Amber Healy, Author at It's All Journalism

#278 — Progressive and unencumbered, the Young Turks way

Cenk Uygur has opinions on journalism and he’s not hesitant to share them.

Uygur started his professional career as a lawyer but hated it. He took a turn into public access TV and loved it, later trying talk radio.

Cenk Uygur is the host of The Young Turks, a online show of perspective journalism.

In 2002, he started The Young Turks, the show for which he’s best known.

“At the time, it was just a radio show on Sirius, me and a guy who’s now the host of TCM,” Uygur said. “It was the first ever show on Sirius. We saw ourselves as talk show hosts, not journalists.”

He considers what they do on The Young Turks “perspective journalism,” a voice for a progressive audience that doesn’t want — or have time for – partisan filler and anchors who don’t care about the news they’re presenting.

That might have something to do with the show’s success on YouTube. There are no corporate executives to answer to, nor are there advertisers to appease.

Broadcast and network television “costs too much money. There are too many gatekeepers,” Uygur said. “People don’t want gatekeepers. They don’t want you to cater to corporate advertisers first. Online video encourages, and it’s part of its DNA, to find people in the crowd and lift them up. Since we had no money and no infrastructure, we would’ve been lost (on broadcast TV). The crowd lifted us up. This is the voice apparently they were interested in.”

And those opinions about journalism — they were many.

“We don’t hide our opinion and I think mainstream journalism does,” Uygur said. “I don’t think TV has a liberal bias. That’s hilarious.” A touch of sarcasm here: “Giant multibillion-dollar corporations are so liberal. It’s just a right-wing talking point. TV perpetuates that talking point because the like pretending to be liberal.”

TV corporations have an “establishment bias,” Uygur continued. They embrace the status quo because it made them successful. “Why the hell would they want to rock the boat? It’s their boat! We’re honest about our perspective. We’re progressives. We’re outsiders. We don’t particularly like the establishment. That has given us an enormous advantage because the audience are also outsiders, they don’t like insiders.”

As for some anchors?

“Guys on TV are typically news actors, not anchors,” he said. “Some of them write their own scripts, some care, some help produce the show. I’ve seen many others in my days in cable news go in, read the script once and go on the air. I’ve seen some walk in, not read the script once and go on the air. If that’s not a news actor I don’t know what is.”

Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks, joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss the hidden bias of most broadcast journalism — it’s not what some might expect — and how millennials helped build his media empire.

#131 – Ben Wikler is looking for a good fight

#277 — Washington City Paper staff embraces uncertain future

The ground under their feet might not be very steady these days, but the staff at Washington City Paper remains focused on their mission.

Alexa Mills came to journalism at the age of 32 and “job security was not my expectation. That’s not my framework coming into this,” she said.

Alexa Mills

Perhaps that’s why she’s keeping an even keel as the City Paper is seeking a new buyer.

“We’re just living in the moment. Right now, we’re working on City Paper,” she said.

The staff has been “really high energy” since word came out a few weeks ago that the paper was up for sale. “I said right away, there’s no point in us being sad sacks. We love journalism, so let’s have a great time, we’ll figure this out.”

Her staff of 10 – nine if she’s not counting herself, she believes – remains dedicated to doing good work and acting as D.C’s local paper.

The Washington Post “does less and less every month with local. Their focus, thank goodness, is on national and they’re killing it,” Mills said. “But we’re killing it locally. We dominate,” with coverage focusing on housing, food and other issues of intimate interest to City Paper readers and district dwellers.

Even with an uncertain future, the City Paper and its staff have dreams of adding to their coverage. “We’d love to do health. I’d love to have a sports report.” There’s a reporter at the paper now who wants to cover social justice issues, taking a localized view on issues of immigration and the uptick in protests that have become more common in the past few months.

They recently wrote about a reporter in New Haven, Connecticut, who “saw the writing on the wall in New Haven with changes in the way information is delivered. He launched a new site, the New Haven Independent, which is online-only. He had the DNA of an alt weekly but he’s New Haven’s news. I think that’s one way we’re thinking about” the future of the paper.

