Introduction to the Special Issue: Meeting the Digital Demand through a Multi-Perspective Methodological Approach

ABSTRACT

This introduction to the special issue makes the argument that, in order to understand journalistic production and consumption in an increasingly complex digital world, journalism studies must employ research designs that combine methods from different academic perspectives and disciplines. In particular, we propose increased collaboration with scholars working in information technology, the arts, psychology, and data science.

KEYWORDS:

• journalism innovation
• methods
• qualitative
• quantitative
• interdisciplinary
• multi-method

Be it due to new technologies, changing business models, or a profession in turmoil—the disruption of journalism continues to provide new research questions for our discipline (e.g., Blumler 2010; Eldridge et al. 2019; Reese 2016). However, future research on these questions also demands a critical re-evaluation of the available methodological approaches many of us use.

This special issue features a very diverse group of scholars showing their efforts in developing, testing, and debating future methodologies for our field, both by extending existing methods, and by bringing in novel methodological approaches from other areas. In our introduction to the special issue, we as guest editors want to contextualise this exciting and innovative work. While the articles speak to many different research areas within journalism studies, they have in common their multiperspectivity. Be it through computational methods, arts-based inquiry, or psychological experimentation—the scholars in this special issue show us that, to answer new questions within journalism studies, we must integrate traditional views on methodology with existing solutions from other academic disciplines.

Introductory Thoughts

Journalism research offers a constantly growing body of knowledge of how journalists work, produce, and are perceived in modern information ecologies. The journals that serve the field, such as Journalism Studies, Digital Journalism, and Journalism Practice, are a platform for lively debate, where international, interdisciplinary, and innovative research is presented. The field engages in debates within professional organisations, such as the Journalism Studies Division at the International Communication Division, and comes together in many local, regional and international conferences per year. In short, the field of journalism studies is thriving. However, while the academic platforms we name here are used for ongoing lively debates regarding the normative and theoretical frameworks necessary to understand contemporary journalism (Van Dalen 2019), there is only a very limited discussion on methodological thinking within our field.

As Carlson and colleagues note, this is because journalism is “question-driven, rather than methods-first in its orientation to research” (2018, 17). Yet, journalism research observes an industry that can today only be described as a moving target, and any approximation at understanding journalistic innovation must go hand in hand with innovation in research strategies also. So, while we are indeed not a method-driven field, we are a field that has continually adopted journalistic innovation for its own research purposes. Wahl-Jorgensen and Hanitzsch (2009; see also Carlson et al. 2018) have identified distinct periods of journalism research and methodology—all of which correspond to significant shifts in how journalism is practiced. First, with the emergence of the professional press and the rise of investigative journalism during the eighteenth and nineteenth century, there was a focus on researching the normative role of journalists, based on the work of German scholars such as Weber and Marx. However, with the rise and fall of the free press in emerging democracies and fascist regimes during the first half of the twentieth century, an evidence-driven turn took place, where the study of the impact of journalism on audiences becomes important. Next, with the professionalisation of a strong press and TV journalism during the 1970s and 1980s, a systematic empirical study of journalism practices and routines and its ideologies emerged, followed by a turn towards comparative research as the globalisation of media corporations and channels during the 1990s took hold. And now we face a fifth turn, defined by the social, political, and economic consequences of digital technology (Carlson et al. 2018). This new area of journalism research is fuelled by new questions regarding the traditional routines and organisational structures of journalism, and it enlarges other questions, such as the relationship between journalism and its public(s) and society as a whole (Karlsson and Sjøvaag 2016).

While every period has its dynamics, this fifth period can also be differentiated by the speed at which everything changes. The fast development of new devices to use media, the multiplication of online media as sources, and the increasingly powerful role of digital social media platforms and other intermediaries in changing news consumption patterns (Broersma and Eldridge 2019; Lecheler and Kruikemeier 2016)—all this has demanded scholars to reconsider current scholarly methods. Also, a shift from news organisation to news networks has posed issues of sampling. Moreover, developments in the (digital) media landscape, together with societal challenges, such as the issue of trust in the media and the rise of populism, encourage journalism scholars to develop and improve more contemporary approaches to examine the consumption and implications of news (Van Aelst et al. 2017).

