an image from The Messenger deck.
With public trust in journalism eroding in today’s fast-changing media landscape, a question that has grappled researcher and journalist Emilie Gambade is how journalists can truly connect with their audiences. In this interview, Emilie spoke to EJO about her current doctoral research focusing on humanising the practitioner through filming techniques – telling the stories of the journalist themselves, not simply the stories they cover.
Your research on ‘humanising’ the practitioner is fascinating. Could you tell us a little bit about your background? What inspired your current research?
I am the head of Life, Videos & Podcasts at Daily Maverick, an innovative and influential digital news media in South Africa. Before this, I was the editor-in-chief of ELLE South Africa and the brand director for Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, House & Leisure, also in South Africa. I have a mixed background of creativity and news and I am equally passionate about telling stories through beautiful visuals as I am about investigative journalism.
What inspired my research is the crisis of trust that has disrupted the media landscape over the last decade. Many in the industry have been wondering quite deeply about the dire state of the media, and a lot has already been written about the crisis in the press. My work is looking at how a different approach to storytelling might help rebuild trust in journalism.
As journalists, we hope that our stories will be read, heard, watched, trusted, and also shared. We need trusted and truthful information to build a strong ecosystem, a “shared reality” as Maria Ressa calls it. There is a paper by Anil Kunnel – I’m probably paraphrasing – who says that we share information with people we feel connected to, often without thinking about it, and for those social connections to happen, we need to see each other, we need to feel like we belong. So how do we create a sense of “belonging”? How do we truly connect with each other, how do we build those parasocial relationships with our viewers, how do we make them feel like “we’re in this together”? And beyond that, how do we build epistemic trust, emotional trust, and then how do we scale it – is it even possible?
What does ‘humanising the practitioner’ mean in the context of your research?
There has been quite a lot of research done on the professional mask that journalists, and other professionals for that matter, tend to wear when they are working. What would it actually look like if that mask was stripped? Think about this: what if we place the journalist at the center of the story, making their subjectivity, their work, their values visible on screen. My argument is that when audiences see journalists as fully human beings, they are more likely to extend trust. And to be curious about what they do.
I’m working on a series called The Messenger, in collaboration with my co-director, Malibongwe Tyilo, and the series is essentially an experiment in “humanising” the journalist. We are exploring how to build stronger audience connections. The idea is to push past the rigid constraints of traditional news delivery, for example, traditional broadcasters’ famous “Voice of God”, and breaking through professional masks. I explore how revealing a journalist’s vulnerability on film through personal storytelling can help form a parasocial bond with the audience, a deeper connection.
You mentioned that you’ve seen that connection already. What do you mean by this, what have you seen?
Last year, at Daily Maverick, we were filming one of our journalists, a reporter on environmental issues – her reporting is grounded in human stories. She recorded the story on camera, and at one point, when talking about how the community she had encountered felt like they had been “left behind”, abandoned by their municipal government, her voice started to break slightly, tears coming to her eyes. Rather than cutting this unscripted moment, we thought it offered a powerful glimpse into the personal impact of on-the-ground journalism. With her consent, we kept it in the final edit. And that part brought much more impact to the story, and an NGO then contacted her because they wanted to help the community.
That’s really interesting, and also, I believe it helps build that trust with the community? Sometimes you see the journalists as an outsider. You see the edited piece, but you also see the journalists behind the scene. You see someone who’s very human…
Exactly. And this can’t be manufactured, it can’t be scripted. That’s the thing, trust has to be earned, it’s a pact between the audience, the filmmaker and the journalist on screen.
This brings us very nicely to our next question, which is on trust. It’s very interesting to talk about trust in today’s context, especially where there’s a lot of misinformation/disinformation, issues around use of AI and verification. I think you’ve also mentioned there’s that erosion of public trust in journalism. So within that context how do you understand trust in the contemporary media landscape, and how would humanising the practitioner help build that trust?
