journalism research project

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.

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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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Research in Journalism, Media and Culture

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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

Doctoral Students — Journalism, Media and Culture

Selected Graduates

• Sanna Ali, Ph.D. 2023. AI Policy Analyst, Stanford Cyber Policy Center and RegLab
• Jeff Nagy, Ph.D. 2023. Assistant Professor, Communication and Media Studies, York University
• Anna Gibson, Ph.D. 2022. Postdoctoral Fellow, MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing
• 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
• Morgan G. Ames , Ph.D. 2013. Assistant Adjunct Professor, School of Information, University of California, Berkeley
• Seeta Pena Gangdaharan , Ph.D. 2012. Assistant Professor, Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics
• Mike Ananny , Ph.D. 2011, Associate Professor, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California
• 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
• Francis Lapfung Lee , Ph.D. 2003, Professor, School of Journalism and Communication, City University of Hong Kong

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Research and Resources

We shape the future of journalism..

From groundbreaking global research to IJNet.org, the world’s largest multilingual website for the latest media trends and opportunities, ICFJ is setting the agenda for 21st-century journalism.

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Our Research

ICFJ's research arm explores the challenges and opportunities facing the news media today. Our goal is to help find solutions that advance independent and trustworthy public-interest journalism.

International Journalists' Network (IJNet)

IJNet is an essential resource for aspiring and professional journalists worldwide who want to strengthen their skills, advance their careers and prepare for the daily challenges they face in the often-embattled and ever-evolving role of truth-teller. Its website is a one-stop shop for journalism news and opportunities, aggregating fellowships, grants, awards and more from around the world. 

Road Safety Reporting Competition and Awards

The Road Safety Reporting Competition and Awards aims to help journalists produce stories that shine a light on road crash deaths and injuries in some of the hardest-hit countries.

Journalism and the Pandemic Survey

The Journalism and the Pandemic Project from the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University has published the first large-scale global survey of journalists since the COVID-19 pandemic began. The project is mapping the impacts of COVID-19 on journalism worldwide, informing responses to the crisis, and helping to reimagine its future.

Maria Ressa: Fighting an Onslaught of Online Violence

This big data case study is a product of a Participatory Action Research project partnership between ICFJ, the University of Sheffield, and digital news outlet Rappler. Below is the executive summary.

Read the full report here . Content warning: This report includes graphic content that illustrates the severity of online

We Need Your Expertise for the First Global Survey on Technology in Newsrooms

Update: The survey has now closed. Please see the results .

The International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) is conducting a valuable survey on the State of Technology in Global Newsrooms. This unique study will shed much-needed light on how news media professionals around the world are embracing the digital revolution. The study will identify key trends shaping our business as technology redefines how we produce and distribute the news.

The ICFJ Online Violence Project

With the support of UNESCO, the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) has published a groundbreaking, book-length global study on online violence against women journalists, documenting alarming trends and offering solutions to this pernicious problem. The Chilling: A global study of online violence against women journalists is the most geographically, linguistically and ethnically diverse research ever published on the theme. Publication of the 300-page book, concludes a three-year research project originally commissioned by UNESCO in 2019.

U.S. Study Tour for Georgian journalists

Research discussion paper: global trends in online violence against women journalists.

The Chilling: A global study of online violence against women journalists was published in full in November 2022. See the final study , drawing from interviews and surveys of more than 850 women journalists.

The United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has published research produced by the International

The State of Technology in Global Newsrooms

The International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) has launched a benchmark global survey that will yield unprecedented data on how news organizations are adapting to the digital age. The results will update and expand ICFJ's 2017 State of Technology in Global Newsrooms report, and reveal how the industry has changed in the last two years.

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How does the world engage with its news media? In a dynamically shifting global journalism industry, we track the ever-shifting trends, changes and advancements, aiming to connect rigorous academic research with the practical experiences of professional journalists, media managers and policymakers.

Our focus is on internationally comparative research, and we conduct and facilitate research that addresses the most significant issues facing journalists and media organisations in a rapidly developing industry.

Our research is conducted by a team of in-house academics, along with Visiting Fellows and research associates. We also collaborate with researchers from across the University of Oxford and from other leading global universities. 

Support for our research comes from a variety of academic funding bodies, foundations, non-profit and NGOs as well as industry partners. Find out more about who supports us .

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Expert Commentary

The journalistic method: Five principles for blending analysis and narrative

Columbia Journalism School's Nicholas Lemann explains a series of rules that can help journalists successfully integrate research and reporting.

Republish this article

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

by The Journalist's Resource, The Journalist's Resource April 8, 2016

This <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org/media/journalistic-method-tip-sheet-blending-analysis-narrative/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org">The Journalist's Resource</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.<img src="https://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/cropped-jr-favicon-150x150.png" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

The intersection of knowledge and narrative, of informed journalism, is the heart of what the Journalist’s Resource project continues to explore. In the short essay below, Nicholas Lemann, a professor and dean emeritus at the Columbia Journalism School and a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker , articulates a method for journalism that integrates knowledge while preserving the art of storytelling. We reprint it here with his permission:

A central problem in the practice of journalism is that most of the time, we are trying to engage in narrative and analysis at the same time. They don’t naturally go together. Journalists more often unwittingly let the narrative distort the analysis than vice versa. What follows is an attempt at a journalistic version of the scientific method, aimed at protecting us from writing stories that are factually accurate and narratively compelling, but still fail to capture the truth of a situation.

• Awareness. On any complicated subject, beware, when you set out, of overly simple conceptions of what ‘the story’ is. Often these involve your having unwittingly accepted somebody else’s frame of reference, or having been primed to see the story in a certain way, or having mistaken correlation for causation, or having succumbed to some other form of embedded misperception. As a first step, you should always stop and ask yourself what you have bought into before you have begun.
• Forming a hypothesis. It’s healthier to admit to yourself that you have one than to go into a story with the idea that you have no presuppositions at all – that would be impossible. You should state a working hypothesis (to yourself, anyway), and then ask yourself what would prove the hypothesis false and what would be an alternate hypothesis to explain whatever it is you are investigating. As you report, you should try not just to prove but also to disprove your working hypothesis, and you should engage in a continuing process of revision of the hypothesis, if necessary. If you don’t design your reporting in such a way that if your hypothesis is flawed, you will find that out before you finish the story, then you are leaving yourself open to getting the story seriously wrong.
• Mapping the discourse. On any important issue, there is likely to be a long-running debate with a set of established compass points. Therefore the idea that you can find ‘an expert’ who can explain the issue quickly over the phone is unrealistic, and so, probably, is the idea that you can find two experts, one on each side, who between them can do justice to the subject. Instead, you should familiarize yourself with the expert discourse on the subject. You don’t need to read everything, but you need to know what the major schools of thought are, and where the debate stands at present, and you should be able to read the primary material for yourself as a way of enriching what other people tell you about it.
• Evaluating the data. Never accept a conclusion from an expert at face value. Instead, you should follow the steps that led to the conclusion, and you should make some judgment as to whether the methodology and presentation are sound. You should also find out whether somebody else has drawn a different conclusion about the same subject.
• Transparency. Journalism is not scholarship and does not generally use bibliographies or footnotes, but you should use attribution in your work in such a way that readers and colleagues can see, to the greatest extent possible, where your information came from and how you have reached your conclusions. Therefore, the use of anonymous sources should be kept to a minimum – you should always try to avoid saying something important with only the testimony of an unnamed person as proof. Even your journalistic competitors should be able to tell, from your work, how to pursue your story further.

Nicholas Lemann is the Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor of Journalism and Dean Emeritus at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. 

Keywords: reporting, style, writing

About The Author

The Journalist's Resource

Journalism : Research methods

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Research projects

Media education in cambodia.

The Centre for Advancing Journalism (CAJ) has been selected by UNESCO to research Cambodia’s journalism education sector and provide advice about how international supporters might better support media training.

The 9-month consultancy project is being led by Liam Cochrane, who has been reporting on Cambodia for 20 years. In December 2022, Liam and CAJ director Andrew Dodd conducted field research in Phnom Penh, with the assistance of Cambodian journalist Lon Nara. They met students, teachers, reporters, editors, non-government organisations, donors and diplomats. A qualitative survey will also be conducted by specialist Cambodian researcher Chandore Khuon.

Weeks after the visit, the Cambodian Government forcibly shut down the last remaining independent newsroom, Voice of Democracy. It’s a new low point for the nation’s much beleaguered media and reflects a wider shift to an outright dictatorship.

The project will result in a published report giving an overview of Cambodia’s journalism education sector, as well as targeted advice for universities and UNESCO

Research Group on Journalism Pedagogy

The group has been conducting research since 2019 on journalism pedagogy in an attempt to teach journalism to international students at the University of Melbourne, and especially those from the People’s Republic of China.  We aim to improve our educational outcomes by a deeper understanding of the international students we serve.

New Beats: Mass redundancies, career changes and the future of Australian journalism

This project investigated what happened to around 3,000 journalists who became redundant in Australia during or since 2012.

The project, which commenced in 2014, has been funded by the Australian Research Council through the ARC Linkage and ARC Discovery schemes and was conducted by a  team of researchers from La Trobe University, Deakin University, the University of Melbourne, Swinburne University, the University of Sydney and the University of Amsterdam.

China: The Covid-19 Story: Unmasking China’s Global Strategy

Ancient flora stories: the rich heritage of yea's flora fossil site.

An ordinary roadside cutting on Limestone Road, Yea, Victoria, marks a place that overturned long held scientific understanding of how and when plants evolved. The site is listed in the National Heritage List for its significant contribution to the world’s understanding of our ancient earth’s secrets and for its association with Dr Cookson, one of the most eminent palaeobotanists of the 20th century. This project tells its story.

IFJ Report - The China Story: Reshaping the World's Media

FJ Report - The China Story: Reshaping the World's Media

A global survey of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) measuring China’s global media outreach by surveying journalism unions worldwide, found clear indications of the wide-ranging impact of China’s moves to extend its influence through global journalism unions and individual journalists.

The Civic Impact of Journalism

This multi-faceted, interdisciplinary project is funded by industry and the Ian Potter Foundation. It aims to address one of the key challenges of our times.

Journalism faces an existential threat as a result of the digital revolution. In Australia, nearly 2000 jobs in journalism have been lost from traditional news media organisations as the advertising revenue that supports journalism flows away to online platforms.

At the same time, online news platforms have neither the resources nor expertise to take up the work that the traditional media are relied upon to do. What is at stake for democratic societies in this state of affairs?

An essential step in answering that question is to assess the impact of journalism on civic life. What is it that journalism brings to civic life? What is at risk?

The functions journalism is expected to perform in democratic societies have been established and recognised for at least 70 years:

• to keep the public up to date with what is going on in the world
• to provide the public with reliable information on which they may base choices as participants in political, economic and social life
• to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and opinions, to be a watchdog on those in power
• to help societies understand themselves
• to provide the material upon which members of a society can base a common conversation

These functions all contribute to the working of capitalist democracies.

It is one thing to list them, however, and another to test whether and how journalism discharges them. Only by doing that will it be possible to assess what really is at stake for society if journalism becomes attenuated.

Over the two years 2015-16, a team of researchers assembled under the aegis of the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne, designed and carried out the research under a project called the Civic Impact of Journalism.

The multi-disciplinary team was led by Associate Professor Margaret Simons, Director of the Centre and a specialist in journalism and media. The others were Dr Denis Muller (political science, media and journalism), Dr Andrea Carson (political science and media), Emeritus Professor Rod Tiffen (media, government and politics), Professor Brian McNair (journalism, media and communications), Professor Helen Sullivan (political science and government, Ms Jennifer Martin (journalism) and Mr Doug Hendrie (political science).

The research was empirical, designed to find out what the real impact of journalism is. It was based on case studies, some of which were based on the functions of journalism mentioned earlier, and some based on how journalism worked in three diverse community settings.

The functions examined were: investigative, campaigning, and reportage of civic forums such as parliament and the courts:

• The investigative study tells how Joanne McCarthy of The Newcastle Morning Herald – and the newspaper itself – revealed the cover-up of child sexual abuse by the Catholic Church in the Hunter Valley. It shows the direct connection between that work and the establishment of the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse
• The campaigning case study tells of the War on 1034 road-safety campaign by the Melbourne Herald, which created the political climate in which the Victorian Government was able to implement a series of crucial law reforms, specifically the compulsory wearing of seat belts and the use of random breath tests to counter drink-driving
• The civic-forum reportage case study examines the decline in reportage of the County and Supreme Courts in Victoria and the effect on the workings of the courts, notably the increased use of suppression orders by judicial officers concerned that inexperienced court reporters will unwittingly publish prejudicial material. It also explores the consequences for the concept of open justice

The three place-based case studies were carried out in Moree, Byron Bay and Broadmeadows, each of which has a civic history or social characteristics that would enable the researchers see with reasonable clarity the role journalism plays in the civic life of those places.

These six case studies lead to some important conclusions about what journalism brings to civic society. They also identify emerging deficits that are likely to weaken Australian democracy if neglected.

Publications

A book resulting from this project is currently in preparation.

Other resulting publications are as follows:

• Latimore , J., Nolan , D. and Simons , M. (2016) “Reassembling the Indigenous Sphere,” in Australasian Journal of Information Systems
• Simons , M., Tiffen , R., Hendrie , D., Carson , A., Sullivan , H., Muller , D. and McNair , B. (2016) “Understanding the civic impact of journalism: A realistic evaluation perspective,” in Journalism Studies , pp. 1-15
• Carson , A., Muller , D., Martin , J., and Simons , M. (2016) “A new symbiosis? Opportunities and challenges to hyperlocal journalism in the digital age,” in Media International Australia
• Simons , M. and Buller , B. (2015) “Dead Trees and Live Links – what good are newspapers?” Australian and New Zealand Communications Association, Refereed Proceedings of 2015 Annual Conference

Violence Against Women: a media intervention

This project investigates how a neglected social issue - namely violence against women - suddenly became news and asks: what are the limitations of this new found visibility? In the process, the project also looks at how gender inequality in the newsroom impacts on news agendas.

Violence against women costs Australia $14.7 USD billion a year in harm and loss of opportunity for women, including the cost of intimate partner violence as the lead cause of preventable disease and premature death among women aged 15-44. Violence against women is a largely hidden problem, yet manifests in and forms part of the backdrop to most other more visible health issues. It is, one would think, the biggest crime story in Australia and one of our biggest social and economic stories. Yet until recently, violence against women was not reported prominently or consistently by mainstream media.

This is of concern, since media plays a key role in forming societal attitudes to gender and gender roles. At the same time, ethnographic accounts of the newsroom and surveys of female journalists have suggested that newsrooms are sexist workplaces. These gender issues appear to be reflected in news values and decisions, and are stubbornly resistant to change.

The rape and murder of 29 year old Jill Meagher on September 22, 2012 signalled a turning point in the media’s coverage of violence against women. Since then, the Herald Sun newspaper – Australia’s largest circulation daily – has taken a conscious leadership role in reporting on violence against women as shown by the successful ‘Take a Stand’ campaign which continues today.

We have interviewed editorial executives, senior and junior journalists from the Herald Sun, The Age, Mamamia, Channel 10s The Project and Channel Nine to find out how these changes in news priorities occurred. Our focus has included cursory reporting of violence against women as well as in-depth, consistent and contextual reporting of the issue. Alongside the interviews we are analysing print, online and broadcast content from the above mentioned outlets, spanning in time from September 2014 to late 2016.

In early 2016 we launched Uncovered , an online social media intervention aimed at journalists to help them source information about violence against women and further improve coverage of the issue. The impact of this intervention will be studied through more interviews and an analysis of media content post-intervention.

Finally, a series of focus groups with people from across Australia will be carried out in 2017. This qualitative component of the project will complement existing data from the National Community Attitudes towards Violence against Women Survey (NCAS) and in particular, further explore the impact of the media on community attitudes.

The project is already beginning to shed light on what forces, conversations, considerations and internal politics have been working together to shift newsroom agendas and news judgments. We will examine the limitations of this change in news agenda, reasons and implications.

• Dr Margaret Simons
• Professor Jenny Morgan
• Dr Denis Muller
• Professor Kelsey Hegarty
• Dr Kristin Diemer
• Associate Professor Michael Flood (University of Woolongong)
• Loni Cooper
• Jane Gilmore
• Annie Blatchford
• New News: Changing the Story: Reporting on Violence Against Women

The Citizens’ Agenda

Australian voters directly shape federal election debate.

Voters in 10 key federal electorates had a chance to directly influence debate and media coverage in 2013’s federal election, through a ground-breaking project run by the University of Melbourne and the social media group OurSay .

The Citizens’ Agenda project enabled voters to post questions on the OurSay website, and vote for the questions others contributed. The questions that attracted the most support were then put to the candidates at a series of public meetings in August and September 2013. University of Melbourne researchers used the project to test whether the use of social media to detect a ‘Citizens’ Agenda’ can improve civic engagement, and alter how journalists report politics.

Citizens’ Agenda factsheet

The research team analysed the data from this exercise, including the numerous interviews with political candidates, journalists and citizens. Preliminary conclusions included that:

• The OurSay intervention engaged mainly those citizens already engaged in political activity, both online and offline. There was some evidence of its drawing in citizens for the first time, and of some cross-over between online and offline interactions (web based voting and town hall meetings), but the cross-over was limited
• Younger people were more likely to participate in the online activity than to attend the town hall meetings, though this did happen in some instances, for example, in the context of support for specific political parties (Greens and Sex Party)
• Conversely, older people were less likely to propose or vote for questions or otherwise participate in the online processes, but were more likely than younger people to turn up to the town hall meetings, having heard about them through other than online sources

The Citizens’ Agenda is believed to be the world’s first social media ‘intervention’ of its kind. The participating electorates were chosen because they broadly represent the diversity of Australia, including a mix of marginal seats and safe seats, urban, rural and regional, and a mix of incumbent political parties. They include Melbourne (Vic), Corangamite (Vic), Bradfield (NSW), Fowler (NSW), Longman (Queensland), Oxley (Queensland), Brand (WA), Grey (SA), Denison (Tasmania) and Fraser (ACT).

Major national survey

In May 2013, the research team released the results of a major national survey which gauged the public’s attitudes to political engagement, trust in government and media, and the current state of the political landscape. The independent national poll found Australian politicians have failed to engage or build a sense of trust with voters just months out from the federal election.

“The Survey commissioned by the Citizens’ Agenda project – found a clear majority of voters (58%) thought the quality of political leadership was now ‘noticeably worse’ than usual.”

The Director of the Centre for Advancing Journalism, Dr Margaret Simons, said the project empowered voters through social media to truly help shape political debate. “Voters in a democracy shouldn’t be passive. On the contrary, with powerful new tools of communication all around, we should be telling politicians what matters to us and forcing them to engage,” she said.

Download the Citizens’ Agenda national survey of voters results

• Simons , M., Sullivan , H., Nolan , D. and Martin , A. (2013) “The Citizens’ Agenda,” in Simons, M. (ed.,). What’s Next in Journalism?: new-media entrepreneurs tell their stories. Melbourne/London: Scribe Publications

More information

• View a poster summary of the project (3.20Mb pdf)

Wakul App - Amplifying Indigenous Media

Indigenous Australians are creating, accessing and distributing news content like never before. Indigenous and mainstream print and broadcast channels are being challenged and held to account by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders producing stories for their own people. Wakul App gathers the stories from traditional and new media Indigenous news sources and centralises them in one place, connecting diverse communities through the new technology they are using.

This innovative project, conducted in partnership with The Guardian in Australia and Indigenous X, arose out of The Civic Impact of Journalism Project and its key insight that new media is resulting in a growth in Indigenous media.

Wakul App is currently in prototype form. Its further development will form the basis of an ARC Linkage Grant application in 2017.

Journalism in China

This ongoing research project involves interviewing journalists in China with a view to understanding how it is changing, and in particular how new and social media is impacting on government censorship and control. Researchers David Nolan, Margaret Simons and Scott Wright are visiting China regularly and interviewing a large number of journalists operating in different platform and geographical settings. This is edgy work, involving careful protection of the confidentiality of sources.

• Simons , M., Nolan , D. and Wright , S. (2016). “‘We are not North Korea’: propaganda and professionalism in the People’s Republic of China,” in Media, Culture & Society

Journalism Entrepreneurship in New Media

For the first time in human history, most people in developed countries are able to publish their news and thoughts to the world within a few minutes of deciding to do so. Meanwhile, the big industrial-scale media organisations are in decline, and at the same time there is a new blog, website, or social-media presence almost every hour.

This Centre takes a continuing interest in this emerging sector of news media, and has hosted a number of seminars and workshops for new media entrepreneurs. This resulted in the 2013 Book What’s Next in Journalism, co-published with Scribe. This is a collection of contributions by new-media entrepreneurs from a variety of backgrounds – journalism, IT innovation, social activism, and community work. They talk about connecting with their audiences, and what just might be a new kind of news ecosystem in which everyone gets to play.

• Simons , M. (ed) (2013) What’s Next in Journalism? Melbourne / London: Scribe Publications

Public attitudes towards asylum seekers and refugees

In collaboration with the Melbourne Social Equity Institute and the Melbourne Refugee Studies Program, The Centre for Advancing Journalism is researching the drivers of public attitudes towards asylum seekers.

We will conduct a range of focus groups designed to interrogate why people feel the way they do about refugees and asylum seekers. The result will be a research report breaking new ground on this issue, and designed to be useful to NGOs, policy makers and others.

‘Islamisation’ and other anxieties: voter attitudes towards asylum seekers

Legal Constraints on the Reporting of Violence Against Women

Research shows that media reports of intimate partner homicides (IPHs) exclude information about the accused’s prior violence and the broader social context of violence against women (VAW). This is despite the reality that IPHs, more than any other crime, arise out of a history of prior violence and an environment where gender inequality is entrenched in social, cultural and organisational structures and practices (Our Watch, ANROWS, & VicHealth, 2015).

What has not been sufficiently recognised in these critiques however, is the impact of legal restrictions, which prohibit the publication of certain types of information, and the rules of evidence, which govern what raw material is available to a journalist.

