471. Info District: A 21st century model for funding local news

Municipalities across the country have specially designated areas for dedicated uses, from airports and hospitals to mosquito abatement and commercial properties.

Why not do the same for news?

That’s what the Community Information Cooperative wants to encourage and help build. The concept, called an Info District, would create publicly funded areas for the development of local news organizations, and the people who live near and provide money for those districts would have a say in how local information is gathered and shared.

Simon Galperin of the Community Information Cooperative

“Through the co-op, we’re trying to address the local journalism crisis at a variety of levels, including the policy level, the organizing level and on the ground, building something from scratch, what does it take to build a 21st Century news organization from the ground up,” says Simon Galperin, a founding director of the co-op. He came up with the idea of Info Districts at the City University of New York, building on a concept he’d discussed with a friend after failing to prepare for an assignment. “Focusing on infrastructure building is not what traditional journalism training gets you. At some point, and I’m not a religious guy, but at some point it does feel spiritual. It connects so much with me and the people I look at and see as my peers and allies.”

Galperin currently is putting this model to work in his hometown of Bloomfield, New Jersey, where he’s running the Bloomfield Information Project.

“We’re trying to take the lofty ideas and put them into practice,” he says. “They have an open space trust fund. That means the properties in the town get taxed at about $20 per property. The money gets pooled together and there’s a committee that helps purchase and maintain open space. New parks are built this way. There’s an existing infrastructure for civic investment in a public good. (Info Districts are) a similar concept. The governance structure is different.”

Establishing an Info District would also involve plenty of community engagement and input, Galperin says.

“In Bloomfield, if you taxed everyone $10 per year, that would give us a $500,000 operating budget. What we could accomplish, what a community-run organization could accomplish — I’m not sure if you want to call that (a) small or big (budget) — it would completely change the future of Bloomfield, it would change the future of Essex County, it would improve public health, it would increase voter turnout, it would improve access to information. Having an organization dedicated to encouraging civic engagement by using journalism training, education and organizing, that’s what we need in our communities nowadays. To fund that, ad dollars aren’t going to do it.”

Simon Galperin, founding director of the Community Information Cooperative, explains the concept of an Info District. He talks with It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell about how local news initiatives, funded by taxpayer dollars, can help change the future for municipalities across the country.

Better News: Nonprofit newsrooms turn rivalry into revenue stream

Better News: Newsroom partnership benefits Charlotte’s Latino community

Ju-Don Marshall of WFAE and Hilda Gurdian of La Noticia

WFAE, the public radio station serving the Charlotte, North Carolina region, has been around for nearly 40 years. In that time, the area has seen a dramatic increase in its Latino population.

Ju-Don Marshall, WFAE’s chief content officer and executive vice president, recently wrote a report for the Better News Initiative on how the radio station changed its approach to better engage the region’s Latino population. This included an equitable partnership with La Noticia, a Spanish-language newspaper serving North Carolina, and a joint Report for America reporter.

On this episode of Better News, Marshall and Hilda Gurdian, publisher of La Noticia, tell host Michael O’Connell how they made this partnership a success not only for their newsrooms but the communities they serve.

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 Local News Transformation Fund 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.

Better News: Amplifier highlights Charlotte through its diverse music scene

470. COVID-19 exposes growing need for mental health reporting

For nine months prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Camalot Todd had access all the resources of a broadcast newsroom to help her produce in-depth stories on mental health for Spectrum News, a broadcast news station and website in Buffalo, in partnership with Report For America.

That all changed when the world hit pause.

A few weeks before the pandemic hit, Todd had interviewed faith leaders in the Black community about their role in helping to fight the stigma of addressing mental health issues.

Camalot Todd

“One source said these problems have always existed and they haven’t been addressed because the boat is still floating,” she says, with the boat being America as a whole. “No one is concerned about people on the back of the boat because everything’s fine. Two weeks later, COVID happened and you immediately saw the boat start to sink. You saw it when the first data came out about who was dying at higher rates. You saw it three weeks after, when we had three different police departments reporting an increase in overdoses.”

