Benjamin Toff

Broadly, I study the public's relationship to news and journalism. A lot of that work has focused on subjects like news avoidance and trust in news. More recently, I've also been studying the supply of local news and information in Minnesota and how that ecosystem has been changing as well as working with news organizations around evaluating the effectiveness of different strategies some are deploying to better engage with the public and rebuild trust. I'm also working on projects around the growing use of artificial intelligence in newsrooms and the public's expectations around disclosure, transparency, and labeling. Finally, I'm leading an Interdisciplinary Collaborative Workshop around the 80th anniversary of the Minnesota Poll, which the Star Tribune now fields in partnership with MPR News and KARE-11. We are using the occasion as a jumping off point for thinking about the past, present, and future of state-level public opinion research.

 

 

This is hard. I mostly leave it to others to try and define the field—to the extent it can even be defined as a field. But basically I see it as a set of approaches around harnessing and wrangling different kinds of structured and unstructured data about the world, which allow researchers to produce new knowledge and gain deeper insights. 

 

In a study I led recently looking at how audiences responded to news generated with the help of AI, we found that when people read stories labeled as having been produced with the help of AI, they evaluate the news organizations responsible for producing that content as less trustworthy even as they don't necessarily perceive the articles themselves as any less accurate or fair or biased. We think it points to some important tensions that news organizations will need to navigate as they adopt these tools for various purposes and seek to be transparent about how they are doing so.

 

In our project mapping the local news ecosystem in Minnesota, we are building a database of news sources, geocoding them, and building interactive maps using ArcGIS through U-Spatial.