392. Calling out racists in cartoons makes them angry

Jen Sorensen gets hate mail — she has a folder she checks with some regularity — but it’s not quite the pit of despair and misogyny some might expect.

“There isn’t quite as much misogynist hate mail as I thought there’d be,” says the cartoonist.

That might be due to the alternative press outlets in which her work is primarily circulating.

“Some people aren’t seeing my strip who might react strongly to it.”

But being a woman, and a woman who creates political cartoons, and one who does this work during the Trump era, presents other challenges.

The lack of broad attention is keeping some of the important topics she explores out of reach of the masses.

“In the midst of a traditionalist movement that’s so antagonistic to women and women’s rights, that’s a part of the story that’s getting overlooked a little,” Sorensen says. “You think there might be more attention on women political cartoonists when there doesn’t seem to be more than in the past.”

Most of the complaints she does receive are from people who don’t appreciate their views and political allegiances called out as racist.

Jen Sorensen receives a lot of hate mail for her political cartoons, but not as much as one might think.

“I think they don’t understand that just simply by supporting Trump and accepting this rhetoric and everything he’s doing with immigrants and immigrant children, they don’t see the connection” with racist thoughts and practices, she says. Instead, they’re more likely to argue that “liberals, by noticing race, are the racists.”

Despite the misogyny, despite the angry emails, despite the struggles, Sorensen says it’s the simple act of drawing attention to unfair or slanted situations that help make change happen. Ten years ago, people weren’t having the same level of conversation about things like representation in media that are happening now.

“There are always going to be people who take things too far,” she says. “It’s never fun to be criticized, but this is the way social progress happens. Instead of dismissing it, we need to recognize that this is people responding to a racist environment, to the Trump administration’s lies about immigrants and people responding to attacks on civil rights.”

Producer Michael O’Connell is joined again this week by political cartoonist Jen Sorensen to talk about being a woman with a platform and a voice in the time of Trump, the feedback she receives and why calling out social problems and racist thought might be the only way to move society forward.

391. America has a bad case of truth decay, according to new RAND report

When politicians and policy makers can’t agree on a basic set of facts, how can they really establish a set of priorities for a nation?

When citizens have more difficulty discerning facts from opinion, and no longer trust elected leaders or the media to provide information, what does that do to a society?

In a new book entitled Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life, Jennifer Kavanagh of RAND and her colleagues set out to answer those questions, only to find a distressing state of affairs set in motion long before the 2016 election brought the term “fake news” into our vocabulary.

“Truth decay is the term we’re using to refer to the diminishing role facts, data and analysis play in political and civil discourse and in our policy-making process,” Kavanagh says. “We wanted to define what this means, what we think is causing it, to talk about the consequences and to think about what we still don’t know and lay out a research agenda for studying it. It allowed us then to launch into a research agenda and set up a portfolio of work to understand and address the phenomena.”

It was a key point established early on in the research: “If policy makers can’t agree on facts, if they don’t have a common set of facts as a starting point, they can’t actually have a meaningful policy debate,” she says. “They can’t debate policy options, set national priorities, (determine) how do we allocate scarce resources.”

At the start, RAND, a research organization that works with policy makers, established four trends as contributing to truth decay: The increasing disagreements between facts and data, even when more evidence exists to support established facts; the blurring of the line between facts and opinion; the increasing volume of opinion, especially when presented as fact; and the declining trust in institutions that once were trusted sources of valid, fact-based information.

Distrust in the media and government is so high at this point in history that people don’t know who to believe.

“People not only are not sure what’s true and what’s not, but they don’t know where to turn” for fact-based information, Kavanagh says.

Producer Michael O’Connell is joined this week by Jennifer Kavanagh of RAND to discuss her new book, Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life, on the concerning loss of trust and recognition in facts and evidence among policy makers and citizens alike, as opinion gets louder and harder to discern in media.

384. Memes, manifestos and 4chan — making sense of a toxic online culture

390. Shining a brighter collective light on DC’s homeless population

Washington, D.C. is a competitive town where the federal government overshadows almost everything else.

But it’s also a regular city, where people with no affiliation to the government live, work and thrive, or get pushed into the shadows.

Chris Cain, Eric Falquero and Rachel Sadon

A group of 10 news outlets joined forces to help shine a light on one of D.C.’s biggest local issues, one that often gets swept aside: the city’s large homeless population. In August, outlets made a concerted effort to provide a deep, comprehensive and multi-faceted series of stories about what it means to be homeless in Washington, from the city’s shelters to how many teenagers are without a stable place to sleep.

