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Journalistic writing is, as you might expect, the style of writing used by journalists. It is therefore a term for the broad style of writing used by news media outlets to put together stories.

Every news media outlet has its own ‘house’ style, which is usually set out in guidelines. This describes grammar and style points to be used in that publication or website. However, there are some common factors and characteristics to all journalistic writing.

This page describes the five different types of journalistic writing. It also provides some tips for writing in journalistic style to help you develop your skills in this area.

The Purpose of Journalistic Writing

Journalistic writing has a very clear purpose: to attract readers to a website, broadcaster or print media. This allows the owners to make money, usually by selling advertising space.

Newspapers traditionally did not make most of their money by selling newspapers. Instead, their main income was actually from advertising. If you look back at an early copy of the London Times , for example (from the early 1900s), the whole front page was actually advertisements, not news.

The news and stories are only a ‘hook’ to bring in readers and keep advertisers happy.

Journalists therefore want to attract readers to their stories—and then keep them.

They are therefore very good at identifying good stories, but also telling the story in a way that hooks and keeps readers interested.

Types of Journalistic Writing

There are five main types of journalistic writing:

Investigative journalism aims to discover the truth about a topic, person, group or event . It may require detailed and in-depth exploration through interviews, research and analysis. The purpose of investigative journalism is to answer questions.

News journalism reports facts, as they emerge . It aims to provide people with objective information about current events, in straightforward terms.

Feature writing provides a deeper look at events, people or topics , and offer a new perspective. Like investigative journalism, it may seek to uncover new information, but is less about answering questions, and more about simply providing more information.

Columns are the personal opinions of the writer . They are designed to entertain and persuade readers, and sometimes to be controversial and generate discussion.

Reviews describe a subject in a factual way, and then provide a personal opinion on it . They are often about books or television programmes when published in news media.

The importance of objectivity

It should be clear from the list of types of journalistic writing that journalists are not forbidden from expressing their opinions.

However, it is important that any journalist is absolutely clear when they are expressing their opinion, and when they are reporting on facts.

Readers are generally seeking objective writing and reporting when they are reading news or investigative journalism, or features. The place for opinions is columns or reviews.

The Journalistic Writing Process

Journalists tend to follow a clear process in writing any article. This allows them to put together a compelling story, with all the necessary elements.

This process is:

1. Gather all necessary information

The first step is to gather all the information that you need to write the story.

You want to know all the facts, from as many angles as possible. Journalists often spend time ‘on site’ as part of this process, interviewing people to find out what has happened, and how events have affected them.

Ideally, you want to use primary sources: people who were actually there, and witnessed the events. Secondary sources (those who were told by others what happened) are very much second-best in journalism.

2. Verify all your sources

It is crucial to establish the value of your information—that is, whether it is true or not.

A question of individual ‘truth’

It has become common in internet writing to talk about ‘your truth’, or ‘his truth’.

There is a place for this in journalism. It recognises that the same events may be experienced and interpreted in different ways by different people.

However, journalists also need to recognise that there are always some objective facts associated with any story. They must take time to separate these objective facts from opinions or perceptions and interpretations of events.

3. Establish your angle

You then need to establish your story ‘angle’ or focus: the aspect that makes it newsworthy.

This will vary with different types of journalism, and for different news outlets. It may also need some thought to establish why people should care about your story.

4. Write a strong opening paragraph

Your opening paragraph tells readers why they should bother to read on.

It needs to summarise the five Ws of the story: who, what, why, when, and where.

5. Consider the headline

Journalists are not necessarily expected to come up with their own headlines. However, it helps to consider how a piece might be headlined.

Being able to summarise the piece in a few words is a very good way to ensure that you are clear about your story and angle.

6. Use the ‘inverted pyramid’ structure

Journalists use a very clear structure for their stories. They start with the most important information (the opening paragraph, above), then expand on that with more detail. Finally, the last section of the article provides more information for anyone who is interested.

This means that you can therefore glean the main elements of any news story from the first paragraph—and decide if you want to read on.

Why the Inverted Pyramid?

The inverted pyramid structure actually stems from print journalism.

If typesetters could not fit the whole story into the space available, they would simply cut off the last few sentences until the article fitted.

Journalists therefore started to write in a way that ensured that the important information would not be removed during this process!

7. Edit your work carefully

The final step in the journalistic writing process is to edit your work yourself before submitting it.

Newsrooms and media outlets generally employ professional editors to check all copy before submitting it. However, journalists also have a responsibility to check their work over before submission to make sure it makes sense.

Read your work over to check that you have written in plain English , and that your meaning is as clear as possible. This will save the sub-editors and editors from having to waste time contacting you for clarifications.

Journalistic Writing Style

As well as a very clear process, journalists also share a common style.

This is NOT the same as the style guidelines used for certain publications (see box), but describes common features of all journalistic writing.

The features of journalistic writing include:

Short sentences . Short sentences are much easier to read and understand than longer ones. Journalists therefore tend to keep their sentences to a line of print or less.

Active voice . The active voice (‘he did x’, rather than ‘x was done by him’) is action-focused, and shorter. It therefore keeps readers’ interest, and makes stories more direct and personal.

Quotes. Most news stories and journalistic writing will include quotes from individuals. This makes the story much more people-focused—which is more likely to keep readers interested. This is why many press releases try to provide quotes (and there is more about this in our page How to Write a Press Release ).

Style guidelines

Most news media have style guidelines. They may share these with other outlets (for example, by using the Associated Press guidelines), or they may have their own (such as the London Times style guide).

These guidelines explain the ‘house style’. This may include, for example, whether the outlet commonly uses an ‘Oxford comma’ or comma placed after the penultimate item in a list, and describe the use of capitals or italics for certain words or phrases.

It is important to be aware of these style guidelines if you are writing for a particular publication.

Journalistic writing is the style used by news outlets to tell factual stories. It uses some established conventions, many of which are driven by the constraints of printing. However, these also work well in internet writing as they grab and hold readers’ attention very effectively.

Continue to: Writing for the Internet Cliches to Avoid

See also: Creative Writing Technical Writing Coherence in Writing

How to Write a Journalistic Essay

Jessica cook.

A journalistic essay is a combination of journalistic reporting and personal essay writing. A newspaper article contains straight journalistic reporting most of the time, while a personal essay tells a story. In a journalistic essay, you must combine these elements in order to tell a story with a factual basis in reporting.

Do your research. The basis of a journalistic essay must be factual; you should use your skills as a journalist to interview the people involved with the story you want to tell and research any available background information. Record interviews, take notes, and spend time at the library or online researching the information you need for the story. Take photos as you conduct your research so you can add them to your essay or at least use them to help you remember important information.

Organize your facts. Begin your essay by outlining your factual information and organizing it in a manner that is easy to understand. You do not always have to tell a story in chronological order; instead, consider how to tell the story in a way that will keep your readers interested from beginning to end.

Write your essay in a clear and concise manner. Avoid overly flowery or confusing sentences; you should strive to make your point clear, not to impress your reader with your vast vocabulary skills.

Let the story be the important part of your essay, not your writing. Your writing should showcase the story in the best light, hooking your reader's interest and keeping it until the end.

• 1 The Guardian: How Journalists Write, by Peter Cole

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What Is Literary Journalism?

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Literary journalism is a form of nonfiction that combines factual reporting with narrative techniques and stylistic strategies traditionally associated with fiction. This form of writing can also be called  narrative journalism or new journalism . The term literary journalism is sometimes used interchangeably with creative nonfiction ; more often, however, it is regarded as one type of creative nonfiction.

In his ground-breaking anthology The Literary Journalists , Norman Sims observed that literary journalism "demands immersion in complex, difficult subjects. The voice of the writer surfaces to show that an author is at work."

Highly regarded literary journalists in the U.S. today include John McPhee , Jane Kramer, Mark Singer, and Richard Rhodes. Some notable literary journalists of the past include Stephen Crane, Henry Mayhew , Jack London , George Orwell , and Tom Wolfe.

Characteristics of Literary Journalism

There is not exactly a concrete formula that writers use to craft literary journalism, as there is for other genres, but according to Sims, a few somewhat flexible rules and common features define literary journalism. "Among the shared characteristics of literary journalism are immersion reporting, complicated structures, character development, symbolism , voice , a focus on ordinary people ... and accuracy.

"Literary journalists recognize the need for a consciousness on the page through which the objects in view are filtered. A list of characteristics can be an easier way to define literary journalism than a formal definition or a set of rules. Well, there are some rules, but Mark Kramer used the term 'breakable rules' in an anthology we edited. Among those rules, Kramer included:

• Literary journalists immerse themselves in subjects' worlds...
• Literary journalists work out implicit covenants about accuracy and candor...
• Literary journalists write mostly about routine events.
• Literary journalists develop meaning by building upon the readers' sequential reactions.

... Journalism ties itself to the actual, the confirmed, that which is not simply imagined. ... Literary journalists have adhered to the rules of accuracy—or mostly so—precisely because their work cannot be labeled as journalism if details and characters are imaginary." 

Why Literary Journalism Is Not Fiction or Journalism

The term "literary journalism" suggests ties to fiction and journalism, but according to Jan Whitt, literary journalism does not fit neatly into any other category of writing. "Literary journalism is not fiction—the people are real and the events occurred—nor is it journalism in a traditional sense.

"There is interpretation, a personal point of view, and (often) experimentation with structure and chronology. Another essential element of literary journalism is its focus. Rather than emphasizing institutions, literary journalism explores the lives of those who are affected by those institutions."

The Role of the Reader

Because creative nonfiction is so nuanced, the burden of interpreting literary journalism falls on readers. John McPhee, quoted by Sims in "The Art of Literary Journalism," elaborates: "Through dialogue , words, the presentation of the scene, you can turn over the material to the reader. The reader is ninety-some percent of what's creative in creative writing. A writer simply gets things started."

Literary Journalism and the Truth

Literary journalists face a complicated challenge. They must deliver facts and comment on current events in ways that speak to much larger big picture truths about culture, politics, and other major facets of life; literary journalists are, if anything, more tied to authenticity than other journalists. Literary journalism exists for a reason: to start conversations.

Literary Journalism as Nonfiction Prose

Rose Wilder talks about literary journalism as nonfiction prose—informational writing that flows and develops organically like a story—and the strategies that effective writers of this genre employ in The Rediscovered Writings of Rose Wilder Lane, Literary journalist. "As defined by Thomas B. Connery, literary journalism is 'nonfiction printed prose whose verifiable content is shaped and transformed into a story or sketch by use of narrative and rhetorical  techniques generally associated with fiction.'

"Through these stories and sketches, authors 'make a statement, or provide an interpretation, about the people and culture depicted.' Norman Sims adds to this definition by suggesting the genre  itself allows readers to 'behold others' lives, often set within far clearer contexts than we can bring to our own.'

"He goes on to suggest, 'There is something intrinsically political—and strongly democratic—about literary journalism—something pluralistic, pro-individual, anti-cant, and anti-elite.' Further, as John E. Hartsock points out, the bulk of work that has been considered literary journalism is composed 'largely by professional journalists or those writers whose industrial means of production is to be found in the newspaper and magazine press, thus making them at least for the interim de facto journalists.'"

She concludes, "Common to many definitions of literary journalism is that the work itself should contain some kind of higher truth; the stories themselves may be said to be emblematic of a larger truth."

Background of Literary Journalism

This distinct version of journalism owes its beginnings to the likes of Benjamin Franklin, William Hazlitt, Joseph Pulitzer, and others. "[Benjamin] Franklin's Silence Dogood essays marked his entrance into literary journalism," begins Carla Mulford. "Silence, the persona Franklin adopted, speaks to the form that literary journalism should take—that it should be situated in the ordinary world—even though her background was not typically found in newspaper writing." 

Literary journalism as it is now was decades in the making, and it is very much intertwined with the New Journalism movement of the late 20th century. Arthur Krystal speaks to the critical role that essayist William Hazlitt played in refining the genre: "A hundred and fifty years before the New Journalists of the 1960s rubbed our noses in their egos, [William] Hazlitt put himself into his work with a candor that would have been unthinkable a few generations earlier."

Robert Boynton clarifies the relationship between literary journalism and new journalism, two terms that were once separate but are now often used interchangeably. "The phrase 'New Journalism' first appeared in an American context in the 1880s when it was used to describe the blend of sensationalism and crusading journalism—muckraking on behalf of immigrants and the poor—one found in the New York World and other papers... Although it was historically unrelated to [Joseph] Pulitzer's New Journalism, the genre of writing that Lincoln Steffens called 'literary journalism' shared many of its goals."

Boynton goes on to compare literary journalism with editorial policy. "As the city editor of the New York Commercial Advertiser in the 1890s, Steffens made literary journalism—artfully told narrative stories about subjects of concern to the masses—into editorial policy, insisting that the basic goals of the artist and the journalist (subjectivity, honesty, empathy) were the same."

• Boynton, Robert S. The New New Journalism: Conversations with America's Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft . Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2007.
• Krystal, Arthur. "Slang-Whanger." The New Yorker, 11 May 2009.
• Lane, Rose Wilder.  The Rediscovered Writings of Rose Wilder Lane, Literary Journalist . Edited by Amy Mattson Lauters, University of Missouri Press, 2007.
• Mulford, Carla. “Benjamin Franklin and Transatlantic Literary Journalism.”  Transatlantic Literary Studies, 1660-1830 , edited by Eve Tavor Bannet and Susan Manning, Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 75–90.
• Sims, Norman. True Stories: A Century of Literary Journalism . 1st ed., Northwestern University Press, 2008.
• Sims, Norman. “The Art of Literary Journalism.”  Literary Journalism , edited by Norman Sims and Mark Kramer, Ballantine Books, 1995.
• Sims, Norman. The Literary Journalists . Ballantine Books, 1984.
• Whitt, Jan. Women in American Journalism: A New History . University of Illinois Press, 2008.
• An Introduction to Literary Nonfiction
• Creative Nonfiction
• John McPhee: His Life and Work
• Defining Nonfiction Writing
• Genres in Literature
• literary present (verbs)
• Third-Person Point of View
• Tips on Great Writing: Setting the Scene
• A Guide to All Types of Narration, With Examples
• What Is a Synopsis and How Do You Write One?
• The Essay: History and Definition
• A Look at the Roles Characters Play in Literature
• What Is a Novel? Definition and Characteristics
• Point of View in Grammar and Composition

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Literary Journalism

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Literary journalism is another essay form that is best reserved for intermediate and advanced level courses, but it can be incorporated into introductory and composition courses. Literary journalism is the creative nonfiction form that comes closest to newspaper and magazine writing. It is fact-driven and requires research and, often, interviews.

