Shirish Kulkarni on "reflective journalism" - learning from gamers, youth, comedians and novelists how to revivify news reporting
Photo by Chase Clark on Unsplash
Interested to find the work of Shirish Kulkarni, an experienced journalist current working for the Welsh branch of the Bureau of Investigations, and an advocate of something called “reflective journalism”. (We’re happy to feed this into our interest in an Alternative Media System).
Shirish’s 2020 manifesto for change summarises his seven-step approach
I don’t watch the news.
I’m a TV journalist with 25 years’ experience working for all the UK’s major news broadcasters, and I don’t watch the news. That’s a problem for our industry, but mostly it’s a problem with our industry.
When I do, occasionally, watch a news programme I rarely come away feeling I’m better informed, I don’t feel better equipped to engage with civil society and I don’t feel like I understand the forces shaping the world better.
These are the basics of journalism, and we’re manifestly failing to live up to them. What my 25 years in newsrooms has taught me is that the intended audience in the minds of many journalists is just other journalists, not the viewers we’re supposed to be here to serve. That has to change.
If I, a TV journalist, find TV news impossible to stomach, how on earth do we expect anyone else to watch what we do?
That’s why I was so pleased to win funding to research and develop new forms of storytelling from Clwstwr, an innovation programme for the South Wales screen sector. What we’re doing right now is failing on many levels, but there must be a better way of telling our stories.
To help figure that out, and to get different perspectives, I’ve largely spoken to people from outside the industry — games designers, comedians, puppeteers, YouTubers, storytellers of all kinds — to try to get a handle on what it is about stories that helps them really connect and engage.
They’ve come up with lots of unique and interesting things from their own experiences of course, but what’s really struck me is how often they’ve said exactly the same things. I’ve set out some of the common themes below:
Content
We provide a very specific kind of “content”, largely borne of journalistic orthodoxy, but often not very useful in helping our viewers understand the big questions or policy trade-offs that lie at the heart of civic society.
This was something the comedian, Rob Newman, highlighted. For example, the “interactive” content around the Budget often focusses on how much we, as individuals, would be better or worse off. Baldly reeling off stock market figures at the end of bulletins doesn’t tell us anything about the economy. Share prices going up isn’t necessarily good for us.
Our wellbeing isn’t measured only in monetary terms — we may care more about trade-offs between Defence and Education spending, for example. We’re never given that wider context.
On a separate track, crime stories make up a sizeable proportion of TV news coverage, and many organisations even have a Crime Correspondent. But how many stories of individual criminal acts go beyond shock or prurience to actually advance aims of citizenship?
In reality, they create a distorted view of the world which makes it harder to have evidence-based discussions on criminal justice policy. A disproportionate focus on the very worst criminals means our discourse becomes shaped solely around ideas of punishment rather than rehabilitation and a negative spiral is triggered and perpetuated.
When I’ve asked fellow journalists why we do things the way we do, I’m often confronted by blank faces. The unspoken answer is “Because that’s just the way we do it”. Newsrooms often think they’re innovating by trying a “whizzy” new format, or launching on a new platform, but that’s not it.
We urgently need to rethink our journalism from the ground up, asking the fundamental questions: “What is journalism for?” and “What will help users understand the news better?”. As David Caswell from BBC News Labs has put it recently, there’s a difference between ordinary and existential innovation that is not very well understood in broadcast/online news.
As well as the editorial questions, we also need to consider how they intersect with technical and computational change — is the “package” or “article” the best way of putting together useful pieces of information or are there entirely different ways in which we can produce and deliver journalism?
Context
Our news coverage prioritises “Breaking” or at least “moving” events, but often to the detriment of context, analysis or understanding. Philip Pullman, in “Daemon Voices”, his book on storytelling, talks about how he never uses the present tense, because all it offers is a vertical slice through a horizontal life.
Sure, there are obvious “on the day” stories, but we can do better at providing more holistic context — both before and after the “point of crisis”. Climate Change YouTuber Dr Adam Levy (Climate Adam) told me how, as a scientist he can’t understand a new paper meaningfully unless it’s put into a wider context of what’s come before or the work that might follow.
As journalists, we need to better understand this, rather than being obsessed with the easy one-shot hit.
At a very basic level, our journalism (largely by and for journalists) assumes enormous amounts of knowledge that many users just don’t have.
I’m certainly not immune to this — it’s only in the last week that I’ve discovered that LOTS of people don’t know what HS2 is, but now that I know, I can totally understand why they would feel excluded or embarrassed by headlines or stories which give no explanation beyond initials and a number.
We also need to understand how to provide more realistic reflections of the world, by not just focussing on drama or crisis. Journalists based in London likely don’t get just how scared many, many people are about travelling to the capital — worried about terrorism, because they rarely meet those people or have those conversations.
The fear isn’t rational, but clearly it doesn’t spring out of nowhere. Similarly, wouldn’t we be better giving clear information on the risk of getting Coronavirus, rather than majoring on “super-spreaders” for the clicks?
