The Lear Center: Media Impact Project

The Lear Center’s Media Impact Project provides a deeper understanding of media’s influence on social trends and individual behavior. Through an evolving inventory of reports, publications and tools, the Media Impact Project works to:

• Raise awareness of state-of-the-art practices to measure media engagement and impact;
• Significantly improve the quality of digital data collection and analysis among foundation grantees and other media organizations;
• Determine the impact that media projects have had on the knowledge, attitudes and behaviors of target audiences and communities; and
• Enable foundations, grantees and other media organizations to make informed, data-driven decisions.
   

A diverse team of researchers including social and behavioral scientists, journalists, analytics experts and other specialists continue to collaborate to test and create new ways to measure the impact of media. To date, resources include Measuring Media Impact: An Overview of the Field and See, Say, Feel, Do: Social Media Metrics that Matter among many others.
 

The Norman Lear Center is a nonpartisan research and public policy center that studies the social, political, economic and cultural impact of entertainment. The Center’s website archives its numerous projects and publications—many of which are geared towards media, civic engagement, and impact. The Lear Center translates its findings into action through testimony, journalism, strategic research and innovative public outreach campaigns centered around seven major themes: boundaries, creativity, the political economy of entertainment, audience, technology, ethics, and innovation. From its base in the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, the Lear Center bridges the gap between the entertainment industry, academia, and the public.