When journalists fall behind the culture that the internet demands

I love country music. And in the country music community, Hank Williams is widely considered to be the father of the genre.

There’s just one little explosive qualifier to this belief. Hank Williams learned everything he knew about music from a black man in his town named Rufus “Tee-Tot” Payne. Payne taught Hank to play the guitar while simultaneously exposing him to the blues and other African American musical influences. Hank Williams then fused these two styles, started playing it on the radio, and got famous. In the 1930s rural south, white people tended to stick to hillbilly folk music. Had it not been for Rufus Payne, country music likely wouldn’t have happened.

We have very few recordings of Payne and he’s mostly been erased from history. We really wouldn’t even know about his impact if it weren’t for an interview with Hank where he credited him with teaching him everything he knows.

The internet exists now and the culture of linking and embedding makes it less likely that people who have something to say or offer to our culture go without credit. But under the equalizing force of the internet, “credit” is no longer adequate. People who wish to speak for or about others in an official capacity are now being asked to come to the table as full-flesh individuals who earn the trust of those they wish to report on. And by and large, journalists are abdicating this request.

Our journalism class had a speaker this week who spoke about the importance of history when seeking to understand and engage with communities. I can’t help but think of the long history of white people taking the things that black people created and turning them into their own with little more than a passing reference to the original influence — and how this history informs the relationship between white journalists and online communities like #BlackTwitter, or the twitter subcommittee where black users discuss issues of importance to them and their communities. In a study of #BlackTwitter, users reported being resentful of the way journalists will embed tweets in their pieces without asking permission, thus exposing them to potential harassment.

Here’s one place we see trust-building clash with the professional notion that the journalist has a right to anything that occurs in the public domain. What journalists end up doing under the cover of this technical legality is burning trust for the rest of us and thereby making the very communities that need more attention from the public rightfully reluctant to engage further. This notion is supported by the model of journalism in which journalists parachute in, report a story, and then leave — thus not needing to worry, except maybe privately on the side, about the impacts of their reporting on the people they reported on.

In the same study, users also reported wanting journalists to engage as themselves, like — you know — people, in a two-way conversation with the community, rather than simply watching the conversations as anonymous blobs — effectively, what they said was, surveilling them.

Here, again, we see trust-building clash with another core professional journalistic tenet: being a ‘fly on the wall’. Journalists are routinely asked to leave themselves out of it. To take their emotions out of it. To have the view from everywhere and nowhere specific. My own personal theory about why journalists don’t engage subcommunities to the fullest extent is that they reach this edge, don’t want to or don’t feel it right to come to their “sources” in this way, and settle for merely embedding tweets and creeping on conversations instead.

Something incredibly obvious that I think is only dawning on journalism now is that “sources” are also readers. And our industry’s mechanical, detached, and unaccountable relationship to “sources” creates “people” who “don’t trust the media”. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that trust for the media is burning at the same time in history that anyone can be heard without our permission.

In the face of evidence like this study, journalists need to ask themselves whether this professional code is a ship they’re willing to go down on.