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Josh Wilson

Changing journalism philanthropy — and practice: A shared metamorphosis

April 28, 2015 by Josh Wilson 2 Comments

Nonprofit journalism — and in particular its public-interest practice in neglected and marginalized communities — is critically underfunded, and journalists and their advocates are in a great position to lead systemic change.

This change has to go deep. It must affect journalism’s value proposition, its enterprise — the mechanism journalists use to organize and work together — and its relationship with “audiences” and with subsidy.

Journalism leadership — from below

This change is more than an alteration in processes — it’s an evolution and refinement of the nature of the organism, from rationale and paradigm to means and methods.

And it is a shared metamorphosis. Journalism practice, audiences and economics are deep in transitional phases. Community needs are growing more pronounced. Philanthropy (institutional and individual) needs to observe and respond — but journalists (myself included) must articulate and advocate for their own needs as service providers more effectively.

If we journalists want our working conditions to improve, we have to organize, and we have to lead the conversation about our role and value in the United States today.

But we can’t do that without listening, and this may be the most difficult thing of all. I’m not sure we know entirely, or in some cases at all, how to listen to the most important people of all.

We’re trying to monetize UGC, we’re trying to build membership funnels … but somehow we’re not listening. We’re not essential to their daily lives. We’re just an optional product on a shelf.

What’s not working here?

More to the point, how can we turn this situation around?

Three inflection points

(1) We can start by rethinking our value proposition. Are we selling products or providing a service? Can the deep public-interest work we want to do really compete against lolcats and runaway llamas? What’s the real value we as journalists ideally provide? How can we best articulate and demonstrate that value in a manner that inspires the trust and enthusiasm of the people we want to serve?

(2) We can follow-up by repositioning our practice with a focus on enterprising missions, not commerce-oriented entrepreneurship. The former is about providing an ongoing, regular service for a community that needs it. The latter is about trying to build and monetize non-commercial products for a market that is distracted by shiny commercial products.

(3) We can bring the change home by building, and seeking investment in, shared infrastructure to provide scale and efficiencies. These would include critical services in distribution and marketing, fund development and technology platforms.

With regards to this final inflection point: The lack of significant and appropriate infrastructure for journalism practitioners doing public-interest work is a deep pain point in need of realistically designed solutions and immediate investment.

Data — the missing link

Measuring audience engagement alone is insufficient and to determining journalism’s public-interest outcomes.

There’s missing context, namely, what does the funding want?

In a democratic society notable for its widening wealth and inequity gaps, the needs of capital (to use a trendy term) cannot be ignored.

Journalism philanthropy (as well as commercial investment) is driven in large part by theories of change based in economic dogma native to the legacy commercial-news industry.

What are the impacts of this market-oriented dogma on journalism’s service to its community?

These are specific and real phenomena that can and should be identified and measured — to provide tools for responsible investment, and to provide some form of accountability.

Here a few such data points that a roomful of grad students could really tear to pieces over the course of a semester:

  • How the type and source of funding — grants, ads, crowdfunding, subscriptions, small donors, major patrons or brand-driven subsidiary businesses (events, training, data services, etc.) — affects a journalism outlet’s mission and appeal to diverse audiences
  • The functional, fungible, economic value of public-interest reporting across news organizations in the commercial market — providing critical context for discussions about subsidy and public-interest reporting
  • The specific unfulfilled information needs of neglected communities — and standardized/adaptable methods of identifying and responding to those communities and those needs
  • Longitudinal data — at least five years, but ideally encompassing more than one election cycle — tracking the impact of quality, accessible journalism in diverse communities over time

Philanthropists: To invest in a business model you need a complete picture of the conditions on the ground for the producer, and of the actual information needs of the community. Otherwise your public-interest mission is flying blind, and the prospects of impact funding are undermined.

Journalists: The economic sustainability of your practice depends on your work being indispensable on a lifestyle level — a vital source of information that people use to make a spectrum of critical choices. What issues of scale, relevance and accessibility must you resolve in order to achieve this?

Strategies and actions

Consider this a call to action for journalists and their advocates in all their diversity.

Leadership, listening and multi-tiered advocacy can open the way for a more level playing field for public-interest reporting practice.

Consider the following strategies and actions as starting points for a conversation that needs to be owned by many other people who care about journalism in our democracy.

Strategy: Develop data-driven measurements of the public-interest outcomes of journalism funding.

Action:  Identify the influence of types of funding in relation to types of news coverage produced and communities served, in order to set a baseline of accountability around journalism’s public-interest outcomes. This is an encompassing and complex data set that can sustain a critical, national conversation about the civic performance of the Fourth Estate.

Strategy: Support collaboration and network-building between independent news producers.

Action: Develop, fund and iterate shared/distributed/horizontal/p2p tools and infrastructure services to support independent news production, distribution and operations by diverse, accomplished public-interest news producers — individuals and organizations — that lack the connections, resources and scale available to mass media.

Strategy: Help communities organize to get and support the quality journalism they need.

Action: Shift from thinking about markets to focus instead on constituencies and community organizing. Re-imagine your promotional activities more fully as a public-information campaign — a type of cause campaign, really. There’s no room for paywalls here, but lots of room for developing a strong charitable foundation for public-interest work people need in their lives.

The 2016 general election, with its billions in influence-dollars, is a great lens to look at this through. What does community engagement with vital civic information really look like in such a crowded, low-quality information ecosystem?

(And remember that “community” is an encompassing term that includes more than specific geographic regions.)

Strategy: Identify and encourage philanthropic leadership

Action: (1) Philanthropists and foundations that put money down on journalism subsidy and infrastructure need to take more prominent roles as advocates for increased overall largesse nationwide. This can be achieved through a program of data-driven advocacy targeting the philanthropic community, complete with PowerPoints and panels, articles in the trade publications and some coalition building.

There are plenty of problems with the patronage of the wealthy. The support of individual sustainers — very large numbers of them — is in fact the only meaningful outcome of the entire business-model conversation. But institutional charity has its place, and until Fourth Estate has fully reconstituted its social contract with its constituency, such funding is critical.

 Action: (2) Philanthropists and microphilanthropy communities — including giving circles and crowdfunding programs — should take the lead in supporting an emerging culture of commissioning in journalism.

Just as commissions drive great works in the arts and humanities, commissioning provide a great opportunity to activate journalistic productivity around specific topics of interest to communities with unfulfilled information needs.

Strategy: Rehabilitate journalism before individual donors.

Action: Again, think about a cause campaign. It needs to be as easy and as logical to give to public-interest reporting in your community as it is to donate to your local PTA, public library, fire department — or the Red Cross, March of Dimes or United Way.

Yet the brand of “Big J Journalism” is damaged. Repairing that damage and improving the practice’s public image is worthy of a “Got Milk?”-style PR campaign, and would require coordinated fundraising and sector-wide enrollment.

The imperative of change

Executing any of these grand schemes would require nontrivial energy and funding inputs.

But given the protean moment we are in the midst of, given the entrepreneurial energy, given the exhortations to “go big or go home,” I really want to make the case that for all the good that’s being achieved, we all have to get way further out of our comfort zones than we have so far.

Healthy information ecosystems and news ecologies are complex and fragile — but if cultivated they can be become resilient and enormously productive.

The metaphor of the market and its brutal, reductionist worldview is not appropriate for this level of charitable human service. The information needs of communities transcend the vicissitudes of the market and the attention economy. Our mission, ingenuity and commitment as journalists all demand more of us.

