Journalists’ views on the research-practice gap

Journalism practitioners rarely apply research to their practice, and often decline to supply their time to support research. These issues indicate a research-practice gap in journalism. Yet efforts to characterize the gap are in their infancy. This study uses 16 semi-structured interviews with US journalism practitioners to understand, first, how practitioners characterize the applicability of research to their work; and second, how they describe the nature of and reasons for the research-practice gap in journalism. We applied the framework of institutional logics to understand the conflicts that might contribute to the gap at the intra-organizational and inter-organizational levels. The study found that journalists value the evidence research gives them, but do not see research as essential to their work. Participants identified three types of research-practice gaps corresponding to three stages in the research process: 1) researchers asking the wrong questions, 2) researchers communicating their findings poorly, and 3) institutional barriers keeping research from being applied in the newsroom. Participants’ statements point to the instantiation of professional, market, efficiency, and academic logics, which may affect how journalists experience the scholar-practitioner gap. Conflicting logics at the intra-organizational level limit journalists’ implementation of research findings while competing logics between organizations relate to the gaps of researchers asking the wrong questions and communicating findings poorly. While future studies should complement this work with other perspectives on the research-practice gap, this exploratory study lays the groundwork by characterizing the gap through journalists’ experiences and expertise.