The four essential functions of news
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What's the point of the news?
For the last few centuries, longer even, this has been a pretty easy question to answer. Travel used to be expensive and dangerous, and basic education was a privilege almost everywhere. The things that could show up at your door unannounced unless a reliable messenger got there first included epidemics, taxes, and wars. The solutions to this problem were town criers who could shout for all to hear. Notices tacked to temple or tavern walls came next. Even though not everyone could read them, the information was passed along. Eventually printed pamphlets would travel from hand to hand. The point of this early news was simple: to tell people what was going on. The individual and social upside of being better informed was huge; it was easier to take part in unfolding events more quickly and fully.
It wasn't perfect. Early news wasn't professionalized and was very political. Regimes, trade groups, churches, political parties, and the wealthy paid for or produced pamphlets and then newspapers. The point and power of the news was to inform but also to persuade. The responsibility of disentangling the information from the agenda was up to the people getting news on everything from the best crops to plant to the dangers of witches to the benefits of colonialism.
When technology like bigger printing presses, then radio, and then television made reaching larger audiences possible, advertisers piggybacked on that popularity, and news had a moment in the sun as a profitable business and influence powerhouse. The mechanics of producing news gained widespread agreement—to gather, verify, and distribute information—and the idea of what it meant to inform people morphed from outright persuasion to a softer consensus building. Publishers and then editors relished their role of deciding what mattered enough to be publicly documented, explained, or investigated. In deciding what was “news,” these organizations also made decisions about what didn't much matter. Ida B. Wells, for example, had to start her own paper so her investigations into the prevalence of and false pretexts for lynchings would be reliably published.
Information is at its most accessible, participatory, curated, and commodified. For the news to inform, in this environment, isn't very meaningful. The attempt at agenda-setting still happens, but now rarely lands. For most people, news is now less of a service than it has ever been. In the United States and around the world, governments and corporations have shown just how willing they are to abuse their power and weaponize information. They fear little accountability for causing even the most serious of harms.
Reporters and news organizations that care about serving the public good need to reimagine and redefine their purpose in response to this information and political environment. How can we gather, verify, and distribute information more likely to have a real-world impact on an individual or within a community?
The following essential functions of news are offered as a starting point for increasing the value of news for all of us. When news producers ask themselves, explicitly, the function they hope their reporting can have in the real world, they can make their utility more likely without falling prey to agenda setting or becoming invested in the outcomes of certain stories. If we ask ourselves what we are hoping to accomplish through publishing news, it becomes harder to believe individual newsrooms can fulfill this promise alone. The public can and should have a meaningful role in each of these functions. Funders and policy initiatives also have an enormous role to play in making higher-value news designed to fulfill these functions more or less possible.
Record creation
Technology has distributed this ability to the broader public, but journalists using their reporting to create an accurate, verified, and accessible record of significant events and experiences is still often critical. For example, videos of Minneapolis resident Renee Good being shot and killed by a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent were ubiquitous on social media almost instantly and broadcast on news stations almost as quickly. It took 8 more days for the New York Times to publish an exhaustive video analysis of the shooting. That reporting created a clearer and more accurate record and made it more difficult for the federal government to push a false narrative about Good.
The COVID-19 pandemic was thoroughly documented and reported, but a more complete record and meaning-making for New Yorkers was made possible by projects like The City's obituary and remembrance project.
A record that verifies community experience can increase accountability. The Wage Theft Monitor, maintained by Documented New York and originally built with help from ProPublica, responded to widespread rumors of worker exploitation. It compiles proven wage theft claims into a monitoring tool prospective workers can use to evaluate employers.
Residents need not only to benefit from a robust public record; they can create and formalize it. City Bureau’s Documenters program is a collaborative record creation effort between newsrooms, community organizations, and trained members of the community with a proven track record of increasing civic participation and health.
Meeting information needs
It might be tempting to think news meets information needs by its very nature, but it does not. An information need is the space between what one needs to know to meet their challenges and verified, understandable, and actionable information that could help them. Information needs can be acute and prevalent even now, when information is abundant and so much of it is easily accessible.
Newsrooms that excel at meeting information needs engage first in rigorous assessment of where residents say resources, accountability, or both are lacking, using everything from listening to surveys to structured listening and data analysis to full ecosystem scans to make it more likely that needs don't just inform coverage but drive it. The news product is also likely to be responsive to community preferences and can range from short newsletters to text messages or WhatsApp groups to guides or traditional stories. Many newsrooms perform this essential function incredibly well during a natural disaster, but fewer maintain this level of responsiveness and service as a baseline.
Accountability reporting
There are few entities better equipped to use information to increase accountability than news organizations. The impact and utility of this reporting can have an impact on individuals, but typically it is more widely felt. Accountability reporting is resource intensive, but smaller newsrooms often prioritize it anyway. Examples are everywhere, from MLK50 and ProPublica reporting on a local hospital suing low-income residents into bankruptcy. A story with 11 bylines from newsrooms across Chicago investigated federal agents use of nonlethal chemical weapons against protesters, in violation of a court order. And 404 Media is a small and specialized newsroom that nevertheless succeeds in relentless watchdogging of tech companies with sophisticated and thorough reporting on surveillance and digital safety.
Only a few news organizations are lucky enough to have sizable enough audiences to create accountability through publishing alone. Newsrooms have begun going further to help create accountability, while often stopping short of activism.
The same news organizations in Chicago that collaborated to cover ICE tactics sued the federal government for First Amendment violations because of their use of force against protesters and journalists. The organizations were successful in getting an injunction and dropped the lawsuit when agents left the city. A collaboration between reporters, Detroit Documenters and lawyers has done everything from phone banks to helping residents file complicated legal motions to ensure the county treasurer finally pays residents money owed to them because of illegal tax foreclosures. Both The Markup and 404 Media make tools their readers can use to monitor and improve their own digital security.
Responding to local needs
This function is both responsive and service-oriented. The needs contemplated here are material and critical rather than intellectual, and local news is typically in a better position to meet them.
Many news organizations are practiced at shifting to prioritize emerging local needs in times of crisis. L.A. Taco has covered immigration policy and enforcement for years alongside its award-winning food writing. Newsrooms across the country pivoted as a group to help people navigate COVID-19 and the challenges it brought to accessing everything from unemployment checks to food banks. Some newsrooms even began to facilitate mutual aid, and newsrooms like the Jersey Bee still carry on that service.
Coverage is not the only way newsrooms can respond to local needs. Even the most traditional of news organizations amplify stories of people in need, knowing this amplification may help those people gain resources. The New York Times has raised money for local nonprofits through its Communities Fund for more than a century. As members of a community, newsrooms often set up food drives, toy drives, and even blood drives in their offices. Most newsrooms have only begun to tap the potential of what products a more service-oriented and responsive newsroom could offer.
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Each of these functions needs to be attended to for a community to be well-informed. But one newsroom might not be able to fulfill all these functions, nor do they have to be limited by them. These are the essential functions of news, not the only ones.