Last night I attended a terrific panel discussion at the GlobeLab sponsored by the Boston chapter of the Online News Association and Hacks/Hackers Boston.
Titled “Human-Centered Journalism: Designing for Engagement,” the discussion focused on the idea that the right design for a news project can bring the community into the conversation.
There was, for instance, quite a bit of talk about The Boston Globe’s “68 Blocks” series, which included multimedia elements such as Instagrams and self-shot videos by teenagers in Bowdoin-Geneva, a poor, mostly African-American neighborhood that was the subject of the series.
Despite those interactive touches, “68 Blocks” was controversial within some elements of the community. I can’t speak for them, but the general complaint seemed to be that they resented outsiders coming in and observing them as though they were exotic specimens.
One of the panelists, Kenneth Bailey of the Design Studio for Social Innovation, put his finger on a possible problem when he said that too many journalists see themselves as “literary types” rather than fostering relationships with the communities they cover.
Another, Alvin Chang, a data journalist who was involved in “68 Blocks,” said, “The people we are covering are not necessarily the people who read the Globe.”
The third panelist was Laura Amico, co-founder of Homicide Watch and a colleague of mine at Northeastern. The moderator was Adrienne Debigare, the “new media catalyst” at the GlobeLab.
Tiffany Campbell of WBUR put together a Storify that does a good job of summarizing the discussion. Please have a look.
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Sounds like a great event and gets to the heart of so much of what’s wrong with much of modern journalism. When we seek to cover people and communities who are not our audience, there will always be problems. I definitely don’t blame people in those communities for feeling like they are being observed like so many zoo animals. The goal should be for those communities to already be in our audience when we cover them and cover them not only when there is a shooting or a school funding controversy, but cover them the same way we cover other areas of our cities. But I doubt seriously whether legacy news organizations are capable or willing to do it.