Of Wetbutt, Sports Journalism and the Future of Communications

In Clay Shirky's seminal 2010 essay “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable” (the “unthinkable” being a world without newspapers—something not so unthinkable anymore), he wrote about the time in 1993 when the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain investigated the online piracy of a popular humour column.

They discovered the pirate was a teen in the Midwest who loved the column, and wanted to share them with others online.

Shirky quoted a newspaper editor who said of that experience: “When a 14 year-old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”

That experience reported by Shirky came to mind for me after reading a column by Winnipeg Free Press sports reporter Paul Wiecek.

In the column, Wiecek wrote about how one of the biggest scoops of the 2017 Major League Baseball season (a trade between the Chicago Cubs and White Sox) came not from the traditional media, but from two members of Reddit.

“It was as close to a clean kill as you can get in the reporting business these days,” Wiecek wrote.

“A stunning trade that came out of the blue, with huge implications for both teams, and no one had even a sniff of it until two users on a subreddit devoted to White Sox gossip broke the story.”

Who was this intrepid reporting tandem? Reddit users KatyPerrysBootyHole and Wetbutt23.

As Wiecek wrote: “You can’t make this stuff up.”

When the Cubs President of Baseball Operations was asked a day after the trade whether he had any other big trades up his sleeve, he replied: "Ask Wetbutt."

“Welcome to 2017,” Wiecek wrote, where huge corporations like baseball teams can be scooped by social media users named  KatyPerrysBootyHole and Wetbutt23.

It’s a world, he wrote where “it’s not just that the old rules of sports journalism don’t apply—it’s that there aren’t any rules in the first place.”

While sports has always had "a guy who knows a guy whose brother is the assistant trainer," he added, “the game-changer in recent years was the evolution of the internet and the megaphone that it provided via social media.”

Now, that same guy “has a platform to distribute his information that is at least as powerful as the Fox Sports portal.”

For sports teams, which employ armies of PR and media relations people to control the message, and the media itself, which has seen itself as the main conduit of information about sport and most anything else in the world, this is now become an issue of “trying to control the uncontrollable.”

What does this mean for non-profits?

Unlike major league sports teams and corporations, we don’t have the resources to try to control the message (not that it is even possible these days).

Like the Chicago Cubs and Whitesox, we are just as susceptible to seeing news about our programs broken by people on social media (but hopefully with better monikers).

For international NGOs, this means that programs done far away are not so far away that someone can’t post a photo or post a comment about it—whether that’s a visitor or a local person.

This is a change from the past, when it was impossible for donors and others to learn anything about our work, unless we reported it—the costs, in terms of travel and access on the ground—were just too high for the average person.

But now anyone with a cell phone could share his or her observations with the world about a feeding program or development project—both good, and bad.

For domestic non-profits, this has been an issue for a longer time, if not forever. Someone unhappy with their meal at the homeless mission or service at the shelter could always go to the media.

The challenge always was to get the media’s attention, or hope the media had enough resources to want to tell the story.

Now those constraints are gone. Think the meal at the mission is slop? Up goes a photo and maybe it goes viral.

As Wiecek said, it is “trying to control the uncontrollable.”

When the “uncontrollable” is positive, it works in our favour. When it isn’t, well . . . that’s a problem.

Whatever it is, we are losing—maybe we have already lost—the ability to control the message. (Whether that was entirely a good thing is a debatable point.)

The question then is: How to respond? When the Wetbutts of the world have as much power and reach as the mainstream media (or more among the younger demographic), how do we communicate about our work and the people we serve?

I don’t have all the answers. Over the next few months, together with a colleague, I hope to find some ideas that might work. 

Or maybe just more questions.

What Can the Media Learn From Churches?

What can newsrooms learn from churches?

If there ever was a title that was made for this Faith Page columnist and media junkie, that is it.

It appeared on an article by by Benjamin Mullin on the Poynter Institute earlier this month.

(It also reminded me of my earlier post about what the mainstream media might learn from church publications.)

In the article, Mullin notes that prior to the Internet and social media, the media didn’t need to innovate. Profits were strong and steady, so why change?

Today, however, the traditional business model for legacy media “has been gutted.” 

Advertising has declined precipitously, and circulation, viewers and listeners are decreasing across the board.

In response, the media has been casting around for an answer. The problem is, Mullin says, they keep asking each other how to get out of the fix they’re in. 

Problem is, none of them have an answer, either.

So what if instead of seeking answers in the same old places, the media looked elsewhere—like to churches and other membership organizations?

That’s what New York University professor Jay Rosen says they need to do.

“In the news industry, it's very common for managers, when confronted with something different, to say: ‘Who else is doing this?’” Rosen said. 

“But what they mean by ‘who else is doing this’ is, ‘who else in news?’ And, more specifically, ‘who else in our category?’

“They tend to look horizontally at their own kind.”

What they should do, he suggests, is look to churches, orchestras, activist organizations — to groups that have managed to build and keep devoted, paying followings.

To learn more, Rosen created that the Membership Puzzle Project, a collaboration between the Dutch journalism platform de Correspondent and New York University. 

