Disaster or Adventure? Dealing with the Decline of Traditional Media
Traditional news outlets are in decline. Daily newspapers and regional radio newsrooms that aren’t closing their doors altogether are drastically reducing staff and covering less local news.
The virtual extinction of beat reporters who tenaciously covered environment, labor, community health, immigration -- and the reduced funding for investigative journalism -- means the quality and depth of pieces on progressive justice issues via traditional television, radio and print news mediums is waning.
Local television coverage is reduced to shorter sound bytes in fewer and fewer pieces about local issues, as they seek to add international news to their half-hour broadcasts in some absurd effort to compete with the cable news giants.
In my work as a progressive communicator I, like so many of us, am striving to navigate the volatile and rapidly changing media landscape with an open, creative mind and a smile on my face.
Funny, how all this makes me think of my mom. In fact, I’ve been likening my exploration of emerging new media and web 2.0 tools to our many road trips in Mom’s old Rambler station wagon, exploring new terrain across southern California at the height of Los Angeles’ urban sprawl in the 1970s. It was a time when new neighborhoods, mini-malls and dead-end streets could replace old familiar landmarks like hills, groves of fruit trees and wetlands -- seemingly overnight.
Once when I dared to accuse Mom of being lost she stated firmly that we were NOT lost, but rather we were having an adventure! But as I pointed out to her in a particularly astute observation for a 6 year-old, sometimes one person’s adventure is another’s disaster!
To understand the true impact on grassroots communications it is vital to understand the many ways that local story placement has been central to strategic media efforts:
- Often to prove to editors at a national ‘opinion leader’ media outlet like the New York Times or USA Today that a local progressive story was exemplary of a trend and thus newsworthy, grassroots communicators would supply the clips of local press coverage earned to date on the issue in various towns and cities. This source of proof is evaporating.
- The local news story was both a place for grassroots spokesperson to warm up and become more accomplished in doing interviews and, perhaps even more important, the placement of a person in a local news story (especially with a spokesperson from communities most disproportionately impacted by an issue but often least cited or respected as an expert source) served to legitimize their voice in the eyes of national media outlets. It also raised their clout in the eyes of their adversaries: government officials, policy makers and corporate wrongdoers who had a harder time dismissing someone as an expert if they were quoted in the local media during the course of the campaign. These media outlets are vanishing daily.
- The strategic communicator’s job has always been to provide context in media pitches: localizing a national story and putting our community’s face on it, or nationalizing a local story, bringing to light the significance (on a national or even international level) of something happening in our communities. The death of the local daily paper means all this changes.
Listening to public television news veteran Jim Lehrer in his recent speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco reminded me of the challenges faced by those on the other side of the mic as well, and I knew my mom would remind me that we are all in this together, the journalist and the progressive communicator with the story to tell. Somehow the fate of important news will require in some way that me AND Jim, stand together, and, as my mother would put it, make some lemonade with the current lemons.
Adventure or disaster?
I listened intently last week to the Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet’s hearing to ‘examine the future of journalism’ I noticed how indeed one witness’ adventure was another’s disaster. I appreciated Arianna Huffington’s reframing: “The discussion needs to move from “How do we save newspapers?” to “How do we strengthen journalism -- via whatever platform it is delivered?”
Now for progressive communicators, our question could be reframed as: how do we strengthen the voices of those seeking justice, via whatever platform their truth is delivered?” We need to work more as a community of practice to come to some answers, and I hope that PCN can provide a space for this important discussion. Here are a few suggestions from my experience:
- Preparation and a transformative approach to how we train can help. Training our spokespeople is never just a matter of technique and sound bytes. There are barriers to overcome so that folks feel strong and empowered to serve as messengers, to get beyond the people they already know and reach out to other key groups as well as communities and decision-makers who need to hear from them. We need to develop fierce messengers for social justice. To do this, we have to be willing to confront and overcome internal challenges that can be decades old. The difference between a good spokesperson and a great spokesperson is genuine trust that what they say matters, and that they are worthy to be considered as an expert.
- How we pitch the story can strengthen these voices, and help overcome some of the external barriers and 'isms' that still permeate the minds of some journalists and some audiences. I think of this as a friendly "Reporter Re-education Campaign" as we strive to 'redefine the expert'. Once trained, we must pitch our spokespeople in ways that challenge and encourage journalists and media makers to see these voices -- especially those of people most directly impacted by issues and yet most disproportionately left OUT of the dialogue -- as the experts they indeed are. And to incorporate them into stories in a way that acknowledges their legitimacy, rather than demeaning or tokenizing them. Joining forces with journalists, bloggers and other on and offline media makers in this endeavor allows us to have our spokesperson's back.
So despite our sentimentality for the old, we must evolve with the times, experiment, multitask, even as we hold to the PR “staples” of traditional media for as long as audiences are there.
Invariably on the trips with Mom there were a lot of U-turns involved, but we saw lots of new sights, learned new things, had a great time and eventually found our way. I’m confident that we indeed will “find our way” in this evolving communications and media landscape.
Borrowing my Mom’s tenacious hope, I imagine we’ll arrive from this rocky road trip with truth, accuracy, journalistic integrity, justice and a more informed and empowered citizenry intact.
Article by Celia Alario