50 UK INVESTIGATION News
At its core, the NCTJ will be identifying, helping to hire and embedding in local newsrooms people who we are calling ‘community journalists’. “These community journalists will not so much pound the pavements, but use technology to identify and give more community news to those under-served audiences. A key part of this will be their training. Once they have been hired and embedded in the newsrooms, there must be really robust, proper training, to make sure that these positions can grow within the newsrooms.” REIMAGINING REPORTING It’s been hard for Facebook to stay out of the headlines lately. Facebook feed algorithms have been accused of distorting the public discourse – from the American heartland to Myanmar. And in a Brexit-torn UK, people are just now coming to terms with the signal-boosting that occurred on social media platforms before and during the Brexit referendum, and are looking for someone to blame. Sceptics might see the initiative as an attempt from Facebook to win back some public goodwill. That is certainly possible, but the company has always been intensely practical. There is also, no doubt, an experimental angle to the Community News Project – a planting of seeds to see
what germinates, and what fruit, if any, there might be to harvest. Facebook started talking to UK newsrooms about the project a year ago. From the beginning, the conversation raised issues about a population in dire need of local reporting. “We learned that, as these newsrooms have had to pull back in the last few years, there are certain communities that don't get as much reliable news and information as they used to,“ Wrenn explains. “The second area of concern was diversity. They wanted to encourage more diverse journalists from more varied backgrounds to come and work in their newsrooms.” Long before Wrenn joined the Facebook team, he was a local journalist for UK papers, doing everything from court reporting to cat shows. He moved on to a decade-long career at CNN, then to his current position at Facebook. “In this grant, I see Facebook as the facilitator or the enabler,” Wrenn says, “but the NCTJ is going to be responsible for
working with the publishers to identify and hire the journalists. We will help with the training – we’ve got some expertise in that – but it really will be led by the NCTJ.” The digital tools that the new recruits will be expected to familiarise themselves with won’t be limited to Facebook products, Wrenn insists. They will be using a range of technology, dashboards and insights for publishing and monitoring online information, traffic and sentiment. “If we can give them very strong support and make sure they are real pioneers for new ways of working in the newsroom, I think that will be one of our success metrics.”
RESPONSIBILITY Wrenn and the Facebook News
Partnerships team are well aware of public scepticism and the trend toward blaming social media for the decline of traditional news. “We’re very conscious of that. In all candour, there were challenges for local
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