Cracking the Code: Creating New Lifelines between Journalists and Academics

A Vision for the Future

The group brainstormed several new ways to partner in worthwhile research ventures and to disseminate useful information. The hub of their ideas was the creation of a central clearinghouse that would function in a number of ways. As a matchmaker, it could pair newsrooms with academics in research partnerships or match funders who might commission research with those who could supply it.

They imagined a research clearinghouse that could abstract findings, link to full reports, provide e-mail alerts to interested editors and academics, archive studies, reward top work and give added value to good efforts.

The editors said they would like to see executive summaries of important findings that they could read quickly. They wanted to be alerted to information they could use. And they wanted to see how they could use it. Speed and driving readership were critical.

The academics sought ways to pay for good research and ways to build pathways from the journalism school to other areas of university expertise. They also acknowledged that universities had to create new models to validate research the industry needed, much like business and medical schools do.

Building Bridges

Gene Foreman urged the building of bridges between the university community and industry, starting with the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) and the Associated Press Managing Editors association (APME). They could acquaint editors with research that’s being done, summarize findings and build links to research on their Web sites.

“We have to recognize that editors have a lot to read, they’ve got more details and problems than they can deal with. So we have to make it very palatable and easy to access,” he said.

Although traditional university models might not contain incentives for researchers to participate in a collaborative clearinghouse effort, Jack Hamilton and others saw many benefits.

“If I could cover the costs of doing [applied research], I would do it because our school would be the place that this was done and our school values that,” he said. “So, if we become the place it’s done, that makes us a better place. And in a competitive world, you want to be doing things that other people aren’t doing.”

Cybersalons

All agreed that new technology makes the task of broadcasting good research much easier and cheaper than earlier efforts, such as the well-regarded News Research Reports, once supported by the newspaper publishers organization but later a victim of the organization’s downsizing.

One idea was for a cybersalon, with summaries of key research, books or major speeches posted daily or periodically.

One suggestion was to have an internal cybersalon in which participants would have to know their subject. Members would get free information every day and in exchange they would have to participate in a debate once a month or at some interval. The other possibility would be to have an external cybersalon where anyone could come in and ask a question. It could build on the “Ask Jeeves” Web site model.

Participants saw the possibility of building a revenue model by encrypting some of the research findings and charging a subscription fee. In return, subscribers would receive e-mail alerts and highlights of good research. 

“I think an executive summary of research is about what managers want to have land on their desk in the morning. They can click on a headline and get a little bit more of an executive summary, then have a link to the full study,” said Dave Kurpius.

Added Phil Meyer, “Another model could be something like Jim Romanesco’s Media Gossip, where you have headlines and links to the full reports. That would be fun to put together. You could call it Research Gossip or something.”

Critical to the journalists, however, was that any clearinghouse have an archive that would give a professional the ability to research whether studies have been done on a particular topic. For example, if they were redoing their Life Section, they could go in and find if there were any studies done on Living sections.

The academics were interested in a matchmaker function that would match their interest in a particular topic with a newsroom interested in the same subject.

University-wide Portal

Several of the academics saw the possibility of having a cybersalon serve as a pathway to other areas of university expertise that could be applied to the challenges confronting journalism in a digital era.

“Since we’re building this, we might as well build this into a mega-complex,” said Jack Hamilton. “What about having such a site also work as a portal, not to an individual university, per se, but various people who are working in the field. So that if you need help with media management, here are places you go.” 

It would become a resource directory as well as a research directory, with a list of experts organized by topic and ways to speak with them.

Another idea would be to commission, several times a year, an editor/researcher team to do a literature review of a particular subject and condense and interpret the research in useful ways for the industry. Such a team could research all the studies done, for example, on the topic of newspapers and democratic networks, and deliver those findings with comments and perspectives that would tell newsrooms what has been learned about this research.

One way to make a cybersalon work would be to make it so prestigious that people are eager to participate. Another way to make it work would be to pay for it, the group said.

Incentives 

The group wrestled with how their ideas could be supported. Esther Thorson said the Missouri School of Journalism engages in research commissioned by the industry. “It seems like ad agencies do this all the time. They’ll come to us and they’ll say ‘I’ll give you $10,000 if you’ll go out and tell me everything you can about media synergy and how it works.’ Then we do it.

“Now, if you pay a pair of people $1,000 to do a lit review, and then try to bring in the applied perspective on what that means, you have a really excellent piece of journalism that everybody could use.”

Added Phil Meyer, “Instead of a piece of paper that gets lost in a desk drawer somewhere, it’s archived on the Web and it gradually builds until there’s a huge body of knowledge there. That’s a brilliant idea.”

The group acknowledged that their ideas were not without pitfalls. For one, many expected university naysayers to erect barriers.

“You have a whole growing trend of cultural studies, critical theory. In the academy they would want absolutely nothing to do with this. They hate business, they hate industry, and they’ll do anything to torpedo these kinds of things and will try to stop it in many faculties and find it to be evil incarnate,” said Dave Kurpius.

