Podcast Archives – It's All Journalism

433. Movement journalism: A way to report on injustice

Tina Vasquez’s journey toward movement journalism grew from her background and family, who she sees as direct influences on how she does her work.

Vasquez, a senior reporter with Prism, has been covering immigration issues, specifically the treatment of undocumented immigrants and the abuse and mistreatment they suffer, for most of her career. But it’s only recently that she’s learned the language to accurately identify the type of work she does: movement journalism, a topic for which she recently wrote a piece for Nieman Reports.

Tina Vasquez is a senior reporter at Prism.

Put simply, movement journalism is “journalism in service of liberation and it seeks to meet the needs of the community directly affected by injustice,” she says. “As an extension, as I do journalism, I don’t see myself reporting on communities but alongside them. I end up working very closely with people who are sources but trying to respond to their information needs, whether that has anything to do with reporting; just using the skills I have and the power I have to get them the information they need for their communities.”

She doesn’t see herself as an advocate, necessarily.

“I don’t purport to be a mouthpiece for movements,” Vasquez says. “I try hard to shift narratives. I do center advocates in my reporting a lot. They come from directly affected communities. I write really uncomfortable stories and don’t adhere to a tidy narrative. Sometimes that doesn’t gel with organizations.”

For example, Vasquez recently uncovered the name of the doctor who is believed to have carried out forced operations on women in ICE facilities in Georgia. She spoke directly with women who had been subjected to these procedures, some of whom spoke out against the whistleblower and saying the woman who brought the story to light was complicit in the actions.

Vasquez knows personal the hardships facing undocumented immigrants — her father came to the U.S. from Mexico without “authorization,” she says — and Vasquez feels that makes her better prepared and knowledgeable about the nuances of challenges facing that community of people.

It also makes her keenly aware of who’s missing from most stories about immigration.

“When I look at mainstream reporting about immigration or immigration reporting from legacy outlets, there are no undocumented people quoted, pretty regularly,” she says. “If you are reading reporting about this horrible new policy that brutalizes immigrants in the U.S., there will be Trump quotes and Stephen Miller quotes and ICE and DHS, but nowhere will you find people most impacted by this policy.”

She’s also had people make assumptions about her own citizenship. “Based on my reporting and my name, people have threatened to call ICE on me and threatened to report me. They think I must be undocumented. It’s so strange.”

If her fellow reporters take issue with her work, or want to question her ability to cover these issues objectively?

“I’ve never had a lot of concern about how other journalists view my work,” Vasquez says. “I know what things are important to me and how building trust is important to me and how keeping people safe is important to me. If that doesn’t gel with mainstream journalism, I’m totally fine with that.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks with Tina Vasquez, a reporter with Prism and author of a new piece in Nieman Reports titled “Is Movement Journalism What Is Needed During This Reckoning Over Race and Inequality?” They discuss movement journalism and how people who practice it aren’t necessarily advocates but are better equipped to present stories from marginalized and underserved communities.

423. Covering Black communities with nuance and purpose

432. Overdose crisis, harm reduction, and the Rust Belt

What’s driving Jack Shuler these days, and what’s at the heart of his new book, is a quest for empathy and rethinking America’s War on Drugs during the current overdose crisis.

As an associate professor of English at Denison University, Shuler teaches students about narrative journalism, the ability to tell longer, character-driven stories to a broad audience using some of the same skills fiction writers use to build their worlds.

Shuler’s book, This Is Ohio: The Overdose Crisis and the Front Lines of a New America, examines the way in which Americans from Rust Belt cities are struggling to get clean and the people who are trying to incorporate harm reduction practices into a social justice issue that many people overlook.

Jack Shuler is the author of *This Is Ohio: The Overdose Crisis and the Front Lines of a New America*,

Shuler began hanging out at a diner in Newark where activists and organizers would meet with people. The diner itself was started by a man who wanted to help provide job experiences for people who might not otherwise be able to get hired — people with felony convictions or substance abuse issues. From those conversations, he became interested in the issue of homelessness and, more importantly, how people became homeless.

“At the time I was working on a pitch about how people experience election night living in motels,” he says. “I wasn’t hearing about either candidate running for office about the growing inequality in income gaps and homelessness and the Rust Belt. As I talked to folks, this idea of deaths of despair, of overdose, that’s what most people were talking about. All these pressures leading to homelessness, leading to camps, were combining in a really awful way in overdoses.”

