The Local Journalism Triad: Public Engagement
(Third part of the Triad)
Economic sustainability and the future of online journalism rely on a 180-degree shift in the relationship with the target audience. To achieve broad engagement with people, journalists in the digital age will have to leave the newsroom and join the information ecosystem in which they are inserted.
Until now, reporters and editors used to look outside the newsroom for the data, facts, events and ideas that were later taken to their work desks where the material would be checked, selected, organized and formatted in texts, audio, videos or multimedia platforms. The processing in the newsrooms followed the procedures, rules and values dictated by the writing manuals, which reflected the worldview of journalistic companies, including autonomous professionals.
Digitization and the internet made this model outdated because it ignored the reality of millions of people who were outside the news streams due to technological limitations but who in the digital age gained unprecedented protagonism thanks to the exponential expansion of both communication channels and equipment for receiving and transmitting news. Realities that once seemed extraterrestrial have become disturbingly close, imposing remarkable changes in the behaviour of professionals and journalistic companies.
In 1979, when I covered the crisis of the invasion of the US embassy in Tehran, the fact that the ayatollahs and the overwhelming majority of the Iranian population treated politics and religion as the same thing was seen in the West as a sign of mental imbalance. I had acrimonious discussions with my colleagues in the central newsroom because mosques are a daily space for business, prayer, politics and cultural activities for Iranians who follow the Islamic religion. Something normal within the habits and values of the local society, but in the Euro-American West, the lack of information, made this difference in cultural standards simply not understood, much less accepted.
As the world of communication became smaller due to the expansion of the global information network created by the internet, journalism now faces the dilemma of leaving its professional trench in newsrooms to discover the world as it is, especially its socio-cultural diversity and complexity. Journalists need to break out of the Olympic isolation of newsrooms because the public has become more demanding when it comes to news, thanks to the technological paraphernalia of smartphones, tablets and laptops.
Avoiding the newsroom filters
To produce the information that people want and need, journalism needs to know, as broadly as possible, the audience it intends to serve by providing reliable, relevant, current and accurate news. Leaving the newsroom means seeing the outside world as it is, without going through the filters and values of the newsroom culture. For this, the professional has two tools: research, either through questionnaires or through reading, and direct observation, that is, seeing how people live, what they want, what they need, and what they dream about.
It is necessary to use both tools simultaneously because the exclusive use of direct observation can generate wrong conclusions due to possible differences in worldview between the journalist and the people observed. And research alone can also lead to errors because, as every interviewer or ethnography specialist knows, any question always induces some answer.
The combined use of research and direct observation allows identifying the ecosystem in which the target audience under study is inserted. An ecosystem is a set of institutions, structures and agents participating in data flows, facts, events and ideas available to a given human group. It also allows for defining the information needs of a community, that is, the information and news that people most seek, want or need.
With data from the ecosystem and information needs, the journalist can act as a news curator, that is, to select what matters to the community, and at the same time suggest new topics and sources, as well as signal when fake news appears or when the community is the target of a disinformation process. The final objective of both tools is to gain the public’s trust, without which it will be very difficult to create the conditions for people to perceive financial sustainability as their task as well.
Further Reading:
- The Triad of Digital Journalism
— The Triad of Local Journalism — Exploring the Sustainability Challange
— Journalism in the Age of Digital Complexity
