The Journalist’s Resource bridges the gap between academia and journalism, informing the news by empowering journalists to use academic research throughout every step of the reporting and editing process.
Now in our second decade, we have become a crucial source of information and material for thousands of journalists all over the world. Here are a few of the ways our small editorial team bolstered journalism in 2024.
1. We published resources to help journalists cover the 2024 US election.
Throughout the year, journalists all over the United States were hard at work covering the 2024 general election, helping voters make informed choices from local school boards to the national presidency.
The Journalist’s Resource team was hard at work, too, creating resources to help you cover the news in the lead-up to Election Day and beyond.
Our 2024 election collection comprised 25 tip sheets, research roundups, explainers and webinar recordings that informed news coverage of opinion polls, voting issues, election administration, ballot measures, election results and more.
Highlights included:
- How — and why — to create a guide to local and state judicial elections: Public elections for judges are often marked by low turnout and low information about the candidates. This piece looked at out how and why three newsrooms created guides to help voters understand judicial races — and included eight tips to help other newsrooms create their own judicial election guides.
- A research roundup about school board elections in the US: To help journalists contextualize coverage of school board elections, we spotlighted research on who votes in these elections, the role of teachers’ unions, and how new school board members can influence school segregation, funding and test scores.
2. We teamed up on webinars to help journalists cover a broad range of public policy topics.
Our webinars, produced in collaboration with some stellar organizations, drew hundreds of attendees from all over the world. (To all of you who tuned in, thank you for your truly excellent Zoom chat insights and questions.)
These live events, recorded and published on our website for later viewing, included:
- A webinar about covering felony disenfranchisement, held the week before Election Day, which we co-hosted with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit newsroom that covers the U.S. criminal justice system. The panelists discussed topline findings from the third round of the newsroom’s political survey of more than 54,000 incarcerated people, across the nation.
3. We helped journalists cover stories about public health.
In a time when many public health issues are highly politicized and polarized, it has never been more important to help journalists understand and cover public health and medical research.
The health-focused pieces we published in 2024 included:
4. We helped journalists avoid mistakes when covering stories about research.
Our “Know Your Research” section includes tip sheets and explainers to help journalists understand academic research methods; find and recognize high-quality research; investigate scientific misconduct and research errors; and avoid missteps when reporting on new studies and public opinion polls.
The pieces we published in 2024 included:
Thank you to all the journalists who kept audiences informed throughout this exciting, exhausting year. The Journalist’s Resource team looks forward to supporting and collaborating with you in 2025.
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