The aim of this project is to provide empirical data showing how legal restrictions and the rules of evidence impact the media’s production of stories about IPH trials. This will go towards a better understanding of the processes that influence media coverage of IPHs, facilitating accurate, balanced and ethical journalism practice.

Journalism Ethics in the Digital Age

In Dr Denis Muller, the Centre for Advancing Journalism (CAJ) has one of Australia’s leading thinkers in journalism ethics. His recent book Journalism Ethics for the Digital Age canvasses the many issues in current day journalism practice. Journalism is being transformed by the digital revolution. Journalists working for media organisations are having to file and update stories across multiple platforms under increasing time pressures. Meanwhile, anyone with sufficient literacy skills and access to the internet can aspire to practise journalism, and many are doing so.

And yet journalism in any form still depends for its legitimacy on the observance of ethical principles and practices. For example, it has to maintain a commitment to telling the truth, and to minimise deception and betrayal; deal with conflicts of interest; protect sources and their confidences; know how to report on traumatised and vulnerable people; and know when to respect privacy.

Journalism Ethics for the Digital Age covers all these areas and more. It traces the ethics of journalism from their origins in philosophy to the new challenges brought about by digital technology, with practical examples to show how ethical values and principles can play out in the real world. An invaluable tool for ethical decision-making, this is a book for professional journalists and citizen journalists, for students in the disciplines of journalism, media, communications, and applied ethics, and for the engaged reader everywhere.

• Muller , D. (2014) Journalism Ethics for the Digital Age. Melbourne / London: Scribe Publications

Best Practice in Data Journalism

Good journalism relies on verified facts, and sustainable robust democracies need engaged, informed citizens. In this journalism is vital, yet is also profoundly challenged by the consequences of technological change. The communications technologies of our time, including pervasive information and access to Big Data, bring both opportunities and dilemmas.

As part of its continuing mission to make a positive contribution to journalism at a time of change, the Centre for Advancing Journalism is conducting a number of activities aimed at exploring the best practice in data journalism, and charting ways forward.

In September 2014 and June 2015 the Centre hosted a two day workshop, Best Practice in Data Journalism, bringing together a select group of invited data journalists and specialists in Big Data from a number of different academic disciplines and industries. They were joined by representatives of the federally funded AURIN project, government representatives involved in the Government 2.0 agenda, leading figures from industry involved in Big Data, and experts from a range of relevant University disciplines.

The aims of the best practice workshop were to:

• Bring together Data Journalism practitioners to discuss their practice, challenges and aims
• Promote conversations and connections between the nation’s best Data Journalists and relevant experts from the University and industry
• Promote understanding of the challenges and opportunities of Data Journalism, in the interests of building effective responses, including through collaborations
• Explore new technologies to facilitate the above through big data analysis and visualisation
• A focus of the workshop was to explore the Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network ( AURIN ) and the capabilities of data it offers for Data Journalism driven projects

AURIN is a $24 million initiative funded by the Australian Government’s Education Investment Fund and Super Science schemes, and provides access to a wide range of data sets (over 1000) from more than 30 major data providers. It is being established to support research into the built environment and urban domain including designers and planners and academic researchers from a wide range of disciplines. The uniqueness of AURIN to other efforts is that it provides live programmatic access to data from the definitive data providers across Australia including government organisations such as the ABS, Department of Health, and Department of Transport and commercial organisations such as the Fairfax Australian Property Monitors.

The Centre for Advancing Journalism and AURIN are keen to develop data journalism projects and collaborations arising out of this workshop.

More recently, Centre Director Margaret Simons and Research Assistant Elyas Khan presented a keynote address “Journalism at the Crossroads” at the eResearch Australiasia 2016 Conference, in which they outlined the pressing need for collaborations between journalists and computer engineers, or “hacks and hackers”.

Find out more about the conference on the eResearch website .

AuSud media project

The AuSud Media Project was born out of concerns over media representations of Sudanese Australians, and a desire to find practical ways of addressing the issue. An Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) report published in 2009 ( African Australians: A report on human rights and social inclusion issues ) noted that,

"Unfortunately, the media usually focuses on crime or on political commentary about African-Australians - and has often been negative or critical, and sometimes misleading. This has contributed to general community confusion or concern about African-Australians, and has caused distress to many."

The research team received an ARC Linkage Grant (LP110100063) to implement a research based journalism training initiative for Sudanese Australians. The training side of the project involved working with our linkage partners, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and the Australian Multicultural Education Service (AMES) , in the development of a journalism training program taught by highly respected journalists. That training program, conducted over three years, was completed at the end of 2013. Those who undertook the training have established their own online news site The Gazelle (inactive since 2014).

The research side of the project included media content analysis, focus groups with participants and interviews with journalists. This research will inform the provision of future initiatives of its kind, as well as explore the way in which new arrivals to Australia are portrayed in the media, with a view to improving media practice in this area. The Final Report is now available below.

• Report AuSud Media Project 2014 (1.09Mb pdf)

AuSud research team

Dr Denis Muller (Honorary) Email | Profile Centre for Advancing Journalism The University of Melbourne

Dr David Nolan Email | Profile School of Culture and Communication The University of Melbourne

Professor Karen Farquharson Life and Social Sciences Swinburne University of Technology

Professor Timothy Marjoribanks Graduate School of Management La Trobe University

As part of the AuSud project, the research team conducted a preliminary study of 8 months of mainstream news coverage of Sudanese people in Australia. This study was partly supported by a University of Melbourne Social Justice Initiative Grant. This research analysed coverage before and after the 2007 Federal election - a period which also coincided with the tragic bashing death of Liep Gony. The analysis of 203 articles found that while not all coverage was negative, the majority of stories represented Sudanese Australians in relation to violence and issues of integration.

Based on this research, the team has recently published an article in the Journal of Intercultural Studies:

• Nolan , D., Farquharson , K., Politoff , V. and Marjoribanks , T. (2011) "Mediated Multiculturalism: Newspaper Representations of Sudanese Migrants in Australia," in Journal of Intercultural Studies 32 (6), pp. 657-673

Media training

The 2010 ausud pilot training.

With the support of the Victorian Multicultural Commission and the The Myer Foundation , the researchers of the AuSud Media Project were able to offer a pilot training program in 2010.

"I feel the Journalism training has helped me learn the skills needed to express my news stories with confidence. Often media coverage of the Sudanese community is very negative. The journalism training program delivered by the Centre for Advancing Journalism imparted me with the skills to write a news story, be aware of the ethical obligations around writing news, and gain the skills required to be able to handle media interviews. I am glad that I have learnt these skills and am now in a position to respond to the negative media publicity of the Sudanese Community."

Kot Michael Monoah, AuSud Project participant

AuSud celebrates achievements

In May 2012, the Centre for Advancing Journalism celebrated the completion of another 12 week course in journalism for Sudanese Australians. The completion ceremony was the culmination of thirteen students' participation in the AuSud Media Project, with the objective to gain valuable skills in journalism. The students were taught by some of Australia's best journalists, writers and broadcasters, who also provided mentorship to the students.

Michael Gawenda said: "Our students embraced 12 weeks of media training including feature writing, editing, interviewing and ethics. To celebrate completing the course we compiled some of their writing into a small publication. They should be thrilled to see their work in print and be very proud of what they've achieved."

• View AuSud students work 2012 (1.3Mb pdf)
• View AuSud students work 2011 (1.36Mb pdf)

The AuSud blog

The central aim of the AuSud Media Project is to facilitate Sudanese Australians in the development of their own voice. As part of this goal, participants of the AuSud Media Project are working on an AuSud Blog - a space where those who have been through the training can share their insights and perspectives to a wider audience. To read their work please go to THE GAZELLE: Afro-Australian Voices blog (inactive since 2014).

Black Saturday: In the media spotlight

Stage i - how the media covered australia's worst peace-time disaster.

The February 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria was Australia’s worst peace-time disaster that left 173 people dead, more than 414 injured, over 1700 homes destroyed and an estimated 7000 people homeless. Coverage of Black Saturday was extensive and in many ways comprehensive. The journalists, photographers and television crews involved in the coverage faced major challenges in doing their work and were deeply affected by what they witnessed. They were faced with ethical questions, logistical problems and fundamental questions about how to cover a natural disaster so close to home.

The Centre has undertaken a significant research project aimed at exploring the experience of journalists, editors and news directors reporting on the Black Saturday fires. The goal of the research was to allow those involved in covering the fires to reflect on their experiences, the quality of the coverage, the pressures they faced, and any lessons they learned for future coverage of major disasters. The research findings were launched at a conference on November 19, 2010 involving representatives from media organisations and key emergency services involved in the Black Saturday bushfires.

• Read the Stage I, Executive Summary on How the Media Covered Australia’s Worst Peace-time Disaster (365kb pdf)
• Purchase Media Ethics and Disasters: Lessons from the Black Saturday Bushfires , by Dr Denis Muller

Stage II - The Survivor Stories

This report is about the impact of media exposure on survivors. It is based on qualitative research in the form of in-depth personal interviews with 27 survivors from eight bushfire-affected communities. The interviews were carried out shortly after the second anniversary of Black Saturday. The research was discussed at a community forum in Marysville on 21 September, 2011 at which bushfire-affected community members responded to the findings.

• Read Stage II, Executive Summary on The Survivor Stories (340kb pdf)
• Read the Methodology for Parts I and II (530kb pdf)

Journalism, trauma and the treatment of vulnerable people : A case study based on the coverage of Black Saturday

This publication, by Dr Denis Muller will integrate the two major research reports, one about how journalists who covered the Black Saturday bushfires responded to the ethical challenges they faced, and the other about the effects on survivors of their encounters with the media in the immediate aftermath of the fires. It recounts the way the tragedy of Black Saturday unfolded, and how the media coverage developed from the evening of Black Saturday through the weeks that followed. In the course of this narrative, large ethical issues emerge, and they are discussed from the point of view of the media practitioners and the survivors, in which the voices of both groups are heard directly.

One large ethical issue concerned the way media practitioners dealt with traumatised survivors, and how they handled their own emotional responses to these traumatic conditions. A significant part of this new book deals with these two sides of the trauma question, as well as the vexed question of consent. Another big issue concerned the relationship between media and emergency services personnel, which affected access to people, places and information. Other major issues concerned deception and intrusion.

Further reading

Media reports about the conference and our research study include:

• Muller , D. and Gawenda , M. “Ethical Free-for-all Over Media Access to the Firezone” (815kb pdf) published in Media international Australia, November 2010
• Stewart , C. “Untold stories of Victoria’s bushfire disaster,” in The Australian, 23 November 2009 (Online) Not available
• Munro , I. “Study finds media have no rules for disasters,” in The Age, 19 November 2009 (Online) Cited 06/02/2013
• Simons , M. “Journalists Adrift: The Reporting of Black Saturday" and “Humans First, Journalist Second. The Journalism of Black Saturday,” on crikey.com.au, 19 November 2009 (Online) Cited 06/02/2013
• Holmes , J. “Bushfire tragedy inspired the best from Australian journalists,” on The Drum, 23 December, 2009 (Online) Cited 28/04/2016

Press photography in Australia

Press photography has long influenced how Australians have understood themselves and their world. This project, funded by the Australian Research Council (LP 120200458) with the National Library of Australia and the Walkley Foundation, documents the history of Australian press photography, from the first published news photograph (in 1888) to the way press photography is used today. The research focuses upon changes and continuities in how the Australian press has used photographs over time. This includes examining the seismic advances in technology and its impact on news photography and the ethical and editorial issues surrounding news photography. It also looks at the ways that news photography can blur the boundaries between public and private worlds, at the evolution of the profession and the use of amateur and agency photographs in newspapers, and editorial shifts in the placement, captioning and framing of news photos. The research also considers the photographic representation of Australia and the world, including international events, politics and leadership, war, crime, gender, immigration, protest, women, disaster and sport.

The outcomes of the research will be communicated through a book, conference presentations and articles and many public events. One of its most important initiatives is the collection of sixty oral history interviews with Australian newspaper and magazine photographers to be kept at the National Library of Australia’s Oral History and Folklore collection. The NLA’s collection records the voices that describe our cultural, intellectual and social life and the interviews will give illuminating insight into the experiences and lives of our press photographers.

Work on Press Photography in Australia was undertaken as part of the Australian Research Council’s Linkage Projects funding scheme (project number LP120200458).

Lead researcher and prominent journalist Mr Michael Gawenda says he was thrilled to have secured a $200,000 Australian Research Council grant to fund the study Press Photography in Australia. "This project will enable us to look at an area of journalism that is often neglected: the place of photography in Australian journalism and the way photography has recorded major events in Australian history," he says. "It will look at how the photograph – and now video – has been used in journalism to record social and political change."

"This is a wonderful project at a time when journalism is in a great period of change and the use of photography and video is increasingly important in the digital age, "Mr Gawenda says. In a journalism career spanning more than three decades, Mr Gawenda has been a political reporter, foreign correspondent, columnist and was Editor-in-Chief of The Age from 1997 to 2004.

Professor Sally Young from the University’s School of Social and Political Sciences, Professor Kate Darian-Smith (Honorary) , from the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies and Associate Professor Fay Anderson from the School of Journalism, Australian and Indigenous Studies, Monash University will also work on the research project.

• Young , Sally and Anderson , Fay (2016). Shooting the Picture: A History of Australian Press Photography . Melbourne University Press

Journal articles

• Anderson , F. (2014) "Collective Silence: The Australian Press Reporting of Suffering during the World Wars," in Journalism History, 40(3), pp. 148-57
• Anderson , F. (2014) "Chasing the Pictures: Press and Magazine Photography," in Media International Australia , No. 150, pp. 47-55

Conference papers

• Anderson , F. (2015) “‘A Strange Alchemy:’ The State of Australian Press Photography,” History Section –  The Conference of the International Association for Media and Communication Research, Montreal, 12 - 16 July 2015
• Anderson , D., Anderson , F. and Lindgren , M. (2015) “The Unguarded Moment: Telling Stories of Trauma, Resistance and Renewal,” Ethics of Society and Ethics of Communication Section –  The Conference of the International Association for Media and Communication Research, Montreal, 12 - 16 July 2015
• Young , S. (2015), “Foundational Moments in Australian Press Photography,” Australian Historical Association Conference, University of Sydney, 9 July 2015
• Anderson , F. (2014), “From World War One to Afghanistan, Armenia to Gaza: Showing images of suffering then and Now,” Keynote address for the ‘Media, War and Memory’ Conference, Auckland University of Technology, 18 to 19 September 2014
• Anderson , F. (2014) ““Take the Picture": Australian Press Photographers, Crime and Gender,” International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) annual conference, University of Hyderabad, India, 16-19 July 2014
• Anderson , F. (2012) ““Shooting the Body”: Photographing Our Boys and Violence during World War Two,” presented at the Violence Studies Conference, Humanities Research Institute and the Centre for the History of Violence at the University of Newcastle, 21-24 August 2012, Crowne Plaza, Newcastle

For more information, please contact:

Professor Sally Young Email: [email protected]

Visit the Press Photography in Australia website

Journalism Research Topics: 120+ Ideas to Consider

Journalism is quite a broad industry that entails enumerating helpful information and showing it on different media channels, including television, social media, radio, and beyond.

For framing an outstanding research paper, your topic must enable your audience to focus on the key issues and make them keen to know more about your topic. However, finding the perfect topic isn’t easy.

Students often select their topic in haste and later realize that there needs to be more information or evidence to prove their hypothesis. Others get bored with their research after choosing a tedious journalism topic.

Journalism is an excellent subject that can open up many exciting ideas for students. However, this blog is genuinely written for you if you’re facing difficulty. Here are some unique journalism research topics you can use as inspiration.

Table of Contents

How to Choose Your Journalism Research Topic:

Finding a unique journalism topic is complex and requires extensive research and clever work. Generally, the internet is stuffed with thousands of journalism topics to write about, but the real struggle lies in identifying your “perfect” topic within that.

We have compiled a few suggestions that might help you create brilliant topics:

• Students must refrain from any extravagantly broad topic, as it can be time-consuming and lead to confusion among students.
• Choose a subject or topic that sparks your interest and curiosity level.
• Students need to narrow their research into essential research questions.
• Avoid providing a research paper based on goofy journalism topics to avoid misinterpretation or negative impact on your audience. Instead, ensure that your chosen topic will be informative for your readers.
• Choose a novel topic that emphasizes distinct issues so readers can understand the fundamental research.

Thus, if you are about to research your journalism topic, ensure it stands in line with your university guidelines. Furthermore, ensure that your topic adheres to all the above-mentioned suggestions.

120+ Journalism Research Topics

As intended professional journalists, brilliant journalism ideas will always be welcomed and appreciated by your professors.

As mentioned, journalism is compiling, collecting, and assessing unique data and information on major on-going events. Along with writing on special journalism topics, one should also be open to writing about innovative discoveries about a pre-existing event.

We have thoroughly compiled a list of some contemplated journalism research topics that you can use as inspiration to get started with the writing business right away:

Journalism Research Topics for High School Students

• Celebrities’ rights to privacy: How far should the paparazzi be allowed to infringe?
• Examining the impact of racism in the media, both positive and negative
• How do electronic media outlets influence journalism in the present era?
• The influence of famous personalities on the independence of the media and journalists.
• Challenges and opportunities for journalism in the 21st century
• Impact of the media on diplomacy
• Explain why it is inappropriate for famous people and idols to be subjected to media trials.
• Why is radio still a crucial medium of communication in the twenty-first century?
• Televisions must stop broadcasting sexual content.
• Investigating journalism as a dangerous profession
• Comment on the sexualization of women in media advertisements
• Describe the effects of media misdirection and misinformation.
• Describe ways to regulate mass media to guarantee that students are only minimally exposed to inappropriate content.
• Why is the United States of America considered a global superpower?
• The role of media outlets during the pandemic
• Imperativeness of journalism for disadvantaged social groups
• Is print media no longer necessary in the age of social media?
• How has technology altered media

Brilliant Mass Communication and Journalism Research Topics

Read Also – 400+ Philosophy Research Paper Topics

• The credibility of online journalism
• The role of journalism in war zones
• Current Changes in Journalism in the United States
• Theoretical and methodological trends in journalism
• The history of journalism
• Journalism and the construction of police brutality
• Media’s role in curbing corruption
• Political women in media culture
• A critical review of the methodological trends and controversies surrounding the use of opinion polls
• Media’s role in exposing corrupted politicians
• Government-sanctioned journalism in China
• News workers, technology, and journalism history
• Trends in fake news in the modern media space
• Media censorship in China
• The future of blogging and journalism in the United States
• Critical analysis of how the British journalists try to win over the royals
• Bridging media psychology and cognitive neuroscience

Sports Journalism Research Topics

• Empirical research on racial discrimination in sports
• The journey of a sportsperson: researching the importance of storytelling for sports persons
• A qualitative investigation into the lives of sportswomen
• Impact of sports journalism on the construction of “body image” in the mind of a younger generation
• Homophobia in modern sports and the role of media channels in increasing such negativism
• Ethics in sports journalism
• Protecting brand through media and journalism channels
• Trans journalist association for sports: opportunities and challenges
• TVG Network in sports reporting
• What happened to Adriano: investigating the Dark Story Behind the Retirement of “Next Door” Ronaldo
• Evaluating media’s role in helping GenZ athletes to seek their “authentic voice.”
• The challenges of sports media during Covid19 outbreak
• The part of sports journalism in entertaining the masses
• Richie Benaud, the voice of cricket and an influential broadcaster
• James Hird’s suspected drug overdose: invasive reporting violates the right to privacy
• Sports journalism as strategic sports marketing
• The dangers of sports journalism
• FIFA world cup 2022: restrictions on journalists for covering the event
• The harsh truth of replacing sports journalism with “mindless gossip columnists.”

Investigative Journalism and Media Topics for Research

Read Also – 40 Architecture Thesis Topics

• Examining the impact of television advertising on the moral behaviors of young minds
• Representation of Muslim women and Islam by journalists
• The evolution of the media in the United States
• Sports journalism: Why is it challenging for sports journalists to succeed in sports broadcasting?
• Compare and contrast FOX and BBC news reports.
• Countering the false image of Arab women in the Arab media
• The influence of print media on the advancement of pop culture
• Transculturation in media translation
• Why do celebrity rumors frequently dominate media outlets as opposed to important news?
• The life and works of Eric Eyre
• Justify the lack of explicit depictions of atrocity in the media.
• Describe why the Government primarily uses the media as a propaganda tool.
• Examine whether politicians rely on the media to maintain their power.
• A critical analysis of freedom and the press.
• Money has corrupted the media: an overview.
• The life and works of Dean Banquet
• The correlation of media and Government
• Media bias in investigative journalism

Electronic Media Topics for Research

• Media Education in the Age of Disruptive Media
• Evaluating the future of broadcasting from a global perspective
• The internet explosion
• Is print media dead?
• Broadcasting in the era of electronic media
• Communication through electronic media platforms
• Analyzing the role of electronic media channels in shaping modern-day journalism
• The impact of electronic media on social behavior

Journalism Topics Straight From the Experts

• Describe the effects of biased journalism and why it could harm society.
• An in-depth look at international journalism
• Compare and contrast the Obama and Trump administrations’ treatment of the media.
• Research the “Black Lives Matter” movement and examine how the media contributed to its growth.
• The connection between politics and the media: Are there any media organizations that are politically apolitical?
• Does media coverage of conflict have any beneficial or adverse effects?
• Understanding journalism as a dangerous profession
• The influence of journalism and its impact on army operations
• Mass media censorship in North Korea
• Crisis of Credibility in Journalism and the Media in an Era of Radical Nationalism
• The business of journalism: fake news, but real money!
• How media channels are spreading hatred and violence
• Investigative reporting on the Brazilian drug trade

Literary Journalism Topics to Write About

Read Also – History of Modern Literature

• Literary journalism in the twentieth century
• Employing metaphors in headlines.
• Justify the need for social media platforms to outlaw fake news.
• Are American enemies treated correctly by the media?
• How has journalism been affected by scientific and technological advances?
• American literary journalism
• Literary journalism and the drama of civic life
• Understanding the rise of literary journalism in the eighteenth century
• Researching Tesla’s unique business model
• The evolving ethics of journalism in the 21st century
• Consider the necessity for real-life tales in the media of today.
• A theoretical analysis of the theory of the social responsibility of journalism
• Communication theory in journalism: are journalists the new peacekeeping force?

