Does journalism work?

How do we know that the work that journalists do accomplishes anything at all? And what does journalism do, exactly, beyond vague statements like “supports democracy” and trivial ones like “gives me movie reviews”?

I made this image a couple months ago to introduce the question at a conference. A reporter researches and writes a story. The first arrow represents the process that gets that story published. We understand that process quite well, and the internet makes publishing really cheap and easy. Then there’s a process that takes published, accurate information and turns it into truth and justice for all. That’s the part that’s fuzzy. In fact I don’t think we understand it at all. I call this “the last mile problem” in journalism — how does journalism actually reach people?

Journalists occasionally claim a scalp, such as by embarrassing a politician enough to force them to resign, or focussing attention on some issue long enough to get legislation passed. Journalism also theoretically informs citizens so they can vote responsibly, in the elections which happen every few years. As I’ve argued before, these are weak levers by which to shift society. I’m less interested in what journalism does in extraordinary times, and more interested in how the journalist’s work improves the day-to-day operation of a society, and the experiences of the people living in it.

It’s possible that much of the journalism we have is effective. Maybe the mere existence of consistent reporting on the machinations of the powerful keeps them in line, and we’ll only know what journalism really gave us when it disappears and civilization collapses into a mire of secrecy and corruption. Or maybe that’s already happened. How would we know? How can we tell whether journalism, as a local or a global endeavor, is doing better this year than last?

Other fields have goals
I like to hang around the international development community, and those people have real problems. People working in public health are charged with improving access to clean water or preventing the spread of HIV. Others try to get more girls into school, or to raise entire communities out of poverty.

There are lots of ways to attack such complex social problems. An NGO or a foundation or a UN organ could lobby local politicians, produce research reports, provide services directly to affected populations, or launch a public awareness campaign. The way in which an organization proposes to have an effect is called their “theory of change.” This is a term I hear frequently at gatherings of development workers, and from the staff of NGOs and international organizations. Such organizations must continually develop and articulate their theory of change in order to secure philanthropic funding.

Journalism has no theory of change — at least not at the level of practice.

I’ve taken to asking editors, “what do you want your work to change in society?” The answer is generally along the lines of, “we aren’t here to change things. We are only here to publish information.” I don’t think that’s an acceptable answer. Journalism without effect does not deserve the special place in democracy that it tries to claim.

The question of “what change should journalism produce” is hard because it is unavoidably a normative question, a question about how journalists envision a “better” world. At the moment, the field of professional journalism is mired in intense confusion about its role and the meaning of classic standards such as “objectivity.” This has obscured discussion of the field’s goals at a moment of great transition brought on by new communications technology, precisely the time when clarity is most needed.

It’s telling that discussions of journalism’s fundamentals frequently harken back to the great debate of Lippman vs. Dewey. That happened in the 1920s. This was not only before live television and before the internet, it was before bastions of modern reasoning such as statistical inference, the study of cognitive biases, and the social construction of knowledge were fully developed. Other fields have done much better in adapting to the philosophical and technological revolutions of the last century.

Medicine in general and public health in particular have become relentlessly evidence-based. It’s no longer enough to run anti-smoking ads; we now require those responsible for public health to show that their preferred method of behavior modification actually reduces disease. Meanwhile, marketers have rallied around the idea that purpose of their work is to get targeted individuals to do something, whether that’s purchasing a product or voting for a particular candidate. That may not be an appropriate goal for non-advocacy journalism, but marketing and public relations researchers have made very careful studies of communication, recall, and belief.

Similar concerns over how messages are received arise in many fields, from crisis communications to public diplomacy. But not in journalism. If journalism does not change action it must change minds, but the tools and language of belief change seem to be entirely missing from the profession.

