Draft Four: Why does our newsroom exist? (3/4)
Building blocks for a journalism of connection and hope.
This is the third of four letters in which I’ll be sharing a complete working draft of my CUNY News Innovation and Leadership final project. All our final projects, in short 5-min videos, are now online. Feedback, thoughts or ideas are welcome, encouraged and appreciated. You can read them in order at the links below:
New products and formats
Journalism that actually helps and represents communities has to assemble products that align with our definitions and principles: be caring, make lives better, create connection etc. And it might well be that expanding the definition of a news product beyond something that is “published” or “broadcast” could be freeing. This could include:
Forms of journalism done at human scale;
Actual Experiences (AE);
Conversations;
Live events – from journalism on stage, to plays;
Public square events;
Spaces and communities to connect around the news;
Public forums;
Answering questions;
Providing context;
Facilitating living libraries.
None of the above conform to the way we're used to getting journalism delivered to us. And most don't conform to our contemporary desire for efficiency – they actually run counter to the promises of customizable content through GenerativeAI.
Eric Gordon and Gabriel Mugar describe these as: „meaningful inefficiencies”. Their book of the same name talks about civic participation and civic design done through a lens that encourages connection, care and conversation.
Imagine a city wanting your feedback on a park it wants to remake: it can do it, it can give you choices (better), it can consult you before designing some choices (even better), and it can create the entire process together with you (wow, crazy!).
It's meaningful because we'll be closer to one another when the job ends, and we'll be more invested in the outcome and the future of the park. It's also inefficient, because by the standards of how we expect life to work, it's slow, contradictory, and won't surface easy answers.
Now move this into a newsroom. The authors describe newsroom projects on incarceration and low income housing that were not interviews with experts, or analysis, but rather “story circles”, gatherings where different groups sat together and shared life events, building knowledge from lived experience.
The designer of the project on the reintegration of prisoners, the authors write, “at first believed the main goal was educating the public about the state's correctional system. She later realized that the primary goal was actually creating basic human connection”.
“This is not about building compassion, but about creating a collaborative process, one that begins with empathy, but that results in a distribution of caring responsibilities to the inmates, the community and the prison staff”.
This is another important aspect of this idea: it involves care, and not just any type of care. You can care about improving prison conditions, you can care for the people involved, and maybe give money and empathize with their stories, but how can you design an experience that involves caring with?
Thus, journalism as a meaningful inefficiency is about creating products meant to distribute “caring responsibility”. Quoting from Gordon and Mugar:
“It is an attempt to intervene in the way that news gets produced by designing a system wherein a multiple of publics come together with some flexibility to play, to explore, and to encounter the unexpected, as a means of not simply drawing attention to an issue (what the press usually does), but in creating the conditions for people to care. Caring in this case is the ability for people involved to distribute caring responsibilities collectively.”
jessikah maria ross designed the conversations on housing that Gordon and Mugar spotlight. (She has also recently written this guide on how to do participatory trauma-informed journalism). jesikah says we should start thinking about how “anytime you're bringing people together intentionally, it's a gathering, and a gathering can be a product, and if you don't feel comfortable thinking about a gathering as a product, then you could certainly have content that is pulled either in images as a photo essay or Instagram series or a digital story.”
Telling good stories isn't going away, but maybe the way we get to consume them, or find the space for them to reach us is changing.
In recent years there have been several research studies on the effect of various forms of live journalism on the public. A paper on the Finnish live journalism show, Musta laatikko (Black Box), concluded that it creates a “shared reality” that “can support audiences to comprehend the news by contextualizing them as part of history and anticipated futures. (...) The stories can also transcend everyday existence by being a reminder of how finite and precious human life is. Similarly, democratic and public participation can be portrayed as a meaningful moral and universalist pursuit, rather than a citizen responsibility to be fulfilled. (...) Moreover, journalists can envelop themselves and their audience within a shared 'us' and thereby invite them to reflect on shared meanings, collective truths, and the social and ecological challenges faced by society.”
New metrics
It's all fine and good until we get to decide what success would look like for the journalism described above. Metrics for connection, shared reality, and for works of “meaningful inefficiency” have to be different. Here are some of the things we should think about measuring:
Meeting better in communities;
Conversing more meaningfully;
People being more careful with each other;
Participating more;
Having more patience for change;
Coming together for good;
Becoming more curious;
Empowerment.
Even though many journalists complain about the industry’s reflexive tendency to talk about views or clicks, they can’t help themselves. Many feel a story has failed if it hasn’t hit some (often) arbitrary threshold of trafic. Maybe it’s the institution’s definition of succes, or maybe it’s the reporter’s, but it exists.
Even in newsrooms that don’t share traffic numbers or use them to make decisions, the feeling that “not enough people saw this” exists. There is a natural tendency for many in the profession to have reach, and it’s been fed by more than a decade of conversation about “scale” and the seemingly infinite possibilities of social media. Today, journalism is entering a post-social world – virality isn’t what it used to be for news, and the platforms’ relationship with the business has largely ended.
