Trust me, I’m a journalist!
How constructive and solution-oriented journalism can help solve the growing problem of news avoidance
This article was first published in German as part of a series of essays issued by Stephan Weichert on Meedia.de
As on many evenings, my family had gathered in front of the television to watch the evening news. It’s one of the few daily rituals my teenagers and I cultivate together — or let’s say one of us cultivates; the others are forced to join. Or let’s say, one of us cultivates, the others have to join in. All was fine until my twelve-year-old daughter cried out, “Do they actually think this is something people want to see? Constant wars, catastrophes and bad news. I really don’t feel like letting them drag me down like that.” “Teenage daughter storms out of the room accompained by excessive eyeroll from teenage son. Somehow, this teenagers’ mom understands.”
The Generation Greta is alarmed
Fewer and fewer young people are being forced by their parents to watch linear news on television today. It doesn’t make sense in the eyes of the younger audiences anyway, as they can find information on the Internet whenever they want it. Nevertheless, I am sticking to the ritual. It’s partly out of nostalgia and partly because interesting conversations often take place in front of glow of the TV campfire. It becomes clear to me again and again that this “Generation Greta is not only interested in what’s going on in the world; they are downright alarmed (“Mom, who knows if we’ll still be able to live on this planet in 50 years’ time?!”). And they are looking for solutions — which they find all too rarely in the established media. Instead, they are confronted with a never-ending flood of bad news. That leaves some of them helpless, others upset. Many turn away and look elsewhere for information.
News mainly from YouTube
In the United States, a recent joint study by Common Sense and Survey Monkey revealed that more than half of American teenagers receive their news mainly through social media, especially YouTube. Just under a third of those who consume news daily say they do so through traditional channels such as television (13%) or newspapers (15%). Meanwhile, influencers are clearly on the rise: according to the study, one in three American teenagers (31%) receives their news from them. Another third rely on informed people in their own environment, such as family members, friends and teachers, to tell them what’s going on in the world.
The results of the study deserve our attention because they indicate that we journalists don’t do our job well enough, namely distilling relevant topics from the plethora of news and presenting them to our users in a way that meets their needs. In this unsatisfying situation, young people have begun to use Facebook’s “Family & Friends” algorithm in real life: They assign a filter function to trusted people — including influencers — and hope that really important messages will reach them somehow in this way. As a result, young audiences are turning away from traditional media. This means fewer paying customers for all those who have to monetize their journalism and a diminishing relevance and reach for media with a public service remit.
Why people avoid the news
However, older audiences are also turning away from established media. The current Reuters Digital News Report contains strong indications of a growing news avoidance on the part of adult media users worldwide. In the study, 32 percent of respondents say they “often or sometimes avoid the news”. In the Brexit-shaken UK the number of news avoiders has even risen by 11 to 35 percent within just two years. The authors of the study explain this with a growing social polarization in the country, which is allegedly also reflected in the reporting on Brexit. The situation in Germany is less gloomy, but in my country, too, about a quarter of the population say they often or sometimes avoid news consumption. What drives my fellow countrymen (and women) and other to eschew the news? According to the Reuters study, convictions such as “news have negative effects on my mood”, “I don’t feel there is anything I can do about it” and “I can’t rely on the news to be true” are among the main reasons.
1. Trust
Much has already been written about the subject of trust. No digital business model works without trust. No brand can survive without trust. And without the trust of our users, our entire industry is at risk. Deutsche Welle (DW) is still well off and enjoys a high level of trust among our users worldwide. As a public broadcaster from Germany, we often operate in extremely polarized and sometimes censored media markets. In a study two years ago, 96 percent of respondents from different regions of the world stated that they considered DW to be trustworthy.
Trust is gained through openness, transparency and constructive communication. By contrast, people who are always negative and never come up with a good idea tend not to enjoy our trust. In their presence we have the feeling that something can’t be right, after all, the reality of our lives is shaped by positive and negative events. It is unlikely that the chronic nagger has an objective view of what is really going on.
2. Negativity bias
The constant stream of bad news also makes us physically and psychologically uncomfortable. We react faster and more strongly to negative than to positive events due to evolution. Neuroscientists call this the “negativity bias” of our brains.