Filed Under: Commentary Tagged With: journaism, nonprofit, public interest, sustainability

Priority problems: Journalism's position in the charitable-giving ecosystem

April 8, 2015 by Josh Wilson Leave a Comment

Amidst the news industry’s many challenges, and the hopeful flowering of a new nonprofit-news movement, the low position of public-interest news reporting in the charitable ecosystem is a troubling puzzle.

It also speaks poorly of our cultural and democratic priorities. Billions are spent on media that sell and influence, producing messages that serve vested political and commercial interests — yet the room sure clears out fast when the conversation turns to the topic of paying for public-interest journalism.

Where’s the soup kitchen for the information economy? Image: The New Yorker / Franco Pagetti

It turns out, in fact, that for all the declamations and examinations of journalism’s importance to our democracy, actually funding its noncommercial, public-interest practice is one of the lowest priorities of the charitable sector — inclusive of major and individual philanthropy.

Priority disconnect

This lack of subsidy has crippled public-interest journalism, which is not competitive in the commercial attention economy, and not easily or ethically monetized, particularly at the local level.

The good news is that such harsh conditions have produced a tough strain of nonprofit survivors. These organizations — members, for example, of the Media Consortium or the Institute for Nonprofit News — are drought tolerant. They take root in niches and keep blooming.

In organizational terms, they’re high-achieving, efficient, networked and media savvy. Their potential as engines of public-interest information is off the charts.

Yet the opportunity and mission they represent has not yet been fully recognized and embraced across the spectrum of philanthropy.

The sap may be rising for the new crop of news nonprofits — but a garden will not grow unless you water it.

In today’s parsimonious funding economy, that means infrastructure for new news nonprofits is rudimentary, newsrooms operate on shoestring budgets, founders heroically take on operations as well as editorial roles, and their ventures only thrive relative to their ability to sacrifice and work for free.

Their dedication is beyond question, as is the lack of support. Let’s look at the numbers for a better sense of journalism’s low position in the current funding ecosystem.

Journalism as a subset of media funding

Up-to-date numbers for journalism philanthropy are elusive. A good benchmark comes via a Foundation Center report that tracked $1.86 billion in grants of $10,000 or more to “media” projects of all sorts in the United States from 2009 and 2011.

That alone, however, did not necessarily add up to more money for news production.

Of that sum, 55 percent — about $1.02 billion — went to developing “media platforms” across the Internet, broadcast, film and video, TV, mobile, etc.

Actual journalism production (and training) received about half that — $527 million, accounting for 22 percent of all media grantmaking during the three-year period under scrutiny.

Journalism’s position in the individual-giving spectrum

Individual Americans gave $335.17 billion to charity in 2013, according to Giving USA, the majority of which went to religious organizations ($105.3 billion) followed by education ($52.07 billion) and human services ($41.51 billion).

In fact, Journalism itself doesn’t come up as a category, at least in the public summary of the report.

The nearest you get is arts, culture, and humanities — all noncommercial arenas of discourse, narrative, study and exchange — with an estimated $16.66 billion in giving in 2013.

For perspective, that’s a bit more than 30 times in one year what nonprofit journalism was given over three years.

Profits, politics and influence money

The forthcoming 2016 elections, with billions of influence dollars lining up for media prime time, reframe journalism’s funding struggles in the context of a full-blown ecosystem crisis.

One projection expects election-ad spending to hit $12 billion next year — a tide of influence messages choking media channels like an offshore toxic-algae bloom fed by unregulated fertilizer runoff.

That $12 billion in influence funding is a bit more than 22 times the $527 million in charitable funds invested in journalism and media from 2009 to 2011.

It will also make up a handsome 18.4 percent of the estimated $65 billion in revenue the U.S. news industry as a whole is expected to earn in 2016.

Mass media are are handily adapting to the information economy and developing all sorts of marketing and revenue streams. The philanthropic sector remains enormously wealthy. And individual giving remains a deep and largely untapped wellspring.

Yet nonprofit journalism — and specifically public-interest news production in communities that lack it — remains a neglected, and even unrecognized, priority.

Where is the imagination, the conscience, the commitment and the will to strengthen this emerging, and desperately needed, charitable sector?

 

Filed Under: Commentary Tagged With: democracy, funding, journalism, media, philanthropy

Why not just pay more journalists? The crisis of journalism as metaphor

January 29, 2014 by Josh Wilson Leave a Comment

In which a vision of the future creates drought and desiccation in the present.

Let’s talk about metaphors. “The future of journalism,” for example.

It packs a punch! It’s powerful and inspiring, suggesting continuity and achievement. The past — gears, ink and union pressmen. The future — mobile media, apps and seamless user experiences.

The metaphor here is primarily technological, and as such industrial, albeit in the clean-room spirit of chip manufacturing rather than a sweaty old pressroom floor. It tells us that there is indeed a future for “journalism,” the same way that there’s a future for media technology.

And as far as futures go, media technology seems like a great one to hitch your wagon to — it’s vastly empowering, and comes with a high-productivity, innovation-driven business model. Things anyone would love to see in a journalism enterprise as well.

So far, however, this particular future does not seem to be one in which journalists actually get paid, which is rather a bad thing.

An industrial crisis

Let’s break that down a bit, starting with the nonprofit side — we’ll save commercial media for a future posting (and make only a passing reference to the nonprofit industrial complex).

According to a Foundation Center report, between 2009 and 2011 donors gave $1.86 billion in grants of $10,000 or more to “media” projects of all sorts in the United States.

The good news here is that media grantmaking in general grew at an inspiring rate of 21 percent over that period — although that alone does not mean “more money for reporters.”

Of that sum, 55 percent — about $1.02 billion — went to developing “media platforms” across the Internet, broadcast, film and video, TV, mobile, etc. Actual journalism production (and training) received about half that — $527 million, accounting for 22 percent of all media grantmaking during the three-year period under scrutiny.

Does this three-year funding gap indicate an affinity for techno-futurist grant making? Or perhaps an aversion by grant makers to actually funding reporting?

These are worthy questions, though a bit existential given the depth of the crisis.

What actually matters — the outcome on the ground and in communities — is that the practice of journalism is in the grips of a deep funding drought that’s showing no signs of breaking.

Drought is not an economic formula to crack — although it is often exacerbated by industrial activity.

Drought is devastation. It is hostile to growth and development. It turns people out of their homes, degrades populations, creates opportunity for fraud and abuse, and even produces wars.

And that’s not a very happy future of journalism at all.

While there have been some glimmers of hope — a hardy spring crop of news nonprofits battling to take root, some interesting new commercial business ventures — the news industry is not in any real way positioned to rebuild lost capacity.

And if it does rebuild that capacity — perhaps by via robust, diversified monetization strategies — would a thousand labor beats then bloom coast to coast?

Would environmental-health stories and money-and-politics investigations begin appearing above the fold, on the front page, throughout the week?

Would third-party candidates be routinely featured in debates and reporting?

The crisis of journalism is more complicated than the collapse of the ad model, or the need for new monetization strategies. It strikes more fundamentally at the issue of where the money comes from, and what journalism is for.

At least with regards to the Fourth Estate — that idealized embodiment of civic empowerment in a democracy — the point is simply to pay journalists to cover issues in the public interest, right?

And the problem, apparently, is that no one seems to want to do that.

The depths of the drought

Commercial news organizations are paying fewer and fewer journalists each year. Newspaper employment numbers dropped from 57,000 in 2007 to 38,000 in 2013. In 2011 job cuts surged 30 percent.

