At a time when traditional news audiences are declining and media advocates fret over news fatigue, many outlets are asking themselves what people want.
The answer, according to content creator and Under the Desk News founder V Spehar, is a sense that they are being included.
“People don’t want objectivity,” Spehar said. “They want to either be affirmed or educated or included or feel like they can build on that story.”
Spehar’s comments came Wednesday during one of three roundtable discussions led by Poynter Institute president Neil Brown on the state of the news industry. The conversations, which featured media figures from The Washington Post, The New York Times, TIME, Bloomberg News as well as influencers and independent journalists, follow the publication this week of a Poynter report called “OnPoynt — Values Rising: Trends and traction in journalism and the news industry.” Using the report as a jumping off point, panelists broke down the myth of news avoidance and analyzed the influence of artificial intelligence and other technology on the industry.
Narratives that most people don’t trust “the media” lack nuance, according to the report. Pew Research Center found that the majority of Americans trust local news sources and believe in their importance. Giving audiences meaningful information and services engenders trust, the report argues.
URL Media CEO and co-founder S. Mitra Kalita shared during one roundtable that she defines trust as “when someone calls me a second time.” During the pandemic, she served as senior vice president at CNN. But despite having such a large reach, she felt “powerless” when she realized that her neighbors still couldn’t get personalized information about COVID-19.
So Kalita founded a newsletter, which evolved into Epicenter NYC, to answer her neighbors’ questions. Hearing from them, “You helped me once. Can you help me again?” was a humbling demonstration of trust, Kalita said.
Media literacy influencer Kelsey Russell said that advances in technology have made it easier for people to access information and consequently question what experts, including journalists, tell them. They don’t need to take those experts at their word; they can use the internet to search and find what might be contradictory information.
“For so long, journalists had a lot of power, and what they were saying was the truth, and there’s no questions. But now we have access to ask people questions.” Russell said. “I think the more you tell people about the process — and it might not be the journalists themselves, it might be the whole team putting that together — you start to gain people’s trust because they want to see the behind-the-scenes that used to just not be questioned at all.”
The report acknowledges that much of the conversation about distrust in media revolves around national publications. Spehar said many audiences feel that journalists and traditional outlets don’t care about them.
“(The perception is) those people don’t feel like they care about me at all. They’re just so worried about each other and getting each other and who has a scoop,” Spehar said. “In the meantime, it feels like the American public got left behind, or felt like they’re not smart enough to contribute to it, or ‘Well, if you don’t read The New York Times, then you don’t get it.’ ”
“I think we say that we hate The New York Times because we wish that they loved us, and we feel like they don’t.”
National media often emphasizes its impartiality in a bid to earn people’s trust, Kalita said. But impartiality means distance, and what people are seeking is “more connection.”
Though some media watchers lament the phenomenon of news fatigue, many people are actually interested in the news, several panelists said. Washington Post senior national political correspondent Ashley Parker said that from an early age, her kids realized that they could get information they wanted about the world from the newspaper. And during the last presidential administration, she was often stopped by strangers who wanted to talk politics whenever they saw her media lanyard.
“There was news fatigue, but there was also tremendous news fascination in the weeds (of politics),” Parker said. “I was stunned that sort of average people who are not journalists were just as riveted and fascinated as I was.”
Alex Mahadevan, director of MediaWise at the Poynter Institute, said he doesn’t think people have news fatigue, but rather social media fatigue. In the past, consuming news was a “deliberate” act — a person needed to deliberately choose to pick up a newspaper. But the rise of social platforms and web 2.0 has made consuming news “incidental.”
“What we’re seeing is people have so many options for news, and I think they’re not fatigued by news, they’re fatigued by social media,” Mahadevan said. He added that in an effort to go back to a more deliberate consumption of news, young people are turning to sources like newsletters or individual creators.
People are willing to pay for both news and an opportunity to participate in the conversation around that news, panelists said. Mahadevan pointed to Sidechannel, a Discord server run by several technology journalists, as one example. Subscribers get access to the journalists involved, as well as other readers of those journalists’ newsletters.
Margaret Sullivan, executive director of the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics at Columbia Journalism School, said that she’s found in starting her Substack newsletter that people “really respond to the personal voice.” Her posts are free, but people who want to comment have to subscribe.
Audiences are fundamentally interested in good storytelling, several panelists said. And journalists help fulfill that interest.
“If you look at human beings, they love telling each other stories. They love reading interesting stories. They love reacting to stories. They love understanding their world,” Bloomberg Media chief digital officer Julia Beizer said. “And I think we as journalists have an opportunity, an obligation, and indeed a duty, to actually continue to do that work of finding interesting stories and sharing them with the world.”
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