Identifying Values to Guide Journalism Into the Future
By Clare Lombardo
In May, the Pulitzer Board awarded 15 prizes honoring the best journalism of the past year. The Associated Press won the public service prize for their coverage of Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Gimlet Media and reporter Connie Walker were honored in the audio reporting category for a podcast about Walker’s father that became a larger investigation into residential schools in Canada.[1]
While widely hailed as the highest honor in journalism, the Pulitzer Prizes have no set criteria. The winning entries for commentary, criticism, and editorial writing are vastly different in both form and impact than those for investigative reporting or local reporting. Honesty, transparency and thoroughness of sourcing are each “longstanding ethics of the journalistic profession” that the awards seek to honor, along with, according to the entry site, enterprise reporting that holds power to account.[2] But ultimately, "It is left up to the nominating juries and the Pulitzer Prize Board to determine exactly what makes a work ‘distinguished.’”[3]
As the Board’s openness shows, identifying what makes good journalism is no simple task. In fact, defining journalism at all, in an age where anyone can share their observations and experiences with the world, is a matter of debate. The very forces that have broadened possibilities for journalistic work — namely, the internet — have also threatened business models for newspapers and other legacy media. This has led to a tension: Though defining journalism has only gotten harder in recent years, doing so has simultaneously become part of making a case for supporting the press. That is, those who consider journalism to be a public good — and therefore worth treating differently under law — must clarify what, exactly, is worth distinguishing. It makes sense, then, that as world leaders increasingly seek to address the risks of online content and a rapidly changing news industry, some are inevitably defining what makes the news.
This comes with widespread policy implications. The U.K. Online Safety Bill features special provisions and exemptions for “news publisher content,” which, according to the bill, is “subject to a standards code” and “editorial control,” among a number of other identifiers.[4] The European Media Freedom Act assumes a shared vision of “media service providers” as “public watchdogs.”[5] These definitions may eventually determine which media entities have exceptions and protections under law in their respective jurisdictions.
In the U.S., what journalism is worth investing in?
In the United States, many researchers, including Milton Wolf panelists, see funding from nonprofits and the government as potential revenue streams to replace ad-driven models of the past. Expanding public service media is another avenue for the future.[6] No matter the source, however, funding depends on an essential question: What journalism is worth investing in?
“Newspapers are not somehow magical vessels for an informed democracy,” as Nikki Usher writes,[7] and funding entities that aren’t serving public needs is fruitless. Industry leaders behind a recent “Roadmap for Local News” believe that “saving” local news should be oriented around investing in “civic media,” which spreads vital information in communities, and not around saving newspapers without regard to the content they disseminate. Civic media, in this view, can be spread by libraries and schools just as it can be shared by digital news start-ups or podcasts.[8] Victor Pickard, Penn professor and Milton Wolf Seminar participant, has expressed a similar vision for “public media centers.”[9] These proposals for the journalism’s future broaden the remit of the press beyond “public watchdogs” and reorient their work toward communities.
Crucially, Green et al. resist defining journalism in their “Roadmap for Local News.” Instead, they argue for “reimagining” what journalism could be, situating journalists within an “information ecosystem” of educators and organizers, part of a community dedicated to delivering “civic information.” To evaluate this ecosystem, they recommend establishing a “common impact measurement system” that can be applied across various media systems. “Tracking newsroom employment and advertising revenue is less helpful than asking, on an annual basis, the extent to which communities’ information needs are met,” they write. In addition, equity implications and power dynamics should be taken into account while evaluating news sustainability, they say.[10]
Until recently, I worked in public media in the U.S., where I regularly faced existential questions about what models of journalism would be sustainable in the future. I found the ideas in the “Roadmap For Local News” especially compelling because, instead of starting with journalists, Green and her co-authors start with values. U.S. media currently have an opportunity to follow suit, identifying which values should guide journalism in the future. After the Milton Wolf Seminar in April of 2023, I began pondering this question for myself.
What values should guide journalism?
One measure used regularly to evaluate journalism is trust. However, I was especially inspired by the work of one Milton Wolf presenter, Jussi Latvala, who is researching journalistic transparency at the Reuters Institute. He posed what I think is an essential question: How much trust in journalism is the right amount? Increasing trust in the press has become a central concern for journalists and those who study news in recent years, but lessons from authoritarian regimes show that complete trust in news is not, in fact, a great sign.
