Podcast Archives - Page 2 of 34 - It's All Journalism

#301 — How about a nutrition label for news truthiness?

Imagine this: an unmissable notation on an article identifying all sources used within the story, naming all people involved in the creation process, clearly marking whether the article had a conservative or liberal bent and indicating to what degree the article is verifiably accurate.

That’s the kind of “radical transparency” Amy Webb of The Future Today Institute wants to make real.

“At my core, I’m an optimist. I do believe that we have the ability to create the futures we want. I believe I can do something to help create positive change,” she said. “If journalists can get their acts together and come up with a way to gain trust, then this is the time for our newsrooms to shine.”

Amy Webb is the founder of The Future Today Institute.

It’s an idea she’s been touting at Online News Association conferences for the past few years, building with each year as new ideas and technologies come to light. She first suggested ways and methods to verify journalists and articles at the 2015 conference; in 2016 she floated the idea of using blockchain as a way to make that happen.

“I think the key here is developing a spectrum so that we define, maybe not just news organizations but the credibility of the story itself,” she said. “There are ways to use machine learning, generative algorithms, lots of techniques that exist that would allow you to ask a machine to do a read-through of a story and, assuming the system hadn’t been hacked … it could get a grade at the end, 100 percent verified.”

Even Breitbart, the notorious website formerly run by Steve Bannon, publishes accurate and truthful content “occasionally.” It just might be content that goes directly against a reader’s politics. The same is true of MSNBC – “a lot of people with different political ideologies and complain that the content is inaccurate, but factually it is correct, it just butts up against your political leanings.”

Webb has been calling for a kind of nutrition facts label for articles for some time now. “Every article would have a transparent label: this is where the information came from, this is who touched the story, this is the truthiness, this is the verification,” she said. “It could be automated. The faster we can approach radical transparency within news and make that available to the public, the better off we’ll be and the harder it’ll be to yell fake news.”

The kicker? There’s also a possibility all the data collected from that kind of verification could be monetized. “There’s something called differential privacy, a way of anonymizing data attached. … In the process of creating transparency and data, you can learn a lot from all that data. Somebody might be willing to pay for the privilege of learning from the data, maybe a marketer or activist or a school teacher. As long as that was also transparent – the opposite of Facebook – there’s an opportunity to develop profit centers, possibly even profit sharing, that everyone in the news ecosystem could exploit in a good and meaningful way,” Webb said.

For this week’s milestone podcast, producer Michael O’Connell brings back Amy Webb from The Future Today Institute, to talk about her vision for tools that would help media outlets gain trust with “radical transparency” in the shape of a badge verifying the pedigree of an article.

Editor’s Note: Below is Amy Webb’s presentation at the 2017 Online News Association conference.

#300 — The who, what and where of podcasting

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell speaks during an April 5 panel sponsored by Humanities DC. Also on the panel are, from left, moderator Jill Olmsted of American University; Alicia Montgomery of NPR’s Morning Edition; and Mary Nichols of the FuseBox Radio Broadcast.

The District of Columbia’s rich landscape of podcasting was on display Thursday, April 5, as It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell joined Mary Nichols of the FuseBox Radio Broadcast and Alicia Montgomery of NPR’s Morning Edition and Code Switch, for a panel on podcasting. HumanitiesDC, which aims to enrich people’s lives through the humanities and grants, hosted he event at Busboys and Poets. Jill Olmsted, a broadcasting professor at American University, served as the panel’s moderator.

#299 — Can journalism survive in a post-truth world?

Discussions of journalism and the news of the day were always staples of Ed Madison’s life. His father was the first African-American to join the editorial staff of the Chicago Tribune after working as a reporter for that publication for many years.

In his new book, Madison, an assistant professor and media partnership coordinator at the University of Oregon, uses that perspective to take a critical glance of the state of journalism today and what went wrong – or what might still be working properly.

Ed Madison is an assistant professor at the University of Oregon.

