Can we please move on from “multimedia”? There’s a better way to think about your newsroom’s digital production
The term might still be technically accurate, but I think its connotation is holding us back. I’ve tried using a platform-agnostic approach in USC Annenberg’s student newsroom.
By now, it’s self-evident that journalists have more to do in the course of our work. Pick your poison: You have to write your story and tweet. You have to finish your TV package and turn it around as a web story. You have to report your story and get (vertical) photos on the scene for an Instagram Story. And on and on.
At the same time, it’s obvious that a journalist’s output is less defined by the format of the news organization she works for than it used to be. You might be hired to work on a TV station’s app, or to make video for a newspaper’s website.
Journalism schools are adjusting accordingly. USC Annenberg, where I teach, has moved from offering undergraduate majors in “print and digital journalism” and “broadcast and digital journalism” to simply offering a B.A. in journalism. Part of my job overseeing digital in Annenberg’s co-curricular newsroom has been to apply the philosophy laid out in the curriculum to a fast-paced newsroom environment. Let me say here that I have the luxury of figuring out a digital structure and approach without having to worry about feeding a (legacy or otherwise) moneymaker.
So in this world, how do we acknowledge, teach and practice the idea that the skills you use in journalism are less defined by the origins of the organization you work for? One way to do it is to pile on the formats: You have to produce, say, a broadcast package, upload it to YouTube, write a text story from it and embed your video, then write a tweet. That’s what some people call “multimedia” — and for the record I hate that word. It’s essentially shorthand for: You have a preferred way to tell stories and all other platforms are secondary.
As I’ve written before, I believe there is a better approach, and that is teaching and executing a diverse set of storytelling skills by being platform agnostic. In our newsroom, we call it the “story-first mindset.” It means that reporters and editors focus on the story they want to tell and determine, among the platforms where we publish, the best format. Or, they tell stories different ways across platforms, instead of just posting a link or sharing a video designed for another format. The platform-agnostic approach allows us to focus on the basics — well-reported and verified information, compelling and well-shot visuals, strong writing, good sound — and asks students to determine how to best feature those components.
We first implemented these values in our newsroom when my colleagues Amara Aguilar and Rebecca Haggerty pioneered a native social media storytelling desk, which complemented the other outlets where our newsroom publishes: website, radio and TV. We loved the creativity and platform-appropriate stories coming out of that desk and ultimately tried to push the philosophy forward by better integrating it throughout the newsroom. As a former editor on mobile and social media desks, I’ve long wondered what newsrooms look like when those desks phase out, as journalists better understand that storytelling across platforms is everyone’s responsibility.
So we moved to a structure where the students who work for the digital arm of our newsroom are taught not to default to a particular format. And we discourage students from coming in with an idea about where they want to publish and later finding a story to fill that space. Instead, we harness the multiplatform skills they learn in class by allowing them to focus on telling a story well, natively in the space they have determined is best. Our editors understand they are responsible for more than one medium, instead of thinking they only worry about the website and let the social team handle the rest.
This philosophy plays out daily in our newsroom, and in the first weeks of the semester we outline the strategy this way for new students. One of my favorite examples of a story where we were able to execute a platform-agnostic strategy — and still cover our bases across various formats — was about a bike repair shop owner who was being told by the university that he could no longer have his location on campus. We had traditional text stories, TV packages and radio pieces, but we also used the elements of the story to our advantage in other formats — for example with a map on Twitter and a text-on-screen video on Facebook.
Now, I realize these examples are not particularly unheard of or revelatory. You see professional news organizations doing Twitter threads with native content all the time, and I’m assuming you’re not on Facebook or Twitter if you’ve never seen a text-on-screen video. But in a multiplatform newsroom like ours, where our output includes legacy and new media formats and reporters — not video, mobile or social teams — are producing 99% of our content, we’ve had to emphasize the platform-agnostic strategy to avoid only linking to text stories or YouTube on social, using certain platforms mainly to drive traffic elsewhere or publishing promos with little news value.
It’s harder for me and the faculty I work with to implement this philosophy. We have to explain it to students and other faculty alike. So why do we go through the trouble?
