#375 What does it take to cover hate?

Michael Edison Hayden didn’t have any designs on being a reporter, let alone one who spends his time covering hate groups. He started out as an American playwright who was just looking for work while living overseas.

After several years as a de facto correspondent for U.S. papers in India and Nepal, he and his family moved back to the U.S.

The idea of protecting the safety of immigrants and people of color in the United States is of particular importance to him — in addition to his wife being from India, his mother immigrated to the U.S. from Egypt.

He was covering for someone at ABC News when the 2017 Unite the Right rally happened in Charlottesville. He’d covered a similar rally earlier in the year, in the same town, and used his contacts there to report in real time the horrors witnessed by activists who saw James Fields run through an intersection at the city’s downtown mall, killing Heather Heyer.

“I was very upset after Charlottesville,” Hayden says, now an editor at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “I wanted to sharpen the reporting on extremism because I felt they had gotten away with too much in the leadup to that rally. Those dapper white supremacist stories about RIchard Spencer.”

With that in mind, Hayden stresses that reporters who want to cover hate groups and white supremacist/nationalist organizations understand what they’re getting into and how to protect themselves while working to report on dangerous people.

“If you want to do it the right way, put a lot of work in,” he says. Coming into a newsroom and accusing someone of being a neo-Nazi isn’t enough to warrant a story. “The more thorough the reporting, the more detail-oriented your report is, the more impactful your reporting will be.” It’s easy to shrug off accusations without evidence or proof to back them up.

“Quoting people, getting as many sources as possible, using the person’s entire online history” is a smarter approach. “Thorough is better. It tends to be that when you come in with ‘someone shared a naughty link,’ it doesn’t work. You have to get really dirty with it and actually go long and spend a lot more time,” he says. “We need fewer stories about far-right extremists but more reporting. … We need deeper reporting on how these things work, where the money flows are coming from, who people are from behind the scenes, how they organize when they’re not being seen.”

Hayden also stresses the importance of knowing what to do and who to contact if a reporter feels under attack or under threat for their work.

He’s recently written a guide on open-source intelligence for the Tow Center that features a detailed section on security and how to keep a reporter — and their family — safe from these types of threats.

“You want to pull all your information off the internet if you’re going to get involved,” Hayden says. “You want to keep your family protected and keep their pictures off the internet. If you feel you’re in an unfamiliar place, you can DM me, you can email me. I’d be happy to hear you out. … If someone’s concerned, you always have time. You don’t need to break scoops and you don’t need to slam a story through. If it could be dangerous to you, slow it down. It’s more important to make sure you’re safe.”

It’s All Journalism producer Michael O’Connell sits down with the Southern Poverty Law Center‘s Michael Edison Hayden to discuss the dangers of covering white supremacist groups, the lingering ghosts of the Charlottesville rally and why Twitter locked his account for two days due to a photo printed in a Tennessee newspaper.

#374 What’s changed for women in newsrooms? Less than you think

Across decades and mediums, women in newsrooms have a multitude of experiences in common. That includes shedding, or trying not to shed, a few tears at the office.

It’s something that took Kristin Grady Gilger and Julia Wallace by surprise when they were writing their new book, so much so that it inspired the title, There’s No Crying In Newsrooms: What Women Have Learned About What It Takes To Lead. Gilger and Wallace, both faculty at Arizona State University and former editors, wanted to show what it’s like for women to move up the ranks in journalism.

Kristin Grady Gilger and Julia Wallace, authors of There’s No Crying in the Newsroom: What Women Have Learned About What It Takes To Lead

“I spent 20 years in newsrooms, and I knew women had a lot of really interesting, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes outrageous stories to tell about what their experiences were like,” said Gilger, senior associate dean and Reynolds Professor in Business Journalism at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. She previously worked as a reporter and editor for publications including The Times-Picayune (now The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate) in New Orleans, the Statesman Journal in Salem, Oregon; and The Arizona Republic — the latter two overlapped with Wallace’s tenure there.

