Podcast Archives – It's All Journalism

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

For any website, podcast, print or other outlet that claims to have a difficult time finding women to talk knowledgeably and expertly about sports, Lindsay Gibbs has some advice: Try harder.

The former writer for Think Progress is the founder of the Power Plays newsletter and co-founder of the Burn It All Down podcast, which exclusively has had women and non-binary guests talking about sports for three years now.

“We haven’t had any men on the show so far,” she says. “We’ve never once said we have a ban on men, but we decided we wanted to be purposeful (in finding female and non-binary guests). When looking at topics, if we want an NFL expert to come in or an athlete, we look for women to come in and talk about it. We haven’t had a problem. Sometimes we have to dig a little bit deeper, but … I’m amazed how a little bit of awareness and effort (can) open your world.”

She was a sports reporter at Think Progress, but her task was to write about sports in relation to other broader topics — racism, sexism, homophobia, the environment, politics, etc.

“That’s what I did full time for four years,” she says. “Through it all I’ve gotten more and more into covering women’s sports as a whole, and that’s what I focus on now. Every single story the other reporters were covering … there’s a sports angle to every single topic. Sports doesn’t exist in its own bubble.”

Gibbs was never told to “stick to sports” and was encouraged to do just the opposite. “There was never any pretending that sports was separate from everything.”

Lifelong sports fan Lindsay Gibbs is the co-founder of the Burn It All Down podcast and founder of the Power Plays newsletter. She talks with It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell about the importance of including women and non-binary people in sports coverage and why sports is not separate from any other news topic.

#371 NLGJA continues to transform how newsrooms cover LGBTQ issues

416. The story of America’s most corrupt police squad

“I’m always at the front line of news! I gotta get there before everyone else!”

He says this jokingly, but there’s a kernel of truth to Baynard Woods’ statement.

In 2015, he covered the Freddie Gray “uprising” in Baltimore, following the death of a man in police custody, from the time of Gray’s death through the riots and the trial that followed.

But that ordeal, which gained national attention as the city burned, is only part of the story of Woods’ work covering police corruption, missteps and controversy in his home city.

Baynard Woods is co-author of “I Got A Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad

Woods has co-authored a book, with Brandon Soderberg, exploring a long-standing and incredibly corrupt unit within the Baltimore Police Department. An elite group of detectives and cops, the Gun Trace Task Force, adopted some mafia-like tactics to profit from both illegal guns and drugs in the city, sometimes stealing drugs from dealers in order to sell them to other dealers and dirty cops. The book, “I Got A Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad,” comes out July 21.

“This elite squad of Baltimore police officers were the kind who go around looking for trouble,” Woods says. “Originally, they were supposed to track guns back to people selling guns illegally.”

The team was ultimately found out and indicted in March 2017, just two years after the uprisings.

“What made this the most corrupt squad was they’d all been committing crimes separately (from each other) for years,” Woods says. The book starts in 2016 with the theft of $100,000 from someone’s house along with “two kilos from his house that a white bail bondsman was selling. … He’s stealing large amounts of cocaine and money from dealers. We follow through and one of the other guys is protecting a group of drug dealers he grew up with. … The dealers are selling to white kids in the suburbs and they’re overdosing. They get a tap on a phone and they hear (the dealer) calling the cop.”

The book is paced like a crime novel — because it is — without editorializing, Woods says. They didn’t need to dramatize anything, as this is one of those “truth is stranger than fiction” scenarios.

There’s a documentary of the same name in the works that was originally supposed to premiere this summer at the Maryland Film Festival but that’s been sidelined for the time being.

“We were simultaneously doing long video interviews while doing other reporting,” he says.” It was almost like a confessional.”

They also had the benefit of being in court for various trials from which they were eventually, later, able to piece together previous crimes in which this crime unit was implicated. “We can see all these police officers lying on the stand. Regularly. We were able to piece together scenes,” he says.

Friend of the podcast Baynard Woods talks to It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell about his new book, coming out next month, exploring an incredibly corrupt special unit within the Baltimore Police Department that led a cover crime spree, undetected, for years.

