Backpack Journalism in Niche Beats
This post was written as part of my Specialized Reporting course at Appalachian State University.
In digital media, reporting from outside of newsrooms is commonplace and sometimes required. Thanks to consumer demand for consistent, on-the-go content, journalists now have the means and motivation to do so.
I think backpack journalism creates opportunities for good, high-quality content to become more of a norm in the media. It’s especially promising when combined with mobile storytelling vehicles.
But to me, this promise is diminished by a new expectation in the media to be spitting out stories at an almost 24/7 rate—even if this means sacrificing the quality of those stories.
We’ve already seen this play out.
Within the last 10 years, media organizations have been forced to shift their revenue models. They’ve been called to not only embrace digital storytelling, but to dominate it. And now we see a bloody fight to the death between surviving media publications to collect as many views, favorites, likes, etc. as they can, across as many platforms as possible.
Perhaps the reason for this is because the success of any media outlet now largely depends on how readers will consume their content. The emphasis is moving away from compelling, well-reported stories and more toward audience reaction—whether good or bad.
John Oliver made some excellent points surrounding this topic on his show last month:
Backpack reporting has garnered criticism from both old and new media consumers and journalists for being sloppy and superficial.
This is primarily because the technology is trying to overcompensate by constantly creating heaps of so-called “cutting edge” storytelling platforms to fit the genre. Suddenly, it’s not about telling an important story through mobile mediums. Instead it’s about telling a story that will provoke readers enough to engage with it.
And reader engagement is no longer a confirmation that a news source is informing the public. It’s a vehicle to monetize content—to literally turn audience reaction into a steady, manipulative cash flow.
Joshua Topolsky, co-founder of The Verge and Vox Media, sums this up pretty well in a Medium post about the media’s desperate and unrealistic strive to produce low quality, yet “hot” content:
“Over time, we built up scale in digital to replace user value. We thought we could solve with numbers (the new, seemingly infinite numbers the internet and social media provides) what we couldn’t solve with attention. And with every new set of eyeballs (or clicks, or views) we added, we diminished the merit of what we made. And advertisers asked for more, because those eyes were worth less. And we made more. And it was less valuable.
The media industry now largely thinks its only working business model is to reach as many people as possible, and sell — usually programmatically, but sometimes not — as many advertisements against that audience as it can.”
So my point to fellow journalists—and my strategy going forward in my career—is to embrace the backpack journalist lifestyle and everything that comes with it, especially mobile storytelling skills.
But I want to keep this in check. Though I understand the importance of producing content quickly, I want to make producing content well a priority. And, with time and practice, I’ll hopefully achieve both.