We know the concept of trust in the media is difficult to box neatly as a singular, homogeneous metric; it’s not a static reference point, it’s more dynamic, it is a pact built on mutual risk and reciprocity. It shifts depending on region, medium, context, but it implies a level of vulnerability from the person doing the trusting, because if you tell me something and I trust you, I am choosing to believe that you won’t be deceptive So I make myself vulnerable to the trustee (this is not from me, I am paraphrasing but cannot remember who is this statement from).. There is a paper by Dr Tali Aharoni, which talks about how the digital era has reframed trust as a social emotion, where audiences lean on feelings, intuitions, and gut instinct rather than systematic verification or fact-checking, for example, to trust someone or something. And it’s this emotive layer that interests me. Humanising the journalist means a more embodied, vulnerable presence made visible to the audience. It means dropping the professional mask, being more real and more authentic.
Why did you choose the UK and South Africa as the main focal points of your research? Have you observed any key similarities and differences between the media landscapes of these two countries in relation to what you’re researching on, and how is that impacting your focus and your research?
Looking at recent studies, levels of trust in the press are quite different from one country to another. In South Africa, where trust in the press is more resilient than elsewhere, lower levels of trust in the media are tied in part to the continued concentration of media ownership within white-owned conglomerates for example. The lack of inclusivity or representation might mean that you don’t trust what you’re reading or what you’re seeing. That’s one example. There’s also a push to move away from a Western-centric journalistic praxis and instead, looking at an approach that is rooted in togetherness, in communal accountability grounded in Ubuntu philosophy. There has been quite a lot of research in the past decade done by prominent academics in South Africa on this idea of what Ubuntu would look like in media and in journalism, which I think is really important and fascinating.
In the UK, the picture is quite different. While established public broadcasters like the BBC remain quite resilient, they are operating in an increasingly fragmented landscape. And the erosion of trust is, for example, rooted in a series of scandals that have blurred the lines between political, financial, and journalism or journalistic spheres, which means that for many the news media has come to be seen as part of the establishment.
You briefly spoke about your docuseries, The Messenger. Could you tell us more about it – how is it designed to humanise the journalists? How does this docuseries help establish that visual relationality with an audience, which you mentioned earlier?
The best analogy to explain The Messenger would be Chef’s Table on Netflix. Chef’s Table is a show about food but more so, it is about the chefs behind the food. The food becomes almost secondary to the chef’s stories; it’s about the chefs’ heartbreaks, the challenges that come with being a chef, the creativity behind recipes that wow the public; it tells the stories of their families, their journeys.
Watching Chef’s Table sparked the idea for The Messenger. I fell in love with the series not because of the food, but because of the chefs’ personal, almost intimate stories. It made me feel like I was entering their world, and it made the food more… easy to understand too. I thought, ‘if only we could do a series that did exactly the same for journalists’. That’s what The Messenger is. The pilot episode features Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa, a Filipino-American journalist and the co-founder and CEO of Rappler. A lot has already been written on Maria Ressa’s incredible work. There has been a documentary as well, called A Thousand Cuts, on how former President of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte intimidated, threatened and arrested Maria when Rappler investigated the propaganda campaigns spread by online trolls. She is a fierce advocate for freedom of the press, and so much more. What people might not know about Maria Ressa is the story of her childhood, leaving the Philippines to move to New Jersey, in the US for example. Her journey from Tom Rivers High School to Princeton to Manila, the many places, stories and people that defined her extraordinary life and work.
That’s brilliant. Would you be doing this as a series?
Yes, the idea is to feature many journalists, editors and publishers – one episode per journalist/ editor/ publisher, to be aired on public broadcast channels as far and wide as possible.
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Emilie Gambade started out in women’s media, then worked as editor-in-chief of ELLE South Africa and ELLE Decoration South Africa, and later as brand director of Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan and House & Leisure in South Africa. Today, she leads the multimedia, as well as the life and culture section at Daily Maverick while pursuing her PhD at City St George’s University of London, exploring how stories move people and shape the world we live in.
