From empathy to community

“Empathy may help discover unmet needs in the short term, but community will allow news organizations to scale solutions and build greater trust in the long term.”

Empathy. The term has been used quite a bit in recent years, but in 2016, it seemed to take on a particular weight.

emi-kolawoleThere were those who outlined its limits, and others who found there wasn’t enough of it. This year, Michigan State published what it claimed was a first-of-its-kind study ranking nations by empathy. (In case you’re wondering, the United States came in seventh.)

This marks yet another year news organizations spent investing in and growing their empathy muscle by way of incorporating the creative problem-solving process known as design thinking. The push to better know their audiences and be more inclusive of their views and experiences has been underway for quite some time now.

As I approach the end of the year, however, empathy hasn’t felt complete. It falls short as a term to describe the type of connection news organizations will be called on to make with readers, viewers, and listeners in 2017.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that empathy will be set aside. In fact, I’m predicting quite the opposite: I believe that news organizations’ understanding and use of empathy will grow and mature in the coming year. Rather than merely work towards empathy with journalism consumers to create better products in the short term, news organizations will better network those connections to form greater community among their audience members.

A move from empathy to community may seem regressive. After all, wasn’t community the news industry buzzword of the last decade or more? Did it ever even go away? It was the dream of comments section moderators everywhere: If only we could get people to stop screaming past one another and build greater community…

The scenario is different today, however. We’re seeing people on both the editorial and business side of news organizations be aware that thinking like a designer is not merely the realm of the design department, and that executing on this way of thinking can be powerful and unique to each team. Empathy is now a tool anyone and everyone in the newsroom can and should be able to use.

That said, establishing an empathic connection with a reader, viewer, listener, or contributor is much easier to say than to do, and I fear much more is being said about empathy than is being done.

It’s not enough to run out and ask some quick “whys” and “how’d that make you feels” to a few users and then run back to use what they tell you. A deeper, more persistent connection is and has always been necessary. It’s even more necessary now as calls become louder for greater news literacy and facts become frighteningly fungible. What good is empathy for news organizations if not in service to the lasting connections that form community?

I recently finished Courtney Martin’s latest book, The New Better Off, the message of which she sums up in a simple phrase: “Community is everything.” The book is a tour through the big questions around success, achievement, work, family, and, yes, community that I have often found myself asking and heard from peers.

I was in the middle of the book as the election results rolled in and the conversation around journalism and media turned reflective. There were calls for greater connection across lines of difference and claims thrown around that journalists had lost touch — even as I was witnessing how diligently many were working to connect. That was when I realized how and why empathy could evolve in the coming year.

I was further inspired by the Stanford d.school’s director of teaching and learning Carissa Carter, who outlined the institute’s approach to teaching design thinking. Beyond merely addressing design thinking as a process of five stages (including empathizing), she presented how the d.school endeavors to teach their students eight abilities, including learning from others and moving between concrete and abstract.

In 2017, I see news organizations making a similar evolution from formula to ability. I see them incorporating empathy into their day-to-day work across the newsroom in order to form a more lasting interconnectedness as well as a set of shared goals and expectations with and among their audiences. Empathy may help discover unmet needs in the short term, but community will allow news organizations to scale solutions and build greater trust in the long term.

For example, empathy with a few readers may help unearth a need for more shortform stories, or a new app dedicated to fashion coverage. Community is built on a number of those types of connections, each one going deeper than the last. It allows organizations to place new products into a stronger web of connection between the organization and the audience.

Where empathy implies a more finite engagement, community implies one that is ongoing. So, as newsrooms continue to grow in their learning and application of design thinking, I predict they will build on their empathic connections with their audience for the purposes of product and experience to form broader, stronger and more robust communities.

Here’s to 2017, the year of empathy in service to community and, ultimately, greater trust and understanding.

Emi Kolawole is founder and CEO of Dexign LLC.

Coleen O'Lear   Back to basics

Cory Haik   Navigating power in Trump’s America

Nicholas Quah   Podcasting’s coming class war

Sara M. Watson   There is no neutral interface

Priya Ganapati   Mobile websites are ready for reinvention

Libby Bawcombe   Kids board the podcast train

Lee Glendinning   A call for great editing

Helen Havlak   Chasing mobile search results

Amy O'Leary   Not just covering communities, reaching them

Reyhan Harmanci   Bear witness — but then what?

