Political News Is Changing
University of Wisconsin journalism professor Sue Robinson has long been a solutions journalism booster, investing significant time into researching the practice. Her latest report — done with Margarita Orozco, assistant professor at the University of Kansas, and Joshua P. Darr, associate professor at Syracuse University — might be the most encouraging yet.
“How the Engagement Journalism Movement Is Changing Political News Content: An Applied-Research Study” shows that retraining journalists in covering politics is having an impact. Among cohorts trained by Hearken, Trusting News and SJN, the research team found “more content considered to be ‘engaged,’ more transparent stories, and somewhat of a boost in solutions-oriented content.” Importantly, they also found “almost a third fewer horse-race, game-framed political stories.”
The full study is paywalled, but you can find the abstract and purchase the full study here. Or, you can hear from Robinson herself. This is slow, difficult work for the newsrooms involved; they are swimming against the tides of what they’ve been taught and what’s expected to constitute political news. But the needle is slowly moving. Now there’s some serious data backing that up.
