Precision Journalism

Precision journalism is a term that links the application of social science research methods (including [Page 600]survey research methods) to the practice of gathering information for the news purposes of journalists. Similar to a social scientist, a precision journalist discloses the data collection methodology well enough that another precision journalist or researcher could replicate the research studies and ostensibly would reach the same conclusions.

The term was coined by Everette E. Dennis in 1971 as part of seminar he taught at the University of Oregon. The concept then was explicated by one of his students, Neil Felgenhauer, in a term paper that later became a book chapter. Most of the “new journalism” of the time that inspired Dennis's seminar was the creation of talented writers (e.g. Tom Wolfe) who used fiction techniques to construct powerful narratives about current events. The class discussion compared this semi-fictional approach to journalism with precision journalism techniques. As Dennis and William Rivers noted in a 1974 report, although other journalists are pushing news reporting toward more of an art, precision journalists are pushing it toward more of a science. The origins of precision journalism go back to the first public opinion polls that used systematic sampling methods instead of just gathering readily available person-on-the-street interviews. George Gallup based a newspaper column on his national polls that used rigorous survey methods, which, for example, led to a much more accurate pre-election prediction of the 1936 Landon-Roosevelt election than that of the more well-known and much larger unscientific poll conducted by the Literary Digest magazine.

Other early users of precision journalism were the television networks wanting to be first to announce the presidential winner on Election Day, although not all their early usage of these new reporting techniques proved reliable or accurate. For example, in 1960, CBS used a statistical model based on the timing of and results from the pre-election polls they had been conducting. The model captured the candidate standings at given points in time and compared them to the presidential candidate standings at the same points in times in the previous election. The initial findings from the model proved to be incorrect, and the resulting bias produced an incorrect early call for Richard Nixon as the projected winner over John F. Kennedy.

In the 1960s, news coverage of the civil rights and anti-war movements fueled the need for new reporting techniques. Standard journalism traditionally was focused on gathering information from the most visible spokespersons for the respective movements—a top-down approach—and thus tended to place too much importance on what was said by these elite sources, who often had their own personal agendas. In contrast, Newsweek magazine commissioned pollster Louis Harris to do special civil rights surveys among black citizenry to uncover a broader and more accurate understanding of the attitudes held by the black community.

In 1967, when there were race riots in Detroit, the Knight Newspapers sent Philip Meyer from their Washington bureau to help The Detroit Free Press cover the ongoing story. Meyer stayed in Detroit to conduct a survey of residents in the affected neighborhoods in order to measure the grievances held by blacks and thus the root causes of the riot. (Meyer had learned these research techniques as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in the previous academic year.) The news stories that resulted from the surveying were one of several factors that earned the Free Press the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for general local reporting. Following this, Meyer was assigned to study Miami to further utilize precision journalism methods to aid news coverage of racial problems there before and after the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1969, the Russell Sage Foundation sponsored Meyer to take a leave of absence from Knight Newspapers and direct a project to prepare a precision journalism handbook for journalists, which resulted in the publication of the first edition of Meyer's book, Precision Journalism.

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