Informative immersion in communities is essential for local journalism
As more research results emerge on the future of the press and journalism, concern grows about the lack of data on how ordinary people are facing changes in the so-called contemporary information ecosystem, and especially about the way the public participates in these transformations. This means that journalists will need more social sensitivity than professional skills in text or image production.
It’s a matter of act the need to overcome an invisible barrier that separates low-income people from journalists. There is a general feeling in favelas and lower-middle-class neighbourhoods that press professionals have a higher status than ordinary people. They are “men who know men”, a jargon that is very common on the outskirts of metropolises or in small towns in the interior, to identify professionals who have access to decision-makers and influential people.
The accumulated experience of countless projects in the relationship between journalists and the public indicates that the ideal pattern would be an equal partnership standard, that is, both sides would accumulate the greatest possible knowledge of each other’s reality. There are dozens of initiatives concerned with bringing ordinary people closer to the journalistic universe, especially in the United States and Europe. But the reverse situation, the immersion of reporters and editors in the community realm, didn’t get the same attention from professionals and academic researchers.
I consulted several specialists in public relations, and they all confirmed the lack of data, either because they are not being researched, or because investigations are still ongoing, because the topic is too recent. This gap in experience and knowledge prevents the emergence of an equal relationship between professionals and the public. A relationship that became unbalanced due to professionally ingrained concern for exporting social, political and cultural values of the corporate press to readers, listeners, viewers and users of news websites.
Most journalists are not aware of this barrier because they live in an environment where the professional culture is based on the questionable principle that reporters, editors and commentators know what is good for the public. Thus, opinion polls on public perceptions mainly reflect what professionals want to know rather than prioritizing what people feel and know. It is a question of positioning when studying a specific information ecosystem (1).
To know what people think, it is necessary to find out what they say to each other, which implies direct coexistence between the journalist and the community, minimizing the newsroom culture as much as possible. This is what many researchers call journalistic immersion in the community, a procedure that can be understood using the Theory of Practice (2)
A new form of news engagement
The establishment of a new relationship between journalists and the public is unavoidable because, in the digital age, people will have a role different from the current one in the production of news and, especially, in the financial support of independent and non-commercial journalistic projects. Everything indicates, from research carried out by professionals themselves and academics, that the sustainability of journalism, especially local and segmented journalism (3), will depend on personal monetary contributions, whether in the form of fees or taxes or through direct payments such as subscriptions, paywall (payment for access) and exchanges (for goods or services).
The relationship, on an equal footing, between members of a community and journalists will entail responsibilities for both parties. Professionals take on the task of preserving the quality and effectiveness of news flows within the community, whose members, in turn, will have the responsibility for ensuring the financial sustainability of the means, human and material, necessary to guarantee the dissemination and sharing of information.
This new type of engagement between professionals and the public points towards mutual dependence, which changes how the journalist and the members of a community deal with the news. If there is integration, the main flow of news (relevant, unpublished and pertinent data, facts and events) tends to originate from people, with the journalist being responsible for checking veracity, accuracy and expanded contextualization. The final formatting of a news item will no longer be determined by writing techniques (inverted pyramid, for example) but by the relational and colloquial communication concerns between individuals.
The fact that we are immersed in the avalanche of information generated by the internet causes an extraordinary increase in the flow of news within social networks. In a community, news increasingly tends to emerge from the sharing of perceptions and opinions between people. It is a highly dynamic process, subject to distortions such as fake news, which is leading journalists to increasingly function as curators, consultants and tutors.
As the public is today an essential character in the financial survival of journalistic projects, especially in small cities and low-income populations, professionals end up having to resort more to procedures close to sociology, anthropology and social assistance than to news production techniques provided by writing manuals and journalism schools.
(1) An information ecosystem, in a simple definition, is the set of information flows that shape the formation of perceptions and opinions in social communities.
(2) Theory of Practice — It is the generic name given to a set of theories concerned with the study of reality through procedures free from previous concepts. The objective is to develop theories and hypotheses based on reality instead of trying to interpret the world based on theories. More details in the chapter Introduction: Practice Theory, by Theodore Schatzki, in the book The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, 2001
(3) The expression ‘segmented’ is used in the sentence to indicate readers, listeners, viewers and internet users with specific interests in some area of knowledge or professional activity.
