Engagement and Relevance

Engagement is an important function of journalism because journalists need to work to engage the readers in their stories. In order to keep the audience engaged, journalists must know the audience and understand that their first loyalty is to the citizens. Communication is important in the engagement process and journalists must communicate with their audience, not merely talk at them. Journalists need to write stories that are interesting and informative that will communicate important information to their audience.

One of the ways to engage audiences is to tell stories, not merely report incidents. Storytelling helps keeps the readers interest when they understand sources as characters and events as a plot. Jeff Jarvis, a writer on Buzz Machine wrote about how storytelling in journalism is declining due to new media. Journalism can now be a status update on facebook, a post on twitter, or a photo rather than stories about individuals. However, Jarvis concludes that if journalists focus only on telling stories, other forms of media are ignored, which can be sources of valuable information to the audience.

Additionally, news must be relevant to the audience in order to keep them engaged. The audience should be able to see themselves sand their community in stories. Often the trend in journalism is to report sensational stories that are interesting, but not necessarily relevant to the audience. The interactive media lab at the University of Florida wrote about sensationalism and the effect sensationalism has on audiences. Although viewers enjoy seeing sensational stories, they are often irrelevant to the audience meaning citizens were not being informed about their communities. The lab suggests that the reason sensationalism is so popular among audiences is because it is easier to understand a love affair or scandal than it is to understand a war or a difficult piece of legislation.

Journalism celebrity is becoming a difficult dilemma for journalists. Often celebrity can get in the way of reporting a story because sources may not be willing to communicate with the celebrity or the journalist may not be able to get relevant information due to their celebrity status. Additionally, celebrity status may keep journalists from being entirely independent. After Anderson Cooper assisted a bleeding Haitian boy following the Haiti earthquake he was accused by other journalists of neglecting his journalism in order to show his celebrity. Jon Snow, a British reporter said of the incident, “I’d call it elongated nightly fundraising. We didn’t learn very much from it. To my mind he isn’t a celebrity reporter — he’s just a celebrity.”