Why Audience Engagement Matters in Today’s Media Environment. Trending news burnout is real for some journalists. The AP’s Nicole Hernandez suggests remembering that audience engagement can reignite their vision.
by Rachel Jones, National Press Foundation
In many ways, Nicole Hernandez’s childhood amply prepared her for her current career path.
As the daughter of immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Hernandez was born in Athens, Georgia. Because her parents were international students, her neighbors hailed from a broad range of countries, including from Iran, Poland, South Korea, India, Ethiopia, all over Latin America. Her parents encouraged her curiosity and communication with others.
“Probably one of the fondest memories I have is celebrating Children’s Day, which is a holiday in Japan, because a very dear friend of ours, that was a tradition that he had and he wanted to share it with us,” Hernandez, AP’s News Editor for Digital and Audience Engagement told NPF’s Widening the Pipeline fellows in June. “And so we would celebrate Children’s Day together. And just as I was growing up realizing, hey, we’re all trying to deal with this commonality of getting an education, trying to raise families, trying to figure out groceries and things like that for the kids. All of us are coming in from different cultural lenses of how to address that, but we are in this together and doing it.”
It made the decision to become a journalist easy for Hernandez. “A big part of it was realizing it’s about these people. It’s about that audience and that connection that I still hold very near and dear to my heart.”
Hernandez followed a fairly pragmatic path toward building her journalistic expertise. Along with reporting, she explored the digital production space, very specifically around homepage presentation and social media engagement in newsrooms including the Boston Globe and NPR.
“So one of the projects that I was really fortunate to work at NPR, was where we come from, a look at the stories of immigration, a look at the stories that people carry forward and how they do that through language, through food, through festivals. Just how do we keep those connections going and how do they change over time?”
As her skill set deepened, Hernandez realized her career didn’t have to be just one thing. “And just eventually over time though, I realized, oh yes, I enjoy reporting. I also really like data. I also really like thinking about, what is the presentation on the website? How are we from events like this getting the information to people in real time rather than the print cycle?”
Ultimately, Hernandez urges reporters on the front lines in communities to remember one important thing. “If you’re exploring that avenue of how do I become an audience engagement journalist, first of all, you already are. We all started at a place before we became journalists of saying, how do I navigate the world? How do I want to share that with the world? Where do I want to develop? And what are the connections I want to keep in the communities I want to be part of and carry that forward? Your audiences still care about that, too. That is still part of it.
Speaker: Nicole Hernandez, News Editor, Digital and Audience Engagement, The Associated Press
Transcript, summary and resources:
The Widening the Pipeline Fellowship is sponsored by the Evelyn Y. Davis Foundation and Lenovo. NPF is solely responsible for the content. This video was produced within the Evelyn Y. Davis studios.
10 июн 2024
