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Faculty in Journalism, Culture and Communication analyze emerging and enduring forms of public communication and the institutional and economic conditions that sustain them. They employ a range of research methods, including ethnography, textual and historical analysis, and political economic approaches to media industries. As digital technologies have transformed mediated practices, the faculty has opened a series of new areas of inquiry, including computational journalism, the study of algorithms in institutions, and the cultural history of Silicon Valley.

Angèle Christin  is an associate professor. She is interested in fields and organizations where algorithms and ‘big data’ analytics transform professional values, expertise, and work practices. In her dissertation, she analyzed the growing importance of audience metrics in web journalism in the United States and France. Drawing on ethnographic methods, she examined how American and French journalists make sense of traffic numbers in different ways, which in turn has distinct effects on the production of news in the two countries. In a new project, she studies the construction, institutionalization, and reception of analytics and predictive algorithms in the U.S. criminal justice system.

Ted Glasser  is an emeritus professor.  His teaching and research focus on media practices and performance, with emphasis on questions of press responsibility and accountability. His books include  Normative Theories of the Media: Journalism in Democratic Societies,  written with Clifford Christians, Denis McQuail, Kaarle Nordenstreng, and Robert White, which in 2010 won the Frank Luther Mott-Kappa Tau Alpha award for best research-based book on journalism/mass communication and was one of three finalists for the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s Tankard Book Award;  The Idea of Public Journalism , an edited collection of essays, recently translated into Chinese;  Custodians of Conscience: Investigative Journalism and Public Virtue , written with James S. Ettema, which won the Society of Professional Journalists’ award for best research on journalism, the Bart Richards Award for Media Criticism, and the Frank Luther Mott-Kappa Tau Alpha award for the best research-based book on journalism/mass communication;  Public Opinion and the Communication of Consent , edited with Charles T. Salmon; and  Media Freedom and Accountability , edited with Everette E. Dennis and Donald M. Gillmor.  His research, commentaries and book reviews have appeared in a variety of publications, including the  Journal of Communication, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, Journalism Studies, Policy Sciences, Journal of American History, Quill, Nieman Reports  and  The New York Times Book Review .

James T. Hamilton  is a professor and the director of the Journalism Program. His work on the economics of news focuses on the market failures involved in the production of public affairs coverage and the generation of investigative reporting. Through research in the emerging area of computational journalism, he is exploring how to lower the cost of discovering stories about the operation of political institutions.

Xiaochang Li  is an assistant professor. She is broadly interested in the history of informatics, computation, and related data practices. Drawing upon media history, history of science, and STS, her work is concerned with how information technologies shape the production and circulation of knowledge and the relationship between technical practices and social worlds. Her current research examines the history of speech recognition and natural language processing and how the pursuit of language influenced the development of AI, Machine Learning, and contemporary algorithmic culture. Her work also touches on sound studies and the history of acoustics and she has previously worked on topics concerning transnational media audiences and digital content circulation.

Fred Turner  is a professor and cultural historian of media and media technologies. Trained in both Communication and Science and Technology Studies, he has long been interested in how media and American culture have shaped one another over time. His most recent work has focused on the rise of American technocracy since World War II and on the aesthetic and ideological manifestations of that rise in the digital era. Before earning his Ph.D., Turner worked as a journalist for ten years. He continues to write for newspapers and magazines and strongly supports researchers who seek to have a public impact with their work.

Like all Communication faculty, the members of the Journalism, Communication and Culture group routinely collaborate with colleagues from around the campus. The group enjoys particularly strong collaborations with sociologists, historians, art historians, and computer scientists.

Faculty — Journalism, Media and Culture

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• Sanna Ali, Ph.D. 2023. AI Policy Analyst, Stanford Cyber Policy Center and RegLab
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• Jihye Lee , Ph.D. 2022. Assistant Professor, School of Advertising and Public Relations, UT Austin
• Andreas Katsanevas, Ph.D. 2020. Technology Policy Researcher, Meta
• Sheng Zou,  Ph.D. 2020. Assistant Professor, School of Communication, Hong Kong Baptist University
• Christine Larson , Ph.D. 2017. Assistant Professor, Journalism, University of Colorado, Boulder
• Yeon Joo , Ph.D. 2014. Associate Professor, Department of Digital Media, Myongji University, Seoul
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• Seeta Pena Gangdaharan , Ph.D. 2012. Assistant Professor, Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics
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• Daniel Kreiss , Ph.D. 2010, Associate Professor, School of Media and Journalism, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
• John Kim , Ph.D. 2009, Associate Professor, Media and Cultural Studies, Macalaster College
• Erica Robles-Anderson , Ph.D. 2009, Associate Professor, Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University
• Isabel Awad , Ph.D. 2007, Associate Professor, Department of Media and Communication, Erasmus University (Netherlands)
• Cherian George , Ph.D. 2003, Professor, Associate Dean, School of Communication, Hong Kong Baptist University
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Article contents

Theories of journalism.

• Stephen D. Reese Stephen D. Reese School of Journalism, Moody College of Communication, The University of Texas at Austin
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.83
• Published online: 31 August 2016

Journalism seeks to observe and communicate what it learns of social importance, something called news, and in doing so is always in the process of creating a public by bringing it into synchronized conversation with itself. Theories of journalism provide explanatory frameworks for understanding a complex combination of social practice, product, and institutional arrangement. Journalism’s late 20th-century professionalized, high modern version, which is still recognizable today, has continued to change, particularly with the disruptive effect of the Internet, as it has evolved to absorb other forms. The boundaries of profession and news organization have been destabilized within this rapidly shifting media terrain, but still there remain productive approaches for systematically organizing knowledge around the concept of journalism.

The early 20th-century perspectives on journalism—before becoming linked to the communication field and a more narrow media effects focus—were at home in the University of Chicago school of sociology, which emphasized community-based, multi-method participant observation. A sociology of news perspective resurfaced with more ethnographic research in newsrooms in the 1950s, and theories of journalism have continued to highlight the ethnographic method, especially in understanding the impact of technology on a more digitally-oriented journalism practice. A hierarchy of influences perspective, developed by Shoemaker and Reese, incorporates other perspectives beyond the ethnographic by considering factors at multiple levels of analysis that shape media content, the journalistic message system, from the micro to the macro: individual characteristics of specific newsworkers, their routines of work, organizational-level concerns, institutional issues, and the larger social system. At each level, one can identify the main factors that shape the symbolic reality constituted and produced by journalism, as well as how these factors interact across levels and compare across different contexts (e.g., national, technological).

A hierarchy of influences model worked well to disentangle the relationships among professionals and their routines, and the news organizations that housed them, which cohered into institutions. But journalism has been newly problematized, destabilizing and restructuring both the units and levels of analysis in journalism theorizing. The networked public sphere is constituted with new assemblages: of newswork, institutional arrangements, and global connections, which give rise to new emerging deliberative spaces. Journalism theories now have as much interest in process as product, in assemblage as outcome, but still need to be concerned with the nature of quality of these spaces. What shape do they take on and with what implications for healthy democratic discourse?

• levels of analysis
• networked journalism
• media sociology
• hierarchy of influences
• deliberative spaces

Introduction

Journalism seeks to observe and communicate what it learns of social importance, something called news, and in doing so is always in the process of creating a public by bringing it into synchronized conversation with itself. Theories of journalism provide explanatory frameworks for understanding a complex combination of social practice, product, and institutional arrangement. Journalism’s late 20th-century professionalized, high modern version, which is still recognizable today, has continued to change, particularly with the disruptive effect of the Internet, as it has evolved to absorb other forms. Unlike many other more settled fields, journalism research has been obsessed with the very definition of its core concept—what journalism is. The boundaries of profession and news organization have been destabilized within this rapidly shifting media terrain, but still there remain productive approaches for systematically organizing knowledge around the concept of journalism. In this article I review some of these approaches using levels of analysis framework and consider ways this perspective must be adapted to new conceptions of this rapidly changing field.

Theories of journalism, as Löffelholz ( 2008 ) observed, come from diverse perspectives, beginning with early normative concerns leading to more empirical analysis of how journalists work. Adding a systems perspective attempted to position the individual as part of a larger system (e.g., Rühl, 1969 ) and to understand news as a cultural product. The early 20th-century research perspectives on journalism, before they became linked to the communication field and a more narrow media effects focus, were at home in the University of Chicago school of sociology, which emphasized community-based, multi-method participant observation including issues of communication and public opinion. Early figures like Robert Park had an interest in the newspaper and how it not just affected but created community itself by extending social networks—regarding communities as existing in communication. The post-WWII shift of sociological influence to Columbia University, and related communication research along with it, displaced this more holistic concern with a short-term effects, variable-analytic, social-psychology perspective on questions of interest to the burgeoning mass consumer industries—and to the mass media built on their advertising revenue.

Theories of journalism have largely been situated within this tradition of communication research more generally as it developed during this period. As a result they have shared a preoccupation with the large-scale mass media in the U.S. and Western Europe, and the professionals operating within those media institutions. Journalism has been regarded as having vital functions for the larger social system, leaving the task of research to explore the process of journalistic communication and ways audiences responded to news messages. This left relatively less room for more critical questions concerning how journalism fits within the larger social structure—including who makes news, what counts as news, and whose interests news serves. (Gitlin, 1978 ; Reese & Ballinger, 2001 ). Aligned with journalism and mass communication education—which in turn was concerned with training for media industries—research took on a strongly normative character in regarding journalism as a crucial underpinning of democratic society. That was what journalists themselves believed, serving as a justification for their professional status and legal protections.

Shift to a Sociology of News

Running counter to this process and effects tradition, a couple of early newsroom studies, in particular, signaled special concerns with journalism as a social practice. David Manning White’s ( 1950 ) classic study of the news “gatekeeper” suggested that news is what the “newspaperman” says it is, while Warren Breed’s ( 1955 ) study of social control in the newsroom, showed how journalists absorbed news policy, even if that policy was not always explicit, and how the tension between the different motivations of journalists and the (often more conservative) owner needed to be reconciled to make the system work. As Reese and Ballinger ( 2001 ) have argued, the findings of White and Breed were safely interpreted at the time within the prevailing narrative, or received history of the field, as upholding the status quo: namely that the gatekeeper and newspaper publisher would select stories in the interest of the community of which they were part. This blunted the critical edge and subversive quality of such research, which threatened to make journalism decision-making newly problematic.

Journalism professionals have historically adhered to a philosophical, realist view of the world in which news of external events is “out there” waiting to be gathered and disseminated. But this process is a social construction determined by a number of larger forces, making the search for these forces and understanding how they interact a logical focus of theoretical development. Theories of journalism have followed a sociological turn, a perspective that brings with it questions of power, control, structures, institutions, class, and community: all concepts that, as Waisbord ( 2014 ) observes, have been applied to journalism research more than other communication subfields, yielding an area often called “media sociology.” Broadly speaking, this approach to journalism ties social structures to symbolic formations, seeking to understand how social reality takes shape and foregrounding normative concerns of how well journalism is working under these arrangements.

