384. Memes, manifestos and 4chan — making sense of a toxic online culture

Dale Beran first heard about 4chan around 2005, when he began seeing referrals from the website to a first-generation web comic he was working on. Later, he encountered some of the people behind 4chan at the Otakon anime convention in his hometown of Baltimore.

“Back then, they were talking about stuff like ‘memes’ and “trolling collectives,” stuff that by 2016 we all know leaked down into popular culture. But then, it was just confined to this weird little anime subgroup.” said Beran, a writer and artist whose work has appeared in publications ranging from Quartz to HuffPost to The Daily Dot.

From its humble roots as an anime fan site, 4chan would go on to spawn Anonymous, GamerGate and the online alt-right movement that helped to elect Donald Trump.

To try to make sense of it all, Beran tracked 4chan’s evolution over the years and penned the 2017 article for Medium — 4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump. In his new book, It Came from Something Awful — How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office, he examines the toxic online culture that came out of 4chan and how it’s impacted the real world.

“The book came out of a sense of necessity where I’d written the article and everyone was like, ‘Where’s the book?'” he said, laughing. “That’s really what happened. They were like, ‘Tell us more.'”

It’s All Journalism producer Michael O’Connell interviews writer and artist Dale Beran about his new book, It Came from Something Awful — How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office. Beran tries to explain the toxic online culture that sprang out of a website created for fans of Japanese animation and how it’s impacted the real world, including the 2016 presidential election.

#375 What does it take to cover hate?

#383 Public good vs private enterprise: sustainability in local news

Should readers pay for local news as a private enterprise or should local news be subsidized with government funding? News sustainability experts pondered this question Monday during a policy discussion at Gallup World Headquarters in Washington, D.C.

The event was timed to coincide with the release of a new report from Gallup and the Knight Foundation about the importance of local news and Americans’ willingness to support it.

It’s All Journalism producer Michael O’Connell and Penny Muse Abernathy of the University of North Carolina

Penny Muse Abernathy, the Knight chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at the University of North Carolina, moderated the panel, which consisted of Howard Husock, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute; Chris Lewis, president and CEO of Public Knowledge; and Danielle Coffey, senior vice president and general counsel for the News Media Alliance.

The report, which is based on a series of panel surveys with 1,300 respondents each, found that 8 in 10 people believe that everyone should have access to local news, even if they don’t pay for it.

The survey also revealed that more Americans trust local news over national news — 45 percent compared to 31 percent.

When the data is viewed through a political lenses, though, trust in local news appears to be vulnerable to partisan bias. Of Republicans who took the survey, only 34 percent said they trusted local news organizations compared to 57 percent of Democrats. While an almost identical number of Democrats (56 percent) said they trusted national news organizations, only 9 percent of Republicans said they did.

Penny Muse Abernathy, author of Saving Community Journalism: The Path to Profitability and The Expanding News Desert, sat down with It’s All Journalism producer Michael O’Connell to discuss Public Good or Private Enterprise? A Policy Discussion on the Future of Local News. The Nov. 18 discussion coincided with the release of a new report by Gallup and the Knight Foundation looking at the importance of local news to our democracy and the public’s willingness to support it.

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

#382 Diverse newsrooms can act as fact-checking resources

It’s not all high-profile meetings and running through airports for reporters who work internationally.

They need on-the-ground help to find a place to stay, a reliable translator if they don’t speak the language fluently, maybe even a driver to help get to and from their interviews safely.

Hostwriter is designed to help reporters that aren’t backed by a major mainstream media organization find all of those resources, says Tina Lee, who runs the organization’s ambassador program.

The idea is that if a reporter taps into Hostwriter’s resources, he or she will be willing to provide the same assistance to an international reporter in their own town should the need arise.

It’s not always easy for a reporter to gain access to on-the-ground information, due to cultural differences, difficulties in passing through borders and other challenges that might not be obvious to some.

