Journalism educators and allies should build a pro-democracy social media network. Here are some thoughts on how to begin.

Jelani Cobb, the Dean of Columbia University’s School of Journalism, announced his departure from Twitter this week in a New Yorker column that reflected on the devolution of a platform that once held promise as a global force for democracy and human rights, but which has become something else entirely under its new owner, Elon Musk:

My sepia-tinted memories of what Twitter was—or could possibly have become—dissolved at the prospect of stuffing money in the pocket of the richest man on the planet. Yet leaving has yielded its own complications, including unwinding connections to sources, colleagues, and roughly four hundred thousand followers. The alternatives that have gained prominence in recent weeks do not offer the same reach, or the rich vein of dissimilarity across social and geographic lines, that were some of the best aspects of Twitter. 

Jelani Cobb, Why I quit Elon Musk’s Twitter, Daily Comment, New Yorker Magazine, November 27, 2022

My former BlogHer colleague Liz Gumbinner echoes Cobb’s longing for what Twitter was at its best and dissatisfaction with the current alternatives:

Twitter is where I’ve created authentic connections and meaningful relationships. It’s where I’ve learned and grown so much from communities where I was most definitely not on the guest list, but allowed me to listen in quietly anyway. It’s where I’ve “met” so many people who have truly enriched my life and it’s not like we can’t meet somewhere else (say, here?) but still. 

Liz Gumbinner, “Twitter, you break my heart,” I’m Walking Here newsletter on Substack, November 23

I hear you Liz – although I would offer that for me, blogging and especially the original BlogHer was that space of possibility and authentic connection, and that dream faded with its corporate takeover and the rise of social platforms. We lost a lot when serious blogging got subsumed by social platforms with their discourse-flattening algorithms and inadequately-vetted ad tech. But I digress.

That one rich man’s caprice could ignite so much angst is a symptom of the larger vulnerability of the media ecosystem whose health is essential to the prospect of democracy. But the flight to alternative platforms based on open source software is an opportunity for journalism educators and civic media technologists to create a technological and curricular framework that will deepen students’ understanding of what it means to not only do pro-democracy journalism, but to strengthen a pro-democracy civic infrastructure. For example, why can’t we build a network of Mastodon instances centered in local communities and supported by students and researchers in journalism and computer science programs? Such an initiative would create organic opportunities for students, media leaders and community members to learn about the challenges of scaling platforms, policies related around design justice, digital redlining, content moderation, verification, and a host of other important issues related to online community engagement and civic participation. And it might create a more inclusive context for thinking through how we create a robust public square that is not captive to Silicon Valley.

Here’s how I think it can happen :

  • A National Academies-style summit focused on developing a pedagogical research and practice agenda that outlines the knowledge, skills and values students in journalism, computer science, design and related fields need in order to support community information infrastructures consistent with democratic values. The summit would bring researchers, thought leaders and activists together to share how work on the best ways to bring the best thinking about digital public infrastructure, pro-democracy journalism, algorithmic justice, better social media moderation and accountability into undergraduate and graduate curricula in journalism, communications and related fields. The state of research on pedagogical models for interdisciplinary computing collaboration would be a key focus. The proceedings would result in a monograph like the 2011 National Academies Report of a Workshop on the Pedagogical Aspects of Computational Thinking.
  • An open-source collaboration among journalism educators and civic media activists to develop curricular materials to support the creation, support and moderation of local social networks, similar to the collaborative effort behind the open source Media Innovation and Entrepreneurship textbook.
  • A network to support cross-disciplinary student collaboration and innovation.
  • The development of a strategy for ensuring that there is a freer exchange of ideas and resources between and among professional organizations, scholarly organizations, funders and other thought leaders around these issues. Organizations such as Free Press, the Democracy Fund, and the Center for Cooperative Media are laying the foundation for a pro-democracy media ecosystem, and the new Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard University is a hopeful harbinger of curricular innovation in this arena. What’s missing is the direct engagement with those who have been thinking about the computational journalism aspect of these issues from years – going all the way back to 2015 when Dave Winer argued that journalism students should learn to set up and run their own servers. The practical obstacle to Winer’s proposal was that most journalism programs lacked the faculty expertise, curriculum and assessment tools to integrate that kind of instruction into their programs. We’ve made progress since then, but there’s still a lot of work to be done, especially when it comes to strategies for the equitable distribution of computing education expertise to community colleges and small journalism programs. The computer science education community has been working on this problem, but I haven’t seen it on the agenda at the major journalism education conferences.

Since much of my own work has been as part of interdisciplinary teams focused on deepening science literacy in non-STEM curricula broadly, and computational thinking in journalism curricula specifically, I have been privileged to learn from experts in other fields about the importance of identifying learning progressions and ways of structuring teaching collaborations, assessing learning, and applying best practices in community-engaged learning. There’s so much we can learn from each other, but building cultures of collaboration and mutual respect across cultures and disciplines requires care and thoughtful attention.

