Keeping it Local: Community Reporters Elevating Civil Discourse

right so let's get started good evening everyone my name is william johnson and happy world press freedom day i am the program director for pentecost america and welcome to keeping it local community reporters elevating civil discourse so this world press freedom day pen is highlighting the writing of a group of community based journalists editors and publishers that demonstrate the necessity of local news stories and fostering informed civil discourse tonight we're going to celebrate and elevate local reportage with some of the folks who make it happen and we're also going to provide some concrete actions we all can take to ensure their vital regional news coverage continues as i mentioned before i am the program director for pentecost america and within the larger organization of penn the pentacross america program provides resources to mobilize pen america's communities across the country we have chapters in tulsa birmingham detroit which is my hometown so big up to detroit dallas fort worth austin the piedmont region of north carolina and miami south florida our pin america chapters are doing fantastic work including organizing public forums highlighting the work of local journalists in the time of covet hosting literary conversations and events just like this one to learn more about what we're doing please visit pin.org you know the best way to support this work is to become a member of pen america our strength is really in our membership we are a nationwide community of novelists non-fiction authors journalists editors poets screenwriters essays playwrights publishers translators agents and other literary professionals and we're even a larger larger network of devoted readers and supporters so please join us in carrying out pins important mission now without further ado i'd like to introduce our moderator for this evening zack stanford zach is an award-winning journalist who recently served as editor-at-large at buzzfeed and was the first black editor-in-chief at the advocate and worked as an investigative reporter at the guardian staff stafford is currently a columnist for msnbc i will now turn the conversation over to zach thank you william my my i want to say old friend but it's not because i think we're old i just have known you for quite a bit now but thank you for that um and it's nice to be here with all of you i have a deep deep love for pat america from everything that pin america does from you know support of journalism to authors to poets everything and i'm so excited to be chatting with these folks today because i think a lot of us in journalism began at the local level whether it's your local student newspaper or you did work at a a local newspaper i worked chicago tribune right out of college so i very much believe in study papers um but i want to introduce everyone and then we're going to dive into the conversation with my colleagues here about why local journalism is i think the most vital part of journalism honestly um i really do believe that um so first off we have sierra hinton who is the executive director and publisher of scalawag a journalism a storytelling organization building solidarity consciousness and community by awakening the popular imagination to new possibilities that spark social change next up is willoughby mariano who is an investigative reporter for the atlanta journal constitution where she focuses on housing and criminal justice issues and atlanta has been very busy this year so i can't wait to hear about your work there and then next up we have sarah raha a city reporter at the detroit news aside from her city beat raha has been focused on daily chronovice reporting in michigan immigration topics it helps with the detroit news investigations teams and then last but not least we have chilean ito who is a legislative assistant for the u.s senator brian schatz who is a democrat from hawaii and is the policy lead on the education arts and humanities census and civil rights and social issues portfolios so very very busy important work so i'm so glad to be with all of you today and i want to begin with a little a question about you personally and what got you into the business and i know some of you have different routes here especially you sierra who does not come from a traditional path so i'd love to hear from all of you about what brought you into more of a local journalism and kind of what was the story that you worked on that really kind of cemented for you that this was the work that you wanted to be engaged with so it will be i'd love to start with you oh gosh this is kind of a hard question because like throughout my life you know local news has sort of been what you know it's it's what a little uh uh the child of immigrant parents uses to like learn about what the real world is supposed to be like um and it's how my parents did as well you know they read those you know those old school columnists like you know mike royko and and jimmy breslin um and um you know and oddly what cemented it for me in local news um wasn't a story you know that was terribly deep and meaningful um it was it was my first um big um sort of front of the book story for newsday newspaper out in long island where i was an intern it was my first daily news internship about um a family of geese that had been murdered there were eight of them um and they were being cared for and no one knew who poisoned them um they were being cared for by a vietnam veteran and and he said they killed the babies they killed my babies and it was such a lovely little moment of like actually being able to care for somebody you know and and send a message out for somebody you know who wasn't i mean he was working at a gas station he wasn't living a huge life but was you know you know giving giving a voice to just you know some a an ordinary person who doesn't um who had gone through something horrible um and you know those tiny stories are actually what would sort of brought me to this and the fact that we actually cared i love that and i love that you brought up