The book, Reimagining journalism in a post-truth world: How late-night comedians, internet trolls, and savvy reporters are transforming news, is the result of two years’ work with Ben DeJarnette.

The original manuscript was due right around the time of the November 2016 presidential election.

They got a six-month extension.

“After that happened, it shifted how we all reimagined journalism at this point,” Madison said. “Some politicians don’t like the watchdog role journalism plays in society, but (the industry has) never been under attack on a daily basis as it has been in this administration currently. It was timely and, perhaps, fortuitous for this to come out now, but it’s a little bit of a different take than we had initially imagined.”

The public isn’t overly fond of journalists and the work they do, he says, citing the statistic that 32 percent of people say trust the media. Still, “when there’s a catastrophe or grave incident that happens, people tend to go to legacy media outlets that are tried and true — the New York Times, CNN, NPR. That continues to be the case.”

In discussions with his students, Madison said he’ll ask them why they repeatedly shop at a certain store, or why they frequent a particular restaurant. It comes down to reliability and consistency, the same reason people return to the same media outlets in times of big developments.

“I think that’s the same way we should look at news and information,” said Madison, who “doesn’t engage” with terms like fake news because it lends itself too easily to “ideological conversations about the legitimacy of mainstream media compared to other types of organizations.”

People turn to legacy media outlets they’ve learned to trust because “there are organizations that have built a track record and there are reasons for that. Their leaders are conscientious about protecting the integrity of what they do,” he said.

Ed Madison, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Oregon and author of a new book, Reimagining journalism in a post-truth world: How late-night comedians, internet trolls, and savvy reporters are transforming news, joins producer Michael O’Connell to explain why terms like “fake news” aren’t worth acknowledging and how writing cue cards for Mike Douglas made him a better producer.

#298 — Investigative journalism helps restore lives robbed by injustice

Melissa Segura admits that investigative journalism is not the first thing most people think of when they talk about BuzzFeed. But her work, especially her investigation into the corrupt practices of Chicago Police Detective Reynaldo Guevara, is changing that perception.

Segura’s background began in sports. Thanks to an older brother who would muscle his way to the remote after school and keep ESPN on the TV, she went to college with “an inordinate amount of sports knowledge” and an interest in narrative journalism.

Melissa Segura

One piece in particular, written by Sports Illustrated’s Gary Smith, told of a nationally watched high school basketball player who was accused of sexually assaulting a disabled woman in a New York City hallway.

“He was the best prospect in the country at the time,” she said. “He served his time, he did what he was supposed to. But when the time came for colleges to recruit him, there was a lot of backlash and he lost all his offers.” Any school that had considered offering him a scholarship or tryout faced criticism and scorn and the young player was left with nothing.

“It was an incredibly human and deep piece, which had me looking at other things he was doing and other things Sports Illustrated was doing,” Segura said. It also fed into her lifelong interest in the justice system.

When Sports Illustrated went through layoffs, she found a fellowship with BuzzFeed for investigative reporting. She’d just had a conversation with an attorney about the plea bargaining and justice system in the United States, including a case where a woman in Chicago denied killing two men she’d been charged with murdering and, after taking a plea deal, the woman was still facing the death penalty.

Earlier this year, Segura won a Polk Award for local reporting for coverage of Guevara, who had been using shady practices for decades, locking up innocent people for years on end for crimes they didn’t commit.

Melissa Segura, a Polk Award-winning journalist with BuzzFeed, joins Michael O’Connell to discuss her journey from unwitting sports nerd with an interest in writing deep, human stories to shining a bright light on a dirty Chicago detective in the name of righting several decades’ worth of wrongs.

#294 — Polk Awards honor gutsy investigative reporting

#297 — Learning, relearning and unlearning the magic of broadcast

Richard Davies, co-host of the How Do We Fix It? podcast, fell in love with radio and broadcasting at the ripe old age of nine.