The idea is borrowed from a major project from the San Francisco Chronicle by way of coverage from the New York Times, says Eric Falquero, the editorial director of Street Sense Media, a publication aimed squarely at the homeless population in the city. “They started organizing a list like this four years ago, the New York Times wrote about it and four different people I know emailed it to me. I thought we can do that, we can recruit other outlets to cooperate.”

It’s an effort that included, in its most recent iteration, outlets like DCist and The DC Line in addition to Street Sense.

“We published around 10 stories, which is a lot for us on any one given topic,” says Rachel Sadon, the editor-in-chief at DCist. “The beauty is, there are so many different angles to (the topic of homelessness). We also made sure to be following up on stories we might not otherwise follow up on. Two folks who had been experiencing homelessness were sitting or sleeping on a bench late at night were killed. For the longest time, we didn’t have any information. This gave us an opportunity to say, a month after this, we don’t know who the driver is, we don’t know if he was arrested, and here’s why it happened on federally-controlled land.”

Her outlet also took a look at homelessness for children and students in D.C. who also have to try and go to school when they don’t have a permanent address. For many of the city’s youngest people experiencing homelessness, going back to school means a return to stability, Sadon says.

The joint DC Homeless Crisis Reporting Project also provided an opportunity to take a closer look at some policy-level decisions in the city that will have a direct impact on people who struggle to find, or retain housing.

“Homelessness does relate to so many issues that are top-of-agenda for D.C.,” says Chris Cain of The DC Line. “Not just the mayor’s plans to close what had been the major family shelter, where conditions were legendarily bad, but her commitment to affordable housing that encourages the private sector to build 36,000 new homes by 2025, with one-third being affordable.”

Many of these outlets — with the exception of Street Sense — do not focus on homeleness on a regular basis. A project like this provides a wonderful opportunity to help their readers stop and learn about such a pressing issue and educate them on another part of their hometown that they might not otherwise give much thought on a regular basis.

It’s also an effort that provided some good news on progress: Falquero said the city’s homeless population has been declining over the past few years.

Producer Michael O’Connell is joined by Eric Falquero, editorial director of Street Sense Media; Rachel Sadon, editor-in-chief of DCist; and Chris Cain of The DC Line, as they discuss a 10-outlet effort to cover various aspects of homelessness in Washington for the DC Homeless Crisis Reporting Project and why they wanted to dedicate time, space and resources to the issue.

389. Learning from, and protecting, young journalists around the world

The world of journalism has changed a bit since Jennifer Karchmer got her start, but her passion for asking questions and telling stories has only grown stronger.

Now an independent journalist and mentor, Karchmer lives in Washington State, where she’s advocated toward the passage of the state’s New Voices law to help protect young journalists.

“Students aren’t necessarily covered by the First Amendment,” she explains. “In 1988, there was a Supreme Court case, Hazelwood, that turned the clock back in a bad way. It essentially enabled censorship by schools that were looking at stories they didn’t feel presented their high school or college in a flattering light.”

At the time, this might have included stories about teen pregnancy, drug use or the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Karchmer notes. “Because the schools were uncomfortable with it, they were using this as an opportunity to censor and use prior restraint.”

Journalism advocates began to lobby for state-level legislation, arguing that if these students were doing journalism, like the New York Times, and weren’t libeling anyone and were following all other guiding principles and rules as other professionals would, they should have the same protections.

To date, 14 states have passed New Voices legislation to help ensure student journalists aren’t punished or censored from publishing stories and to reinforce their protections under the First Amendment.

It’s important for young journalists to understand the rights and protections they have in the U.S., which for so long has been a beacon of free speech and freedom of the press for countries around the world. Karchmer also encourages journalists to travel internationally and speak with reporters in other countries to help them realize that there isn’t just one way to be a reporter.

She became familiar with Reporters WIthout Borders around 2010 and learned about the annual index that organization puts out, ranking the countries around the world with the best and worst track records for journalism. As an American, it’s something journalists here can almost take for granted, but she was curious to see what it meant to be a journalist in Iceland and, later, South Africa, to explore what the industry looks like in places that might be very different in their public approaches to, and support for, journalism and reporters.

She was welcomed with open arms in both Iceland and South Africa and spent time talking to reporters in both countries and came away from both learning a great deal about how U.S. press freedoms are interpreted in other countries and how reporters internationally operate.

“We in the U.S., we don’t have a lock on journalism,” she says. “It’s a construct. The thing I would encourage journalists to do is early on, get an understanding of journalism around the world. This is a public service, this is my passion, it’s in my blood. Getting out of the four walls of your newsroom, get out and travel.”

