I marked the 100th day of President Trump being President Trump by going through my emails and reading the media coverage of what President Trump has and hasn’t done.
Confused yet? Try being a journalist right now. We’re supposed to break out of our bubbles, explore other bubbles, all while blowing up a big enough bubble for people to pay attention to us. If you’re out of breath, I am too. With a winter internship at KNBC under my belt, I have now worked in almost every sector of the media: print, digital, and broadcast. (Public radio, I’m looking at you. Kidding. Sort of.) I didn’t set out to become a journalist with a bucket list of places to work. I got involved in this because I wanted to find and tell the truth, to help others tell their stories. Gaining knowledge along the way of how different corners of the media work has only greater informed my eventual long-term job and made me more excited about the people working alongside me in this mission. A three-month internship in any arena doesn’t qualify you as an expert or teach you everything about the industry; heck, I barely learned enough about the content management system. It hasn’t made anything clearer about what anyone’s future as a journalist will be like or even what the next 100 days of a Trump administration will look like. We keep guessing, and someday we find the balance between taking him literally and taking him seriously, a point first made by Salena Zito reporting from the campaign trail in September. "When he makes claims like this [a statistic about unemployed black youth], the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally. When I presented that thought to him, he paused again, 'Now that’s interesting.'" It’s also a claim mentioned in Reuters’ “Newsgathering 3.0” report. Hitting on the news landscape of today for digital and legacy news organizations and various approaches to comprehensive information-gathering and storytelling, the report details a recommendation for what we as journalists should focus on: what information really matters, what’s really going on, and what it really means. Easier said than done. (I'll just leave this here.) In the first 100 days of the Trump presidency, I said I wanted to do things differently. As an intern in one of the top markets for broadcast news—not to mention a total newbie to the broadcast news world—I didn’t have a lot of sway in the way I operated at work. But I did have power in decision-making for my personal life. Previous posts on this blog have focused on unplugging and connecting with the people around me. I attempted to put these words to action in a couple ways: 1) significantly decreasing my own social media usage and output (or at least trying to) and 2) launching a hobby I’ve called the 140 Days Project, to document the shared wisdom of people I’ve been meeting across the U.S. and encourage myself to break out of my bubble. I announced the effort with this description: "140 Snapchat auto-deletions until there's a college diploma with my name on it. 140 24-hour-news cycles until President Donald Trump will have five months under his belt of putting "America First." 140 characters until we both overwrite on Twitter. Let's slow them down a bit. Follow along as I spend the next 140 days sharing some tidbits and tales from the people I meet along the way in California, Chicago, and places in between." It has since evolved to: “Can I ask you a random question? ... What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever had?” Those are the sentiments I’ve started with and carried on in more than 40 encounters with people from my time in LA for my internship to my drive back through three time zones to my hometown of Chicago, where I’m staying for the next few weeks until graduation. This project has allowed me a chance for person-to-person contact in a world where we just don’t have very much anymore, to learn about the individuals through their own words and in their home spaces as a traveler rather than a full-time journalist. It also allows me to stay in touch with some of the folks I’ve met along the way who choose to follow me on the Instagram where I post their words. It’s a small prick in my bubble, for sure, but sometimes it’s the small trickles that can later on create the biggest waterfall. And even if I stop reflexively opening my Instagram and Snapchat apps when I’m bored, it doesn’t mean they’re going away from everyone else's phones. As Tina Fey so eloquently described the unrelenting phenomenon of Photoshop (which, if you think about it, sort of democratized to become today’s Instagram platform) in her 2011 autobiography “Bossypants”: “Give it up. Retouching is here to stay. Technology doesn’t move backward. No society has ever de-industrialized. Which is why we’ll never turn back from Photoshop—and why the economic collapse of China is going to be the death of us all. Never mind that. Let’s keep being up in arms about this Photoshop business!” (You can tell I’ve had a lot of free time these past few weeks. But invigorating solutions for today's journalism woes are in the works. I've said it before and I'll say it again: it's both the most exciting and the most terrifying time to be involved in the work that we do.
