There are many benefits to bridging the gap between academic research and journalism. At the same time, the size of that gap should not be understated. And even more crucially, to bridge the gap, we must understand how it came to be.
Differences in expectations
Journalists and researchers often agree on a similar vision: the survival of democracy requires strong, independent journalism. Yet the incentive structures for journalists and academics set up different expectations for each.
Newsrooms want research to focus on timely, practical issues, and are interested in solutions that can improve a news organization’s sustainability and resilience. And they want those solutions now, before conditions on the ground change yet again.
As Erica Beshears Perel, director of the Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media at the University of North Carolina, says, “It is an emergent situation in terms of the business models, in terms of trust, in terms of just what’s happening in newsrooms on the ground. It is changing really quickly. That makes research a lot harder to do.”
Benjamin Toff, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota, concurs. “There’s a sort of pace and urgency… people in the industry want very clear roadmaps.” A VP at a multimedia news organization described the problem this way, in a forthcoming scholarly paper for the journal Journalism: “You’re so busy putting out the news of the day. It’s like, when do you have the time to focus on how you actually do your job?”
On the flip side, academic journals frequently emphasize theoretical questions and building a body of empirical knowledge, regardless of news organizations’ immediate needs. They also stress methodological rigor, and the benefits of peer review — the process whereby scholars critique and vet each others’ work before publication in journals. As a result, study development from inception to publication often takes several years.
Talia Stroud, who leads the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas, explains that there can be immense value in the academic approach, even when its findings appear abstract or incremental: “Even in the basic sciences, there’s research that has no practical purpose at the time you’re doing it, and then you discover later that it really does.”
But journalists, understandably, often find the theoretical focus of much academic research immaterial when issues plaguing newsrooms need practical solutions. “Journalists… just want to know the bottom line,” Stroud says. “And that’s not the incentive structure [in academia]. And frankly, that’s not the way that journalism faculty are trained.”
In addition, the slow production time of academic research can make it less suitable to addressing emerging issues in journalism. By the time an academic idea has time to take root in a newsroom, the moment may have passed for it to be of use. “[Academics] certainly can’t move fast enough for the newsroom,” says Joy Mayer, director of Trusting News, a support organization that helps newsrooms build reader trust. “Research doesn’t move at the speed of news.”
On top of this, research is often so specific that it has limited applicability to other geographies or sectors, according to participants in the Journalism study. For example, when a study outlines techniques for building trust in Finland, can that help a newsroom in the United States? Academics may argue, “sometimes, yes,” but often such studies appear to journalists to be irrelevant.
What’s more, journalists can be put off by what seems like academics’ constant criticism of their profession. There’s a reason for this: Many academics view their role as critical, functioning as a watchdog that focuses on uncovering flaws in journalistic practice. Academics argue that such work is valuable, because often a problem must be diagnosed before solutions can be sought. However, this critical stance can lead to frustration among journalists who feel that academic research is rarely invested in finding real solutions — or that it fails to highlight the industry’s real successes and best practices.
Barriers to accessing research: Paywalls and time
Although academic research is plentiful, studies tend to be published in subscription-based journals, which place articles behind paywalls. Journalists don’t usually have institutional access, and therefore face difficulty in accessing research findings. Subscriptions to these journals are expensive. Subscriptions to some top periodicals cost more than $1,000 annually. Organizations such as Nieman Lab, Poynter and Journalists’ Resource help bridge the gap by summarizing studies and interviewing authors, but they can only cover a small portion of the studies out there.
The volume of research can itself be problematic, presenting another serious barrier for practitioners, according to journalists interviewed for the Journalism paper. Newsrooms work at a breakneck pace, especially as belts tighten. Most journalism organizations don’t have time to think about big picture ideas or strategic improvements when they are trying to get the paper out that day or get a liveshot ready for the nightly news. This lack of time affects outlets’ ability to keep up with what’s being published, to read the articles and to figure out how to apply findings to their own practices.
As one journalist told the Journalism researchers, “When you’re in the middle of the weeds, it’s extremely hard to get up on the balcony… We’re supposed to be the leaders of this newsroom, figuring out the path forward… [but] we can’t even identify the path.”
Participants in the Journalism study said this problem is compounded because researchers and journals often don’t make it clear who their target audience is. Several said studies may try to appeal to reporters, when only editors or executives have the power to make the recommended changes. A reporter said, “If no one can show my bosses… if there was evidence that coverage of women’s sports was beneficial for XYZ reasons, then we probably would cover more of it. In the absence of that, we’re just going to keep doing what we’ve been doing.”