Gilger said that not long after Wallace joined the Cronkite School she approached her about writing a book together.

“We talked to almost 100 women, over 100 people in total,” said Wallace, the Cronkite School’s Frank Russell Chair and a former news industry executive. “And so, you know, the reporting took some time, because one of the surprising things for us is we got people — first, everyone wanted to talk to us. And then when we got them on the phone, they couldn’t stop talking, because people had so many stories and so much insight they wanted to share. And then we also spent time in person with a number of the women we interviewed, especially those who are going into depth with and profiling in chapters. So we had some fun to three day visits with some of these women.”

Gilger and Wallace wanted to highlight women who broke through barriers and overcame obstacles to get to where they were in the industry, as well as help prepare their students for the workforce. In the end they settled on a mix of interviewees including Marcy McGuinness, who worked at CBS News for about thirty years and then at Al Jazeera, and Melissa Bell, publisher and co-founder of Vox Media.

Women from public radio, magazines and newspapers, as well as a range of ages and ethnic backgrounds are also featured in the book, Gilger said.

Hearing their stories, Wallace said something that surprised her and Gilger was not so much the frequency of sexual harassment, but rather that so many of these highly accomplished women often doubted themselves at work.

“Most of them just never really felt like they had truly arrived, that they felt like they had to keep proving themselves over and over, even when you thought, wow, you know, look at how far you’ve gotten in your career,” said Wallace, who was the first female editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “And, you know, that’s not an entirely bad thing — who wants to work for someone, who you know, thinks they’re absolutely right all the time, and never has any doubt? But it can be a bad thing if it paralyzes you in terms of making decisions.”

Other comments they heard included being overlooked for certain reporting beats or leadership positions, and the feeling of becoming invisible past the age of 50 or 60. And once women did make it to managerial positions in newsrooms, many said it was difficult to exact authority without being viewed as overly “bossy.”

So some didn’t — take Agness “Aggie” Underwood, for example. Wallace explained how Underwood, who started as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express in 1935 and was promoted to city desk editor in 1947. Underwood kept a baseball bat and pistol in her desk, to chase off publicists or get the newsroom’s attention.

“She had to be so tough to get the respect of all these men who worked for her,” Wallace said.

Today, Gilger and Wallace said it’s clear from efforts such as the #MeToo movement, as well as the attitudes of their own students, that women are less willing to put up with certain workplace behaviors. The reluctance to speak up more readily is something which Gilger described as mistake on the part of her generation of female journos.

“I mean, we kind of thought, you know, keep your head down, do great work, work harder than anybody else, bring up other women behind you. Keep your seat at the table, and we would solve the problems,” Gilger said. “And clearly we didn’t.”

It’s why the women said writing the book was as much about hope for the next wave as it was acknowledgement of the past.

It’s All Journalism producer Amelia Brust talks to Kristin Grady Gilger and Julia Wallace about their new book, There’s No Crying In Newsrooms: What Women Have Learned About What It Takes To Lead, which examines what it’s like for women to move up the ranks in journalism.

#132 – Vox.com adds context to the news

#373 Media outlets worldwide push for greater climate change coverage

Mark Hertsgaard, environmental reporter for The Nation, grew up with a news anchor father but didn’t intend to go into journalism. He did, however, have an innate understanding of and respect for the environment.

“The environment is a theme I keep coming back to,” he says. “At a fairly young age, I realized if you don’t get that issue right, none of the other issues are going to matter. If we don’t have a livable planet with drinkable water and breathable air and healthy soil, it doesn’t matter what we do about health care or incarceration policies because there won’t be a society to sustain it.”

The United States media has been a decade behind in climate coverage since at least the 1990s.

Considering Al Gore’s work on sounding the alarm about our rapidly heating planet, and that he was vice president of the U.S. at the time, that’s a grave assessment.

But the confusion between talking about the science of climate and taking a political stance when reporting about climate issues has made the topic difficult or scary for some reporters and made news organizations hesitant to write even basic stories about climate-based research.