Literary journalism is sometimes called “immersion journalism” because it requires a closer, more active relationship to the subject and to the people the literary journalist is exploring. Like journalistic writing, the literary journalism piece should be well-researched, focus on a brief period of time, and concentrate on what is happening outside of the writer’s small circle of personal experience and feelings.

An Example and Discussion of a Literary Journalism

The following excerpt from George Orwell is a good example of literary journalism. Orwell wrote about the colonial regime in Marrakech. His father was a colonial officer, so Orwell was confronted with the reality of empire from an early age, and that experience is reflected in his literary journalism piece, Marrakech :

Orwell isn’t writing a reflective, personal essay about his travels through Marrakech. Neither is he writing a memoir about what it was like to be the son of a colonial officer, nor how that experience shaped his adult life. He writes in a descriptive way about the Jewish quarters in Marrakech, about the invisibility of the “natives,” and about the way citizenship doesn’t ensure equality under a colonial regime.

Generating Ideas for Literary Journalism

One way to incorporate literary journalism into an introductory or intermediate level course is simply to have students write personal essays first. Then the students can go back and research the facts behind the personal experiences related in their essays. They can incorporate historical data, interviews, or broaden the range of their personal essay by exploring the cultural or political issues hinted at in their personal essays.

If a student writes, in passing, about the first presidential candidate they were eligible to vote for, then they can include facts and figures around that particular election, as well as research other events that were current at that time, for example. As with other essay forms, students should find topics that are important to them.

The Art of Journalistic Writing: A Comprehensive Guide ✍️

Journalistic writing aims to provide accurate and objective news coverage to the audience. Learn how to write like journalists in this comprehensive guide.

In the fast-paced realm of freelance writing, captivating and informative articles are the key to setting yourself apart from the competition. That's where the art of journalistic writing becomes your secret weapon. 

Below, we'll delve into the significance of journalistic writing for Independents, demystify its definition and various types, explore its essential features, and provide you with invaluable tips to sharpen your skills. Get ready to unlock the power of journalistic writing and take your freelance career to new heights . Let's dive in and discover the magic behind compelling stories that captivate readers worldwide.

What is journalistic writing? 📝 

Journalistic writing, as the name implies, is the style of writing used by journalists and news media organizations to share news and information about local, national, and global events, issues, and developments with the public.

The main goal of journalistic writing is to provide accurate and objective news coverage. Journalists gather facts, conduct research, and interview sources to present a fair and unbiased account of events. They strive to deliver information clearly, concisely, and interestingly that grabs readers’ attention and helps them understand the subject.

Journalistic writing also encourages public discussion, critical thinking, and informed decision-making. Since journalists present diverse perspectives, analyze complex issues, and investigate misconduct, they empower readers to form opinions and actively engage with the news. Journalistic writing acts as a watchdog, holding institutions and individuals accountable and promoting transparency in society.

Types of journalistic writing 🔥

Different types of journalism writing styles serve unique purposes, from exposing truths to keeping us informed, sparking conversations, and providing meaningful insights into the world around us. 

Here are five types of journalistic writing you should know about:

Investigative journalism 🕵️

Investigative journalists are like detectives in the news world. They dive deep into topics, dedicating their time and resources to uncover hidden information, expose corruption, and bring wrongdoing to the surface.

News journalism 🗞️

News journalists are frontline reporters who inform people about the latest happenings. They cover a wide range of topics, from politics and the economy to science and entertainment. They gather facts, interview sources, and present unbiased information objectively and concisely.

Column journalism 📰

In column journalism, writers share their personal opinions and perspectives on various subjects. They offer analysis, commentary, and insights on social, cultural, or political issues. Whether they are experts in their fields or well-known figures with unique voices, their columns provide readers with different standpoints and spark thought-provoking discussions.

Feature writing 🙇 

Feature writers take us beyond the basic facts and immerse us in storytelling. They explore human-interest stories, profiles, and in-depth features on specific topics. They also delve into the personal lives, experiences, or achievements of individuals or communities, providing a deeper understanding of the subject matter by using narrative techniques.

Reviews journalism 📖

Reviewers are the guides helping us make informed decisions about the arts. They evaluate and critique films, books, music, theater shows, and more. Through their opinions and assessments, they analyze the quality, impact, and significance of creative works. Review journalism not only helps us choose what to watch, read, or listen to, but it also contributes to cultural conversations and discussions.

Key features of journalistic writing 🔑

Journalistic writing distinguishes itself from other forms of writing through several essential characteristics. And here are a few: 

• Accuracy and objectivity: These are of utmost importance. Journalists go to great lengths to gather reliable information, verify sources, and present a balanced perspective. They strive to separate facts from opinions, ensuring readers receive an accurate account of events.
• Timeliness and relevance: Journalists focus on current events and issues that are of interest to the public. They aim to provide up-to-date information, sharing the latest developments and their implications.
• Clarity and conciseness: Journalists use clear and simple language, avoiding complex jargon that might confuse the audience. They use short sentences and paragraphs that enhance readability.
• Inverted pyramid structure: Commonly employed in journalistic writing, this structure places the most important information at the beginning of the article –– in the headline and the first paragraph. Subsequent paragraphs contain supporting details arranged in descending order of significance. By adopting this approach, journalists enable readers to grasp the main points quickly and decide whether to delve deeper into the topic.
• Engagement and impact: Journalists leverage various storytelling techniques, such as vivid descriptions and compelling narratives, to captivate their audience. They incorporate quotes, anecdotes, and human-interest elements to evoke emotions among readers and make the story relatable.

How to write like a journalist: 7 tips 💯

Now that you know the ins and outs of journalistic style and storytelling, let’s explore the best practices to follow during news writing: 

1. Use the inverted pyramid structure 🔻

If you’re wondering how to structure and write a news story or article, the answer is simple: Go from the most important to the least important. Start your articles with vital facts, and arrange supporting details in descending order of significance. This structure ensures readers receive essential information even if they don’t read the entire piece.

2. Establish your angle 📐

 Before you begin writing , determine the angle or perspective you want to take on the story. Although you should share a neutral opinion, choosing an angle helps you stay focused and deliver a clear message. Consider what makes your story unique or newsworthy, and shape your narrative accordingly.

3. Stick to the facts 🩹

Journalistic writing values accuracy and objectivity. Present information verifiable and supported by credible sources, and avoid personal opinions and biases –– allowing the facts to speak for themselves. Fact-checking is essential to maintain the integrity of your writing.

4. Use quotations to generate credibility 💭

Including quotes from reliable sources adds credibility and depth to your writing. Interview relevant individuals, experts, or eyewitnesses to gather their perspectives and insights. Incorporate their direct quotes to support your narrative and provide first-hand accounts.

5. Write clear and concise sentences 💎

Use straightforward language to effectively communicate your message. Journalism articles typically only include one-to-three sentences per paragraph and should not exceed 20 words per sentence. 

6. Edit and revise 💻

Thorough editing is crucial to produce polished and professional journalistic pieces. So once you finish your first draft, invest time on editing and revising your work. Look for grammatical errors, clarity issues, and redundancies. And ensure your writing flows smoothly and maintains a consistent tone. 

7. Maintain ethical standards 🏅

You want repeat readers who’ll come back for more from you. And for that, you must keep in mind journalistic principles and share fair, trusting, and accountable pieces. Attribute information to appropriate sources, respect privacy when necessary, and conduct thorough fact-checking.

Write like a pro with Contra 🌟

Mastering the art of journalistic writing is the key to becoming a skilled and impactful freelance writer . By understanding the criticality of thorough research, engaging storytelling, and holding the powerful accountable, you can create compelling news stories that resonate with readers. 

And with Contra as your trusted companion, you'll have the tools and resources to refine your journalistic writing skills and take your freelance career to new heights. So don't miss out on the opportunity to write like a pro. Sign up with Contra today, promote your services commission-free, and connect with fellow writers. 

Check out Contra for Independents , and join our Slack community to interact with a supportive network of writers, sharing knowledge and learning from each other.

How to Write an Op-Ed: A Guide to Effective Opinion Writing 🖋️

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What Is Content Writing? Tips to Craft Engaging Content 👀

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Journalism Ethics: A Philosophical Approach

Professor of Philosophy

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Since the introduction of radio and television news, journalism has gone through multiple transformations, but each time it has been sustained by a commitment to basic values and best practices. Journalism Ethics is a reminder, a defence, and an elucidation of core journalistic values, with particular emphasis on the interplay of theory, conceptual analysis and practice. This unified text on journalism ethics begins with a sophisticated model for ethical decision making, devised by two of the nation's leading ethicists, which connects classical theories with the central purposes of journalism. Top scholars from philosophy, journalism and communications offer essays on such topics as objectivity, privacy, confidentiality, conflict of interest, the history of journalism, online journalism, and the definition of a journalist. Theoretical essays are paired with practical essays in order to better inform the discussion. The result is a guide to ethically sound and socially justified journalism, in whatever form that practice emerges.

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Jerz's Literacy Weblog (est. 1999)

Journalism tips: news story vs. english essay.

Jerz  >  Writing  > Journalism

To write a news story, you’ll use many of the skills that help you write good personal essays; however, the two kinds of writing have important differences, so what counts as “good writing” is also different.

English Essay: Driven by your thoughtful analysis of long quotations from already-published sources (written by experts).

• It’s not a good English essay if it depends mostly on quotations from people you talked with. (Your English professor wants to evaluate your ability to think and write about your own ideas, not copy down what people say to you.)

News Story:  Driven by the timely, first-ever publication of short quotations from eyewitnesses, participants, decision-makers, or perhaps random citizens directly affected by a current event.

• It’s a good news story if it’s powered by fresh, unpublished quotations from credible sources you’ve interviewed yourself.
• It’s not a good news story if it’s powered by your own summaries of or commentary about already-published statements. (Your reader doesn’t want to be impressed by or even notice your brilliant writing skill.)

Instead of a thesis or research question, a  news article has a lead  (or “lede”).

Instead of long paragraphs designed to convince professors that you understand your subject, a  news article has short paragraphs  (usually 1-3 sentences) with details carefully chosen to help non-experts understand your subject.

25 May 2012 — first published here (based on handouts I created for various journalism classes since 2003)

14 thoughts on “ Journalism Tips: News Story vs. English Essay ”

Pingback: Writing a news story calls on different skills than writing a traditional essay. | Jerz's Literacy Weblog (est. 1999)

Pingback: Reflecting: Academic writing V. Journalism

Hi, I would like to know when the date of this article is published, for the references of my assignment. Thank you :)

I have added a date at the bottom of the text.

Pingback: Vanessa Otero’s Updated Media Bias Chart (Liberal/Mainstream/Conservative; Facts/Analysis/Opinion/Propaganda/Fake News) UPDATED 3.1 | Jerz's Literacy Weblog

I like how you mentioned that journalists aim to inform the reader. I want to write news reports for politics for my career. Thanks for the tips on writing a news story.

Holy cow flaps (we say this in rural VT). A good Teacher employs appropriate methods to help individuals learn. Good Teachers are hard to find. Comparisons and tips like this provide great value to journalism students. Thank you!

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RT @DennisJerz: News Story vs. English Essay: Journalism requires brief quotes from original interviews, not deep textual analysis. http://…

this is true :)

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What Does “Longform” Journalism Really Mean?

On love and ruin , terminology, and the anxiety of limits.

Writers are preoccupied with limits: temporal and physical and metaphysical, the divisions between self and other, the mind’s inability to reconstruct the subject of its fascination. Borges envisioned “a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point.” Moby-Dick ’s Ishmael claimed that “true places” resisted the attempts of mapmakers. Stories often assume the shape of their limitations. In 2006, the same year that Twitter launched, Robert Olen Butler published Severance , a story collection that employed what one reviewer called “a new—and unlikely to be replicated—art form, the vignette of the severed head told in exactly 240 words.”

For journalists, tasked with something like verisimilitude, these limits are always existential. Joe Gould claimed to be writing an oral history whose purview was the knowable world. Joseph Mitchell, who first profiled Gould for The New Yorker in 1942, came to doubt the history’s existence, and said as much after Gould’s death. Gould’s history was never published. Another New Yorker staff writer, Jill Lepore, suspects Gould’s compulsive writing was hypergraphia. “This is an illness, a mania,” she wrote, “but seems more like something a writer might envy.” Perhaps Mitchell did; after his final piece on Gould, Mitchell never published another word. Like Gould’s productivity, Mitchell’s silence was storied but impossible to verify. Lepore wrote about both men in “Joe Gould’s Teeth,” a feature article whose word count grew into a book-length manuscript.

“Writers tumble into this story,” wrote Lepore, “and then they plummet.” The boundaries of the observable world push inward and outward; we are fathomless, the universe immeasurable. Where, then, should a story begin and end?

In the past decade, as declining ad revenue constricted editorial space in print publications, online publishing offered journalists freedom from some of their limits. A story could be as complicated as its subject required, and as long as necessary, though the ancient caveat still applied: your readers might not stick with you until the end. Websites such as BuzzFeed, whose content seemed to assume a newly attention-deficient readership, occasionally published pieces of narrative nonfiction whose word counts reached into the thousands. Online publishers began to label such stories “longform.”

Journalists and their readers have an uneasy history with such labels. “I have no idea who coined the term ‘the New Journalism’ or when it was coined,” wrote Tom Wolfe in a 1972 feature article in New York . “I have never even liked the term.” Neither did Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote to Wolfe and threatened to “have your goddamn femurs ground into bone splinters if you ever mention my name again in connection with that horrible ‘new journalism’ shuck you’re promoting.” (Wolfe still included Thompson in his 1973 anthology, The New Journalism .) “Creative nonfiction” still enjoys wide usage, and a magazine exists by the same name. Its editor, Lee Gutkind, writes that Creative Nonfiction “defines the genre simply, succinctly, and accurately as ‘true stories well told.’” These labels amount to a shaggy taxonomy; journalists that share certain aesthetics are grouped together, and then those groups are differentiated from each other, to the presumed benefit of readers.

