484. City Paper uses its 40 years of expertise to help local business

The Washington City Paper is marking 40 years of serving Washington, D.C., with in-depth, deeply researched coverage readers would be hard-pressed to find in the bigger, flashier paper down the street. But now, the District’s weekly alternative newspaper is making a concerted effort to help share its knowledge and expertise with small local businesses as well.

“To me, the City Paper is giving readers that kind of analysis and that deeper look, not just what is happening but why and how it’s happening,” says Caroline Jones, the paper’s interim editor. She’s been with the paper for nine years but also spent a summer working there as an intern during college. It’s also the paper she read as a teenager in Silver Spring, Maryland, when she and her friends were mapping out their Friday night adventures.

Duc Luu is the publisher and chief development officer at the Washington City Paper.

Caroline Jones is the interim editor at the Washington City Paper.

“Because City Paper is based in the tradition of telling a longer story and providing more context and deeper, more fully felt-out and realized stories, City Paper is able to chronicle events in the way the district has changed in a way, partly due to our longevity,” she says. “We’ve been around a lot longer than many places in D.C. we now see publishing regularly. We also just have that knowledge base and we are the storytellers of D.C. We can go deeper and longer and create a more fully formed narrative about what’s happening in the district.”

Those resources and that name recognition make the City Paper a trusted partner in the community as well.

“One of our missions is to inform and give context. Another important part of where we’re going now is to be a connector of people to their communities and to each other,” says Duc Luu, the paper’s publisher and chief development officer. The City Lights event calendar — the same one Johnson used as a teenager and for which she served as editor when she first joined the paper — helps people know their communities better and introduces them to new places to go, he says.

In the early days of the pandemic, a new issue came to light: now that more commerce was happening online, small businesses, the same ones that advertise in the City Paper, would need to shift their presence, but many might have been completely unaware of how to do that.

“We launched a back-to-business webinar series that enabled us to bring together the digital expertise we’ve built working with dozens of small business leaders around here,” Luu says. “It allowed us to get their knowledge about how to build a digital marketing presence for small businesses. We brought in thought leaders to help them get over that hump. We’ve bulked up our digital classifieds so it’s not just in print.”

The partnership between local papers and local businesses is crucial, according to Luu.

“We just can’t have a thriving community newspaper without a thriving small business community,” he says. “That’s going to be our bread and butter in terms of people who are really supporting us financially and trying to connect with potential customers.”

Duc Luu, publisher and chief development officer for the Washington City Paper, and interim editor Caroline Jones talk to It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell about the alt weekly’s 40-year history in Washington, D.C. They also discuss how the paper’s role has changed in that time and how it’s using its status and connections to work with small businesses during the pandemic.

483. Data can be the spine of your reporting

Data is a key component to MaryJo Webster’s reporting. But it wasn’t always that way. In fact, Webster did everything she could to avoid math in high school and college. She wanted to be writer instead.

It wasn’t until the late 1990s, when Webster was already working in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, that she was introduced to the idea of data journalism.

Maryjo Webster is the data editor at the Minneapolis Star Tribune.(Aaron Lavinsky)

“I was slaving over the city budget, trying to calculate the percentage change for each department between the current budget and the proposed budget for the next year,” says Webster, who is now data editor for the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. “A colleague came over to me and said ‘Can I show you how to use Microsoft Excel?’ I was enthralled immediately.”

It’s so much easier to access and clean data to make it useful for reporters: “When I first started, if you were to run a big query on a database, it was real common for us to set the query to run and then go get coffee and maybe it would be done when we got back. Today, that same query can run in the blink of an eye — even a tiny laptop can do far more than the computers we had 20 years ago.”

The tools have also improved considerably and the vast majority are free for use, something that’s opened the doors for newsrooms of all sizes. Data has become a true source, like someone a reporter would interview, but without worrying that key information will be hidden or otherwise obscured.

“I personally think the best approach is thinking about what stories do we want to tell, what’s happening in our community, what are the most pressing issues of the day and what data sources do we have that could help answer key questions, uncover things our human sources might not want us to know and fill in those details you might not get another way,” Webster says.