Automated media

In the old days, the first thing an aspiring journalists learned about the news business was that the business model was about “delivering eyeballs to advertisers.” Journalism historians tell us that advertising revenue facilitated the turn from partisan news media and pamphleteering to independent news outlets staffed by people who became professionalized as journalists with norms, ethics and standards of practice. The growth of advertising-financed news paralleled the growth of the industrial-era consumer economy and made news a viable business. The staff-and-line structure of industrial organizations made it easy and logical to separate the editorial and business functions of the newspaper, freeing journalists to focus on reporting without necessarily having to think about the business consequences – the so-called “wall between church and state.” The digital turn in journalism has, of course, destroyed that wall, but it’s done much more – it’s changed the business logic behind paying for content. Mark Andrejevic and his colleagues at Monash University are helpful here:

Since the mass media has few technological mechanisms for targeting specific groups of people, advertisers developed very rough proxies – concentrating ads for household products, for example, during daytime hours to reach homemakers (hence the term “soap opera”); or placing toy ads alongside Saturday morning cartoons.

The ads followed the content, and, in some cases, its timing and geography. These ads were available to large groups of people, and thus available for public scrutiny – and often became the topic of concern about stereotyping and predatory marketing tactics.

Going Dark: Holding platforms to account over targeted online advertising, July 5, 2021

As Andrejevic notes in his 2019 book, Automated Media, digital publishing platforms — including, but not limited to social media — give advertisers a way of targeting and surveilling consumers directly, just as they give governments and other powerful actors ways of shaping public opinion without debating openly in the public square. Instead, databases, machine learning and AI technologies foster opportunities to create media environments in which people can construct their own shared meanings and notions of epistemic authority. We see this in the power of hashtag activism and the infodemics of baseless conspiracy theories that endanger both public health and the viability of democratic regimes around the world. What Andrejevic gives us in this book is a way of understanding how the logic of the automated systems themselves — the machine-to-machine communication — helps to undermine the Enlightenment-era assumptions about the ability of reason and evidence win out in the marketplace of ideas.

Here’s how Andrejevic puts it:

Whereas automated machinery offloaded the social labor of production onto mechanized infrastructures, automated media seek to offload culture itself onto artificial intelligence and data-driven forms of social sorting and decision-making. The result is what might be described as an ongoing process of social de-skilling accompanied by the dis-embedding of key decision-making processes from the forms of social life and social interaction upon which they rely. The attempt to abstract core elements of human culture from the realm of social interaction (by offloading them onto automated information systems) makes it easier to misrecognize and ignore the underlying forms of social interdependence and recognition that enable the formation of shared or common interests and understandings. This social de-skilling is the result of what the chapter describes as the “cascading” logic of automation that characterizes the contemporary information environment: automated information collection generates so much information that only automated systems can meaningfully organize it. Once sense-making becomes automated, the next logical step is toward automated response, which, in turn, promises to surpass the capacities of human subjects. If automated machinery displaced human labor, automation targets the figure of the subject. 

Mark Andrejevic, Automated Media. Introduction

Andrejevic discusses the implications of this in some detail in this New Books interview:

I’m going to be spending some time with Andrejevic’s work. I think it has a lot to teach me as I grapple with the questions I raised in my February, 2021 blog post that asked what journalism educators need to know in the era of the fourth industrial revolution. I suspect I will want to put it in conversation with Ramesh Srinavasan’s “Beyond the Valley.

Here’s my 2021 blog post, if you’re curious.

What do 21st-century journalism educators need to know?

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the publication of the Knight-Carnegie Initiative report on the Future of Journalism Education. A collaboration between two foundations and 11 prominent journalism schools and institutes, the initiative was formed in 2005 to address both long-standing concerns about the intellectual depth and breadth of journalism education and contemporary questions about how to add digital skills and entrepreneurship to the curriculum.

In 2007, I wrote my own short essay for Nieman Reports calling for a new approach to journalism education. I argued that, “The challenge for journalists—and journalism educators—is to think about ways to create dynamic curricula to enhance the practice of journalism. Such a challenge lends itself to the development of new and closer partnerships among journalists, technology specialists involved with communications tools, economists looking at new business models, and educators working with the next generation of potential journalists. ” Specifically, I called for:

  • the creation of an undergraduate journalism education major and related certification that would support the teaching of media literacy and multimedia technology skills in secondary schools,
  • the infusion of what has come to be known as computational thinking (the ability to formulate, analyze, and solve problems in ways that optimize what humans and computers do best) in our undergraduate and graduate curricula,
  • an alertness to the ways in which emerging and evolving computing and communications technologies will reshape our industry. I urged journalism educators to engage in interdisciplinary research and teaching collaborations and called for attention to the likely impact of artificial intelligence on our news distribution and consumption practices.

