it and turn it into a report about the research?”

Ralph Izard: “One thing we’ve talked about is issuing news releases and sending them around the country in anticipation of the publication of a particularly good piece in the Newspaper Research Journal. I have no excuse. We just talked about doing it.”

Moving the Needle

Chris Peck: “There are a couple of problems and they surfaced here. The first one goes back to why no one reads the Newspaper Research Journal. You have to have a way to translate what you have in the research world into something that can be reflected in the newspaper.

“The issue for editors, often, is how do I translate that research into content that is going to move the needle in some way in terms of readership?” 

Jack Hamilton: “Is it that it’s not enough just to get research? Is it that the research has to be framed or stated in a way that it is useful? And is it also, as a second step, that the researcher needs to be there in the newsroom showing you how to implement it?”

Chris Peck: “That’s a problem because there is often a gap between the knowledge of the researcher and the knowledge of what actually happens in the newsroom.

“We did some work that Pew funded on a civic mapping project with the University of Wisconsin … The idea was actually to map how people communicated and how the power structures really work in a community. It sounded pretty good … The problem is the map is so doggone complicated. It’s like mapping the Milky Way. You bring the reporters in and they look up at this map and it overwhelms them.”

Jack Hamilton: “What is it you needed? You told us you got the Milky Way.”

Chris Peck: “What we needed were the horoscopes. We needed the 12 constellations. We didn’t need every single one.”

Jack Hamilton: “Could I say it another way? What you needed was not just the numbers but to make meaning out of the numbers?”

Chris Peck: “Yes … One of the things that would be valuable for editors is to arm them with some of the research that’s out there. A lot of research in terms of community connection, for example, exists.

“That is a very important issue right now in journalism. I’d put it in the top two or three most important things editors are focused on right now – the relationship that people have to the communities in which they live and then figuring out how the newspaper fits in.

“If the questions were: Where do people in your community go for information? How do they begin to be assimilated? How do they relate to one another in your community? … You’d have a sign-up list 500 editors deep.” 

Dave Kurpius: “Chris, would it help if, along with the research, you also got a model?”

Chris Peck: “That goes back to this idea of going someplace to develop the model. That would be very useful … It’s very difficult to do that within the existing culture and structure of the newsroom because our model is already built. We reinforce it every day.”

Linking Knowledge and Action

Ev Dennis: “It seems to me that all this is pointless unless you institutionalize the research function in your news organization. And secondly, most applied research is pointless without policy connections.

” … Even things like Kinsey research is done again and again. And then someone asks: What should we do about it, if anything? We reject these five recommendations, we take these two.

“It’s a linkage between knowledge and action. Otherwise, it’s a fool’s errand and a waste of time.”

Gene Foreman: “I wanted to mention a couple of examples. Neither were tremendously in-depth studies, but they were very useful to me. 

“One, ‘Goodbye Copy Desk, Hello Trouble?’ … John Russial, a former colleague at The Inquirer now teaching at the University of Oregon, examined a rather short-lived trend toward abolishing copy desks and distributing copy editors among reporting teams. He examined some problems this system caused. 

“And the kind of research done in Tom Kunkel’s project at the University of Maryland on the ‘State of the American Newspaper.’ It’s very pertinent to what we do.”

Jack Hamilton: “What’s interesting about the examples you give is – we have been focusing largely on quantitative research – you’re seeing a role for qualitative analysis and I think that’s good.”

Gene Foreman: “It’s the sort of thing we often don’t take the time to do in our newsrooms. We don’t push back from the dailiness of our task and look at longer-term trends and how we ought to be changing to respond. We could have some help.”

Engaging Newsrooms in Research

Dorothy Wilson: “We’re getting a lot of good research. The problem is: How do you get it down to the ranks of the newsroom?

“We have a rapidly growing community. We’re looking at this research that says we’ve got to move much faster as a newsroom. But we’ve got a newsroom that is crawling along, so what do we do about that?

“We did some research on our own. I set up a group in the newsroom, 15 people. We met each week for about eight months. We talked about: How does our newsroom function? How do we think? How do we react? What is our culture? 

