Inclusion is the New Objectivity
I have worked for both Italian and American media companies in New York City. Aside from their size — small foreign bureaus vs. the headquarters of a national media organization — their approach to setting the daily news agenda was the same.
First thing in the morning, top news executives, assignment editors and some reporters — a few teleconferenced in — would gather for a power session, and pitch story ideas in their areas of coverage. They would decide what was newsworthy when it came to politics, the economy, markets, foreign events, crime, entertainment, culture, you name it.
They prescribed an information menu for an audience that they rarely talked with and certainly would have not invited to the table. This news production system operated on the assumption that journalists and editors knew it all. It was up to them to decide what others, meaning the public, ought to know and would know.
Watching from the sidelines, as I rarely attended those meetings, I was both awed by the confidence of the people in the room, and troubled by it.
“Gee, they have a lot of responsibility,” I used to say to myself. How could they be so sure that they knew everything worth considering on a given topic, on a given day? I wondered. And how did they know that what they decided should be reported was relevant to their audience?
Fast-forward 20 years, and it turns out I was onto something: They didn’t always know.
The advent of digital technologies gave audiences the power to look beyond traditional media to fulfill their information needs, exposing the limitations of the old, non inclusive model of news production.
What I didn’t question, at the time, was whether that method could truly be objective, meaning “impartial,” and whether including the public was incompatible with balanced journalism.
Communication should flow both ways, we now know, and the public does matter. How to engage and collaborate with it is a question pushing the frontiers of journalism, particularly at the local level.
Scott Lewis, editor-in-chief of the investigative nonprofit Voice of San Diego, clarified that idea for me in an interview published with the NiemanLab.
“Newspapers play this strange game of ‘objectivity’ that is really subjectivity,” he said. “The moment they decide what to cover, they’re making a subjective decision about what’s important.”
That’s why he decided, unapologetically, to declare what his publication stands for, and to give the public a way “to weigh in” and decide which stories to report.
In this framework, inclusion it new objectivity.
Jennifer Brandel, former journalist turned tech CEO, took it further. She developed Hearken, whose name means “to listen attentively.” It’s a platform that allows newsrooms to connect with members of the audience through embeddable forms. Journalists get to ask carefully crafted questions to guide the reporting, and even invite the public to participate.
The result is “people-powered journalism,” as she calls it.
In a 2015 podcast interview with Current, as well as in Medium articles, Brandel explains that including the public doesn’t mean losing journalistic boundaries of integrity. On the contrary, journalists remain the experts at canvassing audience feedback about what to cover, but they retain the audience as a constant companion and consultant along the process.
What interests me is how I can apply Hearken’s tools to my community: immigrants in New York City facing integration barriers. As an independent journalist, I don’t have the resources of a newsroom, but could I reach immigrants by asking an organization that caters to them if I could, say, embed a brief questionnaire in its newsletter?
I attended an event this week at the Harlem YMCA, which organized it to welcome immigrants in the community. Among the vendors and the nonprofits that participated I made connections that I’m planning to explore.