By Tamara Merritt
Themes of trust, audience engagement, and a fractured media landscape emerged during a panel discussion Saturday about the challenge of improving political journalism.
Moderated by Lucy van Oldenbarneveld, former news anchor for CBC Ottawa, five panelists took on the challenge of dissecting the question: “How do we make political coverage stronger and more relevant to people who are disengaged?”
The panelists were Press Progress reporter Luke Lebrun, The Hill Times columnist Erica Ifill, POLITICO parliamentary reporter Mickey Djuric, Toronto Star politics writer Raisa Patel and Karyn Pugliese, former APTN, CBC, Canada’s National Observer and Canadaland journalist.
Ifill noted that journalism is consumed in different ways by different genders and generations. And different platforms appeal to different emotions, she said.
“Voting,” Ifill added, “is not an intellectual endeavour. It is an emotional one.”
Lebrun tackled the question of relevance through an economic lens. As journalism has evolved through the years it is rapidly transforming from ad-based models, which appeal to a mass audience, to a proliferation of publications focused on niche issues, he said.
Different outlets employ different strategies of engagement, Lebrun noted, highlighting the California online publication The Oakland Side as an organization that supports itself by holding in-person meetings to crowd-source community issues and to share stories directly from the very public journalists are seeking to serve.
The panel’s main theme arose when Patel touched on the topic of trust, an issue that journalists have struggled with for decades. She suggested that smaller, niche and independent publications now have a better chance at gaining audience trust than larger, traditional legacy media.
Patel said trust is hard to come by. “Building trust, getting people to talk to you, getting people to be in your stories and tell a story…I almost wonder if we need to reform the entire industry,” she said.
“These models, these systems, these structures that have worked for so long just aren’t working anymore,” she added. “The key to relevance is revolution.”
The lack of trust in legacy news media was personified by one panel member herself. “I don’t trust news either,” Ifill said, laughing. Ifill, who is also a podcast host, defined her purpose as a journalist as giving “fact-based opinion that represents marginalized communities.” But the majority of news organizations have not achieved this goal, she said. “I think news organizations have broken the public’s trust,” she said.
Lebrun suggested a more robust embrace of transparency as a solution to the lack of trust. Lebrun referenced an initiative called The Trust Project. It is a list developed to enhance the credibility and trustworthiness of a news website. The checklist includes using author bios that describe the journalist’s expertise in the byline and placing the address of the news organization on its website to act as a legitimizing factor. The aim is to allow individuals a look behind the curtain regarding the motivation of a story.
Intertwined with this dilemma of trust is the theme of audience engagement. “We need to figure out how we reconnect with our audience and recreate community with them,” Pugliese said. You need to “build those connections on the ground with communities.” Once you build a relationship with the community you are reporting on a relationship of trust will inevitably be built “because they know the face behind the article.”
A shift in attitudes towards the audience may also be a key in regaining trust. “Don’t have contempt for the audience,” said Pugliese. As journalists, she added, “we forget there’s a public out there.”
A key issue with trust, Pugliese iterates is how the news is viewed as a product and not as a service. “We have to be more accessible,” she said, suggesting an approach more akin to community journalism, reporting from the ground up.
During the post-panel Q&A, fired-up attendee said the conference was failing to really reimagine what political journalism should be.
“If we are reimagining, then we must understand that the vast majority of people are considered less than human, are in fact excluded from democracy and that they are aspiring not only to be human, but to invent what it means to be human.” His heartfelt plea was met with applause.
While trust and community building took up most of the panel’s discussion, another audience member brought up a concept she said had been missing from the conversation: courage. “We are talking about trust, but I think you know what to do,” she said. “I just think there is a lack of courage right now and I think that’s what we have to grapple with.”