“I think there are a lot of folks who are gatekeepers, who block change, interfere in a very negative way.

“As a result of this group, which we call Newsroom 2000, we’ve made a number of structural changes, personnel changes. Our newsroom looks very different than it did a year ago. I think it is much more receptive to looking at some data that tells us that we’re not doing a good job in some areas.”

Jack Hamilton: “Dorothy, is this an example of where academics could have helped with that?”

Dorothy Wilson: “Definitely … One of the first questions I had is: Where do we start? We ended up getting a newsroom-culture survey the Charlotte paper used about five or six years ago. We customized it for our newsroom. We could have used a professional to help us customize it.

” … I think that underscores the gap between people in newsrooms knowing where they can get information, between the kind of research available out there, versus what do I need right now.

“The second thing I’m looking at is our Monday newspaper. How can we really make it useful? We’re talking about creating a Monday paper that’s very different from what anybody else has done before. I’m not finding very much to help me with that … I mean, all newspapers struggle with this. People don’t read the Monday paper.

“There’s also this impatience. In two months I need to be able to get some wheels on this project.

“So I think there definitely are some entry points for researchers.”

Dave Kurpius: “Can I ask a quick question? My sense is that journalists talk to each other in different ways about the news than citizens do. In fact, I know that. There was a study done about television stations a while back that showed that television journalists talk about being first, having the best video. And the citizens talked about understanding the story and having good information. 

“I’m wondering if, in this process, you also took it out to the citizens – took a story that was about a community out to that community and asked: Does this ring true here?”

Dorothy Wilson: “We didn’t do something like that … I think that would have been very valuable … We want to know when we don’t have our finger on the pulse. I think we really struggle with understanding what news is. And I think, to our readers, it’s very different than what it is for us.”

Jack Hamilton: “Do I understand that part of what you’re saying is that there are places on campus that would be useful, apart from schools of journalism, but you need a portal? That the school of journalism becomes a portal into the rest of the university. Did somebody say that last night? It’s a brilliant idea.” 

Dorothy Wilson: “Exactly. We haven’t really needed that because newsrooms thought they knew everything. They had all the information and all the knowledge. Now, with change happening as rapidly as it is and with circulation dropping, we are looking for answers.” 

Kathy Spurlock: “That is exactly where I’m headed. There are days that I feel like, using a very Louisiana analogy, I have had alligators snapping at my behind all day long. You really do feel like you’ve got readers, you’ve got management, you’ve got Internet, you’ve got all these different things, trends du jour… I really need some help sorting through all the available information.

“It might be there are five studies on credibility and here are the results and here are the trends that come out of that. Kind of an editing of the information that’s available, compacted in a way I can get to it and do further research on things that I need and possibly be able to put those concepts into use.”

Jan Schaffer: “Almost like highlights or alerts or even abstracts?”

Kathy Spurlock: “Abstracts.”

Phil Meyer: “You made a statement earlier that people wouldn’t call up the Manship School and find out about the research or something like that. But people will call … they’ll call about press law questions, they’ll call about ethics questions. What would it take to have that same notion apply to research questions?” 

Kathy Spurlock: “I think it’s a perception among a lot of editors that the academy really doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the day-to-day operation of a newsroom.

“If the research is aimed at things that are important to the way that we’re going to continue to operate, then I think it can change.”

Alex Jones: “I’ve mostly been listening, because this is a new area for me. But it strikes me that there are some very, very good ideas here. I think the clearinghouse idea is a very good one.

“It would seem to me that part of the strategy of an effort like this would be to identify the people who are the decision makers and to try to connect with them, because that’s the only connection that really is going to be meaningful.

“All of this has been described as a worthless exercise unless you find a way to make it work. The key to making it work is to get the Dorothys interested. And you have to persuade Chris that this is something that’s of some value to him.”

Jack Hamilton: “Is there somebody between Chris Peck and a CEO who should be here?”

