Test With Feedback and Share Your Findings
After you have conducted your analysis, consider how you want to share the results to reach the audiences aligned with your research purpose. To ensure a robust analysis and comprehensive final product, consider a few additional steps before finalizing your material and data for publication. Below are some simple steps to consider:
1. Seek feedback on your data and your analysis from subject matter experts in academia and practitioner circles.
Conducting a study of journalism employment is a novel endeavor and one that requires adaptation to a rapidly changing environment. As such, we recommend sharing your data, methodological choices, and analysis with external subject matter experts from academic and practitioner circles for their feedback. Doing so ensures a type of informal peer review and a rigor to the data analysis that otherwise might be missing from the analysis. It is especially important to be clear and transparent around methodological choices because these affect the data you are able to collect and the story you are trying to tell. Being transparent helps to ensure clarity, accuracy, and replicability of your research.
2. Consider publishing your staffing dataset publicly
We encourage you to publish your dataset publicly. Doing so lends greater credibility and transparency to your work. It also helps a variety of stakeholders in the field who are interested in journalism employment and who care about journalism’s role in a democracy. By sharing the data that underpins your analysis, you are assisting other individuals–community leaders, journalists, and academics–who might be interested in conducting subsequent analyses. Please be sure to indicate how your dataset and your work should be cited. Additionally, ensure that your publicly available dataset is in a format that is not changeable by anyone external to the research team who drafted the work to protect the integrity of the data. Some researchers like data visualization tools like Tableau for building interactive visualization dashboards. Others have used Google Docs and set the settings in such a way as to limit who can change the data. Many options exist, so choose the route that aligns with your research goals, purpose, and budget.
3. Welcome public input
If you provide your database publicly, we’d recommend that you offer an option where organizations can contact you with updated figures as it pertains to staffing details. Your research team can then vet these suggested data points before possible inclusion. If you do decide to integrate the updated data, you will need to note in your report and on your website that the data are a work in progress and will change over time. Alternatively, you can choose to save the data for a future report, noting when the data was received by the research team.
4. Produce a report that highlights key findings
When writing your report, remember the audiences you are writing for. Are you trying to reach community leaders, funders, policymakers, journalists, or academics? The audience(s) you are writing for will determine how you intend to communicate the information, including your writing style, what types of analyses and visualizations you include, and the overall design and presentation of the report. For example, funders and policymakers might be interested in knowing which counties or regions have the fewest journalists because it may inform their philanthropic strategies or policymaking efforts.
5. Partner with an academic institution to broaden your reach
Although it may sound counter-intuitive, consider sharing your data and findings with academics who conduct journalism studies research as they may be able to partner with you to conduct additional research or repurpose your existing data into research that aligns with academic conventions and can be published in peer review journal articles. Doing so will not only expand the reach of your research and findings, but will also serve as a connection point between the practitioner and academic fields and help strengthen this body of research in both places.
6. Host a webinar or public event to present findings
In keeping with your research purpose, consider providing a public facing webinar to communicate your research findings to a wide audience. Additionally, you could consider, depending on time and budget, to host a public event where you could share the findings or you could present findings at an industry-affiliated conference. By presenting your work both virtually and in-person to these audiences, you will be able to extend the reach and impact of your research, which in turn will help the broader field of journalism studies and journalism practitioners.
