The case for making analysis factual and funny at the same time
Whenever you manage to get your audience to laugh, you can place some facts on their tounges and make them swallow it.
Please note that the following atticle is adopted on the remarks I made at the Jeju Forum for Peace and Prosperity on the 27th of June 2018, at a session hosted by the Korea Foundation where I was invited as a speaker.
“What role can young journalists to play in order to denuclearizing the Korean peninsula and to achieve peace?” The headline for this session does indeed signal that one is having high expectations on the role media can play in this historic process, and I belive such high expectations are adequate.
As journalists, our aspiration is to inform and explain with the hope of educating our audiences. Or as the BBC used to put it in a previous slogan, “making sense of it all”. Unfortunately, that is not always the case.
Following the reporting from the summit in Singapore between President Trump and Chairman Kim, many of the western media outlets fell short of that goal. By far and large the coverage centered around keeping the audience updated on a specific set of events at the summit (“Mr Trump said this, Mr Kim said that”) rather than explain to what extent those events mattered or not. Although they did report on the news, the absence of helpful views was evident during the often-live coverage of the event. In short, they failed to make any sense of it all.
This should not be seen as the fault of individual journalists, but as a sign of a challenging media landscape where how previous business models have been challenged. As more media outlets competes over certain audience as well as over diminishing advertising budgets too many have chosen to be provide quick news rather than qualitative views simply, simply because it is both easier and cheaper.
Just giving people the latest news and the updated facts requires no in-depth knowledge of the issue being discussed, needs no knowledge of history that would provide perspective on why it is happening, and make no use of any cultural know-how that might explain how it’s is happening. Reporting on the fact that President Trump is having a summit with chairman Kim in Singapore may be accurate, but it is still inadequate if you want to help your people make sense of it all.
An additional factor may be the simple fact that to most western journalists, the Korean peninsula is figuratively and literally at the margin of how we see the world. The journalists covering the summit evidently had little knowledge of the issue discussed. Few western media have correspondents updated on South Korean affairs and even fewer have sources on the ground in North Korea.
The first point I want to offer on the role young journalists can play in order to denuclearize the Korean peninsula and to achieve peace, is therefore that we have to offer our audiences views, not news.
The second point I want to offer is that I want to define “young” not as a physical age but being young at heart. That requires an ability of staying curious about the world and, equally important, an ability to explore new ways of telling stories by using a variety of media channels.
In order to do this, journalists need to find and act on data based on who their audiences are and how they consume media in general (as opposed to how they consume news) as well as grounded understanding on their knowledge of the topic being covered.
Based on what I’ve learned as I have tried to explore how to explain and educate current topics to my audiences the most effectively, I’d like to share what I found effective in trying to get them engaged.
Connect to something they care about
In addition to the starting question of any attempt to report on something — “What’s the story here?” — one then has to ask oneself “What would it take to make it easier to understand to my audience?” I’ve fund that the answer often is to connect parts of the story to things you know they already care about. Or in other words, put it in a bigger context.
So, let’s say you want to get feminists to understand why Korean beauty products came to to be associated with quality, you will find it to be easier to make them care about it if you also at a bit about the importance Korean women are been expected to place on appearance in the men-centered society. In other words, helping them understand how the new piece of knowledge fits with pieces of knowledge they already have will lower the threshold for them to become engaged. The rule here is that the more complex a story is, the more context you will need to provide.
Let the medium shape the story.
What channels your audience use will shape how the story is told. If they love Instagram, then your story needs to make the most of Instagram’s features, be it as an Insta Story or a film on IGTV. I’m hardly the first to make this point, but still it’s very common to see how some stories are told from one single narrative, formatted to fit to each medium rather than to have the various mediums shape the narrative.
I’ve successfully told stories on fairly complex political issues using Stories and although I couldn’t include nearly as many nuances ad I would have writing a long article about that issue, I’ve received an engagement among the audience that is much higher than had I told it merely through text. As a journalist with a newspaper background, I’m inclined to think that there’s no purer and higher form of journalism than the long form, well-researched, well-written, Pulitzer Prize-winning articles that the New Yorker have been associated with.
But based on data on my audience, I’ve discovered that even though they would agree with me, that’s not what gets them engaged. And since I started doing less of articles and more of Insta Stories I found the engagement of my audience, as well as the overall reach of my stories increase substantially.
Make it factual and funny.
A serious topic may deserve a serious tone of reporting, but I want to advocate for the importance of mixing in a joke here and there as well. Think of it from a feed point of view. All news exists as do pearls on an necklace. Regardless of your audience prefer tv, a newspaper or Facebook, there’s always something before and something else after your piece, and nowadays chances are pretty high that it’s something entertaining and engaging. That has led to us expecting everything in that feed to be entertaining to some degree and if we find something is not, we skip and jump to the next thing.
This is not to say that every story needs to entertain, rather it’s stating that you must make all you can do to prevent it from being boring. Adding a silly, seemingly irrelevant reference into a story can actually make the story as a whole feel more relevant if it gets us more engaged. Whenever you make your audience smile, laugh even, you get the opportunity to place some facts on their tough and have them swallow it.
If you are to explain North Korean history, you might want to point out the fact that Kim Il Jung must be saving quite some time every morning by not having to decide what to wear since he always have the same pant suit, and suggest some ideas about what he might do with that extra time? As long as you remember that you are a journalist, not a comedian, I’d even argue that the more factual you are, the funnier you can be.
So, to return to the topic for this session, it’s my opinion that by using some of these insights we journalists might be more effective in telling stories related to the historic events unfolding on the Korean peninsula today. By doing it in ways that will make it easier for people to understand them, it will also make it easier to anticipate a future where the two Koreas will be able to peacefully co-exist.