In 2018 the Star Tribune ran a series, called Denied Justice, about women who had been raped, looking at how many reports were investigated to the point where a trial took place. The story began when a woman, one of several who accused a University of Minnesota athlete of assaulting her, told reporter Brandon Stahl how badly the police had treated her during their investigation. The reporter began asking other experts who agreed that the victim’s experience with police was “totally normal but the conviction in her case was totally abnormal,” Webster says.

Those same experts couldn’t say how frequently, or infrequently, rape investigations ended with an indictment or charge, so the Star Tribune’s team started digging.

“Only 8 percent of cases resulted in a conviction, only about 25 percent of cases went to the prosecutor and only about half the time did police do the basic steps we were tracking,” Webster says. In the meantime, a pair of reporters sought out women who had filed rape accounts with the police, asking them to share their stories from reporting the assault and their outcomes.

“The combination of the systemic data, the data proving the systemic problem, and the heartbreaking stories of these women was just too much. Policymakers could not ignore it. We’ve seen immense changes in Minnesota since then,” including major overhauls to state statues on sexual assault in this past legislative session.

“When people read that story, you’re not going to find many numbers in it,” Webster says. “The numbers are serving as a spine holding up the story we’re telling. The stories are about the women.”

MaryJo Webster is the data editor for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. She talks with It’s All Journalism producer Michael O’Connell about her aversion to math before learning about data journalism, how data can be a better story source than interviewing a person, and how entering a query into a database can help pull information to tell the real stories of a community.

482. Noema aims to help academics, policy makers think differently

Noema is the ancient Greek word for thinking, something Noema magazine’s editors take to heart.

Kathleen Miles has been the executive editor for Noema magazine, a publication of the Berggruen Institute, from its previous iteration as World Post, a product that ran as a partnership first with the Huffington Post and, later, the Washington Post.

Kathleen Miles is executive editor of Noema magazine

“With Noema, what we wanted to do more of, and what we’ve been able to do more of now, is more long-form and ideas-based content less pegged to a 24-hour news cycle and with a longer shelf life,” Miles says.

The idea of thinking big thoughts and collecting information from a wide variety of sources is in keeping with Miles’ career: She admits to not wanting to get into journalism right away because she wanted to have “more breadth to my career.”

Before joining World Post, Miles worked as a political action coordinator during the presidential candidacy of John Kerry for the International Ironworkers; investigated unfair labor practices for the National Labor Relations Board and served as an inner city English, history and humanities teacher for Teach for America.

“I loved them all but I didn’t quite want to commit to one for the long haul because I had too many interests,” she says.

With Noema, Miles is working with like-minded writers and editors who want to take the time to explore topics and ideas that might otherwise be siloed in academic journals and, by default, less accessible to people outside those worlds.

“By covering overlapping fields, everything from philosophy to economics to politics and technology, our aim is to get out of the usual lanes and cross those disciplines and cultural silos,” Miles says. “We publish a lot of academics and have a lot of academic readers, but that’s not all we are.”

Academic journals tend to “silo disciplines,” Milos says. “Philosophers tend to publish in and read philosophy journals. Biologists tend to read and publish in biology journals. We’re aiming to capture some of the most innovative and unnoticed ideas in those academic and cross-disciplinary spaces and make them more accessible to a wider audience.”

Noema also wants to include different approaches to considering policy ideas, including pieces of cli-fi, or climate-change fiction, and has started to include pieces of science fiction as well.

“I’m looking to publish more science fiction stories that specifically only go out one to 10 years, instead of 500 years out, where you’re making these wild imaginative guesses rather than an informed prediction or a possibility in the near term,” Miles says. “We had a writer who had an innovative idea for data policy. Instead of describing what it should look like, he pretended he was writing a year in the future and described what it does look like. This kind of writing lets you play out policy proposals so people can actually imagine and see what you’re envisioning through, often, a fictional character who has lived it or is living it.”

And with an audience that includes heads of state in addition to academics and policy makers, the content within Noema’s pages reaches “people who are actually in a position to take some of the ideas and policy prescriptions we publish and run with them.”