Journalism as surveillance of ignorance
It used to be the job of an editor to decide what to publish. Maybe it is now the job of an editor to decide what needs to be known. These are not at all the same thing. They used to be, when nothing could be done with a story after the ink hit paper. The internet allows so much more — promotion within specific communities, feedback on readership and reception, conversation as opposed to oratory. And potentially, cheap techniques to determine what people already believe.

We should expect that users will largely be choosing for themselves what to read and view. That’s reality, and that’s fine, and systems that make it easy to satisfy curiosity are systems that will make us smarter (even though we’ll mostly use them for entertainment.) But I believe there will still be an identifiable set of common content, the few things that the public — or some targeted fraction of it — absolutely has to know to participate meaningfully in the civic issues of the day. This is more or less what editors put on the front page today. But rather than the headlines reflecting the most important events, perhaps they should reflect the most pernicious misconceptions. Good journalists already have some sense of this, and every so often we learn of an alarming gap in public knowledge. A majority of Americans believed for years that Saddam Hussein was linked to 9/11, for example. Today, most Americans don’t know what’s actually in Obama’s new health care laws. (I apologize again to my international readers for the US-centric examples; I’d love to hear of similarly woeful tales from other countries.)

Combatting ignorance is harder than publishing. It’s my best guess for the second, mysterious arrow in the diagram above. Fortunately we also have new tools. We have reams and reams of data that people voluntarily put online, the “data exhaust” of entire societies. We also have old-fashioned public opinion polls, and their lightweight cousin online polls (though self-selection bias may render online surveys useless for all but the most casual work.) Somewhere in all this data and all this communication, it must be possible to figure out what it is that people actually believe — and where those beliefs are factually wrong in an uncomplicated way, precisely the way that an editor would say “that’s not true, we can’t print it.”

There are many possibilities for understanding the beliefs of an audience. I am particularly intrigued by opinion mapping, deliberative polling, and the attempts of UN Global Pulse to create data-driven societal monitoring systems. It may actually be possible to cheaply measure the state of public knowledge, which would also give us concrete metrics for improvement. We need new ways of thinking about the surveillance of ignorance, and we need software to implement them. But more than anything else, we need journalists attuned to what it is that people don’t know. Good journalists already are; they can see what is missing from discussion — whether that’s a question that no one has answered or a challenge to a prevalent belief — and do the hard work of adding it.

This effort applies at all scales. Each journalist has an audience or audiences, their communities of concern. Each could track what their audience already knows and believes. The job of the journalist, so conceived, is not merely to report the happenings, but to ensure that the audience is aware of and understands the most crucial of them. That won’t be easy. Aside from the challenges of determining what an audience already knows, people don’t like to be told they’re uninformed or wrong. This is why I believe a journalist needs to learn everything there is know about public communication, borrowing and adapting from marketing experts and public health planners. Genuine honesty and humility seems to me the ethical core, and newsroom transparency is a critical check on this power.

Of course, decisions would have to be made about what are misconceptions and which of them are important enough to combat. Decisions have to be made already about what to cover and promote with limited resources, and these hard choices are the iceberg that sinks any hope of a truly “impartial” journalism. It’s a reality that the profession has to deal with every day, and I wish we would get on with the work of crafting and communicating our normative stance, rather than insisting that “objectivity” means we don’t have one. (Even Wikipedia explains its norms in great detail.) I’d like to start with a list of things that journalists wish were better known. Be honest. I know you’ve already thought about this.

But if we can get over that hurdle — if we can admit that journalism needs concrete goals — then we stand a chance of doing better journalism, and knowing when we’re doing it. For me, the insane possibility of new communications technology carries with it the obligation to do better than we ever have before.

UPDATE: As if on cue, a major study was released four days after I published this, showing that a majority of American voters were misinformed about the issues they voted on in the recent mid-term elections. I discuss what that means here.

41 thoughts on “Does journalism work?”

