From white paper to newspaper: Making academia more accessible to journalists

NiemanJournalismLab reporting:
As an idea, “knowledge-based reporting” sounds pretty hard to disagree with. No-brainer, right? But Harvard Prof. Tom Patterson has argued that knowledge is woefully absent from most journalism today:

Journalists are not trained to think first about how systematic knowledge might inform a news story. They look first to the scene of action and then to the statements of involved or interested parties. Typically, the question of whether a particular episode might have a fuller explanation is never asked. Stanford’s Shanto Iyengar has concluded in his studies that news is overwhelmingly “episodic.” Events are usually reported in isolation.

Of course, scholars aren’t producing daily stories on tight deadlines. Real knowledge-based reporting is hard. On some stories, the people most qualified to write them are probably your sources. So we journalists rely on interviews, past articles, and seemingly trustworthy material on the web and elsewhere.
About 18 months ago, Patterson and others at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center set out to make knowledge more accessible. They created a website called Journalist’s Resource, a curated, searchable index of high-quality research papers on topics of interest to reporters. The site’s editors write up studies in a journalistic way, plucking out facts and narratives that can be woven into stories. Unlike most academic products, Journalist’s Resource is openly accessible, well-designed, and licensed under Creative Commons. And now, as the pace of 2012 election coverage quickens, Journalist’s Resource is preparing to debut a special political section.
Alex Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center, said Journalist’s Resource is an endorsement of a different kind of journalism.
“We don’t claim to have a corner on truth, but what we are trying to do is make the case that the best, most reliable insights…on any given subject is probably some kind of serious scholarly work,” Jones said. “Not just anecdotal, you know, ‘When I was here 20 years ago, my God…’ That’s the journalist’s way of doing things, usually, is just calling a couple of people up and getting a few quotes.”
http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/11/from-white-paper-to-newspaper-making-academia-more-accessible-to-journalists/?utm_source=Daily+Lab+email+list&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=95809bd2ab-DAILY_EMAIL