Very quickly, the Las Vegas native (who grew up in Denver) had to learn how to produce video content and record Zoom calls using a makeshift studio in her studio apartment. Instead of having weeks to schedule and record and map out interviews, mental health reporting became a high priority and stories needed to be turned more quickly.

“At the start, a lot (of my reporting) was prevention and resources,” Todd says. “Everyone was a little optimistic, hoping it wouldn’t last past the summer. We were so naive. A lot was, if you’re struggling with mental health, these are the nonprofits doing telehealth services for first responders, here’s where you can get support for children. Then it became more of a, this doesn’t seem like it’s ending.”

While Todd had some training in covering mental health and trauma, including reporting on the mass shooting in Las Vegas in October 2017, she says this kind of reporting is “not a skill set a lot of journalists learn. I went to journalism school and took all the classes, talking about trauma reporting and the impact on you wasn’t really mentioned outside of the Dart Center. It was learn as I go. I have been very fortunate because there’s a lot more trainings now I take part in. I was an opioid and addiction fellow for the National Press Foundation this year and that helped me understand how to report on addiction and substance use. It’s a work in progress.”

To help organize and prioritize her pandemic mental health reporting, Todd went old school and put up a chalkboard wall in her apartment, mapping out first the demographics in Buffalo and then the service providers and nonprofit organizations in the region. “I would circle back to the nonprofits and say what are people calling you for, what are the biggest challenges. What are you seeing the most need for? And I’d tackle those (topics) first.”

Camalot Todd is a mental health reporter at Spectrum News 1 in Buffalo through a partnership with Report for America. She talks with It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell about her background covering this topic and how the pandemic created challenges and a greater need for this kind of reporting.

439. How the coronavirus changed journalism

469. The Defiant breaks down cryptocurrency

The financial world is confusing enough for most people, including journalists, to try and understand. Bears, bulls, highs, lows, stocks, bonds; it’s a lot to try and comprehend and it’s very easy to be intimidated.

Throw cryptocurrency and blockchain and Bitcoin and Etherium into the mix and it’s all the more complicated.

Camila Russo didn’t set out to be a financial journalist but taking a finance class during her masters program at Northwestern introduced her to that world, one she quickly found she loved.

Camila Russo is a financial journalist and current editor of The Defiant.

“I actually enjoyed reporting on that side of things rather than politics and foreign policy,” she says. “From there, I realized this was an interesting career path. I applied for a Bloomberg internship, stayed there for eight years and that shaped me as a financial journalist.”

There’s a kind of objective truth in writing about financial matters that isn’t possible in other kinds of journalism, according to Russo.

“You’re reporting on numbers, things you can quantify and prove,” she says. “I started to realize the market provides us a more objective way of looking at things. A price is the condensation of thousands of things. The price of a company’s stock, whether it’s going up or down, it’s reflecting the opinion of thousands of investors around the world. The same with government bonds. Bonds from Argentina have super high yields; that’s a way of saying the policies its government is doing is impacting the country in a negative way. That’s more objective than finding analysts to comment on a story. You can show with numbers what’s going on with a country or a company.”

Russo is the founder and current editor for The Defiant, a business news site, newsletter, and podcast about decentralized finance, primarily focusing on the rapidly expanding world of blockchain cryptocurrencies.

“Blockchains are decentralized and distributed networks,” Russo says. “This means they are networks of people who are running a software all over the world and there’s no hierarchy to those individuals, who are nodes of the network. It’s this system not run by a central party, it’s run by nodes running a software globally. These participants are incentivized in currency. Cryptocurrency, the way it’s produced involves a lot of cryptography, so that’s basically it. Networks and participants of the network are incentivized to run and confirm transactions in the network by earning cryptocurrency.”

The first cryptocurrency was Bitcoin, followed by the Ethereum blockchain and its currency, Ether, and now there are others, including DogeCoin, a cryptocurrency that started as a joke “underpinned by a meme that Elon Musk tweeted,” Russo says.

Camila Russo is the founder and current editor of The Defiant, a business news site, newsletter, and podcast about decentralized finance. She talks with It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell about the clarity of financial reporting and explains how blockchains work.

