“Diversity is essential to the success of the news industry, and journalists must include diverse voices in their coverage in order to reach a broader audience. We have stories to tell, but many in our audience have stopped listening because they can tell that we’re not talking about them.”
— Gwen Ifill
As part of research conducted for the Engaged Journalism Lab exploring how philanthropy can support diverse, inclusive newsrooms, I visited local newsrooms, interviewed experts, technical practitioners and community groups, sat with journalists and listened.
Many opportunities for philanthropy to fund stronger, more resilient and diverse journalism ecosystems involves backtracking and investing in critical infrastructure to support those ecosystems and to formalize heretofore informal mechanisms that serve diverse audiences and communities. To date, this project has unpacked opportunities for media funders to support data infrastructure, adaptive leaders, reimagined newsroom spaces and how national issues are reported in local community narratives.
As Ifill’s quote explains and significant data pointing to the consistent struggle to develop and grow audience share in local communities where populations are steadily increasing, it can be argued that diverse audiences have “stopped listening” to mainstream news. But that does not mean diverse communities have stopped communicating messages, stories and narratives that deserve attention. For many communities that public square now lives online.
There is safety in small numbers and low levels of trust in technology platforms mean many meaningful conversations are unfolding in silo’ed corners of the Internet. It is up to journalists to meet diverse communities where they are and to invest in engagement not as a means for audience growth, but as mechanisms for listening to the voices gathered there and producing quality journalism that serves the public.
For the purposes of this research, listening infrastructure is defined as a collection of explicit processes, systems and tools intended to support a journalist’s capacity to monitor meaningful public conversations in online communities in order to increase human dimensions and depth in reporting.
The intention is essentially the definition and can be reverse-engineered through three questions:
1. How do journalists find meaningful conversations in online communities beyond their own?
2. How do journalists show up/conduct themselves in online communities beyond their own?
3. What do journalists use to continuously listen and learn from online communities beyond their own?
All of this can be boiled down to one question: How do you pay attention?
For local newsrooms the mechanisms to pay for resources that can systemize, improve and boost journalists ability to pay attention are cost-intensive, both in staff time and budget resources. The listening infrastructure that does exist is far from structured, effective or formalized and essentially boils down to social media monitoring subscriptions. As a result, individual reporters have their own individual systems and their own methods for discerning what gets their limited time, attention and energy. Often this boils down to attention being determined by push notifications, Nuzzel and curated Tweetdeck columns. In my research, I occasionally came across groups of journalists who covered similar beats, such as gun violence, and shared pooled resources as a means to both boost one another’s listening infrastructure and better cover a wide, disparate community with increasingly growing online community silos.
This is a challenge that exists in industry spaces beyond newsrooms. A substantial part of this research has involved scanning similar fields and communities also undergoing deep transitions and shifts to surface what lessons, patterns and practices in those spaces can be applied in the newsroom context. In the social change movement space, there is also a critical listening infrastructure gap. Social change movement organizations also tend to serve communities that largely exist online and struggle with continual misalignment between which communities they exist to serve and which communities their campaigns ultimately pay attention to.
In the ocean conservation space, those silos are even more prevalent and with extreme scarcity in funding, the barriers for collaboration among competitive organizations are even higher. In 2011 Rachel Weidinger founded Upwell, an effort to build a backbone for listening and measurement for the ocean conservation space that had previously not existed. The intention was to build listening infrastructure to be shared across organizations in order to better inform online campaigns, information sharing and collaborative community building. Upwell billed itself as the ‘PR agency for the ocean’ and broke ground developing innovative big listening practice: sifting through high volumes of news and online conversations for movements and pairing that big data with analysis and distributed network building.
What was the outcome for all these buzzwords?
Conversation metrics rather than individual campaign level metrics. In a newsroom context, the outcome of an infrastructure like Upwell would look similar to this MIT Media Lab report analyzing the collective impact in online conversation and attention resulting from press coverage of stories like the shooting death of Trayvon Martin every single week. It also allowed for amplification and networking building on top of the analysis of online conversational metrics.
The existence of Upwell allowed online engagement within the ocean conservation space to shift from a micro to a macro level and for campaigners to strategically and authentically participate in online conversations already in progress. It created, through a set of tools and processes, capacity for paying attention at scale that was not previously possible.
In an interview with me for this research Weidinger, now a Future for Good Fellow at the Institute for the Future, explained Upwell’s approach that was grounded in both offline community engagement (meeting the ocean conservation digital managers where they are) and online community management (sourcing rich conversation metrics in unlikely places through listening to social conversations about the ocean).