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In a moment of either self care or broad stupidity, I decided to not check most social media over winter break.
But what did omitting my daily (okay, sometimes several-times-a-day) Facebook and Twitter scrolling mean? I missed out on my Friends and followers sharing articles from Occupy Democrats? I skipped seeing their frustrations with and mockings of the Trump Train supporters? I was supposed to not look at my phone when awkwardly waiting to go through airport security?
By putting away my phone and resisting the habitual instinct to scroll, I actually met people. I talked with strangers I otherwise never would've encountered in my Facebook sphere or my Twitter cylinder. And yes, this is most likely a Millennial problem (I see you gray-haired editors rolling your eyes, but come on, you've probably done this before too) but it was refreshing to connect with people in the real world rather than my own little online world. Someone in the airport security line even offered me a taste of his homemade sweet potato pie after I commented how good it smelled.
I still kept up with the news, too--and that made it seem more like actual news rather than just information/infotainment. Thanks to a constant onslaught of email newsletters (these are some of my favorites - check out your own local letters!) I was able to consume the news when I wanted, rather than having it constantly shared and promoted on my feeds. I didn't have any news FOMO, because the lovely reporters, editors, and curators behind the newsletters made sure I had the essentials and I didn't have to rely on Facebook's sneaky algorithm or the chronology of my Twitter feed. (Plus, people who write email newsletters tend to sound a lot less panicked and dramatic than people on social media.) This semi-sabbatical made me reconsider my social media habits not just as a person, but also as a journalist. Many of our personal accounts allow us to fabricate our own images of ourselves. I'm as guilty of reliving my day by rewatching my Snapchat Story as the next person, but there's a difference between that and between staying isolated in our social media cylinders. Especially as journalists, we should treat our accounts and activities on Facebook, Twitter, etc. as public service opportunities. I can't control the Facebook algorithm, but I can control my postings. There's nothing wrong with sharing our own stories, but what about sharing the stories of people around us? We can serve as conduits for pertinent news and information in our communities and societies through our own accounts. But we can also do more than observe from our own social media bubbles: we can show our audiences that we're human, that we're a part of their communities and lives as well. We can engage, and we can offer the opportunity for others to engage. This may be easier said than done, but opportunity is ripe on the local level. Check out the Twitter feed and Facebook page of Lici Beveridge, the engagement editor at the Hattiesburg American in Mississippi. I met her a few months ago through a journalism workshop geared toward building an engaging newsroom, thanks to the Poynter Institute. She shares the happenings in Hattiesburg in a way that demonstrates her local ties and simultaneously informs her audiences.
Remember the golden rule of not using first person in journalism? Lici's social media is a model to abide by.
And there's proof that this sort of engagement works: in a 2015 study about journalists' social media activities and the impact they have on their news products, researcher Jayeon Lee found that "the journalist was evaluated more positively when he disclosed personal information and when he had engaged with people who left comments. He was perceived to be more likeable." Nearly since the dawn of social media itself, opportunities to connect with sources and find breaking news have abounded. As NPR's ethics handbook reminds us, "Properly used, social networking sites can be valuable parts of our newsgathering and reporting kits because they can speed research and quickly extend a reporter’s contacts. They are also useful transparency tools — allowing us to open up our reporting and editing processes when appropriate. " This semi-dated but still helpful Mashable piece discusses some of those ways, such as how a Chicago transportation reporter Friended bus drivers on Facebook to communicate about city transit updates both to not leave an email trail, but also in a more intimate and relatable way. And in the modern reporting era with a Trump presidency, David Fahrenthold's crowd-sourced and transparent reporting on the president-elect's charitable initiatives sets a new standard. And so, here is my news: I moved to Los Angeles a few days ago to intern at the local NBC affiliate, KNBC, with their political team. The weather is crazy nice here compared to Chicago (#sorrynotsorry), and I've walked probably close to 10 miles in the past two days exploring the area. But I've also had the chance to meet some people who also chose not to scroll and instead have a conversation, and it's the stories like theirs that I'm looking forward to getting to know better and share with you all in one way or another.
