Watching the Watchdogs: The News Media’s Role in Canadian Politics

Wagner, Angelia

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-49240-3_17

Cited by 12 publications

References 31 publications

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How Journalists Engage

Robinson

2023

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How Journalists Engage: A Theory of Trust Building, Identity, and Care explores the ways journalists of different identities enact trusting relationships with their audiences according to divergent sets of principles. Drawing from case studies, community work, surveys, interviews, and focus groups, this book documents the now established “built environment” powered with engagement journalism that represents the first major paradigm shift of the press’s core values in more than a century. A proliferation of media-trust programs, grants, foundations, companies, collaborations, networks, and money demands that journalists take on four new roles—relationship builder, content collaborator, community conversation facilitator, and professional network builder—and be fluent in eight skill sets: radical transparency, power dynamic accounting, mediation, reciprocity, media literacies, community offline work, needs/assets/solution analyses, and collaborative production. These are in addition to the normative skills related to being a watchdog and storyteller. This trust-building theory demands journalism be enacted with an identity-aware care through listening and learning. This identity-aware ethic of care—a theory that comes from developmental psychology and is nurtured in gender and women’s studies—prioritizes communities over the propping up of problematic institutions that news media have traditionally protected in the name of objectivity. Instead, this theory asks journalists to acknowledge and incorporate their own identities—especially the privileges, biases, and marginalization attached to them—and those of their communities, resulting in a more intentional moral voice focused on justice and equity so that all news participants can feel cared for within information exchange about public affairs.

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