Some of this seems obvious now. No one argues whether computational thinking is important or whether newsrooms need technologists and multimedia specialists, for example. Similarly, no one argues the need for greater media literacy to combat disinformation and to foster greater civic participation. Every journalism program understands the need for digital and multimedia faculty – and that big data and AI matter. Data journalism and interactive journalism are recognized occupational specialties, and a fertile area of scholarship (See Nikki Usher, C.W. Anderson). Something akin to the open source software movement is emerging among journalism educators focused on innovation, with texts on such urgent topics as media entrepreneurship, data journalism, coding pedagogy, and verification. And no one argues the need for the new forms of interdisciplinary collaboration and research partnerships.

Despite this, none of the articles in that Nieman special issue on Teaching Journalism in the Digital Age anticipated the degree to which the knowledge, values and skills required to deliver a 21st century journalism education require a fundamental rethinking of the requirements journalism educators should be expected to meet. What we are confronted with goes beyond the need to incorporate new specialties within the existing structure of journalism and mass communications departments. The transformation of our news and information ecosystems changes the nature of everything we do, and the contexts in which we do it.

We debate whether aspiring journalism educators actually need a PhD (and if so, in what?) , and how we should value professional experience, vs. academic credentials. We’re trying to get at the question of what all journalism educators should be expected to know, how specialties within the field can be defined, and come to conclusions about the academic and professional preparation best suited to the tasks.

The purpose of this essay is twofold: to instigate a conversation about areas of practice and pedagogy that are central to the challenges confronting us, and to highlight examples of work intended to confront these challenges. In particular, I want to focus on three areas that have been a focus of my own re-education over the last 30 years: journalism’s epistemologies, ontologies, and literacies. Ultimately, I hope this will inform our approach to designing curricula for graduate programs for journalism educators, and for thinking through strategies and standards for their ongoing professional development.

A bit about me: I’ve been teaching Journalism and Professional Writing for 30 years in a small undergraduate program. (We have a separate Communication Studies department with whom we work closely.) I came to academia with a background in science communications, corporate PR, and freelance magazine writing, During the 1980s, I witnessed the pervasive effects of hollowing out of the manufacturing economy. I was also part of a generation of people with minoritized identities (in my case, Black, female, a mother, urban, newly middle-class, newly disabled) who had gained entrée to spaces previously denied them (in my case, the Ivy League, the tech industry, affluent suburbs). I thought I might be able to help journalism and PR students understand what this emerging economy would look like and what it would demand of them.

I was also impelled by a larger set of public policy debates crystallized in a 1987 report by the US Department of Labor – Workforce 2000: Work and Workers for the 21st Century. Based on its demographic analysis, the report’s writers concluded that the America’s future required finding, cultivating and making space for people with backgrounds like mine. Specifically, it argued:

If the United States is to continue to prosper, policymakers must find ways to accomplish the following: stimulate balanced growth; accelerate productivity increase in service industries; maintain the dynamism of an aging workforce; reconcile the conflicting needs of women, work and families; integrate Black and Hispanic workers fully into the economy; and improve the educational preparation for all workers.

William B. Johnston et. al., https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED290887.pdf

I started teaching online journalism in 1996 and co-founded a department of Interactive Multimedia in 2003, partially hoping to create an environment for interdisciplinary learning and reflective practice. What I know about communications theory and journalism history beyond my Master’s degree is largely self-taught. What I know about programming, scripting, and design is either self-taught, a by-product of the eight years I spent at AT&T in the 1980s where even word processing required writing in Unix, or the product of two decades of research and teaching collaborations with computer scientists, media scholars and designers.

I do recognize that I am writing this at a time of existential crisis for journalism as a civic institution and as a financially viable industry. I’m also writing at a time when a global pandemic has accelerated and exacerbated threats to the existence of many colleges and universities. However, if democracy and civil society is to survive, some form of independent journalism must be part of the social contract. Whatever form that journalism takes, these questions will need to be addressed.

Challenge 1: Journalism’s epistemologies

How do we know what’s worth reporting and how do we get and vet what we report? These are essential questions that we attempt to address by hewing to a discipline of verification. The computational turn in journalism is the latest of a series of movements that can create more comprehensive, engaging, and more accurate reporting through the development and deployment of new tools for mining, analyzing and presenting information. It’s also a movement whose failings highlight the ways in which the news industry continues to grapple with unresolved historical rifts over objectivity, fairness, and the nature and needs of the publics journalists serve. And it’s empowered malign actors with tools to amplify violent ideologies, lies, and dangerous fringe ideas.

This June, 2019 Pew Research poll is just the latest of a long list of studies confirming that news consumers recognize the credibility crisis in journalism.