For one week, starting September 16, that will change.

The Nation and the Columbia Journalism Review are spearheading Covering Climate Now, an international push and emphasis on covering climate, leading up to a meeting of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in New York.

The American press “tends to reflect the discussion going on with political elites” when it comes to climate, he says. “In the United States, unlike in Europe, the political elites have essentially tried to ignore or outright deny the science around climate change. This has been evident for many years.”

Even in the ‘90s, with Gore in the White House, the discussion in the American press was about whether climate change was real. In Europe, even in countries whose leaders were “right-of-center,” the argument wasn’t whether climate change was real but what was to be done about it and who would pay for it, Hertsgaard says. Unfortunately, not much has changed in the past 20 years.

Last October, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a concerning report saying the world as a whole has 12 years to become carbon neutral and slash heat-trapping gas emissions. It was a report that should have caused a greater stir in the media, but it didn’t.

Hertsgaard points to Margaret Sullivan, a media columnist at the The Washington Post, who said this should be the number one issue in American media and should be front-page news every day. Of course, that hasn’t been the case, because some outlets still believe reporting or discussing climate science is taking a political stance, something he vows is not true.

After many emails and months of discussion, news outlets around the world have signed on to devote time and space — online, in print, on broadcast, etc., — to covering the current state of the climate and the dangers therein, leading up to this year’s UN environmental conference.

In all, more than 160 outlets will dedicate a week to climate coverage, outlets ranging from tiny websites in Togo and Rhode Island to the Guardian and Bloomberg News and the Times of India.

Producer Michael O’Connell is joined by Mark Hertsgaard, environmental reporter for The Nation, to discuss next week’s Covering Climate Now initiative, organized by The Nation and the Columbia Journalism Review. More than 160 outlets of all sizes, around the world, will spend the week highlighting the science of climate change.

Better News: Amplifier highlights Charlotte through its diverse music scene

When Joni Deutsch arrived in Charlotte, North Carolina to become the podcast lead at NPR station WFAE, she wanted to create something that captured the city’s unique identity beyond just football and banking. To that end, she launched Amplifier, a biweekly podcast that highlights the region’s diverse music scene in September 2018.

In early 2019, Deutsch wrote a report for the American Press Institute‘s Better News Initiative to share Amplifier’s success and encourage other public radio stations to create local music podcasts of their own. Read the full report here.

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.

Better News: Events may be difficult, but they’re still worth doing

#372 Algorithms are changing how journalists do their jobs

Nick Diakopoulos is an assistant professor in communication studies and computer science at Northwestern University where he’s also the director of the Computational Journalism Lab. In addition, Diakopoulos the author of Automating the News: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Media. Recently, it was announced that he is joining Jeremy Bowers’ team at The Washington Post to develop a computational political journalism R&D lab to help the Post’s election coverage. Diakopoulos joins It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell to discuss how algorithms are changing the way journalists are doing their jobs.

It’s All Journalism: When I get a guest on the podcast, who’s sort of coming from a mix of disciplines, I usually like to ask which came first? Journalism or computers or computer science?

Nick Diakopoulos: It’s such an interesting question. I mean, you know, I’ve been coding since I was probably about six-years old. I’m writing computer programs on the old Commodore 64 in Basic, but I also grew up in a household where my father was a journalist for a long time. So I guess I was exposed to both at a pretty young age. I studied computer engineering in college and then moved into computer science for my Ph.D. So that’s, that’s really where my formal training comes in. But I was certainly exposed to journalism at a young age and,worked at a magazine and high school and that kind of thing. So tying the two together kind of made a lot of sense for me.

IAJ: What inspired you to write this book about automating the news?

