A theory of change is a framework used by advocates and policy makers to describe how a program, project or intervention will achieve a desired impact or goal. Journalists often know their work is essential to democracy and hope it can bring about change, but don’t tend to lay out how their work can turn into action. Nicole Lewis, engagement editor at the Marshall Project, and Lam Vo, investigative reporter at Documented, want to change this. As fellows at the University of Missouri Reynolds Journalist Institute, Lewis and Vo, plan to address this gap by building a resource to help local journalists boost civic engagement by developing and implementing a theory of change for their work.
While news creators weren’t initially one of the communities they envisioned working with, Lewis told NCC that it’s become increasingly clear that collaborations between news creators and journalists will be essential to the work they both do creating change. NCC sat down with Lewis to talk about how and why a theory of change is needed among journalists and news creators and what collaboration between them using this framework might look like.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Maya Srikrishnan: Can you start by explaining what a theory of change is?
Nicole Lewis: I just came off of a set of meetings where I realized that perhaps the terminology theory of change is actually too meta or too vague in some ways to describe what we’re looking for or what we’re hoping to help journalists figure out. It’s the sort of missing middle – the ideas or the steps that you can take in order to achieve some sort of impact in the world, some sort of real world impact. And so it’s stepping back, closing your eyes, and thinking as a journalist about the potential for your work and what you would need to do in order to bring that potential to life.
And it’s not that there’s one overarching theory of change for all journalism. The change is project dependent. It’s outlet dependent. So in my work, more specifically, as an engagement editor in the criminal justice space, we’re often thinking about abuse, harm, wrongdoing when doing journalism. Digging in order to kind of show who’s accountable, show how a system failed and the hope or intended outcome is often, for a legislator – someone with some amount of policy making power – to read it, notice it and create some policy that stops the harm. In the case of some individual actor doing something wrong, [the hope is] they lose their position of power.
But there’s a whole host of other ways that change happens in the world, and that’s really the intention that Lam and I had. How can we be thinking about all the other methods or models or ways that we can have an impact as journalists?
Why is it important for journalists to use this framework?
We have moved so clearly away from the idea that journalists can just put information out on the web and on any platform and it’s going to reach the people it needs to reach. The notion that we have some sort of mass reach or mass appeal is really dead.
Audiences are fractured on and offline. We’re vying for time and attention from anything that kind of exists on the web or on TV. There’s so much screen competition for attention, so I think that creating work and really trying to be explicit and specific about the outcome helps us reach an audience better. We can say we know people are out there trying to navigate this, and we’ve provided information kind of tailor made for their unique sort of challenge or need. I think that’s one bucket – that trust building, that relationship with your audience.
But I actually think there’s also a bigger kind of existential issue at play right now for journalism. We’re being targeted by the current administration, discredited, seen as not trustworthy or not important. And it worries me to think if news is not the source of credible, reliable information about what’s going on in the world, where are people actually going to turn? There’s so much misinformation and AI presents such a huge threat because of the ease with which you could churn some of it out and create realistic graphics to go alongside your ideology. We can’t win in trying to entertain people, but we might be able to win by trying to inform people in a way that’s actually actionable.
One-in-five Americans now get most of their news from social media and news creators – most of whom don’t have training from traditional newsrooms. Do news creators who are not tied to mainstream journalism outlets also need a theory of change or is it something that they may be inherently practicing because of the environment they work in?
I do think that news creators would benefit from creating a theory of change for their own work. In thinking about my audience – what do I want them to know? What opportunities for self advocacy are coming or upcoming? What narratives am I interested in unsettling? What information is my audience most craving and/or lacking?
I do think that the way that news creators are able to use those platforms – the level of engagement that they have with their audience, does suggest to me that they’re better able to understand what people are struggling with and what they’re asking for. You think about the amount of times creators will say, “Comment this or that about what you need and you want me to make content.” That personal relationship with your audience does allow you to take a little bit more of an analytical approach, and then figure out how you provide for your audience.
Knowing your audience really well, engaging with them, asking them direct questions does allow you to have more of an understanding, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have a bigger theory of change for your work. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re also doing the work to look beyond your audience at these landscape opportunities. Say you’re a news creator and your interest is in politics, then there’s definitely work to do to understand what your audience wants to know. But there’s also just real work to do to understand what opportunities exist for your audience externally. You need to understand when is the registration or election deadline. You need to build in a certain kind of reporting that would allow you to do both.
You’ve established where journalists versus creators are in this framework and it seems like they have different strengths when it comes to approaching it. How can journalists and news creators learn from each other or collaborate to ensure that they’re having impact with their work?
Where reporters really have the biggest strength is we know how to do the reporting. Our work is laser focused on the institutions. It’s focused externally and on the people in power. Oftentimes, we do have an understanding of the potential solutions because we’ve been reporting on issues: the systems that are broken, the reporting requirements, the deadlines.
I think on the flip side, news creators’ relationship to their audiences allow them to understand, what are they not getting about X,Y, Z issue? What is the stumbling block? There can be a disconnect between what I think as a journalist is important and what an audience needs. This came up all the time with me when I was reporting on felony disenfranchisement. I’d be questioning people about what’s the voter turnout like? And is anyone excited? And what does it mean? And the reality is, for many of the people we are trying to reach, and for many of the organizations who were actually doing the direct service work of registering them, people who are coming out of prison are more interested in finding stable housing and getting a job. If I was a creator and I had a bigger audience following then I would be to say, “How could I tie those together? Is there more that I could do there?” And so I think there’s a real opportunity for collaboration in that.
Is there anything else you want to add or anything I haven’t asked that I should have?
There is one thing that comes up again and again. How is this different from advocacy? We’re walking a line. With advocacy you’re trying to push people to some preconceived decision – saying, “Do this,” and pushing people to align with that decision. This is different. We’re saying, “What do you want to know?” Our currency is information. Information can have an impact, but it’s not about pushing them in a particular direction. We’re not pointing the direction of who people should vote for, but we want them to know where their polling place is.