Social protest and upheaval in the 1960s brought greater concern about how journalism was implicated in a discredited power structure, leading to greater interest in the inner workings of institutional journalism—as represented most visibly by a number of newsroom ethnographies. Stonbely ( 2013 ) identifies a group of such studies that, after a long hiatus, followed in the later 60s and 70s the earlier example of White and Breed. These studies, she argues, represent a “cornerstone” of American media sociology, covering that “legacy” period of media development centered around a handful of major broadcast and print media that commanded mass audiences and, for the most part, their trust. Among these she identifies Edward Jay Epstein’s ( 1974 ) News from Nowhere (about network television news), Mark Fishman’s ( 1980 ) Manufacturing the News , Gaye Tuchman’s ( 1978 ) Making News (about local newspapers), and Herbert Gans’ ( 1979 ) Deciding What’s News (about national newsmagazines and television). They all broke with the prevailing approaches to communication research by emphasizing news as an organizational product that had to be socially constructed, not simply transmitted to the audience. These became classic examples of newsroom sociology, time-consuming but rich in detail, and until recently served to anchor our understanding of how newswork happens.

The sociology of news has continued to highlight the ethnographic method, long marginalized within mainstream sociology. The method, however, has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years across the social sciences with its greater capacity to engage public interest with accessible storytelling—indeed, a quality more closely aligned with journalism itself. Ethnography and its participant observation have proved especially useful in understanding with close observation the impact of technology on a more digitally-oriented journalism practice. A new wave of news ethnographies has been precipitated particularly by the migration of news online. Prominent examples include the work of Boczkowski ( 2004 , 2010 ), especially in showing how technology has affected the newsroom organization and practice. His work on Argentinian newsrooms shows the paradox of striving in an age of digital abundance to conform to the news competition. Ryfe’s ( 2012 ) analysis of three American newsrooms showed that journalists have not adapted very well to change, using the tensions embedded in their profession to reconfirm and justify the same procedures they have used since before the industry upheaval.

Usher ( 2014 ) provides the most recent single-newsroom ethnography within the Gans tradition of the New York Times , choosing an elite news organization as the embodiment of the journalism profession. Her participant observation shows what happens when a traditional and powerful institution must adapt to the inescapable digital world, that despite the major technological shifts, “many of the routines and practices of news production observed in the golden era of news ethnography remain constant” (p. 228). What is more, the routines surrounding key values of immediacy, interactivity, and participation show remarkable similarities to a diverse host of other online news settings (Domingo & Paterson, 2011 ; Paterson & Domingo, 2008 ).

Levels of Analysis: Hierarchy of Influences Perspective

Although ethnographies provide a nuanced, insider view of a social setting, they can privilege the immediate context of the newsmaking experience and work toward organizational functionalism. That is, everything observed is easily assumed to be there for a good reason, and selecting one organizational site elevates it as the key player in news gatekeeping decisions. Thus, beyond the first-hand observation of newswork, primarily within an organizational setting, a broader conception of the sociology of news is needed that incorporates the ethnographic perspective but includes other levels of analysis, including individual professional issues and larger macro social structures impinging on journalism. A hierarchy of influences model, developed by Shoemaker and Reese ( 2014 , 1996 ), does this by considering factors at multiple levels of analysis that shape media content, the journalistic message system, from the micro to the macro: individual characteristics of specific newsworkers, their routines of work, organizational-level concerns, institutional issues, and larger social-systems. The model “takes into account the multiple forces that simultaneously impinge on the media and suggest how influence at one level may interact with that at another” ( 2014 , p. 1). At each level, one can identify the main factors that shape the symbolic reality constituted and produced by journalism, how these factors interact across levels and compare across different contexts (e.g., national, technological).

This approach raises, especially at the individual level, the notion of structure and agency. As a human activity, journalism naturally involves the agency of individuals, which is both constrained and enabled by the structures surrounding them. Ascribing relatively more agency to individuals leads to a greater emphasis on the personal characteristics that guide them (the crusading journalist myth and biographical tradition underscore this tendency); an emphasis on macro structures, on the other hand, tends to de-emphasize this personal agency. A political economic perspective, for example, has the effect of rendering journalists as mere tools of class and other interests. Taking these issues into account, journalism research can be organized by these hierarchical levels as reviewed below, with examples of new conceptual issues.

On the most micro level, we assume that individual creative, professional practitioners matter and knowing who they are helps understand the larger journalistic project—who is being drawn to the profession, how adequately they reflect society, and what professional values they support. The individual level of analysis considers the personal traits of newsworkers, news values they adhere to, professional roles they take on, and other demographic features (e.g., gender, race, class). In spite of the traditional notion of professional “objective” detachment, we assume these characteristics matter in their work. Journalists make decisions based on psychological-level attributes, but they operate within a web of constraints.

Thus, this level of analysis considers the relative autonomy of individuals, how they are both shaped by, contribute to, and identity with their surrounding organizations. Defining news professionals as those working in major decision-making capacities for media organizations, Weaver and colleagues (e.g., Weaver, Beam, Brownlee, Voakes, & Wilhoit, 2007 ) have tracked the composition of that group over several years, along with how they perceive their roles. Surveying journalists working for traditional news organizations shows perceptions by those individuals most invested in the shrinking professional core. They see journalism heading in the wrong direction, have declining job satisfaction, but give greater importance to their role in analyzing complex problems and investigating official claims (Wilnat & Weaver, 2014 ).

Although many such studies seek to capture a description of the profession as a whole, the individual level certainly draws attention to the fact that there is no single professional type, not even within national cultures. As professional environments are shifting rapidly, analysis at this level helps understand how professional roles relate to larger structures, serving as a means of adaptation and survival. In the dynamic Chinese media context, for example, Hassid ( 2011 ) has identified four types of journalists: American style professionals, communist professionals (“throat and tongue” of the Communist Party), workaday journalists (corrupt, anything for a price), and advocate professionals, who push the envelope and are committed to ideals of transparency, openness, and public participation. Geall ( 2013 ) argues that these are the professionals especially equipped for survival, who can exploit the openings provided by the chaotic aspects and contradictions of the Chinese media environment.

The routines level is concerned with those patterns of behavior that form the immediate structures of newswork. If journalism is primarily a social practice, routines are the ways of working that constitute that practice. They may include those unstated rules and ritualized enactments that are not always made explicit. In studying these routines, we assume that power is exercised within organizations—not always by idiosyncratic dictates by leaders but through establishing a pattern of practices that serve the needs of the organization, adapt to requirements of news sources, control the workflow, and give it a meaningful structure. These range from deadline and space requirements to pack journalism and the strategically enacted procedures (e.g., using quotations and balancing) designed to invoke “objectivity” itself. News routines serve the needs of journalists and the organization, but they also have come to embody considerations about the audience, what it will find acceptable and interesting in the forms of news values.

But these routines have been unsettled, as news media adapt to digital flows and metrics, affording the ability to present information that allows greater user participation. From a time when journalists had only a vague conception of their audience, reading and viewing now can be monitored in real time, leading to new value being placed on what is trending, shared, and endorsed. News aggregators, for example, both within and outside traditional news organizations, have had to develop new routines of screenwork, continually checking the incoming streams of information, monitoring what types of stories drive audience traffic, and finding ways to appropriately verify and advance what Coddington ( 2015 ) calls “second-hand story-telling,” with routines that support transparency. They help to reconcile the tension between the professional imperative of control and a more open participatory news space online. This “second-order” newswork still maintains a professional ethos, distant from the eyewitness field reporting professionals have always valorized, yet still holding that ethos as an aspiration.

Organizational

Associated with the organizational level in particular, the ethnographic approach to journalism contributed the insight, now well accepted, that news is an organizational product. Edward Epstein’s News from nowhere did that for television news, showing its organizational constraints and structure in how the location of bureaus dictated what events were available to be translated into daily news flow. Now the walls of these organizations have become more fluid as they enter into collaborative relationships to produce news, and they take on a range of new emerging forms from the large-scale enterprise of daily news gathering to the small-staff, minimalist blogging operation. The key question at this level is “how does it work?” In that respect, the early analysis of Breed ( 1955 ) of social control in the newsroom continues to be relevant today in considering how the different parts of the organization work together to maintain itself and accomplish its goals.

These tensions are particularly revealed during times of social change. Lee and Chan ( 2008 ) show, for example, that although Hong Kong has a strong tradition of journalistic professionalism, self-censorship has increased following the handover to the mainland government, bringing greater political pressure on local media. News managers try to minimize conflicts by assigning sensitive stories to less experienced journalists, warning them ambiguously to “be smart,” or justifying their instructions with a professional rationale (“be objective”). Since the so-called “Umbrella Revolution,” news organizations there have faced greater challenges in smoothing over these conflicts with owners, many of whom have business ties to the mainland.

Institutional

At the next, more macro, socio-institutional level is concerned with the “inter-organizational field,” how the various organizations doing news work cohere into a larger institution. The media institution in turn enters into structured dependency relationships with other major systemic players: including the state, public relations, and advertising. Benson ( 2004 ) has advocated bringing the sociology of media (systems) back into the analysis, by emphasizing the journalistic institutional field, deconstructing the media system (especially cross-nationally) into its institutional components. This represents the meso-level environment for media—the interplay of economic, political, and cultural factors—lying between organization and society as a whole.

The new institutionalism perspective imported from political science treats the “media” as a political actor in relationship with others (e.g., Ryfe, 2006 ). This approach includes a historical dimension, which helps explain the emergence of practices and norms as a contingent outcome. In showing how the news media have in common their goals of seeking legitimacy, access to information, and making money, institutionalist analysis helps explain their homogeneity (Cook, 1998 ; Sparrow, 1999 ). Bourdieu’s ( 2005 ) field theory is similar to institutionalism in identifying spheres of action, which must be understood in relation to each other, and which in the case of the journalistic field implies autonomy, homogeneity, and is a result of a path dependent historical trajectory. We understand the journalistic field to be structured by combinations of economic and cultural capital, and although there is individual agency the field conditions the actions of its members.

Both fields and institutions bring up questions of where the boundaries lie among these institutions as they jockey for power and how these interdependencies shape the news product. Power flows not only from the state to the media, but the other way around in a process of mutual adaptation. Fox News, for example, has dictated to the Republican Party as it seeks to manage the presidential campaign by creating a debate forum for aspiring candidates, some of whom had contracts with Fox for on-air appearances. At the institutional level we can better recognize the even more complex nature of mediatization: a distinctive stage in the long-term development of contemporary mass democracies in which political processes have grown more or less dependent on the mass media and shaped themselves accordingly.

Social System

The most macro, social system level is concerned with traditional theories of society and power as they relate to journalism. Much of early U.S. communication research was predicated on a benign, functional pluralism view of power in democratic society that assumed a self-righting balance of interests. But when journalism decision-making becomes problematic, powerful interests become directly implicated, and more critical political economic explanations consider journalism to be an extension of class and corporate power. Herman and Chomsky’s ( 1988 ) propaganda model, for example, gives journalists relatively little autonomy as they work to uphold the interests of their sources, advertisers, and other elites. In a more subtle elaboration, long pre-dating the propaganda model, hegemony theory takes Antonio Gramsci’s extension of Marx to explain how power relations become naturalized, even while granting media some relative autonomy from class power and interests. Ideology explains how the social system hangs together as the media project ideas and meaning in the service of power and interests. Violations of paradigmatic boundaries in a society require repair work and help explain media representations of deviance and marginalization of dissent.

