Journalists seeking vaccine for ‘pandemic of distrust’
Northeastern University’s journalism department hosted a wonderful summit this weekend about the future of video journalism, brand building across multiple platforms and AI applications.
The event was the culmination of the latest round of the Reinventing Local Television News project, which placed a fantastic experimental video producer on my team throughout 2024. Her work here in Boston, and the work of her peers in New York and Chicago, formed the cornerstones of the conference.
“I’m really just looking for moments when people are just themselves,” said WCVB fellow Leanna Scachetti. “People are just looking for authenticity. Younger people, in particular, can smell fakeness from a mile away.”
On Day 1, the project laid out 10 principles for future local news innovation. Their list underscores the imperative of working on digital video platforms and suggest the earnestness with which those stories should be told.
- Video is essential to modern journalism
- Prioritize video on digital platforms
- Design video for online behavior
- Right format, right platform
- Build a next-gen storytelling team
- Authenticity over perfection
- Spotlight underreported stories
- Leverage animation to inform
- Experiment, analyze and iterate to inspire
- Innovate like the future depends on it
“What are the questions that are popping into my head?” said WLS fellow Angela Chen. “What is it that I’m not finding that I want to find?”
“It’s less about story selection and more about story forms,” Media research guru Seth Geiger said.
Geiger put data behind the project’s conclusions, identifying that local news innovation has not kept pace with changes in the media ecosystem and consumer habits. Across all age groups in his surveys, social media was the No. 1 source of news, with users aged 18-24 consuming social platforms 3.2 times per day.
He also presented data identifying a “pandemic of distrust” between audiences and the media they consume. Geiger shared four macro trends:
- News avoidance has now caught up with news fatigue
- Social media starts the news cycle (Platform often gets credit instead of creator)
- The frequency problem is starting to become a reach problem
- Trust still matters but convenience is valued more than brand affinity
Despite significant losses, local news still leads the current media landscape for trust and Geiger believes that’s where the future of the industry must begin.
“The path back to trust is going to happen at the local level,” Geiger said.
He also said, “Local news is going to be the single most important platform to get us out.”
During my presentation, about developing digital brands, I spoke about defining those foundational beliefs and duties to our audience. Within those guardrails, we have opportunities to modernize our voice.
The organizers and presenters of this conference believe local news will need to better keep pace with user trends, and platform preferences, to make this salvation possible. While much of the conference conversation focused on TikTok success stories, Geiger said the most important distribution opportunity right now is actually YouTube.
On Day 2, when the Washington Post Universe team spoke about their expansion from TikTok to include YouTube and Instagram, Geiger’s point was underscored. Joseph Ferguson, the newcomer from that team, presented an generalized outline for social video structure that he often finds successful:
- Hook: Stop the user’s scroll, often with a question
- Answer the question: Provide pay off and create interest in why
- Context: Give the background
- Relevance: Bring it home
- Climax: A joke or revelation that only makes sense based on previous elements
- Outro: What’s coming next?
Artificial intelligence, a secondary theme of the conference, was also shown to help spur inspiration in this process. Syracuse University Professor Keren Henderson presented her research which led to the creation of a tool, called ReelFramer, which generates suggested social video scripts following one of three structural themes:
- Expository dialogue: Where one character as an expert explains to another character, the naive newcomer, about a news event.
- Reenactment: Two or more stakeholders in a news event act out in real-time or compressed sequence.
- Comedic analogy: Where characters bring the event into a related comparison.
All of this work takes time for writing, production and editing that go beyond our usual reporting investments. Presenters from the Washington Post, PBS Digital Studios and Vox all shared production timelines lasting up to an average of three weeks — a very unusual timeline for the daily local newsroom.
Expository animations, another secondary theme of the conference and a previous subject of the research team, also require specialized personnel and additional investments of time.
That left some of us in the audience asking whether growth in these areas will require trimming something else, or whether our newsrooms can pioneer more moderate investments that can still pay outsized dividends.
National organizations are dominating the playing field right now, and doing most of the pioneering work, because their content applies to a larger scale.
So far, our experience with a single dedicated producer shows the impact on a local level can be excellent. Our next challenge is to push her work to test newer presentation formats while also teaching the tried and true methods used over the past year to others.
How can we all be, in the traditionalist’s eyes, “weird,” so that we may grow and recover without losing the foundation of our brands or journalistic duty?