Political Journalism and Mass Media Topics for Research

Read Also – 200 Political Science Research Topics

• Propaganda in the mass media
• Understanding the psychology of media and politics
• Evaluating the credibility of public media organizations
• New complexities and practices in political journalism
• Popular political media tactics of political parties in the United States
• Can the media influence election outcomes?
• Investigations into the lives of prominent American politicians
• Political scandals cause media introspection.
• Evaluating the impact of politics on mass media
• The politics of public journalism

Unique Journalism Research Topics

• Look into the Government’s media regulation policies.
• Examining the media’s role in eradicating poverty
• Describe how readers may verify the accuracy and reliability of news reports.
• Part of the Media in the Russia-Ukraine Crisis
• How did the Vietnam War’s coverage in the media change over time?
• The authoritarian theory of the press
• Describe the fundamental problems that journalism faces.
• Examines the question of whether media outlets are to blame for the dissemination of dubious news.
• Comprehending the media’s role in eradicating illiteracy rates in developing and under-developed nations
• Contributions and the roles of journalists in COVID-19 pandemic management
• Transculturation’s significance in media translation
• Investigation into famous American politicians

Winding Up!!

Know that each research topic mentioned above has been carefully selected to help you with your research.

We understand coming up with the best topic will be something other than a walk in the park. It would be a challenging journey, mainly because no amount of diligent work can fully guarantee your expected results.

The above topics will allow you to efficiently conduct extensive research, interviews, and other practical methods of collecting relevant data for your research. Last but not least, remember this is your one shot, so give it your best effort. Good luck with your future endeavors!

By Alex Brown

I'm an ambitious, seasoned, and versatile author. I am experienced in proposing, outlining, and writing engaging assignments. Developing contagious academic work is always my top priority. I have a keen eye for detail and diligence in producing exceptional academic writing work. I work hard daily to help students with their assignments and projects. Experimenting with creative writing styles while maintaining a solid and informative voice is what I enjoy the most.

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• Research & Projects

Research and projects

Projects at the institute of journalism.

Covering Cohesion Policy in Europe (COPE)

"Covering Cohesion Policy in Europe - Training MOOC for European Journalism Students" (COPE) is the title of a project funded by the EU Commission. Under the leadership of the Institute of Journalism, a new MOOC - Massive Open Online Course - will be created on covering EU cohesion policy.

The online course will be available to all universities in the European Union that train journalists at the undergraduate level. The COPE consortium consists of academics and journalism trainers from TU Dortmund University, AP Hogeschool Antwerp in Belgium, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, University of Wrocław in Poland, University of Porto in Portugal, Babeș-Bolyai University in Romania, as well as the European Journalism Training Association (EJTA) and the non-governmental organization Arena for Journalism in Europe.

More information

CoMMPASS stands for “Communicating Migration and Mobility – E-Learning Programs and Newsroom Applications for Sub-Saharan Africa.” This EU-funded Erasmus+ project addresses the role of the media in reporting on migration and mobility, a key challenge in the 21st century, while promoting the development of an African narrative on the issue.

In the three-year course of the project (2023-2026), a consortium of six partners in Africa (Makerere University and Ugandan Christian University in Uganda, Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences and University of Livingstonia in Malawi, and Université Joseph-Ki-Zerbo and Université Thomas-Sankara in Burkina Faso) and two in Europe (Dortmund University and ISCTE-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa in Portugal) will design and launch an innovative and interactive e-learning tool in four key African languages (English, French, Portuguese and Swahili) to facilitate better coverage on migration and mobility.

The Dortmund Center for data-based Media Analysis (DoCMA) is an interdisciplinary research project, in which algorithms process huge quantities of newspaper articles and texts of social media in order to recognize patterns. The results enable the team to identify emerging trends in social networks, to track the development of a topic or compare how a topic is reported across media and/or countries.

DoCMA is a cross-faculty network of scientists, and serves the scientific exchange, the promotion of young scientists and the advancement of larger research and development projects in the field of data-based media analysis. The two professors Henrik Müller (journalism) and Jörg Rahnenführer (statistics) are both directors of DoCMA. 

The FeKoM project—funded by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF, Federal Ministry of Education and Research)—aims to support the formation of an ethics-sensitive attitude in communication and media research.

Against the background of the steadily growing complexity of research processes and the increased importance of reflecting on research ethics, the topic is becoming increasingly important.

The project pursues the goal of formulating evidence-based recommendations for applied research ethics in quantitative studies (and its communication in teaching) and implementing them within the scientific community.

GERMAN-AUSTRIAN DIGITAL MEDIA OBSERVATORY (GADMO)

GADMO is the largest coalition of fact-checkers and researchers in the German-speaking area: The aim of the project led by the Institute of Journalism is the coordinated fight against false claims and disinformation on the Internet. For the first time, the leading fact-checking organisations in the German-speaking countries Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa), Agence France Press (AFP), Austria Presse Agentur (APA) and the independent non-profit investigative newsroom Correctiv join forces. They cooperate with communication and data scientists from the Institute of Journalism and the Faculty of Statistics at TU Dortmund University and the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology. The Athens Technology Center is a technical partner. GADMO is part of the network of the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) and is funded by the EU commission. 

Journalism & Democracy

What are the expectations of society and politics from journalism? What do the individual groups know about the expectations of the others? These questions are at the centre of the study "Journalism and Democracy", led by Prof. Dr. Michael Steinbrecher and Prof. Dr. Günther Rager. 

As a first step, journalists were surveyed - both newcomers to journalism (students at the Institute of Journalism at TU Dortmund University and trainees in various media companies) as well as experienced journalists. 

Next, a large-scale survey of politicians was conducted. This was followed by surveys of the public, economic actors and technological pioneers. An extension to other socially relevant groups is planned.

More information (in German)

Medien-Doktor

Based at the Chair of Science Journalism at the Institute of Journalism, the "Medien-Doktor" (in English "The German Health News Review") regularly evaluates journalistic contributions on health, nutrition and environmental topics with the help of a pool of experts consisting of renowned journalists. The expert opinions are prepared according to defined criteria.

The expert opinions published on the website medien-doktor.de, together with research tips, analyses and blog posts, also serve as a self-learning centre - for journalists and representatives of science PR, for teachers or citizens interested in the topic of media literacy. 

medien-doktor.de  

medien-doktor assistance

The aim of the project "medien-doktor assistance" at the Chair of Science Journalism is to develop an assistance system and create new structures for quality assurance in science reporting, especially in medical reporting, with a focus on regional media. Together with partner newsrooms such as Ruhr Nachrichten and Nürnberger Zeitung, the support needs will be specified and training offers will be made. 

Subsequently, the "Medien-Doktor" team will develop and evaluate the prototype of an assistance system together with the cooperation partner Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS) in Sankt Augustin and with a working group from the Faculty of Statistics at TU Dortmund University, using methods ranging from data journalism to machine learning.

The project is supported by the "WPK-Innovationsfonds", an initiative of Wissenschaftspressekonferenz, Joachim Herz Stiftung, VolkswagenStiftung, Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft, Schöpflin Stiftung, Rudolf Augstein Stiftung and ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius.

The aim of the project "noFake"—funded by the BMBF—is to dovetail the skills of humans and machines in order to enable citizens with minimal further training to carry out the essential steps of fact-checking. An AI system will be developed, which will sift through large amounts of data, pre-sort and annotate suspicious text and image material, and contextualise it for the human fact-checkers.

The project is being carried out by a consortium of the Ruhr University of Bochum, the non-profit investigative newsroom CORRECTIV, and TU Dortmund University with the assistance of Prof. Tobias Gostomzyk.

NRWision is a media platform for residents of North Rhine-Westphalia. It includes a media library with over 26,000 audio and video pieces, as well as a state-wide TV broadcast. NRWision is aimed at all NRW residents who create podcasts, radio shows, short films, reports, videos, or anything else for no financial benefits. An editorial service is provided to participants, i.e., the NRWision team checks for legal issues, writes an accompanying text, and provides editorial and technical guidance for future productions.

NRWision is funded by the Media Authority of North Rhine-Westphalia. Responsibility for the project lies with the Institute of Journalism.

Rhine Ruhr Center for Science Communication Research (RRC)

Funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, the Rhine Ruhr Center for Science Communication Research (RRC) reorganises science communication research and develops innovative communication formats. To do so, the RRC focuses on findings from the interdisciplinary field of Science Studies as well as the development of new perspectives to communicate the Social Sciences and Humanities. The central aim is to enable both specialist audiences and a broader public to evaluate facts and research results in a reflective manner and to convey a nuanced picture of science.

The RRC combines the expertise of four project partners: the Chair of Science Journalism at TU Dortmund University, the Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities Essen (KWI), the Forum Internationale Wissenschaft at the University of Bonn and the Institute for Media Research and Development at Bonn-Rhine-Sieg University of Applied Sciences.

"SecHuman - Security for People in Cyberspace" is a graduate programme in which 13 doctoral students from the Ruhr University of Bochum, the TU Dortmund University and the University of Applied Sciences Dortmund investigate technical and social problems of IT security in an inter- and transdisciplinary research environment. To ensure the socio-political and practical relevance of the research, the research group cooperates with numerous practitioners from business, politics and civil society.

The SecHuman research college is embedded in the Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security at the Ruhr University of Bochum, one of the leading European research institutes in the field of IT security. 

Projects at the Erich Brost Institute for international journalism

The European Journalism Observatory (EJO), a network of 13 independent non-profit media research institutes in 11 countries, aims to bridge journalism research and practice in Europe, and to foster professionalism and press freedom. The EJO promotes dialogue between media researchers and practitioners. It brings the results of media research to people who deal with and work in the media. It aims to improve the quality of journalism, contribute to a richer understanding of media, and to foster press freedom and media accountability. The German EJO site is located at the Erich Brost Institute. 

German EJO  /  English EJO

Global research on media accountability

Media accountability has been a prime research focus of the team led by Prof. Dr. Susanne Fengler for more than a decade. The team has contributed to  major global comparative research .

The most recent publications are the Global Handbook of Media Accountability  and the Special Issue of the Journal of Middle East Media (JMEM).

The research started in 2010 with the MediaAcT project’ which - for the first time - presented a comparative study on media self-regulation and media transparency of the media in Europe, North Africa (Tunisia) and the Middle East (Jordan). 

Reporting on migration

Research on reporting on migration and forced displacement has been a cornerstone of Prof. Dr. Susanne Fengler’s chair in international journalism for over a decade. The research comprises comparative global studies which include African, Arabic, American, Asian and European countries. These studies as well as projects with workshops attended by practicing journalists and educators revealed a dearth of journalistic education on reporting on migration and forced displacement along with a lack of curricula resources.

This insight resulted in the research and publication of the UNESCO Handbook for Journalism Educators: Reporting on Migrants and Refugees .

Media accountability in the MENA region

Since 2020, the project (funded by the Federal German Foreign Office) aimed to support media accountability in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Syria and Tunisia. A comparative pilot-study titled  “Media Accountability in the MENA region“  researched the status of applied media accountability in the region.

Further workshops have been conducted to enhance the application of media accountability, while an online platform introduced a range of media accountability tools in  Arabic  and  English , and a  regional network for media accountability in the MENA region  was formed.

Mediadelcom

Mediadelcom is the abbreviated and most commonly used title of the EU Horizon 2020 funded project: “Critical Exploration of Media Related Risks and Opportunities for Deliberative Communication: Development Scenarios of the European Media Landscape“. The Erich Brost Institute is the German partner. After developing a holistic theoretical framework to describe risks and opportunities for deliberative communication in Europe, the project analyses monitoring capabilities and past developments in journalism, media regulation, media usage, and media-related competencies in the 14 project countries. Based on this data, the consortium will develop a diagnostic tool to analyze future scenarios.

More information  

Media self-regulation in Poland

Since 2020 with support of the Zeit-Stiftung, the Erich Brost Institute for International Journalism—in cooperation with the Universities of Warsaw and Wrocław—has been successfully promoting high-level dialog formats on media self-regulation in Poland.

The co-operation succeeded in bringing leading Polish media, journalists' and press publishers' associations and media policy to one table, with the aim of building bridges between these stakeholders. Subsequently a joint Working Group on Self-Regulation was established (see full report in  Central European Journal of Communication ).

MEDIEN MIGATION INTEGRATION

MEDIEN MIGRATION INTEGRATION is an e-learning platform on the topics of migration, media and discrimination. The Erich Brost Institute, together with Mediendienst Integration, has developed more than 20 free courses for media professionals, prospective journalists and other interested parties.

The platform supports well-founded reporting on the topics of migration and integration with more than 250 videos, audios, graphics, tasks as well as interactive quiz formats and role plays. The project is part of the media forum of the federal government's National Action Plan for Integration.

More information (in German)  

NEWSREEL stands for two sequential EU-funded projects through which the Erich Brost Institute (EBI) is committed to innovations in journalism education. The project partners develop e-learning materials and model syllabi for different fields of journalism training that need an update. Besides the EBI, the consortium consists of universities from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Portugal, and Romania, as well as the Berlin-based collaborative journalism organization Hostwriter as a practice partner. The EBI team is contributing its expertise in reporting on migrants and refugees, as well as in foreign coverage.

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Virtual Reality Journalism

Table of Contents

Executive Summary

After decades of research and development, virtual reality appears to be on the cusp of mainstream adoption. For journalists, the combination of immersive video capture and dissemination via mobile VR players is particularly exciting. It promises to bring audiences closer to a story than any previous platform.

Two technological advances have enabled this opportunity: cameras that can record a scene in 360-degree, stereoscopic video and a new generation of headsets. This new phase of VR places the medium squarely into the tradition of documentary—a path defined by the emergence of still photography and advanced by better picture quality, color, film, and higher-definition video. Each of these innovations allowed audiences to more richly experience the lives of others. The authors of this report wish to explore whether virtual reality can take us farther still.

To answer this question, we assembled a team of VR experts, documentary journalists, and media scholars to conduct research-based experimentation.

The digital media production company Secret Location, a trailblazer in interactive storytelling and live-motion virtual reality, were the project’s production leads, building a prototype 360-degree, stereoscopic camera and spearheading an extensive post-production, development process. CEO James Milward and Creative Director Pietro Gagliano helmed the Secret Location team, which also included nearly a dozen technical experts.

PBS’s Frontline , in particular Executive Producer Raney Aronson-Rath, Managing Editor (digital) Sarah Moughty, and filmmaker Dan Edge, led the editorial process and enabled our virtual reality experiment as it was shot alongside an ongoing Frontline feature documentary.

The Tow Center for Digital Journalism facilitated the project. The center’s former research director and current assistant professor at UBC, Taylor Owen, and senior fellow Fergus Pitt embedded themselves within the entire editorial and production process, interviewing participants and working to position the experiment at the forefront of a wider conversation about changes in journalistic practice.

This report has four parts.

First, it traces the history of virtual reality, in both theory and practice. Fifty years of research and theory about virtual reality have produced two concepts which are at the core of journalistic virtual reality: immersion, or how enveloped a user is, and presence, or the perception of “being there.” Theorists identify a link between the two; greater levels of immersion lead to greater levels of presence. The authors’ hypothesis is that as the separation shrinks between audiences and news subjects, journalistic records gain new political and social power. Audiences become witnesses.

Second, we conducted a case study of one of the first documentaries produced for the medium: an ambitious project, shot on location in West Africa with innovative technology and a newly formed team. This documentary was a collaboration between Frontline , Secret Location, and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism. The authors have documented its planning, field production, post-production and distribution, observing the processes and recording the lessons, missteps, and end results.

Third, we draw a series of findings from the case study, which together document the opportunities and challenges we see emerging from this new technology. These findings are detailed in Chapter 4, but can be summarized as:

• Virtual reality represents a new narrative form, one for which technical and stylistic norms are in their infancy .

The VR medium challenges core journalistic questions evolving from the fourth wall debate, such as “who is the journalist?” and “what does the journalist represent?”

A combination of the limits of technology, narrative structure, and journalistic intent determine the degree of agency given to users in a VR experience.

The technology requirements for producing live-motion virtual reality journalism are burdensome, non-synergistic, rapidly evolving, and expensive.

At almost every stage of the process, virtual reality journalism is presented with tradeoffs that sit on a spectrum of time, cost, and quality.

The production processes and tools are mostly immature, are not yet well integrated, or common; the whole process from capture through to viewing requires a wide range of specialist, professional skills.

At this point in the medium’s development, producing a piece of virtual reality media requires a complete merger between the editorial and production processes.

• Adding interactivity and user navigation into a live-motion virtual reality environment is very helpful for journalistic output, and also very cumbersome.

High-end, live motion virtual reality with added interactivity and CGI elements is very expensive and has a very long production cycle.

This project’s form is not the only one possible for journalistic VR. Others, including immediate coverage, may be accessible, cheaper, and have journalistic value.

Finally, we make the following recommendations for journalists seeking to work in virtual reality:

• Journalists must choose a place on the spectrum of VR technology. Given current technology constraints, a piece of VR journalism can be of amazing quality, but with that comes the need for a team with extensive expertise and an expectation of long-turnaround—demands that require a large budget, as well as timeline flexibility. Or, it can be of lower-production quality, quicker turnaround, and thereby less costly. If producers choose to include extensive interactivity, with the very highest fidelity and technical features, they are limiting their audience size to those few with high-end headsets.
• Draw on narrative technique. Journalists making VR pieces should expect that storytelling techniques will remain powerful in this medium. The temptation when faced with a new medium, especially a highly technical one, is to concentrate on mastering the technology—often at the expense of conveying a compelling story. In the context of documentary VR, there appear to be two strategies for crafting narrative. The first is to have directed-action take place in front of the “surround” camera. The second is to adulterate the immersive video with extra elements, such as computer-generated graphics or extra video layers. The preexisting grammar of film is significantly altered; montages don’t exist in a recognizable way, while the functions of camera angles and frames change as well.
• The whole production team needs to understand the form, and what raw material the finished work will need, before production starts. In our case, a lack of raw material that could be used to tell the story made the production of this project more difficult and expensive. While the field crew went to Africa and recorded footage, that footage only portrayed locations. Although those locations were important, the 360-degree field footage—on its own—was missing anything resembling characters, context, or elements of a plot. Journalists intending to use immersive, live-action video as a main part of their finished work will need to come back from the field with footage that can be authored into a compelling story, in the VR form. It is very hard to imagine this task without the field crew’s understanding of the affordances, limitations, and characteristics of the medium.
• More research, development, and theoretical work are necessary, specifically around how best to conceive of the roles of journalists and users—and how to communicate that relationship to users. Virtual reality allows the user to feel present in the scene. Although that is a constructed experience, it is not yet clear how journalists should portray the relationship between themselves, the user, and the subjects of their work. The conclusions section lists many of the relevant questions and their implications. Journalists, theorists, and producers can and should review these ideas and start to develop answers.
• Journalists should aim to use production equipment that simplifies the workflow. Simpler equipment is likely to reduce production and post-production efforts, bringing down costs and widening the swath for the number of people who can produce VR. This will often include tradeoffs: In some cases simpler equipment will have reduced capability, for example cameras which shoot basic 360-degree video instead of 360-degree, stereoscopic video. Here, journalists will need to balance simplicity against other desirable characteristics.
• As VR production, authoring, and distribution technology is developed, the journalism industry must understand and articulate its requirements, and be prepared to act should it appear those needs aren’t being met. The virtual reality industry is quickly developing new technology, which is likely to rapidly reduce costs, give authors new capabilities, and reach users in new ways. However, unless the journalism industry articulates its distinct needs, and the value in meeting those needs, VR products will only properly serve other fields (such as gaming and productivity).
• The industry should explore (and share knowledge about) many different journalistic applications of VR, beyond highly produced documentaries. This project explored VR documentary in depth. However, just as long-form documentary is not the only worthwhile form of television journalism, the journalism industry may find value in fast-turnaround VR, live VR, VR data visualization, game-like VR, and many other forms.
• Choose teams that can work collaboratively. This is a complex medium, with few standards or shared assumptions about how to produce good work. In its current environment, most projects will involve a number of people with disparate backgrounds who need to share knowledge, exchange ideas, make missteps and correct them. Without good communication and collaboration abilities, that will be difficult.

At a time defined by rapid technological advances, it is our collective hope that this project can serve as the start of a thoughtful industry and scholarly conversation about how virtual reality journalism might evolve, and the wider implications of its adoption. In short, this project seeks to investigate what’s involved in making virtual reality journalism, to better understand the nonfiction storytelling potential of VR, to produce a good work of journalism that affords the audience with a new understanding of elements of the story, and to provide critical reflection on the potential of virtual reality for the practice of journalism.

What follows is our attempt to articulate a moment in the evolution of VR technology and to understand what it means for journalism—by creating a virtual reality film, as well as reflecting on its process, technical requirements, feasibility, and impact.

PDFs and printed copies of this report are available on the  Tow Center’s Gitbook page .

Introduction

What Is VR?

Virtual reality (VR) is an immersive media experience that replicates either a real or imagined environment and allows users to interact with this world in ways that feel as if they are there. To create a virtual reality experience, two primary components are necessary. First, one must be able to produce a virtual world. This can either be through video capture—recording a real-world scene—or by building the environment in Computer Generated Imagery (CGI). Second, one needs a device with which users can immerse themselves in this virtual environment. These generally take the form of dedicated rooms or head-mounted displays.