Such labels sometimes reward the writer, who becomes associated with a popular movement. They sometimes reward the reader, who has a new word for what she seeks. Most often, they reward the publisher. But a publisher’s loyalties can shift with the market. Medium, a publishing platform that developed an early reputation for longform journalism, distanced itself from the label. (“It was not our intention… to create a platform just for ‘long-form’ content,” said Ev Williams, Medium CEO and a co-founder of Twitter.) BuzzFeed, on the other hand, hired a “longform editor” in 2013 to oversee a section of the site devoted to such stories. The longform editor described his section as “BuzzFeed for people who are afraid of BuzzFeed.”

Whether labels like “longform” reward a story is another matter. “Length is hardly the quality that most meaningfully classifies these stories,” wrote James Bennet in The Atlantic . “Yet there’s a real conundrum here: If ‘long-form’ doesn’t fit, what term is elastic enough to encompass the varied journalism it has come to represent, from narrative to essay, profile to criticism?” The term “journalism” is, somehow, insufficient.

Taxonomy presents one conundrum; popularity makes for another. The “longform” label offers readers and writers a new way to self-identify, and a new hashtag by which they may find, distinguish and promote stories. An attendant risk is that a story’s appeal as a “longform” product could short-circuit editorial judgment and damage a writer or his subject before a large audience.

In 2014, Grantland published “ Dr. V’s Magical Putter ,” a 7,000-word profile of an inventor and transgender woman whose gender transition was revealed in the story—before she had revealed it to people in her life. “What began as a story about a brilliant woman with a new invention,” author Chris Hannan wrote, “had turned into the tale of a troubled man who had invented a new life for himself.” Hannan reveals in his final paragraphs that his subject committed suicide, and wrote, “Writing a eulogy for a person who by all accounts despised you is an odd experience.” In the New York Times , Jonathan Mahler cautioned readers and writers again “fetishizing the form and losing sight of its function.”

“Longform” springs from journalism’s anxiety over limitations—mainly, its online audience’s attention span. During the longform decade, software developers created programs that translate word counts into estimated reading times. Both Longreads.com and Longform.org use the program, as does Medium. For their first assignment, students of the late New York Times media critic David Carr wrote stories with estimated reading times of fewer than five minutes.

In 2011, The Atavist Magazine began to publish longform stories—“one blockbuster nonfiction story a month, generally between 5,000 and 30,000 words.” Since its inception, The Atavist ’s stories have been nominated for eight National Magazine Awards; the magazine’s first win, for 2015’s “Love and Ruin,” was also the first time the coveted “feature writing” award went to a digital magazine. While the magazine’s founder, Evan Ratliff, employs the “longform” label to describe The Atavist ’s work, he doesn’t fret about his audience’s attention span.

“The people who are making decisions based on that, I don’t think they’re doing it based on actual research, either,” he told Columbia Journalism Review a few months after The Atavist Magazine published its first story. “I think they’re all doing it based on anecdotal experience.” Ratliff concluded, “I don’t really care if attention spans are going down in the world overall or not.” And the universe—the unknowable curator of all the components of our stories—doesn’t care either.

Love and Ruin is a new anthology of stories culled from The Atavist ’s first five years. If labels like “longform” mean anything, then Love and Ruin is also the first collection of stories that typify a new genre, a successor to titles like Wolfe’s The New Journalism and Robert Boynton’s The New New Journalism .

“‘Longform’ written storytelling . . . was, it was said, going the way of the black rhino,” Ratliff writes in his foreword. “Our magazine is built on questioning that wisdom.” Still, Ratliff doesn’t dwell on the word; if length can be considered a characteristic of each story in Love and Ruin , then it’s the one that interests him least.

Each story in Love and Ruin first appeared online, via the magazine’s proprietary platform, along with interview excerpts, original photography, embedded videos, and optional audiobook downloads. Most also came with an estimated reading time. The shortest story in Love and Ruin —Brooke Jarvis’ 10,000-word account of the year she spent working with leprosy patients in Kalaupapa, Hawaii, as the community and its last inhabitants dwindled—is classified online as a “44 minute read.” The longest stories clear 20,000 words, which means a time commitment equivalent to watching a feature film.

The ten stories in Love and Ruin fall comfortably within the word counts that The Atavist sets for its nonfiction, a range that contemporary readers expect from “longform.” But word counts and reading times are poor distinguishing features for a genre, a lackluster explanation for why these stories should appear together, and a useless tool for evaluating the rewards of the book.

The stories in Love and Ruin don’t share many sensibilities. Ratliff writes in his foreword that there is no “house style”—a suggestion that each Atavist story is told in something closer to each writer’s authentic voice. In her introduction, New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean takes on journalism’s taxonomy problem, sets aside a few genre labels (“new journalism,” “creative nonfiction,” “longform”), and then classifies the stories in Love and Ruin as “magpie journalism.” It’s a laudatory phrase, but at a second glance it doesn’t distinguish the stories in Love and Ruin from plenty of others.

If the stories in Love and Ruin are bound by something other than glue, then it’s a sort of thematic unity, born from the same anxieties that gave us “longform.” Each story in Love and Ruin depicts its author’s struggle with the limits of investigation, representation, or understanding. “The Fort of Young Saplings” follows Vanessa Veselka’s tangential connection to a native Alaskan tribe back to the moment when that tribe’s history was overwritten. Jarvis’ story, “When We Are Called to Part,” approaches the same critical moment, when a community becomes a collection of stories, told selectively and bracketed by time. In “Mother, Stranger,” Cris Beam navigates the fog of her abusive mother’s mental illness and her own traumatic upbringing. “I didn’t have a language for my mother,” writes Beam, “probably because she didn’t have a cohesive language for herself.” The black boxes in Love and Ruin are figurative and sometimes literal; Adam Higginbotham’s “1,000 Pounds of Dynamite,” an anatomy of a failed extortion plot, features both.  

Underpinned by limits and all their attendant complications, the narratives that arise from Love and Ruin are fundamentally strange and unwieldy, and as long as they need to be. Leslie Jamison’s “52 Blue” provides Love and Ruin with its most luminous prose. But the story—about a solitary whale that sings at a unique and isolating frequency, and the people drawn to the whale’s story—also offers the anthology’s best consideration of the boundaries that shape stories and their telling.

“52 Blue suggests not just one single whale as a metaphor for loneliness, but metaphor itself as a salve for loneliness,” Jamison writes. “What if we grant the whale his whaleness, grant him furlough from our metaphoric employ, but still grant the contours of his second self—the one we’ve made—and admit what he’s done for us?”

Jamison does not reach her best ideas in few words. But without the words she uses, those ideas may not be otherwise reachable. A story’s word count can sometimes be a proxy for complexity; that’s the appeal of a label like “longform” for the readers that claim to love it. But complicated stories also refute “longform.” They leave their readers with a feeling that the story and its shape are an inevitable match. How else could it have been told?

Here, then, is The Atavist ’s chief achievement with Love and Ruin : In collecting its finest “longform” nonfiction, The Atavist created an anthology that undermines its own flimsy label—and, hopefully, refutes some of our anxiety about time and attention, and the other limits that govern our lives.

The anxiety of limitation—the dread of meaning lost, to time and to space—is recurrent. “Before there were even screens in our living rooms, the same worries reared their heads,” writes Nick Bilton in I Live in the Future, and Here’s How it Works . “There was a time in the 1920s when cultural critics feared Americans were losing their ability to swallow a long, thoughtful novel or even a detailed magazine piece. The evil culprit: Reader’s Digest .”

But the condensed and excerpted stories in Reader’s Digest didn’t bring about the end of attention, or of complicated storytelling. “Reader’s weren’t abandoning long stories for short ones,” writes Bilton. “The appeal of Reader’s Digest was in the overall experience.”

In 2001, David Foster Wallace—who died in the early years of the “longform” decade and whose nonfiction posthumously bears that label—reviewed a collection of prose poems. “These putatively ‘transgressive’ forms depend heavily on received ideas of genre, category, and formal conventions,” wrote Wallace, “since without such an established context there’s nothing much to transgress against.” Do away with some of those conventions and received ideas, and a genre seems more accommodating. Labels like “longform” and “prose poem” are unnecessary limitations; they may evoke a certain shape, but they also constrain it.

A few years ago, for his introduction to The Best American Magazine Writing , James Bennet wrote a short essay that later appeared online at The Atlantic , under the headline “Against ‘Long-Form Journalism.’” Bennet argues that the label is insubstantial and misleading, and then suggests “another perfectly good, honorable name for this kind of work—the one on the cover of this anthology. You might just call it all magazine writing.” But that’s like distinguishing between “book fiction” and “movie fiction,” and besides, “magazine journalism” conflates a story with a product. A medium like print may help to shape a story, but that medium is always just a tool in the service of a narrative, and media change. There will come a time when Best American Magazine Writing needs a new title.

All the stories we tell are products of limits. Time shatters histories and then hides a few pieces. Writers construct narratives and, inevitably, omit some details. Addressing the same issue in photography, Errol Morris asked, “Isn’t there always a possible elephant lurking just at the edge of the frame?” Perhaps the elephant is unimportant to the story. And yet, there he is.

Here’s the trade-off: Narratives require that we surrender our conceptions of time and space, that we readjust our ideas of what can be known and what might be said. They can be fallible by design but still leave understanding in their wake. A story, of any length, moves readers through the world without fracturing meaning. The world fractures meaning on its own.

So perhaps we can unburden ourselves of labels like “longform.” The Atavist has already begun to do just that; in 2014, the site stopped translating word counts into estimated reading times. And perhaps we can task ourselves with something more: that we read and write closer to those circumstances that bracket our lives, and simply take the time and space we need.

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journalistic

Definition of journalistic

Examples of journalistic in a sentence.

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'journalistic.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

1791, in the meaning defined above

Dictionary Entries Near journalistic

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“Journalistic.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/journalistic. Accessed 26 Apr. 2024.

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The New Rules of Political Journalism

In this election, the reporting strategies of the past will not be enough.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

In our digitally chaotic world, relying on the election-reporting strategies of the past is like bringing the rules of chess to the Thunderdome.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic :

• The October 7 rape denialists
• Finding justice in Palestine
• Biden’s safe, polite campaign stop in Scranton

This past weekend, I was on a panel at the annual conference of the International Symposium on Online Journalism, in beautiful downtown Austin. Several journalists discussed the question: Are we going to get it right this time? Have the media learned their lessons, and are journalists ready for the vertiginous slog of the 2024 campaign?

My answer: only if we realize how profoundly the rules of the game have changed.

Lest we need reminding, this year’s election features a candidate who incited an insurrection, called for terminating sections of the Constitution, was found liable for what a federal judge says was “rape” as it is commonly understood, faces 88 felony charges, and—I’m tempted to add “etcetera” here, but that’s the problem, isn’t it? The volume and enormity of it all is impossible to take in.

The man is neither a riddle nor an enigma. He lays it all out there: his fawning over the world’s authoritarians, his threats to abandon our allies, his contempt for the rule of law, his intention to use the federal government as an instrument of retribution . Journalists must be careful not to give in to what Brian Klaas has called the “ Banality of Crazy .” As I’ve written in the past, there have been so many outrages and so many assaults on decency that it’s easy to become numbed by the cascade of awfulness.

The former White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer points out a recent example in his newsletter: On a radio show earlier this month, Donald Trump bizarrely suggested that Joe Biden was high on cocaine when he delivered his energetic State of the Union address. It was a startling moment, yet several major national media outlets did not cover the story.

And when Trump called for the execution of General Mark Milley, it didn’t have nearly the explosive effect it should have. “I had expected every website and all the cable news shows to lead with a story about Trump demanding the execution of the highest military officer in the country,” this magazine’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, told The Washington Post . “If Barack Obama or George W. Bush had done so, I’m sure [the news media] would have been all over it.” (Trump’s threats against Milley came after The Atlantic published a profile of Milley by Goldberg.)

In our digitally chaotic world, relying on the reporting strategies of the past is like bringing the rules of chess to the Thunderdome. There has, of course, been some progress. The major cable networks no longer carry Trump’s rallies live without context, but they still broadcast town-hall meetings and interviews with the former president, which boost ratings. NBC’s abortive decision to hire Ronna McDaniel, a former chair of the Republican National Committee, as a contributor, despite her role in spreading lies about the 2020 election, highlighted the disconnect between this moment and much of the national media.

And then there is the internet. It is certainly possible that richer, more insightful media will emerge from the digital revolution, but we’re obviously not there now. Back in 2016, we worried that social media had become a vector for disinformation and bigotry, but since then, we’ve seen Elon Musk’s extraordinary enshittification of X. In 2016, we worried (too late) about foreign interference and bots. In 2024, we are going to have to contend with deepfakes created by AI.

This year will see some of the best journalism of our lifetime. (You’ll find much of it here in The Atlantic .) But because both the media and their audiences are badly fractured, much of that reporting is siloed off from the voters who need it most. Because millions of Americans are locked in information bubbles, half of the country either won’t see important journalism about the dangers of a second Trump term or won’t believe it.

As Paul Farhi notes in The Atlantic , MAGA-friendly websites have experienced massive drops in traffic, but social media continues to thrive on negativity and providing dopamine hits of anger and fear. And of distraction—last week, the most-liked videos on TikTok about the presidential race included a video of a man singing to Biden and Trump’s visit to a Chick-fil-A .

To put it mildly, the arc of social media does not bend toward Edward R. Murrow–style journalism.

So what’s to be done? I don’t have any easy answers, because I don’t think they exist. Getting it right this time does not mean that journalists need to pull their punches in covering Biden or become slavish defenders of his administration’s policies. In fact, that would only make matters worse. But perhaps we could start with some modest proposals.

