Draft Four: Why does our newsroom exist? (2/4)
Building blocks for a journalism of connection and hope.
This is the second of four letters in which I’ll be sharing a complete working draft of my capstone project for the CUNY News Innovation and Leadership program I have recently finished. Any feedback, thoughts or ideas are welcome, encouraged and appreciated.
✦ Part I ✦
New metaphors
A new way to see the world requires different metaphors for what journalism is, who journalists are, and what their work entails. The “watch dog” or “the fourth estate” or “holding power to account” need companions; here are some options:
An act of service;
A way of holding space;
Empathy training;
Community healing;
Being a guide on the last mile;
Mimic how nature communicates;
Interstitium / Connective tissue;
Constellation;
Narrative change-maker;
A hub of resiliency.
Jennifer Brandel, the founder of Hearken, uses the illustration below to discuss transitioning between systems: an old one, traditional and struggling to keep going, and an emergent one, incubated in networks and communities of practice.
“When you come up during a certain era, each generation has its own water it’s been swimming in, where it just feels like this is how the world works in their own perception of reality,” Brandel says about the change we’re undergoing. “And I think that some of the leaders who are either literally running newsrooms or on the boards or governance structures that are running newsrooms are still in an old world that doesn’t exist anymore. And it’s not that they’re bad people or anything. I think, you know, if given time and education and ways to discuss and figure it out, they could move on it, but that’s really hard.”
This existing and dying system is about seeing the journalists (not the public) as the experts, maintaining and perpetuating a company rather than empowering people to make change in their community, thinking of published stories and news broadcasts as the only possible products, holding on to ideas of scale and continuous growth, measuring impact in clicks and awards etc.
Change is scary for anyone. But it’ll come. And one question is how can we be better equipped to serve and connect communities? Here are four of the metaphors above, in Brandel’s words:
GUIDE THE LAST MILE. Urban planners often think about the last mile problem, where there’s many people who live a mile or more away from where a bus or train service line will end. And I feel like journalism so often drops people off in the middle of nowhere with the articles, where they don’t know where to go or what they can do about it.
They have just been given a problem. Like their psyche has been dropped off in the middle of a burning canyon of trees, and they’re just like “I don’t know how we get out of this”, and there’s no bridging. We need things like: “If you’re interested in learning more, here are local organizations working to solve this problem.” Or “here are solutions other places have tried to solve for this”.
We do this so people know where to put that energy, that angst, that confusion, that despair, that outrage, whatever it is they’re feeling. It just sits in them. So I also think a lot about how you convert energy into movement, and not just have it sit and stagnate, because I think that actually creates a level of dis-ease and actual disease, societal disease.
COLLECTIVE SENSE-MAKING. The other thing I keep thinking about is collective sense making. I was at this great gathering last summer and someone said: “What does it mean that the entire product design of journalism is to be consumed individually?” So, if you think about it, you’re on your phone, you’re watching a video, you are an individual choosing your own adventure, and taking in this information that is really difficult and complicated. And you’re often doing it by yourself.
You're left to yourself to make sense of it or to just form your own opinions and not be informed by other people who are seeing a different angle of the same topic. And so how might newsrooms and journalists create spaces for collective sense making, where you can go “here’s this major issue, and here’s 10 different ways that it’s impacting people”, and hear from the people themselves who are being impacted in different ways. Thus you can get a more well-rounded understanding, and also understand where you fit in, and how you can do something about it, not just be informed.
HOW NATURE COMMUNICATES. I was at a conference and there was a woman who’s kind of the mother of biomimicry, which is a field in which we design things based on how the natural world operates, and she said communication in nature happens in three parts: there has to be a signal, so something being pushed out, there has to be some kind of meaning-making from that signal, and there has to be a response.
Without all three of those things, there is no communication.
Journalism is obsessed with and hyper-muscular about the signal, and not the meaning-making, and not the response. We're focused on informing, but not engaging and equipping people for what to do next. To me, journalism is a failure of communication if you compare it to how communication actually happens in the natural world. It's just signal signal signal.
