Negotiating Genre and New Media for STEM News

ABSTRACT

This article—co-authored by a transdisciplinary team of social scientists and journalists in the United States—traces changes to the news landscape in recent decades, and asks: How are legacy media producers grappling with these new realities? As part of a four-year collaboration on young adult news consumption, we take a participatory action research approach to this question, tacking back and forth between newsroom concepts and anthropological ones in pursuit of a synthesis that strengthens both. Starting from anthropological frameworks of participation, the authors argue that broadcast videos typically position their audiences as overhearers rather than interlocutors, while the reverse is true for social media, and that these tendencies shape audience expectations. We find that many audiences have what we call poetic motivations: they are drawn to stories that exemplify their genre. For example, the participatory nature of social media genres translates well to a more candid style that can incorporate live questions and other direct participation. The study reported here focuses on STEM news, but many of the findings apply to news production in general. Our reflective methods can also be applied more widely in the field of journalism to synthesize perspectives from theory and practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Journalism
• new media
• participation
• engagement
• participatory action research
• science communication

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Roni Dengler, Alicia Hayes, Susan Hannah, Jenny Hijazi, Nicole LaMarca, Jamie Leventhal, Patty Morales, Kathryn Nock, Amy Parson, Layla Quran, and Vicky Stein for their support with this work; and our other NewsHour and NewKnowledge colleagues for their frequent advice and support on this work. We also thank Kate Flinner, Lavanya H. Murali, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

We have uploaded prompts for journals, team discussions, exit interviews, and roundtables as supplementary materials here. However, individual journals and transcripts of interviews and meetings are not available due to IRB restrictions on the sharing of raw data. Specifically, the power dynamics inherent in the composition of our team make this data sensitive: authors of this paper with direct supervisory authority saw only synthesized data from more junior members of their team, many of whom are also named as authors.

Notes

1 We focus on early career adults (a life stage: those ages 18–35 and not in school) rather than Millennials (a generation: those born between 1981 and 1996 (Dimock 2018). However, these two groups had significant overlap during our study.

2 For a similar turn in the field of communication, see Lievrouw (2009).

3 While a story may ultimately be reported by a single author, these decisions are made through interaction as well: it takes a team to determine what is newsworthy, trustworthy, and authoritative.

4 However, marginalized communities on social media remain highly skeptical of mainstream news outlets and are more likely to retweet or share content from other sources (Freelon et al. 2018).

5 Within the realm of science communication specifically, user-generated content outperforms content developed by professional media on YouTube (Welbourne and Grant 2016).

6 In fact, print and online articles rarely converge perfectly. An early study of print and web editions of national papers found that online articles corresponded less and less to the original print over the course of the day (Mensing and Greer 2006; cited in Karlsson 2011). Content need not even start out identical; both producers and consumers hold strong ideologies about the affordances of various media and the types of content that are most suited to each one (e.g., Nielsen 1997, 2008; Shea 2015). Yet these ideologies are contested: between 2015 and 2018, newspapers of record have debated how transparent to be in online updates, led by the Washington Post, Vox, and Buzzfeed posting links to prior versions of their articles (Spayd 2016).

Additional information

Funding

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under (grant number 1516347). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.