Community-led listening project offers solutions to journalism’s biggest challenges

"Would you sit through something that was dehumanising you, not representing you correctly, misrepresenting you? You wouldn't, you would disengage."

Those are the stark, heartfelt words of Cardiff community leader Abdi Yusuf, neatly summing up one of the reasons many people are choosing to avoid news journalism. That is an entirely rational choice.

We all know that journalism is facing existential questions around trust, news avoidance and the need to better engage with audiences. But, what if, all at once, we could:

• Help news organisations better understand the needs of our most marginalised communities
• Rebuild relationships between newsrooms and those people and communities who trust journalism the least
• And inspire the greater civic and democratic engagement, necessary for healthy societies

Well, now a radical collaboration between the Media Cymru innovation consortium and the BBC has delivered inspiring solutions to some of those existential challenges. Most importantly, those answers have come from citizens themselves.

Working deeply with some of Wales's most marginalised people and communities, across more than six months of participatory research, the 'News for All' project has put community at the centre of the process to understand exactly what our citizens want and need from journalism. Sessions were designed and led by community facilitators, drawing on theatre and art techniques and this radical approach delivered new and exciting insights.

Many of the participants began the process with very poor impressions of journalism and the BBC, with some saying they regard "journalism as oppression" and describing it as having the same negative impact on their lives as the police. However, the innovative nature of the research, and the focus on creating long-term relationships, proved that it is possible to rebuild trust, even where it has been lost.

Key insights from the research include:

Participants are very news literate

They understand the political economy of journalism, the centralisation of ownership, the lack of diversity in newsrooms etc, and that is why they are choosing not to engage with journalism

New innovation approaches

Journalism innovation has habitually focused on outputs and formats, but that is not going to shift the dial for any of our participants. Put simply, if a story is misrepresenting, ignoring or attacking them then it does not matter what format it is in.

They are much more interested in a recalibration of how journalists connect with them, how stories are surfaced, researched and chosen and who is telling the stories. The thing that will encourage them to re-engage with journalism is this “input-side” innovation

AI is not the answer to the fundamental challenges

Whilst many news organisations are going "all in" on AI for efficiency reasons, it is clear that AI is not going to address fundamental concerns around how journalism is failing to meet people's needs.

There is not a single user asking for more, cheaper content. What they want from us is more of the uniquely human characteristics of connection, collaboration and care

Building confidence, motivation and hope

Participants told us that, as a direct result of being involved in the project, they felt both more confident and more motivated to get involved in other civic and democratic activities. For public service media outlets in particular, and for our societies in general, this is potentially a crucial intervention. Participants reported that the possibility of genuine change (in contrast to what they see in other aspects of their lives) was what motivated them.

Practical ideas for your newsroom:

Participants asked all the right questions - wanting to know who decides what stories are told, and why - the kind of real (rather than superficial) transparency which would actually make a difference to those who most mistrust the media. The group also co-created their own practical solutions to some of journalism's key challenges. These included:

Journalists in residence

Reporters spending focused time in marginalised communities and then reporting on wider systemic issues and stories - health, education, welfare etc - through the lenses of those communities

Community forums

Routinely bringing together news organisations, communities and power holders (MP’s, MS’s, councillors, police chiefs etc) to create relationships of genuine accountability and build trust

Deeper contextual storytelling

The group wanted a move away from "news" to stories that explored deeper context - looking both backwards and forwards in time, to explore "why we’ve got here" and "where we might go".

More detail on all these insights can be found in our report - “News For All - The Story So Far” - co-authored and co-edited by participants of the research as well as the project team of journalists, designers and researchers from Media Cymru and the BBC. The report also sets out how the work could be replicated by any media organisation around the world - with potentially transformational effects.

Shirish Kulkarni is an award winning journalist, researcher and community organiser and currently News Innovation Research Fellow of Media Cymru and JOMEC (the Cardiff University School of Journalism, Media and Culture).

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