A chart showing Journalists are not blamed most for creating made-up news and information, but Americans say the news media are most responsible for fixing it

Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Avid Ovadya advances a framework for he calls the credibility assessment model: “In summary,” he writes, ‘the answer to the question ‘What should we investigate if we want to determine whether something is credible?’ is that we need to investigate the evidence supporting the claims, the reputation of the network purveying the information, or some combination of the two. Journalists have created a number of fact-checking and verification operations to guide news consumers to credible information, But the problems of fake news and public skepticism persist.

Computational journalist and educator Jonathan Stray notes that the strategies that governmental agencies, platforms and news organizations vary widely in their effectiveness in combating misinformation. The most effective strategies and tools may be incompatible with the values of a free press and free speech. In 2019 paper (.pdf) presented to an international conference on the issue, Stray argued, “In societies with a free press, there is no one with the power to direct all media outlets and platforms to refute or ignore or publish particular items, and it seems unlikely that people across different sectors of society would agree on what is disinformation and what is not.” You can see Stray’s presentation to an international conference on countering misinformation.

Ovadya hopes the framework that his team is developing will be used to create fact-checking systems that can be run by networks of bots on large data sets. But finding reliable measures of evidence and reputation that are free of implicit bias and accepted in a wide range of contexts is proving to be a wicked problem. As Cathy O’Neil notes in her book, Weapons of Math Destruction, data that appears unbiased is often anything but:

The models being used today are opaque, unregulated, and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination: If a poor student can’t get a loan because a lending model deems him too risky (by virtue of his zip code), he’s then cut off from the kind of education that could pull him out of poverty, and a vicious spiral ensues. Models are propping up the lucky and punishing the downtrodden, creating a “toxic cocktail for democracy.” Welcome to the dark side of Big Data.

Blurb for Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction

While the definition of journalistic objectivity has never been stable, there’s no current consensus on what it means and whether it is attainable and desirable. David Mindich, Pamela Newkirk, Natalie Byfield and Lewis Raven-Wallace are among those who have persuasively argued that even in the good old days when journalism was more trusted, news organizations often failed to meet their own standards for credible sourcing, representative coverage and political independence. These failures, in large measure, were failures to accord epistemic authority to those on the less privileged side of the Robert Maynard’s “fault lines” of race, class, gender, geography and generation. (As Mark Dery has noted, this failure persisted has into the digital era.)

All journalism educators should be conversant with these debates and the evolving standards of practice that emerge from them. This especially applies to professors of the practice who might have absorbed the facile notion that the most objective reporting “plays it down the middle.”

Challenge 2: Journalism’s ontologies

Ontology is that branch of philosophy that seeks to name what “is” in the world. To say that in the past, journalists were gatekeepers is to make an ontological statement. So are definitional distinctions between “news,” “features,” “entertainment,” etc.

Similarly, In computer science, ontology refers to the act of defining the categories and hierarchies that are used to structure information in algorithms and databases. In a digital age, journalism’s ontologies are represented in both the human and technological structures of news ecosystems.

David Ryfe argues that the fundamental crisis facing American journalism in particular, and Western journalism, generally, is ontological:

Today, in the field they once dominated, journalists find themselves standing cheek by jowl with a vast array of other news producers: from community blogs to corporate communications offices, and from nonprofit organizations to advocacy groups. Many of these organizations have little interest in or knowledge of journalism. Yet, they produce and distribute as much if not more news as journalists.

In this context, the question of what journalism is, and is for, and how it is to be distinguished from an array of other news produces, is raised anew.

Ryfe, D. (2019). The ontology of journalism. Journalism, 20(1), 206–209. https://doi.org/10.1177/8756087918809246

One of the challenges to journalists’ efforts to convey those distinctions is that many members of the public they seek to serve don’t see journalists the way they see themselves. Brendan Nyhan and George Lakoff are among the researchers who have taught us that the simplest claims of fact can land differently with different audiences. To a disturbing degree, substantial percentages of Americans agree with former Pres. Donald Trump’s assertion that mainstream news organizations are the “enemy of the people.” Take the topline results of this August, 2018 Ipsos online poll, for example:

While a plurality – 46% — agree “most news outlets try their best to produce honest reporting”, there are very stark splits by the partisan identification of the respondent with most Democrats (68%) generally believing in the good intent of journalists, but comparatively few Republicans (29%). And when we ask questions with specific partisan cues, the political split is very wide. For instance, 80% of Republicans but only 23% of Democrats agree that “most news outlets have a liberal bias,” and 79% of Republicans but only 11% of Democrats agree, “the mainstream media treats President Trump unfairly”. Returning to President Trump’s views on the press, almost a third of the American people (29%) agree with the idea that “the news media is the enemy of the American people,” including a plurality of Republicans (48%).

Americans’ Views on the Media: Ipsos poll shows almost a third of the American people agree that the news media is the enemy, August 7, 2018. Accessed July 18, 2019. https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/americans-views-media-2018-08-07

Similarly, public perceptions of the degree to which journalists fulfill such traditional roles as serving as watchdogs holding the powerful to account are divided along sharply partisan lines. This 2018 poll from Pew Research illustrates that division.

