Three ideas for making online newsgathering feel reciprocal, communal, and natural
I’ve spent a lot of my life online, so it can be easy to take for granted what finding community on the internet looks like — and what it feels like when a journalist swoops into a preexisting digital space, breaks the rules to ask a question, and leaves without regard for the distrust they might have sowed.
Subreddits, Facebook groups, and Discord servers are communities much like the neighborhoods local journalists cover on the regular. And while reporters have become a lot better at recognizing what parachuting looks like in real life, it can be hard to notice when you’re doing fly-by journalism online.
Been chased out of a neighborhood Facebook group by angry commenters after asking a question about a longstanding local controversy? That’s probably parachute journalism.
Been heckled by Redditors after posting a sourcing call that doesn’t offer anonymity? That’s probably parachute journalism.
Been flamed on X for covering a “viral” social media trend that’s actually been around forever? That’s probably parachute journalism.
In other words, digital parachute journalism looks like glomming onto a community only when it’s trending. It looks like diving into virtual spaces without paying attention to a groups’ norms (let alone the care it takes to maintain them). Sometimes, this is an unfortunate part of doing our jobs. Others, it leaves a whole host of damage: broken trust, disillusionment, and a lack of faith in the media to get — well — anything right.
Part of my job at The Philadelphia Inquirer is covering how Philadelphians use the internet to make memes, money, and meaning. My work takes me to parts of the internet I can’t access without a lot of goodwill, like Swiftie-led addiction recovery groups, a Discord server where city officials were wheeling and dealing cryptocurrency, and the home of X’s foremost Liza Minnelli stan.
These stories took weeks to report! Luckily, there are a few tried-and-true tips journalists can incorporate into their process when it comes to reporting online, regardless of their deadline.
Here are top takeaways from our Lightning Chat on how to build trust — and avoid parachuting — in online communities:
#1: Try to give after you take
Members of niche internet communities are protective of their spaces, which is why it’s important to remember the fundamental power imbalance of being a reporter in a (semi)-private space.
These spaces have moderators and rules for a handful of reasons: To keep their communities small, to insulate themselves from outside hate, and to weed out trolls. And here you are as journalists preparing to open these spaces to more members, more vitriol, and more trolls, regardless of intention.
How do you get around that? By giving a little!
Philadelphia Inquirer social platforms editor Vaughn Johnson recommends sharing gift links to paywalled content in groups you’re looking to build relationships with. This strategy worked especially well on Reddit for The Inquirer. Offering free articles about how to navigate things such as Philly’s public school system in r/Philadelphia has helped the subreddit go from a forum that was openly hostile to journalists to a place where reporters can be in direct contact with readers through semi-regular AMAs.
If paywalls are out of your control, how are some small ways to give back:
- Ask for feedback on your reporting: Try to make the information exchange a two-way street by being open to questions from community members about your reporting process, or, after a story has published, questions about why you made certain editorial choices.
- Send a newspaper: Even if a digital space is based in one location, the internet is decentralized, so members can be anywhere. If you interviewed someone who lives 3,000 miles away about a story that touches your hometown, consider shipping them a newspaper free of charge so they can see and touch the final product.
#2: Find ways to mesh journalism ethics with community norms
Journalism is an industry that values transparency, identity, and open access, which can often cut across the norms of many digital communities, which strive to uphold anonymity and meter out access based on vibes.
How do you remain ethical while respecting a space you don’t necessarily belong in? How do you respect sources’ desire for anonymity while accepting the reality that doing so might make it difficult to do your job?
Well you have to compromise — not in terms of why you do things, but how. Work with moderators or respected community members to come up with plans for conducting interviews, contacting sources, and thumbing through information.
Yes, that sounds counterintuitive: We’re used to gatekeepers denying access or requesting exceptions to the rules because they’re hiding something. In reality, most internet communities want to have a say in the reporting process because they’re deeply personal spaces that can substitute as a diary.
Case in point: When Morgan Sung was reporting on the people who can’t stop making oddbody Furbies (aka modifying the classic 90s toy to have anything but its signature oval shape), she was led to Discord communities where members discussed using the revamped Furbies as outlets for body dysmorphia, gender dysphoria, or their disabilities. In other words, deeply personal crap.
In order to make sure Sung had enough access to the Discords for her reporting — but not enough where she’d accidentally come across and use sensitive information — Sung worked with moderators to determine a list of channels she’d have access to. She also worked with the community to create her own channel where members could ask her questions or volunteer for interviews.
These guardrails gave the community agency, according to Sung, and made them feel comfortable sharing intimate details because they got to opt-in to the experience, not opt out.
#3: Be an honest broker, even if it means telling the internet what they don’t want to hear
Let’s be real: Sometimes, you won’t be able to reach a compromise. Sometimes, a community is just going to be outright hostile to you because they’ve been burned in the past by other reporters, or in some cases, because you’re a member of the “fake news media.” (Yawn.)
Those moments suck, but they’re also moments of clarity where you get to explain how your process works and why you can’t divert from it.
The goal of these explanations is not to make potential sources like you. Rather, they work to help set expectations of what’s reasonable to ask of a journalist, and at the very least, make clear that we don’t make up the rules as we go.
Let’s use anonymity as a case study. We know granting it is a rarity, and even then, we’d likely have to know the person’s name, alongside our editor and legal department. A potential source doesn’t know that — unless you tell them, so instead of forcing someone on the record or giving up altogether, try explaining why the rules you follow exist, and even more importantly, what you can give them to help feel safe going on the record.
At the end of the day, people value transparency, so they’d rather see a let-down of an explanation than nothing altogether.
All in all, I recommend every digital spaces as analogs for real life ones. A lot of the tips I outlined are largely the same as best practices for IRL community engagement, which can feel separate from digital engagement, even if it isn’t.
A good rule of thumb if you forget everything else: If you wouldn’t do it to a source on the scene, why try it with one behind a screen?
Beatrice Forman is a general assignment reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer, where she gets to spend a lot of time exploring Philly’s corner of the internet. She’s also the project coordinator for U.S. Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative of newsrooms committed to better political reporting. Beatrice has previously worked at Billy Penn/WHYY, Resolve Philly, and for SiriusXM radio host Michael Smerconish. She holds a B.A from the University of Pennsylvania. She served as Gather’s guest curator for the month of May.
