Journalism and news in a distracted age
NOTE: This post is one of a series considering the future of journalism and media education for my 2018 Disruptive Journalism Education Fellowship from the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at CUNY. This post considers the definition of news as we develop our new journalism curriculum.
So much in today’s frenetic information environment focuses on speed. Get it now. Post it now. Give me your hot take NOW.
Recently, Tronc decided to cut half the reporters and editors — including Editor-in-Chief Jim Rich — from the New York Daily News newsroom, according to a CNN report. An internal staff email obtained by CNN explained the restructuring rationale (emphasis added):
We are reducing today the size of the editorial team by approximately 50 percent and re-focusing much of our talent on breaking news — especially in areas of crime, civil justice and public responsibility. We know our readers look to us for a unique point of view, and we believe these topics offer our best opportunity to differentiate our reporting.
Part of that push toward “breaking news” is driven by algorithmic rewards. In the age of search-engine optimization, organizations reap tangible benefits of headlines and posts that reflect the latest search trends, and the more current your take, the greater chance for your content to hit the top of those results pages. The 24–7 news cycle of cable news often spends more time with live interviews and commentary roundtables talking about those trending topics, rather than reporting on them.
The big problem: “Breaking news” is a commodity. It is not a point of differentiation.
As an educator thinking about training the next generation of journalists, the question arises: What if we stopped covering every wreck, fire, shooting, viral video, etc., and focused instead on the deeper elements of community and humanity?
What’s news?
Two decades ago, when the world was still figuring out the Internet as a news medium, I attended a city-editor training seminar at the American Press Institute. One evening, the organizers scheduled a trip to the original Newseum in Virginia, where we watched a short film titled “What’s News?”
We were inundated by snapshots and sounds of history: President Kennedy’s assassination, the destruction of the Hindenburg, the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana. News clips and inspirational quotes flashed across the screen, reminding us of our vital role as the righters of wrongs, chroniclers of history, sharers of the human experience. The multimedia torrent elicited chills from that group of jaded editors worn down by the daily journalistic grind.
What we did was a critical component of a free society. It was important.
As we walked out, though, we nudged ourselves off the high ground with someone joking, “Well, apparently, everything is news.”
How prescient that statement proved to be. In the age of social media, everything is news, depending on audience and context. Yes, as professionally trained journalists, we can recite a litany of news values built around proximity, relevance, and impact — we know what a story is, for God’s sake — but our stature as traditional keepers of the content gate has faded. Any person, journalist or not, has the possibility of striking that resonant chord with the masses to alter perceptions of an event, experience, or issue.
It is this new reality that gives me pause as a media professor in Springfield, Missouri, as we redesign our journalism curriculum at Drury University. What should we be teaching our students? How do we refine the old notions of newsworthiness? How do we develop the next generation of chroniclers, investigators, and truthtellers in this crowded, chaotic age?
The shifting reality of “coverage”
I vividly remember seeing Janis Krums’ amazing tweet in 2009 revealing a U.S. Airways jet in the Hudson River. It became a prominent example in my classes of the power of the citizen journalist.
Then came the #iranelection hashtag, as thousands of Iranians took to the streets as part of the Green Revolution and captured the on-the-ground reality through pictures and personal updates. Something was changing here. My Twitter thread had become more powerful than the largest media organizations, few of whom had any presence on the ground in the cloistered country.
As Clay Shirky had predicted, here came everybody.
Today, this explosion of personal documentation has gone well beyond status updates and selfies. Sensationalism has moved off the grocery stands into our social-media feeds as our friends, families, and colleagues share the most morbid, bizarre, outrageous items they can find, often without checking the facts first.
As media consumers, we have become surveillance machines. Soon after the Iranian election, researcher Alfred Hermida articulated the idea of “ambient journalism,” where our sense of the news reality emerges from the social-media mass. To keep up, we are always scanning and scrolling, consuming events around us in headlines, pictures, and video snippets.
News organizations struggled to inject their verified, updated “news” into the hyperkinetic flurry. Many latched on to clickbait tactics to be seen and heard amid the cacophony. They chased the popular, the clickable, the viral.