1. It encourages digital best practices. Why are newsrooms hiring whole teams to publish for Instagram Stories and/or Snapchat Discover? Why is your Facebook feed full of videos with text on screen? Why aren’t tweets and push alerts just the text of the print headline? Because stories that are produced specifically for a particular platform are better. Full stop. Journalists have known this for decades (radio needs good sound! TV needs compelling visuals!), but it took a long time for the industry to acknowledge that it’s also true for the internet. We’ve (mostly) moved away from simply publishing a newspaper online, and similarly we are moving away from seeing social media as secondary to another product, be it a website, a TV broadcast or a podcast. Here’s another way to think about it: Social media teams don’t ask an evening broadcast team to aim the camera on a Twitter feed and start scrolling. Similarly, they (should) produce video that is made for social media, not post a video intended for another medium on Twitter. This is not to say that the whole argument is centered around social media — it’s true for all platforms. But, as anyone who’s worked on a social media desk (🙋) can probably tell you, this difference in perspective often manifests there.
By encouraging students to approach their stories with a platform-agnostic mindset, I hope we are graduating journalists who are acutely attuned to the needs of audiences in the varying media where they publish. They might not produce on as many platforms per shift in our newsroom, but they will do better on each one. When it comes time in their professional lives to “turn something around for digital,” their training will allow for better execution in that space.
2. It’s better training for students to develop critical thinking about journalism formats, as they inevitably continue to evolve. What will journalism look like in 10 years? We don’t know exactly. I believe the best training we can provide for the future is critical thinking. Why are stories told this way, and who are these stories reaching? What is the person reading, watching or listening to your story doing simultaneously? Sitting on the train? Scrolling through Facebook before bed? Cooking dinner? With the internet and especially with mobile, we know the answer to that question less and less. So what is most important here? Is it that you learn a series of particular formats? No. It’s that you take a step back to look at how information is consumed and optimize your storytelling for the various modes of consumption.
So teaching students that there is a primary mode and then you adapt that primary format to these certain secondary formats is a losing long-term strategy. We are far from being in a static media environment. So, I hope that when students focus on the basic components of good storytelling first and use that information to determine where to tell the story, we will produce more critical thinking and make them more discerning news producers.
3. It’s centered around the audience and not on the news organization. Approaching stories by determining the best platform rather than feeling you have to fill many platforms, or that some platforms are just secondary, is a better way to tell a complete story in one space, instead of assuming your audience will tap on your link, tune in at 5 p.m. or get the “link in bio.” It is my conviction that a journalist’s job is not just to put information out into the world and assume or hope it is consumed. It is our job to do everything we can to ensure that it is, in fact, consumed. So we can either use the many platforms at our disposal to serve our needs (read our story, listen to our show), or we can serve the audience’s needs, which are: I’m here on this platform and I need/want information. Thinking “story first” and native to the platform allows journalists to better serve this audience need.
Now, you may point out that there are many very legitimate concerns about ~the platforms~, including when we are on their domains instead of our own. Telling stories natively on various social media platforms means we are ceding control, and often revenue. I get it, and for the record, I am a fan of the subscription strategy, which you could argue goes against my point here: Instead of telling students to publish natively across platforms, we should be training them to drive audiences to a core product. OK, but if you want to do that, that core product needs to be stellar. It needs to fill a need for the audience that prompts them to part with their money. In other words, it needs to be audience-focused — it needs to put them and their needs first. And boom, I’m back to my point in bold above. In this iteration of the argument, it ties in with point No. 2 as well: My job is produce good journalists and critical thinkers, not to make money. The principles that flow out of being platform agnostic will set students up to develop better audience-focused products and stories across various newsroom situations.
OK, this is all nice for journalism schools and educators, and me in a newsroom that doesn’t have to make money. But does it have any impact outside that bubble? Is there something newsrooms can take from this? Maybe. Our newsroom — like so many legacy organizations — still needs to meet deadlines and create content for daily products and news digests, including radio and television broadcasts, a weekly newsletter and a weekly Alexa skill. While we don’t print a daily newspaper, many organizations still do. I acknowledge that it’s hard to feed those production schedules and not lose sight of the story-first mindset, and even our newsroom does not perfectly embody the philosophy all the time. Nonetheless, we have found ways to carry out the platform-agnostic strategy, and many of our stories, and our students’ approach, are better for it.
I hope that this subtle shift to a platform-agnostic mindset can make a difference in your newsroom, student or otherwise, when appropriate. Even if it’s small and doesn’t manifest structurally, the approach allows you to think about the story filling the right platforms instead of finding stories to fill certain platforms. That gets you one step closer to telling better stories, and to being ready to adjust as the media landscape continues to evolve.
