University of New Hampshire
The Nashua Telegraph
Naushua, NH
Lisa C. Miller, associate professor
Dave Solomon, editor
4/19/05 and 4/20/05 Rivier College Nashua, NH- 19 juniors and seniors enrolled in Issues in Journalism.
What were the key issues discussed at the roundtable?
Bias in news media.
Were some issues more important to readers, viewers, story subjects and sources? If so, what were they?
They were very concerned about what information they weren't getting in stories -- what journalists weren't telling them or asking about -- and what stories weren't getting covered. They want reporters to contact people on all sides of a story and give them equal play in stories. They wanted headlines to carefully match stories, not to indicate a bias.
Were there important points of agreement on coverage approaches or news philosophy that would improve the newspaper's content and its credibility? What were they?
That the newspaper explain clearly who/what its sources are along with information that might indicate whether sources are biased, such as who sponsors them.
Were there points on which roundtable participants agreed to disagree? Where were they?
I don't recall a lot of disagreement, though a couple of people did question our class study because they felt we used definitions that were too broad to decide what was a liberal or conserverative view on a subject.
Will the newspaper consider changes in its coverage of the roundtable issue, or in its news philosophy, as a result of the discussions? What changes? (Professors should consult with their key editor contact to answer this and other questions referring to the newspaper's actions.)
One problem students doing the bias audit saw was that AP stories sometimes were cut so that sources from only one side of an issue were presented in the paper, and sometimes only sources from one side were directly quoted, giving that side more weight. I believe the editors are going to look more closely at how they edit and trim these stories.
How has the newspaper informed its readers of the roundtable, what happened there and what may occur because of the discussion?
INFORMATION ABOUT THE CLASS AND THE STUDENTS:
What did your students learn from putting on a roundtable? A great deal. First, that it's hard to quantify bias or to get a group to agree on what it is. Second, that the news coverage they audited for eight weeks basically was neutral, and so readers mostly get their sense of a newspaper's liberal or conservative bias from the paper's editorial/op-ed pages. That people may not be open to reading comments they don't agree with and so then may see bias in a balanced story regardless. They also learned a great deal about issues in the news; they rarely get this kind of opportunity to do such close reading of news stories.
They learned that some readers have very strong opinions about the paper and that they, as future editors and reporters, must develop thick skins. But they also learned that readers appreciate a newspaper staff's sincere desire to pay attention to their concerns.
What worked well in having the students organize and facilitate the roundtable? From the professor's viewpoint? From the newspaper's viewpoint? Everything. The bias audit we did was very interesting and helped us see and discuss the issue of bias in new ways, and then presenting the results and seeing what readers thought helped us articulate why and how we did what we did and what we discovered, as well as getting some feedback on what we found.
What would you do differently if you had another class work on a roundtable? I might have them work on it six weeks only, so that we'd have more time to hold a few full-class discussions on what we were doing. We didn't do as much of that as we all would have liked because I was concerned about running out of time to complete the audit.
If we were going to audit the editorial pages again, we could use help from a Telegraph editor to identify liberal or conservative views of local issues.
I'd have students present the audit results at the beginning of the roundtable sessions, to give participants a framework for talking about them
INFORMATION ABOUT THE PARTNERSHIP WITH THE NEWSPAPER:
What was important for the university to offer to gain the newspaper's cooperation?
To make ourselves available for the project and the roundtable
What was important for the newspaper to provide to help the university and the professor? That the Telegraph provided newspapers, trained us in looking for bias, and that Dave Solomon was always available if we had questions.
Do you have any other advice for professors who would like to do a roundtable? If so, please include it here.
Do it! The students were thrilled to work on a project that had real-life applications.