The paper also has the support of its competition. Washingtonian and DCist both have published articles about the City Paper’s uncertain future.

“I think competition is important in news,” Mills said. “One thing we’ve heard from other outlets is they do want us here. DCist put an article out about our situation. … When we’re competing with another outlet, whether it be the Post or WAMU or DCist for a story, that forces us to think about our angle, what additional interview can we do, what additional reporting can we do. That competition really benefits readers in D.C..”

It also helps readers, she said.

“I think journalists, you hate the person who gets your story better than you, but you don’t want them to go away. I think the media market for local news in D.C. is not saturated. We want to stay here. We want to participate.”

Alexa Mills, editor for the Washington City Paper, joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss the future of her publication and the importance of local news in a town dominated by a major national newspaper.

#276 — Write like a journalist, think like an entrepreneur

The time is right for journalists who think like entrepreneurs.

Rich Gordon, a professor and director of digital innovation at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, knows this territory well. He was a reporter at the Miami Herald in the 1990s when the internet was still a new creation. Prior to that, he was digging through “rows and columns of numbers” from census data, working in the budding data journalism world with the Richmond Times Dispatch.

Rich Gordon is director of digital innovation at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

“I remember looking for the first time at a webpage and the underlying code, HTML, and thinking, ‘Oh, this is probably the way we’ll do online publishing,’” he recalled. “At the time, it was AOL and Prodigy. HTML brought it home.”

He was in the right place at the right time when the Herald decided to publish all its newspaper and media outlets online, becoming the paper’s first online director in 1995. Gordon was tasked not only with developing websites for the Herald and other publications but thinking of ways to make money off those sites.

“You can’t just create on product today and be done with it,” he said. “You’re always having to create new publications, new media products, new tools for readers and users. I brought that with me to Medill after four years running the Miami Herald’s online operation.”

Now he’s helping new journalism students hone their skills not just in writing and reporting but considering all opportunities on the horizon for developing new platforms in which quality information can be shared with audiences.

The motivation to study journalism hasn’t changed much but the tools and opportunities have, Gordon said. Those who will be most successful in branching out from traditional media into the new world might share some qualities with entrepreneurs, whose skills can’t really be taught as readily.

“Every organization now needs to have and create new publications and media products, not just news organizations,” Gordon said. “Every company, every brand, every nonprofit organization, probably has email newsletters, websites, apps, and they need to communicate their story to stakeholders. The process of building a successful media product is the same whether at a news organization or a non-news organization.”

The old adage of knowing your audience rings true for non-media outlets, something journalism students need to remember, he said.

Journalism students and working writers “understand content storytelling, which is at the core” of developing a media product. “What they need to be successful on the product side is other skills that compliment storytelling skills.”

Rich Gordon, professor and director of digital innovation at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss the onset of data and digital journalism, how the intersection of the two changed his career, and why “media product” doesn’t have to be a forbidden topic of conversation for journalism students.

#252 – Going native: Branded content helps sustain journalism

#275 – Politico grows beyond its digital startup roots

Calling Carrie Budoff Brown’s tenure at Politico a whirlwind would be underselling it.

After several years at the Philadelphia Inquirer, she joined the publication in 2007 just as it was starting.

Carrie Budoff Brown

“I decided it would be riskier to stay in Philadelphia than to go to a startup. That’s how concerned I was about the Inquirer and the health of regional journalism,” she said.

Budoff Brown was mostly concerned that the longstanding paper wasn’t prepared for digital journalism and the evolving way in which readers were getting, and wanted to get, their news.

Politico lured her with the idea of a digital-first approach to news.

“At the time it was a unique concept,” she recalled. “Now it’s normal. They recognized that the pace of journalism is speeding up.”

It didn’t hurt that the masthead was filled with names she’d read for several years, a team she respected.

