By KENT WARNEKE

The headline of the column in the Los Angeles Times simply said this: “Journalism matters, science concludes.”

Now that’s welcome news to the eyes and ears of every journalist.

Written by Deb Netburn, her column reflected on a new study published recently in the journal Science that concludes that journalism drives the national conversation, and science now has proven it. The study indicates that even small news outlets can have a substantial impact on the issues Americans talk about and when they talk about them.
 
I so liked what her column had to say that I’m going to reprint excerpts from it here:

“Journalists have a job that affects American democracy. That’s the conclusion of study leader Gary King, director of Harvard University’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. King and his co-authors found that if three small- to medium-sized news outlets publish stories on the same topic simultaneously, they can cause the volume of social media posts on that issue to increase by an average of nearly 20 percent in a single day.

“ ‘This is a big impact, especially given the size of the outlets we worked with,’ said Ariel White, a political scientist at MIT who worked on the study.
 
“The news industry has lots of ways to monitor how many people are reading an individual article online, what devices they are reading it on, and how they came to find those stories in the first place.

“What’s traditionally been harder to measure is whether the articles inspire readers to talk about a topic with friends and family, or take a public stand on a particular issue. Measuring how a single set of stories can influence what gets discussed online is no easy feat. Researchers can’t control the news. And if they can’t do that, how can they run an experiment?

“The participants in the study worked together to come up with a list of 11 broad topics — such as immigration, climate change, race relations and education policy — that the news organizations were either covering or were interested in covering.
 
“Next, a set of two to five outlets volunteered to publish stories on the same topic at the same time.

“Then the researchers identified a pair of consecutive weeks during which they expected the news to be generally slow. One week was randomly selected to serve as the ‘treated week,’ when the stories would be published, and the other week would serve as a control.

“That allowed the authors to measure the effect that a cluster of stories had on the Twitter conversation. All they had to do was compare the number of times the agreed-upon topic was mentioned in the week after the stories were published to the number of mentions during the control week.
 
“The investigators ran the experiment 35 times between October 2013 and March 2016.

“The effect was significant: social media posts about a given topic jumped 19.4 percent, on average, the day after stories on that topic were published. That translated into an average of 13,166 additional posts about a topic after it was covered in the press.”

So what’s the bottom line? The study’s authors said, “The decisions made in the nation’s newsrooms have remarkably large effects on the character and composition for the national conversation.”