Journalism is always teaching. A story teaches us what deserves attention. A source list tells us whose knowledge carries weight. A headline offers a theory of cause and consequence in a handful of words. Repetition can turn one interpretation into common sense while another disappears from view.
Journalists are learning at the same time. They learn what counts as evidence, what a good source looks like, how much uncertainty can remain in a story, when an error requires correction, and which professional habits are so familiar that nobody thinks to explain them anymore.
My research studies journalism as a site of teaching and learning: what journalism teaches people about the world, what journalists need to learn about their own practices and publics, and how those processes are changing as the boundaries of journalism change. That places my work at the intersection of journalism practice, education, news and media literacy, and ethics. It also means I study education well beyond the classroom. Learning happens in newsrooms, ethics codes, editorial routines, corrections, audience conversations, platform cultures, creator practices, professional histories, and the stories journalists tell about journalism itself.
Some lessons are intentional. Others survive because nobody has asked recently whether they still make sense. That is often where my research begins.
Journalists need news literacy, too
News literacy research has often focused on what audiences need to know about news. My work asks what journalists need to know about journalism.
Journalists make decisions every day about credibility, evidence, relevance, harm, expertise, and public knowledge. Professional experience can make those judgments feel instinctive. Verification becomes something a journalist simply knows how to do. Objectivity becomes common sense. Authority can begin to feel like something conferred by the press badge itself.
I developed News Literate Journalism to examine that problem. The framework treats news literacy as a professional responsibility. Journalists need to understand the institution they practice within: its histories, routines, economic conditions, assumptions about knowledge, ethical obligations, relationships with publics, and recurring blind spots.
My research on journalists’ own definitions of news literacy has shown that these definitions do more than describe what audiences should know. They reveal how journalists understand their own expertise, how they describe credible knowledge, and where they draw the boundaries of the profession.
That makes news literacy central to journalistic practice. A journalist who understands how journalism produces knowledge is better prepared to explain why a source was chosen, recognize when a routine is narrowing the story, identify what remains uncertain, or reconsider a professional assumption that no longer fits the evidence.
Learning how journalism thinks
Metacognition gives this work a practical center. Journalists make consequential decisions under deadline, uncertainty, incomplete information, emotional pressure, and organizational constraint. Stories change while they are being reported. Sources contradict one another. Evidence appears late. A question that seemed obvious at 9 a.m. may look foolish by noon.
I study how journalists reflect on their reasoning, regulate their judgment, and adapt as those conditions change. Those habits appear in ordinary newsroom moments: reconsidering a source list, recognizing an assumption during an interview, revising an explanation after new evidence appears, changing a reporting strategy, correcting an error, or realizing that a familiar routine is creating a problem nobody intended.
I examine these processes through interviews, newsroom reconstruction, professional discourse, corrections, transparency practices, and other forms of journalistic work. The question underneath them is straightforward: what do journalists think they know about journalism, how did they learn it, and what changes when reflection becomes part of the craft?
Journalism is changing where it happens
The boundaries around journalism are becoming harder to police.
Creators perform reporting work. Podcasters borrow journalistic conventions while attacking journalism as an institution. Automated systems take on parts of verification and fact-checking. Political information moves through personalities, platforms, newsletters, videos, and communities that do not resemble the newsroom structures around which many professional norms were formed.
I study what happens to journalistic practice as it moves through those spaces.
My work has examined right-wing podcasts and metajournalistic discourse, automated fact-checking, political news, and emerging forms of creator journalism. These cases make familiar practices easier to see because they remove them from familiar surroundings. Verification, sourcing, attribution, explanation, interpretation, correction, and audience relationships look different when they are performed by people who may never call themselves journalists. That creates a new problem for news literacy. Teaching people to locate trustworthy journalism by recognizing established institutions becomes less useful when journalistic behaviors circulate well beyond those institutions.
So I am increasingly interested in how people recognize journalism through practice: what producers do with evidence, how they explain what they know, how they treat uncertainty, and what kind of relationship they establish with the people who rely on them.