#165 – Street-level reporting of Baltimore protests

415. Coronavirus is changing how newsrooms work

Everything about our collective daily lives has changed in the past three months, since COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, but some of the ways we’ve adapted to meet this challenge were already in the works. Coronavirus might have just sped up the acceleration in evolving technology and work habits that were inevitable.

“COVID has changed the way everything is operating, and not temporarily,” says Mike Donoghue of The Alpha Group. “I think we’re seeing the speeding up of existing trends in consumer behavior. The remote workforce — you’d expect that, over the years, there are cost savings (to having employees work remotely instead of in an office). At this point, you have to wonder what percentage of people are going to go back to the same office environment they left.”

The same might be true for news organizations — many had already started to try and take relationships with their readers and viewers back from social media to create something more valuable to the communities they serve.

“Look at the last 10-15 years,” says The Alpha Group’s David Cohn. “The internet allowed people to form communities outside geography. Media became a national game. Coronavirus is very much a local story.”

Through Subtext, the text-based platform Cohn and Donoghue released earlier this year, people can directly ask reporters questions and get personalized answers about issues pertaining to their hometowns. It’s re-establishing a relationship between reporter and community in a way that has gotten lost, or at least watered down, in the large-scale social media practice.

David Cohn

Coronavirus has also spurred some newsrooms to adopt practices that take them back to a position of providing real community service, Cohn says. He points to the Boston Globe and the Dallas Morning News in particular: Both provided ways for people in need to virtually raise their hands in looking for assistance in the early days of quarantine, while also providing an opportunity for neighbors to step up and provide help, including simple things like dropping off groceries.

Some news outlets have also seen an increase in subscribers as people want news from their backyards and want access to things that matter directly to them, like finding out locations for COVID-19 testing.

But how will those relationships be sustained going forward, as things start to return to something like normal?

“It’s a real challenge, but for the time being, that’s going to be the thing news organizations are going to have to figure out,” Cohn says. “To leverage that relationship going forward until things like events or ad revenue come back in earnest. Every in-person event is on hold right now. In a world where those don’t come back soon, news organizations are going to have to figure out that service and make it a service.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks to David Cohn and Mike Donoghue of The Alpha Group about how COVID-19 has sped up technology-based evolutions that were already starting to take shape and how newsrooms will need to keep those changes coming when things return to “normal.”

394. Improve audience conversations and avoid trolls with Subtext

414. Will local ownership help Baltimore Sun survive?

Local ownership may be the key to keeping the venerable Baltimore Sun a viable part of its community.

Like many other newsrooms, The Sun is facing hard times. Two decades ago, with multiple international bureaus and a large presence just down the highway in Washington, D.C., the paper’s staff numbered in the hundreds. Now it’s down to about 80.

Matthew Gallagher is president of the Goldseker Foundation.

Just weeks after winning a Pulitzer Prize for local coverage for their work investigating a former mayor, many in the city are wondering who will own the paper and what it will mean for the Baltimore community.

“The Sun is vital to the civic life of Baltimore and the entire central Maryland region,” says Matt Gallagher of the Goldseker Foundation, an organization that is trying to assume ownership and responsibility for the Sun. “It really is part of the fabric of this great city. It’s an institution that’s incredibly important to save right now.”

Liz Bowie, a member of the Sun’s staff and of the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, says the stretched-thin staff is doing the best it can to continue reporting on the important matters, but admits it’s getting very difficult.

Looming overhead is the knowledge that Tribune Publishing, which has owned the paper for some time, sold one-third stake in The Baltimore Sun to Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund based in New York City. At the end of June, Alden Capital will take a controlling interest in Tribune Publishing.

Liz Bowie covers education for The Baltimore Sun.

“There have been past efforts mounted to try and convince the out-of-town ownership of The Sun to sell to civic-minded owners who are interested in converting The Sun to a nonprofit in the hopes of putting it on more stable footing going forward and position the Sun for more investment,” Gallagher says. “The Goldseker Foundation joined this effort a few years ago because our duty and responsibility is to invest in the people and institutions of Baltimore. We think there’s no institution more worthy of that type of investment right now than the Sun. … A wide cross-section of leaders from the philanthropic, civic and business community have stepped up and expressed interest in being capital partners. We hope to pull it off in the not-too-distant future.”

