In 2024, Inclusive Journalism Cymru was invited to collaborate with the Public Interest News Foundation, researchers from Warwick University, and a group of journalism pioneers and innovators, on a project to develop a framework and toolkit for Co-Creational News Media.
In essence, co-creational journalism seeks to deeply involve citizens in the production and distribution of information. We believe working and learning alongside people and communities is essential to a healthy and sustainable future for journalism.
Our founder, Shirish Kulkarni, was invited to speak at the launch of the Toolkit, and below is a lightly edited version of his reflections.
In a way, it’s strange that we talk about “co-creational” journalism as something novel or unusual. I’d argue that all journalism is co-creational. If I interview someone or tell their story, that work has been co-created with them and it’s strange for me to claim “ownership” of that work. Perhaps one reason we do is because journalists (including me!) have egos and want to win awards. I often think if we took the ego out of journalism we’d solve most of its problems.
But when I was looking through the toolkit and thinking about where co-creational journalism sits in our current understanding of the news ecosystem, I was thinking about the huge paradox in the fact that co-creating journalism would be absolute anathema to so many of the mainstream, legacy, or what I like to call status quo journalism organisations who proudly claim (without much evidence I would point out) to be “trusted”.
I’ve worked in and with those status quo organisations for 30 years now, and it’s very clear to me that there are at least three foundational principles of their journalism that are just fundamentally flawed, and are creating the crisis in journalism.
Firstly there is the reliance on the discredited notion of “objectivity” which has never existed, but suits those with power very well. Of course many of those people with power are exactly the people who own or run newsrooms or have influence over them.
"I’d argue that all journalism is co-creational. If I interview someone or tell their story, that work has been co-created with them and it’s strange for me to claim “ownership” of that work."
Writer
Secondly, we may not admit it, but at the centre of the “traditional” model of journalism is a belief that we know better than the people we are supposed to be serving, what it is they need to know and how they should know it. If they reject our analysis and choose not to consume our products, then we call that “news avoidance” as if it’s their mistake rather than ours.
A belief that the customer is always wrong is ONE way to run a business I guess, but we can see how well that’s going.
And thirdly, there’s a kind of guiding principle in journalism that our role is to help deliver simplicity and certainty. The problem is, that both of those are the precise OPPOSITE of the way the world actually works. Our lives, our communities, our systems are complex and uncertain, and rather than attempting to manufacture simplicity and certainty, we need to be able to hold the uncertainty and lean into the complexity.
Taken together, I think we can summarise the journalism industry’s approach to any kind of challenge as wanting to find the easy answers, not necessarily the right ones.
You can see it in the headlong, and largely uncritical, rush into AI that so many journalism organisations are on. That’s too rarely for the benefit of their users, or as I prefer to call them, citizens. There is not a single citizen saying, you know what I really want – MORE, CHEAPER, content. Indeed, in a context where trust is the existential challenge facing journalism, all the evidence (including from the recent Reuters Institute Digital News Report) points to the fact that increasing use of AI in journalism is creating MORE distrust. It’s as if every strategy of the status quo industry is designed to make things worse.
So that’s all to say that, for me, co-creating journalism is not just a soft, fluffy, nice to have. It’s actually the ONLY future for journalism. Right now, writing a 600 word inverted pyramid news article is not a marketable skill. In the coming world defined by machines, the only currency we’ll have, the only role for journalism, will be in genuine human connection.
That’s the only way you build trust, by being in relationship with people – and ideally not from behind a computer screen. I sometimes say it’s not brain surgery – you build trust by doing trustworthy things, and I’m not sure the journalism industry has been doing many trustworthy things in the last few years.
That’s why I’m particularly pleased that this toolkit has centred not just participation, but accountability and care, which are the critical features of co-creation for me, because participation means nothing without that accountability and care.
When we talk about so-called news avoidance we’re abdicating responsibility, because we want easy answers and we don’t want to take accountability or deal with the messiness or complexity of the real world. Co-creational journalism IS messy, it IS complicated, it is often frustrating and enraging – a bit like life.
But, a bit like life, all those things can sometimes transmogrify into something transcendently beautiful, fulfilling and transformative. If this toolkit can help more of us grab some of those fleeting moments of transcendence, then all the rest is worth it.
You can visit Shirish’s website or follow him on X or LinkedIn.
