Journalism as a Conversation

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.