What would that mean to the Sun’s staff?

“Local owners have a much greater stake in making sure the paper is a vital institution,” Bowie says. “Out-of-town ownership, over the years, has shown that profits are more important than the journalism. As a journalist, I’ve seen, time and again, the company refusing to give raises to the majority of the staff. Anybody who is at the top of the scale hasn’t even been given a cost-of-living increase in seven years. Young reporters do get step increases for the first six years, but those have been hard for the company to justify. They want the union to get rid of those step increases so they can keep wages low. I also think there will be a much stronger sense of community if there’s local ownership in the paper.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks to reporter Liz Bowie of the Washington-Baltimore News Guild and Matt Gallagher of the Goldseker Foundation to discuss the community-driven efforts to purchase The Baltimore Sun and turn it into a nonprofit organization.

408. Google News Initiative wants to help local news

Better News: How To Forge New Audiences Of Color

The Democrat and Chronicle of Rochester New York was facing a big problem. Its primary audience was old, white and dwindling. The newspaper had to figure out how to reach a younger and more diverse audience — and fast.

C.J. Benjamin is the Emerging Audiences Editor at the Rochester (NY) Democrat-Chronicle. (Michael Jackson)

C.J. Benjamin, emerging audiences editor for the Democrat and Chronicle, discusses how the paper successfully developed a strategy to better engage a younger and more diverse audience. She wrote about the experience for American Press Institute‘s Better News Initiative. Read her 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.

413. Long history of bad police responses to protests

Before covering a protest, remember that no protest is a monolithic event, represented by just one group of people or one action.

More reporters are finding themselves on the streets, walking and talking with protesters as people are demonstrating against the use of force by police officers and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Based in Minneapolis, science reporter Maggie Koerth of FiveThirtyEight wanted to get a better idea of what was happening in her city, as protesters organized demonstrations just blocks from her home. She worked with a freelancer for the Washington Post the night the Third Precinct headquarters for the Minneapolis Police was burned by protesters.

Inspired, she went to Google Scholar to see what had been previously written and researched about police interactions with protesters.

“I ran across a paper talking about 50 years of research and how this had been studied for decades, and researchers kept coming to the conclusion that escalating force did not have the effect police thought it did and, in fact, escalated violence,” she says. “If they’ve known this for this long, and they keep finding the same things, why isn’t it changing?”

Koerth reached out to Jamiles Lartey and The Marshall Project wanting to take another look at police tactics when it comes to interacting with demonstrations.

“I have always recommended and advised for fellow reporters to reach out, especially when the news cycle is moving fast and you don’t have the ability to read everything that’s ever been done and to build every source from scratch,” he says. “We were thrilled that FiveThirtyEight reached out to us and that we were able to put this piece together in the speed that we were and with the degree of acuity we had.”

The piece, published June 1, explores why police essentially handle and respond to protests in the wrong way.

Among their advice for reporters who are being called upon to respond and report from these changing and often volatile situations: Don’t stop asking questions and don’t try to limit the scope of what’s going on.

“I think we, in the media, need to push back on the idea of a peaceful protest vs violent protests vs destruction,” Lartey says. “They’re just protests. There are moments within them and factions within them that are different from one moment to the next and from one person to the next. Their reason for being there can be diametrically opposed. Their tactics while they’re there, that they feel are appropriate to get their point across. They don’t have a purity test before they come to a protest. I don’t think defining a protest by the most dramatic 2 or 5 or 15 seconds, or the most outrageous action that a small minority of people make.”

Koerth added that she met some people who were on board with the police station burning down, but that wasn’t the only action taken that night. Four miles away, they saw “a Black youth organized protest that involved moving through the wealthiest and whitest neighborhoods and it picked up people as it went. You had this happening at the same time people were setting bonfires outside the police station. There’s not one unified thing happening at the same time.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks to science writer Maggie Koerth of FiveThirtyEight and Jamiles Lartey of the Marshall Project about their new collaborative piece on how police departments across the country are, historically and currently, wrong in their understanding and approach to protests.

