It’s easy, now, to say there’s a divide that must be bridged between journalists and news organizations and the audience their coverage is for. A major wake-up call for the news industry came in the 2016 presidential election. The message is that media consumers are not being heard and, because of that, the media is not telling the whole story.
Cultural divide
“To put it bluntly, the media missed the story,” wrote Margaret Sullivan, a media columnist for the Washington Post, the day after the election. “In the end, a huge number of American voters wanted something different. And although these voters shouted and screamed it, most journalists weren’t listening. They didn’t get it.”
Her article was one of 86 “pieces of journalism wisdom,” curated by Poynter, produced in just a month following an election that shocked political forecasters and pundits across the nation.
The evidence that the news media were out of step with society was hard to miss. Only 32 percent of respondents said they had “a fair amount” or “a great deal” of trust in mass media in a Gallup poll released less than two months before the election. Only 14 percent of respondents who identified as Republican trusted the media, down from 32 percent the year before. Those numbers should have shown something was off kilter, but seemed to have no effect on the media at large. Going into Election Day coverage, PBS NewsHour host Judy Woodruff recalled that most knew “there was a chance Trump could win … But all the smart people said it was not going to happen.”
That “smart people” thinking could be a product of the news industry culture that Jennifer Brandel, the CEO and co-founder of Hearken, a company that develops outreach strategies for news organizations, identified as “a serious problem the news industry does not talk about” in April 2016. “The culture of journalism breeds disdain for the people we’re meant to be serving,” she wrote. She found that disdain ranged “from subtle annoyance to straight-up hatred.”
Further, as Politico found when it crunched the numbers, there’s a good reason many in the middle of the country see the media as coastal and liberal. That’s especially true now that have shrunk and given way to online media, which is even more concentrated in coastal areas and Chicago. Politico reports, with only 22 percent of jobs found outside these media strongholds.
In short, the culture and group-think of newsrooms and the way they interact with and listen to their audience needs to change. And from local outlets to regional players to national organizations, the news media is beginning to take steps to listen more.
Opening ears
The most obvious examples come on the hyperlocal front, where the audience is definable by a small geographic region. In hyperlocal newsrooms, journalists are more intertwined with the communities they cover because they’re a physical part of those communities.
Scott Schaefer, who, along with his wife, Theresa, runs the B-Town Blog in Burien, Washington, just south of Seattle, says he is regularly recognized as “the blog guy” when out and about in the community. The “mom and pop” team also runs blogs focused on other inner-ring suburbs of Seattle and do so with the help of a few contractors, including a former city editor for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. What sets them apart, Schaefer said, is extreme availability.
“It’s not a 9-5 job, it’s a lifestyle,” he said. “I’ll post things in the middle of the night, I’ll post over coffee… I work on a MacBook Pro and I can work from anywhere I can get the internet, which is anywhere now.”
Schaefer makes it easy for people to reach him; he called back within one hour of receiving an interview request. The B-Town Blog’s contact page has both an office phone — a traditional landline, Schaefer noted — and a cellphone number that readers can call and text 24-hours a day. He said they get dozens of emails and text messages daily from readers with story tips, and what his readers have to say often changes the focus of the coverage.
It’s a model of community involvement and an open ear that other newsrooms are trying to emulate. Dustin Bratcher, who runs the Ohio County Monitor based in Beaver Dam, Kentucky, said that the B-Town Blog is what he and other hyper-local news outlets look to for inspiration. But all communities are different. Whereas B-Town operates in an inner suburb of Seattle and boasts an urban population of 50,000 or so, Bratcher and his brother, Lee, cover a county of nearly 600 square miles and a population of around 24,000.
Bratcher, a former print reporter and designer for a local weekly, noticed that there was a lack of coverage of municipal and county meetings and politics and that people wanted more of that. Cue the Monitor, which specializes in local political and governmental coverage. In a county where, Bratcher said, internet coverage is spotty and cell service can be a bust — including in the county government complex — the Monitor saw great success for a news service in such a small population area. Bratcher said the site’s unique visitors doubled every year for the first three years before leveling off.
