‘We need to enable more experimentation in this space’
Photo by Girl with red hat on Unsplash
As journalism and social media influencers continue to intersect, it’s natural to wonder how they will impact college journalism.
Fortunately, a blueprint is emerging.
The American Press Institute recently brought together six local newsrooms to experiment with social media influencers and report on their successes — and failures.
I spoke to Samantha Ragland, vice president of journalism programs for API, who was enthusiastic about the role that college journalism educators can play.
Sam said that college classrooms and newsrooms provide great opportunities for experimentation and applauded any professorial efforts at expanded social media initiatives, whether they involve bona fide campus influencers or simply student journalists looking to expand their skills.
There are tons of takeaways in API’s guide to influencer collaborations: Lessons from four months of local news experiments, which include:
· Develop your influencer strategy
· Mapping your local influencer landscape
· Building Trust: An ethical roadmap for journalists who partner with influencers
· Essential contract guidelines for navigating influencer collaborations
· 22 ideas to steal from the API Influencer Learning Cohort
Sam said the research was born out of conversations around informed voters as part of the Knight Election Hub, and was influenced by her past work at The Palm Beach Post.
“One of the things that we talked about was about helping journalists partner with local trusted messengers to share information that can support an informed voter,” she said. Sam explained that in the past, her news team frequently allowed, for example, musicians and artists to do social media takeovers of the Post’s social platforms — “well before these people were ever called influencers.”
But those efforts were usually short-lived.
“What we found is that newsrooms who have experimented with this work in the past have done it in a one-off situation,” Sam said. “It was really hard to find an organization who had built a sustained relationship with these trusted messengers over a long period of time.”
She said it’s important to rethink the labels and traditional definitions that get thrown around; what’s really important to audiences is trust and authenticity. And where better to experiment with different ways to establish trust and be authentic than the proving grounds of college journalism?
First up, thinking about what “influence” means, since the word “influencers” tends to get a bad rap.
“Some people think they're just pushing makeup or pushing ideology without really stepping back and saying, ‘You know, am I an influencer? Who in my community trusts me?’” she said. “Because understanding influence and where influence comes from has to be a part of this conversation.”
That means transactional relationships won’t cut it. Instead, the industry needs to look beyond a marketing role for trusted messengers.
“How are we thinking about these messengers as authentic storytellers, too?” she wondered.
College journalists may be digital experts, but they tend to want to silo their lives, she said. They want their responsibilities to the news to be separate from their campus connections.
“I think the first step is getting people excited about the fact that they're affiliated with this critical resource on campus. What is the power and the opportunity when you are connected to the narrative of campus life through the way that you report and cover the student body?”
Sam gave an example from her digital storytelling team at The Palm Beach Post. Every reported “story” had to be shared across three different platforms in three different ways — and print didn’t count.
“Our job is not about influencer journalism,” she said. “It's about delivering the right information in the right intonation in the right space, utilizing the right idiosyncrasies and engagement tools to reach the audience where they are.
“And so if your student journalists are still so focused on a print byline without knowing how to translate a print story every single time into an Instagram story, without knowing how to translate every single time they're reporting into a live AMA, they're missing the point.”
She agreed with the conventional wisdom that student journalists should be taught foundational reporting skills and ethics, but added that multimedia and social media plays need to be baked into their lessons as the line continues to blur between traditional journalism and influence.
She suggested that a good assignment for a journalism student in media law, for example, would be to craft an explainer Instagram reel around the basics of libel, instead of being assigned a written essay about the topic.
That, however, could be a scary assignment for a professor who feels they lack digital expertise.
“I think that if professors are afraid, then the first thing they can do is to do it themselves,” Sam suggested. Practicing unfamiliar social media technology lets faculty gain new perspective on creator journalism, and provides them a way to test it themselves.
“Get in front of the camera. Feel what that's like. Add videos, add thoughts, use captions and just do it,” she said. “It lessens fear and increases confidence.”
Try it for a week, she suggested, and focus on telling the story of how your family eats dinner for seven days.
“On the first day, it's probably going to be two or three slides, with pictures that are probably not going to be very good or very creative. The next thing you know, there are multiple shots of a recipe being made. There's close-ups and pan-outs, there's the voting tool being used, there's a video or music being added so that there's an ambience … all of this stuff kind of happens naturally if you just decide, even for one week, to steep yourself deeply in the space.”
That way, those making the assignments have enough working knowledge to communicate possibility and mitigate student fear.
Still, these suggested assignments and stories require a different mindset.
“It’s important (to) understand the workload. If you are going to really prioritize the level of storytelling and engagement that we are seeing across this influencer trend right now, (professors and advisers) will need to change the way they manage (students),” Sam said. “You will need to redefine success … so that these people, these journalists, can really be authentically creative, even when that creativity isn't necessarily driving traffic or newsletter subs to your site.”
She offered up an easy example: campus events.
“I think anything that is campus event related is an opportunity to really test the space, and you can do that in a two-prong way,” she said.
The first is live coverage.
“Take the platform that you are choosing — it could be Instagram, it could be TikTok, it could be something else — and go into the space and just tell the narrative, set the scene. Walk in and show what you're dealing with.”
She suggested adding captions, interviewing people, adding some person-on-the-street questions, or posting a poll for people to ask questions about what's happening at the event.
“You do the live storytelling in real time on the platform. That’s the first way,” Sam said. “The other way of covering events is going in knowing exactly what cards you're going to shoot before you get there … knowing that an event is happening and then sitting with your editor to say, ‘OK, what is the best way to really share this narrative based on the tools that we have at our disposal?’”
She said that the idea is to essentially create a storyboard so students know going in exactly what they want to hit.
She suggested starting with small, low-risk projects, “like campus history quizzes, when you're just going out with the Instagram account and you're asking people about campus history and seeing if they got it right or got it wrong.”
Another low-risk idea: Get an instrumental recording of the school fight song. Play it, and see if your sources can fill in the lyrics.
“Those things are really fun. They're authentic. They show the diversity of the student body. They create an environment of membership and belonging.”
Sam said that empowering creator journalism within the student body requires intention.
“In the same way that you have an editorial strategy across the school calendar, you need a social strategy that that bends toward native storytelling in the space,” she said.