But other participants noted that managers don’t have the time to read or implement research, either. An editor at a digital news outlet said, “It is harder to fit things like this into my day, now that I have like 18 competing demands.”
Mayer points out that coming from a journalism support organization, her whole approach is to present newsrooms with actionable advice. “And still it’s feeling harder and harder to get newsrooms’ attention for the 15 minutes it would take to read a post about [for example] five things you need to do differently with your election coverage this season.”
The time spent on this kind of strategic work takes money away from newsroom salaries, Toff points out. “And I think researchers themselves are so inundated with, there’s just too much to read.” Mayer mentions that the information onslaught affects her, too. “I’m like, dude, I don’t always read the research.”
TL;DR: Academic research formats
That lack of time clashes directly with the way journalism research is written. As with much social science research, journalism papers can be long, often around 8,000 or 9,000 words. The typical format of a research article doesn’t help non-academics to easily identify the most important takeaways. By journalists’ standards, these articles “bury the lede.” While journal articles typically feature abstracts, even these don’t often focus on practical implications. What’s more, academic jargon and theoretical terms in these publications can hinder a journalist’s understanding of research.
Perel says that parallel to this, there is a “discoverability” issue. “There are so many resources that have been published over the last, who knows how long, about how to grow your audience, how to best practices for starting a newsletter, all of this type of thing. And they get published and then they just sit on a website somewhere and no one ever goes back to them.”
Envisioning a way forward, she says, will require the academic world to re-think its publishing approach, much like many newsrooms are doing today. “(Some) journalists are (still) producing news according to formats and ideas of journalism that existed 20, 25 years ago, and may or may not be super matched up to what people want to read. Similarly, researchers may be producing research in forms and in ways that are not super interesting or relevant to the practitioners.
“If you want a specific audience to find it useful, you need to build it with that in mind,” Perel says.
Challenges in collaboration
Many in this arena say researchers can best support journalists when the two sectors act collaboratively — for example, when academics turn to newsrooms to see what questions they need answered. At the same time, the busy nature of newsrooms and journalists further hinders collaboration with academics. Newsrooms can sometimes perceive academics as extractive rather than collaborative, and as disconnected from the practical realities of the industry.
This perception is exacerbated by some academics’ lack of recent newsroom experience, which leads to a disconnect in understanding the practical barriers journalists face. “Researchers do not seem to know much about journalism,” one journalist told scholars conducting a survey for Nieman Lab.
Mayer concurs: “[The partnership] tanks pretty quickly if they ask for things that aren’t practical… or this might apply to other kinds of newsrooms, it would never apply to my kind of newsroom.
“Journalists just don’t have any tolerance for that at all.”
Cultural differences
Finally, some of journalists’ skepticism about academia might be ascribed to newsroom culture. There’s a long history of journalists doing things a certain way because “this is how it’s always been done.” Mayer says, “I feel like journalists really struggle to make time for emerging best practices or evolution on things that feel softer or things that compromise their autonomy. They think they’ve got it covered, their coverage is fine.” An editor in the Journalism study explained that many newsrooms are “automatically dismissive” of academics, due to journalists feeling that they “know everything they need to know.”
David Bornstein, co-founder and CEO of the Solutions Journalism Network, describes how he’s seen this resistance in action. Based on a robust body of research, he argues that engagement around an issue doesn’t get bolstered by simply beating the drum about the issue’s importance. “The climate crisis, people are paralyzed, people don’t know what to do about it,” Bornstein says, by way of example. Yet, he recalls that challenged by this research, many journalists stiffen their resistance and cling to the old ways of doing things. “Journalists will say, ‘We have to keep telling them how serious it is, otherwise they’ll get complacent…’ Disengagement is something that journalists will say, well, they should just toughen up and pay attention.”
Changes afoot?
At the same time, our interviewees noted that journalism culture seems to be changing. With the status quo no longer working, journalists are becoming more open to new approaches. And academic research — done right — offers an evidence-based way to think differently. “I just got off a call with a Zoom room full of journalists and they said, what impact do newsrooms see when they do these things? They’re hungry,” Mayer shared. “They need to be able to take back to their boss what exactly, what precise benefit will we see if we take time to engage with the strategies you’re telling us to use?”
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Overall, the reasons for the research-practice gap in journalism can be summarized as:
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