I’ve had some interesting back-and-forths with folks online about what journalism is or what journalists should be doing. For some people, if we’re not engaging every day in watchdog journalism that demonstrates a seriousness to the craft, we’re failing.
For others, it’s about how to get out of a rut where we seem to be telling the same story to an increasingly disinterested audience. Important content gets lost among the random string of click-bait and cat TikToks, they argued, because people don’t “get it” when it comes to the value of news.
For me, everything goes back to the basic rules of audience-centricity and storytelling. A great story will grab and hold readers when it is told well by skilled craftspeople in media.
When it comes to audience-centricity, it comes back to answering two questions:
- What happened?
- Why should I (as the reader) care?
The problem with professors and journalists in that regard is that we sometimes fail to connect on these basic elements, something that came through to me in a story I recently retold.
As part of my job at UW-Oshkosh, I get to be a Team Fellow for our volleyball team. The gig is great: I volunteer to serve as a homework helper, a college-range life coach and basically an ear for anything the athletes feel they need that they can’t get from the other resources available to them on campus. Some times, like last week, I end up helping out by talking to recruits they bring around, which is where this story kind of starts.
I know almost nothing about volleyball, even after seven years of trying, but the kid who was being recruited was a libero, so I told the kid the one story about a libero that I knew.
When Zoe was in grade school, she wanted to play volleyball. The sport, generally speaking, is dominated by giants who play above the net on offense and defense, so my lilliputian child was going to be at a disadvantage, something she found completely deflating.
Around that time, I took her to a UWO game and she got to watch Rachel Gardner, the team’s fireplug of a libero. She was having an amazing game, throwing her body all over the place with reckless abandon.
Rachel Gardner, my kid’s volleyball hero.
“Do you see Rachel out there?” I asked Zoe.
“Yes,” Zoe said. “She’s the BEST PLAYER on the court!”
“What else?”
“She’s small like me!”
After the game, the team did an autograph and meet-and-greet session with the fans. I’d run into Rachel earlier that week and explained the whole “Zoe is short” situation and told her how much she’d love a picture after the game. Rachel said she’d love to.
When Rachel saw us in line, she asked, “Are you Zoe? Come on around in back here!”
Rachel gave her a big hug, we took a couple pictures and we essentially made my kid smile for a week.
Later that month, my mom, Amy and Zoe went to the American Writers Museum in Chicago to hear Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor do a reading of her book and sign copies of her children’s book for kids. Only children were allowed to meet the justice and get pictures, which Zoe was more than happy to do. It was an amazing night for everyone involved.
An impressive resume, no doubt, but did she average more than 5 digs per set her senior year?
Fast forward to the next holiday gathering of our family where we were all talking about the cool things we’d gotten to do over the past year. I then told Zoe, “Why don’t you tell everyone about the really cool experience you had recently?”
“Yeah!” she said. “I got to meet RACHEL GARDNER! She’s a libero on the volleyball team, and she’s small like me and she’s -”
I interrupted, “Um… I meant the time you and nana and mama went to Chicago for that reading…”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “There was a judge lady who was nice. Anyway, Rachel gave me a hug and we took a picture…” And on and on it went.
In thinking about it from an adult’s perspective, meeting one of the nine people responsible for our nation’s highest legal opinions would have been an epic moment. Even more, Justice Sotomayor was the first Latina appointed to the Supreme Court and only the third woman to ever hold a spot on it.
To my kid, she was just a “nice judge lady.” Now, on the other hand, Rachel Gardner was something to truly behold: A small, tough, amazing student athlete who gave Zoe something to which she could aspire. In short (sorry for the pun), it was so much easier for her to grasp the “what happened” (I met Rachel Gardner, volleyball superstar) and why it mattered (She’s doing something I care about in a way that I can’t right now, but I could if I worked hard enough).
In conceptualizing audience-centricity through the eyes of a child, you learn to figure out that what WE as journalists think is SUPPOSED to be important isn’t always what IS important to the audience we serve. Learning to meet the audience where it lives is crucial in making sure we connect with the readers and viewers in a relevant and useful way.
Even more, it puts a larger impetus on us as media professionals to better explain the answer to that second question. I don’t know if telling Zoe everything this incredible woman did in terms of shattering glass ceilings and shaping juris prudence would have helped the justice measure up to a libero in her eyes. That said, I think it might have helped her think about Sonia Sotomayor as a bit more than a “nice judge lady.”
Even if she couldn’t outdo Rachel Gardner.