Podcast Archives – It's All Journalism

#332 How well are journalists really listening to their audience?

Reporters need to be good listeners. It’s a top job requirement: how can we tell good stories if we’re not listening closely to the people we interview?

But are reporters hearing everything that’s being said? And if so, what do they do with that information?

Cole Goins

“We’re not good at expanding our field of listening and incorporating deeper tactics to really understand the information needs of our communities in a way that drives the strategy of what we cover, how we cover it and how we get that information out,” said Cole Goins, a journalist, facilitator and media consultant with the American Press Institute. “We do listen a lot but I don’t think we embed that into our strategy as deeply as we could.”

Journalism has long been a one-sided form of communication, with reporters determining what pieces of information to use based solely on their judgment. But in a time of diminished trust and accusations of making stuff up, taking into consideration what readers want to know about and what their concerns are could help address those issues while building trust and increasing transparency, he said.

“We’re talking about, with a deeper emphasis on listening, getting away from more extractive and more to a transactional nature, so we’re being more responsive to what people want to know and how we can think about journalism as more like a service,” Goins said.

This would require more interaction with readers, listeners, viewers, etc., but simply adding a monthly open house or roundtable discussion won’t cut it. Go to where your audience, your community, your readers are already gathering and join them there. Make the extra effort to meet them on their terms to help meet your goals, Goins suggested.

It’s an opportunity for the community to share their feedback, questions and suggestions, along with complaints and concerns, with reporters that can foster better relationships and, in turn, provide better coverage and improved trust, just by hearing readers’ thoughts.

It’s the age-old question: We listen, but how well do we hear? Cole Goins, a journalist, facilitator and media consultant with the American Press Institute, joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss how expanding and deepening listening practices can help journalists build trust and improve their coverage in communities that are questioning the processes reporters use to tell their stories.

#328 — Unraveling metrics, subscription models to identify reader revenue

#331 Investigating abuse by priests in the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo

For a brief time, Charlie Specht left journalism. He took a job in politics, as many journalists do, after working at the Buffalo News.

When the movie “Spotlight” came out, the urge to return to journalism hit him hard. But not even he could’ve guessed that the story behind that movie — a team of journalists uncovering decades of sexual abuse of children by priests in Boston — would be waiting for him when he returned to the newsroom.

Specht is an investigative reporter for WKBW, the ABC affiliate in Buffalo. Since March, he’s been reporting, in three 9-minute packages on broadcast news and a handful of smaller pieces, what appears to be a decades-long cover-up of sexual abuse of children and young men by priests in the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo.

Charlie Specht

“This is a rare investigative story that we didn’t preplan things, we didn’t drop a big story to get things going,” Specht said. “This is a story that every reporter in town was working on. Michael Whalen, a regular boy from South Buffalo, had a press conference in March in front of the Diocese of Buffalo and said ‘I was sexually assaulted by a parish priest in the 1980s.’ He wanted to tell his story. It was a very simple, heartfelt story. It looked to be a one-off, if you will, a story that might last a couple days.”

That night, a reporter with the Buffalo News went to the home of Father Norbert Orsolits, the priest Whalen said abused him, and the priest admitted yes, he had abused dozens of boys over the course of decades.

Specht has worked to get in touch with victims and whistleblowers and tell their stories. He’s doing this in a town that still has deep Catholic roots and deep Irish roots, much like Boston, and a city where the 60,000 Catholics were told by previous bishops that the abuse problem in Boston didn’t exist in Buffalo.

“Whistleblowers within the church contacted us to say this isn’t a thing of the past, this is still going on,” Specht said. “They felt morally compelled to come forward. They felt like things were still being obscured from the public.”

He and his team started with the list of 42 priests published by the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo in March that the diocese admitted had been accused of sexual abuse. They looked at where those priests had been reassigned, but even as that process started, victims were calling Specht angry – their abuser was not included on the list. According to Specht’s reporting and the documents provided to him by whistleblowers, the number is in excess of 100.

The Catholic Diocese of Buffalo had been willing to talk to reporters at first but Bishop Richard Malone hasn’t answered questions in months. He’s also refusing to step down from his position.

