Better News: Nonprofit newsrooms turn rivalry into revenue stream

Erica Perel and Chrissy Beck

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

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

The Better News podcast is a partnership between It’s All Journalism and the American Press Institute to a) showcase innovative/experimental ideas that emerge from the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative and b) share replicable strategies and tactics that benefit the news industry as a whole. Sign up for the Better News newsletter to receive news about the latest resources, case studies, and insights. For more news about the It’s All Journalism podcast and future episodes of Better News, sign up for the weekly IAJ newsletter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#234 – DIY approach to data scraping bolsters crime coverage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

454. Solutions Journalism tackles community problems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

434. Put community at the center of your journalism

453. Making sure Wikipedia shows that Women Do News

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

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

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

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

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

Jareen Imam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Better News: Measure the impact of local journalism on your community

452. Journalism charter school inspires DC’s young writers

At the age of 11, Marco Clark was misdiagnosed by a teacher as having some educational challenges. At the age of 11, Marco Clark was misdiagnosed by a teache

This led to him graduating high school in five years instead of four, with a 1.6 grade point average and scoring 480 on the SATs. But he didn’t give up.

“In college, I realized I had a challenge in reading comprehension and part of that was that I lived out the label given to me at 11-years old around the ability to comprehend appropriately based on a misdiagnosis on an assessment,” he says. These miscues and systemic failings inspired him to double down and work harder to become an educator, working as a teacher, dean, assistant principal and then principal.

Dr. Marco Clark is the CEO and founder of the Richard Wright Public Charter School for Journalism and Media Arts in Washington, D.C.,

But at every turn, he found that students didn’t have enough of a voice in their own education to really get what they needed out of schools.

Now he’s the founder and CEO of the Richard Wright Public Charter School for Journalism and Media Arts in Washington, D.C., a school established to help students learn how to gain the skills they need to be good writers and producers and to pursue careers in journalism.

“I decided to open a school in some of the poorest areas of the District, in Wards 7 and 8, recognizing that these students would have an issue with reading and writing and math,” Clark says. “I figured if we came up with a thematic base that would say we can focus on journalism, which, in turn, our hope would be, if you improve their reading skills, their writing would improve. They would develop a voice and begin to uplift people one person at a time.”

The school is named after Richard Wright, “a great writer and advocate for his community,” Clark says. “Now you have the school and it encompasses the name of a person who fought for the same exact thing I do.”

Charter schools are public schools that students can apply to attend, without restrictions or requirements based on grades, abilities or where they live. Students apply to attend and, if there’s a seat for them, they’re allowed to enroll.

“Whether bright or broken or behavioral issues, we serve them and we do it well,” he says. Charter schools also have more accountability than public schools, in that while they have autonomous control over the students’ curriculum, a failing charter school will be closed down while failing traditional schools will remain open.

The curriculum at the Richard Wright Charter School focuses on writing and photojournalism, in addition to production and behind-the-scenes technology.

“We have kids now working on podcasts,” Clark says. “We have a radio station where we’re putting the communications out there. As they walk away, they will have a wealth of this information and knowledge that will hopefully navigate them to a career in journalism and mass communications.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks with Dr. Marco Clark, founder and CEO of the Richard Wright Public Charter School for Journalism and Media Arts in Washington, D.C. He explains how educational issues in his own childhood made him passionate about helping students have more of a voice in their own education and why charter schools are held more accountable in exchange for more autonomy.

421. Teach journalism to expand a kid’s worldview

451. Axios newsletter tackles local news in Tampa Bay

Selene San Felice might only be a few years into her career, but she has learned and seen quite a bit. One of the things she’s learned is that a newsletter is a great way for reporters to connect with and cover a community.

A native of Maryland, San Felice went to college in Tampa Bay and, as life would have it, she’s now working from her Maryland home for a new Axios newsletter based in Tampa Bay with her mentor, Ben Montgomery.

In the interim, she spent 3 1/2 years at the Capital Gazette, including the terrible day when her editor and four other colleagues were killed back in 2018.

Selene San Felice recently started a new job working on Axios’ Tampa Bay newsletter.

“I started at the Capital as a general assignment reporter. I was a night shift person, which meant I ended at 9 p.m. I covered late meetings, I’d cover a vigil every now and then. But mostly I was doing a lot of features,” she says. “They’d have you do human interest features and I loved doing that. I fell in love with doing features.”

The horrible tragedy at the Capital Gazette and the looming sale to a hedge fund (which has since changed course) also underscored for San Felice the importance and power of local newspapers.

“I think that, especially working at a place like Axios, a national outlet where we’re going into local news, we want to make sure we’re having friendly competition but also lifting up local outlets,” she says. “If the Times has a great feature, I can point people to that. I learned that lesson at the Capital when I walked out of the newsroom that day and thought this is it, we’re going to be shut down, and we kept putting the paper out the day after and every day after that.”

She’s also learning the benefit of newsletters, something she would’ve laughed off a year or two ago.

“I didn’t take newsletters seriously,” San Felice says. “I have learned that it is incredibly hard to do a newsletter. It needs to be something that’s not overwhelming and people need to get their news. I think it’s a really awesome thing when I open my Axios newsletter in the morning, I’m more inclined to open it up because I’m going to get what I need in three minutes. It’s fast and I can move on with my day.”

