Plus: What people expect from podcasts as a form of journalism, improving reporting on suicide saves lives, and the important role of Google Knowledge Panels in cueing confidence in news organizations.
Editor’s note: Longtime Nieman Lab readers know the bylines of Mark Coddington and Seth Lewis. Mark wrote the weekly This Week in Review column for us from 2010 to 2014; Seth’s written for us off and on since 2010. Together they’ve launched a monthly newsletter on recent academic research around journalism. It’s called RQ1 and we’re happy to bring each issue to you here at Nieman Lab.
There is perhaps no more studied — or worried-about — dimension of news over the past five to ten years than the decline of media trust. It’s extremely well-documented at this point, across virtually all corners of the globe. And we now have hundreds of studies examining just about every facet of this decline — its causes, its effects, and its many proposed solutions.
But there’s one less-studied group of people for whom a declining trust in the news media might be particularly damaging for journalists: whistleblowers. Journalists have depended on whistleblowers for some of their most consequential stories of the past several decades. But since whistleblowers often initiate an interaction with journalists, their act is a leap of faith that requires significant trust in both the journalist individually and the professional standards and impact of the news media more generally.
That’s the...
When a company promises to save the planet by 2050, it sounds reassuring. But what if that promise comes with no real plan, no credible evidence, and no accountability? A sweeping new study reveal...