As he continued to research and talk with people in Lincoln County, Ohio, and other rural areas, he “was very conscious of the fact that the national narrative around the overdose crisis was that Ohio and West Virginia were on their knees and their morgues were filling up. All of that is true, but the part I wasn’t seeing, I was seeing all these people fighting back and trying to save lives.”

The harm reduction movement includes concepts like needle exchanges in order to help people who are addicted to injected drugs have access to clean needles, which helps cut down on certain transmissible diseases.

“It’s a public health approach to addressing the harms that can come from using drugs, especially IV drug use,” Shuler says. “It’s also a social justice movement. There are lots of harms that come from drug use and some of those harms are larger harms, like racism. Racism and the drug war that affects people who use drugs. We can’t help people who use drugs if we don’t address larger systemic issues.”

Harm reduction as a social movement is one that can be difficult for some people to grasp because of the limited understanding and conversations about drug abuse and overdose in general.

“We’re not thinking enough about social determinants of health,” he says. “We’re treating this as a health crisis instead of a criminal justice crisis, but we’re still treating it as a criminal justice crisis. People don’t know enough about harm reduction. People still think addiction is a moral failing. People use drugs because drugs make them feel better. The next question should be, why do people feel bad? Those are big, huge questions and they require a lot of money to address. I don’t know if we have the will. If people aren’t even willing to wear masks, or don’t have the will collectively to address this, we’ll still be here when the pandemic subsides.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks to Jack Shuler, an associate professor at Denison University and author of a new book, This Is Ohio: The Overdose Crisis and the Front Lines of a New America. They discuss the drug overdose crisis in Ohio and how harm reduction practices can help save lives and communities.

427. Crime reporting: Covering violence and trauma

Better News: How to use events to grow a diverse audience

Even in the times of COVID-19, events — done virtually — can still be a useful method for newsrooms looking to build their audiences and promote brand loyalty.

Cierra Hinton

Cierra Hinton is the executive director-publisher for Scalawag, a nonprofit media organization launched in 2015 and based in Durham, North Carolina. Recently, she and Alysia Harris wrote an article for the American Press Institute‘s Better News initiative on how Scalawag was using events to diversify its audience and grow membership. Read the full report here.

The Better News podcast is a partnership between It’s All Journalism and the American Press Institute to a) showcase innovative/experimental ideas that emerge from the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative and b) to share replicable strategies and tactics that benefit the news industry as a whole.Sign up for the Better News newsletter to receive news about the latest resources, case studies and insights. For more news about the It’s All Journalism podcast and future episodes of Better News, sign up for the weekly IAJ newsletter.

Better News: How To Forge New Audiences Of Color

431. Statistics and sports: Telling stories with numbers

Possibly more than other sports played in public for adoring fans, baseball is a game of strategy and thought. It’s one where storylines exist and can change at any time, leading to memorable games that are discussed for generations.

Mark Simon has built his career telling stories about the game, adding data journalism with narrative skills to expand the drama beyond the diamond.

Mark Simon is the host of two podcasts, The Sports Info Solutions Baseball Podcast and The Journalism Salute.

In 2016, Simon was working for a baseball publication and asked if he could do a player profile on pitcher Ryan Merritt.

“He was like the 15th or 16th or 17th guy on the staff. Due to a series of injuries deep in the playoffs, he was thrown in to pitch what was the Indians’ biggest game of the year, to try and win the pennant against the Blue Jays,” Simon recalls. The idea for the story was to dig into Merritt’s background and see if there were any parallels in his younger days that lined up with his moment in the spotlight.

“I reached out to people from his hometown and eventually got the best man at his wedding and his high school baseball coach. When Ryan was a kid, they used to throw rocks at trees. He could hit any spot he wanted on the tree,” Simon says. “In the game that day, Ryan Merritt pitched pretty well. He was able to put his pitches in exactly the right spot.”

The company where Simon works today, Sports Info Solutions, has a tool that allows researchers to pull data like that, showing the accuracy of a pitcher based on how many times his pitch meets the catcher’s glove.

“He rated in the 80th or 90th percentile for that,” something called pitch framing, Simon said. “That’s a piece of information, a piece of data, I wouldn’t have been able to get as Joe Ordinary Human Interest Reporter. I was able to combine the human interest aspect of the story with the numerical part of the story and combine it into something that, in the end, the baseball editor was pretty pleased with how it turned out.”

Simon spent 16 years at ESPN, including a stint co-hosting the Baseball Today. He’s also the author of The Yankees Index, Every Number Tells A Story.

Now Simon is the host of the Sports InfoSolutions Baseball Podcast, a clearly and simply named show that delivers what it promises by featuring baseball writers, broadcasters and players talking about the game they love.

