The idea of engaged journalism is a new concept to me. Before this class, I didn’t know that was a thing - or more that it had an official name. Diving right into the concept and practicing in real life really changed my perspective and taught me a lot about its pros and cons.
Some great benefits that I’ve experienced so far is the amount of different information that can and was collected by our class. We were really able to learn from a variety of individuals that came from all across the country. Also, I think it’s very valuable to have input from ‘regular’ citizens as they are the ones who experience the problems in the world first hand.
Some cons to engaged journalism can include the credibility of the information you receive. My mythbusting group grappled with this. We had some really unique perspectives, but we were unsure how much of it was realistic. It brings up the problem that we’ve talked about a few times in class - what is truth and how is it intertwined with one's perspective and experiences?
Through these past three weeks, we have transitioned from simply talking about engaged journalism in theory to attempting to use the tactic in practice. Compared to more traditional forms of journalism, engaged journalism takes the subject of the piece and allows them to have just as much of an impact on the shaping of the story as the journalist does. Stories written by engaged journalists are meant to involve community members directly, figuring out what story they feel should be told and then giving them the tools to begin solving issues. Ideally, this form of journalism facilitates a higher level of civic action in citizens. Trust between journalist and community is also a huge component of this form. The journalist is expected to work to a point of transparency with the citizens they involve in their story in order to get just as much honesty out of them. A level of mutual respect and reliance is expected in this field.
In practice, this was much harder to achieve and at times it was even a bit frustrating. I found that myself as well as most of the other students went into interviews and the digital media campaigns with implicit biases that shaped expectations for how they believed the story would unfold. Most of the time, our expectations would not end up lining up with what really unfolded—especially with the small amount of time we were allotted. I think it is vital to sort out what one’s implicit biases might be before continuing on with an engaged journalism piece. I think it is equally as important to get into an accepting mindset—to acknowledge that whatever happens, while it might not be what was expected or desired, it is still important and can still function as valuable data.
I think another very common trap that a lot of people can fall into with the practice of engaged journalism when covering a marginalized person or community is the toxic mindset of “savior.” A journalist must acknowledge their positionality and what it is that allows them to have a larger and more impactful reach than community members they are reporting on. The journalist, especially the engaged journalist, has the power to give a voice to those who have been silenced. This is why it is important for the journalist to be as respectful as possible. To truly let community members shape their own story, with no leading whatsoever. The citizens choose and shape their story or stories. The journalist is just there to document it and get it out into the world.
Having spent the last three weeks thinking about and utilizing engaged journalism practices, I now identity three primary limitations and perils of this technique: citizens’ detachment, outsized ‘extremes’ of social media, and the possibility of violence.
First, my group used Facebook and Reddit for our Digital Media Campaign, and I was surprised how difficult it was to get people to participate and engage. We created an ad to generate traffic and response to our page, and 1,847 people saw the ad and 265 “engaged” with it, meaning reacted, commented or shared. However, none of the people who saw or “engaged” with the ad actually posted on the page we linked; we got a series of comments, but that was it. Thus, we soon realized that getting people to post and be actively involved with the project was going to be more difficult than we had initially expected. We do attribute some of the disengagement to our initial expectations outlined on the page. We originally asked people to share all forms of media—including written responses but also videos, photos, etc.—but after getting little traction, we changed our post to be less demanding, encouraging folks to write just a few sentences about the impact of guns in schools on their lives. We eventually switched our inquiry entirely to “what questions do you have about guns in schools?” in the hopes of getting more responses and possibly some questions which could trigger our final video. However, none of these strategies sparked much traffic or contributions. Thus, a limitation of crowdsourcing my group and I encountered was citizens’ detachment and willingness to actively engage.
Second, my group and I confronted the outsized ‘extremes’ of social media on both Facebook and Reddit. While no citizens were explicitly fighting or yelling at one another—at least from our perspectives—most responses and comments we received (re)presented the greatest extremes surrounding guns in schools (i.e., no guns even for security officers and all faculty and staff should be armed). I argue we encountered these extremities because of a broad internet trend: the people posting on these pages are generally the most strongly opinionated in either direction. Thus, I think crowdsourcing—especially using social media platforms—primarily reaches and involves the people with the most extreme opinions and perspectives, meaning campaigns like ours may be missing a large segment of the American public who is more moderate and thus not engaging in these online forums.
Third, the possibility of violence is a peril I’ve been thinking about throughout this entire project. Since day one of the DMC, my group members and I were frequently checking our Facebook and Reddit sites to make sure there was no content (im)(ex)plicitly promoting gun violence because we were worried a project like ours could easily attract citizens who glorify rampage shootings. Thus, I argue a huge peril of crowdsourcing that needs to be taken into account is that posts on social media—while they exist initially on the internet—can have impacts on the ‘real world’ too.
Finally, to answer the second part of Anthony’s prompt, I think crowdsourcing—through social media at least—can theoretically spark dialogue, which benefits group identity and problem solving. However, more often than not in my experience, it simply demonstrates how deeply polarized our country is and pushes individuals even farther into their own ‘corners,’ especially given the aforementioned ‘extremes’ on the internet. Thus, while crowdsourcing in theory could be great for democracy and building bridges, in reality, I do often worry that it simply exacerbates the polarization that already exists and leads to yelling more than it does to listening.
Some of the main purposes of engaged journalism are to work with communities towards solutions to their problems. The journalist is a synthesizer for communities and works to facilitate dialogue. In an ideal world, it seems like a productive and ethical way to solve community issues, but realistically there are limitations. Engaged journalism can take an unrealistic amount of time, defining a community can be challenging, and getting nuanced crowd-sourced opinions can be difficult.