“The response to the public, according to parishioners, has been anything but transparent,” Specht said.

On Thursday, Oct. 25, one of Specht’s whistleblower sources, Siobhan O’Connor, came forward. Previously the bishop’s secretary, she was a featured interviewed on CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday, Oct. 28, in a piece about the priest abuse scandal in Buffalo, along with the first member of the clergy in Buffalo to call on the bishop to resign. Specht said he’s got at least two more big stories in the works. “There’s no end in sight on this story,” he says.

Charlie Specht, an investigative reporter with WKBW in Buffalo, joins producers Michael O’Connell and Amelia Brust to discuss his months-long work investigating accusations of sexual abuse of children and young men by priests in the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo.

#298 — Investigative journalism helps restore lives robbed by injustice

#330 Lawsuit against Trump aims to counter assault on free press

What happens when the person sworn to protect the Constitution, through rhetoric and governmental actions, begins to threaten the First Amendment? For a group of nonprofits interested in protecting freedom of expression, the answer is to sue.

On Oct. 16, PEN America, the Protect Democracy Project, and the Yale School Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump for the attitudes he’s expressed toward press freedom as well as using his governmental powers to threaten media entities.

Kristy Parker

“Dating back to the early days of his campaign, he started issuing threats that if he became president, he would use the government powers to retaliate against media entities that were critical of him,” said Kristy Parker, legal counsel with Protect Democracy, who represents the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

“He started singling out again from the very early days of his campaign, entities like CNN and the Washington Post, and since he has become president, he has continued with that behavior and has actually used his government powers to retaliate against media entities that he believes have criticized him or have covered him unfavorably,” she said.

Trump’s attacks have not been limited to just words. The Justice Department has taken antitrust enforcement action against the merger of AT&T and Time Warner. The latter is the parent company of CNN, one of the frequent targets of the president’s ire. Trump also issued an executive order authorizing the Postal Service to look at raising the postal rates for Amazon, a company founded by Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post.

“[PEN America] felt it was very important to do something to make a stand about the fact that these things actually are not just a a violation of norms by this president, but actually things that violate our First Amendment,” said Parker.

On this week’s It’s All Journalism podcast, host Michael O’Connell talks to Kristy Parker, legal counsel for the Protect Democracy Project, about the lawsuit her organization, PEN America and the Yale School Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic recently filed against President Donald Trump. They discuss why the three organizations think the president’s actions are not just out of the norm, but violations of the First Amendment.

#304 — Fighting for truth through transparency and sunlight

#329— Looking back at the subprime mortgage crisis, 10 years later

The world was a different place 10 years ago.

After years of booming and growing at a rapid pace, the housing market cratered due to the seemingly overnight collapse of the subprime mortgage market.

Lisa Rowan (Aileen Perilla/The Penny Hoarder)

People across the country were losing their homes in the blink of an eye. The stock market was crashing in ways not seen for decades. Lenders and big banks were going out of business every day.

The leadership at The Penny Hoarder, a consumer-facing publication that provides financial news and advice for everyday investors, had asked its staff to take on a big project, something that would involve multiple departments and would be bigger than “a 5-minute video or a 2,500 word story,” said Lisa Rowan, a senior writer and on-air analyst with the publication.

One of the other writers, Desiree Stennett, grew up in the Miami area and, with the Miami-Dade region being amongs the hardest hit in the country when the subprime mortgage crisis occurred, suggested looking back on the market collapse and reaching out to people who’d lost their homes.

“She had a lot of questions that weren’t being answered,” Rowan said. As the U.S. economy appears to have rebounded and most people are believed to be doing better now than they were 10 years ago, Stennett “was curious as to whether it would be true if we walked to people hit hardest 10 years ago. That was the idea that struck people the most.”

To start digging, the magazine began by reaching out to readers.

“We put a call in our email newsletter for people to fill out a simple Google form and tell us, did you lose your home, how are you doing now, what was your experience,” Rowan said. “We got more than 50 responses from people who told us about their experiences. They were so open with us.”