One doesn’t need to take a Marxian perspective to recognize that journalism and media institutions function within a larger social system, and these systems increasingly span national boundaries. The most direct way to address factors at the social system level is through cross-national comparison, an important theoretical development at this level. This comparative approach applied to professional journalism is exemplified by Hanitzsch et al. ( 2011 ), who mounted a survey across 18 countries from a mix of news organizations on their role perceptions, epistemological orientations and ethical views, a design that allowed them to directly assess the influence of national context on the perceptions of journalists themselves. Their research raises the question: To what extent is there a global journalistic culture? They found three major clusters of similar countries classified as Western, peripheral-Western, and developing/transitional, but generally shared is a sense of detachment and non-involvement in their perceived professional roles, and in being a watchdog of government (and to some extent business). They differ on the value of interventionism, the promotion of certain goals of social change, but in general there is evidence for a universal ideology and professional identity.

Utility of the Hierarchy of Influences

As key concepts developed within journalism research, it has become helpful to unpack them across a levels of analysis perspective. Professionalism, for example, can be seen to operate in different ways across each of the five levels (Reese, 2001 ), as can another key concept, news gatekeeping: the winnowing of a vast amount of possible news items into a constricted space. Shoemaker and Vos ( 2009 ) examine gatekeeping across the five levels, discerning the forces at each level operating to shape news decision-making. These questions have been more focused on specific editorial decision-makers, but an increasing online abundance of news and social media platforms, capacity and audience interactivity require a similar rethinking of this concept. In spite of online abundance, news decisions are still being made, but in different locations and sequences. This seemingly flattened hierarchy of gatekeeping authority may disguise the actuality, as Vos and Heinderycks ( 2015 ) argue, of a persistent homogeneity to certain stories, and missing important others altogether (e.g., financial crisis of 2008 ).

A hierarchical model has encouraged the sorting out of micro, meso and macro levels, and provides a framework for analyzing the operation of combined factors. Evaluating the contribution of multiple levels simultaneously helps yield greater explanatory power. Survey of journalists, for example, by Weaver et al. ( 2007 ) examined the contribution of different nested contextual factors on journalistic work (organization, medium, etc.) This has been extended to include the social-system level in a hierarchical approach to factors shaping international journalism (Hanitzsch et al., 2010 ).

New Geography of Media Sociology

For a number of reasons, then, the hierarchy of influences has been a valuable guide to theorizing journalism, but to what extent must it be reconsidered in light of the major changes in the media landscape? The journalism of the 20th Century was synonymous with the prevailing industrial forms. News was what news organizations produced, and journalists were the professionals who worked for them. A hierarchy of influences approach worked well with this model to disentangle the relationships among professionals and their routines, and the news organizations that housed them, which cohered into institutions. How does this levels of analysis framework adapt to the new media world where the lines are not as tidy?

The news industry and profession have changed dramatically in the last two decades, with the internet severing the association of advertising with the news product, undermining the once robust subsidy provided by those seeking the mass audiences media were able to command. As a result, large-scale news organizations have faced serious economic disruption, along with easy digital access to free content threatening the unique role of professional journalism. Anderson, Bell, and Shirky ( 2012 ) put a positive face on the recent decade’s “post-industrial” effects on the news ecosystem as an increase in freedom to communicate beyond the traditional publishing and broadcasting models. This freedom has brought an explosion of digital practices and platforms, with in many respects new, more effective journalistic forms—but at a cost to institutional clarity and coherence. In the process, these changes have made the definition of journalist and news organization increasingly problematic.

In accommodating the ethnographic perspective, the hierarchal model has not precluded the variable-analytic, effects-on-content tradition, but the new online journalistic ecosystem has moved theorizing farther away from that tradition in adopting more spatially-oriented models of networks, spheres and fields. As the boundaries of journalism have shifted to include more citizen interaction and global connectivity, various terms have been used to describe the new journalistic eco-system, but they all suggest a more networked quality. This extends to the broader socio-political deliberative arena in general to which journalism contributes, a space now often loosely deemed a “networked public sphere,” or even a “global networked sphere.”

To refer more specifically to journalism’s new reality shaped by the internet, Benkler ( 2011 ), for example, uses “networked 4th estate” to refer, along with professional journalists, to those citizen and other social movements that combine to form a more decentralized democratic discourse, revealing a redistribution of how content is created and shared. One of the most prominent writers in the “future of news,” Jeff Jarvis ( 2006 ), uses “networked journalism” to refer to the new collaborative relationships between professional and citizen in creating new information. Journalists have become nodes in this larger networked journalism, a “diffused capacity to record information, share it, and distribute it” (Haak, Parks, & Castells, 2012 , p. xx). At the more formal news industry level, Anderson, Bell, and Shirky ( 2012 ) use the “networked institution” concept to capture the need for news organizations themselves to become more collaborative. These concepts suggest that journalism can no longer be easily understood within organizational containers but extends across traditional, more well-defined boundaries through connectivity in unpredictable ways. These spatial metaphors and orienting concepts—whether networks, fields, or spheres—point simultaneously to the blurring of lines between professional and citizen, between one organization and another as they develop more collaborative partnerships and work across digital platforms.

This is a different way of thinking of news compared to studies of production within institutions. Adding a more organic quality to the picture, leads to terms like news “ecology” and “eco-system” (Anderson, 2013 ), still suggesting interconnected but disparate units, all participating in a similar space with a differentiation of roles. Traditional legacy media provide an anchor for smaller publications, bloggers and citizens, who react to and supplement what happens in the larger press. Thus, the practice, product, and institutional dimensions are captured in this new metaphor of networked journalism. The eco-system shift is revealed in new forms of newswork that theories of journalism must take into account. The relentless flow of abundant information has led to a new breed of news aggregators (referred to earlier) who add value through digesting, repackaging information—stripping it down to its core components. The news narratives traditionally housed within article story structures now get broken down into smaller “atomic units,” which can be restructured, reordered, annotated, aggregated, and widely shared—ordering them back up into different narrative structures (Coddington, 2015 ). Thus, this potential for connectivity extends even at the content-structure level to the elements of a traditional news story, which can be more easily disaggregated and redeployed.

Of course, this flow of dis- and re-aggregated information would not be possible were it not for the computational power now available. Journalism, like other forms of knowledge-production, has encountered its big data, or data-driven, moment, which has led to theoretical shifts to better understand the restructuring of news and potential for interactivity with users. From a professional vantage point, the effects of this computational power on journalism take on several closely related forms. From an early concern with “precision journalism,” when journalists were encouraged to use the tools of social science for more rigorous insights, other terms have emerged in recent years to capture this phenomenon (Coddington, 2014 ). Data journalism, loosely employed, refers to the use of data by journalists to gather and present stories, merging with web design and visualization to allow massive amounts of information to be marshaled and made available for crowdsourcing analytics. Access to big data tools brings both greater analytical power to journalists but also changes the way they can structure stories to allow greater utility for the audience. Regarding professional practice, a “computational journalism” is regarded by Hamilton and Turner ( 2009 ) as embracing both, bringing “algorithms, data, and social science to supplement the accountability functions of journalism” (p. 2). Through algorithms the audience itself has a more interactive capacity to learn and tailor news consumption based on personal traits and patterns.

Technology has reshaped the journalistic field in a more general way by importing new values. As news organizations have relied on those from outside the professional field for digital expertise, the values of the technology culture have become linked with journalistic practice. The open source concept, for example, is both a practical approach to coding but also a philosophy of sharing (it makes transparent the DNA of its design). Lewis and Usher ( 2013 ) argue that the ethos of open source—embedded in hacker culture and emphasizing iteration, tinkering, transparency, and participation—has important implications for journalism, drawing it out from its closed professional boundaries into greater transparency.

New Methodological and Conceptual Challenges

Capturing the workings of these new eco-systems brings new challenges to the traditional ethnographic method. The ethnographer must decide the appropriate “site,” identify the “social actors,” and describe their practices. But when news becomes more diffused in its production, with journalists working and communicating remotely, or in small organizations loosely aligned with a larger parent company, or dispersed across platforms, the single site becomes more difficult to select (e.g., Cottle, 2007 ). How can ethnography be done on decentralized, deterritorialized communities? What is there to observe?

In keeping with the “networked journalism” perspective, newer efforts fittingly have shifted away from a location-based “factory floor” ethnography. Howard ( 2002 ) has demonstrated the utility of a “network ethnography”: “The process of using ethnographic field methods on cases and field sites selected using social network analysis” (p. 561). In his analysis, he identifies a distributed “e-politics” community, not based in a single organization but in various agencies, party and campaign staffs, and individual consultants—a loosely configured professional group of digital tool developers for political communication. He locates the critical actors through their strategically located position in the network that links them together and targets interviews accordingly.

Beyond these methodological challenges, the new eco-system requires new conceptual tools. In social network analysis, connections typically are found among homogeneous nodes (whether people or news hyperlinks), but related to the network is the richer concept of assemblage , which can include human and non-human, material and non-material, combined into a nexus of meaningful integration. This concept is useful in many areas of social science to capture dynamic phenomena spilling out of existing categories, becoming recombined in new ways, and not as easily identified within a single level of analysis. An assemblage can be a contingent set of relationships to accomplish shifting and transitory social objectives not otherwise defined by formal institutions. In that respect, journalism is not some naturally existing category, but a complex and contingent assemblage—less product than process.

Technology is at the heart of this transformational connectivity, affecting journalism’s tools, processes, and ways of thinking. Rather than regarding technology as an exogenous force making its effects felt from the outside on journalism, it increasingly must be taken into account as “making a difference” as it becomes integrated into journalistic practice. This has led to new ways of theorizing socio-technical systems and examining their interconnections, such as Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT), borrowed from science studies (reviewed in Turner, 2005 ). This radically descriptive approach blurs the human/technological lines, rendering both “actants” in an “ontologically flat” perspective. From a levels perspective ANT doesn’t make the same distinction between individual-level factors and routines, merging them into an integrated nexus. More broadly, Lewis and Westlund ( 2014 ) have advocated approaching cross-media work, the integration of multiple platforms, as a “system of actors, actants, audiences, activities engaged in complex set of media activities” (p. 34).

The assemblage concept has richer utility than its association with ANT. Anderson ( 2013 ) argues more broadly that newswork itself is one of “assemblage” and “can be envisioned and described as the continuous process of networking the news” (p. 172) across “news products, institutions, and networks . . . drawing together a variety of objects, big and small, social and technological, human and non-human” (p. 4). In the case of “news objects,” these are the things available for inclusion into larger assemblages. He maps online hyperlinks in the Philadelphia community to show a form of assemblage within a news ecosystem, “pointing to a pattern of iterative pyramiding in which key web sites positioned within highly particular communities of interest act as bridges to larger, more diffused digital communities” (Anderson, 2010 , p. 289).

This idea directs attention outside of journalism organizations to those places where interaction with journalism plays an integral part, especially in political communication. Assemblages can be viewed as a combination of heterogeneous elements oriented toward a given task (including semantic elements, messages, frames). Chadwick ( 2011 ) argues that, facilitated by digital platforms, political information cycles are complex assemblages of modular units, with permeable boundaries among them, which can only be understood in their relationships with each other. In the “hybrid media system” he designates assemblage as both process and event:

multiple, loosely coupled individuals, groups, sites, and temporal instances of interaction involving diverse yet highly interdependent news creators and media technologies that plug and unplug themselves from the news-making process, often in real time (p. 64).