One main limitation to engaged journalism is it is time consuming and, in the age of the mass creation of news, it can be unrealistic to take weeks and months to complete a story. It takes time for the journalists to reach out to communities and people to hear their questions, concerns, opinions, and stories. To get a representative group, the journalist must talk to many people. Additionally, it takes time to build relationships and trust with the community members and, to eliminate the community from being taken advantage of, the journalist should keep the relationship going. Overall, the time constraints on journalists can make engaged journalism techniques unrealistic.
Another struggle encountered with engaged journalism is defining community. For guns in schools, the community is massive and trying to get diverse perspectives from all over the country bordered on impossible. Engaged journalism can be very effective when the journalist is located within a small community and they are living and working in that community, as seen with the On the Ground reporting.
A peril of engaged journalism is, when crowd-sourcing, it is easy to get people whose minds are made up and opinions are strong to engage with the topic. It is harder to get people who are undecided on the topic to speak or with more nuanced perspectives. In my digital media campaign, I received lots of responses such as “arm the teachers” and “mental health needs to be addressed,” but more nuanced thoughts and opinions were not shared. This can lead more polarized opinions within communities, rather than working towards solutions.
I've been trained pretty significantly in traditional journalism, from classes in high school to working on my high school and college papers, as well as taking a class with Corey. Because my view of journalism has been pretty one-sided, it's been enlightening to learn about engaged journalism.
The limitations and perils of this technique come with the benefits. It’s just impossible for engaged journalism to properly cover an entire country. There almost aren’t enough journalists to represent the 330 million people in the United States. It’s great for grassroots coverage of an area, but it doesn’t make sense on a wider scale. Think of all the big-name investigative pieces that have happened in the last 50 years in America. Pentagon Papers, Watergate, Clinton-Lewinsky; all these wouldn’t have been able to happen through engaged journalism. If there was an entire community covering these top-secret events, they would be ruined. Investigative journalism can take place most effectively when it’s just one or two journalists working around a case. Crowdsourcing experiences, ideas, opinions, and perspectives would absolutely have interfered with these examples.
The Clinton-Lewinsky case is especially interesting when thinking about what would’ve happened if it was run by engaged journalists. It’s a complicated case, but because the news story was scooped by tabloid The Drudge Report, I wonder if the story would’ve been scooped even earlier. Knowledge is at an absolute premium in these kinds of cases, with tight-lipped reporters battling to confirm and release information. If we had a bunch of engaged journalists involved, it’s tough to say that the secrets would have been equally as safe.
As you develop your critique, give particular attention to the ways in which crowdsourcing experiences, ideas, opinions, and perspectives may actually interfere with the democratic ideal of cultivating within citizens a sense of responsibility for working together on the problems we face.
This^^ ponderance makes me feel like valuing so many opinions and perspectives would get in the way on solving problems. If everybody feels like their own problems are the ones that need to be solved, how do we figure out which are the most important problems to solve? This feels like an issue that could be solved by traditional journalism. But I could also just be thinking cynically. In a better scenario, people would be able to work together and find commonalities within their issues, therefore being able to act on the problems most prudent to their communities.
Throughout our class, particularly in the first week, there seemed to be a recurring theme of engaged journalism being the solution to the falling popularity of journalism as a whole. Traditional journalism seemed to be referred to as outdated, info-loading which is no longer relevant or needed in this age of social media. To be fair, there is so much of an information overdose from social media, particularly primary sources from people who witness crimes and brutality and can take video immediately. Not to mention that coverage, particularly sensationalized TV coverage, will boil down many areas to stereotypes, particularly poor areas or areas predominantly inhabited by people of color. Articles we have read reiterate the fact that much of the public is tired of simply being talked on, not talked to, about their problems. Engaged journalism can destabilize stereotypes by working on the ground with citizens, and move towards finding solutions for the problems they face as opposed to just covering them. Overall engaged journalism does have these critical advantages to traditional journalism, but one of the major criticisms to engaged journalism are accessibility and spread. While the majority of the world does have social media and technology which would allow them to access this media overload, there is also a good portion of the world, particularly older generations, which may not have this access to understand problems. In that way there is still a need for traditional journalism and the information spread; though there is definitely room for figuring out how to properly cover tragedies and issues within marginalized communities. Coverage of shootings is chaotic, heavily focused on the images of grief as opposed to the images of evil (the shooter). The footage of Columbine we reviewed was voyeuristic and unrelenting in coming close to victims and survivors’ faces directly after escaping. Though it is important that there is information about the shooting, it is completely unnecessary and even unethical to interview survivors directly after the fact. And how does engaged journalism come into these situations? It’s hard. You can’t have people working on solutions this quickly. In this case the solution is to modify current methods of reporting. The other issue of engaged journalism is connected to this; engaged journalism really is grassroots. It’s nearly impossible to solve a whole nation’s problems by employing journalists all over as part of one project; it’s just not realistic. Thus it is ever more important to encourage engaged journalist practices and create coalitions or groups of journalists to engage with different communities. Unfortunately with ad revenue in mind, it’s hard to imagine big media conglomerates working on the ground.
I think the greatest limit to engaged journalism is time. In the understanding I have built of engaged journalism, it requires an aspect of immersement. It is not enough to find a pre-existing community and gather its story in an hour or a day. You must have the time to build trust and respect, to fully understand the multiplicities of their truth, and be able to adequately express their story without making your own assumptions about it. As with High Ground, there needs to be attention paid to the historical aspect, the present, and the hopes for the future. All of this takes time, resources, and energy that is not necessarily possible in the culture of journalism that exists in this day. There is decreasing money for journalism as a whole, so there is less and less money to send teams to conduct long-form, immersive journalism that involves relationship-building. One of the biggest things that we all can give is our time -- especially as college students, who don’t necessarily have many financial means of our own to give at this stage of our lives.
