Journalism as a Conversation

The Freehold, New Jersey “coffeehouse newsroom” got me thinking about the hard practicality of doing journalism as a social conversation. It wouldn’t be easy, and it would break a lot of decades-old rules about whose voice really counts. But we need look no further than public-journalism reform efforts of the late-‘80s and 1990s.

Public, or sometimes called “civic,” journalism is exactly what it sounds like. Embarrassed and somewhat guilt-ridden about the mass exodus of citizens from public affairs, newsrooms started experimenting with ways to re-engage the public.

Goodbye horse-race political coverage, problem-oriented reporting and top-down “conversation.” Hello issues-and-solution-oriented coverage with help from the grassroots. The thinking was that if you bring the public back into public-affairs reporting, those citizens might engage in civic life the way previous generations had, or at least show up at the polls to vote.

Author’s note: This is part of a continuing series on the nuts-and-bolts of my dissertation on journalism as a conversation. Where appropriate, I link back to related posts in the series.

I knew fairly early on in my doctoral studies that I’d be doing at least one pair of experiments for my dissertation on journalism as as conversation. The kinds of questions I was asking — What is conversation? What are its features or variables? — all but dictated experimental work.

I also knew the first experiment needed to compare traditional, Associated-Press style stories with what I’d call “collaborative” stories,” or those that result from intense collaboration between a professional journalist and citizen audience members. That comparison would set a baseline for understanding whether audience members even perceive differences between journalism as a just-the-facts lecture and journalism as a conversation.

I also wanted to determine in that first experiment whether adding a short, biographical video of a journalist speaking to her audience enhanced the perception of her humanness. For years, researchers have known that news audiences view newspapers as less credible than TV news, in large part because of the lack of the journalist’s human presence in newspapers. Hard to compete with TV’s flesh-and-blood news anchors and field correspondents.

Author’s note: This is part of a continuing series on the nuts-and-bolts of my dissertation on journalism as a conversation. Where appropriate, I link back to related posts in the series.

One of the first things you learn in research is that your overarching question or hypothesis dictates your research method.

At the most basic level, if you’re looking at measurable variables, you know you’ll be doing quantitative research. And if you’re interested in causal relations between variables, you basically must conduct a controlled experiment. That tight control allows you to make assertions about causation because you’ve ruled out alternative explanations for your findings. Hard but fun research. 

In the case of journalism as a conversation, the academic literature is replete with qualitative, descriptive studies but little quantitative, empirical work. That was a key signal I had a potential gap to exploit in the literature. 

The more important gap was that it appeared no one had actually tried to measure the phenomenon of conversation in any systematic way.

My doctoral mission was set: Figure out how to define the thing we talk about and then carefully measure it in the context of plummeting circulations and audience shares, bankruptcies and closures and waning credibility. The big question: What are the actual features/variables of conversation?

The chase was on …

Author’s note: This is part of a continuing series on the nuts-and-bolts of my dissertation on journalism as a conversation. Where appropriate, I link back to related posts in the series.

Tumblr’s fun, yall, but time to resume posts about the dissertation proper. When I first applied to doc programs, I was torn between two life-long passions: journalism and film. I even thought about combining the two and dissertating about depictions of journalists on film. 

By the time I was leaving The Seattle Times to start my doctorate in 2006, the news business seemed to be in freefall: plummeting circulations, layoffs, buyouts and, soon, bankruptcies and closures. Virtually every person who said good-bye told me I’d better use my education to help figure out a solution to the problems.

Partially in response to essdogg’s questions: The citation for the previously mentioned study: Newhagen, J. & Nass, C. (1988). Differential criteria for evaluating credibility of newspapers and TV news. Journalism Quarterly, 65, 567-588. It’s considered seminal in the field of media credibility research. 

In the years leading up to it, scholars were seriously flummoxed by various studies, mostly surveys and experiments, that showed people rated TV news as more credible, both in local and national contexts — with or without Dan Rather. Newhagen and Nass cracked the puzzle by figuring out news consumers simply were using different criteria to evaluate crediblity in TV and the press. 

Here’s the thing about video on newspaper sites: The goal isn’t to replicate TV news but to show there are real live people behind the institution. Today’s Internet personalities do this instinctively. Take Merlin Mann: Besides 43 folders, the Hipster PDA and Inbox Zero we chuckle at his tweets, watch him as That Phone Guy and laugh with him on You Look Nice Today. In Tumblr culture, users will post pictures of themselves for Gratuitous Picture of Yourself Wednesday, or GPOYW. It’s a fun meme that gives blog authors a pretense-free way to post vanity pictures of themselves. Meanwhile, the Birdhouse launch video, featuring Adam Lisagor, Cameron Hunt, Scott Simpson and Merlin Mann, helped personalize the company and the application. 

True, news media organizations have a long way to go in integrating these queues into their Web sites to the degree of sophistication that their readers do on their personal site, but the TimesCast is a start. And it’s exactly the right time to take risks. BTW, only the first 30 seconds or so were inside the news huddle. The rest of the TimesCast consisted of interviews conducted in the newsroom. For what it’s worth, I also think this can aid transparency by showing a bit more about how the mainstream media sausage gets made.

What is journalism-as-a-conversation, at least in the experience of online audiences? I used my doctorate to figure that out. A search of fields as varied as computer network analysis and political communication revealed a half dozen or so key features, or variables, to conversation:

* Coorientation/homophily: perceived similarity (two types) to journalist.

* Social presence: perceived humanness of journalist.

