478. Keeping journalists safe is a priority for former EMT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Situational awareness isn’t spy training.

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

Severe WX News Gear from Chris Post on Vimeo.

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

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

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

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

— Chris Post (@ChrisMPost) August 27, 2021

477. Washingtonian staff solidifies its voice by forming a union

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

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

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

Daniella Byck

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

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

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

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

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

Jessica Sidman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

414. Will local ownership help Baltimore Sun survive?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

475. Podcasting is the last frontier of the open internet

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

Those were the days when the open web ruled.

Benjamin Bellamy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Better News: LA Times Creates Compelling Virtual Events During Pandemic

Donna Wares and Samantha Melbourneweaver of the Los Angeles Times.

The Los Angeles Times has a long history of hosting successful in-person events. Its annual Festival of Books, for example, draws more than 150,000 people every spring. But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, many of those events were at risk of being canceled.

The Times’ audience engagement director, Samantha Melbourneweaver, and live events editor, Donna Wares, recently wrote a piece for the Better News initiative about how the L.A. Times built a compelling series of virtual events during the pandemic.

In this episode of Better News, Melbourneweaver and Wares tell host Michael O’Connell what worked and what didn’t work. They also share advice on how other newsrooms can develop their own successful live events strategies.

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 Local News Transformation Fund 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.

474. Pushed Out: How domestic violence can lead to homelessness

Julia Paskin envisioned herself an artist, not someone who would work as a writer or reporter.

When she was in her 20s and fighting depression, due in part to feeling “deeply unhappy” and “needing to feel fulfilled in my work,” she enrolled in classes at Pasadena City College. There she learned from the vice president of operations at KPCC in Los Angeles, eventually working through internships to land a reporting job there.

Julia Paskin

Not being able to imagine a scenario that existed on the periphery of her life is something at the heart of her new series, “Pushed Out: LA’s Unhoused Women,” a partnership between KPCC, LA’s NPR station, and LAist.

“Our newsroom received a grant from the Blue Shield Foundation to cover the intersection of domestic violence, intimate partner violence, and homelessness,” Paskin says. “We just were given that edict, go report on this, tell a bunch of stories, however you do this is up to you. I started looking at the data, which is not terribly substantial — it’s not reported enough — and figuring out who are these people, who are the most affected and staggeringly it’s women. There are many permutations of how experiencing or surviving intimate partner violence will lead to becoming unhoused.”

There have been people in Paskin’s life who have experienced homelessness, and she spent much of her childhood “in housing court trying to stave off eviction.” As a result, much of what she heard from homeless women during her reporting was more of a surprise to her editors than to her, with a few exceptions.

“The sheer brutality of it is hard to bear,” Paskin says. “Maybe what was the most edifying was how law enforcement played a role in making living outside incredibly difficult for women. Being roused in the middle of the night and criminalized for being unhoused. Some of the requirements for entering a women’s shelter are shocking: You can’t bring your kids with you. You can’t work anymore. You understand that policies were put in place for a reason, mainly for the safety of the residents and the staff, but how do you move forward with your life? How do you expect someone to work their way out of homelessness when you don’t allow them to work?”

Paskin wanted to make sure the women she spoke with had a safety and support system in place, in case telling their stories proved difficult or retriggered their trauma from the harrowing experiences they lived through. Journalists sometimes aren’t as careful or considerate when it comes to pursuing complex, emotional and difficult stories like those involving abuse and struggling to survive in dangerous conditions.

But she also wanted to tell the stories responsibly and in a way that answered questions people who have never been close to this situation might have.

These are the kinds of questions abuse survivors often hear, including “Why did you stay for so long? Why didn’t you just get a job? The assumptions people make,” Paskin says. She wanted “ to illustrate the point that becoming homeless is incredibly easy in America, especially in a housing market like Los Angeles. When you start to add the layers of vulnerability, it becomes all the more plausible to become unhoused. We wanted to pull away the mystique. We’re an NPR station, we have a lot of listeners of privilege. We wanted to illustrated that it happens in a tangible way to people doing the best they can.”

Julia Paskin is a radio producer and writer for KPCC and LAist who recently launched a series called ‘Pushed Out: LA’s Unhoused Women,’ telling the stories of women who are experiencing homelessness after leaving an intimate partner abuse situation. She talks with It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell about the challenges of sharing these stories in a responsible way while making it clear that homelessness could happen, easily, to almost anyone.