This gift of time and forming connections is almost a counter to crowdsourcing. Forming connections requires investment from both sides, and a willingness to understand one another. Crowdsourcing, which could be easily viewed as community engagement because many voices can be heard through it, does not build these trusting relationships. It is easy to give a singular, anecdotal comment to a Facebook post. It is more difficult, though, to explain it, give it contextual meaning, feel invested in it and the project towards which it is going, and then be interested in the outcome. As such, it doesn’t necessarily truly engage citizens. It is similar to the transactional relationship that Laura Frank discussed -- the question asks something for the journalists, an answer is given, and the relationship ends there. As such, another limitation of community engaged journalism is that it is difficulty to do it on a large scale, because there is only so much capacity to get to know many, many people and hear many voices. There are some topics that cannot be adequately described or captured by engaged journalism because they are nationwide or worldwide, and there is no concrete community story to be told -- there is a variety between all. And, again, with too many people involved, there tends to be a diffusion of responsibility (oh, there’s five hundred of us -- someone else will do it) that again limits the sense of responsibility that is desired.
Over the last three weeks I've grown very interested in the possibilities of Engaged Journalism, but, as made clear by this question, there are some limitations and perils.
The first limitation that comes to mind is time. Creating a piece of journalism using engaged journalism takes a lot of time. Instead of gaining most of our information through online research, we've gone out into the community and spent a significant amount of time sifting through community responses in the form of video footage and survey results. As our time has been limited and we have spent a great deal of time in these initial data collection steps, I feel that I still have significant gaps in knowledge regarding the topic of guns in schools.
The next limitation is one of breadth. This goes somewhat hand in hand with the limitation of time. While we have focused in on the Colorado Springs community, I wish I could have spent some more time broadening my scope of inquiry to learn about how this issue is treated in other countries.
Finally, our recent class discussion around the security of the event drew attention to the safety perils of an engaged approach to a controversial topic such as guns in schools. In opening ourselves up to all perspectives (or at least trying to) we make ourselves more vulnerable than if we hand-pick what are news sources are going to be. Still, I have enjoyed experimenting with the engaged approach and find it an interesting way to approach news. I hope I'll get to read more news produced through engaged techniques in the future.
Engaged journalism is a practice of problem solving. It provokes truth from within its readers and requires active participation of the community. Engaged journalism is a conversation. A collective storytelling process that allows citizens to be the experts of their own communities. It works from the bottom up and seeks a multitude of truthS. While traditional journalism’s goal is to inform the population, so they can be educated, engaged journalism’s is to give communities the tools and power to make their own decisions. Engaged journalism as a nuanced method of reporting allows the voice-less to be heard, but it also has its limits.
The first drawback of, engaged journalism is that it requires seeming infinite time and a seemingly finite space. Because engaged journalism calls upon citizens to both identify their own problems and work with journalists to solve them, it takes a long time. It is dependent on the journalist and the community coming together through individual relationships. As we’ve read in our nightly readings and heard from the speakers coming to class, these relationships are formed in kitchens, at baseball games, at town hall meetings, and everywhere in between. The extensive and intensive amount of time is one that unfortunately most journalists cannot afford in the time where people demand instant gratification. When done correctly, the reporter also does not finish being engaged after the story is published. Their relationships must be maintained afterwards regardless of the outcome of their work. While traditional journalism relies on presenting the “facts” in a situation from an outside perspective, engaged journalism allows the community to identify their own problems. This can be a positive, but it is also worth questioning community members to remove themselves from their every-day struggles and look outside their community to identify large scale problems. When the goal of engaged journalism is not necessarily to inform citizens but rather give voice to them, perhaps some of the content the community is interested in isn’t necessarily what should be focused on on a larger scale. Having a community’s collective consciousness could also be detrimental to diverse opinions and result in group-think. One of the articles we read one night defined the concept of a “filter bubble,” when there is a larger public forum with diverse choices, we tend to dive into channels we prefer and the range of learning shrinks. Although seemingly contradictory to engaged journalism, I think the concept of a filter bubble within a community could allow the community to identify the problems and solutions and reinforce each other’s opinions instead of allowing an outside source to analyze their situation more objectively. Overall, I do see some drawbacks to engaged journalism, but in my opinion the pros undoubtedly outweigh the cons. I think engaged journalism as a framework, not a regiment, is beneficial for the quality of the work as well as the engaged community.
Good engaged journalism takes time. High News in Memphis spends four months in each neighborhood they report on, in order to get to know its’ inhabitants. I don’t think there is any magic amount of time that promises the end result of an engaged journalism piece. Instead, there is a specific amount of time for each participant, that allows them to become comfortable enough to share their story.
The Digital Media Campaign made me realize that it is very difficult to have meaningful engagement over Facebook. We tried to get the stories from a community of individuals rather than from a cohesive community that was already in place. It takes time to grow a community, or a network, and people must have something in common. While our lack of time was not beneficial, the real struggles in our DMC lay in gaining people’s trust enough to convince them to share their story on our fairly un-credible looking page.
The benefit to engaged journalism is ethically sound journalism that tells one person, or many peoples’, truth. It is focused on what is important to the audience and points out a problem in hopes of the community finding a solution. Solution-based reporting is a new idea to me. I took an Environmental Journalism class last semester and I wonder now if we had tried to use engaged journalism techniques, how much more powerful our reporting would have been. The piece I was most proud of in that class was a story of an activist, a mother, and a landowner, fighting against Proposition 112. We spoke to so many officials (like most traditional journalists do) but the most powerful voice I heard was the one of the woman, standing in front of her home, gesturing to the nearby fracking sites that were violating her land. I believe that engaged journalism will continue to gain traction because people want to hear relatable voices. They want to hear what real people have to say rather than what politicians and experts have to say.
