I have decided that this is one piece of required reading for my Columbia University students when the new semester opens next month.
It is titled, Advice for aspiring explainer journalists (Vox) , and written by David Roberts. Some highlights:
–These days, journalism is “less about producing new information than it is about gathering information already on the record, evaluating it, and explaining and contextualizing it for an audience, perhaps with some analysis and argumentation for good measure.”
-The best explainer journalists have mastered their subject matter and know far more than the average reader about the topic.
-Explainer journalists also network in a way that not only yields career opportunities, but improves their research and writing. “The people who have come to my favorable attention over the years have done so because they ask smart questions, or point to information or sources I hadn’t seen, or connect me with other useful people. Whatever their roles or intentions, they know and care about the subject matter; they want to learn and they want to share what they know.”
Journalism in the era of online
I read this piece while in Vienna working with the editorial team of Kurier, as we move toward a mobile first approach. Today’s workshop was all about how we concentrate on stories, NOT editions. Part of the content of the workshop was about the journalism of everywhereness, and in which the audience is bombarded constantly by information. Our readers know more than readers of ten years ago used to know before they got our information.
That is a central theme of the Roberts piece. He writes that there are no longer supply constraints, that it is cheap for anyone to publish something on the web, and that there are “virtually no constraints left on the supply of information. Libraries are online. Government records are online. Every public figure’s every move is blogged or tweeted.”
What is the approach the journalist should take when so much of the information is known?
That of explainer, writes Roberts.
Two things follow. First, with supply constraints gone, there is no reason to confine web journalism to the length and formal constraints of journalism developed for paper. Any story can be as long as it needs to be, whether it’s 200 words or 2,000. Not every journalist must choose between the view-from-nowhere voice of the objective journalist and stale aphorisms of major newspaper editorial pages. There is room for a greater variety of length, form, tone, voice, and subject on the web.
And second, there’s more need for explanation.
People want to know how the world works. They want to know why the things that are happening are happening. They don’t stop wanting to learn when they get out of school.
And this is where the role of journalists can become essential, as explainers. As Roberts so eloquently tells us, people want to know how the world works. He insists, and I agree, that these days it is less about producing new information that it it is about gathering information already on the record, evaluating it and explaining and contextualizing it for an audience.
Here is where the role of a “content manager” plays an important part of what stories will be followed and how they will be handled. In this context, a story may have a “lean forward” mode early in the day, but become more explanatory and more “lean back” in subsequent updates.
I am always surprised by newsrooms where this shift in the role of the journalist—-and the role of information—have not been incorporated in work flow transformation and work assignments.
That is what my workshop today was all about.
At the end of the workshop, the young journalists had selected stories that needed more updates, better coverage, and, indeed, more explanations.
I asked the question: How is what you have done today different from how you have done this in the usual manner here?
I already knew the answer, but it was good to hear it again, and to discuss what change and transformation are all about: “Well,” said a young woman, “we would have concentrated on the way the story would appear in the print edition of tomorrow, thus eliminating the updates and the video component.”
Journalists not only need to become explainers, they also need to explore different ways of telling those stories across different platforms.
Read the entire piece here:
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/12/7/18117404/advice-for-journalists-news-media
TheMarioBlog post #2972