​A new research model developed by Dr. Zvi Reich at BGU’s Department of Communication Studies was the basis of a lecture he gave last week at Sokolov House in Tel-Aviv titled, ”Can Journalists become Experts in their Field?". The lecture addressed fascinating questions on the abilities of journalists to become experts in the news betas they cover.

Dr. Reich, who is a former Yedioth Aharonoth senior journalist and currently a journalism researcher, proposes that we should see journalists as experts as “bipolar interactional experts” as they interact with their sources on the one hand and with their audiences on the other. These two interactions not only mould each other, but also give legitimacy to the process of collecting information.  

Dr. Reich’s lecture argued that in order to achieve the rank of full interactional experts, journalists are required to meet three criteria: 

1.       They cover the same field for years in order to gain experience, considered the most important resource of expertise today. 

2.       They cover well-defined fields, such as crime or parliament, not large “umbrella” areas like science or health, which can be divided into a series of sub-fields, each of which in itself requires years of experience to develop interactional expertise. 

3.       They regularly breach the norms of their news beat. These norms limit the standards of expertise of reporters in the fields. As such, they prevent the members of the field from becoming submerged in more in-depth information and cause the journalists to live from hand to mouth, when they collect the minimum information needed for their next news item. Therefore, the few journalists who are able to develop into interactional experts in fact breach this norm and collect more than the minimum required information. 

The contribution of the model is recognition of journalism as a form of expertise, although it is not considered a profession; it connects between the way journalists gather information and the type of the knowledge gained; and also it opens new comparative research options between journalists and other interactional experts who rely on human informants as a source of their output, such as occurs for example in anthropology, intelligence and law.  

The research shows that “bi-polar interactionism” in the media is not a theoretical or analytical category, but a structured principle which can be found in series of journalistic practices and roles, designed to cope with different mixes of source interactionism and audience interactionism. For example, investigative journalists, and journalists with fixed news beats represent relatively high source interactionism, while editors, general and general assignment reporters represent a relatively high audience interactionism.