you know the immigrant experience about these local papers that are part of communities are so vital to folks when they're coming to the country um what city did you found your parents immigrate to oh uh well uh i was in brooklyn for a while uh but um yeah but raised outside chicago um so oh there you go yeah i um sierra i'd love to hear from you next yeah um so it was really uh for me place that brought me to this work um i always say like i accidentally became a publisher um that was like definitely not the plan um i started working with scalawag in 2017 and it was really the mission and the focus on the south um which is my home i'm from north carolina but have lived in tennessee um in mississippi and um yeah just uh the the call to place and and the real passion for the south uh made me want to be a part of the team um and you know it was i guess my like background in fundraising and development that actually brought me into the work of being a publisher so it wasn't so much the journalism but now that i'm like doing this work i've developed a deep passion for journalism and um the tool that i think it is and and how it can be used by communities um to make our our our homes more equitable yeah and has there been a story as a publisher i love talking to publishers because publishers really are the reason why we all have jobs i think they really are why we all get to work but was there a time you know as you step into the role i know you began on the growth side of the mag um but was there a moment when you were like wow damn like journalism actually does help these communities in a really deep way yeah um i think it was hmm let me think about that well actually i think um a story that we just revisited recently um about a city in georgia lagrange louis wallace who was working at scalawag at the time first wrote about this story and how folks were organizing around utilities and so they actually ended up suing the city and just recently we wrote um the latest part of that story uh they won um and so it's just like a really uh yeah it was a great story about the power of community and what can happen when people come together and you know i think a lot of times we see stories covering what politicians are doing or what's happening at city hall or what the school board is doing um but it's always the stories where we're like covering people then i'm just like yeah people power i love that i love that yeah yeah it's like it's like always the best i think people always think journalists want to talk to like politicians or celebrities i did a lot of celebrity work when i was hosting a morning show and everyone was like isn't that the best part i was like no celebrities are terrible they're really boring it's like everyday people who are not very jaded that are like the people you want to talk to and people actually believe and like see the power and the story that they're telling celebrities are like i don't know i don't even look at my own twitter so what am i what am i doing here but you know speaking of everyday people sarah i know that you've been doing a lot of really important work on the ground in michigan around the coronavirus and then also just some other incredible work in general there but talk to us more about kind of what brought you into the space what inspired you to kind of do the work in detroit yeah um so i also had a family immigrate here to michigan um from lebanon and they wanted me to be a doctor and lawyer course and i was like oh i want to write and uh it's it was when i actually got a scholarship to to journalism school and that's when they were like go have fun it was a good chance for me to learn a lot but i think what solidified it for me very young was i went to um i was on a like a field trip very young and um we went to the holocaust museum here we had one of the national hot house museums in michigan and i was looking at all the photographs and they tell you that it's gonna be super graphic and all these things and i thought who took these pictures you know who who was sent to document this and the impact that it had on me and the people that i was with i felt like i wanted to do that like i i had a knack for photography and i actually joined journalism as a photojournalist and i wanted to have pictures say more than words but then i got into the people aspect of it like you guys talked about and listening to stories and hearing the debates of both sides and kind of being in that middle and being able to pick the truth out of um opinion is or the facts out of opinion is something that i thought was almost the more fun part um that you got to listen to all of these things and collect research and go back and try to explain it to somebody else in a much more organized fashion and you learn so much more yourself and one thing that really solidified it for me was in my later years of the news about two or three years ago i started reporting a lot on immigration and one of the first stories that i pieced together myself because you know sometimes you get a tip and you kind of build off of it but this one i had to just piece together from talking to so many families and i realized that a lot of the detainees that was iraqi detainees in michigan that were getting swept up in trump's raid were cutting off their tethers to evade deportation and many of them who had family members that had already been deported had died and they were kind of like doing this and doing this as the witnesses there this is their last arrival and hope and to get their cases heard and their stories heard um and gaining their trust was a big factor for me and kind of watching it all play out was something that i realized that i couldn't have done on a national level the time it would have taken the amount of resources used to talk to these families and stay in touch with them and had been reporting on it for over a year to get to that point i thought was something that i felt like i earned and that was what solidified journalism for me at a local level yeah i really appreciate you saying that because we don't talk enough about