After covering the Senate in 2007 and the presidential campaign in 2008, Budoff Brown covered President Barack Obama’s landmark health care legislation on Capitol Hill, something she reflects on now from time to time and wonders whether the media did a sufficient job investigating.

But it’s a rare law in that “there’s a start and finish to it. It’s so hard to get that in Washington these days,” she said. “I look back on the coverage now and wonder what did we get right, what did we miss. The media did do well at it but I see stories now and I see how much of it was repeating itself, decisions made by lawmakers and the president and how those decisions continue to reverberate.”

Health care was the focus of one of Politico’s first paid vertical publications, called Politico Pulse at the time (now evolved into Politico Pro). It remains a “core competency” of Politico’s coverage, with a team of 14 reporters around the country as well as in Washington.

When Politico decided to branch out yet again, it looked to Europe and committed to build a multi-national newsroom focused around the European Union and its seat in Brussels.

“Brussels is interesting. It’s one of the most powerful regulatory capitals of the world. There’s lots of money spent, lots of politics,’ Budoff Brown said.

Now, just a few years later, there’s a team of 75-100 journalists covering the EU, including reporters from Paris, London, Berlin and Frankfurt. The idea was for “Europeans to report on Europe in a way Washington is reported on,” instead of reporters from a given country covering affairs of concern to their nation alone, Budoff Brown said.

It’s an experiment that’s paying off.

“We decide the health of something by how many re-subscribe after a year,” she said. “It’s well above 90 percent. They were paying for it at higher rates than we ever expected. That was a sign that this is going to work and it’s something I’m very proud of.”

Politico‘s editor Carrie Budoff Brown joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss the evolution of Politico in Washington and the European Union.

#184 – Wild World of Louisiana politics

#274 — Journalists, get excited about your writing

The best way to get better at writing? Read more.

Julia Goldberg is the author of ‘Inside Story: Everyone’s Guide to Reporting and Writing Creative Nonfiction.’ (Photo by Jessica Preston Photography)

“I started thinking a lot about the notion of how do we cultivate creativity and excitement about our work,” said Julia Goldberg, a professor of creative writing at Santa Fe University of Art and Design and a previous editor of the Santa Fe Reporter, an alt-weekly.

Goldberg has been thinking of herself as a writer for most of her life, but her thinking about what makes writing interesting and exciting led her to write a new book, “Inside Story: Everyone’s Guide to Reporting and Writing Creative Nonfiction.”

“One of the ways I cultivate excitement is by reading great writing, thinking about how the writer has been able to pull off” what they’ve done, pondering their process and how those practices can be adopted, she says. She asked her students to think about writers they love as a class.

Goldberg said she couldn’t find a book that covered all the bases she had in mind, so she wrote one.

“I got excited about writing myself, which made me excited about reading journalism and doing all the things it’s hard to do when you’re on deadline,” she said. “This is what needs to happen – you have to be cultivating a sense of excitement by looking at and reading things and being really jazzed about them.”

In the alt-weekly and alternative journalism world, many writers don’t come to the newsroom with traditional journalism backgrounds. Not many go through journalism school before arriving in alt publication newsrooms, Goldberg said, and as a result they’re not interested in traditional journalism. Instead, they’re inspired by longer form reporting, in the same vein as Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe.

With her students, she noticed that many of them have the same mixture of a love of writing and a burning curiosity, the combination of which gives them skills they don’t even realize could be useful in a professional setting.

Julia Goldberg, professor of creative writing at Santa Fe University and author of the recently published book, “Inside Story: Everyone’s Guide to Reporting and Writing Creative Nonfiction,” talks with producer Michael O’Connell about the process of researching and writing a book and how reading more can translate into better, more engaging and vivid writing.

#268 — Put big thoughts into your writing

#273 – Political polarization and the massacre that wasn’t

When Andrea Wenzel and Sam Ford wanted to take a closer look at political polarization and how that can change relationships within a community, they happened across the perfect place to collect stories.

