Journalism’s Biggest Problem isn’t a Lack of Money. It’s a Lack of Community.
A pair of recent controversies at two student newspapers have exposed the core challenge faced by all of embattled news media in 2019. It’s not what you’ve likely heard — a life-threatening lack of revenue, corporate consolidation, a hostile president. These problems orbit a central, elemental and relatively solvable problem that these student journalists have already begun to confront: We have little to no tangible relationship with the communities we purport to serve. We don’t know our audience.
I mean, we “know” them. Thanks to metrics provided by Google Analytics, Chartbeat, and other powerful technology, we know how many of them there are, where they’re physically located, their demographics, their “affinities,” how long they spend on our sites, how long they watch our videos, what they skip in our podcasts. We “know” everything we need to know about them to monetize them for advertisers, or to convert them to subscriptions, or to alert shareholders to their swelling ranks.
But when it comes to knowing the actual people in our communities and audiences — literally knowing their names and lives and actual interests and concerns and stories — conventional journalism is critically out of touch. Student reporters have learned this the hard way over the last month, starting at Harvard, where editors at The Crimson have weathered backlash for soliciting a response from ICE in an article about the student-driven Abolish ICE campaign on campus.
At colleges and universities, conventional journalism is often viewed as an outgrowth of power and privilege by both the left and the right.
Of course, The Crimson did the right thing here. Soliciting comment from the target of a major protest is Reporting 101 for any responsible news organization. But a population of students who view ICE as an existential threat didn’t necessarily take Reporting 101. They and their families have probably seen ICE agents in their neighborhoods. They probably haven’t seen journalists. They don’t know what “soliciting comment” even means or looks like. To wit, activists at Harvard even launched a petition asserting, “In this political climate, a request for comment is virtually the same as tipping [ICE] off, regardless of how they are contacted,” and further demanding that The Crimson “apologize for the harm they inflicted on the undocumented community” and “declare their commitment to protecting undocumented students on campus.” The petition has since received more than 1,000 signatures.
On Nov. 10, Harvard’s Undergraduate Council narrowly approved an official statement expressing “solidarity with the concerns of [student activist group] Act on a Dream, undocumented students, and other marginalized individuals on campus.” Crimson editor Kristine Guillaume again defended the reporting, adding that she and Crimson leadership had met with its critics to explain The Crimson’s process. Nevertheless, according to The Crimson, student groups including Act on a Dream and Harvard College Democrats are boycotting The Crimson and its reporters until it changes policy — basically demanding the suspension of Reporting 101 under the guise of audience sensitivity.
Suspending Reporting 101 is basically what happened at Northwestern University, where the student-run Daily Northwestern has drawn national attention after apologizing for its coverage of protests at a Nov. 5 campus appearance by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions. After receiving complaints from protesters that their photographs and reporting — -from a public event — exposed students to risk of legal action, institutional opprobrium, or general online immortality, The Daily retracted photos and heavily revised its reporting from the Sessions visit.
“Some protesters found photos posted to reporters’ Twitter accounts retraumatizing and invasive,” explained an editorial published by The Daily on Nov. 10 (coincidentally, the same day student government was litigating The Crimson’s coverage at Harvard). “Those photos have since been taken down,” the editorial continued. “On one hand, as the paper of record for Northwestern, we want to ensure students, administrators and alumni understand the gravity of the events that took place Tuesday night. However, we decided to prioritize the trust and safety of students who were photographed.”
Under no circumstances did The Daily need to apologize or amend its story. The event and protest were unambiguously public. The protest was unquestionably newsworthy. Nobody “retraumatized” anybody. Ethically and legally, this is open and shut.
Yet after quelling my initial spasms of outrage at this Flagrant Defiance of Journalistic Principles, the journalism educator in me intervened to interrogate what really happened here. I remembered how black student activists at Sacramento State, where I advise the student-run State Hornet news site, frustratedly alleged earlier this year that State Hornet reporters only covered them during protests. I remembered how one of our State Hornet staffers complained around the same time that her peers’ reporting on people of color reflected only political activism, tension, arrests, and controversy — a mere sliver of that population’s representation in the campus community.
