Push Journalism vs. Pull Journalism

TL, DR:

Push journalism is what's happening now:

- The reporter has a hunch about a story

- The reporter checks with a couple of sources and their editor

- The story is published

- Then everyone in the organization PUSHES LIKE HELL to get the story in front of as many people as possible

Pull journalism would be the alternative (better) approach:

- Have a hunch about a problem that people might be experiencing

- Interview those people – perhaps a dozen of them – and listen for signals that your hunch is correct

- Also listen for signals that your hunch is incorrect

- Formulate a hypothesis based on these conversations about what might address the problem

- Go back to those dozen people, if possible, and present your work. Rinse. Repeat.

- Publish it, and then present it to all of the people that you’ve spoken with and ask them, if they believe it’s useful, to let people know.

This is a rather confusing list of grievances. I have no idea why it's being upvoted, except maybe that any broadside against journalism currently finds its audience?

As far as I can tell, the author mostly wants journalists to focus more on what people want to read.

That's rather surprising, considering the criticism usually revolves around journalists writing too much for the market, i. e. the perennial complaints about page view maximisation, buzzfeed's big clickstream leaderboard, too much political horse-race coverage, emotional storytelling, etc etc.

In fact, the article here makes this point almost explicit: "newsrooms aren’t empathizing, prototyping, or testing their work with their audience before they publish." Count me among those quite happy with newsrooms not deciding coverage on the basis on "empathizing and prototyping". Because that would seem the quickest path into the filter bubble.

The article also ignores that most journalism already reaches its audience by what I would consider "pull", in as far as the concept has any meaning: I pay for magazines and a newspaper, and follow some publications and journalists on twitter or RSS.

The author complains about journalists "PUSHES LIKE HELL" (all-caps theirs). I have no idea what that's supposed to mean, really. Posting the article to Twitter and Facebook? The author lists "[..] email blasts, social media campaigns – and, possibly worst of all, paid social media campaigns". The first two seem completely benign, except that they are phrased to suggest some sort of malfeasance. A newsletter you presumedly signed up for is not an "email blast", it's just an email. Nor are social media posts the same as "social media campaigns". As to paid social media posts, I rarely if ever see see any paid advertising for individual stories. Does anybody?

Another complaint is journalists ignoring facts contradicting their pet theories, and not asking sources that would contradict them. That's a complaint seemingly completely unrelated to the article's main thesis. But in any case, it's mostly fantasy. Read any article in, say, Politico, The Atlantic, or the NYT and you will find either a quote from the subject of an article, or a statement such as "XYZ declined to comment / did not reply to a request for comment".

I don't really see the relevance, at least wrt journalism with high stakes like the national security beat:

https://theintercept.com/2014/12/19/senior-cia-officer-cente...

How could that possibly have been published using the "pull" method?

But most importantly, it seems like a red herring. Regardless of push or pull, the significant question for national security reporting is this: does the news gathering organization have enough money and prestige for a legal and PR team large enough to publish against the objections and pressures coming from the government?

If the answer is yes, you've got yourself a functioning national security division. If the answer is no, you're that "knucklehead" just asking to be made an example of, and you (wisely) don't publish the name[1].

I'm sure a lot of other types of news require similarly strong teams to write meaningful news stories against the wishes of other large and powerful organizations.

Edit: "knucklehead" quoting the ACLU lawyer's advice to that independent journalist. I personally admire his work on that story, and he's mentioned in the Intercept piece. :)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeEB6F8fmbY

this is a list of broad criticisms of journalism, not a radical new approach to journalism.

> journalists don't contact enough sources for stories

> journalists ignore sources which contradict their initial assumptions

> journalists don't work closely enough with their sources in writing their story

> journalists tell stories which are not useful to their audience

> journalists should use a grassroots network of interested individuals to spread word about new stories instead of traditional mass media channels of distribution

Author of the post in question here. Thanks for the thoughtful commentary. Always nice to stumble on a conversation about something I've written that I assume nobody has read. :)

Few quick responses to some of the themes that you've all surfaced:

The essay is coming from the context of my own work, which is focused on public-service journalism and local journalism. These types of journalism can result in different types of reporting products, e.g., https://projects.propublica.org/chicago-tickets/ Many of us in the industry consider these types of products "journalism," but they are not necessarily what comes to mind for most.