Pam Luecke: “Publisher. Publishers are the gatekeeper to getting research done. I think if push comes to shove, research is often the line item that’s cut from newspaper budgets.

” … I’ve been in journalism 25 years and have worked closely with universities and journalism schools in most of my jobs. But usually it’s on the giving end rather than the receiving end. Our newsrooms are speaking to classes or helping coach interns and things like that. But I can’t recall any time when I’ve really partnered with a journalism program for research. And I think that’s a shame.”

Jack Hamilton: “Is there a reason, on reflection?”

Phil Meyer: “The reason is historical. Newspapers always found it so easy to make money it gave them no reason to depend on universities as a source of innovation. So the historic justification for the existence of journalism schools has been to supply cheap labor to the newspaper industry.”

Alex Jones: “I have to dissent from that slightly. Having been a newspaper editor myself, and having taken advantage of the cheap labor that journalism schools have provided, there’s no question that what Phil says is true as far as it goes.

“I don’t think that there’s an editor with any self-respect who wouldn’t be interested in some program or some effort that he or she thought was going to improve their newspaper … to help them do their job better, to shore up their franchise, to make more money for them, ultimately.

“Now, one of the basic problems is that you guys don’t sell your product very well. You don’t go to the newspaper editor and say: We’ve got something that will help you. You’ve got to sell it. You’ve got to persuade the editor that it’s something that’s in his interest or her interest to do.”

Borrowing from Existing Models

Chris Peck: “If you put those two ideas together, I think you’ve got the answer to your question, Jack. If you looked at other relationships that other academic communities have with their business counterparts, you would see something very different.

“If you talk about medical schools and the medical profession or if you talk about business schools and other business communities, the relationship is much different.

“Let’s take the medical example. In medicine, you have a lot of research being done that I’d put in the category of the silver bullet. I think that’s something that the newspaper industry would be very happy to have. They would love to have the silver bullet right now that would solve the circulation problem.

“Again, taking this medical analogy, if somebody out there is doing this great research and finding a cure, if you find the cure and you’re a medical researcher, then you apply it to Merck or one of the big pharmaceuticals. They say, ‘Wow, that’s it. We’ll give you a lot of money. Let’s form a lot of partnerships.’

“The other is the kind of basic R&D a lot of business schools do, where they develop everything from a piece of software to a product, and they have this reciprocal relationship.

“That doesn’t exist, with the possible exception of about three journalism programs in the country – Missouri, Columbia and Northwestern. Northwestern, of course, has actually done quite a bit more recently with the Kellogg School and kind of merged their business and their media programs. 

“I think that you’re really on to something. You have to rethink the whole orientation of what has gone on in journalism schools and mass-comm schools, beyond just giving you the worker.

“You have to say: Okay, help us then develop – whether there’s an equity partnership, whether there’s some sort of a product development that’s going to help us in journalism.”

Phil Meyer: “I think we need to adopt the medical school model, but we have to find a way to jump start it. What we need is a weapons laboratory … where we could actually do experiments the way medical schools do experiments and try different ways of arranging the platform and do radical stuff that no newspaper company in its right mind would try to do.”

Chris Peck: “You’re on to something that’s pivotal here in terms of research and development. If you’ve seen the initial research that Northwestern University has done about news cultures, you would be shocked to see the lockstep nature of how newsroom cultures are organized … the way they approach problem solving, the way that they approach challenges, the way they approach innovation. Their model is designed to squish innovation. 

“If you’re really going to do innovation, you really can’t look at newspapers as the place to go. This again is a role for the academic world … If you had a place where you might practice innovation – an institute or a place where people could come together and say we’re going to try something – we need a place where you don’t have to operate within those confines.”

Jack Hamilton: “The goal here is to come out with useful ideas. One way is to be positive. But it might be useful to just get on the table why this isn’t happening.” 

Phil Meyer: “The reason it hasn’t happened is the media business, especially the newspaper business, has been very slow to be affected by technological change. I dream of the day when people react to my graduates coming into the newsroom the same way people in engineering firms react to new engineering graduates walking in. They know that these kids have technical skills that they don’t have. And they tremble in their boots because seeing these smart kids means that they’re going to have to catch up.

