The ability to be empathetic to the lives, needs and stories of others is often an unwritten strength in the job description of the modern Journalist.
Perhaps it is assumed journalists and other media professionals already know how to consider others when it comes to multimedia communication. This is probably an accurate assumption, but understanding where that competence and knowledge originates from sits rights at the core of why I consider myself to be a good journalist… in the making. The ability to place yourself in other people’s shoes is key to understanding other people’s needs at both ends of the media and requires empathetic strength.
From day one of your pathway as a Journalist, you are given a very important set of values to uphold throughout the duration of the career ahead of you. These values are of course, fairness, balance and accuracy. As a young journalism student, I consider these to values to be paramount in the publication of ethical multimedia journalism production. Just knowing these values is not quite enough to make me feel I am carrying out my role as a modern Journalist as ethically possible. At the route of these three ethical values for me, is empathy.
Allowing empathy to guide my way through the process of finding and producing a journalism story offers me a more innate method of ensuring I have upheld the journalistic values of fairness, balance and accuracy. The first step of producing a journalistic piece is finding a story and to do that well it’s always helpful to understand what your audience is looking for and what they want to know.
Empathising with the community is really important in achieving balance, but if you do, you will find that balance comes naturally. Empathising with not only the people you’re writing for but also the people you’re writing about ensures that you have the understanding necessary to ensure your piece is fair to the needs of both parties and is accurate to the reality of the situation you are representing in your work.
Technology is a very useful tool in understanding the community you’re working with, whether that is an online community or other. Technology offers media professionals a way of gaging information about issues facing demographics, allows them to easily receive feedback and produce soft or hard news as quickly as possible. Understanding the values that work best for you as a journalist is very important. Personally, empathising with society and understanding culture is one of the most important values in achieving that.