ND: When I was in grad school back at Georgia Tech, this would’ve been in 2006, I really started discussing with my advisor there what would it mean to kind of smash together computing and journalism and what would that look like? For the last, I guess 13 years, I’ve been sort of thinking about the intersection of those fields pretty deeply. And around 2016, it just all started to come together and it felt like the right time to start working on really kind of writing it down. What did it mean to do journalism computationally? What does it mean for journalism and what did it mean for computer science? Really kind of inspired to take some of the applied research that I’ve been thinking about over the years and frame it in a way that’s accessible to practitioners as well. So try to translate some of the results and findings in the research in a way that they can be useful for reporters and editors.

IAJ: OK. When we talk about computational journalism, what does that encompass?

ND: So in the book, I really kind of cover the whole gamut of what I think it encompasses. So that includes everything from data mining and machine learning to find stories and large data sets to automatically producing written articles or data visualizations, interactively generating content in the form of news bots or chat bots. But also things like how are algorithms used in news distribution. So if you look at something like a search engine or a feed or recommender system, how do those algorithms play into the way that people are exposed to news? And then finally I also think about and talk about this kind of the broader issue of algorithms in society and how journalists can start investigating and scrutinizing algorithms that are used now throughout government and throughout the private sector to contribute to sort of decision making processes. So when I talk about algorithms in journalism and computational journalism, I’m really kind of talking about all of those things. It is sort of a widely scoped field.

IAJ: What are some of the ways that algorithms are rewriting the media, changing the way that we cover the news and the way we report and present it?

ND: Yeah. So, I think it really, algorithms are changing all kinds of different facets of how the media is produced. Again, you know, from how the stories are found using algorithms to identify interesting patterns or happenings in datasets to the way stories are written. What I focus on in the book is how algorithms are changing news production, and in particular how people need to work together with algorithms and together with machine learning systems or data mining systems in kind of what I call hybridized workflows. So what are the things that, algorithms do well and what are the things that people do well and then how do you kind of marry those together into a productive work process, so that you get more than the sum of the pieces there.

IAJ: A lot of people, when they think about algorithms and media, they think about negative things like bots that are spreading fake news or trying to get your information. But I take it, you talk a lot about the benefits of what this type of computational journalism can actually provide and less about the downside or the negative side. Is that correct?

ND: Well, I’m an optimist. I’m trying to be optimistic about how this technology can really be useful for enhancing news production. So, I mean, every technology has some good and some bad, and algorithmic approaches to news production are sort of no different. I mean, on the plus side, I think news automation can help produce news more quickly. It can produce news on a wider scale or wider breadth of material. It can be used to personalize content to make it more relevant to individuals. And it can also help produce higher quality journalism. So, you know, when we talk about investigative journalism, the ability ability to use data mining and algorithmic approaches to dig through some of these large document corpora, that’s a real advantage and it allows journalists to discover more unique and original stories, and do sort of a more comprehensive job investigating these things than they otherwise could without algorithmic approaches. So that’s kind of on the, on the plus side of the ledger.

Of course there’s also disadvantages to automate a news production. Certainly, these techniques require a lot of data. They require clean data. And so if you’re working in a domain where data is not sort of available or if it’s often dirty data and requires a lot of cleaning, then that’s going to limit your use of automation. Sort of a broader point there is that if information is not quantified, if there’s some important piece of context for a story that’s just not, that hasn’t been digitized or hasn’t been quantified, that’s not going to be accessible to an algorithm.

And I would say another big issue with algorithmic approaches and, and AI in general is that they tend to be very brittle. Typically, these systems are engineered to work in a narrow domain, where it’s been sort of very carefully thought through and engineered. And that really ends up being a pretty substantial limitation, right? Because in the world of news, things are always changing. The world is a dynamic place. There’s a lot of different things that can go wrong in the world. And if you’re just using a sort of narrowly engineered piece of software that could easily break, if something out of bounds kind of kind of happens in the news. So obviously, advantages and disadvantages adhere to automated production technologies.

IAJ: Are there any projects or newsrooms that you’ve seen out there that you think are doing cutting edge or exceptional work with computational journalism?