Kathleen Miles is the executive editor of Noema, a cross-disciplinary academic magazine from the Berggruen Institute. She talks with It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell about the importance of breaking out of the 24-hour news cycle to give writers the room to investigate deeper topics to help decision-makers approach policy discussions.

469. The Defiant breaks down cryptocurrency

481. How to cover a music industry changed by COVID-19

From writing a fanzine more than 20 years ago to joining panel discussions about women in the music industry, Shirley Halperin says she keeps one foot in the world of old school print journalism and another in the digital present.

“I came up in a time when the rock journalist was this sort of heralded profession,” says Halperin, the executive editor for music at Variety, where she leads coverage for both the print edition and the magazine’s website. “I find myself and my age to be a huge advantage. … I was around for the biggest physical album sales week in history —until Adele broke it — NSYNC in 2001, with 2.6 million albums, CDs, physical media, sold in one week. And then the music industry cratered for the next seven, eight, nine, 10 years. Things were bad. There were huge amounts of layoffs and those positions of being a music editor at a local paper, they started to go away.”

Shirley Halperin is the music editor at Variety.

Realizing that the industry was changing, and her job needed to change with it, she learned to embrace the daily grind and learn how to adapt and use her skills for multiple platforms.

“I worked at UsWeekly, a major magazine that didn’t have a website in 2002. I had to morph into being equally adept at digital as print. I think a lot of people don’t have both those skills. You’re either really good at one or the other and juggling the two is difficult. I feel like I’ve learned how to do it because I’ve had to.”

How, exactly, has she learned to not just juggle the different demands of writing for digital and print but to do it well?

“It’s about managing your time well,” Halperin says. “When I started at the Hollywood Reporter, where we’d hold (an article) for print, to wait for the magazine instead of putting it online. That’s an old school mentality. I still get that from some of my counterparts at magazines. It really is about being able to switch back and forth. I have the way I do my day: The first half of the day is web-focused. When things quiet down in the evening, I can work on print stories. It’s a grind.”

Now add COVID-19 and a year without in-person concerts into the mix and it’s not just music journalism that’s changed.

Putting together a magazine, in which people had been gathering in meeting rooms to pore over photos and layout options, became more challenging. Remote working was already in place before the pandemic, but the subject changed pretty drastically, from who’s touring and releasing a new album to how will the industry adapt and survive.

“The concert industry had been such a cash cow for so many years, running at top speed,” Halperin says. “I never expected to see a massive industry go from 100 to zero in such a short time. It’s really meant a lot of working the phones. The old-school journalists know how to do this and that’s what it’s been like, to cover how agencies, promoters, venues are going to change the way they tour so people don’t get sick coming to see a live show.”

There’s also the business side of things on a larger scale.

“That’s been the biggest change, really, having to look at a beat that stock prices are fluctuating, there’s no money coming in, there are layoffs, there are executives not taking salaries. All that has happened in the last 18 months for a company like Live Nation.”

Shirley Halperin is the executive editor for music at Variety for both its online and print music coverage. She talks with It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell about covering all aspects of the music industry, how old-school journalism practices differ from the digital world and the way the music industry adapted to COVID-19.

480. What’s it like on the Senate beat?

Before Zach Cohen started college, he asked an editor for some advice on what to study to be a better journalist.

“He recommended not majoring in journalism,” says Cohen, the National Journal correspondent now covering the U.S. Senate. “He said go get your background in something other than journalism, so you can report with authority on that topic.”

Taking that advice to heart, Cohen studied at American University’s School of International Service, minoring in journalism, getting his real education covering student government for the university paper.

The National Journal is akin to other Washington, DC-focused publications, like The Hill and Roll Call, in that its driving purpose is to explain how Washington works and who the major players are at any given time.

Zach Cohen is the Senate correspondent for the National Journal.

In the past few years, Cohen has developed a few particular interest, including judiciary proceedings — he covered both of former President Trump’s impeachment trials and the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett — but he also keeps an eye out for other interesting bills that are scheduled to come up for debate.

