Managing Audience Participation Essay

Journalism is not an easy task as the audience has to be willing to participate in the data collection process. The journalist should be able to manage their practices, workflow, and strategies they use in the field work. The research process has changed over time, and the journalists are now able to predict and deal with the uncertainty if the present events. Despite the uncertainty, the new researchers must make sure that the information they will be presenting is reliable and it is part of the journalism culture. To ensure that the culture of the profession is followed, reporters for a network of institutionalized stories which helps in guaranteeing the trustworthiness of the news. In the newsroom, each staff member is assigned specific responsibility, roles, and procedures depending on all the planned activities (Domingo, 2011, 76). It helps in being answerable in case of any issues arising in the place of work.

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Journalism culture is very cautious in adopting any changes in the society since they explore all sides of any change, such as technology and innovation. It would thus be compromising if a media company were to present strong negative points concerning the disadvantage of innovation and end up incorporating it into their operations. When a company decides to adopt any changes, they should be having ways of protecting the reporters from any external attacks. Initially, the newsrooms used the user-generated content (UGC), and the materials were unofficial, and it compromised the quality, focus and reliability of the information collected. The desire to protect the journalism profession has called for improved approaches where the reporting activities follow a certain pattern with several new production stages which have to be applied.

Participatory journalism has to be managed to ensure that the reports which are given by the audience can be relied upon. The reporters should be able to differentiate between the facts and opinions as provided by the audience. The reporter should be able to manage the audience, especially when they have relevant information which can be used in reporting certain events. The journalists should be able to make a distinction between the information provided to determine its usefulness, for example, the newsworthiness of images. The images should be reviewed by the relevant department, such as marketing department on business advertising images, before they can be released to the public. Such photos should contain helpful and reliable data, to avoid implicating the media station later, in case the new was found out to be undependable. Images of holiday trips, for example, the department in charge should first verify that all the listed services are available before printing such news to avoid duping the readers. Filtering and selection stage is necessary for images, especially in the Finnish newspaper, for information verification (Domingo, 2011, 79).

The journalists should be able to tell the difference between facts and opinions when collecting news data. Facts are accompanied by hard proof which can be used to verify what is being narrated. Ideas, on the other hand, are not reliable since an individual expresses their views concerning an issue and they are mostly biased depending on what they feel is right or should be done. However, neither the facts nor the opinions should be ignored since they all have substantial data concerning a case and can be used in reporting. The ideas, for example, are used in showing the views of people surrounding a particular case. To avoid confusing reviewing of this information, it is necessary to assign roles, as done in Ynet, the editors are in charge of reviewing the facts; opinions are studied by the junior reporters and then reports to the editor who establishes whether everything is reliable.

Managing the information which has been posted on the websites such as blogs uses different strategies. The users are free to publish their opinions, even when there is no evidence to support it. A hands-off approach is mostly applied, and intervention is done only when abuse is reported by the users. The website is considered as the space of the users instead of the journalists. The duty of the journalists is filtering the comments which are considered abusive. It regarded as a debate platform, where the community can express their views concerning an issue freely, without facing any limitations on what they want to say.

There are particular attitudes which are directed towards participatory journalism in the newsroom, and they help shape the management practices. The motivation and opinions differ from media companies, thus diverse management styles. Some media houses take the comments of the people as a chance to learn more about what is happening and conducted further research, as seen in the USA Today newspaper (Domingo, 2011, 82).

The flow of the work in the production of news has to be managed to ensure that no job is left unattended to and complete evaluation of information is done before it is released to the public. In the access and observation stage, all information available has to be collected, including the comments from the audience, since some of them provide comments with rich stories. Once all the information is obtained, the next stage of filtering, selecting, processing, editing, and distribution follow. Some of the comments may be unreliable and have to be filtered out of the main story, and only the helpful information is chosen for publishing. The interpretation stage follows where the journalist assigned to that duty goes through the community comments to establish whether they have relevance to the main story before they are published. The source is then determined, and some of the newspapers hold interviews with the participants with reliable and helpful information. The meetings are considered necessary since they help determine if there are any contradictions from the story that the community source had provided on the websites or through comments. When the reporters are conducting the interview, they can be able to tell how reliable the information and if it can be used in news reporting (Domingo, 2011, 95).

Conclusion

To conclude, the article has provided an insight into the steps the journalists follow when they are looking for news and involve the community as a general source. There are websites which are open for citizens to participate in any story since the reporters cannot get to the individuals to collect the information they have. It is necessary for verification of the reliability of any information to be done before it is printed. Each newsroom has the production procedure it follows in news production, to ensure that they will not compromise their operations by presenting fake news. Using the community as the source also helps get rich stories on any events.

Reference

Domingo, D. (2011). Managing Audience Participation: Practices, Workflows, and Strategies. Participatory Journalism. 76-95.