First, we should redefine newsworthy . Klaas argues that journalists need to emphasize the magnitude rather than simply the novelty of political events. Trump’s ongoing attacks on democracy may not be new, but they define the stakes of 2024. So although live coverage of Trump rallies without any accompanying analysis remains a spectacularly bad idea, it’s important to neither ignore nor mute the dark message that Trump delivers at every event. As a recent headline in The Guardian put it, “Trump’s Bizarre, Vindictive Incoherence Has to Be Heard in Full to Be Believed.”

Why not relentlessly emphasize the truth, and publish more fact-checked transcripts that highlight his wilder and more unhinged rants? (Emphasizing magnitude is, of course, a tremendous challenge for journalists when the amplification mechanisms of the modern web—that is, social-media algorithms—are set by companies that have proved to be hostile to the distribution of information from reputable news outlets.)

The media challenge will be to emphasize the abnormality of Donald Trump without succumbing to a reactionary ideological tribalism, which would simply drive audiences further into their silos. Put another way: Media outlets will need all the credibility they can muster when they try to sound the alarm that none of this is normal . And it is far more important to get it right than to get it fast, because every lapse will be weaponized.

The commitment to “fairness” should not, however, mean creating false equivalencies or fake balance. (An exaggerated report about Biden’s memory lapses , for example, should not be a bigger story than Trump’s invitation to Vladimir Putin to invade European countries .)

In the age of Trump, it is also important that members of the media not be distracted by theatrics generally. (This includes Trump’s trial drama, the party conventions, and even— as David Frum points out in The Atlantic —the debates.) Relatedly, the stakes are simply too high to wallow in vibes, memes, or an obsessive focus on within-the-margin-of-error polls. Democracy can indeed be crushed by authoritarianism. But it can also be suffocated by the sort of trivia that often dominates social media.

And, finally, the Prime Directive of 2024: Never, ever become numbed by the endless drumbeat of outrages.

• Political analysis needs more witchcraft.
• Right-wing media are in trouble.

Today’s News

• The Senate dismissed the articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and ruled that they were unconstitutional, ending his trial before it got under way.
• House Speaker Mike Johnson will proceed with a plan, backed by President Joe Biden, to vote on separate bills to provide aid to Ukraine, Israel, and U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific. The proposed move has raised criticism from some conservative representatives.
• Four Columbia University officials, including the president, Nemat Shafik, testified in a congressional committee hearing about student safety, free speech, and anti-Semitism on campus.
• The Trump Trials : The first days of the criminal case against Donald Trump have been mundane, even boring—and that’s remarkable, George T. Conway III writes.
• The Weekly Planet : The cocoa shortage could make chocolate more expensive forever, Yasmin Tayag writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Something Weird Is Happening With Caesar Salads

By Ellen Cushing

On a November evening in Brooklyn, in 2023, I was in trouble (hungry). I ordered a kale Caesar at a place I like. Instead, I got: a tangle of kale, pickled red onion, and “sweet and spicy almonds,” dressed in a thinnish, vaguely savory liquid and topped with a glob of crème fraîche roughly the size and vibe of a golf ball. It was a pretty weird food. We are living through an age of unchecked Caesar-salad fraud. Putative Caesars are dressed with yogurt or miso or tequila or lemongrass; they are served with zucchini, orange zest, pig ear, kimchi, poached duck egg, roasted fennel, fried chickpeas, buffalo-cauliflower fritters, tōgarashi -dusted rice crackers. They are missing anchovies, or croutons, or even lettuce … Molly Baz is a chef, a cookbook author, and a bit of a Caesar obsessive—she owns a pair of sneakers with “CAE” on one tongue and “SAL” on the other—and she put it succinctly when she told me, “There’s been a lot of liberties taken, for better or for worse.”

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Opinion | Everyday sexism has no place in sports journalism

The conversation around gregg doyel’s comments to caitlin clark failed to address larger, systemic issues that could lead to better journalism.

We probably all groaned simultaneously.

“Start doing it to me and we’ll get along just fine,” said Gregg Doyel , a middle-aged male sports journalist, at the first press conference Caitlin Clark gave after being selected as the No. 1 WNBA draft pick by the Indiana Fever. The columnist for The Indianapolis Star had just flashed the “heart” sign that Clark gives to her family at games and apparently thought flirting with a 22-year-old was clever or endearing.

It wasn’t. It was just creepy.

Our visceral reaction was because Doyel’s offhanded quip was one in a line of behaviors we’ve observed for years. So when people on social media started to call him out for his unprofessional actions, we felt relief that maybe the culture was changing. Perhaps the attitudes toward women’s sports are changing outside of newsrooms, but clearly they aren’t within some of them.

What happened next, unfortunately, was not a conversation about needed changes in journalism or how such behavior diminishes women’s sports. The debate that ensued focused on Doyel’s intentions and the impact on him. The Poynter column about the issue followed that myopic pattern. It failed to address larger, systemic issues that could lead to better journalism.

Women have been enduring sexist behavior in the workplace — well, forever. Women’s sports have been degraded as less important than men’s — well, forever. This moment of women’s basketball popularity has been a joyous and empowering time. We watched as the women drew more viewers than the men during March Madness, followed by the WNBA draft, which more people watched than ever before. But then a prominent journalist at the largest regional newspaper covering Clark — a journalist with whom she may now have to regularly interact — stepped in to remind us that women still are not equal.

It seems Doyel did not realize he had caused harm until people called him out online. Doyel’s amazement to learn that his actions contributed to sexism in sports journalism is the definition of privilege: not having to think about things.

As journalism professors, we teach journalism students to examine their privilege, to consider the ways journalism can feed stereotypes and to understand that bias is part of larger, often intangible systems than interpersonal encounters. We teach them to show their sources respect.

The Poynter column about this issue didn’t address tenets of good sports journalism or how journalism could be improved. Rather, it excused a journalist who acted inappropriately, focused on the negative effects for him, attempted to explain his intent, and ignored the repercussions not only for Clark, but also for women athletes. This is how toxic masculinity is preserved.

As we have seen through our journalism teaching, research, and work, sports is still dominated by a “bro” culture — whether you’re a fan, journalist or journalism student. The “boys will be boys” mentality still exists at many levels, as we can attest by the Doyel apologists (both male and female) trying to explain away his behavior.

So, we have to ask (again) and be disruptive (again): What will it take for male sports writers to treat women athletes as just that, athletes? Instead of sex objects? Instead of “boring” or inferior?

As educators, we prefer to focus on the next generation of sports writers. For journalism to improve, the conversation must address the bigger picture and what journalism educators and newsrooms can do.

• Hire and promote women on the sports desk. Student journalists often feel powerless, but they aren’t. Assign women writers to prominent beats on campus and in professional newsrooms. Promote women into editor and other leadership roles. Managerial and editing experience can only help women as they move along their career track.
• Treat the women you hire as equal co-workers, but also with respect. If women are seen as tokens or expected to be “one of the boys,” the culture continues. What culture do we mean? See No. 3.
• Work to end “bro” culture. Sports is still a boys club. Women journalists report only 15% of sports journalism stories. Despite recent increases fueled by college basketball, only about 15% of sports coverage focuses on women athletes and teams. Ending the male-centered culture is easier said than done, right? But those of us who teach sports journalism see it all the time. It’s not comfortable to stop class and address sexist remarks, but we as educators must.
• Treat women like humans. It sounds ridiculous that we still have to say this, but some still see women as inferior to men. Until men start considering women as equals and — this is important — men stand up to other men who don’t, nothing will change. We’re not damsels in distress, but we do need your support.
• Sexist remarks aren’t cute or funny. Just stop. The social media backlash to Doyel’s behavior should be a lesson that it’s time to grow up and stop making these kinds of cracks.
• When people offer critique, listen. Poynter’s column said Doyel received “massive criticism” and “was crushed online” for his “badly bungled” introduction. We think he deserved it. Stop defending and apologizing. Journalists have a responsibility to listen to their critics.
• Understand individual and systemic bias. Journalism has been criticized, fairly, for covering the storm and ignoring the atmosphere. Journalists tend to focus on shocking events rather than underlying conditions. Creepy comments are the storm born of the atmosphere of sexism and a patriarchal attitude that privileges men.
• Training. Honestly, it shouldn’t have to come to this. But newsrooms need to provide cultural awareness training to those covering women’s sports.
• We’re working, not dating. Kind of simple, right? But men need to be reminded that covering women athletes (or women lawyers, or women mayors) is a job, not a dating app.
• Think before you speak. These are words to live by that many of us preach to our students. And, yes, plenty of us have bungled when a microphone is before us. But professionals need to follow this guideline: Ask yourself: “Would you say it to/write it about a middle-aged white man?”

Women’s sports are enjoying a historic moment. This should be celebrated. It’s beyond disappointing that we’re spending time talking about a columnist who not only demeaned a generational talent in a press conference but also shifted the conversation away from her greatness and the joy of this moment.

We call not only for changes in coverage, but also for changes in culture and attitude so that women can play sports free from harassment, so our women students can aim for careers in sports journalism, and so working women can do their jobs without enduring out-of-line comments, aggression, and discrimination — able to enjoy their work and succeed the same way men do.

Opinion | Is there a feud between the White House and New York Times?

Politico reports – and the Times denies – changes in coverage due to ire over not getting a one-on-one interview with the president.

Opinion | A conversation with White House Correspondents’ Association president Kelly O’Donnell

Advocating for her press corps colleagues has become a second full-time job for NBC News' senior White House correspondent.

Hunter Biden was indicted twice. A claim that he and others have escaped criminal charges is wrong.

Donald Trump faces dozens of criminal charges, but it’s inaccurate to claim that others including Hunter Biden were never charged with any crimes.

Opinion | The case for funding environmental journalism right now

Philanthropy has an important role to play in supporting reporters, but funding must be transparent and clear to maintain credibility

How Poynter transformed a hands-on workshop into an email course

Lessons learned from an experiment in building a new journalism project

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Guest Essay

Donald Trump’s Secret Shame About New York City Haunts His Trial

By Elizabeth Spiers

Ms. Spiers, a contributing Opinion writer, is a journalist and a digital media strategist.

With jury selection underway in Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Lower Manhattan, the former president’s chickens have finally come home to roost. It feels uniquely appropriate that Mr. Trump will have to endure the scrutiny on his old home turf. New York City residents have been subjected to his venality and corruption for much longer than the rest of the country, and we’re familiar with his antics — the threats, the lawsuits, the braggadocio, his general ability to slip through the tiniest crack in the bureaucracy or legal system just fast enough to avoid the consequences of his actions. He rose to fame here, but was never truly accepted by the old money elites he admired. The rich and powerful sometimes invited him to their parties, but behind his back they laughed at his coarse methods and his tacky aesthetic. His inability to succeed in New York in quite the way he wanted to drove much of the damage he did to the country as a whole, and arguably his entire political career.

For many of his admirers, Mr. Trump represents a certain kind of rich person whose wealth and success are emblematic of the American dream, and on the campaign trail, that was the story he told. That illusion was reinforced by “The Apprentice,” a heavily scripted pseudocompetition in which Mr. Trump pretended to fire people, something that in real life he generally has others do. He likes having authority but not doing the hard work of leadership and prefers to outsource the dirty work to underlings and lawyers.

It’s harder for Mr. Trump to avoid the actual untelevised reality of who he is in New York City, where he grew up the son of a wealthy Queens real estate developer and used his inheritance less to grow the family business than to grow his personal brand. His business dealings were murky , sometimes mob-connected and riddled with high-profile failures and bankruptcies . Serious real estate investors did not regard him as a peer. Eventually, banks began to refuse to lend him money. He was ruthlessly skewered by New York publications, most famously by Spy magazine, which called him a “short-fingered vulgarian.”

But he had a taste for being in the public eye — constantly. Gossip columnists at his favored tabloids often received tips from Mr. Trump about himself, even about his own sexual escapades, under the pseudonym John Barron . If you want to get attention without paying for public relations consultants, another good way to do it is to run for public office. Mr. Trump expressed interest in the presidency starting in the late 1980s, took steps in that direction in 2000 and considered it again in 2012 before being elected in 2016.

All of these qualities make Mr. Trump what the complexity scientist Peter Turchin refers to as an “elite aspirant.” It may seem absurd to refer to a rich guy who went to an Ivy League school and has been a public figure for a long time as an aspiring elite, but by Professor Turchin’s definition, Mr. Trump fits the term because he wanted forms of power he did not have. He had wealth, which is one of Professor Turchin’s four types of elite power, but precariously. He had neither the kind of influence that media figures who deal in persuasion have nor the raw political power that elected officials do. He admires dictators and people whose power is derived from violence (military figures, law enforcement) because he doesn’t have that, either.

If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere, the song goes, but Mr. Trump couldn’t make it here — at least not the way he craved — despite being born here and being one of the few people who could afford it.

So it’s easy to understand why he bashes his hometown as a crime-ridden hellscape, and why the Oval Office appealed. Washington offered him political power but also something he may have wanted even more: the respect New York denied him.

No physical space in New York City is more emblematic of Mr. Trump than his flagship Trump Tower. It’s flashy, slightly out of place on Fifth Avenue , with what seems like a general aesthetic philosophy that one can never have too much gold plating. When he got permission to tear down the Bonwit Teller building, which used to stand on that site, he promised to donate its Art Deco friezes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He destroyed them instead. New York magazine’s Marie Brenner wrote at the time that the building’s approval “ legitimized a pushy kid nobody took seriously. ”

The details of the criminal case getting underway in Manhattan make it salacious (A porn star! Hush money!) and it would probably have been a career-ending scandal for any other president, but against the backdrop of Mr. Trump’s endless appearances in supermarket tabloids, it just seems like par for the course. New Yorkers pride themselves on a certain kind of skepticism that allows them to spot a con man, but Mr. Trump’s cons have always been so out in the open that we may have underestimated his vindictiveness and his capacity to do real harm.

There were glimpses of it, though. It’s tough to identify the nadir of Mr. Trump’s bad behavior in New York, but I believe it was in 1989, when he took out ads in major media outlets (including this one) calling for the death penalty to be reinstated in New York State after five Black and Latino teenagers were accused of raping a jogger in Central Park. The five men had their convictions vacated in 2002, but Mr. Trump still refuses, out of malice or vanity, to apologize or acknowledge their innocence. When asked whether he believes they should have been convicted, he still insists that they admitted their guilt .

