How do you serve a public that doesn’t trust you anymore?
Journalists across the country are having a crisis of conscience in the aftermath of an election few of us saw coming, amid the endemic of fake news on Facebook and the all-out war the president-elect has been waging against the mainstream media on Twitter.
The best answer I can come up with is we need to show our work.
Now, more than ever, mainstream journalists need to show we traffic in truth, doubling down on data and documents. So much of a reporter’s daily routine is interrogating facts, hunting down primary sources, summarizing our findings and publishing a digest for readers. It’s not enough. It never was.
For decades, we’ve had tools at our disposal to allow readers to dive deeper, to show them how we know what we know, but too often we fail to use them. Now, as we compete for attention with charlatans who repackage outrage, sowing skepticism in the mainstream press, we shouldn’t be lamenting that skepticism. We should be encouraging it.
I’m a criminal justice reporter, and most of my stories are built on a foundation of public records and court documents. Some I get as a matter of routine. Some I fight for in court. Nearly all of them, I publish online.
DocumentCloud, a project run by Investigative Reporters and Editors, is my best friend. I evangelize for it in my newsroom. I use it to upload and organize countless records and share them with my readers, embedding pages and excerpts in my stories. It’s a way of building trust with the audience. I am saying to them: Don’t just take my word for it. Here, look: facts!
There are countless other tools that make showing our work quick and easy. We should use them.
When I worked with a colleague on his story about a man killed by police whose death was attributed to a controversial medical diagnosis, we collaborated with a data reporter to turn hundreds of pages of paper records into first-of-its-kind state database of deaths in police custody.
When I chronicled the plight of two New Jersey men serving life sentences for a crime a wrongful conviction project claims they didn’t commit, I posted all the evidence along with my story, inviting readers to make up their own minds.
When another coworker looked into state bias crime data amid national reports of racial violence after the election, he found the data law enforcement was collecting was garbage. So he told that story, shining a light on the weakness of evidence and explaining why that, itself, was a big story.
To a lot of great reporters, this is old hat. Legacy media like The New York Times and The Washington Post and public interest nonprofits like ProPublica have been publishing primary documents and data along in sidebars and interactives alongside their big investigations for years. Many regional newsrooms have gotten religion on showing our work, too. Yet hardly anybody is making the sharing of primary sources a regular part of their daily journalism.
It seems almost silly to say this stuff in 2016, but as an avid news consumer I know a lot of newsrooms still aren’t even doing the basics: Link to references in your stories, publish primary documents online, invite interrogations into your data, and do everything in your power to demonstrate the shoe leather that went into 650 words of copy. As we enter 2017, we need to find new ways to bake such transparency into our routines.
The rise of the true crime podcast has shown just how interested audiences are in getting a window into the reporting process. Not every newspaper and local public radio station needs to go full Serial, but we should strive every day to not only provide the documents and data to readers, but to teach them how to interpret and interrogate them, how to obtain primary records themselves.
There will always be readers who believe anything put in front of them on a screen, and others who will distrust us no matter how high we stack the evidence. There isn’t One Simple Trick that will bring them all back to reality.
But we ended 2016 looking around at the Great Fake News Epidemic, wondering how the hell we got here. In 2017, let’s tell readers every day: Here’s what we learned, here’s how we confirmed it, and here’s how you can do the same.
S.P. Sullivan is a statehouse reporter for NJ.com and The Star-Ledger.