the relationship building that is in journalism when we talk about like getting sources people think of it like uh we were talking about aaron sorkin before this but people think of it like the newsroom where it's like you make a phone call and you're like i work for a really big cable news outlet you're gonna do this the story for me and blah blah blah and people just do it it's like no that's not the case a lot of times the bigger the outlet the more fear people have so i'd love to hear more about how you all have been navigating this as like as journalists as people and as people within communities that you're diving into what are the things that you're learning as you're kind of building these relationships and how are you seeing that ability to get into those communities to tell their own stories is impacting just the local level and also making sure these people are being heard and seen if that makes sense this is really about community building so who would like to go i can jump in um i think you know at scalawag we do uh in-person events when it's safe and virtual events um we've been doing those throughout the pandemic and um honestly i think when we uh started events um you know we knew we wanted to like deepen our relationship with community um and um we knew that uh especially covering such a large region the south like we needed to show up uh locally and start to build relationships but we i don't think we realize just like how impactful um in-person events were going to be uh for us and um i think it was not only the like uh connections that we made during the events but it's the relationships that we were able to build upon after um both with like individuals and community organizers on the ground um but also with like organizations um everyone from like environmental justice organizers and organizations to like local churches and just being able to really like get to know people and plug in and also um yeah just have them like extend their relationships and their networks um and their connection to community to you it goes like such a long way um and and being able to like build trust quickly um and uh it's invaluable when you think about how like sarah was just saying just how much time it can take to build that level of trust being able to in some ways have a have a proxy or have folks um you know extend that to you it's just uh amazing and and super helpful now anyone else i have something to say here this is such a complicated and very interesting question for somebody who works at a large traditional metro daily because um we used to be ginormous right you know we used to have hundreds of of people who were journalists you know crawling all over the uh the the metro region and so you know going to the grocery store was almost an act of pr in a way because you'd run into somebody who you had just covered um who may or may not be friendly at the time and you'd be looking at bananas and saying hey i i just want to buy bananas but but each one of these acts is like you know it is an opportunity to build community and to let people know that you're like a person and that they're a person so so like what i do i mean and and because we're um our tradition the metro journalist mainstream daily news tradition is is sort of an oppositional one uh with the community and and and the kind of coalition building is is not considered as appropriate um although i i have criticisms of that like just being everywhere was and is an incredible virtue you know going out the door and being you know uh and someone's saying hey you're the newspaper lady um you know or calling up here i just got a i got a call on sunday hey you know you're in the newspaper lady i'm like yes yes i am and it's sunday but that's okay but um it's just this everyday act that you do while walking around um you know like i put out there that i'm the newspaper lady so that way people can can find me and know where i am um and i'm not just dealing with like you know institutional sources people in power um and it's um and i'm just very very sad that they're so uh they're they're not nearly as many of the of us as we used to because it's you can't go to every grocery store um you know uh yeah but you know you ca i mean you you go to fewer and fewer meetings um and you know you know in order to be a good reporter uh in order to get people to trust you you have to go to a lot of things that you never write about and um and there were fewer and fewer of us to do all that kind of um you know that sort of thing uh building trust but literally i'd love to quickly follow up to theirs like why is this such a bad thing for us as communities that we don't have access to journalists like that now like what are we losing by not being able to call up a newspaper lady every day to say hey i got something and this is what i think a lot of us have not even realized as as as these huge metro dailies have um have shrunken um you know we closed down our we don't have a london bureau or a beijing bureau anymore at the ajc we we used to um uh but uh you know we you know we we've pulled back our resources there are a few of our a few of us around and and so when you open up the paper it is thinner than it was 20 years ago there you know you can't lie about that i mean it's just the objective you know the objective truth and what that means is you literally know less um i mean i have um i did a talk at at harvard law school uh two weeks ago uh where where people you know they were these kids were great they're very smart they were supposed to look at all these um uh you know newspapers local newspaper ecosystems and see how robust the local news ecosystem was and they were they would say oh it's great uh and i would say no you do not remember what that paper used to look like many years ago and let me tell you they had no idea what was gone um you know uh in-depth coverage of of of local meetings and and um you know things you know things that your neighbors were doing that you had no idea i mean it was not perfect at all 20 years ago there are a lot of people excluded from the