But, as Hostwriter is exploring in its new book, Unbias the News: Why diversity matters in journalism, international journalism and why having a diverse newsroom can help ensure not only better, more widespread coverage, but can identify bad reporting practices.

“Sometimes you don’t see something because it’s not in your background,” Lee says.

For example, one of the book’s authors is of Afghan-Austrian descent and writes about being a war correspondent in Afghanistan. He was concerned when he read another reporter’s account of an in-home interview conducted with a teenage girl.

“He knew it was impossible for someone to get this conversation,” due to differences in culture and religious practices that would not have permitted a family to leave their teenage daughter with a man not related to them. “That’s (a story) an editor might like. If they had someone on the team (familiar with the culture), it might raise questions. Someone might be persuasive and have great access, but someone might also be making this up.”

It’s not limited to international reporting, she stresses.

“Think about the way issues that primarily affect poor people are covered,” she says. “Or the way that issues that primarily affect sex workers are covered. Often when sex workers are murdered, it’s not even in the newspaper. If a non-sex-worker woman gets killed, it would be in the crime section. Public transportation issues don’t get covered in the same way because maybe journalists don’t use public transportation. It pays to have (a wide variety of) people on your team because it affects your community. It’s a matter of trust.”

Producer Michael O’Connell is joined by Tina Lee, head of the ambassador program for Hostwriter and editor-in-chief of a new book, Unbias the News: Why diversity matters in journalism. This week, they discuss the book and why diverse newsrooms can poke holes in too-good-to-be-true reporting and how hiring people from a variety of backgrounds provides better and deeper coverage.

#358 How to cover diversity, political division in a divided America

#381 Journalism, anxiety and video therapy

It’s not exactly a chicken-and-egg question, but it’s one Anna Mortimer has thought about quite a bit.

Does working in journalism cause anxiety, or do people who have higher-than-average levels of anxiety find themselves more attracted to high-stress jobs like journalism?

For Mortimer, whose father was a war correspondent killed when she was 19 at the end of the war in El Salvador, she thinks it’s the latter.

“Journalism is probably secondary,” says Mortimer, who has changed careers and gone into psychotherapy. “I probably have a high anxiety that makes me very aware of how other people are thinking and feeling. That makes you a good journalist but it also makes you a good psychotherapist.”

She thinks people who have similar tendencies are attracted to jobs like journalism, where a lot of drive is required, as is a level of comfort working in high-stress environments. “If you go into one of these professions that consumes your whole life, if you’re only as good as the last word you wrote, you’re in trouble,” she says. “People in the field are already on the run from unwanted feelings back home. I think you’re in trouble before you go into the profession. There’s a sort of hyper vigilance that anxious children might have that makes you a great journalist or air traffic controller, but it doesn’t help you sleep at night or have a more fulfilling life.”

But Mortimer wants to try and right that ship, or at least provide some respite.

After starting a small remote therapy practice in which she meets with her patience via web video, she launched The Mind Field, a platform that connects international development workers, journalists and similar professionals with therapists. Her patients are from anywhere in the world where there’s a WiFi connection, but she does get a lot of journalists and aid workers in far-flung locales.

“I think the reason video therapy can be a good thing — I think it’s second best. If you live in one place and can go see a therapist near you, the face-to-face experience is important,” she says. “Video therapy offers you therapy in your hotel room, your tent, wherever there’s WiFi. I see people who go out to refugee camps and speak to me on their phones. It’s so adaptable.”

Mortimer also cautions against pursuing happiness, especially among those who live with depression. “I’m anti-positive thinking because of course if you’re depressed you’re not thinking positively. It’s absurdly simplistic. I think people get very trapped in it and then feel they’ve failed.”

Producer Michael O’Connell is joined by Anna Mortimer, a journalist-turned-psychotherapist and one of the creators of The Mind Field, a service that provides video therapy sessions for international development workers, journalists and similar professionals.

