Photo by Sydney Boles/Ohio Valley Resource

Project Overview

How do journalists cover those outside of their own experience? As researchers study newsroom diversity, this has been one of the most pressing issues on editors and publishers as they try to improve trust with marginalized communities and diversity in their own newsroom. This led me to a very simple question: How well do journalists understand their own coverage? I used the explanatory structure suggested by Creswell and Plano Clark (2011) to develop in-depth interviews, which were then contextualized by content analysis. I compared the analysis of what the journalists thought they portrayed in their writing, and what actually appeared. Ultimately, I found that while the reporters I interviewed had fine-tuned control over depicting the conflict and impact value of a news story, they struggled with other elements. I also found in the interviews there are implications about how newsrooms think of news values, and more research is needed to understand how descriptive news values influence coverage.