The future of journalism is … relational
Ideas on how to foster more connection and care - from across Europe
🔥 Over the last weeks I’ve been very tempted to print out this quote in large letters and post it in selected newsrooms:
“Being able to write a news story will not be a skill that has any value.
If we want to be journalists in 5 years’ time, we will have to bring something different to the table, and that will have to be things that a machine can’t do.
I often characterise these human skills as connection, collaboration and care – where we focus on building genuine two way relationships with our users.”
Shirish Kulkarni - who focuses on innovation and inclusion in journalism - wrote this in reference to how newsrooms plan to use AI → Mostly to create more of the same.
🤯 Yep, there are editors-in-chief raving about how their video output has quadrupled, thanks to ChatGPT writing the scripts.
So, while the topic of „news avoidance“ (I’ll explain the „“ later on) has been all over my feeds for weeks, the culture in newsrooms is frustratingly hard to change.
But for everyone who agrees that we have to bring “something different to the table”, this edition delivers ideas on how to foster connection and care - from across Europe. 👇
👋 Hey there fellow curious journalists,
thanks so much for coming on this email-ride - curating interesting bits and pieces from journalism across Europe (and occasionally beyond).
🇮🇹🤝Are you also going to the International Journalism Festival in Perugia? If you fancy a chat over a coffee or a spritz, drop me a line. I’d love to meet some of the faces behind the email addresses.
💤 The newsletter is coming out of a bit of hibernation, aka. I’ve had lots of time to think - so this edition has fewer, but hopefully richer topics. Next time we'll be back to more curation, less exploration.
☕ Best prepare your favourite beverage: You have 1.480 words ahead of you - that’s about 12 minutes reading time.
🖼️ Let’s Reframe News Avoidance
Words matter and the term “News Avoider“ always bothered me, as it puts the blame on the person who „avoids“ the news, when the responsibility lies with us journalists, as we produce news the public does not want to read, listen to or watch.
So I was delighted to stumble across this suggestion:
„Avoiding news is not an absolute activity. Almost everyone regularly avoids the news, even if only during the holidays. Perhaps it is better to speak of 'conscious news use' in that case.“
It‘s from a Dutch research paper that looks at how the changing media use by young people affects the role and importance of journalism in a democracy. (The paper is really interesting. Just pop the .pdf in Google translate. It’s totally worth this little effort.)
This relates to a question I have been asking myself a lot these days:
🙋♀️ „How much news do I really need to consume - to be a good citizen?”
The study even makes the interesting argument that less news = more civic engagement, at least during a crisis:
“We find that over time, news avoidance is positively related to civic engagement in prosocial activities during a crisis. That is, people who said they actively avoided news about the crisis were more likely to become civically active about the crisis.”
Instead of FOMO (fear of missing out) are people experiencing JOMO (joy of missing out) when it comes to news, media analyst Thomas Baekdal points out in his newsletter - and the reason is homemade in our newsrooms:
“A month ago, I did a quick analysis of how many articles the largest Danish newspapers had written about Trump in a single month, and the answer was about 110 articles/month, or about 3.5 articles/day. So, my question to you is simply this. Is it a good use of your time to read that many articles about a single person every day?”
The problem seems to be deeply rooted in the fast-paced culture of newsrooms: I've run workshops where news journalists tell me they get restless if they don't get at least one news story out every hour.
👉 So the question I ask myself - it's more like the question every newsroom should ask before publishing anything new: "Will this news help our audience be better citizens?"
⚡ Caring about our audiences also means not spamming them with every news and every update available. Or as a research paper from the Reuters Institute put it:
Part of the problem is: We prioritize what we measure. If a newsroom focuses on clicks and views (and uses those metrics to attract advertisers), then of course there is no incentive to publish less.
So I was really happy to see the Guardian start to publish a “Deeply read” list next to the “Most viewed” list on their homepage.
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💡And a final thought on the subject:
There's so much emphasis on NEWS these days that it sometimes feels like it's the only thing we journalists produce. When in fact there is so much more in our repertoire - documentaries, features, essays, portraits, you name it.
And yes, news is our most "flawed" product, as in: the one people feel most disconnected from - but I think it's worth considering giving some of that attention (and the resources) to our other formats.
Oh hey, you are new here?
Hi, I’m Isabel, a journalist & digital strategist from Germany.
❤️ finding new ways of storytelling and developing formats for new platforms.
🙌 Goal for 2024: Knowing more about what my European colleagues are working on.