These challenges are now faced by a discipline that is no longer “emerging”, but that is a firm part of media and communication research. Journalism studies has grown up, it is diverse, international, and professionalised. It is also increasingly attractive for scholars from other fields, with those traditionally working in media effects, political communication, and sociology participating in scholarly debates on the future of journalism (Lecheler 2020). So, as we enter a new period of journalistic production and consumption, we witness a discipline characterised by high level of professionalisation and interconnection, all this means that there must come a focus on research methods—those scholars who enter the field bring their tradition with them, and those in the journalism field adapt novel and traditional approaches to answer the questions of today. What is more, the need for methodological debate is fuelled by larger changes connected to research integrity and open science movements within the social sciences and humanities (Dienlin et al. 2020).

This Special Issue

As we mentioned above, this special issue showcases a wide array of articles discussing methods. Interestingly, most studies in this issue adapted methods from other disciplines and “moved” them to the field of journalism studies. The articles reflect on both established methods and how they can be utilised in the digital news environment. Specifically, two articles in this issue focus on the news consumer. These articles discuss how people’s actual everyday news consumption can be scrutinised, yet they do so from different positions. Groot Kormelink critically reflects upon three interview-based methods that focus on how news consumers experience news consumption (such as the think aloud protocol, watching and discussing news, and the two-sided video-ethnography). The most important take-away point is that, with all qualitative interview methods that are discussed in the paper, the assistance of an outsider perspective is an important factor that helps news consumers to articulate their experience of news use, especially in a more digital and more hybrid news environment. Vermeer and Trilling tackle the same question but they suggest using a computational method that has successfully been used in other domains, such as economics/finance and gaming. By deploying Markov chains, they argue that using these chains–which aim to understand the sequence of news consumption–helps uncover how people navigate through a digital media landscape.

Interestingly, Haim moves then beyond studies that analyse, for instance, browsing data, and asserts that agent-based testing might overcome the problems that arise from the use of browsing data (e.g., bias in sample). For Haim, agent-based testing is “a systematic and experimental approach that emulates online behaviour to test algorithmically curated media environments under various conditions” (see abstract). Finally, in line with the emerging computational approach to study the complex and hybrid journalistic media environments, de Grove, Boghe, and de Marez specify and critically reflect on the conditions under which Supervised Machine Learning can be a useful tool for journalism scholars.

Three other papers in this special issue focus on journalism practices. These studies introduce new complementary methodologies to already existing approaches, thereby giving journalism scholars the opportunity to ask questions across different dimensions (e.g., to combine micro and macro level questions) in a complex media environment. Witschge, Hölsgens, and de Wildt propose arts-based research methods in journalism studies. This method employs a visual and narrative artistic form as a research tool. In their article, they propose three arts-based methods to analyse the increasing blurring profession of journalism. Using artistic forms in collaborative spaces, arts-based methods help to better understand experiences of journalists and artists, and they provide more room to analyse the complexity of creative professions such as journalism. Glogger and Otto propose an experimental approach for studying journalistic practices. They argue that experimental studies allow for a closer look at the individual-level and shared decision-making processes of journalists. This means that journalistic production may be observed across multiple factors (e.g., considering the impact of journalistic culture vs. values of a specific journalist). Consequently, they introduce the factorial survey experiment to the field of journalism studies, which allows to study many multi-level factors affecting journalism decision-making and attitudes in a comparative way. Barnoy and Reich complement these articles in a unique way, namely by explaining how news making reconstructions can help to address news processes in a complex news environment. News making reconstructions uncover how news becomes “news”, again allowing us to consider many factors that can potentially influence a journalists’ decisions, such as the impact of technology and journalists’ working conditions.