“We try to have intelligent baseball conversations,” he says. “The other area we delve into with players is how do you do what you do on the defensive side. How are you able to make this catch that nobody else can make, how are you able to field this ball that nobody else can field? How are you able to do that pitch framing thing I talked about? Players are open and willing to talk shop like that because it plays to their strengths.”

This week, It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell is joined by Mark Simon, a statistics reporter for Sports Info Solutions and host of the platform’s baseball podcast. In addition, Simon just launched a media-focused podcast: The Journalism Salute.

417. Can’t find women who know sports? Try harder

430. Don’t expect any answers on Election Night

The best advice for young reporters this election night is to be patient.

While some national networks might want to start making calls and announcing winners in state, local, and, of course, the presidential election early on the night of Nov. 3, it’s probably much smarter to resist that urge, says Ryan Whalen, a Buffalo-based reporter with Spectrum News and the network’s Capital Tonight nightly political show.

“The worst thing you can do as a journalist is say something definitively that ends up not being true,” Whalen says. “Election Night, you tend to want to make those calls. Even if someone is saying they won an election, you might want to hedge that. Know the scenario. This election is going to be so much different than anyone’s dealt with before. If you plan on saying something definitive on election night, you’re probably wrong.”

It’s anticipated that more people will be voting by mail, given the concerns about COVID-19 and the long lines likely at polling locations. Votes cast by mail won’t be counted in time to be verified and factored in for the general election, meaning it is very unlikely we’ll know with any certainty who will win the presidential race on Election Day.

“I think this will be the strangest election night of my lifetime,” Whalen says. “Generally, we’re sitting there, hoping that the ballots will come in quick enough that we’re not there until 1 a.m. We’re going in knowing that’s not going to be the case this year.”

This week, It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell is joined by Spectrum News reporter Ryan Whalen to discuss the wild lead-up to this year’s election and why smart reporters should resist calling races on Election Night.

#369 How journalists can avoid rising to the bait in covering Trump

429. Need video footage? Hire a Stringr

If all news is local, how can broadcast newsrooms meet the need for video footage when their resources are limited?

Lindsay Stewart worked as a producer for ABC News in the LA newsroom and noticed that, more and more often, she’d be asked to create a segment on a story and would be hard-pressed to find enough footage, or of the right quality, to cover the item.

Lindsay Stewart is the co-founder of Stringr

This was in the earlier days of social media, which made more clips available, but it also meant more newsrooms accessing the same viral footage and racing — and bidding — for rights to use it.

“I thought there had to be a better way. I wished there was a system in which I could request a video I wanted or I could request more video and that there was a clearinghouse that made it less block-and-tackle in terms of finding the videographer, clearing the clip, and coming up with a price that was fair for all,” she says. “Some people are willing to give away their tornado clip and some thought it was worth $100,000, neither of which were particularly fair.”

Stewart decided to co-found her own solution.

Stringr now has more than 120,000 videographers around the U.S. with varying degrees of availability and expertise, plus the ability to provide and distribute breaking news footage and video that has a longer shelf life for newsrooms, advertising agencies, and is in the process of producing full features.

“We have gradations of providers from what we call Stringr Crowd, which is run-and-gun breaking news, all the way up to full professionals that shoot very high-end videos not just for news but other kinds of customers,” Stewart says. “What we’ve also established now is a robust technological platform, which is from end-to-end, every part of the life cycle of creating a video, not just at the sourcing side of it but all the way through editing, transcription, publishing. We do now live and taped and we even put the technology in the hands of some customers.”

This not only allows broadcast newsrooms to find spot news footage they need for their main stories of the day, but it also to increases the corps of videographers by submitting a request for work to the platform, finding a videographer who can provide it, and working out the price of the video directly from the Stringr app.

It also helps meet the needs of even the largest news companies, when breaking news happens but there isn’t enough time to send a crew to the location. While the Los Angeles bureaus are well-staffed, for example, the media coverage area extends to San Diego, more than 90 minutes away.

The videographers who work on Stringr “allow them to capture video where they can’t or don’t have enough time to send their own people,” Stewart says.

It’s All Journalism producer Michael O’Connell talks to Lindsay Stewart, a former broadcast news producer-turned-entrepreneur, about Stringr, which allows newsrooms to access a network of 120,000 videographers to help cover the news of the day and beyond.