This ferocious, national-scale teardown of an entire industry also reveals the relative value of public-interest journalism in the commercial marketplace: Not much.

Foundations don’t pay journalists. Sure, there are a handful of specialized grant makers, plus the odd reporting fellowship. But, as noted above, even within the field of journalism grant making, “media platforms” get the lion’s share of largesse.

Apparently, individuals also don’t want to pay journalists. At the very least, there are plenty of obstacles to doing so. Given issues of trust, brand, visibility, and competition for donations and subscriptions, it seems as if there never will be enough donors or subscribers to sustain a thriving journalism sector.

Then again, there never were. Industrial journalism’s primary subsidy was always advertising, and the breaking of that monopoly with the emergence of networked digital media was when the drought began in earnest.

Even top-shelf news nonprofits get only a fraction of their funding from individual donations, subscriptions and memberships — a most vexing reality given the quality of the journalism they produce, and the depth of civic need.

But the numbers do not lie.

In 2013, for example, ProPublica’s $11.9 million income budget came almost entirely from major gifts and boardmember-related contributions. Online donations, presumably from individual small donors, amounted to $215,000 — 1.8 percent of its total income.

Among regional nonprofit heavies, 16 percent of the Texas Tribune’s $4 million income budget in 2012 came from its membership program, to the tune of $643,935. That same year the Voice of San Diego, known for its potent membership program, boasted 26 percent of its income from membership dues — that’s $366,877 out of an overall income budget of $1.4 million. It’s the healthiest level of individual support we’ve seen so far, but it’s still just one-quarter of VOSD’s overall budget.

It’s not like these organizations aren’t doing good, relevant work that needs to be in circulation. They’re doing all that and more — winning awards, building donor bases, cultivating ancillary income streams, maybe even tweaking the business model.

These are the cream of the crop, the roll-up-your-sleeves “journopreneurs” blazing a trail for the industry into the electronic frontier of the 21st century. So where’s the popular upwelling of support?

This disconnection — or at least under-representation — of individuals from the journalism funding formula is all the more boggling when you consider that they are the drivers of the charitable economy in the United States.

A wellspring gone dry?

Individual Americans gave more than $228.44 billion annually to charity in 2012, out of a total of $316.23 billion donated that year. According to Giving USA, the majority of that went to religious organizations — 32 percent — as well as education and human services (13 percent each).

Yet journalism or media don’t even come up as categories in the survey. The closest you get is “arts, culture, and humanities,” which claimed five percent of the overall annual haul — an estimated $14.44 billion. That’s a 7.8 percent increase from 2011, and many times more in one year than the discouraging trickle the Foundation Center survey identified as going to media (and a bit of journalism) from 2009-2011.

How did the Fourth Estate, redoubtable fortress of the public interest, end up outside the fundraising sweet spot? With a public so given to good causes, and a demonstrated interest in supporting expression, inquiry and discourse?

One theory, proposed by Tom Stites of the Banyan Project (full disclosure: I am a Banyan adviser), is that the public, and lower-income audiences and readers in particular, have been “discarded” by a commercial-news business model that doesn’t value their civic, economic and cultural condition.

The result, he says, is that news media produce coverage of greater value to more affluent audiences, which have greater appeal to high-paying advertisers. For everyone else, journalism presumably loses value and relevance.

With the devaluing of audiences — and certain types of audiences in particular — comes a most curious phenomenon Stites describes as a “news desert”:

“Elites and the affluent are awash in information designed to serve them, but everyday people, who often grapple with significantly different concerns, are hungry for credible information they need to make their best life and citizenship decisions. Sadly, in many communities there’s just no oasis, no sustenance to be found — communities where the ‘new news ecosystem’ is not a cliché but a desert.”

Metaphors are conceptual frameworks that help interpret facts, express ideas and convey opinions. Take a step further back and look at the metaphor itself as an artifact, as something to study (its epistemology, I suppose) and one can break down how that metaphor functions in society, and the values it represents.

The crisis of journalism is a crisis of metaphor. A technological, industrial business model’s unsustainable economics are desiccating news ecologies and information ecosystems nationwide.

Journalism is not an industry. Not any more. There’s a media industry. An entertainment industry. A publishing industry. There’s even, as mentioned previously, a “nonprofit-industrial complex.”

Journalism definitely happens between all these players — and not just ambulance-chasing, Hollywood-obsessed puff pieces, mind you. We’re talking serious, amazing, I’m-eating-my-vegetables-because-they’re-so-damn-good journalism.

But journalism as an industry — once the jewel-studded waistcoat to American industrial democracy — is now most notable for its rust belt. The Fourth Estate itself has entire wings gone derelict.

Maybe we need a new metaphor — it is, after all, the future. We have better tools and deeper experiences with which to survey the landscape.

This new conceptual terrain is ripe for sustainable, adaptive systems design. It yearns for new irrigation methods that can sustain healthy information ecosystems and thriving news ecologies.

In this new landscape, the people formerly known as the audience have a newfound recognition of their empowerment in civic life — but risk marginalization by only engaging through the metaphor of the marketplace.

In this new landscape, journalists, editors and publishers alike have been rather disoriented by the seeming evaporation of their watershed. The well-digging is getting a bit more industrious of late — but tapping into diminishing aquifers is hardly the path to building a more environmentally appropriate, sustainable, and widespread Fourth Estate in American democracy.

Watershed restoration

Here’s a metaphor to try on.

Journalism is a scraggly old cactus in the dry and ravaged desert that blooms gloriously — magnificently, transformatively — whenever the rain conspires with the sun.

The good news is, watersheds can be restored, and cultivated. The garden can diversify and proliferate. It’s a matter of systems design. Appropriate technologies. Complementary relationships. Journalists could learn a lot from the permaculture movement.

It’s possible, you know. To have the journalism sector we all know we really need. There are a lot of infrastructural knots to untangle, but it can be done.

Journalists simply need to better understand their funding watersheds, and more effectively and sustainably build their endeavor in relation to this ecological opportunity.

The public — being that watershed in the profoundest and most pure sense — also has an opportunity, and indeed a mandate and an urgent need. The public is the enshrined wellspring of democratic legitimacy, and it is also deeply vulnerable to abuses of democratic process.

Only engaged individuals and communities can truly “save” journalism — as donors, as subscribers, and most of all as advocates for their own information needs.

But they need better mechanisms to do this, and a new vision for journalism’s value in their lives, their communities, and their democracy.

The health and sustainability of the journalism sector is thus linked to its relevance and connection to the communities it proposes to serve, and who most urgently need it.

This is the opportunity and necessity that a watershed approach to journalism represents. It’s not merely deeper than a futurist metaphor — it’s the context within which a sustainable, healthy future will take root and flourish.

Filed Under: Commentary

Introducing the Watershed Media Project

December 21, 2013 by Josh Wilson Leave a Comment

The Watershed Media Project is a new initiative to research and develop grassroots funding, production and promotional models for independent, public-interest journalism and media.

Watershed will grow by achieving a series of small, simple, incremental goals over longer periods of time; by periodically publishing research, analysis and commentary using blogs and social media; and by encompassing and managing Newsdesk.org and Newsfunders.net as test platforms for its overarching hypothesis, which goes something like this:

Grassroots funding and production models for journalism can more effectively serve key public-interest needs than institutional news media and monetized news products.