conversation but at least it was there um and if it was simply more diverse and more conscience of clash class and culture uh differences then that then it might have you know and it persisted we might not be in the middle of the sort of polarization issues we have today and i can talk on and on about that but i don't want to i don't want to take up all the air in the room no i wish you could go there i mean you could be preaching all day for us but i think like sarah i think you're doing a lot of um important work in michigan right now that i just think a lot about how if you didn't exist if the detroit press wasn't there what would happen for folks especially those dealing with chronovirus so can you speak to like kind of what you've been saying this past year of if there were reporters like yourself on the ground what would happen and also maybe imagine what a world could look like in michigan if there were more of you able to work in the communities right now if there are more of us we wouldn't each have more than a dozen beats i mean it's with with less people working we all have to be so much more of experts on everything and that's where you get the flaws right like someone can't be an expert on everything someone can't have 25 beats covering everything every day but at the same time i think we took for granted especially in the pandemic i've i've took for granted how great door knocking is being able to walk up someone's door and actually get their opinion and talk them about their neighbors or their neighborhood or the community people won't even answer the door anymore during the pandemic just at the height of it it was just very scary for them to see anybody coming up to their door um and even then they weren't um i guess knowledgeable enough about what was going on there everyone felt like they were trying to avoid the news and turn on something else without journalists we lose those watchdogs of our community that really hold in place um things that we do take for granted being at those meetings making sure that random boards and commissions aren't you know lifting their salary caps and using the city's money to pay themselves being sure that we get those myths debunked about the vaccine about you know what's circulating on the internet and all these things that we're learning from facebook and twitter and trying to provide some nutritious uh fact-based uh news is important and i think if there were more of us maybe it would be a little bit easier to hear from more communities i think right now with the shrinking team we're hearing less and less and we're really focusing on populated areas like detroit or atlanta or i mean there's the new york times is killing it but do we expect them to go into these local communities and try to explain these in-depth stories from maybe the one or two days they get to do that story so yeah yeah yeah i think i'm so glad you brought up to new york times because you know they've become such a robust machine and i'm sure we all have colleagues and loved ones that work there have worked with them um but you know it doesn't it's not a good stand-in for the work that you all do in your cities every day day in and day out and we do see a lot of friction i've been a part of this conversation when i was in chicago where the new york times would helicopter in chicago and they would try to do a crime story and it would always go left and go really bad and people would be really upset um and communities would be in real pain they would say you know i trusted this person and they misused my story and they didn't get it right and there was huge fallout and the problem that would happen is that the new york times reporter i say this with lots of love with the helicopter back to new york city and they would have to deal with the fallout of the communities which all of us were in these communities that had to do with that fallout so i'd love to turn the conversation to that relationship and libby i feel like you're shaking your head a lot right now and i want to go to you about kind of what do you think about this relationship between local and national news and what can we do to kind of better kind of manage those relationships especially as we see it become really top happy like there's a lot of like currently i'm with msnbc msnbc's part of nbc which is a massive network of people but it doesn't it's not a good stand-in for the voices that are actually in the communities every day no and what happens i mean so i've been in this business you know again i'm old um and i've been in this business forever um and whatever state i've worked in um whatever locality i've worked in it ends up being um well there's there's a complicated relationship between national news and um and and local news but but what happens is that local news ends up in many ways setting the agenda um because um we are the ones who supposedly know the community best and so it's very hard for national outlet to come in um uh without reading us first um and it's usually you know the sort of keystone species as the the pen america report said uh last year the year before um is uh is the metro daily um so places like the detroit news like like in the atlanta journal constitution like the chicago trivia um now um i mean the thing about that is that you know any of us who've covered a disaster anything horrible um you know we all know that the local reporters are the ones who have to clean up the mess i mean i've literally been on the phone or in the room with somebody who's been upset or grieving about um the coverage uh you know uh of a particular situation sometimes you know granted sometimes we make our mistakes too um and big ones but um the people uh but there's almost no recourse um if you are a local person um and uh and and feel sort of steamrolled by by a big story um but we we have to deal with these people long term and so we build you know i think we work on our relationships we betrayal is is a much scarier thing for us i mean not only i mean you know there's a human cost uh to us we have to you know we have to live with