“My dad bought a big Sony reel-to-reel tape recorder,” he recalled. “I started playing around with it. I have a recording of myself doing newscasts, making up stories about people doing various things.”

Journalist Richard Davies is the co-host of the How Do We Fix It? podcast.

Now, after a 30-year career in broadcast, Davies heads up a podcast production company, embracing the new frontier of audio recording.

His career in journalism started in newspapers, which kept him grounded and taught him the discipline that has served him well in his tenure, most of which was spent at ABC News.

Davies laments that journalism has become more of a business, with more care and attention to what drives ratings.

“Journalism has become less interested in issues in issues and more interested in clashes, controversy and celebrities,” he said. “You’re either thrilling people or shocking people or surprising people. I’m not saying all forms of broadcast journalism are like that, but I do think there’s a bias toward over-dramatization in journalism that is perhaps now more pronounced than ever with cable TV news being so prominent in the past 20 years.”

Davies values, more than anything, the power journalism has to stitch communities back together and sees podcasting as a logical continuation of radio’s magic.

“Radio sometimes is on in the background. Podcasts are rarely on in the background. They’re often consumed in headphones at a time when the listener is not distracted by other forms of media on your screen,” he says. Additionally, the voice or voices featured in the podcasts are more likely speaking directly into the listener’s ears, putting them in the listener’s head.

A podcast “demands something a little bit different,” he said. “Radio’s dealing with audio, and podcasting’s dealing with audio, but it’s different in some ways. It’s been that aspect of learning and unlearning that’s been fascinating to me.”

Richard Davies, a self-proclaimed news junkie who started on the path to a career in journalism at the ripe old age of 9, joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss his days as a broadcaster with ABC News, the stories that have stayed with him and why he’s enjoying the “Wild Wild West” feel of podcasts with the How Do We Fix It? podcast.

#243 – Solo video journalist emerges as model for most newsrooms

#296 — Cinematic video journalism shakes up old model of visual storytelling

The concept of video journalism is as old as the television broadcast, but it doesn’t need to be predictable or boring.

“It’s been through the ring,” says David Dunkley Gyimah, a video journalist who leads the Innovatory disLAB (UK) and is currently an Asper visiting professor of Journalism at the University of British Columbia.“Video journalism, as a label for whatever this thing is, has been around since the 1950s. It meant something else then. It surfaced again in the 1990s as a way of one person doing video … one person would grab a camera, go out, shoot, do the stand-up and sometimes come back and edit.”

David Dunkley Gyimah

The BBC itself adopted the one-person-band approach to video reporting in the early 2000s and newspapers soon followed, he said.

Reporters are still out there telling stories, finding and searching for the truth in their work, but Dunkley Dyimah compares it to the impressionist painters that came after realists.

“Impressionists came along and say ‘we’re going to do the truth, but this is our impression of it,’” he said. “That’s what happened. The idea of training people still within the (premise) of telling the truth, being honest, letting them tell their stories in a myriad of ways and styles changed. It became something akin to the package,” or the concise ways in which broadcast reporters produce and air their stories.

But therein lies a risk: Now there’s a generation or more of “marketeers and PR people” who can present information in visually the same style and cadence as a reporter’s package because they know and understand how this presentation works.

“The result of video journalism being absorbed into this mainstream idea of oh, it’s just TV journalism, it’s forced a number of people, including me, to look for new ways to define this thing,” he said.

They’re finding inspiration in cinematic elements – not of the big screen Hollywood variety, but of powerful, strong images as a way to grab viewers’ attention and bring the news in more meaningful ways.

Visual storyteller and cinematic journalism expert David Dunkley Gyimah joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss how video journalism has changed, and stayed the same, since its inception in the 1950s.

#290 — What’s it like to report from North Korea?

#295 — Putting sports second, athletes first

Sports fans love their teams. They love to quibble about which player should or shouldn’t have been traded; which general manager or coach deserves to stay or should be kicked out; what the future holds for a team that has identified with a city for generations.