Recent studies of political campaigns uses the concept to capture the relational aspects of mobilization, where elements are assembled in ways that have an identity, outside of a more formally constituted organization or institution (e.g., Kreis, 2012 ). Studying the more personal dimension of political field campaigns Nielsen ( 2012 ) finds ad hoc combinations of staffers, volunteers, and part-timers, that vary in their allegiance to hierarchy and length of their commitment.

Networked assemblages can still be located within specific levels of analysis, but they encourage reordering relationships and rethinking a linear process of influence in favor of constantly changing interest clusters driven by information entrepreneurs. Traditional political communication studies, for example, at the institutional level have treated news production as responding to state actors as it relays information to citizens, either in a cascading activation process (Entman, 2003 ) or through the indexing of news construction to the boundaries of debate within the political system (Bennett, 1990 ). Elite circuits of information exchange among institutional players, however, don’t map onto this relationship so easily. As Davis ( 2007 ) has argued, policy-making networks—a form of assemblage of elite actors—constitute micro-spheres of power which don’t correspond to representative politics. Journalists are integral, often captive, parts of these networks, not just the recipients of political newsworthy information which yields communicative output.

Assemblages within a Levels Framework

This new geography of journalism has problematized and destabilized both the units and levels of analysis in journalism theorizing. Because of these disruptions, much of the most important effort in recent years has been directed at the very definition of journalism and its boundaries with other fields (Carlson & Lewis, 2015 ). As a professional issue journalism becomes a jurisdictional project, policing its boundaries and defending its prerogatives. This can also be thought as a process of repair and maintenance of the journalistic “paradigm” (e.g., Reese, 1990 ), an ideological process similar to that captured at the social-system level of analysis. These concerns resemble Zelizer’s ( 1993 ) introduction of the “interpretive communities” concept to explain how journalists come to collective understandings of their work through shared discourse—a frame that extends beyond the strictly formal tenets of the profession itself. Despite the contested boundaries around the journalistic units of analysis, whether profession or organization, these boundary actions can also be identified across the levels of analysis. In this section, the levels of influence are considered in how they map onto new forms of assemblage.

Certain norms and routines, such as verification and sourcing, serve as boundary objects or markers, and are used to distinguish between journalism practiced by professionals and what they deem as less worthy practices. Individual organizations, such as the New York Times , seek to differentiate themselves from less acceptable entities as WikiLeaks, suspect because of its statelessness and non-institutionalized relationship with official sources (Coddington, 2012 ). The institutional level points to how mainstream journalism experiences an identity confusion, given the fuzzy borders between it and partisan news organizations such as Fox News, or comedic platforms such as The Daily Show and the former Colbert Report. That brings into question the homogeneity of the institutional field, violating the assumption for both Bourdieu and Institutionalists but making the process of boundary work more theoretically important.

As suggested earlier, the work of journalism and many of our theoretical questions are not so easily nested now within a set of hierarchical levels. Societal changes force a re-examination of the relationship between individuals and larger structures. That is, the aggregates traditionally signaled by levels—whether community, organization, or nation—are containers that don’t have the same meaning as they once did, as new structures are woven outside of and through institutional frameworks. As Castells ( 1996 ) argues, we need to rethink particularly the fundamental issue of identity, given that people “increasingly organize their meaning not around what they do, but on the basis of what they are, or believe they are” (p. 3). They are no longer as easily described by their individual markers of group membership. As a result, research needs to be more cautious with what it claims about the explanatory power of traditional demographic and other classifications when it comes to journalists (and other creative workers). For example, technology has brought new pressures on journalists, increasing the velocity of incoming information and need for multi-tasking, but it has also given them the ability to create a personal brand. Using social media such as Twitter can create personal reach beyond anything possible before, meaning they are not so easily subsumed within their organizational container.

The idea of assemblage is appealing in reflecting the reality of new configurations, suggesting elements that cut across several levels of analysis. But that means the boundaries between levels are not always as clear. Routines of newswork, for example, must now accommodate the combination of individual workers and their tools, combining individuals and their techniques into actor-networks. And “technology” has become a multi-scalar phenomenon, a nexus of actants not easily located at any one level. Previous theorizing reasoned from structures to predict symbolic expressions found in news coverage and mediated representations (“influences on content”), but this content itself now is not so easily detached from the hierarchical structures. Symbolic expression becomes a resource for inclusion in an assemblage. Nevertheless, even in a dramatically restructured news environment, hierarchical power—not the least of which the State—is still with us and reasserting itself in many areas, even if deployed through different means. And much of the work of journalism continues to occur in organized, institutionalized settings. This is true even for non-news organizations that practice journalism as a part of their social mission. Advocacy NGOs, such as Human Rights Watch, investigate, report and disseminate information, not only to provide to traditional media organizations journalist but to share directly with their stakeholders (Powers, 2015 ).

The hierarchy of influences presents a useful standard against which to measure the destabilization of journalism and realignment of forces, and to incorporate explanatory power. The idea of a radically contingent and ever-shifting assemblage is at odds with the drive in social science to find predictable aggregates of social material, congealing into institutions that have a history and life of their own. Assemblages are still located within a framework of power, even if not so intuitively, and these larger structures add explanatory value. Benson ( 2014 ) has cautioned against the tendency of perspectives like actor-network theory to simply describe these new configurations of professionals and practices, to “follow the actors,” advocating instead that they be explained within larger structures. And a levels of analysis framework reminds scholars to identify in which larger macro structures their phenomena of interest are located.

New Global Assemblages

The changing theoretical landscape for journalism must be positioned against the forces of globalization, which brings a “stretching” of social relations, connecting people at a distance, and “compression” as they interact with simultaneity and synchronicity. The idea of “global journalism” brings another kind of assemblage. Certainly, there has been in recent years a greater international emphasis in journalism theorizing, which brings greater emphasis on the social-system level. The growing use of cross-national research designs allow for testing the influence of the national social-system on journalism and help untangle institutional-level variables—showing, for example, how the extent to which media rely on commercial support as part of the political economic field shapes media practice (e.g., Benson, 2013 ). But emphasis on institutional fields within national cultures may overestimate the degree of national journalistic homogeneity. Certain components of a journalistic field—such as television, and increasingly online news—may be more likely to converge toward a more global standard, while the printed press, more firmly rooted in historical styles, may be less likely to change. So the social-system level is not synonymous with the national, and assemblages help alert us to new configurations.

Corcoran and Fahy ( 2009 ) take a more pan-national approach to global journalism, examining how power flows within and across national contexts through elite-oriented media, whether the International New York Times , Wall St. Journal , or in their case the Financial Times . The FT is global in the sense that it has a privileged place in European Union discourse, with a core audience among globalized elites doing business in Europe and Brussels. Journalists became part of networks of information flow that support elite structures, leading the authors to suggest a “cosmopolitanism embedded in the transnational culture of European elites, whose material interests stretch beyond national boundaries and whose social imaginary is nourished by elite media such as the FT” (p. 110).

Globalization adds a different dimension that works beyond these nested levels-of-analysis hierarchies to produce something of the “global” embedded in local subnational spaces. Global phenomena operate at multiple scales and are not neatly located on a continuum ranging from local to international. Sassen ( 2006 ) points to not only the disassembling of the state, but reconstituted arrangements: new global assemblages of, in her case, territory, authority, and rights. Ethnographic analysis of newswork need not be abandoned in the search for new globalized forms of journalism. Research may take the form of case studies with thick description where these new combinations may be properly explored. But this more subtle aspect of global spaces raises the possibility of new sites for investigation. For example Firdaus ( 2012 ) has studied Al Jazeera journalists working in Malaysia, signifying a subnational, “glocal” journalistic space embedded within the global media-hub city of Kuala Lumpur.

In another approach to global journalism, Berglez ( 2008 ) advocates a new way of analyzing news from a content-based perspective that takes into account its deterritorialized quality. News texts can be examined empirically for their “global outlook,” to the extent that they draw wider connections, reflecting a different epistemological stance:

The national outlook puts the nation-state at the center of things when framing social reality, while the global outlook instead seeks to understand and explain how economic, political, social and ecological practices, processes and problems in different parts of the world affect each other, are interlocked, or share commonalities (p. 3).

Mediated Spaces

The networked public sphere is constituted with new assemblages: of newswork, institutional arrangements, and global connections, which give rise to new emerging deliberative spaces. Journalism theories now have as much interest in process as product, in assemblage as outcome, but still need to be concerned with understanding the nature of quality of these spaces. What shape do they take on and with what implications for healthy democratic discourse?

Journalism research has a strong tradition of equating these spaces to a mapping of media content, and content-based studies are growing in number with vast amounts of media material available for analysis. Certainly, big data and related computational tools have begun to allow the kind of analysis more consistent with the new ecosystem at a network level of analysis. This is particularly true in research on online content that takes the hyperlink as the fundamental connecting feature, which allows the mapping of the networked space, including blogo- and Twitter-spheres based on a post- and Tweet-centric space. These analyses often provide striking visualizations of the patterns, but structures of these networks must still be related to larger structures of which they are a part. In explicating the idea of these “mediated” spaces, the challenge, perhaps counter-intuitive, is to conceive of them from a less media-centric perspective. Theories of journalism, by their nature, tend to begin with organized journalism and work out from there, but this may overstate its influence and hinder a fuller understanding journalism’s position. Journalism is itself an assemblage and a part of, albeit an important one, of others that lie both inside and outside of institutionalized structures. The assemblage concept alerts us to wider combinations of elements that constitute new mediated spaces, and these configurations must be identified, while a levels of analysis framework will continue to help organize explanatory efforts.

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Research Topics & Ideas: Journalism

50 Topic Ideas To Kickstart Your Research Project

If you’re just starting out exploring journalism-related topics for your dissertation, thesis or research project, you’ve come to the right place. In this post, we’ll help kickstart your research by providing a hearty list of journalism-related research ideas , including examples from recent studies.

PS – This is just the start…

We know it’s exciting to run through a list of research topics, but please keep in mind that this list is just a starting point . These topic ideas provided here are intentionally broad and generic , so keep in mind that you will need to develop them further. Nevertheless, they should inspire some ideas for your project.

To develop a suitable research topic, you’ll need to identify a clear and convincing research gap , and a viable plan to fill that gap. If this sounds foreign to you, check out our free research topic webinar that explores how to find and refine a high-quality research topic, from scratch. Alternatively, consider our 1-on-1 coaching service .