399. FedNet gathers latest multimedia news from Capitol Hill

428. Fake news, presidential deception and the Civil War

A president decides, in a moment of widespread political unrest, that the best course of action in the nation’s greatest interest is having journalists arrested for sharing a story that contained purposely false information.

A cutting-edge form of instant communication that people dreamed would unite a nation on the brink of disaster proved to be a wedge between the citizenry, driving friends further apart.

Author and writer Elizabeth Mitchel (Ceridwen Morris)

Powerful political leaders writing articles for newspapers and other outlets, under anonymous of false bylines, to garner votes and sway support for their actions of choice.

In researching her latest book, Elizabeth Mitchell found all this and more modern-day chaos — from 1864.

The book, Lincoln’s Lie: A True Civil War Caper Through Fake News, Wall Street and the White House, details a series of incidents that could just as easily — or believably — be happening right now.

Mitchell’s career has included stints at Spin and George, but she admits she tried to get out of journalism classes in college because she wasn’t interested in being a reporter.

“I explained I would never need to get that education because that wasn’t what I was planning on being,” she says. “I was very interested in writing, I loved books.”

Still, Mitchell oversaw political and investigative pieces at Spin for a number of years, including hiring William Vollmann to cover the drug trade in Burma and the Bosnian war, and Elizabeth Gilbert, who landed on Mitchell’s radar after Bob Guccione Jr., the magazine’s founder, mentioned Gilbert wrote pretty interesting short stories. “She went all over the place and handed in perfect copy,” Mitchell recalls.

After working at Spin, Mitchell was headhunted to join the team at George and worked for several years alongside John F. Kennedy Jr.

But it’s the interview process that keeps her writing and reporting and researching.

“Fiction writers say the characters took over and surprised me — I could never get myself to the point of being surprised” when trying to write fiction, Mitchell says. “In non-fiction, people are constantly surprising you. There have been times I’ve interviewed people for many days, hours and hours of long conversation, and just as you’re about to hang up, they’ll say, ‘Oh, well, there’s this one other thing.’ It’s always that (thing) that turns the story in this incredible way. I can’t get enough of that experience. I find it so exciting that you can go in and you have a license to talk to anyone you’d like and you can ask anything you’re curious about and you can tell that story to anyone.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell is joined by author and editor Elizabeth Mitchell to talk about the interview process and how 1864 is more like 2020 than most people realize. Mitchell also discusses her new book, Lincoln’s Lie: A True Civil War Caper Through Fake News, Wall Street and the White House

413. Long history of bad police responses to protests

427. Crime reporting: Covering violence and trauma

Some of the most difficult stories reporters write about involve violence and trauma. These are also among the most important stories a journalist will cover.

For a solid decade, Rachel Dissell and fellow reporter Leila Atassi, at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, relentlessly sat in on task force meetings while the Cleveland Police Department went through 14,000 untested rape kits, some sitting on shelves for years.

They also covered the case of Anthony Sowell, a man who raped and killed at least 11 women in Cleveland, Dissell’s hometown, while assaulting others who managed to survive.

Later, she and Andrea Simakis wrote another series about Sandi Fedor, a woman who had to continually fight for her rape case to be examined, essentially doing most of the legwork herself.

“Like many reporters, I started out doing crime reporting, being the young person who gets sent out to every horrible thing that happens and is expected to know how to handle these weighty topics,” Dissell says. “A lot of other reporters didn’t want to have anything to do with it. The stories were complicated and difficult to report and I was attracted to it for that reason. Over the years, I kind of took a turn from telling these stories in a way that focused on individual cases to taking an eye more to the system that handled them.”

Over and over again, she and her writing partners found that the Cleveland Police Department just didn’t seem interested in pursuing rape cases, maybe not understanding at the time that rape kits can be used to identify assailiants and bring them to justice.

For the women raped and killed by Sowell, the reporters noticed a pattern among the survivors: They were women who, due to race or socioeconomic status or history of drug use, the police would be less likely to believe if they reported their attack.

When Dissell and Atassi realized that there were rape kits that had been essentially cast aside and ignored, the police were hard-pressed to explain why the kits were left untouched or even how many they had.

“They are still in the process of testing thousands,” Dissell says. “They ended up having people connected to 20 or more cases. The police did not see those kits as an investigative tool, they saw them as a way to prove a case. If they did have a case that was strong enough to make an arrest and go to court, they could use it to say, yes, we’re sure this is the right person.”

Sometime in the next month or so, the department will finish testing the final 200 kits. “Even though I no longer work for the Plain Dealer, I have such a strong urge to use the opportunity to look back,” she says.

