‘Connections key to journalism’s future’

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By Joseph Bernard A. Marzan

Journalist Pia Ranada, head of Community at Rappler, touched base with Ilonggo students on Friday, emphasizing the importance of personal connection with audiences as the future of journalism in an increasingly technology-driven media environment.

Ranada, the 2024 Marshall McLuhan Fellow, gave a short lecture at West Visayas State University in La Paz, Iloilo City, as part of the Marshall McLuhan Forum of the Canadian Embassy, which has visited the university almost annually.

Her talk centered on correlating journalism and the need for personal connections with audiences.

She cited the loneliness problem among Filipinos, including 57 percent feeling lonely in 2023 according to the Meta-Gallup Global State of Social Connections study, and a Philippine Statistics Authority analysis showing 20 percent feeling lonely at least once a week.

Ranada also noted technological disruptions that have been causing upheaval in society, including the forming of echo chambers and silos among groups.

She emphasized two terms: enshittification, or the deterioration of online platforms due to decisions to prioritize profit over user experience, and AI slop, or the flooding of artificial intelligence-generated content onto online platforms.

“On one hand, in the physical space, we’re losing that sense of connection with different sectors of society, feeling more isolated, and on the other hand, we also see a lot of low-quality information or distractions that are keeping us hooked onto doomscrolling and endless feeds,” Ranada said.

In answering the question, “Can journalism help?” in the context of increasing disconnection, she shared her belief that the core of journalism is being connected to the world and that journalism could cultivate connection.

“Every time you open the newspaper or you read a news article, in a way that is you declaring to yourself that, ‘I care about the world beyond me. That’s why I want to read this article, because this article is about the greater world out there, and I care enough to read it up,'” she said.

“Journalism can only survive if people care what happens to their communities. If they didn’t care, journalism would be dead. Journalism is based on the premise that people care about the world we live in,” she added.

Ranada shared Rappler’s initiatives, which include Kapihan with local candidates during the 2025 elections and various workshops and community caravans.

She also highlighted the Communities platform on the Rappler app, which shares content, moderates conversations and connects with readers through chat.

Daily Guardian is one of Rappler’s partners, with stories appearing on the Daily Guardian chatbox on Communities.

She credited many of Rappler’s flood control investigative reports to information provided by locals in the Communities chatbox as well as tip lines that they have kept open.

BUILDING CONNECTIONS AS JOURNALISTS

Before the main topic of her lecture, Ranada shared her experiences covering the Rodrigo Duterte administration and how this made her realize that connections between journalists and their audiences were key to her current work.

She cited how the media was labeled by the Duterte administration and its allies as “presstitutes,” among other propaganda, and how audiences turned away from the press because of these.

“Covering Duterte in those years and being on the frontlines to that kind of propaganda [against the media] made me think how vulnerable journalists are to that kind of narrative, and it made me ask, ‘Why? Why was it so easy to for a very charismatic leader to turn an entire nation against its own journalists?'” she said.

“What I realized was that, it’s because journalists have also been very separate from the audiences we write for. There tends to be this buffer, that most of the time, readers don’t understand how we work, and we often don’t understand our readers,” she added.

She said it was this experience, and her opportunity as a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University, that drew her to the concept of engagement journalism and participatory journalism.

“When I was in Stanford, I realized that maybe the next step for journalism is not more content, but more collaboration; it’s more engagement with people, and maybe that’s how journalism could survive, even through presidents who are extremely effective at turning communities against their enemies,” she said.

“Maybe if people understood journalists more, and journalists gave more value to readers, more than just headlines and press releases, maybe they would be more likely to protect and side with journalists this time,” she added.

It was these realizations, together with her post as Community head at Rappler, that gave her the mission of improving trust between journalists and their audiences.

“One thing I realized there is that journalism doesn’t and shouldn’t live in a vacuum. When we see journalism as something that should be in an ivory tower, separate from the people and above the fray, then that makes journalism a lot less valuable to people and a lot less approachable, and that could actually mean the death of journalism, if we keep thinking in those terms,” Ranada said.