Session Proposer/Leader

Heather Blakeslee, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, Root Quarterly: Art and Ideas from Philadelphia (heather@redpenarts.com)

Session Recorders

Heather Blakeslee // Emily Bargo

Participant List

Alex Keepe, WBEZ
Emily Bargo, Internews
Dylan Smith, Tucson Sentinal
Trip Jennings, New Mexico In Depth
Akshara Vivekananthan, Healthspan Foundation
Amir Richardson, WHYY
Dan Frumkin, Listening to America
Irene McKisson
Scott Blanchard WIFT
Megan Lucen, J+D People’s Newsroom

Issue

Media organizations, whether they be regionally-rooted print media, surgical interventions for certain communities, or larger projects are often asked by funders and supporters how they will “scale.” However, when solutions journalism and community-based media is committed to a place and a people, relationships and trust are paramount, as is not imposing the journalist’s or outlet’s views on the community they are covering—ideally they are part of that community, but that’s simply not possible much of the time. Additionally, there is viewpoint diversity within these communities and identity groups. It should go without saying that not all women, not black people, not all residents of South Philadelphia—pick your identity group—experience the world or think the same. And so how do we consider these two conflicting concepts—one that prioritizes growth and operating “at scale”—a concept that often isn’t clearly defined and whose outcomes are not always good—with the retail, person-to-person relationships and community building required of media organizations that are part of a healthy ecosystem.

CONVERSATION TALKING POINTS

Metrics and scale—are we asking the wrong questions?

Monitoring and evaluation from foundations and supporters require some milestones and metrics, but they sometimes use the language and methods of business or venture capital—Scale! Scale! Scale! As quickly as you can!—rather than looking to long-term and sustainable growth that requires multiple year grants—sometimes over a decade or more to really make a difference.

There are also a lot of things about “scale” that are truly awful: consider factory farming, or the exploitation of workers in factories whose companies have achieved scale. The idea of scaling something that is actually good for society may sometimes be a non-starter unless we look at the externalities. So what size is the right size for a project? Must we make a mouse into an elephant? What is in the DNA of a project?

One suggestion would be to put retail-level person-to-person interviews in a database to be able for other journalists to access. But can we trust our fellow interviewers? What is the context? The devil may be in the details here. 80% of human communication is non-verbal, and so how would words in a database really help us?

But just the process of talking with people is part of the product here. The act of questioning, searching, itself changes community dynamics and could build trust.

At WHYY, they strive to keep conversation intimate—they aren’t town halls. In their conversations across difference series, we wondered whether there was follow-up. Did the participants become more open-minded? More willing to come to conversations in a good-faith way, where they ask clarifying questions to understand rather than to convince, as Braver Angels uses in its methodology?

In a Braver Angels “red/blue” workshop in PA in 2020, both sides agreed that our politicians don’t represent us, that we are worried about big media and big tech consolidating power, and that we need to reclaim our communities from polarized discourse. We actually do have common ground.

There has been a massive shift against civil dialogue (which doesn’t always mean “polite” or “tone policing”—see Alexandra Hudson’s new book “The Soul of Civility”)

How do we invest in the people who are modeling behavior that results in good outcomes?

The other replication crisis

Sometimes, when foundations say scale, they mean replicate—how can I do this project/program in another locale? This is similarly unhelpful. How many times do we have to see that local and regional programs are just that: local and regional. They rely on geography, local leaders, local cultures and norms, history, and many other factors that are simply not analogous to other places. That is not to say that you can’t take some of the bones of an idea and take it someplace else, but as Seth Kaplan writes in his forthcoming book “Fragile Neighborhoods,” the neighborhood is the single most important unit in social cohesion. Shouldn’t our media business models take that into account? And shouldn’t foundations and other investors?

What is our value? Impact?

We need to be seen by more people as more valuable—as relevant—to their lives. So it makes a difference what language we use. Journalism is an act of collective sensemaking. We’ve lost that art. How can we map and understand our own influence? And then how can we make the case for funding that impact?

We need to set the expectations from the beginning, especially when working at the community level: this is what you can get from us and this is what you can’t get from us because it’s not possible. We need to engage in participatory budgeting in that regard, engaging who we hope to serve in deciding what we put our resources into.