#266 —Democracy in Crisis: How alt newspapers cover national news

412. Critical thinking is an essential skill for journalists

Journalists take their obligations seriously to try and discern the facts from the lies or misinformation, but that doesn’t mean only double or triple-checking sources and bits of data.

What journalists really need are critical thinking skills, says Jonathan Haber, author of Critical Thinking, the 50th title in Essential Knowledge Series from MIT Press.

Jonathan Haber is the author of *Critical Thinking* from MIT Press

“Given the time we’re living through, where you have competing information that can have life-or-death consequences, the need to think independently and critically, rather than believe what we’re told, is more crucial than ever,” Haber says.

Think of the world of science, with its structures and methods for taking a question and driving toward a confirmation or dismissal of a hypothesis. Science is “more of a culture, a culture of ways and ways of checking your own thinking and ways of thinking that diminishes the likelihood that you’ll believe something that’s false,” Haber says.

Journalists, like teachers and people in other skilled professions, have internalized some concepts and facets of critical thinking into their approach to work, but it’s not embraced or necessarily taught on a systematic level, Haber says.

“Facts are the lifeblood of journalism. They’re terrific, they’re important, I’m a big fan of fact checking sites, but facts are not enough,” he says. For example, if someone wrote an editorial arguing that social distancing measures put in place to slow the spread of COVID-19 were not effective because the death toll is still rising, the facts made in the editorial are true: people have been social distancing for a month or more, and the death toll has continued to increase.

“Those two premises are true facts. Fact checking would confirm that the facts are right,” he says. “But if you look at the conclusion, it’s clearly false. Why is it false? It’s false because the facts, the evidence doesn’t prove enough reason to believe the conclusions. Nobody promised us that social distancing would work immediately, we were told it would take time. The argument is invalid, it’s a weak argument.”

No efforts toward fact checking are wasted, Haber stresses, but that’s only one part of the process for truly thinking critically about an argument, a statement or a policy.

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks to Jonathan Haber, author of a new book on critical thinking from MIT Press, about how journalists can use critical thinking to improve their reporting.

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

411. Massive Science behind covering COVID-19

Covering the coronavirus pandemic has been difficult for just about all newsrooms for the past few months, trying to figure out just what it was and how it worked.

“There are fewer stories now about the fundamental basics of the public health,” says Allan Lasser, co-founder of Massive Science, a companythat works to help make science more accessible.

Allan Lasser is co-founder of Massive Science

“There were a few waves of stories early on, when social distancing was new to people, when it was uncertain what we should be doing or how the virus worked, what the symptoms were,” he says. “We’re now moving into a space that’s more looking ahead a little and trying to prepare ourselves for what the future’s going to be for the next 12 to 18 months until we have a vaccine and trying to preemptively answer some of the questions of when it might be safe to stop socializing, what the consequences might be if we get it wrong and trying to prepare for the next set of decisions we might have to make instead of catching up.”

As Massive Science raced to understand and explain COVID-19 to its audience while dealing with those uncertainties early in the year, it focused first on some of the basic science behind the heavy lab work that would prove so important, and confusing, in the early days of coronavirus coverage.

“We did a lot of news stories early on that explained what was happening, politically and economically,” he says. Some of that pertained to whether there was a sufficient supply of test kits, whether those kits could be contaminated and the amount of tracing that should be completed.

“A lot of articles in general publications made gestures about this stuff being based in science and public health but it didn’t go deep into the research says and why it’s the right course of action or how does a test kit work,” Lasser says. “We spent a lot of early efforts trying to flesh out the basics of public health and how the situation is being handled from the perspective of someone in a lab. We had a lot of questions ourselves and saw a lot of questions asked on social media. We deployed a living Q&A page where readers can submit questions to us and we pass them off to epidemiologists, public health experts and researchers to answer questions from a point of authority.”

Many times, however, the scientific questions were dealing with a brand new virus that didn’t have a long history of research behind it.

“Sometimes we don’t know, or the answer requires more research,” he says. “We’re not being shy about saying that.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks to Allan Lasser, co-founder of Massive Science, to discuss the challenges of making science more accessible and how to explain the coronavirus to a non-scientific audience.