“A couple of months ago, there was a debate about whether the DEA should retain some of its enforcement capacity to crack down on fentanyl distribution,” Cohen says. “It became a bigger question about criminal justice reform. There was a danger that if the Democrats couldn’t come up with an agreement on how to classify fentanyl as a schedule one narcotic, or whether to at all, with at least certain types of fentanyl, or the DEA would lose its enforcement ability. I get to cover stories you don’t hear a lot about but they’re really important questions that they are debating.”

With so much going on in any given week that the Senate is in session, how does Cohen know what to prioritize, what to lightly address, and what might come out of left field as a surprise crisis?

“Each Sunday we write a look-ahead, here’s what the Senate is working on this week,” he says. “I can touch on a couple different issue areas coming up at the same time. Even if it’s not a full story, it’s telling our readers you should watch this. … I’ll talk to my editor every day, but especially on Monday, to track what’s happening, here’s what I’m thinking about writing, here’s what might pop up and derail my entire schedule. We try to be flexible so we can find what works for the moment.”

Cohen also relies on some grounding sources who can provide information to bring him up to speed on the topic at hand.

“Luckily, nothing surprises people a lot, they usually know an issue is coming up,” he says. “If I have to write about the reconciliation process, I better bone up on Senate rules and procedures and I have a chance to do that. I have some sources I go to time and time again and ask them all my dumb questions so I don’t sound so dumb when I write about it.”

Zach Cohen is the Senate correspondent for the National Journal, also appearing on cable news stations on behalf of his publication. He talks with It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell about why he studied international service in college, how to set up a weekly schedule for coverage and why it’s important to have trusted sources who get used to your questions.

459. Politico project shows just how white and male statehouses remain

479. Digital melted mainstream media’s ice cream moment

Michael Hainsworth is a future-embracing, self-proclaimed geek who wanted to be a radio guy, became a TV guy and is now a digital guy in every sense of the word.

On his first podcast with a friend, Hainsworth used a pseudonyms because the broadcaster he worked for wouldn’t have given permission for the show. It might’ve been seen as a threat.

The reason for that?

“Mainstream media is scared to death of digital,” Hainsworth says. “It always has been, it continues to be. It had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 20th century, let alone the 21st. I didn’t bother to ask my employer if I could launch a podcast, I just did it. I cut my teeth on that and learned a lot about the nature of podcasting. At the end of the day, it’s an industry that is unaware of how to monetize it and fearful of not possessing control over the final product.”

Hainsworth, based in Toronto, tried to move his financial broadcast network, or at least his show forward by suggesting some changes to streamline the presentation of critical information to viewers.

Toronto-based podcaster Michael Hainsworth is the editor-at-large of at Futurithmic

“While financial television is very charts- and graphs-oriented, you can strip the video off almost every single show and turn it into a podcast,” he says. “There was no interest in doing that because they couldn’t figure out how to monetize it.”

The jumping-off point came when Hainsworth made suggestions about changing the way the broadcast looked. He was working with a bad producer and a bad director and wanted to go back to sitting at the anchor desk, providing valuable information and cutting away, for starters, the animated introduction to the broadcast.

“I said ‘Let’s get right to the show and let’s do it for mobile,’” he recalls. “All these ideas, I turned to my boss and presented them and he said that’s all well and good but we have to make TV for TV. I realized I had to jump ship and reinvent myself for digital before all my hair was gray and no one believed I knew what I was talking about.”

Hainsworth points to an old concept, the “ice cream moment,” something that radio stations in particular used to program for.

“The idea being that you’re on the way home from the store, you’ve got the quart of ice cream in the trunk, but you’re listening to the radio and you’re in the driveway and the content is so engaging you have to sit there, idling, because you don’t want to miss a thing. That doesn’t exist in the digital era anymore. It changes the way we program tremendously.”

The same goes for the premise that radio stations need to offer regular traffic updates, or that people will reach for their radio when they see a long line of brake lights ahead.

“The idea that you need to program content around an event that is no longer yours to control is absolutely mind-boggling to me,” Hainsworth says.

But he’s turned that frustration, and those limitations, into a career that didn’t exist, and couldn’t have, in his early radio and TV days. He now runs several podcasts that are deeply rooted in reading the digital room and speaking to those who are interested in very particular topics centered on the changing world.

