4 watchwords that can lead to a prosperous journalism future
At the ISOJ conference, everyone was talking about the need to know the audience better
Originally published Apr 18, 2024
In April I attended the International Symposium on Online Journalism in Austin. Rosental Alves, founder and director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, likes to say, “What starts here changes the world.” He’s right. The symposium, which I’ve attended several times over the years, both describes the future and makes it happen. This year was the 25th ISOJ symposium.
Spoiler alert
The four words I kept hearing were local, relationships, trust, and AI. No matter the country, no matter the medium they work in, the 400 in-person attendees and 500 watching online kept coming back to these four words, or their opposites.
Since I’m an optimist who believes that positive attitudes motivate people to positive action, I’ve decided not to dwell too much on all of the many reasons conference attendees expressed an existential despair. But only a fool would ignore the negative trends.
The flip side: why journalists are worried. Among the reasons: political polarization; the global rise of authoritarian regimes; the censorship of media that reveal authoritarian corruption; the imprisonment, torture, and murder of journalists; the public’s loss of trust in news media; young people’s abandonment of traditional media; and the financial collapse of many responsible media.
And one more thing. Many of the negative trends reflect media executives’ ignorance of the global trends that threaten their survival or their inability to do anything about them.
Action on solutions. But the four words I mentioned at the top contain the seeds of solutions. And there are many people who are successfully countering the negative trends.
The power of local
“More people need to pay more money for local news, so we can have a democracy.” That was the message of John Palfrey, president of the MacArthur Foundation, which has committed $300 million over the next five years to revitalize local news in the U.S. The initiative, called Press Forward, has as its premise “Democracy flourishes when people have access to reliable information.” Local coverage of local issues gets people engaged in their communities and with each other. It helps build trust, reduces “us vs. them” thinking.
Jim Brady of the Knight Foundation, on the same panel, said his organization has committed $150 million over five years to Press Forward. Courtney Bengston of the Wichita Foundation added that her organization learns from residents what the local problems are before deciding where to spend money. She funds proposals that have three elements: collaboration, experimentation, and a goal of transformation.
The power of relationships and trust
The people who seem to have solutions for how to get young people consuming news and building trust are the so-called “influencers.” This was the subject of my favorite panel, moderated by Adeline Hulin of UNESCO (France).
“People are looking for a personal relationship with media so they can evaluate whether they are trustworthy,” she said. “Influencers are building trust with engaging content.”
Salla-Rosa Leinonen, a public television producer from Finland, said traditional media presenters “speak with authority, while influencers are much more approachable.”
María Paulina Baena, a journalist and co-creator of La Pulla in Colombia, did investigative journalism on a YouTube channel that has 1.35 million subscribers. “People don’t care whether you’re a journalist or a ‘content creator’,” she said. “They trust you if you do rigorous research and are transparent about your work. You have to put your face there.”
Her success in attracting followers, she said, is by displaying her emotions in video — her anger or frustration with the reality of political and social life in Colombia.
Hugo Travers of France founded HugoDécrypte in 2015 when he was 18. CNN has said he might be the most popular journalist in France. His mission “is to make news and major contemporary issues accessible to as many people as possible, especially young people.”
He said that he was very interested in politics as a teenager but did not understand what journalists were talking about on TV. He realized they were talking to each other and their small circle of insiders. He liked YouTube and thought young people would watch videos that gave context and background to explain national and international events. HugoDécrypte (Hugo decodes or explains) now has a staff of 25 and an audience of more than 14 million people on its various social networks, including 6 million on TikTok.
Sam Ellis, a journalist and video producer for SearchParty, “an independent video journalism project” that investigates news around geopolitics and global sports. He has reported on how Saudi Arabia is sponsoring sporting events like the LIV Golf tour with hundreds of millions of dollars to promote its global political goals. Search Party has gained more than 330,000 subscribers in its first 7 months.
The power of AI
The theme of how to use this new technology tool ran through nearly every panel at the Symposium. There are plenty of reasons to fear its abuse, and there are lots of reasons to see it as an aid to producing trustworthy journalism.
Marc Lavallee, director of technology product and strategy for the journalism program at the Knight Foundation, moderated a panel on how journalists can use AI to do rigorous fact-checking and reporting when they can’t physically be on site, such as in war zones.
The main tools are OSINT (open-source intelligence from online databases and information sources) and SOCINT (social media intelligence, gathered from photos, videos, and other information posted by ordinary users).
“So many of the techniques of journalism go to a situation kind of as it is unfolding, or maybe after it happened, using techniques to understand what did happen and to be able to report that out,” Lavallee said. “And in this era, when most of the people of the planet have a camera, where satellites are tracking every move globally, there’s so much more of an opportunity to actually take that information.”
The panel included Meg Kelly, senior reporter with Visual Forensics of The Washington Post; Haley Willis, visual investigations reporter at The New York Times; Marc Perkins, investigations editor at the BBC World Service; and Eoghan Macguire, lead editor at Bellingcat.
A sampling of sessions
All these sessions took place in April, and the topics are still relevant.
Breaking the News: more racial, ethnic, gender voices needed
Strategies that are improving revenue for local news media
Media are making a mistake by trying to appease bullies like Trump
How a Ukrainian news organization outwitted Kremlin censorship