Another buzzword-turned-value prevalent in modern newsrooms is audience engagement — the kind that goes beyond page views and instead builds a relationship between the reader and the journalist. Yet, as Schmidt et al. write, “A gap has emerged between the promise and reality of engaged journalism.”[11] This rings true in my own experience in journalism: I worked on various engagement projects — including call-in radio shows, a public contest, and crowdsourced stories. I found that while engagement strategies are often envisioned as a pathway toward democratizing newsmaking and distributing more power to audiences, some approaches can also reinforce the boundaries between audiences and journalists — positioning journalists as the arbiters of what audience contributions are useful. This is not to say that engagement isn’t worthwhile, but that engagement for engagement’s sake may not be a value that should drive journalism into the future.
Instead, one concept that may be useful for journalists is reciprocity, or reciprocal journalism, as Lewis et al. call it.[12] I first came across this term in my coursework as a masters student in media and communications and immediately appreciated how valuable it would be in a newsroom. Reciprocal journalism comes in many forms, but ultimately provides benefits for both the journalists and their participants, Lewis et al. write. Reciprocity is an especially useful concept to apply when evaluating engagement strategies, Borger et al. propose. [13] Their research shows that audience members enter journalistic exchanges with the expectation of reciprocity, but this expectation isn’t always fulfilled. As such, reciprocity could be a tenant in the “common impact measurement system” that Green and her co-authors recommend in the “Roadmap for Local News.”
One especially useful example of reciprocity in action is at City Bureau, a media nonprofit with branches in various U.S. cities. (Darryl Holliday, one of the “Roadmap for Local News” authors, co-founded the organization.) City Bureau pays people in different cities to attend and document public meetings.[14] I find this arrangement to reflect reciprocity since participants quite literally benefit financially. Notably, this network of community contributors challenges the boundaries sometimes assumed between “journalists” and their audience. Reciprocity, then, demands that journalists reevaluate the ways they’ve defined their work and their relationships to readers in the past. This reevaluation, I think, is exactly what journalism in the U.S. needs in order to remain viable.
Media leaders and policymakers in the U.S. have the chance to steer investment in journalism and policies that support it toward values, reevaluating the work newsrooms do in the process. To me, reciprocity is a good place to start.
Footnotes
[1] The Pulitzer Prizes, “2023 Pulitzer Prizes,” The Pulitzer Prizes (Columbia University, 2023).
[2] The Pulitzer Prizes, “2023 Journalism Submission Guidelines, Requirements and FAQs,” The Pulitzer Prizes (Columbia University, 2022).
[3] The Pulitzer Prizes, “Frequently Asked Questions,” The Pulitzer Prizes (Columbia University), accessed May 30, 2023.
[4] Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, “Online Safety Bill,” Pub. L. No. HL Bill 87, accessed May 25, 2023.
[5] European Commission, “European Media Freedom Act,” Pub. L. No. COM(2022)457 (2022).
[6] Victor Pickard, “Revitalizing America’s News Deserts,” The Progressive Magazine, November 30, 2022.
[7] Nikki Usher, “The Real Problems with the Problem of News Deserts: Toward Rooting Place, Precision, and Positionality in Scholarship on Local News and Democracy,” Political Communication, February 20, 2023, 4.
[8] Elizabeth Green, Darryl Holliday, and Mike Rispoli, “The Roadmap for Local News,” Local News Roadmap, February 3, 2023.
[9]Victor Pickard, “The Local Rise of Public Media Centers,” Nieman Lab, December 2021.
[10] Green et al., “The Roadmap for Local News.”
[11] Thomas R. Schmidt, Jacob L. Nelson, and Regina G. Lawrence, “Conceptualizing the Active Audience: Rhetoric and Practice in ‘Engaged Journalism,’” Journalism 23, no. 1 (June 15, 2020): 3–21.
[12] Seth C. Lewis, Avery E. Holton, and Mark Coddington, “Reciprocal Journalism,” Journalism Practice 8, no. 2 (2014): 229–41.
[13] Merel Borger, Anita van Hoof, and José Sanders, “Expecting Reciprocity: Towards a Model of the Participants’ Perspective on Participatory Journalism,” New Media & Society 18, no. 5 (May 2016): 708–25.
[14] City Bureau. “Documenters: Homepage.” Documenters.org. City Bureau. Accessed January 4, 2023.