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Session on Post-Covid Journalism by Carrie Brown
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Sujan
4:55
Hello and welcome to the special lecture on ‘Post-Covid Journalism’ by Dr. Carrie Brown, Director, Social journalism at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, New York.
4:57
Carrie Brown won the 2014 award for being National Educator of the Year and is one of the pioneers of the field of mobile journalism education.
4:58
4:59
Dr. Carrie Brown kicks off the lecture by acknowledging the elephant in the room, "The journalism landscape is not really great, is it?"
5:00
She says, "There is growing social and economic need for journalism to change."
5:02
She lists the issues at hand. "There are organisations closing; there are layoffs; advertising is bleak," she says.
However, Brown adds, "There was one kind of exciting bright spot. There was one big bump in digital traffic, right after everything locked down in March in the US."
5:03
She charts the changes. She says, "A lot of that bump had already faded by April. This kind of news fatigue had set in by then. Obviously, there is a historic election on the cards, but the growth hasn't sustained like we hoped."
5:04
Brown says: "We can't rely on billionaires and economic saviours. But I was really disappointed at billionaires taking back their investments from media companies."
She shares her insights with the students of ACJ. "I think engagement might be the way forward, because it is absolutely critical to remedy the flaws that traditional journalism had."
5:05
She talks about the issues in journalism that had been there even before the pandemic and how the pandemic only made a bad thing worse.
She says, "We obviously haven't been responsive to some communities traditionally."
5:06
She frames these changes as the need of the hour.
Brown says: "There is a strong economic case to do that. This strategy is going to make the profession more economic and people are going to encourage it. If we listen to our audiences, some journalists think we might relegate ourselves to the lowest denominator kind of journalism."
5:08
She says: "But I think the thought has to go a little deeper. We need to look at how things affect people's lives, what it does to their jobs, mortgage and things like that."
5:12
"In terms of monetisation and business strategies, membership models interest me. It is not only about sustainability but it in contrast to subscriptions, you are really trying to attract people who really want to actively participate in your journalism. It is really a way to sustain engagement as an organisation, not just as a project," Brown says.
She says that obviously, no one model is going to solve all the problems that we are facing, but she really likes where the trends are going in the case of membership model in the sort of post-virus world.
5:14
Carrie says, "You journalists are always not going to be the gatekeepers to decide what news is reported. We talk about it a lot with our students. Our students go out with a series of questions to understand what people's needs are. What kind of news they want or need. You have to design your assessments very carefully."
She advises the students, "You have to be able to understand how people are living their lives, you need to speak to others in their communities."
5:15
Brown says: "Certainly journalists are story tellers. If you have written a beautiful investigative piece, it is possible that some of the most affected people by it might not be able to read the piece because of various reasons."
She shares the example of her students. "Our students have blown our minds really in that sense. They had a community theatre project. Outlier media in Detroit are essentially a media organisation that exists via text messages. Most of their audience are people from low-income areas and may not have access to internet and are very much involved in texting. They used their text messaging model to let people ask them questions about where to get tests done during the pandemic. That is really wonderful," she says.
5:16
"Another example is "The City" a relatively new Not for profit organisation. NYC is a pecuiar place as in it is called the media capital of the US but when it comes to local news, many neighbourhoods are under-covered. People in "The City" approached communities and engaged closely with them trying to build trust with them. These meetings helped them partly to set their reporting agendas. There are many other cool examples of strategies like that the journalists are increasingly using. It is particularly important during the time of the virus," Brown says.
5:17
Abirami has questions to ask...
5:18
"Do you think in Post-Covid world, health journalism will be on peak replacing all other areas?"
Brown answers, "Definitely. Social journalism has really good solutions to offer to health reporting. There are definitely more students interested in health journalism."
Ajay brings up Sir David Attenborough's comments about excess capitalism wreaking havoc to the environment. He asks membership models would help in this case when a story can easily be trashed because it is not appealing to the members.
5:20
Brown responds by saying that every model has its own pros and cons. Especially Jeff gets a lot of pushback from students in this case, she says. "There is a student of ours who is working with a Social journalism Co-op. There are checks and balances there that help them make proper news that is helpful for people. Membership models can actually help with this. Instead of collecting more money from less people, membership models can help collect less money from more people."
Suyashi asks, "How do you diversify the people who are giving the information in news?"
5:21
Brown acknowledges that this shift is a long time coming. "It has always been core to the premise of social journalism. We also talk of objectivity. In US, white, old, male was considered objective, but the same was not true of other identity groups. Diversifying is imperative on an economic level too. We can be part of the pressure to bring the change on the diversity front."
5:22
Nikita asks, "Do you believe subscription models can become exclusionary in terms of who can access it?"
5:23
Brown says that a lot of people are motivated to donate so that the paywall comes down for everyone. "We need diversity of revenue models. Sometimes, subscription makes sense for certain parts of the business. At a moment of crisis like now, we need to be open minded that there can be different kinds of revenue models. Paywalls are frustrating for sure," she says.
Shruti R asks, "Can social journalism and development journalism be connected?"
5:24
Brown says, "I am not quite sure of the definition of development journalism." She says that government money funding for journalism could be approached in creative ways so that it does not impact new agenda setting.
Moyurie asks about impact of COVID on social journalism as contact is problematic now.
5:25
5:27
Brown says that a lot of strategies social journalists used to rely upon were based on going into the communities and interacting. "But now we are very limited in terms of outdoor reporting. With us confined in our homes, the strategies of many of my students are changing," she says.
It is necessary to use Facebook and WhatsApp groups as sources of finding spaces where "communities are communicating with themselves." It was so even earlier, but the virus has accelerated that.
She explains that it takes a lot of trust on the journalists for them to get included in that space. "You can not suddenly show up with a bunch of questions. It can be tricky," she says.
Sourish asks, "Can community engagement be tokenised?" He asks would he, as a member of the LGBT community, be pushed into a corner to cover only those issues.
5:29
Brown says, "We have amped up our exercises this semester so that students think about their identities and how that interacts with journalism and other identities." She says the only way is to be very conscious of it. "Trying to bring formally excluded voices in the conversation without tokenising it, is something we need to consciously work on."
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