Engagement Journalism News 03–24–23
Updates from the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY’s engagement journalism MA program and its students, faculty, and alumni, plus good reads, research and other news from the field. Bonus content (!) may include (what else?) Fred pics and a roundup of other tidbits of interest and possibly a rant from program director Carrie Brown (that’s me — views my own).
#EngagedJ at CUNY
- Several of our alumni contributed to the Missing Them Exhibit at Photoville, a powerful memorial to New Yorkers that lost their lives to Covid. This free, public exhibit is open in two locations: the Bronx Documentary Center and Moore Homestead Playground in Elmhurst, Queens, and will be open for viewing until May 31.
- Joe Amditis, ’16, associate director of products + events at the Center for Cooperative Media, released a new ChatGPT handbook to help publishers use AI for local news. Joe knows his stuff, so be sure to check it out.
- Program Director Carrie Brown (that’s me) is serving as an external reviewer for the University of Rhode Island’s journalism program, and she visited campus this week. It’s always interesting to learn from how other schools design their curriculum, and she met some wonderful students (who maybe just maybe might want to join us for grad school one day, hey-yo). Bonus: Rhode Island is very beautiful, and the Amtrak from Kingston to Newark has some great views.
Engagement reads 📚
- Mutual Aid and the “Messy Middle”: pushing public radio toward antiracism by Andrea Wenzel (2021). Late to this, but it’s an incredibly useful examination of the potential and challenges of bringing the concept of mutual aid to journalism. The News and Information Community Exchange, or N.I.C.E, brought together grassroots news and information content creators with WHYY in Philadelphia to share ideas, wisdom, and sources. The project helped to build trust and challenge assumptions about what constitutes “real journalism,” but also illustrates the challenges of setting clear expectations among parties with diverse interests and the risk of overpromising what journalists can deliver to communities, given limited staff and resources.
- Don’t ever miss the monthly round up on research on journalism from Seth Lewis and Mark Coddington. This month they highlight research on how social media policies are failing journalists and more.
Research Wanted
Speaking of research, The Participatory Journalism Interest Group is seeking your research papers and extended abstracts for the AEJMC conference. Deadline April 1! We are also looking for paper reviewers — please reach out to Carrie if interested.
Other interesting journalism 📚
- The End of the English Major by Nathan Heller (Feb). There was more focus on Harvard than I might like, given that its problems are not exactly representative, but it does point to a change with massive implications for higher education as fewer and fewer students pursue degrees in the humanities, instead opting for STEM. For what it’s worth, graduate programs in journalism love to see students with a wide variety of majors or double majors. And as ever, herein lies the rub: “In 1980, on average, state funding accounted for 79% of public universities’ revenue. By 2019, that figure was 55%. Universities have two options. They can strip down academics, or they can run to the market and surf its waves.”
- Stop Treating Adolescent Girls as Emotionally Abnormal by Jessica Grose. Social media is a tool often used by engagement journalists, and of late there has been a sweeping moral panic building about its effects on kids and its contributions to the rising tide of depression and anxiety. Concern is certainly warranted, but at the same time, it’s good to see some more nuance and complexity around teen mental health. Grose offers some skepticism about narratives that imply that girls in particular are uniquely susceptible to emotional upheaval.
Here we go again — another simplistic take on objectivity in news, a rant by Carrie
Sigh. Former Washington Post editor Marty Baron has written a piece in defense of objectivity that is buttressing my personal theory that the word “objectivity” has a way of making people immediately lose their ability to grasp nuance and complexity. As I wrote on Twitter, as one of the “many” academics who are “encouraging and enabling” critics of objectivity, I wanted to respond.
To his credit, Baron is accurate in his enumeration of why many journalists today eschew the way objectivity is often practiced in journalism, noting that it tends to privilege the white male point of view, among other things. However, ironically enough in a piece written in reverence of research, reporting, and humility, Baron does not meaningfully engage with some of the specific critiques of coverage under his own watch, nor does he seem familiar with any of the decades of research that carefully enumerate through textual analysis and observation how the rituals around objectivity in journalism influence coverage in a host of ways that support the status quo and reify existing power structures.
Also ironically, there are very few individual sentences taken by themselves in this whole piece that I even disagree with, other than the ones at the end that conclude the American press is doing GREAT defending democracy and just needs to be left alone to keep doing great. To be CLEAR, no, this “academic enabler” does NOT tell my students anything like: “oh, no need to do any reporting on that, just tell me what you think. Or, just trust your gut! Or, your rightful role is to be the moral police to the world. Or, your lived experience is universal.” I mean, come on. Hell, I run a whole program that is more or less dedicated to this: “I believe our profession would benefit from listening more to the public and from talking less at the public, as if we knew it all” and I can recite the Kovach and Rosenstiel quote he cites by heart (to be fair, I used to work for them.)
Most critics of objectivity agree (!!) that journalists need to keep an open mind, maintain their independence, rigorously check their assumptions, and to be transparent about what we don’t know and where we are coming from. They also believe, however, that these values should apply at the top of the masthead too, not only to people on the lower rungs of the newsroom hierarchy or exclusively to women, people of color, etc.
Objectivity’s defenders don’t seem to understand how the so-called standard they revere is so often applied unequally and without enough care, making myriad assumptions about what counts as “real” news and whose views are valid. To take just one of so many possible examples, take a look at the voluminous research on the “protest paradigm” that shows how news values can legitimize some forms of dissent while demonizing others.
Human beings have argued about the nature of truth and how we can and should search for it for centuries. It’s a complicated and challenging. Yes, journalism must have a system for testing different claims, but that method also involves constantly questioning the limits of our own understanding and recognizing that “truth” itself is a moving target. Asserting that we simply need to uncritically double down on some antiquated notion of “objectivity” is not going to cut it.
Photo 📸
Quotable
You never heard of Brandolini’s law? You may need this for your sanity: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.” — Jay Rosen
“one problem with the internet might be that people think being a critical thinker and being a contrarian asshole are the same thing” — Mike Drucker