Cumbersome, largely lab-based technologies for VR have been in use for decades and theorized about for even longer. But recent technological advances in 360-degree, 3D-video capture; computational capacity; and display technology have led to a new generation of consumer-based virtual reality production. Over the past three years, an ecosystem of companies and experimentation has emerged on both the content and dissemination sides of VR. This renaissance can be traced to the development of the Oculus Rift headset. Developed by Palmer Luckey, who was frustrated with the state of headset technology, the Oculus headset was first launched as a wildly popular Kickstarter campaign in 2012. Less than two years later, Facebook bought the company for $2 billion. Meanwhile, a wide range of other headsets has emerged (described below), and virtual reality is quickly becoming Silicon Valley’s next gold rush.

While devices have been evolving rapidly, so has the content for them. While the video game industry has driven the majority of content development, new camera technology also enables virtual reality experiences based on video-capturing real events. These new cameras are being placed at sporting events, music concerts, and even on helicopters and drones.

The authors of this report believe it is at this intersection of new headset technology and live-motion content production that there emerges a valuable, timely opportunity for examining what this all means for journalism.

So as to reflect on the challenges and potential of virtual reality within journalism, this project brought together a unique mix of participants: technologists who could build the prototype-camera technology and render a VR experience (Secret Location), a journalistic organization willing to experiment with driving its reporting and storytelling ( Frontline ), and a research group committed to studying, critically reflecting on, and contextualizing the entire process (the Tow Center for Digital Journalism).

What follows is our attempt to articulate a moment in the evolution of VR technology and to understand what it means for journalism.

Technophiles have followed virtual reality (VR) for a long time, but a number of recent technological advances have finally placed the medium on the cusp of mainstream adoption. Oculus has released its Rift headset to developers, while the company’s consumer headset, Crescent Bay, will reach customers in early 2016; Samsung has released Gear VR ; Sony has a device in development; and Google has built a clandestine intervention called Cardboard (a simple VR player made of cardboard, Velcro, magnets, a rubber band, two biconvex lenses, and a smartphone). Together these advances, along with leaps in video technology, screen quality, and web-based distribution portals, have inspired a surge in media attention and developer interest.

We now have the computational power, screen resolution, and refresh rate to play VR with a small and inexpensive portable headset. VR is a commercial reality. We know that users already enjoy its capability to play video games, sit courtside at a basketball game, and view porn, but what about watching the news or a documentary? What is the potential for journalism in virtual reality?

Our goal with this project was to explore the extension of factual filmmaking onto this new platform, and to reflect on the implications of doing so. Is live-motion virtual reality a new frontier for documentary journalism, or will the expense, cumbersome production process, and limited distribution channels render it a medium unsuitable for the field?

Virtual reality is not new. A generation of media and technology researchers i have long used bulky prototype headsets and VR “caves” to experiment with virtual environments. Research focused mostly on how humans respond to virtual environments, especially when their minds are at least partially tricked into thinking they are somewhere else. Do we learn, care, empathize, and fear as we do in real life? This research is tremendously important as we enter a new VR age, out of the lab and into people’s homes.

In addition to the headsets, camera technology is set to transform the VR experience. While computer graphics and gaming dominated early content demonstrations for the Oculus Rift and similar devices, new, sometimes experimental cameras are able to capture live-motion, 360-degree and stereoscopic virtual reality footage.

While 360-degree cameras have been around for years, the new generation of systems is also stereoscopic, adding greater depth perception. This added dimension, along with the spatial and temporal resolution of current VR headset displays, can get users closer to what researchers call presence, or the feeling of being there.

These new cameras, feeding content to a new and exciting medium, open up a tremendous opportunity for journalists to immerse audiences within their reporting, and for users to experience journalism in powerful new ways.

We are all acutely aware that this emerging medium, while exciting, represents significant changes for the practice of journalism. Virtual reality presents a new technical and narrative form. It requires new cameras, new shooting and editing processes, new viewing infrastructure, new levels of interactivity, and can leverage distributed networks in new ways.

The medium itself raises important questions for the relationship and positionality of journalists and audiences. Virtual reality affords users increased control over what, in a scene, they pay attention to. The medium also supports interactive elements, although virtual reality is not the first medium to pull storytelling from its bound, linear form. This is potentially a far more fluid space, where the audience has a new (though still limited) kind of agency in how it experiences the story. This appears to change how journalists must construct their stories and their own places in it. It also changes how audiences engage with journalism, bringing them into stories in a visceral, experiential manner not possible in other mediums.

More conceptually, virtual reality journalism also offers a new window through which to study the relationship between consumers of media and the representation of subjects. Whereas newspapers, radio, television, and social media each brought us closer to being immersed in the experience of others, virtual reality has the potential to go even farther. A core question is whether virtual reality can provide similar feelings of empathy and compassion to real-life experiences. As will be discussed below, recent work has shown that virtual reality can create a feeling of “social presence”—the feeling that a user is really “there”—which can engender far greater empathy for the subject than in other media representations. Others have called this experience “co-presence” and are exploring how it can be used to bridge the distance between those experiencing human rights abuses and those in the position to assist them. [@humanrights] For journalists, the promise is that VR will offer audiences greater factual understanding of a topic. Could users walk away from a journalistic VR experience with more knowledge than they might get from watching a traditional film or reading a newspaper story? [@knowledge]

We also imagine that journalists may need to produce content for the VR medium simply to keep up with audience expectations. Generations that have grown up with rich media on interactive platforms may expect immersive, visceral experiences. Current audiences for news and documentary on linear TV skew older [@tvaudience] , whereas more than 70 percent of U.S. teens play video games, according to Pew Research. [@pew] Pew also notes that young audiences are heavy users of interactive, visual media like Snapchat and Instagram (admittedly much less cumbersome platforms than VR headsets). The new storytelling method of the current era is virtual reality, and the media industry expects it to attract major audiences.

So, although the medium has decades of history, it is the recent surge of technical and social interest, its new relevance for journalism, the breadth of the communications puzzles, and the industry’s pressing need to keep innovating that have all come together to make this research opportune.

Report Outline

In order to explore the potential of VR for journalism, our project team gathered journalism scholars (Tow Center), virtual reality experts (Secret Location), and world-leading documentary filmmakers ( Frontline ).

CEO James Milward and Creative Director Pietro Gagliano helmed the Secret Location team, which included nearly a dozen technical experts. PBS’s Frontline , in particular Executive Producer Raney Aronson, Managing Editor (digital) Sarah Moughty, and filmmaker Dan Edge, led the editorial process and enabled our virtual reality experiment as it was shot alongside an ongoing feature documentary. The Tow Center for Digital Journalism facilitated the project. The center’s former research director and current assistant professor at UBC, Taylor Owen, and senior fellow Fergus Pitt embedded themselves within the editorial and production process, interviewing participants and working to position the experiment at the forefront of a wider conversation about changes in journalistic practice.

We begin this report by reviewing the history of virtual reality journalism, placing the current socio-technological moment in a context of decades of research and experimentation. We identify key concepts and theories we believe should be at the center of virtual reality journalism. We know that virtual reality has a rich history in forward-thinking research labs and is sparking interest in the fields of digital media and communications, but it is important to ground this study in the origins of its journalistic utility and how this history might shape our understanding of the opportunity and limitations

We then outline our own experiment with live-motion virtual reality journalism—a VR documentary on the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Secret Location, a trailblazer in interactive storytelling and live-motion virtual reality, built a prototype, 360/3D camera and took the lead on extensive, post-production development processes.

Having outlined the background to this experiment, we provide an analysis of the case study, detailing both technical and journalistic opportunities and challenges. First, we explore the technical requirements for doing live-motion virtual reality. This is a nascent practice, and much equipment and expertise are required for each stage of production. The technology is evolving quickly, but it is still possible to divide this process into three identifiable stages, each with its own technologies and required skill sets.

• Capture via new camera and sound
• Post Production using a mix of image processing, motion graphics, CGI, and 3D-modeling software;
• Distribution via a spectrum of emerging headset technologies and their associated content stores.

Finally, for journalists, what does it mean to report in this new medium? We already know that producers need advanced equipment and technical skill sets, but the requirements for reporting and storytelling may also change. Does virtual reality challenge existing divisions between editorial and production in ways that push journalism in either problematic or beneficial directions? VR could also force us to rethink narrative form, bringing discussions about nonlinear storytelling and user agency into journalism.

This mixed-method approach, of simultaneously experimenting with and studying a new journalism technology, has provided notable benefits unavailable when theorizing from a distance. After being directly involved in all stages of the production process, we’ve accessed it in great detail and depth.

It is our collective hope that this project can serve as the start of a thoughtful industry and scholarly conversation about how virtual reality journalism might evolve, and the wider implications of its potential mainstream adoption. This project investigates what’s involved in making virtual reality journalism and provides a critical reflection on the potential of its practice in journalism.

VR as Journalism

Virtual reality has a long history in both the popular imagination and a wide range of scholarly experimentation and commercial development. In engaging with this literature, this report seeks to draw a line through these historical, theoretical, and technical discourses so as to tie the evolution of the form to the practice of journalism.

The Continuum of Visual Mediums

Virtual reality journalism can be seen as part of a continuum of visual mediums that have long influenced journalism, one that arguably shifts core concepts of representation and immersion. This continuum is best understood by looking at the evolution of how we learn about international events. From roughly the 1920s&ndash;1970s, the photograph was the dominant medium through which photojournalists disseminated images, aiming to educate the public about global events. While the photograph was initially hailed as a means to objectively convey information and provide a “true” account of events happening elsewhere, Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others questioned the objectivity construct as it called attention to the ethical dilemma of consuming images of pain and suffering, as well as noted that there is always someone behind the camera deciding what to keep in its frame and what to exclude. Television reporting arguably overtook the dominance of the photograph in the mid-1970s, when TV began to displace more traditional forms of print media. [@photography]

In the 1990s, visual journalism evolved along two parallel, technological developments. Digital technology accelerated access to video, while computational technology enabled more interactive forms of media. Audiences began to witness news in a range of modes, including CD-ROMs, newsgames, websites, social and mobile platforms. This report does not discuss journalism within those particular mediums, because while these platforms support interactivity, they are vastly different from VR in that they are not necessarily immersive (a concept explained in more detail below).

As immersive journalism researchers Nonny de la Pe&ntilde;a and others outline, there is a long history of attempts to place the journalism audience into the story. [@knowledge] Beginning with early accounts of video-based, foreign reporting, through to experimentations placing journalism into gaming environments and interactive media worlds, reporters have explored ways of giving their audiences both agency and higher degrees of presence in a story. For the most part, these efforts can be categorized as interactive journalism. De la Pena, et al., describes the bounds of this form:

The user enters a digitally represented world through a traditional computer interface. There is an element of choice, where the user can select actions among a set of possibilities, investigating different topics and aspects of the underlying news story. This offers both a method of navigation through a narrative, occasionally bringing the user to documents, photographs, or audiovisual footage of the actual story, and it also offers an experience. [@knowledge2]

While these approaches provide audience members with agency and some choice in how they experience a narrative, there are limitations around the ability to make news consumers feel like they are actually “there.”

Even still, our working hypothesis is that this evolution of visual media technologies has produced a parallel continuum of witnessing, with each advance bringing the viewer closer to the experience of others—from print photography; to television; to interactive, immersive and social digital media; and now live-motion virtual reality. Moving along the continuum, the consumer becomes an increasingly active participant in the experience of witnessing, as the barriers between self and the other begin to erode. What’s more, virtual reality offers the promise of further breaking the “fourth wall” of journalism, wherein those represented become individuals possessing agency, rather than what Liisa Malkki has referred to as “speechless emissaries.” [@emissaries] If this is the case, it will be because core concepts of virtual reality—such as immersion and presence—offer a qualitatively different media experience than other forms of visual representation.

The Foundations of Immersive Media Research

Specific journalism-focused research on computer-generated, immersive video and live-action, immersive virtual reality is nascent. Some early studies have considered the potential of “immersive journalism” in virtual reality, [@reality; @reality2; @reality3] and others have considered the necessarily changing nature of narrative form that will ensue in the VR space. [@space; @space2; @space3; @space4] Both draw extensively on earlier work on interactive, 2D media.

In order to broaden the baseline for a journalism-focused virtual reality discourse, it is valuable to draw upon the comparatively extensive scholarship about the implications of virtual reality on human-computer interaction and the process of visual representation. Scholars have already studied VR from the standpoint of human-computer interaction, seeking to better understand:

• the technology’s implications for self-perception;
• the technological factors that contribute to greater “presence,” exploring the interaction of users with CGI avatars;
• and the impact virtual reality has on social stereotypes and memory.

There’s also a significant amount of research from the field of health sciences, where virtual reality is used as a low-risk simulation tool for patients with eating disorders, chronic pain, and autism [@autism] . Researchers have used virtual reality to study social phenomena, such as interpersonal relations and emotions like empathy, as well. [@empathy]

Throughout all this literature, a central and thematic question emerges about how closely experiences in virtual reality replicate real senses, emotions, and memories. While much of the existing research certainly does not overlap with journalism or even communication studies, it is still necessary that new VR practitioners in journalism closely monitor its observations.

Indeed, the research has produced two virtual reality concepts of particular relevance to journalism. They are Immersion and Presence . Both, to varying degrees, seek to describe the feeling that one is experiencing an alternate reality by way of a virtual system. It is this feeling of experiencing the other that is critical to journalistic application.

First, immersion is generally defined as the feeling that someone has left his or her immediate, physical world and entered into a virtual environment. [@environment] In the virtual reality field, this is achieved via a headset or spaces known as Cave Automatic Virtual Environments (CAVEs). A number of scholars have sought to define both the characteristics and technological requirements for achieving states of immersion. Seminal work by Witmer and Singer describes a feeling of being enveloped by, included in, or in interaction with a digital environment. [@environment2] They identify particular factors which promote immersion: the ease of interaction, image realism, duration of immersion, social factors within the immersion, internal factors unique to the user, and system factors such as equipment sophistication. [@environment] Others are more technologically deterministic, focusing on the specific technology requirements to achieve what is called a multimodal, sensory input. They say that if an experience excludes the outside world, addresses many senses with high fidelity, surrounds the user, and matches the user’s bodily movements, it will create a sense of physical reality and be highly immersive.17

The concept of immersion is widely used outside of virtual reality literature and is often applied to describe a wide range of digital journalism projects involving interactive 2D and gaming. In this sense, the degree of immersion can be interpreted on a spectrum ranging from scenarios in which the user is offered some agency and a first-person perspective, to the full VR experience wherein the user is embedded enough in the media to achieve a sense of altered reality.

Presence is often discussed in the context of immersive VR. Indeed, Witmer and Singer argue that there is a correlation between a greater feeling of immersion and a greater potential for feeling presence. [@environment2] The concept of presence is loosely defined as the feeling of “being there.” Its range of definitions all describe a state in which the user is taken somewhere else via technology, and truly feels transported. They also, however, are all but theoretical constructs, which place differing thresholds on the need for an absolute sense of detachment from physical reality. Kim and Biocca see presence as a combination between the “departure” from physical reality and the “arrival in a virtual environment.” [@environment3] Meanwhile, Lombard describes it as the moment when one is dis-intermediated from the technology that is creating the immersion. [@immersion] Zahorik and Jenison suggest that presence is achieved when one reacts to a virtual environment as he or she would react to the physical world. [@world]

The core value of virtual reality for journalism lies in this possibility for presence. Presence may engender an emotional connection to a story and place. It may also give audiences a greater understanding of stories when the spatial elements of a location are key to comprehending the reality of events. Nonny de la Pe&ntilde;a, et al., identify a reaction when users respond to a media experience as if they are actually living through it, even though they know it is not real. They call this “Response As If Real” (RAIR). This is the primary, distinguishing characteristic between interactive and immersive media. A particularly powerful characteristic of the RAIR effect is, they say, the fact that it requires a very low level of fidelity. Even when the sophistication and fidelity of the technology is limited, users react to immersive experience in very real ways. This, in part, explains why relatively low-quality headsets (such as Google Cardboard) remain powerful despite their computational inferiority to more expensive systems. For de la Pena, et al., a combination of three variables determine the journalistic value of the RAIR effect: the representation of the place in which the experience is grounded, the feeling that events being experienced are real, and the transformation of the user’s positionality into a first-person participant.

It is worth noting that much of the early work studying immersive environments was conducted with computer-generated visuals, primarily in CAVEs, which allowed for manipulation by researchers; they do not necessarily replicate or truly mirror reality and generally relied on computer-generated avatars and scripted communication.

CAVE-based experiences derive from an entirely different generation of VR, and they operate very differently from the current wave of devices. Aside from the obvious differences between immersive media delivered into rooms versus head-mounted displays, advances in camera and post-production technology now make it possible to film live-motion VR much more readily. While this 360-degree video still undergoes significant computational post-production, we hypothesize that its effects on audiences will create a new category for research. As this kind of video starts its journey as light from the physical world, captured by a sensor, it attempts to mimic the human eye. The end result is as different from computer-generated environments as photography was from illustration. And so there remains a tremendous opportunity for a new phase of virtual reality research.

Frontline Case Study

Project Design

Looking to test both the technical practicalities and potential of VR journalism, we produced a virtual reality documentary on the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia. Director Dan Edge was already producing a feature documentary for Frontline on the topic and agreed to take on the additional project. What follows is a detailed breakdown of the VR production experience.

This research project comes at a time when virtual reality’s value for journalism is largely hypothetical. The industry desperately needs evidence of the platform’s benefits and information about the necessary skills, practices, and equipment.

The industry has only produced a few works of journalism in live-motion virtual reality ( The New York Times ’s “Walking New York,” the BBC’s Calais “Jungle,” Gannet’s “Harvest of Change,” and Vice News’s “Millions March” and “Waves of Grace”).22 The Associated Press, Gannet, Vice News, Fusion, and The New York Times have all made major commitments to developing journalism in virtual reality. The context and theories described in the preceding chapters suggest that immersive experiences can engender feelings of presence, producing higher levels of engagement (and perhaps empathy), and give audiences enhanced spatial understanding. However, without multiple examples, the industry is unable to make a judgment about whether the hypothesized value is real.

The next step in assessing VR’s potential within journalism is to understand what is involved in producing the work—a necessity for journalists who want to make virtual reality content, strategists who need to judge the viability of the medium for their own circumstances, and innovators who intend to improve the processes and outcomes.

This case study, we believe, contributes to the knowledge base on these high-level topics, illustrating how virtual reality can be valuable for journalism, as well as chronicling the processes and resources that are involved technically, conceptually, and editorially.

The writing below represents the observations of our core research team about the process of producing a piece of live-motion virtual reality journalism. Taylor Owen and Fergus Pitt had access to all stages of the editorial and development process, and to technical documents, communications between project teams, and project iterations at all points of evolution. The information in the case study therefore draws on the researchers’ observations of key workshops and meetings, structured interviews with team members during the production process, email exchanges, and reviews of technical documents. Raney Aronson-Rath and James Milward, along with their respective teams, both reviewed and contributed to the case study. Readers should note that the authors are not objective observers; Fergus Pitt and Taylor Owen contributed money from the Tow Center’s research fund and the Knight Foundation’s prototype fund that paid for camera equipment and some of Secret Location’s production effort.

Roles and Teams

Below we document the main players involved in producing virtual reality journalism. It omits a number of people, including some who temporarily substituted into roles, or who contributed back-office efforts. Also, this project leveraged elements of Frontline ’s traditional television documentary resources, including considerable journalistic research and production planning. Those contributions are not included below. The full credit list for the production is available in the appendices of this report.

Raney Aronson-Rath , Executive Producer, Frontline —editorial development, story selection, commissioning, editorial oversight. James Milward , Executive Producer and Founder, Secret Location—project development, virtual reality domain knowledge. Dan Edge , Director and Producer, Frontline and Mongoose Production—360-degree video and sound recording, direction, scripting. Luke Van Osch , Project Manager, Secret Location—project management, VR technology documentation and training. Preeti Gandhi , Producer, Secret Location—creative production, project management, VR post production, technology-build supervision. Michael Kazanowski , Motionographer, Secret Location—360-degree camera and post-production technology development, 360-degree video stitching, immersive video authoring. Steve Miller , Motionographer, Secret Location—360-degree camera and post-production technology development. Taylor Owen , Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia—project development, research, documentation, and report drafting. Fergus Pitt , Senior Research Fellow, Tow Center for Digital Journalism—project development, research, and documentation, and report drafting. Pietro Gagliano , Creative Director, Secret Location—digital concept direction. Andy Garcia , Art Director, Secret Location—motion graphics design and production. Sarah Moughty , Managing Editor of Digital, Frontline —editorial and production liaison.

The project moved through stages of development, field production, digital-production, and distribution.

While the diagram below shows—at a high level—those stages, more importantly it shows the component tasks. It is simplified and focuses on the VR-specific processes. As such, it omits important aspects of journalistic reporting and research, and many business and operational support contributions without which any production would fail. As with most models, this one sacrifices precision for simplicity. In reality, stages overlapped; some steps were repeated, and the team went backwards and forward through the phases.

Pre-Production

Team Assembly

This production brought together teams from three groups: Frontline , Secret Location, and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism. Frontline , a prestigious documentary program on the PBS television network, brought long-form, television journalism expertise. Frontline funded the shooting and leveraged the “traditional” television documentary it was already producing. This virtual reality project was part of that program’s continuing push into digital and Internet platforms and products.

Secret Location, an award-winning interactive agency headquartered in Toronto, has been developing virtual reality work since January of 2014—seemingly a short time, but not in the context of this new field. The agency brought critical VR creative experience, its existing hardware and software tool-development, and its established VR workflows. It capitalized on previous experience with 3D game design and production necessary for VR but rare in journalism teams.

The Tow Center for Digital Journalism is a research and development center within the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. The Tow Center funded Secret Location’s work, and was part of the project’s fundraising and development process. The Tow Center brought research and analytical background, as well as media-project and team-management experience. For the Tow Center, this project contributes to continuing lines of research in new platforms and production practices for journalism.

Story Selection

During the second half of 2014, Frontline was producing a number of documentaries that were candidates for VR treatment. Each party involved in our project had a number of key criteria for a story that could take advantage of the medium’s attributes: It needed scenes and locations that were important to the audience’s understanding of the narrative. It also had to benefit significantly from a feeling of user presence. However, logistics factored in, too: The camera and microphone would be bulky, intrusive, and tricky to operate. The story’s director would have to be adaptable and willing to explore new technologies.