Journalism-Related Research Topics

• Analyzing the impact of social media on news consumption patterns among millennials.
• Investigating the role of investigative journalism in combating political corruption.
• The impact of digital transformation on traditional print media business models.
• Examining the ethical challenges of undercover reporting in investigative journalism.
• The role of citizen journalism in shaping public opinion during major political events.
• Analyzing the effectiveness of fact-checking platforms in combating fake news.
• The impact of smartphone journalism on the quality of news reporting.
• Investigating the representation of minority groups in mainstream media.
• The role of photojournalism in humanizing the impacts of climate change.
• Analyzing the challenges of maintaining journalistic objectivity in conflict zones.
• The impact of artificial intelligence on newsroom operations and reporting.
• Investigating the influence of media ownership on editorial independence.
• The role of journalism in shaping public policy on environmental issues.
• Analyzing the portrayal of mental health issues in news media.
• The impact of live streaming technology on broadcast journalism.
• Investigating the challenges faced by freelance journalists in the digital era.
• The role of journalism in promoting government accountability in emerging democracies.
• Analyzing the effects of sensationalism in news reporting on public trust.
• The impact of virtual reality technology on immersive journalism.
• Investigating the role of press freedom in protecting human rights.
• The challenges of reporting on science and technology in mainstream media.
• Analyzing gender representation in sports journalism.
• The impact of media consolidation on diversity of perspectives in news.
• Investigating the ethical implications of drone journalism.
• The role of independent media in fostering democratic processes.

Journalism-Related Research Ideas (Continued)

• Analyzing the portrayal of immigration in national news outlets.
• The impact of censorship and media regulation on journalistic practices.
• Investigating the role of podcasts in the future of journalism.
• The challenges and opportunities of bilingual reporting in multicultural societies.
• Analyzing the dynamics of news reporting in authoritarian regimes.
• The impact of audience analytics on news content and presentation.
• Investigating the implications of deepfake technology for journalistic integrity.
• The role of local journalism in community engagement and development.
• Analyzing the effects of journalism on public health awareness campaigns.
• The impact of economic pressures on investigative journalism.
• Investigating the challenges of reporting in a polarized political climate.
• The role of media literacy in fostering critical thinking among audiences.
• Analyzing the influence of celebrity journalism on cultural values.
• The impact of cross-platform journalism on audience reach and engagement.
• Investigating the effects of social media algorithms on news distribution.
• The role of data journalism in enhancing transparency and public understanding.
• Analyzing the impact of crowd-sourced journalism on news authenticity.
• The challenges of balancing speed and accuracy in digital news reporting.
• Investigating the role of international correspondents in the digital age.
• The impact of public relations practices on journalistic independence.
• Analyzing the representation of LGBTQ+ issues in mainstream journalism.
• The role of journalism in addressing societal issues like homelessness and poverty.
• Investigating the effects of editorial bias in shaping public perception.
• The impact of journalism on political activism and social movements.
• Analyzing the challenges of maintaining journalistic standards in entertainment reporting.

Recent Journalism-Related Studies

While the ideas we’ve presented above are a decent starting point for finding a research topic, they are fairly generic and non-specific. So, it helps to look at actual studies in the journalism space to see how this all comes together in practice.

Below, we’ve included a selection of recent studies to help refine your thinking. These are actual studies,  so they can provide some useful insight as to what a research topic looks like in practice.

• Imagination, Algorithms and News: Developing AI Literacy for Journalism (Deuze & Beckett, 2022)
• Evaluation of the Effect of a Live Interview in Journalism Students on Salivary Stress Biomarkers and Conventional Stress Scales (Roca et al., 2022)
• Professional and Personal Identity, Precarity and Discrimination in Global Arts Journalism (Sharp & Vodanovic, 2022)
• The Impact of Information and Communication Technologies on Journalism in the Digital Ara A Descriptive and Critical Approach (Chettah et al., 2022)
• Women in Mass Communication (Creedon & Wackwitz, 2022)
• Newsgames: Experiential Reality, Ludenic News Reading, Conflict of Purposes and Norms (Cengi̇z & Kaya, 2022)
• Deep Journalism and DeepJournal V1.0: A Data-Driven Deep Learning Approach to Discover Parameters for Transportation (Ahmad et al., 2022)
• A View From the Trenches: Interviews With Journalists About Reporting Science News (Anderson & Dudo, 2023)
• Understanding Journalisms: From Information to Entertainment by Persuasion and Promotion (Bernier, 2022)
• Role of educational institutions in promoting medical research and publications in Pakistan (Aslam, 2022)
• Ethics for Journalists (Keeble, 2022)
• “I Felt I Got to Know Everyone”: How News on Stage Combines Theatre and Journalism for a Live Audience (Adams & Cooper, 2022)
• Newsafety: Infrastructures, Practices and Consequences (Westlund et al., 2022)
• The Golden Age of American Journalism (Alent’eva et al., 2022)
• Advancing a Radical Audience Turn in Journalism. Fundamental Dilemmas for Journalism Studies (Swart et al., 2022)
• Mcluhan’s Theories and Convergence of Online and Papers’ Newsrooms (Barceló-Sánchez et al., 2022)
• Scientific communication after the COVID-19 crisis: TikTok publishing strategies on the transmedia board (Neira et al., 2023)

As you can see, these research topics are a lot more focused than the generic topic ideas we presented earlier. So, for you to develop a high-quality research topic, you’ll need to get specific and laser-focused on a specific context with specific variables of interest.  In the video below, we explore some other important things you’ll need to consider when crafting your research topic.

Get 1-On-1 Help

If you’re still unsure about how to find a quality research topic, check out our Research Topic Kickstarter service, which is the perfect starting point for developing a unique, well-justified research topic.

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How to Write and Publish a Research Paper for a Peer-Reviewed Journal

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• Published: 30 April 2020
• Volume 36 , pages 909–913, ( 2021 )

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• Clara Busse   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0178-1000 1 &
• Ella August   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5151-1036 1 , 2  

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Communicating research findings is an essential step in the research process. Often, peer-reviewed journals are the forum for such communication, yet many researchers are never taught how to write a publishable scientific paper. In this article, we explain the basic structure of a scientific paper and describe the information that should be included in each section. We also identify common pitfalls for each section and recommend strategies to avoid them. Further, we give advice about target journal selection and authorship. In the online resource 1 , we provide an example of a high-quality scientific paper, with annotations identifying the elements we describe in this article.

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How to Choose the Right Journal

The Point Is…to Publish?

Writing Skills

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

Introduction

Writing a scientific paper is an important component of the research process, yet researchers often receive little formal training in scientific writing. This is especially true in low-resource settings. In this article, we explain why choosing a target journal is important, give advice about authorship, provide a basic structure for writing each section of a scientific paper, and describe common pitfalls and recommendations for each section. In the online resource 1 , we also include an annotated journal article that identifies the key elements and writing approaches that we detail here. Before you begin your research, make sure you have ethical clearance from all relevant ethical review boards.

Select a Target Journal Early in the Writing Process

We recommend that you select a “target journal” early in the writing process; a “target journal” is the journal to which you plan to submit your paper. Each journal has a set of core readers and you should tailor your writing to this readership. For example, if you plan to submit a manuscript about vaping during pregnancy to a pregnancy-focused journal, you will need to explain what vaping is because readers of this journal may not have a background in this topic. However, if you were to submit that same article to a tobacco journal, you would not need to provide as much background information about vaping.

Information about a journal’s core readership can be found on its website, usually in a section called “About this journal” or something similar. For example, the Journal of Cancer Education presents such information on the “Aims and Scope” page of its website, which can be found here: https://www.springer.com/journal/13187/aims-and-scope .

Peer reviewer guidelines from your target journal are an additional resource that can help you tailor your writing to the journal and provide additional advice about crafting an effective article [ 1 ]. These are not always available, but it is worth a quick web search to find out.

Identify Author Roles Early in the Process

Early in the writing process, identify authors, determine the order of authors, and discuss the responsibilities of each author. Standard author responsibilities have been identified by The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) [ 2 ]. To set clear expectations about each team member’s responsibilities and prevent errors in communication, we also suggest outlining more detailed roles, such as who will draft each section of the manuscript, write the abstract, submit the paper electronically, serve as corresponding author, and write the cover letter. It is best to formalize this agreement in writing after discussing it, circulating the document to the author team for approval. We suggest creating a title page on which all authors are listed in the agreed-upon order. It may be necessary to adjust authorship roles and order during the development of the paper. If a new author order is agreed upon, be sure to update the title page in the manuscript draft.

In the case where multiple papers will result from a single study, authors should discuss who will author each paper. Additionally, authors should agree on a deadline for each paper and the lead author should take responsibility for producing an initial draft by this deadline.

Structure of the Introduction Section

The introduction section should be approximately three to five paragraphs in length. Look at examples from your target journal to decide the appropriate length. This section should include the elements shown in Fig.  1 . Begin with a general context, narrowing to the specific focus of the paper. Include five main elements: why your research is important, what is already known about the topic, the “gap” or what is not yet known about the topic, why it is important to learn the new information that your research adds, and the specific research aim(s) that your paper addresses. Your research aim should address the gap you identified. Be sure to add enough background information to enable readers to understand your study. Table 1 provides common introduction section pitfalls and recommendations for addressing them.

The main elements of the introduction section of an original research article. Often, the elements overlap

Methods Section

The purpose of the methods section is twofold: to explain how the study was done in enough detail to enable its replication and to provide enough contextual detail to enable readers to understand and interpret the results. In general, the essential elements of a methods section are the following: a description of the setting and participants, the study design and timing, the recruitment and sampling, the data collection process, the dataset, the dependent and independent variables, the covariates, the analytic approach for each research objective, and the ethical approval. The hallmark of an exemplary methods section is the justification of why each method was used. Table 2 provides common methods section pitfalls and recommendations for addressing them.

Results Section

The focus of the results section should be associations, or lack thereof, rather than statistical tests. Two considerations should guide your writing here. First, the results should present answers to each part of the research aim. Second, return to the methods section to ensure that the analysis and variables for each result have been explained.

Begin the results section by describing the number of participants in the final sample and details such as the number who were approached to participate, the proportion who were eligible and who enrolled, and the number of participants who dropped out. The next part of the results should describe the participant characteristics. After that, you may organize your results by the aim or by putting the most exciting results first. Do not forget to report your non-significant associations. These are still findings.

Tables and figures capture the reader’s attention and efficiently communicate your main findings [ 3 ]. Each table and figure should have a clear message and should complement, rather than repeat, the text. Tables and figures should communicate all salient details necessary for a reader to understand the findings without consulting the text. Include information on comparisons and tests, as well as information about the sample and timing of the study in the title, legend, or in a footnote. Note that figures are often more visually interesting than tables, so if it is feasible to make a figure, make a figure. To avoid confusing the reader, either avoid abbreviations in tables and figures, or define them in a footnote. Note that there should not be citations in the results section and you should not interpret results here. Table 3 provides common results section pitfalls and recommendations for addressing them.

Discussion Section

Opposite the introduction section, the discussion should take the form of a right-side-up triangle beginning with interpretation of your results and moving to general implications (Fig.  2 ). This section typically begins with a restatement of the main findings, which can usually be accomplished with a few carefully-crafted sentences.

Major elements of the discussion section of an original research article. Often, the elements overlap

Next, interpret the meaning or explain the significance of your results, lifting the reader’s gaze from the study’s specific findings to more general applications. Then, compare these study findings with other research. Are these findings in agreement or disagreement with those from other studies? Does this study impart additional nuance to well-accepted theories? Situate your findings within the broader context of scientific literature, then explain the pathways or mechanisms that might give rise to, or explain, the results.