Watershed Media is responding in part to “Post-Industrial Journalism,” a crucial 2012 manifesto by Emily Bell, C.W. Anderson and Clay Shirky, in which they memorably declare that “there’s no such thing as the news industry anymore,” and call for “new forms of organization” within which to develop and drive the practice of journalism in our democracy.

Significantly, the use of “watershed” as a metaphor for how media and culture are created and funded is also resonant with commonplace media-reform and future-of-journalism metaphors such as “information ecosystem” and “news ecology.”

These are easy metaphors, even seductive, and yet taking them seriously begins to compel questions. What, for example, are the funding watersheds that sustain these media-based ecosystems? How does one measure and ensure their health and sustainability?

That’s ground that needs to be broken, and a conversation that can start here.

Filed Under: Watershed News

Chuck Lewis: How to Start a News Nonprofit

June 17, 2010 by Josh Wilson Leave a Comment

[Interview conducted May 2008]

A former 60 Minutes producer, Charles Lewis hit hard limits on what he could cover in the commercial sector. So he jumped ship, and embarked on the “tough slog” of building his own nonprofit news outlet at a time — the late ’80s — when the industry was still flush, and the Internet largely unknown. The Center for Public Integrity went on to break ground as a new type of public-interest news outlet, while Lewis has since founded the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, and played a key role in forming the Investigative News Network.

Notable Quotes

• STARTING UP: “The first time we got a six-figure grant was in ’94. For the first four years I could not get a major foundation — a well-known, large, kind of iconic foundation — to even answer my letters. So, y’know, it was a tough slog, a very brick-by-brick thing.”

• SPREADING THE WORD: “When I started the Center, the Internet was not really used by the public — the late ’80s, early ’90s. And so when we released something, we’d go to the National Press Club, and it’d be on C-SPAN, or the wire services would move stories based on what we had found, and it would be framed as findings even though it was a news story. And it worked, and people started noticing us. But the Web obviously helped, because instead of printing up a few hundred copies of a report, you could obviously put it on the Web and it would be available everywhere.”

• SIGNAL TO NOISE: “The problem is the Web and the blogosphere … doesn’t easily distinguish between quality and crap … That, and you start to be lumped in with a lot of things that you’re sheepish to even be associated with …. So the Web has its downsides, too, I would say. The viral nature of something exciting moving — we’ve seen that. And the Center saw lots of very big studies that got instant global attention when it hit … but the other side of that is, it’s getting lost in the din.”

• SELF-LIMITING JOURNALISM: “My worry is the extent to which both political sensibilities and intellectual squeamishness, about covering or not covering certain subjects, will creep into any new systems or forums. Most of these things come down to people and they come down to large bureaucracies — and whenever that happens, generally you’d better look out, because people get kind of strange, and frankly kind of closed-minded about what they’re willing to do. We’ve seen some of the results of the sort of calcification, and what I’d call a sort of nervous anxiety, about what the outcome of investigative journalism might be, who might be offended, etc.”

• THIS MAGIC MOMENT: “I think the opportunities are just breathtaking, and I actually think this is the most exciting time to be alive, or a journalist — ever. It’s sort of like what it was like in the end of the 1940s, with the advent of television — except it’s multimedia, it’s every potential form of communication imaginable, all exploding at once.”

• THE FUTURE: “Whatever happens is going to be a startup; it’s not going to be an existing entity trying to adapt. Entrepreneurialism always works better at new platforms, unencumbered by the past, or bureaucracies, or precedents, or cultural sensibilities that date back decades.”


CHARLES LEWIS, TALKING PUBLIC MEDIA
Interview by Josh Wilson, May 2008Let’s talk about your path into nonprofit and noncommercial media. I know the basic story — that you got frustrated at 60 Minutes and needed to strike out on your own — but I’m sure there’s more to it.

[Laughs] Yeah, yeah, that’s an understatement. I had done investigative reporting at two networks, ABC and CBS, over an eleven-year period — and I basically came to a sense that there was a lack of seriousness and sincerity, really, about doing thorough, substantive investigative journalism, and I began to realize that I had done my time there, and it was time to move on.

This occurred in a number of specific cases of specific stories where they were not aired, or parts of them would not be aired. And I mean, I’m giving you the sort of Cliff’s Notes version …

But this happens in every sort of major news organization. There are these pressures we all hear about — and it does happen, and I experienced it firsthand, and I saw my colleagues experience it.

And I’m an old-fashioned, meat-and-potatoes guy that likes to investigate the bastards, whoever they are, and I don’t like anybody telling me that I can’t do this or that when it comes to that kind of work. The reasons would have to be really compelling, and they weren’t. [Laughs.]

So I didn’t have any idea what was out there; I just knew the world I was in was not working for me.

I was familiar with some models; I knew the Center for Investigative Reporting had been around; I knew about the Better Government Association in Chicago, which was really more of a nonprofit watchdog entity than a journalism entity — although it was a partner with many journalism outlets in Chicago.

The two of them had different models, in the way they were funded and their backgrounds and their approaches … and CIR, as you know, is the oldest nonprofit investigative journalism entity, actually I suspect in the world, from everything I’ve done and research I’ve done.

And I was close friends, still am, with Lowell Bergman — so I was familiar with the CIR model, but I had issues with the model, there were some things that I would want to do differently and ended up doing differently.

Everyone adapts to whatever they’re encountering and whatever they’re approaching based on experiences, tastes, biases [and] life experience. And I had a slightly different idea in mind. And I didn’t know it would be nonprofit at first. I mean, I didn’t know what IT would be — capital I, capital T — I just knew that I needed to be in charge of it [laughs], not anyone else telling me what I could do or should do.

That’s how it all started. And I explored all kinds of possibilities. I explored for-profits, I explored nonprofit, I had offers from numerous commercial news organizations, I had offers from Hollywood folks [laughs] — I had lots of possibilities.

But the one that I was most intrigued with was a nonprofit, and that’s really what became the Center for Public Integrity.

It wasn’t a short, quick odyssey; it took, literally, a long time. From start to finish — I left in November of ’88 and began working full time to make the Center happen, having obtained some funding, about a year later, actually, October 1, 1989. But it was a tough slog to get just to that point, and of course the next two or three years were really a tough slog.

So starting nonprofits is not a simple matter. And when you’re trying to control it, you deliberately have a board that will not be involved in fundraising, because they’re journalists. [Laughs]

And you have certain rules or sensibilities about what money you’ll take, and from whom, and all that stuff — and when you start down those roads, you’re starting to shut doors off to yourself, in terms of opportunities to grow the organization.

And in your earnestness for moral and ethical purity, or at least the perception thereof — hopefully both — you know, it actually does affect the level and degree of your success, in terms of your capacity, your size, all that stuff.

The more earnest, the less capacity?

Yeah, the more earnest and the more fastidious you are about your funding sources, in other words, the more limiting you become … to what money is worthy of your enterprise. I’m being slightly humorous here — my feeble attempt at humor.

But that degree of earnestness can impede the growth and the capacity of the enterprise — because if you’re too picky, you won’t accept money from anybody, and you won’t have any money.

At some point, you have to come off the ivory tower and come down into the village. [Laughs] And anyone who has started anything has had to do that. No matter how lofty the original notion.

So probably about five or six years to get it to a state where you considered it –

The first time we got a six-figure grant was in ’94. For the first four years I could not get a major foundation — a well-known, large, kind of iconic foundation — to even answer my letters. So, y’know, it was a tough slog, a very brick-by-brick thing.

Do you feel that’s changed?