The team explored the potential of one Frontline production about end-of-life decisions. That project’s director had already gained access to and the trust of several families at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Despite the likely emotional power of being “in the room” and the potential to demystify a hidden experience around end-of-life interactions, we ultimately rejected the option because we couldn’t figure out an ethical way to be present with a bulky, ugly camera while maintaining the intimacy and sensitivity necessary for the director’s established fly-on-the-wall style of filmmaking.

An Ebola story, already in the early stages of production, became our favored option. Dan Edge, the director, was a filmmaker with experience incorporating innovative digital processes into his productions. The locations throughout West Africa were significant to the story and unfamiliar to many audiences. Nonetheless, the story still presented challenges. Secret Location would have preferred that a cameraperson with 360-degree video experience work alongside the director. That wasn’t possible. In fact, shooting conditions were extremely difficult all around and fast communication between those in the field and the experts in Toronto proved impossible.

Immersive Video Technology Development

Secret Location had already designed and built a camera rig for shooting the necessary 360-degree, stereoscopic video—having found that none of the commercially available equipment met its requirements. ii The agency had used the equipment to record VR video of a basketball game to promote BallUp , a reality TV show. For our project, the team designed and built a slightly updated version, including a 5.1-channel microphone to record surround sound. We also leveraged Secret Location’s existing 360-degree video post-production workflow.

The full production and post-production technology we used is detailed in the appendices of this report.

VR Training and Story Discussion

Once the camera was built and the topic chosen, key members of the production and post-production teams met in Secret Location’s Toronto offices. The agenda of the five-hour meeting was to train the director, Dan Edge, to use the camera; workshop the story; and begin to establish a common understanding of the VR platform and the film’s goals. This workshop was the first time Secret Location and Frontline staff met. The Frontline staff already had a well-formed understanding of traditional documentary and the facts of the Ebola outbreak, but discussion of the VR product was very basic and open-ended. At this point the team had only just started sketching possibilities for the VR experience’s overall structure. Some journalistic concepts were new to the Secret Location team, and director Dan Edge did not have any history working in VR.

Secret Location’s project manager and its camera designers explained the equipment’s operation and handed over four cases containing the cameras, sound gear, batteries, chargers, and stands.

This workshop was the only time prior to field production for face-to-face or online collaboration between the VR-experienced Secret Location team and the journalistically experienced Frontline team.

In the Field

Dan Edge worked as part of a two-person team, shooting 360-degree, stereoscopic video of three scenes in West Africa; two scenes were in a region around 17 miles northwest of the intersecting borders of Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. The third location was a field clinic in Macenta, 60 miles farther east in Guinea. Throughout this field shoot, Edge and his team primarily focused on collecting material for his traditional Frontline TV documentary.

His first location was at the foot of a tall kola nut tree in the jungle where a 2-year-old named Emile is thought to have come in contact with bats. This tree is the site where some scientists believe the boy contracted the Ebola virus, which killed him in December of 2013. The tree was quite close to Edge’s next location: the village of Meliandou where Emile lived, and the virus spread to his sister, mother, grandmother, and the rest of the victims who then passed it on to more than 27,000 people in neighboring Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia.

At the kola nut tree, Edge filmed in two short sessions: the first batch of video was just two minutes, interrupted by the onset of a thunderstorm. The second kola nut tree shoot was around eight minutes long.

These shoots were the first time Edge used the prototype camera in the field. To understand the complexity of the filming process, it’s useful to realize that the camera rig was an improvised, immature combination of technologies. It used 12 GoPro cameras held in stereo pairs by a 3D-printed frame. GoPro cameras, while widely used in professional settings, lack certain “high-end” features. They have inconsistencies in their lenses, provide only limited control over color and light levels, and don’t have automatic synchronization or calibration features.

Director Dan Edge shooting the kola nut tree scene.

To produce stitchable footage, the field crew needed to provide a visual reference for calibration in post-production. Secret Location’s solution was to tie a piece of string to the top of the camera mount and hold it to the chest of a crewmember, who then walked in a circle around the camera. The string kept the crewmember at a consistent distance from the camera, helping the post-production team identify which pixels from one camera should line up with the next.

Edge’s first batch of footage collected at the kola nut tree suffered from a combination of nonprofessional equipment and difficult, highly variable lighting conditions. The 12 GoPros’ auto-exposure software fluctuated wildly, which made stitching the video files together very laborious.

The director’s experience in Meliandou was better. He described it as a “typical Guinean jungle village scene—kids playing, women cooking, men sitting.”

In the video capture, viewers can see children walking past, locals fidgeting, and smoke drifting upwards.

Sixty miles east, Edge also filmed at a French Red Cross Ebola clinic in Macenta, Guinea. He filmed for around 30 minutes, letting action unfold around the camera. Two figures in hazmat suits exchange black disposal bags; a figure walks a wheelbarrow past, and there are glimpses of patients between tent edges.

Overall, Edge reported a difficult experience:

It was a huge challenge to transport, maintain, and operate the equipment in the field without a technician or at least another pair of hands on the team. There was very little access to electricity in the jungle—so charging 12 cameras and a zoom, et cetera, was not straightforward. It was hot and difficult work. The odd-looking camera engendered suspicion in locals; some assumed it was a malevolent machine that would make villagers sick. I have a feeling exposure may be a real problem. Having looked through the files it seems to me that the sky is exposed differently in different shots, which I think may make stitching problematic. . . . I wouldn’t be that keen to shoot in the jungle again without a specific person whose job it is to manage the gear!

Crucially, Edge’s approach to shooting the 360-degree footage was to place the camera and let any action unfold around him. In his words, “Each scene places us at an important location/moment in the history of the outbreak—places most of us would never normally go to.” He didn’t shoot interviews or high-action scenes in 3D. This produced a challenge later in the project, which is discussed in the findings section of this report.

Digital Production

This grouping covers the work that was mostly completed in Secret Location’s Toronto offices, with editorial reviews from the Frontline team. This phase produced ideas about the structure of the VR experience; it also including stitching together video files from the field recording, producing the interactive motion graphics, and authoring the final VR product. It was a highly iterative process, with many steps repeated as the team agreed and refined its goals for the final product.

Structuring the Experience

Virtual reality can have a range of structures. It is a flexible, digital, interactive medium, which theoretically means authors can give audiences control over the order in which they view scenes, over content within a scene, or their viewing angle for a scene. However, the possibilities narrow when producers factor in playback equipment’s technical specifications and, most importantly, how to arrange narrative elements so that audiences will have a coherent, engaging experience.

The producers eventually decided to give the Ebola virtual reality documentary a linear structure with ordered “chapters” based on the live-action, 360-degree footage; with a motion graphics introduction, interstitial scenes, and outro. The 360-degree, live-action video scenes also contain layered-in 2D video clips of key characters.

*The combinations of 3D motion graphics, 360-degree video, and 2D video used in various scenes.

Through the conceptualization process, the team considered and discarded other structures, including a hub and spoke model, in which users could choose the order in which they viewed scenes.

The team members decided to use the linear sequence, primarily because they judged that providing a clear and coherent narrative was more important than giving the audience control over the sequence of scenes or an highly interactive experience.

That same emphasis on story informed the decision to layer 2D video into the 360-degree scenes. Without the 2D videos the scenes may have still provided the audience with a strong feeling of presence in locations that were important to the Ebola outbreak, but they would have had no focal point, been far less engaging, and related less information. This choice, its implications, and factors are explored in more detail in the findings section of this report.

Stitching the 360-Degree Video

Stitching video is a time-consuming, highly technical, awkward task. In this case it involved taking the 12 individual video files and combining them into two spherical videos, one for each eye. Many producers hope the process will become far less onerous, and maybe even disappear as 360-degree, stereoscopic camera technology improves. Secret Location imported the stitched video files into a VR authoring tool (in this case, the Unity software suite because of its ability to integrate video) and combined them with motion graphics, 2D-video, and sound assets. We provide further detail about the process and equipment in an appendix.

Motion Graphics Production

In this project, motion graphics serve crucial narrative functions. They set the tone, frame the story, and convey the virus’s spread from the microscopic to an epidemic across West Africa. They place the immersive video chapters into necessary context. As such, the Secret Location creative and art directors produced multiple drafts for editorial review by Frontline ’s journalists before their final renders. The team’s unusual willingness to share “edits” and respond to notes was vital to producing a quality product.

Computer-generated graphics also helped to capitalize on VR’s ability to put the user into a range of spaces at a range of scales—from a microscopic view alongside infected cells to an ultra-high angle viewing an entire virtual hemisphere.

The first scene in the experience is a motion graphics prologue, showing the virus inside a blood vessel, then—foreshadowing the later transition scenes—a photo-real, 3D model of the Guinean village. As the virtual camera zooms out, red arcs over a globe to indicate the virus’s infection path toward regional outbreaks; then Africa-wide ones. Edge sent the blood vessel sequences to a biologist who checked the accuracy of the virus and blood cell depictions. The placement and timing of the red paths were drawn from a map that Edge’s producer researched for the traditional Frontline documentary.

The subsequent motion graphics interstitials continue the approach of using red lines bleeding across an ever-widening view of the region and the world.

After Secret Location produced early sketches and drafted VR experiences, Edge spent five days in the Toronto office working alongside the motion graphics artists and art directors to polish the scenes for accuracy and narrative.

3D/2D Video Editing and Authoring

The live-action video scenes combine 2D video clips layered inside a 360-degree, stereoscopic video environment. These clips serve two main functions: They provide an unambiguous subject for the viewer’s attention, thereby avoiding confusion and disorientation. But perhaps most importantly, they impart much of the narrative by describing events, characters, and emotions.

The Secret Location team started by inserting placeholder clips, extracted from the traditional Frontline television documentary, to illustrate the technique and desired structure. Edge and Aronson-Rath gave paper edits, and drew on more of the footage that Edge’s field team had collected. Edge then worked with the Secret Location team to further refine the exact clips and their placement within the 360-degree, live-action scenes and motion graphics interstitials.

Dissemination

At the time of writing, the process of disseminating VR content to users is relatively complex: technically, strategically, and from the user-experience perspective. And the decision-making factors interrelate. There are multiple types of playback equipment and their different capabilities affect how the content works.

The vast majority of VR content is distributed through curated content stores, operated by the companies who also build the hardware, including Oculus (Facebook-owned), Samsung, and Google. The relationship between the companies only further complicates this landscape. Samsung had already incorporated Oculus’s technology, and during the life of our project the two moved into closer marketing associations for both hardware and content.

Our project teams’ professional relationships with the content partnerships staff of hardware companies produced marketing opportunities, such as the production of branded Google Cardboard headsets, and publicity through the hardware platforms’ channels to audiences. These potential benefits became factors when deciding which playback equipment to target.

The Playback Hardware

It’s useful to think of two categories of consumer-grade playback hardware: wired, high-fidelity and mobile. The high-fidelity class is primarily exemplified by the Oculus company’s Rift and Crescent Bay headsets. They are capable of very high video quality and a lot of interactivity, but must be tethered to a powerful external computer.

The mobile class contains more devices, but they share common design fundamentals. A smartphone provides the screen, computation, and most of the necessary motion sensing. It clips into a light-excluding headset with lenses between the user’s eyes and the smartphone. However, the mobile devices have far less computing power than the high-fidelity class, which forces VR producers to compress video and restrict some interactivity. Smartphone variability introduces further complexity; old versions of operating systems and lower-powered processors mean VR experiences may crash or not play at all. The most prominent companies in this group are Samsung (with its Gear VR product) and Google (with Cardboard).

So, the key tradeoff when considering hardware is between providing a very high-fidelity and stable experience on expensive, unwieldy equipment and a more variable, slightly lower-quality experience on cheaper, less cumbersome equipment.

Platform Reach, Content Stores, and Marketing

The producers considered the apparent marketing and promotion opportunities associated with the various companies’ content stores.

Google, marketing its Cardboard headset, provides partners with an option to produce branded headsets, designed to be given out at public events and sent to a mailing list. Google had been using its Play store to distribute VR content, though it subsequently rolled out VR support to its YouTube app for Android phones and announced intent to launch on iOS.

Oculus, owned by Facebook, provides its high-end devices as development kits and had announced a release date of spring of 2016 for its consumer product. The Rift and Crescent Bay product managers appeared to be primarily targeting the gaming market, emphasizing computer-generated graphics over immersive video. However, the Oculus brand was also being promoted within the content store used by the Samsung Gear VR device. That store included games and narrative experiences from a number of publishers.

We ultimately chose to develop the project for both Google Cardboard and Samsung Gear VR. This required significant development time, but it allowed for the documentary to reach a far greater audience via Cardboard, while also retaining higher resolution for the Gear VR.

Case Study Findings

Narrative Form

Virtual reality represents a new narrative form, one for which technical and stylistic norms are in their infancy.

The authors of this report have concluded that some fundamental components of narrative remain massively important to documentary storytelling, whether in traditional media or VR. These are primarily characters, actions, emotions, locations, and causality. They need to be present and understood by the audience for the work to produce a satisfying and compelling experience. Likewise, audience members benefit from being guided through the experience—directing their attention and exposing narrative elements at the right time to keep viewers engaged, without their getting bored by having too little to absorb or confused by too many story elements introduced with no organization. Few journalists would be unfamiliar with these ideas. However, VR presents new changes and challenges around delivering narrative elements.

Our research indicates that producers must exert directorial control in order to deliver those “satisfying and compelling” narrative elements mentioned above. While simply placing the camera in an interesting location can make the user feel present, this does not on its own produce an effective journalistic experience. However, many basic techniques available to traditional documentary directors present problems when working in VR. For example, directors cannot quickly cut between angles or scenes (a primary technique for shaping the audience experience in traditional video) without severely disorienting users. There is practically no 360-degree archive footage directors can draw upon. The camera cannot be panned or zoomed, and if a videographer wants to light a scene for narrative effect, the lighting equipment is difficult to hide.

So, we see two broad strategies for directors to exert control over how the narrative is incorporated into the experience. (These are not mutually exclusive.) The first is for the team in the field to direct the action around the camera. The second is to supplement the raw, immersive video by layering other content into a scene and/or including extra CG scenes before and/or after the live action scenes. In this project we called the CG scenes “interstitials” and they were crucial narrative and framing devices.

Regarding the first strategy of directing action in the field, traditional documentaries commonly feature “set pieces”—often interview formats, but sometimes coordinated action or even staged reenactments. Some documentary makers are uncomfortable with the staged action or reenactments for stylistic or ethical reasons. These preferences may need to be reexamined in the context of VR, where there are fewer available techniques for shaping narrative.

The Frontline Ebola documentary uses a lot of the second technique, supplementation. Scenes made entirely from computer-generated graphics introduce the story; set up the context of each immersive, live video scene; and close out the experience. The producers also layered 2D video clips into the 360-degree scenes. These 2D inlays can be valuable for adding background content and focusing a user’s attention on a specific element of the story. However, by supplementing the direct recording of the scene, some viewers may feel less immersed—as is predicted by the framework of immersive factors outlined in the theory section of this report (specifically, that model would say the producers’ decision to adulterate the raw footage reduced the experience’s fidelity). It would be valuable to conduct controlled audience research on this. The producers would have preferred that more 360-degree footage be available, so they could have used less supplementation.

Representation and Positionality

There are extensive journalistic debates about both the positionality of journalists and their audience, as well as what is being represented in the field of view of a journalistic work. Live-motion, 360/3D virtual reality environments complicate both.

Who, for example, is the user in a virtual reality environment? The journalist, in creating the point of view of the user, is making decisions about who the journalist will be, and who the user is supposed to be. Are users invisible bystanders in the scene? Do they inhabit the journalist’s position and role? Is the journalist (and her or his team) in the field of view? Is the journalist the guide to the experience? All of these editorial decisions will have significant impact on the resulting experience. Additionally, is the experience intended to be real, or surreal? Is the editorial goal to replicate reality, or to allow the user to do something that is not humanly possible (to fly, to look down on a conversation from above, to control the pace and evolution of a story)?

For this project, our team provided two perspectives. When users are situated in a live-motion, VR environment, they see the experience from a human, first-person perspective. They are in a place as a scene unfolds around them. For the transitions in between the three live-motion scenes, however, we used a surreal CGI perspective that allows users to watch the spread of disease over a map, which gave viewers a sense of the scale and pace of Ebola’s spread.

An additional editorial and production decision concerns how the construct of a scene is represented to a user. There is a conflict in the logic of virtual reality, namely that the experience is a highly mediated one. Everything in the scene is almost, by necessity, highly prescribed. At the same time, a principle selling point of the technology is that users feel like they are present in a real environment. The very real sense of immersion and users’ ability to control elements of the experience risk masking the editorial construct of journalism’s work. The users are not really there, and what they are seeing and experiencing (as in all works of journalism) is highly prescribed.

Contemporary head-mounted VR can support user agency in terms of where a viewer chooses to look, and the content and interactions he or she triggers.

While the production examined in this case study granted users control over the direction in which they looked, scenes were designed to give a “best” experience when viewers were looking toward an anticipated “front.” The subjects of each scene, whether video clips or computer-generated objects, were in a single field of view.

However, the producers enforced a fairly linear content structure. Viewers experience a first scene, which delivers some information; the next scene delivers information that builds upon the previous scene, and so on throughout the experience. This was a conscious, deliberate decision on the part of the producers, primarily because they felt it served the topic and suited the available content. (An extra factor was that the reduced interactivity broadens the number and type of devices capable of playing the experience.) However, that will not necessarily be true of all VR journalism.

The producers’ belief that narrative elements were important to the success of the experience, and that authorial control was the best way to deliver those elements—especially in such a nascent and complex medium as VR—underpinned both of these decisions.

Challenging Tech Requirements

First, the capture technology is burdensome. This is primarily because the necessary cameras are either DIY, prototype, or very high-end and proprietary. This project used a DIY camera setup, which was challenging to operate and train our filmmaker to use. Having 12 separate cameras as part of the rig also introduced extra risks around equipment malfunction, storage, and battery life, particularly when shooting in challenging settings.

Second, the suite of cameras, editing software, and viewing devices necessary to produce a live-motion virtual reality product are non-synergistic. Virtual reality components are produced by a range of different companies, and often include experimental and DIY hacks. This means there is no common workflow or suite of products that integrate well, and the production demands a broad range of specialist, technological experts.

Third, the many technologies for creating and distributing live-motion virtual reality are rapidly evolving. During the course of this one project, we learned of new production cameras being developed and many new headsets—ranging from the sub-$10 Google Cardboard to the high-end Oculus consumer release. Google is developing a full-process, integrated suite including a new camera, auto-stitching program, and YouTube VR player. While this is exciting, the shifting landscape makes editorial and production planning very difficult. Technology and process decisions made early on can have a tangible effect on audience reach and relevance months down the line.

Finally, nearly every stage of the VR process is currently very expensive. This is particularly the case when working with CGI, which this project did. The high cost of the camera came from its hardware components, as well as compensation for the development team that designed, built, and refined the kit. Post-production requires a range of technical expertise for the stitching process, programming CGI components, and navigation. This particular expertise is in high demand, so hourly rates are commensurately elevated.

The technology and steps used in the Ebola documentary project (detailed in the appendices) will be useful as a starting point for other teams who want to produce documentary VR, especially those incorporating immersive, 360-degree, live-action video. However, any project starting now would likely benefit from more recently released equipment and newly developed techniques. That being said, some high-level points seem worth reviewing. It is helpful to divide this process into three stages: capture, digital and post-production, and dissemination.

Stage 1: Capture

First, the video capture . Using a camera rig of 12 GoPros introduced huge labor and logistical challenges in the field and in post-production. We were only able to produce a high-quality, immersive video under quite narrow circumstances.

Director Dan Edge reported difficulties in the field: The GoPros aren’t designed to work in synchronization, nor is it possible to coordinate exposure and color. The cameras require individual charging cables and it’s laborious to turn them on and off.

The size, appearance, and unwieldiness of the camera are in marked contrast to other modern recording devices, which can be flexible and unobtrusive. This reduces the types of locations where footage can be easily collected (e.g., some conflict settings or in places where discretion is paramount, like hospitals). These restrictions pose a significant challenge for documentary filmmaking, where access and actuality are key.

There is some hope on this front, however. Participants in the VR marketplace are developing more integrated and elegant cameras. Some keep the strategy of using many lenses in left-and-right pairs of “eyes.” (Paired lenses are necessary for stereoscopic footage, which can theoretically produce greater fidelity, and therefore immersion and presence.) Others are aiming for high-quality, 360-degree video, but with one lens per direction, abandoning stereoscopy in favor of simplicity, lower cost, and weight. It remains to be seen if either strategy will become the norm, or if both will remain viable—depending on the videographer’s context.

However, when this production started the team reluctantly judged that a custom-built, 12-camera rig was our only viable strategy. One alternative was to work with a camera-making company that could also perform the stitching and authoring, but excluded outsiders from that process. The production team, which viewed authoring as a particularly important journalistic process, could not envision removing itself from that step. This view has only gotten stronger. A second alternative, which has become more viable in the rapidly developing industry, would be to use a commercially released camera that produces 360-degree video, but not stereoscopic video. The question of whether stereoscopy is crucial to the effectiveness of the experience remains unanswered; however, the authors have spoken to teams planning current productions that have avoided it because of its high production overhead.

Stage 2: Digital and Post-Production

Second is the Digital and Post-Production process. This VR project required significant post-production effort working with newly combined technologies. The workflows and tools are documented in the appendices, and the authors believe that those sections will be particularly useful for future producers.

The camera strategy had implications for the post-production process. Recording HD video with 12 GoPro cameras produces many gigabytes of data. Organizing those files, moving them from the field to the studio, storing them—each of these steps becomes more onerous as the amount of video data increases. The process of stitching the video together, and making the visual quality consistent, is likewise laborious. At the moment, our production team could find no technology capable of doing the job without very large amounts of human effort to supplement the computational pass.