“That doesn’t happen in journalism because journalism is mostly taught by old guys, like me, who talk about the way we did things 10 and 20 years ago. There are not that many new ideas coming out of journalism schools. 

“But there are a couple of exceptions in two technological areas. One is my own field, precision journalism, the application of scientific research method to newsgathering. 

“The other area is in the use of the Internet, use of it as a research tool and also as part of what will eventually be the news distribution tool … So we are getting to be more like medical schools and engineering schools and business schools in those two limited areas.”

Jack Hamilton: “So what you’re saying is that if you’re trained in a medical school, then you’re being trained to do things that don’t exist?”

Phil Meyer: “Right. You’re being trained by people who are also doing research and who are creating knowledge at the same time they’re imparting it. Journalism schools need to value the creation of knowledge as much as the imparting of knowledge.

“The other is the basic difference between a trade and a profession. In a profession, you learn, first, from principles so that not only do you understand how to do it, you understand why it’s done that way. So when technology or society changes, you can adapt. 

“A craftsperson learns by emulation, monkey-see, monkey-do. And that’s basically what journalism education does. It’s teaching the craft: This is the way we’ve always done it, this is the way you’ll always do it in your career. 

“As we adapt to more of the professional model, and as we persuade our students to learn things like the process and effects of mass communication, how information gets into people’s heads, then we’re preparing them to adapt in a professional way to technological changes.

“Journalism is a very undeveloped profession and journalism schools are undeveloped professional schools for that reason. Technology is forcing the professions to change, and the best journalism schools will be on top of that and slightly ahead of the curve.”

Jack Hamilton: “So, journalism schools have to become as technological as the marketplace?”

Phil Meyer: “More technological. They have to be ahead of it.”

Ev Dennis: “I was going to add that journalism schools themselves are not very strategic about doing systematic work … There’s remarkably little good applied research coming out of journalism schools … Most people who get PhDs do two or three articles and never generate anything else.

“Why? Because there’s no motivation for it. The motivation is to get promoted and so people who want to be promoted and tenured, they do that.”

Esther Thorson: “If you go to the top 10 journalism schools in the United States, they don’t give a crap about what goes on in newsrooms because that is not where their payoff system is.”

Ev Dennis: “You mean the top 10 research-oriented schools, because the top 10 professional schools don’t care about research.”

Ralph Izard: “The flip side is, to be honest, in the newsroom there’s a disdain for academics except as sources for stories. Or a source of cheap labor, of course.”

Nancy Conner: “I can reduce all of this to six words: No time, no money, no leadership.” 

Ralph Izard: “And I’d add no respect.”

Ev Dennis: “I ran a leadership institute for 12 years for deans and we always had deans of business schools come and talk about how business schools became respectable, because they had very low status in American universities 50 years ago. Today, they are highly regarded and have a lot of credibility. Research was one of the key factors that led to their respectability. They almost overdid it on research, and now they’re coming back toward more practice.

“I think it has a lot to do with … the belief that there’s something valuable to be had.”

Jack Hamilton: “Nancy, I understand time. Editors don’t have time to sift through all of this and academics have other things to do. One of the disconnects I see is that professionals say they want research quickly. But most academics have one important job they have to do, and that’s teach, otherwise, what’s the point?

“But I’m puzzled about money. I know academics don’t have money, but that isn’t really the issue, is it? In this case, isn’t it that the industry wants good research but they don’t want to pay for it?”

Nancy Conner: “Absolutely. If you don’t see a direct connection between the payoff from research that you might pay for, it’s going to be a little hard to sell it in a budget that’s already being squeezed.”

Esther Thorson: “I think some of the most important research we’ve done has all been foundation sponsored. The reason for that is that the outside world looks at journalism sometimes not very positively. People see a lot of things wrong. And foundations are willing to fund research that would either try to change things or at least try to figure out why things are the way they are … The news media themselves are never going to pay for that kind of thing.”