I think one peril of engaged journalism that we encountered due to the nature of the block plan and the timeline of the class is how hard it can be to gain the trust of the community that one is reporting on and, further, to make sure that the relationship that you form is upheld consistently and responsibly. As this class is only running for three weeks, it was difficult to embed ourselves fully enough into the Colorado Springs community in order to be able to interview or receive feedback from all of the members of the population whose perspectives could help us to form a complete view of the state of the public’s opinion on guns in schools.
One example of this is the difficulties that the “community letters” DMC group faced. Many of the Colorado Springs business owners did not want to put community letter boxes up in their storefronts for fear of coming across as too political. Perhaps if we had had more time to embed ourselves in the community and to convince those store owners of the relevancy and importance of the issue of guns in schools, even outside of and beyond the political context, local store owners would have been more willing to participate in the project. This would have allowed us to gather longer-form answers from a wider and random sampling of Colorado Springs citizens.
Further, a longer time frame would have allowed our group to have a follow-up dinner with our group of students from different colleges in the city, giving them time to reflect and perhaps adjust their opinions before we convened again. Though we could meet again outside of the class and plan to keep in touch in the months leading up to the PBS report, doing so outside of the context of a PBS collaborative class is more difficult. Many engaged journalists report under a similar time pressure because of the financial strain that most news organizations face in this current age of journalism.
From my experience I found that that the greatest limitation is time. I think that because a lot of the time you are going and talking to communities without a preconceived direction of conversation, it can take a longer time to develop a solid angle. Furthermore, crowdsourcing, but generally finding community members to talk to requires solid networks , or a lot of time on the streets. Compared to traditional reporting in a lot of cases, it can takes months on end to find a new, compelling narrative. While I think a lot of us are biased by the fact that we had only three and a half weeks to finish our project, I think it is an important limitation.
I think another limitation is definitely recognizing that inherently, you never be able to get every single voice on an issue. Engaged journalism is seemingly large-scale due to its problem solving goals, however it would be naive for an engaged journalist to believe that their approach id most definitely more balanced. We we have worked to recognize biases, but those biases still exist in who we choose to interview, and how we choose to edit.
And lastly, the last part of the question Anthony asked, I think is spot. When you get a range of opinions and experiences at the table, how do you decide the value of them in comparison with each others? In the case of gun violence, there are such stark divides, and does that lead to greater problem solving? I think it definitely can make the democratic process more chaotic.
As this project has progressed, I believe we all have found that engaged journalism seems to be a double edged sword. Obviously, as media changes due to technology, how we understand journalism as a whole has always shifted and raised eyebrows over the years. To avoid to critics of how social media and the internet has changed journalism, I assumed that engaged journalism was a natural counter to this new reality. However, after studying the literature and attempting to do this type of work throughout our project, it doesn’t seem so simple anymore.
Using engaged journalism, to me, seems like an opportunity to help expose issues and voices from the grassroots level that is directed at created civic engagement throughout our country. Although this ideal type is wonderful in theory, it is very difficult to follow all of the “best practices” of engaged journalism all the time. This has been a tough dichotomy to live with throughout the class and I believe it even made me discouraged at the whole process at times. Although we may never be able to reach the perfect and pure ideals of engaged journalism, I believe it is important to strive for them even if we do not make it all the way there.
Engaged journalism is very special in terms of how it can fit into other types of journalism. This can cause the opposite problem than the previously stated issue which is that by trying to be an engaged journalist along with being a traditional or social media based or whatever type of journalist, those ideals could become too watered down to become helpful. Despite the reality that most engaged journalism will either not come close enough or will be too far away from our theoretical understanding, I believe it is still useful to believe in and fight for this type of reporting in the 21st century.
After spending 3 weeks in this class, I’ve come to hear the term “Engaged Journalism” a few times too often. While we often seemed to be critiquing traditional journalism and its lack of both humanity and perspective, its “engaged” counterpart seems to come with just as many difficulties and disadvantages. Crowdsourcing stories and seeking experiences from just about anywhere and anyone, can insanely frustrating and time-consuming. For one thing, you’ll never truly be able to get everyone’s perspective that you need or have an accurate proportion of representation. Certain people of certain groups will probably be less likely to share their opinion, or more difficult to get in contact with. So no matter what, both the bias and just personal abilities of the engaged journalist have many limitations in terms of what crowds they can access. No matter how hard we may try to represent everyone’s opinions, someone is bound to be left out. In addition, the data which you collect is bound to contain false information and require quite a bit of fact-checking. As some of us had personally experienced with people we’d gained access to from our group project, when you’re reaching out to the general public, you can’t expect them to always be telling the truth or always know what they’re talking about. And as journalists always looking to seek new information, we can’t always make those distinctions for ourselves, requiring a lot more research and fact-checking of our sources. Overall, while the method of engaged journalism can be very powerful and showcase the experiences of many different both populist and marginalized groups, it is very much based on an ideal. If all journalism strived to be “engaged”, most journalistic works would be both much lower in quantity and quality, given the time and energy each piece would take. It’s a beautiful concept, but I don’t see it taking over our newstands (and News apps) anytime soon.
The idea of engaged journalism is a new concept to me. Before this class, I didn’t know that was a thing - or more that it had an official name. Diving right into the concept and practicing in real life really changed my perspective and taught me a lot about its pros and cons.
