Emerging trends in journalism: how to use them and increase effectiveness as a reporter

Foreign Press spoke with Damian Radcliffe, the Carolyn S. Chambers Professor in Journalism at the University of Oregon, to take a critical look at emerging trends in the field of journalism. Radcliffe has had an accomplished and diverse career as a teacher, researcher, digital analyst, and consultant. His work has taken him worldwide to the United Kingdom (where he is originally from), the Middle East, and the United States. An active journalist himself, Radcliffe urged young professionals to have an entrepreneurial mindset and always be aware of how to best reach their audience. He then explores several new and emerging phenomena in today’s tech-driven society, notably social media and remote interviews, and how these can be used to journalists’ advantage. The segment provides unique insight into navigating the changing world of journalism and is a must-read for those looking to improve their digital skills.   

How do you become a successful journalist in a fast-changing digital news environment?

That's a great question. The communication landscape is constantly and rapidly evolving. Yet, at the same time, there remain some constants. For example, you still need to be able to write, to have a strong news sense, and a good understanding of media ethics and the law. 

Core skills like these remain integral to the work of all journalists, whatever the platform you’re working on, or the type of digital news organization (start-up, legacy media, etc.) you are working for. You’ve got to have these fundamentals down, regardless of the fact that how we produce – and consume - journalism continues to evolve. It can be easy to overlook that.

Today's journalists must multitask. What skills do journalists of today need, and what should they invest in besides obtaining great reporting skills?

Any journalist worth their salt has those core skills that I’ve already mentioned in their toolbox. 

Alongside that, you also need to be a bit of a “Jack of All Trades,” someone who can do quite a few things, but there’s also a value in being a specialist too – be that by subject matter or platform. My former colleague, Lisa Heyamoto, who is now the Director of Learning and Training at LION Publishers, used to talk about the need for your journalistic skillset to be T-shaped, and I think that’s very true. 

For younger journalists (but not exclusive to them), I also advocate that there are two other key things you also need to do that are often overlooked.

Firstly, you need to be entrepreneurial and develop an entrepreneurial mindset, certainly in developing your career and skills. You need to drive that development. An employer won’t do that for you. You need to be your own best advocate regarding the stories you cover, how your role grows and how you keep moving forward and being challenged.

Secondly, I also think it is incumbent on any journalist to understand the wider business. That means understanding how journalism is paid for and the implications for the journalism you produce. It also means being ahead of - and understanding - trends in consumption and content creation; and being able to predict and ride that wave; and how your work fits into it. 

Knowing where the audience is heading, how this impacts the business model for the organization you are working for, or the types of opportunities that might come your way, enables you (and your employers) to be one step ahead of the competition. 

Damian Radcliffe

To be more specific, let's look at Twitter first. Several journalists use Twitter as their primary social media platform to stay connected with news and the flow of information for their reporting. Is it possible for you to share some tips on how a journalist can effectively use Twitter to promote his work?

I'm glad you asked this because I actually wrote a piece recently for the International Journalists’ Network (IJNet) sharing some skills and tricks that I feel more journalists need to know about! 

From a sharing and outreach perspective, I’m a big fan of threads as a way to break down complex stories or to share the reporting process as a story is breaking. And you can absolutely inject opinion and personality into this. 

This recent thread from the British journalist Ian Dunt, as the UK Parliament debated what was happening in Afghanistan, is a great example. Once it really gets going, there’s a fantastic use of quotes, commentary, and links. I totally immersed myself in this one-person news feed for quite some time. 

You can also use the search functionality on Twitter to see who has shared your work, but without necessarily mentioning (@) you. That’s super helpful to show the impact of your reporting. I need to get better at thanking people for sharing. It’s always nice when people do that to me, and that’s something I, therefore, need to do more often. I also plan to use Moments more as a way to curate and archive stories. It’s a Twitter function that journalists can use more to promote their work, IMHO.

Another thing I’d like to see more journalists do is to fill out their Twitter bio! It’s amazing how many people don’t include their email there, or at the very least a link to where I can find you online! 

When I'm trying to share my research, I know it could be really, really hard to find contact details for people on Twitter, LinkedIn, or even on the masthead on a site or sites that you have been writing for. I understand that you want to avoid the trolls, but please make it a bit easier for genuine people to be able to contact you. On Twitter, that might be as simple as keeping your DM’s open.

And, of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that Twitter shouldn’t just be about promotion. 

It’s also a great way to source stories, engage with communities, and monitor conversation (it’s fine to be a lurker!) to discover expert sources and different perspectives. The challenge, of course, is doing this in a way that beats the algorithm (which too often gives you more of what it thinks you want, not what you need) and doing so in a time-efficient manner. I miss Nuzzel, which used to be a great app for sorting the wheat from the chaff!

There's also Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. What role do you think they can play in assisting journalists with outreach? 

These are great platforms, but they all have different attributes and audiences. 

It's super important for journalists to understand that all social media platforms are not equal. 

They each have different characteristics and cultures, and audiences use them differently. So that means you cannot simply pump out the same story, in the same way, across a variety of different channels. You need to tailor your offering to the style of that platform. 

Look at how National Geographic uses Instagram or the Washington Post to harness TikTok. The material and styles they use differ from other platforms, and that's exactly how it should be.

It's time-consuming to reskin your content for a variety of different platforms, and not all of them are going to work for you. So, it's essential to ask key questions about which platforms work best for you and your audience. 

For example, one of my former students, Reina Harwood, is working at a small newspaper in a coastal community here in Oregon. She quickly realized that this community is not on Twitter, but they are very active on Facebook, so she had to pivot her social media presence to where the audience is.