In 2017 and 2018, partisan divides in support of the news media's watchdog role largest ever measured

There’s a broad agreement that rebuilding trust in journalism requires finding new ways to connect with communities – and that requires developing products and approaches that respond to specific community needs. Monica Guzman offers this guide for engaging audiences. The Democracy Fund has engaged in a multi-year effort to identify best practices, tools and funding mechanisms for inclusive, community-driven journalism. Free Press offers guides to help communities and news organizations collaborate to improve news coverage.

These efforts are as effective as the depth and breadth of the constituencies they engage. There is evidence that news organizations aren’t meeting that bar now. A May, 2019 Pew survey found that the people most likely to be interviewed by local news outlets are most likely to be older, educated, white men.

The same survey found that the percentage of Americans who had spoken to a local journalist declined between 2016 and 2019.

Sue Robinson has produced a guide for journalists seeking to diversify their sources, drawing upon research conducted in cities across the United States. Resource constraints are major issue, Robinson reports: “With contracting newsrooms, journalists of all colors find themselves stretched thin in reporting on local communities such that all voices and perspectives can be represented.” Noting that many members of marginalized communities have justifiable fears about opening up to the press, she calls for, “rethinking traditional journalistic notions such as “critical distance” and re-conceptualizing established relationships to sources and audiences so that source networks expand. ”

Similarly, improved reporting on rural America also requires a fundamental rethink. Letrell Deshan Crittenden and Andrea Wenzel underscored this in their April 2020 Tow Center report, The road to making small-town news more inclusive. Crittenden and Wenzel conducted focus group research in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, a rural community that New York Times columnist David Brooks depicted in a 2001 book as uniformly pastoral, conservative and white. But Chambersburg is diverse, and the lack of a common and inclusive local news source has reinforced racial divisions and impeded civic dialogue. Black and Latinx community members argued that news coverage of their community is either stereotypical or nonexistent, with deleterious consequences for local governance. White respondents downplayed racial tensions and decried perceived liberal media bias. Latinx participants called for more Spanish-language news sources.

This kind of qualitative research informs the movement to integrate design thinking into journalism practice and pedagogy. Design thinking can be a great entry point to developing and teaching strategies for more inclusive news reporting, presentation, and community-building. It also opens the door to deeper questions about the affordances and limits of the technologies at our disposal. Computer scientist Ramesh Srinavasan has argued that if we approach the development of information technologies with cultural humility, our databases and content management systems might be reimagined to reflect how the communities we are designing for create and preserve knowledge. Journalists, designers and computer science ought to be in collaborative conversation about the ideas that Srinivasan is advancing. You can learn more by reading the summaries of his projects and the elaboration of his ideas in his books as Whose Global Village? , After the Internet, and Beyond the Valley.

Challenge 3: Journalism’s literacies

In a 2018 Nieman Reports essay, Cindy Royal, a leading scholar and curriculum developer in the area of coding pedagogy for journalism, argues persuasively that too many journalism faculty resist learning and teaching the skills students need to meet employers’ growing needs. Royal notes a 2018 study by Amanda Bright documenting this bottleneck, and noting that innovation, to the degree that it is happening, is concentrated in larger, better funded programs. Royal calls for the inclusion of digital technology design and development in Communications PhD curricula and a reworking of institutional recruitment, tenure, and promotion practices to place greater value on teaching, research and practice in these emerging critical areas. In a separate Nieman essay she argues that, at the very least, every journalism faculty member needs to know how to teach some fundamental technical skills, such as how to scrape a website.

Mindy McAdams agrees. McAdams is a pioneer in online journalism practice and teaching who has influenced thousands of online journalists with her workshops, blog posts and books. In an October, 2019 telephone interview, she observed that too many journalism educators who don’t consider themselves technology specialists “think they don’t need to know about the tech.”

“I feel like if you are In the field of chemistry you take it upon yourself to know what’s happening in the whole field,” McAdams said. For example, “As AI becomes such a buzzword, how many people who are journalism educators even know what is meant by that? They could know more about it if they follow it as a news topic.”

Royal created CodeActually, a coding curriculum for journalism and communications students. And if you are baffled by AI, McAdams has a helpful lecture series on YouTube, AI in Media and Society, that will bring you up to speed.

My own thinking about what Royal and McAdams are saying is “yes, and.” The technological transformation of news gathering has changed every aspect of journalism practice, and I can’t conceive of an aspect of the curriculum that can be taught without rethinking tech’s role. That role is more profound than I realized back in 2009, when I argued that journalists needed to understand computational thinking.

