MISSION

NewsLab's primary goal is to help local TV newsrooms find new ways of telling stories, especially substantive and complex stories, to better inform the television news audience. Because these new approaches are "good television," they can encourage stations to tackle stories that many of them now leave to the newspapers. We believe our efforts can help to improve the quality of television news and its value to viewers.

NewsLab offers a wealth of online resources, including tip sheets and checklists for story planning and coverage, plus hundreds of useful links, sorted by topic.

Part of NewsLab's mission is to apply the lessons of the best available research about how people process information from television in our storytelling examples, so viewers can understand and remember more of what they watch. NewsLab serves as a bridge between academic researchers and journalism professionals, so the lessons learned in the academy can be shared more widely than they currently are, and so the needs of professionals can be addressed in academic research projects.

An additional goal for NewsLab is to provide resources for journalism educators, including classroom and curriculum materials. NewsLab tipsheets and articles can be printed from this Web site for use as handouts.

We freely share the strategies and research we develop through our programs and projects, and we often work in partnership with other journalism groups to spread what we learn.

In our view, journalists in this age of information overload cannot simply be content with getting information into people’s living rooms. We also have to be concerned with getting it into their heads. As the historian James David Barber put it: "If journalism has a responsibility for telling the truth, journalists also have a responsibility for telling it in a way that people can understand it." NewsLab has helped local stations do just that, by testing and explaining how viewers react to specific storytelling approaches. Contact us to learn more.