One of the men, Yusef Salaam, is now a member of the New York City Council. The day Mr. Trump was arrested in April of 2023, Mr. Salaam wrote, in an ad mocked up to look like Mr. Trump’s original, “I hope that you exercise your civil liberties to the fullest, and that you get what the Exonerated Five did not get — a presumption of innocence and a fair trial.”

And that’s what he’s getting, at last.

In many ways Mr. Trump’s success outside of New York is a function of a characteristic he has that the city itself does not: an inferiority complex. Even when confronted with evidence of his wrongdoing, he insists that he is a victim, and now so are the people who vote for him. When he was indicted in Georgia , he told his followers, “They’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you — and I’m just standing in their way.”

Mr. Trump was successful in part because he projected his own anxieties onto the people who were loyal to him. When pressuring the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to help him overturn the results of the 2020 election, he said, “They’re going around playing you and laughing at you behind your back, Brad, whether you know it or not, they’re laughing at you.” Mr. Trump both fears and loathes being laughed at, and publicly seethed his way through the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2011 when, as expected, he was the butt of some of the jokes. “He was pissed off like I’d never seen him before,” Chris Christie later said . “Just beside himself with fury.” The evening confirmed Mr. Trump’s suspicions that the elites were sneering at him and he wasn’t in on their jokes.

In this sense he’s a lot like Richard Nixon, who, as his former aide Tom Charles Huston said, understood “in his gut” when middle-class people “felt they were being put upon, because he felt he had been put upon.”

Mr. Trump also feels that he has been put upon not just by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, and the New York attorney general, Letitia James, but by all of the New York City liberals who did not take him seriously when he put on a faceful of makeup, donned a comically long tie and climbed into the clown car bound for Washington. There is some relief for New Yorkers who are witnessing the prospect of his comeuppance, though. The rest of the country is seeing a side of Mr. Trump that New York City residents have always been familiar with: the guy who’s angry that he hasn’t been accepted in the elite circles he admires and is outraged that others have.

Elizabeth Spiers, a contributing Opinion writer, is a journalist and a digital media strategist.

Mr. Winter used a small paper cutout of Donald Trump to create this image.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Journalism ethics.

• Patrick Lee Plaisance Patrick Lee Plaisance Department of Journalism & Media Communication, Colorado State University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.89
• Published online: 09 June 2016

News workers—writers, editors, videographers, bloggers, photographers, designers—regularly confront questions of potential harms and conflicting values in the course of their work, and the field of journalism ethics concerns itself with standards of behavior and the quality of justifications used to defend controversial journalistic decisions. While journalism ethics, as with the philosophy of ethics in general, is less concerned with pronouncements of the “rightness” or “wrongness” of certain acts, it relies on longstanding notions of the public-service mission of journalism. However, informing the public and serving a “watchdog” function regularly require journalists to negotiate questions of privacy, autonomy, community engagement, and the potentially damaging consequences of providing information that individuals and governments would rather withhold.

As news organizations continue to search for successful business models to support journalistic work, ethics questions over conflicts of interest and content transparency (e.g., native advertising) have gained prominence. Media technology platforms that have served to democratize and decentralize the dissemination of news have underscored the debate about who, or what type of content, should be subjected to journalism ethics standards. Media ethics scholars, most of whom are from Western democracies, also are struggling to articulate the features of a “global” journalism ethics framework that emphasizes broad internationalist ideals yet accommodates cultural pluralism. This is particularly challenging given that the very idea of “press freedom” remains an alien one in many countries of the world, and the notion is explicitly included in the constitutions of only a few of the world’s democratic societies. The global trend toward recognizing and promoting press freedom is clear, but it is occurring at different rates in different countries. Other work in the field explores the factors on the individual, organizational, and societal levels that help or hinder journalists seeking to ensure that their work is defined by widely accepted virtues and ethical principles.

• minimizing harm
• public service
• global ethics
• newsgathering standards
• framing effects
• journalism culture
• media technology

Introduction

Potential harm posed by news accounts, the use of deceptive tactics to secure stories, and the increasing prevalence of infotainment content are all examples of journalism ethics issues. In addition to specific practices, the field of journalism ethics also addresses broader theoretical issues such as what roles the news media should play in society, whether the idea of patriotism poses a conflict of interest for journalists, and what might constitute a set of universal or global values to define good journalism across cultures. As a field, journalism ethics spans a wide range of issues from examination of specific case studies that raise questions of privacy and editorial independence, to abstract, normative arguments about how concepts from moral philosophy such as realism, relativism, and the Aristotelian notion of eudaimonia , or flourishing, should inform the work of journalism.

As the idea of journalism has evolved over the centuries, economic imperatives and the desire to be seen as performing “professionalized” work have motivated news publishers and journalists to embrace various standards of behavior. Depending on its cultural context, the idea of journalism emerged from commercial or political “hack” work, where newspapers were entertainment or party organs, to its role in most developed countries as an autonomous broker of information and “watchdog” of power centers on behalf of citizens. As a result, publishers, editors, and writers recognized the value of embracing standards of conduct to build integrity and commercial viability. Journalism ethics scholars and researchers have explored the philosophical underpinnings of these standards, the recurrent failures of news workers to meet them, and the moral obligations of journalism on a societal level.

Ethics and the Journalistic Mission

While ethics is conventionally understood as the work involved to discern “right” actions from wrong, it is more precisely a field of inquiry focused on examining the quality of our deliberations when dealing with moral dilemmas. It is about asking the “right” questions to best illuminate our duties and potential impacts on others. As such, ethics rarely provides clear answers about the best way to handle quandaries. Rather, ethics serves to help us highlight morally relevant issues and come up with optimal defensible decisions. This also describes the field of journalism ethics: while there are some clear rules and standards about how journalists should operate, more common are abstract statements of value that are intended to inform good behavior. Journalism ethics is a distinct subfield of media ethics in that it addresses behavior and dilemmas unique to the practices of gathering and presenting news content. It works within the context of journalism culture that assumes a critical public-service function of the work in a professional or semi-professional setting distinct from marketing or promotional media content. While journalism ethics scholarship draws from moral philosophy in its use of concepts such as autonomy, harm, and justice, it also represents an applied ethics approach, focusing as it often does on case studies and analyses of situations that pose dilemmas involving protection of journalistic credibility or potential harm to story subjects. Ethicists in media often call for a deontological approach in journalism practice—for journalists to be more mindful of these broad duties and less concerned about the consequences of providing the news to the public. True public service, they argue, requires journalists to report the news, as explosive, discomforting, or controversial as it may be, and let the chips fall where they may. The public must decide how that information will be utilized. These ethicists insist that journalists should resist paternalistic impulses and pressure to “sanitize” the news. Despite this general tendency, many journalism ethics codes and standards also include explicitly utilitarian concerns—a recognition that journalists must, of course, be mindful of the consequences of their work, particularly when it comes to potential harmful effects of some information. The tensions created by these two approaches often constitute the heart of many journalism ethics controversies, just as they do in other areas of applied ethics. A look at codes of ethics embraced by various journalistic organizations around the world illustrates how both approaches are invoked. These codes most often avoid clear declarations of prohibitions or required actions, and instead provide aspirational calls for journalists to report the news courageously, to be accountable to the public, and to minimize harm as much as possible. All of these imply a special covenant with the public and an obligation to act in ways that serve more than the commercial interests of individual journalists or news organizations. This includes, as one of the first publishers of the New York Times famously said, to report the news “without fear or favor”—in other words, without being cowed or intimidated by powerful people or institutions who might want to shape the news for their own interests, and also without any agenda to promote any single individual, cause, or policy in the course of reporting. In commercial media systems, the specter of corporate conflict of interest is a recurring journalism ethics issue: corporate media conglomerates use their journalism divisions to promote, in the guise of news content, products or services (such as a film or musical artist) produced by another division. Similarly, nationalized or party-owned news outlets subject to government or political control are typically perceived as lacking sufficient editorial autonomy to report news that may adversely impact those in power. Accountability in journalism most often refers to fulfilling a public-service role in the dissemination of news. It calls for journalists to respond quickly to questions about accuracy, and to acknowledge and correct mistakes. It also implies the notion that journalists wield considerable power in their ability to spotlight and scrutinize the behavior of others, and that they must use that power judiciously. Journalists, consequently, are expected to acknowledge their own ethical lapses, and to apply the same standards of behavior to themselves that they hold for news subjects. Most journalistic ethics codes also call for minimizing harm in the course of news work. Note that the call to minimize harm is distinct from imperatives to “prevent” or “avoid” harm, which are virtually non-existent in journalism. This semantic distinction is deliberate and reflects an acknowledgement that harmful effects are occasionally inevitable in the course of good journalism. Journalistic harm is most conventionally understood as materially “setting back” an important and legitimate “interest” of someone or some group that is the focus of news. Some such harms might be easily defended, such as the economic harm caused by an investigative report on the questionable or illegal practices of a company. Other such harms are more difficult to justify, such as the damage created to someone’s reputation by the disclosure of personal facts not considered very newsworthy. But harm can take many other forms. Ill-considered behavior might result in harm to the individual journalist’s reputation or that of his or her news organization. As with most other lines of work, the ethically questionable behavior of individual actors can easily reflect on—and harm—the profession or field as a whole, reducing trust. The public also can be harmed with misinformation and sensationalistic coverage or content that leaves people with an inaccurate understanding of a topic or issue. In most cases, journalists minimize potential harms by articulating the public value of published information and by considering withholding information that might be less important or relevant for a story. Journalists also consider story “play”—how images and graphics are used as well as story placement and prominence. More recently, journalism ethics discussions and scholarship have emphasized additional values. One is transparency, or being aboveboard in explaining news decisions. For example, recent efforts to revise the code of ethics of the Society for Professional Journalists in the United States resulted in adding the imperative that journalists “be transparent.” In some cases, this has meant inviting the public to observe, either personally or via streaming video, editorial meetings of news organizations. In others, it has meant allowing digital access to databases and other files that are used in building news stories. Another value that has gained in prominence in journalism ethics is community engagement. More journalistic organizations, particularly digital-only news sites, have expressed an obligation to move beyond mere reporting of the news and to make efforts to foster civic participation. At its most basic, this manifests itself through active story comment lines and forums to discuss stories and issues. But it also can include the sponsorship by news organizations of public meetings to address specific issues of concern as well as inviting audience members to “sponsor” an investigative effort, which a news organization, once receiving sufficient financial support, “pledges” to publish.

Journalism and Ethics Frameworks

Much work in journalism ethics is rooted in two predominant strains found in the philosophy of ethics. One is consequentialism , in which much of the moral weight of decisions is placed on the goodness of the outcome. In journalism, this is most clearly illustrated by the focus on possible harms resulting from newsgathering and publishing. The other predominant strain is deontology , or duty-based ethics. Many news outlets and journalism associations have embraced ethics codes that itemize the various duties that responsible journalists must carry out: duty to serve the public, duty to scrutinize centers of power, duty to be as transparent and accountable as possible. But the “third way” in ethics, virtue theory, has recently been gathering prominence in journalism practice as well. Rooted in the work of Aristotle, this approach focuses instead on identifying “virtues”—what it means to be courageous, charitable, honest, and so forth—and articulating how such virtues ought to be manifested in our lives if we are serious about the promotion of human “flourishing.” Insisting that journalists should “be virtuous” may sound like a less-than-useful platitude, but recognizing and living by virtues is far from simple. We would not still be discussing them thousands of years after Aristotle if it were. And as we have seen, ethics is rarely black and white. We must juggle competing claims, weigh various possible harms, articulate often multiple duties—all in the course of just one ethical question. In moral psychology (discussed later in this article), the idea of “moral commitment” is an important one—the degree to which individuals internalize moral principles, or virtues, into their very self-identities, so that those principles almost reflexively inform daily behavior. Moral “exemplars” are those among us who not only internalize these principles, but whose moral development has given them what might be called a highly developed skill of discrimination: the ability to make fine-grained distinctions among similar situations and to thoughtfully respond with just the right mix of appraisals, beliefs, and behavior that still reflect one’s broader moral commitments. This is the more character-driven approach that preoccupies virtue ethicists. One of them, Rosalind Hursthouse ( 1999 , p. 154), argued that the virtues “are not excellences of character, not traits that, by their very nature, make their possessors good and result in good conduct.” Rather, she said we must remember the “Aristotelian idea that each of the virtues involves practical wisdom, the ability to reason correctly about practical matters.” It is more of a “ground-up” approach, rather than the “top-down” approach of duty ethics or the “ends-focused” approach of consequentialism. And for a growing chorus of journalism ethics scholars, it may be the most useful one. “By building from our appreciation of ‘particular facts’ about how the media operate in the contemporary world, we have a more useful starting point for the tangled problems of media ethics than by relying on supposedly consensual norms, rights or obligations,” wrote media ethicist Nick Couldry ( 2013 , p. 42).

A notable example of virtue ethics applied to journalism is offered by media ethicist Sandra Borden. Borden draws on the work of philosopher Alistair MacIntyre, who argues that the ancient Greeks understood the notion of virtues as qualities that were critical to have if one were to perform well in his or her social roles. Aristotle described virtues not as ends in themselves, but as tools to achieve what he said should be our broader aim: “the good life,” or eudaimonia . As individuals, we not only contribute to our own well-being but help bring about such flourishing for all through specialized work that is often referred to as professional behavior. In his landmark book, After Virtue , MacIntyre ( 2007 , p. 187) called this type of work a practice :

By ‘practice’ I . . . mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the end and good involved, are systematically extended.