In my hometown of Springfield, we see these tactics in use by all local news organizations as they push toward the immediate and the provocative. Disasters and crime coverage dominate the scene, in part because such stories are easy to obtain for news organizations with shrinking resources. They have a high return on investment, generating clicks, shares, and, ultimately, ad dollars.
But as I scan my local news landscape, it inspires an attitude reminiscent of Farmville regret. Over time, initial stimulation gives way to an unhealthy, hollow feeling. As engaged citizens of our hometowns, we crave something more substantial, more meaningful.
This past week, I took a snapshot of one morning’s run through our local sites to highlight where journalism may be missing the mark.
Television
Our top-rated NBC affiliate regularly leads its afternoon and evening newscasts with crime or court coverage. On this day, an overnight police chase led the site, with some election coverage and national sports woven in. A separate police chase that ended in a crash also made the page.
A click to our ABC affiliate shows an almost identical front page with the same lead because it is owned by the same parent company, Gray Television. (The two stations share a newsroom.)
Our CBS affiliate went for international disasters (earthquake, fire) with some localized political coverage. To leaven the hard news, the site offers an “Ask the Doctor” feature for dealing with fall allergies.
Our Fox affiliate — soon to be owned by Nexstar, corporate parent of our CBS affiliate — went for a missing Joplin man who had been found. Two crime stories ended up among the top six.
Newspaper
The News-Leader opted for a court story focused on a heroin ring. The police pursuit that ended with a crash is here, too, along with election coverage and a story about a highly visible apartment complex opening near Missouri State University.
Radio
KTTS-FM, a commercial station owned by E.W. Scripps Co. with a local news staff, led with a security system from one of our major local health providers. It also offered the police pursuit, the found lost man, and a crash as stories.
KSMU-FM, our local NPR affiliate operated by Missouri State University, has no crime among its top stories. It concentrated on election follow-ups.
News and the life lived
I know many of our local journalists; they are passionate professionals, dedicated to the Springfield community. Several are longtime residents of the Ozarks and understand this region deeply.
As a former editor, I recognize the justifications behind these story choices. Election coverage is an obvious part of our First Amendment responsibility. The police chase rises to the top because it puts people at risk, and local residents will be talking about it. Crime and public safety regularly top audience-interest lists, and the visual, digestible stories do well online. The court story has the added benefit of explaining how federal investigators pursued a local heroin ring, an important story given the region’s opioid crisis.
But now, in my role beyond the newsroom, I ask myself, “Do these headlines as a whole help me understand and live my life in Springfield, Missouri?”
When I worked as a News-Leader editor, friends outside the news business used to confess, “Yes, I know I should read the paper, but I just don’t have time.” Today, some of my friends say in amazement, “You watch local news?” For many people, active local news consumption is just not a necessary part of their day.
Like their counterparts nationally, they are increasingly turning to the Internet and social media to keep up. The phenomenon reminds me of something a visiting Huffington Post writer told our students a few years ago: If a story is important enough, it will find me.
With the proliferation of content, people are engaging with a huge amount of media each day. They spend hours binge-watching shows, sharing selfies, consuming memes and status updates — all customized content that informs and shapes their lives, whether through information, connection, or entertainment.
But “news” is often seen as irrelevant homework. With so many headlines leaning on crimes, crisis, and conflict, we find that the surveillance conducted by our news organizations often does not mesh with the reality of our lived lives. Too few stories reflect the conversations with our neighbors, the heart of our hometown. They are exhaustingly cute, strange, obscure — often in places well beyond our local coverage area— in an effort to get us to click and share.
Jeff Jarvis offered this take in a recent Atlantic post about the current media environment (emphasis added):
…those of us in media must acknowledge our responsibility for the messes we’ve made. Long before the net, media played a key role in polarizing the nation into red versus blue, black versus white, 99 percent versus 1 percent. CNN earned its money in conflict rather than resolution. Fox News has done more damage to American democracy than the internet. It was the media’s primary business model, built on volume and attention, that led to the clickbait that is the ruin of the net. Media and platforms as well as advertisers need to work together to build new business models based on value, on relationships, on accomplishment, on quality, on openness.
In Springfield, our newspaper still covers certain topics deeply, such as education and poverty, but like other Gannett newspapers, it has seen its newsroom gutted by buyouts and layoffs over the past decade. Investigative/ public-service projects are less frequent.