She and Montgomery have also decided to let their own personalities shine through, including little notes at the bottom of each newsletter telling readers what they’re reading, or watching, or listening to, or cooking.

“You get to know us as journalists and people,” San Felice says. “I think that’s part of what the news is all about. It’s about having that good beat reporter you know you can depend on. The news should also be fun, as hard and difficult and overwhelming as it is, if you like us, you should be able to get to know us as well.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks with Selene San Felice, a new reporter with Axios in Tampa Bay. She discusses her newfound respect for newsletters, the importance of local news and why her new outlet will help lift up what others might consider the competition.

427. Crime reporting: Covering violence and trauma

450. Gulf States Newsroom launches to share regional stories nationally

Priska Neely is overseeing and managing a new journalism collaborative startup, NPR’s Gulf States Newsroom, to help public media stations in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi share regionally important stories on healthcare, criminal justice and issues of wealth and poverty.

In some ways, her reporting and this new initiative are deeply linked to the work she’s been doing most of her life.

While at KPPC in LA, Neely covered issues pertaining to children between the ages of birth and 5. “I did a lot of stories about curriculum and child care issues in LA and California,” she says. “The story that took over my life was about Black infant mortality. I heard that Black babies are twice as likely to die as white babies in the first year of their life. As a Black woman, I was shocked. That was the first time hearing that.”

It was a personal story and statistic for her: “My sister lost two babies that were born premature. My other sister had my nephew premature. They didn’t know that statistic. They didn’t know their own personal statistics were wrapped up in that trend of racism, of being a Black woman in America and how that plays out in your own health outcomes. That was one of my driving questions: Does the community that this impacts even realize they’re part of it?”

The first story out from Gulf States Newsroom, by Shalina Chatlani, the health care reporter based at WWNO in New Orleans, explores a different element of the same core problem of systemic racism and disparities in health care access.

NPR’s new station investigations team had some data about where vaccination sites were placed in major cities across the South and were exploring disparities around race.

“Her story looked at Baton Rouge, where there aren’t many medical facilities, pharmacies or grocery stores, places where the (COVID-19) vaccine is being distributed,” Neely says. “The data showed that three-quarters of sites people had access to were in the southern part of the city, in mostly white areas. She was able to go there and talk to leaders in the north part of the city about pre-existing issues and how this is life for them. They’re now seeing that inequity in the vaccine rollout.”

The story was broadcast by all three stations involved in the Gulf States Newsroom and the reporter was involved in an NPR roundtable with a reporter from another state.

“She’s going to have a version of the story that we did locally, regionally and on NPR nationally, too,” Neely says. “It’s fulfilling and checking all the boxes: we shared content in three states and issues from this region,” but it will also find a national audience, something Neely hopes to do on a regular basis with the new initiative.

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks with Priska Neely, managing editor of the new Gulf States Newsroom project from NPR. She talks about her career in journalism and the new initiative to help tell important stories from Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi across the region and the nation.

423. Covering Black communities with nuance and purpose

449. Making amends for failing to tell The Truth in Black and White

The Brush Creek flood in September 1977 destroyed a portion of Kansas City, killing 25 people and wrecking countless businesses, homes and causing other damage.

The Kansas City Star, at the time, focused on the destruction at the Country Club Plaza, a high-end shopping center, and the affluent neighborhoods near there.

Mará Rose Williams, a 22-year education reporter with the Kansas City Star and co-creator of the paper’s series, “The Truth in Black and White.”

There was little written at the time about the devastation to the Black neighborhoods nearby, where most of the flooding took place.

“Our reporters did not go into those communities and talk to those people about how the flood impacted their lives,” says Mará Rose Williams, who now serves as the paper’s education reporter. “People tend to gravitate toward where they are comfortable and what they know. When you have a newsroom or an industry where a diverse population is not represented, you are going to miss a complete perspective. That’s exactly what happened with the Kansas City Star.”

Williams is trying to fix that overlooked, misreported and misrepresented story, among others, by leading an initiative to go back through the Star’s coverage, historically, and find examples of other incidents in which the lives of Black Americans were overlooked, ignored or poorly judged.

Williams is the driving force behind the Star’s series “The Truth in Black and White.” It kicked off last year with an apology for the paper’s historic failure to cover racism and discrimination in the city and to go back and re-report events to try and correct old mistakes.

“We know we live in a society that, for decades and decades, has marginalized people of color. As a result, newspapers did the same. That’s just a fact. We know that,” she says. “I was interested in trying to find out exactly, pinpointing, where and what we did at the Star. I knew papers across the country had done this but I wanted to find out what we had done.”

She had the support of her editors upon explaining her idea of the series, which began with an apology. The apology was important, she says, because if a newspaper is truly sincere in trying to make up for the mistakes of the past, it has to acknowledge that mistakes were made and take ownership of them.

In re-investigating the flood, the Star tried to reach out to some people whose lives were upended. The Star also relied on the reporting of the Kansas City Call, the city’s Black-owned weekly paper, which covered the floods extensively at the time.

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell is joined by Mará Rose Williams, a 22-year education reporter with the Kansas City Star and co-creator of the paper’s series, “The Truth in Black and White.” The series began with an apology for the paper’s white-washing of history and failing to adequately cover the lives and losses of Black Americans and revisited some events to try and make things right.

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

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