Practicing Convergence Journalism

An Introduction to Cross-Media Storytelling

Janet Kolodzy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136222825
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Journalisme

Practicing Convergence Journalism teaches budding journalists how to make the most of digital technology to tell their stories effectively across multiple media platforms—in print, audio, video and online. Janet Kolodzy addresses multi-media and cross-media thinking, organizing, reporting and producing for both short-form spot news and long-form features. Her approach focuses on storytelling principles, not just specific technical practices, providing journalists with the mindset and skills they need to adapt their writing and reporting for the tools of today and tomorrow.

With this book and the aid of its companion website, students learn how to:

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• Develop a cross-media mode of journalistic thinking that will result in stories suitable for a fast-paced, multitasking and mobile audience.

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• Decide when visuals are useful and necessary, and understand how to capture, select and organize them to effectively enhance a reader's understanding of a story.

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• Put together various elements of storytelling (writing, audio, moving and still pictures) for an interactive journalistic experience.

1 WHAT’S OLD IS NEW, WHAT’S NEW IS OLD

DOI: 10.4324/9780203097434-1

Talk to anyone who worked in journalism before the Internet, smartphones or even Twitter and you might hear of the doom and gloom of news and journalism today. Some journalists and those who study the news and how it is communicated often provide a Chicken Little scenario about the future of news. The sky, or really the audience for traditional news presentation, is falling.

However, by looking at what is declining, very little attention is being paid to what is growing. While audiences, especially young ones, were rejecting newspaper and news magazine subscriptions and the network evening newscasts, they were embracing Skype, YouTube, Instant Messaging, Storify, news aggregators such as Google News, texting and Facebook. In fact, their interest in news was growing; they wanted to know what was going on in their world of family and friends, as well as what others like them were doing elsewhere. And, they wanted it right now.

By 2010, 30 years after CNN introduced 24/7 news, a whole generation knew of nothing but a world of instant news gratification. By 2010, some two decades after Internet use became commonplace, that same generation knew of nothing but a world of interactivity and sharing of information, pictures, videos and comments. The fact that Facebook surpassed Google in one measure as the most popular site on the Internet in 2010 illustrates this shift in expectations (Mui, 2010): people want news fast and they want control about where, when, who and how they interact with it.

Convergence journalism—providing news to people when, where and how they want it using any and all communication tools available—aims to meet those expectations. Practicing convergence journalism requires understanding the media technology landscape and being flexible enough to navigate it to the benefit of the news audience while adhering to the best principles of journalism.

For example, when a water-main break in the Boston area in May 2010 forced dozens of communities to issue tap-water bans, Twitter served as one of the best places for news on the ban and about supermarket runs on bottled water. As journalism professor and Boston Globe media blogger Mark Leccese noted, the “tweets” from individuals about their encounters at finding empty shelves provided interesting, relevant and timely elements to the story (Leccese, 2010). The Twitter posts satisfied several of the long- accepted criteria of what is newsworthy: human interest, relevance and timeliness. Reports of battles over the few remaining bottles of water added a fourth: conflict.

A year earlier, Twitter again provided a tool for news on Iranian protests and the resulting government crackdown. The posts bypassed the government’s efforts to control news. Video of the death of 26-year-old Neda Agha-Soltan during the June 2009 protests in Tehran, Iran, was anonymously uploaded on YouTube. It captured international attention and condemnation, and won the prestigious George Polk award for videography.

What Makes a Story Newsworthy?

Timeliness

Proximity

Prominence

Conflict

Unusualness

Usefulness

Relevance

Human interest

Figure 1.1 The cellphone video depicting Neda Agha-Soltan as she was dying from the crackdown against anti-government Iranian demonstrators in 2009 went “viral” on YouTube. It demonstrated the new power of citizen and social media that ballooned two years later in uprisings throughout the Arab world.

The interest in news isn’t fading away, but interest in many of the ways it has been delivered to people throughout the second half of the twentieth century is. Fewer people want to spend 30 minutes every morning with the daily newspaper or schedule to be home in time to watch a 30-minute network evening newscast. More people go online and use news aggregators like Google News to keep up with the happenings in the world and they follow news of very specific interest to them.

This represents what blogger and journalism professor Jeff Jarvis refers to as “the mass of niches.” Jarvis argues that the news industry, like all businesses, should take its cue from this change in audience/consumer demand by deciding to better “serve the niche” in what he calls the “mass of niches” economy. Value in a “mass of niches” economy is in what you know, how you serve others or how you can participate, Jarvis indicated (Jarvis, 2009). If so, then the future of news and journalism relies on ensuring its value of gathering and disseminating knowledge, providing service to the public while participating with and in communities. These are not new goals for journalism, but the modern audience’s expectation for news requires an approach that revitalizes connections with the news public.

