Too often, we think of journalism as "reporting news". And yet a huge concern in journalism is "how to make your news *story* connect with your reader". It is the classic question, almost a cliche - but in an age of increasing media distrust, its a question that still needs some thought.
It involves examining what news is, what a news story is, and who gets lost in that transformation.
First, what makes an "event" different than "news"?
News are events that matter, that are deemed to have some kind of relevance to our lives. So, news might be defined as an event plus some kind of social reaction or response to that event. Extramarital affairs are not news; presidential extramarital affairs are news in this country because this society deems that the private activities of public officials matter - for any myriad of reasons. How "big" a news story is is in part determined by how intense the event's impact will be on the social psyche.
But "news" happens on all levels of scale. A house on fire is an event. It is "news" to its occupants, the neighborhood - its society. If the fire is in a town 10 states from you, it probably won't be "news" to you, but that doesn't diminish its relevance to the society (the homeowners, the neighborhood) that it affects.
Traditional journalism filters this by taking an event plus its social response ("news"), then feeding it ("the news story") back to the individual in that society that responded, and hoping to engage a secondary response (the classic "connect with your reader"). By this time you are far removed from the actual event, it having been filtered by both the social response, then re-filtered and compressed by the gatherer/shaper (news media) that tries to win a secondary response.
It is a loop unaware of itself. News doesn't operate in a vacuum, it's an integral part of the society it happens in.
It's a challenge to overcome such distancing this loop self-creates: as readers, we choke on a condensed, filtered social nugget (the news story) that we are asked to respond to ( "the reader connection"), while subliminally knowing we are part of it. As journalists, we have to apply our standard journalistic techniques in a way that shortens this distance, but too often the filtering and transforming of news into a news story by the infrastructure of traditional journalism increases this distance, not lessens it.
While journalists desperately want to connect with us, they lose sight of the readers equally intense need to connect back into some part of this loop, be it the news story or the media that distributes it or maybe even the very social network itself that defined the event as news. People feel increasingly alienated, disconnected, and the media's (until now) unilateral dissemination of information may be playing a small, subconscious role in that modern malaise.
So, we've established that news is determined by a social response. But societies do not make up individuals; individuals make up societies.
What would occur if a society connects and reacts to events not as an amorphous mass requiring filtration and compression only to re-feed itself, but as a self - disclosing collective of individuals articulating its own responses?
The society itself would determine what is "news" by openly sharing their *individual responses* to events, in the public platform of participatory journalism. Such a transparency would give a more accurate and truthful record and reflection of what that society self-determines to be "news", as everyone's response is openly disclosed and shared.
This doesn't obfuscate the need for traditional journalism, but the traditional journalism apparatus should understand the nature of this social loop, and be aware of its role in it.
One of the web's greatest strengths is its ability to make social connections. Since news are events that matter (i.e.,are deemed to have some kind of social impact or response), using the socialization strengths of the web allows people to fully interact both with the events themselves (by telling the story),and with the way and manner that those events are disseminated by others (other citizen reporters, and/or a news organization).
News organizations that support such public reporting and community initiatives can help restore their lost media trust by bonding the readership to a news source that actually includes and responds to the society it reports to.
In my view, that’s how 21st century journalism will start to answer the classic question posed at the beginning: You connect to the reader by including them, involving them, responding to them, allowing a voice and a platform to articulate the news that happens to them as well as the news that happened to them that you tell them about.
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