My second-guessing persisted as the controversy of the last week snowballed. I sensed the conventional wisdom missing the point. Charles Whitaker, dean of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, tried to be constructive. “I say let’s have a dialogue about what journalism is and what you might expect when you hold a protest in a public setting,” Whitaker wrote to the protesters. “Feel free to critique the coverage. That’s what The Daily’s opinion pages are for. Better yet, join the staff. The Daily is not and should not be the lone provenance of Medill students. I assure you, your input would be welcomed.”
Whitaker thinks he’s being magnanimous here, and I believe he’s got good intentions. Adding new and unique voices to a newsroom is a great idea, and we try to do that every semester at The State Hornet. But that dismayed State Hornet staffer I mentioned above opted not to return to work. Even allowing that the Northwestern protesters might misunderstand press freedom and journalists’ rights, journalists themselves misunderstand those students. The “dialogue” to date demands reckoning with the fundamental and very real distrust rippling out from the epicenter of colleges and universities, where conventional journalism is often viewed as an outgrowth of power and privilege by both the left and the right.
Is this a misapprehension? Who am I to say? New York Times politics reporter Astead Herndon crucially underscored this point after the Northwestern snafu:
This assessment makes the most sense to me. In light of the events at Harvard and Northwestern (not to mention in our own staff meetings at Sac State), it doesn’t seem like heresy or even much of a stretch to suggest that news organizations and journalists should respect, respond to and perhaps also steadily rethink those dynamics in their day-to-day operations. There’s only one way to truly engage a person — a greeting, an introduction, a conversation. Honest listening. No strings attached. And newsrooms need to do this work in their communities, not the other way around.
There’s a business case to be made for community, too. After a generation of giving audiences a free, ad-supported product online, news organizations now want to convert these audiences to subscribers through discounts and limited-time offers. Some are even seeking donors to support reporting projects with professed civic value. Often, these campaigns are accompanied by a value proposition branded “Support Local Journalism” or #ReadLocal. Who wouldn’t want to do that, right? Because… Local. Right?
But when was the last time you gave a “local” stranger attention, let alone money, let alone your credit card number to charge you a low introductory rate that inevitably balloons to hundreds of dollars a year? And then, as Nieman Lab editor Joshua Benton recently showed in the troubling case of the Los Angeles Times, they never follow up or invite you over for a cup of coffee or drop by to say “Hi”? This is no way to treat your audience — not your loyal audience, not your prospective audience. This is no way to treat your community.
Indeed, every facet of community needs to be taken seriously for the survival of a free press. At the university level, from Sac State to Northwestern to Harvard, we have to teach it. Even as someone who savors a good fight, I doubt the appropriate lesson here is to scold or resist accountability to the people we’re supposed to serve. It’s certainly not appropriate, at the professional level, to assume our work is inherently worthy of their money.
What’s the solution for journalists? We talk a good community game at the university level, usually in the context of how journalistic techniques serve an abstract audience out there in the world. We talk about the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics, which begins with directives to Seek Truth and Report It and to Minimize Harm. But what does that really look like in practice? Traditional standards and mottos like “Audience above all” make sense in a vacuum, but journalists, editors and photographers don’t work in a vacuum. Journalists at Northwestern and beyond have been accused of purveying “trauma porn” in the hungry pursuit of dramatic images and videos and quotes that bring the “audience” in. It’s upsetting to think that’s how any journalist might be perceived, let alone a student journalist still attempting to figure all this out.
So maybe if we can teach students about the SPJ Code of Ethics, then we can ask for examples of how they (and we) practice those ethics. If we can teach students about Associated Press style, then we can teach them how to ask community leaders to coffee. If we can teach them about bias, objectivity, and “getting both sides of the story,” then we can teach them to explore those concepts with skeptical audiences and actual sources who aren’t in our classes. If we can teach them about time-consuming public records requests and data analysis, then we can teach them how to get out from behind their computers and go knock on doors. If we can teach them how to use smartphones to cover campus unrest, then we can teach them how to use those same phones to make tough phone calls and hear vital feedback.
Again, the student journalists at Harvard and Northwestern did nothing wrong, but I think that’s the wrong conclusion to draw. The reality is that our communities demand better. And better can’t wait.
Stu VanAirsdale is the faculty adviser at The State Hornet, the student news organization at Sacramento State. Send him your comments or ideas for Du Jour articles at stvcsus@gmail.com.