But I’ve come to the conclusion that knowing how technology affects what journalists can do and how that’s received is more important than knowing how to “do” the technology. And it’s equally important to understand what the technologies, and the thinking behind them, do – especially to people and communities in information deserts or who are targets of disinformation. (This reading list necessarily starts with Meredith Broussard’s Artificial Unintelligence, but we need journalism-relevant analyses of the work of Simone Browne, Cathy Davidson, Safiya Noble, Ruha Benjamin, Virginia Eubanks,, Mar Hicks, and Andre Brock, for starters.

Here are four examples that might give pause to faculty who think that their teaching and practice are unaffected by technological change :

Journalists have had to rethink the inverted pyramid in light of research on the impact of linguistic framing. Journalists’ assumption that audiences trust a dispassionate recitation of facts in perceived order of importance is no match for a media ecosystem dominated by social platforms that make it easy to publish and amplify all kinds of misinformation and disinformation. That’s why linguist George Lakoff advises that journalists substitute the “truth sandwich” for stories about lies and misinformation:

Truth Sandwich:
1. Start with the truth. The first frame gets the advantage.
2. Indicate the lie. Avoid amplifying the specific language if possible.
3. Return to the truth. Always repeat truths more than lies.
Hear more in Ep 14 of FrameLab w/@gilduran76

Originally tweeted by George Lakoff (@GeorgeLakoff) on December 1, 2018.

Lakoff’s recommendation is grounded in his decades of work in linguistics, cognition and neuroscience. This video provides a helpful introduction.

To create content that will be understood as truthful and gathered in good faith, we have to understand how our brains process information and evaluate its credibility.

Our audience engagement strategies and technologies aren’t value neutral. Journalism practitioners, educators and scholars need to be able to engage the questions Andrew Losowsky and Jennifer Brandel raised in their session on audience engagement ethics at the 2018 Online News Association conference:

‘Audience engagement’ is the hot new thing in journalism; but most journalists are pursuing it without understanding the risks – for the community and for the newsroom – of inviting the audience into a conversation. What happens when people who aren’t used to being sources share a sensitive, deeply personal story? What happens when we reach out to communities for information, but don’t stick around to answer questions or address concerns? How do we build trust authentically, without resorting to a journalistic sleight of hand to get reluctant sources to talk? 

We urgently need to establish ethical frameworks around this work, or we risk further erosion of trust in journalism, and could even be endangering people’s lives.

Optimizing engagement tools to promote accurate information and constructive discourse is no mean feat. A March, 2019 article in Recode detailed Twitter’s stymied efforts to create incentives for constructive conversations on the platform. One fundamental challenge is understanding how to gauge the “health” of a conversation.

Technology has breached the church-state divide between the business and editorial sides of news in subtle and overt ways. The Columbia Journalism Review has argued that journalists need to understand how advertising technologies “influence the practice, distribution, and perception of journalism.”

Efforts to assess address the information needs of underserved communities can be facilitated or impeded by the way we deploy audience engagement technologies and related strategies. For example, Sue Robinson studied how mainstream journalists’ narrow sourcing and reliance on social media posts to gauge African American community views of a charter school controversy in Madison Wisconsin contributed to important blind spots in their reporting. She notes, “Despite the optimism that digital networks will diffuse power through entrenched structures, scholarly evidence has shown how online networks act as echo chambers for the powerful. In these spaces, offline inequalities not only persist but are exacerbated in digital spaces,”

We need to analyze journalism technologies and storytelling methods through the lens of critical computing. In his 2013 book Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation and Expression, D. Fox Harrell explains that

“[C]ritical computing entails critically assessing the potential of the technology being researched and developed to engender conceptual change in users and the potential of the technology to engender real-world change in society….. Critical computing systems are built on cultural computing groundings, which in turn are informed by subjective computing research aims.”

D, Fox Harrell

Because those subjective aims can reinforce oppressive systems, Harrell stresses the importance of bringing diverse perspectives to the tech development process. As we embrace various dynamic storytelling tools for journalism – augmented reality, virtual reality and gamification, for example – we need to be cognizant of these cultural groundings and subjective aims, and we need well-researched pedagogies that address them.

Those pedagogies need to address not only how we tell individual stories in an ethical, accessible and inclusive way, but also how we help members of vulnerable communities harden their media ecosystems against propaganda and disinformation. For example, Howard University’s Truth Be Told News project has been combatting misinformation in and about African Americans for years in the tradition of the historic Black press. But it’s unlikely that the project’s creators ever envisioned the troll-powered Russian disinformation campaigns unleashed on social media in 2016 and 2020 to discourage African Americans and Latinx voters from participating in the electoral process. In December, 2020, Facebook and the National Association of Black Journalists launched a Fact-checking Fellowship that will fund journalists for one year’s work with an established fact-checking outfit. It would be wonderful if there were parallel initiatives supporting basic research on these issues at institutions such as Howard that are deeply connected to the communities being targeted. At the University of Buffalo, Siwei Lyu is doing NSF-funded research on helping people and systems detect deepfakes. Computational journalists need to be part of these research projects.

