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"The Athletic's growth and The New York Times"

Kyodo News (Japan)

Why is [The Athletic] growing while the media environment is changing and local newspapers are struggling with circulation? Gregory Perreault, an associate professor at the University of South Florida who is knowledgeable about digital media, analyzed the situation, stating, "They persuaded and hired reporters who already had a proven track record covering local teams. The strategy that people will pay for high-quality content has succeeded." The company is also venturing into diversifying its revenue structure, such as collaborating with auction sites for sports collectibles and featuring highlight videos, as it explores the future of sports media in a new era.

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"We know why journalists leave the profession. A new study looks at why they stay"

NiemanLab 

In our study, Claudia and I found that journalists found joy in exercising service-oriented roles of journalism and in opportunities for camaraderie. The study draws on interviews with 20 journalists across the United States who were asked about the joyful experiences in their news work. The journalists worked in a range of mediums and beats at outlets including The Charlotte Observer, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Robesonian, FanSided, and ESPN.  

 

Journalists found joy in developing genuine emotional connections with their audience. They reflected on the incredible amount of trust their audience granted them in the interview process — and they didn’t take that trust for granted. As one put it, “You’re telling me your life story and you’re just going to have to trust me that I’m going to get it right, that I’m going to tell it well.”  The day-to-day work of news, journalists reminded us, was the opportunity to learn for a living. And what they learned often reminded them that humanity offers stories of conflict, yes, but also stories of forgiveness, gratitude, compassion, and generosity.

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"Q&A with Rural News Researcher, Dr. Gregory P. Perreault"

CISL University of North Carolina-Chapel 

My research, overall, is about adaptation. I think that this poses a particular problem in rural journalism, in that many newsrooms are well resourced when it comes to adaptation — changes in society, changes in political climate, changes in technology.  These are things for which there are resources to help you adjust.

 

If you now sense that your audience is on TikTok, you can go to some trainings, you can study from others, you can look at who else is doing it in your city and obtain a sense of how to adapt to that method of storytelling.  If you’ve noticed that your comments sections have become increasingly hostile in the run up to an election, there are systems that you can put in place or an AI filter you can put in place or any additional mechanisms to flag and remove comments before any sort of hate reaches the eyes of other audiences.  But, if you’re in a rural community, sometimes you’re in a newsroom and it’s just you. You are the news. So, that adaptation puts an additional strain on a journalist. Understanding what that strain is and how journalists can manage adaptation is essential to survival.

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“What Makes a Good Leader? Competence in the Field, Say Employees" 

NonProfit Quarterly
The study, written by Gregory P. Perreault of the University of South Florida and Samuel M. Tham of Colorado State University, builds on other scholarship not specific to the field of journalism, pointing to the same conclusion: employees view good leadership as being deeply tied to their bosses’ ability to actually understand—and do—the work those employees carry out every day.

 

“I think in journalism, and this perhaps is true of other fields as well, we seek someone that can teach us, if they’re going to be our employer. I mean, if we’re going to work for somebody, why not work for someone that can teach us something?” says Perreault.

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“People don’t quit bad jobs, they quit bad bosses”: How journalists evaluate newsroom leadership 

NiemanLab

A recent study from Dr. Samuel Tham of Colorado State University and me found that many journalists generally have a positive perspective of their leaders. The study, which was published in Journalism, draws on interviews with journalists from across the United States in which we asked participants to share the exemplary qualities of a leader, and then to describe their own direct supervisor.

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RQ 1: Research Roundup- “‘It’s not hate but…’: Marginal categories in rural journalism”

NiemanLab

Being more closely connected to their audiences, rural journalists were more reluctant to label such people and activities in their communities as hate — at least in part because of the fear of repercussion that would arise from such declarations in coverage. Indeed, as the authors note, “Journalists in some cases felt pressure from their audience to apply false balance in their work through labeling groups like Black Lives Matter as a hate group.”

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App State professor publishes research on rural journalists reporting on hate

Watauga Democrat

 

“A lot of the work I do is motivated by a concern for hate in society, which is a growing problem. Journalists end up being on the front lines of it, simply by nature of being at events,” Perreault said.

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Journalists in these rural communities feel a sense of responsibility to report on issues of hate but fear alienating their audiences in doing so, according to the study. Regardless of fear, Perreault said that many respondents in the study were defensive over the communities they serve and their ability to educate and inform them. He said one respondent who was a minority found herself reporting in a rural area and was concerned about how she would be perceived. However, once she began talking to people and explaining her point of view, a connection and trust was built.

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RQ 1: Research Roundup-Journalists on COVID-19 Journalism 

NiemanLab
Taking this ecological approach, the authors emphasize the multi-faceted nature of journalists' path through the pandemic -- from the personal vulnerability and fear they experienced to shifts in how they managed sources to the heightened struggles to combat misinformation. For example, the study found that journalists "saw the pandemic as laying bare the endangered nature of journalism, which was a result of pressure from access to sources as well as market forces. This jeopardized journalists' ability to fulfill their responsibility to society."

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RQ 1: Research Roundup-Covering Hate 

NiemanLab
For this study, Perreault and colleagues interviewed 18 journalists who have covered white nationalist rallies, and conclude with some best practices for reporters tasked with covering these issues. Overall, they found that journalists worried about walking into an “objectivity trap” and giving too much legitimacy to white nationalists simply by virtue of covering their rallies, particularly given that such hate groups take advantage of journalists’ professional predilections toward fairness and neutrality to convey and mainstream their message.

“To avoid that outcome,” the authors argue, “journalists should seek to resist the tendency to cover [white nationalist] rallies episodically (with conflict as the driving force of the story) and instead look to cover rallies more thematically by placing them in broader social and political contexts.”

 

"There is a lot to be said for the old-fashioned press conference" 

Falter (Austria)

In the Fulbright research study, "we interviewed Austrian and American journalists. Most use the photo platform to reach their audience. In some niches - for example in travel or lifestyle journalism - this is of course more common than elsewhere. We are also currently looking at whether influencers are seen as competition. Our results show that influencers are actually perceived as advertisers, and that media and advertising can traditionally live well together. Journalists have always needed advertisers so that their stories reach an audience."

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"The academic quarter hour, rhythm games, mutants and web dragons"

Games Podcast/ ORF (Austria)"

"As a subfield of journalism, [gaming journalism] is an incredibly valuable arena of expression, of experience that for years was sort of just the thing happening in the basement with your teenage son. But gaming is truly a ubiquitous gaming activity. If you look at the numbers, a third of all human beings play video games, to one extent or another, so the fact that there would be a dearth of coverage--and I would define it as that for many years--is actually really frustrating, in the sense that there's so much happening there. As a matter of fact, as my studies have shown, even journalists who are not gaming specialists can look at the activities happening within gaming, and certainly GamerGate was one of those moments, and say "there's a lot happening here. This isn't just a storytelling platform, it's also a platform for social activity"...there's a whole host of stories to be told through and around gaming. So I find it incredibly fascinating as a form of journalism to see how people are leveraging this interactive to tell new stories."​