The aim of the project is to “gather knowledge about the most important question for the future of high quality, public-service journalism: How do we build a sustainable news organization that restores trust in journalism and moves readers to become paying members of an online community?”

Or, to put it another way, the Project wants to find out what makes membership programs successful.

Based on the success of de Correspondent, Rosen believes the membership model holds a lot of promise for news organizations.

And what is he learning so far?

Again, based on what’s happening at de Correspondent, he believes a key to success is for everyone in the newsroom to accept the principle of connecting with members and engaging with people as knowledgeable readers.

He also thinks it is important for the media to customers, but as people who are engaged in the creation of the news.

When people are engaged with journalism and they feel a part of it, a “strong bond” is created between members and journalists, he says.

At de Correspondent, a way this happens is that reporters are required to do weekly emails that explain what they're working on and the knowledge needs they have.

“They ask for help from the membership,” Rosen says. “And so they're constantly drawing information — knowledge, tips, contacts, links — from the members . . . they treat the members not just as financial supporters, but as a knowledge community.

What he’s trying to figure out is how to create “a more muscular notion of membership than simply, ‘Donate money to support this site?’ That has become our headlight observation.”

To come up with is more “muscular” model, Rosen intends to research a variety of membership organizations. Churches are of particular interest.

Reflecting on the Project, part of me wants to warn Rosen—churches aren’t doing as well as he thinks. Like the media, and every other group or organization, they are challenged by a greying and shrinking audience.

But I applaud him for looking beyond the usual places for answers. This is something I think all groups, organizations, faith groups, and the media should do.

What if we got the leaders from all those different groups in a room and invited them to work at the common challenges together? What kind of wisdom might arise?

Who knows—maybe the answer might be found in the place that is least suspected and expected.

And if it can’t be found—if there truly is no new model to replace all the models the Internet broke, to paraphrase Clay Shirky—then at least, at the end of the day, we can say we tried our best.  

Cut the Jargon, and Other Tips for Sharing About International Development with the Public

The way most NGOs speak about the topic a “foreign language” to most people

“The public needs the bigger picture for aid to survive.”

That was the headline for an article on the website of Bond, an organization in Great Britain that works on behalf of international NGOs.

Written in June after that country’s general election, author Melissa Paramasivan said that British NGOs “should consider themselves lucky that their budget battleground wasn’t bloodier.”

Despite concerns that aid might be cut, “most parties pledged to keep the UK’s commitment 0.7% of GDP to aid,” she wrote.

But that doesn’t mean NGOs can rest, she added; aid has become a target for politicians, the media and those who call for more money to be spent at home—where an estimated 1.1 million Britons use food banks.

If NGOs want to preserve aid funding, then they need to help the public understand what the money is spent on—they need to do better communications, Paramasivan stated.

Unlike health, education or transport, “aid is not a service that you see or experience every day in the UK,” she wrote.

“This means communicators should be working even harder to tell us what the budget is being used for and how it relates to the wider work of the government, and the world.”

NGO communicators need to do the same thing as any other marketer: “Convince people that what you’re selling is worth parting money for.”

Currently, she went on, NGOs are doing a very poor job at that.

NGO communications tends to consist of “quarterly reports, riddled with jargon, written for a target audience already working in the sector, generally indigestible to the general public.”

It needs to change, she added, “otherwise the funding will.”

One way to do this is social media. But many NGOs aim their social media messages at specialists, not the generalists—the public, the people the politicians listen to.

“To borrow from business, aid used to be a Business to Business (B2B) model,” she wrote, noting how aid groups used to think all they needed to do was get money from the government and then report to them how they spent it.

But now, she said, “it’s a Business to Consumer model (B2C) driven by the growth of digital and social media. The public has an ever-increasing influence on how money is spent, especially when aid is brought into election campaigns.”

Now aid groups need to not just report back to government how they spent their money, but also to the public who makes that expenditure possible, she says.

So, what’s the solution for those who fear aid cuts? “Cut the jargon and stop underestimating people,” Paramasivan says.

International Development is a complex concept, she acknowledges. But the way most NGOs talk about it, “it’s a foreign language” for most people—and it doesn’t help that most of the discussion takes place in lecture halls and insider meetings, conferences and roundtables.

Communicators, she says, “need to share stories in easy-to-find arenas and with accessible messaging.”

She is quick to note that she isn’t advocating dumbing things down; “people understand a lot more than you think,” she stataes. “They just need to see where it fits into the bigger picture.”

Her suggestions for breaking “the cycle of introverted communications? Get practical. Invest in communications; it’s as important as monitoring and evaluation.”

“Strip back the jargon when pitching to journalists. There is every chance your story fits the global news agenda, don’t package it as ‘development news.’”

“Think about it as a conversation in the pub—you are telling an interesting topical story to a general audience. Leave the jargon for conferences.”

Use Facebook live, hackathons, twitter chat; “there are more and more ways to reach people than press releases.”

And don’t be surprised when your case study gets three likes, she says. Groups need to ask: Why should anyone read this story? How are we leading people to it? What’s their experience when they get there?

Sounds like good advice to me.

For more on this, see my post “When it Comes to International Development, Are We Nuts?” about the one question that NGOs may need to answer  above all others.