Journals vary in their approach to strengths and limitations sections: some are embedded paragraphs within the discussion section, while some mandate separate section headings. Keep in mind that every study has strengths and limitations. Candidly reporting yours helps readers to correctly interpret your research findings.

The next element of the discussion is a summary of the potential impacts and applications of the research. Should these results be used to optimally design an intervention? Does the work have implications for clinical protocols or public policy? These considerations will help the reader to further grasp the possible impacts of the presented work.

Finally, the discussion should conclude with specific suggestions for future work. Here, you have an opportunity to illuminate specific gaps in the literature that compel further study. Avoid the phrase “future research is necessary” because the recommendation is too general to be helpful to readers. Instead, provide substantive and specific recommendations for future studies. Table 4 provides common discussion section pitfalls and recommendations for addressing them.

Follow the Journal’s Author Guidelines

After you select a target journal, identify the journal’s author guidelines to guide the formatting of your manuscript and references. Author guidelines will often (but not always) include instructions for titles, cover letters, and other components of a manuscript submission. Read the guidelines carefully. If you do not follow the guidelines, your article will be sent back to you.

Finally, do not submit your paper to more than one journal at a time. Even if this is not explicitly stated in the author guidelines of your target journal, it is considered inappropriate and unprofessional.

Your title should invite readers to continue reading beyond the first page [ 4 , 5 ]. It should be informative and interesting. Consider describing the independent and dependent variables, the population and setting, the study design, the timing, and even the main result in your title. Because the focus of the paper can change as you write and revise, we recommend you wait until you have finished writing your paper before composing the title.

Be sure that the title is useful for potential readers searching for your topic. The keywords you select should complement those in your title to maximize the likelihood that a researcher will find your paper through a database search. Avoid using abbreviations in your title unless they are very well known, such as SNP, because it is more likely that someone will use a complete word rather than an abbreviation as a search term to help readers find your paper.

After you have written a complete draft, use the checklist (Fig. 3 ) below to guide your revisions and editing. Additional resources are available on writing the abstract and citing references [ 5 ]. When you feel that your work is ready, ask a trusted colleague or two to read the work and provide informal feedback. The box below provides a checklist that summarizes the key points offered in this article.

Checklist for manuscript quality

Data Availability

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Vetto JT (2014) Short and sweet: a short course on concise medical writing. J Cancer Educ 29(1):194–195

Brett M, Kording K (2017) Ten simple rules for structuring papers. PLoS ComputBiol. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005619

Lang TA (2017) Writing a better research article. J Public Health Emerg. https://doi.org/10.21037/jphe.2017.11.06

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Acknowledgments

Ella August is grateful to the Sustainable Sciences Institute for mentoring her in training researchers on writing and publishing their research.

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Busse, C., August, E. How to Write and Publish a Research Paper for a Peer-Reviewed Journal. J Canc Educ 36 , 909–913 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13187-020-01751-z

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CAMPUS JOURNALISM: VARYING CULTURES AND ITS EFFECTS TO SECONDARY CAMPUS JOURNALISTS

11 Pages Posted: 1 Mar 2021

John Harold Dela Rosa

Central Luzon State University

Joy Nicole Lucero

Danilo vargas.

Date Written: February 28, 2021

Campus journalism has become an avenue for the youth to hone their skills, to be disciplined, to think critically, and to be the upholders of freedom of the press even at their young age. By practicing campus journalism, it entails different cultures that the staffers may adopt as they get along in the process of learning and experience. The chief purpose of the study is to describe these campus journalism cultures and how these might have effects on them. These may result in awareness on socio-political issues, skills and discipline improvements, and analytical and/or critical improvement for them. By the use of descriptive research, the study utilized purposive sampling among the four (4) participating secondary publications to generate first-hand data that were undergone through interviews and filling up of questionnaires. There are more female staffers than males, and males are more inlined in visuals fortes (e.g: cartooning). They are more using television and social media as the primary sources of information. Problems are also occurring to the campus journalists like late releasing of issues, losing of the readers’ interests, and so on. Conducting special training and press conferences are the most prominent cultures in the publications. These are helpful for them to grow in particular to these cultural effects. These cultures and all other variables are also analyzed by the use of Pearson’s square test to further seek if these have strong relationships to cultural effects. The analysis suggests that their awareness of socio-political issues even before joining campus press has a strong relation to their awareness improvement after they joined. This proves that their habit of following current events has a positive effect on them in terms of socio-political awareness.

Keywords: Campus Journalism, Cultures, Secondary, Journalists

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Central Luzon State University ( email )

Barangay Bantug Science City of Munoz Science City of Muñoz, Nueva Ecija 3119 Philippines 3121 (Fax)

Danilo Vargas (Contact Author)

Science City of Munoz Science City of Munoz Science City Of Munoz, Nueva Ecija 3121 Philippines 3121 (Fax)

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Journalism Research Paper Topics

• Advocacy Journalism
• Alternative Journalism
• Broadcast Journalism
• Celebrity Journalists
• Citizen Journalism
• Credibility of Journalists
• Cross-Media Production
• Embedded Journalists
• Ethics in Journalism
• Ethnic Journalism
• Foreign Correspondents
• Gatekeeping
• Gender and Journalism

History of Journalism

• Interpretive Journalism
• Interview as Journalistic Form
• Investigative Reporting
• Journalism and Group Dynamics
• Journalism Education
• Journalists’ Role Perception
• Minority Journalism
• New Journalism
• News Agencies
• News Cycles
• News Ideologies
• News Routines
• News Sources
• News Workers
• Newspaper Journalism
• Normative Theories of Journalism
• Online Journalism
• Partisan Press
• Peace Journalism
• Political Journalists
• Precision Journalism
• Press Conference
• Printer-Editors
• Professional Journalists’ Associations
• Professionalization of Journalism
• Public Journalism
• Science Journalism
• Standards of News
• Telegraphic News
• Violence against Journalists
• War Correspondents
• Yellow Journalism

Journalism is a modern-era phenomenon that began its separation from ordinary communication first with correspondence in the form of newsletters sent out in multiple copies to existing social networks.

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Newsletter authors also required some facility to produce more than one copy and to distribute the result, as well as sufficient social status to make their activity appear to have value for recipients. With the advent of the printing press some early newssheets imitated hand-made newsletters, but the primary model for all printing was the book as printer-editors incorporated the sharing of new intelligences into their line of business.

The main claim to distinction for journalism has come through a close alliance with political life. Politics impinged on printing from the beginning in the form of government controls, and printing itself quickly became a political act of either cooperation with or defiance of the powerful, or the state. Journalism developed at the nexus of negotiating boundaries to demarcate private life, civil society (or the market), and the state from each other, and in some perspectives that zone became a special or sacred space. It was a short step then for the emerging press to become enmeshed in politics, an alliance of two initially and perhaps continually unsavory activities, an irony often lost on practitioners and scholars. The nineteenth century turned newspapers into the central node of news as an economic activity.

Differentiation among Journalists

Although fiction writing occasionally imitates news, journalism differs fundamentally in practice.

Separating the occupation of journalist from author is one marker of a project under way by the early twentieth century to make journalism into a particular kind of profession. Other markers include the emergence of acceptable practices, training programs, associations, and codes of ethics. In many parts of the world, journalism remained part of and firmly aligned with literary work, and even in nations where the professional project predominated, such as the United States, movements of long-form and literary journalism arose.

From its birth in the industrialized newsroom, journalism developed customary patterns for all aspects of work. The best-known example is the ‘beat,’ combining location and process so that a reporter goes through a set of routines to gather information from predictable and reliable places. As an occupational category, journalism in the nineteenth century merged several tasks: principally those of the ‘editor,’ who managed some aspect of content from a central office, the ‘correspondent,’ who ventured out as a worldly traveler and (perhaps imperial) observer of affairs, and various forms of ‘news hound,’ who did piecework as local scavengers to fill the editorial hole by the inch, pursuing a particular topic or venue such as crime or the docks. As journalism emerged as a professional project, specialization produced new bundles of tasks.

The production of news content has become more portable across traditional print and broadcast media as the tasks journalists perform converge on digital technology. The changes might point to multimedia journalism or instead to a de-skilling of practice as the tools shift from professionals’ into others’ hands. In many countries, citizens can now tell each other their own news by writing and distributing it electronically from home, a community center, library, or mobile device. During political crises in Africa and the Arab uprisings of 2011, citizen journalists appear to have contributed to movements against established political power.

Scholarly Study and Prospects

Alignments between industry and the academy for the purposes of job training helped shape journalism research. The first university journalism programs grew from the organized efforts of publishers and press associations to harness academic work to the project of making journalism respectable.

By the late 1940s, social science became the dominant paradigm for academic inquiry into journalism, organized generally around the concept of ‘mass communication.’ Humanities approaches fell behind, and studies employing quantitative methodology published in the journal of news media research, Journalism Quarterly, rose from 10 to 48 percent between 1937 and 1957. Earlier paradigms treated journalism as a powerful force in defining social problems, propagating government ideas, and fomenting public support, but the functionalist thinking among scholars at mid-century saw journalism as limited in its effects.

By the 1960s intellectual currents such as semiotics influenced thinking about journalism. Social scientists studied journalists’ autonomy from surrounding forces. By the 1970s fault lines emerged in the dominant social scientific paradigm after research found that greater effects could occur among distinct social groups than among general audiences, and that journalism had influence in setting priorities among political elites. In Britain cultural studies scholars analyzed journalism texts, and social critics described how capitalist ownership and shared values among media professionals helped support class domination. US sociologists examined news and conducted fieldwork among journalists.

In the early 1980s the communication discipline underwent a period of ferment, and journalism study moved along new vectors. Particularly in relation to political life, framing effects developed as a research approach. Under the emerging conditions of postmodernism, attention to news was declining among youth, and journalism as a professional project entered a conscious period of crisis. Industrial changes liberalized state-controlled media in some countries; cable, talk radio, and other alternatives to traditional news outlets proliferated in countries with commercial systems; and new populist media arose as tabloid journalism spread globally. Scholars of journalism engaged in political and economic critiques that examined the relationship of media organizations to centers of social control.

The ‘new journalism studies’ incorporated concepts of narrative, myth, ideology, and hegemony and engaged in professional critique, political and economic analysis, and sociological observation. The paradigm took institutional form in anthologies, new journals, and in the creation and rapid growth of a Journalism Studies Division in the International Communication Association (ICA).