Some kind of financial support would be necessary, the group agreed. “There’s got to be a reward structure to keep doing it,” said Jack Hamilton. “At some point, either there’s going to be foundation money for it or there’s got to be some way to recover costs.”

Still, the group saw other benefits. “One incentive is if you bring our faculty and graduate students to your newsroom to solve a problem, and you pay us for it, I as an administrator can make profit. I can then put the profit back into the operation to make sure I do a better job of educating kids. So I get more money,” said Hamilton.

He said that Louisiana State’s audit of Middle East coverage in The Philadelphia Inquirer was a good example of giving the academics good opportunities and some compensation, and giving the university more credibility. “The more we do, the more we’re called on to do this kind of work, the more opportunities there are,” Hamilton said.

Phil Meyer said he had a similar experience with the University of North Carolina and USA Today on a number of projects. “Once you start that connection between a given news medium and a university, if it works well, it tends to grow and it develops in ways you never expected.”

New Models

Some of the participants asked whether journalism academics really would be open to research that would be more useful to the industry and would be validated in different ways.

“We all know there are going to be people who are going to scoff at practically everything that’s been said here today, because they don’t buy the practical notion. Well, let’s accept the fact that they’re there. But there are quite a number of people who I think would jump into this kind of practical effort,” said Ralph Izard.

“…Part of the problem is consistency and continuity. We started this [AEJMC] Alliance Committee, and it did rather well at the beginning. But even though the committee exists, I don’t hear too much about it anymore.”

Ev Dennis agreed. “I think you can make headway if you have modest goals and you get people who care about this together to work on it. I wouldn’t fool too much with the national organizations. I think ASNE is good in the sense they have the model of the editor-in-residence. But with the journalism organizations, little professional-academic collaboration happens. There is a lot of goodwill in a given year and then it doesn’t really happen.”

Dennis cited a project he did once with Ottaway Newspapers that resulted in several small studies by journalism professors. “They offered the money on a continued basis and it died, even though there was money there. So I’m not sure how you build continuity into it unless you create some infrastructure that makes it work.”

The group ventured into imagining how journalism schools could operate differently. 

“It seems to me that universities need to find other ways to sell knowledge than they’ve sold it in the past,” said Hamilton. “Journalism schools are really very poorly organized to work effectively with the media.” 

“Maybe one of the things we could look at as a palliative is for somebody to come up with a new model for how schools like ours ought to be organized, in a way that we interface better with the industry. Maybe we also sell our information in different kinds of packages, in addition to the traditional ones. 

“Then you can start valuing what you have to do for tenure in a different way. In other words, if you can make yourself look different enough, then when it’s time to go up for tenure, you can be evaluated in a way that’s different.

“This actually could have a great positive result for the industry. If we were organized in the right way, if we could have people on the faculty who were expected to be doing research only for the industry, there could be a value attached to that. Then we would be in a position to make a whole different case for ourselves and organize ourselves in a different financial way.”

Ev Dennis said he thought it would be difficult but possible. “Every effort that I know of to reform journalism education – and I’ve been part of some of these – has been met with a slammed door and great resistance,” he said. “…But I think you’ve got a good point in that journalism schools need fixing, in that they don’t have the organization or infrastructure to do what we’ve been talking about here.

“It could be done. A commission might be the way to do it, get the right people on it, if they spoke with some authority. I think they could sit in this room and in 30 minutes figure out how to do it, because it’s a matter of what functions need to be carried out to have systematic interplay with the media. You need to have staff to do that. You need to have an associate dean who has some clout, and some other resources. It could be done, and we’d get a lot better.”

Conclusion

In wrapping up, the group agreed that there were two primary issues on the table: More collaboration between universities and newsrooms in industry research and translating that research into something journalism organizations could use quickly. They also agreed they needed better models to make both of those things happen.

“What was surprising in this discussion was the sense of urgency,” said Hamilton. Many forces were fueling this need for speed. Technological change was creating new pressures. Previous efforts have faltered, creating a vacuum. News organizations are worried about how they will remain viable operations. And there’s a greater sense of awareness that the industry needs to do things in new ways.

Here’s a list of goals the group identified:

• We need journalism schools to be a portal to other university expertise.
• We need ways to collect and synthesize research findings.
• We need journalism educators to promote their services.
• We need newsrooms willing to jump start and fund research.
• We need to bring people together around specific questions that need to be answered, rather than research topics done for the fun of it.
• We need to prep-fire the newsroom to make sure it’s ready for the research when it comes in.
• We need to follow up the research with a continuing dialogue on the real search for truth in the newsroom.
• We need to have readable, practical research going into newsrooms. 
• We need a clearinghouse to pull all these functions together.

“Some people think it would be worth looking at a theoretical model of how a journalism school might be configured differently. I’d even be willing to try to make something like that work,” Hamilton said. “You might fail, but it could be a hell of a lot of fun fighting the good fight.”