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Defector’s Kelsey
McKinney on how
2020 destroyed
the concept of
“sticking to
sports”
WALT HICKEY

Journalists perceive
stories published in
local news outlets to How Eviction Lab
is helping
be less newsworthy journalists cover a
spiraling housing
crisis
Plus: “Cultural competence” through diverse sourcing;
SARAH SCIRE
limitations in how journalists represent public opinion; and
lessons from studying 7,000 news push notifications.

By MARK CODDINGTON AND SETH LEWIS Sept. 8, 2020, 8:30 a.m. %

Editor’s note: Longtime Nieman Lab readers know the bylines of Should the
Mark Coddington and Seth Lewis. Mark wrote the weekly This Week government use
in Review column for us from 2010 to 2014; Seth’s written for us off Section 230 to
force the tech
and on since 2010. Together they’ve launched a monthly newsletter
giants into paying
on recent academic research around journalism. It’s called RQ1 and for the news?
we’re happy to bring each issue to you here at Nieman Lab. JOSHUA BENTON

A new test of the influence of national news

coverage
It’s clear that in the U.S., the news industry is steadily becoming The Pentagon
orders the military
more national. Local news continues to be hollowed out, and newspaper Stars
national news organizations are taking an ever-greater share of and Stripes to shut
news revenue and audience attention. But the most prominent down by the end
of the month
national news organizations’ spot at the center of journalists’
LAURA HAZARD OWEN
vision of their own profession isn’t new at all. When scholars
began looking sociologically at the process of news production in
the 1950s, they found local journalists taking their cues on news
judgment from the national news. Timothy Crouse’s classic
portrayal of the 1972 campaign press corps, The Boys on the Bus,
depicts a handful of national news organizations with an almost
Facebook has been
comically outsized influence on the rest of the field.
terrible about
removing vaccine
We’ve seen journalists follow the national leaders for long enough
misinformation.
that few scholars have stopped to ask why. Does national news Will it do better
coverage give a story the imprimatur of newsworthiness in with election
misinformation?
journalists’ eyes? Or is it more of a competitive instinct that drives
LAURA HAZARD OWEN
the pack? Perhaps the largest news organizations’ influence is
overstated, and they simply have more resources to get there first
to stories that other journalists would’ve found newsworthy
anyway.

Those are the ideas that drive Hans J.G. Hassell’s new study,
“What makes news newsworthy,” published this month in The
International Journal of Press/Politics. Hassell conducted a
survey-based experiment with 1,510 American newspaper
journalists to find out whether journalists considered a story more
or less newsworthy based on whether they were told that it was
published by a national newspaper, a mid-sized metro, a local
newspaper, or nowhere at all.

Hassell found that journalists saw a story published by a national

newspaper as being no more newsworthy than the same story
having gone unpublished, or published by a mid-sized paper. This
held true whether journalists were asked about newsworthiness in
the eyes of their audiences or their editors — the latter intended
as a measurement of competitively motivated perception.

But while national publication didn’t give stories a

newsworthiness boost, local newspapers fared even worse. A story
published by a local newspaper was seen as less newsworthy than
one that hadn’t been published at all. Not surprisingly, this effect
was stronger among journalists who didn’t work for small, local
papers.

The study’s findings suggest that journalists’ follow-the-leader

approach to national news may not be driven by the fact that it
was covered by national news organizations as a sort of
newsworthiness “stamp of approval.” Instead, Hassell posits that
mimicry of national news may simply be because national news
organizations have more resources to lead the way on stories that
journalists broadly consider newsworthy, or because those
organizations operate under a broader sense of newsworthiness
that will resonate with a greater share of journalists.

The scope of newsworthiness may also help explain journalists’

apparently low view of newsworthiness of local newspapers’
stories. Since those newspapers’ sense of newsworthiness tends to
be more narrowly defined by geography, journalists may be
conditioned to view local newspapers’ stories as irrelevant to their
own organizations’ goals. This would especially be the case as
national politics increases its dominance over local politics in the
American imagination.