Come along on my journey in this newsletter:
To find out how people would like be informed:
💬 Talk to your audience
To build a relationship with your users, the most important step is…well…getting to know them. And our analytics will only take us so far - they can answer the What (“Content X is very popular with segment Y of our audience.”), but never the Why.
If you’re only looking at your numbers, you’re likely to keep reproducing the same “popular” content over and over. Or as Brian Morrissey put it in The Rebooting newsletter:
If legacy media relied too much on gut and instinct, digital media has swung the pendulum too far in the direction of optimization. The inevitable result is busineses run around dashboards. (…) Talking to the people you’re making things for will uncover insights into their needs that you will not torture out of Excel spreadsheets, Google Analytics or QuickBooks.
One thing we’re bound to discover:
🎡Consumer habits are fluid
It's far too simplistic to assume things like "Gen Z only watches short videos". Our media needs change throughout the day, depending on the situation we are in:
We effortlessly shuffle between many different services in search of the piece of content that can deliver for the occasion: One night friends are gathered for nostalgic laughs at The One Where Ross Finds Out, the next we go to bed early with the crime podcast in our ears. Our needs are not static, and neither is the fluid consumer.
(Excerpt from the annual report on the development of media habits published by DR, Danish public broadcaster)
People wanting different things throughout the day is not a brand new discovery. What is new: Our audience more and more expects us journalists to cater to their fluid needs - in one place.
🏆 The report cites Spotify as a prime example of how to keep an otherwise restless audience engaged - by offering content for different needs: relaxing playlists for reading, white noise compilations for better sleep, or indie music from the 2000s for when you're feeling nostalgic.
🤖 There is, of course, great potential to use AI to better serve our fluid audiences.
Some newsrooms are already experimenting with it successfully - primarily to present the same content in different variations: bullet points for those in a hurry, explainers for those new to the topic, and deep dives for those with prior knowledge.
This is a great start, but it barely scratches the surface of our users' diverse informational needs.
🔍We can only curate the right “playlists” for our audiences if we take the time to thoroughly analyse those needs.
One useful advice when embarking on this mission:
🚮 Get rid of oversimplified personas
Unfortunately, audience-first thinking often means hastily creating a persona in a workshop. Sometimes just to signal to others: “Hey, look - we’ve thought about our users.” This approach does not help us deliver better journalism and, at worst, reinforces stereotypes and prejudices.
“The persona is a tool to divide, not include.“ is Katharina Köth’s strong view on it. As a Strategy & Experience Director she tries to challenge herself to think more inclusively about the people she wants to reach - and shared an excellent presentation on her approach.
🧩 It’s an invitation to see identity as multi-faceted and evolving.
To warm up to the idea, you can start by thinking about yourself → Who are you? What do you identify with? Probably as many, many things:
👆Just like yourself, our audience has also many facets of identity. And depending on the context, different parts of our identity influence our goals and motivations.
🎯When we think about how best to reach our audience with what type of content, we should also think about in what „state of being“ we will be addressing them in.
🕰️ Certain aspects of our identity can be stronger, others weaker, and they can change over time as you live your life and experience new things. For example, "being a daughter" may be more important to you at one point in your life, and your relationship with your mother may change.
👆Rather than using an oversimplified and static persona, we could try to develop a way of visualising all the characteristics of our potential audience, how they might evolve and what that means for our content. It would certainly help us to brainstorm and deliver better journalism to our 'fluid consumers'.
📚 If you want to dive deeper: Katharina’s approach is based on work by Prof. Kathleen Wallace on the Network Self → Here’s a really good article about it.
✨ To end on a brighter note, it is really encouraging to see how some newsrooms have been working on analysing and visualising their user needs.
Most used smartocto's model, but modified the needs or identified new ones to better suit their specific audience and brand.
For one of the workshops that I ran, I put all the new needs that I had come across next to each other - to inspire others.👇
(I’ve probably missed a few - if you have encountered more, feel free to send them my way. I’d love to expand the collection.)
🫶 Yay, you’ve made it this far - thanks so much for scrolling all the way through!
👆Did you enjoy this issue? Then feel free to spread the newsletter-lover! 💌
🌐Sidenote: If you are wondering: How can I read up on all theses examples in a foreign language? There is this fitting quote I overheard:
“The language of Europe is translation.”
Luckily, translation has gotten quite easy: Nearly every browser has a neat translation function (or an add-on available), a lot of email providers too and there is of course your favourite AI tool to help out.
👋 That’s all - for now.
Stay curious out there,
Isabel
*This newsletter was made with lots of ❤️ and a bit of help by AI for better flow and translations.*