Trying something as radical as measuring the impact of a gathering on, let’s say, 10 people in a room, while simultaneously grieving the very real dip of traffic coming from Facebook can be daunting. Not to mention that many digital newsrooms still operate on a financial model largely reliant on digital advertising and clicks. Even in places that embrace reader revenue as a business model metrics are complicated: some measure how stories convert readers to paying subscribes as a way of succes.
Can you measure creating stronger community bonds and reader revenue while also keeping the incentive structure aligned to the mission?
New tensions
Doing the work will surface tensions between old ways and habits, and new ones. The ones regarding metrics are just some of them. Here are others:
React vs. Restore;
Call out vs. Call in;
Point to vs. Guide to;
Break news vs. Gift news;
Burn vs. Build;
Business vs. Service;
Shame vs. Solution;
Diminish vs. Illuminate;
Transactional vs. Transformative.
These are all ways to contrast the old paradigm with a new one. Much of journalism is reactive: it’s purpose is to provide information after an event has happened. What if it’s purpose was more proactive, more intentional? What if instead of pointing fingers and calling out politicians, it “called in” and invited conversation?
Many of the tensions referenced above deal with one of journalism’s main activities: expose wrongdoing. Still, in the act of doing so practitioners often resort to shaming, blaming, and painting the world bleak.
In a conversation with journalist-turned-conflict mediator Amanda Ripley we addressed the difficulty of moving away from framing the world as such:
“I think sometimes journalists think ‘well, of course people avoid news because it's hard, and news is hard, and life is hard’, and they get very righteous about it. But I think the biggest problem is that there's nothing to do with the news.
If we were in our new organization, would we run every project through a litmus test which is basically: Do people already know about this? Is there anything to be done? And if there's nothing to be done by them – which is most of the time – then is anyone doing anything? Is there a vicarious sense of agency that we can help generate through storytelling and reporting so that even though I can't personally intervene in that conflict, it’s good for me to know what other people are trying to do? And even if it doesn't work, it's good for me to know. Because it might spark ideas for my community.
But if the answer is no, no, no – people already know about this, there's nothing they can do, and you have no reporting or data that would indicate that anyone else is doing something useful. I guess the question would be: should we cover it?”
What Amanda is saying is that it will be hard to stop doing journalism they way we’re used to do it: reactive, combative, often without paying attention to whether it’s been useful to anyone. Solving some of this tension might at least open the door to innovation.
“I remember when I was working on the Complicating the narratives essay”, says Amada, “I interviewed this woman who had been a journalist and she became a mediator, and she said that if she were to go back to journalism, she would spend a lot less time trying to be clever and more time trying to find the bits and pieces of people's stories that don't fit.
That really stuck with me; you know when something really lands, and you realize that you've been complicit in that.
I mean, the truth is I can be pretty clever, and it's easier to be clever in language when you're taking something down, when you're criticizing, and judging, and attacking. It's just easier. It's easier to be in any room the person who's attacking than the person who's inventing or trying to find a solution.
I think people are very hungry for some other ways to navigate conflict right now. So it's not hard. It is hard to learn the skills and to implement them and to go against the cultural grain that you're in, whatever it is. That is hard.”
New challenges
Both creating new metrics as well as holding tensions to see what emerges will eventually also run up against the dire reality of funding. Who will pay for this? And who will have the patience to stick with it for the time it needs to show results?
There are a lot of complicated questions regarding who pays for this, and who benefits. As Andrew Losowsky of Vox Media puts it: “Are you serving the communities who will pay for your journalism? And if so, then you are primarily serving the people who have the money to do so? And also, are you serving those who advertise next to your journalism? And if so, what does that say about the types of journalism you will or won't do? [There] will always be conflicts there. And I think that is an inherent contradiction at the heart of a lot of journalism.”
That's not the only challenge, but it might among be the main ones. I’ll list some you’ve read about below, as a reminder of the work ahead.
Little money to test theories & run pilots;
How do you share in-person conversations with a larger public? What's enough to be called public service?
Is this journalism done solely through a progressive lens?
Does this risk excluding people who can't participate and access experiences? Can we design truly accessible places?
If reach is not the goal, and metrics are “soft”, how do we define “enough”? Can we define success as a limit on capacity? (See also this essay on “degrowth journalism” by Adam Thomas).
There is a lot of ego in journalism; do we need different talent pipelines?
This requires new leadership – how can we change the default paradigm of straight white men at the helm?
Cultural resistance, especially for countries/spaces with little interpersonal trust, a high distance from power, lack of tolerance for uncertainty, and high levels of cynicism (according to the Hofstede scale).
Next Sunday is the final episode of this series: a sketch of a pilot project I’m hoping to run in the near future here in Bucharest.