From September 22nd to the 24th, a diverse panel of eighteen Summit County are residents were brought together to study and deliberate in conversations about local media and its role in the lives of Ohioans. Citizen Jurors gathered to learn from media experts, to deliberate on the best existing tools for journalists, and to generate recommendations for Ohio media’s issue-based coverage.
The participants were charged with evaluating the roles or niche(s) they would like to see local and Ohio-based media partners fill in order to better serve Ohio residents during the 2016 Presidential Election and beyond. Take a look at what they came up with in the Informed Citizen Akron #3 Final Report.
Informed Citizen Akron Event #3 Final Report
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Local Media Depends on Everyone
Our local news organizations matter. Local news tends to be the most accurate in covering issues in our community and tends to be the most trusted source of news for the majority of citizens. Journalism at all levels including, at the local level, is changing. Fewer people are paying for news, and local media generates significantly less money from advertising revenue than even 15 years ago. As a result, there are fewer reporters trying to do more: cover more stories, take their own photos and video, and post online and on social media.
Still, journalists and local media organizations have responsibilities to the community. Journalists need to be accountable to the public for what they report and how they report it, and they need to clearly acknowledge mistakes when they make them. Local news media should be the voice for, to, and of the community.
Citizens, too, have responsibilities to our communities. We need to take a more active role in becoming and staying informed, recognizing that news and important issues are often complex. We should also support our local media in any way we can. Our opinions, comments, feedback, and clicks make a difference!
For our communities to thrive, citizens and local media need to interact more. Local media must seek direction from the community about what needs to be covered. As citizens, we need to make our voices heard so that our stories are told and our perspectives and opinions help shape public conversations about important issues. Our communities are diverse, and the only way we can capture that diversity is by listening to and engaging the whole community.
Thankfully, there are many different approaches to improving journalism and strengthening the role of journalism in our communities. We focused on Accountability Journalism, Citizen-Led Journalism, and Social Journalism, which we discuss in more detail below.
Accountability Journalism (25 votes)
Accountability Journalism involves news organizations which take the lead in monitoring and evaluating the claims and actions of politicians and other leaders. Accountability journalism likely emphasizes data, provides context, and evaluates the degree of truth in claims. “Fact-checking,” or assessing the truth of a person’s or group’s statement or claim, is a key and prominent aspect of accountability journalism. The term “accountability journalism” can also refer to “watchdog” journalism.
Goals
The primary goals and objectives of accountability journalism are to inform and educate readers and audiences about key issues and events. This is done by concentrating on facts, data, and information focused by theme (such as schools, local elected officials, local funding, demographic info, or crime at the community level). When this happens effectively it can generate deeper involvement and trust among readers, which can lead to increased sales or readership and stronger relationships between community members, media organizations, and journalists.
Strengths
The strengths of accountability journalism include accuracy and clarity of information and data leading to efficient use of readers’ time. This approach can generate a consistent source of content and stories can focus on negative, salacious events, scandals, or the discovery and presentation of negative information to generate interest and sales. When news organizations provide reliable information, it can lead to a media organization becoming a trusted community resource.
Weaknesses
Primary drawbacks of this approach include the potential for stories to lack context and the human elemen by focusing on descriptions of events, information, or data. This can create conflict, tension, and friction among community members and can keep people from accessing stories if they feel alienated by coverage. This strategy can be a major resource drain on media organizations and journalists if information is difficult to obtain and verify, and may also take away creativity from the reporting process. These stories can overwhelm readers or audiences with data and information that prove a point, but may not be of value to the individual.
Tools and Strategies for Implementing Accountability Journalism
- Infographics help present complex information in a short, visual format. Infographics may be useful in helping people understanding a complicated issue or lots of statistics more quickly.
