Name: Jay Rosen: This is what a news organization built on reader trust looks like
Brand: niemanlab.org
SKU: niemanlab-org-5
Availability: OnlineOnly

critic

Jay Rosen: This is what a news organization built on reader trust looks like

preview

HOME&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;LATEST STORY&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;March 28, 2017, 9 a.m.The NYU professor explains why he’s working with De Correspondent on its U.S. launch — and why figuring out a trusted membership model is key to journalism’s future.At the kind of journalism conferences that I attend, , who had in the digital operations of The New York Times and The Guardian in recent years, has been asking a : What if news organizations optimized every part of the operation for trust? Not for speed, traffic, profits, headlines or prizes… but for trust. What would that even look like?My answer: It&nbsp;would look a lot like .Launched in 2013 in The Netherlands, De Correspondent is funded solely by its members: 56,000 of them, who pay about $63 a year because they believe in the kind of journalism that is done by its 21 full-time correspondents and 75 freelancers. The leaders of the site announced today that they will soon expand to the U.S.&nbsp;and set up shop in New York. (See Ken Doctor’s post on Nieman Lab for the details on that.)It was also that I am going to help them. With $515,000 from the Knight Foundation and the&nbsp;Democracy Fund, I am launching at NYU a that is designed to benefit American news organizations that have a membership strategy while improving the odds that The Correspondent will succeed in its move across The Atlantic. I have further agreed to become The Correspondent’s first “ambassador” in the U.S. market. That means I will help introduce its model to others who might be able to assist — including possible funders. (Are )As you might have sensed, I believe in what these young Dutch journalists are doing. I think they have a strong sense of how to build a sustainable newsroom. But what really impressed me is what I said before: the way they optimize for trust. In this piece I will:Why do I say that a news organization optimized for trust would look a lot like The Correspondent? There are four main reasons.Reason 1. No ads. No targeting. Have you ever heard this&nbsp;maxim? “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” Its lessons can be overdrawn, and some , but this phrase captures something about commercial media properties. You cannot trust them to be wholly on the side of their publics because they have another class of customers to worry about: the advertisers. Even if they are run with integrity and would never cave to an advertiser’s demands, a range of subtler distortions can creep in. Obvious example: clickbait. Less obvious: Pools of available ad&nbsp;money (food, real estate, cars) tend to spring up as editorial products (, , ).There’s nothing inherently corrupt&nbsp;about this. It’s a system that can subsidize a lot of good work. And every subsidy system has drawbacks, including membership. But if you’re doing public service journalism and trying to optimize for trust, it helps immensely to be free from&nbsp;the business of buying and selling people’s attention. The Correspondent got that right away. That is why it is ad-free and has no commercial sponsors.“The Correspondent does not have to think about target groups or tailor its content to please, for instance, well-heeled readers between the ages of 25 and 40,” the founders told me. “The site sees its readers as curiosity-driven individuals who cannot be reduced to demographics. This principle is also the basis for our data minimization privacy policy.” Its key tenets:Of course, terms like “where possible” leave a lot of room for interpretation. Because it still relies on third-party services like YouTube, Vimeo, and SoundCloud, The Correspondent cannot say to its members: “You will never be tracked.” But it can say: These&nbsp;are the services we use and why. This&nbsp;is what we are doing to minimize the problem. It&nbsp;can level with people, as it does and . (Google translations to English and .)Reason 2. Freedom&nbsp;from the 24-hour news cycle. The Correspondent calls&nbsp;itself an “antidote to the daily news grind.” When you’re not straining to find a unique angle into&nbsp;a story that the entire press pack is chewing&nbsp;on, it’s easier to avoid clickbait headlines, which undo&nbsp;trust. Not chasing today’s splashy story can hurt your traffic, but when you’re not selling traffic (because you don’t have advertisers), the pain&nbsp;is minimized.The other risk is to relevance: If you’re not covering the stories that everyone is hearing about ad nauseam, will&nbsp;you begin to sound inessential and out of touch? The Correspondent has an answer to that: “Not the weather, but the climate.” It’s a&nbsp;phrase the editors use to keep themselves on track. It means: Ignore&nbsp;the daily blips, focus&nbsp;on the underlying patterns. “Not the weather, but the climate” is just a slogan. You have to execute on it, and that is always hard. But it is the right slogan when you’re trying to optimize&nbsp;for trust. And if you can execute on it, you won’t seem out of touch at all. You will feel&nbsp;more essential. (To get a feel for The Correspondent’s brand of journalism, go and .)Reason 3. Writers at the center with room to run. In the era of print journalism, the term in use was “writer’s paper.” (The Village Voice in its golden age of the 1960s and ’70s was called a writer’s paper.) That means a newsroom where the editorial initiative — the ideas for what to cover — come from the people whose names are on the articles. They are given lots of room