460. Knowing your worth in the diverse world of freelancing

Emilia Benton has been running toward her goals for a long time, picking up valuable lessons along the way.

Seeing the editor’s note in each issue of her favorite magazine, Cosmo Girl, inspired Benton as a teenager to write in and ask founding editor Atoosa Rubenstein for advice. “I thought this was a career I would be interested in. She wrote back with a ton of advice, a page worth, which I printed out and put up on my wall,” Benton says.

It was all good advice, encouraging her to write for her high school paper and, if she was serious about pursuing a career in journalism, especially magazine journalism, she should consider going to college near or in New York City, because that would provide the advantage for in-person interviews.

Emilia Benton is a freelance writer.

It’s all advice Benton followed, attending Hofstra University on Long Island, a mere 25-minute train ride to the heart of the city. Two years after graduating, and after internships at a handful of magazines, including Cosmo Girl, Benton returned to her home in Houston looking for something new.

After some time as a copy editor on special projects for the Houston Chronicle and some time with the Texas Medical Center, where she used her editorial skills working on informed consent forms for clinical trials, Benton found herself out of work.

“I had all this time on my hands and had a story idea I wanted to pitch to Runner’s World,” says Benton, an avid runner. “I had never had to submit a story pitch before and I didn’t know how to go about it.”

She reached out to a friend who had connections there and was told who to direct the story to and how to set up the pitch and, despite not really feeling confident in herself or the pitch, Benton sent it off.

“They accepted it and it got a really great response from their audience, which surprised me,” Benton says. “I thought this would be a one-time thing and I didn’t expect to continue to freelance for the meantime. I was able to spend the next year and a half pursuing relationships that allowed me to get where I am now.”

Benton continues to freelance for Runner’s World and other publications, including the Houston Chronicle, but admits sometimes she’ll accept a lower-paying assignment based on the publication and topic.

“Having worked on staff on a publication that has freelancers, I empathize that these places have budgets to work with,” she says. “There are things I take into consideration if the place is offering me too low (a fee). If someone is asking for a 1,000-word article with at least two interviewed sources and they’re offering $200 or less, that’s ludicrous.”

The variety in her work has also afforded Benton some perspective on the pluses and minuses of working in a culturally diverse city like Houston. While the local broadcast stations employ a diverse range of reporters, “salary growth is still stagnant for people and women of color. That was my experience there. That’s a reason I had to leave my job at the Chronicle. After doing some investigation and talking to coworkers and peers, as a woman of color I was earning a lot less than my white male counterparts.”

She points to the graphics and information posted on social media for Equal Pay Day, a day in late March in which a white woman has earned the equivalent of her white male counterparts in the previous year. The graphics typically show how much less women and people of color earn compared to white men and “you’ll see Latinos are at the very bottom of the chain.”

The disparity doesn’t end there: Benton has noticed her work will be referenced on social media or podcasts but she isn’t named, while similar work by white male writers almost always includes their information. “This is an example of unconscious bias,” she says. “Is there any like of thinking behind it? Is it oh, no one’s going to know this writer? That contributes to the problem. I don’t bring that up to harp on my follower counts, but being mentioned by name could make or break being noticed by someone in the industry and getting an opportunity.”

It’s All Journalism producer Amelia Brust talks with freelance reporter Emilia Benton. They discuss their shared love of running and how Benton has learned how to be a successful freelance writer by doing.

445. Investigative reporter exposes maid abuse in Beirut

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

Politico published a data-rich project in February demonstrating just how white and male state legislatures remain even after decades of people pushing for more diverse representation in government.

“We wanted to see what sorts of people were in those power centers and decided to take a data-based approach to doing that,” said Angela Greiling Keane, a managing editor who oversees Politico’s state-based teams.

Angela Greiling Keane

Late last summer, Politico launched a project called The Fifty, which focused on governing outside of Washington, D.C., both locally and statewide. Through that project, the Politico team began to see that many of the big decisions starting to be made post-pandemic were in the statehouses.

“I was curious about the state legislatures,” Greiling Keane said. “When you look at them, it’s fairly obvious that they’re not as diverse as the country.”

