Abstract
Effective Journalism. How the Information Ecosystem Works and What Journalists Should Do About It examines how news and online content affect audiences according to metric parameters and how journalists may respond in this media landscape. Jessica Roberts—assistant professor of communication studies in the Faculty of Human Sciences at Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Portugal—follows a Western economist behavioral strand, examining media from market values and platforms, their interfaces and convergences with human cognition, and unequal distributions in contemporary market-driven media landscapes.
Well-established concepts like agenda setting and agenda framing are central to this strand. Rogers and Dearing (1988) discuss agenda setting in the interaction among media, public, and policy agendas, building from McCombs and Shaw’s (1972) seminal article. Along with agenda framing, these concepts reflect that media not only sets agendas but also shapes (frames) how we think (Ghanem et al., 2009). Framing in Roberts’ book focuses on the attention of audiences and nuanced media output (p. 39, 139, 151, 160, 197).
In arguing for more nuance, Roberts suggests that both journalists and the public can influence an unbalanced scale of contemporary media metrics. Foremost, Roberts advocates literacy around the information ecosystem and its implications on journalism; how people process news indicates how journalists might respond to serve their audiences and communities (p. 4); this also applies to commercial agents, such as social media companies whose community guidelines could further emphasize user responsibilities (p. 170), and transparency around algorithms and platform functionality (p. 172), as well as governments, regulating such platform operations and ownership structures (pp. 173–174).
While Roberts states a founding principle to journalism in the “marketplace of ideas,” to allow the public to judge for themselves what to have and what to do with it (p. 1), this principle also poses challenges to the journalist, building from metrics and demarcating journalism’s objectivity or neutrality (p. 4, 8).
A central question concerns the implications around metrics (p. 15, 36, 65); Roberts moves to cognitive psychologies on information overload (p. 15, 22), continued polarization (p. 43, 47), and a proliferation of fake and junk news (p. 55)—that is, rationality from metrics is contingent (Howard, 2020).
The comparison between the public and journalists in a marketplace is but one challenge. As Roberts states, clicks and shares expose more audiences to yet more advertising (p. 31). Market regulations on social platforms form a response (p. 163), but another, as stated by Roberts, is to integrate journalism with information ecosystems and local communities (p. 139). Yet another response is to remove the function of micro-targeting on social media platforms (p. 169). Roberts’ text hinges on this central question: who or what would make the ecosystem work better?
While I would gladly join in line for media to be a forum for debate (p. 153) and an ethic to “present constituting groups of society to each other” (p. 156), I particularly appreciate Roberts’ examination as a call to scrutinize contingent terms with which ideas spread or unbalanced structures of the information ecosystem contend. While Roberts writes in a straightforward style, the discussion encompasses many potential avenues.
The current debate around the media landscape includes many areas and entry points: Corbett (2015) urges further examination of media interrelated with social processes, and Nelson (2021) examines the relationship between journalists and their audiences. The Horizon Europe project MeDeMAP collaborates with 10 European institutions to determine how media perform democratic functions in different conditions and to different audiences, highlighting accountability, transparency, effectiveness, and promoting active and inclusive citizenship.
Roberts corroborates with the premises noted above. A core argument is how “motivated reasoning,” closely related to “confirmation bias” (p. 48, pp. 82–83), identifies as a process by which information is recognized as valid, while it can also be (re)created and (re)disseminated. Roberts highlights that in the information ecosystem, biases are found and affect content moderation as well as machines, while they are sometimes hidden; content moderation can both reduce and increase biases (p. 86, 130, 143, 164). Roberts highlights an information ecosystem where journalists and the public alike struggle (p. 11, 24), given that access to preference settings creates the potential to opt out, which results in new filters (p. 45, 50). Adding to the struggle, diversity in social media expands on polarization, as referenced in confirmation bias studies (Sunstein, 2017) and filter bubbles (Pariser, 2011).
Chapter 8 delves into addressing these issues through solutions journalism, slow journalism, and service journalism (p. 109). While these journalism approaches are part of the media information landscape, Roberts adheres that they do not attract all journalists for the betterment of communities. Still, Roberts focuses on their potential, such as service journalism at Outlier Media in Detroit which offers more voices and diverse content.
The discussion culminates on how to retract and moderate communication strategies and how metrics and smart devices appeal to cultivate empathy and build community in public journalism (p. 135). Roberts poses a particular responsibility to journalists to fend off negativity and encourage self-efficacy. And this is where Effective Journalism: How the Information Ecosystem Works and What Journalists Should Do About It encourages acceptance and empathy from interdependence and relationship, as explained by Pettigrew (1998), Turner et al. (2007), and Pettigrew et al. (2011) among others. This may or may not be the objective of every journalist, nor every media outlet in the contemporary information landscape, but as stated by Roberts, the 1947 Commission on Freedom of the Press affords an example of power to the public as well as to market regulations (p. 149) with valuable implications on media literacy, for instance, in schools and libraries (p. 190). Roberts advocates a diversity of voices to demarcate and support also the role of journalists (p. 138, 141, pp. 148–149): “Putting events in a context that gives them meaning includes providing an account of events in a frame that accurately reflects and centres consensus views, rather than the opposing views, or most extreme ideological positions” (p. 151).