to run. The implied contrast is with an “editor’s paper” (Time magazine during its classic period) where the writers have less room to run.It has no print product, but The&nbsp;Correspondent is a writer’s paper. Its 21&nbsp;full-time correspondents&nbsp;are encouraged to define their own beats and pick subjects they are passionate about, driven to understand. (Here’s of what their writers cover.) The approach is similar to the “obsessions” model by Quartz. At The Correspondent, there&nbsp;is no requirement that journalists take the , but they are also not on&nbsp;anyone’s team.No party line. No forced objectivity. The writers can come to conclusions and show conviction, but they have to be evidence-based in the extreme. If the evidence obliges them to, they will alter their convictions and share that new perspective with readers. Correspondents never do he said/she said journalism; rather they do “I said then, I say now” journalism.In my view, this&nbsp;is the right way to optimize for trust in the writers.Reason 4: Journalist as discussion&nbsp;leader. In exchange for the freedom they are allowed in defining&nbsp;their beats and reporting on their passions, correspondents are required to invest in rich interactions with readers. They do not have a choice. It is . This step is crucial to The Correspondent’s trust model — and its economy. The editors “journalist as conversation&nbsp;leader.” It starts with a feature of the site. You can follow individual writers — the ones whose projects you care most about.Expectations are that writers will continuously share what they are working on with the people who follow them and read their stuff. They will pose questions and as they launch new projects: what they want to find out, the expertise they are going to need to do this right, any sort of&nbsp;help they want&nbsp;from readers. Sometimes readers are . Writers&nbsp;also manage the discussion threads — which are not called comments but contributions — in order to highlight the best additions and pull useful material into the next iteration of an ongoing story. All of&nbsp;the correspondents have weekly email newsletters that update their followers on what the writers are working on. (Here’s an from clean tech and mobility correspondent Thalia Verkade.)These requirements resemble the approach taken by The Washington Post’s during the 2016 campaign. As I :Fahrenthold explains what he’s doing as he does it. He lets the ultimate readers of his work see how painstakingly it is put together. He lets those who might have knowledge help him. People who follow along can see how much goes into one of his stories, which means they are more likely to trust it. (And to mistrust Trump’s attacks on it…See how that works?) He’s also human, humble, approachable, and very, very determined. He never goes beyond the facts, but he calls bullshit when he has the facts. So impressive are the results that people tell me all the time that Fahrenthold by himself got them to subscribe. He is not “solving,” but he’s certainly helping with the trust problem.Fahrenhold came to this style on his own, and was widely praised for it. Journalists at The Correspondent are required to operate this way. And it pays off. Here’s a callout to readers (and people the readers might know): “Dear Shell employees: Let’s talk.” And here’s what from it: ‘Shell knew’: oil giant’s 1991 film warned of climate change danger. Impressive. And , readers explain in their own words why they contribute knowledge to The Correspondent.In 1999, my friend , then working as Silicon Valley columnist for the San Jose Mercury news but early to blogging, came to an important : “My readers know more than I do.” It took 15 years, but a news company finally baked into its business model Gillmor’s profound insight into what journalism could be in the internet age. This is from an about The Correspondent’s rise, which quotes cofounder and current publisher :De Correspondent’s philosophy is that 100 physician readers know more than one healthcare reporter. So when that healthcare reporter is prepping a story, they announce to readers what they’re planning to write and ask those with first-hand knowledge of the issues — from doctors to patients — to volunteer their experiences. “By doing this we get better informed stories because we have more sources from a wider range of people,” Pfauth tells The Drum. “It’s not just opinion makers or spokespersons, we get people from the floor. And, of course, there are business advantages because we turn those readers into more loyal readers. When they participate that leads to a stronger bond between the journalist and the reader.”Right! And that is how you maximize trust — and produce quality journalism — through genuine reader engagement.Notice how all the pieces fit together: When you don’t have advertisers, there’s nothing you have to cover because it brings traffic or offers the right environment for ads. Release from the 24-hour news cycle — coupled with dropping the advertisers — lets you grant your writers more creative freedom. This in turns helps attract talent. Requiring the talent to interact with the readers and from them not only improves the journalism by broadening its base, it also binds the readers to the writers and gives them a stake in the final product because they joined in its formation. They are thus more likely to share it with others — and more likely to renew their membership.Here I have to explain something about how The Correspondent’s “pay” model works. If you go to the homepage and try to access its contents, you will be asked to join and pay the membership fee. But that is the one and only incarnation of any pay “wall.” On the web or via email, any link you