National security reporting (The Intercept) and national reporting of any kind, are for sure different beasts, and beat to a different drum. National reporting, as pointed out, tends to report what has happened. National security reporting is typically adversarial reporting, and -- as pointed out -- the concept of pull journalism is probably not a fit there.

However, in the context of local and public-service journalism -- where, when it works well, it aims to explain "the climate not the weather" (i.e., _why_ something is happening, not simply that it happened) -- I believe there is an opportunity to do a better job "centering the user" in the conversation about what to report, and -- frankly -- what the reporting product looks like (Is it written? Is it video? Is it a database? Is it a podcast?).

All that to say, the essay simply proposes that there are patterns in journalism that have become cemented over the decades, and that re-thinking these patterns in the context of the changes that have occurred in the way people consume and interact with information are worth exploring for new journalism undertakings.

Three cents! :)

P.S. Thanks for catching the typos!

I don't understand what the author's issue is with what he describes as "push". Sounds like how an investigative journalism project is supposed to play out. Couple of things:

> The reporter has a hunch about a newsworthy story that hasn’t being told yet

A 'hunch' isn't something an editor signs off on when budgets are low as it is. More like "a reporter gets a lead about a newsworthy story".

> Then everyone in the organization PUSHES LIKE HELL to get the story in front of as many people as possible in the hope that it will reach the people who need that information the most

This seems like what the author has an issue with. If it's their story, they have the right to push it across whatever channels they have at their disposal. Today they use paid social. Yesterday, they may have used newsstands, or a syndication agreement with another publication.

What's the big deal?

Coming from a field where "worse is better" has been the motto for a while, I don't think pull journalism seems like something that is going to really work.

> A few months back, I sat down for a coffee with a with a journalist who was starting a new a regional news project.

What about proofread journalists? :-)

There are some fundamental misunderstandings here about what journalism is and how it's produced.

> [H]ere’s how I see push journalism:

The reporter has a hunch about a newsworthy story that hasn’t being told yet

Most journalism doesn't start with a reporter's hunch; it starts because something happened somewhere. President Trump offended somebody; two soldiers were killed in an ambush in Afghanistan; the local factory announced it's laying off 10% of its workforce; the city council voted against filling the pothole on Main Street. Something happened, an editor decided that thing was newsworthy, and now the reporter's task is to tell the reader about it.

Because of this, most reporters don't spend time thinking Big Thoughts about long-term trends. They tell a story of something that happened, and then move on to the next thing that happened while they were writing about the other thing. Hence the saying that "journalism is the first rough draft of history" (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2010/08/on-the-trail-of-...). Explaining long-term trends is what historians do. Journalists do something different; they tell people what happened.

Most of the other misunderstandings in the piece fall out from this one. Journalists don't look for solutions to problems, they don't even look for problems; they look for things that happened. (Which is why problems like "the President offended somebody" get more coverage than problems like "in twenty years climate change will drown us all" -- the President's offense is something that happened, the creeping, inexorable apocalypse is something that hasn't happened yet.) Journalists have neither the time nor the need to consult twelve sources for every story; they're not looking to determine the ideal response to some problem, they're just looking to tell people about something that happened, and you only need two or three independent confirmations that something happened to be able to say with reasonable certainty that it did in fact happen. And most journalists aren't "PUSH[ING] LIKE HELL to get the story in front of as many people as possible"; when they've told the story of one thing that happened, they move on to the next one. Things are always happening, after all.

None of which is to say that this process is necessarily ideal, of course. (Few things in the world are.) Just that, if you want to reform journalism, you have to start with a firm grounding in what journalism is. And journalism is not a quest for product-market fit, or a flavor of historiography, or an attempt to figure out What It All Means. Journalism is telling people about things that happened, and the further you get from that elemental task, the less what you're doing can be considered journalism.

I don't know much about journalism but I follow a lot of journalists on Twitter. (And I play a doctor on TV). Aside from coverage of Donald Trump, where in the past he has basically acted as the assignment editor for all of mainstream media -- I don't think this characterization of journalism is correct. For instance, the fact that the title of 'assignment editor' exists helps to dispel the effectiveness of "hunch" based reporting.

A lot of the high quality journalism I'm attracted to (NYT, This American Life, etc.) seems to be more "pull" than "push"... journalism through other media (namely TV and video) seems to be more oriented towards PUSH, while print, especially from older outlets (TIME, NYT, WaPo) seems more PULL.