Journalism also teaches people who they are
My LGBTQ+ journalism and media research approaches teaching and learning from another direction.
News does more than tell people what happened. It contributes to the categories through which people become publicly understandable. A community repeatedly described through conflict learns something about whose existence is treated as political. An LGBTQ+ journalist who repeatedly calculates whether disclosure is professionally safe learns something about whose identity is assumed to be ordinary. An obituary that softens a public figure’s history teaches readers which harms deserve to remain part of public memory.
I study those lessons.
My work has examined LGBTQ+ journalists’ experiences inside news organizations, queer audiences’ relationships with news, the representation of queer people and histories, and the ways journalism remembers lives after death. These projects keep returning me to the relationship among recognition, ethics, and power. Journalism decides whose knowledge appears credible, whose identity becomes a story, whose pain can be understood, and whose experiences require explanation before they can be taken seriously.
Equity changes the questions we ask
My work in equitable media literacy and journalism education grows from the same concern.
Who gets imagined when we design a media literacy intervention? Whose experience with journalism is treated as typical? What happens when we teach professional norms without examining where those norms came from or whom they have served?
Equity changes the questions. It asks us to examine how familiar routines acquired authority, where they have produced unequal outcomes, and what journalists and educators might need to learn differently.
My framework of Restorative Queer Ethics developed from this concern. It asks what journalism owes communities after earlier coverage has contributed to erasure, distortion, or harm. Repair begins with memory. Journalists have to understand what happened, how professional reasoning helped make it possible, and what practices could reduce the chance of repeating it. That requires learning, sometimes from histories the profession would prefer to leave behind.
Trust and avoidance are lessons, too
Trust runs through this research because audiences are also learning from journalism. They notice whether journalists explain their decisions. They watch what happens after an error. They see which communities receive curiosity and which receive suspicion. They remember whether journalists spoke with them or merely wrote about them.
Those experiences accumulate: trust grows from them, so can distrust.
News avoidance offers another way to see that relationship. People leave news for many reasons, including fatigue and overload. My work is especially interested in what happens when disengagement grows from repeated experience with journalism itself.
For LGBTQ+ audiences and other communities navigating hostile information environments, stepping away can coexist with deep concern about public affairs. People may ration their exposure, rely on trusted intermediaries, seek primary sources, or withdraw for a time because constant attention carries its own costs.
That complicates the assumption that avoidance signals indifference. Sometimes people are responding to what journalism has already taught them about the experience of being its audience. The harder question for me is what journalism can learn from that response.
What connects the work
I keep returning to institutional learning. How does journalism decide what counts as knowledge? How do journalists learn those judgments? How does professional authority become credible? Which routines deserve to continue, and which survive largely through habit? What happens when people who were poorly served by journalism begin setting their own terms for attention, trust, and participation?
These questions connect my work on news literacy, metacognition, professional practice, queer journalism, media equity, trust, avoidance, and changing forms of news production.
I study journalism’s failures closely because people live with their consequences. I also want the research to give practitioners somewhere to go after the critique. That is where care, critique, and possibility meet in my work.
How I work
I am a mixed-methods researcher and transformative pragmatist. My methods follow the problem I am trying to understand. I use interviews, newsroom reconstruction, discourse analysis, textual analysis, archival research, surveys, and curriculum and policy analysis.
I also want the scholarship to resonate and make an impact in the public. Sometimes that takes the form of an academic article or book chapter. Sometimes it becomes a curriculum, newsroom resource, white paper, workshop, professional-development session, or collaboration with journalists and educators.
Practice gives the research another way to think about life. Does the idea help someone see a newsroom routine differently? Does it give an educator a better way to teach? Can it help a journalist explain what they know and what they still do not? Can it help an organization recognize harm before that harm becomes another part of its history?
I study journalism as a site of teaching and learning because journalism’s future depends, in part, on what it is willing to learn about itself. That includes its authority, its habits, its publics, its histories, and the people who have spent a long time learning what journalism feels like from the other side of the story.