Working with 12 video frames for each stereoscopic, 360-degree scene required vast, specialized, human effort. This involved cost and time implications which logically challenge journalistic applications, reliant as they are on timely release to audiences.

Stage 3: Dissemination

Third is product Dissemination . The VR user base is currently relatively small and divided across a number of platforms. As detailed earlier, each platform has a unique set of strengths and weaknesses, such as the accessibility of the Google Cardboard versus the processing power of the Oculus Rift DK 2.

The producers weighed the strengths of each platform and chose to release the VR experience for the Samsung Gear VR and Google Cardboard devices. While these devices lack the raw processing power of Oculus’s DK 2, and advanced features like positional tracking (a camera that tracks the user’s head position in 3D space and reflects that positioning in VR), the Gear VR and Google Cardboard offer the greatest ease of use and accessibility to the growing VR audience.

The Gear VR and Google Cardboard head-mounted displays utilize individuals’ smartphones for VR playback rather than a high-end PC like the DK2. This creates a much larger potential audience than the DK2. They also require less setup and configuration, and aren’t tethered to a computer, making their use less arduous and intimidating to the average viewer. Knowing that the audience for our project would skew more toward the mainstream than the video, gamer-heavy demographics of the DK2, the producers felt it was of great importance that the VR equipment itself could get into as many hands as possible and be accessible to a relatively less tech-savvy audience.

The distribution networks for the Gear VR and Google Cardboard are more mature than that of the DK2. Google Cardboard apps are distributed through the existing iOS and Android app stores, and the recently launched Gear VR app store follows a standardized installation process and hardware requirements, unlike the Oculus Share store for DK2.

Finally, Gear VR and Google Cardboard enjoy one hardware advantage over the DK2, which is the higher-screen resolution on newer smartphones. Because the producers decided to focus on a more linear, narrative-driven experience, rather than high levels of interactivity and user input that require more processing power, the higher-resolution screen was a greater benefit than features that the DK2 could provide.

Tech Tradeoffs

Given the technological challenges outlined above, we believe it is most useful to view the production choices for live-motion virtual reality as a series of tradeoffs.

First is a choice between the long production time needed to produce full-feature VR versus lower-quality caption and production that meets the immediacy of many journalistic needs. Soon, we will likely be able to add live VR to this spectrum, but for the near future the feature set and quality will be worse than even current short-turnaround production capability.

Second, the high cost and expertise requirements of adding interactives, CGI, high video quality, and headsets limit the range of organizations and individuals that can produce it. Ultimately, there is a very limited production capacity in newsrooms for high-end VR.

Third, high-production value also diminished the reach of the product, as it is only playable on high-end headsets. Even if distributed on a large commercial scale, it will still be very expensive.

In short, given the current technology constraints, a piece of VR journalism can be high-quality, long-turnaround, require a production team with extensive expertise, and have a limited audience. Or, it can be of lower production quality, quicker turnaround, and reach a wider audience.

Wide Range of Skills Needed

This project incorporated the efforts of a wide range of specialists. Between them, the various team members had skills in (at least) reporting, producing, hardware development, software development, system design, workflow design, videography, film direction, art direction, 3D-motion graphic production (which Secret Location calls “motionography”), coding, video-editing, VR-authoring, editorial, business development, project management, and marketing. They also had the ability to learn and conceive of new processes and practices, both technical and narrative, and the ability to collaborate. Many of these skills are not widely held, and the authors believe it’s unrealistic to expect a single person to perform all of these tasks at a high level.

This production model contrasts with other journalistic media. For example, even in documentary production it is practical for one or two people to perform the majority of tasks at high quality—a scenario made possible by filmmaking’s access to relatively cheap, high-performance cameras and software editing suites, which have all been designed to work together.

Merged Editorial and Production Processes

In June, director Dan Edge went to Toronto, where Secret Location performed the digital production. This co-working phase was crucial; as noted above, the Ebola production drew upon people with rare specializations, and with the abilities and temperaments to collaborate well. Through the digital production phase, the TV documentary makers learned a great deal about the narrative and technical sides of VR. They improved their understanding of what raw material to collect from the field, how VR experiences might be structured, and how this medium can combine motion graphics and live-action, immersive video.

Notably, the digital production phase was the first moment wherein the teams were tightly integrated. In an ideal world, a member of the Secret Location technology and production team would have joined Edge in the field to collaborate on setting up the camera and generating ideas in real time about what to shoot to tell the VR-specific story. However, because of the restricted access to the subjects and locations, this was not possible. Hence, all the video collection, both linear and VR, became Edge’s responsibility. It appears to be unrealistic to expect a two-person field team to produce video for different mediums at the same time. In the field, conceptual and operational resources dedicated to VR would have been an advantage.

So, a VR field team must have multiple, uncommon skill sets: Although there are no “standards” for journalistic VR directors, logically it is beneficial for the people collecting the raw material to have direct experience authoring a narrative in the medium. But collecting material for journalism is an advanced skill as well, done best when the director intimately understands (at least) the facts of the topic, the psychology of interviews, the ethics of filmmaking, the practicalities of fieldwork, and has a vision for the story. As a result, the ideal field team would include, at least, a technically proficient VR producer and camera operator to work collaboratively with the journalist/linear filmmaker.

Over time, virtual reality documentary may become so common that many individuals or small teams have all the necessary skills to produce it. A standard, narrative grammar may emerge, so that a post-production team can be confident that any moderately experienced crew will return from the field with the footage needed to tell a story. For example, using traditional documentary filmmaking as a contrasting illustration, experienced directors know they will need close-ups, medium shots, wide shots, establishing shots, perhaps sit-down interviews, reversals, and as much action as possible. In some cases they will have a pre-written shot list. These practices are standard, because experienced filmmakers understand the grammar and potential structures of narrative film, and how it is produced in the edit suite. However, until such time when a standard, VR-video grammar emerges, it seems likely that field teams will require dedicated VR staff. It’s advisable to merge the processes and teams from an early point in the production process.

CGI Interactivity and Navigation

Adding interactivity and user navigation into a live-motion virtual reality environment is both very helpful for journalistic output, and also very cumbersome.

There is currently a deficit in out-of-the-box tools, software, and established protocols for adding interactivity and navigation into live-motion VR environments. Consequently, for this project, both had to be custom developed—an expensive and time-consuming process. In fact, the process to create virtual reality narratives is so new that enabling any type of interactivity requires the unique combination of four or five software packages. It also demands a significant amount of trial and error to continually export the “build” of the VR project from an already complicated software workflow just to test whether or not it works on the device running the application (desktop or mobile) and the head-mounted display. An additional challenge is that different headsets already have different interfaces and navigation options, primarily driven from the computing power necessary to run these virtual reality applications. This is because the power to run the complicated 360-degree field of view, additional video frames, and interactivity is substantial. Hence, you must make decisions and compromises on file size, graphical fidelity, and user experience when distributing on multiple different platforms.

Cost and Time

This production’s high cost and time was partially a result of the specialized skills, the immature equipment, and the unfamiliar processes. Those are detailed above. The authors can imagine efficiencies and changes in the production process, and see benefits of the more mature equipment coming to market. We would expect these to reduce the costs significantly. However, the high cost of this project was also a function of its end result—a highly produced work crafted from many different types of raw material. In this, it seems that this style of virtual reality can be compared in cost to medium or high-end TV (where journalism is sometimes present), or a large-budget web/mobile project (an area in which journalism has rarely had the resources to compete).

The cash costs of this project were significant. Secret Location charged $55,000 for labor, and another $19,515 for the camera hardware, design, and development. This included substantial, additional in-kind contributions. For Frontline, the project added approximately 25 percent to the production cost of its regular TV documentary, which covered the additional filming, travel to the edit, director’s time, and an editorial team to oversee the project. All parties contributed significant in-kind efforts, which did not show up on the cash budget.

The cost of highly produced VR work would seem to have implications for viable business models in the short term. If the best cost comparison is with high-end TV or console game production, it is likely that currently producers and commissioners will need to produce high-end journalistic VR without an expectation of direct cost recovery from audiences or advertisers. iii

Crafted Narrative Versus Timely Witnessing

This was a VR piece made by teams whose business is normally producing highly-polished works; Frontline makes long-form broadcast documentaries, and Secret Location produces high-end digital experiences and games. Both of these forms bias toward longer production timelines than does breaking news. This project inherited that approach.

However, plenty of news is produced and disseminated with minimal crafting, especially if the core journalistic value is in quickly disseminating coverage of events. The authors can easily imagine journalistic VR with less emphasis on a shaped narrative, where the attraction for audiences is the chance to feel present in a place where newsworthy events are happening.

However, it is rare for journalists and camera crews to be present when unplanned news happens; although they frequently rush to the aftermath. (While news outlets increasingly have immediate eyewitness footage of events, it is almost always shot by amateurs who give or sell their content to professionals. [@professionals] ) Journalists who also carry VR-equipment are even less likely to be present when news breaks; the kit is rare, harder to use, and currently services a smaller audience.

Nonetheless, there is still plenty of journalistic value and potential audience interest in giving viewers the opportunity to witness predictable news events or feel present in locations where news has recently happened. (As this report was being finalized, CNN and collaborators transmitted live VR coverage of the first U.S. Democratic Party’s presidential debate in the 2016 election cycle. The field of view was restricted to around 130 degrees and the resolution was low, but the video did not buffer when observed by one of this report’s authors.) The camera and stitching technology developments may make that form of VR journalism more viable. Indeed, Google’s presentation of its “Jump VR” technology shows a direct pipeline between the camera, a vaguely defined system called the “assembler,” and the content’s display on YouTube.

Recommendations

• Journalists must choose a place on the spectrum of VR technology. Given current technology constraints, a piece of VR journalism can be of very high technical and narrative quality, but with that comes the need for a team with extensive expertise and an expectation of long-turnaround—demands that require a large budget and timeline flexibility. Or, it can be of lower-production quality, quicker in turnaround, and thereby less costly. If producers choose to include extensive interactivity, with the very highest fidelity and technical features, they are limiting their audience size to those few with high-end headsets.
• Draw on narrative technique. Journalists making VR pieces should expect that storytelling techniques will remain powerful in this medium. The temptation when faced with a new medium, especially a highly technical one, is to concentrate on mastering the technology and to make prominent those elements which highlight the technology—often at the expense of conveying a compelling story. In the context of documentary VR, there appear to be two strategies for crafting narrative. The first is to have directed-action take place in front of the “surround” camera. The second is to adulterate the immersive video with extra elements, such as computer-generated graphics or extra video layers. The preexisting grammar of film is significantly altered; montages don’t exist in a recognizable way, while the functions of camera angles and frames change as well.
• The whole production team needs to understand the form, and what raw material the finished work will need, before production starts. In our case, a lack of raw material that could be used to tell the story made the production of this project more difficult and expensive. While the field crew went to Africa and recorded footage, that footage only portrayed locations. Although those locations were important, the 360-degree field footage—on its own—was missing anything resembling characters, context, or elements of a plot. Journalists intending to use immersive, live-action video as a main part of their finished work will need to come back from the field with footage that can be authored into a compelling story in the VR form. It is very hard to imagine this task without the field crew’s understanding of the affordances, limitations, and characteristics of the medium.
• More research, development, and theoretical work are necessary, specifically around how best to conceive of the roles of journalists and users—and how to communicate that relationship to users. Virtual reality allows the user to feel present in the scene. Although that is a constructed experience, it is not yet clear how journalists should portray the relationship between themselves, the user, and the subjects of their work. The findings section above lists many of the relevant questions and their implications. Journalists, theorists, and producers can and should review these ideas and start to develop answers.
• The industry should explore (and share knowledge about) many different journalistic applications of VR, beyond highly produced documentaries. This project explored VR documentary in depth. However, just as long-form documentary is not the only worthwhile form inside that medium, the journalism industry may find value in fast-turnaround VR, live VR, VR data visualization, game-like VR, and many other forms.
• Choose teams that can work collaboratively. This remains a complex medium, with few standards or shared assumptions about how to produce good work. In its current environment, most projects will involve a number of people with disparate backgrounds who need to share knowledge, exchange ideas, make missteps and correct them. Without good communication and collaboration abilities, that will be difficult.

In this report, the authors have aimed to share insights and lessons which will be useful to a new field, in a new industry. Some of those may seem daunting. Readers may, when reviewing the case study, balk at the costs, the complexity, and the conceptual shifts. But we strongly advocate that readers keep in mind this medium’s astounding potential for journalism, as well as the fact that we are in its very early days. We invite those who haven’t already used VR to find a headset—even one of the cheapest—and immerse themselves in the powerful works of virtual reality. It important to stress that this is a medium in rapid development, with a rush of Silicon Valley-energy fueling a period of innovation in the entertainment industry. The technology being built is tailored to the film, gaming, and sports entertainment worlds. Journalism is, and will remain, a minor cog in this emerging ecosystem. This, in our view, makes it even more vital for journalists to jump in and experiment, and to help develop VR technologies and processes that suit our needs and benefit our audiences. Over the course of this project, we have seen this begin to happen. Even in the final days when this report was being edited, the authors discovered new journalistic virtual reality works in production. We expect that in another year’s time, even more producers will have tackled the medium; we hope some of them will have read our work and found it valuable. We will be watching closely as new communities of research and

Video Production Narrative Techniques in VR

This report offers the perspective of a team that worked alongside a video documentary production. That necessarily influences the frame of reference. The notes about shot composition and editing, for example, invoke comparisons with traditional video, as opposed to audio or the written word.

However, in VR, the director needs to manage all of this in new ways. This section outlines the tools at filmmakers’ disposal, and some notes on their evolution to this new medium.

Audio and Visual Tools for Narrative

Framing/Composition/Perspective

Narrative Change: Very high Technical Change: Very high

These are the directorial elements that are different from most recorded, visual media. Traditional screen-based media works within a rectangular frame; filmmakers generally expect a landscape orientation, although the adoption of mobile platforms has recently pushed square and portrait compositions into consideration.

With head-mounted displays, viewers have the ability to look in any direction through a 360-degree sphere. The horizontal field of view at any one time is generally greater than 90 degrees, with high-end devices allowing for 110 degrees.

Therefore, in virtual reality, directors must expect to work with framing that is not fixed. This has implications for visual conventions, including the rule of thirds, left or right of frame, and even the concept of out-of-frame.

Likewise, traditional directors often work with perspective. They may be accustomed to positioning a camera so that the angle of a shot evokes a particular relationship between the viewer and subject; shots from below may indicate that the subject of a shot has more power, for example.

In traditional filmmaking, cuts are a primary tool. But that changes for VR. In traditional filmmaking a shot can last a few frames or many minutes. Clips from different moments and locations are strung together, often in rapid succession, to convey meaning. (In VR the concepts of a shot and a scene converge. It seems the most natural word to describe a continuous piece of immersive, 360-degree video is “scene,” even though it’s made up of a single “shot.”) The authors are unaware of any VR works that have successfully used immersive scenes that are just a few seconds long. In VR, thus far, it appears that the only way to use a sequence of short shots is if the director layers 2D video inside a frame as a part of the immersive space.

This has significant implications for how documentarians do their work. If directors want to avoid relying on 2D video, or other overlays, it appears they will need to capture the action, or the interviews, as they will be experienced by the viewer; that is to say, without cuts other than the starts and ends of the scene.

Movement Within the Frame

Narrative Change: Moderate Technical Change: High

A VR scene can include movement. Indeed a director can use moving objects or people to guide audience attention toward the important action in a scene.

However, some movement types tend to cause viewers more problems than others. Movements toward or away from the camera are effective and easy to watch, as are lateral movements through only part of the sphere; whereas an object or person traveling 360 degrees around viewers can frustrate them, as they feel compelled to swivel around to follow the action.

Camera Movement

Narrative Change: Moderate Technical Change: Moderate

VR cameras move less than traditional ones. When they do move, they tend toward simple trajectories and steady speeds. Moving a VR camera initiates problems; it appears to cause greater nausea for users, and their feeling of immersion reduces. These are both likely to be the result of a mismatch between sensory inputs; the eyes are passing a message of movement, but the users’ other senses disagree.

Color and Lighting

Narrative Change: Low Technical Change: High

The narrative functions of color and lighting don’t appear to differ very much between mediums. However, in current VR production, color and lighting are more difficult to manage than in traditional documentary filmmaking. This, however, appears to be an artifact of available technology, as opposed to a fundamental difference in the VR medium.

Technical difficulties stem from the fact that it’s a lot more challenging to find attractive and consistent lighting for 360 degrees around the camera. Also, 360-degree cameras necessarily capture light from multiple lenses to separate sensors. The Frontline production used a rig of 12 GoPros. As a result, each video file ran the risk of under- or over-exposure, and had a different color temperature from the next.

Filmmakers often use focus to direct viewers’ attention toward parts of a frame. While there’s nothing, theoretically, which makes that device unavailable in virtual reality, there are currently considerable technical and practical barriers to producing the effect in-camera. The GoPros used in the Frontline production had fixed, deep depths of field, so it was not possible to blur part of the view.

Stereoscopy is a new, related factor. The strongest stereoscopic effect is found when an object is around five to 15 feet away from the camera.

Graphics and Data Visualization

Narrative Change: High Technical Change: High

VR provides great potential for the evolution of on-screen data visualization. This comes from the medium’s interactivity, the added three-dimensionality, and a new set of human computer interfaces.

Flat videos regularly show non-interactive charts, while interactive graphics have become common on desktop computers, tablets, and mobile devices. The human interfaces for those platforms are commonly limited to keyboards, pointing devices (a mouse for example), and touch via gestures. The VR industry has developed links to companies building more sophisticated human-computer interfaces including hand- and finger-tracking. This hints at new possibilities to manipulate data visualizations in VR, whether with natural hand gestures and actions (grabbing, turning, pushing, pulling, or with multiple fingers or hands), or by way of more intuitively understanding extra dimensionality.

In virtual reality, audio contributes a great deal to the feeling of immersion and, therefore, presence. In particular, audio that seems to come from the specific direction of on-screen objects makes the sensory feedback consistent and more believable. This appears to be true for dialogue, actuality, and foley sound. Directional audio is also a powerful tool for directing a viewer’s attention toward the part of the 360-degree scene where the filmmaker intends to show action.

Interactivity Tools

Virtual reality headsets, having computational functions, potentially give their users some agency and freedom. This depends on a range of factors, from the producer’s intent through to the computer power and memory, and the available human-computer interfaces (joysticks, pointers, et cetera).

Virtual reality researchers identify three high-level groups of interactions: object manipulation, viewpoint manipulation, and application control. These aren’t specific to journalistic virtual reality, but the following points draw on those.

Viewing Direction

This refers to the orientation and position of the user’s view within the virtual environment. The points above that discuss shot composition and camera movement show how viewing direction has implications for narrative.

Manipulating Objects

Although the virtual reality medium can allow users to manipulate objects, this may be the type of interaction that presents the greatest challenges for producers from traditional documentary backgrounds. For all practical purposes, this type of interaction is only possible in computer-generated environments (as opposed to camera-recorded video). It is therefore most commonly associated with games and open-ended experience

Navigating Through Content

Virtual reality producers can allow users to play content in individual chapters or segments. These can be made available one by one, forcing users to proceed in a linear path; or producers can make many segments available for users to access as they choose.

Post-Production Technology and Workflow

This phase involves a combination of stitching raw video footage and assembling the interactive motion graphics, the audio, and the various video assets.

Video Stitching

Secret Location’s stitching process, the first three parts of the workflow diagrammed above, takes the raw camera footage and prepares it for inclusion into an immersive experience. The camera used was made from 12 Go-Pros arranged in six pairs of left and right; together, they covered a sphere.

In the first step of the process, marked part 1 above, the technicians took the raw video files from the GoPro cameras and, in the video effects software system Adobe AfterEffects, made a timeline for the left eye and a timeline for the right eye. Each timeline had six synchronized video channels; one for each segment of the sphere. At this point the technician also corrected the color and exposure for consistency (but not yet perfect).

In part 2, the technician worked in a software system called Autopano Giga by the Kolor company. It’s designed for stitching together video pixels. The technician took the six video channels for each eye, which were produced in the previous step, and stitched them together into two panoramic videos; one for each eye. The technician also worked to make the color and exposure even better.

In part 3, the two spherical video files went back into AfterEffects, and using the Anaglyph plug-in, they were combined into a single-stereo panoramic video.

VR Motionography

This step, marked part 4 in the diagram above, is fundamentally where the audience experience gets shaped. Its closest analogy for traditional documentary filmmakers would be the video-editing process, where a story starts attaining its coherent form. The Secret Location motionographer worked in the software package Unity 3d with the Oculus plug-in.

i: Such as the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University, The Virtual Reality Lab at NTNU, The Virtual Reality Laboratory at the University of Texas among many others.

ii: This is a rapidly evolving situation. One community-curated catalogue of VR equipment at https://virtual-reality.silk.co/ listed 35 panoramic cameras as of mid-July 2015, in various stages of development and production, with varying levels of functionality.

iii: There are many examples of journalism subsidized or funded by sources other than advertisers or end-users; public sector media, philanthropically-funded media, trust-funded media. NGOs and corporations also fund non-fiction work.