Independent journalist Jennifer Karchmer joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss the importance of international travel for reporters and the New Voices initiative, which works to ensure student journalists are fully protected by the First Amendment.

#368 Amplifying young international voices to tell stories that matter

388. Who wants to own their own newspaper? NewStart’s here to help

What happens when a newspaper owner is ready to retire and there’s no one in line to take over?

“As I go around the country and talk to different people at weekly and small daily papers, we’re finding there’s no succession plan at these papers,” said Jim Iovino of West Virginia University.

To help keep these papers alive, and to train and prepare the next generation of newspaper owners, Iovino and Don Smith of the West Virginia Press Association have teamed up to start NewStart, a local newspaper ownership program.

“We’re looking at the community level, small town weekly papers, daily newspapers across the country. We’re trying to find these individuals who want to come back and work in their hometown or find a new small town they want to live in, who want to own a paper or publication,” he says. “We train them in all the ways they need to do that in a smart way going forward with digital subscriptions, a whole new business model and then help match them up with a newspaper that wants to sell in an area they want to buy. We help facilitate that transaction and give them years of support after.”

Newspapers remain the best source of local news and play major roles in small town life, Smith says.

Small towns “count on their newspaper to be the marketplace of ideas in their community. When you talk to someone about their newspaper, it’s local. The radio and TV may be regional, but their newspaper is local. These small weekly newspapers stay in the home from week to week and often they’ll have the whole year sitting there.”

The goal is to keep these papers alive, keep them in their communities, without turning them into affiliates of one of the larger newspaper conglomerates, they say. They also don’t want to see news deserts overtake these towns.

NewStart offers a year-long program, at West Virginia University but also offered online, to go over the business side of things. They help prospective new owners make a business plan, learn the economics of newspaper ownership, but the course also helps the person find a newspaper to take over and make the deal happen.

“If you don’t understand the entrepreneurial part of this but want to make that commitment to a community, you probably won’t make it,” Smith says.

Producer Michael O’Connell is joined this week by Jim Iovino of West Virginia University and Don Smith of the West Virginia Press Association to talk about NewStart, their partnership to help recruit and train new newspaper owners across the country.

Better News: Iconic southern newspaper undergoes digital-first transformation

386. NewsMatch, INN and good news for independent, investigative news

In the past few years, the attacks on journalism – and journalists – have increased.

But so too have donations to independent, investigative news organizations, thanks in part to the efforts of NewsMatch.

Sue Cross

“People are starting to look for news they can trust,” says Sue Cross, the executive director and CEO for the Institute for Nonprofit News.

Every year, around the holidays, NewsMatch announces a fundraising drive in which every dollar donated is doubled. NewsMatch is an initiative from some of the major journalism organizations, including the Knight Foundation, Democracy Fund, Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation and others, and is a concerted effort to make sure investigative journalism efforts are not lost or solely reliant on ad sales.

The general idea is a simple one: “If you build public support for your news in your community, we will match these individual donations. Aside from the financial impact, NewsMatch also does … this end-of-year campaign. It has generated more than $14 million for news organizations.”

NewsMatch makes it easy for people to donate as well, helping to find individual journalists, or outlets in their home cities, or to a topic of interest. Donations are matched through the end of the year.

“The future of news is how much communities support it and individuals support it,” Cross says.

She knows firsthand how important it is to support local and independent journalism, and it’s something she sees as an increasing priority not just in the United States but around the world.

INN started in 2009 when a group of investigative journalists from 27 organizations, “essentially the entire nonprofit universe at the time,” came together to discuss the future of their profession in light of the economic slump.

“They set aside competition, which is hard for investigative reporters to do, and said investigative reporting is crucial to our democracy and it’s under threat, so we’re going to form this consortium to try and sustain it,” she says.

Now INN has grown to include international outlets and has helped to increase the number of nonprofit news organizations tenfold, with 3,000 people working in nonprofit news in the U.S. and more than 2,000 of those positions are journalists in the field.

“Our goal is to keep that going and, in the next 10 years, generate another tenfold growth,” Cross says. “We’d like to see 20,000 journalists working in public service, essentially. … In essence, we’re trying to recreate journalism, or a big part of it, as a public trust, rather than a for-profit business.”

When local news outlets close their doors, that eliminates someone paying attention to what’s going on at city hall or the statehouse, she says. Funding investigative journalism and independent outlets go hand-in-hand.

The silver lining here, and there is one, is that the latest INN index found independent outlets are on something of a growth swing, with at least one new outlet opening each month for the last 12 years, and most of the support for those outlets is coming from small, individual donors.