They started interviewing people in Bowling Green, Kentucky, home of the infamous — and non-existent – Bowling Green Massacre.

As part of the project on political polarization, Andrea Wenzel and Sam Ford hosted a workshop to discuss ideas with Kentucky residents over a catfish dinner.

“I think, like a lot of us, with all this rhetoric about being a divided country, people are polarized as far as what media they’re getting, and we wanted to see what that means,” said Wenzel, an assistant professor at Temple University and fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism. “I wanted to try and find a case study and talk to people and see whether there are any shared spaces left” in which people who self-identify as Republican or Democrat were still gathering together.

Ford has spent most of his career in rural journalism and had just started working with Wenzel when Kellyanne Conway used the fictional Bowling Green Massacre as historic justification for the Trump administration’s first attempt at a travel ban targeting majority Islamic countries. Bowling Green, it turns out, is Ford’s hometown.

“Residents had some fun with it,” Ford said. The day after the assertion was made, “there was a vigil for truth and human rights. There was a mixed set of reasons why people were responding but they were fairly unified in making fun of the administration. For some, it was mocking the media. For some, it was a lighthearted poke of fun for what they saw as a misstatement, for others it was taking a dig at the administration.”

Andrea Wenzel

The area surrounding Bowling Green, which is a college town, voted largely for Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

It was perfect timing and the perfect place for their conversation, published in August by the Tow Center as “Lessons on overcoming polarization from Bowling Green and Ohio County, Kentucky.”

Wenzel and Ford wanted to understand how political polarization – if it exists – reached beyond the dining room table to change the way people interacted with each other, Wenzel said. They invited participants first to a focus group and then to keep news diaries, tracking not only which articles they read but how they discussed those articles with others, their social media habits and their thoughts on the issues raised.

Sam Ford

The results were interesting and somewhat sobering.

“People had stories of having a falling out with people close to them in their lives, boyfriends and girlfriends breaking up, hearing people say they were going to change churches or not talking to various relatives,” Wenzel said. “The situation was something where people felt it in their lives very close to home, but at the same time, people were sharing community spaces.” They would bump into people from differing political views around town and while shopping but wouldn’t necessarily discuss the political matters of the day.

Andrea Wenzel, an assistant professor at Temple University, and Sam Ford, media executive and consultant, join producer Michael O’Connell to discuss their research on political polarization following the 2016 election, as published by the Tow Center in August as “Lessons on overcoming polarization from Bowling Green and Ohio County, Kentucky.”

#258 — Old-School approach sometimes the best path forward

#272 – Lack of government transparency leaves press, public in the dark

There’s no one universal – or national — standard when it comes to open government laws, requiring the availability of public records requested by journalists or citizens.

Each state has its own law, but what is required by each state is often a mystery to the journalists who cover state and local governments, said Miranda Spivack, an independent journalist and the Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Professor of Journalism at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana.

Miranda Spivak is an independent journalist and the Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Professor of Journalism at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana.

Miranda Spivack is an independent journalist and the Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Professor of Journalism at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana.

“Regular people and reporters don’t know you can go in and get this information and they have to give it to you,” she said.

While working on a series of stories for the Reveal program from the Center for Investigative Reporting, affiliated with NPR, Spivack found that despite Beltway reporters’ obsession with transparency in government – “which was made worse by the Obama administration and even worse by the Trump administration — what’s going on at the state and local level is equally bad and maybe worse. That’s where real people’s lives are affected. If you want to know what the school board is paying teachers or what they’re spending on their own travel, or how your local tax dollars are being used, that should be information you can get.”

Unfortunately, due to a combination of a lack of local reporters covering statehouse issues and the state and local government’s interest in self-preservation, the laws on the books in each state aren’t being fully used to the extent they should be, and both citizens and reporters are suffering.

Take, for example, the use of body cameras on police uniforms and patrol car dashboards.