ReplyDeleteSome great benefits that I’ve experienced so far is the amount of different information that can and was collected by our class. We were really able to learn from a variety of individuals that came from all across the country. Also, I think it’s very valuable to have input from ‘regular’ citizens as they are the ones who experience the problems in the world first hand.
Some cons to engaged journalism can include the credibility of the information you receive. My mythbusting group grappled with this. We had some really unique perspectives, but we were unsure how much of it was realistic. It brings up the problem that we’ve talked about a few times in class - what is truth and how is it intertwined with one's perspective and experiences?
Through these past three weeks, we have transitioned from simply talking about engaged journalism in theory to attempting to use the tactic in practice. Compared to more traditional forms of journalism, engaged journalism takes the subject of the piece and allows them to have just as much of an impact on the shaping of the story as the journalist does. Stories written by engaged journalists are meant to involve community members directly, figuring out what story they feel should be told and then giving them the tools to begin solving issues. Ideally, this form of journalism facilitates a higher level of civic action in citizens. Trust between journalist and community is also a huge component of this form. The journalist is expected to work to a point of transparency with the citizens they involve in their story in order to get just as much honesty out of them. A level of mutual respect and reliance is expected in this field.
ReplyDeleteIn practice, this was much harder to achieve and at times it was even a bit frustrating. I found that myself as well as most of the other students went into interviews and the digital media campaigns with implicit biases that shaped expectations for how they believed the story would unfold. Most of the time, our expectations would not end up lining up with what really unfolded—especially with the small amount of time we were allotted. I think it is vital to sort out what one’s implicit biases might be before continuing on with an engaged journalism piece. I think it is equally as important to get into an accepting mindset—to acknowledge that whatever happens, while it might not be what was expected or desired, it is still important and can still function as valuable data.
I think another very common trap that a lot of people can fall into with the practice of engaged journalism when covering a marginalized person or community is the toxic mindset of “savior.” A journalist must acknowledge their positionality and what it is that allows them to have a larger and more impactful reach than community members they are reporting on. The journalist, especially the engaged journalist, has the power to give a voice to those who have been silenced. This is why it is important for the journalist to be as respectful as possible. To truly let community members shape their own story, with no leading whatsoever. The citizens choose and shape their story or stories. The journalist is just there to document it and get it out into the world.
-Logan Smith
DeleteHaving spent the last three weeks thinking about and utilizing engaged journalism practices, I now identity three primary limitations and perils of this technique: citizens’ detachment, outsized ‘extremes’ of social media, and the possibility of violence.
ReplyDeleteFirst, my group used Facebook and Reddit for our Digital Media Campaign, and I was surprised how difficult it was to get people to participate and engage. We created an ad to generate traffic and response to our page, and 1,847 people saw the ad and 265 “engaged” with it, meaning reacted, commented or shared. However, none of the people who saw or “engaged” with the ad actually posted on the page we linked; we got a series of comments, but that was it. Thus, we soon realized that getting people to post and be actively involved with the project was going to be more difficult than we had initially expected. We do attribute some of the disengagement to our initial expectations outlined on the page. We originally asked people to share all forms of media—including written responses but also videos, photos, etc.—but after getting little traction, we changed our post to be less demanding, encouraging folks to write just a few sentences about the impact of guns in schools on their lives. We eventually switched our inquiry entirely to “what questions do you have about guns in schools?” in the hopes of getting more responses and possibly some questions which could trigger our final video. However, none of these strategies sparked much traffic or contributions. Thus, a limitation of crowdsourcing my group and I encountered was citizens’ detachment and willingness to actively engage.
Second, my group and I confronted the outsized ‘extremes’ of social media on both Facebook and Reddit. While no citizens were explicitly fighting or yelling at one another—at least from our perspectives—most responses and comments we received (re)presented the greatest extremes surrounding guns in schools (i.e., no guns even for security officers and all faculty and staff should be armed). I argue we encountered these extremities because of a broad internet trend: the people posting on these pages are generally the most strongly opinionated in either direction. Thus, I think crowdsourcing—especially using social media platforms—primarily reaches and involves the people with the most extreme opinions and perspectives, meaning campaigns like ours may be missing a large segment of the American public who is more moderate and thus not engaging in these online forums.
Third, the possibility of violence is a peril I’ve been thinking about throughout this entire project. Since day one of the DMC, my group members and I were frequently checking our Facebook and Reddit sites to make sure there was no content (im)(ex)plicitly promoting gun violence because we were worried a project like ours could easily attract citizens who glorify rampage shootings. Thus, I argue a huge peril of crowdsourcing that needs to be taken into account is that posts on social media—while they exist initially on the internet—can have impacts on the ‘real world’ too.
Finally, to answer the second part of Anthony’s prompt, I think crowdsourcing—through social media at least—can theoretically spark dialogue, which benefits group identity and problem solving. However, more often than not in my experience, it simply demonstrates how deeply polarized our country is and pushes individuals even farther into their own ‘corners,’ especially given the aforementioned ‘extremes’ on the internet. Thus, while crowdsourcing in theory could be great for democracy and building bridges, in reality, I do often worry that it simply exacerbates the polarization that already exists and leads to yelling more than it does to listening.
Some of the main purposes of engaged journalism are to work with communities towards solutions to their problems. The journalist is a synthesizer for communities and works to facilitate dialogue. In an ideal world, it seems like a productive and ethical way to solve community issues, but realistically there are limitations. Engaged journalism can take an unrealistic amount of time, defining a community can be challenging, and getting nuanced crowd-sourced opinions can be difficult.
