Choosing the right storytelling tools
Because we only have two arms
The tools are coming at us journalists from all directions. They’re supposed to be helpful — after all, they are tools — but instead, they often overwhelm us.
“Essentially journalists need four arms,” said Peter Fowler, presenter for Radio NZ. “One to hold a video camera, one to report, another arm for live tweeting and lastly an arm to take still pictures.”
Fowler was appearing as part of a diverse panel Storyology Sydney, discussing how news organisations engage with audiences. And, for better or worse, all those digital tools are the means by which we engage.
Fowler has developed an app called VoxPop that allows Radio NZ listeners to record comments that the app transcribes and sends directly to Radio NZ’s newsroom. His platform saves reporters time in transcribing, so now they need just three arms.
But that’s still more arms than we have. Irene Jay Liu, Asia-Pacific lead for Google News Lab, assures journalists that they don’t need to be across every medium.
“As soon as there is a new medium or site out, there is this immense pressure for journalists to jump on it,” she said.
“It’s about picking the tool to match the circumstances.”
The session brought together diverse “New newsrooms” — Facebook, Google News Lab, VoxPop and Rappler — all to discuss their methods of engaging with news.
Conceived in 2010, Rappler is a social news network where an audience can respond to articles by selecting an option of how it makes them feel. Rappler’s CEO Maria Ressa said her hope is to inspire community engagement and digitally fueled actions for social change. It has now become the third top news site in the Phillippines.
Facebook takes a different approach when it comes to engaging with content creators. They provide backend “performance tracker” tools for publishers to analyse and monitor how their story is received by the public. Aine Kerr, manager of global journalism partnerships at Facebook, said that one of the most useful tools that Facebook provides is the newsfeed algorithms that show readers the most relevant content and “cut through the noise.”
Whilst these tools promote engagement with readers by providing a medium for dialogue between journalists and their audience, Ressa believes they could potentially be undermining the power of journalists and asks “who are the real gatekeepers?”.
It was a panel full of questions that reflect the evolving state of the media at the moment. With so many tools to engage readers, Ressa says the struggle will be to translate the credibility of traditional journalism tools into the virtual world.
