“The Journalist is No Longer The Privileged Channel”

Jonathan Hewett, Director of the new Interactive Journalism Master at City University London, about the skills journalism students need to have today to be prepared for a changing job market and the importance of talking to “ordinary” users.

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You started an Interactive Journalism Master at City University last autumn – what does that Master involve, and how is it reflecting changes in journalism?

We started it because it was clear that enough news organizations and related bodies were moving towards including more participative thoughts into the journalism they were doing. Thats what we tried to focus on in our syllabus.

So how will journalism – and journalists – have to change?

Journalism increasingly starts to treat its audiences as active participants instead of passive recipients. That involves getting into a discussion with readers and using them as a source of information, be it via crowdsourcing, social media use or simply by entering the discussion regarding ones articles.

Some of us seem to have a tough time accepting that our profession is changing so much. Why is that so hard – are journalists an especially change-resistant crowd?

I guess change is always hard, especially when it involves questioning your position of power. If you go back a number of years, where was the interaction between the reader and the journalist? In local papers, the reporter would perhaps go out and meet people in his community, but besides that, there wasn’t much going on. At national news organisations, most people with whom a reporter would deal were either experts or sources; not so much “ordinary” people and readers.

There is probably some psychology involved in it: The journalist – at least in general interest media – is no longer the privileged channel, the person who knows more than anyone else and has the contacts. That’s hard to accept. Before the internet, the journalist was an elevated gatekeeper to a world that was more or less closed to the readers.

Speaking of the gatekeeper function, do you see it disappear? Or does it just change?

It is still there to some extent, but its getting less important. “Gatekeeper” is perhaps not the right word anymore. When doing research about a specific topic, the journalist might still be the one with the contacts and inside knowledge – but as soon as the story is online, the readers become basically equal. Then it’s a matter of time, resources and personal preferences how reporters deal with the openness of information, whether they interact with users or not.

How big is the potential for change in journalism that enhancing user engagement could have? 

It depends on how the news organizations will prioritize their ressources. They will likely do so according to possible revenue streams and advantages they will have from changes. So the big question is: Is there a reward for engaging users and talking to users? Does it help creating stories, does it produce user generated content, or facilitate research? I see huge potential there.

Online users are often seen more as a nuisance and necessary evil, less as something you can really profit from – part of that being so because of the rude tone in most online forums. Can we change that?

It certainly depends on the kind of community. I have the following theory: In very specific forums, let’s say for lawyers, in very defined communities, there are implicit or explicit professional standards linked to this certain community. You are likely to see less bad behavior there, because people stay in their professional roles. On a general newssite, there is no implicit or exlicit standard role. And yes, the comments can be rude. The quality of a community starts to improve if you have a system where you need a certain number of comments to get published, or where the community has ways to flag inappopriate comments – and of course present and engaged community managers and journalists.

But there comes the next problem: As soon as a human is involved, there is a very direct resource cost, but the benefits are generelly only visible in the long term. Its not that you change something today and have a better community tomorrow. That’s a problem for news organisations who usually want to see quick results in everything.

One of the most important questions will be how to ensure journalistic ethic standards with user generated contenct and crowdsourced info.

There is a danger to lower those standards, and we have to be very aware of that. Journalists need to make sure they represent a source of trust and check information thouroughly. User generated content needs to be rechecked, the sources, the metadata of pictures, that is always going to be an issue.

You have been in journalism education quite a while. If you look at your students today, do you see a change in what they expect from the profession?

I do, and some of them are very excited about the changes and the potential new media brings. Several are more focused on the classic way of journalism and want to end up there. What journalism has to offer has become much broader. Some may find that exciting, some may find it daunting.

What knowledge is necessary to be successful in media today?

There is an enourmous range of journalism jobs out there. It’s just important to know that it’s unlikely that everyone is going to end up in a “traditional” journalism job. There is much more choice than 10 or 15 years ago, and that can be very confusing for students. The only way to handle that is to be well informed about the current trends and changes in journalism, so to be able to make a concious decision about what to choose in the end. We try to give our students a broad range of skills and knowledge and bring in many guest speakers and lectures, so they are prepared for that.

When you think of news organisations today, who is doing a good job in making interactive journalism?

Well, the Guardian, certainly. The Telegraph is doing quite a lot with fairly modest resources, in terms of using social media like Twitter. Reuters is doing interesting projects regarding the publishing of real-time information for their business and finance community. Interesting stuff is also going on outside journalism, where businesses and companies are doing social media campaigns or create specialized online communities. It would be wise for journalism to keep an eye on those developments, too.

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This interview is part of a series of interviews I will publish on my blog throughout the next months. It’s part of my Knight Fellowship project about user engagement and online communities in journalism. I will talk to community managers, journalists, scientists and media managers about their view on user engagement and try to find examples of online platforms that tried interesting, daunting, promising or crazy ways of working with their community. Recommendations always welcome!