How journalists can gain the trust of their audience
Situation Definition
Mark Russell, Executive Editor of The Commercial Appeal, is a very accomplished journalist with several years of journalism ethics experience. In recent years, the general trust of journalists has declined. Mark Russell’s lecture made it clear how journalists can regain that trust with their audiences. The two attributes that every journalist must practice are transparency and diversity.
Analysis
The first issue that Russell discussed was transparency in journalism. One of the easiest ways for a journalist to be transparent is to connect and interact with their audience. Connecting with the audience allows journalists to understand how the readers feel about their stories as well as showing the readers that the writer cares about the audience. A journalist who engages with their audience has much more credibility than one who makes no effort to receive input from their readers.
A more specific example of transparency is “visual transparency”, outlined in Astrid Gynnild’s article titled Surveillance Videos and Visual Transparency in Journalism. Visual transparency is the idea that pictures and videos included with articles increase credibility with readers because it gives them confirmation of locations and events. Gynnild says, “the relience on surveillance videos as ‘objective’ information allows media to reinforce existing power structures within society while appearing to be transparent.” (Gynnild, 2014)
Another issue that is very important for journalists to pay attention to is diversity. Being one-dimensional and only reporting stories of the same nature or on the same subjects discredits other types of stories that a journalist may try to write in the future. For example, if a certain journalist only writes about billionaire CEOs in Philadelphia, it would be very difficult for them to write a story about poverty, or another minority group, in Philadelphia that people would respect.
In 2010, a study was conducted by Serena Carpenter, from Arizona State University, in which she created a way to measure content diveristy and apply the model it to online journalism in the United States. After extensive research, Carpenter and her team found that online journalism, especially citizen created content such as blogs and social media, increase diversity in the big picture of journalism.
Conclusion
Trust is clearly one of the biggest issues that journalists face in todays industry. One of the ways journalists can help themselves gain the trust of their audience is by practicing transparency and diversity. This means interacting with the communities in which a journalist is reporting on, and reporting on a variety of topics and social groups.
References
Gynnild, Astrid. August 2014. “Surveillance Videos and Visual Transparency in Journalism” Journalism Studies Volume 15.4.
Carpenter, Serena. February 2010. “A study of content diversity in online citizen journalism and online newspaper aticles”