ReplyDeleteOne main limitation to engaged journalism is it is time consuming and, in the age of the mass creation of news, it can be unrealistic to take weeks and months to complete a story. It takes time for the journalists to reach out to communities and people to hear their questions, concerns, opinions, and stories. To get a representative group, the journalist must talk to many people. Additionally, it takes time to build relationships and trust with the community members and, to eliminate the community from being taken advantage of, the journalist should keep the relationship going. Overall, the time constraints on journalists can make engaged journalism techniques unrealistic.
Another struggle encountered with engaged journalism is defining community. For guns in schools, the community is massive and trying to get diverse perspectives from all over the country bordered on impossible. Engaged journalism can be very effective when the journalist is located within a small community and they are living and working in that community, as seen with the On the Ground reporting.
A peril of engaged journalism is, when crowd-sourcing, it is easy to get people whose minds are made up and opinions are strong to engage with the topic. It is harder to get people who are undecided on the topic to speak or with more nuanced perspectives. In my digital media campaign, I received lots of responses such as “arm the teachers” and “mental health needs to be addressed,” but more nuanced thoughts and opinions were not shared. This can lead more polarized opinions within communities, rather than working towards solutions.
I've been trained pretty significantly in traditional journalism, from classes in high school to working on my high school and college papers, as well as taking a class with Corey. Because my view of journalism has been pretty one-sided, it's been enlightening to learn about engaged journalism.
ReplyDeleteThe limitations and perils of this technique come with the benefits. It’s just impossible for engaged journalism to properly cover an entire country. There almost aren’t enough journalists to represent the 330 million people in the United States. It’s great for grassroots coverage of an area, but it doesn’t make sense on a wider scale. Think of all the big-name investigative pieces that have happened in the last 50 years in America. Pentagon Papers, Watergate, Clinton-Lewinsky; all these wouldn’t have been able to happen through engaged journalism. If there was an entire community covering these top-secret events, they would be ruined. Investigative journalism can take place most effectively when it’s just one or two journalists working around a case. Crowdsourcing experiences, ideas, opinions, and perspectives would absolutely have interfered with these examples.
The Clinton-Lewinsky case is especially interesting when thinking about what would’ve happened if it was run by engaged journalists. It’s a complicated case, but because the news story was scooped by tabloid The Drudge Report, I wonder if the story would’ve been scooped even earlier. Knowledge is at an absolute premium in these kinds of cases, with tight-lipped reporters battling to confirm and release information. If we had a bunch of engaged journalists involved, it’s tough to say that the secrets would have been equally as safe.
As you develop your critique, give particular attention to the ways in which crowdsourcing experiences, ideas, opinions, and perspectives may actually interfere with the democratic ideal of cultivating within citizens a sense of responsibility for working together on the problems we face.
This^^ ponderance makes me feel like valuing so many opinions and perspectives would get in the way on solving problems. If everybody feels like their own problems are the ones that need to be solved, how do we figure out which are the most important problems to solve? This feels like an issue that could be solved by traditional journalism. But I could also just be thinking cynically. In a better scenario, people would be able to work together and find commonalities within their issues, therefore being able to act on the problems most prudent to their communities.
Throughout our class, particularly in the first week, there seemed to be a recurring theme of engaged journalism being the solution to the falling popularity of journalism as a whole. Traditional journalism seemed to be referred to as outdated, info-loading which is no longer relevant or needed in this age of social media. To be fair, there is so much of an information overdose from social media, particularly primary sources from people who witness crimes and brutality and can take video immediately. Not to mention that coverage, particularly sensationalized TV coverage, will boil down many areas to stereotypes, particularly poor areas or areas predominantly inhabited by people of color. Articles we have read reiterate the fact that much of the public is tired of simply being talked on, not talked to, about their problems. Engaged journalism can destabilize stereotypes by working on the ground with citizens, and move towards finding solutions for the problems they face as opposed to just covering them. Overall engaged journalism does have these critical advantages to traditional journalism, but one of the major criticisms to engaged journalism are accessibility and spread.
ReplyDeleteWhile the majority of the world does have social media and technology which would allow them to access this media overload, there is also a good portion of the world, particularly older generations, which may not have this access to understand problems. In that way there is still a need for traditional journalism and the information spread; though there is definitely room for figuring out how to properly cover tragedies and issues within marginalized communities. Coverage of shootings is chaotic, heavily focused on the images of grief as opposed to the images of evil (the shooter). The footage of Columbine we reviewed was voyeuristic and unrelenting in coming close to victims and survivors’ faces directly after escaping. Though it is important that there is information about the shooting, it is completely unnecessary and even unethical to interview survivors directly after the fact. And how does engaged journalism come into these situations? It’s hard. You can’t have people working on solutions this quickly. In this case the solution is to modify current methods of reporting. The other issue of engaged journalism is connected to this; engaged journalism really is grassroots. It’s nearly impossible to solve a whole nation’s problems by employing journalists all over as part of one project; it’s just not realistic. Thus it is ever more important to encourage engaged journalist practices and create coalitions or groups of journalists to engage with different communities. Unfortunately with ad revenue in mind, it’s hard to imagine big media conglomerates working on the ground.
I think the greatest limit to engaged journalism is time. In the understanding I have built of engaged journalism, it requires an aspect of immersement. It is not enough to find a pre-existing community and gather its story in an hour or a day. You must have the time to build trust and respect, to fully understand the multiplicities of their truth, and be able to adequately express their story without making your own assumptions about it. As with High Ground, there needs to be attention paid to the historical aspect, the present, and the hopes for the future. All of this takes time, resources, and energy that is not necessarily possible in the culture of journalism that exists in this day. There is decreasing money for journalism as a whole, so there is less and less money to send teams to conduct long-form, immersive journalism that involves relationship-building. One of the biggest things that we all can give is our time -- especially as college students, who don’t necessarily have many financial means of our own to give at this stage of our lives.