- Accessible and can be easily shared on social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
- Help make difficult information simple, can help digest in-depth articles and analyze stats, and allows audience or reader to make decisions based on facts
- Unbiased
- Community events can help journalists identify important community themes and priorities, uncover new stories and sources, build new relationships with a broader community, bring together diverse groups in the community, educate community members or build awareness of an issue, generate ideas from community members, and/or raise revenue
- Identify themes and priorities for investigation and research
- Hear directly from community members from different backgrounds as well as community leaders
- Transparency in priority setting can build trust, clarity, familiarity and ultimately foster community
- Training citizen journalists occurs when community members are trained by journalists to report on local issues, particularly in areas or neighborhoods where coverage is limited, lacking, or misrepresenting the community.
- People with local knowledge and expertise can support journalists and build capacity which can improve accuracy, build relationships, generate empathy and improve trust
Benefits of infographics:
Benefits of community events:
Benefits of training citizen journalists:
Citizen-led Journalism (15 votes)
Citizen-led Journalism considers the average citizen the authority on the information and news they need and how they would like that news reported. The degree of influence of citizens in local media can vary. Citizen-led journalism may involve local media helping citizens do their own reporting and storytelling or utilizing direct citizen engagement to solicit feedback from citizens throughout the reporting process (identifying stories or information needs, provide feedback to the reporter throughout the story cycle, evaluate the final story, and decide which stories or information to cover next based on that story).
Goals
The primary goals and objectives of citizen-led journalism are to involve citizens directly in sharing their stories, perspectives, and ideas, identify a clear sense of what matters to the community, better inform readers by providing more information about community issues from the perspective of diverse citizens, empower people to take action in their communities, and develop a shared ownership of community issues –where citizens are active partners in addressing shared issues and hold one another accountable for achieving results.
Strengths
The benefits of citizen-led journalism include: Achieving greater cost effectiveness for both local media organizations and the overall community, because citizens are able to contribute directly to the work of local media and other community organizations; building a stronger connection to one’s community, where community members can relate to the news and see themselves and their perspectives in the news; generating better information about the community, where citizens can see the perspectives and stories of others they may never otherwise interact with.
Weaknesses
The drawbacks of citizen-led journalism include: A potential decline in quality of journalism, since the average citizen may not be an authority on issues where a professional journalist may have greater expertise, and most citizens don’t have expensive technical equipment, resulting in (for example) grainy videos; a difficulty in deciding which stories and perspectives are shared, resulting in disappointment when someone doesn’t see themselves in the news; lower trust in journalism, because involved citizens may be more motivated by self-interest and their own personal biases than professional journalists.
Tools and Strategies for Implementing Citizen-led Journalism
- Solutions Journalism encourages journalists to write about the most promising solutions to issues the community faces based on evidence and compelling data, without advocating for any specific solution.
- A powerful antidote to negativity and apathy, combating the reality that people feel desensitized to problems and bad news.
- Citizens will focus more on taking ownership of and solving problems in their community.
- The community will have more knowledge of ideas, solutions, and sources for help on challenging issues.
- Training citizen journalists occurs when some news organizations and nonprofits directly train and work with members of their community to report on local issues, particularly in areas or neighborhoods where media presence is limited, lacking, non-inclusive, or misrepresenting the community.
- The ability to explore issues and stories professional journalists aren’t able to cover.
- Individuals that receive training may become professional journalists, diversifying the makeup of a news organization. These individuals may also go on to take other leadership roles in their community.
- Individuals may see citizen reporting as more legitimate and more trustworthy because the journalist comes from their same community, encouraging individuals to be more honest and open when engaging with citizen journalists Identify themes and priorities for investigation and research.
- Community events hosted by news organizations can help journalists uncover new stories and sources, build new relationships with a broader community, bring together diverse groups in the community, educate community members or build awareness of an issue, generate ideas from community members, and/or raise revenue.
- A better understanding of the community.
- Additional revenue to support the sustainability of the news organization, including by raising money directly or consulting with other organizations about hosting community events.
- Serving as a model for other communities, institutions, and groups to host productive community engagement events.
