COLUMBIA
JOURNALISM
by Savannah Jacobson Illustrations by Julie Murphy
REVIEW
SPRING
O
2021:
S avannah
J acobson 3 3
ver the past decade, amid the decline of the physical newspaper and the rise of online clickbait, journalists have often been driven by the same question: How do we get people to see our coverage? Audience engagement has grown into a vital, if still underappreciated, facet of many newsrooms. It’s also where some of the industry’s most creative work takes place. Back in 2014, when WNYC wanted to report on sleep habits, it introduced an app that posed twenty questions about the quantity and quality of listeners’ sleep; more than twenty-six hundred people responded. When, in 2017, ProPublica opened a newsroom to cover the state of Illinois, staffers teamed up with a community theater to hold workshops and connect with residents from different regions. In 2019, Radio Ambulante, a Latin America– focused podcast, established Clubes de Escucha (Listening Clubs) to gather in-person audiences to hear and discuss the show. In 2020, a Pew Research Center survey found that 53 percent of American adults “often” or “sometimes” receive news via social media, so it’s no wonder that journalists have
increasingly headed to online platforms—seeking to meet audiences where they are, and to head off conspiracy-fueled rants. These efforts are not just about growing or serving an audience. They also make journalism better. A few years ago, a CJR report found that, “while many journalists’ decisions are made with readers in mind,” those journalists tend to picture the consumers of their work as “unfocused, imagined abstractions, built on long-held assumptions, newsroom folklore, and imperfect inference.” At some outlets, the old presumptions may still hold. But there are a great number of journalists today whose audience engagement is dynamic, responsive, and effective at delivering information where it ought to go.
DIRECT MESSAGING SERVICES
In the evening, Nigel Mugamu, a journalist in Zimbabwe, uses WhatsApp to send out an “e-paper” of the day’s news. Through his news organization, 263Chat (a reference to the country’s calling code), Mugamu aims to foster progressive civic dialogue and, as he told Jamlab, a journalism project focused