Alex Mahadevan (Chris Zuppa/The Penny Hoarder)

Alex Mahadevan, a data journalist with The Penny Hoarder, started down a different avenue.

“I downloaded every single census track in the U.S. and property values to look at neighborhoods, as specific as I could get, that had the biggest run-up before the housing burst and the biggest decline after,” he said. “There was a neighborhood in Lee County (Florida), LeHigh Acres, that ended up being far and away the neighborhood hit the hardest. It was basically half-built. I started looking at property records to see if I could find a source and found a real estate agent who bought up several homes in this neighborhood. He saw his real estate sign on the national news.”

Mahadevan had worked near Lee County prior to joining The Penny Hoarder and remembered the name of the county clerk. Another call there revealed the clerk was named in The Wall Street Journal due to the high rate of foreclosures in the county.

As they reached out to readers who were willing to speak about that dark time in their lives, many of them felt just as raw as they did 10 years ago, Rowan said.

“When you look back at something 10 years ago, it’s easy to look at the numbers and the black and white of it, but there’s so much gray in the middle of it, of what happened to real people, even how they were affected in the years after,” she said. “Bringing back some of those feelings of anxiety that were present at the time — we felt lucky we could do that but we felt grateful people were willing to revisit that time in their lives with such clarity and openness.”

Hard to believe it’s been 10 years since the housing bubble burst, sending the stock market into a tailspin. Lisa Rowan, a senior writer and on-air analyst with The Penny Hoarder, and Alex Mahadevan, a data journalist at The Penny Hoarder, discuss their publication’s major project The American Nightmare: 10 Years Later with producer Michael O’Connell, detailing how readers were willing to open up about a dark time in their lives and what they’ve found has changed in the years following.

#314 — Data reporting fuels Washington Post’s massive homicide project

#328 — Unraveling metrics, subscription models to identify reader revenue

After so many years of talking about the impending and inevitable onset of digital newsrooms, it’s finally starting to happen.

And it’s largely due to metrics and subscriptions.

Gwen Vargo, director of reader revenue at the American Press Institute

Newsrooms are learning that they can’t rely on traditional streams of revenue to keep the lights on. In order to do that, they need to understand what their readers, viewers or users are interested in, which types of reporting get the most attention and drive the most engagement and traffic. The best way to find that out, and in turn keep them coming back, is to look at metrics.

Those same metrics can back up a reporter’s story suggestions or lead them in new directions, further driving engagement and traffic and, after a while, leading to more subscriptions.

For Gwen Vargo, director of reader revenue at the American Press Institute, it’s all coming full circle.

Newsrooms “have to be sustainable by getting more revenue with readers. That aligns really well with a newsroom,” she said. “If you’re generating content that’s valuable with the reader (and they’re willing to) pay for, that aligns better journalistically than chasing headlines for clicks. Even though it’s a shift, it should be a comfortable shift. Newsrooms are able to embrace it a little easier because it’s based on producing really high-quality content, away from that kind of volume/subscription funnel.”

Furthermore, people are really comfortable with the idea of a subscription-based service, she said. Look at how many people subscribe to Netflix for movies and TV shows, or Spotify for music, or the number of monthly or weekly box-based services, from clothing to prepared meals.

“I think the subscription mindset is more ingrained now than it has been,” Vargo said. “People are more comfortable with it as a concept. As more people are paying for news, it props it up. If a bunch of people are putting up paywalls, it becomes more normalized, something that is accepted and expected.”

API is set to relaunch its Metrics for News information service in October and has published research on the paths readers take before paying for a subscription to a news outlet. “More than 70 percent of people who subscribe read (an outlet) for a few months” before buying in, she said. “More than half were a year. That’s shocking to me that it was so long.”

API’s research also indicates people are subscribing to websites via social media platforms, something considered absurd just a few years ago.

Gwen Vargo, director of reader revenue with the American Press Institute, joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss the finer points of how to get readers to first click on the articles reporters spend so much time creating, and then to take it a step further and get them to subscribe.

#103 – Penny Muse Abernathy — It’s not too late to save community journalism

#327 – Black Dance Magazine aims for January relaunch

Dance has long been an important part of Norma Porter’s life.

