Getting too close to your community?

Social journalists shouldn’t be afraid to fall between two stools

Journalism is a strange métier. Or which other professional is not capable of having a randomly interesting conversation without thinking “This could be a story — wait — this is a story!” Who else, besides journalists, the president, diplomats and other privleged opinion-makers, can get into pretty much any place? And who else struggles with every-day-problems such as: What can I do to prevent my smartphone falling on my face when I read in bed until I fall asleep? Okay, the latter can actually happen to any individual addicted to new media.

Speaking of: Smartphones and social media have not only changed our job description, but have broadened how, where, and — and we will focus on this for now — by whom news is produced. Technically, pretty much anyone with a smartphone can live-tweet, report, take pictures and videos. Practically, this is already happening. Especially activists—e.g. the ones from Black Lives Matter, who have done an excellent job in stepping in and uncovering police brutality — have used social media as a tool to connect, empower, and reveal injustice, and they have done so in a way many journalists can learn from.

“I don’t know what journalism is. I just record what I witness,” says 27-year-old Zhou Shuguang, better known as “Zola”.

Zola — according to the The Huffington Post “one of China’s best-known “’citizen reporters’” — has travelled around around China with a video camera and filmed injustice. So what is he? A blogger, an activist, a journalist? Probably all of this. This article on Nieman Reports — a must-read on this issue — asks if it is possible, and/or nesecarry, to draw a line between journalism, activism, and other kinds of speech.

Some journalist feel threatened by the—NO, don’t say that word! — change that has, driven by technological progress, pretty much turned the whole world into a possible newsroom. But nobody can reasonably deny that technology has made this world more transparent, less hierarchial and more democratic. If journalism is considered to be a watchdog, why jump on a stool and scream: “Who let all the dogs out?”

To understand that fear of change, one must consider that especially newspaper journalism is, and always has been, everything but a well-paid profession, and who would want to be replaced by a blogging millennial that works for (almost) nothing? I don’t think this will happen, though. The more news there is out there, the more critial readers become of whom they trust.

And here the journalists come in. They must cooperate with bloggers and activists, like The Guardian has with Wikileaker Julian Assange. But according to what we learn in CUNY J-School’s social journalism program (#socialj), journalists have to come down from their thrones and stop to assume to know what’s best for communities. Instead they should emphasize, listen and gain a community’s trust in order to be able to understand and support its members.

Traditional journalists might think doing so you’d be tempted to be instrumentalised by activists or end up being — watch out, here comes a though-determinating cliché — not objective. On the other hand, communities are often hesitent to trust and tell their stories to journalists that, as socialj-Founder Jeff Jarvis puts it, “parachute in” and are never heard of again after they got their story.

Stepping out of the traditional newsroom into the real world and seeing it through the eyes of a single mother, a black activist, an unsheltert person or a squatter, demands journalistic activism. So indeed, being a social journalist can feel like falling between two stools, but we shouldn’t be afraid of that. I guess social journalists are more the “tweeting-while-standing-up”-types anyway.