This sparked a couple of questions. First, what data was available that could shed light on the lack of diversity in state government? And second, if the legislatures aren’t as representative of the states in which they’re located, what does that mean for the people who are being governed?

Politico’s research team began scouring the country looking for data that could answer these questions.

Renuka Rayasam

One of the first data sets they identified was a survey the National Conference of State Legislatures conducted every five years to examine the demographic breakdowns of the legislatures.

“Through our reporting, we uncovered other groups who have also started tracking this,” said Allan James Vestal, Politico’s senior news applications developer.

Renuka Rayasam, Politico’s Texas-based correspondent, was brought in once all of the data had been compiled.

“It’s a dream thing for a reporter that I had all this data in front of me, and you could look at all these trends and you could very easily zero in on where the focus should be,” she said.

Not only did the data help Rayasam, fellow reporter Nolan D. McCaskill, and graphics reporter Beatrice Jin identify which states and topics they should look at, it allowed them to begin to exploring the “why” behind the story.

Why state legislatures are still very white — and very male is the end result of the Politico’s team effort, a project that uses data-based reporting and visualizations to examine the lack of diversity in state legislatures and what that means for the public they represent.

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks to Angela Greiling Keane, Renuka Rayasam, and Allan James Vestal about Politico’s data-rich project, Why state legislatures are still very white — and very male, which examines how statehouses are less diverse than the communities they represent.

412. Critical thinking is an essential skill for journalists

458. How service journalism helps solve community problems

At the root, most journalism is some kind of service journalism. But only by listening to the audience can journalists really provide the service they believe they offer.

“We’ve had this ‘teacher at the front of the class’ mentality,” says Megan Griffith-Greene, the service features editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer. “‘We’re going to tell you what’s important and you’re going to sit there and listen and then we’ll move on.’ That perspective has been pretty white and male and kind of elitist and it’s failing. It’s not working. It doesn’t serve people.”

Service journalism, Griffith-Greene says, can fill this gap and more newsrooms are realizing the value and importance of what had previously been “maligned” and considered the stuff of women’s magazines.

Megan Griffith-Greene is the service features editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

She defines service journalism as helping people solve problems. “As journalists, I think we’re very good at pointing out problems. We’re less good at helping people solve them.

“Good service journalism is really hard to do,” she says. “It’s really hard to do a good job with this, to provide a good and useful resource for people. It’s not as easy as I think people assume.”

The core of service journalism is finding what people need to know in their daily lives, what information they need to make decisions, and helping them find and utilize it, she says.

“There’s a shift to being more listening focused, more community focused; listening to what people tell us, that this is the information we need and centering our reporting on that,” Griffith-Greene says.

This also helps make reporters essential to the communities in which they live and work. “It feels like an obvious place to start, but what do you need? What do you need help with and how can we be an access point,” she says. “We have access to a range of experts. We can help people solve those problems. We’re uniquely positioned to help people solve those problems. It’s an important step in building trust and becoming essential to our communities.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks with Megan Griffith-Greene, service features editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer. They discuss what service journalism means, how it can help reporters better understand their communities and why it’s no longer the territory of women’s magazines.

#359 Reporter uses pop-up newsrooms to amplify Philly’s unheard voices

457. New Humanitarian’s mission-centric focus a model for other newsrooms

A brochure left on her desk by her father changed the direction of Heba Aly’s life.

Born to Egyptian parents in Canada, Aly’s heart had two passions: journalism and human rights.

The brochure was for an internship in Senegal, writing for a United Nations-founded publication that covered international efforts to provide humanitarian assistance, originally to Rwanda following the genocide there in 1995. Aly is now the CEO of The New Humanitarian, formerly called IRIN, and remains as passionately committed to providing mission-based coverage of international crises.

Heba Aly is the CEO of The New Humanitarian.

“We began as an information coordination product under the helm of the UN. We’ve evolved to become the bona fide newsroom we are today, moving toward a more journalistic approach, growing offices around the world from an East Africa focus and incorporating more storytelling,” she says. “The mission of informing how the world responds to crises has remained.”

As a general reporter with the CBC in Canada, she was never able to dive too deeply into a story or an issue, but that kind of reporting is at the core of The New Humanitarian.

