One question journalists should be asking
A simple yes-or-no question can rebuild the relationship between journalist and community, and possibly help democracy.
For this post, I’m not going to beat around the bush with a clever lead. Instead, I’m just going to get straight to the point and present the one question journalists should be asking, regardless of their medium or audience:
“Can I, the journalist, do some reporting for you, the community?”
There it is, stripped of its original context yet hinting at some reawakened spirit of journalism in the service of others. Now here’s how that question — that call to action — came about. It’s a good story, one that I hope will give the reader an appreciation for how profound the question truly is.
In December 2016, one month after the contentious US presidential election, journalists Jeremy Hay and Eve Pearlman invited female voters in San Francisco and Alabama to join a Facebook group for some moderated, online political discourse.
“Curiosity over conflict drives so many people, and we wanted to capitalize on that,” Hay explained recently to social journalists at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. “But we were not just collecting people to experiment with them, to do journalism to them or to get content out of them.”
“Our job as journalists was, ‘You want to know something about that community? We will go and find out for you’, ” Hay continued. “We were a service to these communities.”
So the journalists, working as a partnership between AL.com and Spaceship Media, posted news articles and original videos to the Facebook group, anticipating disparate reactions and comments. At times, the debate grew intense, Hay said. Emotion and confusion overtook reason and clarity.
But as part of the online moderation, Hay and his colleagues went beyond asking participants to cool their jets. They offered to gather facts. “While you’re talking about this, we’re going to do journalism for you,” Hay explained.
And it was during those heated debates that the reporters asked: “Can we help? Can we do some reporting for you?”
Imagine a community called democracy. All 330 million of its members have myriad concerns, yet their overall goal is to live equitably under the law. What can help them appreciate each others’ problems without prejudice? How might they fill their shared needs? What tool does this democracy have “to form a more perfect union”?
Journalism. And not the kind of journalism that assumes to know what democracy wants, or that dictates what democracy needs. I’m talking about the kind of journalism that listens with humility, that responds to a democracy’s concerns and reminds its members that they have agency.
Hay and his colleagues demonstrated how social journalism can do this. They didn’t gain any political converts — that was never the goal, Hay said. But as of this writing, an equal number of conservative and liberal participants have decided to keep the Facebook group active, even though the experiment ended in January 2017. Some are planning vacations together, Hay added.
Moreover, the remaining participants have admitted to Hay that exchanging opinions without a moderator — a journalist willing to gather and report facts — ain’t easy. Might this give them a greater appreciation for journalism’s role in democracy? I don’t know but I hope so.
All of this is why the question posed above is so important. Therefore, it is with an open mind and eyes set on a doable goal that I ask you, the reader: Can I do some reporting for you?
