Hi, listeners. Welcome to Ashoka podcast,
which is called "Why should I care?". And today we have another guest. Jeremy Drucker is with us. Jeremy is our only
Brooklyn born Czech fellow. Hi, Jeremy. That's right. Thank you.
Happy to be here. It's great to have you here. So in this podcast,
we actually give people a glimpse the world where solutions
outnumber the problems. But I would like to start with one
problem, which is news fatigue. Could you say what that is, please? Sure. This is also kno
wn as news aversion,
and it basically means that people are so tired of the news for a variety of reasons
that they start tuning out or turning off. So they basically either selectively avoid certain topics or just
avoid the news altogether. This is obviously not a good thing for any
democracy or any kind of society if people are just tuning out,
because people who tune out tend not to be very engaged with what's going on or
civically active or any of that. And these numbers have been going up
g
lobally for the last couple years, and I think it's at about
32% now for a lot of places. And that's up, I don't know, six, seven, eight percentage points
in the last five years. So this is a serious problem,
and it's getting worse. Okay, so why should we care about it? Like in middle ages, people didn't know
all those things and somehow they lived. Why should I care about it? Yeah, well, I think partly what I said before, just about engaging...
And if people are not interested in the news, part
icularly certain topics,
a lot of people say: "I don't want to read any more news
about Ukraine", before it was Covid. So they're not keeping informed. They're not going to push for change. They're not going to be engaged at all with what's happening
in their local communities. So I think that's pure and simple. The research has shown that people
that are fatigued from the news, people who are depressed,
they feel powerlessness, like they can't do anything,
and basically tune out from society. S
o I think we should all care about that because we hope people will be,
especially in democracies, more participatory, more active,
pushing politicians to make a change. But if they don't even know what's going
on, it's very difficult to do that. Okay, so I should care about it because in democracy, if I don't like something,
I cannot do the change myself. So it's in my interest if other
people are worried about something or they disagree with something,
because then if our opinions align we can
together try and change something
in frames of the democratic tools. Is that it? Yeah, I think you put that well, generally, again, if people are engaged
around a certain topic or theme, they're going to look around
for like-minded people and then either launch civic activism themselves or activities or
initiatives or maybe even form a political party or a movement or
something like that. But again, if people don't know what's going on in the world,
if they're just sitting at home, they don't w
ant to turn on the computer or
turn on the TV, turn on the radio, they're probably not going
to be pushing for change. They're probably going to be wallowing in despair and at home and not wanting
to go out in the world and even try to make a change because
they feel it has no sense. Everything is going in a bad direction. So why should I get involved? Why should I care? And if they don't do that,
what could happen? I think eventually, if these figures still
keep going up and up, I think we're g
oing to have only a certain
group of people that are civically active, which, again, cuts off
a lot of diverse viewpoints. A lot of other ways of solving problems. Could be a lot of young
people who are very creative. They can think of change, but if they also are so depressed about
what they're reading and what they're experiencing, they're also
going to just not get involved. So I think there'll be a lot of wasted
opportunities of different creative solutions that people might have
to problems
, but they're so depressed and so uninvolved that those
solutions never see the light of day. This is a bigger question about journalism
because it's not just about news aversion, but about representation and people seeing
journalists like them, that look like them, that talk like them,
that cover their problems. It's gotten better over the last
couple of years, but there's still a lot of black holes out there where
diversity is a huge issue. So again, if people don't feel like
they're represent
ed in the media, they feel like the media only talks about
what's bad in their particular groups, this is also a huge problem. I totally understand why news
fatigue is important for me personally. What are you doing about it? So my organization is a training
organization, and we also publish an online magazine
about Central and Eastern Europe. So we've gotten very involved in, say,
the last six or seven years in something called solutions journalism. People have always done it,
but a big movemen
t to kind of change the landscape of the journalistic
profession started almost exactly ten years ago in the US and has
been spreading around the world. And we've been, I hope, doing a lot to
spread it in Central and Eastern Europe. And not surprisingly, if you hear the name,
the goal is to not only cover what's wrong in the world, but actually
what's going right. So this is to counter the news fatigue. So people actually have some sense of
power, of being civically active, that they see similar
examples in the past
that have worked and change is possible. There is some positive
stuff going on in the world after all, it's not all negative. So we've really been trying to convince journalists to take a step back,
look at the type of reporting they've been doing, focusing almost exclusively
on problems, and to take another approach and really try to figure
out who's doing it right. That's the key question we're always asking with solutions journalism,
who's doing it right? And then to rea
lly investigate
is it having impact. What are the limitations? How's it being done with the hope that others can emulate these
successes in other places? I think this is super important. What you just said is that solutions journalism is not just
talking about good things. So it's not just rainbows and unicorns,
but it's really investigating the solutions, like making sure that this
is not just, oh, don't worry, there are some good things happening
in the world as well, but it's really trying to
see how this
works and doing the same journalism thing just with a solution,
not with the problem. Right?
Yeah. And a lot of people get confused by that. They think it's like a fireman saving a kitten up in the tree and good
news and happy news and all. A lot of people also think it's advocacy, that these journalists are
picking a particular solution. Maybe it would be implemented by a friend at an NGO that they know,
but it's not, it's not advocacy. I often like to think of it as investigative
journalism with the same
fairness that you're providing, except it's investigating
a solution and not a problem. But you still have the same
journalistic standards. You talk to people, you really try to figure out - does
the solution have real impact as well? We also have started to say the word
"response" a lot more because solutions tend to mean complete solutions,
things that are always working, these grand solutions
to the world's problems, but we're really talking about effective
responses
that are working today. They might not work ten years from now,
but they're working now, and they're things that people can
investigate and then others can hopefully copy them or adapt them
to their own communities. Can you give an example of an article or a material that was
created around a problem and some responses that you
find especially interesting or appealing? Since we're in Poland, I remember clearly a story that we were
in probably about two years ago, which was tackling the fact tha
t a lot
of people with Down syndrome are in institutions or isolated at home
and are not a part of local communities. And there's actually a theater in Gdańsk,
you probably know about it. And there they have people with Down syndrome who are actually working as
ushers... Yes. And helping seat people and really engaging with the local community,
which is beneficial to both sides. Right?