Conclusion

It’s hard to think about what journalism educators will need to know when we don’t know what journalism will become. Nic Neumann’s January 2021 report on journalism’s trends and predictions for the Reuters Institute identifies far-reaching changes in editorial practices and business structure:

2021 will be a year of profound and rapid digital change following the shock delivered by Covid-19. Lockdowns and other restrictions have broken old habits and created new ones, but it is only this year that we’ll discover how fundamental those changes have been. While many of us crave a return to ‘normal’, the reality is likely to be different as we emerge warily into a world where the physical and virtual coexist in new ways.

Nic Neumann, Journalism, media, and technology trends and predictions 2021

However, we do know that the survival of democratic civic values requires a cadre of educators and leaders who can serve as advocates, defenders and innovators of the best that journalism has to offer. This will require more robust research and debate that goes beyond the “Do you need a PhD?” debate.

A 21st-century journalism department or school requires faculty with newsroom experience and expertise in the rhetorical and literary forms underpinning storytelling across platforms and in social environments. (Yes, that means writing and shoe-leather reporting skills are still necessary. They’re just no longer sufficient.) It also requires both data journalists and computational journalists who understand and adhere to principles of algorithmic justice. It needs social scientists who can teach the quantitative and qualitative skills needed to assess community information needs and translate those needs into reporting that will be seen as trustworthy and useful. It needs specialists in media psychology and ecology who are conversant with emerging technologies. It continues to need legal specialists and ethicists. It needs specialists in entrepreneurship and tech management, because news organizations are tech enterprises now. And it still needs historians – although the journalism history canon needs substantial revision and expansion. I don’t know of a Masters or Ph.D. program that does all of those things well. However, the areas I’ve outlined here may be a way of invigorating the imagination about what’s needed and what’s possible.

When two or three are gathered in the name of journalism and user experience design….

I was pleased to see that my post on user experience design in journalism education attracted the attention of a blogger who is pursuing graduate studies in Interactive Media with a focus in precisely this area. (Can’t find the blogger’s name, I’m afraid, but the blog is called UX+JX, which is catchy and cute in a geeky way.) I’ll be looking forward to the progress of this new colleague’s dissertation research. I’m also grateful for the pointer to Cindy Royal’s fascinating 2010 ethnography  (.pdf) of the New York Times Interactive desk. Perusing her site, I also came across this May, 2009 Online Journalism Review article on News as User Experience, which serves as a decent general introduction to the concept for news organizations.

The Forethought: Du Bois the Journalist

Author’s note: This part of an unpublished 2002 essay, “Not the Subject but the Premise: Postcards from the Edge of Du Bois’ Black Belt,”  is reproduced here for comment and as fodder in the body of work upon which I am drawing for my sabbatical project. I consider it to be a failed work with some useful nuggets.

“‘[T]he sheriff came and took my mule and corn and furniture —

‘Furniture?’ I asked; ‘but furniture is exempt from seizure by law.

‘Well, he took it just the same,’ said the hard-faced man.'”

— WEB Du Bois in Dougherty County, Georgia

Of the Black Belt,” Souls of Black Folk, 1903.’

“It’s alright now/

alright now/

I gave it over to Jesus/

And it’s alright now.”

— sung at St. Mary’s Holiness Church in Hamlet, North Carolina, May, 2002

The Forethought: Du Bois the Journalist

Before he became a scholar, activist and would-be Bismarck of his race, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) was a journalist. As a teenager in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, young Willie was a correspondent for the New York Globe, Freeman and Springfield Republican; at Fisk; he edited the school newspaper. After two commercially unsuccessful attempts to create his own journal of news and opinion, his Crisis magazine would be integral to the birthing of the modern civil rights coalition as well as the Harlem artistic movement of the 1920s.  After both of his departures from the NAACP, in 1934 and 1948, he became a regular contributor to several black and later, radical news organs.

The Souls of Black Folk is suffused with the best journalistic sensibilities: vivid description, pithy characterization, abundant but carefully chosen detail, and evocative narration. This, along with its seminal influence on racial thought, explains why the faculty of New York University gave Souls and his Crisis columns on race two separate spots on its list of the 100 best works of journalism of the 20th century. (NYU) Despite this, and the growing scholarly attention to Du Bois’ writings, the consideration of his work as journalism has been slight. Most of the attention that has been accorded has gone, understandably, to study of The Crisis.