THE CONSTELLATION. The original sin, or the biggest sin of journalism, is not acknowledging that we need each other. There is this idea of individualism, and this culture of “we should be self-sustaining, we should be able to do things ourselves”. Not acknowledging our interdependence is what also fuels the isolation, alienation, loneliness that people are feeling. Because it feels like we’re not supposed to be interdependent, because our culture has pushed us toward a narrative frame that makes interdependence seem like you’re bad, you fucked up, you’re broken.
But interdependence is the key to a thriving ecosystem. So even within a city, how can a newsroom look at itself not as a destination, as in a hub and spoke model, but instead as being a node in a network, a constellation.
If we stop thinking of our institutions as the be-all end-all, and frame our goal as actually making things happen in community, then I think people would be able to be much more creative in how that institution can operate and move. If you start to disaggregate things from just keeping a company alive, and instead have people paid and thinking about what are the talents and jobs to be done that are still needed in community, I think all manner of creative options become available.
But that’s scary, you know. Like who’s about to blow things up and be like: “we’re gonna become a distributed network coordinated interstitium of our city rather than a company with a label and a name that puts things out on a signal.”
New roles
For journalists to do such work and/or do it so differently, they also need to reframe their roles – both in theory and in practice. Some of these could be actual newsroom jobs, some could be part of the responsibilities of anyone who engages with communities.
Experience designer;
Convener;
Facilitator;
Mediator;
Relationship builder;
Community collaborator;
Industry networker;
Guide;
Teacher of storytelling;
Cheerleader for change agents;
Story librarian;
Identity builder.
jesikah maria ross has been working for years at the intersection of journalism, art and community development. She spent the last decade coordinating participatory media projects “with a path and a plan that changes how we collect, tell and share the stories of our communities”.
She is also one of the hosts of the Care Collaboratory (check out this zine!), a gathering of people interested in care-based storytelling practices (which I've been fortunate to join for their spring-summer 2024 season.)
Something she thinks a lot about is our power as journalists to convene, which she sees as essential today: “My feeling is we’re more afraid of people we don’t know, we’re less inclined to even go out, we’re less inclined to try new things, which really just supports fragmentation, loneliness, and isolation. No amount of sharing text and images are going to really penetrate. I think we need the antidote to that: connection.”
What we need for connection is to create experiences, ross says.
“The old theory of change is I give you information and that will make change. And I think what is new is that if I create and design an experience where you participate and out of that you will be able to bring something – knowledge, empathy, new relationships, motivation – that will move towards making things better in some way. If we create experiences of care, empathy, belonging, and possibility, then people will be able to feel that and, in turn, co-create that with other people, so that there’ll be a ripple effect.”
Designing these experiences, combined with hosting, facilitating, and moderating them are the skills we need or the skills we should bring in through collaborating or co-creating with other civic actors. In her book, Sue Robinson also lists four essential new roles that open into a wide array of activities: relationship builder, community collaborator, conversation facilitator, and professional industry networker.
New skills
All these new roles have new skills embedded in them. The one that comes up the most, not surprisingly, is listening – arguably many of the others spring from it.
Listening;
Learning;
Hosting;
Facilitating;
Humility;
Trauma-aware reporting;
Distill and synthesize;
Decode and humanize data.
In How Journalists Engage Robinson highlights two essential skills - learning and listening - and unpacks what else is embedded within them:
1. Radical transparency. Highlighting who was involved in story production, the contributors’ identities, ethical decisions etc.).
2. Power dynamic appreciation. Acknowledging in reporting and in content production the power dynamics at work. This also refers to the power in the newsroom and within the reporter’s own self, and the newsroom’s problematic practices.
3. Mediation. Helping people find common ground/values and moving beyond polarization.
4. Reciprocity and feedback loops. Following through with sources and community members, checking in with people constantly.
5. Media literacies. Everyone, from K–12 teachers and parents to tech companies and journalists, has to help people recognize good information.
6. Community offline work. Visiting schools, hosting forums.
7. Needs/assets/solutions analyses. Proactively helping community stakeholders to listen for a community’s various needs, recognize the existing assets and potential partnerships, connect groups and policymakers, and work toward solutions to problems.
8. Collaborative production. Partnering with other news media or community groups to develop shared ethical guidelines around information exchange or asking people to crowdsource and even produce content.