So the people with Down syndrome are not just sitting at home,
but they're engaging. They're doing something wo
rthwhile, but also they are meeting people who have
never met people with Down syndrome before and seeing that they can also be
a vibrant part of the community. That particular solution,
from what I remember, was being implemented in Germany,
and the director of the theater in Gdańsk was visiting and saw it in Germany
and thought this is a great idea. I guess he did some investigation on his own how it would work and then
adapted it back in Gdańsk. So I think that's a really nice example. It's s
omething... The author interviewed people involved, and it's something
that could be adapted by other people. So there are really hundreds,
thousands of examples like that... Where do you find them? ...this kind of civic initiatives. Where do you find them? Can our listeners find them somewhere? Yeah, well, I mean, these types of stories...
I should mention there's something called the Solutions Journalism Tracker,
which is a huge database of solution stories, which is run by the
Solutions Journ
alism Network. I think last time I looked, there were something like 14 000 curated solution stories there. So that's a great place
to look for inspiration. Otherwise, it's a lot of times things
that we see happening in our own communities, journalists
can find them sometimes. Sometimes they're coming out of
innovators and things like that. So it could be just walking to your office one day and you see some kind
of interesting civic initiative. It could be a restaurant that employs
people with d
isabilities. It could be anything like that. A lot of times they are civic initiatives
or work by NGOs, but also government programs do work
sometimes and are worth profiling also. So I think they're all around us. It's just until now, a lot of people have not really been
looking for them or thinking they were worthy
subjects to write about. They focused only on problems. And we as journalists are often taught
that we're supposed to be the watchdogs of democracy, uncover crime
and corruption and
all of that. So it's also a little bit how we've all been educated. So we're trying to change that approach
and have people look beyond that. Okay, so if you say that this is a solution or a response to news fatigue,
do you have any data that shows that this works and people prefer... Yeah. ...this kind of information? I don't have it in my pocket right now,
but there's plenty of research that's being done, both commissioned
by the Solutions Journalism Network. We're actually also
commissioning
some research. The preliminary results should be ready
by the end of the year, looking particularly
at Central and Eastern Europe. But there's a lot of research out there
that can be accessed on SJN, Solutions Journalism Network site,
which does show that people who consume solutions journalism
are more likely to get involved in that particular issue,
to stay interested in that issue, to share stories related to that issue,
and even just to read to the end of the article, people tend to really
consume this and say they want more of it. Of course there's still going
to be clickbait out there. There's going to be stories about celebrities and crime and corruption
that might get a lot of views also. But it does seem to be a hunger when
people are asked in surveys and just anecdotally, people just say:
"I'm tired of just reading about what's going wrong in the world,
and I want to be inspired". And again, the research shows people tend to be more involved
in the issue from then on. We kno
w what you're doing. We know what the problem is
about and why we should care. So if you think of our listeners, not all of them are
journalists, obviously. If some of you are, please have a look at
the Solutions Journalism Network website. But what can an average,
normal person do about it? I think a normal person
can really demand more. I think we know how
businesses work, right? I mean, we're a non-profit. We think this is important. We have donors that believe in our
mission, but commercial
organizations that reach a lot more people than we do,
they're going to keep doing the same thing over and over again unless
readers really demand change. It could be simply not
buying the paper anymore. But I think that's not a good thing, because as we talked about before,
we want people to stay engaged, not to stop consuming media,
but they should really be demanding whether it's a letter to the editor or
calling up an editorial office, whatever it might be,
supporting this kind of journalism
, because I think as more people in powerful
positions see that this is the way to go, that it's leading to more reader
engagement, more subscriptions, more ad pages clicked on the Internet,
it's going to be adopted even more. So I think a lot of us understand it's the right thing to do,
but we still have to show on a much larger scale that it's commercially viable
and makes also business sense. There's a lot of research that's
heading in that direction. We're still pretty early, though. This is
only a decade, really,
into spreading this concept. So there's some good examples in the US,
some in Western Europe, and now we're trying to also map
them in Central and Eastern Europe. But there are some great
examples out there. I mean, just one, since we talked a little
bit about Ukraine and news avoidance related to Ukraine,
there's a great solutions journalism outlet in Ukraine which is
called "Rubryka". And they've really shown, I think they have something like
2 million visits a month no
w. So they're showing it's part of their
model and that people will read it and consume it, even in a really
difficult climate that is Ukraine today. So we just have to keep spreading the model and then
mapping out the examples of it leading to better business results,
because I think that's ultimately the way to start changing
the profession as a whole. Thank you.
That was really interesting. So, listeners, now you know
what you're supposed to do. If you care about news fatigue and you want mor
e solutions journalism,
then you need to show your editors or your media outlets that this is what
you want and what you need. And this was "Why should I care" podcast with Jeremy Drucker,
our Ashoka fellow from Czech Republic. I'm Agata Stafiej-Bartosik. This podcast is produced
by Anna Ślusareńka, and the fact checking and all
the wonderful links that you will find in the description of the podcast
are provided by Anita Głowacka. Thank you.
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