How journalists are rethinking their relationship with the audience

Leaving readers a space to have their say is not a web invention. Eighteenth-century English newspapers were printed with blank areas where a reader could add observations — misspellings, wrong facts and inane remarks included — before passing the sheet on to friends or family. That practice was phased out as newspapers turned into professional products authored by journalists, and audience participation was narrowed into formal channels such as the letters page. Comment fields on news sites are the same impulse returning several hundred years later.

The talk this page recorded was given at the Screen Futures conference in Melbourne on 10 July 2011, and drew on Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers — a study by Jane B. Singer, Alfred Hermida, David Domingo, Ari Heinonen, Steve Paulussen, Thorsten Quandt, Zvi Reich and Marina Vujnovic, published by Wiley-Blackwell. The research went through newsrooms at more than a dozen newspapers in ten Western liberal democracies to find out how far journalists were actually opening the news process to the public, at a point when digital tools were creating openings for participation, production and distribution on a scale the trade had not dealt with before. What the authors recorded in those newsrooms was a mixture of apprehension, confusion, fear and hope among journalists watching their traditional authority over the flow of information change quickly.

It found three stances. Conventional journalists treated the craft as something to be defended and prioritised the boundary between professionals and readers; one American editor defined the brand’s offer as “a newspaper and a site that can be trusted”. Dialogical journalists argued the newsroom had to be more open to working with the audience, another American editor describing a more collaborative journalism as a way “to repair the relationship, to regain people’s trust”. Most people fell into neither camp. The study called them ambivalent journalists: doubtful about users as participants, and simultaneously willing to grant that a more active audience had value — the ordinary position of someone whose rules and norms are being rewritten while the work continues.

The practical finding was narrower than the rhetoric around participation suggested. Readers were let in at the two ends of the process — sending tips, photos and video before a story existed, and commenting once it was published — while the decisions about what counted as news and how it would be reported stayed almost entirely with the journalist. The paper’s term for the resulting role was “active recipients”: expected to act when news happens, then react after it is published. Participation was real, in other words, but it was bolted to the outside of an editorial model that was not itself opened up.

The tension is not new either, and the study framed it as structural rather than as a failure of nerve. Journalists are used to owning the news in the basic sense that they decide what to report and how; journalism has also always been expected to carry voices from outside the newsroom. What the research found, for the period it covered, was that most journalists had looked for ways to preserve their professional standing rather than to redefine what being a journalist meant. As one Canadian editor said, “journalism remains journalism, and it’s not going to change its fundamentals.”