these people in our lives calling us up in the middle of the night because they're angry um and and we want to be able to feel good about ourselves for for the long term so it's a um uh you know it's it's a complicated relationship but we we always you know uh you know initially we have the power and later on we clean up the mess every time every time um because you're the one that communities hold accountable and they're also they know your name they don't know the names of the new york times reporters many days um and that's there's a real power in that and here i'd love to turn to you because i feel like what you all are doing at such a regional level it speaks to this it's kind of creating scale and a lot of access points for folks to hear lots of different stories by the community and for the community yeah and um you know we we have been known to come for the new york times quite a few times very publicly because of just like the real harm that we see uh publications um like the new york times doing not only in what willoughby just was just talking about but also just in the way that they um you know not always intentionally but just like affirm very harmful narratives about places um so you know we see this in the south a lot there are a lot of stereotypes and tropes about the south and what it means to be southern and working class southerners in particular and um you know if you're from from the south uh you know that it's way more nuanced and more complex than a lot of folks who are reporting on what's going on here but aren't from here um understand and so when we think about narrative shift and we think about you know the power of journalism to um help nourish the radical imagination and help give folks um you know a new vision uh for the future uh that really stands in conflict with folks affirming um narratives that have been entrenched in this way and so you know for us we really see our role as a regional organization as not only like um you know dismantling those very harmful narratives but also uh really trying to make that connection for folks across communities as well and how can we like build this media ecosystem in the south um so that folks who are um you know in atlanta understand with folks in birmingham what folks in new orleans are doing and how they're moving and what are the like commonalities between those places and what can we learn from each other and how can we build together to transform the region yeah and do you see that relationship between like a local a regional and national newspaper needing to be i mean strengthen i guess or like what are you hoping to see what would you like the relationship between the new york times that's kind of like to me yeah i just i i think i um so i think for us um you know they have a capacity and power and uh resources that like we don't have and that a lot of um local news organizations don't have and it's like so what is like meaningful um reciprocal partnership look like uh and like you know you can't just like just in the ways we don't want them parachuting in to do reporting we don't want them parachuting in for partnership either and we have really invested a lot in in building and helping to create career pathways for folks in their local communities so like what does a meaning meaningful partnership with the new york times look like in helping to keep people where they are right now it sort of feels like you have to like live on one of the coasts to have like a like a career like a real career in journalism and it's like super important for people to know like you can stay in your home community and be a journalist and have a meaningful career um in this industry um and i think that organizations like the new york times can help to facilitate that um if they're willing to make that investment yeah and it's as we keep saying here it's like we need folks working in their communities telling these stories like it's incredibly vital to to democracy and it's not even that's not being hyperbolic at all um but you brought a partnership that's something i want to go to sarah i know that recently you had you at the detroit news had a partnership i think with bridge magazine where you all did a very large story that was really important so i'd love to talk hear more about that partnership because i think to me on the surface that looks like how these things work on the local level you have a local magazine with a powerful newspaper coming together and just sharing resources so can you talk a bit about that absolutely so um that partnership was formed on a different collaborative called the new york southeast michigan journalism collaborative where they're trying to get solutions journalism out there finding these big topics and providing actual solutions to create change so they picked caregiving as a national topic and we partnered with other another excuse me another newsroom to actually not just split up the work but tell stories across state lines and not have to be so limited that way we at least reach some wider audience and maybe get more attention to the national problem which is that it by you know 2026 we're gonna face uh a direct care worker shortage of more than twenty thousand two hundred thousand people in michigan alone and our seniors are getting older who's gonna take care of them and why there's such high turnover turnover in this industry and that's not something i would normally report on but it's something that i got to learn how to work with another newsroom that uh another reporter and just provide context and the next day my report was on npr and it was just such a quick turnaround to see that people actually cared um and partnerships does excuse me partnerships do make a long lasting impact because if it just shows we're not alone we can all actually join together in these forces and i think what sierra brought up about her idea and how that partnership could work it seems easy it seems like we could do that we utilize the wire like everybody else does and one thing that was touched on was that although newspapers are probably 25 of all