“Average people are stepping up to support, in many cases, local newsrooms, but also ones that cover investigative news,” Cross says. “These are donations from individual people, average citizens, giving in many cases small amounts, or major amounts, but they’re supporting local news organizations in a very direct way.”

Sue Cross, executive director and CEO for the Institute for Nonprofit News, joins producer Michael O’Connell to share some good news on the state of investigative and independent journalism and how donors have through the end of the year to double their contribution to small newsrooms across the country via NewsMatch.

#383 Public good vs private enterprise: sustainability in local news

385. LA Times podcast unravels 15-year-old mystery in Room 20

A nameless man led Joanne Faryon on the journey of her life.

A reporter who’s worked in radio, TV and newspapers, Faryon heard about a man in California who had been living in a nursing home for 15 years, on life support, in a vegetative state. Worse yet, no one knew who he was.

“He was driving in a van trying to cross the border, the Mexico-U.S. border in the Southern California desert and he crashed,” she says. “The van was taken to a place called 66 Garage,” which was how the man was known for more than a decade.

Faryon had done some reporting on the man and his plight when she decided one day to quit her job and solve the mystery of the man’s identity.

But like so many of the best ideas, things took a series of turns. She tried pitching the man’s story, and the search for his name, as a magazine article, as a book, even as a series of podcasts, all to no avail.

Part of the struggle was that Faryon recorded everything, always, so when the time came to log her interviews for usable sound, she’d find long stretches of nothing interrupted by “hiss from an oxygen take, but in the middle you’d have this amazing interaction” with a member of the nursing home’s staff.

With the help of an editor, Sarah White, Faryon was able to produce the podcast Room 20, a story in which she unexpectedly became a character and a driver of change.

The story, as it unfolds, is about three main things.

“It’s about immigration and how a man basically loses his humanity when he crosses the border,” Faryon says. “It’s about the question of consciousness and how good medicine is, or isn’t, for determining consciousness. It’s about these end-of-life decisions we all face. When are we prolonging life or are we prolonging death? These choices are not necessarily reserved for old people — in a lot of cases, people who are on life support, particularly in California. … They’re people who’ve been in accidents, they’re in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s. Someone along the way has made a decision to keep them alive (in a vegetative state) and they end up living sometimes for decades.”

Producer Michael O’Connell is joined this week by Joanne Faryon, the driving force behind the Room 22 podcast, which helped identify a man who lived for more than 15 years in a vegetative state and was known only as 66 Garage.

Better News: Amplifier highlights Charlotte through its diverse music scene

#382 Diverse newsrooms can act as fact-checking resources

It’s not all high-profile meetings and running through airports for reporters who work internationally.

They need on-the-ground help to find a place to stay, a reliable translator if they don’t speak the language fluently, maybe even a driver to help get to and from their interviews safely.

Hostwriter is designed to help reporters that aren’t backed by a major mainstream media organization find all of those resources, says Tina Lee, who runs the organization’s ambassador program.

The idea is that if a reporter taps into Hostwriter’s resources, he or she will be willing to provide the same assistance to an international reporter in their own town should the need arise.

It’s not always easy for a reporter to gain access to on-the-ground information, due to cultural differences, difficulties in passing through borders and other challenges that might not be obvious to some.

But, as Hostwriter is exploring in its new book, Unbias the News: Why diversity matters in journalism, international journalism and why having a diverse newsroom can help ensure not only better, more widespread coverage, but can identify bad reporting practices.

“Sometimes you don’t see something because it’s not in your background,” Lee says.

For example, one of the book’s authors is of Afghan-Austrian descent and writes about being a war correspondent in Afghanistan. He was concerned when he read another reporter’s account of an in-home interview conducted with a teenage girl.

“He knew it was impossible for someone to get this conversation,” due to differences in culture and religious practices that would not have permitted a family to leave their teenage daughter with a man not related to them. “That’s (a story) an editor might like. If they had someone on the team (familiar with the culture), it might raise questions. Someone might be persuasive and have great access, but someone might also be making this up.”

It’s not limited to international reporting, she stresses.

“Think about the way issues that primarily affect poor people are covered,” she says. “Or the way that issues that primarily affect sex workers are covered. Often when sex workers are murdered, it’s not even in the newspaper. If a non-sex-worker woman gets killed, it would be in the crime section. Public transportation issues don’t get covered in the same way because maybe journalists don’t use public transportation. It pays to have (a wide variety of) people on your team because it affects your community. It’s a matter of trust.”