ReplyDeleteThis gift of time and forming connections is almost a counter to crowdsourcing. Forming connections requires investment from both sides, and a willingness to understand one another. Crowdsourcing, which could be easily viewed as community engagement because many voices can be heard through it, does not build these trusting relationships. It is easy to give a singular, anecdotal comment to a Facebook post. It is more difficult, though, to explain it, give it contextual meaning, feel invested in it and the project towards which it is going, and then be interested in the outcome. As such, it doesn’t necessarily truly engage citizens. It is similar to the transactional relationship that Laura Frank discussed -- the question asks something for the journalists, an answer is given, and the relationship ends there. As such, another limitation of community engaged journalism is that it is difficulty to do it on a large scale, because there is only so much capacity to get to know many, many people and hear many voices. There are some topics that cannot be adequately described or captured by engaged journalism because they are nationwide or worldwide, and there is no concrete community story to be told -- there is a variety between all. And, again, with too many people involved, there tends to be a diffusion of responsibility (oh, there’s five hundred of us -- someone else will do it) that again limits the sense of responsibility that is desired.
Over the last three weeks I've grown very interested in the possibilities of Engaged Journalism, but, as made clear by this question, there are some limitations and perils.
ReplyDeleteThe first limitation that comes to mind is time. Creating a piece of journalism using engaged journalism takes a lot of time. Instead of gaining most of our information through online research, we've gone out into the community and spent a significant amount of time sifting through community responses in the form of video footage and survey results. As our time has been limited and we have spent a great deal of time in these initial data collection steps, I feel that I still have significant gaps in knowledge regarding the topic of guns in schools.
The next limitation is one of breadth. This goes somewhat hand in hand with the limitation of time. While we have focused in on the Colorado Springs community, I wish I could have spent some more time broadening my scope of inquiry to learn about how this issue is treated in other countries.
Finally, our recent class discussion around the security of the event drew attention to the safety perils of an engaged approach to a controversial topic such as guns in schools. In opening ourselves up to all perspectives (or at least trying to) we make ourselves more vulnerable than if we hand-pick what are news sources are going to be. Still, I have enjoyed experimenting with the engaged approach and find it an interesting way to approach news. I hope I'll get to read more news produced through engaged techniques in the future.
Engaged journalism is a practice of problem solving. It provokes truth from within its readers and requires active participation of the community. Engaged journalism is a conversation. A collective storytelling process that allows citizens to be the experts of their own communities. It works from the bottom up and seeks a multitude of truthS. While traditional journalism’s goal is to inform the population, so they can be educated, engaged journalism’s is to give communities the tools and power to make their own decisions. Engaged journalism as a nuanced method of reporting allows the voice-less to be heard, but it also has its limits.
ReplyDeleteThe first drawback of, engaged journalism is that it requires seeming infinite time and a seemingly finite space. Because engaged journalism calls upon citizens to both identify their own problems and work with journalists to solve them, it takes a long time. It is dependent on the journalist and the community coming together through individual relationships. As we’ve read in our nightly readings and heard from the speakers coming to class, these relationships are formed in kitchens, at baseball games, at town hall meetings, and everywhere in between. The extensive and intensive amount of time is one that unfortunately most journalists cannot afford in the time where people demand instant gratification. When done correctly, the reporter also does not finish being engaged after the story is published. Their relationships must be maintained afterwards regardless of the outcome of their work. While traditional journalism relies on presenting the “facts” in a situation from an outside perspective, engaged journalism allows the community to identify their own problems. This can be a positive, but it is also worth questioning community members to remove themselves from their every-day struggles and look outside their community to identify large scale problems. When the goal of engaged journalism is not necessarily to inform citizens but rather give voice to them, perhaps some of the content the community is interested in isn’t necessarily what should be focused on on a larger scale. Having a community’s collective consciousness could also be detrimental to diverse opinions and result in group-think. One of the articles we read one night defined the concept of a “filter bubble,” when there is a larger public forum with diverse choices, we tend to dive into channels we prefer and the range of learning shrinks. Although seemingly contradictory to engaged journalism, I think the concept of a filter bubble within a community could allow the community to identify the problems and solutions and reinforce each other’s opinions instead of allowing an outside source to analyze their situation more objectively. Overall, I do see some drawbacks to engaged journalism, but in my opinion the pros undoubtedly outweigh the cons. I think engaged journalism as a framework, not a regiment, is beneficial for the quality of the work as well as the engaged community.
Good engaged journalism takes time. High News in Memphis spends four months in each neighborhood they report on, in order to get to know its’ inhabitants. I don’t think there is any magic amount of time that promises the end result of an engaged journalism piece. Instead, there is a specific amount of time for each participant, that allows them to become comfortable enough to share their story.
ReplyDeleteThe Digital Media Campaign made me realize that it is very difficult to have meaningful engagement over Facebook. We tried to get the stories from a community of individuals rather than from a cohesive community that was already in place. It takes time to grow a community, or a network, and people must have something in common. While our lack of time was not beneficial, the real struggles in our DMC lay in gaining people’s trust enough to convince them to share their story on our fairly un-credible looking page.
The benefit to engaged journalism is ethically sound journalism that tells one person, or many peoples’, truth. It is focused on what is important to the audience and points out a problem in hopes of the community finding a solution. Solution-based reporting is a new idea to me. I took an Environmental Journalism class last semester and I wonder now if we had tried to use engaged journalism techniques, how much more powerful our reporting would have been. The piece I was most proud of in that class was a story of an activist, a mother, and a landowner, fighting against Proposition 112. We spoke to so many officials (like most traditional journalists do) but the most powerful voice I heard was the one of the woman, standing in front of her home, gesturing to the nearby fracking sites that were violating her land. I believe that engaged journalism will continue to gain traction because people want to hear relatable voices. They want to hear what real people have to say rather than what politicians and experts have to say.
