Good Questions Q&As
Editor’s Note: We discontinued our Good Questions Q&A series in early 2020. However, you can peruse API’s body of written work, including interviews with innovators in local news, here.
Our Good Questions Q&A series takes you inside the heads of leaders and thinkers who can illuminate the path forward for news organizations.
Many of the interview subjects are people in the news business doing interesting things. Others bring you powerful ideas from outside the news industry, from people like Harvard Business School professor and disruption theory expert Clayton Christensen, Microsoft researcher and youth culture expert Danah Boyd, or technology futurist Amy Webb.
How can photojournalists build trust through their work? 7 good questions with T.J. Thomson
In the social media age, we are inundated with visual information — yet we know very little about how and why these images are made, especially in journalistic contexts. This can be a huge barrier to establishing trust between visual journalists, their subjects, and the people who consume their work. Dr. T.J. Thomson is a […]
Can civility save journalism? 5 good questions with researcher Ashley Muddiman
Contentious stories and clickbait headlines are more than just annoying. They’re a barrier to a civil discussion of facts, they tend to increase partisanship, and they can impact the level of trust in media and other institutions. But are “civil” stories that focus on solutions interesting enough to attract readers? For her new research, University […]
Helping readers tell the difference between news and opinion: 7 good questions with Duke Reporters’ Lab’s Rebecca Iannucci
One possible explanation for declining trust in news organizations is blurry lines between news and opinion. If someone doesn’t like a commentator’s stance on particular issues, that could color how they look at everything else that news organization does. Plus, research by API shows that people are finding it difficult to tell the difference between […]
How everyday things like cooking can be a powerful storytelling tool: 6 Good Questions with NPR Hot Pot producers Rhitu Chatterjee and Ben de la Cruz
Spend some time on social media, and you’re sure to see food videos — maybe featuring a restaurant’s unique dish or showing the process of decorating a dessert. NPR is keying into audiences’ appetites for this trend in their recent project NPR Hot Pot. NPR blogs The Salt and Goats and Soda teamed up to […]
Covering news issues with comics: 7 good questions with Jake Halpern
Experimenting with visual storytelling formats can allow a newsroom to rise above the clutter by taking a fresh angle to news topics. Last January, The New York Times did that by launching Welcome to the New World, a fully reported graphic narrative. It is the first series of its kind, according to editor Bruce Headlam. […]
How young adults define ‘news’: 7 good questions with Data & Society’s Mary Madden
Teenagers and young adults are challenging long-held assumptions about news consumption patterns. A new report from Data & Society explores how young adults use mobile devices, messaging apps and social media to consume breaking news. It finds that young adults express low levels of trust in news media and use a variety of methods to […]
Going for teens’ inboxes: 6 good questions with the Huffington Post’s director of growth and analytics Kiki Von Glinow
The Huffington Post is targeting its youngest audience yet, girls from Generation Z. And HuffPost is going for a place you might not expect — their email inboxes — with a newsletter called The Tea. It’s an exclusive, weekly Q&A with a different celebrity, particularly other teen girls. From in-house research, editors at HuffPost, like […]
Journalism driven by stakeholders: 9 good questions with Stakeholder Media Project’s Mark Lee Hunter
More media organizations are being created and controlled by the people who are invested in the issues their organizations are covering, according to Mark Lee Hunter. This form of journalism, called “stakeholder-driven media,” is changing our media landscape and offers lessons for traditional news organizations in building community. Hunter defines stakeholder-driven media as “media [that] […]
Measuring investigative journalism’s impact on society: 8 good questions with James T. Hamilton
“The results of [investigative] reporting do not come cheaply, but they are a bargain to society,” James T. Hamilton writes in his new book Democracy’s Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism, out this month from Harvard University Press. Through his research, Hamilton, the Hearst Professor of Journalism at Stanford University, finds that while investigative journalism […]
Bringing diversity to the news industry: 5 good questions with Outlier Media’s Sarah Alvarez
When it comes to diversity in news organizations, Sarah Alvarez is taking action. The Stanford JSK Journalism Fellow runs her own news organization, Outlier Media, which is dedicated to providing data and valuable information to low-income communities. Alvarez previously worked as a senior producer for Michigan Radio, and she also holds a J.D. from Columbia […]