Hassell’s study does provide an encouraging indication that

journalists’ perception of newsworthiness leans less on the
publication decisions of their more prominent colleagues than
we’ve thought. But for local newspapers facing an existential
crisis, other journalists’ apparent low regard for the
newsworthiness of the work they publish could be read as a
stinging reminder of their place near the periphery of a field they
once were a more prominent part of.

Research roundup
Here are some other studies that caught our eye this month:

§ § §

“Sourcing diversity, shifting culture: Building ‘cultural

competence’ in public media.” By Andrea Wenzel, in Digital
Journalism.”

There has been a years-long conversation, intensified in recent

months, about how news organizations can make a meaningful
difference in diversifying their staffs, addressing race and the
newsroom, and more fully including marginalized voices. In this
study, Wenzel makes an essential contribution to that discussion
by examining — through a year and a half of interviews and
ethnography — how a U.S. public media station sought to “shift a
culture of whiteness and increase the representation of people of
color within both staffing and online and broadcast coverage.”

Wenzel finds some mixed success. Of course, any single initiative,

like this foundation-supported effort to help Philadelphia-based
WHYY to build “cultural competency,” is unlikely to transform
things by itself, but there were some tangible changes. For
example, the process of auditing and monitoring sources quoted
in local stories allowed journalists to evaluate their routinized
forms of quoting traditional authority figures (such as university
professors) — practices that tended to over-represent white voices
at the expense of a broader range of experts within communities.

At the same time, though, the enduring structures, patterns, and

path dependencies of WHYY made it difficult for the cultural
competency initiative to institutionalize change. “Many
traditional journalistic practices remained in place, along with
much of the white editorial leadership and largely white
newsroom,” Wenzel writes. Citing French sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu’s theory about fields and how they change (or not), she
goes on to write, “For cultural competency practices to undertake
the work of ‘transforming the structure of relations of forces’ in
the journalism field, the practices would need to become
routinized and the structures and positions that support them will
need to be strengthened.”

§ § §

“The voice of the people in the news: A content analysis of public

opinion displays in routine and election news.” By Kathleen
Beckers, in Journalism Studies.

An important part of news is attempting to reflect public opinion,

which journalists do in a wide variety of ways — from polls to
person-on-the-street interviews to embedded tweets and more.
“These public opinion displays,” Beckers writes, “vary in how
explicitly they refer to public opinion, how representative they are
of the larger population and how active the role of citizens is.” So,
what can be learned from studying a broad sweep of how public
opinion is portrayed in the news?

Analyzing nearly 4,000 items in Flemish (Belgian) print and

television news media, representing both routine and election
periods, Beckers found that journalists take seriously their
responsibility to describe public sentiment: about 1 in 5 news
items overall and almost half of all election coverage had one or
more references to public opinion in some form or another.

But there are a few qualifiers to this finding: First, citizens seem
to have little say in this process. “Proactive expressions of public
opinion taking place in the real world” — such as protests —
receive little coverage, and are covered even less frequently in
election news, Beckers notes. Second, journalists’ most common
methods for sourcing public opinion vary by media type — vox
pops are preferred for television, and general inferences (i.e.,
claims without precise evidence) are most common in print news
— and both of these approaches give journalists “quite some
leeway in how to cover public opinion.” Plus, vox pops and
general inferences, while certainly convenient, aren’t exactly the
most representative ways of expressing the public’s mood.

§ § §

“The temporal nature of mobile push notification alerts: A study

of European news outlets’ dissemination patterns.” By Dawn
Wheatley and Raul Ferrer-Conill, in Digital Journalism.

If you’re reading this, odds are that you get news alerts on your
phone. Maybe even a lot of them.

Mobile push notifications are a vital (if overlooked) element of

news distribution. They offer the chance to reach readers
instantaneously and directly (without social media getting in the
way), and at various time points to suit people’s on-the-go
preferences for getting news during lulls in the day. Such
notifications are under-researched in journalism studies, so
Wheatley and Ferrer-Conill offer an important accounting — one
that focuses especially on whether news organizations “attempt to
integrate with existing mobile-user behavior patterns or seek to
be a disruptive element, garnering attention when audiences are
not typically using devices.”