The success came from the brothers trying new initiatives that connected them with readers in ways that the other, more traditionally-minded, papers in the area were not trying. Namely, they took advantage of social media — on Facebook they have 10,000 followers, or more than 40 percent of the population of their coverage area — and they make a point to be available and responsive to readers. The brothers did not, however, have as much success with advertising, so they switched to a subscription model but have largely retained the same level of readership.
Opening doors
Then there are hyperlocal outlets that take a more direct initiative in listening to their audience. On the south and west sides of Chicago, the nonprofit news start-up City Bureau opens its doors every Thursday night to the community it serves in a program it calls Public Newsroom.
“It’s a front-row seat for residents to see how journalism is produced, to contribute to it,” said Andrea Hart, a co-founder and the community director for City Bureau, in a video application for Chicago Community Trust’s 2017 Acting Up Award. “It’s an opportunity for journalists to learn how and see how communities want to talk about their neighborhoods.”
Public Newsroom is not only a listening and communication session but also a workshop for attendees to learn about the process of journalism and to participate in it, creating a two-way street that can increase the understanding from everyone about not only coverage needs but the process in which it can happen.
Bringing the audience in is happening on larger stages, as well. The American Press Institute has a series on “focused listening” efforts at news organizations across the country, from bringing in the community to better cover minority and other diverse communities and topics in Nashville at The Tennessean, to enabling “news deputies” to give input via text-message at the Alabama Media Group. The last one was a strategy developed by GroundSource, a company that, like Hearken, is developing outreach strategies for news organizations.
Even in heavily-populated areas with media organization density, local voices can be crowded out. That’s often the case in New Jersey, where the state has effectively become a local “news desert” due to the pull of New York City-based news in the northern half of the state and the focus on Philadelphia in the southern half. That’s according to Timothy Karr, the senior director of strategy and communications at Free Press, an organization whose project “News Voices” aims to change that desert in New Jersey, with a similar mission in North Carolina.
“We have organizers in the state of New Jersey who have held nearly a dozen social events on media justice,” Karr said. While the organization has a focus on social justice, he said the town-hall-like events put together by project organizers also have the added benefit of reconnecting news organizations to the people in their own communities and especially with people “who they may not see traditionally as sources.”
All of that has added to more interesting and localized stories that the partner newsrooms had not been considering before, he said, and to forming greater trust between the organizations and their communities.
Mistrust and feeling the news media isn’t truly listening isn’t just a problem in minority communities, as a Columbia Journalism Review article interviewing residents of two very different Philadelphia-area communities finds out. Feeling like your community is not being heard creates “a lack of trust in media, issues of perceived relevance, and a sense of relentless negativity” that have “led many readers to vacillate between disengaging from the news for periods of time, and seeking out alternative sources from interpersonal and social media networks.”
Survival
For traditional news to survive, it needs to change. While there are many ways that journalism needs to adapt to better serve the communities it covers, one of the easiest and most straightforward ways is to be quiet and listen.
“We need to focus more on listening, on dialog, and on building real communities of journalists and readers,” wrote Andrew Losowsky, the project lead for the Coral Project, a company that builds open-source software to build community around news organizations, shortly after the 2016 election. “Readers — as well as people who no longer consume traditional media — tell us that they want to be heard by journalists, and that they want to have an impact on what they see.”
While this can take the form of journalists making themselves more available, it also could mean visiting with residents just to hear their take on things, rather than “parachuting” in to a community whenever big news breaks, or bringing community members in for listening sessions. Luckily for news organizations who want to try listening sessions, there are already initiatives to emulate and even a guide produced by NPR on how to get started.
Above all, listening is one of the quickest ways for news organizations and journalists to be seen as members of the community, rather than as tossing information down from a perceived mountaintop, because, as Hearken CEO Jennifer Brandel points out, “There is no mountaintop anymore. Newsrooms no longer have a lock on the information people need and want to live their lives.”
Flint McColgan fell in love with western Montana during a photo project between stints at daily newspapers in North Dakota and Pennsylvania and decided to come back. He has worked as a film critic, a police and courts beat reporter and, most recently, a state and county politics and government beat reporter. In his free time, he travels, writes, plays pool, repairs typewriters and makes photos for his own amusement.