Such practices, he argued, involve “standards of excellence and obedience to rules” that are aimed at attaining internal goods, or things that contribute to the common good regardless of who actually receives them. Media professionals, when deliberately informing their work with the “standards of excellence” that are attached to their “practices,” are able to deliver public goods such as providing information and analysis that enables the public to participate in a vigorous democratic life. As Borden ( 2007 , p. 16) summarized, “an occupation’s purpose provides it with moral justification, from a virtue perspective, if it can be integrated into a broader conception of what is good for humans.” In her book, Journalism as Practice , she made the compelling case that journalism should indeed be treated as a MacIntyrean practice . Another media ethicist, Victor Pickard ( 2011 , p. 76), eloquently described the “practice” of journalism having internal goods as its aim:

[Journalism] is an essential public service with social benefits that transcend its revenue stream. In its ideal form, journalism creates tremendous positive externalities. It serves as a watchdog over the powerful, covers crucial social issues, and provides a forum for diverse voices and viewpoints. As such, journalism functions as democracy’s critical infrastructure.

Implications of Specific Practices

Due to the ongoing nature and recurring tensions inherent in news work, several specific types of questions and controversies regularly surface. Yet it should be clear that ethics provides no clear-cut solution to cases of the same type; indeed, ethicists often argue for very different resolutions or optimal decisions among similar cases, depending on context and factors that may have more or less importance in different situations. It nonetheless is valuable to note several broad types of journalism ethics questions:

Conflict of interest. As noted previously, corporate and political conflicts of interest commonly raise questions of journalistic autonomy and adherence to ideals of public service. Conflict of interest can also occur at the individual level, where the interests or values of a single journalist might tempt him or her to compromise his or her news judgements. Most journalistic policies require news workers to treat potential appearances of conflict of interest as just as much a threat to credibility as actual conflicts, and, in cases of the latter, to take explicit steps to acknowledge the conflict and to either minimize or eliminate it. In most cases, journalists are expected to recuse themselves from activities that might pose a journalistic conflict. This includes policies that prohibit reporters covering politics from featuring political bumper stickers on their private vehicles.

Minimizing harm. Also as noted, the concept of harm can take many forms, and journalists are regularly called upon to justify their decisions that arguably cause harm to individuals or groups. Photojournalists in war zones and those covering sites of humanitarian tragedy have been challenged, for example, for their decisions to maintain their role as dispassionate witnesses to scenes of human suffering, rather than setting down their cameras and helping those in need. News organizations also have drawn criticism when disclosing secret or classified information that, in the course of informing the public, may arguably harm or undermine national interests.

Balancing privacy interests. Generally, theorists agree that everyone requires a degree of privacy to allow for self-development and to enable individuals to manage their multiple social roles. But with the value of privacy regularly being contested, journalists confront the dilemma of the extent to which respect for individual privacy should determine news coverage. While some scholars have argued that protecting privacy should never be considered the job of the journalist because of myriad and shifting definitions, others emphasize that journalism that respects privacy can encourage civic participation and engagement. Ethics arguments frequently flare over when disclosure of personal information is merited as well as when story subjects arguably seek to dodge accountability by invoking questionable or ill-informed privacy claims.

News frame effects. News content that may have negative effects on society frequently raises ethics questions. For example, psychologists have long warned of the “contagion” effect of coverage of suicide that focuses on the method of death and emotional state of the subject, which may prompt others in a similar emotional state to “copy” the story. Journalists have embraced media guidelines for responsible coverage of suicide as a social-health issue rather than as spectacle. The way an issue in the news is “framed” by story narratives, using factors such as sourcing, point of view, emphasis, and description, can leave audiences with a particular understanding of that issue. Framing of hot-button topics such as gun violence, gender roles, or obesity can serve to emphasize or favor one perspective over another and thus raise ethical questions.

Stereotypes. Relying on or perpetuating gender, racial, or ethnic stereotypes in news stories also can be considered a framing issue, and journalists must be mindful of inadvertent stereotyping. Expediency, narrative brevity, and the press of deadlines often discourage thoughtful considerations of the descriptions used for story subjects, be they local celebrities or police suspects. Research has suggested a consistent gender bias in news descriptions of physicality, emphasizing clothing items for women but not men, for example. Also, consistent focus on race often leaves skewed perceptions of crime patterns in the mind of the public.

Newsgathering techniques. What methods are justifiable in the collection of information valuable to the public? Classic what-ends-justify-the-means questions regularly confront journalists. While absolutist policies are rare, many news organizations refuse to pay for news or interviews, though tabloid outlets commonly do so. The concern is that sources with a financial incentive may be tempted to embellish, alter, or even fabricate facts and events, thereby undermining the journalistic enterprise. In some developing countries, such as Kenya, China, and India, money is regularly passed to individual journalists to curry favor and secure positive treatment. With celebrity periodicals, where exposure has created its own competitive market among a finite pool of public figures, payment for attention has become more removed from objective newsworthiness standards. The use of deceptive tactics, such as hidden cameras, also raises ethical questions. Several journalistic organizations have adopted policies stating that hidden cameras should be used only as a last resort and only when the information sought has high potential value for the public. Similar policies apply to journalists misrepresenting themselves to access information.

Graphic images. The publication of photos that depict gore, violence, and suffering regularly raises ethical questions for news journalists. Such questions become particularly heated during times of war or conflict, and when patriotic sentiments may bring added pressure to bear on journalists to depict the “right” story and avoid using images that audiences might perceive to be demoralizing. Claims that graphic images can be offensive, harmful, or unnecessary clash with concerns that avoiding such images risks sanitizing or propagandizing the news, which can easily undermine journalistic credibility. As with other journalistic ethics issues, the controversies over the publication of graphic images reflect diametric approaches within ethics itself: A utilitarian concern focused on minimizing harmful consequences of a decision versus a deontological ethos that calls for depicting the news with courage and relying on audiences to make their own decisions about the value of such images.

Ethics and Journalism Sociology

A variety of factors influences and even determines the behavior of journalists. The professional, cultural, and organizational environments in which journalists work have been referred to as their “moral ecology,” a recognition that news workers, like everyone else, do not operate in a self-defined vacuum, and that individual beliefs and predispositions are routinely subsumed by broader processes of socialization that can both help and hinder the exercise of ethical reasoning skills and moral autonomy. Thus, normative claims about what journalists should or should not do in the course of their work must rest not on assumptions that journalists are guided solely by personal beliefs but on an appreciation of these socialization processes. For example, journalists are criticized for advancing a “news agenda” reflecting their personal biases, but such claims often ignore how the broader constraints of the news decision-making process (e.g., the requirements of video production on deadline), organizational structure (e.g., the allocation of resources intended to produce one type of news content over another), or professional culture (e.g., the internal system of sanctions and rewards from editors based on impartiality of work) function as much greater influences. That moral ecology, of course, varies widely around the globe. Journalism sociology research over the years has identified broad “levels” or categories of factors that influence the production of news, generally distinguishing among individual-, organizational-, and societal-level spheres. For example, the ongoing “Worlds of Journalism” project examining news work across cultures has identified six levels of influence:

The individual level includes personal opinions, values, and demographic data as well as information on specific roles and occupational characteristics within a news organization.

The media routines level includes deadlines, production procedures, and standards and other constraints posed by newsgathering practices.

The organizational level includes technological imperatives, advertising or revenue considerations, and editorial decision-making.

The media structures level includes the economic model of news that entails profitability and resource allocation as realities in the relatively high costs of news production.

The systemic level includes national-level data such as regulatory policies, ideological assumptions, and degree of press freedoms.

Reference groups constitute a dimension that spans professional and personal domains to include competing news organizations, audiences, colleagues, friends, and family members.

In much research on journalism culture since the late 20th century, organizational- and societal-level factors have been found to be stronger influences on news content than individual-level factors, suggesting a hierarchical structure of influences in which the higher the level, the stronger the influence. However, no definitive model of influence has emerged.

Media Technology

The proliferation of online media has resulted in a host of new complications for journalists and news organizations. While traditional ethical concepts do not fundamentally change when information is delivered online, the ease and ubiquity of digital media provide new ways of interacting with audience members and story subjects. And everyone is tempted to do things he or she may not otherwise contemplate without the speed and ease of media technology. As one media ethics scholar noted, “Deceptive behavior in cyberspace is . . . not a new moral issue though it raises the problem of ‘moral distance’ with extra urgency . . . The speed of digital communication does not create new forms of immorality, but makes it possible to commit immoral acts so fast one hardly notices” ( 2000 , pp. 34–35). For example, the issue of corrections and retractions in digital journalism has received considerable attention.

Generally, many journalistic organizations, such as the Canadian Association of Journalists, have adopted policies against “unpublishing” erroneous reports from their archives and instead amending corrections to them. News organizations also have felt increasing pressure from story subjects who are embarrassed by content and argue that it is unfair for the news organizations to archive material long after it is no longer relevant. But allowing individuals to “scrub” the public record for their own interests raises deeper questions about the value of independently curated public information, and it also can threaten a key aspect of the journalistic mission, which is to document history. As one journalism educator has said, “Source remorse is not a reason to unpublish.” Unpublishing material also does little to eliminate the “echoes” that likely exist all over the Web on search engines, blogs, and other news sites. Better to correct or amend the existing archived material, which both preserves the integrity of the journalistic process and also fosters credibility through transparent action. For instance, editors at the Boston Globe cited the latter for their decision to correct, but not remove, a live blog post erroneously stating that an arrest had been made shortly after the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013 . In rare cases, a news organization may consider unpublishing a story that is judged to be unethical or even be questionable legally, or when continued accessibility of an archived story may pose a real threat to someone’s well-being. In such cases, many policies urge journalists to look for evidence of concrete harm, such a doctor’s opinion, and for any such decisions to unpublish to be made by consensus, never leaving them to a single person.

The immediacy provided by media technology has enabled journalists to increase their relevance and value and to foster new forms of interaction with audiences. It also can encourage broad collaborative efforts with non-journalists whose perspectives and information can augment journalistic efforts. But that very immediacy can threaten to become deterministic —the value of now can displace ethical concerns of credibility, verification, and care. In the rush to be a part of the conversation and buzz on breaking stories, many news organizations have fallen victim to all stripes of hoaxes. “The development of social networks for real-time news and information, and the integration of social media content in the news media, creates tensions for a profession based on a discipline of verification,” said journalism technology scholar Alfred Hermida. News sites around the world, for example, circulated what turned out to be a fake photo of Osama Bin Laden’s body soon after his death in May 2011 . The immediacy of digital technology tempts journalists to post, share, and verify later—often at the cost of their long-term credibility. This risk of compromised integrity or even partiality is a serious concern reflected in the social media policies of most news organizations. The notion of technological determinism—that values emphasized by technology such as convenience tempt us to set aside other values such as respect, conscientiousness, and even safety—has resulted in abetting the perilous impulse in a competitive media system of getting it first rather than getting it right. Critic Evgeny Morozov ( 2011 , p. xvi) calls this “cyber-centrism,” or our tendency to “prioritize the tool over the environment.” The integration of social media also has required journalists to resist the temptation for informality. Several news organizations have adopted explicit policies that reinforce how traditional concerns of ethics as well as etiquette apply to social media. For example, the Associated Press cautions its writers about the peril residing in too-informal use of Twitter:

Twitter, in particular, can present some challenges—with a tight character count and no way to modulate your body language or the volume and tone of your voice, requests that are intended to be sensitive can come across as cold or even demanding. Think about how your tweet would come across if spoken with an angry voice, because that’s just how the recipient may hear it in his head.

Media technology has collapsed time and space in the exchange of information, but it also has arguably initiated a reformation of communication structures. No longer is the news media system a “closed” one in which journalists serve a central gatekeeping function; now we have an “open” system in which the sourcing and distribution of information has been radically democratized and globalized. As many theorists have said, we now have a networked society. Journalists and journalistic brands are now just single nodes among a constellation of voices and sources, all moving in a “shared” information space. This, writes scholar Ansgard Heinrich, “sketches the evolution of an interactive sphere that, at least in theory, fosters a greater level of interaction and exchange. Connection, interaction, and collaboration are the markers of this shift.” This transformation, however, poses many questions for journalism as it has been conventionally understood, in the form of print newspapers and broadcast networks. Who do you link to? How do you distinguish between activist bloggers and more dispassionate collaborators? Do these distinctions matter anymore? And in this new “network journalism,” how are journalists to act responsibly in what is now a global sphere? Scholars have begun insisting that journalists have a responsibility to be more cosmopolitan in their outlook and their framing of news, and to work harder to transcend the “nationalistic” lenses that have traditionally dominated news narratives. As Heinrich argues, “This nationally inward looking focus of news reporting, however, does not do justice to a world (1) where events in one corner of the world might affect the other; (2) where news stories produced by one outlet are not restricted in access to ‘local,’ i.e., national audiences; and (3) in which many voices roam through the spheres of a digitally connected world that might provide an alternative take on a news story.” Globally responsible journalists, then, must break out of the tradition of foreign correspondent narratives that focus almost exclusively on elite or official sources and on how events impact a particular nation, instead engaging in the multitude of activist and “unofficial” sources that provide often competing narratives.

Global Journalism Ethics Theorizing

Much journalism ethics theorizing since the end of the 20th century has been preoccupied with the desire to establish viable ethical norms that transcend cultural boundaries and reflect what one researcher referred to as an empirical trend toward “ever-increasing globalization of journalism standards.” Some of this work calls for a media system that relies on a framework of international human rights, or a general veneration of human life, to guide news work regardless of culture. Others have called for a “modified contractualist” approach that would respect differing cultural manifestations of broad principles. Still others insist that any such global framework reject Enlightenment assumptions of the primacy of individual rights and rationality. Too often, claims of journalism standards of behavior remain rooted in Western cultural assumptions and are imperialistically imposed onto non-Western cultures in which the values of social stability and collective well-being replace individualistic models. As one scholar observed, “It is a global reality that the common concerns we have as human beings coexist with differences of ethical thinking and priorities in different cultures. This coexistence of common ground and different places plays out in the work of journalists across the world.” Notwithstanding the rarity with which the value of press freedom is enshrined in Western media systems, American and European scholars and journalistic organizations continue to dominate journalism ethics discourse. As a result, that discourse is focused on protecting journalistic functions with the rule of law and insulating them from power and identity politics. The European Federation of Journalists, for example, released a report in 2015 examining the effects of chronic corruption in 18 countries, noting how “media managers are doing ‘deals’ with advertisers to carry paid-for material disguised as news, how editors are being bribed by politicians or corporate managers and how this whole process makes it increasingly difficult to separate journalism from propaganda from public relations.” But voices from other parts of the world are joining the discourse on press freedom and journalism ethics. Many sociology and philosophy scholars on the African continent have offered critiques of postcolonial systems to promote journalism institutions (e.g., Kasoma, 1996 ; Wasserman, 2006 ). In 2015 , the Journal of Media Ethics published a special issue devoted to the notion of ubuntu as a guiding framework for media practice—the idea common among several south African cultures that individual flourishing is possible only through community belonging and social identity. The widespread practice of journalists accepting gifts and cash in exchange for favorable treatment—called “brown-envelope” journalism in Nigeria and “red-envelope” journalism in China—is receiving an increased amount of attention by journalism sociology scholars around the world (Xu, 2016 ). The practice in China was an intrinsic part of the commercialization of the media system in China beginning in the 1980s, and was actually initiated by foreign companies to entice journalists to attend press conferences (Zhao, 1998 ).