Swati Sharma Failing diversity is failing journalism
Ray Soto VR moves from experiments to immersion
David Weigel A test for online speech
Mathew Ingram The Faustian Facebook dance continues
Joanne Lipman The year of the drone, really
Tanya Cordrey The resurgence of reach
Sarah Marshall Focusing on the why of the click
M. Scott Havens Quality advertising to pair with quality content
Matt Waite The people running the media are the problem
Katie Zhu The year of minority media
Alice Antheaume A new test for French media
Jeremy Barr A terrible year for Tiers B through D
Olivia Ma The year collaboration beats competition
Dan Gillmor Fix the demand side of news too
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Earn trust by working for (and with) readers
Rachel Sklar Women are going to get loud
Bill Adair The year of the fact-checking bot
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen News after advertising may look like news before advertising
Mike Ragsdale A smarter information diet
Sue Schardt Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love
Helen Havlak Chasing mobile search results
Kawandeep Virdee Moving deeper than the machine of clicks
Taylor Lorenz “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing
Matt Karolian AI improves publishing
Lee Glendinning A call for great editing
Andrea Silenzi Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis
Margarita Noriega From pinning tweets to tweeting pins
P. Kim Bui The year journalism teaches again
Mario García Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward
Samantha Barry Messaging apps go mainstream
Sydette Harry Facing journalism’s history
Andrew Haeg The year of listening
Juan Luis Sánchez Your predictions are our present
Nathalie Malinarich Making it easy
Jon Slade Trusted news, at a premium
Tim Herrera The safe space of service journalism
Priya Ganapati Mobile websites are ready for reinvention
David Chavern Fake news gets solved
Umbreen Bhatti A sense of journalists’ humanity
Andrew Losowsky Building our own communities
Laura Walker Authentic voices, not fake news
Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel A rebirth of populist journalism
Anita Zielina The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom
Ashley C. Woods Local journalism will fight a new fight
Tim Griggs The year we stop taking sides
Robert Hernandez History will exclude you, again
Molly de Aguiar Philanthropists galvanize around news
Megan H. Chan Cultural reporting goes mainstream
Cory Haik Navigating power in Trump’s America
Michael Oreskes Reversing the erosion of democracy
Mandy Velez The audience is the source and the story
Claire Wardle Verification takes center stage
Carla Zanoni Prioritizing emotional health
Steve Henn The next revolution is voice
Elizabeth Jensen Trust depends on the details
Bill Keller A healthy skepticism about data
Zizi Papacharissi Distracted journalism looks in the mirror
Mira Lowe News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”
Rebekah Monson Journalism is community-as-a-service
Kathleen Kingsbury Print as a premium offering
Dhiya Kuriakose The year of digital detoxing
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon Truthiness in private spaces
S.P. Sullivan Baking transparency into our routines
Amy Webb Journalism as a service
Michael Kuntz Trust is the new click
Alexis Lloyd Public trust for private realities
Millie Tran International expansion without colonial overtones
Liz Danzico The triumph of the small
Rachel Schallom Stop flying over the flyover states
Erin Millar The bottom falls out of Canadian media
Alberto Cairo Communicating uncertainty to our readers
Amy O'Leary Not just covering communities, reaching them
Tressie McMillan Cottom A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis
Almar Latour Thanks, #fakenews
Scott Dodd Nonprofits team up for impact
Tracie Powell Building reader relationships
Sam Ford The year we talk about our awful metrics
Ole Reißmann Un-faking the news
Aja Bogdanoff Comments start pulling their weight
Gabriel Snyder The aberration of 20th-century journalism
Dan Colarusso Let’s make live video we can love
Andy Rossback The year of the user
Andrew Ramsammy Rise of the rebel journalist
Pablo Boczkowski Fake news and the future of journalism
Guy Raz Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever
Vivian Schiller Tested like never before
Ariane Bernard Better data about your users
Rubina Madan Fillion Snapchat grows up
Keren Goldshlager Defining a focus, and then saying no
Francesco Marconi The year of augmented writing
Lam Thuy Vo The primary source in the age of mechanical multiplication
Nushin Rashidian A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions
Ken Schwencke Disaggregation and collection
Julia Beizer Building a coherent core identity
Amie Ferris-Rotman Вслед за Россией
Asma Khalid The year of the newsy podcast
David Skok What lies beyond paywalls
Doris Truong Connecting with diverse perspectives
Reyhan Harmanci Bear witness — but then what?
Maria Bustillos “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook”
Emi Kolawole From empathy to community
An Xiao Mina 2017 is for the attention innovators
Renée Kaplan Pure reach has reached its limit
Liz McMillen The year of deep insights
Christopher Meighan Unlocking a deeper mobile experience
Sara M. Watson There is no neutral interface
Jonathan Hunt Measurement companies get with the times
Hillary Frey Forests need to burn to regrow
Dannagal G. Young The return of the gatekeepers
Geetika Rudra Journalism is community
Moreno Cruz Osório The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism
Adam Thomas The coming collaboration across Europe
Mary Meehan Feeling blue in a red state
Jim Friedlich A banner year for venture philanthropy
Richard Tofel The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us
Mary Walter-Brown Getting comfortable asking for money
Carrie Brown-Smith We won’t do enough
Emily Goligoski Incorporating audience feedback at scale
Javaun Moradi What can we own?
Melody Kramer Radically rethinking design
Libby Bawcombe Kids board the podcast train
Ryan McCarthy Platforms grow up or grow more toxic
Nicholas Quah Podcasting’s coming class war
Burt Herman Local news gets interesting
Corey Ford The year of the rebelpreneur
Peter Sterne A dangerous anti-press mix
Jonathan Stray A boom in responsible conservative media
Errin Haines Chaos or community?
Annemarie Dooling UGC as a path out of the bubble
Erin Pettigrew A year of reflection in tech
Sarah Wolozin Virtual reality on the open web
Ståle Grut The battle for high-quality VR