Instead of asking a handful of questions of the CD Howe Institute, a leading think tank in Canada, he has full 30-minute conversations with their experts, asking more than a dozen questions.

“They’re detailed (questions), they’re valuable intel as well. I’m giving back to my listeners way more today than three years ago when I was standing in front of a TV camera,” he says.

Michael Hainsworth is a Toronto-based podcaster who left a 20-plus-year broadcast career to embrace all digital media has to offer. He talks with It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell about the fear mainstream media has for digital, why that’s a bad idea and how the ice cream moment has melted.

478. Keeping journalists safe is a priority for former EMT

Christopher Post had a 20-year career in emergency response, working in public safety, fire and emergency medical services before trading the ambulance for the news vehicle. Now he’s a video journalist in Allentown, Pennsylvania, but he wants to use his training to help keep reporters safe.

“I tell a lot of younger journalists, I learned how to ask questions in the back of an ambulance,” Post says. “That’s where I honed my skills to interview somebody and try to find out what happened. I love being able to do that, to talk to people.”

Christoper Post is a former EMT who is now a video journalist with WFMZ in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Post’s background means that, in addition to camera gear and extra batteries, he keeps a first aid kit in his news vehicle and credits at $15 pair of rubber boots he picked up at a farm supply store as an integral part of his work equipment. They came in handy recently when he covered flooding and storm damage from Hurricane Ida.

At the heart of his job, now as in the past, is safety and being aware of his surroundings. While first responders are trained in situational awareness, watching for high-stress situations or unsafe environments that might create new problems, it’s not something for which journalists receive training.

“The rules have changed in the last few years with how journalists are looked at and the threats toward journalists are different,” he says. “They’re different than they were a few years ago. I always take into consideration safety. As I was getting ready today, I put fresh batteries into a flashlight. I try to do things that are proactive versus reactive to make sure I’m successful when I go to work tonight. It used to be international journalists that took safety (training) and we gotta go off to the training program, but the reality is, safety is very much domestic as it is international. We should look at it that way.”

Recently, Chris added a number of safety precautions to his Twitter feed, to help journalists covering weather emergencies, including flooding from hurricanes.

“You shouldn’t be wading around barefoot or in flip flops in floodwater,” Post says, as an example. That water could be filled with bacteria from dead animals, “raw sewage to fuel oil to all sorts of stuff. Safety is always on my mind.”

Situational awareness isn’t spy training.

“When you see something that seems out of place, you can make a decision about what’s next,” Post says.” Be one step ahead of someone who might want to do you harm. I drive a vehicle with my station’s name on it. Sometimes it’s great, sometimes it’s not. Moreso not. I could be sitting at the traffic light waiting to make a turn and someone toots their horn and flips me the bird. It’s crazy. I stop at the convenience store to get a drink and someone’s yelling at me, accusing me of being fake news.”

Severe WX News Gear from Chris Post on Vimeo.

Journalists at every level should learn these skills — not only will it keep them safe, it can help them prolong their careers.

“I wish the industry would have taken safety concerns more seriously a lot sooner,” Post says. “I look at friends of ours, journalists that get burned out. I hear how did it get to this point. It’s because I was dealing with this situation or that situation or this other situation. They were all really hard things. The way you can be resilient to those things is to be prepared for it.”

Christopher Post spent 20 years as a first responder before changing careers and becoming a video journalist. He talks with It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell about how journalists can develop situational awareness and be safe when covering potentially dangerous stories.

Journalist pals, here are some tips for covering a hurricane. This is best practices of 20+ years of being in disaster zones, Any questions? — Hurricane season runs from June 1st to November 30th every year, @NPPA @RTDNA @spj_tweets

— Chris Post (@ChrisMPost) August 27, 2021

477. Washingtonian staff solidifies its voice by forming a union

Staffers at Washingtonian Magazine voted to form a union recently in order to improve working conditions, address concerns they had about how some employees were being treated, and to secure a voice for themselves in the publication’s future.

