political journalism | Nieman Journalism Lab

Articles tagged political journalism (61)

W. Joseph CampbellOctober 21, 2024

Don’t trust the polls? Neither did The New York Times in 1956 (spoiler: it didn’t work out great)

“There was some feeling that the Times should stick to reporting trends and let the pollsters make the forecasts.”

Hanaa' TameezMay 3, 2023

A new fellowship, backed by Robert Allbritton, aims to shake up the Capitol Hill reporting pipeline

“All the editors I know wish they had more time to mentor their reporters, but they’re under so much pressure to produce that they just can’t do it.”

Shraddha ChakradharFebruary 10, 2022

A new study shows how newsroom and audience diversity affects coverage of political candidates

The study suggests audience diversity results in favorable coverage for non-white political candidates. But newsroom diversity may be a boon for white candidates.

The Democracy SOS fellowship is designed to help newsrooms improve their politics and election coverage

Rahul Bhargava, Meg Heckman and Emily Boardman NdulueJanuary 5, 2022

It’s O.K. to write about women, fashion, and politics — but here’s how to do it better

“Optics is part of politics, which makes wardrobe choices fair game in many news stories, and not just in those featuring women.”

Joshua BentonOctober 23, 2020

As they shrink, are local newspapers protecting their “iron core” of local government coverage? This paper says no

Newspapers have all had to make cuts. But it doesn’t look like they’ve favored the beats that are most important to democracy — watchdog coverage of local governments — over other kinds of news.

Joshua BentonOctober 7, 2020

Should news outlets stop making election forecasts based on polling data?

There’s good evidence that some people find predictive models like FiveThirtyEight’s confusing, and an argument that they might keep people from voting. But 2016’s scars shouldn’t mean that voters have to be kept in the dark.

Joshua BentonSeptember 21, 2020

“Politics as a chronic stressor”: News about politics bums you out and can make you feel ill — but it also makes you take action

“Daily political events consistently evoked negative emotions [which] predicted worse day-to-day psychological and physical health, but also greater motivation to take action aimed at changing the political system that evoked the negative emotions in the first place.”

Joshua BentonAugust 21, 2020

What can “folk theories of journalism” tell us about why some people don’t trust us?

“Many of our interviewees had little direct experience with news, yet they ‘knew’ they could not trust it, or found it boring, or that it was part of a shady system intended to hide important matters from them.”

Christine SchmidtJuly 25, 2019

How to cover 11,250 elections at once: Here’s how The Washington Post’s new computational journalism lab will tackle 2020

“We’re not super-interested in telling a story about one Iowa county using this infrastructure. But we’re making sure our reporters know which county in Iowa to go if they’re looking for one that has particular characteristics.”

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