Journalists' networks: Homophily and peering over the shoulder of other journalists.

Social media plays an important role in how journalists gather and report news. To understand journalists' professional environment, we examine the networks of journalists on Twitter who cover politics for U.S. newspapers in conjunction with a sample of journalists who completed a survey. By combining both their network data and survey responses, we examine the distribution of journalists' ideology (n = 264) and journalistic values (n = 247); and using the network data, we examine the directional relationships between journalists working at large and small papers (n = 4,661). We find that journalists tend to form connections with those who share similar journalistic values. However, we find little evidence that journalists build professional relationships based on similarity in political ideology. Lastly, journalists at larger media outlets are more likely to be central in journalists' Twitter networks, providing evidence that journalists look to other journalists at larger outlets for direction in news coverage. Our evidence provides unique insights into how social media illuminates journalists' professional environment and how that environment may shape news coverage.

Public mass shootings cause large surges in Americans' engagement with gun policy.

As public mass shootings continue to plague the United States, a growing scholarly literature seeks to understand the political effects of these tragic events. This literature, however, focuses on public opinion or turnout and vote choice, leaving open to question whether or not public mass shootings affect a range of other important actions citizens may take to engage with gun policy. Leveraging the as-good-as random timing of high-publicity public mass shootings over the past decade and an immense array of publicly available and proprietary data, we demonstrate that these events consistently cause surges in public engagement with gun policy-including internet searches, streaming documentaries, discussion on social media, signing petitions, and donating to political action committees. Importantly, we document the behaviors where shootings induce polarizing upswings in engagement and those where upswings skew toward gun control. Finally, we demonstrate that low-publicity shootings largely exert little-to-no effect on our outcomes.

Virtual Mega-Meetings: Here to Stay?

Among the paradigms changed by the COVID-19 pandemic is the traditional academic and educational conference. In the vein of turning lemons into lemonade, many organizations and individuals have discovered ways that this public health necessitated change can be transformed into a boon to both participants and organizations. However, the question of whether this shift becomes permanent, or a component of the future of academic and educational meetings remains to be seen, and likely will depend on the solution to some of the challenges that have not been sweetened by the shift. This editorial draws on experience with a limited scope of virtual meetings in two different disciplines to make the case that the Virtual Mega-Conference is likely to continue to be a part of life in the years ahead.

There is no liberal media bias in which news stories political journalists choose to cover.

Is the media biased against conservatives? Although a dominant majority of journalists identify as liberals/Democrats and many Americans and public officials frequently decry supposedly high and increasing levels of media bias, little compelling evidence exists as to (i) the ideological or partisan leanings of the many journalists who fail to answer surveys and/or identify as independents and (ii) whether journalists' political leanings bleed into the choice of which stories to cover that Americans ultimately consume. Using a unique combination of a large-scale survey of political journalists, data from journalists' Twitter networks, election returns, a large-scale correspondence experiment, and a conjoint survey experiment, we show definitively that the media exhibits no bias against conservatives (or liberals for that matter) in what news that they choose to cover. This shows that journalists' individual ideological leanings have unexpectedly little effect on the vitally important, but, up to this point, unexplored, early stage of political news generation.