I think one peril of engaged journalism that we encountered due to the nature of the block plan and the timeline of the class is how hard it can be to gain the trust of the community that one is reporting on and, further, to make sure that the relationship that you form is upheld consistently and responsibly. As this class is only running for three weeks, it was difficult to embed ourselves fully enough into the Colorado Springs community in order to be able to interview or receive feedback from all of the members of the population whose perspectives could help us to form a complete view of the state of the public’s opinion on guns in schools.
ReplyDeleteOne example of this is the difficulties that the “community letters” DMC group faced. Many of the Colorado Springs business owners did not want to put community letter boxes up in their storefronts for fear of coming across as too political. Perhaps if we had had more time to embed ourselves in the community and to convince those store owners of the relevancy and importance of the issue of guns in schools, even outside of and beyond the political context, local store owners would have been more willing to participate in the project. This would have allowed us to gather longer-form answers from a wider and random sampling of Colorado Springs citizens.
Further, a longer time frame would have allowed our group to have a follow-up dinner with our group of students from different colleges in the city, giving them time to reflect and perhaps adjust their opinions before we convened again. Though we could meet again outside of the class and plan to keep in touch in the months leading up to the PBS report, doing so outside of the context of a PBS collaborative class is more difficult. Many engaged journalists report under a similar time pressure because of the financial strain that most news organizations face in this current age of journalism.
From my experience I found that that the greatest limitation is time. I think that because a lot of the time you are going and talking to communities without a preconceived direction of conversation, it can take a longer time to develop a solid angle. Furthermore, crowdsourcing, but generally finding community members to talk to requires solid networks , or a lot of time on the streets. Compared to traditional reporting in a lot of cases, it can takes months on end to find a new, compelling narrative. While I think a lot of us are biased by the fact that we had only three and a half weeks to finish our project, I think it is an important limitation.
ReplyDeleteI think another limitation is definitely recognizing that inherently, you never be able to get every single voice on an issue. Engaged journalism is seemingly large-scale due to its problem solving goals, however it would be naive for an engaged journalist to believe that their approach id most definitely more balanced. We we have worked to recognize biases, but those biases still exist in who we choose to interview, and how we choose to edit.
And lastly, the last part of the question Anthony asked, I think is spot. When you get a range of opinions and experiences at the table, how do you decide the value of them in comparison with each others? In the case of gun violence, there are such stark divides, and does that lead to greater problem solving? I think it definitely can make the democratic process more chaotic.
- Sam Pfeifer
DeleteW3D5 - Limitations & Perils of Engaged Journalism - Isabella McShea
ReplyDeleteAs this project has progressed, I believe we all have found that engaged journalism seems to be a double edged sword. Obviously, as media changes due to technology, how we understand journalism as a whole has always shifted and raised eyebrows over the years. To avoid to critics of how social media and the internet has changed journalism, I assumed that engaged journalism was a natural counter to this new reality. However, after studying the literature and attempting to do this type of work throughout our project, it doesn’t seem so simple anymore.
Using engaged journalism, to me, seems like an opportunity to help expose issues and voices from the grassroots level that is directed at created civic engagement throughout our country. Although this ideal type is wonderful in theory, it is very difficult to follow all of the “best practices” of engaged journalism all the time. This has been a tough dichotomy to live with throughout the class and I believe it even made me discouraged at the whole process at times. Although we may never be able to reach the perfect and pure ideals of engaged journalism, I believe it is important to strive for them even if we do not make it all the way there.
Engaged journalism is very special in terms of how it can fit into other types of journalism. This can cause the opposite problem than the previously stated issue which is that by trying to be an engaged journalist along with being a traditional or social media based or whatever type of journalist, those ideals could become too watered down to become helpful. Despite the reality that most engaged journalism will either not come close enough or will be too far away from our theoretical understanding, I believe it is still useful to believe in and fight for this type of reporting in the 21st century.
After spending 3 weeks in this class, I’ve come to hear the term “Engaged Journalism” a few times too often. While we often seemed to be critiquing traditional journalism and its lack of both humanity and perspective, its “engaged” counterpart seems to come with just as many difficulties and disadvantages. Crowdsourcing stories and seeking experiences from just about anywhere and anyone, can insanely frustrating and time-consuming.
ReplyDeleteFor one thing, you’ll never truly be able to get everyone’s perspective that you need or have an accurate proportion of representation. Certain people of certain groups will probably be less likely to share their opinion, or more difficult to get in contact with. So no matter what, both the bias and just personal abilities of the engaged journalist have many limitations in terms of what crowds they can access. No matter how hard we may try to represent everyone’s opinions, someone is bound to be left out.
In addition, the data which you collect is bound to contain false information and require quite a bit of fact-checking. As some of us had personally experienced with people we’d gained access to from our group project, when you’re reaching out to the general public, you can’t expect them to always be telling the truth or always know what they’re talking about. And as journalists always looking to seek new information, we can’t always make those distinctions for ourselves, requiring a lot more research and fact-checking of our sources.
Overall, while the method of engaged journalism can be very powerful and showcase the experiences of many different both populist and marginalized groups, it is very much based on an ideal. If all journalism strived to be “engaged”, most journalistic works would be both much lower in quantity and quality, given the time and energy each piece would take. It’s a beautiful concept, but I don’t see it taking over our newstands (and News apps) anytime soon.