Delivering news using the most basic social media: the streets
Occupying the public space as a way to reconnect with a disillusioned audience
Three months have passed since the start of my John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford, when I arrived after a cross-country trip in a vintage — but still gleaming — Cadillac, loaded with buckets of glue, a bunch of Dysturb’s mural-sized news photos, a lot of ideas to assault Silicon Valley, and explore the following issue:
How might photojournalists reach a wider audience bypassing news filter bubbles and traditional media channels?
The fracture between the media and the audience has rarely been as deep as in recent years. For a part of the U.S. population and the current administration, mainstream media has become the enemy, accused of fabricating fake news and using “alternative facts” to reinforce bias. In France where I’m from, studies show that youth in particular don’t read or trust the news. Meanwhile, it has never been easier to widely spread unverified information online.
The days when a newspaper front page or national evening broadcast held the public’s attention are long gone. Instead, the news has become increasingly dependent on social media platforms. “Likes” and “shares” from online communities — sorted and hierarchized by algorithms — dictate our news feed. The algorithms prioritize what we are most likely to click on, depending on our interests and values, which exposes the audience to partial news. In other words, the algorithms create news filter bubbles. And while it helps secure advertising revenues, it also isolates from the diversity of opinions and perspectives. As a result, polarized opposition blocs are not only gaining ground, but they are also losing the means to communicate with each other.
It is more critical and urgent than ever to explore how journalists can reach their audience bypassing filter bubbles, and how the public can be exposed to large array of information capable of undermining their own bias.
About Dysturb
If you’re not familiar with it, Dysturb is a guerrilla media movement making visual information freely accessible to a wider audience using the most basic social media: the streets. Led by a group of photojournalists, writers and artists, Dysturb presents photojournalism in an innovative way, completely independent of the restrictions of conventional news publishing channels.
Our collective began with mural-size photographs pasted in public places: city walls, skate parks, and school hallways. In stark black and white, we make billboard-size prints of news images, in a format usually used for color commercial advertisements. We leverage the same tools used so efficiently by advertisers to reach the audience, and apply this approach to the news. Why? Because we want to approach crucial issues — climate change, women’s rights, the rise of populism or the refugee crisis — and place them directly in front of people’s eyes.
To date, our teams have installed more than 1,000 murals in cities worldwide and visited nearly 100 schools. We select the photographs that we paste from a diverse pool of voices in a network of 10,000 photojournalists spread around the globe, with an emphasis on strong imagery that can stop a passer-by and raise questions.
During the past four years, we’ve partnered with major institutions, organizations and cultural events including the United Nations, the European Parliament, World Press Photo, the Magnum Foundation, the International Center of Photography, Instagram, and various festivals.
We choose the locations of our paste-ups according to foot traffic, and we take into consideration the neighborhood’s social profile. We also aim at pairing our activations with an educational programming. In this information age, traditional journalism institutions are not reaching the majority of the youth. This is the reason why we have a network of journalists who visit schools to teach media literacy — students learn where and how to get informed, how to verify and cross-check pieces of information, how to avoid spreading misinformation, what it is like to be in the field, and how the media industry functions. We also provide context for the students about the photograph that we paste within the school and discuss the issue it documents.
Dysturb supports the core goals of photojournalism — that is, to enhance interactions between the people touched by social, political or environmental injustice with the audience and those who can potentially help. Our mission is to spark a dialogue around important and too often under-reported issues.
#ReframeClimate in the Bay Area
As I arrived in San Francisco in early September, I was joined by Dysturb’s co-director, Pierre Terdjman and our long-time collaborator, Justin Mignot. Together, we spearheaded a campaign titled #ReframeClimate throughout the Bay Area, in collaboration with the Magnum Foundation and the Asia Society’s Coal + Ice show at Fort Mason. This activation — 30 paste-ups and two conferences — challenges the stereotypical notions of what climate change looks like in order to expand and deepen perceptions about its many implications. It was the third iteration of this collaborative campaign, which was initiated at the occasion of COP21, the United Nations Conference on Climate Change, held in Paris in 2015.
The September event allowed me to start making contacts with local institutions and high schools in order to probe ideas and develop prototypes that aim at engaging the audience with the news, both in public spaces and schools. I strongly believe that photojournalism is a universal language with the power to demolish stereotypes. It can trigger discussions, alert consciences and further assist people with the keys to better understand world events. A combination of both physical and digital experiences may have a future within the media landscape. This mix can reach those disheartened by the news, or living in news deserts, especially young people.
Navigating Stanford
Apart from researching my initial umbrella question, I’ve been focusing on business strategy and development with some of my fellow fellows, and on improving my managerial skills at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. I’ve also been brainstorming about services and products that could deepen our engagement with our audience, grow it, and pursue Dysturb’s journalistic mission while being sustainable for both the organization and the freelance photojournalism community. I particularly enjoyed the Brown Institute for Media Innovation lecture series and the Design Thinking methodology at the D.School, where students from all departments are brought together to brainstorm and foster innovation.