No, I still think it’s hard to start things, actually — because it’s a very complicated dynamic between resources you need, what is your mission, what exactly is your self-imposed mandate.

And I hate to say it, but then it comes down to those intangibles, like the buzz factor — are you being noticed?

And if you’re doing something that’s counter to, or even in competition with existing major media, you are almost by definition not going to be receiving news coverage.

And so, off the bat … you’re certainly not assisting yourself, helping yourself in terms of publicity and attracting attention to yourself in the community, whatever that community is.

And it’s very, very hard.

So, there’s a direct relationship between the media discovering something and the availability of philanthropic funds. [Then] the hot commodity — or one of other cliches, the flavor of the month — gets all the funding, because it’s exciting, and that entity is a player and donors are thrilled to be associated with it.

And they feel what they’ve done is important, and it’s showing that it’s important because others have seen it as well, and there’s this exciting moment when that all happens.

But if any piece of it’s not worked right, if you don’t have the people, if don’t have the right projects, and you don’t have folks noticing what you’ve done — in other words, if what you’ve done is not terribly significant or even new, or impressive, or whatever word you want to use — then the funding will be affected by that.

I don’t care how many soapboxes you get on, how many phone calls you make, how many meetings and luncheons you attend. You will not be able to go beyond your own performance, or your record as an entity.

And — that part is a very, very tricky dynamic to understand — because without money you will not be able to function. And if you don’t function well, you don’t get money. It’s a little bit like a cat chasing its tail. It’s exceedingly difficult.

And the reason, I think, that nine out of ten new enterprises, companies or nonprofits fail is because getting the balance down — between the resources needed and the ways in which they are expended and the impact from those expenses — y’know, it’s a very, very delicate equilibrium.

With a startup, you don’t have a lot of people …

The capacity issues for a startup …

Yes — capacity is just a very big deal.

What’s the potential of the Internet to change or open up this situation, or will it?

Well, I’ve seen it on both sides. When I started the Center, the Internet was not really used by the public — the late ’80s, early ’90s. In Washington, most usage of the Web didn’t start occurring most places until the mid-’90s.

And so when we released something, we’d go to the National Press Club, and it’d be on C-SPAN, or the wire services would move stories based on what we had found, and it would be framed as findings even though it was a news story. And it worked, and people started noticing us.

But the Web obviously helped, because instead of printing up a few hundred copies of a report, you could obviously put it on the Web and it would be available everywhere. From the mid-’90s to today, we’ve seen a exponential explosion in terms of how many people that is. And of course you have the global component, which you didn’t have with news conferences at the Press Club.

So, yes, the impact of the Web is astonishing in that sense, in terms of what you can do journalistically, but also, most importantly of course, your economies of scale, your costs of this and that, in many ways go down. And your reach and your dissemination of course is the most exciting part, because it’s global.

And that’s all great. The bad news is that now there are tens of millions of people who have websites or blogs …

The info glut.

Yeah, there is a glut. And the problem is the Web and the blogosphere … doesn’t easily distinguish between quality and crap … That, and you start to be lumped in with a lot of things that you’re sheepish to even be associated with …. So the Web has its downsides, too, I would say.

The viral nature of something exciting moving — we’ve seen that. And the Center saw lots of very big studies that got instant global attention when it hit — I mean, the excitement of the Web is quite real and quite palpable and thrilling to behold — but the other side of that is, it’s getting lost in the din.

Do you think that there’s an opportunity for what I’m going to broadly call “public media” to provide standards or credibility amidst this undifferentiated glut? And if so, do you have any thoughts about what that would look like?

I have ideas about what everything should look like [laughs] … but I don’t know public media and what public media will become, both from the standpoint of technology, and the so-called spectrum, and the new digital channels …

I have friends who are authors of books about it, and I can get answers when I need ‘em, but there’s good news and there’s bad news about the PBS/NPR model: The good news is that nonprofit institutions were created in our lifetime, at least mine — 40 years ago — and it’s thrilling and inspiring to know that new things that have high impact can be created. We sometimes forget that, frankly, certainly in the public context.

So just the vision and possibility that it could happen at all is inspiring.

Yeah … when I see that a news organization today has 30 million listeners throughout the nation, and it started out of thin air forty years ago, that’s terribly exciting. And when I see it’s doubled its audience in the last decade, that’s thrilling.

When I see that they have over thirty bureaus around the world when CBS is down to five or whatever it is — that is remarkable.

So we have to stand back and acknowledge what we do see, before we go forward, and so — some of the things that have been created are magnificent.

On the other hand, you’re talking to an investigative reporter kind of junkie. I mean, I’ve been doing it for thirty years, and that’s all I really mostly care about.

And, with the exception of some of Bill Moyers’ programs and specials and Frontline, some of the Frontline shows, there’s not much of that on PBS — and NPR generally speaking does not do investigative reporting.

And so, in all the things that are contemplated, do I know what new structures and new systems will be created to enable investigative journalism, or to ensure that quality in-depth journalism occurs?

I’m not persuaded we’ve ever achieved that, number one, and number two, I don’t know what that is. And I don’t think anyone does, honestly. Is there a lot of discussion about it? Of course there is. I mean there’s an event in Washington, I know the American University Center for Social Media has been involved in mapping —

The Beyond Broadcast project …

Beyond Broadcast and folks, and — and I’m on faculty with Pat Aufderhide, who is in the AU School of Communication, and I myself am starting a new research center at American called the Investigative Reporting Workshop, which will be I think the first entity that I know of, at least in the U.S., looking at new models to do investigative reporting, both creation and dissemination or delivery of investigative reporting, as the sole mission of the enterprise …

I think what you’re asking is the question of the hour in many ways, certainly regarding the public realm, and public journalism, and what’s possible and all that.

But my worry is the extent to which both political sensibilities and intellectual squeamishness, about covering or not covering certain subjects, will creep into any new systems or forums.

Most of these things come down to people and they come down to large bureaucracies — and whenever that happens, generally you’d better look out, because people get kind of strange, and frankly kind of closed-minded about what they’re willing to do.

We’ve seen some of the results of the sort of calcification, and what I’d call a sort of nervous anxiety, about what the outcome of investigative journalism might be, who might be offended, etc.

I’ve been hearing people saying or discussing this and thinking about it for years and years and years, and I’m into the — I’m into investigating. Period.

Everything else kind of follows…

Yeah, everything else follows. If you’ve got the information, and you’ve got the quality journalism that you’ve been able to either do yourself or work with others to achieve, you’ll find a way to get it out these days — and that is one advantage of the Web.

But back to your question, it’s a great question, I don’t think we have what you just asked, and I don’t think anyone has any idea where it’s headed. And anyone who would say, “trust me, it’s gonna be great,” I would also hold onto my wallet and lock my doors.

There’s a mixed record here of setting up federal and national systems and guaranteeing they won’t be politicized in recent years, but they do become politicized — so let’s just get over that idea [laughs].

So you’re hearing a suspicious, independent cuss here, on the other end of the phone.

That’s fine. You know, independence is one of the bullet points in the SPJ Code of Ethics, to “act independently.” This is a bit of an aside, but I did leave SFGate.com after Hearst took over because of a lack of opportunity, because of people telling me what I couldn’t do. I started Newsdesk.org because the Internet appealed to me as a place where it was possible to be more independent.

I wonder if there is the opportunity to create a model or system or method — maybe not an institution, but a method — by which journalists can act independently within the classic decentralized Internet structure, where there is no center, everybody’s independent — but if they’re all signed on to a set of standards, for example, suddenly you have the professionalism and the support network that lack the hierarchy. That’s the theory behind Newsdesk.org. And that might be pipe dreaming.