Benefits of Solutions Journalism:
Benefits of training citizen journalists:
Benefits of community events:
Social Journalism (14 votes)
Social Journalism operates with the understanding that journalism should create work that is considered a public service, not a product. To achieve this, journalists must work closely with the communities to identify the information they need, and answer it directly in their reporting; this approach takes shape as a mixture of community organizing, data management, education, and more. Social journalism, above all, focuses on collaboration with the community and investment in its future.
Goals
The primary goals and objectives of social journalism are to develop a collaborative relationship with the community; receive feedback and direction from the public for engaging coverage ideas; and empower citizens by giving them an active voice in the journalistic process. When this happens effectively, it can improve the public’s trust in the media, raise readership levels by providing content that is relevant and interesting to the community, and increase the number of opportunities for citizens to use their voice.
Strengths
Coverage that reflects feedback from citizens will directly reflect their concerns, priorities, and questions; as a result, citizens will have more interest in reading the article in its entirety, and it may perform overall better online. This supports the media organization’s financial sustainability. When citizens see that coverage has been tailored to their interests, it will support a collaborative relationship that imagines journalists as partners with the community and journalism as an open discussion. Social journalism also gives an opportunity for community members to engage directly (online and in-person) with journalists, strengthening the relationship between the community and the media, and building trust. Finally, social journalism directly engages citizens and empowers them, by providing them with solutions, to make positive change in their community.
Weaknesses
The primary drawbacks of social journalism include the potentially large commitment of human resources and financial support in adopting this strategy; newsrooms already face tighter budgets and reduced staff due to decreased revenue, so this commitment can be difficult for local media organizations to make. Additionally, because this strategy focuses on the involvement of individuals, it is vulnerable to subjectivity. The tools used to implement social journalism must ensure that individuals most vocal about their opinions are heard equally to those who may not share their opinions as loudly. Relying on citizens’ subjectivity in deciding subjects for coverage can also risk citizens missing the information they need, while they might be getting the information they want. Lastly, social journalism requires a large amount of cooperation from journalists and citizens, and this may be difficult to achieve.
Tools and Strategies for Implementing Social Journalism
- Solutions Journalism is a tool used to provide alternate narratives and potential answers to problems facing the local community; this tool does not seek to change minds, but to show the community possibilities.
- Informs citizens of possible actions they can take to solve problems, and empowers them to take those actions.
- Opens up discussion of challenging and/or sensitive topics within the community.
- Can unite communities together to face a challenging issue.
- Provides a sense of hope to the community in dealing with the problem.
- Crowd-powered Journalism is a tool which relies on the community’s support and depends on the community providing media organizations with information relating to topics for coverage. While other social journalism tools can require resources from media organizations, crowd-powered journalism reduces the burden of data-gathering for newsrooms.
- Citizens engage directly with media organizations which increases their personal connection with the project and media organization.
- Costs next to nothing for newsrooms, and saves them money overall. Because citizens are supplying the labor of data collection, journalists are able to focus on other parts of the coverage.
- Community events bring people together and unite them in addressing a certain topic of concern to the community. These typically take place in person, but could potentially include some type of online presence, in order to engage with as many citizens as possible.
- Communities are strengthened by in-person interaction which allows people to meet their neighbors
- Helping to organize in-person events provides another way to demonstrate the media’s commitment to the community.
- Holding live events creates an additional opportunity for the community to discuss problems, solutions, and actions that will improve the community.
Benefits of Solutions Journalism:
Benefits of Crowd-powered Journalism:
Benefits of community events:
Expert Presentations
(Listed Chronologically)
- Doug Oplinger, Managing Editor, Akron Beacon Journal
- Carrie Brown, Director of Social Journalism Graduate Program, City University of New York (CUNY)
- Jane Elizabeth, Senior Research Project Manager, American Press Institute
- Molly de Aguiar, Director of Informed Communities, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation
- Fiona Morgan, Journalism Program Director, Free Press
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