C.W. Anderson: The most important thing is you have a big question that is going to take a few decades to answer

Abstract

If you are a journalism researcher in Brazil you will certainly remember this name. Professor C.W. Anderson is very well known in the country for the Post Industrial Journalism Report, written with Emily Bell and Clay Shirky in 2012 at Columbia University. But besides that remarkable work, Anderson has done a lot of other research, including the most recent one: the book “Apostles of Certainty: Data Journalism and the Politics of Doubt”, in which he analyses how the idea of what data journalism is has changed over time. “I discovered that certain aspects of data journalism are more like they were a hundred years ago that might they were 50 years ago”. In this interview, we talked about a lot of subjects as the culture of the click in the newsrooms, ethnography (Anderson describes himself as an ethnographer that studies the news), the crisis in journalism, politics and Academia. To the early career researchers, Anderson gives an advice: “If you have a big question then it becomes less important whether you publish a lot or a little because it's all geared towards answering it. And I think what happens is that a lot of the time scholars don't always have a big question. They're not trained to that. They're trained to have smaller questions”. C.W. Anderson is an American citizen now living in the UK as he is a professor at the University of Leeds. Our kind conversation took place this February in his office, during a very cold afternoon of the European winter.