Bonus: Look at This podcast provides forum for DC’s homeless

Street Sense vendors Carlton Johnson, left, and Daniel Ball talk to Michael O’Connell. (Sage Levy)

In a bonus episode of It’s All Journalism, host Michael O’Connell discusses his recently completed project, “Look at This.” The podcast series shares the stories of the homeless men and women who sell the Street Sense newspaper in Washington, D.C.

The podcast series is a production of Street Sense Media, a nonprofit whose mission is to end homelessness in the Washington, D.C. area. It does this by providing people with the skills and tools they need to become more confident and empowered.

In service of its mission, Street Sense Media produces journalism about homelessness issues in the D.C. area, publishing it in a variety of platforms, including film, theater, photography, illustration, and podcasting.It also publishes the weekly Street Sense newspaper, which the homeless vendors sell as a way to earn income.

O’Connell served as executive producer for “Look at This,” in partnership with Patch.com. Episode’s can be found on the Street Sense website, Patch’s Washington, D.C. site, or Podbean.

Listen to “Look at This”:

468. Bitchin’ Pitchin’ creator talks freelance tips, moral and ethical convictions

Abby Lee Hood does not hide who they are.

A self-declared “leftist journo,” Hood is a Tennessee-based freelancer and creator of the Bitchin’ Pitchin’ monthly newsletter who tries to find story angles through frameworks, including making national news local and local news relatable on a national level.

Recently, they emailed a state senator on several pieces of anti-transgender legislation, something that is happening around the country.

“His response was, that’s biased, you’re an activist and you’re prejudiced because you used ‘anti-LGBTQ,’” Hood says. In their experience, “you’re going to get called an activist if you’re anything other than far right. It’s important for me to live by my personal morals.”

Abby Lee Hood is a freelancer who writes the Bitchin’ Pitchin’ newsletter. (Photo by Jenn Curtis)

That particular piece is an example of taking a national story with local ripples and exploring it.

“Even though it’s happening on a nationwide level, I’m always looking for how does that impact the business community here? How does that impact transgendered Tennesseans? What are the businesses in Tennessee who are donating to candidates and legislators who are pushing these bills? You can find a national story that applies to your local audience and vice versa.”

Hood says most of their freelance work comes from successful pitches, but not everything. But does the up-front identity of being a “leftist” ever hinder them from finding work, or publications willing to pay for it?

“I know my ethics and I know my morals,” Hood says. “It doesn’t concern me, but it does concern others. They’ve reached out to people I work with. … The thing about being a leftist journalist, I have lost work. People have decided not to work with me. One of the editors I work with frequently said, when I first pitched her, someone said don’t work with them because they’re an activist. I know there are people who come to my (Twitter) profile and go ‘No thank you.’ To them, I say good riddance. I’m grateful for the work I do have, I get by and I do OK. There’s a certain amount of privilege to say good riddance to those people. … I wouldn’t want to work with them anyway.”

Hood says the “leftist” tag really translates more to trying to highlight voices that might be overlooked or marginalized from other reporters.

“I tend to focus a lot on the working class and how the news affects the working class,” they say. “You’ll find no Karl Marx in my writing.”

Abby Lee Hood, a freelance writer and creator of the monthly Bitchin’ Pitchin’ newsletter, joins host Michael O’Connell to discuss tips for successful freelance pitching. They also explain what it means to be a “leftist journo” and the freedom that comes from being upfront about their morals and ethics.

467. TikTok Used To Expose Abuse Of Domestic Workers

TikTok isn’t just about dances and lessons and poking a little fun at the world.

For domestic workers in the Persian Gulf region, TikTok has been a way to say in the open, to the whole world, that which has previously been shared only in secret.

Louise Donovan is an award-winning journalist who, like so many people, found herself unexpectedly at home and cut-off from her usual sources and stories last year during the pandemic. Now with the Fuller Project for International Reporting, a non-profit newsroom that often partners with news organizations around the world to shed light on stories affecting women, Donovan saw an opportunity to build on her previous work about domestic employees.

Louise Donovan is a reporter for The Fuller Project.

