Fellows' Research Papers

During their stay at the Institute each of the fellows is required to write a research paper, which is usually around 10,000 words long, and in style falls somewhere between long-format investigative reporting and a more academic and theoretical treatise.  

The papers as a minimum have to show that the fellows have consulted a wide variety of contacts and sources, have given their papers a clear structure and argument, and have thought carefully about the key research questions they are addressing.

Many of the fellows choose to carry out content analysis of newspapers or broadcast media, but this is not a requirement.  Most conduct interviews with practitioners, media analysts and academics.  An international comparative approach is encouraged.

Although there have been a huge variety of topics that fellows have chosen to research, some themes have become more recurrent in recent years:

• The future of business models for the print media 

• The changing relationship between new and traditional media, and particularly the role of citizen journalism

• The changing nature and practice of journalism

• The impact of new media in closed or semi-closed media environments

• The role new and established media played in the Arab Spring

• The challenges of reporting climate change

For example, recent fellows have written well-researched papers on the nature and impact of social media in such diverse countries as China, Egypt, Nigeria, Peru and Haiti.

Sunday Dare wrote a research project entitled The Rise of Citizen Journalism in Nigeria – A Case Study of Sahara Reporters, in which he examined in detail his country’s foremost citizen journalism enterprise, SaharaReporters.com.

Nicola Bruno, an Italian journalist, wrote a study entitled Tweet first, verify later? How real-time information is changing the coverage of worldwide crisis events on how mainstream media used social media in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake in January 2010.  

Nagwa Abdallah, an Egyptian journalist working at the al-Ahram newspaper, examined the role of the traditional and new media in the January 2011 popular uprising against Hosni Mubarak in her paper The Role of the Media in the Democratic Transition in Egypt: a case study of the January 2011 Revolution    

Yvette Sierra Praeli, a freelance Peruvian journalist, wrote an analysis of how even in democratically-elected governments new media can play a crucial role in supplying information to the public which governments would prefer to suppress. New Media and Freedom of the Press

Zhou Kangliang, a Chinese broadcast journalist, wrote a study on microblogging in China and its relationship with mainstream journalism entitled The Power of the Chinese Netizen? How Microblogging is Changing Chinese Journalism.