New collaborators
Arguably, a community-centered approach that prioritizes care and listening should lead to collaboration, and co-creation. Journalists don’t need to have all the necessary skills, but they need to know where to find the people who do and what to ask for:
Community organizers and activists, who can bestow a transfer of trust and power and also be trainers and guides;
Facilitators, who can be mentors and co-hosts for difficult conversations;
Experience designers and artists that can help shape convenings.
Leezel Tanglao is a Assistant Managing Editor of Digital for the Dallas Morning News, and a community leader and innovator. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she brought together peers from the Filipino Young Leaders Program to build Tayo, a virtual help desk to answer the Filipino-American community’s questions and debunk misinformation in a way that was aware of who the stakeholders were. “How do we prevent people from dying because they are getting faulty information?” was their driving question. “And how do we get through to them?”
Her journalism skills were crucial to framing the project, but the succes came from its interdisciplinary taskforce (technologists, attorneys, health care experts all contributed). Tayo has now expanded its research and informational scope to public health, migration, election information and other topics, and each article is still regularly reviewed by a panel of subject-matter experts. Finding funding is still difficult for Tanglao and her peers because Tayo is hard to put into a box.
“They way we’re set up now doesn’t fit under the traditional journalism lens, which is actually very depressing to me”, Tanglao says. “You are basically gatekeeping other communities that have a lot to offer and know the audiences better. The practices of journalism can be far more than we know it to be.”
New workflows and stories
As all of the above come together, our approach to the work will change – both in what we do and how we do it. We can:
Use a community participation model: listen-harvest-prioritize-act;
Choose a level of participation: from providing information, to consultation, all the way to empowerment;
Be transparent about who you are, what you do, why you do it, and how;
Do stories together – especially with vulnerable communities or communities that journalism has been done to;
Surface civic victories as inspiration;
Be a translator for jargon coming from other civic actors, which we can turn into actionable experiences for citizens;
Become a repository of solutions for community problems.
Joy Mayer has been running the Trusting News project since 2016. Joy’s essential pitch is that you need to meet your community’s needs in order to be trusted. You have to listen, engage, invite people in, make them understand how story ideas appear and how they get decided on.
But there’s a piece that has to come before “process transparency”, she says, and it has to do with benevolence and the perception of it: “Do I feel like I can trust you? This kind of has to come first. Before I believe your checklist, before I believe the fact checkers, I have to believe that the people doing the fact checking have integrity. This Knight/Gallup research last year asked about societal benevolence and individual benevolence. And the question is like, do I believe that journalists care what happens to me as a result of their work? And do I believe the journalists care what happens to society as a result of their work?”
For many people, the answer was “no”, they didn’t think journalists gave a shit.
Involving people in the work, whether by deciding together what should be covered, involving them in the journalism, training them to do the journalism themselves, and then giving them agency over how they’re portrayed are complicated moves for the profession.
“A really practical example”, says Shirish Kulkarni, an award-winning journalist and media innovator from the UK. “People say: why don’t journalists check their stories with us after they've interviewed us? It’s a simple, obvious thing. And journalists say: ‘oh, it’s journalistic independence’ (...) But if people don’t have power and trust is the existential challenge we are facing, why should we not? What are we scared of? I think that what we are scared of is the key question there, because at some level, I think we know we’re misrepresenting people.”
The second idea I'll borrow from Joy Mayer is humility. Yes, explaining journalism is still necessary, because we take for granted that people understand how we decide what to cover when, of course, nobody understands. “The industry can’t decide”, Mayer says. “In a newsroom we can’t agree on how we decide what we cover! And yet, somehow, we think the public will know that, right?”
What Mayer has since added to an ideal newsroom’s to-do list is humility – journalists understanding what they’re missing and how they can do better. And asking communities to tell us about our failings.
“We’re asking more often the fundamental question of who feels seen and understood by journalism, and who feels neglected or misrepresented by journalism, and the answer to that question holds a lot of keys”, Mayer says. “So I think that the longer I’m doing this, the more I realize how much we’re getting wrong, and the less patience I have with journalism that might meet journalists’ definition of success, but isn’t actually helping any communities.”
Next Sunday, we’ll explore the new products, formats and metrics the work calls for, and the tensions embedded in such endeavors.