• S. Gregory, “Co-Presence: A New Way to Bring People Together for Human Rights Activism,” Witness, 23 September 2013, https://blog.witness.org/2013/09/co-presence-for-human-rights/.
• N. De la Pena et al., “Immersive Journalism: Immersive Virtual Reality for the First-Person Experience of News,” Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments,2010, no. 4, 291&ndash;301.
• D.A.L. Levy N. Newman and R.K. Nielsen, Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2015 (2015), https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/ Reuters%20Institute%20Digital%20News%20Report%202015_Full%20Report.pdf.
• A. Lenhart, “Teens, Social Media & Technology Overview 2015: Smartphones Facilitate Shifts in Communication Landscape for Teens,” Pew Research Center, April 2015, https://www.pewinternet.org/files/2015/04/PI_TeensandTech_Update2015_0409151.pdf.
• J. Benthall, Disasters, Relief and the Media (1993).
• Pena et al., “Immersive Journalism: Immersive Virtual Reality for the First-Person Experience of News.”
• N. De la Pena et al., “Immersive Journalism: Immersive Virtual Reality for the First-Person Experience of News,” Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments, 2010, no. 4, 293.
• L.H. Malkki, “Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization,” Cultural Anthropology, 1996, no. 3, 377&ndash;404.
• N. De la Pena et al., “Immersive Journalism: Immersive Virtual Reality for the First-Person Experience of News,” Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments, 2010, no. 4, 291&ndash;301; C. Stapleton and C.E. Hughes, “Believing Is Seeing: Cultivating Radical Media Innovations,” IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications, 2006, no. 1, 88&ndash;93; A. SchmitzWeiss, “Virtual Worlds: Where the Journalist and the Avatar Combine New Research Paradigm for Journalism Scholarship, Professional Journalism Training,” Paper Presented At the Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association, 21 May 2009, 1&ndash;9.
• R. Aylett and S. Louchart, “Towards a Narrative Theory of Virtual Reality,” Virtual Reality, 2003, no. 1, 2&ndash;9; G. Subsol (Ed.), Virtual Storytelling: Using Virtual Reality Technologies for Storytelling (2001); R. Aylett J. Ibanez and R. Ruiz-Rodarte, “Storytelling in Virtual Environments From a Virtual Guide Perspective,” Virtual Reality, 2003, no. 1, 30&ndash;42; B. MacIntyre and J.D. Bolter, “Single-Narrative, Multiple Point-of-View Dramatic Experiences in Augmented Reality,” Virtual Reality, 2003, no.1, 10&ndash;16.
• M.R. Kandalaft et al., “Virtual Reality Social Cognition Training for Young Adults With High-Functioning Autism,” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, January 2013, no. 1, 34&ndash;44.
• A.J. Coffey et al., “New Media Environments &ndash; Comparative Effects Upon Intercultural Sensitivity: A Five-Dimensional Analysis,” International Journal of Intercultural Relations, September 2013, no. 5, 605&ndash;627.
• Anonymous, “Immersion and Sense of Presence,” Cyberpsychology Lab, University of Quebec Outaouais, Undated, https://w3.uqo.ca/cyberpsy/en/pres_en.htm.
• B.G. Witmer and M.J. Singer, “Measuring Presence in Virtual Environments: A Presence Questionnaire,” Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 1998,no. 3, 225&ndash;240.
• Anonymous, “Immersion and Sense of Presence.”
• Witmer and Singer, “Measuring Presence in Virtual Environments: A Presence Questionnaire.”
• T. Kim and F. Biocca, “Telepresence Via Television: Two Dimensions of Telepresence May Have Different Connections to Memory and Persuasion,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, September 1997, no. 2.
• M. Slater and S. Wilbur, “A Framework for Immersive Virtual Environments (FIVE): Speculations on the Role of Presence in Virtual Environments,” Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 1997, no. 6, 603&ndash;616.
• P. Zahorik and R.L. Jenison, “Presence and Being-in-the-World,” Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 1998, no. 1, 78&ndash;89.
• S. Dubberley C. Wardle and P. Brown, Amateur Footage: A Global Study of User-Generated Content (2014), img/posts/tow-content/uploads/2014/05/Tow-Center-Amateur-Footage-A-Global-Study-of-User-Generated-Content-in-TV-and-Online-News-Output.pdf.

About the Tow Center

The Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, a partner of CJR, is a research center exploring the ways in which technology is changing journalism, its practice and its consumption — as we seek new ways to judge the reliability, standards, and credibility of information online.

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Office of the Dean for Research

New research projects and collaborations selected for funding from the Office of the Dean for Research

A collaboration that explores dynamics among humans, machines, and the environment brings together researchers from the disciplines of architecture, computer science and physics. The project is one of several to be funded by the Office of the Dean for Research. Credit: Daniela Mitterberger, Princeton School of Architecture

New faculty-led projects in areas ranging from the arts and humanities to energy and the environment have been selected to receive funding from the Office of the Dean for Research.

The funds enable exploration of daring ideas and promising collaborations in ways that expand knowledge, impact society, and benefit the planet. Projects are selected via a competitive application process involving proposal reviews by anonymous peer-review panels. 

“This funding grows the capacity for researchers to investigate unconventional or untested ideas that can be difficult to fund through traditional sources,” said Dean for Research Peter Schiffer, professor of physics. “Through these funds, Princeton makes such explorations possible.”

This year, the program selected projects in five themes:

New Ideas in the Humanities

New industrial collaborations, collaborations between artists and scientists or engineers, sustainability of our planet, exploratory energy research.

The New Ideas in the Humanities fund encourages innovative scholarship on original theories as well as enduring questions. Projects may involve the development of new ideas, working groups, conferences, technologies, datasets, expanded access to scholarly resources, or major pieces of scholarly work. The following projects were funded:

Launching the next phase of On TAP: A Theatre & Performance Studies Podcast

• Brian Herrera , Associate Professor of Theater, Lewis Center for the Arts

Originally launched in 2016, On TAP: A Theatre and Performance Studies Podcast  has become a successful, far-reaching, and pathbreaking example of what collaborative humanities scholarship can be in the era of digital and social media. This award will enable a critical scholarly assessment of the podcast’s impact and allow OnTAP ’s continued production over the next two years.  

Indian Ocean trade, the global Middle Ages and the Cairo Geniza

• Marina Rustow , Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East; Professor of Near Eastern Studies and History 

Several hundred letters, legal deeds, lists and accounts dating from Indian Ocean traders from 1060 to 1250 C.E. will be published online and in print in the original Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic alongside English translations. The documents, which survived in a medieval Egyptian synagogue within a larger cache known as the Cairo Geniza, provide unparalleled information about global history before European colonialism.

Program in Law & Public Policy (P*LAW) project in legal journalism 

• Deborah Pearlstein , Director, Program in Law and Public Policy (P*LAW); Charles and Marie Robertson Visiting Professor in Law and Public Affairs

This project will bring a distinguished visiting journalist to Princeton for a two-year residence to foster innovative methods of legal journalism through original investigative research. The project will improve factual and historical research methods through the study of comparative best practices, support original interviews regarding cases of current relevance and historic significance, and disseminate findings through public events and audiovisual and archival preservation. 

The New Industrial Collaborations fund fosters research collaborations between industry and academia, helping to identify challenges and aiding the transformation of discoveries. The program requires a matching contribution from a collaborating company in the second year of the project. The following project was funded:

Real-time brain-to-image reconstructions and foundation models for neuroimaging data

• Kenneth Norman , Huo Professor in Computational and Theoretical Neuroscience; Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience; Chair, Department of Psychology
• Sanjeev Arora , Charles C. Fitzmorris Professor in Computer Science
• Jonathan Pillow , Professor of Princeton Neuroscience Institute
• Uri Hasson , Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
• Industrial Collaborator : Stability AI

Princeton scientists will collaborate with researchers at Stability AI, an open-source generative artificial intelligence (AI) company, to build a system that can visually reconstruct images based on brain activity of patients after a single fMRI brain-imaging session over a timespan of a few seconds. Such a real-time system would, with the patient’s consent, enable researchers to view the patient’s internal mental experience, providing transformative implications for basic science discovery, clinical diagnosis and treatment.

The Collaborations between Artists and Scientists or Engineers fund encourages collaborations between faculty and scholars in the arts and those in the natural sciences or engineering to promote synergistic innovations, allowing experts in seemingly unrelated fields to expand their collective knowledge in ways that benefit both disciplines. The following projects were funded:

Forever chemicals, ecological futures: A collaboration of bioremediation science and multimedia storytelling

• José Avalos , Associate Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment
• Allison Carruth , Professor of American Studies and the High Meadows Environmental Institute, Director of Blue Lab
• Peter Jaffe , William L. Knapp '47 Professor of Civil Engineering, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
• David Reinfurt , Professor of the Practice, Visual Arts in the Lewis Center for the Arts

This collaboration connects biological and environmental engineering with science communication and visual media to engage diverse communities with the ecological ubiquity of long-lived environmental contaminants known as per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). The researchers, which includes Research Associate Scholar Mansha Seth Pasricha , will combine the development of bioengineering solutions to biodegrade these forever chemicals with the production of an innovative lab-to-field series of mixed-media documentary shorts, data visualizations, and local events involving science museums, environmental justice groups, and community arts organizations to raise awareness and engage responses.

Robotic territories: A human-robot performance

• Daniela Mitterberger , Assistant Professor of Architecture
• Benjamin Eysenbach , Assistant Professor of Computer Science
• Gautam Reddy , Assistant Professor of Physics

This collaboration will investigate the dynamics among humans, machines, and the environment, advocating for a paradigm shift in how we understand and interact with our world through technology. The research aims to explore the complex domain of human and robotic interaction through the lens of performance, behavior, motion and representation with the investigative methods of research by design. The result of this research will be a live performance starring three robots and one human interacting in real-time using new bio-inspired artificial systems alongside augmented reality technologies and machine learning algorithms.

The  Sustainability of Our Planet fund focuses on discovering, developing, and adopting sustainable solutions aimed at mitigating the effects of natural resource extraction and use, climate change, land-use change, and other human activities that degrade the environment and pollute Earth. Made possible thanks to the extraordinary vision and generosity of John McDonnell, Class of 1960, the fund is co-organized by the Office of the Dean for Research, the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, and the High Meadows Environmental Institute Innovation. The following projects were funded:

Accelerated discovery of ion-selective electrodes for industrial wastewater refining

• Ryan Kingsbury , Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment

This project explores a new approach to reclaiming valuable metals such as copper, nickel, lead and zinc from industrial wastewater. The technology relies on a family of chemical structures known as Prussian Blue analogs (PBAs) that act as electrodes to attract and trap specific metals. The team will conduct computational screenings to identify and optimize PBA structures, and then produce the structures and test them for their ability to remove metals. The approach has the potential to minimize waste of industrial metals, enhance recycling, and reduce dependence on mining.

Agriculture to architecture: Straw building material

• Paul Lewis , Professor of Architecture
• Guy Nordenson , Professor of Architecture

This project will research and test straw-based construction systems with the goal of reducing emissions of carbon dioxide from building materials while fostering economic and social benefits. An agricultural byproduct, straw is inexpensive, lightweight, fast growing, and able to sequester significant amounts of carbon when used in building construction. The team will explore technical designs for straw as both insulation and structural components in ways that lead to new forms of architecture while supporting growing construction demands.

Design of zeotype-confined amines for carbon capture in humid environments

• Marcella Lusardi ,  Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and the Princeton Materials Institute

Materials that capture carbon dioxide from the air could play an important role in meeting climate change goals. One promising class of adsorbent materials for carbon capture is zeolites, which afford tunability in critical properties like confinement and composition, and have demonstrated success in many commercialized technologies at scale.  This project will investigate methods of tailoring the structure and polarity of zeolites to improve their ability to capture carbon in humid environments.

The Exploratory Energy Research fund exemplifies the University’s commitment to support innovative curiosity-driven energy research through new ideas and concepts aimed at finding sustainable energy solutions. The fund was established as part of Princeton’s larger  Energy Research Fund . The following project was funded:

Innovative Hybrid Plasma-Electrochemical System for Efficient and Selective Green Ammonia Synthesis

• Yiguang Ju , Robert Porter Patterson Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

This project will pioneer an environmentally friendly method for making ammonia, a chemical that can be useful in future hydrogen-based energy storage, transport and usage. The method will involve development of several technologies, including tungsten-based membranes and plasma-assisted membrane surface nitrification, which makes it possible to produce ammonia at much lower temperatures than are required for current production methods. The study will enable the efficient and sustainable synthesis of ammonia from nitrogen and water using renewable electricity.

180 Powerful Journalism Research Topics To Focus On

Table of Contents

Finding a unique journalism research topic is one of the tricky tasks that require a lot of innovation. If you are a student who is pursuing a degree in communication or media studies, then you will often be asked to write essays or research papers on interesting journalism topics. Right now, do you want to write an informative journalism research paper? Are you searching for the best journalism research topics? Go through this blog post and get the top powerful journalism research topics and ideas that will help you boost your grades.

Tips for Selecting a Good Journalism Research Topic

Journalism is a broad field of study that mainly deals with the gathering and distribution of information to various media channels such as radio, TV, newspaper, and social media. In order to complete graduation, mainly, as a part of the final year academic project, the students who are pursuing media studies must submit a research paper or thesis on journalism topics.

When you are assigned a task to prepare a journalism research paper, topic selection is the first step that you can’t skip. Remember, you can impress your professor and score high grades only if you have a unique topic.

In general, there are endless unique journalism research topics and ideas available, but the real challenge lies in identifying one specific journalism topic out of them all. Hence, to help you all, here we have shared a few important tips that you can follow during the topic selection.

• The topic you choose should match your interest.
• The topic should be exciting and informative for the readers.
• Avoid choosing too broad topics because they may require a lot of time to complete.
• If your topic is too broad, narrow it down to a specific research question that is easy to write about before the deadline.
• Instead of picking the frequently discussed research topics, go with the topic that focuses on unique issues that are fresh for the readers to learn and understand.
• The research topic you choose should support extensive research and contain relevant sources for reference.

Additionally, check whether the research topic you have selected stands in line with your professor’s instructions. Also, before finalizing the journalism research topic you have selected, make sure it satisfies all the above-mentioned tips. The journalism research topic is said to be good only if it meets the requirements shared above.

List of Journalism Research Paper Topics and Ideas

When it comes to writing a journalism research paper, you need to invest a lot of effort and time to search and find the best journalism research topic. Hence, to make your topic selection process easier, here, we have composed a list of exclusive journalism research topics and ideas.

Explore the complete list of ideas and pick a powerful journalism research topic of your preference.

Top Research Topics on Journalism

• What are the duties and roles of a professional journalist?
• How have technological and scientific developments affected journalism?
• Discuss how influential people control the freedom of journalists and the media.
• How has social media affected modern journalism?
• Explain the challenges that journalists in varying topographical situations face every day.
• How can journalists change the perception of women as being materialistic?
• A journalist should be well-versed in different topics about local and international news- Explain.
• How do the media facilitate the stereotypical representations of females by portraying them as materialistic objects?
• How has technology affected the mediums that journalists used to reach people?
• Discuss the major problems that are experienced by journalists as they discharge their duties.
• Are social media websites making third-person journalists?
• Is social media making print media obsolete?
• Can journalism be used to help improve marginalized sections in society?
• How has COVID-19 revealed the role of journalists at a global level?
• How are electronic media channels shaping modern-day journalism?
• Discuss the impact of Yellow journalism on the sports and entertainment industry
• How do power-hungry politicians misuse media houses and journalists?
• Discuss the dangers of investigative journalism
• Impact of fake journalism on people and society as a whole
• Political scandals cause media introspection.
• How are women journalists treated in the world?
• What are the challenges faced by women journalists in Middle-East countries?
• Discuss the role of journalism during World War I and World War II
• Impact of journalism on the lifestyle change of Henry Meghan
• Is it good to consider, social media and blogging as the future of journalism? Explain with justifications
• What is communication?
• Media, Censorship, and Propaganda.
• The freedom of speech and its impact on the media.
• The main aspects of communication.
• The triggering topics.
• The phenomenon of hype and its usage of the media.

Best Journalism Research Topics

• How can journalists help the masses understand topical issues better?
• What is the role of the media in reducing crime?
• Discuss the negative implications of media in influencing violence.
• What is the link between media and the growth of the fashion industry?
• What is the subsequent impact of media on the growth of an economy?
• Discuss the likely implications of partisan advertisement outlets.
• What are your thoughts on denying an operational license to partisan media outlets?
• Examine how media has impacted your living over the last ten years.
• Elaborate on the potential beneficiaries of media versus society-influenced violence.
• Investigate how the media industry has evolved because of technological advancement.
• How has journalism contributed to political turmoil in Kenya?

Read more: Excellent Communication Research Topics To Consider

Excellent Journalism Research Paper Topics

• How significant is the media in the war against crimes?
• Use of mainstream media in strategic communication
• How the media influence political patterns
• Media use by kids and adolescents
• How society benefits from a free media
• Scare strategies that the media use to accomplish goals
• How do the media influence immorality?
• Do video games form a part of the media?
• Media censorship and propaganda
• How the media portrays popular culture and identity

Research Paper Topics in Mass Communication and Journalism

• What are the benefits of international journalism ?
• How effective are social media marketing campaigns
• Explain how journalists altered the coverage of news relating to World War II.
• Define media downshifting and discuss why people are reverting to newspapers again.
• Discuss mass communication laws in the U.S.
• Define journalism ethics and highlight its importance in news coverage.
• Investigate why radio still commands a huge following.
• Explain different types of media and differ according to the audience.
• Investigate terrorism in media and highlight examples in the world today.
• Highlight some relevant media disasters and explain how to prevent them.

Journalism Thesis Topics

• How media houses benefit from advertising
• Explain why video blogs are the new diaries.
• How effective are media companies as compared to single bloggers with regard to news coverage?
• Define fan fiction and fandom in the media.
• Explain the critical attributes of communication.
• Discuss the peculiarities of children’s media.
• How do the media affect the political class in a country?
• Key stakeholders of modern media
• How the media influences the articulation of major social matters
• How the media preempt situations

Unique Journalism Research Topics

• Investigate how the government regulates the media.
• What is the role of mass media in spreading awareness?
• Explain how readers can confirm the truth and credibility of news articles.
• Discuss the relevance of media in the growth of a steadfast country.
• Explain how social media has impacted the reporting of police brutality cases.
• What was the impact of mass media on the scope of the Vietnam War
• Determine whether governments should have exclusive power to censor news reporters and journalists.
• Elaborate on the main drawbacks facing journalism.
• Discuss whether media outlets are responsible for the spread of unverified stories.
• Analyze why media agencies should cease using metaphors in headlines.
• Media psychology- How it applies to communication.
• Explain the role of media in the growth of the music industry.
• Analyze the influence of media on innovations.
• Explain the implications of a one-sided media and why it might be dangerous to society.
• Analyze the media violations of a person’s freedom and rights.
• Investigate the Black Lives Matter movement and analyze the role of media in advancing it.
• Examine how media affects the diminishing of traditions and culture.
• Why is the press essential in spreading political rivalry among the political subject and class?
• What role does mass media play in promoting learning activities?
• Examine the role of mass media on the political class of America in the 18th century.

Investigative Journalism Research Topics

• What is the role of transculturation in media translation
• Discuss the objectification of women and its adverse psychological impacts.
• Discuss whether politicians depend on media to retain their power.
• Explain why mass media is more of a propaganda tool for the government.
• Explain why the media should not include graphic images depicting violence or war brutality.
• What are the historical development and cultural impact of media in the U.S.?
• How some governments silence investigative journalists
• An investigation into the key stakeholders of modern media houses.
• How magazine covers are used to get more sales
• How journalists can maintain high-quality reporting without necessarily spending more
• What are the negative impacts of television advertisements on children?
• How the media is helping call centers to create jobs and help the unemployed members of society.
• Examine how the image of the Arab woman appears in Arab media.
• How the media makes the USA look like the ultimate ruler
• Conduct a comparative analysis of news reports between FOX and BBC News.
• How mainstream media is promoting the upsurge of public misinformation and fake news
• How influential politicians make key decisions for some media houses
• What are the moral lines that separate investigative journalism from the violation of people’s privacy?
• How the media is helping rebrand some countries- Case study of Nigeria.

Read more: Best Visual Analysis Essay Topics and Writing Guidelines for Students to Focus On

Interesting Journalism Thesis Topics

• Examine some of the most significant anticipated changes to journalism in days to come
• Is it true that the internet makes people read less about current events?
• Elaborate on different ways by which mass media outlets benefit from advertisements and product promotions.
• Discuss why it is not appropriate for celebrities and superstars to undergo trials by the media.
• Define stylized writing and elaborate on whether it is acceptable in today’s internet-reliant world.
• Discuss the critical negative influence mass media may have on students.
• Elaborate why televisions need to stop showing sexual content.
• Examine media and its influence in the articulation of social matters like racism.
• Investigate the impact of new media on digital learning budgets.
• Examine if journalism can seek the truth without breaking the journalism code.
• What are the causes and impacts of media addiction
• Discuss the effect of mass media on one’s emotional and psychological wellbeing.
• Highlight how disabled people are represented by the media today
• Discuss why we should trust the media to deliver accurate news.

Engaging Journalism Dissertation Topics

• Discuss the representation of women journalists in the media fraternity.
• Describe ways to regulate mass media to guarantee that students are only minimally exposed to inappropriate content
• Discuss the reasons that make the United States of America considered a global superpower from media perspectives
• The imperativeness of journalism for disadvantaged social groups
• A Critical review of the methodological trends and controversies surrounding the Use of opinion poll
• Critically analyze how the British journalists try to win over the royals
• Homophobia in modern sports and the role of media channels in increasing such negativism Homophobia
• Discuss the role of media in promoting same-sex marriage
• Evaluate the role played by media in helping GenZ athletes to seek their ‘authentic voice’
• Describe the impact of replacing sports journalism with mindless gossip columnists
• What were the restrictions on journalists for covering the FIFA World Cup 2022?

Great Journalism Research Paper Topics

• What is the effect of media on diplomacy
• A case study of pollution as a social issue and the media’s role in combating it.
• Investigate the impact of fear created by media reporting crimes.
• Hidden messages are passed through the media.
• Discuss the role of media as an agenda-setting tool.
• Elaborate on the flaws representation of black women in media.
• Discuss the use of women and their sexuality in mass media advertisements.
• How media images represent different entities
• Could virtual reality be the future of modern media?
• Do the media create or react to events?
• What moral distinctions exist between the invasion of privacy and investigative journalism?
• Are journalists nowadays more focused on attractiveness than on delivering more accurate news?
• Discuss the main issues that journalists face when performing their responsibilities.
• What impact have advances in science and technology had on journalism?
• What can journalists do to combat the idea that women are materialistic?

