Learning to Listen
The key skill needed to save the news
The most critical skill needed to reinvent and save journalism is listening. Not listening for quotes to put in our already-conceived stories. Not listening to comments about our already-completed stories. Not listening to data about how many people read, like, or click on our stories. (“But enough about you. What did you think of my article?”)
No, we must learn to listen to the needs, goals, and desires of the public before we commit journalism, so that they can inform that journalism.
At CUNY, in our entrepreneurial journalism program, we call that listening to a market. In our social journalism program, we call it listening to a community. It’s the same skill. We tell our students never to start by taking their own idea or story or product to people. Take instead an open mind, eyes, ears, and notebook: observe, listen, understand, and empathize with the needs of the people you want to serve. Let that inspire how you might inform them and help them meet their goals.
Do not treat people as an anonymous mass, a faceless demographic, a passive audience, or reductionist data. Treat them as individuals and members of communities so you can serve them with relevance, utility, and value. That is the essence of the relationship strategy I propose for the future of journalism.
This week, on July 15, we are holding our third annual summit of entrepreneurial — and social and innovative — journalism educators at CUNY and we decided to make this session all about listening and how to teach our students this skill because we believe it is so vital.
And so I was delighted to see the inaugural column by the new New York Times public editor, Liz Spayd, encouraging journalists to do a better job of listening to the people they serve. She writes:
What The Times and most other newsrooms mostly do now is not so much listen to readers as watch and analyze them, like fish in a bowl. They view them in bulk, through statistics measuring how many millions of “unique” users clicked on content last month, or watched a video, or came to the site multiple times, or arrived through Facebook.
Right. Now I’ll try to push her definition of listening another step or two, because that’s my job.
She is right to put the listening imperative not only in journalistic terms but also in business terms. The problem is that as a vestige of our mass-media roots, we still measure success in scale. She writes:
But as a recent strategy report found, the company must be far more aggressive in reaching a broader audience and adapting to new tastes. Susan Chira, a deputy executive editor who helped lead an internal committee examining this issue, told me there are few more important priorities. “If we don’t do this, we can’t do anything else,” she said. “We have to have a broader audience to fund what we do.” If the plan is to engage a broader audience, then what is The Times doing to make that happen?
Listening is not just about drawing a “broader audience” to what the paper creates. It’s not just about changing what it creates to adapt to new tastes.
Listening turns journalism’s process on its head. It means we start not with our story ideas and news judgment — Spayd says journalists “subscribe to the view that editors and reporters have the most cultivated sense of which stories are most important, and which subjects most worthy of attention.” Social journalism starts instead with a community’s needs — which we can’t discern unless we listen — and judges its success not on circulation, traffic, page views, attention, or engagement with our so-called content but instead with our impact on people’s lives: journalism as service. That requires even more radical cultural and organizational change.
Spayd suggests the need to open up comments more and I won’t disagree. The Times and Washington Post are working on ways to improve comments, which is sorely needed. But comments are syncopated listening: We don’t listen to the public about what we cover until after we’re done, when we should be listening before we start.
She also argues that the newspaper’s “small number of consumer-facing staffers is indicative of the bigger problem: a newsroom too distant from the people it serves.” Yes. But talking with the public isn’t the job of someone with “audience development” or “social media” on the business card. Listening should be the job of every journalist, equipped with appropriate skills and reflexes.
Spayd writes:
What would prove more fruitful is for newsrooms to treat their audience like people with crucial information to convey — preferences, habits and shifting ways of consuming information. What do they like about what we do and how we do it? What do they want done differently? What do they turn to other sites for?
Yes. The audience — I prefer public — has the means to share information and expertise without the need for mediators — that is, media — and news organizations’ first job should be to facilitate that exchange and then to add journalistic value where we hear the need: with reporting, first and foremost, and fact-checking and context and education.
I agree with Spayd that when journalism becomes more conversational it also needs to change its tone and recognize that humor — that is, a human voice — can enhance trust and credibility.
And I agree with her that listening to the public and serving them does not mean that we will feed them just cats and Kardashians; that is a gross insult to the public we serve. Slate — ever exploring new frontiers of contrarianism — attacks Spayd for her column and suggestions. Isaac Chotiner snipes:
But Spayd essentially argues that the Times needs to become more focused on the desires of its readers, whatever those desires may be. She seems unaware that there is a difference between giving readers what they want and ensuring that readers receive the best news coverage possible — the latter being the purpose of a newspaper, including a digital one…. Spayd’s phony populism is bizarre coming from a journalist. If the reporters and editors at the Times don’t know journalism better than the average person, then why are they being paid to make journalistic decisions?
That is just the kind of editorial hubris Spayd is arguing against. He ably proves her point.
“I no longer believe that listening to readers leads to dumbed-down journalism, if handled well,” Spayd says. “I don’t worry that The Times will go too far in incorporating reader ideas, nor do I think it will be careless in doing so. I worry that it won’t go far enough.”
Well-said.
When she posted her column this weekend, we at CUNY were quick to welcome a member of the congregation:
Our friend Jay Rosen also tweeted praise for Spayd as she follows a very tough act, Margaret Sullivan:
I second those tweets.
LATER: Note well that this skill — listening — will be key to adapting many other institutions and industries to an age when anyone can speak. It is vital in politics and government. But note well how listening is not rewarded. Ezra Klein writes about just that today in trying to understand Hillary Clinton as a listener not an orator.
Modern presidential campaigns are built to reward people who are really, really good at talking. So imagine what a campaign feels like if you’re not entirely natural in front of big crowds. Imagine that you are constantly compared to your husband, one of the greatest campaign orators of all time; that you’ve been burned again and again after saying the wrong thing in public; that you’ve been told, for decades, that you come across as calculated and inauthentic on the stump. What would you do?
When Hillary Clinton ran for the Senate in 2000, she tried to do something very strange: She tried to campaign by listening. It was called her “listening tour,” and the press did not like it.
