From audience to community: An alternative future for watchdog journalism

Editor’s note: we are publishing a guest column by Mark Lee Hunter, an author, scholar, and investigative journalist. A version of this piece was delivered as a keynote speech at Lithuania’s Investigative Journalism Festival organised by Lithuanian public broadcaster LRT and Lithuanian Journalism Centre. Opinions expressed in the “Opinion” section are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Fix.

There were approximately 100 definitions of community the last time I looked, and the only thing they had in common was that they referred to human beings. “Ah,” commented a colleague. “So we leave chimpanzees out?” For our purposes today, yes. Chimpanzees are beautiful animals, but they do not form communities that support independent media. Humans do. I will propose to you that this is the core of our current work – not simply or merely building audiences, but instead building communities around and with us. 

What kind of community do I mean, precisely? And how do we fit into it?

The Stakeholder Media Project (SMP), which I co-founded at INSEAD with Luk Van Wassenhove and Maria Besiou, argued that so far as media are concerned, a community may be formed through practice or interest. It’s a place, physical or emotional, where people care about the same things, or are doing the same things. Their media – because everyone owns some kind of media today – serve those values and interests. They exist to promote the community (and its influence), to protect its values and interests, and to prevail over adversaries. 

We can call media that embrace this model “community-powered journalism”, as Kevin J. Davis and I wrote, or  “stakeholder-driven media” (SDM, as opposed to MSM, “mainstream media”). In business scholarship, where the nature of stakeholders came to salience through Ed Freeman, a stakeholder is someone who can affect or is affected by an organization. We are affected by corporations, oligarchs, political leaders, as well as by our neighbors, who collectively make up a place. We can also affect them, as journalists and actors of a community. Like all journalism, this emerging game is about power. Also like mainstream journalism, a lone voice is more easily lost. Whether or not we wish to take sides, we will need someone on our side.    

If you wonder what SDM look like, think of Reddit, where a multitude of communities of interest co-exist

Or for that matter, the reports of financial analysts, some of whom have loyal investor followings.  Or the thriving little industry of “horror stories” websites and Reddit groups about AirBnB, sponsored in some cases by the company’s competitors. Or the OCCRP, a community of journalists and civil society organizations, like Transparency International, that oppose oligarchy and impunity. 

Greenpeace is in a class of their own. They declared in 1995 that Greenpeace would henceforth be a media organization as well as an activist force. Thirty years later, Greenpeace is a significant online and print publisher of environmental news and investigations (disclosure: I collaborated with them on a project in 2017). Their worldwide community includes three million donating members, and 70 million social media followers. The project I did with them was spurned by French MSM, for whom Greenpeace is a quasi-enemy of the State, but that didn’t matter, because 150,000 French downloaded it, and networks of online environmental outlets promoted it. That was a so-called natural experiment – could you generate impact through SDM, even if MSM ignore you? Yes. 

Can you generate impact without SDM? Despite the legend of Watergate, the short answer is no. That question was first and best studied by David L. Protess et al. in their landmark book, The Journalism of Outrage (1991). They found that results follow from coalitions between journalists and civil society actors. Anton Harber, whose journalism contributed mightily to the fall of Apartheid, said that the movement’s success depended on a coalition of journalists, civil society and lawyers.  We are still learning about collaboration – it’s been little more than a decade since trans-border projects became a force – and working with people besides journalists is much of what we have to learn. 

I ran another experiment in 2023, when I sought to contribute to the reform of France’s laws on assisted dying (it’s mostly illegal, and I want it to be legal). From the start of that project, I watched as my articles were turned down by MSM. Instead, they were published by right-to-die groups and Mediapart’s blog pages, where they found a community. The impact went beyond the community. The opposition to reform promoted lies, and we – a team I recruited – made it more difficult to keep repeating one of them.  Just one lie, but it was pretty big, and I’m proud we took it out of circulation, with zero support from MSM. We’re going after some others now. 

Since I’ve opened the can of misinformation, let’s eat the contents. We are on the front lines of a war, in which personal or political gain is captured through lying. I thank my brother Richard Hunter, who’s writing a book on the subject, for this insight: We are fighting as individuals, and the other side, led by states and oligarchs, has gathered armies – of bots, the online equivalent of drones; and of poorly-paid, obedient liars. Misinformation is a low-risk, low-cost, high profit industry, enabled and concealed by online platforms whose view of privacy favors theirs over yours. 