“That’s opened a new area of secrecy for local and state police departments,” Spivack said. “Everyone now has cameras – there was a big push in the Obama administration, $40 million to help them get cameras.” Accountability was the stated purpose but many states “passed laws to make it very difficult to make those videos public. The idea that this would make things more accountable has gone by the wayside. I doubt, in the Trump administration, there will be any pressure to change that.”

She added that “In Maryland, there’s a 10-day waiting period if a police officer doesn’t want to be interviewed by investigators. That’s fatal to any investigation.”

Miranda Spivack, the Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Professor of Journalism at DePauw University in Indiana, talks to It’s All Journalism producer Michael O’Connell about the importance of open government laws and why journalists need to learn them — and why state and local governments don’t want them to.

#209 – Lawsuits that have chilling effect on free speech

#271 – ProPublica project documents rise of hate crimes in U.S.

As a nation, we’re talking more about hate crimes and the ideas of white supremacy more today than in the past 30 years. But is there evidence to support the suspicions that hate crimes are happening more frequently?

That’s a question ProPublica has set out to try and answer. Unsurprisingly, it’s a murky field of investigation.

Pro Publica is working with more than 100 newsrooms to document incidents of hate crimes occurring in the U.S.

The FBI estimates there are roughly 6,000 hate crimes a year, based on reports filed with the federal agency. But ask the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the number is much higher – closer to a quarter of a million, said Rachel Glickhouse of ProPublica’s Documenting Hate project.

The initiative builds on work done by the organization last year leading up to the presidential election. “In the weeks after the election, there was a lot of chatter and some initial evidence that there was a spike in hate incidents happening,” Glickhouse said. At the time, a team of journalists “decided to look into how we can know if hate crimes are going up … let’s look at the data. They found that the data is flawed.”

The result is a far-reaching effort to work with newsrooms in a collaborative environment, collecting reports on hate crimes reported to civil rights groups and the public, and then cross-referencing that information with incidents covered by newsrooms large and small.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is a key partner in the Documenting Hate initiative. SLPC gives ProPublica “data about incidents that have been reported to them. We’re working with a couple of others to try and get their data. They’re sending us information about the incidents people told about and we’re putting it into a centralized database,” Glickhouse said.

Other incidents going into the database are from a crowd-sourced project: “On our site, we have a form that anyone can fill out to report a hate incident, a hate crime, a bias incident,” she continued. “We’re keeping it open as to what the person experienced, but anything in the realm of hate.”

Even determining whether something qualifies as a hate crime — perpetrated against a person based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability or other protected status as noted by the FBI — is murky because laws vary from state to state.

More than 100 newsrooms are working with ProPublica on Documenting Hate, using their centralized database to find incidents in their coverage areas or to glean statistics on what could be national trends. Those same newsrooms also can feed information back into the database, providing updates on existing cases or adding new ones as they cover them.

It’s All Journalism producer Michael O’Connell talks to Rachel Glickhouse, who oversees ProPublica’s Documenting Hate project. The initiative aims to improve the data collection of hate crime incidents to determine whether hate crimes are on the rise, as many perceive. ProPublica is working with more than 100 newsrooms, civil rights organizations and members of the public to collect and verify the data.

#220 – Potential corruption exposed in NY governor’s office

#270 — ‘Brutal’ times ahead for alt press

Alt weeklies and other publications have the same battles to fight as their bigger brothers and sisters: Finding enough advertising to keep the proverbial lights on.

Andrew Beaujon is senior editor at Washingtonian. (Photo by Evy Mages)

Andrew Beaujon, a senior editor at the Washingtonian, sees the next few years as being “brutal” for alt publications. Following a panel discussion at the recent Association of Alternative Newsmedia’s annual conference, Beaujon asserts the closure of alt weeklies is “not a reflection on the quality of work they’re doing, it’s a reflection on the fact that they’re not making any money. You can’t keep offering people the same but less” when it comes to the local coverage readers have come to expect.