“I’ve been dancing since about 4,” she said. “I started at a local studio … (and) moved on to a program at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell smiles with his former classmate Norma Porter, publisher of Black Dance Magazine.

But by the time she was in high school, she was a little burned out on that world and took a break.

Porter’s parents wanted her to pursue a degree in a program that would have better odds at a stable career, leading her to study journalism with a minor in dance at American University.

It was the interactive journalism program at American University that put dance back in the forefront of her life.

A class assignment involved either speaking to a journalism startup about their business model and how they got off the ground or to develop a business model for a new publication.

“I had been out of dance for a long time,” she said. Porter had an idea for a publication focused on dancers, and dancers of color in particular, written by dancers and aimed at schools that had otherwise been largely ignored by mainstream media publications.

“There are two major black dance companies that most people know about, the Alvin Ailey Dance Company and the Dance Theater of Harlem. Those were the only companies you saw,” Porter said. “There’s got to be more. I think the journalistic person in me felt there had to be other people like me, in cities across the country, or self-taught dancers that were making dance and performing. Their stories needed to be told.”

She discussed her idea with one of her former teachers, Carol Foster with the International Association of Blacks in Dance, who mentioned the organization’s annual conference that happened to be coming to Washington, D.C., in just a few months.

“I was pushed out there and it was interesting because I probably would’ve never done it,” she said.

Porter introduced the concept for Black Dance Magazine in early 2013 and published three issues that year before going on hiatus so Porter could take a longer, more serious look at the publication and its audience.

Now Porter lives in Philadelphia, working at Temple University, spending a lot of her time with the Boyer College of Music and Dance. She’s seeing more dance and getting ready to relaunch the magazine in January 2019. This time around, thought, the magazine has nonprofit status through its relationship with the International Association of Blacks in Dance. Porter is also running a GoFundMe fundraiser to start the project out right.

On this week’s It’s All Journalism, Producer Michael O’Connell talks to publisher Norma Porter about the relaunch of Black Dance Magazine, which tells the stories of dancers of color. Porter is running a GoFundMe fundraiser for the magazine, which will relaunch in January.

#326 — Give women a voice and the world listens

As a girl growing up in the D.C. area, Xanthe Scharff learned early on the importance of writing, of taking every day experiences and putting them to paper.

Her parents, both psychoanalysts, said it was important to find time every day to write down what they’d done so someone else could learn from it.

Scharff is co-founder and executive director of the Fuller Project for International Reporting, a nonprofit organization working to increase women’s representation in media, both in the newsroom and in coverage.

Xanthe Scharff is the U.S.
Bureau chief of the Fuller Project for International Reporting

She previously spent a decade in Malawi, first writing about families living on $1 per day, covering their financial decisions and the way they would prioritize their sons’ educations over their daughters’. After her first piece, published in the Christian Science Monitor, one family’s daughter was forced to leave school in eighth grade, while her brother continued on. Readers were so moved by the girl’s story they sent in donations, wanting to help allow girls to keep going to school and ease the burden on their parents.

“I went back to the village and found a way to set up management and identify all the girls in the village who hadn’t made it past eighth grade,” Scharff said. “None of the girls had gotten past that. That was a way to set up a group of girls ready to go on and most needing of help.” She continued to report on the girls for a year and readers continued to respond, sending in donations totaling $40,000.

After a year, she knew she could no longer report on the girls and their education, so she stopped writing about them and, instead, created AGE Africa. “I worked on that for a decade until I moved abroad. … It’s still going, serving thousands of girls in Malawi. That idea that journalism can have impact is incredibly personal to me.”

It was that effort that led Scharff to dedicate more of her life to girls’ education. “I was shocked by the way that a family where the woman was the financial head of the household would deprioritize girls,” she said. Further, when she’d sit and talk with girls about their experiences, they routinely shared similar stories about the abuse they suffered from teachers, but they did so very casually.

She started the Fuller Project with Christina Asquith, who wrote about book about the role and importance the rights of women played in international situations, from the U.S. invasion of Iraq and beyond. Both had reported on issues about women, education and policy and knew that when women step up, everyone benefits and societies become stronger.

