At this week’s Round Table, Jack, Jedd, and Madeline spoke with Jennifer Brandel, Co-founder & CEO of Hearken, a company that helps organizations around the world develop and operationalize participatory processes. Jennifer was "an intensely curious kid," and that curiosity has been her guiding principle all her life and what brought her into journalism. Jennifer envisions a shift from a model of readers as consumers to readers as partners, and from a model of journalism as autocracy to journalism as democracy. She is deeply concerned about what makes “a good story.” Currently, the perception is that conflict —two sides opposing each other—is what sells, which is damaging to democracy unto itself. In today’s newsrooms, things are optimized for speed and efficiency and the reader is only involved after something is published. Jennifer’s Hearken aims to involve the public in news coverage at all four stages—pitching, assigning, reporting, and editing. Journalists should see themselves more as stewards for the public: what does the reader want and need to know? This leads to dramatically different stories because the public asks questions that are far more expansive, like what will this city look like 50 years from now? Or What would it be like if our statues were reflective of women and the full population? We talked a lot about the pros and cons of technology in journalism. Jennifer reminded us that tech is like fire: it can be applied in ways that are positive and productive or damaging and destructive. The question she and the Hearken team ask themselves is how can we avoid extractive engagement, in which media is selling your attention and data to third parties and instead use tech to create a reinforcing feedback loop. Jennifer underscored that the introduction of tech into journalism provided great potential to get feedback from readers but was instead designed sub-optimally around comments and opinions, not authentic input into production. As she put it, “When you invite people to ask what they don’t know rather than share their opinions, you open up a new model.” The irony is, it’s not as if the public’s ideas aren’t good and won’t help you meet metrics—quite the opposite! WHEN newsrooms listen to the public, consumption metrics are much higher but it is relatively rare. What gets in the way is capitalism: it is hard to finance investments in tech in a way that doesn’t create negative repercussions down the line. We are particularly excited by Jennifer’s work on The Citizens Agenda– a people-powered approach to journalism applied to elections that focuses on what do people voting need to know in order to be informed at the ballot box? The public actually has FAR more detailed and interesting questions than politicians tend to think and there is deep value in bringing the public into the process of elections, a cornerstone of democracy. Thank you for listening!
Jennifer recommends the books The View From Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity –and wonders whether objectivity is either possible OR desirable!