Jack Hamilton: “If we take that statement at face value, that they’re never going to pay for it, then in a sense we’re wasting our time with a conference like this. If the only way this will be valued is if somebody else pays for it, then it’s never going to be a very high priority.”

Esther Thorson: “I think there are two kinds of research. One is research that takes a critical analysis approach: Hey, something is wrong here, let’s figure out what it is and why.

“Another kind of research – and this is what business schools do – is managerial research. So an editor says, ‘I’ve got this problem, would you come in here and help me try to solve it? I’ll pay you money to do it.’ Well, then I do it.

“It’s important to keep in mind that, just as the news industry is supposed to be the watchdog of government, journalism schools are supposed to be the watchdog of the media industry. In that sense, to put all your eggs in the managerial research basket would be a problem.”

Revenue Centers

Jan Schaffer: “Ev, I’m interested in your model with business school deans. How much of the research ultimately turned into revenue centers for the business school? How much respect generated from the fact that they were bringing in money? And how much of that research also resulted in products that could be marketed, also generating more revenue?”

Ev Dennis: “A lot of it … A lot of it was theoretical research that had applied concepts. So they could come out of it with a theoretical paper but then sell applications to a company to do some work, to a pharmaceutical company, for example. And it worked. 

“I have a question of the editors, though. You all take summer and other interns to work in the newsroom. Would you take a research intern who was, say a master’s or a doctoral student, to come and do a research inventory or help with a project that you want done and pay him as you would a regular newsroom intern?”

Kathy Spurlock: “Good idea … One of the things I’m doing, in an employee retention mode, is I am actually paying for advanced degrees. If I have someone in school for three years getting a master’s degree, they’re going to stay with me for three years. I’m actually spending about the same amount of money that I would spend to send them to national week-long seminars, so it really pays off for me in terms of retaining a good employee.

“But what if I take someone in their final year, in the thesis mode, and I put them to work at the newspaper part-time, pay them to do the research on something we need or the industry needs and essentially sponsor thesis work?

“I get a highly qualified employee in my newsroom. I also get a piece of research that I want.”

Arlene Morgan: “Esther said something about journalism schools being watchdogs of the profession. That’s news to me. I’ve been in this profession a long time and I’ve never had a journalism school serve as a watchdog at The Inquirer.”

Esther Thorson: “See, that’s a good point, Arlene, because they are the watchdog over you, but they’ve published a bunch of articles about you that you don’t even know about.”

Jack Hamilton: “They’re watching but they’re not barking in a way you can hear.”

Cooperative Programming

Ralph Izard: “The Alliance Committee of ASJMC was a joint committee of the journalism administrators and the educators organizations designed, number one, to explore cooperative programming. And then to suggest ways to continue working together.

“We found a lot of cooperation going on between specific journalism programs and specific media organizations in the hometown. There was not much of an opportunity on a national level or even on a large-scale regional level for the same thing to occur.”

Jack Hamilton: “Some of you may remember the Saturday Night Live skit called ‘Women’s Problems’? It was all men on the program. Some of these meetings were sort of the equivalent of that. It was how do we work better with the professionals and there were no professionals in the room.”

Esther Thorson: “It seems like one thing we really need would be to introduce a question, then bring together people around that question.

“Chris suggested one I think would be perfect: How do newspapers and other news media fit into the ongoing network of citizenship? There have been at least 40 articles about that in the last two years. It’s probably one of the biggest doctoral dissertation areas in the United States.

“Why not have a meeting about that? The purpose would be to plan joint research and to find resources to pay for it.”

Chris Peck: “Let me pose a question to you, Jack, and the other academics. If you had a way to say there are 50 newspapers in the United States that would take a doctoral student or a research student next year to do research, is there a mechanism available where you could identify those students through a network of mass-comm programs?”

Jack Hamilton: “This may get back to the clearinghouse concept … This clearinghouse can have many facets to it and maybe that’s one of them. We’d have to do a census and find out how many universities would like to participate in this, but it’s an interesting idea. 