Bonus: Look at This podcast provides forum for DC’s homeless

473. Mental health toolkit designed by and for student journalists

Imagine being a student journalist, working on a daily publication with real, hard-and-fast deadlines, when your school becomes the middle of an enrollment scandal.

For Eileen Toh, Natalie Bettendorf and their colleagues at theUniversity of Southern California’s Daily Trojan, it turned into a nonstop series of breaking news stories on top of school work and assignments.

Unfortunately, it was also the beginning of a time of tremendous mental health stress and emotional challenges. By the end of that year, nine USC students had died, some by suicide and some by other causes, and everyone was feeling the strain.

Eileen Toh, Karan Nevatia, and Natalie Bettendorf of the University of Southern California’s Daily Trojan.

Bettendorf and her close friend, Karan Nevatia, started working together to create a wellness initiative at the paper.

“Mental health in the journalistic space was something he was really passionate about,” she says. “He said we could make this new position of a wellness director and they could focus on how to make newsrooms a healthier space. That summer we worked really closely together on developing this new program. I think that’s when I really started developing my interest in mental health and reporting on mental health.”

Nevatia learned about a memorial scholarship for USC students, in which they could propose grants for spaces in mental health. He wanted to create a toolkit for journalists — not just students but anyone who worked in news, anywhere — to help have resources available online to be able to take care of themselves.

Sadly, he died by suicide in September 2020. His friends felt compelled to see his vision be made real. They are now the co-founders and leaders of the Student Journalism Wellness Project.

“We have a number of resources available. Some are contacts for help, like the national suicide hotline, the Trevor Project hotline, a contact number for USC students. We also have stuff from the Daily Trojan, stuff from other student newsrooms and papers and other reporting we’ve seen on mental health in student journalism or journalism in general,” Toh says.

They included one of Nevatia’s columns, one they say helped the newsroom realize their own mental health as a collective was being taxed because of the built-in compulsions to work hard and not take breaks in the name of news.

“He talked about the newsroom needing to prioritize journalists’ well-being in order to prevent burnout,” Toh says. “This was the first time I think all of us, as a staff, realized this is a problem we’re facing too. … As we were editing that story, we were surprised. This is something we have to collectively address. This column was something really close to my heart.”

The toolkit also includes a letter Bettendorf wrote to, and from, the paper’s editorial board.

“At the beginning of the Fall 2019 semester, I was laying out all these things Karan and I had been discussing about launching the wellness initiative. One of the things in the letter is the goal for the initiative to not only be external — we wanted to put more context about mental health and cover issues on campus that address well-being — but also internal, within our newsroom. How are we taking care of our staff? We understood that to put out the best content we had, we had to take care of ourselves. How can we keep a sustainable model within our newsroom? For me, that was something that was really important to put up on the site because it was the guidelines for thinking about this initiative.”

Eileen Toh and Natalie Bettendorf are two of the leaders and co-founders of the University of Southern California’s Student Journalism Wellness Project, an online resource kit for journalists to help handle the stress and mental health obstacles that come from working in news. They tell It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell about the importance of the project and their friend, Karan Nevatia, who started the initiative before dying by suicide in 2020.

472. CNN Style explores intersection of news and culture

CNN is synonymous with hard-hitting news and an international approach to it, with correspondents around the world keeping viewers, and readers, informed about what’s happening in the world.

That’s no surprise; that’s the expectation.

The surprise is that CNN Style does much the same, but with a different entry point.

“The North Star for us is a tagline we started using internally: We put culture in context. What that means is, our mission is to help our audience make sense of the world around them through the lens of visual culture, be it art, fashion, design, architecture, beauty. That’s what informs a lot of the editorial decision-making on my end,” says Fiona Sinclair Scott, CNN Style’s global editor.

Fiona Sinclair Scott is CNN Style’s global editor.

Historically, the style section of a newspaper, magazine or website might have been where “women’s issues” were discussed. But Scott says her audience is nearly evenly split between men and women.

“We do cater to women, but I wouldn’t say that our coverage is heavily focused on servicing women in particular,” she says. “We do have strong women on the team and we do strong storytelling when it comes to women’s issues, but when you look at our audience, when you break it down, it’s almost a 50/50 split in terms of gender.”

The “tiny, tiny team” was recently honored by the Alliance for Women in Media with a Gracie Award for the best Information/Entertainment Website, something Scott calls a “huge honor. It’s just really great to be recognized by an organization that champions women in particular. It’s such a credit to the team.”

One of the three staff members of the team, Stephy Chung, is the driving force behind CNN Style’s ambitious Hyphenated series.