Sydette Harry   Facing journalism’s history

Ashley C. Woods   Local journalism will fight a new fight

Ryan McCarthy   Platforms grow up or grow more toxic

David Skok   What lies beyond paywalls

Rachel Sklar   Women are going to get loud

Andrew Haeg   The year of listening

Laura Walker   Authentic voices, not fake news

Rubina Madan Fillion   Snapchat grows up

Melody Kramer   Radically rethinking design

Jeremy Barr   A terrible year for Tiers B through D

Umbreen Bhatti   A sense of journalists’ humanity

Swati Sharma   Failing diversity is failing journalism

Margarita Noriega   From pinning tweets to tweeting pins

Mary Walter-Brown   Getting comfortable asking for money

Anita Zielina   The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom

Aja Bogdanoff   Comments start pulling their weight

Joanne Lipman   The year of the drone, really

Hillary Frey   Forests need to burn to regrow

Kathleen Kingsbury   Print as a premium offering

Matt Karolian   AI improves publishing

Rachel Schallom   Stop flying over the flyover states

Erin Millar   The bottom falls out of Canadian media

Francesco Marconi   The year of augmented writing

Mike Ragsdale   A smarter information diet

Carrie Brown-Smith   We won’t do enough

Mark Armstrong   Time to pay up

Rebekah Monson   Journalism is community-as-a-service

Ariane Bernard   Better data about your users

Michael Kuntz   Trust is the new click

Megan H. Chan   Cultural reporting goes mainstream

Richard Tofel   The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us

Dannagal G. Young   The return of the gatekeepers

Jon Slade   Trusted news, at a premium

Burt Herman   Local news gets interesting

Keren Goldshlager   Defining a focus, and then saying no

Tim Herrera   The safe space of service journalism

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen   News after advertising may look like news before advertising

Doris Truong   Connecting with diverse perspectives

Juan Luis Sánchez   Your predictions are our present

Guy Raz   Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever

Errin Haines   Chaos or community?

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Truthiness in private spaces

Tressie McMillan Cottom   A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis

Almar Latour   Thanks, #fakenews

Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel   A rebirth of populist journalism

Amy Webb   Journalism as a service

Erin Pettigrew   A year of reflection in tech

Liz Danzico   The triumph of the small

Peter Sterne   A dangerous anti-press mix

Alexis Lloyd   Public trust for private realities

Jim Friedlich   A banner year for venture philanthropy

Maria Bustillos   “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook”

Javaun Moradi   What can we own?

Katie Zhu   The year of minority media

Tim Griggs   The year we stop taking sides

Sam Ford   The year we talk about our awful metrics

Sarah Wolozin   Virtual reality on the open web

David Chavern   Fake news gets solved

Dan Colarusso   Let’s make live video we can love

Kawandeep Virdee   Moving deeper than the machine of clicks

Carla Zanoni   Prioritizing emotional health

Liz McMillen   The year of deep insights

Gabriel Snyder   The aberration of 20th-century journalism

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Earn trust by working for (and with) readers

Cindy Royal   Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid

Emily Goligoski   Incorporating audience feedback at scale

Olivia Ma   The year collaboration beats competition

Ole Reißmann   Un-faking the news

Zizi Papacharissi   Distracted journalism looks in the mirror

M. Scott Havens   Quality advertising to pair with quality content

Tracie Powell   Building reader relationships

Jonathan Hunt   Measurement companies get with the times

Tanya Cordrey   The resurgence of reach

Lam Thuy Vo   The primary source in the age of mechanical multiplication

Robert Hernandez   History will exclude you, again

Michael Oreskes   Reversing the erosion of democracy

Bill Adair   The year of the fact-checking bot

Amie Ferris-Rotman   Вслед за Россией

Andy Rossback   The year of the user

Adam Thomas   The coming collaboration across Europe

Emi Kolawole   From empathy to community

Mario García   Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward

Caitlin Thompson   High touch, high value

Samantha Barry   Messaging apps go mainstream

Mary Meehan   Feeling blue in a red state

Dan Gillmor   Fix the demand side of news too

Nushin Rashidian   A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting stratifies into hard layers

Dhiya Kuriakose   The year of digital detoxing

P. Kim Bui   The year journalism teaches again

Sarah Marshall   Focusing on the why of the click

Geetika Rudra   Journalism is community

Corey Ford   The year of the rebelpreneur

Renée Kaplan   Pure reach has reached its limit

Felix Salmon   Headlines matter

Annemarie Dooling   UGC as a path out of the bubble

An Xiao Mina   2017 is for the attention innovators

Julia Beizer   Building a coherent core identity

Alice Antheaume   A new test for French media

Ståle Grut   The battle for high-quality VR

Sue Schardt   Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love

Claire Wardle   Verification takes center stage

Christopher Meighan   Unlocking a deeper mobile experience

Nathalie Malinarich   Making it easy

Trushar Barot   API or die

Scott Dodd   Nonprofits team up for impact

Mira Lowe   News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”

Ray Soto   VR moves from experiments to immersion

Matt Waite   The people running the media are the problem

Elizabeth Jensen   Trust depends on the details

Pablo Boczkowski   Fake news and the future of journalism

Ken Schwencke   Disaggregation and collection

Mandy Velez   The audience is the source and the story

Bill Keller   A healthy skepticism about data

Alberto Cairo   Communicating uncertainty to our readers

Vivian Schiller   Tested like never before

David Weigel   A test for online speech

Jonathan Stray   A boom in responsible conservative media

Moreno Cruz Osório   The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism

Molly de Aguiar   Philanthropists galvanize around news

Steve Henn   The next revolution is voice

Laura E. Davis   Show your work

S.P. Sullivan   Baking transparency into our routines

Millie Tran   International expansion without colonial overtones

Andrea Silenzi   Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis

Mathew Ingram   The Faustian Facebook dance continues

Andrew Ramsammy   Rise of the rebel journalist

Asma Khalid   The year of the newsy podcast

Taylor Lorenz   “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing

Andrew Losowsky   Building our own communities