Xanthe Scharff, co-founder and executive director of the Fuller Project for International Reporting, joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss her belief that writing every day and sharing stories can help change lives for girls and women around the world.

#322 — Syrian child brides: Pursuing a story that needed telling

#325 — Wounded Muse author follows career path through China

Robert Delaney, author of the upcoming novel The Wounded Muse, fell into his career as a journalist and writer.

He also fell into his specialty.

He can, in part, thank his kung fu instructor.

“When I was going to university, I wound up in the school of communications and thought, sure, journalism, that’s fine,” said Delaney, the U.S. bureau chief for the South China Morning Post. “I didn’t have an aptitude for math or science and figured what the hell.”

Robert F. Delaney

He was studying at Temple University and, at the same time, taking kung fu lessons. As part of an independent study project, he looked into the history and world of martial arts in America. He was also studying Mandarin.

“My adviser asked me to make sure I understood the foundation and philosophical underpinnings of kung fu, which took me to China,” he said. “I started learning about the country. At the time, I wasn’t expecting to go to China, but eventually the grand master at the studio asked if I was interested in going. That’s how I ended up in China.”

Delaney first landed in China in 1992, spending a year in a “third-tier city where there weren’t any English-language speakers other than missionaries.” Needless to say, it put quite a damper on his personal and social life.

Eventually, he landed a job with Dow Jones when the wire service was looking for an American or foreigner with journalism experience who could also speak Mandarin. Financial reporting was almost as foreign a concept as living full time in China. He was sent for a time to Singapore to learn how to cover rubber markets, learning the language of trade and commerce and futures.

“It wasn’t my natural comfortable place to be, writing about finance or futures,” Delaney said. “But what made it easy was no one else was covering futures for a western market. On the one hand, it was odd for me to be covering something I wasn’t inclined to look at closely, but because there was so much interest. We’re getting into the mid-‘90s. That’s when China’s economy started to take off. Whatever I was writing seemed to do OK.”

His lack of familiarity in the world of watching and learning trade and futures markets gave him a kind of advantage in a round-about way, and it also helped that he wasn’t a native Mandarin speaker, though he was getting better all the time. He’d ask a question of an expert, let them talk for several minutes, then ask his interview to summarize what they just said.

“After listening to so many explanations, my listening ability improved a lot,” he said.

Still, he didn’t really believe himself a journalist.

“I saw myself as more someone who was playing the part of a journalist. Because it was my first job, I figured this was what I needed to do,” Delaney said. “It took me a while to fall into the understanding that, yes, I was a journalist. Even though I was covering odd things, I gradually realized it was, in fact, the work of a journalist.”

Robert Delaney, the U.S. bureau chief for the South China Morning Post, tells producer Michael O’Connell about his unusual career path, from kung fu student to futures reporter covering the market in China. He also talks about writing his first novel, The Wounded Muse, which will be released in October.

#312 – Podcasting: A way to promote press freedom abroad

#324 — Lynching, racism and seizing a moment to atone for a paper’s past sins

When The National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened earlier this year, the Montgomery Advertiser saw an opportunity.

It was a rare chance to apologize and take responsibility for past sins, when the paper was complicit in the lynching deaths of thousands of men and women.

Bro Krift, the paper’s executive editor, and Brian Lyman, its state government and politics reporter, published a series of articles and an editorial to apologize for the paper’s “callous indifference” toward the practice of lynching and the casual shrug it gave to the people who died.

Bro Krift and Brian Lyman

“I read through 20 years of stories and editorials on this stuff and there was always as sense of, yes, lynching is bad but we don’t want to do anything about it,” Lyman said. “If you look ahead to the paper’s coverage of the Montgomery bus boycott, it was amused cynicism, which was wholly inappropriate. When they had the Selma to Montgomery march, there was hostility directed toward the protesters. This paper didn’t wrap itself in glory when it came to covering these events right through the civil rights era.”

The opening of the memorial felt significant, not just for Montgomery and the county in which it was built, but for the south as a whole, especially in a changing world.