Agency
We know that viewers are withdrawing from the news, often because it makes them feel helpless and hopeless. We need to provide them with a gateway to “Agency”, some way in which they can get involved or feel like they can make a difference in the world — this is something that came up in every single one of my research interviews.
That might just be by showing them stories of individuals or communities who are making the world better, or even providing creative “calls to action”. Emotional processing can’t just take place on twitter or Facebook, we should be showing that there are different approaches and signposting different ways in which users can engage with the world.
We might do this by committing to stories and communities over the long-term, not just the short. Where we see progress, we see hope and where people see journalists genuinely engaging with the arc of a story rather than just the high or low point, we build trust.
As journalists we can’t just rail against mistrust of our work without thinking about why that is and doing something about it.
Tone
The “voice” we’re using is old-fashioned and formulaic and desperately needs to change if we’re going to continue to connect and engage. I watched one of the UK’s flagship news programmes with a group of young people at the Ethnic Minorities and Youth Support Team in Swansea. It was a chastening experience, because there was little in the programme that would ever be of interest or value to them, and everything felt like they were being talked down to.
Changing voice isn’t about doing “yoof” news. I truly believe there’s a way of communicating in a more accessible way which will be better for all viewers.
We also massively talk down to younger viewers. One of the fascinating insights from my conversations with game designer, Sam Barlow, was that his audiences (largely, but not exclusively, young) crave complexity and nuance. Conditioned by the depth of narrative in popular culture (think The Wire, The Sopranos, Game of Thrones) we want that kind of depth in everything we watch or read.
However, journalists are often told users can’t tolerate and don’t want complexity. Both things can’t be right at the same time. We need to think about working with, and for, the kind of complexity that users want.
Emotion
“Emotional Storytelling” is a buzz-phrase in journalism at the moment, and at first sight seems to be a shortcut to engagement: present affecting, personal stories that connect at an emotional level, and the viewers will come running.
However, there are inherent dangers in this approach. Individual stories are, by definition, not necessarily the best way of explaining a complex, general problem. Similarly, because viewers increasingly come to us with pre-formed and stubborn views, that doesn’t mean we should go chasing them by going down the road of opinion and comment — as broadcasters are increasingly doing.
This is short-termist and wildly misguided. When facts are under attack, we shouldn’t abandon them, we should cling to them even more tightly.
Diversity
Innovating in storytelling isn’t just about telling stories differently, it’s about telling different stories. I endured 20 years of eye-rolling in London newsrooms whenever I pitched a story about or from Wales. That’s before you get onto issues of even deeper structural inequality.
A Sky News colleague once told me, “You don’t get racism anymore”. Aside from the personal shock, it’s culturally alarming if journalists — who decide what makes news and what the public hear about the world — think that racism isn’t an issue.
It’s no good “blackwashing” newsrooms with interns who can help you get stories on knife crime. Newsrooms need to really start listening to different voices and reflecting their experiences.
In fiction writing, we’re often told, “write what you know” but that’s equally important in journalism. I’ve done investigations on the far right, and failures in mental health care because they both present a fundamental existential threat to me personally.
I was delighted in the last week to see Wales Live do stories on the history of Welsh / Italian cafes and a dramatic rise in admissions to hospitals for severe allergic reactions. These were produced by two brilliant young journalists — one of whom has Italian heritage and one of whom has severe allergies.
The more diverse our workforce, and the more their perspectives are heard and understood, the more of these great stories we’ll have. It’s worth noting too, that these aren’t niche box-ticking exercises to fill diversity quotas — both stories had dramatic engagement both on and offline.
Narrative
We’re hardwired for stories. At an evolutionary level, we need to hear them to help us learn about how to navigate the world. We love “Once upon a time” tales, but news stories are told in an entirely different way from traditional stories.
The inverted pyramid style tells us almost everything we need to know in the headline. Why then are we surprised when viewers only watch or read our story for 10 seconds? As Jonathan Gottschall, author of “The Storytelling Animal” pointed out to me, this narrative style annihilates our natural sense of curiosity and makes it almost impossible to provide context.
Can we tell stories in a more subtle, nuanced way that guides the viewer in a more natural, compelling and engaging way?
Ultimately, the public service, civic value of what we do has to be at the root of broadcast or mobile news. We need our stories to reflect the world better and help viewers understand the context in which we’re living, to help us all make better decisions. To do that, we need to tell our stories better.
In recent months, Kurkarni has been proposing something called “modular journalism”, which he mocked up as a BBC mobile story on Belarus (see graphic):
To meet diverse needs, we need to create a diversity of stories, whilst also acknowledging that we are working in an environment where the journalism workforce is contracting rather than expanding.
One way of doing that is to create multiple, smaller, functional units of news journalism, instead of singular articles. These modules of journalism can then be combined and recombined in a variety of ways (either manually or automatically) to provide stories which meet the needs of a wider range of users.