Trust

Trust is missing when it comes to the media, and it can only be built over time with consistent relationships. And maybe we can’t get content out of those relationships that require trust. And you can’t replace trust. Change moves at the speed of trust. How do we solve this?

Viewpoint Diversity

• We’re working in a context of organized opposition to talking with one another. Politics has taken over absolutely everything.
• We need to change our collective stance from one of convincing to understanding. If we’re trying to convince, we’ve already lost.
• Media business models are incentivizing the wrong behavior and we have to reverse that, which requires foundations and others to help at the ground level with new kinds of business models that can become sustainable over time—which again speaks to the need for long-term relationships with funders and supporters who understand that even a three-year timeline is likely not enough.
• How do we organize and illuminate the “exhausted majority” of the country, as outlined in the More In Common “Hidden Tribes” report? Why do we continue to cater to the extremes? Local news went away and so there is no one to represent the vast majority of the country. Are there any media funders out there who care about this? Most of them are attached to extreme progressive ideology (including places such as the Independence Public Media Foundation in Philadelphia, whose funding guidelines may not even be legal as they potentially violate the Civil Rights Act) and that’s just not who most Americans are.
• We currently have a high threshold for outrage, which is one of the “high value” emotions that our media models are often based on. Others include rage, fear, and disgust. How do we switch those to positive high value emotions such as awe, wonder, and joy to get away from the “if it bleeds it ledes” mentality? Solutions-based journalism should consider the latter emotions as a framework. We want a better society. We can’t build it on fear and outrage.
• Local and regional news is less polarized and therefore more trusted, and given that it’s our personality as journalists and editors to question authority, norms, and to be naturally curious, we’re actually well-positioned to help reverse the polarization if we approach our communities and communications in a way the privileges better outcomes.
• How do we get more people to be part of the social fabric generally by being part of local government, civic, religious, and other community-based institutions?

ON CONSERVATIVES—Who, what, where?

Ironically, in asking first who are the conservatives, one participant characterized them as people who want to “other” other people and to “control” them. This cartoonish “othering” is exactly why people don’t trust what they perceive as the “liberal” media. We’re engaging in the exact behavior we’re criticizing. We’re all complex, and reducing people to caricatures isn’t helpful.

We asked where the conservatives were at this conference. If they were here, would someone be speaking about them in this way?

What do we even mean when we say conservative?

Is legacy media itself conservative? Are we talking about political conservatism? Are we talking about cultural conservatism of the kind that Yoram Hazony writes about in his book “Reclaiming Conservatism”? How do we address the fact that Latino, black, and Asian communities are more conservative culturally than their white progressive counterparts, and yet are consistently coded as progressive or assumed to be progressive because they are “people of color?”

Should we be using all these labels on people anyway, or just treating them as individuals?

We all define what might constitute liberal and conservative based on our context and surroundings. What’s conservative in the East Village is not what’s conservative in Omaha.

Furthermore, what is our larger context? Why are we not considering how much our biology and psychology influence our experience?

We all believe we should be more curious—but also know the phrase “curiosity killed the cat.” Is this idiom more entrenched in our culture than we think, and does it discourage us from knowing one another better?

It’s possible for local and regional news media to decrease polarization by staying away from labels, assumptions, and just going into communities and talking to people as individuals, without a preconceived narrative. A healthy news ecosystem has to work for that particular locale—which may be a niche, not a vast landscape.

RESOURCES

Hidden Tribes and the Exhausted Majority
A report by More In Common https://hiddentribes.us/

“Fragile Neighborhoods”
By Seth Kaplan

Braver Angels
Political Depolarization Organization

“The Soul of Civility”
By Alexandra Hudson

Blueprint: On the Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society
By Nicholas Christakis

“The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion”
By Jonathan Haidt

On “High Value” Emotions and how they’re embedded in current media models
See research by Molly Crocket at the Yale Human Nature Lab

“Reclaiming Conservatism”
By Yoram Hazony

Session Host: Kate Myers

FRAMING QUESTIONS

• What problem do we assume we are solving when we say “people want journalism?”
• How do we find out what community needs actually are?
• What does journalism really mean in this context?
• Do people really want local news?

