'It’s about learning what your audience wants'

What do you think the consequences are for classical media given that social media platforms have become the number one distributor of media?

If news organizations want people to see their content, they know they need to be on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Snapchat and that people will find them via Facebook or other social web services. But by seeing Facebook as way to distribute their content, they’re losing access to their content, their metrics and their archives. Everything is disappearing into that Facebook black hole.

It’s not quite a deal with the devil but I think at the moment there’s this sense that that’s where the eyeballs are, so we have to be there. But actually, the implications of this are huge. My concern is that as an industry we haven’t stopped to talk about if there is another way, or made sure we’re not losing in this deal. Because eyeballs are great, but in the long term, what does this mean?

Indeed, what does that mean for the education of the new generation of journalists coming up?

That’s a really good question because I think journalism schools have to teach the skills that students need. For example, if you're teaching a student about making videos, you need to teach them how to make a video that will get as many hits as possible when it autoplays on Facebook. There is a new grammar of videos being constructed because of Facebook. We need to be teaching that, but at the same time, we need to be teaching students about the bigger policy implications, about why you need to be concerned about this, about understanding technology enough to understand what works, what doesn’t, what’s appropriate and what’s not. Also, do students understand ethics enough to understand them within a social network context? To me, we can't just cross our arms and say we’re not going to play with social networks and we’re not going to teach our students what they need to know. We need to make sure we’re producing journalists who are critical and thoughtful and who understand the wider implications of all of this.

What would you say are the most important changes and challenges to journalistic curricula nowadays compared to ten or twenty years ago?

First, there’s social newsgathering. If you teach at a journalism school and the last time you were at a breaking-news desk and it was all about the agencies, now you need to be able to teach your students how to find content quickly on the social web, how to verify it, how to seek permissions and how to publish it. Much of the best content around a breaking-news event now will appear on a social network. From a curriculum point of view, how can you ensure you’re teaching everything involved around social discovery.

I think the other side of this is data journalism. Many stories can be found on a .pdf that’s hidden on a government website somewhere. Teaching the skills about finding stories in data and telling and visualizing them, that’s the biggest shift for journalism students.

There is also the question of whether we need to teach students to code. Ultimately, I think we need to sort this other stuff out first, and then recognize that we need to make sure students aren’t scared of technology, that they understand it so they can understand encryption, security practices, and the difference between the internet and the web.

What about ethical constraints?

When it comes to ethics, I feel very strongly that the ethics we used to teach are still in place now. If we’re talking about the ethics of knocking on someone’s door after their child has died in an accident and how you treat someone who has just gone through a traumatic event, the same kinds of issues apply to how you treat people on Twitter or about showing graphic content in an autoplay video on Facebook. People stop and think about what this means in a digital context, but I think the ethical questions are exactly the same.

What would be the ideal curriculum for a journalist nowadays?

That’s a big question, but for me, it’s the same that it’s always been, which is how to find a story and how to tell that story. The tools have changed slightly, but for me, the rest is still exactly the same. Rather than how do you go to the pub and have a conversation with someone to find a story, now it’s how do you get inside a community within Facebook and find a story and gain people’s trust. Then the next stage of the curriculum is how you tell that story in engaging ways, playing a shorter video that’s going to work on Facebook or creating an Instagram narrative. It’s the same as it’s always been, about storytelling, we just have to make sure people feel comfortable with the tools.

In addition, we've always taught people how to fact-check. Digital verification requires different tools, but it still involves the same steps we previously taught. I don't think the way we design curricula has changed, rather it’s the tools which have changed.

We work in countries in Africa and South America and support a lot of community media. What strategies should a young media outlet follow now that they’re living in a digital world?

To me, community media are attached to their local communities, so in many ways, they have more skills and more opportunities than big mainstream organizations. If you take the London riots from the summer of 2011, mainstream journalists were up in their helicopters trying to tell the story but community radio stations absolutely understood their communities and reached out to them. They were saying, “Tell us what happened. How did these riots occur?” They had relationships with their local communities that the mostly white, middle-class BBC journalist didn’t. Whether it's a community radio station in Colombia or Nairobi, they have those connections and because of social media they can listen to the community’s conversations and find out where the stories are because the community trusts them. They can get the scoop of the century.

I think one thing that is missing is that sometimes community radio stations or newspapers don’t have the connections with the mainstream media to amplify their coverage. Sometimes they have great stories but they’re not getting as many eyeballs as they could.

Let’s imagine a community media organization is starting up in a part of a city. What kind of digital strategy do you think they should follow?

It’s about learning what your audience wants. If you look at a chat app, like WhatsApp, there are some very big success stories. Audiences get alerts from a local community organization informing them about traffic jams or public transport closures. I think there are opportunities for local community organizations to report and distribute news in the best way possible. It might be via a Facebook group, it might be WhatsApp group. I wouldn't necessarily say a website is the best way to go because audiences don’t always type in a URL every morning. They find news in the places where they're spending time, which is WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter, depending on the country. So for me, it’s about thinking about what news I want to provide, and then where I should be putting that news so that my audience can find it.

And if you imagine a smaller community organization trying to be a media producer, what does that mean digitally for the organization?

They should ask how the community uses media. Rather than saying, “I want to have a community radio station,” they should consider whether that’s the best thing for their audience or if people would prefer little snippets of audio they can find in different places. Staff members shouldn’t do only what they already know how to do. Building a website so you can write long articles, is that what your audience wants? I think staff, whether at the BBC or Deutsche Welle or a small community station in Nairobi, has to understanding what community members need and where they spend their time. Now the digital tools exist to make it very easy to provide, create and distribute content.

But we still have to consider what the audience can do, what level of digital literacy people have. How can we deal with that?

There’s a huge need now to work with communities, whether it’s with schools or community groups. There’s an amazing example from Mozambique where people wrote down their concerns and issues on a blackboard that had been set up in the community. Then community media responded to those issues in their newspapers. Community media have amazing opportunities to ask an audience what, how, when and where it wants information in a way that the BBC doesn’t. Digital literacy is partly finding out from the audience what they do and don’t understand, what they need more of and where they're spending their time. I often think the audience is more savvy than we give them credit for. But we don’t spend enough time talking with them about how they consume media.

Imagine that an interesting amount of money came your way which allowed you to carry out any study you wanted on a digital topic. What would it be?

At the moment I’m very, very interested in the relationship between social networks and news organizations. Many people are thinking about distribution. How can new organizations find more eyeballs by using Snapchat or WhatsApp or Facebook? But my passion is user-generated content or eyewitness media. I’m fascinated by chat apps, like WhatsApp. I want to study the role of chat apps in social discovery.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Claire Wardle is the research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Before that, she was the senior social media officer at United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and has worked in academia and journalism research as well as with journalists in the field. She holds a PhD in Communications and an MA in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania. She taught at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies in the UK and is considered one of the world’s experts on user-generated content. Dr. Wardle was previously director of News Services for Storyful, and currently sits on the World Economic Forum’s Committee on Social Media. She was also responsible for the design and development of the social media training program at the BBC.