Our local stations face similar challenges. KOLR-10 (OzarksFirst), for example, provides longer features to explore community issues such as housing, domestic violence, and opioid addiction. But competition pushes it to pursue crime and disaster coverage, just like the other stations.
Here, like so many other places, the commodity coverage of “breaking news” fills much of the local news budget on a daily basis, as corporate parents demand that their local properties do more with less. And “more” is often seen in terms of quantity over quality.
Seeking the next journalism
The editor who hired me in Springfield, Randy Hammer, was a strong voice in the civic journalism/public journalism movement of the 1990s, an effort to make our journalism better reflect the community we covered. He consistently challenged the traditional beat structure in the newsroom, and many long-timers pushed back on the idea of abandoning areas that we had covered in the past.
His argument against sacred beats: We have always made decisions about what we will and won’t cover. We can’t cover everything.
As I scan the headlines locally, I see they match the conception of news when I went to journalism school 30 years ago: police, courts, politics (city/county/state), education, business, sports, weather. Today, though, we can access the National Weather Service for the latest forecasts and radar images. We can follow law enforcement and fire departments on Twitter. We can often get better video/photographs from neighbors at the scene.
It brings me back to Hammer’s challenge: What won’t we cover?
What if we did not chase every buzz of the police scanner? What if we concentrated on our role as verifiers and storytellers rather than updaters and stenographers? What if we prized context and depth above immediacy?
For the past year, with the help of my Tow-Knight #disruptive fellowship and the support of my university, I have been exploring these newer threads of journalism, visiting creative places that think differently about “news.” In this time of rising news deserts, part of the training of the next generation must include deciding how to use dwindling resources most creatively.
As we rework Drury’s program, here are some broad themes we’re exploring:
- Verified curation: We have come a long way from the original conception of “citizen journalists.” How do we tap into the local energy on Facebook, Twitter, and other social spaces without resorting to superficial “What do you think?” queries? How can we verify the work of the Janis Krumses flying through the mass and help people make sense of it, like Storyful and PolitiFact? How can we develop networks of public documenters to collaborate with journalists like City Bureau in Chicago? How do we help the community navigate the mass of information available locally?
- Community engagement: Following the leads of innovators such as Carrie Brown and Joy Mayer, we want to explore how we listen to our communities and foster engagement and trust through transparency. How can we adapt engagement strategies developed and tested by Talia Stroud’s team at the University of Texas’ Center for Media Engagement? How do we incorporate news events into our processes as successfully as the Texas Tribune? How do we serve as explainers of the media process, tapping into the work of Claire Wardle and First Draft News?
- Resonant storytelling: Using our low-power FM station as a hub, how can we develop a new community news voice, similar to Chicago’s WBEZ or St. Louis Public Radio? Both use Hearken’s listening platform and have created longform shows that resonate with a deep understanding of their communities (Curious City, Curious Louis, We Live Here). How do we incorporate in-depth audio documentaries into a curriculum originally built around video and online?
- Data analysis: How can we develop and maintain local databases, as ProPublica and NICAR have done for national data? Could we transform police blotters and other routine government information— much as Adrian Holovaty did with the original incarnation of EveryBlock —into useful actionable knowledge? How do we create a common base of trusted information about the area to help everyone make sense of the issues facing our community?
- Solutions-based accountability: How do we infuse a sense of Fourth Estate responsibility in this work? How do we temper anti-media sentiment while pushing for openness and government accountability? How do we go beyond identifying problems to exploring and evaluating solutions in our investigative projects, as recommended by the Solutions Journalism Network?
- Entrepreneurial resilience: How do we encourage innovative resilience and build a sense of economic understanding into our students’ ideas? How can they embrace an ethic of continuous improvement to ensure their connections with the community do not weaken as technology and habits change?
I know many colleagues around the world are wrestling with these same issues as they update and test new curricula. In the weeks ahead, I’ll be exploring these threads as we try to figure out how to take these broad strokes and turn them into a tangible curriculum for a small liberal-arts university.
How does this outline compare with yours? What areas are we missing? I’d love to hear about your experiments, and learn from your successes and failures.