What the previous three articles have in common is their focus on determining a variety of factors that affect journalism practices using one multi-perspectival methodological strategy. Robinson and Anderson, finally, argue for another crucial and novel method to capture these levels. They uncover and aim to understand the entirety of complex media ecosystems by deploying network ethnography. Specifically, they combine ethnography and network analysis together, which provides future studies with the opportunity to fully grasp the news media ecology on all its levels, such as the impact of individual actions and social system factors.

A Call for a Multi-Perspective Approach

Journalism research should not only dive into new concepts, but must also look further into how to research a disrupted field. The excellent work showcased in this special issue motivates us to end this introduction with a call for more collaborative work among journalism scholars of different (sub-)disciplines. Interestingly, this follows developments within the profession of journalism also. Journalists and news organisations are realising that the holy grail might not lie in teaching all journalists new (technical) skills, or in inventing a new type of media platform or even in re-inventing the profession all the time, but that collaboration with other professional fields is more economic and useful. This can mean working with developers and designers to produce innovative journalistic productions, collaborating with tech companies to build new platforms, or listening to the public for a better understanding of society. In times of uncertainty and disinformation, it is even more important that the core of journalism practice stays intact. Observations of the field show that, to be able to keep to the core function of journalism, interdisciplinary collaboration can help journalism beyond this disruptive period, or at least keep up in a field that is in permanent change (Newton 2013).

So, working together does not dilute a professions’ importance, it allows for core strengths to be perfected. Therefore, we propose that future research in our field should focus on multi-method studies that are able to bring together different perspectives on complex digital media landscapes. Scholars should have the courage to experiment with new methods, and to critically look into how they can incorporate novel methods that help us to better understand the field of journalism as it is increasingly fuelled with uncertainty. This special issue provides papers that already manage to open up a methodological debate within journalism studies. These papers show that our field can benefit from scholars with different methodological expertise collaborating to get better answers to increasingly complex questions. We want to highlight a need for collaboration in the following areas:

• Firstly, we encourage collaboration between journalism scholars and two seemingly very different academic fields, namely the arts and information technology. The last few years have shown an increase in initiatives and programmes, where those working in the arts and technology have collaborated, most visibly in the use of technology or data by artists. While ostensibly different, the arts and information technology are similar in that they both research undiscovered issues that are particularly important in the journalism sector. For example, while academics focusing on technology may study how new technological developments change the journalism sector using “big data”, but working in interdisciplinary teams using arts-based methods may allow them to also generate new reflections on theoretical development and ethical issues at stake.

• Secondly, we suggest more intensive collaboration between journalism scholars and several subdisciplines of psychology. In times of uncertainty, and when news consumption and journalistic production seem to be increasingly determined by individual-level differences in a fragmented public, knowledge on these differences is crucial for our discipline. For instance, a more audience-centred approach towards studying journalism necessitates increased knowledge on the psychological traits and states that determine individual-level attitudes and behaviour. Also, journalism research focused on emotions depends on research traditions developed in emotion psychology and other subfields. While psychological effects studies are more common in communication science, we urge journalism studies scholars to collaborate more with the field of psychology to get a better individual-level understanding of media consumers and their habits.

• Thirdly, and this is something that is now frequently discussed in our field, we want to further encourage journalism scholars and data scientists to work together. Data is all around us and will become more pervasive as new technologies emerge. The collaboration between data scientists and journalism scholars analysing “big data” can help us understand consumption patterns, the effects of media content, and will help us analyse larger sets of online media content. However, data also becomes a concept in itself that is interesting even for those who do not want to use the empirical methods connected to “big data”. Journalism scholars oriented more towards the humanities may want to collaborate with data scientists on questions such as objectivity, truth, and bias through data.

So, in sum, the field of journalism is challenged to understand new sociological, cultural, economic, technological and ethical issues, which are increasingly complex to research. A multi-perspective approach does not only help us journalism scholars to tackle complex research questions, but it also broadens our view of academic research.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID

Sophie Lecheler http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7320-1012