They analyzed more than 7,000 push notifications from 34 news

outlets in nine European countries. They found that, although
news organizations do tend to emphasize reliably key moments
for news consumption — such as first thing in the morning during
commutes or when users have more downtime in the evening —
they also tend to spread notifications throughout the day. In this
way, they seek to embed themselves in users’ habitual “checking
cycles,” capitalizing on how people turn to their phones
repeatedly during the in-between periods of the day.

They also found that for-profit publishers tend to use push

notifications more often, suggesting a market-focused element to
notifications (no surprise there), and the same was true of print
outlets compared to online-only ones — indicating, perhaps, a
more concerted effort to win back newspaper audiences that were
lost in recent decades. Regardless, there is much yet to learn
about the rhythms of news notifications and how they figure into
the evolving picture of news consumption today.

§ § §

“Engagement moderation: What journalists should say to

improve online discussions.” By Gina M. Masullo, Martin J. Riedl,
and Q. Elyse Huang, in Journalism Practice.

The comment sections for news stories are notorious for being
dens of vitriol and hostility, particularly when poorly managed or
left unattended. When the discussion among readers goes awry,
as it so often does on hot-button topics, what are moderators — or
journalists, as the case may be at many news organizations —
supposed to do in trying to intervene?

In this study, Masullo and team propose the idea of engagement

moderation, which they define as “community managers or
journalists interacting with commenters to improve the comment
threads, rather than deleting comments.” They tested the utility of
this concept using an experiment involving a mock Facebook page
(because news organizations are increasingly shifting their
commenting spaces there), built to appear as if it belonged to the
ostensibly unbiased Associated Press. They found that such
engagement could help in dealing with incivility, particularly
when journalists or community managers used “high-person-
centered messages” — that is, messages that acknowledge people’s
apparent emotional pain or frustration. Such interventions, they
found, led news readers to have “more positive attitudes toward
the news outlet’s Facebook page, online community, and handling
of incivility.”

§ § §

“‘Friending’ journalists on social media: Effects on perceived

objectivity and intention to consume news.” By Jayeon Lee, in
Journalism Studies.

By now, we’re accustomed to journalists revealing more and more

of their personal as well as professional selves on social media. It’s
a gradual process of transparency, branding, and self-disclosure
that has its pluses and minuses, and which raises a host of
questions about how news audiences perceive and respond to
such behavior.

Lee’s study, based on an experiment with 267 college students,

explored how a journalist’s self-disclosure on social media
affected the audience’s intentions to follow that journalist’s news
updates as well as perceptions about that journalist’s objectivity.
When journalists self-disclosed and interacted directly with users,
that had the strongest direct effect on people’s likelihood to
consume the news they produced. But that intention to follow the
journalist was tempered somewhat by negative attitudes that
these participants — yes, even young adults — had about the
journalist’s objectivity, despite the personal disclosures avoiding
partisan politics.

Still, the study’s overall assessment is that the negative influence

of weakened perceived objectivity doesn’t offset the positive
impact of a journalist’s self-disclosure. This suggests, Lee writes,
that “general expectations about professional journalism have
shifted, or at least the norms are expanding to accommodate
diverse activities happening on social media.” Perhaps that’s true,
but exactly how that gets translated into newsrooms’ social media
guidelines of the future is yet to be determined.

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Defector’s Kelsey McKinney on how 2020 destroyed

the concept of “sticking to sports”
“We can’t cover sports right now, or ever, as an individual and separate thing
because sports are the gift we get for making our society as just and fair as
possible.”

How Eviction Lab is helping journalists cover a

spiraling housing crisis
As the pandemic has worsened an already critical situation, researchers started to
live track evictions in 17 cities and launched a scorecard to compare protections for
renters in each state.

Should the government use Section 230 to force the

tech giants into paying for the news?
A new paper argues that the “26 words that created the internet” should remain in
force — but only for companies that agree to certain new regulations and
restrictions.

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