news outlets they make up half of all original reporting so we look at these national outlets and we have to think well where are they getting this reporting from and dive deeper and we're hoping that we get that hyperlink that at least they sourced us in some way it's sad to see when your sources go to the bigger guys when they have a bigger story and then you have to be the person to follow hopefully partnerships reduce that and give us give us that leverage to create these national topics and national stories on a local level um and that way we can at least have some sort of united front yeah yeah you know as as an editor i've been in many fights on the phone defending reporters work who we it was obvious that this other outlet has lifted our reporting and has not hyperlinked or has not sourced and they're like well you can't prove it it's like no girl i can prove it like there are date lines there are ways in which we can prove and there's an outlet we've talked about here already that i will not say is very infamous for lifting things and not um hyperlinking things even though the traffic there could be very widely shared partnerships really great hyperlinks are also really great for seo this is good practices for like a website search so anyway um we are running low on time so i want to move into like a fun question or non-funded question actually this is not a fun question i do not know why i said that um and then i'm going to move on to trelane true lane that's going to speak to uh they're gonna speak to some of the legislation they're working on um and then we'll go to q a so if you have questions this would be a time in which you can drop them into the chat box and then we can open it up from there um so i guess what i really want to go just because we're all reporters is you know it's been a lot of hard years the past few years you know the media's been very much under attack and i feel like we as reporters are constantly having to defend what we do all the time um so i'd love to know how you all have been doing through all this and kind of what your hopes are for the future of media with us all talking about the media but really i guess where you're finding support just to keep going in this work because as we've all kind of described you know every year we find less resources supporting us less people kind of getting behind us but we still have to fight to tell these stories so i'd love to hear kind of like how you're doing where you're at and what what you're kind of leaning on these days anyone can go first um how am i doing um you know honestly i um am doing well at least on the journalism front um i think that uh in many ways um [Music] our organization is like having a real moment um a lot of the things that we have been talking about and covering for years before i would say like mainstream status quo whatever like before like most people were having a conversation about it i'm thinking about um police abolition i'm thinking about uh the fight for 15 raising the minimum wage like we have been reporting on these things for years and letting folks know like look this is like important work that people are on the ground doing and fighting for um day in and day out uh and um now like folks are looking to us as a part of that uh conversation um and in a lot of ways that feels very validating and it and it um yeah just is very affirming um and lets us know that like even if people are um you know reading the reporting that we're doing right now there will come a time when the conversations that we're having at scalawag do come into the mainstream and folks will you know look to us um because we've been doing that work for a while um and yeah i'm just getting a lot of inspiration from other folks who are leading that space uh you know um media 2070 is a new project that was recently announced around media reparations um and who would have thought we would ever get to a place so we were talking about reparations um to communities media reparations at that um and having that be like a valid conversation that people are willing to engage um in uh in good faith uh so that just that sort of like again radical imagination um really gives me a lot of hope willabee what about you you you said you you've been in the business for a little bit so how have you been lately what are you thinking what is your crystal ball showing you and also i see ajc everywhere i feel like lately like i see you almost reporting a lot yeah we are everywhere because georgia is now the center yeah i've been very lucky in the sense that so i've been away on a fellowship at harvard um since august um but um and it's uh that's just about to end um but i keep in close contact with my friends and and i know exactly how i felt before i went on fellowship and i was exhausted um because we know exactly how small our newsroom is in comparison to what it was before and we also know um that we cannot let standards slip um georgia was at the forefront of opening up uh during the the pandemic uh and we were we were the the people who figured out that uh our governor was not giving correct numbers about the number of cases and giving misleading information about the number of cases it is now giving more misleading information about vaccinations um we you know people were literally calling me and i was answering like just ordinary people i was answering emails at 3am from ordinary people who were panicking because they didn't know whether to go outside um i mean this is we you know we answered every single email from every single um you know uh person who approached us in earnest not harassing us which happened a lot but approached us in earnest saying oh my god i'm desperate i don't know what to do um and i'm terrified and i you know i have these pre-existing conditions um so uh my friends are exhausted and i know i'll be exhausted again uh the you know the this new cycle is not letting up georgia will remain the center of the political universe for a while now uh for for a number of years coming uh and our workload our low workload is not going to let up