“Previously, domestic workers would use WhatsApp individually to talk with their family and friends back home,” she says. These women typically come from Asian and African nations and move to Saudi Arabia and Qatar for employment, but their working conditions are such that their bosses can steal and keep their passports and refuse them the ability to change jobs or visit their families without permission.

“Most foreign domestic workers in the gulf are sponsored through a system that gives their employers almost total control over them,” Donovan says. “They’re very vulnerable. These abuses have been documented a lot before. It’s nothing new that their sponsorship system is quite exploitative. What was different was that not a lot of women previously were taking to a very public platform to talk about it.”

Unlike Facebook or other social media platforms, TikTok is much more public — the option to talk privately just doesn’t exist in the same way. People from anywhere can see anyone’s video based on however the TikTok algorithm is working that day.

Donovan didn’t have a source tell her to look at the platform to find these women telling their stories; she just decided to look around and see what she could find.

“Some were using it like everyone else, to have fun and pass the time, but others were using it to document these abuses and these exploitative working conditions they face every day. I wanted people to know that there were women raising awareness of the issues they face, very bravely. They wanted to tell women at home, who might want to head to the Middle East, about the realities, but they were also telling women around the world” about their lives and the dangers they lived in.

Louise Donovan, an award-winning journalist with the Fuller Project, joins host Michael O’Connell to talk about her reporting on domestic workers using TikTok to raise awareness on their abusive conditions. She explains how these concerns were previously shared privately, on WhatsApp and other platforms, before the pandemic.

445. Investigative reporter exposes maid abuse in Beirut

466 Prison Journalism Project helps inmates share their stories

A “divine” meeting between Shaheen Pasha and Yukari Kane forged a powerful friendship and partnership that gave rise to the Prison Journalism Project, an initiative to help people who are behind bars and have a passion for writing to find a wider audience and change the conversation about life in prison.

“All the issues we care about, homelessness and drugs and mental health and public school education, it’s all really tied intricately to the state of incarceration,” Kane says.

Shaheen Pasha of the Prison Journalism Project

She had never covered the criminal justice system or anything pertaining to it before she was offered the chance to teach journalism to inmates at San Quentin. “I thought I’m going to do something outside my box. It was completely perspective changing.”

For Pasha, who had experience covering court cases, it was a personal experience that brought her to develop a passion for this work.

“It wasn’t something I thought much about beyond what happened in a courtroom,” she said. “But then I became one of the millions of Americans who has a loved one behind bars. My best friend was arrested and sentenced to 150 years in prison in New Jersey. Suddenly, I had to think about someone I love whose life is behind bars. I went to visit him shortly after he was sentenced and it was this moment where I was looking at someone who I knew, super intelligent, who had so much he could offer the world, and he was languishing.”

Pasha also taught journalism in prisons after becoming a professor — at first, when she called what she wanted to do “journalism,” her request was denied, so instead she suggested she’d teach “media writing” and they agreed.

Yukari Kane of the Prison Journalism Project

“Our mission is to train writers who are incarcerated and those whose lives are impacted,” Kane says. “The formerly incarcerated, friends, family, people who work (in prisons), and help them find a larger audience” through the Prison Journalism Project.

They offer the program in two parts, a handout-based correspondence course and editorial work.

“We want to put out relevant stories,” Kane says. “We also want to provide an opportunity that’s a lower bar than other publications (for the writers to become published authors). In addition, we work one-on-one with some writers to get essays and articles published elsewhere. We want to do more with other media organizations to get stories out.”

While they do need to work within the restrictions established by each prison, they also want to make sure people have the chance to tell their stories.

“We don’t want them to do anything that would put them in any kind of jeopardy. We’re very much aware of the environment they’re in. They have agency,” Pasha says. “They feel this is a way for them to get their voice out and they’re fully conscious of what the repercussions may be.”

Shaheen Pasha and Yukari Kane, co-founders and co-executive directors of the Prison Journalism Project, join It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell to explain their initiative. They work with inmates to help those with an interest in writing learn how to tell their stories to a wider audience.

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

Better News: Killing Zombies On Your Subscription List

The Arizona Republic had a zombie problem.