Tim Graham has written about the highs and lows of the sports fans in Buffalo for the better part of 20 years as a writer for the Buffalo News, covering both the NFL’s Bills and the NHL’s Sabres through more valleys than peaks, the bankruptcy and sale of the NHL franchise and the death of an iconic owner that could have relocated the Bills to California or Canada.

Buffalo News Sports Writer Tim Graham. {Photo by Derek Gee / Buffalo News}

Buffalo fans are a passionate breed, as it could be argued are most fans in any city of any team, but Graham prefers to focus on the bigger pictures: What happens after the game is done and real life sets in.

“Once that game’s over, it really becomes a triviality,” said Graham, a writer who first joined the Buffalo News in 2000 and spent seven years there before going to Palm Beach, Florida, before a stint at ESPN before returning to New York’s second-largest city to cover the Sabres and, later, the Bills.

“When you talk about your team going bankrupt (as the Sabres did), or your owner being ushered into a federal court (Sabres again) or serious issues like CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy), the brain injuries going on in the NFL, the national anthem demonstrations, all of these thing matter on a much larger scale,” Graham says. “I really get into writing those stories because I know if you do it in a comprehensive way, it’s a story that will stand the test. You can look back on it and – my goal is to have written the definitive story on a subject instead of a game played in November. Nobody goes back to read those stories.”

Graham has profiled some legendary athletes: Bills great Darryl Talley; NHL goon turned soft-hearted good guy John Scott, even Bjorn Nittmo, a kicker who played just a handful of games but caught the attention of David Letterman.

Sports writing is less about the scores, wins and losses as it is about the lives the athletes lead off the field, the struggles they face and the risks they take in pursuit of their dreams and in order to live up to their potential, not just athletically but personally.

When it comes to CTE, the brain injury closely associated with football players who suffer multiple concussions, it resonates with readers because “the prospect of death is universal. We’re all afraid. … When you write about things like CTE, you’re able to humanize these people that wear helmets on Sunday afternoons. They wear these team colors and they go out and fight for your city’s honor and these are the guys we really root for and don’t think about it much more beyond that. I’m certain that’s why NFL rating have slipped … because of what we’re learning about brain injuries and football players.”

Tim Graham, an NFL writer for the Buffalo News for the better part of two decades, joins producer Michael O’Connell to talk about the highs and lows of covering a city whose teams are better known for losing than winning and why, in the big picture, the W/L column is secondary to everything off the playing field.

#215 – Learning from the best of the best in sports

#294 — Polk Awards honor gutsy investigative reporting

For the first time, three digital journalists and outlets have taken home major prizes with this year’s George Polk Awards.

Iona Craig of The Intercept won the Foreign Reporting Award for her work investigating a SEAL raid on a village in Yemen, hailed as a triumph by the Trump administration but rife with destruction and civilian casualties.

Melissa Segura of Buzzfeed won the Local Reporting Award for her investigation into the practices of a Chicago detective playing “fast and loose” with facts, locking innocent people away in prison for decades, people who Segura’s work helped free.

Ralph Engelman

Elle Reeve of VICE News won the National Television Reporting award for her astonishing and first-person reporting of the Charlottesville protest last summer that resulted in one woman’s death. Her work included one-on-one interviews with the leaders of the alt-right group that organized the event. (The work was also the subject of a previous episode of this podcast).

The Polk Awards were once referred to by a New York Times columnist as the “guts awards,” said Ralph Engelman, a senior professor of journalism at Long Island University Brooklyn and co-administrator of the awards.

The awards “recognize reporters who break important stories and are enterprising and sometimes take risks even getting the stories,” he said. “We live in a time when journalism is under attack, all the references to fake news, the changing finances that have hurt investigative reporting. But there is still important, great investigative work going on that has impact.”

He noted that one of the big prizes this year went to a team of reporters from different outlets, Jody Kantor and Mean Twohey of the New York Times and Ronan Farrow of The New Yorker for their explosive piece on Harvey Weinstein. They won the National Reporting Award for their efforts.

