Here is a brief write-up of some of the main points from my talk at the Screen Futures conference in Australia on the promise and practice of participatory journalism.
The talk was based on findings in my co-authored book, Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers, into how journalists are thinking about their relationship with the people formerly known as the audience.
Comments on stories have become a familiar feature on news websites. But the idea of leaving a space for readers to “have their say” is hundreds of years old.
Early newspapers in eighteenth-century England left blank spaces where readers could add their observations, complete with spelling mistakes, erroneous facts and inane comments, before passing it on to friends or family.
These early experiments in audience contributions were phased out, as newspapers became professional products authored by journalists. Participation became more formal and rigid through channels such as letters to the editor.
Hundreds of years later, spaces for readers to add their thoughts have re-emerged on news websites as one of a myriad of ways for the audience to participate and interact with the news.
For our book, we wanted to find out how far journalists were opening up the news process to the public at a time when digital technologies are creating opportunities for new forms of media participation, production and distribution on an unprecedented scale.
In our journey through newsrooms at more than a dozen newspapers in 10 Western liberal democracies, we found mixed feelings. There was apprehension, confusion, fear and hope, among journalists who are experiencing facing a rapid and radical shift in their traditional power to oversee the flow of information.
Our research found that three approaches in the newsroom. Some took what we call a conventional stance, seeing journalism as a practice to be defended. The priority for these “conventional journalists” was to preserve traditional boundaries between professionals and readers. An American editor insisted that “what we have to offer as our brand is a newspaper and a site that can be trusted.”
On the other side of the spectrum were journalists who were more open to a dialogue with readers. These “dialogical journalists” shared a belief that the newsroom had to be more open to working with the audience. For one American editor, a more open and collaborative form of journalism was a way “to repair the relationship, to regain people’s trust.”
Mostly, journalists didn’t neatly fall into the camp of traditionalists or evangelists. Instead, they expressed reservations about users as participants in the news, while at the same time acknowledging the potential value of a more active audience. It is hardly surprising most people in the newsroom are “ambivalent journalists”, trying to figure out their role at a time of rapid change to long-held rules, norms and values.
Journalists are used to owning the news, in the most basic sense that they decide what and how to report. Yet at the same time, journalism has always been expected to provide a way for voices from outside the media to be heard.
These tensions are being played out every day in newsrooms across the world. Journalists are torn encouraging readers to be more active in the media, while simultaneously defending the core of the news production process.
While participatory journalism is often celebrated for its potential for a more open media, the reality is more humbling dramatic. The audience has few opportunities to influence what makes the news and how it is reported. Instead readers are involved at the start of the news process by sending in tips, photos or videos, and once a story is published by offering their take on the news.
Journalists see the audience as “active recipients” of the news. Citizens are expected to act when news happens, by taking a photo or emailing in a news tip, and then react by commenting. The crucial and central processes of deciding what news is and how to cover and present it remains almost entirely under the journalist’s control.
The way newsrooms have adopted participatory journalism continues to change and evolve as they try to meld a culture of openness and collaboration with an editorial model of hierarchy and control.
For the most part, so far, journalists have sought to find ways to maintain their professional status, rather than redefine what it means to be a journalist.
As one editor in Canada expressed it, “journalism remains journalism, and it’s not going to change its fundamentals.”
Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers by Jane B. Singer, Alfred Hermida, David Domingo, Ari Heinonen, Steve Paulussen, Thorsten Quandt, Zvi Reich, Marina Vujnovic, is published by Wiley-Blackwell.
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