#380 Lacuna Voices will be home to stories that deserve an audience

As both a staff writer and a freelancer, Punteha van Terheyden has been sharing “true life” stories of real people for many years.

But last summer, she had a week where incredible stories she pitched to newspapers and magazines in the UK weren’t being picked up.

“They weren’t landing like they normally do,” she says. “The reason for the no’s didn’t feel right for me.”

One of the stories she believed was worthy of publication was about a man who was in the process of divorcing but found himself out of his family’s home, feeling alienated and like his children were turning against him.

Try as she might, she couldn’t find an outlet willing the story. She had a theory as to why this was happening: In the UK, readers seem more interested in hearing from a woman’s point of view when it comes to emotional stories, rather than men.

“In my experience in the British media, women’s stories are preferred,” van Terheyden says. “I’d get sent out daily on a door knock, when a story had just broken, and they’d always say, ‘get the mom, get the sister, get the daughter.’ The only time they asked for the man was if the woman was dead.”

Now she’s preparing to launch a new platform, Lacuna Voices, that will be a home to stories that deserve readers’ attention.

“As a platform, I want it to be a collection of voices to fill the gap,” she says. “All these people who have amazing stories to tell, that are worth hearing about.” Topics are open but will likely include mental and physical health challenges, parenting issues, lifestyle issues.

One of the issues van Terheyden hopes to focus on is endometriosis, something that one in 10 women live with, but do so silently and without their stories told in the media.

“It’s not sexy enough to get into newspapers,” she says. “So many women are suffering from this, they want to talk about it, they want to read about it.”

She’s also going to use the platform to address something that’s bothered her in her freelance career: Writers who submit stories will be paid when the story is completed, without having to wait for its publication.

Producer Michael O’Connell is joined by Punteha van Terheyden, founder of a new platform that she hopes will help fill the gap of great stories that don’t find homes in mainstream media outlets. Lacuna Voices is set to launch in January.

#379 New book reveals the Tools for Podcasting

When you started your career being compared to Mary Tyler Moore in Minneapolis, it’s pretty much guaranteed your future will be promising and feature more than a few twists and turns.

For 30 years, Jill Olmsted has taught journalism, but she started as a reporter with a longstanding love of local news. After several stops along the way, it came time to either “chase the next bigger market” or make a change.

Now, as a professor at American University, she’s dealing with undergrad and grad students who are either just starting out in the industry or who are making a career change.

These are students who are so heavily connected to technology and smartphones they have a hard time grasping the importance of having in-person, eye-to-eye interviews with sources, she says.

“The best way to interview is to look someone in the eyes, be able to read their body signals and interact with them in a real way,” she says. “A lot of students are uncomfortable with that.”

Students are also struggling with paying for textbooks, so when she decided to write a book, Olmsted decided it would be free.

Her new book, Tools for Podcasting, builds on her career and experiences while also diving into how podcasts work and warns of the lack of diversity in both the voices found in podcasts and the photos used to promote them.

“Originally, I was going to do just a chapter in a book about audio storytelling,” she says. “Then I started to do some research and found out all these fascinating things.”

Olmsted was inspired at the Sound Education conference at Harvard when she met literary professors who knew nothing about audio production but were going outside their comfort zone to create and produce podcasts.

The book includes “some interactive audio and video tutorials, exercises. I paid a good deal of attention to diversity in pictures, for one thing,” she says. “There are free resources out there for photographs, but a lot of time I was looking hard to find faces of color. There’s a great need for that. Overwhelmingly, the pictures were white, and white males. … Hopefully, whether you’re a journalist who wants to start doing a podcast or an anthropologist who wants to tell a story, this resource can tell you how to create a podcast of your own. For free.”

Producer Michael O’Connell is joined this week by American University professor Jill Olmsted to discuss her new book, Tools for Podcasting, the importance in working for diversity in all aspects of podcasting and reporting, and her early career comparison to Mary Tyler Moore.