  1. Great article, Jonathan.

    I believe you’re on to something here. With digital technology propelling journalism into an obscure realm, it will be important for traditional and non-traditional news outlets to examine new ways of achieving what they’ve probably never had the opportunity to achieve before. The first step is for news organizations to simply admit what they can’t cover (for whatever reason). This isn’t to criticize the work they already produce, but to inform people about topics which are lingering out there and worth paying attention to.

    Check out our teaser trailer to the documentary film on the U.S. newspaper industry called “Fit to Print”.

    htt://www.fittoprintfilm.com

  2. The answer lies in the formation of a subscription based social network in which each journalist gets involved with his/her readers in a seminar type educational experience that includes the kind of measurement you describe.

    Check http://ifihadmyway.com for more details.

  3. Twitter-length answers ennobles no one. I read your thoughts here with interest. I’m a public school teacher (I teach American literature, Peace Studies, and Moral Reasoning in a suburban American high school) but I have some background in public health. I am hearted to read your validation, I think?, of evidence-based research. My frustration (that was clearly evident during that PDF discussion) was a failure of many there to understand their roles as journalists the way that I understand them. (Shouldn’t all people doing a different job from me let me dictate the way they do theirs?? I know, I know….)

    Journalism, irrespective of the medium, has a function, it seems to me: ferret out the truth and report it so that people can make informed decisions about their lives and their government. It feels to me, justified or not, that not many journalists take this seriously. Take the backlash to WikiLeaks in general and Julian Assange in particular. He’s a hard guy to like from a media perspective, so as the individual in front of his organization, he is easily dismissed. And yet, WL is providing information that journalists should be (no?) flocking to in droves. But do they? Have they in the past without being spoon fed? Assange says they haven’t, which is why he needs to put a face to the organization. Therein lies the distraction.

    Do people like me have a fundamental misunderstanding of what journalists are supposed to do? I see them as doing the work of “angels,” providing information to regular Joes so they can make decisions (to the extent they are educated to make them–another issue). Am I wrong?

    I’m a regional school committee member in my area of Massachusetts. Three terms of nothing but frustration–I’m done at the end of this one. I do everything I’m supposed to do; I vote, I campaign for my (liberal) candidates, I run for office and still I feel like the joke’s on me. When groups like WikiLeaks can exposed the corruption and hypocrisy in such stark and vivid detail, I want to crawl back home and hide. Did I really have the nerve to drag some old lady out of her house to vote for Obama in 2008, claiming he marked a new era in American exceptionalism? Holy shit. Pass the wine bottle; I’m going to drink my supper.

    I have vented in full. I want journalists to be on my side, not “theirs,” the myriad “others” who seem to be playing a parallel game of governance. Am I unreasonable?

  4. She teaches English and has serious subject/verb agreement issues. Oy. My apologies for the poor proofreading.

  5. Are you kidding me?
    First, journalists, REAL journalists — not bloggers, tweeters etc — HAVE a goal. To report OBJECTIVELY. They don’t have an agenda. They put their own biases aside and REPORT.
    JOURNALISTS are not columnists nor the talkin heads on cable news.
    And “news” is not “information.”
    ugh.

  6. “Objectivity” is not a goal. The goal is the betterment of society in some way. How does that work, exactly, is it possible to measure the effectiveness, and can we do it better?

  7. Back in the 1970s when I was a student at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia, I took a summer off to tour Europe. I signed up for an organized tour for college students. We went just about everywhere, including behind what was then the Iron Curtain. As a journalism major, what I saw in communist countries was a lesson I will never forget. The lesson still applies today and validates journalism — if people will just find the energy and time to be interested in what is happing in their community and in the world.

    Here’s the lesson — a society without a free press is a repressed society and that is a very hard way to live indeed. If people will just pay attention to it, even basic journalism is valuable. It is needed! The future of journalism is in the hands of those who consume the information, or don’t consume it. Get complacent over even the simple day-to-day things that make the world go ’round and you may pay the price of no longer having a journalism profession that actually does support democracy.

