Journalism Can Establish its Credentials—All it Takes is a Little Research

Does journalism qualify as academic research? I’m tempted to answer with a simple ‘Yes’. But then the qualifiers start to creep in, so a fuller answer would probably be ‘yes, no, maybe’.

This is not a cop out. It simply reflects the complexity of the question. It is one that is highly nuanced and carries a lifetime of baggage with it. Like many questions, it is pre-empted by a host of others that help to explain and justify the ultimate answer: What is journalism? What is academic research? Is there any significant difference between the research that journalists undertake and that which is the subject of academic enterprise? Perhaps most pertinent of all: Why are we even asking this question?

On the surface, the first question appears relatively straightforward. Most definitions will include statements about journalism telling society about itself, of holding public figures to account and even mention its role in ‘providing history’s first draft’. But such definitions tend to be too superficial. They do not discuss how journalists uncover the information that ultimately becomes the basis of the story. Nor do they take into account the rapidly changing nature of journalism: the capacity of improvements in technology to help us both access and interpret information, as well as present stories in ways that are more visually appealing than in the past and with an immediacy that was not contemplated even 10 or 15 years ago.

For journalism to establish its academic credentials it needs to do a better job at selling itself: at explaining not just what it does, but how it does it. For much of its life, journalism has been considered a trade or a craft. A university degree was not (and still is not) a prerequisite for entry into journalism. Aspiring journalists learnt on-the-job, much as apprentices entering other trades did. Even then, the programmes of study were rarely formalized and certainly not accredited.

The decision by colleges of advanced education and universities to enter the field by offering programmes of study for would-be journalists has done little to improve the standing of journalism either in the broader community or within academe, as a range of public opinion polls on the ethics and honesty of various professions attest. Sadly, journalists invariably sit at the bottom of these tables. But why? Is it because they do such a bad job, or is it because people simply do not understand the nature of the work they do, including the complexities involved in researching major stories? It is a combination of the two, I would suggest.

The public standing of journalism and the standing of journalism programmes among their academic peers are in some ways linked, but in other ways separate. I frequently have conversations with non-journalism academics who profess to be experts on the media simply because they watch the television news daily, read the newspaper, or listen to talkback radio while travelling to and from work. To me, this is akin to claiming competency in surgery, just because you’ve had an operation, or the law, simply because you’ve been the subject of a drink driving charge. It is nonsense. And yet these people often influence the standing of journalism programmes within the university environment and, heaven forbid, the resources provided and even the structure of courses.

I also believe journalism is the victim of academic snobbery, which can be traced back to the days of the old two-tiered tertiary system in Australia when Colleges of Advanced Education provided training and universities catered for the professions. The decision to turn CAEs into universities, and to upgrade the status of the programmes offered, wasn’t widely welcomed within the traditional university environment. Many questioned—still do—why programmes such as journalism should be offered.

Whilst the journalism academics sought to justify their new home, they were not assisted by the responses of industry, with many senior media executives continuing to extol the virtues of on-the-job training while questioning the benefit of a university degree. Even today, when most entry level positions in the media are filled by graduates with journalism or communications degrees, the standing of our programmes is not assisted by the occasional grumblings of media executives who continue to question the merit of university-based journalism education while having no clear understanding of course structure. ¹

This highlights one of the major issues and barriers—confronting journalism educators, namely the difference between training and education. While training is a key element of any journalism degree programme, the reality is that the majority of programmes offer a much broader education, with many students undertaking double degrees, or multiple majors that provide them with a qualification that can take them into a range of fields beyond journalism.

While there is no such beast as a standard journalism degree in Australia, there are core elements that would assist journalism educators in their quest to gain academic credit for their journalism. Apart from helping students to develop skills in writing and presenting the news, journalism programmes also provide significant research skills. Research is, and always has been, the basis of good journalism. I’m not talking about a 140-character Twitter post, a blog response, an in-brief, or even a regurgitated media release, although research is embedded in many of these. What I’m talking about is long form journalism, narrative nonfiction, investigative journalism, the type of journalism that might take days, weeks, months, even years to pull together. This is the type of journalism that Estelle Blackburn is renowned for. It is the type of journalism that appears on Four Corners. It is the type of journalism that has exposed some of the gravest wrongs and misdeeds in history (Blackburn, 2003; 2007).