neither is koga not you know there'll be a new problem around the corner yeah and that means everyone that's on this chat should subscribe to the ajc today i don't i'm not getting paid to say that either um sarah what about you i mean well they hit that nail on the head i mean everyone is just so tired i think with the amount of juggling we're having to do with and especially local papers are so essential during the pandemic i think people forget to realize like we're sitting here reporting on what businesses are closed in your local community where you can get testing where's the work you can you walk in and just get a vaccine and um all of that is being juggled with okay how do we manage this paywall how do we figure this out how do we gain this ad revenue attraction gain our readers back and try to produce something that's not corona related that's entertaining um and it's it's something that we're all feeling um less creative about because we have this um we had four years of a presidential campaign and now we have another four years of probably a pandemic and um it's interesting to see where we're going in our daily coverage and i'm doing okay i think we're uh we're getting the experience that some people may not have otherwise and this is a a definite hurdle and challenge that i think we're taking pretty well well trelane i'd love to bring you into the conversation to talk about how you all are working to save our jobs so let's talk about it um so talk to us about how senator brian chat's office is uh trying to support local news through a legislative uh kind of attempts sure yes to try to hopefully tie this conversation together um you know i think willoughby mentioned the pan america report from a couple of years ago and one of the recommendations in that report was the creation of this commission type entity that brings together experts from different aspects of you know i think this field both the local journalists the editors um uh both you know digital native broadcast radio uh you know journalism professors all of representatives from the unions from the industry everybody um to sit on a commission and really work through some of the particular problems that everyone here has identified and try to you know draw some recommendations for for congress and so that's what our bill uh would do it's the future of local news commission act it would create that 13-member commission um with broad representative um representation from from the the the field and then would you know not only look at the state of local news as it's been declining for the past couple of well not declining as the has experienced problems over the the past um couple of decades but also you know we added in particular language about the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on uh uh journalism and the you know some of the the programs that supported you know small business and non-profit entities and whether those were actually helpful in supporting uh local news outlets um you know to just try to do some tie-in and have this this commission be passed you know quickly and timely within all of the many different packages that congress has been producing over the past couple of months um and so we're hoping to reintroduce that bill next week um and then at the same time you know call on the the biden administration to to move quickly on this i think the bill itself outlines you know pretty prescriptively who should be on the commission what it should look like what its duties are sort of the function of quorum etc um but i think at the end of the day that's something that through executive action the administration could take it upon themselves to create this type of entity and and um would not necessarily require an act of congress um although if he wants to pass our bill that's great um so we're hoping to move really quickly on this issue so that at least you know our bill is a little agnostic on the particular solutions i think it would be actually really interesting to hear from the panelists on what they think are some particular solutions that that the federal government uh should be looking at but i think setting up the structure of the commission would be really helpful in in at least identifying sort of broadly the problem and then really starting to work on some solutions that either congress can take or different federal entities could take or even recommendations that that state and local government entities should should be taking gotcha and you said the word executive action and i cannot not ask the question of are you bringing that up because uh there's not a lot of bipartisan support behind defending the media right now in congress so actually on a couple of other local news bills there's one there's a bill um from representative kirkpatrick from arizona that it involves taxes so it's way above my head um but that bill is bipartisan and we've been trying to make our bill bipartisan over the past i think year and a half now and i think we're we're pretty close and i think by making the case that we're sort of you know agnostic on what the commission will produce and it's really just looking at the problem we're hoping that it'll create some bipartisan interest but it hasn't yet so you know holding out hope we have a week and is there a world in which uh does that uh would community support help push more bipartisan support or kind of what can folks do today to help with this endeavor yes i think it would be it would be really helpful you know for especially local news outlets or local news supporting organizations to talk about the necessity of this type of bill this type of commission identifying these problems and then you know you know recommending that they're um congressional delegations you know take a look at at least take a look at the bill um i'm happy to share more information um about now and then once once it's introduced for folks but um i think you know as someone who does work in congress when when folks back home uh call an email and and write in you know we do take notice right is there anything the panelists