Du Bois’ reporting was part of an evidentiary brief that, if heeded, would lead to greater support for the policies he advocated for black advancement: fair wages, rents and opportunities for land ownership investment in higher education, and physical safety. In using journalism as one of his weapons, he seems to have understood what media scholar Michael Schudson meant when he declared of 20th century reporting,

“…[T]he power of the media lies not only (and not even primarily) in its power to declare things to be true, but in its power to provide the forms in which the declarations appear. News in a newspaper … has a relationship with the ‘real world,’ not only in content, but in form; that is, in the way the world is incorporated into unquestioned and unnoticed conventions of narration, and then transfigured, no longer a subject for discussion but a premise of any conversation at all.” (Lule)

This essay will consider two journalistic essays in Souls of Black Folk. Particular attention will be given to what Du Bois saw as the proper aim of journalism, and the proper role of the black journalist. The power of Du Bois’ journalism in Souls lies in the specificity with which he placed black life in the context of the social and historical forces that shaped its essential character and defined its structures of opportunity. We get a glimpse of his nascent ability to draw out the multiplicative ways in which African Americans adapted to and agitated against their oppression. However, when viewed in terms of the evolution of racial discourse however, it may be that the most profound effect of Du Bois’ journalism was his ability to demonstrate the centrality of black labor, black culture and black action to American prosperity, identity and well-being. Ironically, we shall see that it is this example that contemporary African American journalists find themselves most challenged to follow.

In Souls, Du Bois the reporter is most evident in Chapters Seven and Eight, “Of the Black Belt” and “Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece.” Both chapters are portraits of Dougherty County, Georgia. As works of journalism, they presage what Tom Wolfe preciously called the New Journalism of the 1960s — the blending of observation, contextual data and narrative technique. There is, however, another way in which the work has contemporary resonance: as a black journalist whose audience and markets crossed racial lines, Du Bois had to grapple with an oppressive and intricate racial ideology that constrained and discounted not only about such southern blacks as were found in Dougherty County, but also  educated northern blacks as himself.

Du Bois had to convince his readers that he was an authoritative interpreter of African American experience – a task made more difficult by the fact that his objective was to supplant what his readers thought they know about his subject. His task was complicated by several unique factors. One the one hand, he had to contend with those who would argue that Du Bois’ mixed racial background made him incapable of understanding the souls of real black folk. On the other, Du Bois faced the personal challenge of understanding people whose skin tones resembled his or his family members, but whose lives under Reconstruction and Jim Crow differed radically from his comparatively Edenic boyhood in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Finally, he had to contend with emerging standards both of scholarship and of journalism that discounted traditional rhetorical strategies employed by earlier black writers, such as appeals to emotion, biblical authority and first-person narratives.

If he faced unique challenges, Du Bois was also unique in the resources that he brought to the task of destroying and rebuilding the foundations of racial discourse. He could rely not only on his youthful reporting experience, expansive knowledge base and considerable literary gifts, but also the data collection that he was beginning to amass through his work for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and his direction of the Atlanta University studies. (Lewis, Biography, p. 195) Du Bois was a pioneer in the emerging field of empirical sociology, and the AU studies were part of his lifelong effort to build a comprehensive data portrait of every imaginable aspect of black life — from schooling to economic development to religion and family life. He had invented many of the fields’ methods of data collection and analysis during his first major sociological project, The Philadelphia Negro — among other things, he personally interviewed 3000 black residents of Philadelphia’s seventh ward.

According to Lewis, his principal biographer, Du Bois bragged that his knowledge came from having “lived with the colored people, joined their social life, and visited their homes.” He was particularly scornful of the “car-window sociologist,,, the man who seeks to understand and know the South by devoting a few leisure hours of a holiday trip to unraveling the snarl of centuries….” (Souls, p. 128) In other words, he practiced immersive reporting long before there was a name for it.

Above all, Du Bois struggled to hold to his sense of personal and racial mission. As one of a small number of African Americans who had access to an elite education, Du Bois believed fervently that the future of the race depended on the disciplined, clear-eyed leadership of liberally educated men and women. He had declared, early on, his intention to be one of those leaders. On his 25th birthday, alone in his graduate student quarters at the University of Berlin, Du Bois wrote in his journal, “These are my plans: To make a name in science, to make a name in literature, and thus to raise my race.” (Lewis, Biography, p. 135)

Du Bois was not alone in his efforts to expose the fetid underside of American industrial development. This was, after all, the era of combat between the muckraking journalists and the robber barons. Ida Wells had published her anti-lynching expose, The Red Record. Lincoln Steffens was exposing The Shame of the Cities. Ida Tarbell was publishing her voluminous analysis of Standard Oil.

In fact, Tarbell’s disclosures specifically motivated the Rockefellers to disburse millions to establish the General Education Board (GEB) and the Southern Education Board (SEB) — two foundations that, in the absence of federal involvement in public education, would dominate African American education policy at all levels for decades to come. (Lewis 265-268) Emphasizing ”scientific philanthropy,” the GEB directed most of its funding to industrial and moral education programs at schools such as Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. The GEB was composed of some of the most powerful men in America, so their positions on black education limned the boundaries of mainstream thinking on race.