come across to an article in The Correspondent is always free to access. Members can share links with their networks without limit, and those links will always work. No one ever gets a notice like: You have accessed 9 of the 10 free articles you are entitled to this month… Members don’t pay to be members because they’re getting exclusive access to something the rest of the public is denied. That’s not how it works. That’s how works. That’s how works. The Correspondent wants its work to spread freely. It also wants you to become a member. It refuses to grant any contradiction between the two.Again, I think this is the right way to maximize trust in a “readers pay the freight” model.As I have tried to make clear, I think The Correspondent has a good model. But so far, it has only proven itself in the Dutch market (17 million people). The American market (325 million) is different: far bigger and vastly more competitive. It would be foolish to assume that The Correspondent could simply transplant itself and thrive in the United States. Member-funded journalism has a long history here, most obviously in public radio but . And there are membership organizations in fields other than journalism that might have good insights.At the same time, The Correspondent knows things that local, nonprofit and specialized news sites in the U.S. can benefit from as they turn to readers to support them. Knowledge ought to flow in both directions. From American sites to The Correspondent, and from The Correspondent to American journalism as the Dutch site brings its model to the U.S. This is where the begins work. It is designed to answer three questions:Here’s how the project will try to answer these questions:Because I think they know what they’re doing. Because they have the right priorities. Because American journalism needs to open itself to influence from abroad. Because the production of public interest news cannot be successful without the reproduction of trust in the people who are authoring that news. Because Aron Pilhofer asked a really smart question: What if news organizations optimized every part of the operation for trust? Because Trump is manufacturing mistrust at a faster rate than journalists can adapt their methods for inspiring public confidence in what they do. Because we don’t have a lot of time, people. Because readers, viewers, and listeners, waking up to the urgency of the moment, are ready to support real journalism with real money, but only if the social contract changes. Because what good is an academic reputation if you aren’t prepared to spend it on something you really believe in?Photo of De Correspondent office via .&nbsp;What’s the best way to follow how the news is changing?Our daily email, with all the freshest future-of-journalism news.MLARosen, Jay. "Jay Rosen: This is what a news organization built on reader trust looks like." Nieman Journalism Lab. Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, 28 Mar. 2017. Web. 13 Sep. 2022.APARosen, J. (2017, Mar. 28). Jay Rosen: This is what a news organization built on reader trust looks like. Nieman Journalism Lab. Retrieved September 13, 2022, from https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/03/jay-rosen-this-is-what-a-news-organization-built-on-reader-trust-looks-like/ChicagoRosen, Jay. "Jay Rosen: This is what a news organization built on reader trust looks like." Nieman Journalism Lab. Last modified March 28, 2017. Accessed September 13, 2022. https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/03/jay-rosen-this-is-what-a-news-organization-built-on-reader-trust-looks-like/.Wikipedia{{cite web&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;| url = https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/03/jay-rosen-this-is-what-a-news-organization-built-on-reader-trust-looks-like/&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;| title = Jay Rosen: This is what a news organization built on reader trust looks like&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;| last = Rosen&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;| first = Jay&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;| work = [[Nieman Journalism Lab]]&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;| date = 28 March 2017&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;| accessdate = 13 September 2022&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;| ref = {{harvid|Rosen|2017}}}}Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.Help advance the Nieman Foundation’s mission “to promote and elevate the standards of journalism” .© 2022 by the President and Fellows of Harvard CollegeWalter Lippmann HouseOne Francis Ave.Cambridge, MA 02138617 495 2237The Nieman Journalism Lab is a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age.It’s a project of the .Follow usThe basicsProjectsDirectorStaff writers© President and Fellows of Harvard College, unless otherwise noted.

HOME&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;LATEST STORY&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;March 28, 2017, 9 a.m.The NYU professor explains why he’s working with De Correspondent on its U.S. launch — and why figuring out a trusted membership model is key to journalism’s future.At the kind of journalism conferences that I attend, , who had in the digital operations of The New York Times and The Guardian in recent years, has been asking a : What if news organizations optimized every part...

public

Jay Rosen

We are the Nieman Journalism Lab, part of @niemanfdn at Harvard. We're trying to figure out the future of news.

Jay Rosen: This is what a news organization built on reader trust looks like

No article scores yet.

CRITIC REVIEWS

PUBLIC REVIEWS