We, the media.
This weekend I welcomed the opportunity to debrief, discuss, and deconstruct the ways that media outlets have covered our communities. My fellow workshoppers came from organizations ranging from a local Chicago neighborhood newspaper to public radio in Minnesota to a journalism school in Nebraska to a newsletter startup in Seattle. And we all know: it’s time for change. There have been countless articles attempting to pull apart the dry results of the election and the way we, the media, failed. We failed to talk to everyone that mattered—which is everyone. We wrote off groups that we felt had already been represented. In trying to listen to some groups better than we had in the past, we forgot about others. In the media industry today, this is a particularly remarkable challenge when you’re already squeezing pennies and writing for clicks. But this is not an acceptable excuse. No excuse is acceptable. Journalists tend to like to talk. When you’re interviewing someone, you’re trying to get to know them and make them feel comfortable chatting with you. And we like to be heard. We use our platforms to share the words that we write and, sometimes, the opinions that we hold. We value our authority in our audiences. We haven’t been listening. That’s why the timing of the Poynter Institute’s “Building an Engaged Newsroom” conference worked out so perfectly. I and 29 other journalists spent a day and a half plunging into discussions about community engagement, audience construction, and the role of the news media in our lives. We’re learning to associate ourselves with the audience and our community now, rather than outside of them. We, the media, are guilty. But we’re also energized for this change. We’re ready to get to work. Note: As the only student participating in the institute, I was the only person unattached to a formal news organization. Stay tuned for some news on that coming in the coming weeks.
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Election Day means different things for different people. All of us Americans have been barraged by campaign ads and social media posts and more, but not all of us journalists will choose to vote. After reading a column about how the writer does not vote for the sake of journalistic integrity, I was curious about what my peers in the journalism world thought about voting as a reporter. Here's what the columnist, James Ragland of the Dallas Morning News, had to say: I'm neutral — an old-school holdout who still cherishes the romantic ideal of journalists as objective purveyors of truth. That objectivity is just as important to me today as it was when I first signed up for this gig nearly 32 years ago. ... A number of journalists on my social media channels have been sharing pictures of their own civic participation. I've also heard about national reporters who opt out of voting to avoid conflicts of interest; Anderson Cooper and Jake Tapper include themselves in this group as well as Ragland.
But I haven't heard about this from my Millennial peers. Arguably, no age group is more highly courted to #GOTV (that's get out the vote, for the un-hashtagged) than us collegiate voters. What do they have to say for themselves? Several journalists and a handful of readers responded to my informal Facebook survey. Here's a smattering of their answers:
As for me, I haven't missed voting in an election since I turned 18 and registered to vote. I respect the decisions of journalists who omit submitting their own ballot, but downballot races are incredibly important. As a student journalist, there's this awkward space of not wanting to show objectivity or political bias but there is a separation between the work I'm doing right now and potential work I could in national political reporting. And at least I'm not donating to candidates and contributing to the hyperbole of the biased mainstream media. Plus, I would feel like a hypocrite harping on people to vote without having marked up my own ballot. So if you have a "I Voted" sticker or bracelet from this campaign cycle or not, godspeed and good luck to everyone on the campaign trail or in the newsroom in this final stretch.
After an election cycle largely defined by Twitter moments, it's hard to imagine where campaigns on social media could go from here.
In a paper from a 2013 fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, Twitter's major role in this year's race was only hypothetical. Former CNN reporter and now head of news for Snapchat Peter Hamby delved into the way that intra-campaign conversations on Twitter shaped the communications of the 2012 presidential race. He believed that the value of being a "boy on the bus," or a traditional presidential campaign reporter following the candidate's daily happenings by traveling with the campaign, was steadily decreasing in favor of the easy-to-follow buzz generated by Twitter. In fact, Hamby argued that "Twitter is the central news source for the Washington-based political news establishment." But what particularly stood out to me was this tidbit toward the end: But according to {NBC News Political Director] Chuck Todd, it's all but certain that some candidates in 2016 will find a way to harness the social media beast and run with it.
Welp.
Let's take a quick peek at a "hypothetical" candidate, shall we?
Which makes you wonder - what comes next? (After draining the swamp, apparently.)