Lingering questions

How to put Engagement journalism in the lead, not as an extra nice to have?

What IS journalism anyway?

The green line partnerships deck

Host: Megan Garvey, LAist

Participants: Scott Klein, The City, Kimi Yoshino, Baltimore Banner, Alayna Hutchinson, Temple U grad student

Discussion

Premise: By listening with more intent to communities we will find stories that would otherwise have gone uncovered, including watchdog stories that can have an impact.

Why it matters: Advancing the adoption of engaged journalism in more meaningful ways — taking the practice of siloes and making it integral to how we practice the trade in all ways — requires a shared understanding that the best practices of engaged journalism leads to stronger, more diverse stories that have an impact.

A key question we heard in another session: How do you get buy-in from top newsroom leadership for this work?

As top newsroom leaders (and a student journalist who asked great questions) we think this is at least the beginning of a road map.

The bottom line for metrics driven orgs: Connecting with communities of trust that already exist also creates an audience for your journalism that will share your work.

Some case studies:

The City in NY did open newsroom sessions, setting up tables in Queens libraries. Those morphed into public events around themes that included programming and listening.

For example:

WBEZ in Chicago is currently focusing on four areas traditionally not served by public radio. This focus includes in-person conversations that give communities members to talk about anything they want to and include some directed questions about their impressions of WBEZ (including if they have none or if it’s negative). Out of these conversations, the engagement team creates reports that allow them to ID themes in terms of issues and concerns raised. One example shared in another session: In one area several people mentioned a proliferation of vacant lots, which became a tip for the newsroom.

The Baltimore Banner ahead of launch tapped the space in local libraries to convene people from hyper-local neighborhood associations, bringing five orgs together at once. Through these listening sessions they asked:

· What kind of coverage are you looking for?

· What are the resources you’re looking for?

They then summarized the listening tour and had smaller listening sessions bringing people back for additional conversation

From those conversations, a new newsroom was able to create direct lines of contact between community members who have continued to be both resources and sources.

Question: How do you advertise these events? How do you get people who might not traditionally come to these events?

•  Libraries may help put up fliers
• Church fliers/bulletin boards
• The City has used something called EDDM, a USPS marketing service, every door direct mail. Used it after identifying areas with a high density of buildings that should have been under rent control but seemed to have been destabilized. CTA “come and see if you’re building should be rent stabilized (Note: this outperformed a FB ad, used a QR code to track respondents.)

Question: A lot of local organizations are middle level – almost secretive – we talk about how do we gain the trust?

• One of the answers is we work with people who already have that trust or are within the organization already.
• We can, through the bounds of journalism ethics, befriend them.

Example: Resolve Philly uses information hub captains  who work with community and ID people who already are leaders in their community.

Example: In New York, former city employees have very active online communities. The City has heard from them asking why they’re not doing more to cover retiree healthcare. In turn, The City has seen significant readership to stories that dive into topics raised as a concern by this group.

Example: One of the Baltimore Banner’s most successful impact stories was about SNAP fraud – and it ultimately resulted in millions of dollars being routed back into stolen benefits. They got on to the story because a reporter found a local FB group complaining about having those benefits stolen which opened up a whole community of sources.

Example: Another story about the death of a child in a hit and run crash led a reporter to a Facebook group that became a source of information and also drove an audience to that coverage.

Key takeaways:

• Finding pre-assembled groups who have already assembled around a common enemy or a common cause can both help you find stories and to make sure there’s an audience to follow them.
• There are stories people want to tell and no news organization has ever bothered to ask them questions. Sometimes just showing up is enough to get them to tell us.
• How we listen matters. We talk a lot about newsroom diversity. Reminder that it’s part of how we listen, to have people who can connect with communities has a direct impact on the kinds of stories your organization can and will cover.
• You can’t conflate doing engaged journalism is just making communities happy – whether they want the story done or not. Example from The City: They investigated a poorly run program for people who had been released from prison. The person running the program was popular in the community, but he was also effectively defrauding that same community.
• People don’t expect journalists to be community centered. You need to make being part of the community central to your mission and how you report and assign stories. In the Baltimore Banner’s case that meant intentionally writing “good” stories about neighborhoods — particularly in areas where people felt past coverage was not multi-dimensional. It’s foundational work and also impact work.

