The Role of the Journalist

The journalist is a filter as well as a transmitter, an organizer and interpreter as well as one who gathers and delivers facts. They create stories that answer the questions of ‘who, what, where, when, why, and how' preferably in an inverted pyramid.

A Story Teller and Scientist

Journalists can use artistic license to be storytellers using the literary tools of fiction, including exquisite detail, interior monologue (what a newsworthy person is thinking as well as his or her overt behavior), and short-story structure, with a character, a problem, and a resolution in a short span of words. Journalism can also use the science method incorporating data-gathering and analysis tools and a disciplined search for verifiable truth.

Scientific Thinkers

In 1989, physicist Lawrence Cranberg argued that "journalism itself is a science, and . . . a properly qualified, responsible journalist is a practicing scientist." Both scientists and journalists, he said, "march to the same orders and serve the common need of mankind for shared knowledge and understanding.

Journalism as science means adopting scientific method, scientific objectivity, and scientific ideals to the entire process of mass communication. The process: collect, store, retrieve, analyze, reduce, and communicate. The journalistic ideal is to be open-minded, to enter an investigation with a clean slate, free of any prejudgment.

Journalists are scientific thinkers employing: skepticism, replicability – search for truth, operationalization -  test a model finding the observable and testable piece, sense of the tentativeness of truth balancing  absolutism and relativism with a bias towards relativism, parsimony -  given a choice between rival theories pick the simpler one. Reporters, like scientists, are in the business of reality testing, examining the existing theories, thinking through their consequences, developing related hypotheses that can be operationalized (i.e., tested), and putting them to the test.

Build A Story with a Perceptual Framework

A perceptual framework is built in creating a story or schema - constructs, hypotheses, expectations, organizing principles, frames, scripts, plans, prototypes, or stereotypes. Schema are the way we see things is a combination of what is there and what we expected to find. They become the theoretical model. Describing the essential parts of a process, natural or man-made, in a way that allows conclusions to be tested by experiment or by observation or both. We use them simply because we need them to think at all. The data of everyday life, left unfitted to any model, take too much effort to process and interpret in the raw. Our senses take in too much of it.

Extracted from: http://www.unc.edu/~pmeyer/book/Chapter1.htm