糖心视频

Is the news media broken? According to a survey released last October by Gallup, Americans continue to register record-low trust in the mass media鈥攚ith less than one-third expressing trust in the media to report the news "fully, accurately and fairly."

While our relationship with the news may be more complicated than ever, the importance of having a well-informed citizenry has never been more important.

Derek Dubois is a Ph.D. student in the College of Business at URI. His academic advisors are Mehmet Yalcin, an associate professor in the College of Business, and Hasan Ashraf, an assistant professor of supply chain management at California State University Long Beach. With a background in media studies, and now as a doctoral candidate in URI's supply chain management program, Dubois has a unique view of today's media environment. As part of his doctoral dissertation, he examined information flows in the news media, conducting qualitative and quantitative analysis on mainstream media coverage.

While the digital shift has opened news information to more voices and competition, it's also created challenges: misinformation, polarization, and the sheer speed at which content travels. Dubois contends that applying supply chain thinking can help us better understand how media and news information move through society, diagnose where things break down and how to address these problems.

The results of Dubois' research, framing the flow of information as a supply chain, were published in .

He spoke with Rhody Today about some of that research and how to begin rebuilding trust.

What was the framework behind looking into the concept of how news media can be considered a supply chain?

I come from a pretty unique mix of experiences. I spent years working in finance and supply chain roles for a health care company, but I also have a master's in media studies, and taught film and media as an adjunct professor for over a decade. I've always been fascinated by how the media shapes the way we see the world, and we're living in a time where our relationship with news feels more complicated than ever.

So, when I decided to move into academia full-time, I wanted to bring those two worlds together. I started thinking: what if we looked at news the way we look at a supply chain (i.e., planned, sourced, produced, and distributed)? Framing it that way could help us break down the process, understand where things go wrong, and hopefully rebuild trust in news while giving media professionals new ways to think about how information flows.

What research is out there related to looking at how the news media can be considered a supply chain?

There's a significant body of research on news media from fields like media studies, journalism, communications and sociology. Very little of it, however, applies a supply chain perspective. There's been some early work, like , which looked at how lessons from digitizing physical supply chains could apply to media. But overall, there isn't a dedicated stream of literature focused on media supply chains鈥攅specially news.

For a long time, supply chain scholarship was all about physical products. In the last couple of decades, though, we've seen more attention on service supply chains鈥攖hings like health care or hospitality. News fits that model, especially now that it's shifted from a physical product, like a newspaper, to the digital flow of information. That's where I see the gap. My dissertation is about starting to fill that space and I think it's just the beginning. There's so much potential for applying supply chain thinking to better understand how media and especially news information, moves through society.

What are some of the stages in the supply chain for the flow of news information?

When I think about the stages of the news media supply chain, I see it starting with planning and sourcing. This includes deciding what's newsworthy and where the information comes from. From there, it moves into production, where stories are written, edited, and packaged for different formats, and finally into distribution, where they reach audiences through outlets like traditional news organizations, aggregators like Google News, and social media platforms. Digitalization has transformed all of this. It's made the supply chain more complex and more varied.

On one end, you can have a single blogger reporting on their own, and on the other, a major story that flows through wire services that gets picked up by national outlets and then spreads through social media. That same digital shift has opened news information to more voices and competition, but it's also created challenges: misinformation, polarization, and the sheer speed at which content travels. Those dynamics are exactly why I think applying supply chain thinking can help us better understand and address these problems.

How is information affected as it moves throughout the supply chain?

Information changes as it moves through the news media supply chain. The longer and more complex the chain, the more chances there are for it to be shaped, sometimes in helpful ways, like adding context or clarity, and sometimes in ways that distort it. At every stage (i.e., planning, sourcing, making, and distributing), choices are made that affect how a story takes shape. For example, decisions about which sources to use, how to frame the story, or even how much space or airtime it's given all influence the final product.

Most importantly, though, is that news firms play gatekeeper roles, deciding which events are newsworthy vs. not. On top of that, broader factors like regulation, a news outlet's editorial priorities, or shifting public discourse about what counts as "news" also play a role. Ultimately, a newsworthy event moves through all these layers before it reaches the audience, and what you see as a finished story has been filtered through each of those steps. That's why thinking about news as a supply chain is so powerful鈥攊t helps us unpack where and how information gets reshaped.

What surprised you most through researching the flow of information as a supply chain?

Honestly, what surprised me most was just how much complexity there is once you start mapping news information as a supply chain. I expected to see a linear process. But the reality is that it's this sprawling, multidirectional network with all these different actors, technologies, and feedback loops. Digitalization has completely reshaped things. The boundaries of where the "supply chain" starts and ends are much fuzzier than I anticipated. Social media means that sourcing often begins in completely decentralized ways, and distribution doesn't end anymore because stories can be reshared endlessly. I was also struck by how much institutional pressure like financial constraints, digital clicks and shifting norms have reshaped information as it moves through the chain.

What node in the supply chain do you think has the biggest impact on the flow of information?

I think the most significant lever for change is rebuilding trust by re-establishing a shared understanding of facts. When digitalization pushed news into a 24/7 cycle, outlets moved from simply reporting facts to providing nonstop analysis and commentary. Over time, that's fueled a system where different media supply chains frame events through very different worldviews, often politically. As a result, someone watching MSNBC and someone watching Fox News can walk away with entirely different versions of reality, even though both are technically covering the same events. Fixing that isn't simple. It's a societal challenge.

But I think a supply chain lens can help us diagnose where things break down: whether that's in sourcing, production, or even how news is distributed and consumed. Pairing that with efforts like improving media literacy and refining more ethical, efficient information flows could open up a lot of necessary research and practical solutions.

Dubois says that his goal is to help restore journalism to its vital role as the fourth estate. Though everyone carries their own unconscious biases and feels a particular way about certain media organizations Dubois notes that he's focusing on letting the data and his analysis lead him.