Two decades after developing the reconstruction interview method for studying news and sourcing practices, Zvi Reich found himself searching desperately for effective methods to study one of the most challenging and evasive phenomena of our field: journalists’ knowledge and expertise. After a arduous process of trial and error, he currently leads a research project of four innovative research methods at the Ben Gurion university of the Negev.
- News sorting, a method in which journalists are asked to sort a pack of cards that represent a sample of their recent publications, according to their subject-matter and journalistic complexity and reflect on their sorting, thereby exposing the structure of their existing journalistic expertise;
- Delphi panels, in which experts and journalists correspond anonymously mapping the expected skills and expertise of journalists who cover particular beats;
- Natural language processing that is used to map the emergence of linguistic indicators of expertise, analyzing tens of thousands of items published by the studied journalists throughout their careers;
- And micro-diaries, that help trace the socialization process of journalists and the foundations of their expertise during their first years on the job.
Professor Reich will share his joys and agonies in developing innovative methodologies and discuss the assumptions behind them.
