Four Research Methods for Studying Journalists’ Knowledge and Expertise

This chapter introduces four research methods that were developed to explore one of the most empirically challenging and evasive phenomena: journalists’ knowledge and expertise regarding their domains of coverage. Those methods were developed, adapted, and implemented in a research project conducted at the Ben Gurion university of the Negev, Israel and include: 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 was 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.