Podcast Archives – Page 2 of 38 – It's All Journalism

#336 Data Viz Today follows audio path to visual subject

When was the last time you looked closely and attentively at a map and thought of it as an example of data visualization?

A love of maps and all the information they convey provided a new career for Alli Torban, a data visualization designer at the American Enterprise Institute and Data Viz Today.

“I came at data visualization how most people come at data visualization, which is in a very roundabout way,” Torban said. She has a degree in math and moved to the Northern Virginia area to pursue a career working fora government contractor but put her career on the back burner when she had her first child.

She stopped working entirely after her second child was bor but when she decided she wanted to rejoin the work force, Torban didn’t want to go back to what she was doing before.

“I kept coming back to my love of maps,” she said. “I didn’t feel all that fulfilled doing software testing. … I discovered, well, I like maps, and that’s data visualization. There’s a lot of layering of data on maps. I started getting into data journalism.”

But without any formal journalism or data visualization training, Torban had to find a way to learn what she needed to learn while raising her children.

Here she took another unconventional turn: Torban began reaching out to the creators of data visualization pieces she saw and enjoyed and asked them questions about how they developed their pieces.

“I’d contact the author and ask a few questions, like what data they used, how they cleaned it, what their creative process looked like.They would tell me the information,” she said. “I compile that information into a story so I can tell my audience, bring them through the process.”

But why not take a visual concept and relay it on a visual media, like YouTube?

“I have heard that a lot,” Torban laughed. “I love listening to podcasts. I don’t have a lot of time sitting in front of the computer. I’m constantly cleaning up, getting snacks, making dinner. There are lots of things you’re doing when you’re busy following around little people who need a lot of attention. Listening to podcasts were my outlet, so I’m really sticking to podcasts for selfish reasons.”

Alli Torban , a data visualization designer and host of the Data Viz Today podcast, joins producer Michael O’Connell to explain how her love of maps changed her career and why podcasts made more sense than YouTube for exploring a very visual concept.

#183 – Data journalism by the numbers

#335 It’s time to design newsrooms people want to work in

The modern newsroom is changing — not just in the digital space but in the real world as well. Newsrooms used to be bustling, cavernous and cluttered, great for putting out a daily paper, but not ideal for fostering collaboration and improving employee morale.

Dana Coester, a professor at the Reed College of Media at West Virginia University, learned a lot about modern newsroom design during the university’s makeover of its Innovation Center. The aim for that project was to design a space that reflected the way newsrooms were changing their work spaces. After some more research on the subject, she published a study for the American Press Institute about how to improve newsroom design.

Dana Coester

“I heard editors again, again talk about the things that they hated about their old newsrooms,” she said. “They would describe these as these crazy little hovels.”

Redesigning a newsroom isn’t just about making it look better. It’s more about realigning the space to fit and enhance the employees’ workflow.

“The industry as a whole has moved away from that sort of cubicle model anyway,” she said “But if you think about newsrooms, journalists aren’t often at their desks and because they are out reporting and the idea that you would have all of this real estate given over to row after row of mostly empty desks.”

Add on top of that the ongoing downsizing across the journalism industry and many newsrooms had become very dire places to work.

“That’s kind of a morale downer, when you see an acre of chairs, in a really big [space] like the New York Times newsroom,” Coester said. “And, when that space can be given over to all of these sort of flexible, movable spaces that people can come and go, use as needed, and you aggregate sort of in impromptu ways.”

For her study, Coester visited a number of publications, including Quartz and the Virginian-Pilot. She discovered newsrooms that had incorporated more open space, natural lighting and designated gathering spaces to promote a positive work environment and more collaboration.

“They’re all of these theories and innovation about how people approach objects and spaces when things have assigned sort of parameters, then people tend to only think of it in the context of the assigned parameters,” Coester said. “So when you have furniture that’s movable, when you have spaces that are not designated spaces. Now of course we had our sunlit studios and things that have to be specific to a particular activity. But the more you move away from having spaces being assigned spaces to a particular activity, the more it forces the people who are using them to use their imaginations and the space.”