To do that, modern journalists have to think a bit differently. Their journalism needs to be:

1. Audience-centric
2. Story-driven
3. Tool-neutral
4. Professional

These four ideas do not supplant the traditional values and skills of journalists, but refocus and supplement them. Convergence journalists must still write, report, produce and disseminate news. However, these tenets will reinvigorate their journalism, infusing it with the key values and lessons of twentieth-century news while melding with a sense of innovation and excitement for the twenty-first century. This convergence journalism mindset helps today’s journalistic storytellers use different media to reach people whenever, wherever and how ever they want, engaging with people to share and participate in telling the news story. By doing that, convergence journalists should never “lose” an audience interested in the news.

Be “Audience-Centric”

Modern twenty-first-century media audiences have demonstrated quite clearly they are unwilling to be passive; they demand to be active participants in what they read, listen to, watch, comment on, and even pass along to others. They want to check out, choose and collaborate. Journalism has always been “audience-centric” in that its focus and duty is to serve people, not the whims and imaginations of journalists or their organizations. Focusing on serving the public’s needs and wants can be difficult, confusing and seemingly futile as people’s interests can be diverse, scattered and sometimes contradictory.

However, journalism organizations often choose either to pander to people by giving them news they think they want (do people really need extensive updates on Lindsay Lohan’s rehab efforts?) or patronize them by providing news the organizations think audiences need (do people really read an eight-part series on the life of Senator John Kerry?). In both cases, news organizations seem to treat people as passive recipients of news to be manipulated to serve the organizations’ best interests, as opposed to the interests of readers, watchers, listeners and browsers. This does not truly represent the notion of being audience-centric—it is going through the motions. It creates and extends an “us (the media) versus them (the audience)” mentality. To break down this thinking, journalists can move beyond pandering or patronizing audiences to partnering with them, working with them on story ideas, sources and perspectives.

Being audience-centric is thinking about the best ways to serve people’s news and information needs. One way is fast and immediate. Another approach is in-depth, giving the public choices in terms of how deep they want to go into the subject. A look at how people are using media these days, and how they are learning and retaining information shows that more and more people gravitate to these ends of the spectrum of news content and information. Both approaches require the push and pull of news and information. The push involves journalists sending out news to people wherever they happen to want the news. The pull involves journalists interacting with the public in getting tips, insights and clarifications. By practicing convergence journalism, people are pulled into the story by participating in parts of it. A modern multimedia journalist has to think of push/pull as a key function of the fast-and-immediate and in-depth approaches to be truly audience-centric.

Fast and Immediate

The first audience-centric approach—fast and immediate—makes accommodations for media consumption habits. Media multitasking continues to grow as a habit, especially for individuals under age 30, a demographic nicknamed the Millennial or Digital Natives. In fact, multitasking has become as much of a personal habit as brushing teeth and equally as integral and dependent in daily life. If you are under the age of 30, this is stating the obvious. And if you have younger siblings, you know that this upcoming generation of news consumers, those in elementary and secondary school, show no signs of cutting back on their media multitasking. A 2010 Kaiser Foundation study found nearly a third of 8- to 18-year-olds are media multitaskers, packing some 10 hours and 45 minutes of media content in an average day (Rideout, Foehr & Roberts, 2010). News is a part of that media consumption but journalists must realize that the “competition” for eyeballs and ears is a myriad of entertaining, distracting, and attention-getting media offerings.

While it is called media multitasking, scientists who study our brains indicate this habit of texting while listening to music, or playing a video game, or posting a picture or video, or checking the time of a movie is really multitask-switching. We’re not necessarily doing two things at once as much as switching back and forth between two or three or four activities (like reading a text, listening to music, walking). While humans have been able to do this switching for quite some time, digital and mobile technology allows us to do it quickly and easily. There is also some evidence that the brain can be trained to process information faster. So this media multitasking is just switching quickly between a variety of items demanding attention or interest and stopping long enough on one task or bit of information to finish or retain it.

Journalists can respond to this trait of modern-day audiences without reinventing the wheel. The convergence journalist can take advantage of the technological tools to gather and disseminate information in combination with the tried and true traditional journalistic thinking in terms of newsworthiness. If audiences multitask via Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, then today’s journalists have to multitask there as well. Since new and faster multitasking media tools are constantly emerging, modern journalists need to be flexible in learning and using tools to best connect with news audiences.