In the memorial, “you’re supposed to look at the past and understand where you came from and reconcile with those issues,” Krift said. “I didn’t exist in the 1860s, but the paper did. We were very much a part of it. If we were going to be asked that (question) within the memorial and museum, it only made sense for us to write the article that looked at our position, that looked at who we were as a paper and reflect on it and take responsibility for what occurred and how we proliferated the idea of white supremacy.”

In his research, Lyman was particularly haunted by the story of Robin White, a man lynched at the age of 27 in one of the few cases where white men were tried and convicted for his death, although all but one were later pardoned.

“When you’re reading through these lynching stories and confronting the transcripts, when you hear the lynchers’ words, they’re not even viewing their victims as human, they’re not expressing any regret for what they did,” Lyman said. “Robin White exists in the 1900 census and a few court records. There’s so much we don’t know, it screams to learn more. He was 27. He was married. He had a brother. His father, who was born into slavery, was still alive at the time he was murdered.”

When the museum opened, volunteers carried empty jars with the name of a person who’d been lynched written on the label. The jars were to be filled with soil from the county in which they were killed. One woman told Lyman she didn’t know anything about the man whose jar she was filling but she felt like his tombstone.

“That’s kind of how I feel about Robin White,” Lyman said.

It’s All Journalism producers Michael O’Connell and Amelia Brust talk to Bro Krift and Brian Lyman of the Montgomery Advertiser. Inspired by the opening of The National Memorial for Peace and Justice earlier this year, the newspaper examined its role in perpetuating racism and racial segregation during the Jim Crow era.

#207 – Emory students investigate civil rights-era cold cases

Underground press pioneer John Wilcock, 91, dies

John Wilcock, 91, a British journalist who was a pioneer in the underground press of the 1950s and 1960s, died Thursday in a care facility in Ojai, California.

It’s All Journalism interviewed Wilcock in 2017, and he spoke about his early involvement in the underground press in the 1950s.

“There were nine papers in New York City, nearly all dailies or weeklies, fairly big papers,” Wilcock said. “I’d worked through papers with a million, 2 million, 3 million circulation. I’d always been very interested in little papers. Although there were plenty of little papers in England, or were then, there were hardly any of that type of journalism here.”

John Wilcock

An ambitious man, Wilcock and a group of four friends founded the Village Voice, a legendary publication read religiously by the trendy, the counterculture, the artists and the young in New York. It is also considered the first alternative newsweekly in the country.

“We weren’t much interested in daily news but we were interested in people and what they did,” Wilcock recalled. “We had everything in [the paper] — sports, every type of thing except current events.”

While the entire team viewed themselves as equals, Wilcock quickly became the paper’s columnist. According to legend, the late Leonard Cohen, among many other notables, read Wilcock’s columns without fail.

Wilcock, in addition to helping to create the Village Voice in New York City and finding himself near the middle of Andy Warhol’s Factory scene, was the editor of Echo Magazine.

As the ‘60s turned into the ‘70s, the underground press Wilcock helped to pioneer in the U.S. grew. But after 1972, the publications that might’ve been considered “underground” a few years prior had changed mindset.

“They might’ve called themselves the underground press but it was different,” he said. “They were grown-ups who acted in a very civilized way and didn’t play around. We were very serious but we weren’t tied down like the straight press, doesn’t say certain things, can’t say things in a certain way. We were totally free and easy, we printed anything that appealed to us.”

Ethan Persoff, a writer and graphic novelist, who chronicled Wilcock’s career in a series of comics, spoke to It’s All Journalism about Wilcock’s journey through American journalism and the art world.

“Even approaching 90, I’ve never known someone to be so urgent and capable about pushing things into a kind of being,” Persoff said. “I think that was his role in the ‘60s. That part of your soul doesn’t die out.”

Wilcock’s story involved him in the same orbit as many famous people during high-profile events, yet his name isn’t fodder for history books.

“All these people he was around, they were permanently remembered,” Persoff said. “How is it he gets left out? The more you learn about John, you do see, and this is represented really nicely in the comic, he would make something and then something would happen and he’d get thrown out.”

#246 – Journey down the underground press rabbit hole

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