On this week’s It’s All Journalism podcast, Producer Michael O’Connell talks to Dana Coester, a professor at the Reed College of Media at West Virginia University, who recently published a study for the American Press Institute about how some publications are redesigning their newsrooms to make them more collaborative and positive work spaces.

#334 The Correspondent wants to unbreak the news in the US

Most news outlets are driven by a need to break news, to be first on a story or to add some detail no one else has just yet.

The Correspondent, on the other hand, wants to introduce the United States to its model and philosophy of un-breaking the news.

A crowdfunded news site that relies solely on choose-what-you-pay contributions from its subscribers, The Correspondent launched in the Netherlands in 2013 after breaking world record and raising $1.7 million in 30 days.

Rob Wijnberg, co-founding editor of The Correspondent

“We’ve been growing steadily ever since, the fastest-growing ad-free journalism platform in Europe,” said Rob Wijnberg, a co-founding editor. “We wanted to start a daily antidote to the news grind.”

Now The Correspondent has more than 60,000 paying members and is looking to launch in the United States in 2019, if it can get the support it needs to start.

“The Correspondent will only be a reality if we reach our fundraising goal of $2.5 million by Dec. 14,” Wijnberg said. “If we don’t hit the goal, it won’t exist and the people who have contributed will get their money back. Once we hit our goal, we will build a team and we’ll launch in spring 2019.”

As of Nov. 28, The Correspondent has raised $1 million from nearly 15,000 people in 98 countries.

So how, exactly, is The Correspondent different?

It’s based on 10 founding principles, among them being mindful of supporters’ privacy, providing coverage that goes beyond standard headlines and re-think what it means to be “news.”

“It’s not going to be responding to current events you see everywhere,” he said.

Further, there will be wide and deep collaboration between journalists and members, something Wijnberg said is “integral. You see that in other media – Wikipedia is a famous example where readers work on articles, but you don’t see much of that in journalism yet.”

Another way The Correspondent is different: There’s a dedicated conversation editor “whose job is to get people to share expertise on topics we’re exploring. By actively inviting (readers and subscribers) to do this, the comment section we have is very different from what you’re used to on traditional sites.”

Rob Wijnberg, a co-founding editor of The Correspondent, explains to producer Michael O’Connell how a crowdfunded news outlet that cares more about diving deep than following the headlines is preparing to take on the United States after five years of success in Europe.

#323 — Can nonprofit newsrooms improve local coverage?

#333 Whose truth are journalists telling and why does it matter?

In the age of being accused of spreading “fake news” and being quick to defensiveness, Stephanie Lepp has a question.

Whose truth are journalists telling?

Stephanie Lepp, host of Reckonings

“We’re in this post-truth moment, journalists are grappling with accusations of fake news and being called the enemy of the people. Then there’s this question: How do we respond to this, how do we overcome this, how do we deal with this?” asked Lepp, an independent artist and host of the Reckonings podcast.

“In the mainstream media, there’s this knee-jerk reaction, pulling in the opposite direction,” she said. “’You’re accusing us of fake news, no, we stand for truth.’ But have journalists, have the mainstream media, really been telling everyone’s truth? Sure, we’ve been telling the truth, but who’s truth and how and for what purpose? Is the fact that we haven’t been telling everyone’s truth the reason we missed the (2016 presidential) election?”

One of her recent guests posited that truth, however it’s defined, is not enough.

“Truth should be a baseline,” she said. “All journalistic work should be true and fact-checked and there are still questions.”

Take the current administration, for example. Had the mainstream media set up camp in central Ohio during the 2016 campaign cycle, “there was nothing miss-able about Donald Trump’s rise to power” from that perspective, Lepp said. “But the national media isn’t in central Ohio. Had you asked a lot of people in a lot of places that the national media isn’t necessarily covering at all, it wouldn’t have been surprising. There’s a rising tide of white supremacy coming for our national politics. It didn’t have to be surprising.”

Journalists are dedicated to telling the truth, but whose? Stephanie Lepp, an independent artist and host of the Reckonings podcast, joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss the difference between telling the truth and telling a broader, varied truth and why one truth won’t cover the whole story.

#310 — Teaching journalists to trust each other

#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.