“It’s a deeply personal series for Stephy. She’s an Asian American. We decided to launch Hyphenated with a focus on the Asian-American experience. She came to me, very clearly, with an idea for the series and was very straight with me,” Scott says. “She said the anti-Asian sentiment and violence we’re seeing in America right now is really worrying. It’s getting worse and the media isn’t covering it the way it should. We need to do something about it.”

Everything covered in Style is really about something else, she says.

“OK, this is a pitch about photography or a new exhibit opening, but is it about more than that? That’s really, as I’ve come to learn, what interests our audience. We have to think of our audience in a digital space. We’re very data-driven and we have to think about what will resonate with our audience based on the data we’re looking at every day.”

The average CNN viewer and reader isn’t looking for content that would traditionally be found in the style section. “That’s about going, hey, listen, I know you don’t care about design, but this isn’t about design. It’s about something else. It’s about embracing intersectionalities and the interplay between subject areas. We think about fashion and the climate crisis. We think about beauty and identity. We think about art and representation. It’s there, it’s in those intersections, we do something I hope people find to be unique and compelling.”

Fiona Sinclair Scott, CNN Style’s global editor, says everything going on in politics and news around the world is connected to cultural expressions, including fashion, art and design. She talks with It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell about these intersectionalities and why Style is not just for traditional “women’s interests.”

461. The Counter uses food to make news more digestible

471. Info District: A 21st century model for funding local news

Municipalities across the country have specially designated areas for dedicated uses, from airports and hospitals to mosquito abatement and commercial properties.

Why not do the same for news?

That’s what the Community Information Cooperative wants to encourage and help build. The concept, called an Info District, would create publicly funded areas for the development of local news organizations, and the people who live near and provide money for those districts would have a say in how local information is gathered and shared.

Simon Galperin of the Community Information Cooperative

“Through the co-op, we’re trying to address the local journalism crisis at a variety of levels, including the policy level, the organizing level and on the ground, building something from scratch, what does it take to build a 21st Century news organization from the ground up,” says Simon Galperin, a founding director of the co-op. He came up with the idea of Info Districts at the City University of New York, building on a concept he’d discussed with a friend after failing to prepare for an assignment. “Focusing on infrastructure building is not what traditional journalism training gets you. At some point, and I’m not a religious guy, but at some point it does feel spiritual. It connects so much with me and the people I look at and see as my peers and allies.”

Galperin currently is putting this model to work in his hometown of Bloomfield, New Jersey, where he’s running the Bloomfield Information Project.

“We’re trying to take the lofty ideas and put them into practice,” he says. “They have an open space trust fund. That means the properties in the town get taxed at about $20 per property. The money gets pooled together and there’s a committee that helps purchase and maintain open space. New parks are built this way. There’s an existing infrastructure for civic investment in a public good. (Info Districts are) a similar concept. The governance structure is different.”

Establishing an Info District would also involve plenty of community engagement and input, Galperin says.

“In Bloomfield, if you taxed everyone $10 per year, that would give us a $500,000 operating budget. What we could accomplish, what a community-run organization could accomplish — I’m not sure if you want to call that (a) small or big (budget) — it would completely change the future of Bloomfield, it would change the future of Essex County, it would improve public health, it would increase voter turnout, it would improve access to information. Having an organization dedicated to encouraging civic engagement by using journalism training, education and organizing, that’s what we need in our communities nowadays. To fund that, ad dollars aren’t going to do it.”

Simon Galperin, founding director of the Community Information Cooperative, explains the concept of an Info District. He talks with It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell about how local news initiatives, funded by taxpayer dollars, can help change the future for municipalities across the country.

Better News: Nonprofit newsrooms turn rivalry into revenue stream

Better News: Newsroom partnership benefits Charlotte’s Latino community

Ju-Don Marshall of WFAE and Hilda Gurdian of La Noticia

WFAE, the public radio station serving the Charlotte, North Carolina region, has been around for nearly 40 years. In that time, the area has seen a dramatic increase in its Latino population.

Ju-Don Marshall, WFAE’s chief content officer and executive vice president, recently wrote a report for the Better News Initiative on how the radio station changed its approach to better engage the region’s Latino population. This included an equitable partnership with La Noticia, a Spanish-language newspaper serving North Carolina, and a joint Report for America reporter.

On this episode of Better News, Marshall and Hilda Gurdian, publisher of La Noticia, tell host Michael O’Connell how they made this partnership a success not only for their newsrooms but the communities they serve.

Better News: Amplifier highlights Charlotte through its diverse music scene

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