Entry-level and associate writers were making less than their counterparts at other publications and yet were expected to be experts on the city’s lifestyle and nightlife offerings.

In addition, many believed the makeup of the newsroom didn’t reflect the international and multi-ethnic population of the Washington, D.C. area.

Daniella Byck

There had been some sporadic discussions about unionizing or possibly joining an existing collective of which other newsrooms were members.

Then, in May, the chief executive of the Washingtonian Magazine, Cathy Merrill, published an op-ed in the Washington Post suggesting it was time for all reporters, at least on her staff, to come back to the office. Those who refused to comply faced the possibility of being downgraded from staff members to contributors, which meant they would lose some of their benefits.

That turned out to be the tipping point for Merrill’s staff: The day after the piece ran, writers at the Washingtonian unanimously took part in a one-day strike, refusing to update the website or provide any copy for the print magazine. Talk of unionizing solidified.

This came after what food editor Jessica Sidman says has been one of the magazine’s strongest editorial years in its history.

“We had to figure out how to put together the magazine when we were all apart,” says Daniella Byck, an assistant editor for the Washingtonian. “We’re hybrid now that things are opening up. We’re still making the magazine from home and trying to keep up with fast-paced news and making a product that readers love.”

Jessica Sidman

During the COVID-19 work-from-home mandate, staff at the Washingtonian shifted their focus from restaurant and cultural recommendations to how to function and navigate life in a pandemic.

“Our traffic was through the roof,” Sidman says. “We had just a really dedicated team that was out, reporting on protests last summer and providing important news about closures and reopening and government mandates. I think some of the issues we put out in print, really just some stunning, memorable photography and design and some memorable stories. Editorially, it was one of our best years.”

The Washingtonian has a staff of about 50 people, most of whom have editorial titles and responsibilities. The piece Merrill published shook their confidence and angered many of them, sparking action on an idea that had been brought up several times before.

“It was really disappointing to read in this huge newspaper what felt like a veiled threat to our livelihoods,” Byck says.

“It was demoralizing to read,” Sidman adds. “We were wondering, OK, are our benefits at risk? Are our jobs at risk? It felt like we had to say something as public as her op-ed was.”

The op-ed piece was the spark the Washingtonian staff needed to put talk into action.

“It hit home how important it was for us to have a stronger voice,” Sidman says. “No one had asked us under what circumstances we would feel comfortable returning to the office or whether we thought flexible schedules were a good idea. When we did strike, we saw the power we had when we all stood together in solidarity.”

Jessica Sidman and Daniella Byck of the Washingtonian Magazine were two of the publication’s staff who participated in a one-day work strike in May. They talk with It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell about the unexpected opinion piece published in the Washington Post by the magazine’s chief executive that served as a catalyst for the work stoppage and the formation of a new union for employees.

414. Will local ownership help Baltimore Sun survive?

476. Top journalism movies ranked by The Quill, Midwest Film Journal

For many movie fans, the list of journalism movies is a short one: Network, The Paper, All The President’s Men, and maybe a few more will be top of mind.

To commemorate the 110th anniversary of the Society of Professional Journalists in 2019, a team of writers from The Quill and the Midwest Film Review decided to dive in and rank the 110 top journalism movies.

Turns out, there are more than 110 movies that feature journalism or journalists in a prominent and meaningful way, including, yes, Superman and Spider-Man.

Lou Harry is the editor of Quill, the magazine of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Lou Harry served as editor on the project and came up with the idea shortly after joining the staff at the publication, produced by the Society of Professional Journalists. With a background in magazines, he saw an opportunity to take on a big project and make a big splash.

“There are so many top 10 lists out there, or here’s the five best of this kind of movie, the 10 best this kind of play. We have this 110 number hovering out there, let’s go for it,” he says.

He contacted Nick Rogers, a writer on the project and part of the staff at the Midwest Film Journal, and they were off and running.

“When he came up with this project, I don’t think there was an ounce of hesitation,” Rogers says. “We all were immediately on board and excited. The span of movies that we would all be getting to watch, from things we knew and loved well to things we had never seen. It was an exciting combination of old favorites, new discoveries and a way to look at how this profession has been portrayed cinematically.”