References:

• Allan, S. (ed.) (2010). The Routledge companion to news and journalism. London: Routledge. Anderson, P. J., Williams, M., & Ogola, G. (2013). The future of quality news journalism. A cross-continental analysis. London: Routledge.
• Aouragh, M. & Alexander, A. (2011). The Egyptian experience: Sense and nonsense of the internet revolution, International Journal of Communication, 5, 1344 –1358.
• Barnhurst, K. G. (2011). The problem of modern time in American journalism. KronoScope, 11(1–2), 98–123.
• Barnhurst, K. G. & Nerone, J. (2001). The form of news: A history. New York: Guilford.
• Chouliaraki, L. (2013). Re-mediation, inter-mediation, trans-mediation: The cosmopolitan trajectories of convergent journalism. Journalism Studies, 14(2), 267–283.
• Deuze, M. (2010). Journalism and convergence culture. In S. Allan (ed.), The Routledge companion to news and journalism. London: Routledge, pp. 267–276.
• Donsbach, W. (2010). Journalists and their professional identities. In S. Allan (ed), The Routledge companion to news and journalism. London: Routledge, pp. 38–48.
• Etling, B., Kelly, J., Faris, R., & Palfrey, J. (2010). Mapping the Arabic blogosphere: Politics and dissent online. New Media and Society, 12(8), 1225–1243.
• Franklin, B. & Mensing, D. (eds.) (2011). Journalism education, training and employment. London: Routledge.
• Lewis, Seth C. (2012). The tension between professional control and open participation: Journalism and its boundaries. Information, Communication & Society, 15(6), 836–866.
• Vujnovic, M., Singer, J. B., Paulussen, S., Heinonen, A., Reich, Z., Quandt, T., Hermida, A., & Domingo, D. (2010). Exploring the political-economic factors of participatory journalism: Views of online journalists in 10 countries. Journalism Practice, 4, 285–296.
• Zelizer, B. (2004). Taking journalism seriously. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Writing a Research Paper

The information search process, some definitions.

• Choosing a Topic and Identifying Keywords
• Finding Library Materials: Using LibGuides
• Using HillSearch (Library Catalog) to Find Books, Ebooks, And Streaming Media
• Search Databases for Scholarly Journal Articles
• Synthesizing Sources
• Citing Your Research/Creating a Bibliography
• Where to Get Help with Research and Writing

Your Librarian

Have you been assigned a research paper or presentation and are uncertain where to begin? Librarians are here to help you at each step of the research process, from initial topic selection to preparing your bibliography. In her work, Rutgers Information Science Professor Carol Kuhthau defines the steps of  the  Information Search Process  and the feelings researchers experience during each part of it -including occasional feelings of frustration and discouragement. Recognizing that frustration can be part of the research process can help you in the long run. Grappling with initial discomfort can ultimately help you develop your thesis statement, craft arguments and find the resources that best meet your research needs..

The chart below describes The Information Search Process, the tasks related to each step of the process, and the related feelings you may experience.

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Your professor might require a specific type or number of sources for your assignment. The following definitions might be of help understanding the assignment. These definitions have been adapted from the Online Dictionary of Library and Information Science .

Abstract -  A brief, objective representation of the essential content of a book, article, speech, report, dissertation, patent, standard, or other work, presenting the main points in the same order as the original but having no independent literary value. A well-prepared abstract enables the reader to 1) quickly identify the basic content of the document, 2) determine its relevance to their interests, and 3) decide whether it is worth their time to read the entire document

Annotated Bibliography -  A bibliography in which a brief explanatory or evaluative note is added to each reference/citation and abstract. An annotation can be helpful to the researcher in evaluating whether the source is relevant to a given topic or line of inquiry. For more information, watch our video tutorial on creating an annotated bibliography .

Primary Source (non/science topics)  -  A  document or record containing firsthand information or original data on a topic, used in preparing a new (derivative) work. Primary sources include original manuscripts, periodical articles reporting original research or thought, diaries, memoirs, letters, journals, photographs, drawings, posters, film footage, sheet music, songs, interviews, government documents, public records, eyewitness accounts, newspaper clippings, etc.

Primary Source/Primary Study (science topics) -  Also called empirical research studies, primary research studies in the sciences report on an experiment that was performed by the author(s) of the study.  These articles are formatted similarly to a lab report, and will contain the following sections: Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, and References.  Primary research studies will often contain data tables, graphs, and statistical analyses.

Scholarly Journal - A journal  publishing original research and commentary on current developments in a specific discipline, subdiscipline, or field of study (example: Journal of Clinical Epidemiology ). Scholarly journals are usually published in quarterly, bimonthly, or monthly issues sold by subscription (click here to see an example). Articles in scholarly journals are usually written by the person (or persons) who conducted the research. Longer than most magazine articles, they almost always include a bibliography or list of works cited at the end. In journals in the sciences and social sciences, an abstract usually precedes the text of the article, summarizing its content. Most scholarly journals are peer-reviewed, meaning article drafts are reviewed by a panel of experts prior to publication and any needed edits are made by the author. Not all periodicals are scholarly. Some are popular magazines - such as Time or People . Other periodicals are produced for a particular discipline - such as Inc. or Education Week - but articles are written by journalists, not disciplinary experts.

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Journalism Research That Matters

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Despite the looming crisis in journalism, a research–practice gap plagues the news industry. This volume seeks to change the research–practice gap, with timely scholarly research on the most pressing problems facing the news industry today, translated for a non-specialist audience. Contributions from academics and journalists are brought together in order to push a conversation about how to do the kind of journalism research that matters, meaning research that changes journalism for the better for the public and helps make journalism more financially sustainable. The book covers important concerns such as the financial survival of quality news and information, how news audiences consume (or don’t consume) journalism, and how issues such as race, inequality, and diversity must be addressed by journalists and researchers alike. The book addresses needed interventions in policy research and provides a guide to understanding buzzwords like “news literacy,” “data literacy,” and “data scraping” that are more complicated than they might initially seem. Practitioners provide suggestions for working together with scholars—from focusing on product and human-centered design to understanding the different priorities that media professionals and scholars can have, even when approaching collaborative projects. This book provides valuable insights for media professionals and scholars about news business models, audience research, misinformation, diversity and inclusivity, and news philanthropy. It offers journalists a guide on what they need to know, and a call to action for what kind of research journalism scholars can do to best help the news industry reckon with disruption.

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Neural Representations of Sensory Uncertainty and Confidence are Associated with Perceptual Curiosity

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Humans are immensely curious and motivated to reduce uncertainty, but little is known about the neural mechanisms that generate curiosity. Curiosity is inversely associated with confidence, suggesting that it is triggered by states of low confidence (subjective uncertainty). The neural mechanisms of this process, however, have been little investigated. What are the mechanisms through which uncertainty about an event gives rise to curiosity about that event? Inspired by studies of sensory uncertainty, we hypothesized that visual areas provide multivariate representations of uncertainty, which are then read out by higher-order structures to generate signals of confidence and, ultimately, trigger curiosity. During fMRI, participants (17 female, 15 male) performed a new task in which they rated their confidence in identifying distorted images of animals and objects and their curiosity to see the clear image. To link sensory certainty and curiosity, we measured the activity evoked by each image in occipitotemporal cortex (OTC) and devised a new metric of “OTC Certainty” indicating the strength of evidence this activity conveys about the animal vs. object categories. We show that, consistent with findings using trivia questions, perceptual curiosity peaked at low confidence. Moreover, OTC Certainty negatively correlated with curiosity, establishing a link between curiosity and a multivariate representation of sensory uncertainty. Finally, univariate (average) activity in two frontal areas – vmPFC and ACC – correlated positively with confidence and negatively with curiosity, and the vmPFC mediated the relationship between OTC Certainty and curiosity. The results suggest that multiple mechanisms link curiosity with representations of confidence and uncertainty.

Significance Statement Curiosity motivates us to explore and learn about the world around us. Traditional perspectives hypothesize that curiosity arises from variability in confidence, but the neural mechanisms by which this occurs have been difficult to evaluate. Here, we harness the human visual system to uncover a neural mechanism of curiosity. We show that a multivariate representation of certainty in occitotemporal cortex is transformed into a univariate representation of confidence in prefrontal cortex to facilitate curiosity. Together, these results illuminate how perceptual input is transformed by successive neural representations to ultimately evoke a feeling of curiosity - elucidating how and why we become curious to learn and delve into diverse domains of knowledge.

The research described in this paper was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health as part of the National Research Service Award (Grant #:1F31MH125589), and the Zuckerman Institute MR Seed Grant Award (Grant #: CU-ZI-MR-S-0017) both awarded to Michael Cohanpour. We thank the Alyssano Group, Gottlieb Lab, Kriegeskorte Lab, Christopher Baldassano, Janet Metcalfe, and Yasmine El-Shamayleh for their valuable insight on this project; Ray Lee and Noreen Violante for their technical support with the MRI scanner; and Serra Favila, Heiko Schütt, and Javier Domínguez Zamora for their crucial revisions to the manuscript.

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Volume 631 Issue 8020, 11 July 2024

The fungal disease chytridiomycosis has spread rapidly worldwide and has driven at least 90 species of amphibian to extinction. Although successful work has been done treating amphibians in captivity, managing the disease in the wild remains a challenge. In this week’s issue, Anthony Waddle and colleagues present a simple approach that could help amphibians overcome the disease in the wild. The key is temperature — the fungus that causes chytridiomycosis cannot tolerate environments above 28 °C. So, the researchers built a microhabitat using bricks piled inside a small greenhouse warmed by the sun. Testing it using Australian green and golden bell frogs ( Ranoidea aurea ), the team found that the amphibians preferred to sit in the hotspots (as seen on the cover). The warmth of these frog saunas lifted body temperatures high enough for the animals to reduce and clear fungal infections. Frogs cleared in this way subsequently showed resistance to chytridiomycosis, even in cool conditions optimal for fungal growth.

Cover image: Anthony Waddle

Vaccines save lives: how can uptake be increased?

Strategies for public engagement need to be rigorously tested around the world to maximize the potential of immunization.

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Canada just hiked PhD and postdoc pay — here’s how to get your country to do it, too

Walkouts, petitions and tweets: how a grass-roots movement led by students, postdocs and tenured academics radically changed government policy on science funding.

• Kaitlin Kharas

Research Highlights

The surprising driver of amazon deforestation.

Demand from Brazil itself accounts for more than half of the demand for crops and livestock from the Amazon and the savannah that surrounds it.

Fake jewellery from the Stone Age looks like the real deal

‘Amber’ beads dating to the Neolithic period, lasting from the fifth to the third millennium BC, are actually mollusc shells coated with resin and natural pigments.

Killer immune cells pile on the pressure to slay their foes

Immune-system assassins called killer T cells compress target cells, forming a destructive crater.

Ants amputate their nest-mates’ legs to save lives

The location of an injury determines whether ants bite off or preserve a damaged limb.

News in Focus

Lab-grown embryo models: uk unveils first ever rules to guide research.

Countries are grappling with how to regulate research that uses stem-cell-based embryo models. They will be watching the United Kingdom’s voluntary approach.

• Smriti Mallapaty

COVID tsar Patrick Vallance appointed UK science minister

Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer has placed several experts who aren’t politicians into government posts.

• Elizabeth Gibney

Why cancer risk declines sharply in old age

New research identifies some of the genes that could help to explain why lung cancer incidence rises with age but declines after the age of 75.

• Heidi Ledford

How Denisovans thrived on top of the world: mysterious ancient humans’ survival secrets revealed

The cave-dwelling group hunted animals such as hyenas and hares to sustain themselves in harsh environments.

• Ewen Callaway

Ultra-detailed brain map shows neurons that encode words’ meaning

For the first time, scientists identify individual brain cells linked to the linguistic essence of a word.

• Sara Reardon

How do you make salty water drinkable? The hunt for fresh solutions to a briny problem

Unconventional methods for desalination could create more drinking water, help many industries to deal with problematic brines and increase lithium supplies for batteries.

• XiaoZhi Lim

Books & Arts

Book review, how conspiracies took root in our culture.