Captivating Journalism Research Ideas

• Is it possible for the media to serve society’s underprivileged groups?
• Describe how the American media presents adversaries and rivals from throughout the world
• Does the internet really cause individuals to read less about current events?
• Why has the internet changed the way news is reported?
• Examine some of the key upcoming developments in journalism that are most anticipated.
•  Can journalists continue to report on high-quality stories without spending more?
•  Nigeria is a case study of how the media is assisting in the rebranding of some nations
•  How powerful politicians affect some media outlets’ ability to make important judgments
•  A description of the difficulties emerging nations face when it comes to information freedom
• How sexual material is used on the front pages of health publications to draw readers
•  Does the media influence events or just report on them?
•  What impact does the internet have on how the media evolves?
•  Why is radio still a vital type of media in the twenty-first century?
•  Describe ways to control the media to limit the exposure of pupils to inappropriate information
•  Do powerful and influential big media firms have too much sway?
• Do they have to be broken up into smaller pieces?

Latest Journalism Research Topics

• Describe the Part of the Media in the Russia-Ukraine Crisis.
• Discuss the popular media tactics of political parties in the United States
• Consider the necessity for real-life tales in the media of today.
• Write about literary journalism in recent times.
• Investigative reporting on the Brazilian drug trade
• Mass media censorship in North Korea
• FIFA world cup 2022: restrictions on journalists for covering the event
• Critical analysis of how the British journalists try to win over the royals
• Describe the effects of media misdirection and misinformation.

From the list of outstanding journalism research topics and ideas suggested above, you can use any idea as an inspiration for writing a research paper. We have a team of professional academic writers who have good knowledge of mass media and communication to craft a research paper on the best journalism topics.

Quickly avail of our writing service and get a top-quality, plagiarism-free research paper as per your requirements on time at an affordable rate.

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The Project for the Revitalization of Local News

The Project for the Revitalization of Local News is an initiative within the Reynolds School to support local journalism in Nevada. 

Goals of the project

• Provide news coverage by students and professional journalists in Nevada communities that have experienced major reductions in local media, beginning with Elko and Incline Village
• Organize professional meetings for Nevada news leaders to develop strategies and innovations for enhancing and sustaining local service
• Organize public events to raise community awareness of the decline of local journalism in our state
• Conduct academic research to assess the provision of local news in Nevada

Partnering with KUNR

The Project for the Revitalization of Local News has established reporting programs in Elko, through KUNR’s sister station KNCC (pictured left, located at Great Basin College), and in Incline Village, through the Reynolds School’s Lake Tahoe News Collective, in partnership with KUNR. 

Leading research on news in Nevada

In addition to sponsoring industry and community events, the project is conducting the first-ever study of the local-news ecology in Nevada, in cooperation with RSJ’s Center for Advanced Media Studies.

Support for the project

The project receives funding from The Hearst Foundations, the John Ben Snow Memorial Trust, the Office of the Provost at the University of Nevada, Reno, Great Basin College and individual donors. For more information about the project, contact project director Al Stavitsky at [email protected] . 

ICFJ Knight Media Innovators

To reinvent journalism, start by updating its mission, by mattia peretti jun 18, 2024 in audience engagement.

Trust in journalism is at an all-time low, engagement is declining, and the business outlook for the industry is uncertain at best. These are facts. The question is whether you think this situation is inevitable or if you believe things could be better. I’m in the latter camp.

Three months ago I wrote that I believe that journalism as it is can’t be saved, but that we can reinvent it. Only by imagining radical new solutions and creating products that users actually want. 

Reinventing anything forces you to face some hard questions and even harder truths. Luckily, throughout my career I have appreciated time and again how people in journalism are not afraid to dive into this level of self-reflection. I dare say it’s something we even embrace, probably because asking hard questions is part of the definition of a journalist’s work.

So I decided to gather a small group of people in my network to see what we might do together to set this change and reinvention in motion. I call them News Alchemists , for their ability to create novel ideas and solutions, just as alchemists worked to turn base metals into gold. 

With News Alchemists , we aim to articulate a vision for change in the journalism industry and advocate for it, in order to make journalism more user-centric, and more equitable and sustainable as a result.

We have gathered (virtually) twice in the last few weeks to elaborate on our theory of change and try to identify where we can start from to begin moving the wheel of change. The first push is the hardest but we believe that a brighter future for journalism is possible. 

Here’s what I’ve learned so far from our conversations, and some questions we aim to explore in the coming months.

Reconnecting with our mission

We believe that change can only start with a mindset shift toward what I describe as extreme user-centricity. This means creating products and experiences that people actually want, but it’s more complex than that.

It starts with our mission. We need to take some time to reflect on why we think journalism is important and what role it plays in societies. Traditionally, we tend to think about the mission of journalism as informing the public about what is going on in their community, in their country, and across the world; to supply them with the information they need to make informed choices, for example about how they are going to vote in an election.

Is that enough? Do we really believe that all journalism should aim to do is provide information to the public? I don’t think so. This belief risks confusing the production of content with mission accomplished. It suggests that the moment information is provided, our job is done. In this context, extreme user-centricity means acknowledging that information has value only if we help people use it to take action and inspire positive change. So how can we rethink, reconnect with, and update our mission?

As journalists, we should care about the people we report for, right? Otherwise why bother? The problem is that empathy often is not required to do the journalism we currently produce. The system is not designed to reward empathy as a valuable skill. For that to change, we have to start thinking of journalism as a conversation and as a service based on listening, rather than as a mere exercise of content production.

Expanding the definition of journalism

The other risk of equating our mission to the production of content is that it limits the horizon of our creativity. How can we reinvent anything if we already default to such a narrow definition? Furthermore, if we accept that information overload is a significant issue in our societies, aren’t we even exacerbating the situation by only working to produce more and more content all the time? 

Expanding the definition of journalism might mean, for example, embracing our role as conveners. As the American Press Institute highlights in this excellent piece : “Media should be a force for social connection, a convener of people across differences and a facilitator for what to do after the facts are laid bare.” 

Many innovative organizations are already experimenting with this in a number of different formats: from listening clubs to help people discuss what they heard on a podcast, to events with journalists and expert guests on stage to discuss the news with the audience. 

And there are other benefits of convening people for in-person interactions: chief among them, more people would get to know journalists, which could increase trust. After all, it’s easier to ask someone to trust a person they met in real life and exchanged thoughts and ideas with rather than asking them to blindly trust a byline.

Focusing on the experiences we offer

We want to advocate for an increased focus on the quality of people’s experiences when they engage with our journalism. This is a critical shift in mindset. User experience, or UX in short, is not a new concept but it seems to me that we often reduce it to how users interact with our products so that we can improve said products and get people to spend more time with them. 

Absolutely nothing wrong with that, but we must also think of user experience through the wider lens of how our journalism makes them feel . How much better could the products and experiences we create become if we cared for those feelings?

In a nutshell, that’s what our theory of change is built upon: we need a shift toward extreme user-centricity because we believe that by embracing that mindset our products and experiences could be better than they currently are and create more value for the people we aim to serve. This would lead to new paths for sustainability, because people pay for products and experiences that add value to their lives.

Stating the obvious: Change is hard

You might be reading this and thinking “ok, but this is not new, we already know these things” – and you’d be right. We have the evidence. Look back at the very first line of this piece. We have the evidence – and yet change is painfully slow. That’s why it’s critical that we better understand what makes change so difficult and how we can remove such barriers. 

User-centricity should expand to people-centricity, to acknowledge the need to show empathy not only to our users but also to the people working in our organizations. 

Change is hard. It’s scary. Let’s face it, it’s generally easier to not change in whatever field of life. We must consider barriers such as habits, frustrations, power dynamics, and economic incentives, and figure out what levers we can pull to implement change – including in our organizations even if not everyone inside them will embrace that change. We need to activate a positive feedback loop to prove that changing is in everyone’s interest: users, journalists, society, and even companies’ bottom lines.

Change won’t just happen if we are not able to explain clearly what we want to change into. In our conversations, we realized that if we all write down a description of the “ideal news organization,” our descriptions would look quite different from one another. And that’s ok. The point is not getting to the same destination but agreeing that we need a new one and defining the principles we share.

Next steps and how you can get involved

After our first two gatherings, we decided to continue working together through the rest of the year, at least. We know all of this is extremely complex, and we don’t have the arrogance to believe that we can reinvent journalism alone. But we absolutely believe that a better future is possible if we build a movement that fights every day for these principles and makes it easier for everyone to embrace this mindset shift through inspiring conversations and examples of the radical solutions we need.

We believe we have a campaigning role to play to facilitate change at all levels. From inside and outside the organizations, from our staff to engaging with users, starting from journalism education and making that more people-centric, too. 

News Alchemists is like a product in closed beta. The ambition I have for this fellowship year with ICFJ is to test it and understand how to turn it into something that can meaningfully inspire and facilitate positive change. For this year, the goal is not to scale up: we expect to grow the size of the group a little, but not much. But in the future, we hope to develop News Alchemists into something that can grow into a global community, as soon as next year.

We do want to open this conversation to many others across the industry, though. We will be creating opportunities to do just that in the near future. Leave your contact here to express your interest in joining News Alchemists and staying informed about the initiative.

With thanks to the News Alchemists: Annika Ruoranen , Sannuta Raghu , Shirish Kulkarni , Jeremy Gilbert , Agnes Stenbom , Uli Köppen , Aldana Vales , Feli Carrique , Styli Charalambous , Martin Schori , Laura Krantz McNeill , Nick Petrie , Tshepo Tshabalala , Nikita Roy , Rishad Patel , Chris Moran , Elite Truong . And a special thanks to Aslı Sevinc .

Image by Jamillah Knowles & Reset.Tech Australia / © https://au.reset.tech/ / Better Images of AI / Detail from Connected People / CC-BY 4.0.

Read more articles by

Mattia Peretti

Mattia Peretti is a learning experience designer, project manager and AI consultant working in journalism and media – and a Knight Fellow with the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ). From 2019 to 2023, Mattia was the manager of JournalismAI, a joint initiative of Polis – the journalism think-tank at the London School of Economics and Political Science – and the Google News Initiative, aimed at empowering news organizations to use artificial intelligence responsibly.

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CGFoE Files Amicus Curiae Brief in a Case on Investigative Journalism and the Protection of Sources in Peru

June 18, 2024

• Key details

Key Details

• Region Latin-America and Caribbean
• Themes Press Freedom

Columbia GFoE filed an amicus curiae brief to uphold international standards on freedom of expression and protect investigative journalism in Peru in a case involving journalist and   IDL Reporteros director, Gustavo Gorriti.

New York, June 18, 2024 – In May 2024, Columbia Global Freedom of Expression (CGFoE) filed an amicus curiae brief before the First Specialized Constitutional Court of Lima, Peru, in a case involving journalist Gustavo Gorriti, who is being investigated for allegedly bribing prosecutors. The brief states that, according to the highest international standards, the investigation against Gorriti violates his freedom of expression and inhibits the right of Peruvian citizens to access information of substantial public interest. It also stresses that the alleged facts that constitute the journalist’s crime are nothing more than a legitimate exercise of his freedom of expression.

Gorriti is a renowned investigative journalist and director of IDL Reporteros , who has exposed corruption at the highest levels of the Peruvian government, with an impact throughout Latin America. He has been instrumental in holding officials accountable and promoting transparency. However, Gorriti is now facing a preliminary investigation for the crime of active bribery for allegedly providing media support in favor of prosecutors working on the Lava Jato case—one of the most high-profile corruption cases in the region— which is often the subject of his journalist reporting.

The brief submitted by CGFoE explains that the case is part of a serious regional resurgence of the use of criminal proceedings to intimidate and silence journalists, researchers, and other indispensable voices in a democratic society. Likewise, it states that the investigations published by the journalist, which caused the opening of the criminal investigation, not only cannot be the cause of a criminal proceeding but, according to all international jurisprudence on the matter, are expressions that deserve special protection by the State because they report on matters of high public relevance.

In the case in question, the process against Gorriti includes orders to lift the confidentiality of his telephone communications during the last five years. In this regard, based on international and comparative standards, the brief states that this measure, if implemented, would violate the protection of sources guarantee and would discourage other sources from bringing to light information of public interest.  

The brief also highlights that the opening of an investigation in light of the exercise of a fundamental human right, and the disproportionate restriction on sources’ confidentiality, not only constitutes a violation of Mr. Gorriti’s freedom of expression but also significantly inhibits society’s collective right to access information of public interest. In this case, depriving Peruvian society of investigations on corruption also entails irreparable harm to democracy. Citizens have the right to be informed on matters of public interest. This is but an essential precondition for the consolidation of modern democracies in which the State—whose authority and power emanate from its citizens—is obliged to be accountable.

CGFoE’s brief was submitted with the sole purpose of assisting the Court’s work in protecting the freedoms of the press, opinion, and expression in this important case on the use of criminal law against investigative journalism and the protection of journalistic sources. It is authored by our associate director, Hawley Johnson ; our associate expert and former rapporteur of the Office of the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Catalina Botero Marino ; our legal and program consultant, Anderson Javiel Dirocie De León ; and our legal researcher, Juan Manuel Ospina Sánchez .

You can access the full document in its original Spanish version here and you can read a courtesy non-authoritative English translation here .

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Amicus Curiae Brief in Its Original Spanish Version

Courtesy Non-Authoritative English Translation

Hawley Johnson

Associate Director, Global Freedom of Expression, Columbia University

Catalina Botero Marino

Associate Expert of CGFoE Former Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights

Anderson Javiel Dirocie De León

Legal and Program Consultant

Juan Manuel Ospina

Legal Researcher

Media and Journalism Research Center

MJRC Launches Research Project on Media and Politics Across 40+ Nations Prepping for 2024 Polls

Our new research project, decoding the power play: media and elections in 2024, is aimed to chart the interplay among media, political parties and the business sector in a highly charged electoral year..

With elections slated to take place in dozens of countries next year, study of the rapidly evolving media landscape and the unpredictable nature of politics is essential. There are numerous studies focusing on social media content during election periods, yet the influence of the media market’s structural conditions on election fairness and outcomes receives less attention.

Decoding the Power Play: Media and Elections in 2024 is planning to fill that gap by systematically examining and tracking two crucial areas that significantly shape the dynamics of the electoral process: media ownership and political finance. In addition to that, the project aims to collect data and information about the role social networks play in each national context.

On the one hand, Decoding the Power Play: Media and Elections in 2024 aims to uncover the connections between media corporations and political entities, whether they are politicians or political groups. Secondly, the project aims to map the sources of political finance and the main recipients of this funding. Finally, the project also wants to examine the relationships on social networks between media owners and political figures and chart the political expenditure on social media, categorized by tech platform and spender.

As we approach elections in a bevy of nations, including major geopolitical players and some of the world’s most populous countries such as the United States, the European Union, potentially the UK, India, Russia, Indonesia, South Africa, Mexico, Pakistan, South Korea, a string of European countries, and over a dozen African nations, the year 2024 presents a unique opportunity to observe a range of political experiences. These will provide insights into global political trends and their potential impact on the world order and the state of democracy in the coming decade.

The project’s main goal is not to forecast election outcomes or monitor disinformation patterns. Rather, it seeks to shed light on the emerging dominant political structures and the media entities that bolster and magnify their messages. This would improve our understanding of the information and media ecosystem that will develop over the next decade.

The research and data collection, conducted by a research team led by Marius Dragomir, the MJRC Director, began with a preparatory phase from January to June 2023, and will extend with a more intensive data collection phase until March 2025. The collected data will be used to draft a comparative analytical report and a series of academic articles.

The project is highly collaborative, with interested researchers, particularly academic institutions that have the necessary human resources and skills, being welcome to join in.

See more information on the project’s page .

Photo: Licensed under the  Unsplash+ License

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• Interview with Miren Azkarate, visiting researcher at CIRM and holder of the Elbira-Zipitria Chair in the Basque Country

Interview with Aitor Zuberogoitia, Elvira-Zipitria Chair in Basque Studies 2024

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Welcome Aitor Zuberogoitia , new Etxepare Euskal Institutua Elbira-Zipitria Chair in Basque Studies!

He will be in Montréal from October 7 to 21, 2024 to discuss social transformations and transdisciplinarity in cities, the use of minority languages in urban contexts, and the relationship between social media and minority languages.

Aitor Zuberogoitia , PhD in Journalism (EHU-UPV) is Associate Professor of the Faculty of Humanities and Education of Mondragon Unibertsitatea and Co-coordinator of the Global Digital Humanities degree. He also lectures on the Audiovisual Communication degree at Mondragon Unibertsitatea . His main research areas are Higher Education and innovation, communication ethics, communication and citizenship, youth and digital society, and minority language media.

Professor Zuberogoitia, your academic background bridges the disciplines of humanities, technology, and social issues. What initially drew you to explore these interconnected areas within your scholarly pursuits?

I have a background in journalism, first as a journalist and then as a scholar, but some years ago we started a reflection process in our faculty and decided that it was necessary to launch a new BA degree on Humanities adapted to this new era, characterized by an interconnected global world, digital technologies and increasing urbanization. To that end, I was involved in courses on Ethical Cities, Ethics in Sustainable Development, Urban Anthropology, Digital Ethnography and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

At the same time, we began to analyze different trends in the world of the humanities, innovative university programs, and discovered movements such as Experiential Humanities, Humanities in Action or the reports of the GUNI network (Global University Network for Innovation). All of them pointed in the same direction: situated humanities, which analyzed the problems of their territory and interacted with social agents beyond the academy to contribute to the development of their environment and face our civilizational challenges combining the Social Sciences and the Humanities with design thinking and digital technologies.

Given your expertise in digital humanities, what are your thoughts on the evolving role of technology within the educational landscape?

The digital humanities have undergone two significant waves. The first wave focused on digitizing texts and creating digital archives, making traditional humanities resources more accessible and searchable. The second wave emphasized the use of computational methods and tools, such as data mining, text analysis, and digital mapping, to analyze large datasets and uncover new insights within the humanities.

In this second wave, Human Centered Design and citizen participation approaches called "social laboratories" (Social Labs) take on special relevance, working collaboratively based on the real needs raised by different social groups. That's where we stand. Now we face another very important challenge, which is none other than learning to appropriately integrate AI into our research and curricular projects.

Your research has examined the use of the Basque language on social media platforms like TikTok. Based on your observations, what can you tell us about the current state of the Basque language in social media and its potential appeal to younger audiences?

We have carried out several research projects focused on the use of social networks by young people. The results show that the attitudes of Basque adolescents resemble those found in recent studies from western countries, indicating the same predisposition to externally oriented identities. The search for entertainment and the feeling of being part of a digital teen culture/virtual community appear as well as key driving forces for them.

In the case of the Tiktok platform, Basque tiktokers demonstrate a strong commitment to the Basque language and aspire to give it a prominent place on TikTok. However, their efforts are constrained by the limited number of Basque-speaking users on the platform. Consequently, the motivations identified in our studies do not guarantee a significant impact on the community or transform TikTok into a powerful tool for promoting the Basque language. It is necessary to combine this commitment by users with policies aimed at promoting initiatives in Basque on the internet, as has been done in the case of Wikipedia, thanks to which Wikipedia in the Basque language has more than 433,000 entries and is ranked 33rd. in the ranking of languages ​​in terms of number of articles published in the online encyclopedia.

Have you explored the potential downsides of social media and their possible contribution to language attrition, particularly for minority languages like Basque?

Given that the search for entertainment and the feeling of being part of a digital adolescent culture/virtual community are the main drivers when it comes to participating in social networks, minority languages ​​are at a disadvantage, because the content provision is much greater (and produced with many more means) in the majority languages. Additionally, Basque young users have received comments that undermine their choice to use Basque, with derogatory comments suggesting that they should speak in a more widely understood language such as Spanish. These experiences highlight the challenges faced by adolescents producing Basque-speaking content, who face hostility and prejudice based on their linguistic preference.

However, all of this can also be worked on in the classroom. A study that we carried out for four years showed that the experience of creating content in Basque on Wikipedia and knowing experientially the credibility mechanisms of the online encyclopedia in the Basque language resulted in the majority of students considering that their perception of the credibility of Wikipedia had increased and they also recognized that there is a greater volume of information in Basque than they thought and a quality control group that they did not expect.

During your time at McGill University, what key knowledge or experiences do you hope to share with both the student body and the broader Montréal community?

Firstly, I would like to share some ideas and reflections on the future of the Social Sciences and Humanities and the challenges they face; next, as I am part of a peculiar university, a cooperative university that is part of the Mondragon cooperative movement, I would also like to share some information about its origins and its objectives, and the way in which the university has tried to approach and adapt its activity to urban environments (it was born in a semi-rural area), creating a multidisciplinary campus in which the Bachelor's Degree in Global Digital Humanities is located (in this Bachelor's Degree the concept of UniverCity has also been developed, and, in that sense, I am very interested in the way in which CIRM interacts with the city of Montréal from a multidisciplinary perspective).

I would also like to talk about the concept of ethical cities, paying special attention to inclusivity, sustainability and open governance. Finally, and as I am part of a minority culture and language, I would like to talk about the place that both occupy in our citizen environments and the possible development paths they may have.

In anticipation of your upcoming residency as the Elvira-Zipitria Chair at McGill University, what aspects of the Montréal environment, either academic or cultural, are you most eager to experience?

As I have previously noted, I am very struck by CIRM's approach, its way of interacting with the city from a multidisciplinary perspective. I am also interested in the fact that it is the most populated city in Québec, since I want to learn more about the initiatives carried out in that region to preserve its identity and its language (which at the same time is a state language in Europe). And of course, they attract me a lot both its rich cultural activity and its great locations and landscapes.

Professor Zuberogoitia, how do you anticipate your experience at McGill University contributing to your future work and research at Mondragon University?

I would like to take away a series of learnings and references about the university-city interaction (town-gown relations) from a multidisciplinary perspective; I would also like to learn about the research projects that CIRM has been working on and explore possible avenues of collaboration (either in projects or in the preparation of papers) with our research in the Basque Country in relation to the role of the Humanities to promote Action Research and sustainable cooperation between actors involved in urban innovation ecosystems (paying special attention to the perspective of minorities).

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