Cultural diversity notwithstanding, research worldwide has identified several key areas and concepts that concern journalists across cultures. These include truth-telling, accuracy, factualness, objectivity, credibility, balance, verification, independence, fairness, accountability, honesty, and respect. Of course, many of these overlap, and they can apply to one or more of the influence levels referred to previously. But many journalism ethics scholars agree that these are not enough. It is shared moral principles, rather than agreed-upon practices, that can bind responsible journalists around the world in ethical solidarity. As scholar Clifford Christians ( 2010 , p. 6) argues:

Without a defensible conception of the good, our practices are arbitrary. How can we condemn violent practices such as suicide bombings in the name of jihad except through widely accepted principles? We are stunned at the blatant greed and plundering of the earth, but without norms we are only elitists and hot-tempered moralists. Conflicts among people, communities, and nations need principles other than their own for their resolution. A credible ethics, as a minimum, must be transnational in character.

Christians and others argue that such a global media ethic cannot start with conventional morality that assumes a superior rationality, such as that of Kant. Instead, it must begin with a much more “naturalistic” principle: universal human solidarity, which prioritizes human dignity, truth, and nonviolence, all of which are grounded in the notion of the sacredness of life. In addition to this notion, scholars point to the fundamentally social reality of human existence—that despite the predominance of Western individualism, our realities and even our identities are arguably rooted in interaction and community belonging. In this reality, communication is central, as it is through exchange that we understand ourselves and we see the importance of “the Other”—individuals we encounter who may not share our culture or perspective, but whose existence requires respect and validation. Again, Christians, drawing on a long line of earlier philosophers, explains: “Communication is not the transference of knowledge but a dialogic encounter of subjects creating it together.” This leads us to a framework of “anthropological realism” that provides a hopeful basis for a global media ethic. It is anthropological in nature because it is rooted in the realities of human existence rather than claims about any rationalistic ideals. It is realist in that it insists morality has an explicit character that exists independently of our perceptions and judgements. For the moral realist, moral claims of rightness or wrongness are true regardless of any beliefs an individual might have about them. The casual observer, however, might see an immediate problem with such a framework, a problem wrestled with by philosophers since antiquity: what exactly is the nature of the “good” and how do we apprehend it? Is there more to a moral claim than a sort of intuition that we just know right from wrong? And how might journalists articulate this framework of moral realism in the judgements they make about news, about ethnic conflict, about graphic images? In journalism ethics scholarship, these debates continue.

Moral Psychology Research

Broad-brushed, deductive theorizing such as that discussed previously is one active area of journalism ethics research. But other researchers are increasingly acknowledging the need for more empirical work that seeks to better understand ethical reasoning processes on the ground by bringing long-established psychology measurements to bear. This moral psychology research draws on important philosophical concepts as well as instruments that assess beliefs, attitudes, and dispositions to explore possible patterns and relationships among factors in ethical decision-making. Recent cross-cultural research involving interviewing journalists around the globe, led by German researcher Thomas Hanitzsch, suggests that they perceive notions of objectivity, accuracy, and truth-telling as “core elements” of a widely accepted ethic for journalism practice. Journalists, of course, have been socialized into these norms through formal journalism education as well as through immersion in the newsroom culture, with its internal system of sanctions and rewards by peers and superiors based on the perceived quality of one’s work. Other researchers emphasize that social psychological processes resulting in bias perceptions, such as social validation and attitude stabilization, also must be recognized as evident in the work of journalists.

Moral development theory provides several models to help explain how individuals’ moral agency and sense of morality evolve over the course of a lifetime. The most widely cited moral development theory is that of Lawrence Kohlberg, who has argued that our moral development is tied largely to two factors. One is the degree to which we internalize moral principles that apply to all and move away from relativistic thinking—the notion that moral decisions regarding what is “right” are strictly “relative” to one’s own personal values rather than any broader moral principles. The other, closely related to the first, is the sophistication and scope of our understanding of the concept of justice. Our moral development, Kohlberg argues, can be assessed as existing in one of six stages. Based on Kohlberg’s theory, researchers have refined and widely used a survey instrument that measures one’s moral reasoning skills based on these two factors. By assessing the frequency with which respondents draw on higher-order justifications when presented with a moral dilemma, the Defining Issues Test (DIT) has enabled researchers to assess the moral-reasoning skills of various populations such as professional groups. Media researchers Lee Wilkins and Renita Coleman pioneered the application of the DIT to journalists and other media workers, concluding that, because journalists routinely encountered ethical questions in the course of their work, their moral reasoning skills were relatively high compared with workers in other professions.

Another moral psychology instrument that has proven useful in journalism ethics research is the Ethics Position Questionnaire (EPQ) developed by Donelson Forsyth. Because people’s responses to ethical dilemmas are influenced by their worldviews, understanding the basic elements of their outlooks can illuminate the thrust of their ethical judgements. Two such basic elements are key to individuals’ “ethical ideologies.” One is how idealistic they are—that is, to what extent are they optimistic about the actions of others, and to what extent are they concerned about minimizing harm or are more accepting of harmful effects if positive consequences are believed to outweigh them. Another basic element is how relativistic they are—whether they tend to make judgements based primarily on their own interests and perceptions of “rightness” that are relative to their own standing or views, or whether they tend to draw on broader, universal principles to decide what’s ethically justifiable. Using some key items from the Forsyth instrument, the “Worlds of Journalism” project found that most journalists in the 20 countries surveyed tend to embrace universal principles that should be followed regardless of situation and context. They also agreed on the importance of avoiding questionable methods of reporting, even if this means not getting the story. Much less approval—although the extent of it varied between countries—could be found regarding how much personal latitude journalists should have in solving these problems. This desire for flexibility reflects the longstanding tension in ethics between desirable ends and questionable means, as discussed. Many journalists think that in certain situations, some harm to others would be justified if the result supports a greater public good. News workers in Western countries are more likely to disapprove of a contextual and situational ethics. This attitude, however, also exists in non-Western contexts, though less strongly. Chinese, Pakistani, and Russian journalists, on the other hand, tend to be most open to situational ethical practices. Consistent with this result, interviewees in Western contexts showed little support for the idea that journalists should be allowed to set their own individual ethical standards. Similarities between journalists from Western countries also exist with regard to idealism. Although journalists in all countries agreed on the view that questionable methods of reporting should be avoided, those working in Western contexts appreciate this idea more than their colleagues in a developmental and transitional environment. Regarding the acceptance of harmful consequences of reporting for the sake of a greater public good, journalists in most Western countries—but also their colleagues in Brazil, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, and Uganda—tend to keep all options on the table. Journalists in Bulgaria, Chile, China, Egypt, Romania, and Russia, on the other hand, exhibit a greater willingness to accept harmful consequences in the course of newsgathering and reporting.

In a study of journalism “exemplars” in the United States—reporters and editors widely respected for their accomplishments and ethical leadership—media ethicist Patrick Plaisance used both the Defining Issues Test and the Ethics Position Questionnaire, along with several other moral psychology instruments. Regarding the journalism exemplars’ moral reasoning, Plaisance found their DIT scores were indeed higher than that of journalists on average. Regarding the EPQ, the journalism exemplars uniformly rejected relativistic thinking as well. There was also a negative relationship between the journalism exemplars’ DIT scores and their degree of idealistic thinking. That is, the higher the exemplars score on the Defining Issues Test, the less they appear to embrace idealistic thinking. This may first appear counterintuitive; it might stand to reason that people with higher DIT scores, associated as they are with greater application of universal principles in moral judgements, also would be rather idealistic in their outlooks. However, it is important to remember that all of the exemplars scored low in relativistic thinking; so the issue is not that the exemplars would be more or less Machiavellian depending on their DIT scores, but to what degree their belief in universal moral standards, and perhaps primarily their concern for harming others, could be applied rigidly or not. The negative correlation with moral-reasoning scores, then, arguably reinforces the suggestion of comparatively greater moral development in that exemplars with the higher DIT scores exhibit a greater ability to adapt their principles to best fit the often complex range of contingencies in which they find themselves having to work. In other words, they are too wise to believe they can insist on a rigid application of moral rules that can fit all circumstances and have become more adept at making the kind of carefully considered, fine-grained distinctions frequently found among moral exemplars of all walks of life.

Other Resources

African Media Initiative of the Ethical Journalism Network .

Center for International Media Ethics .

Ethical Journalism Network corruption report .

European Federation of Journalists .

Sinnott-Armstrong, W. (2012, Winter). Consequentialism . In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Society for Professional Journalists Code of Ethics .

Steiner, L. (1989). Feminist theorizing and communication ethics. Communication , 12 , 157–173.

Wasserman, H. (2006). Have ethics, will travel: The glocalization of media ethics from an African perspective .

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From the editor: NPR's Uri Berliner paid a big price for speaking out; we owe him a listen

Andy Warhol predicted everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. For former NPR staffer Uri Berliner, the spotlight burned hot for more than a week.

The reverberations in newsrooms across the country, I predict, will last a lot longer.

For those unfamiliar, Berliner was a senior business editor at National Public Radio. In an April 9 essay published in The Free Press , he criticized NPR for losing its way during the Trump presidency, blaming a lack of viewpoint diversity and an increasing lean toward advocacy journalism. As examples, he cited the network’s reporting on Trump’s ties to Russia, which he deemed unbalanced, and said NPR initially treated the discovery of Hunter Biden’s laptop as a distraction.

"An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America," Berliner wrote.

NPR’s critics and a host of conservative pundits celebrated Berliner as a whistleblower. On his Truth Social platform, Trump called NPR a “liberal disinformation machine” and demanded the government pull its funding. NPR went into full damage-control mode. Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep took to his Substack and wrote what amounted to a line-by-line rebuttal , offering a master’s class in impeaching a witness.

Eight days later, Berliner resigned , ending his 25-year career at NPR.

As a journalist who spent five years working for another Washington-based national news outlet, USA TODAY, and one who often writes in this publication about the need for the press to rebuild trust , I’d like to share some thoughts on Berliner’s essay and the aftermath. But first, some disclaimers. My opinions are my own, based on my experiences; I don’t speak for my employer or my colleagues, past or present. Also, I serve on the board of Cincinnati Public Radio, which airs NPR programming locally. And finally, this is a complicated and nuanced topic for me to cover in a 900-word column. (Berliner’s essay was 3,500 words, for comparison.) I encourage you to read Berliner’s piece in its entirety , along with Inskeep’s response and the letter from NPR President and CEO Katherine Maher to all staff , which was published on NPR’s website. With that out of the way …

From the editor: Candid reflection from an ‘enemy of the people’

Berliner’s essay certainly can be picked apart, but it shouldn’t be dismissed. It’s overarching clarion call rang true for me, reminding me of times when the political polarization of our country uncomfortably seeped into the newsrooms I’ve worked in.

At USA TODAY, I was one of the editors who oversaw a report in 2016 that analyzed Trump’s involvement in more than 3,500 lawsuits over three decades , an unprecedented number for a presidential candidate. One high-ranking editor, who is no longer with the organization, took things a step too far in my opinion when she said in a planning meeting that she hoped the story would derail Trump’s campaign. She, of course, was entitled to her own political viewpoint, but those of us who choose this profession must put personal convictions aside and present the facts without judgement − which ultimately the story did, a testimony to the professionalism of the reporters who did the heavy lifting and worked to present a balanced report. But the "unspoken consensus" that Berliner described at NPR can easily take over a newsroom if left unchallenged.

My concern with Berliner’s essay is that it leads the reader to believe the introspection he calls for isn’t happening at NPR. Based on the response from Maher and NPR staffers I know personally, it has been, and I can vouch that it’s happening in the company that employs me, as well. In 2021, The Enquirer participated in an effort called Re-engaging the Right , during which hundreds of conservative news consumers were interviewed so we could better understand perceptions of bias and how to restore trust. We learned a lot, and I hope it’s evident in our political reporting today. But we’re not perfect, and I always appreciate it when readers take the time to point out where we’ve fallen short.  

One of my takeaways from the Re-engaging the Right feedback was that national news organizations often fail the sniff test when accused of promoting an agenda. Here’s an exercise you can try to illustrate the point.

Go to NPR.org and search “immigrant.” When I did so this week, the first story that came up was about a proposal in Massachusetts to allow migrants to work legally , regardless of their immigration status. The rest of the search results also could be described as sympathetic to migrants. Do the same at FoxNews.com. The top result when I searched was a story about an illegal immigrant charged with a sex crime in Connecticut , and the next five items also were crime stories involving immigrants. Try this exercise with other politicized search terms, and you’ll see a similar pattern. Viewed individually, the stories are factual and stand up to review. But taken as a whole, it’s obvious which way each news source leans politically, and that’s a problem.

It's too soon to arrive at a final thought on the Berliner dust-up, but one thing is clear: NPR and other news organizations should resist the urge to circle the wagons and err on the side of listening. There are lessons to be learned.

Enquirer Executive Editor Beryl Love writes a biweekly column that takes you behind the scenes at The Enquirer. Occasionally, he shares his thoughts on local issues, particularly as they pertain to a free press and open government. Love also serves as regional editor for the USA TODAY Network Ohio. Email him at [email protected]. He can’t respond personally to every email, but he reads them all.

