Changes and Challenges of the Communications Professional Through Digital Transformation

The role of the journalist is to report information to the public with as little bias or influence as possible. Prior to Digital Transformation, this feat relied largely on distancing yourself from your audience to maintain independence and objectivity. But platforms like social media have completely changed this practice, "despite the association often made between the wide adoption of social media in newsrooms and a discourse around ‘engagement’, it is unclear to what extent journalists themselves think of their social media activities in such terms. The notion of engagement could be potentially problematic for political journalists, whose long-held norms of independence and objectivity were often taken as maintaining a distance from other groups, including the audience" (Xia et al., 2020, p. 557). 

Today, journalists are expected to interact with their audience in these digital spaces in order to build engagement and attract more readership. So how do communications professionals maintain these boundaries of independence and avoid crossing the line of bias? 

A non-partisan journalistic organization Fourth Estate argues that engaged journalism must center around public trust, "in addition to representing the public interest, engaged journalism involves the public as true partners, enabling journalism to become complete, more accurate, more trusted, and more meaningful” (Francher, 2020, para 5). In order to build this trust, the role of the journalist has become somewhat blurred and ambiguous while society is still learning how we can best engage with the news ourselves. 

A 2020 study found that consumers thrust several roles upon communications professionals including that of the opinion leader, advocate, fact-checker, social commentator, journalism promoter, defender of "true" journalism, conversation moderator, community builder, civic guide, and political therapist (Xia et al., pp. 563 – 568). The Digital Revolution has transformed the journalist-audience relationship, as in the digital landscape we see a less journalism-dominant media space.

Engaged journalism, then, describes the ever-evolving relationship between a communications professional and their audience, which can provide a variety of challenges to circumvent. These challenges include: 

• maintaining impartiality in a highly-charged and divisive digital environment
• finding a balance between public and 'public private' information
• competitive publishing pressures not only from other media outlets, but from private citizens now as well
• mistrust of the media

References

Francher, M. (2020, January 8). The ethics of engaged journalism. Fourth Estate. https://www.fourthestate.org/articles/the-ethics-of-engaged-journalism/

Tommy. (2021). Hands hold a mobile phone with an emoji icon - stock illustration [Image]. GettyImages. https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/illustration/hands-hold-a-mobile-phone-with-an-emoji-icon-royalty-free-illustration/1351447985?adppopup=true

Xia, Y., Robinson, S., Zahay, M., & Freelon, D. (2020). The evolving journalistic roles on social media: Exploring “engagement” as relationship-building between journalists and citizens. Journalism Practice, 14(5), 556 – 573. https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2020.1722729