Newsless.org

A call for help from the academy

For the past couple of days, I’ve been sitting in on the International Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas. This gathering has increasingly piqued my interest every successive year. My past experience of the event has been watching from afar as brilliant folks from domestic and international journalism schools and organizations have delivered absorbing presentations on how journalism is changing and how society is responding to those changes. I’m glad I finally have the good fortune to attend.

Being here has given me the kick in the pants to write something I’ve had in mind for a while now.

The word “symposium” tends to produce smirks in the newsroom. During the year I spent at RJI, there were times I could palpably feel my newsroom colleagues suppressing eye rolls as I described the research being conducted by professors all around me. A strain of proud anti-intellectualism runs strong in the American press, where political reporters casually disdain political scientists, and working journalists fantasize about “retiring” to academia – retreating from the rigors of the field to navel-gaze about it for a spell.

My own career has straddled the worlds of industry and scholarship – in addition to my fellowship year at RJI, my first paid job in journalism was at Poynter. Several of the most brilliant journalists I know are now in the academy, shaping minds and asking far-sighted, important questions. I value the insight of folks like Jay Rosen – a journalism professor who’s never been a reporter – because they were forcefully articulating visions 20 years ago that the long-begrudging industry is finally accepting among its brightest hopes today. So I’m a fierce defender of the academy and its relevance to the discipline.

My belief in that relevance animates the requests I make today. Because I also believe the academy can do more for us – much more. Having hung around journalism schools a fair amount, I think they have a lot of surplus capacity to make our work better, and I intend to tap it, if you’ll let me.

I’m working on this project for NPR that reminds me every day how much we don’t know about the journalism we’re trying to create. Don’t get me wrong – there’s a lot we do know, and one of the goals of this project is to facilitate the sharing of that knowledge among NPR, its member stations, and others in our network. But we’ve developed most of that knowledge in the school of hard knocks, using crude derivations from broad metrics, responding to rough trends in user behavior, slowly grasping for something better than we have.

As we make specific decisions about engineering our sites, I’m frustrated how many decisions we have to make on the basis of hunches, rather than data. Our work raises a steady stream of questions with no readily available answers, only our suppositions drawn from our experiences. What does a user want most when she encounters a topic page? How do we organize a series of links in a way that least detriments attention? What signals on a blog post are most effective at promoting sharing?

My teammates and I are advocates and practitioners of usability testing, A/B testing, eyetracking, and the like, and we’re incorporating those tools into our planning. We’re using an Agile approach to incorporate our on-the-fly learning into our ongoing site development. NPR is the most delightfully research-friendly news organization I’ve ever had the pleasure of working for. And of course, we’ll be watching our analytics like hawks.

But an Omniture report is no substitute for a peer-reviewed study, and our research powers pale in comparison to those of the collective journalism academy. So help me out. I’ve got five requests – some bigger-picture, others more focused. If you think you can help with any of these, please give me a shout.

1. Help us build research into our practice.

As we construct our Argo sites, we’ll be building in hooks for research, devising ideas for A/B testing, and tweaking the sites in response to findings we uncover in real time. But we won’t have the backgrounds or bandwidth to develop studies that produce lasting insight. We’ll lean on our research team as much as we can to help reveal the motivations behind user behavior, but I suspect a collaboration with a top-flight academic team could supercharge what we might discover. I’d love to partner with some numerophilic doctoral students who could geek out over our traffic reports and divine long-term patterns across our sites that might escape our daily perusal.

2. Organize (and open up) your findings so they find us.

I have a strong suspicion that several of the questions I posed above have answers – or at least the beginnings of them – in the existing scholarly literature. But the world of journalism scholarship is so disperse that I have no idea where to go to find that literature.

It’s disheartening that the academy hasn’t gotten farther along in organizing its work on the Web for maximum impact and findability. Each year, PEJ’s State of the News Media report achieves ubiquity in newsrooms – partly because of its enormous scope, but in no small part because of the terrific elegance of its presentation online, with its consistent, easy-to-understand taxonomy. Why have none of the major academic journalism institutions built on this idea for other domains of scholarly research?

At the very least, there should be a Docuticker for journalism alone – a hub collecting and cataloguing the flood of research around journalism that flows daily. Something even more ambitious could easily become a mainstay of newsroom planning.

3. Synthesize your work.

Malcolm Gladwell sparked a cottage industry of fantastic storytellers who could translate ideas and insights from the academic world for a non-scholarly audience. Another reason for the State of the News Media’s impact is the fact that Tom Rosenstiel and company work with economical, lucid writers to convey complicated points.

In the design and technology worlds, scholars have developed a tremendous ecosystem for processing findings from the lab into insights for practitioners. Sites such as SmashingMagazine.com are brilliant at distilling the best information from the world of research into wonderfully useful guidance for Web creators. What’s keeping us from developing a similar information ecosystem for the news industry?

I saw a number of studies this weekend that working journalists would find fascinating and helpful. Yet they’re not available in forms I’d feel comfortable sending around the newsroom. In fact, I’ve never seen scholarship cited in the newsroom that wasn’t accompanied by a readable narrative translation of its findings. I understand that most scholarship is pointed at the academy rather than the industry. But that shouldn’t preclude industry-relevant conclusions from being written up in industry-readable language.

4. Give us a place to ask you questions.

This blog is something of a poor platform from which to deliver a request for help. I’d love to be able to target more focused research queries to domain-specific professors and students. Meanwhile, on the flip side, I’ve worked with and heard from professors and grad students hungry for ideas for research. There’s a disconnect here that makes no sense.

An Ask MetaFilter or Stack Overflow for news research could help foster a marvelous connection between academics and professionals. If a journalism department somewhere were to pioneer that type of forum and commit to addressing queries that came in (even if the answer is, “We have no answer”), I promise I’ll be the first to sign up.

5. Help us devise topic-based story structures.

Topic pages are janky. We know this. With a few exceptions, news site topic pages are good at one thing – attracting Google juice.

I’ll discuss in detail some of my problems with topic pages in another post, but before we can build a better topic page (or topic bundle), we need to understand some specifics. How do the goals of users who arrive at topic pages via search differ from those of users who reach them from our site? Are users generally attracted or repelled by the diversity of content on topic pages, and how does design play into those reactions? Is there an ontology of topic page types? What are their effects?

I have tons more questions along these lines, but I won’t crowd this post with them. Suffice it to say, if questions like these interest you, please e-mail me.