STEP — a model that helps create trust in journalism
Without trust journalism is worth nothing. As a media or a journalist you have to focus on, why your audience should trust what you are telling them. STEP is a new journalistic model that will help you create trust in your journalism — if you are trustworthy.
By: Gerd Maria May, Room of Solutions
The worlds first newspaper was named “Relation” and I think we need to go back to focus on exactly the relation between audience and journalist if we want to fight the trust issues, that is hitting us as an epidemic in these times.
According to the 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer Spring Update: A World in Trauma, trust in traditional news media is at a record low . The study confirms business as the most trusted institution, widening its lead over government and the media. In a world where CEOs are more trusted than the editors in chief, the democracy is in danger. Of course the world needs trustworthy CEOs. But if the future is depending on the business leaders to point out the direction we need to go, we are in danger of going in a direction, where nobody is hold accountable, and the winner is the one that promises the most.
Every democracy needs a free press to make sure to hold those in power accountable, to gather communities, educate and help look for solutions among other things. In an environment where a growing number of people mistrust journalists and believes they are bad for society it is easy to think that the best strategy as a journalist is to stay anonymous and just do as usual. But I think it is time for a serious rethinking of the role as a journalist.
The world needs journalists we can have a relation to. Journalists that we can engage with, that can help us look for and validate solutions to our problems and journalists that can give us a broader perspective of what is going on. If we get that — we get journalism we can trust.
The pope knows
“Journalism is reached not so much by choosing a profession, as by launching oneself on a mission, a bit like a doctor, who studies and works so that evil is cured in the world. Your mission is to explain the world, to make it less dark, to make those who live there fear it less and look at others with greater awareness, and also with more confidence. It is not an easy mission.”
These could have been words in a journalism school — but instead they come from a speech held by Pope Francis on 13. november 2021. And I think that what he says is so true, and in some ways we in the industry have forgotten that journalism is not only about reporting the truth it is also about choosing the stories to be reported and choosing the way to look at the story to tell.
In our hunt for objectivity we have forgotten the mission for journalism to help make the world a better place. Of course objectivity is key to all journalism, and it will always be, but that does not mean, that we can’t take a stand for the good versus the evil. We must do that as trustworthy journalists and media outlets. Examples of journalists being objective but still taking a stand for something could be, that we as journalists fight for justice for all and that we fight for safety for all, those are topics that I believe every journalists will be able to say yes to even if they believe very strongly in the need for objectivity. And when we as journalists show that we have taken a stand for at better world, we will be “someone” not only a reporter, but a person. And when you become a person it will be possible to create a relation to you, and in that way you will be able to create trust.
The STEP-model as a way to build trust
The model STEP is four topics you must visit when you are doing your reporting.
S stands for SOLUTIONS.
Research shows that journalism that includes solutions are more trusted than journalism that only focuses on the problem. That does of course not mean, that we should not focus on conflicts and problems with the critical and investigative journalism. But when we have exposed a problem, we must also try to expose possible solutions.
Examples of that could be when we tell the story of how the climate is in a deep crisis, we should also tell what can be done about it.
Below I have two examples from The Guardian — One shows the problem — like a serious wake up call — which was needed a lot of places.
This next front page is an example of how you also can tell the story by showing the problem AND a solution. This frontpage shows the serious problem — the destruction of planet earth — , but it also shows, that there are progress. That people are working to do something about the problem.
T stands for TRUST.
That means that for every story you make you will have to think about why people should trust what you are telling them. A way to do that is to make it very clear why you are doing the story, and how. As journalists we often think that everybody knows how we validate fact, research on the sources and make sure to understand the whole story. But most of our audience does not know that. A study from 2018 showed that only 43% could understand the difference between a news story and an opinion piece.
An example on how to help people understand what you are doing and in that way build trust can be how VOX is doing it in this video:
In the video from VOX they show how long time and how much effort that goes into creating one single video. Another way is to make it visible in the single story you are creating. An example of that could be to add a box with an explanation next to the story.
This picture shows an example of how an “explain your process” box could look like. This box has been used as a part of a research-project from The Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas in Austin. They posted the same story in two ways. One with the “explain your process” box and one without. The study showed that people who viewed the news article with the box perceived the news organization as significantly more reliable, compared to people who saw the same story without the box.
E stands for ENGAGEMENT.
Engagement means, that you as a journalist must think of how you can engage your audience in the story. Instead of seeing your role as a journalist as one, who knows what is important, you must see your role as one who can help your audience tell their stories or research on the topics, that are important to them.
