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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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.
“I-don’t-know-what-to-say. Every-time-I-try-to-speak-carefully-I-fuck-up-and-make-a-big-mess-of-it-all. I-don’t-want-to-constantly-accuse-you-of-things, so-I’m-going-to-try-to-talk-about-myself-now, as-genuinely-as-I-possibly-can, leaving-every-window-and-all-doors-open-in-the-rain, so-to-speak. This-is-important-to-me-so-please-listen.”
Imagine those sentences being said on camera on CNN—proclaimed by Candy Crowley, Wolf Blitzer, Christiane Amanpour, Robert Novak, and more. Imagine each individual word being punched out with the determination the keys on a typewriter and flipping from reporter to anchor in every space between the words. You’re stared in the eye with sincerity and authority, dared to disagree. (If you can’t imagine it, watch a clip of it here.) That’s the premise of “CNN Concatenated,” a 15-year-old video artwork in which Israeli-American artist Omer Fast extracts news segments word by word to form an 18-minute monologue appearing to have the 24-hour Cable News Network satirically critiquing itself. "Mr. Fast’s edits first ensnare our attention, then keep us working to untangle content,” remarked a museum director about another piece to the New York Times. “The-last-few-months-have-been-difficult. I’ve-said-too-much. I’ve-done-hurtful-things. I-haven’t-said-enough. It-seems-we’ve-developed-a-taste-for-each-other’s-weaknesses,-that-we-thrive-on-consuming-each-other.” “CNN Concatenated” is arguably the loudest member of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s special exhibit Breaking News: Turning the Lens on Mass Media in Los Angeles. Its other video works come with headphones and stools to perch on while listening thoughtfully, but this one is meant to bother you. The deconstruction of the mass media in this exhibit closely examines the authority that news organizations have and the means they might take to manipulate consumers’ emotions. The pieces included in this exhibit focus largely on visual media, but choose different tactics to make their point. (The exhibit does not shed much light on the constructive influences that CNN and other outlets have had on society, by ensuring that hard news is taken apart and made digestible for viewers and that leaders know the power of the 24-hour news station's international cameras.) Seventeen covers of Newsweek magazine adorn one wall, pointing out the magazine’s focus on the O.J. Simpson ordeal and other cultural or social events while Rwandans were slaughtered in a genocide in the 1990s, in Chilean Alfredo Jaar’s Untitled (Newsweek). John Baldessari’s video The Meaning of Various Photographs to Ed Henderson (1973) showcases the guesswork and assumptions made by an acquaintance when presented with out-of-context photojournalism and asked to describe the story they might tell.
To me, one of the most honest and literal works was a side-by-side comparison of the production versus consumption of a local newscast. Americans Dara Birnbaum and Dan Graham created Local TV News Analysis (1980) provides a look into the control room of a news station and the living room of a family. While the production crew works to ensure every detail, the family takes in the news in a much more casual manner. Sometimes their discussion isn’t even related to the information on the screen. It seems as though they’re paying attention but it’s difficult to tell how much is being absorbed. It’s hard to tell how much of the news’s hard work is actually working.
