Getting Serious About Community
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Many people in the media industry talk about building community, but what does that really look like?
“It’s not enough to have a place where readers talk back—or the classic letters-to-the-editors pattern,” Clay Shirky says. “Rather it’s about providing a platform for readers to coordinate with one another. That’s a really radical shift because in part because it means you have to take community seriously.” In the past, journalism organizations had a deep bench with all the pieces under one roof, but a key competency for the new environment is deeply engaging with users and communities in a way that is also scalable. Independent media could build large-scale communities by building a shared platform across publishers.
Real Membership Equals Shared Projects
“The word ‘membership’ has a nice feeling, but what media outlets usually mean by this is: Give me money and we’ll give a product or access. But real membership is about coming together on shared projects, and this is extremely rare.” Shirky claims, “The convening power of media organizations is a power they haven’t used because of their model, but the potential is huge.”
Shared projects are a point on the continuum of user-generated content, from crowdsourcing to co-meaning making. An interesting example in the United Kingdom has been the “Atheist Bus Campaign,” in which a spontaneous campaign to raise £135 to put messages on 800 buses went global. Online gaming has led innovation in shared projects. “Avante-gaming,” for example, mixes real-world interaction with online communities. Similarly, “micro-volunteering,” simple tasks done on mobile phones, has great potential for journalism and is being developed by organizations such as The Extraordinaries. For example, news stories could spark a coordinated micro-volunteering effort that is reflected beneath stories in real-time and rolled up to reveal all actions taken by the multiple site’s users. Ranking the most active members could build community members’ reputations and sense of loyalty.
Community Organizing
Publishers and journalists alike are taking on the role of a classic community organizer. Amanda Michel, a founder of Huffington Post’s OffTheBus who now works for ProPublica, said, “I’m not a journalist by training and I directed the project using the online organizing tactics I learned on the campaigns of Howard Dean and John Kerry.”
Traditional journalists often do not like to mix community organizing with journalism because it can contaminate the credibility of the reporting. However, as the competitive landscape shifts from scarcity to abundance of information and voices, the ability to “cover” the news objectively is no longer the most valuable key competency. Building active communities among users is
exponentially growing in value.
Declarative and Adaptive Reporting
If community building becomes a new competitive advantage, then declaring a perspective may become more valuable than seeking objectivity. Hirschorn wrote that if journalism was no longer weighed down by the need to create an omnibus news product, then “reportage could make the case for why it matters, and why it might even be worth paying for.”
Jonathan Krim of the Washington Post called for “declarative journalism,” where reporters are able to be more honest about their own views. The Economist, a bright spot in the magazine business these days, could be growing thanks to its brazen style. “The aim is not just to tell readers what you think, but to persuade them,” an instruction from the magazine’s style guide reads. Mixing unabashed editorial stances with quality journalism has also been The Media Consortium (TMC) members’ strength.
Getting serious about community could require reporters to go one step further to adaptive journalism, where reporters declare a point of view and adapt it based on their engagement with a community of readers. As a result, journalists may need to adapt the ethical framework of their profession in order to build communities. Based on her experience with Huffington Post, Michel wrote, “Transparency and disclosure, rather than neutrality—often tainted if not patently false—must become critical fourth-estate virtues.”
This blog is an excerpt from The Big Thaw, a guide to the evolution of independent media, written by Tony Deifell of Q Media Labs and produced by The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets. Learn how your organization can use this report. For more information and recommendations from the study, click here.
[...] Taking community seriously requires a greater allocation of resources toward both technology and the personnel who can use it effectively. “Many organizations only see one piece of the puzzle and want to do small experiments—hire an intern and a few people here and there—without seeing how that impacts the rest of the media,” says Ashish Soni, who directs the Information Technology Program at the University of Southern California. “People who do have knowledge of the other pieces of the puzzle can do real systemic innovation, and this is the highest area to impact.” [...]
Thanks for the post Alison, we really appreciate your help in spreading the word about The Extraordinaries! If you have time, please visit our blog for more information, http://www.theextraordinaries.org, or be Extraordinary at http://www.BeExtra.org.
Thanks again!
Kim
This is truly one of the best things I’ve read about journalism, community, transparency and ultimately trust, that I’ve read. I actually have tried to tackle this topic recently because I think it is critically important in avoiding the rapid spiral of news into a commodity product. Great work and thanks.
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