Do you have one I missed? Feel free to share here or on Twitter @NewsBySchmidt.
We, the media.
This weekend I welcomed the opportunity to debrief, discuss, and deconstruct the ways that media outlets have covered our communities. My fellow workshoppers came from organizations ranging from a local Chicago neighborhood newspaper to public radio in Minnesota to a journalism school in Nebraska to a newsletter startup in Seattle. And we all know: it’s time for change. There have been countless articles attempting to pull apart the dry results of the election and the way we, the media, failed. We failed to talk to everyone that mattered—which is everyone. We wrote off groups that we felt had already been represented. In trying to listen to some groups better than we had in the past, we forgot about others. In the media industry today, this is a particularly remarkable challenge when you’re already squeezing pennies and writing for clicks. But this is not an acceptable excuse. No excuse is acceptable. Journalists tend to like to talk. When you’re interviewing someone, you’re trying to get to know them and make them feel comfortable chatting with you. And we like to be heard. We use our platforms to share the words that we write and, sometimes, the opinions that we hold. We value our authority in our audiences. We haven’t been listening. That’s why the timing of the Poynter Institute’s “Building an Engaged Newsroom” conference worked out so perfectly. I and 29 other journalists spent a day and a half plunging into discussions about community engagement, audience construction, and the role of the news media in our lives. We’re learning to associate ourselves with the audience and our community now, rather than outside of them. We, the media, are guilty. But we’re also energized for this change. We’re ready to get to work. Note: As the only student participating in the institute, I was the only person unattached to a formal news organization. Stay tuned for some news on that coming in the coming weeks. What do you do when you're about to hit your stride in your career--and you realize your bosses hate what they're doing? Last week I heard from two groups of people committed to making a change in the way journalism works. Thanks to their efforts, theSkimm has become a ubiquitous way for Millennial women to start their days and City Bureau is now a civic journalism lab putting the tools of journalism in the hands of those whose stories are frequently silenced. As one of the panelists talking about City Bureau said, success is just not quitting. And it seems like these news organizations are definitely on the pathway to success. theSkimmCarly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg remember the day they quit their dream jobs. They were 25-year-old news junkies who had worked their way up through internships when they realized that their bosses were quitting their jobs (if not losing them) out of disenchantment with the industry. If that's what they were supposed to be striving toward, they wanted none of it. So on July 18, 2011--the "scariest day of our lives"--Zakin and Weisberg left NBC News and used the $3,000 in combined savings and the credit card debt they would accumulate together to launch a new way of delivering news to women their age. Through daily emails full of information written like your best friend would tell you, the pair built a community of Skimm'bassadors and loyal readers. Now, just over five years later, they have used the Skimm to create a campaign registering more than 108,000 new voters, have raised more than $16 million in fundraising, and premiered a second product (Skimm Ahead, to complement the events often featured in the daily email). Lessons learned:
City BureauRather than taking the news and putting it in other people's hands like theSkimm, City Bureau has led the Chicago community journalism scene with the mission of putting the news back in the community from sourcing to social media.
It's a fledging organization working hand in hand with South Side Weekly, originally a student publication out of the University of Chicago now converted into a nonprofit highlighting the wins and woes of the lesser-known half of the city, and the Invisible Institute, a "journalistic production company" spearheaded by housing and police reporter Jamie Kalven. City Bureau holds trainings for citizens about everything from Freedom of Information Act requests to recording at public meetings and pays stipends to writers of all levels through its reporting program. But mere months ago, the journalists behind it were frustrated with the way traditional media covered all spaces of the city. They--Darryl Holliday of DNAInfo and the Chicago Sun-Times, Harry Backlund of the South Side Weekly, Andrea Hart from nonprofits helping high school journalists, and Bettina Chang, editor at Chicago magazine--wanted to bring the tools of investigation and journalistic action to residents of the city's South and West Sides. These have culminated in a weekly Public Newsroom, reporter trainings and stipends, and a wide network of support. But City Bureau's work has only just begun. Lessons learned:
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