“The repercussions are incredible,” Engelman said of their work. “I think it is important to basically encourage the great tradition in investigative reporting. This kind of recognition is a message to newspaper publishers and editors as well as the American public about the great cause of investigative journalism because of the kind of impact we’re discussing.”

Ralph Engelman, a senior professor of journalism at Long Island University Brooklyn and co-administrator of the George Polk Awards, joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss this year’s award winners, including three first-time awards for digital outlets, and why newspapers need to reconsider the importance of investigative journalism.

#280 — Vice News Tonight and its different take on political news

#293 — Need new skills? ONA is here to help

It’s pretty obvious we at It’s All Journalism believe our industry is alive and changing, not shrinking or dissolving.

The Online News Association agrees and has started offering new community-level training programs to help reporters on the ground develop the new skills they need in an ever-changing world.

Meghan Murphy is the community manager for the Online News Association.

“Our executive director says journalism isn’t dead or dying. People in our community are excited for these tools,” said Meghan Murphy, ONA’s community manager.

By listening to on-the-ground volunteers and organizers, ONA has worked with five trainers to create curriculum to teach journalists new skills, ranging from backpack journalism – “what can you bring for mobile storytelling that will look professional and nice but not take a ton of time” – to newsletter design elements, digital journalism, how to tell one story on multiple platforms and tools for validating social media posts to determine what’s real when news breaks.

“This isn’t an industry where you start it, learn the skill, then perfect it over the course of a career,” Murphy said. “It’s constantly changing. That’s exciting for people in our community.”

ONA has sponsored and helped coordinate meetup groups around the country for a few years now. It’s an opportunity for journalists to come together, swap ideas and best practices without having to dedicate long hours or big chunks of money to improve their skills.

There are 25 events currently scheduled through June that will keep the five trainers busy. In the meantime, ONA offers some information on its website about the courses it offers and where to find meetup groups across the country in order to keep the conversations going.

It’s another way ONA supports and encourages journalists to interact and engage with their communities and better serve their readers, listeners and watchers.

“You’re starting to see the industry embracing journalism as service,” Murphy said. “We have this extremely powerful role, an important role in communities to make sure they’re informed and connected with each other.”

Meghan Murphy, the Online News Association’s community manager, joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss new training opportunities developed and offered by ONA to help journalists learn skills to keep up in the ever-changing industry.

#244 – Newsrooms need to build trust with their audiences

#292- Where do college students get their news?

It all started last August when I met Miranda Spivack, an independent journalist and the Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Professor of Journalism at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. She’d just participated in a panel on government transparency at the Association of Alternative Newsmedia’s annual conference in Washington, D. C.

It’s All Journalism Producer Michael O’Connell talks to a student during a live podcasting recording at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. (Photo courtesy of Miranda Spivack)

I invited Miranda to come on into the studio and record a podcast. We had a great conversation. In turn, she invited me to visit DePauw to talk to students about podcasting.

That’s how it is sometimes. One invitation leads to another.

So, on Monday morning, Feb. 5, I showed up at DePauw with my laptop and recording equipment, ready to spread the good word about podcasting.

I had a blast.

First up, I talked to eight of Miranda’s students about how to put a podcast together. They’d each gone out and interviewed their fellow students about “fake news.” I helped edit the interviews down to a six-minute podcast and posted it to the It’s All Journalism SoundCloud account.

Later in the day, I gave two presentations about launching a podcast and what makes a good podcast. During the second presentation, rather than do a Q&A, I turned the tables on the audience. I handed out wireless microphones and ask them: “Where do you get your news?”

On this week’s It’s All Journalism podcast, Producer Michael O’Connell travels to DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, to talk about podcasting. In a live podcast recording, he asks a room full of college students how they get their news. It’s a fascinating peek how young people consume their news.

#272 – Lack of government transparency leaves press, public in the dark