No no no. I may be misinterpreting what you’re asking, but I think that could be very useful and there’s a need for it.

In fact, I’m on the advisory committee of a new thing called the I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence — it’s going to be an annual prize and it’s going to be administered by Harvard’s Nieman Foundation — and there have been discussions with I. F. Stone’s son, Jeremy Stone, about what constitutes an independent journalist and independent journalism, and what are the criteria, and we’ve been in deep discussions really in recent weeks.

And you know, I have been asked by them to write about this very subject, and to discuss that is and how to define it. And most journalists, no matter where they work, assume they’re already independent. Also the phrase “investigative” — “Oh, I’m investigative.” What do you mean? “Y’know, I ask questions …”

So these definitions and these terms are still not well understood, even inside the profession of journalism itself.

One of the things that we made a point of at the Center for Public Integrity when I ran it for the first fifteen years was that, to have a code of conduct and standards for — and this really more along the lines of ethics and integrity, about news-gathering techniques — but I was very very strict, as or more strict than the news organizations and networks, places like that, that I have worked.

Given the name of the organization, the Center for Public Integrity, I had very clear ideas about what was reasonable in news-gathering and what was a violation of privacy, or other sensibilities.

And so there’s a way to do investigative reporting and not violate any laws or do things that are just simply unreasonable, I would say.

And even something that basic [as having a standard] is actually borderline revolutionary, because you have lawyers telling you for libel reasons “don’t do it,” because then you’re charged with libel later in some civil situations; they’ll hold it against you that you had a standard — anyway, you can basically lose your mind splitting hairs on any one of these questions, and that’s just the ethics dimension, but the independent one is almost as vexing. It’s not a simple question of what constitutes an independent journalist.

I’ve just interviewed nearly two dozen great journalists of the last half-century about their truth-to-power journalism at the national level, as part of a book I’m writing, and I would dare say in 45 hours of interviews, I would never have asked them to define what we’re discussing — do you know what I mean?

Because not a single one of them — which is probably collectively several hundred years of experience in journalism — would have said the same thing, I suspect.

About what?

About what is an independent journalist. Or — they would all insist that they were independent — and they were — but they all worked for news organizations that at one time or another were not so independent.

And so, I don’t mean to make everything overly complex… but the fact is that these are not simple questions. I mean, they’re great questions, but they’re not simply answered.

So I think it’s something we need to come to grips with as a profession. I think going forward in the Information Age or Internet Age, we need to know better what the answers are to these questions.

But the fact is, there’s no — because we have something like 45 or 50 journalism nonprofit organizations alone in the United States, not to mention a few hundred colleges and universities that teach journalism — there is no single arbiter of anything about journalism, as you know.

There are no professional standards; this is a profession that prides itself on not having any standards [laughs].

I always go back to the SPJ Code –

Well, it is, it’s true — although that code, no offense to SPJ, I mean I’ve been a member for, gosh, a long time — but the SPJ code is actually not the most demanding code.

It’s a perfectly nice and reasonable code. It says some good things, and that’s why we put it on the website, but it doesn’t get down and dirty in the precise techniques and things that are useful for investigative reporting to be discussed, I guess you’d say.

So you can have internal policies that are different, or even go further than the SPJ Code of Ethics, which we did try to do at the Center in some cases.

It’s particularly delicate when you’re dealing with international journalism, where the language is different, the mores are different, the practices even about something that’s verboten in the United States — paying sources — is actually done quite a bit around the world.

One source versus two sources, a lot of the standards and techniques and practices of journalism vary according to geography, and in terms of the duration of their democratic experience, I guess you’d say.

And so — and existing laws in place — do they have criminal libel? Turns out 158 of 168 countries have criminal libel in the world, which is an astonishing thing to say, but it’s true. Article 19 has recently apparently found this in an international survey.

So if you not only risk getting civilly sued, but also thrown in jail in almost all the countries in the world, you can see how delicate this is in setting a standard.

So … now the public space is a global space. It was always kind of global, but it was in the context of the U.S.

Now it’s not — and that may sound like a small point, but it’s actually a rather significant point, because basically there are no global standards for this kind of stuff … I don’t mean to make everything so complicated, but these things are complicated.

It sounds like we have starting points for lots of important issues and ideas.

It’s also not rocket science. These things can be formulated and can gain currency over time, in terms of both the profession and the business of journalism, including the public sector part of journalism.

There are ways this can occur, but especially today there’s a lot of work to be done.

Which would you like to talk about: past or future? Legacy of public media, or opportunities for public media in the future?

I don’t know much about the future. I’m trying to forge it as much as anybody, and I have entrepreneurial leanings in various ways which will play out in the months and years ahead. So I have ideas about the future. But I don’t know about the systems that are going to be established in the future.

Then think in terms of opportunities, as an entrepreneur.

Well, I think the opportunities are just breathtaking, and I actually think this is the most exciting time to be alive, or a journalist — ever. It’s sort of like what it was like in the end of the 1940s, with the advent of television — except it’s multimedia, it’s every potential form of communication imaginable, all exploding at once.

So what’s possible in terms of what you could do journalistically to tell a story, to explain a story — but also even to get a story … some of the various new techniques, from computer-assisted reporting to satellite imagery — all the different techniques now are just breathtaking.

It takes journalism so far, centuries beyond Lincoln Steffens or S.S. McClure or whatever. So I mean, when we see what the technology enables, it is thrilling.

And from an entrepreneurial standpoint, we are obviously seeing a rather significant historic economic transformation — a euphemism everyone uses — but it’s true, the transformation.

And for an entrepreneur, the question is, who is going to pay for this information, this particularly difficult-to-get information, that is the most expensive, time-consuming and slightly riskier information to prepare?

What we have been seeing is [that] most of the for-profit models rely on folks without journalistic sensibilities or concern for community … those folks are into their shareholder earnings and their quarterly profits, and keeping them rather high — uncharacteristically high, vis-a-vis the rest of the industry sectors, even.

And so … the question is — what will emerge in the months and years ahead, and is there a way to redefine this landscape, or even this information that’s so crucial and so important? Is there a way that this information will become suddenly more attractive to the mega-players out there that dominate the global landscape economically?

And I actually think the answer to that is yes. Will it happen? The answer’s yes. Do we know exactly in what form? We don’t quite yet.

But whatever happens is going to be a startup; it’s not going to be an existing entity trying to adapt. Entrepreneurialism always works better at new platforms, unencumbered by the past, or bureaucracies, or precedents, or cultural sensibilities that date back decades.

And so, we’re going to see new startup for-profits, nonprofits and hybrids of the two emerge. We’re seeing it already — but we’re going to see it, I think, on a larger scale, in an economic way that finally takes, so to speak.

So far, the for-profit model has not had any success lately — not really, not substantially for this kind of work — and it is what is terrifying most journalists and most journalism production shops, so the owners in other words — and somehow that’s got to shift.

And I predict it will shift, and I think it will shift even in the next three to five years — but what do I know? I mean, no one really knows. But there are enough signs of ferment and enough signs of where things are going to suggest that it’s possible.

And I do find that utterly thrilling.

Filed Under: Interviews Tagged With: entrepreneurship, journalism, nonprofit, public media, talking public media

Geneva Overholser: ‘Public Media’ or Public Interest?