* Interactivity: perceived smart use of Web tools by journalist to allow collaboration with citizens.

* Friendliness: perceived openness/accessibility of journalist to citizen ideas.

* Informality: perceived casual tone/manner of journalist with audience.

How does conversation work and does it help us with core journalistic values? It’s a pretty complex phenomenon but also a powerful one. And, yes, it can aid credibility and expertise. It confirms what researchers have been wondering about for years: that credibility is not just a rational but a social concept.

I’ll spend the months ahead talking in detail about how each of these features worked in my online news experiments. Briefly, two features, coorientation/homophily and interactivity, are crucial. They often predict whether audiences view news as credible and/or expert. They sometimes predict whether people simply like a story, though friendliness does a better job of that. So does interest in the story topic.

Perhaps the prickliest features of conversation are social presence and informality. In the case of the former, you pretty much need to show a video of a journalist to get people to sense your humanness. That kind of makes sense.

As for informality, you can easily go overboard, often to the detriment of perceived credibility and expertise, so watch out for coming across too casually with your audiences. Informal chit-chat and demeanor can be troublesome.

Why care about the public anyway? You may have noticed Romenesko abuzz a few months back over what mainstream newsrooms should do about online story commenting, especially despicable or asinine speech. Newsrooms are waking up to the reality that online audiences appear to want to participate in the news. One way citizens can do that is through feedback/discussion rolls on stories.

Yet journalists rightly struggle with both the propriety and legality of unfettered feedback, even from named sources.  This question generated lots of discussion a few months ago when I shared my dissertation data with my old newsroom family at The Seattle Times.

A couple thoughts. Citizens can participate in the news in myriad ways. The least interesting and influential is after-the-fact commenting once a story runs or airs. And, yet, this kind of reactive conversation seems to pre-occupy mainstream newsrooms. I’d suggest you turn commenting off, or at least closely guard it. Most newsrooms already use software to keep noxious people at bay or alert editors to offensive language.  Nothing in the Constitution says you ought to tolerate idiots.

My bigger concern is that all of this gets in the way of thinking about conversational journalism as a proactive processs.  And that notion has deep roots in American democratic theory and in media philosophy, from the foundings of the republic to the philosophy of Pragmatism to contemporary media theorists such as the late James Carey.

These scholars offer a vision of democracy, and journalism, as highly deliberative and collaborative. (For a wonderful history, see Altschull’s From Milton to McLuhan: The Ideas Behind American journalism.) The fiery American revolutionary Paine and the French philosophes Voltaire and Rousseau, among others, celebrated everyday people’s stories. They told us the voices of ordinary people in everyday discourse count –– they count in the construction of community knowledge and they count in democratic rule.  In many ways, they make us realize that conversation is the great equalizer in a democracy because we all do it.

Professional journalists, of course, have the unique responsibility as conversation facilitators because of their mass audience.  Probably no one understood this more than Pragmatist John Dewey.  In 1927, he offered a view of citizens in The Public and Its Problems as active collaborators with journalists on news, rather than passive subjects of “governing elites” who know what is best for them, as his intellectual nemesis Walter Lippmann argued at the time. Some think Lippmann ultimately won, citing the corporatization and professionalization of news.

Maybe. But I think the Internet is giving power back to the people. It’s the most important trend in journalism in the 21^st century.  And journalism as a conversation, as my own research found, gets at the heart of it.

Back when I was a reporter, I dreaded “lobby calls” from readers who wanted to share a tip. They’d show up on deadline, in their hip waders or jammies or jumpsuits or whatever. Some of them were batshit crazy and many –– many –– seemed lonely. But most were spot on about news in the community, telling me things I should have known.

I wanted to kill them at times, but they always left me wondering what in god’s name made them feel they were part of the process.  I ended up studying that question for my Ph.D., and you know what? The answers aren’t exactly simple or pretty. But they are fascinating and not just in a pipe-and-smoking-jacket kind of way. You already know why: The Internet is forcing mainstream journalists to re-think the people connections to their audiences because it’s all so easy now. E-mail. Flickr. Instant messaging. Discussion boards.  Twitter.  The conversation no longer takes place in letters to the editor, if it ever really did. And collaboration between professional journalists and citizens can happen in a blink.

We also already know the news business and the academy missed the train to Collaborationville and are racing to get there in what seems at times like a Yugo driven by a one-legged chimp. While academic and trade literature is filled with ad-hoc descriptive studies about the concept of journalism as a conversation, little work followed that treated it with empirical focus. My doctorate sought to end that through a series of online news experiments. The long-term goal: to build a social-scientific theory of conversation that yields cool research to help newsrooms.

This blog, however, is devoted to translating that research to a lay audience. Why? Because if I figured this stuff out, you can, and I have the (practically) single-digit GRE scores to prove it. And because the findings delighted and perplexed me enough to want to want to shout them out. Delighted because the research showed conversation is a real and powerful journalism phenomenon these days, not to be ignored.  Perplexed because it also turned out to be a heck of a lot more complicated than I ever dreamed ­ –– hello long-term research agenda!

I begin at the beginning, with a brief history of democratic theory on journalism as a conversation. It is in our nation’s blood and governance, and that’s a good thing.  Then it’s on to the heart of the research, particularly the features, or variables, that make up conversational journalism. (I may also digress on occasion with musings about my greyhound’s flatulence, monster-truck shows and other errata.)

I invite you to come along for the ride, with or without a chimp, because that’s how we roll in Tacoma.