There are some entries on the list that will surely raise some eyebrows, including the Brenda Starr movie based on the comic strip and Woody Allen’s Scoop.

Nick Rogers is a film critic with the Midwest Film Journal.

“Once we started brainstorming a list, we had to eliminate documentaries, foreign language films, we eliminated strictly made-for-TV projects. That might be another list at some point,” Harry says. “We thought that would effectively thin the herd but there were a lot more.”

Readers also chimed in, reminding them of films they’d overlooked while sharing their thoughts on the ones that did make the cut.

There was another criteria as well: “If you were describing the film to someone, would journalism or journalist or reporter be part of the description? Related to that, we wondered if a journalist is a key character. We did include some films where the journalism piece of it is a device, a person is being interviewed. Some did make the cut. There were some difficult choices in there and some we considered bringing back,” Harry says.

“As we expand the list, the definition is more elastic,” Rogers says. “We recently added Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. it’s a movie I enjoy, but Gwyneth Paltrow’s ‘journalism’ in that is more suspect.”

Lou Harry and Nick Rogers are two of the film buffs behind The Quill’s 110 journalism movies ranked. They talk with It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell about how the movies were selected, the films that were left on the cutting room floor and why Superman needed to be included.

475. Podcasting is the last frontier of the open internet

If you’re of a certain age, you might remember a time when we had more websites than we did platforms. Instead of going to Facebook or Twitter to read something, or catch up with friends, you went to a chat room or searched for a topic of interest to you.

Those were the days when the open web ruled.

Benjamin Bellamy

“The open web was actually the web as it was initially created 30 years ago,” says Benjamin Bellamy, the CEO and founder of Ad Aures, an organization that creates fair and sustainable ecosystems for the podcasting industry, and leader of the Castopod hosting platform.

He’s also an advocate for protecting the open web, something he sees is in danger of vanishing and taking a greater range of free speech with it.

“In 2000, we started to see very centralized platforms; Facebook is one, YouTube is another. You are using its pipe, but you’re not on the web as it was initially. You’re not on the internet. … When you’re on Facebook, you’re on Facebook. Everything that happens inside Facebook is just Facebook, not outside it. You’re using a closed platform. It can be nice and interesting from time to time. We’ve been so used to a closed platform, we don’t even understand what the open internet means.”

He feels that’s a shame, because as the use and access to an open internet, free from restrictions and regulations, shrinks, free speech does too.

“When you’re on Facebook, whether you like it or not, you cannot say something Facebook doesn’t want you to say,” he says. “Whether their motivation is good or bad, that’s not the problem. When you enter Facebook, you’re in someone’s place and you agree to the terms and conditions.”

It’s like going into someone’s home — there’s an understanding that by going inside, you’re agreeing to follow their rules. Closed platforms have the ability to kick someone out if they don’t like how they act.

“As long as you have other places where you can talk freely, that’s not a problem. The problem comes when there’s no other place — if you’re on YouTube and, for some reason, you get a strike, where can you go? There’s nowhere else to go, because YouTube has a kind of monopoly.”

Podcasting is the last open space on the internet that isn’t under the same kind of restrictions and regulations because podcasters can put their content anywhere, and even in multiple locations, all at the same time.

“Thanks to the RSS feed, which is totally decentralized, you can host a podcast wherever you want to host it,” he says. “You can index it on any directory. You can listen to it using any application, it could be a desktop app, a cell phone app, it doesn’t matter. You’re free to use any means of communication, any app. If you’re doing a podcast Apple doesn’t like, they may remove it from their index, but your podcast will still exist. It won’t disappear… It won’t be deleted anywhere. Someone who knows the RSS URL will still be able to listen to it, even using the Apple podcast app.”

Benjamin Bellamy is the the CEO and founder of Ad Aures, an organization that creates fair and sustainable ecosystem for the podcasting industry, and leader of the Castopod hosting platform. He joins It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell to discuss the importance of the open internet and why podcasting is one of the last examples of what made the “old” internet powerful and exciting.

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It's All Journalism

The broccoli of media-focused podcasts.