As this is occurring, part of our competition is trying to crowd out the community that cares about truth by “flooding the space with shit”, in Steve Bannon’s memorable phrase. I’m speaking of the stuff that Vincent Bolloré produces in France, “news” that is biased, unreliable and unashamed; I could also cite the online “influencers” for whom avarice equals ambition. The degradation of their brands spills onto us: journalists can’t be trusted! Why, they sold you the Iraq War, says Alex Jones of Infowars, and he’s right enough. (They also sold you Brexit, but Jones leaves that aside, because he sells Nigel Farage.) They will lie to their audiences (as Fox did concerning Dominion Voting Systems, which it falsely accused of faking election results).  

The stain isn’t just on them: It’s on all journalists, because people conclude that this is what journalists do. We can give up the illusion that anyone is entitled to our respect the moment they declare themselves to be a journalist. I cannot sit to dinner with someone who does what RT does.  

We can’t control what they do, or what they’re paid to do. We can certainly market ourselves more convincingly as a valuable alternative to people who haven’t entered their space or want to leave it, by demonstrating the material value of our work. Every time we tell someone the truth in a way that empowers them, that value is created. 

Ah, but who will recognize it? This is how I see things: Trust, the element that enables someone to act on what we show them, is no longer solely or mainly a matter of professional status or ethics; too many people don’t believe or trust journalists, as the Reuters Institute has well documented. Instead, I propose that trust is a product and function of the community. 

This is blindingly evident from the community of lies. If Donald Trump or one of his vile acolytes says something revolting, or simply revoltingly false, it is applauded by their community.  When we dissect their lies, they accuse us of fake news, and their community believes them, not us. 

We can learn from that dynamic, though not, alas, how to do journalism. We can share the values, knowledge, opportunities, dreams and fears of our people. We can gather and address our own communities. We can focus first on the people who care about what we care about. The others can wait. This is marketing 101: It’s easier to sell to a client who is looking for what you are selling than to persuade a skeptical stranger that you’re what they need.

We will be accused of preaching to the choir, of convincing the convinced, or living in a silo or a bunker. On the contrary: We are living for and within a community that needs our promotion, our protection, and our success in prevailing for them. The community may be large or small, and no matter. What matters is that they see that we are sharing their risks, that we have skin in the game beyond trying to save our paychecks.  

When you begin to view media in this way – as organizations that provide vital services to a community of practice or interest – you give up certain illusions

One is that everyone cares about what we do. They don’t. From a community standpoint, we are focused first and most on the people who do care. Another is that people will naturally find us if we deliver the right content. That may help, but the fact is that they won’t find us on their own, most of the time. Instead, we must find our communities, or build them. 

And we have to give up another illusion: A neutral approach to issues and personalities will not succeed with many communities of interest.  The objectivity, or reality, of facts continues to matter to many (not all) communities, and those are the ones we want to join. With rare exceptions, however, the idea of “objectivity” as the last neutral force in the room is no longer sufficient to sustain a credible offer. What the communities we seek want – whether it is the community of pharmaceutical investors or the front porches down the road – is not merely an objective chronicle of their troubles, and certainly not fantasies or lies that grow those troubles. (If that’s their inclination, they’ll find communities that resemble themselves.) 

The communities we serve want to feel protected, served, recognized, and informed in a way that advances their interests

Their members already know what matters, and they’ve come to us to help figure out what to do about it. The community wants actionable information that helps make things better, for them and those they care about. They do not expect us to be neutral about what we believe and desire. They expect us to be transparent — “this is what we want, this is how we will get it”. 

A media that serves these interests can be profitable for its owners and employees, and valuable to its community. Its scale will be determined by the size of that community. At the top end of the scale, Bloomberg began as a data service for financial professionals; the news was icing on the cake, but it did add value and enable expansion to other customers. 

Bloomberg joined an existing community, and Greenpeace built one. These are the only two workable strategies we saw at the Stakeholder Media Project, and I haven’t seen more since before the pandemic. Certainly, you can’t change an existing community, and it’s very hard to capture one (as Murdoch learned long ago with MySpace, and as Elon Musk is now learning with “the social network formerly known as Twitter”). Even Reddit faltered when its editors went on strike, because they were key actors in the user communities they served.  

Stakeholder-driven journalism is not the same vocation as the press that we learned about in journalism school, and which has been in secular decline for decades, as an employer, a trusted voice, and an economic proposition. For a still-growing sector of the heritage or mainstream media, the current business model is to sell to an oligarch and do as he (nearly all are men) directs.  

We just saw this model at work at the Washington Post, whose publisher, Will Lewis, a man formerly employed to do the bidding of Rupert Murdoch, did the bidding of owner Jeff Bezos and killed the newspaper’s forthcoming endorsement of Kamala Harris. The consequences for the Post have been immediate – 250,000 cancelled subscriptions (10 percent of the subscriber base), tens of thousands of outraged letters and comments (I wrote one myself) on Lewis’s justification for refusing this responsibility. He cites the Post’s stalwart support of “freedom in all its forms.” How thoughtful for Ukraine, who awaited the result of that election with anguish. 