Will Twitter, despite its recent troubles, still be the leader for live postings and campaign news in 2020? Or will the next big thing be a newcomer like Hamby's Snapchat, virtual reality along the campaign through Facebook, or a nascent technology that hasn't even emerged yet? Maybe it will be Tinder for candidates, but with Snapchat's stickers and filters. Any candidate running for a top office from now on has to have a mastery of some form of social media, and it'll have to be organic. Watching Hillary Clinton, her campaign, and her core followers of female Baby Boomers try to figure out how to Tweet and Snap has been painfully awkward. You can't ask people to make memes for you - that's like Jeb Bush asking people to clap, and no one wants to go down that road again. In the homestretch of the 2016 election, the number of ways you can get news is growing almost as quickly as Donald Trump’s tweets. But the newest kids on the block are chatbots, software that can help users order from Taco Bell, set up an appointment on your calendar, or get daily updates about the presidential election polls broken down by state. Many are housed within Facebook’s standalone Messenger app and website already. This helps news organizations and brands alike reach readers and consumers like you in places where you already spend your time. Just in time for Election Day, news organizations are using these chatbots to share not just articles and videos with their audience – content produced by traditional media – but also snippets of information itself. Branching out but staying in In April, the New York Times Magazine’s technology reporter examined Facebook’s foray into chatbots and how that aligns with its mission. “These bots will simply help Facebook and others rope users in as long as possible, like fishermen trawling the open seas with gaping nets,” Jenna Wortham wrote. “Everything from Facebook Live, its new real-time streaming product, to Internet.org, the nonprofit it oversees that seeks to provide Internet access to the developing world, has been accused of harboring the same goal: keeping users on Facebook’s turf.” Now, the New York Times’s politics section has launched a chatbot of its own, considered an elections news service. Every morning the bot contacts the user through Facebook’s Messenger app or website with information about the forecast of the 2016 presidential election outcome. It’s delivered in a precise-looking graph of a plotted line for each candidate showing the changes in the data by month. It doesn’t provide information to substantiate that graph right away, however. But the bot gives you three options to click on from there: “What's new?”, “About our forecast”, and “Thanks.” Selecting “About our forecast” will have the chatbot send a few sentences of context and a link, bringing users back to the Times’s website. This particular bot is patient and limited with what the user can get from it at a time. Each evening, bot subscribers receive a message from the Times’s political correspondent with information about the important issue of the day for the campaigns. It’s evident that the bot designers prioritize the type of news shared rather than a high frequency of information. A future with chatbots The New York Times is not the only news organization experimenting with bots. Newer and nimbler outlets such as Buzzfeed, the Huffington Post, and Vice have already been developing their own bots, and the Washington Post also has a bot in the works. “It won’t maintain your calendar or help you with tracking packages or things like that. It’s got to do what people would expect the Washington Post to do for them,” said the Post’s director of product Joey Marburger. As chatbots become the latest part of the news arsenal, national and local news organizations alike are trying to find out how to use them to their advantage. The Columbia Journalism Review even published a guide to chatbots to help publishers embrace the change and the new possibilities that come with it. “In developing editorial strategies for some of these wide-ranging messaging platforms, news organizations are not just helping to future-proof themselves,” the guide states. “They are also venturing into online spaces that could enable them to reach hundreds of millions of (often young) people with whom they have never engaged before.” And that's definitely something to chat about.
Sure, you can go to a debate watch party. But what better watch party than the ones happening on your social media channels, with gifs and filters galore?
Here's a breakdown of how Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat allowed users to cover the last debate of the 2016 presidential election.
To see play-by-play reactions of professional journalists and commentators, it was easy to watch essentially a livestream of remarks on my Twitter feed. Twitter had partnered with Buzzfeed to provide a broadcast of the debate itself, and for past debates and even the convention I had watched the video there. But I was more interested in seeing individuals' reactions rather than a full video of the debate last night.
However, it was difficult to find Tweets that were a) from people that I didn't already follow and b) that were actually substantial. My Twitter homepage had buzzy remarks and instant quote replays from the journalists I follow, and the #debatenight hashtag took me to either a feed of second connections on Twitter (Tweets from people who are followed by people I follow) or a general "Top Tweets" feed of literally anyone. It wasn't the most satisfying experience - though I did get to see this gem from Merriam-Webster.
Some of my Facebook friends were posting instant reactions to what was said, but because of Facebook's algorithm, that made it clunky to follow along on an instantaneous basis. The app had an alert for the debate but it was still set as an announcement more than a half hour after the event had started.
There were gobs of livestreams from news organizations throughout my News Feed. Some were more creative than others: CNN International had a livestream of a group in Japan watching the debate for a different perspective, and Stephen Colbert's Late Show arranged for a quartet to accompany the debate on their own Facebook Live video. Both of those I found thanks to my own Facebook friends sharing them. But I also wanted to see what people were saying and thinking beyond my own bubble. Because I was using the app on my phone, I couldn't see the Trending News bar that shows up on your Facebook when using a laptop. This morning, the Trending News algorithm told me that "US Presidential Debate" was buzzing with 25,000 people - though it wasn't the trendiest news topic. If you clicked on it, you would see a fact-checking article from AOL (who knew AOL was trending anymore?) followed by livestreams from the night before and "Top Posts" from the Washington Post, CNN International, and Donald Trump's channel himself. It seemed as though Facebook wanted the news organizations to provide the live content rather than aggregating it itself, like Twitter was trying to do. This kept many of us in our bubbles - unless you sought out livestreams to watch and commented to interact with different people, like this user below. Snapchat
Snapchat was quiet last night, but the real treasure trove came after the debate.
Some of the people and organizations I follow on Snapchat were posting on their stories about the debate. Most of the individuals just used the filters to enhance Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump's voices (when you hear the same stump lines again and again, it's more entertaining to hear them at a higher pitch). But then this morning I watched the curated Campus Watch Party and the US Presidential Debate Stories. This was as close as I'd get, it seemed, to finding different takes on the debate beyond the people I already follow. These stories allowed me to see people's reactions from Brigham Young University to Rutgers on the Campus Watch Party story. The main story took viewers behind the scenes at the debate with cameos from Snapchat's Head of News Peter Hamby, house DJ Steve Aoki, former NFL player Emmett Smith, reporters from CNN and the Hill (among others), and students at the University of Nevada Las Vegas who gained entry to the debate hall.
The main debate story also included footage from the event itself with comment cards on the screen fact-checking the candidates' claims by Politifact. For people who didn't have the interest or time to watch the debate or their social media feeds yesterday when it was actually happening, this provided a recap of the moments people talked about and a review of the facts discussed as well. Plus, though the Campus Watch Party story showed many Snapchatters aghast at Donald Trump's "bigly" language, it also included Hillary Clinton toilet paper.
It's easy to forget that there are real people on both sides of this election that aren't Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. Social media can bring us together but also drive us apart, and these Snapchat stories can help viewers connect with people on all sides of the spectrum. I just wish I didn't have to go hunting it for during the debate. |
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