“We have a depth of knowledge that allows our journalism, we hope, to be much richer and ring much more true because we follow it day in and day out,” Aly says. “We know what matters, we know the community that follows it.”

But what really sets her newsroom apart is that it is a nonprofit and writers are not unduly influenced by advertisers.

“We’re driven by a mission, not profit,” she says. “We’re free from the pressure of getting eyeballs for the sake of it. We face pressure from donors in the way advertisers will put pressure on the way you do your job, but we have fared much better in the current environment compared to commercial outlets because we have a loyal audience that cares deeply about what we do.”

Aly said she believes this model will continue to gain strength and support going forward and that, in no small way, the COVID-19 pandemic has helped to underscore this.

“Our audience tripled during the pandemic because people yearned for information about the humanitarian crisis. That’s not just the international policy makers that usually dominate our audience but even people in countries,” she says. “In Tanzania, we did a piece on how the true toll of the virus was being hidden. That was shared widely across the country because people were looking for information they could trust and they couldn’t trust the government. I think, on a global level, there’s a renewed recognition of this kind of work.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell is joined by Heba Aly, CEO of The New Humanitarian, an independent nonprofit newsroom covering humanitarian crises. She discusses how her publication handled the COVID-19 pandemic and why her newsroom might be a model for other outlets as advertising dollars shrink.

Better News: Nonprofit newsrooms turn rivalry into revenue stream

Erica Perel and Chrissy Beck

Chrissy Beck is the managing director of The Chronicle at Duke University and Erica Perel is the former general manager at The Daily Tar Heel at the University of North Carolina. Their newsrooms teamed up to create the Rivalry Challenge around the annual Duke-UNC basketball game, turning it into a revenue maker for both nonprofit newsrooms.

Chrissy and Erica wrote about the Rivalry Challenge for API’s Better News initiative.

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) 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.

Editor’s Note: Erica Perel is now the director of the Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media. The center runs the UNC Table Stakes program.

456. What Is Life shares stories of prisoners facing life sentences

When someone is sentenced to life in prison in Pennsylvania, as things currently stand, there is very little chance of stepping outside again.

“Right now, life means life in prison,” says Joshua Vaughn, creator of the What Is Life? podcast.

“It means you, for the most part, will not get out. One of the only options to get out of life in prison is a commutation.”

John Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, has made some strong efforts to re-start the commutation process moving again after a 30-year period of being stagnant, Vaughn says, but it’s still a small step: of the 5,400 people currently serving life in prison in Pennsylvania, some 40-50 people in the past two years have been released.

The number of people facing life sentences in the state has ballooned since the 1970s, from around 700 people to more than 5,000, Vaughn says. “That is as many people as we had serving any time in prison in the ‘60s and ‘70s.”

The What Is Life? podcast, a “passion project” for Vaughn, involves asking some of these men and women to respond to a short writing prompt: What is life?

“None of the stories have to answer that directly and most don’t incorporate that directly into their story,” he says. “I just wanted to give them the opportunity to tell their story. One gentleman talked about his experience in the courtroom when he was sentenced. One man wrote an open letter to his wife on the outside. One wrote about what his day is like. Some people have written about COVID. A woman wrote poetry about her life leading up to her crime and getting sentenced and coming to a reckoning for what she’d done.”

He notes that while the people facing a life sentence are involved in serious crimes, not all murder charges stem from the same kind of incident.

“We have this perception of what the crime is when someone is convicted of murder, but there’s a broad range of what has happened,” he says. “Some people who did some horrible things when they were younger, they directly took a life and it’s talking to them about how they’ve grown and changed.”

Others were convicted for a murder that occurred during a robbery: Someone had a gun, there was a struggle, someone was killed, or someone dies of a heart attack during the incident. “One man was out with his friends. He says he did not know they were planning to rob a restaurant. They went in, a friend pulled a gun. He says he ran out; a patron says he tried to stop the robbery but all five of them were sentenced to life under this doctrine of felony murder,” Vaughn says. “It’s the same sentence, it’s a mandatory minimum sentence.”