Esther Thorson: “Absolutely. There’s a group of all the journalism graduate school directors, who could, among themselves, decide who would be the best student out of all of those schools to go and work with the issues that are the ones you want to look at.”

Chris Peck: “APME has just gone through a program to think about what it ought to be doing. One of the things that has emerged out of that is this very sort of thing.

“What APME is looking for is: Okay, what are some examples where we could put something – a program, a person, an idea – across the country in newsrooms in every state? As opposed to doing a national credibility study, which is what ASNE does, but it never gets from there down to the newsroom.

“If there was a way to say we could provide 50 researchers across the country, if you could provide us 50 newspapers, then I think you’ve got something. I think there’s a mechanism on the journalistic side, through APME and ASNE, but does it exist on the academic side?”

Ethical Considerations

Jack Hamilton: “Another issue I want to touch on quickly. Are there ethical considerations with journalism schools working with the industry?”

Phil Meyer: “There must be because I have to fill out a piece of paper every year detailing my industry connections. I have to report any business relationship I have that’s beyond a certain amount with an enterprise that’s doing the same kind of thing I’m researching.

“It’s to look for conflicts of interest. It’s based on the medical school model where there is lots of potential for abuses.”

Alex Jones: “When I was covering the press at The New York Times, I used to call academics all the time … I would expect them to tell me if they had a relationship with a newspaper that would have compromised or could have appeared to have compromised what they were telling me about whether the newspaper was behaving properly or improperly.

“I was calling with the assumption that they were an academic with a dispassionate perspective and an informed opinion.”

Jan Schaffer: “I wonder if you could push this question in another direction and think beyond just journalism schools as the research partners and into software developers, venture capitalists, people who come out with proprietary products. What is your thinking about ethical concerns, if things were to start moving in that direction?

“Suppose you were to put out for bid something – a software developer would design for you a database that could give you profiles of neighborhoods in your community and it would aggregate crime stats, home sales, school test scores, new business listings, and do it for 350 communities in a newspaper’s region. 

“You would create the software, marketable to other news organizations, valuable. But to develop it, you’d have to enter into a business relationship that has economic benefits for both of you.”

Arlene Morgan: “You’d have to cover that company.”

Alex Jones: “I speak as a journalist. The only problem is not disclosing these things. I mean, news organizations are businesses. They have dealings with all kinds of other businesses constantly, especially a local newspaper will be a client of the power company and the utility company. They will have issues with taxes. They will have issues with cable. The time you get in trouble is when you don’t disclose it.” 

Chris Peck: “I think there is something beyond simple disclosure. I think it comes up most often with online development in newspapers. It has to do with principles. One of the most difficult things when you go into the online world is saying: Are we bringing the same standard of care to our editing, to our opinion writing, to the tone of the online publications as we do to the newspaper? What is our attitude on obscenities and vulgarities? What do we say about attribution, fact checking?

“What I would say, on an ethical standpoint, is you probably do need a protocol for saying if we’re going to enter into a business agreement with someone for profit, what are the standards and ethics assumptions we’re bringing forward?”

Jack Hamilton: “What about ethical relationships as they relate to universities, which are not-for-profits in a sense but are interested in full disclosure and that kind of thing?”

Chris Peck: “There might well be a clash on something related to privacy, for example, where you’d say: ‘Gee, we’ve got to know this information for whatever purpose because we’re for openness.’ And the university might say: ‘No, first of all, it’s private. Secondly, it’s proprietary.’ “

Phil Meyer: “Universities have very clear sets of rules because this is an old problem for them. One concern is creating a product that’s a proprietary product, that wouldn’t be available to everyone … The other set of problems involves exploiting students, where a professor and his graduate student work on a research project that the professor is getting paid for.”

Nancy Conner: “I also wonder if the newspaper is being researched for something that will be published, how much control does the newspaper have over the privacy of what goes on behind closed doors – some of the difficulties they’re working through, the things the researcher might really help them with but that the newspaper would prefer weren’t out there in print quite as candidly.”