There is no real difference between the research processes that underpin these stories and academic research. Both can begin with a hunch. Whereas the academic research might be expressed as a formalized hypothesis, the journalistic project is likely to be a little more flexible: ‘Did Joe Bloggs siphon $20m in taxpayer funds into a bank account in the Cayman islands? If not Bloggs, then who was responsible?’ While the academic researcher might spend days, months or years peering through a microscope into a Petrie dish, the journalist will seek to follow the money trail using a range of strategies. This will include document searches (online and hardcopy), interviews and potentially even some undercover observational work.

The critical difference between the two approaches comes at the beginning. While the academic project will be subject to scrutiny and approval by university-based ethics committees, the journalistic project is not subject to the same requirements. However, this should not serve to devalue the journalism relative to the academic alternative. The journalist is always aware of the consequences of his or her actions. They are subject to significant legal constraints (defamation, trespass, document theft, use of hidden devices), as well as ethical requirements imposed by their own moral compasses and the various in-house and industry specific codes of conduct. These are sufficient to ensure that the overwhelming majority of journalists act responsibly. While critics might argue that these are not as stringent as the constraints imposed by ethics committees, the reality is that just as there are rotten apples in the journalistic barrel, there are in academe as well. It doesn’t matter what constraints are imposed on some people, they will find their way around them.

Years spent in journalism provide people with very strong insights into the human condition. Journalists spend a great deal of time talking to and interviewing people. They quickly learn when people are telling the truth or whether they are dissembling. Unlike most academics, who have little formal training in interviewing techniques but rely heavily on this tool for research purposes, journalists are skilled at extracting information. This skill can add to the layers of information they receive. While they might occasionally come across as confrontational, there is generally a genuine public interest behind the story (as opposed to a simple interest in the story) that justifies such an approach. While such an approach may cause grief in ethics committee meetings, if applied reasonably, it can generally be justified.

Critics of journalism often argue that it is not subject to the same level of fact checking and/or peer review as academic research, and therefore, it should not carry the same weight as academic research. This is a misnomer. Given the legal and financial risks associated with publishing journalistic research, major investigations are subject to considerable legal scrutiny and fact checking. Statements and claims are cross-referenced. Sources are verified, and information provided by unidentified sources is subject to greater scrutiny before it is used. This process is not the same as blind peer review, but it is nonetheless very thorough. No media organization wants to be forced to close because of a defamation finding against it. Likewise, no journalist wants to lose their house for the same reasons.

Having said this, I don’t believe anyone would argue that all journalism should carry the same weight as academic research. Some journalism is entertainment focused and often based on scuttlebutt and/or innuendo. Such journalism, while serving an apparently important role, would not, in my mind at least, sit alongside academic research. To provide some hypothetical examples: an article about Kylie Minogue having lost weight while on a new diet, for example, is not as important as a scientific study into why people are attracted to diets. Nor would an article on the number of serious injuries during an Australian Football League season carry the same weight as an academic study into why the serious injuries occurred. However, there is no reason why a journalistic investigation into corruption within the horse racing industry that took months to complete, or an investigation into the smuggling of native birds out of Australia should not carry the same weight as an academic study.

For such journalism to stand alongside academic research, it should meet a number of criteria:

It needs to ask and answer significant questions. These should relate to matters of public interest (as opposed to issues that are merely of interest to people because they are entertaining or involve scuttlebutt);

It needs to involve, primarily at least, the work of the journalist, as opposed to a report on work undertaken by others;

It needs to have a solid research focus. This could include documentary research (both online and traditional), as well as interviewing;

It should also involve rigorous analysis. Well-trained journalists are good at this. They also have the capacity to seek assistance from others (experts in a particular field) if need be;

The material uncovered should be presented in an accessible way (that is, in a format that members of the broader community can access and understand).

Journalism educators are often passionate in their defence of journalism as research. Often they will use examples of journalistic projects to support their cases. I believe this is one of the best ways to establish journalism’s credentials. The work of Gail Phillips and Mia Lindgren into asbestos is a case in point (Lindgren & Phillips, 2011). While it did not identify the cause of asbestosis, that work having already been undertaken by medical researchers, it did, nonetheless, provide a very important series of stories about the effect of asbestosis. As such, it provided another dimension to the scientific research that was being conducted elsewhere. It provided a human face to a disease that no amount of scientific research would provide.

Another case in point is the outstanding work of Wendy Bacon, an investigative journalist and journalism educator. Bacon makes an interesting—and important—defence of her decision to continue her work as an investigative journalist while working as an academic. She argues cogently that the former informs the latter: that there have been significant changes in investigative journalism techniques in the years since she made the transition from newsroom to academe and that to provide her students with an insight into current practices she needs to be working as an investigative journalist herself (Bacon, 2006).