Participants:

Tara Pixley (co-host)
Alayna Hutchinson (co-host)
Doron Taussig
Michelle Ferrier 
Summer Moore
Ben Schittler
Steven Arroyo 
Taylor Naroz

Defining media literacy

• Understanding media process and practices
• Disinformation/misinformation, how to identify it
• Ability to understand facts and sources
• Understanding communication channels
• Everyone has lots of different truths, but facts are facts; we come to our truths  through the assessment of facts

Media literacy to digital resilience

• Michelle Ferrier’s work
  • Developed a curriculum called Generation Zeitgeist
  • Looking at how to change behaviors online and address harms

Media literacy is a global problem, it’s not getting easier

• Traditional mediums through which people receive their news rapidly changed, distrust rose, and for many people and communities there had been a history of distrust due to harm caused in those communities, specifically communities of color
• Pew Research Center looks at trust in all cultural institutions and has found that trust in all institutions has declined
• People only follow social media accounts and news organizations that deliver the news they’re interested in
• People can become radicalized easily because they don’t have time to process a lot of information
• Journalism education is behind; many journalism professors have not been in a newsroom for 20+ years
• Many journalists are not media literate – they are not taught critical thinking. The idea of objectivity is deeply ingrained
• Journalism started paying attention to the needs of media literacy when misinformation/disinformation became a huge problem, but this problem has existed

Solutions

• One part is the individual changing their behavior, but it’s also building media literacy into news practices and news product development
• Community members need to be including in the news production processes
  • Deep listening and co-creation with community members
  • Example: WBEZ (Chicago) Community Listening Sessions
    • Journalists hold 1:1 conversations with community members in public spaces
    • Journalist listens to what’s happening in the community and asks what community members want to see covered
    • Journalist collects information and produces stories based on that information
• Journalists need to understand and acknowledge their own biases, and to go beyond interviewing skills and to learn more listening skills and relationship building
• There needs to be a radical shift within journalism education
• Media literacy education should be taught at the elementary level
  • Media literacy curriculums: Facing History and Ourselves, News Literacy Project, Coalition for Children’s Media
  • Teach children research skills

Hosts: 

Bernardo Motta, Alisha (Asha) Wang Saville

Session Reporter:

Alisha (Asha) Wang Saville

Participants:

Off-the-record

Key Quotes/Takeaways

• Avoid being co-opted and therefore rendered ineffective when it comes to serving community
  • Foundations play a role in leveling playing field and should not contribute to gatekeeping
• Scale comes from grouping
• There are significant untapped opportunities to connect / collaborate / learn from one another across not just news orgs but also from a broad range of other orgs including edu, libraries, etc
• Inertia (resistance) is so powerful – where are we close to changing it?
• Status quo = inertia
• Listen more 
• Partner with people not in journalism
• Need different actors included in the newsroom like community organizers
• Readers vs. inform the people
• “Change doesn’t happen because someone wrote a story about it.” << Getting “coverage” is a broken model.

Sparks / Inspirations

• Overlap is just repetition
• Sometimes we don’t publish
• Empathy Interviews: listen, learn, give people a place to intervene
• Newsroms as collectives including organizers, libraries, nonprofits and …?
• Educators are the most powerful inertia in the system
• Untapped funding and co-op models
• News value of “informing community”
• Community organizers should be part of journalism infrastructure
• Training program in citizen reporting to provide employable skills for community members who can then report for your outlet
• You define the success for the funder. Take them on your journey. (s/o The Green Line) (ie. grantees have the power to define success, to define what impact means, then take funders on that journey)
• Technology – AI – add community voices

Next / Lingering Questions

• “How do we pull at the threads of what we have in common?” And what do we weave together?
• What are the conversations you can have (in newsrooms, community) that don’t end in delivering something?
• Want first steps for establishing media co-op
• How to find & sustain the deep immersion in community-centered work?
• Empathy interviews
• From serving needs of those in power to those whose voices need to be heard
• What will it take to SHIFT THE KPI’s?!
• How do these practitioners gathered stay better connected and at what cadence?
• News value
• Community first —> end with the funders