If you have any comment or idea about my current research, or would like to share a Cadillac ride throughout the Bay Area and get glue all over yourself, please get in touch at: bpetit@stanford.edu
Bibliography
To conclude, and especially for prospective fellows interested in my research area, here’s a bibliography of publications that informed and helped me write my application to the JSK Journalism Fellowship, along with a few newsletters I’d recommend you subscribe to:
Newsletters
- American Press Institute: https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/
- Brown Institute for Media Innovation: https://brown.columbia.edu/
- Columbia Journalism Review: https://www.cjr.org/tow-center
- Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center: https://shorensteincenter.org
- Institute for Nonprofit News: https://inn.org/
- MIT Technology Review: https://www.technologyreview.com/newsletters/
- Open News / SRCCON: https://www.opennews.org/
- Recode Daily: https://www.recode.net/recode-daily
- The Center for Public Integrity: https://www.publicintegrity.org/email-subscribe?mc_campaign=PubliciHeader
Articles, books, essays
- Alex Shashkevich, Stanford scholar analyzes responses to algorithms in journalism, criminal justice, Stanford News, Aug 1, 2017: https://news.stanford.edu/2017/08/01/stanford-scholar-analyzes-responses-algorithms-journalism-criminal-justice/
- Ben Dickson, How blockchain helps fight fake news and filter bubbles, thenextweb, Aug 24, 2017: https://thenextweb.com/contributors/2017/08/24/blockchain-helps-fight-fake-news-filter-bubbles/
- Carrie Spector, Stanford scholars observe ‘experts’ to see how they evaluate the credibility of information online, Stanford News, Oct 24, 2017: https://news.stanford.edu/2017/10/24/fact-checkers-outperform-historians-evaluating-online-information/
- Eduardo Graells-Garrido, Mounia Lalmas, Daniele Quercia, Data Portraits: Connecting People of Opposing Views, Cornell University Library, Nov 19, 2013: https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.4658
- Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think, Penguin Books, April 24, 2012: https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Filter_Bubble.html?id=EDoEywAACAAJ
- Elisabeth Ponsot, A complete guide to seeing the news beyond your cozy filter bubble, Quartz, Feb 23, 2017: https://qz.com/896000/a-complete-guide-to-seeing-beyond-your-cozy-filter-bubble/
- Elizabeth Hansen and Emily Goligoski, Guide to audience revenue and engagement, Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, Feb 8, 2018: https://www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/guide-to-audience-revenue-and-engagement.php?mc_cid=d2ac823c5a&mc_eid=fe3a77c899
- Emerging Technology from the arXiv, How to Burst the “Filter Bubble” that Protects Us from Opposing Views, MIT Technology Review, Nov 29, 2013: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/522111/how-to-burst-the-filter-bubble-that-protects-us-from-opposing-views/
- Fred Ritchin, Where do we go from here? A wake-up call for visual journalism in the “post-factual” era, Medium, Nov 24, 2016: https://witness.worldpressphoto.org/where-do-we-go-from-here-8cf1131e23db
- Jim Steyer, Popping the filter bubble, Stanford News, Jan 4, 2017: https://news.stanford.edu/2017/01/04/popping-filter-bubble/
- Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow, Jesse M. Shapiro, Is the Internet Causing Political Polarization? Evidence from Demographics, The National Bureau of Economic Research, March 2017: https://www.nber.org/papers/w23258
- Mark Lorch, Why people believe in conspiracy theories — and how to change their minds, The Conversation, Aug 18, 2017: https://theconversation.com/why-people-believe-in-conspiracy-theories-and-how-to-change-their-minds-82514
- Noah Kulwin, Social media “filter bubbles” aren’t actually a thing, research suggests, Vice News, Apr 14, 2017: https://news.vice.com/en_ca/article/9kdjez/social-media-filter-bubbles-arent-actually-a-thing-research-suggests
- Sam Wineburg, Sarah McGrew, Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Online Civic Literacy, Stanford History Education Group, Nov 22, 2016: https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:fv751yt5934/SHEG%20Evaluating%20Information%20Online.pdf
- Sébastian Seibt, Les théories du complot ont la cote auprès des Français, France 24, Jan 9, 2018: https://www.france24.com/fr/20180109-theorie-complot-ifop-conspiracy-watch-vaccin-jfk-sondage
- Seth Flaxman, Sharad Goel, Justin M. Rao, Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Online News Consumption, Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 80, Issue S1, 1 January 2016, Pages 298–320: https://academic.oup.com/poq/article/80/S1/298/2223402#
- Titus Plattner, Why personalization will be the next revolution in the news industry, Medium, Dec 15, 2017: https://medium.com/jsk-class-of-2018/personalization-3a4cf928a875
Benjamin Petit can be reached at bpetit@stanford.edu. Follow him on Instagram @bendophoto, Facebook @bendophoto and on Twitter @bendophoto.
More info about Dysturb: www.dysturb.com, IG @dysturb, Facebook @dysturb, Twitter @dysturbofficial; and on Benjamin Petit’s photojournalism work: www.benjaminpetit.com.
