Engagement

Pivot to the Intention Economy

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When it comes to civic media, the attention economy is not adequate to the task of serving the unmet information needs of neglected communities.

An intention economy can address this shortcoming in the following manner:

  • PROBLEM: Journalism in a mass-media ecosystem driven by attention and reactive fascinations will always trend toward distraction, spectacle and popular topics.
  • OPPORTUNITY: Mass media driven by specific interests rather than simple attention has at least the opportunity to build a habit of civic engagement around non-spectacular topics and issues.
  • MUTUALITY: In this equation the intention must be mutual, on the part of the media producer as well as on the part of the audience.
  • SUSTAINABILITY: Memberships, contributions, social-sharing and other forms of sustaining actions by audiences represent the apex of the intention economy.
  • DESIGN: Journalism’s practitioners advocates must design and implement systems that make it easy for those intentional economics to develop around public-interest news reporting in neglected communities.

On the demand side, civic-media advocate and Internet journalist Doc Searles explores the idea of the intention economy as a consumer-driven phenomenon, which opens up critical conceptual terrain for consumer or buyer’s co-ops for civic media.

What sort of intention can the production side — journalists and their advocates — bring to the table here?

Sally Lehrman: Rebuilding public trust

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Sally Lehrman directs the journalism ethics program at Santa Clara College and its signature Trust Project. She is a longtime evangelist for journalism values and ethics as a local and national leader in the Society of Professional Journalists and the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation.

Watershed Media:  When it comes to identifying/verifying trustworthy news media, what can technology offer us?

Sally Lehrman: Tchnology can come at this issue a number of ways.

At the Trust Project we’re developing tools and technologies to make it easier for the public – and news distribution platforms like Google and Facebook – to find high-quality, ethically produced, accurate news.

As  foundation to developing technologies that support a more trustworthy news ecosystem, we have gone directly to the public and conducted in-depth interviews to understand what the public values in the news, when their trust has been broken, and what might earn it. We’ve conducted 34 ethnographic-style interviews and will continue these in the new year. We’ve then used the insights from these interviews to work with senior editors from news organizations in the US and Europe to develop a set of what we call “Trust Indicators,” which are journalism practices and commitments that can build trust. Examples would be:

  • best practices, such as an ethics policy, diversity policy, corrections and offering ownership information;
  • information about the author;
  • story labels that would indicate news, opinion, analysis and sponsored content.

We have worked with our collaborators to develop prototypes that would present these indicators as visual cues alongside the story, and also create a signal back to news distribution platforms. Now we’re working on building these out. (You can find the prototypes at thetrustproject.org.

There are also projects like First Draft news, which helps news organizations verify user-generated content as real, and fact-checking consortiums that are using technology to support collaboration.

WM: But is it really about technology? What’s the social dimension? How can journalists and news organizations alike demonstrate their own trustworthiness to a cynical public?

SL: A few things that have come up in our interviews with the public but that are often forgotten get to public engagement, diversity and “agenda.” We hear people asking for the opportunity to interact with their news sources — not just through comments, but through offering story ideas, guiding the story, or suggesting sources. Some suggest get-togethers to discuss the news with one another and with editors.

People also often mention wanting to hear perspectives in news stories from people of color, women, and generally those who are not part of the power structures of business and government. They want to hear from people like themselves and unlike themselves.

Regarding agenda, many people say they realize that journalists aim for objectivity and they want to know there’s a code of ethics behind the process, but they also believe that we all have an agenda. So we’ve heard suggestions about providing more detail about funding structure, corporate structure, issues that the news company or reporter sees as a priority, etc. These practices can demonstrate trustworthiness.

WM: What’s the public’s responsibility, or at least position, in this equation? Passive consumers? Engaged social-media user? How does media literacy fit into the picture?

SL: The public does play an important role in the ecosystem of news.

First, people can demand quality news about issues that are relevant to their lives and support those news organizations providing it.

Secondly, they can play an active role sharing trustworthy news and interrupting the spread of poorly sourced or fake news and advertising posing as news. People can follow some basic steps to check what’s behind a story.

We have found in our interviews with members of the public that many people are conscientious news consumers and make a point of giving themselves a well-rounded diet of information from news sources that take on topics from different perspectives.

If you’re not one of these, you can find one among your friends and enjoy the fruits of their labors. And now, as we face so-called alternate facts coming out of the White House, the public can make it clear that disinformation is unacceptable.

Survey of Newsroom Public-Engagement Programs, October 2016

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Produced for the National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation, October 2016, by Peggy Holman (Journalism That Matters), Kyle Bozentko (The Jefferson Center), and Josh Wilson (Watershed Media Project).

Sample details

Distribution: The survey was distributed to members of the Institute for Nonprofit News, the Media Consortium, the Center for Cooperative Media, and to clients and members of the Hearken community.

Respondents: 23 news organizations responded

Positivity bias? Since all of these organizations endorse engagement programming, or actively provide engagement services, the responses are pretty positive overall.

Budgetary bias? 23 news organizations responded. The majority (11) of respondents had budgets of $500K annually or more. They were followed by seven (7) respondents with budgets from $150K-$499K. In contrast, there were only three total responses from lower-budgeted organizations, from <$75K to $149K. Why is this? One possible explanation may reflect the fact that engagement programming costs money, and that larger organizations do have the resources to invest in community-facing programming that’s simply beyond the reach of smaller organizations.

Responses: An overview

  • Social media is used as “push media.” The majority (20) of responding newsrooms tended to use social media and outreach campaigns to promote their coverage; the same number of respondents said they staged panel events that included audience Q&A.
  • 15 respondents said that they “directly solicited or polled” audiences for tips, feedback and story ideas.
  • More intensive activities had fewer responses. Only 6 staged listening events at least once annually, for example.
  • 18 newsrooms gave brief overviews of their process for managing tips from the community. All were astute, and described practical methods that this fits into a newsroom’s workflow. One lengthy response, however, is particularly telling for the way it breaks down how budgeting and even funding sources impacts the editorial process of committing to a story. It is reproduced here in full, and should be eye-opening for the way it frames the process and challenges of running a quality newsroom:

“[We] evaluate [tips] based on our knowledge of the topic area, reporters’ insight on the topic area, other news coverage. We value suggestions from our readers and take them seriously in shaping our coverage. Not everything that is checked out results in a story. If not, we let the person know what we concluded and why.

“We primarily do investigative reporting projects. We would need to determine how important it is based on our goals–will it have impact and if so how much impact and on which institutions, populations as we begin moving forward. How timely or urgent is it and how do those answers affect our other projects, commitments. Do we have the “right” people to do it, and if not, what will it take to identify those contributors and how will bringing them on affect our budget, and can we afford it? How much time do we think it will take to report and achieve impact?And what will that take in terms of staff, budget, other resources to accomplish our goals? And if we want to do the story, how will other stories, projects, investigations already under way be affected, and can we afford those costs.”

  • A majority of respondents said that engagement programming has had positive impacts, improving their coverage (13 respondents) and traffic (13 respondents). A minority (7 respondents) says such programing has improved their fundraising.
  • 13 respondents said they’d like to do more engagement programming, but are constrained by budgets; individual comments expressed frustration with mastering the new skill sets (perhaps because engagement is still an emerging practice in journalism?), and with the fact that “it can be expensive, and time consuming.” Two final comment captures the dilemma of these newsrooms:

“We have a small staff and sincere engagement requires an investment that competes for our time.”

“I hope we can maintain effective staffing to manage community engagement”