There was no point in her pumping out stories and interview requests on Twitter because the bulk of her perspective audience would never see it. Instead, it was fundamental to meet the audience where they are. 

I've seen local newspapers lean into Instagram because that's where they believe the next generation of readers and potential subscribers are, but in the main, you need to be strategic about where you place your social media bets. 

What is your advice to journalists who want to start their own news production and news websites? What tips can you share with them?

It's never been easier than it is now for journalists to set up their own products. We've seen that with newsletters and the emergence of Substack. We're also seeing it with podcasts (and tools like Anchor) and have done for some time with sites like Medium or WordPress. 

The layoffs that we've seen due to the pandemic may well also encourage more journalists to do their own thing. 

There are some excellent resources out there for people who want to dive into this space. From Google, there are materials like the GNI Startups Playbook and Reader Revenue Playbook (I also pulled together a hyperlinked list of 231 revenue ideas last year), Better News from the American Press Institute is full of great case studies, and the weekly Local Fix newsletter can also offer valuable inspiration and insights. 

However, having looked at this space for a decade and a half, I believe that the biggest challenge for most journalists is the business side. 

A lot of journalists know a beat. They understand a good story, and they increasingly understand how to sell that story post-publication. A different challenge is selling advertising, understanding what a subscription model looks like, and so on. 

It's a bit like when you go from being a staffer to a freelancer. You suddenly realize there are many other skills like taxes and budgeting and business development that you now need and never needed before. 

Most journalists don’t enjoy doing this stuff. And they often don’t know how to do it either. Because of this, we risk putting things off. There's always another story to write. There's always more tinkering and editing of your copy that you could do. The risk is that you keep doing that, so there's never enough time to do the sales, the partnership development, the investment in developing a membership model, etc., you know you need to do. 

I love how a hyperlocal publication in London called the Kentishtowner approached this conundrum to avoid falling into that trap. The team decided to work on editorial till lunchtime and business in the afternoon. They recognized that if they didn't split their time that way, they'd always spend their time on editorial because that was their first love. 

Be very strict with your time management to ensure that the business side of things is given the time it needs, even if it is much less appealing to you than the editorial. 

Journalists are required to conduct interviews virtually in the current virtual world. What should journalists be more careful when they conduct remote interviews? 

One of the good things to come out of the pandemic is that, hopefully, it makes it easier for journalists to use digital resources to engage a wider variety of sources.

I’ve offered a few tips on this subject before. But, I think perhaps the biggest challenge with conducting interviews remotely is the same as any conversation that we have digital, namely what’s lost when you don’t communicate face-to-face. Meeting in person makes it easier to build rapport with a subject. It allows you to see and observe their body language and to make deductions from that. 

There's also a fascinating question about whether you should conduct these interviews with the screen on or off. 

It's really tempting to try and build that connection or having the screen on, but there's also merit to having the screen off – mimicking a phone interview – where you can be fact-checking, looking up follow-up information, etc. whilst the conversation is going on. That’s much harder to do when you're on screen, and it's obvious to your interviewee that you are potentially doing something else.

Terry Gross, the host and executive producer of NPR’s Fresh Air, and Michael Barbaro, host of The New York Times’ podcast The Daily, had a great discussion about elements of this last year, during an event hosted by the National Press Club Journalism Institute, which is worth checking out. 

Can you predict the new trends in journalism in one or two years? Is audio journalism one of them? 

I think there are four trends that we will see more of in the next few years. Audio – and social audio - is definitely one of them. 

The second is that it is interesting to see how quickly some major news organizations and big journalism and media hubs are hiring again. There's a lot of job opportunities out there right now, which might be surprising given the fact that we are still in the middle of a pandemic. 

At the same time, the third trend I would point to is more people going their own way, being entrepreneurial, setting up their own sites or products, and seeking to find ways to monetize that. It’s a crowded space, so niche is probably the way forward here. 

Finally, one of those niche spaces may be local. There's considerable interest from funders and policymakers in ensuring a more robust local news ecosystem and addressing issues like news deserts. We might see more journalists identifying geographic or subject gaps and then seeking to fill them. 

How do you see the current trends in how people consume news, and how are these trends affecting the work of journalists? 

I believe that this is a golden age for journalism, if not a golden age for journalists. It’s clear that the industry's economics are severely challenged, which makes it difficult for some people to make a living from this business. But if you can, there are so many fantastic shops to work at and an incredible array of platforms and tools at your disposal to create and distribute content. 

I find the breadth of content we have access to incredibly exciting, but I totally understand why for some people, it’s overwhelming. 

I think there's going to be incredible value in curation. Many people will increasingly defer to fewer trusted sources for their content (which will make partnerships really important). I believe we will also see more news fatigue, which means we may need to tell some stories differently. 

Many audiences are not following a story incrementally, and we need to reflect that in our coverage. We need to produce more explainers. We need to create content that allows consumers to come to a piece without any assumed knowledge and still benefit from it. 

I also think that the tone of coverage needs to be changed, which is why I'm interested in topics like Solutions Journalism, not just focusing on problems but also shining more of a light on efforts to address major societal issues (and doing so critically). 

Lastly, as we know, there is a need for greater representation not just in newsrooms but in our news coverage. No one will pay for your product if they don’t see their lives, concerns, successes, and triumphs reflected in the media they consume. If we want to win back audiences (or attract them in the first place), we must constantly strive to engage with a more diverse range of sources and stories and have the right people to tell them.