How does advocacy journalism relate to global influence and international broadcasting?

I attended the Advocacy Journalism in the Digital Age conference on March 1, 2011. The conference brought together traditional journalists with advocacy journalists, along with media makers who fit in between these delineations. Some of the ideas we discussed in our class on international broadcasting and global influence crossed over with the ideas discussed at the conference. And they also related to the Napoli article in terms of looking at how audiences have and are evolving and the way that media content providers deal with these changes.

Napoli looks at how media producers in the past looked at success in reaching audience in terms of simply the number of viewers. Napoli articulates that despite some resistance, audience measurement has evolved to include parameters such as audience participation and engagement with the content.[1]

We discussed in class that all media spaces are not alike, and asked why so many media spaces are lacking international content. Many of the presenters at the conference on March 1st believe in their role as conduits, where they give people access to information. Some of the more traditional journalists made sure to clarify that they were NOT aggregators of information, while some of the hybrid journalists embraced this term. John Sawyer, executive director at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, sees his role as an advocate for issue awareness. He wants to engage the broadest public possible and to fill in gaps in coverage. He funds traditional journalists to report on issues, such as HIV/AIDS in Haiti. He feels this approach gives more credibility and integrity to the reporting. He discussed how news agencies get many stories from independent journalists and he is happy to have the reporting repurposed in multiple contexts. While Sawyer’s work is important, his approach still rests on a one-to-many approach, where the journalist is providing content in a unidirectional way.

On the other side of the spectrum, Wendy Hanamura, General manager of Linktv and VP of viewchange.org, believes the issue is to give audiences a trusted pipeline, or a go-to point, to find stories. She sees her role as a curator of stories. Viewchange is about crowdsourcing, citizen journalism and user-generated content. Her approach seems to embrace the evolution of audience in terms of measuring the success of programming through participatory processes. There are multiple layers to this participation. She demonstrated how the viewchange website is based on semantic, which means that the codewriters look at the context of words and link that context to data in a dynamic way. The site has a “Social Actions API”, which finds action items, and aggregates of actions. For example, if you watch a video on Haiti, you can add a link to the video to your facebook page. There are also links to youtube, wiki and to advocacy. The model encourages not only active collaboration, but also action. The other participatory aspect of this site is that they use open source, so the code is shared and improved in the open source community.

How does all of this relate to PD? In Robert Entman’s article, “Theorizing Mediated Public Diplomacy: The U.S. Case”[2], Entman looks at a theory of “mediated public diplomacy”, which he defines as “using mass communication (including the internet) to increase support of a country’s specific foreign policies among audiences beyond that country’s borders.” (p.88) His Cascading Network Activation model considers the hierarchies and power structures involved in getting a political message out to both domestic and foreign audiences. He looks at the importance of culture and context in creating effective frames and having a “degree of success” (p.96). He points out in his conclusion that it is hard to create frames that compete effectively in the global media space.

The panelists at the advocacy journalism conference were discussing how to reach audience and how to get messages out to audiences in order to not only inform, but also to encourage collaboration and action. Pulling all of these ideas together I wonder if PD then must become a form of advocacy journalism. While the idea for international broadcasters has been to maintain credibility as practitioners of traditional journalism, perhaps there is room for advocacy journalism, such as viewchange and other groups creating content that can build bridges between people working on similar causes.

1. Entman, Robert M. “Theorizing Mediated Public Diplomacy: The U.S. Case.” The International Journal of Press/Politics 13 (2008): 87-102.

2. Napoli, Philip M. “Toward a Model of Audience Evolution: New Technologies and The Transformation of Media Audiences.” McGannon Center Working Paper Series Paper 15 (July 1, 2008). http://fordham.bepress.com/mcgannon_working_papers/15.