#378 Podcast shares stories of DC’s music scene

Sean Gotkin remembers the last time the DC music scene was as vibrant, connected and supportive as it is now.

He grew up listening to bands like Fugazi and seeing Rollins Band play at the 9:30 Club downtown. He remembers when musicians and fans alike felt the electricity in the air when the lights went down and the sound came up.

Now he’s running the board at the Black Cat, a gig he’s had since Iota, a club in nearby Arlington, Virginia, closed a few years ago.

But like most musicians, that’s not the only trick in his gig bag.

Gotkin recently launched his second podcast, “Sounds Like DC.” The first podcast, Audiobar, had a 12-episode run where bands would play a few songs in his home studio then chat with him for about 45 minutes.

“Sounds Like DC” is a similar-but-related concept: “I was thinking about the fact that I work with musicians who are all my friends, but I never get the chance to talk with them. How cool would it be, with the equipment I have and the friends I have to sit down and have philosophical conversations about life?” Gotkin says.

He tries not to prepare too much for each conversation, preferring instead to let the conversation flow. He wants the listener to feel like they’re sitting in on a chat between two friends.

“We go from anything about upbringing, early influences in art or music, to what’s the meaning of life, what would you do if you were president for a day,” he says. “I always get the impression that we don’t talk on a deeper level like we used to. But that’s how you get to know about another person.”

Now his podcast bridges the gap he felt in some of the few music podcasts he’s listened to: He brings musicians on to talk about their lives and also the DC music scene.

“For the first time in almost 20-odd years, there’s a collective of musicians that are all wonderfully diverse in what they play,” he says. “Everyone knows each other and they all try to help each other. It hasn’t been like that since the early ‘90s. I was lucky enough to grow up in a time when DC was blowing up. I was working at the Bayou (in Georgetown) at 19 and it was great.”

He’s also been able to fulfill an early goal for his podcast, creating episodes in batches and then bringing all six of his first guests together for a live podcast taping.

“If I can have the six people on the same stage, with the audience talking to them, then we can talk about the stuff that matters,” he says. “We can try to make a change for the better.”

Sean Gotkin, the sound department manager at the Black Cat and host of the biweekly podcast Sounds Like DC, joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss the importance of real conversations between friends and how DC’s music scene is as rich and diverse as it’s ever been.

Better News: Amplifier highlights Charlotte through its diverse music scene

#377 Get rid of your ego and be an empathetic journalist

Reporters know well the frustration of going out to report a story, with a clear idea in mind of what’s going on, only to find their interviews don’t support their concept.

The same happens in newsrooms, when leaders determine in advance what their audiences will want.

A different, and perhaps better, approach, is a form of empathetic journalism that puts the audience, or the interviewee, first.

“It’s about really listening and trying to see audiences for who they are, not who we think they are, and letting them direct the coverage a little bit more than we ever have before,” says P. Kim Bui, director of audience innovation for The Arizona Republic. “We used to do pedestal journalism — we know best, let us tell you what the news is. Empathetic journalism takes the other tack: I don’t know about this, please tell me more, we want to hear from you, I want to learn from you, as a reporter, as I do this. It takes the ego out of journalists a little bit.”

Empathetic journalism also involves a deeper level of listening and trying to hear an interviewee’s story not just on the surface, but to try and better understand that person in a particular moment of their life.

“If you’re writing a story about a drug addict who killed two people, try to understand the motivation behind that person, what drove them there, to see them as human, as a character, as a person, and trying to relay that to the audience,” she says. “I think we can sometimes get lost in trying to tell the story we want to tell. Every reporter does that.”

The same goes for newsrooms and which stories get covered. As organizations try to figure out how to cover more with smaller staffs, it’s easy — and common — to go with what’s been done before.