Producer Michael O’Connell is joined by Tina Lee, head of the ambassador program for Hostwriter and editor-in-chief of a new book, Unbias the News: Why diversity matters in journalism. This week, they discuss the book and why diverse newsrooms can poke holes in too-good-to-be-true reporting and how hiring people from a variety of backgrounds provides better and deeper coverage.

#358 How to cover diversity, political division in a divided America

#381 Journalism, anxiety and video therapy

It’s not exactly a chicken-and-egg question, but it’s one Anna Mortimer has thought about quite a bit.

Does working in journalism cause anxiety, or do people who have higher-than-average levels of anxiety find themselves more attracted to high-stress jobs like journalism?

For Mortimer, whose father was a war correspondent killed when she was 19 at the end of the war in El Salvador, she thinks it’s the latter.

“Journalism is probably secondary,” says Mortimer, who has changed careers and gone into psychotherapy. “I probably have a high anxiety that makes me very aware of how other people are thinking and feeling. That makes you a good journalist but it also makes you a good psychotherapist.”

She thinks people who have similar tendencies are attracted to jobs like journalism, where a lot of drive is required, as is a level of comfort working in high-stress environments. “If you go into one of these professions that consumes your whole life, if you’re only as good as the last word you wrote, you’re in trouble,” she says. “People in the field are already on the run from unwanted feelings back home. I think you’re in trouble before you go into the profession. There’s a sort of hyper vigilance that anxious children might have that makes you a great journalist or air traffic controller, but it doesn’t help you sleep at night or have a more fulfilling life.”

But Mortimer wants to try and right that ship, or at least provide some respite.

After starting a small remote therapy practice in which she meets with her patience via web video, she launched The Mind Field, a platform that connects international development workers, journalists and similar professionals with therapists. Her patients are from anywhere in the world where there’s a WiFi connection, but she does get a lot of journalists and aid workers in far-flung locales.

“I think the reason video therapy can be a good thing — I think it’s second best. If you live in one place and can go see a therapist near you, the face-to-face experience is important,” she says. “Video therapy offers you therapy in your hotel room, your tent, wherever there’s WiFi. I see people who go out to refugee camps and speak to me on their phones. It’s so adaptable.”

Mortimer also cautions against pursuing happiness, especially among those who live with depression. “I’m anti-positive thinking because of course if you’re depressed you’re not thinking positively. It’s absurdly simplistic. I think people get very trapped in it and then feel they’ve failed.”

Producer Michael O’Connell is joined by Anna Mortimer, a journalist-turned-psychotherapist and one of the creators of The Mind Field, a service that provides video therapy sessions for international development workers, journalists and similar professionals.

#380 Lacuna Voices will be home to stories that deserve an audience

As both a staff writer and a freelancer, Punteha van Terheyden has been sharing “true life” stories of real people for many years.

But last summer, she had a week where incredible stories she pitched to newspapers and magazines in the UK weren’t being picked up.

“They weren’t landing like they normally do,” she says. “The reason for the no’s didn’t feel right for me.”

One of the stories she believed was worthy of publication was about a man who was in the process of divorcing but found himself out of his family’s home, feeling alienated and like his children were turning against him.

Try as she might, she couldn’t find an outlet willing the story. She had a theory as to why this was happening: In the UK, readers seem more interested in hearing from a woman’s point of view when it comes to emotional stories, rather than men.

“In my experience in the British media, women’s stories are preferred,” van Terheyden says. “I’d get sent out daily on a door knock, when a story had just broken, and they’d always say, ‘get the mom, get the sister, get the daughter.’ The only time they asked for the man was if the woman was dead.”

Now she’s preparing to launch a new platform, Lacuna Voices, that will be a home to stories that deserve readers’ attention.

“As a platform, I want it to be a collection of voices to fill the gap,” she says. “All these people who have amazing stories to tell, that are worth hearing about.” Topics are open but will likely include mental and physical health challenges, parenting issues, lifestyle issues.

One of the issues van Terheyden hopes to focus on is endometriosis, something that one in 10 women live with, but do so silently and without their stories told in the media.

“It’s not sexy enough to get into newspapers,” she says. “So many women are suffering from this, they want to talk about it, they want to read about it.”

She’s also going to use the platform to address something that’s bothered her in her freelance career: Writers who submit stories will be paid when the story is completed, without having to wait for its publication.

Producer Michael O’Connell is joined by Punteha van Terheyden, founder of a new platform that she hopes will help fill the gap of great stories that don’t find homes in mainstream media outlets. Lacuna Voices is set to launch in January.

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It's All Journalism

The broccoli of media-focused podcasts.