And we thereby see how the audience-facing model – the model that sees its public as a more or less heterogenous crowd of demographics, without taking communities into account – is failing. In recent years the Post incarnated the high-level resistance to Trumpism, the lantern against a terrible fate: “Democracy dies in darkness.” They did a good job of it.  A community of readers grew within that offering. Now the community has been betrayed. At this writing, 250,000 Post subscribers, one-tenth of the total, have cancelled. They will go somewhere else – they have used the Post’s platform to discuss where. If they find a more trustworthy leader of their community elsewhere, they will stay.  It’s a stunning self-inflicted wound.

That entails other losses. The fundamental return on investment in oligarch media is to present one’s views, more or less subtly, in order to direct public opinion and channel debates, or to profit from the power. (In Georgia and Moldova, it is to take and hold the power on behalf of Russia.) If the community – one part of a larger audience, in this case – moves away, all that return is threatened.  

You can’t betray your core community and expect to stay in business, unless Sugar Daddy has deep pockets. On the other hand, if you stand with the community in a crisis, they will not let you disappear. If you do something to make their lives better, they will want you to be there to do it again.  This isn’t a pious wish. I’ve seen it happen at a number of media – the Kyiv Independent and The Fix are great recent examples – that have invested in serving readers and communities concerned by Ukraine, for the former, and independent media professionals for the latter. 

Numerous independent media are developing a community-based model, though not always consciously. Some, like ClimateIntegrity.org, are very conscious of it. They exist to provide high-level data and analysis to prosecutors and lawyers who are considering whether and how to sue Big Oil. Their monthly audience is under 30,000, but their audience happens to be the people who have a direct and urgent need for Climate Integrity’s product. (Influence is not the same as popularity; we will have to change what we count if we’re focused on impact.)

Who is your community? What do they need to know? Can you provide it? 

The answer to the first question – repeat – is not “everyone”, despite the fact that we create public records.  It’s “whoever has a personal or professional interest in what we’re doing.” That’s the core. If we don’t reach them, we will not survive.

The answer to the second question – what do they need to know? – is not, “what we think they should know”.  That’s been the answer for decades, either from arrogance, or in the name of “giving a voice to the voiceless” (in current parlance, “the vulnerable” – a word I dislike, because it implies helplessness, and our job is to awaken strength). There’s a better answer: We can listen more closely to the voices people already possess. (Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson of the Solutions Journalism Network calls this “elder” and “local” knowledge.) 

Meanwhile, communities need watchdogs, and if we can’t bark, we’re useless

That’s part of protecting the community. There’s also no law that we can’t surprise our communities with startling or amusing information, unless it’s patently false, which reminds people that we’re like all those other journalists who lie for a living. 

We can also help build the futures they want; if they don’t want the same future that we do, and we can’t persuade them to rethink, it’s time to find another community. If we’re doing our work of protection, promotion and prevailing well, someone else will need us. These are skills we can carry forward, luckily, because we are obliged to learn them.

One example of what we’ll learn: What is it like to investigate your own community? I’ve done it more than once, and I can’t say it was fun. My friend Hugh Wheelan, who co-founded Responsible Investor – yes, investors have communities too – found himself in an unpleasant conflict with a prominent member of the community who posed a danger to it. It wasn’t fun for Hugh either, and he and his media survived by reporting the story fully.  He made an enemy, and he made a lot more friends.  

You may not care for investors, responsible or not, but that’s irrelevant here. What matters is that an independent media must erase the notion that our work as journalists has nothing to do with the business side of their enterprise.  Why do so many journalists still imagine that they are not in business? Ah, yes: Because all sorts of compromises against nature and ethics occur regularly, or might, on the other side of the Chinese wall.  (I spent two years selling ads at the start of my career).  It’s nonetheless absurd, for a start, not to invite our business staff to co-develop projects that add demonstrable value for the community and show us how to capture some of that value for our media.  

In Korea, Yongjin Kim, the founder of Newstapa, which made a President fall and is now under state pressure, built his enterprise on a community of 40,000. In 2023, I heard his plans for a complete industry infrastructure, based on launching communities, schools, and media aimed at providing reliable truth. There are similar ideas in what the Kyiv Independent is doing. Beyond the details, there is transparent ambition, one I’d call noble – to renew journalism from the ground up, through a community of believers and actors. I haven’t heard a better idea yet. 

This is what is emerging around us, this is the fight we are going to win.

Source of the cover photo: Kaleb Nimz via Unsplash

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