Dear news media: Be authentic, empathetic and use the human brain to your advantage
Take the time to understand people and put yourself in different perspectives.
Information has never been this accessible. We walk around with a library, a news source and even a tracking device for some of our friends in our pockets. Convenience is at an unprecedented premium right now. And I think that many of you in the news industry have rested your laurels on this convenience.
For decades you have relied on strict rules about so-called objectivity, and you haven’t adjusted them much in the face of a changing workforce and media ecosystem. Though I’m a majoring in cognitive science at USC, I’m part of a class that’s looking at trust in news, and guess what: That system isn’t working for you anymore. Gallup says you’re at your lowest point in trust with the public. So what can you do to win it back? Here are a few diagnoses and recommended cures from my world.
Be transparent, not “objective”
Your bias is showing. I interviewed three of my friends from school, and I asked them what they distrust most about the media. In one way or another, they unequivocally answered lack of transparency in political and personal bias. Everyone has biases — it’s OK. But trying to hide it seems so disingenuous to me. No more of this subtle (or not so subtle, in some cases) passive-aggressive commentary that you see in a large portion of televised news channels and websites like the Huffington Post or Drudge Report.
I know changing your habits is a tall order, but as we can see with outlets like Breitbart, this problem only getting worse as more overtly opinionated sites are becoming more popular. And now, as fake news abounds, news consumers really have no idea whom to trust. There is evidence, such as a study released last year, that shows that if you’re upfront and honest about something you’re not normally comfortable with sharing, it generates a genuine response from those you have told. By being upfront with your audience, you can not only slow distrust but actually generate more trust. That’s something you should seriously consider.
Don’t underestimate empathy
Most humans have this in common: We want to know that we’re not alone in who we are and how we feel. Addressing your audience directly and often is the first step toward taking an empathetic path that helps people feel less alone in the world, like they’re being heard. Saying “we hear you, we understand you and we want to cater to you” really demonstrates a more genuine and organic relationship between reader and reporter. Perhaps you can accomplish this by responding consistently to top comments on highly trafficked articles, or having a semi-regular segment where you respond to popular comments, complaints and questions left by users in a dedicated response feature on a website. Little things like that. Because right now it seems like news outlets are deaf to those who hold legitimate issues and criticism for them. I do understand that this is a slow fix, and a lot of it cannot be implemented right away, but I am confident that there can be some common ground found.
The transparency I mention above will also help you on the empathy front. By being transparent and more open with your readers, all of a sudden you go from a perceived place of unwavering bias to a more personable and understanding industry that makes an effort to be in tune with its core audience.
Create a habit
As part of my cognitive science studies, I have developed a passion for observing and predicting social patterns with relations to the internet and popular culture. What I learned is that if you tap into the psychological tendencies that make us happy, sad, excited, etc., you can create a great product that people will very much want to use.
The first step is creating a habit. This may seem self evident, but I’m boiling it down to a specific science. Take, for example, likes on Instagram. When you see yourself getting likes, dopamine is released in your head because you’re receiving social validation. Your body wants to see these likes, so in turn, you become somewhat hooked on receiving likes — and that increases your engagement with Instagram. So if you can harness something in a product for news to generate this sort of craving or desire, you have your retention and engagement from users like never before.
One way possibly to do that is to make the news feel like escapism. Now, I don’t mean make your audience feel like the news is taking them out of their normal life. The thing about escapism is that even if you’re mentally aware that what you’re doing is escapism, your body and emotions still feel like you’re being taken into another world. For example, I read sports headlines while I eat. The result is that I’m efficiently doing two tasks at once, but I now associate the pleasure of eating food with the pleasure of learning about sports headlines, and that relieves my stress. It’s a form of escapism with information.
I do believe there is a way to translate that for other forms of news, likely by focusing on presentation and rhetoric. Change some of those conventions in news, and I’m almost positive you will see a more engaged and informed general public. There are plenty of other psychological tactics that could and should be used as well, such as color association psychology and synthetic happiness.
By taking a time to redesign your platform to become more intuitive and habitual, you are not only showing that you know how humans work, but perhaps you can take what you’ve learned about people from redesigning and apply that to other journalistic conventions that may have neglected to do so.
All my advice basically comes down to this: Take the time to understand people and put yourself in different perspectives. When you boil it down to just that, it doesn’t seem like an arduous or unreasonable task.