    This is not complicated. Access to information results in the messy machinery of democracy that allows us to live the amazing lives we have. Remove that access to information and you have what I saw behind the Iron Curtain — children who don’t laugh, adults who don’t smile, soldiers patrolling the streets with submachine guns and a young woman in East Berlin who was terrified to accept a month-old Newsweek that one American student no longer wanted. By the way, she stuffed the Newsweek down her blouse with shaking hands, glancing all around with utter fear. She was our East Berlin guide that day. As our bus pulled away to return to West Berlin, I saw her watching us, tears streaming down her face. Is that how we want to live?

    Journalism does offer democracy. It does offer justice. It is needed. There are plenty of countries to visit today where journalism does not exist. We already are familiar with the consequences.

  8. To answer the question, Jonathan: Yes, if you can figure out how to MAKE it work.

    Old dogs CAN do new tricks. I’m a 32-year Time Inc. veteran– and former top human interest writer at People–weekly readership 43 million.

    Re: Adam Chadwick’s “it will be important for traditional and non-traditional news outlets to examine new ways of achieving what they’ve probably never had the opportunity to achieve before.”

    How about an engaging, mass-market portal that features first-class, People-style (that’s key– and “different”) human interest content on the actual lives of 3 billion people in the developing world?

    Here’s the new model, MiWorld.com, now in beta: http://www.miworld.com/ Stories link to NGOs, etc. We become, in effect, an aggregated global PR platform for 1.6 million NGOs. Upload their raw content (via branded Flips, or whatever digital works), and PRODUCE it into something people will actually want to read, at MiWorld editorial headquarters in NYC. (Yes, a melding of “citizen reporters” with old-school expertise and know-how.)

    Here’s 8 minutes on how/why it’ll work: http://www.miworld.com/site/pages/video_usccd.html

    Self-monetized. Targets $220 BILLION in annual small-donor (median $50) U.S. charitable giving. After-tax profits (a la Yunus) go to sustainable development in the underdeveloped world, both foreign and domestic. Taps cash pools like Procter & Gamble’s annual $9.6 BILLION in ad expenditures.

    The social networking component MiPage: http://www.miworld.com/site/clips/guatemala.html#mipage

    love ur reax. tnx.

  9. To Ms Schindehette: what does “a global PR platform for 1.6 million NGOs” have to do with citizen reporting or the new model of journalism? Who then is reporting on the NGOs?

  10. Jonathan, very interesting and thoughtful essay. Lots to think about.

    I don’t have much to add, but I do wonder about how this question might be parsed between the individual and the profession.

    My brother’s a cardiologist – he treats patients as a doctor but also as a role in trying to affect public policy. At one level, he’s succeeding in his job if he extends the life of one person, even marginally. But at another, if that results in misallocation of resources in the hospital from, say, primary health care, is that a good thing or not?

    Not trying to make this complicated, but I think there are enough differences between the micro and macro here to need to deal with them as separate questions. What’s the theory of change for an individual, a news organization, and the broader profession?

    My two cents.

    Reg

  11. So you don’t think lame street media is not biased? They didn’t publish anything about fast amd furious until the AG might be found in contempt of Congrees even though one of our border patrol was killed with these weapons sent across the border via the Obama Admin. Again no mention being made that thos was an attempt to put pressure onthe gun owners by enacting more restrictive laws, but it backfired. No furor or headlines or followup by the so called Journalists over all the secret info leaked by the Obama Admin. All kinds of coverage on how the GOP is trying to get the AG because he is after voter ID. Come on. I can remember when Journalists reported the news no matter what party was involved. I could go on and on but youand I know the LSM isn’t going to change.

  12. This is a vaporizer which is aroma based and something can only feel
    it after you’ve got used it. Vaporizer can be a machine utilized as an alternate towards smoking for releasing
    active and simulated ingredients of your respective plant materials or herb.
    The reason is simply due to the construction in the “comedone” which is the
    thing which makes the pimple.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.