Good advice on how empowered communities can get their story over. But also a vision for a different, CAN-based media system entirely
We are constantly concerned about the possibility of (as our blogging category has it) “a better media”. But sometimes it’s useful to be reminded about what it’s like for those who promote community power to deal with the existing media.
By dwelling on the strategies and compromises you have to make to get through to the average news desk, you can see what an “alternative media system” might offer to localities and communities. It might answer their need for a different relationship between themselves, their deliberations and projects, and the motivating public stories that emerge from these.
To that end, here’s a fascinating and focussed discussion (embedded above) from a recent conference held by the Locality charity, titled Pressing Concerns (blog). They’re also provided a tool-kit, and a series of recommendations from the discussion:
Whenever pitching a story, you must have a clear, succinct message or narrative. You often have a single line to capture the attention of a journalist or editor. Useful techniques suggested for tightening pitches included writing it as a text message or as a tweet.
Ensure you use day-to-day, accessible language. Avoid all industry jargon or the language used at your board meetings.
Focus on building and nurturing relationships with your target journalists, publications and broadcasters. Positive, trusting relationships can increase your chances of getting coverage and also help to ensure the coverage is sensitive to your cause and clients. You should also try to read and understand your target publications.
You have to be willing to put your head above the parapet and be opinionated. Having a strong, outspoken social media presence can position you as a leading commentator on your cause.
Timing is all-important. You can sometimes time news to align with national days etc. Sometimes it is worth sitting on stories until they become relevant news items. This involves making a commitment to staying on top of the news as much as you can.
Does your story pass the “so what” test? To be newsworthy a story must be new, shocking, surprising, or unique. “’Charity does good work’ is not a story”, as Becky Slack put it.
Small, local organisations should look to collaborate with groups from other regions – this can turn a localised issue into a national news item.
It’s important to remember that you can’t control a story once it’s out. Coverage can backfire, and can be damaging to your organisation and clients. Make sure you’re prepared. This ties in closely to ensuring you have positive, trusting relationships with the journalists you work with.
One of the main advantages local charities and community groups have is their ability to provide real, human stories. This is the angle that is most likely to get smaller groups press coverage.
More here. By contrast, we’ll share here some of our recent A/UK thinking about an “alternative media system”, which serves our vision of community agency known as CANs:
Disinformation and misinformation is indeed rife in the media and digital public spheres of Europe. We believe that an adequate response to this crisis has to refresh and reinvent the basic relationship between people, their technological media, and the forms of individual and collective agency this relationship sustains and generates. For this, we need effective prototypes of a new media system - a system that is forged and shaped by strong, self-determining, and awakened communities.
In our role as a platform for political and democratic innovation since March 2017, The Alternative UK has been developing a model for CANs (standing variously for “citizen action networks” or “community agency networks”). These address the serious crisis of democratic legitimacy in UK politics, by eschewing traditional party-political identities and the usual left-right ideological spectrum. Instead, CANs seek common ground in stressed communities around practical and sustainable projects and initiatives, which will emerge from a range of innovative participatory practices.
However, we believe that we need to move beyond using the proprietary, extractive and enclosing tools of “Web 2.0” (Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc) to support the work of CANs. So we are seeking funding to build new socio-technical software structures (or platforms) that serve the vital social and civic work of CANs, as we weave together fragmented and polarised communities across the UK. These will involve novel integrations between deliberative forums, digital publishing and mobile applications.
Crucially, however, this software will be established under a “commoning” ownership structure. Among other features, this will make the “social graph” of users’ interactions available and readable to the users themselves, so they have access to the same collective understanding as, say, Facebook’s advertisers have of their users. We intend the prototyping of these socio-technical models with CAN communities to be the seeds of a more trusted and credible media system for all.
More to come, from us, on this theme. But you can hopefully see the difference - which is broadly the shift described by the phrase, “Don’t bemoan the media - become the media”. And become it in a way which recognises the importance of collaboration, data flows and ownership structures - not just for extractive corporate overlords, but for self-determining communities.