It helped our ancestors to identify environmental hazards and enemies in good time and to react to them as quickly as possible. While this mechanism once helped our species survive, an excess of negative events nowadays leads to what I witnessed live with my daughter in our living room: stress, helplessness — and then either disengagement or anger. When this is routinely repeated in many living rooms, it jeopardizes more than just the family peace. Then it’s about the cohesiveness of an entire society.
Our democratic system depends on people taking an interest in the common good and can only cope with a certain number of angry citizens before the danger of social division becomes real. Various recent studies have shown that this is exactly what is currently happening in Germany and other countries. The gap between the so-called informed public and those who no longer trust the media and sometimes even attack them furiously is wider than ever.
Constructive journalism pays off
Despite the tense atmosphere out there, many journalists continue to claim that they provide people with relevant information. The fact that more and more users see things differently and even deliberately turn their backs on traditional media puzzles them. Colleagues often find themselves ridiculed when they argue that the industry needs to critically examine its supposedly objective journalistic relevance criteria to see whether they still respond to the audience’s needs. All over Germany, newsrooms are willing to experiment with a myriad of digital tools and platforms to ensure the continued existence of their own publishing houses. But too few journalists actually question critically whether their offerings still fit in with people’s lives and are relevant to them. My children, for example, are very interested in how their peers in other countries live— especially when they successfully defend themselves against discrimination, environmental pollution or other problems they know from their own country.
Why do so many jounalists find it so difficult to provide people with information that adds value to their lives, to offer solutions to relevant problems, examples of successful initiatives or opportunities for constructive discussions? Why is an approach such as constructive (or solution-oriented) journalism sometimes still ridiculed as “positive news”? Why is the principle “If it bleeds, it leads” still upheld in journalism training, even though this is obviously one of the reasons why people are increasingly avoiding the news?
Of course, wars, crises and catastrophes have always guaranteed record revenues for the newspaper business. A glance at TV ratings and Google News during breaking news situations underscores just how much bad news reaches an overwhelming number of people. But we also know from an analysis of the Guardian, which has been experimenting with constructive journalism for years, that articles focusing constructively on relevant problems are read more intensively, and the probability that readers will share such content is above average. Constructive journalism pays off — and that’s all the more important in an industry where revenues are being generated less and less from newsstand sales and more and more from digital subscription and membership models.
At DW, we have found that discussions on social media are more constructive when we publish constructive videos, e.g. on Facebook. And when discussions are more constructive and less hateful, more women join the discussion. We are thus quite sure that constructive journalism enables the inclusion of a particularly large number of perspectives and thus makes debates more diverse.
Let’s win the race for credibility
It is time for the vast majority of newsrooms to realize that we can never win the race for completeness or for speed. But what we can still win is the race for credibility. To do this, we must provide people with the best possible reconstruction of reality. We can do this by “seeing the world with both eyes”, as the Danish pioneer of constructive journalism, Ulrik Haagerup, writes.
Instead of being chronic naggers, our journalism must reflect the whole range of potential stories. And that includes problems as well as solutions.
We should all think about how we can avoid deepening the gap between the realities of our users and our content.
At DW, one of the “Daily Goals” of our English-language TV news is to broadcast a piece of news with a constructive approach every day. This does not always work, for instance because Breaking News situations are not suitable for constructive journalism. But the day and the week after are very suitable: For example, our reporter from Paris told us the inspiring story of a spontaneous joint prayer of Christian, Jewish and Muslim French when the ruins of Notre Dame were still smouldering after the devastating fire
People are looking for solutions
We know that more than two thirds of our TV viewers hope that our program will provide solutions to problems they have at home. Therefore, we will expand our reporting on relevant topics and society’s most-pressing challenges while combining this with more frequent references to solutions or innovative ideas worth imitating. The Guardian has something similar in mind. Catherine Viner, editor-in-chief, said in a speech about the future of her medium: “..we will develop ideas that help improve the world, not just critique it; (…) People long to feel hopeful again — and young people, especially, yearn to feel the hope that previous generations once had.”
I can only confirm that. As a mother and as a journalist.