Collectively the practices that powered Upwell was in service to answering the question:
Can we use the momentum of focused attention to raise an issue above the noise?
Creating a Values-Based Listening Infrastructure
Weidinger explains the first step to building listening infrastructure is to recognize there will be many dimensions to a single issue and to embed intentional values into systems design.
“I think because whatever story we’re telling about an issue, if that’s voting rates or ocean acidification, it has a lot of facets. It has a lot of variability across communities. It has usually narrative about issues and are very deeply tied into cultural perspectives. So you will see different cultural perspectives reflecting different understandings of social ramifications of what impacts them in their community.”
There is a critical role for media funders to use their position as a collaborative convener to leverage insights pulled from big listening practices and support collectives of newsrooms or groups of journalists in building listening infrastructure aligned with the intention to support shared resource collaboration across newsrooms covering serve diverse communities.
“It is possible to have very targeted niche conversation, but because it’s a very laborious research method and because they’re going to turn up so much value in that research method, you might as well have a bigger lens. So, I think coalitions of collaboratives that will get an issue for multiple perspectives are able to take full advantage of what comes out of it. I think working with funders before because they can take the confirmation, learn from it, change their funding pattern potentially, and offer share that with their grantee networks and the larger networks they’re a part of. That’s when I think this information is valuable. You can create a weather report and you can have a weather report for an entire country and keep it to yourself if you want to. But that feels like a spectacularly inefficient approach to me because if there are really high value assets and if you’re only using it to reshape your own incoming patterns, you’re not getting anywhere near the value you could get out of that investment.”
Weidinger explained the three building blocks to Upwell’s listening infrastructure:
1. The System, monitoring and analyzing online conversations
“Designing a system that supported the ability to pay attention to the large conversation in a deeper way more than anyone else working in the field. That depended on building trust over time, following conversations, trending keywords and Radian6 type of practices that we developed for understanding the conversation at a large scale over time and being able to look at the historic conversation and also people within over time.”
2. The Network/Community Management, leading data-driven attention campaigns
“For big listening to go deep, you have to build the network for the very beginning. It involved face-to-face meetings with influencers and leaders and senior management and all of the big blue and green organizations with scientists and government officials. We are only able to do that because Upwell was initially fiscally sponsored under the umbrella of Ocean Conservancy before spinning out independently which is one of the two large ocean conservation and organization that at that time was 40 years old and had a great reputation with lots of people so we were able to leverage their network in addition to building a network on our own.”
3. The Tide Report newsletter, sharing knowledge with the sector
“Our goal with the newsletter was to recount. We wanted to have the hottest ocean news of the day so that if nothing else it could standalone with a — ‘This is your professional news roundup for today’ utility. This gave us the eyeopener that we wanted and it made it easier to get people on our list and it meant that people would trust their colleagues and their peers, other organizations and conversations we were amplifying.”
The second piece of the newsletter was to get as close to one click sharing as possible. This probably feels like less revolutionary today, but it felt like a crazy project that we started doing in 2012… because people are super busy and we knew that most of the network of influencers and social media managers we were working with were going to give that email, if we were lucky, 30 seconds. If they saw something cool that they think would benefit their personal brand or their organization’s brand, that felt like were vital and important to them then they are going to share it. All of this was in service to building trust by regularly illustrating our commitment to listening back to our community.”
After Upwell: Open Sourcing Infrastructure
Upwell concluded operations in March 2015. All of the intellectual property, reports, content, learnings were open-sourced and licensed Creative Commons. The project was unable to secure sustainable funding and winded down its programming the same way it began it all: through listening, sharing and amplifying for the movement it was created to serve. Weidinger said she sought to “leave as much of the learning infrastructure methods of the project available to the movement as possible.”
The tools and systems Upwell used is commonplace in digital newsrooms but formalizing the infrastructure: the intentionality, values-based metrics and sharing methodologies has led to Upwell continuing to deliver value long after it has shuttered. Ultimately the lesson in Upwell is a lesson in impermanence, that while we design for the long game, things that go up must come down and yet there is still immense knowledge to be gained in studying the heart that went into the scaffolding.
Sabrina Hersi Issa is an award-winning human rights technologist and leads global research and analysis for philanthropy. She organizes Rights x Tech, a gathering for technologists and activists and runs Survivor Fund, a political fund dedicated to supporting the rights of survivors of sexual violence.