Figure 1.2 More people are using more media at the same time, thanks to devices like smart phones that can allow users to check e-mail, listen to music and watch video.

This fast-and-immediate approach to news also carries with it the demand of news finding the audience, and not the other way around. In the past, news producers “built” newspapers, magazines, newsreels, radio and television newscasts, and people went to newsstands, movie houses, and radio and TV at the appointed times where they found news. Today, if the news is important enough, it will get to the people who need to know it.

This approach requires the modern convergence journalist to know a variety of ways of finding the audience and getting its attention. Armed with the traditional notions of what is news but with the added audience-centric thinking of inviting the audience to participate in providing perspective and information, twenty-first-century journalists can satisfy people’s appetites for quick tidbits of news throughout their day.

Just as the telegraph, the radio and the television raised the demand and pace of the fast-and-immediate approach of journalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, digital and mobile communication technology has raised the expectation of fast-and- immediate news today. That fast-and-immediate news often is concise headline-like information in text, but it also could involve a photo illustrating the scene or providing a snapshot of the situation. It also means allowing others the opportunity to provide different perspectives, helping identify useful information and filtering out irrelevant material. Newspaper journalists learned to write headlines to attract readers, and different styles emerged in that effort. Television producers also learned best practices in terms of writing news show opens and teases to attract viewers to stay and watch. These days, modern convergence journalists will need to learn and use techniques in presenting tweets and online story headlines to capture attention and interest.

Again, the Boston water crisis of May 2010 illustrates a fast-and-immediate approach. The water authority issues a drinking water ban; the journalist posts the information and then thinks about what other information people need to have once they learn of the ban. The journalist thinks about who might have the answers to some typical questions by readers and users, and where people can go to get those answers. The reporter also can think of perspectives that can provide insight and more information, such as where people are going to get water and how they are responding to the water ban. While the modern journalist “pushes” the story out to the public with posts of text and pictures, he/she also “pulls” information in from members of the public who want to share their situation with others to add to the collective knowledge. Being audience-centric means this modern journalist focuses on what information, insights, and illustrations best serve the public’s understanding of what is going on.

In-depth

The in-depth approach to being audience-centric involves not merely throwing more of everything (more words, more graphics, more pictures, more animation, more links, more details, etc.) at audiences. But planning to give people more choices as to how much or how little they will delve into a story, its sources, context and history. That means that journalists have a responsibility to guide people through the news and information and not just put a bunch of news tidbits together, hoping people will figure it all out for themselves. Rather than determining a multimedia approach that involves a bunch of pieces to the puzzle that the audience will put together to get the big picture, journalists should plot out the value of each stand-alone piece to the audience and to the understanding of the story. Some people might look at all the different parts while others will look at just one or two. The key is providing choices in terms of the depth of knowledge and perspective.

Being audience-centric in an in-depth approach to news, requires journalists to provide guidance and connections. Journalists have always relied on experts to help provide them with guidance in terms of the information they present to the public. Journalists talk to the fire chief for guidance about a fire and how it was started or spread, or to a lawyer about how a Supreme Court ruling might be implemented, or to a doctor or immunologist about ways to respond to the flu.

However, being in-depth in practicing convergence journalism may mean providing links to various experts’ websites, to more detailed definitions and explanations online, and to additional background in previous news reports so that audiences can choose to determine how in-depth they want to go on the subject material. The convergence journalist guides people to additional information, experts and perspectives for those who want it. By using the journalistic tools to help trust but verify and sort excellent, good and mediocre information (using multiple sources, checking the reliability and sourcing of information, etc.), journalists can provide useful and efficient guidance to people. This guidance will be a much-appreci...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface: What is New About Today’s News Audiences?
• Acknowledgments
• 1 What’s Old is New, What’s New is Old
• 2 Eight Elements of a News Story and the Tools to Build It
• 3 Sources and Background Information: Reporting Before the Reporting
• 4 Short and Fast: Covering a Spot News Story
• 5 Law and Ethics: Reporting Rules of the Road
• 6 Building the Spot News Story
• 7 Capturing Context and Tone: Using Words, Pictures and Sound
• 8 Packaging the Story: The Daily Wrap
• 9 The Multimedia Story: How to Help Audiences Get What They Want and Need
• 10 Feature or Enterprise News Stories
• 11 Digital Storytelling: Design and Data
• 12 Law and Ethics: Producing and Disseminating News
• References
• Index