want in the bill is there anything that came to mind i would you when you proposed that you're late i was i got nervous i was like oh i'm not ready to answer this because i'm sure i have something but i know if anyone else had something that came to mind yeah we can figure out how to like get ad revenue back and take it away from facebook and google well and that's a good idea that's sarah is bringing up the exact point that i that i have this is not i mean there's some interesting proposals out there about about how to raise money for journalists and that's our journalism and that's the sort of the core of the issue here but it it really i mean tax things might be you know important and interesting yeah it's this has to do with that revenue this has to do with facebook and google um uh and and i don't i don't know if this issue is going to be solved anytime soon the solve is senator warren's breakup big tech is what we're hearing here we need to break it up take it away zuckerberg needs less power as a mainstream journalist i'm not neither a support nor deny any support of such a thing but you know this is um this is so much bigger than uh than than than than a lot of us would like to think about um i mean we we were always subsidized um you know and not by uh subscriptions it was classified ads um and there's gotta be a replacement for that uh and that means we have to sell more of the other ads or sell them for more money um or uh or or we have uh billionaires come in and purchase us uh and and they're not a lot of solutions beyond that yeah and a billionaire purchasing you doesn't always solve every issue they create new issues that come up too so um it's very very complicated um okay yeah i think you want to learn more about that um there's a great episode from the patriot act called like why newspapers are dying um it's no more than 20-30 minutes you can find it on youtube uh hassan minaj and the team really break it down very easily to understand uh you know equity and hedge funds buying out local newspapers and why that is and maybe that's why wherever you're listening from if you're listening from a community that's lost it's local newspaper and it might be good to educate yourself on why and the sad like full circle for hasa minhaj and patrick was that it was canceled so while they were doing incredible reporting on netflix so there you go another example big tech doesn't always solve everything so we only have something so we only have a few more minutes so i'd love to uh go to some questions folks have them i'm gonna look i don't see any so if you have one you can drop one in right now because i just have a few minutes um but as we wait is there anything that the that our steam panels would like to remark on or say before we run out of time no since you gave me a soapbox and i could talk about this forever i just want to say no i i have a theory you know and it you know and not an uninformed one i mean there's sort of the people who watch local news are the people who are the folks who could end um polarization um the people who who who watch and read us um you know they're that sort of persuadable middle that yokai benkler talks about the uh the disinformation expert when uh when he talks about people who um you know can really be moved uh to um to act um and and and in ways in voting ways that that could end a lot of the uh stalemates in congress that can that can end our ugly political discourse um so you know if if we you know become uh independent or if we if we become strong in the way that i think we ought to be um then then we have uh incredible power um to to address a lot of the issues that that that really plague us today you know and then you know our national discourse in our in our uh ridiculous kinds of of ways of thinking about issues of i mean there's a real opportunity here i think like the tl dr is you're saying is that we're worth fighting for we're worth figuring this out and i i do think this day is so important i think for so many reasons one of them is you know we can't have a democracy in anywhere in the world if there's not a free press that can sustain itself and grow and flourish and just not these things can't exist together all right right we have no questions but i'm going to throw the william who's going to close us out well um i want to thank all of our panelists and our moderator for this really insightful conversation um i'm leaving emboldened and a little bit outraged so you know we have work to do um and i would say that hopefully every all the attendees so we have work to do too um but there's an action item we can do there is one thing i'm putting it in the chat um pin with some fantastic community partners um has created an advocacy tool for you to reach out to your local representative to tell them how you feel how important local news is so please use this uses uses advocacy tool is in the chat um let your representatives know how important um local news is all right so we are winding down um thank you all panelists this has been a fantastic discussion um and hope we can all oops the action item brings up we're sorry the page function has tried to access it's not final oh so i put in the wrong did not take hold on one second i'm sorry about that let me make sure i'm going to send everyone to another page all right folks so this is our um free press campaign page on this page you will find a link with the action alert so i'm sorry about the confusion so the link is in the chat um please do what you can to support local news so yet again thank you all for this wonderful discussion everyone have a wonderful night and thank you for spending on world press freedom day with us so thank you thank you thank you thank you all right good night and take care thank you again panelist and moderator thank you thank you thank you

Channel: PEN America

Views: 44

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: World Press Freedom Day, press freedom, journalism, advocacy, local journalism, local news

Id: sCgukDpZbCI

Length: 53min 19sec (3199 seconds)

Published: Mon May 10 2021