Why journalism’s listening cure is very much a work in progress

Journalists and editors are these days often told to better listen to their audiences. The listening cure has become a mantra, speaking to what ails much of journalism (we haven’t listened in the past) and pointing to an idea that might well fix it.

If we listened more, they would distrust us less.

No argument thus far. But it is not enough to just say it.

How do you get journalism — and journalists — to take the cure? Showing and sharing what’s happening is a vital first step.

Check out the Year of Listening initiative here and sign up to The Local Fix newsletter here. In both places, you’ll find reasons to be optimistic about the power of listening — and how it could revolutionize journalism.

Because truly listening to audience — and acting upon what it says — is a transformative and for many journalists, an unnatural, even uncomfortable act.

It shifts the power from the content creator to the content receiver. It rebalances that relationship. It makes audiences and reporters co-conspirators, collaborators. The journos are no longer on top.

It also challenges another and little-discussed dynamic: the fact is, journalists actually do listen. A lot. But it is largely to each other.

Journalists staunchly defend the need to self-regulate. That’s only fit and proper. If journalism is its own estate, then it needs to be a bulwark against the other estates that seek to regulate or restrict its power.

But being self-regulated and self-reverential means that many of the standards, codes and rewards for a doing the job — and doing the job well — essentially come from other journalists.

Journalists seek and often crave approval from other journalists first and foremost. If you’ve ever been to a journalism awards night (where the gongs are decided by fellow journos), you will know what I mean.

Journalists ‘create,’ regulate, and support themselves and each other. Who else should a journalist believe when they are told they’re doing a great job? A politician? A bureaucrat? A judge? The public?

Of course, all the above may find the need or desire to praise and recognize what journalists do. A third-party endorsement is always nice. Yet it is not really what counts most to most journalists.

Is this a problem? Is there an alternative? Well, it becomes a problem when listening to each other creates a cultural bias against listening to audiences.

Of course, that is only an actual problem if you believe listening to audiences is more important than listening to your peers. And I don’t think we are, as an industry, there yet.

On a practical level, I wonder whether asking reporters to spend more time listening to audiences rather than each other might well be asking too much in this age of shrinking newsroom resources.

On a cultural level, the practices of most newsrooms and the industry as whole are not biased to listening first.

Editors and reporters may be watching what the audience is doing with and to any one story. They might be spending time trying to understand and interpret audience trends and desires.

But they are biased towards action, to finding a scoop, to making journalism. The industrial model of journalism is a hard ethos to shift.

So, we are at best in a transition to listening. Here are few suggestions to speed that up:

1. Introduce ‘listening’ categories in industry/peer judged awards.

2. Publish the names of the ‘best listener’ reporters within the newsroom on a weekly basis.

3. Enlist newsroom leaders as internal listening evangelists.

4. Fund research into how to change how reporters and editors think of themselves and their industry.

5. Teach journalism students about the value of and need to listen as a primary driver of professional identity.

It might just be a matter of time before the listening cure becomes commonplace. But as much as I think many reporters get it (or are getting it), what we are talking about is a massive cultural shift. It is going to take time, commitment, practice, failure, success and money.

It took several decades for the talking cure of psychoanalysis to be widely accepted. We may be facing a similar time frame for the listening cure for journalism. Let’s hope not.

Peter Fray is co-director of the Centre for Media Transition at University Technology Sydney, the co-host of the Fourth Estate radio show/podcast on radio station 2SER, an adviser to the News Integrity Initiative and a former editor-in-chief of the Sydney Morning Herald.