Each episode of the podcast is about 15 minutes long and is recorded through prison phone calls. “One of the things we do as a society is we take people, put them away and we put them out of sight and out of mind. That is one of the ways we are able to do some of the harsh and very draconian things we do to people. We say you did this awful thing, you’re a monster. … These are human beings. They are capable of growth, they are capable of redemption.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks with Joshua Vaughn, a senior multimedia reporter for The Appeal and creator of the What Is Life? podcast. Vaughn describes the podcast as a “passion project” that features conversations with people sentenced to life in prison in who are unlikely to be released. Listen to What Is Life? on iTunes, Spotify, or GooglePlay.

#234 – DIY approach to data scraping bolsters crime coverage

455. Making Google, Facebook pay their fair share for news

The news industry is today where the music industry was 100 years ago. That’s the viewpoint of David Chavern, president and CEO of the News Media Alliance, an Arlington, Virginia-based nonprofit organization representing digital and print news publishers around the world.

“Music in the 19th century was a print business,” he says. “They controlled their distribution. With the advent of recording devices, they had to develop music licensing over a 15-year period to collect value everywhere music was being played to return value to the publishers and artists.”

News, in the form of printed newspapers, “used to have the most direct relationship you can have with a customer. We manufactured a physical product, then walked it up your driveway and handed it to you in your bathrobe. We now have a couple major companies that stand between us and our audience and they control everything about that, including taking most of the value from that interaction. We need a better deal from our digital distributors to sustain an industry.”

Oddly, while Google and Facebook feel like they have a monopoly on the distribution of digital information on their platforms and in terms of their global reach, U.S. antitrust laws, as currently written, protect the digital giants from the news industry.

The News Media Alliance is working to change that, by way of supporting legislation that would allow digital and print publishers and news organizations to enter into contract negotiations as a unit in order to get better price structures for news publishers from internet agents.

There’s precedent for this action: Australia just passed a new negotiating code that says Google and Facebook have to engage in negotiations with publishers. “They have to be fair and deal with fair value,” Chavern says. “If there’s a dispute, there’s an arbitration system backing it up. This is new to all news publishing but Google and Facebook already pay to license music. They pay to license sports clips. They pay for a lot of content. But for historic reasons, they’ve haven’t had to do that for news.”

Introduced during the last congressional session and just reintroduced recently, the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act would allow news publishers — both digital and physical media — to negotiate collectively with technological platforms for fair compensation for the use of their news content.

The bill, when introduced originally, had bipartisan support and there is current interest from members of Congress to not only support the bill as written but to help strengthen it.

Of course, this won’t be an easy fight.

Google and Facebook “have not taken a public position that I’m aware of but they’re actively lobbying against it,” Chavern says. “That’s the nature of business. I just did a hearing (recently) and there was this bizarre farcical framing about Big Media and Big Tech, a false equivalence between the two. If you roll up all my membership, 2,000 publishers including the biggest ones and the smallest, if we rolled them all up, their revenues are nothing compared to Google and Facebook. We feel the heat from the massive lobbying capacity from their platforms, but we’re fighting for something right and there’s power in that.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks with David Chavern, president and CEO of the News Media Alliance, an Arlington, Virginia-based nonprofit organization representing digital and print news publishers around the world. They discuss new legislative efforts to help news publishers get paid fair value for their content by Facebook and Google and the precedent set in Australia to make this happen.

454. Solutions Journalism tackles community problems

Karen Magnuson of the Solutions Journalism Network spent most of her career in news writing and reporting on the troubles in cities and towns in Michigan, California, and Kansas before becoming the managing editor of the Rochester (NY) Democrat & Chronicle. It was during her time at the Gannett-owned paper that she was introduced to the concept of solutions journalism.

“We invited people from the Solutions Journalism Network to come in and do workshops,” she says. “We were very interested in applying the solutions lens to our education reporting. For many years, we kept reporting on the problems with our city schools but nothing was happening in terms of improving the situation.”

Solutions journalism is a different kind of investigative reporting. It is “rigorous, evidence-based reporting on responses to social problems,” she says. “It’s not journalism for the faint of heart. It’s very rigorous, like prosecuting a story, just as you would if you were conducting an investigation of a problem. Looking at a solution to determine whether something has evidence that actually backs up its progress and being able to help solve the problem, but also its limitations.”