We’re not talking about the brain-eating variety of zombies. Instead, the Republic had too many digital subscribers that weren’t actively engaged with the newspaper’s content. These “zombies” were also most likely to cancel their subscriptions, creating a retention problem.

In 2019-20, the Republic launched a campaign to turn those zombies into loyalists by creating content with which they would be interested in engaging.

John Adams and Alia Beard Rau share their strategy for killing zombies.

John Adams, the Arizona Republic‘s senior director of storytelling and innovation, and Alia Rau, the paper’s former local politics and issues reporter, tell Better News host Michael O’Connell about the Republic’s successful efforts in rooting out zombies. Adams and Rau also wrote a report about the effort for the Better News Initiative.

465. How newsrooms should handle requests to unpublish stories

When news was only available in print publications or on fleeting broadcasts, it mattered little when someone’s arrest or misdeed was reported. There might be a hubbub for a few days, then things would go back to normal.

But in the digital age, where the internet is forever, how do newsrooms go about handling requests to remove articles, some of which might be years old? Is there an obligation to take down or alter a story that is, and was, factually accurate?

Newsrooms used to be more “hardliners” about unpublishing or altering in any way stories that had been accurately and factually reported, says Deborah Dwyer, a 2020-21 Reynolds Journalism Institute resident fellow at the University of Missouri, who spent her time there working on tools to help newsrooms address such requests.

Deborah Dwyer discusses when newsrooms should unpublish the news.

“Unpublishing sounds like a simple word and it has connotations that are inaccurate,” she says. “It’s a wicked problem. (Unpublishing is) the act of deleting, obscuring or significantly altering (a piece). It’s not just removing, which is why it’s contradictory, and it’s factual content. This is content that was accurate when it was published. It may have changed since then.”

A request to unpublish a story differs from a correction because the material in question was not wrong. “It has to be in response to a third-party request, typically prompted by personal motivations like embarrassment or privacy concerns,” Dwyer says. “The phenomenon of unpublishing is something that has arisen because of pressure from outside the newsroom, typically members of the public, to unpublish content about themselves. It can come from within the news organization and that’s really difficult — I know of situations where a publisher stops by and says an advertiser has made a request.”

The alteration being requested might not mean the wholesale deletion of an article; it might be removing a quote, taking out a name, graphic, photo or portions of a broadcast, she says.

“Radio and broadcast organizations have a whole ‘nother set of issues they have to deal with, especially when it comes around transparency,” Dwyer said. “It’s not just about removing and it’s not just a post-publication issue. There are some pre-publication practices journalists could begin to implement that would really help on the back-end.”

Dwyer says this brings up some ethical questions — most of these requests are matters of public record and will remain verified facts, something reporters will argue are protected by the First Amendment. “The legal system leans more heavily these days on protecting personal privacy and it’s not as lenient with the press as they once were,” she says. “Many news organizations have legal people who, especially larger ones, that may get involved in unpublishing decisions. … News organizations need to be making these decisions but they need to be made with a clear set of policies that are well explained to the public and are implemented consistently.”

There are good reasons to object to altering an article, she says, even if that would have been unheard of or unthinkable previously. “The information is available. What you’re talking about is practical obscurity. The information has always been available at the police station. It was available but obscured because no one was going down there to look it up. … Now you don’t have to do any of that. It’s the accessibility. When it is amplified by a news organization, that is what’s going to hit the top of Google search results. That’s what is driving this conversation. … The public doesn’t see this as a police issue or a criminal justice system issue, they see it as a news issue and you’re not allowing me to live a fruitful life today because of the person I was five years ago.”

Editor’s Note: For those wishing to learn more about unpublishing the news, Deborah Dwyer recommended reading Kathy English’s 2009 report: The Longtail of the News: To Unpublish or Not To Unpublish.

Deborah Dwyer, a 2020-2021 Reynolds Journalism Institute resident fellow at the University of Missouri, joins Michael O’Connell to discuss her work, building tools to help newsrooms deal with unpublishing requests. She talks about the ethical conflict some newsrooms might have over this topic and how journalists can help make it easier to comply.

453. Making sure Wikipedia shows that Women Do News

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