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How Pew Research Center will report on generations moving forward

Journalists, researchers and the public often look at society through the lens of generation, using terms like Millennial or Gen Z to describe groups of similarly aged people. This approach can help readers see themselves in the data and assess where we are and where we’re headed as a country.

Pew Research Center has been at the forefront of generational research over the years, telling the story of Millennials as they came of age politically and as they moved more firmly into adult life . In recent years, we’ve also been eager to learn about Gen Z as the leading edge of this generation moves into adulthood.

But generational research has become a crowded arena. The field has been flooded with content that’s often sold as research but is more like clickbait or marketing mythology. There’s also been a growing chorus of criticism about generational research and generational labels in particular.

Recently, as we were preparing to embark on a major research project related to Gen Z, we decided to take a step back and consider how we can study generations in a way that aligns with our values of accuracy, rigor and providing a foundation of facts that enriches the public dialogue.

A typical generation spans 15 to 18 years. As many critics of generational research point out, there is great diversity of thought, experience and behavior within generations.

We set out on a yearlong process of assessing the landscape of generational research. We spoke with experts from outside Pew Research Center, including those who have been publicly critical of our generational analysis, to get their take on the pros and cons of this type of work. We invested in methodological testing to determine whether we could compare findings from our earlier telephone surveys to the online ones we’re conducting now. And we experimented with higher-level statistical analyses that would allow us to isolate the effect of generation.

What emerged from this process was a set of clear guidelines that will help frame our approach going forward. Many of these are principles we’ve always adhered to , but others will require us to change the way we’ve been doing things in recent years.

Here’s a short overview of how we’ll approach generational research in the future:

We’ll only do generational analysis when we have historical data that allows us to compare generations at similar stages of life. When comparing generations, it’s crucial to control for age. In other words, researchers need to look at each generation or age cohort at a similar point in the life cycle. (“Age cohort” is a fancy way of referring to a group of people who were born around the same time.)

When doing this kind of research, the question isn’t whether young adults today are different from middle-aged or older adults today. The question is whether young adults today are different from young adults at some specific point in the past.

To answer this question, it’s necessary to have data that’s been collected over a considerable amount of time – think decades. Standard surveys don’t allow for this type of analysis. We can look at differences across age groups, but we can’t compare age groups over time.

Another complication is that the surveys we conducted 20 or 30 years ago aren’t usually comparable enough to the surveys we’re doing today. Our earlier surveys were done over the phone, and we’ve since transitioned to our nationally representative online survey panel , the American Trends Panel . Our internal testing showed that on many topics, respondents answer questions differently depending on the way they’re being interviewed. So we can’t use most of our surveys from the late 1980s and early 2000s to compare Gen Z with Millennials and Gen Xers at a similar stage of life.

This means that most generational analysis we do will use datasets that have employed similar methodologies over a long period of time, such as surveys from the U.S. Census Bureau. A good example is our 2020 report on Millennial families , which used census data going back to the late 1960s. The report showed that Millennials are marrying and forming families at a much different pace than the generations that came before them.

Even when we have historical data, we will attempt to control for other factors beyond age in making generational comparisons. If we accept that there are real differences across generations, we’re basically saying that people who were born around the same time share certain attitudes or beliefs – and that their views have been influenced by external forces that uniquely shaped them during their formative years. Those forces may have been social changes, economic circumstances, technological advances or political movements.

When we see that younger adults have different views than their older counterparts, it may be driven by their demographic traits rather than the fact that they belong to a particular generation.

The tricky part is isolating those forces from events or circumstances that have affected all age groups, not just one generation. These are often called “period effects.” An example of a period effect is the Watergate scandal, which drove down trust in government among all age groups. Differences in trust across age groups in the wake of Watergate shouldn’t be attributed to the outsize impact that event had on one age group or another, because the change occurred across the board.

Changing demographics also may play a role in patterns that might at first seem like generational differences. We know that the United States has become more racially and ethnically diverse in recent decades, and that race and ethnicity are linked with certain key social and political views. When we see that younger adults have different views than their older counterparts, it may be driven by their demographic traits rather than the fact that they belong to a particular generation.

Controlling for these factors can involve complicated statistical analysis that helps determine whether the differences we see across age groups are indeed due to generation or not. This additional step adds rigor to the process. Unfortunately, it’s often absent from current discussions about Gen Z, Millennials and other generations.

When we can’t do generational analysis, we still see value in looking at differences by age and will do so where it makes sense. Age is one of the most common predictors of differences in attitudes and behaviors. And even if age gaps aren’t rooted in generational differences, they can still be illuminating. They help us understand how people across the age spectrum are responding to key trends, technological breakthroughs and historical events.

Each stage of life comes with a unique set of experiences. Young adults are often at the leading edge of changing attitudes on emerging social trends. Take views on same-sex marriage , for example, or attitudes about gender identity .

Many middle-aged adults, in turn, face the challenge of raising children while also providing care and support to their aging parents. And older adults have their own obstacles and opportunities. All of these stories – rooted in the life cycle, not in generations – are important and compelling, and we can tell them by analyzing our surveys at any given point in time.

When we do have the data to study groups of similarly aged people over time, we won’t always default to using the standard generational definitions and labels. While generational labels are simple and catchy, there are other ways to analyze age cohorts. For example, some observers have suggested grouping people by the decade in which they were born. This would create narrower cohorts in which the members may share more in common. People could also be grouped relative to their age during key historical events (such as the Great Recession or the COVID-19 pandemic) or technological innovations (like the invention of the iPhone).

By choosing not to use the standard generational labels when they’re not appropriate, we can avoid reinforcing harmful stereotypes or oversimplifying people’s complex lived experiences.

Existing generational definitions also may be too broad and arbitrary to capture differences that exist among narrower cohorts. A typical generation spans 15 to 18 years. As many critics of generational research point out, there is great diversity of thought, experience and behavior within generations. The key is to pick a lens that’s most appropriate for the research question that’s being studied. If we’re looking at political views and how they’ve shifted over time, for example, we might group people together according to the first presidential election in which they were eligible to vote.

With these considerations in mind, our audiences should not expect to see a lot of new research coming out of Pew Research Center that uses the generational lens. We’ll only talk about generations when it adds value, advances important national debates and highlights meaningful societal trends.

• Age & Generations
• Demographic Research
• Generation X
• Generation Z
• Generations
• Greatest Generation
• Methodological Research
• Millennials
• Silent Generation

Kim Parker is director of social trends research at Pew Research Center

How Teens and Parents Approach Screen Time

Who are you the art and science of measuring identity, u.s. centenarian population is projected to quadruple over the next 30 years, older workers are growing in number and earning higher wages, teens, social media and technology 2023, most popular.

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Opinion Here’s why Uri Berliner couldn’t stay at NPR

Uri Berliner is offended.

In an April 9 essay in the Free Press, Berliner, who worked at NPR for 25 years, raps his employer for allegedly running a newsroom fueled by progressive sensibilities that seep into a skewed on-air product. Stories on Trump-Russia, Hunter Biden and covid-19 have all suffered from acute NPRitis, he writes. And racial and identity considerations — as well as affinity groups — shape workplace culture.

The essay triggered a bona fide media drama that concluded on Wednesday with Berliner’s resignation. On his way out, he delivered a parting shot at CEO Katherine Maher. “I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new C.E.O. whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my Free Press essay,” Berliner wrote on X .

Just what had Maher done to deserve such a diss? She had published a statement pushing back against Berliner’s essay : “Questioning whether our people are serving our mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity, is profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.” As NPR’s own David Folkenflik reported, Berliner took exception to that commentary.

Which is to say, Berliner is now an expert in disparagement and umbrage. In his Free Press essay, he deplores his colleagues’ “advocacy” and alleges that it had “veered toward efforts to damage or topple [Donald] Trump’s presidency.”

Now that is disparagement. Even in the rough-and-tumble world of journalism, slamming your colleagues for their published work — especially in another outlet — is a rare undertaking. As Berliner suggests in his essay, it was something of a last resort, considering that he had raised his concerns internally to little effect. He invited people to sample NPR’s coverage and “make their own judgment.”

Invitation accepted. Over the past several days, I have sifted through roughly three years’ worth of NPR’s coverage of Russiagate, the effort by federal investigators and the media to discover the truth about the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia. Since NPR’s alleged tilt on this story serves as Exhibit No. 1 in Berliner’s onslaught — and since it’s central to the claim that the network sought to topple Trump — I chose to limit my efforts to this portion of the essay.

And what a portion it is! The NPR Russia-Trump coverage plume under fire from Berliner consists of thousands of articles, podcasts, segments and so on. Berliner links to one . His serious allegations, accordingly, are backed by scant evidence, if any at all. It’s a lazy, summary approach to evaluating a large body of work — a feelings-based critique of the sort that passes for media reporting these days. Too often, essayists write their conclusory broadsides against this or that outlet, confident in the knowledge that their fellow ideological travelers will applaud no matter how threadbare the supporting material.

Berliner’s opus was published by the Free Press , an outlet dedicated to covering stories “ignored or misconstrued in the service of an ideological narrative” — and not by NPR, which requires infinitely greater substantiation for its media reporting, whether the crisis lies in its own newsroom or somewhere else.

The irony there: Berliner has edited many of the stories carrying the byline of Folkenflik, NPR’s media correspondent. He knows better.

Here’s how Berliner supports his conclusions on NPR’s Russia work: Rep. Adam “Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.”

Yes, Schiff is a recurring presence in the broadcasts. “Like many broadcast news organizations, NPR interviewed Rep. Schiff often during the Trump administration, as he was a principal figure in the Russian interference investigation — a story we covered with caution and perspective,” says an NPR spokesperson in a statement. “Rep. Schiff’s perspective was only one element of our coverage of the Russian interference story, in no way did he commandeer the reporting of NPR.” According to the spokesperson, NPR did 900 interviews with congressional lawmakers between January 2017 and December 2019 — including Paul Ryan , Jim Jordan , Eric Swalwell and others.

Numbers matter less than the content of those Schiff interviews, which tend toward procedural mishmash, recitation of previously reported revelations and the centrality of oversight. In this interview , Schiff says that if former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort cooperates with authorities, “we could learn a lot more.” In this one , the congressman speaks to his committee’s investigative imperatives: “I think we need to use subpoenas, and we need to stand up and say, we’re going to get the answers here.” In this one , Schiff is asked whether Trump gets “especially agitated” when the topic turns to Russia. “Well, absolutely,” he responds.

Is this the prejudicial poison of which Berliner writes? I asked him to supply instances in which Schiff’s talking points suffused NPR’s independent reporting. After several emails and a phone call, Berliner hasn’t responded with supporting material.

Had NPR wished to addle its lefty audience with suggestive reporting about Trump’s alleged criminality regarding Russia, it had a tool at its disposal. The so-called Steele dossier, published in early January 2017 by BuzzFeed News, contained explosive allegations presented by a former British intelligence officer. Various news outlets and commentators bathed the dossier in credibility it didn’t deserve, as noted in an extensive thread by Drew Holden and a series in this space . Top offenders include McClatchy, which ran stories bolstering the dossier’s claims that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen had traveled to Prague for collusive business; and dossier believer in chief Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, who cheered for the document throughout Russiagate.

NPR’s dossier work was by no means perfect. “Fresh Air” host Terry Gross, for example, occasionally failed to properly smack down dossier boosters during interviews. Yet the outlet was careful to avoid McClatchy’s “scoops” on Cohen and otherwise to cordon off its descriptions of the dossier with police tape. “NPR has never detailed the document because so much of it remains unproved,” reads a 2019 NPR story . The NPR spokesperson said in a statement: “We were not able to find any examples of NPR corroborating unconfirmed elements of the Trump dossier."

As further evidence of his employer’s errant ways, Berliner argues that after the Mueller report found “no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.” It’s an immutable law of media physics, of course, that coverage peters out when a story comes to an end. Who, after all, is doing continuing coverage of Abscam these days?

But there’s more flimsiness afoot here. Berliner’s dismissal of Robert S. Mueller III’s findings — technically misguided, because the special counsel’s investigation didn’t apply the “concept of 'collusion’” in its work — leaves the impression that the media’s pursuit of the various Russiagate strands was a fool’s errand. In fact, journalists as well as official investigations documented a spreadsheet’s worth of scandalous activity that didn’t amount to an international conspiracy, in Mueller’s view. Trump will have you believe that the absence of criminality signifies the absence of wrongdoing, a logical atrocity abetted by Berliner’s essay.

Ditching the nitty-gritty, Berliner’s claim of an NPR campaign to “topple” Trump grinds against the measured claims in NPR’s day-to-day coverage. Examples abound. In this segment , NPR correspondents struggle to wrap their heads around the just-released Mueller report. In this one , NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly interviews a former CIA official who presciently shoots down liberal fever dreams related to Russia and Trump. In this piece , published months before the Mueller report, an NPR editor argues that the Russia case is “weakening” and even attributes an “important kernel of truth” to the famous tweet by Trump citing “No Smocking Gun … No Collusion.” This piece highlights Trump’s point of view regarding the Mueller investigation. And this one bears the headline “Trumps Exult Following Reports Of No Phone Contact Ahead Of 2016 Russia Meeting.”

After the Russia experience, writes Berliner, NPR compounded its mistakes by moving on with “no mea culpas, no self-reflection.” By all means, self-reflect — it’s a good step for any news organization after a big story. Presumably, Berliner would have supplied various URLs for such a review, but he didn’t share any with me. After skulking around in the NPR search box, I’d nominate the Gross interviews on the dossier and other pieces that faced challenges or turned out to be inconsistent with other reporting.

With his tendentious claims, however, Berliner doesn’t merely overstep the paltry evidence in his piece. He positions his now-former workplace as a hive of ideologues driven by political outcomes instead of the facts — basically a left-wing analogue to Fox News. That salvo appeared to diminish his appeal as a newsroom collaborator.

NPR, as it turns out, is an analogue to nothing — a sui generis outlet driven by old-fashioned journo-principles, an aversion to offending anyone and a steady propensity to annoy listeners. Surely, it has many things to apologize for, though an on-air campaign to oust a president isn’t among them.

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