For me, as someone new to the visual media world, it’s a wonder I’ve had frequently. “No-doubt, we-each-have-our-motives-for-this. We-attack, then-quickly-withdraw-and-defend. We-put-flags-on-various-hilltops-and-lay-siege-to-each-other’s-needs. We-play-hard, make-claims-and-demands, issue-orders-and-restock-our-supplies-in-the-dark. As-life-long-adversaries, we-do-this-with-enough-practice-and-caution-to-know-when-to-stop.” Nearly three months ago I joined the staff of a local TV station as an intern with several broadcast reporters. Three months is hardly enough time for a full understanding of how they work, but it’s provided an insightful glimpse into the motivations and mysteries of the TV news world. I’ve worked alongside reporters, producers, and editors who have served three years or even three decades to the station or to the general cause. Their dedication to the facts and passion for the delivery has brought most of them to the upper echelons of their career, as the L.A. market is the second largest in the nation. As someone who casually consumed the evening news when I lived in a house that actually had a television, I had no conception of how much activity took place behind the scenes. Now, with an intimate perspective of the broadcast and digital teams at a local news station, I wonder how much is lost in translation. These companies have gobs of consultants and focus groups working on that very question; they don’t necessarily need an intern to be an authority on this. To be clear, I don’t consider myself an expert—more so a person who has a peephole into this world and is stretching to climb further into it. But confronted with the artists’ interpretations of the media, the wonder returns: what kind of message are we actually sending? “But-we’re-helpless-before-our-own-instincts. We-cannot-handle-the-quiet, the-horrible-normal, the-shared-noneventfulness-that-would-give-our-relationship-the-stability-it-so-desperately-lacks. I’m-exhausted-from-trying. I-love-you. I-miss-you, even-though-we-hardly-spend-anytime-away-from-each-other. But-still-I-cannot-give-up. It’s-funny-to-say-this-but-I-feel-more-alone-in-your-company-now-than-ever-before.” The Getty Center exhibit runs through April 30. But be careful if you spend too much time there: one security guard remarked that it felt like “torture” after working twelve hours in the exhibit.
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:
In the homestretch of the 2016 election, the number of ways you can get news is growing almost as quickly as Donald Trump’s tweets. But the newest kids on the block are chatbots, software that can help users order from Taco Bell, set up an appointment on your calendar, or get daily updates about the presidential election polls broken down by state. Many are housed within Facebook’s standalone Messenger app and website already. This helps news organizations and brands alike reach readers and consumers like you in places where you already spend your time. Just in time for Election Day, news organizations are using these chatbots to share not just articles and videos with their audience – content produced by traditional media – but also snippets of information itself. Branching out but staying in In April, the New York Times Magazine’s technology reporter examined Facebook’s foray into chatbots and how that aligns with its mission. “These bots will simply help Facebook and others rope users in as long as possible, like fishermen trawling the open seas with gaping nets,” Jenna Wortham wrote. “Everything from Facebook Live, its new real-time streaming product, to Internet.org, the nonprofit it oversees that seeks to provide Internet access to the developing world, has been accused of harboring the same goal: keeping users on Facebook’s turf.” Now, the New York Times’s politics section has launched a chatbot of its own, considered an elections news service. Every morning the bot contacts the user through Facebook’s Messenger app or website with information about the forecast of the 2016 presidential election outcome. It’s delivered in a precise-looking graph of a plotted line for each candidate showing the changes in the data by month. It doesn’t provide information to substantiate that graph right away, however. But the bot gives you three options to click on from there: “What's new?”, “About our forecast”, and “Thanks.” Selecting “About our forecast” will have the chatbot send a few sentences of context and a link, bringing users back to the Times’s website. This particular bot is patient and limited with what the user can get from it at a time. Each evening, bot subscribers receive a message from the Times’s political correspondent with information about the important issue of the day for the campaigns. It’s evident that the bot designers prioritize the type of news shared rather than a high frequency of information. A future with chatbots The New York Times is not the only news organization experimenting with bots. Newer and nimbler outlets such as Buzzfeed, the Huffington Post, and Vice have already been developing their own bots, and the Washington Post also has a bot in the works. “It won’t maintain your calendar or help you with tracking packages or things like that. It’s got to do what people would expect the Washington Post to do for them,” said the Post’s director of product Joey Marburger. As chatbots become the latest part of the news arsenal, national and local news organizations alike are trying to find out how to use them to their advantage. The Columbia Journalism Review even published a guide to chatbots to help publishers embrace the change and the new possibilities that come with it. “In developing editorial strategies for some of these wide-ranging messaging platforms, news organizations are not just helping to future-proof themselves,” the guide states. “They are also venturing into online spaces that could enable them to reach hundreds of millions of (often young) people with whom they have never engaged before.” And that's definitely something to chat about. |
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