UFO hunters and anti-vaxxers might seem like modern phenomena, but they both take inspiration from a little-known anti-science movement.

• Michael Shermer

Blooming plants and sunken cities, Books in brief

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

• Andrew Robinson

Give UK science the overhaul it urgently needs

Five scholars share their science-policy priorities for the incoming government as it faces urgent challenges in tackling climate change, health, inequality and more.

• Marie Claire Brisbois
• Furaha Asani
• Maria Nedeva

Correspondence

Regulate to protect fragile antarctic ecosystems from growing tourism.

• Christian Sonne

More studies needed on how climate change affects exercise health benefits

• Zhenxiang Guo

To explain biological sex, look to evolution

• Paul E. Griffiths
• Hamish G. Spencer

Harrowing trends: how endangered-species researchers find hope in the dark

When data collection can be damaging, conservation scientists must balance ethical trade-offs between interference and inaction.

• Nikki Forrester

Technology Feature

No crispr: oddball ‘jumping gene’ enzyme edits genomes without breaking dna.

A programmable RNA that bridges a genetic donor and a target could herald a safer and more flexible approach to large-scale chromosome changes.

Collection:

Where I Work

Why i work to revive the tasmanian tiger.

Andrew Pask develops genetic sequencing techniques for marsupials — including an apex predator that was hunted to death in the twentieth century.

• Margaret Simons

News & Views

Mini saunas save endangered frogs from fungal disease.

Amphibian species around the world are threatened with extinction by the deadly fungal disease chytridiomycosis. A simple, low-cost solution to provide warm conditions enables frogs to clear the infection and remain disease free.

• Brian Gratwicke
• Anna Savage

Blueprints for ATP machinery will aid tuberculosis drug design

Structural insights into how anti-tuberculosis drugs interact with the enzyme that makes ATP in bacteria and humans pave the way for improved drug design to treat the disease and combat antimicrobial resistance.

• Gregory M. Cook
• Matthew B. McNeil

Speedy stars blow the cover of hidden black hole

Fast-moving stars have been discovered in the middle of the nearby star cluster ω Centauri using two decades of Hubble Space Telescope imaging. The stars offer evidence of a long-sought intermediate-mass black hole.

• Daryl Haggard
• Adrienne Cool

Flies use blood cells to take a deep breath

Insect respiration is commonly thought to rely solely on direct gas exchange through air-filled tracheal tubes. The discovery of oxygen-transporting blood cells in fly larvae reveals a previously unknown way to oxygenate fly tissues.

• Stefan Luschnig

How mud brought France and England together — 150 years ago

Artificial daylight lacks commercial interest, and a geologist’s thirst for knowledge kickstarts the bid for the Channel Tunnel, in our weekly dip into Nature ’s archive.

Ultracold molecules that interact from afar form elusive quantum state

A gas of molecules that interact over long distances has been cooled to mere nanokelvins, resulting in the emergence of a state known as a Bose–Einstein condensate — the first of its kind in this type of molecular system.

• Lauriane Chomaz

Fast-moving stars around an intermediate-mass black hole in ω Centauri

Observations of seven fast-moving stars in the central 3 arcsec (0.08  pc) of ω Centauri indicate an intermediate-mass black hole in ω Centauri.

• Maximilian Häberle
• Nadine Neumayer
• Glenn van de Ven

Observation of Bose–Einstein condensation of dipolar molecules

Bose–Einstein condensate of sodium–caesium molecules is observed by means of evaporative cooling and collisional shielding.

• Niccolò Bigagli
• Weijun Yuan
• Sebastian Will

Tunable entangled photon-pair generation in a liquid crystal

Electric-field tunable generation of entangled photon pairs is achieved by spontaneous parametric down-conversion in a ferroelectric nematic liquid crystal, with an efficiency comparable to that of the best nonlinear crystals.

• Vitaliy Sultanov
• Aljaž Kavčič
• Matjaž Humar

Tunable superconductivity in electron- and hole-doped Bernal bilayer graphene

Tunable superconductivity and a series of flavour-symmetry-breaking phases are observed in electron- and hole-doped Bernal bilayer graphene.

Room-temperature spin injection across a chiral perovskite/III–V interface

By using a chiral halide perovskite material, spin injection at room temperature into a conventional III–V semiconductor multiple quantum well light-emitting diode is demonstrated, resulting in a semiconductor platform that can also control spin.

• Matthew P. Hautzinger
• Matthew C. Beard

Glassy gels toughened by solvent

Solvating polar polymers with ionic liquids at appropriate concentrations can produce a unique class of materials called glassy gels with desirable properties of both glasses and gels.

• Meixiang Wang
• Michael D. Dickey

Direct radical functionalization of native sugars

A radical-based method for functionalizing native sugars shows a way to remove typical protecting-group manipulations.

• Ming Joo Koh

Stereospecific alkenylidene homologation of organoboronates by S N V reaction

We report an S N V reaction, a rare nucleophilic substitution that involves electronically unbiased vinyl electrophiles, which allows the synthesis of cross-conjugated polyenes and bioactive compounds with multi-substituted alkenes.

• Christian D. Knox
• Guangbin Dong

Onset of coupled atmosphere–ocean oxygenation 2.3 billion years ago

The Great Oxidation Event represents a tipping point in Earth’s O 2 mass balance—when more O 2 was being produced than destroyed—that forever changed the habitability of worldwide oceans.

• Chadlin M. Ostrander
• Andy W. Heard
• Sune G. Nielsen

Inner core backtracking by seismic waveform change reversals

Matching seismic waveforms show that the inner core of Earth gradually super-rotated from 2003 to 2008, and then more slowly sub-rotated from 2008 to 2023 back through the same path.

• John E. Vidale
• Ruoyan Wang

Hotspot shelters stimulate frog resistance to chytridiomycosis

Artificial thermal refugia—sites heated to temperatures higher than that of the surrounding environment—provide a way to protect an endangered Australian frog species from a fungal disease that has caused the extinction of many amphibians.

• Anthony W. Waddle
• Simon Clulow
• Richard Shine

Drosophila immune cells transport oxygen through PPO2 protein phase transition

Drosophila haemocytes collaborate with the tracheal system to reserve and transport oxygen through the phase transition of PPO2 crystals, facilitating internal oxygen homeostasis in a process that is comparable to vertebrate respiration.

• Mingyu Shin
• Eunji Chang

Connectomic reconstruction of a female Drosophila ventral nerve cord

Automated reconstruction of dense neural networks in the ventral nerve cord of the fruit fly provides a resource for investigating the neural control of movement.

• Anthony Azevedo
• Ellen Lesser
• John C. Tuthill

Synaptic architecture of leg and wing premotor control networks in Drosophila

We use connectomics to compare the wiring logic of premotor circuits controlling the Drosophila leg and wing, finding that both premotor networks cluster into modules that link motor neurons innervating muscles with related functions.

• Anthony W. Azevedo

Kinetic features dictate sensorimotor alignment in the superior colliculus

Motor units in the superior colliculus of mice exhibit poorly defined representation of static visual fields and instead rely largely on kinetic visual features to link visual inputs to behavioural outcomes.

• Ana González-Rueda
• Kristopher Jensen
• Marco Tripodi

Geographical migration and fitness dynamics of Streptococcus pneumoniae

Mathematical modelling of 15 years of data from South Africa reveals the spread and vaccine-driven changes in fitness and antimicrobial resistance of Streptococcus pneumoniae .

• Sophie Belman
• Noémie Lefrancq
• Henrik Salje

Legionella effector LnaB is a phosphoryl AMPylase that impairs phosphosignalling

An effector protein called LnaB from Legionella pneumophila catalyses a unique type of AMPylation, and LnaB and its homologues represent a distinct family of AMPylases with specific structural features.

• Xiaonan Song
• Yongqun Zhu

Surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 at the Huanan Seafood Market

A study presents the results of surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 in animal and environmental samples from a market linked to early human cases of coronavirus disease 2019.

• William J. Liu

Inhibition of M. tuberculosis and human ATP synthase by BDQ and TBAJ-587

Cryogenic electron microscopy structures of Mycobacterium tuberculosis ATP synthase and human ATP synthase bound to the anti-tuberculosis drug bedaquiline or its analogue TBAJ-587 shed light on drug binding and could lead to new treatments for tuberculosis.

• Yuying Zhang
• Yuezheng Lai
• Hongri Gong

Endoplasmic reticulum–plasma membrane contact gradients direct cell migration

The density and size of contact gradients between the endoplasmic reticulum and the plasma membrane control the speed and direction of cell migration by restricting receptor signalling to the front.

• Jake D. Johnston
• Tobias Meyer

An intermediate Rb–E2F activity state safeguards proliferation commitment

Cells actively sense external and internal signals to stay quiescent or proliferate, and this trigger relies on being in a reversible primed G1 state of partial retinoblastoma inactivation and E2F activation.

• Yumi Konagaya
• David Rosenthal

dsRNA formation leads to preferential nuclear export and gene expression

Antisense RNAs boost gene expression by accelerating the export of mRNA from the nucleus to the cytoplasm through the Dbp2-mediated formation of double-stranded RNAs, which might explain the prevalence of antisense RNAs.

• Jan-Philipp Lamping
• Heike Krebber

TnpB homologues exapted from transposons are RNA-guided transcription factors

RNA-guided transcription factors arose repeatedly via the domestication of transposon-encoded tnpB genes, representing a parallel evolutionary path to CRISPR-Cas adaptive immunity.

• Tanner Wiegand
• Florian T. Hoffmann
• Samuel H. Sternberg

Computational design of soluble and functional membrane protein analogues

A deep learning approach enables accurate computational design of soluble and functional analogues of membrane proteins, expanding the soluble protein fold space and facilitating new approaches to drug screening and design.

• Casper A. Goverde
• Martin Pacesa
• Bruno E. Correia

Bitter taste TAS2R14 activation by intracellular tastants and cholesterol

A cryogenic electron microcopy study of structures of a human receptor for bitter taste finds that cholesterol can activate the receptor, while the tastant molecule acts allosterically on the receptor.

• Xiaolong Hu
• Zhi-Jie Liu

Amendments & Corrections

Author correction: tdp-43 loss and als-risk snps drive mis-splicing and depletion of unc13a.

• Anna-Leigh Brown
• Oscar G. Wilkins
• Pietro Fratta

Author Correction: Disease-associated astrocyte epigenetic memory promotes CNS pathology

• Hong-Gyun Lee
• Joseph M. Rone
• Francisco J. Quintana

Author Correction: The economic commitment of climate change

• Maximilian Kotz
• Anders Levermann
• Leonie Wenz

Publisher Correction: Fabrication of red-emitting perovskite LEDs by stabilizing their octahedral structure

• Lingmei Kong
• Xuyong Yang

Collections

Spinoff prize outlook 2024.

The pursuit of academic knowledge can be its own reward. But for many researchers, the ultimate payback from their ideas and insights comes from forming a company to commercialize them.

Focal Point on Building a Carbon-Neutral Society

Special photosynthetic bacteria that can fix both carbon and nitrogen from the air are promising for creating many useful nitrogen-containing organic compounds, including fertilizers, feedstock for fish farms, and artificial spider silk.

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