While the initial project in Rochester was, she now realizes, “sticking our toe in the water,” as they applied the solutions journalism lens as part of a series, Magnuson has made a deeper investment in the concept. She’s about to mark her one-year anniversary as project director for the Solutions Journalism Network.

Readers of the Democrat & Chronicle appreciated the different take in covering education and Magnuson’s successor at the paper remains committed to the approach.

“You can’t just do a one-off and think you’re going to change the world,” she says. “It’s the kind of approach that can really transform a newsroom but also build trust in a community if readers, users and viewers see that you’re consistently trying to help solve problems instead of unearthing it.”

Now Magnuson is leading an effort across 26 news organizations in New York and Michigan to “leverage their talents, raise awareness on a topic and develop relationships where they can rely on each other and strengthen the media ecosystem.” Their initial project will focus on caregivers for the aging population. “A lot of the issues we looked at prior to the pandemic have been exacerbated by COVID-19,” she says. “The topic has taken on a sense of urgency in addition to being critical because of the growing population of older adults.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks with Karen Magnuson, project director for the Solutions Journalism Network. They discuss what solutions journalism is, how it differs from investigative journalism and her new effort in New York and Michigan to apply solutions journalism to the topic of caregivers for the aging population.

434. Put community at the center of your journalism

453. Making sure Wikipedia shows that Women Do News

Women might be a fixture in journalism, but more could be done to help ensure their presence is secured and thriving. One group of women thinks Wikipedia could be a great avenue to accomplish that goal.

Women Do News is an online effort to create Wikipedia pages for women in news, not just those who are in front of the camera or scoring above-the-fold bylines, but for those who work behind the scenes and often don’t get the accolades or attention they deserve.

“The broader picture of that is we want to raise the profile of women in our industry,” says Angilee Shah, one of the founders of the campaign. “We’ve been cut out of history and the record of news in this country. Wikipedia is a symptom of that and a place where we can start to make sure our stories are part of how we understand news in this country. It’s a simple mission in a lot of ways but it has deep roots in what we’re trying to do to uplift the status of women in news media.”

The campaign was launched by a small group who were part of Take The Lead’s 2019 50 Women Can Change the World in Journalism cohort. The group wants to correct the current state of things: Only 18 percent of biographies on Wikipedia are about women, and more than 90 percent of contributing editors on Wikipedia are men.

“The ripple effect of having a Wikipedia article are pretty big,” Shah says. “It’s a place where we could do something small that would ripple across the internet in ways that are outsized for the effort we put in.”

Jareen Imam

Work like this matters, especially for women who aren’t public figures or recognized names in news.

“It’s harder for women who don’t have that kind of space for name recognition to go and pursue other stories and investigative work because they might not be searchable on the internet. That’s what sources do (before agreeing to speak with a reporter). Wikipedia is a stepping stone for us to add profiles online so female journalists can be recognized for the work they do with colleagues who might be more notable,” says Jareen Imam, director of social newsgathering at NBC News and a member of the International Women’s Media Foundation.

More than that, having a Wikipedia page adds credibility to a woman’s name and online presence. For women who work in news in other countries, they can be the target of disinformation campaigns, sometimes backed by their governments, to discredit or harm them.

“All that disinformation that might happen to women operating in countries like Brazil or India or other places where it’s highly volatile to get the truth out, Wikipedia can rank highly in a search,” she says. “If you search her name, you’ll see that entry first, before the disinformation campaign. It has a big implication with safety and also safeguarding women and their reputations as journalists, especially in places where freedom of speech and freedom of the press is not always guaranteed.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks with Angilee Shah and Jareen Imam about the Women Do News campaign, which is creating Wikipedia entries for women in news to help raise their profiles and credibility.

Better News: COVID-19 timeline helps newsroom attract new subscribers

Randi Stevenson is an executive producer at the San Antonio Express-News. She and Joy-Marie Scott and Chris Quinn wrote an article for Better News back in November about how the Express-News used a COVID-19 timeline to drive subscriptions.

On this episode of the Better News podcast, Stevenson shares what she and her colleagues learned by launching the COVID-19 timeline and offers tips on how other newsrooms can implement a similar feature to increase subscriptions and foster reader engagement