But while I support the inclusion of say investigative journalism when measuring an academic’s research output, or even research projects into critical issues covering politics, science, medicine, economics or society, I struggle to justify the inclusion of work in other areas. For example, I would be loathe to include music or theatre reviews, or sports reports, even if the reporter was teaching arts journalism or sports journalism. I understand that their practice is informing the way in which they teach these particular subjects, but I don’t believe the level of research behind the particular output justifies such status. At the end of the day I believe it is the amount of research, as well as the rigour of the research methodology adopted that should determine whether it is included in an individual academic’s research quantum or not. At its most fundamental, it is a quality versus quantity argument.

Having said this, however, I believe that practical skills in journalism (or practical knowledge in any discipline for that matter) are being devalued by universities. Many of us come to academic careers after years working in a profession (yes, I believe journalism is a profession, despite what I said earlier in this piece about its craft or trade status). We are employed to teach because of those skills and yet after we are employed, we are rarely rewarded for that experience. The debate over the value of journalism research is just one element of this. Of perhaps equal, if not greater, importance is the ‘poor cousin’ status that the textbooks we produce, enjoy, despite being based on a combination of industry and teaching experience. If the truth be known, many of these textbooks are likely to have greater impact than much of the esoteric research produced by academics that is published in obscure journals and distributed among a small number of specialist peers.

There is a second level of irony in this that perhaps reflects the extent to which universities are losing sight of their primary function: teaching. Why is it that academics gain more kudos for writing a journal article reflecting on their teaching pedagogy than they do for researching and writing textbooks that are both informed by, and inform their teaching?

This is highlighted in my own work. Since 2001 I have produced six textbooks. Four of these have been co-authored, one sole edited, the other co-edited. I want to talk about four of these. Two were designed for investigative journalism courses, the other two for feature writing courses.

The first (Journalism: Investigation and Research; Longman Pearson, 2001) was sole edited. I pitched the proposal to the publisher shortly after becoming a journalism academic. While I’d worked as a journalist, I didn’t work specifically as an investigative reporter. As such, I believed that I did not have the credentials to produce a textbook on a subject I knew little about, but had been asked to teach, based on my PhD which explored media coverage of political corruption inquiries in Australia. I did, however, believe that I understood what was required from such a text based on my own reading of books in the field—all international—and the capacity to tap into the skill base that existed in Australia (both journalistic and academic) to produce such a text. The book was widely set among Australian universities for the mix of theory and practice it contained. Chapters by academics were complemented by explanatory pieces from working journalists. These pieces, tagged ‘At the Coal Face’ explained how the journalist covered a particular story.

This approach was also adopted in the second investigative journalism textbook (Journalism Research and Investigation in a Digital World; OUP, 2013, co-edited with Nick Richardson). Again it featured contributions from both working journalists and academics. While the second text featured more chapters and was pitched at a slightly higher level than the first, its goal was nonetheless the same: a marriage of theory and practice. Chapters by academics on how to cover particular types of stories or dealing with identifiable issues were complemented by detailed case studies from practitioners. These were important on a number of levels: (a) they explained how theory can be informed by practice and vice versa; and (b) they provided the practitioners with an opportunity to reflect on their work. Both of these are considered important elements of the traditional academic research process. Richardson is also one of my co-authors (along with Molly Kasinger) on Feature Writing: Telling the Story (Oxford University Press, first edition 2009; second edition 2012).

While writing a textbook, irrespective of whether it is edited or authored, might not be the subject of an ethics application, it does nonetheless require the same degree of academic rigour. Major publishers send draft chapters out to potential users for analysis and feedback. Significantly, a poor textbook can potentially impact on an academic’s reputation more detrimentally than a poorly researched journal article, which is rejected at the blind review stage. While the affected academic may lick their wounds and grumble about the reviewers’ biases or lack of knowledge about their area of specialization, their failure to publish is not widely known. The textbook writer, however, is subject to the whims of the commercial market. At the end of the day a journalism textbook is an academic product with practical underpinnings and goals. And it should be acknowledged as such by universities.

To return to the last question in my opening paragraph, ‘why are we even asking this question?’ The answer: because we have to sell ourselves, and the importance of the work we do far more effectively. If and when that happens, then some practical journalism might gain the kudos it deserves.