#373 Media outlets worldwide push for greater climate change coverage

410. Reporting Latino news during the coronavirus

Now in its 35th year, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists has largely maintained its original mission, to help improve diversity in newsrooms and to advocate for the fair and accurate representation of Latinos in news.

“It’s about perspectives. It’s about your audience. It’s about the demographic, who we are as Latinos and other groups that continue to grow in population,” says Alberto Mendoza, the group’s executive director. “It’s really smart business to be inclusive and to include those voices and that perspective. We really come from so many different cultures and we’re all immigrants. Find the beauty and intersectionality between all the cultures and that’s who’s going to win. It’s going to win in viewership, it’s going to win in revenue and it’ll set the leadership role in how other news outlets should do it.”

Alberto Mendoza of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists

He admits that, unfortunately, the needle hasn’t moved too far in the past three and a half decades.

“The challenges are many, sadly. The reality is Latino journalists have to compete and be better to even get a shot,” Mendoza says. “We find that Hispanic and Latino journalists are often the only one in the newsroom. They end up getting all the stories about the Latino community or trying not to get those stories so they’re not pigeonholed. They don’t have allies or other partners in the newsroom that can help them pitch stories that are really about the community in a favorable way.”

Many journalists have shared stories about being hired for their different perspectives and experiences, only to feel pressure to assimilate once they join a newsroom. Or they’ll pitch a story about the Latino community in their town and the news director will urge them to take a different angle.

“If that journalist wants to talk about the community and how the Latino community is targeted by police and what happens on Saturday nights, they’ll be told to go interview the police department because the police department will say the Latino community is harassing them,” Mendoza says. “That’s when the journalist says that’s not what’s happening, this is what’s happening. That starts creating the conflict for the journalist who thought they’d be able to tell authentic stories about where they come from. They really have to sell it, to pitch it, and then something else happens and the story never makes the air.”

He notes that, as reporters around the world are learning how to cover the coronavirus epidemic while protecting themselves and their families from getting sick, the Latino community is facing other very personal challenges.

“A lot of Latinos are in service positions. They’re the ones still working in the field to get food to tables and the ones still packing things,” he says. “In many ways, we’re telling stories about our own community and our own friends and family. The story becomes very personal and very intimate.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell is joined this week by Alberto Mendoza, executive director of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, to discuss the challenges faced by the Latino community and especially in light of coronavirus.

409. How to cover the coronavirus pandemic

The coronavirus pandemic may be easier for medical and science reporters to cover, but that doesn’t mean general assignment reporters are without support.

Ivan Oransky, vice president for editorial at Medscape and president at the Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ), says his organization is prepared to offer advice, help finding sources and guidance on covering the biggest story of our lifetimes.

“At a high level, the first thing I’d encourage them to do is think about that story with the same amount of skepticism they would a story about politics or a company making an announcement,” he says. “Trust but verify. You should fact-check them. It will start you on the path of being able to make use of resources.”

Oransky says many people who are health reporters most of the year will often find themselves covering politics during primary season or high-profile elections, underscoring that needing help or being out of their comfort zone happens to all reporters at some time or another.

AHCJ is offering a six-month membership to give journalists access to resources they need to cover the pandemic, including people who can help provide context on policy, help decode research work and even act as a source for reporting.

“It’s almost like you’re having colleagues from around the country virtually sitting with you,” he says.

He also encourages reporters to take a step back from time to time and put things in perspective. If they’ve got the time to take a longer view on a story, it might help provide a stronger story if they can explain a piece of policy or community change in the context of what came before and why it matters.

“That’s what happens with science,” Oransky says. “Each paper might tell you a little bit, but you don’t get the whole picture. Are you looking at the whole canvas or just a tiny square? I think that’s challenging on the day-to-day. … I’m very comfortable with and understand the need for volume, but that means you’re getting an unsatisfying view of what’s happening. At the beginning, any story from the front lines was fascinating and important. But a lot of them sound the same.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell is joined this week by Ivan Oransky of the Association of Health Care Journalists to discuss resources and tools available to reporters who find themselves covering the coronavirus pandemic without any specialized training in medical or health reporting.

403. Data journalism in the age of coronavirus

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