“We know there are communities where there aren’t traditional journalists any longer,” says Andrew Conte, director of the Center for Media Innovation at Point Park University in Pittsburgh.
But “traditional journalists” might not be where the future of the industry is going.
Nick Tommarello graduated from Point Park University and has returned as Conte’s graduate assistant this year in the Center and despite starting college with the intent of being a broadcast journalist, he’s now more interested in taking conversations to his community as a form of journalism that’s shared online, where his audience already lives.
“It takes a lot to put news packages together, to work in that hour by hour, minute by minute environment. I started to think of and consider who am I creating this content for,” he says. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s something selfish, but I want to be part of the content shown or told to people in my generation. Unfortunately, I don’t think TV news is that way, at least in the way it is now.”
Instead, Tommarrello created a persona, “Newsy Nick,” and dresses up as an “old-time newsie,” Conte says. Tommarrello organizes what they categorize as community conversations about journalism in a public square in the heart of downtown Pittsburgh to talk about a different issue each time.
“I thought it was going to be a total disaster when it started, but we had an idea, let’s try it,” Conte says. “The first conversation was about the issue of homelessness. We had some leading experts on the topic, a journalist asking questions,” and due to the public and open nature of the space and the conversation, people began to gather, including some who were experiencing homelessness themselves.
“It’s been a revelation for us to realize this is a new way of creating the news, interacting with the news, by bringing it to where people already are,” Conte says.
Conte and Tommarrello view the Center, and its new effort, the Next Generation Newsroom, as a way to expand and deepen the kind of journalism that’s available to people across Pittsburgh and beyond.
The new initiative is “a way to bring together all the work we’ve been doing,” Conte says. The Next Generation Newsroom is a partnership with 30 different local news organizations across southwest Pennsylvania, along with five foundations as part of a local Press Forward Chapter. “We’re working with the Citizens Reporting Academy to provide basic training to amateur citizens to do original journalism. We’re putting all these things together to create a pipeline of young journalists who have a passion for this work and now have a way to carry it out, and then our partners on the professional end, who are out asking questions, we’re creating resources for them. We’re trying to eliminate the instances in which you have multiple journalists standing around at the same story asking similar questions.”
Training people who might not have formal journalism education but are curious about their communities and wanting to know more about what’s going on is an essential part of the Center’s vision and the cornerstone of the Next Generation Newsroom alike.
Young journalism students might not want to follow the path of traditional journalists, but “someone still has to be the one asking the questions, digging up the original information,” Conte says. “Lots of people want to talk about the news, but someone at the root has to have the skills to be able to go and find the mayor and ask the questions, or to find the document and pull it out and figure out what it means.”
Young journalism students and interested citizens alike aren’t getting their news from the evening broadcasts anymore, Tommarrello says. “Think of talk radio back in the day. You had personalities, commentators, analysts who had their own individual publishing platform…Going into secondary education or providing formal training on journalism in general can help distinguish someone who knows and understands social media but also has the background of fact checking and the proper pillars of journalism.”
Andrew Conte, director of the Center for Media Innovation at Point Park University, and graduate student Nick Tommarello share how the Center for Media Innovation is revitalizing local journalism in Pittsburgh.