June 14, 2010 by Josh Wilson Leave a Comment

[Interview conducted May 2008]

It was in the depths of 2006, with the severity of the media crisis only deepening, that GENEVA OVERHOLSER — former editor of the Pulitzer-winning Des Moines Register, ombudsman for The Washington Post, and currently director of the School of Journalism at the University of Southern California — issued her now-classic “On Behalf of Journalism: A Manifesto for Change” sent the conventional wisdom to the recycling bin. It’s not just about Craigslist eating up classified-ad revenue. Journalists, she said, are not open to change. The public trusts them less and less. And “relentless” pressure on media companies to achieve “unusually high profit margins” quarter after quarter only deepens the quagmire.

Notable Quotes

• PUBLIC INTEREST: “One of the great things to emerge is the understanding that transparency and accountability to the public are absolute hallmarks of journalism in the public interest, the vision of information in the public interest … this means that all of us who care about journalism are reminded of the point of it (which we’ve too often needed to be reminded of). It’s not about the journalist, it’s about the public interest — arming people with the information they want and need in order to live their lives more richly and be citizens in a democracy.”

• TRUST: “People will say they do value their local newspaper or their local television station, but they generally believe the press is not as reliable as it used to be.”

• NPR & PBS: “They have their own complexities in terms of being a model; they began with the controversial question of government [funding], and that has affected them substantially, which I hope would not necessarily be true for most public media, but I think it’s important to note that they’re sort of singular in that regard. Although I think there may well be a role for government, it’s important to note that it’s complex. Also, NPR increasingly has a commercial model — they may call them sponsorships, but they aren’t much different from advertisers …”

• PUBLIC PARTICIPATION: “When they are part of a public that is being skeptical, or that is stressing the questions, then they are better. So I think having a public media, having a set of public media, having citizens who are expressing themselves, who are committing their own acts of journalism or who are demanding better journalism — [these] have a real effect of a ‘rising tide lifts all boats.’”

• FOUNDATION FUNDING: “Foundations aren’t necessarily [a solution] — they may be interested in health reporting, but what if you decide when you’re doing this health reporting that you’ve come across a remarkable energy story … are you gonna hold off and then you have to go to the foundation that cares about energy? I’m mean, it’s not the way reporting can work.”


GENEVA OVERHOLSER, TALKING PUBLIC MEDIA
Interview by Josh Wilson, May 2008What are the strengths and weaknesses of public media in the internet era?

When you say public media, do you mean media that are mostly contributed to by non-journalists? Or do you mean nonprofit? I guess you need to define public media for me.

I’m being deliberately evasive on that because different definitions are emerging.

Yeah, well, I don’t know how useful the phrase is; [but] it opens a door to what we really need to be focused on — which is information in the public interest …

Think about something like the Center for Public Integrity, which is certainly a professional, nonprofit center for investigative reporting based in Washington, doing what often looks like fairly traditional investigative reporting, but according to an untraditional economic model, basically because their financing is noncommercial.

It’s certainly producing reporting in the public interest that’s very different from what, say, is happening in the Twin Cities, where you have two struggling newspapers, one of them which had been bought by an equity investor, and you have Minnesota Public Radio, which is a really interesting model; you’ve got MinnPost, which was started by a former publisher of the Star Tribune, being backed by a bunch of investors, and mostly done by professional quote-unquote journalists who have been laid off or took buyouts from these other struggling commercial media. Then you’ve got the Minnesota Monitor [now the Minnesota Independent — Ed.], which is a nonprofit, done by a guy who’s made money — the Center for Independent Media.

Some of the things that Jan Schaffer recognizes, like that wonderful New Hampshire medium that emerged from the library in that little town [Deerfield] that couldn’t meet its information needs. So from the library came this online medium [“The Forum”] that began meeting people’s needs. I mean there are all kinds of things going on — it’s a wide, yeasty mix, right? There’s plenty of room, and there’s plenty of need — whether they can survive, of course, is the question.

What public support means is another question — I mean, you know, newspapers are publically supported too if people subscribe. I mean, when I was editing [the Des Moines Register], people would call me up: “Well, I pay for this newspaper!” They pay 20 percent, max, circulation prices. But, that’s public support.

What are the strengths or weaknesses of public media in the Internet era?

One of the great things to emerge is the understanding that transparency and accountability to the public are absolute hallmarks of journalism in the public interest, the vision of information in the public interest. Because the public are demanding this … this means that all of us who care about journalism are reminded of the point of it — which we’ve too often needed to be reminded of: It’s not about the journalist, it’s about the public interest — arming people with the information they want and need in order to live their lives more richly and be citizens in a democracy.

It means we’ve got new models that we’re launching, it means that citizens are becoming more aware of the importance of journalism as a public good. This is great! That is good for everyone. It’s good for old-time journalists, it’s good for democracy, it’s good for these emerging publications that are made up entirely of citizen contributors.

We are now talking about reliable information, information in the public interest, ethical journalism, whatever you want to call it, we’re talking about this as a public good, and that really is essential to me. In recent decades, we’ve just assumed that the journalism will be provided. It will be provided primarily by commercial media, it will be paid for by advertisers. Fundamentally, we have very little public sense of responsibility for the quality of this information or even for the continued provision of it. There was a presumption that it was just going to flow our way.

The difficulties that have originated with this presumption, and with the failures of journalism to serve the public interest, and also with commercial models collapsing, as well as with the public generally becoming less trusting of all sources of power (it’s not just journalism … there’s much less trust in everything, from Congress to big business) — all these factors mean that the public is really in the arena now, much more likely to demand higher quality journalism, and much more likely to feel they have a responsibility to help produce it. We can hope that there would be sectors of the public who are willing to pay more, and maybe get philanthropists to support the journalism as well,

We’ve seen that a little bit with Herbert and Marion Sandler [the ProPublica funders]. We’ll see more of it — but, that’s also problematic, by the way. [Laughs] None of these things are no-strings. But they’re all there.

There seems to be more consciousness of the problem of the newspaper as commercialized, as a scandal sheet, and reporters have lost a certain cachet. Yet, you just described a countercurrent, of a recognition of the importance of journalism.

Right. And I think those both — they coexist. People will say they do value their local newspaper or their local television station, but they generally believe the press is not as reliable as it used to be. So it’s really hard to know what to make of those kinds of things. But what I do see arising, I think, is a much greater concern on the part of the public about where they’re getting their information and whether their information needs are being heard. You see it now with Free Press and the media reform movement, but you also see it in the blogging movement …

So there’s a huge expectation, which is really healthy, that journalism matters, that news in the public interest matters, that public information matters, that civic discourse matters, and I think that’s absolutely terrific. It also means we’re seeing more, not always better, but more media criticism, and fundamentally that’s a good thing.

Let’s talk about the legacy of public media up to this point. Even before the Internet emerged, public media have been undergoing changes.

Do you mean NPR, or PBS?

Yeah. Not necessarily to coin a phrase — “legacy public media” …

They have their own complexities in terms of being a model; they began with the controversial question of government [funding], and that has affected them substantially, which I hope would not necessarily be true for most public media, but I think it’s important to note that they’re sort of singular in that regard. Although I think there may well be a role for government, it’s important to note that it’s complex. Also, NPR increasingly has a commercial model — they may call them sponsorships, but they aren’t much different from advertisers …

I wrote a book chapter about NPR, and I was trying to think about what were the things that really made it unique, and one of them clearly is public support. It means something, that you have to go to your news consumer and ask them for their support, and they give it to you. It was in a book that came out just recently from the University of Missouri called “What Good is Journalism?”

