This week, another chapter in my internship saga closes – but it proved to me that there is definitely a future for journalism. My summer began with flying cross-country (yes, in both directions) within a seven-day span that included my graduation. The first trip was to Google HQ near San Francisco to visit with the Google News Lab, which sort of sponsored my summer gig. (Want to learn more about the fellowship? Info is here, but feel free to ask me too!) After boarding the plane to Boston within 48 hours of accepting my college diploma, I have spent the summer interviewing cool people doing cool things in the journalism world as part of the Nieman Journalism Lab. Their passions range from subscriptions to healthcare to video games to collaborative tools, and they are only a few of the soldiers at the forefront of journalism.
Interviewing them and writing about their projects was the core of my summer here at the Nieman Lab, as well as working alongside some of the most inquisitive minds I have met. The best way to sum up my summer is by letting a few of my favorite quotes from my interviews speak for themselves. Not all of these quotes made it into the final articles – so let’s call this the reporter’s cut. P.S. Want to see where I go next? Stay tuned, and wish me luck packing! “It was an extraordinary period of turbulence in America and I think we want to try as much as we can to take people back there and give them a sense of what it was like to wake up and read the newspapers but often several times a week, be confronted with this type of violence.” – Jim Giles, CEO of retrospective news start-up Timeline, on the importance of publishing time capsules of the acerbic 1967 race riots in real time—over two months. “Doing a growing number of things that is not ‘articles on the Internet’ makes me a better reporter. I’m keeping in mind that there are actually people reading these stories who are relying on us for information.” – Sarah Kliff, healthcare reporter at Vox, talking about the relationship she’s built with readers through her daily VoxCare newsletter walking Americans through the policy changes in Washington’s healthcare saga. “We had a kitchen cabinet of reporters helping us figure out what types of data sources would tell those stories, and it was very ambitious.” – Dave Lesher, the CEO of nonprofit newsroom CALmatters. Like other state-specific non-profit journalism ventures, CALmatters started from a group of experienced state policy reporters who wanted to prove that local government news matters. He described their initial plans and how they learned to scale back so that the organization could truly grow. “When I got done I knew I was at a crossroads. I knew I wanted to keep building…I’d spend my days teaching software and my nights building software.” - Heather Bryant, the brains behind a collaborative dashboard for journalists called Project Facet and a recent John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University. She went from working in public radio newsrooms in Alaska to teaching herself coding to teaching others how to code in the Bay Area. “Politics and news is something we’re really passionate about. We see it as a problem among the youth: People don’t really read the news over here because it’s super boring. With the little that we do, we try to cover policies and issues affecting us as youth. The way we grew up and see the world is totally different from the current news situation now.” – Jesse Arhin Ghansah, who built up his Africa clickbait company OMGDigital based on advertising to fill the void of relatable Buzzfeed-esque content. OMGDigital began as a blog of “not-boring news” by college students and recently raised over $1 million from investors. “These are people that want to be informed. They are not following every detail and every development. They’re not necessarily news junkies. We have moved away from the inverted pyramid style of saying what’s new and giving some context to really emphasize the context and the impact. Our stories are context, the latest, and the impact.” – Andrew Springer, NBC News’ director of social strategy and the executive producer of the network's twice-daily Snapchat show. He explained their model of decoding news for younger news followers, a.k.a. Snapchat users, as the first hard news show in the Snapchat market. “Wyoming is a microcosm of a lot of what is happening in America today. It represents a subset of American society that I think we’ve learned you can only ignore at your own risk, for sure. … We love the idea that folks that get that out of what we do by interacting with our platforms, but we certainly don’t feel that we want to be limited to our platforms. There are a lot of loyal readers of the Sheridan Press, the Laramie Boomerang, and the Green River Star…. Those are trusted voices and necessary and critical outlets. … We can help inform those communities and engage those communities and provide a level of depth and insight they wouldn’t get otherwise.” – Matthew Copeland, the chief editor of statewide nonprofit newsroom WyoFile. Copeland described Wyoming as “a small town with very long streets” while sharing with me the nature of the news environment there. “You can’t just put stuff up in a cloud, turn a key, and walk away. You need to have a team working on it to maintain it and keep going, but also to respond to changes.” – Aron Pilhofer, the co-creator of DocumentCloud which is that handy way news orgs are able to share primary source documents and other files with readers seamlessly through embedding them in their stories. Pilhofer told me about the financial challenges that DocumentCloud is faced with by hosting hundreds of thousands of pages for news organizations – so far, for free. “There’s so much pressure in traditional startup language and the startup world about valuations and round size and all these kinds of things. Sometimes I think it’s possible to run at the wrong thing, at the numbers or the process, rather than raising money and finding investors that work for the mission that you’re trying to build…[and] being intentional about the outcome.” – Chris Sopher, the CEO of Whereby.us, on the company’s vision for raising investments while coinciding with their mission. Whereby.us is the corporate start-up behind two local newsletters that emphasize community engagement and staying informed on happenings in your city. “A lot of it was done on my front porch brainstorming. The one thing that has made the War Horse so successful is: Every journalist I’ve ever met who has told me ‘please let me know how I can help,’ I wasn’t afraid to take them up on that offer.” – Thomas Brennan, a Marine who turned to journalism after he was medically retired from active duty and wanted to tell the stories of today’s veterans. You may have heard of the War Horse’s first investigation, which uncovered the toxic culture in the Marines United Facebook group where members shared nude photos of female service members. “Being politically aware in this day and age is exhausting. Something to make it a little more accessible and rewarding helps.” – Christopher Cinq-Mars Jarvis, a developer and avid PolitiFact follower who decided to create a game based on their fact-checking to teach players about fake news. “We want to share the storytelling with the people whose lives I am walking through.” – Paul Salopek, a reporter-explorer-extraordinaire as he is in the midst of spending about a decade walking across the planet chronicling the spread of humanity in an experiment of slow journalism. He answered my questions via email from Tajikistan, “where flying ants attracted by my headlamp are rocketing up my nose.” "I’ve also had an evangelical awakening about, ‘yeah, people should pay.’ It’s so much better for the audience and the publisher when the primary revenue source is the audience. Nobody goes into journalism because they want to cater to advertisers and deliver them as many eyeballs as possible….There’s this norm in place that you don’t pay for news and especially some dinky little local news.” – Jay Senter, the publisher, editor, and main writer for the Shawnee Mission Post, an three-person, online-only news organization just outside of Kansas City, Kansas. With much trepidation, Senter pulled the trigger on a paywall for his site asking readers to subscribe rather than relying on advertisers. The bet paid off, with the Post hitting its one-year goal number of subscribers in just three months. Consider Senter a convert. There are a few more quotes I'll add in the coming days as my final stories from the summer with Nieman are published. Credits: the photo of the Lippman House, the home of the Nieman Foundation, is from Nieman Lab's Facebook page. Yes, y'all should follow them on Facebook -- and Twitter, and this nifty daily digest. Photo of the Google News Lab Fellows outside the main cafe, Charlie's, from the Medium post announcing us.
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