This model from my book “Fra tårn til torv” /”From tower to square”(Sorry — but the book is only published in Danish) shows how I think the role as journalists must change.
The first model, that I have called “Traditional journalism” shows the journalist as one who works without engaging with the audience. Only when the story is published the audience gets to know about it. And at that time, the journalist has moved on to a new story.
Instead I think the journalist should engage with the audience all the way from picking the topic of the story over research to publishing and maybe creating events around the story. That is what I have tried to show in the model called “Engaging journalism”. Here the model shows a constant change of focus from the audience to the journalist. Here the journalist ask the audience what they want the journalist to focus on. When the story-topic has been chosen, the journalist can use the audience to help point out relevant sources, research or cases. And when the story has been published, the audience is invited to discuss the topic. Sometimes in the debate under the story, sometimes in a live debate or maybe the story leads too new stories.
When you work as an engaging journalist it is of course always your responsibility to fact check, to be ethical correct, to tell the story in a good way. But you are engaging your audience along the way.
An example of how you can do that could be by using the methods that the tool Hearken promotes.
As a consultant I worked with the local Danish media Lokal Avisen Århus in a project about how to engage their audience. They used the tool Hearken to gather questions from their audience about problems with the traffic situation in the city.
The local newspaper invited the audience to ask them questions about the traffic-situation in a digital box on the website. Then the journalists decided what questions they would work with, and started writing about the topic on the basis of the questions. They published more than 30 stories on the basis of the readers questions. A lot of the articles got more reader engagement than usual. The journalists also worked with my format called 10:10. That means that the journalists moves out of the mediahouse and works from ten different relevant locations over ten days. Here the readers can meet up with the journalists, and the journalists can see the problem in a new way.
The last value in the STEP-model is P.
P stands for PERSPECTIVE.
Perspective means that the journalist always must think of how to give the audience a broad perspective of the story. As a teacher at journalism schools I have taught the students to create a story without all the nuances. It must be simple in order to be understandable. But I think that sometimes we leave to many nuances out of the story.
When I followed the coverage of the American presidential race i 2020 I couldn’t help thinking, that almost all media outlets could benefit from adding some more perspective to the stories. In this clip a Trump-supporter tells CNN why he doesn’t follow facebook-pages with people that don’t agree with him. He says that when he does that, people call him stupid and ignorant. And I think he is right. A lot of people really didn’t understand each other and the media didn’t help. Instead we often made the division even wider.
Journalism must give a broad perspective of the topics it is covering. Sometimes it is by adding some extra facts or sources and sometimes it is by creating new ways of meeting.
In Germany the editor in chief at Zeit Online wanted to minimize the polarization, so he invented what started as “Deutschland spricht”. Here he made people who disagreed meet up and listen to each other and discuss the topic they disagreed on. That format was such a big success, that it is still alive and growing now five years later. In USA it is called America Talks.
Here people who does not agree about for instance Trump can meet up and talk about their views as the German editor in Chief Jochen Wegne hoped, when he started the project i 2017. The project also lives in countries like Denmark, Italy and Norway. In that way the project can help people understand, that even though we do not agree on politics, we can maybe meet about other topics in a good way.
In a newsroom a way of adding more perspective could be to sometimes shift the narrative from the ideology to concrete solutions. When the discussion becomes concrete it is easier to find something to agree on.
I have created a format I call “Room of Solutions”. It is a debate-format, where people meet to discuss possible solutions with the people who can make them happen.
A news outlet can use the debate-format “Room of Solutions” as the ending of a journalistic series, where a topic have been covered over a period of time. Then you can invite your audience to a debate about how to solve the problem you have been covering. in the Room of Solutions you invite the people who actually can do something to solve the problem to participate in the panel. Your audience all gets a red and a green card when they take place in the room. With help of the cards you can ask the audience during the debate about their opinions. In that way you can confront the people in charge with the different voices in the room.
By engaging your audience you automatically get a broader perspective on the issue.
STEP as a way to create trust in journalism
As I have worked with the STEP-model for several years I see, that when you think of journalism in this way, you automatically build relations with your audience. And when you succeed in creating relations you are on the right path to be a trusted journalist that actually can help move our society in a better direction. And in my opinion that is what journalism is all about.
You can have a look at my website if you want to hear more — or you are welcome to reach out for a virtual coffee.
