Key Questions
- What roles is news playing in social life, and how are those roles changing?
- What roles could news play in social life?
- What do journalists' and publics' news routines and day-to-day talk about news look like, and how are these practices changing?
Social, legal, and technological changes constantly create new possibilities for producing and using news. How are journalists and different publics talking about and using these possibilities? We partner with news organizations to jointly study their ever-changing relationships with their readers, viewers, and listeners — and how new journalists absorb and shape professional norms. This work also includes research with publics to understand their routines, their talk about news, and the role news plays more generally in their lives. Journalists and laypeople have always defined the boundaries of news differently, but we share this: we can only make meaning of news in context — it's neither produced nor used in a vacuum.
Future Directions
- How does current journalism practice come to embrace – or reject – new and powerful technologies, like generative algorithms? What concerns, predictions, and hopes do journalists express?
- What is the relationship between the incorporation of new technologies in journalists' workflow and public trust? What types of disclosure are most effective, and how can these shape policy?
- What makes emerging generations of adults feel informed? How can media organizations learn from them and meet their needs?