Through all this gut-wrenching reporting, Dissell has learned a lot about trauma: That of her interview subjects, that which they cannot leave behind, and that which she carries with her after speaking with them.

She’s adopted an approach that works for her, in which she walks a person through the interview process before they have a single conversation. She lets them talk, undirected and mostly uninterrupted. She sits, listening. Sometimes the person will start with a seemingly uninvolved point, later realizing the person was outlining a life of horrible events.

“I always tell people, if at any point this isn’t working for you, let me know,” she says. “It’s not about me. If it’s causing damage, we can work with it or we can step away. No reporter wants to work for something for six months and have someone say I can’t do this. We have to be able to do that.”

That doesn’t mean it’s easy for her.

“We had one time, I know Andrea and I were working with Sandi and we left separately and texted each other when we got home that we cried the entire drive home,” Dissell says. “We had to admit it was getting to us… There is not a great way to deal with someone else’s trauma or your own trauma.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell is joined this week by Rachel Dissell, a former reporter with the Cleveland Plain Dealer, on her history of covering weighty and emotionally grueling crimes in her home city and the way she addresses the trauma of her subjects. Dissell recently wrote about Trauma Journalism in the Time of Coronavirus for the Dart Center For Journalism and Trauma.

418. California City: Secrets of a desert town revealed

Better News: How to win grants to fund journalism

In the past decade, media organizations have been awarded an estimated $300 million in grants to fund journalists and journalism projects — and the number of funders and dollars continues to grow.

Jane Elizabeth discusses how to win grants to fund journalism..

Jane Elizabeth is the managing editor of The News and Observer and The Herald-Sun in North Carolina. She recently wrote a guide for American Press Institute‘s Better News explaining how newsrooms can win grants to fund their journalism projects. Read the full guide here.

Better News: How To Forge New Audiences Of Color

426. Building relationships for the next generation of reporters

For 20 years, Doug Mitchell has worked diligently to expand the skill set of young journalists, opening their eyes and tool kits to the power of audio reporting.

His Next Generation Radio was designed to help people with an interest in public media develop storytelling and recording skills by participating in week-long training sessions.

Doug Mitchell of Next Generation Radio (Yunyi Dai)

“We needed to train our next generation to really think about audio interviewing, digital media, tools that are available to share audio,” he says. Students begin the course on Monday and by Friday have completed their research, conducted interviews, edited the material and written accompanying material on the finished story.

“The fundamental point is to find, train, and hopefully bring in to our system people who are either just out of college or less than five years into their career and either give them a refresher or a total immersion in audio,” he says.

Look below the surface and Next Generation Radio is more than that — it’s also about mentoring and developing relationships with students and helping them make choices in their careers that will benefit them in the long run.

“Since 2013, we are now 72 percent women in our cohort and 60 percent women of color,” Mitchell says, of the more than 460 people now affiliated with the group as a student or mentor.

His focus on building relationships and offering services and mentorship to young journalists also provided Mitchell the opportunity to dive more deeply into the idea of dealing with people on a transactional basis versus a relational one.

Next Generation Radio is built on developing relationships, between mentors and students but also students and their sources, he says.

“It’s about getting it done but also about building relationships,” he says. “It’s a long game. I don’t have the expectation — some people get jobs immediately, but a career is a life-long thing. It has to be built on relationships, not transactional.”

Mitchell was asked to contribute a piece to Nieman Reports recently, titled “Diversity, Equality, Inclusion and the Pipeline Problem.” He knows from experience that if the doors aren’t opened, or found, for journalists of color, they will have a much harder time breaking into the business.

“In public media, we need to continue to create new jobs, not just replacing someone who was in it, but replacing new jobs where people have more control over who they’re talking and it’s not just based on a screaming headline,” he says.

Some outlets are found to have a shortage of non-white sources and journalists will say they don’t have time to find a more diverse group of people to contact. “NPR said some 70 percent of its sources are white. How did you find them? You had to find the time to find the people you had, so you can make the time to find the people you don’t have,” he says.

If newsrooms say they’re not able to hire a more diverse team of reporters, the organization should ask why that is.

“Are people not wanting to move to whatever city because they don’t think there are enough people of color,” he asks. “If you really want to truly recruit and develop relationships, there has to be some sort of acknowledgment of individuals you want to empower.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell is joined this week by friend of the podcast Doug Mitchell, founder of Next Generation Radio, to discuss the long-lasting importance of relational approaches to journalism, for today and the future.

405. Former public radio journalist pushes back on ‘objectivity’

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