But the point is that I do think, yes, that that public engagement with the media and this particular legacy public media has been very important and formative. [I]t’s surely one of the reasons that NPR has been as good as it’s been, and that its listenership doubled essentially in this past ten years, although it has leveled out.

I like to believe that the explanation is part of the same reason that we’re seeing the increase in attention to what they call the British invasion — the Economist and the BBC — which are giving Americans substantial news at a time when our own for-profit media are cutting back. I think NPR is the exception to that sad truth, and it was responsive to the desires of people in communities throughout the country to receive substantial news in the public interest.

Maybe you can talk about the roles public media can take in the Internet era.

Well, I think the media are very much a part of the culture, and are affected by the culture, and we saw that after 9/11, when media were not adequately aggressive, and were not exercising the amount of skepticism we’d hope they would.

When they are part of a public that is being skeptical, or that is stressing the questions, then they are better. So I think having a public media, having a set of public media, having citizens who are expressing themselves, who are committing their own acts of journalism or who are demanding better journalism — [these] have a real effect of a “rising tide lifts all boats.”

You know, there is a wide variety of what’s happening with public engagement. We’re selling our house, so we’ve got some stuff in the basement, boxes of books and eighty long-playing records — I put them on Freecycle D.C., and it is so wonderful — so I’ve had people trooping by taking my box of puzzles, you know, jigsaw puzzles, and my eight boxes of books and my husband’s old table saw — well, that is a form of public medium.

Some of what has happened is that we have disaggregated the pieces that used to come together to make a newspaper, like the classified ads. We also would have had the celebrity news … we had the bridge column, we had the comics — it had all those things that came together and they helped support substantial news … the kind of thing that keeps a democracy going. Well now we’ve kind of disaggregated a lot of that, and reaggregating it in some other way could be part of the solution. If we’re smart we think about how we do social networking, and this Freecycle component, and delivery of the news …

It’s a really interesting time. I couldn’t be more hopeful than I am about having so much public engagement on this question of “Are we, as a democracy, getting the information that we need?”

We used to behave in the journalism world the way doctors do: “Oh, don’t worry your pretty little head about what happens behind this veil” — you know — “only one of us can understand it,” which is surely no good way to provide the public with the information they need. That arrogance is over.

The high priesthood.

The high priesthood. Boy, insufferable it was, even if you were in it!

There are definitely some good folks in it, though …

Oh yeah absolutely — we can’t do without them. We’re nowhere near replacing them

Even replacing may be a little bold — reinventing, reimagining, and redeveloping …

Right, we’re doing all of those things, but nothing has yet arisen that in any way, to date, sufficiently addresses the need to have eyes on the inner working of business and government. In my view. Nothing has yet arisen that anywhere near duplicates the kind of quality, however imperfect, and quantity, of eyeballs on the public business that we need. Most people don’t have time to do that.

That bottom-line investment in reporting power. Person power. So you say nothing yet has arisen to date to replace the newspaper?

I do think the newspaper is the main engine of that kind of reporting for us in this country. In this country until recently it has been a hugely successful commercial model, and you know that really has ended. There were plenty of problems with having the decisions made by businesses that were more focused on profit than public service. But what has happened now is that they can’t even count on this profit — they’re not able pay for this journalism and what we’re struggling with now is figuring out how we’re going to pay for the information needs of the citizenry.

And we’re seeing lots of interesting experiments, but I think we have a long way to go especially before we will really and see the kind of journalism that can go up against big governments and big business. Which is really pretty daunting. It requires deep pockets and tenacity and guts and rolodexes and a lot of things —

Yeah, you need a foundation to do that.

You need a lot of foundations to do that. And foundations aren’t necessarily going to be — they may be interested in health reporting, but what if you decide when you’re doing this health reporting that you come across a remarkable energy story, well — you know, are you gonna hold off and then you have to go to the foundation that cares about energy. I’m mean, it’s not the way reporting can work.

Actually, what I meant is, you need a foundation — as in, you need a base, some sort of journalism infrastructure to stand on, as a reporter or news publisher, which is hard to find these days. But, yeah, the grantmaking foundations are not really in sync with the needs of news publishers.

Actually I do think foundations are going to have to see this as part of the public good. I had dinner with Putnam, you know Robert Putnam who wrote “Bowling Alone,” and I was talking to him about journalism as social capital. I think we need to think of it as social capital.

He was saying that?

No, I was, but he agreed with me, or he sounded like he agreed with me. I think this is the kind of thing we’re going to have to engender among foundation leaders and wealthy people in this country, and communities … you know, the Knight Foundation brought this before community foundations, which are sitting on pots of money across the country…

Yeah, Dan Gillmor made a good comment about that in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2007.

Yes, exactly. That was a fine op-ed.

The thing is, as a reporter, you don’t want to be dependent on a special-interest funder …

Well, you never know what you want to be dependent on. You want to do good work, and I figure you’ll do it any way you can, as long as you’re guaranteeing your independence and keeping your eye on responsible reporting.

What are the opportunities that academics should be thinking about?

I think the academy, the journalism academy, is not doing nearly all it could do. And communities where various universities and colleges are located — you know, they could be making themselves available to the public who want to do the journalism, or want to understand news literacy better. They could be setting up organs on the Web for media criticism. There are all sorts of things that journalism schools could be doing that they aren’t doing. That’s a huge effort and the web clearly makes it much, much richer.

What are the lessons that of the Internet that public media needs to take to heart?

The Internet is a whole new frontier — it really feels like the Wild West, it has endless possibilities and endless pitfalls, and so it seems to me that when we talk about information in the public interest as opposed to everything else that is going on in the Web, we need to think about what constitutes responsibility towards the public, what constitutes the public good …

[I]n my view, that means we’ve got to think carefully about news literacy on the part of the public, so that the public can judge information. In Canada, there is a required course in news literacy in junior high and high school, in all the provinces, which is remarkable. We need to have news literacy here. That’s number one.

And number two, we need to think very carefully as journalists, and as citizens interested in contributing to or providing journalism ourselves, about what are the enduring values that need to go forward in digital media.

We don’t need dead trees, we don’t need the inverted pyramid, but … we could each come up with our own lists, [on which] we’d find truth-telling — or some close approximation to accuracy — you would find context, you would find independence from factions, or, we’d find transparency about our allegiances …

So if I’m providing information in the public interest, it doesn’t matter if I’m a journalist or not, but I need to tell you: what is my intent, here’s what I intend to provide to you; and is it without fear or favor? And it’s perfectly honorable if what I’m doing is giving you the best sales job I can on Hillary Clinton — but I need to say that to you. So transparency, accountability. And then if the public is armed with a better understanding of media; and those who provide media are intent upon being more transparent about what they do, and holding themselves accountable, then the sky’s the limit.

But, you know, Lord knows, it’s not, “Oh, now we have the Web, we needn’t worry about anything else — ”

The techno-Pollyannas.

Right, right. I’m very excited about it, though, good Lord, the depth you know, and it’s really going to reach people, and I still go talk to newsrooms, and people say, “Oh my goodness, I can’t get more than 30 inches in the paper, I guess I can always think about the Web…” Yeah! It’s amazing, the resources available to people now who want to do good work.

I like the optimism.

Yeah! I couldn’t be more excited. Of course, I’m not paid by a daily newspaper anymore.

Filed Under: Interviews Tagged With: enterprise, entrepreneurship, ethics, journalism, talking public media, trust

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