The News Lab at the Shorenstein Center serves as a green room for the news industry, bringing together news practioners and researchers to netowork, collaborate, and brainstorm. The Lab also produces original research into three specific topics: the technology beat, information integrity, and news media business models.
Led by Shorenstein Center Executive Director Nancy Gibbs, formerly editor-in-chief of Time Magazine, and News Lab Director Emily Dreyfuss, a veteran tech journalist best known for her work at WIRED magazine, the News Lab aims for exploration, action, and results.
Research Areas
Technology Beat
As the technology beat has grown to touch every aspect of life, it’s important to understand the beat critically. What training do tech reporters get? How does the mainstream press cover technology? What are the main tropes, biases, blind-spots, angles, and perspectives present in reporting about technology?
Business Models
Different business models for news organizations create different incentives for coverage and audience. We ask: what kinds of business models exist, which are most prevalent, which are most sustainable, and what are the impacts on audiences and communities of various business models?
Information Quality
What kind of information counts as news? What kind of information do audiences need and want from news purveyors? How can news create knowledge and uplift the communities it serves? We tackles these questions from qualitative and quantitative perspectives.
Enter Your Student Newspaper Website
Click on the icon to help the News Lab compile a list of high school student newspapers across the country in order to build a search engine that will search high school journalism by topic. Why? So journalists, policymakers, and researchers have a direct way to understand what teenagers care about. Right now, reporting on teenagers often relies on social media trends and personal anecdote to make its points. We believe the direct words of student journalists can be an important alternate source of adolescent perspective.
