Facing digital turmoil, journalism goes back to school
How collaborations between universities and newsrooms could fill the reporting void
Collaboration (the definition): the action of working with others to produce something.
Collaboration (the complicated reality): working with people who may be in other fields, with different interests, speaking different jargons, compiling data in different ways, producing something for different audiences.
Collaboration (the payoff ): a mingling of expertise, methods and ideas that can lead to more resources, more innovation, more diverse insights, more successes.
A powerful notion — and a tough thing to pull off. There are great divides to cross when different kinds of partners try to work together.
News organizations and universities have long had partnerships of sorts. Journalists rely on academics for news from their fields, expert insights and social analysis; academics need journalists to bring their research to a broader audience. But the work often takes place amid a mutual distrust.
Consider how different their worlds are: Peer-reviewed journals (dotted i’s, crossed t’s, footnotes) are the antithesis of the daily deadline newsroom (frantic phone calls, “could not be reached for comment,” next-day follow-ups). Each side has a stereotype of the other — the ivory tower snob versus the grubby headline hunter, the snail-paced researcher versus the slapdash reporter, the dataobsessed scholar versus the adjectiveobsessed storyteller.
But while methods differ, researchers and journalists can be seen as two sides of the same coin — each working to establish and publish truths and facts. When they work together, the resulting journalism benefits from academic rigour, and the academic work benefits from journalism’s timeliness and popular focus.
In recent years, some researchers and universities have been stepping further into the journalism world, both to work more deeply with news organizations and to create forms of journalism themselves — to join the public conversation. And that’s exciting at a time when the digital revolution is creating a news ecosystem that anyone can contribute to, for better and for worse.
Two aspects of this are particularly interesting under this year’s Atkinson Fellowship for Public Policy, which is examining alternate sources of civic or community information to help fill a growing gap as the news industry in Canada shrinks.
First, as the amount of professional journalism decreases (an estimated one-third of Canada’s journalists have lost their jobs since 2010), we need other reliable and community-minded institutions to help keep us informed.
Second, academics’ contributions — what they focus on and the methods they use — could broaden the way we think about civic or community information. One of the most valued characteristics of professional journalism is its ability to hold governments and other powerful interests accountable. This is key in upholding democracy, and it’s a difficult role for anyone else to play. But other kinds of information also knit communities together and spur our curiosity.
Will this replace the journalism we’re losing? No. Certainly not in quantity, and generally not in the kind of stories that are created. But with training, support and a shift in priorities, this could add something different to the evolving information ecosystem — something smarter and more diverse.
“Could add” is a deliberate wording choice. While the different academic tradition is a strength, it’s also something that has kept scholars from contributing more in the past.
Ann Rauhala, associate chair of Ryerson University’s school of journalism and a former journalist, has lived on both sides of the fence.
She has also taught workshops to anyone at Ryerson interested in learning how to work with the news media, both as interview subjects and as opinion columnists.
“Academics generally are people who have spent their lives pursuing some idea that animates them, and they want the world to appreciate it,” Rauhala says.
“But the way scholars think, in my opinion, is really quite different from how journalists think.”
Journalists, she says, “are looking for something no one else has ever said or done.” They want the newsiest of the news.
But academics start with what others have done before them and add to it. “Scholars build their work, they build their hypotheses, based on other people’s hypotheses. So right from the get-go, the set of assumptions is quite different.”
The university world is also very different in what it values and rewards, Rauhala notes.
“Except for people who have gone to grad school, many, many of us don’t really understand what scholarly life is like or what the expectations are.” Traditionally, when considering hires or promotions, universities have valued a research article read by a couple of hundred people in an academic journal over a piece appearing in a large-circulation newspaper that might be read by tens of thousands.
“The difficulty is that many of the universities, I get that impression, are still stuck with this idea that your value as a scholar and a prof is primarily on the number of journal articles you have published and the number of times other people have cited your work,” Rauhala says. “As though that is the only measure of your efficacy as a public intellectual.
“It would be really nice if the universities actually genuinely rewarded people and recognized people for playing a public role, a true public role.” Changing priorities At the University of Ottawa, Michael Kempa is trying to move in that direction. A criminologist, Kempa found he was spending more and more time responding to reporters’ questions as policing and security issues dominated the news.
He was happy to do it — but as a professor he’s expected to spend 40 per cent of his time teaching, 40 per cent on research and 20 per cent on administration. The interview requests were starting to take up as much as a day a week. Where did the media work fit in and how valuable was it to the university?
Wanting to figure out how to be more effective and also more proactive with the news industry, Kempa spent eight months in 2012 in an innovative journalism program, the Munk fellowship at the University of Toronto. In addition to learning how to produce material himself (he later wrote an investigative feature for the Walrus magazine about civilian oversight of the RCMP that was a finalist for a 2015 Canadian Magazine Award) he returned to U of Ottawa with a strong sense that journalism can be combined with academic research work.
He began offering columns and ideas to news outlets “rather than just responding to journalists” and sometimes used the journalism as a way to advance his research thinking.
Now he wants to teach some of the same skills to other academics at the university. He ran an experimental lab this year with master’s students in criminology to test the idea, and hopes to expand it to faculty. He believes every academic researcher’s data has the seeds of one news feature; and that with support and feedback in a class, the researcher can produce it for popular consumption.
The idea is for the academics to think about their field in a more journalistic way. What part of it is often in the news? What can they add to that public debate? Then they’re taught how to write an opinion column and a short feature.
What motivates them to learn this? What Kempa has found, like Rauhala, is a “desire to have people exposed to the stuff that they find so interesting in their areas of research.”
He cites his own field: “Criminological social science is all about power and human benefit versus suffering — inherently interesting themes. But unfortunately the way we write a lot of it up for an academic audience is of no interest to anybody.”
Some academics might stick with the training when the course is over and produce more media pieces; others might just want to do the one that they’ve had in mind for years, he says. “I think the younger generation of academics is much more interested in consistently engaging the media over time but they don’t have the skills or really any idea of where to get started.”
But as researchers learn more about the media, Kempa hopes they will start thinking about it right from the start of their research projects — setting that focus for themselves, or perhaps collaborating with a journalist at the beginning, designing the research with both academic and mainstream articles in mind and leaning on each other’s expertise.
“Very often the social sciences stop at exactly the moment that investigative journalism begins,” he says. “And what I mean by that is, the academics look at the structure and the ideas that enable all kinds of bad things to happen, and then the investigative journalists pick up and say, ‘Who are the people who pulled the strings who did the bad things?’
“Together we kind of cover the whole picture.” wallace.mtl@gmail.com