In the process of trying to find their way forward, “we’ve kind of forgotten about the audience, and that we’re not typical consumers of news. You’ll get journalists saying ‘the audience doesn’t want this.’ How do you know? When’s the last time you talked to a regular human? Being able to tell stories that are useful, empathetic and newsworthy in a quick manner on multiple platforms is a challenge right now,” she says.

P. Kim Bui, director of audience innovation for The Arizona Republic, joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss empathetic journalism and why listening to “real humans” can help newsrooms better serve their readers, viewers and listeners.

#359 Reporter uses pop-up newsrooms to amplify Philly’s unheard voices

Better News: Post & Courier uncovers new revenue with mini-publisher model

The Post & Courier of Charleston, South Carolina was in dire straights. Its traditional revenue streams — print advertising and circulation — were in decline and the newspaper needed to find a way to reverse that trend — and fast.

The Post & Courier‘s solution, according to Executive Editor Mitch Pugh, was to take a mini-publisher approach, which mobilized the editorial and sales teams into creating new content products in areas like food, politics and real estate. Over two years, the initiative generated almost $900,000 in new product revenue and increased digital subscriptions by 250 percent.

In April, Pugh wrote a report for the American Press Institute‘s Better News Initiative to share some of the lessons The Post & Courier‘s staff learned by adopting its mini-publisher model. Read the full report here.

Mitch Pugh, right, the executive editor of *The News & Courier*, speaks at a Pints & Politics event, which grew out of the newspaper’s politics mini-publisher group. He’s joined by, from left, Political Reporter Caitlin Byrd, former congressman and governor of South Carolina Mark Sanford and Political Reporter Schuyler Kropf.

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.

#376 Citizen journalists help CitizenDetroit document public meetings

As newsrooms continue to shrink, communities are losing valuable information when civic boards meet and no one’s there to explain what happened.

Documenters, an organization that started in Chicago a few years ago and has branched out to Detroit, wants to change that, by training and hiring interested and curious citizens and dispatching them to attend public meetings, take notes, and file their observations.

“We’re very intentional about being accurate about facts and trying to get Detroit to be the most civically engaged in nation,” says Vassilis Jacobs, the senior policy analyst at CitizenDetroit and a Documenters manager.

His team is working closely with WDET, Detroit’s NPR station, to expand Documenters deeper into Detroit. Eleanore Catolico, a civic reporter at the radio station, came to Documenters while in Chicago in 2015. She picked up where she left off, taking extensive notes in Detroit’s charter school board meetings and relaying that information to Documenters’ online portal.

“I’ve learned a lot about the civic reporter role,” she says. “It marries the two focal points of the program in an interesting way. We’re training journalists to provide more equitable coverage in the city but also giving people the opportunity to learn skills and attend meetings and get paid for it and learn the importance of city government.”

The notes taken by Documenters are uploaded onto a website and shared for story idea leads and inspiration. Catolico says she sometimes uses information obtained through a Documenter’s notes, building it up with details and insight that would not have been attainable otherwise.

“The program is really about awakening democratic involvement of people here in the city of Detroit, learning about these boards and commissions, and getting the information inside these boards and commissions and authorities out,” Jacobs says. “Getting nuggets of information out, like water shutoffs in the city and the rate that’s happening … or whether boys can wear shorts in Detroit public schools.”

Without fully staffed newsrooms to make those calls and attend those meetings on a consistent basis, people are losing access to vital information they need to live their lives. The Documenters help bridge the gap, giving journalists information on civic meetings while helping people learn how to take good notes and earn money in the process.

Catolico says notes provided from Documenters has helped inform her reporting, especially when she needs to cover a topic she with which she’s not familiar.

“When I’ve talked to other reporters, they’ve been impressed by how easy it is to use the site,” she says. “It fills a need for them.”

Producer Michael O’Connell is joined by WDET civic reporter Eleanore Catolico and Vassilis Jacobs, senior policy analyst at CitizenDetroit and a Documenters manager, to discuss their efforts to train people to take detailed notes at civic meetings to help keep journalists informed.

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