How can we practice journalism as a public service without compromising quality, integrity, and inclusiveness for the sake of revenue?

joeamditis Admin, SessionNotes

Tuesday, August 22, 2023

Host/ Reporter: 

  • Dionicia Roberson

Participants: 

  • Linn Washington (TU Journalism Dept)
  • Shannon Bowen (NC Local News Workshop)
  • Anthony Damcott
  • Ben Schittler (TU)
  • Cole Cummings (TU)
  • Alanna Hutchinson (TU)
  • Joy Mayer (Trusting News)
  • Scott Blanchard (WITF)
  • Heather May (Great Salt Lake Collaborative)
  • Carla Robinson (Chestnut Hill Local)
  • Carole Carmichael (Chestnut Hill Local)
  • Kat Nagasawa (El Timpano)

Discussion Topic:

HOW CAN WE PRACTICE JOURNALISM AS A PUBLIC SERVICE WITHOUT COMPROMISING QUALITY, INTEGRITY, AND INCLUSIVENESS FOR THE SAKE OF REVENUE?

Main Points of Discussion That Emerged:

  • We know we’re supposed to be changing things, we have the blueprint for doing that and we know new models are required…at the same time, we also know we can’t do this work unless it’s (financially) sustainable. It’s a tricky equation and an uncomfortable place to be.

Where is the money going to come from?

  • What, if anything, do journalists offer that sets us apart? 
  1. Responsibility
    1. To our words and to our communities
  2. The assurance of accuracy
    1. Although an overwhelming number of Americans believe that journalists and the media are deliberately misleading them
  3. The ability to create news content?
    1. Not exclusively ours anymore
  4. Journalistic training?
    1. Available even to non-journalists (i.e. Info Hub Captains at Resolve Philly)

What is “the journalism”? Is it the product or the practice?

  • When we think of professionalism and expertise as the sole domain of journalists, we leave out so many voices and ideas! 
  • We’re looking at what it might look like to include more community voices and have more people see their lives reflected. That is a higher quality of journalism that requires us to be flexible about what we think is news and professional.

Quality

Closing the gap with collaboration

  • The difference between us and content creators is the perception that we’re us and they’re them and there’s a necessary distance. 
  • But legacy media has to close that gap and become collaborators. We need to learn that it’s OK to support and amplify a voice not owned by a journalist. The collaboration can be a challenge but that’s where we need to go.

Participants offer examples of journalistic collaboration with non news partners: 

  • Partnered with two educational institutions; Shippensburg and Franklin Marshall to do some surveying of the community in order to gauge the community’s knowledge on climate. Ultimately collaboration led to a community awareness event that included a play about climate. The writing of the play was journalism-adjacent work because of all that was involved.
  • Great Salt Lake Collaborative had a professional dance company interview members of the team in preparation for composing a modern dance about the lake.

Collaborations with local media that org leaders could really use: 

  • Rather than go out and engage the public on a project and series of community events to raise votes, it would have been so helpful to get the news media to cover this. 

Where did the journalism role fit in? 

  • Creating the news, engaging the public.
  • Lifting up and amplifying convos that are relevant to people that they may be able to impact.
  • Help guide the public toward things that they can engage themselves in (or the slice of the public you have access to and influence over).
  • Convening and holding space for important conversations that engage the public.

More useful to ask “is this thing journalism” than to ask “who is a journalist?”

Integrity

Where does our credibility come from?

  • The belief someone’s not trying to sell you something 
  • Accuracy
  • Transparency, or at least the sense among your consumers that you aren’t hiding your intentions
  • Commitment to following the facts even if you don’t like them
  • Transparency with partnerships

There seems to be a tension between taking money from entities as a source of revenue. What happens when my newspaper has to hold an entity to account?

Credibility: it’s easy to set up good guidelines of autonomy. What you have to worry about is your integrity and ethics.

You have to acknowledge that you could be influenced subconsciously or consciously.

AND if people don’t believe in your integrity, they’ll assume you’re lying anyway.

Integrity and revenue

Civic partnerships as a revenue model. They pay for coverage to their target communities. Does this come with its own ethical issues? 

A participant mentions their org’s method of getting and spreading news and information via “kitchen table conversations”.

  • News orgs can help to sponsor and support these conversations.
  • Doesn’t have to come with a set of articles.
  • This is definitely journalism

How to financially support these endeavors?

  • Digital doesn’t pay! 
  • 90% of revenue generated from print
    • Philanthropy, subs, sponsorships

Inclusiveness

  • How are we ensuring we are providing timely, quality news to folks who cannot pay to consume our work or afford any of our subscription models?
  • Seattle has Real Change produced by the homelessness population and sold to people outside markets. The vendors get to keep all the money they make. Sometimes the vendors will accept anything. Folks not carrying cash is impacting that model a lot. It helps to sustain a population and they produce the paper in their own voices.

(In this way, the population are journalists)

“Journalism is not to tell stories but to inform.”

[It is absolutely possible for storytelling to be informative]

There’s an aspect of usefulness to journalism that matters, whether or not you agree with it. 

  • Complaints from the right: where’s the space for me? 
  • How do we communicate this better [during election coverage]: you [politically dissenting audiences] need to know what happened and what this person [candidate] actually did so you can make a decision?
    • The usefulness: do you dig beneath the horse race sort of story with candidates? 
    • Ultimately the usefulness is in the details and the richness and dimensionality of the story.

Inclusiveness and revenue: the most tension 

  • As we start to shift to a model for a community, we also need to change not just the product model but also the revenue model!

Let’s talk about how to change the revenue model. We’re past the times when there is just one source of info- there are multiple. 

  • This is a big area for philanthropists to step up right now.
    • We need a toolkit and messaging that talks about why they should support local news in order to enable us to be more inclusive.
    • Great Salt Lake is starting a curriculum for 5th graders about the lake, but sneaking in media literacy (inclusiveness, in getting children) can you get funding to subsidize

The big question, again: Where is the money going to come from?

  • Playing around with AI, coming away with the fact that this thing is a giant vacuum cleaner of everything we as journalists produce: a quote, a stat, etc…and we feed it into the vacuum cleaner!!
  • Is there a way we can collectively defend what we produce and capitalize on it? 
  • It’s really important for us to be on top of how we stop being free providers to their data centers.
  • If people can continue to get news for free, why wouldn’t they?
  • Newspapers threw away their content for free online at first. Then when the paywalls went up, the readers revolted! 

AI is the new incarnation of this. It’s going to be a challenge to wrap our arms around that.

How do we become valuable enough that those who can afford it will want to pay? 

  • Having a relationship with communities
  • Reach new audiences
    • Who would feel seen and represented by your journalism? 
    • You need more money! 
    • Seeing where the value is, and turning the value into money?
    • That’s where the money is- in AI. 
    • We should come together as a consortium.