It’s a sad state of affairs, and a quick fact of more newsrooms, that one position is lost every year. He points to an alt publication in Knoxville, Tennessee, where some staffers of a publication that had just closed decided to go out on their own. “They found out advertisers has been advertising out of inertia,” Beaujon said. The advertisers “hadn’t noticed they were still advertising” with the publication and, once it was brought to their attention, they pulled their ads. The cost wasn’t worth the exposure.

Instead, alts need to find, and build on, their strengths and abilities that the bigger publications can’t offer.

The strength that some alt publications have found is the ability to do “mop-up stories,” he said. Alt papers aren’t quite under the same pressure to write breaking news events but have the benefit of being able to “go back, get the documents and meet the people (involved); tell a big story through a smaller story.” Larger, prominent publications don’t have that luxury because they have daily, if not hourly, deadlines to meet for both print and online outlets.

In his time at the Washingtonian and, before that, at the Washington City Paper, Beaujon said he’s come to appreciate the concept and practice of service journalism. “What we can do is really do the mop-up story, go back to the breaking news and find the connecting thread and find the stories people don’t have time to do when (something) happens. We do really good service journalism (at the Washingtonian), something I didn’t understand until I got here. Now I’m very proud of it because I’ve learned how hard it is to do it well and with integrity.”

Andrew Beaujon, a senior editor at the Washingtonian, joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss the challenges shared by the alt press and their major publication brethren and how alts can use the lack of a daily deadline to write more in-depth stories after the dust settles on major news events.

#266 —Democracy in Crisis: How alt newspapers cover national news

#269 – In era of fake news, it’s time to promote news literacy

Reporters are told to check their facts and verify their sources. Why shouldn’t news consumers do the same?

Peter Adams, the senior vice president for education programs at The News Literacy Project, says the sheer volume of information generated every day makes it difficult for anyone, even journalists, to stay on top of what’s factual, what’s real and what’s being presented by a group with an agenda or trying to spread misinformation.

Peter Adams is the senior vice president for education programs at the News Literacy Project.

“I think consuming and creating and engaging with information today is a much more common action than ever before,” Adams said. “It is the most foundational civic action anyone can take. Without understanding what you can trust, we’re limited to our lived experience and what we can witness, which is disempowering and limiting.”

The News Literacy Project provides resources and tools to educators to help students “effectively make their way through today’s information ecosystem,” including how to understand where information comes from, how it is presented and where there are opportunities to find and obtain credible information.

While it’s exciting that there are more outlets for information today than ever before, there are challenges with those opportunities. Roughly 1 billion updates are posted to Facebook daily – “if you’re just trying to take a glance at that billion of posts, you’d be at it for 32 years nonstop, and that doesn’t include the 72 hours of YouTube videos uploaded every minute,” he said. “There’s a staggering amount of information being produced in an environment that’s more complex than ever before.”

The News Literacy Project was designed with secondary school students in mind. But in talking to educators, the non-profit is finding its tools are being used with students as young as fifth and sixth grade all the way up through freshmen and sophomores in college.

The most important lesson for students and adults alike: “People have to be aware that partisans and pundits seek to exploit our biases. We all have a habit of leaning into the information we want to believe and leaning away from or working to dismiss as incompatible (information that doesn’t reaffirm) our existing beliefs. That’s human nature.”

If something strikes a chord and a reader really wants to believe the information is true but it seems too good, it’s time to take a step back and ask some core questions.

“Who created this? Does this organization have standards? Do they aspire to a set of standards designed to help ensure credibility and accuracy? Do they correct mistakes?” Adams said. He added that newspapers and other publications could do a better job of not only correcting their mistakes but explaining how those mistakes made it to publication in the first place, as that will help readers understand both the process and its shortcomings.

Peter Adams, senior vice president for education programs at The News Literacy Project, joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss the tools educators and news consumers alike can use to distinguish credible news and reliable sources from those playing on emotion and playing to bias for clicks.

#259 — Making a game of finding fake news