ND: Yeah, absolutely. There’s a variety of examples in the book. One of the ones that I really like to point out is a story from a couple of years ago that was produced at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper, where they used a machine learning technique to help identify doctors in a large document dumps. So they collected like a 100,000 documents from various medical boards’ websites online. And then they use this machine learning technique to identify documents in that corpus that pointed to doctors that may have been involved in sexual misconduct cases. And, of course, this was a months-long effort. It certainly wasn’t the case that the machine learning acted on its own. I mean, there were some very smart journalists involved who built the system, but then also had to chase the leads that, the machine learning system produced. So, they took 100,000 documents down to maybe 6,000, but then they still had read through those documents and do all the reporting and look into these doctor’s backgrounds and so on, in order just to kind of finish that investigation. So that’s one example that I, that I like to point out of sort of as success of using data mining to find a story.

IAJ: It’s interesting. Just recently was working with, with someone and it was just something as simple as she wanted to create a Google map. And then once, as we were building this map and taking advantage of the data that’s part of the whole Google system that she realized that, she was putting together just a presentation about something that she saying. Then all the data that, that Google had was sort of come up into that. And, and so that actually made this little presentation that she was doing much more rich in content and much more useful to the reader. So, I think people, you know, journalists, I, you know, I know many journalists who are always looking for ways to enhance their stories sometimes in a very little way, but other times, sort of what you’re pointing to, this opportunity to dig deeper and find stories in the data to tell interesting stories in the data. There are just lots of opportunities I think to do that. What would you say to somebody who wants to sort of move their career more toward being, I guess, a computational journalist, somebody who writes more data rich stories maybe, uses a different types of algorithms or programs to assist them in their reporting?

ND: I think this get that kind of how the world is changing and how people need to kind of adapt and retrain themselves to be able to use all this technology that’s emerging. I think sort of the next generation of journalists or where this generation of journalists that wants to keep up, they’re going to need to learn how to be able to update and tweak and validate and supervise these automated and algorithmic systems. If we’re talking about a journalist who wants to use an automated writing tool, they might need to learn some data skills like how to work with structured data, how to work with formal logic, like “if then else” statements on that data. I think some fluency with the basics of computer programming, would probably be quite helpful for a lot of people. I’m not saying that everyone needs to be a software engineer, but we’re talking about some basics. You know, understanding how computer programs work, being able to write some simple computer programs I think goes a long way in helping someone think computationally. And what I mean by thinking computationally is being able to think in a way that you can set up a problem that you have in your reporting in a way that you can get the computer to help you with that problem. I don’t mean that people would actually think like computers, but it’s more thinking about how do I break this problem down in a way that I can get a computer to do a piece of this problem for me.

That’s some of the things that people can kind of learn and adapt to. I mean, another aspect of this would be kind of at the high end, learning advanced statistical techniques, machine learning techniques. Again, I wouldn’t claim that every journalist needs to learn this or it needs to know about this. But I think if you really want to kind of innovate or try, entirely new techniques or adapt some of the techniques that are being used in data science now, then I think developing some of these advanced data science skills could open up new avenues for journalists.

IAJ: Now I know in the past, having talked to lots of different journalists about their day to day working environment, often they find themselves in the situation that, “Hey, I want to do this type of story. I want to do that, use this new type of technology or something.” And it usually comes back onto them to sort of bring it to the newsroom. What can newsrooms do to sort of create an environment where the reporter doesn’t have to know everything. I mean, certainly it’s helpful to know how certain types of systems work and how to report and provide data to help support it. But what can newsrooms do to create that environment to where they can, across the team, pursue this type of reporting?

ND: A lot of what I’ve seen is that these computational journalism projects often times do happen in teams and you have maybe someone who is more expert in data science, paired up with someone who’s more expert in reporting techniques, and then maybe you even have a product person there or a project manager to kind of tie things together. These techniques, these computational techniques, they kind of demand that you bring together different skills on a team. And so I think, in terms of how to set that up in a newsroom, having cross functional teams that come together, in order to tackle particular projects I think is an interesting way to set things up. I think dropping some data scientists in a newsroom could kind of be interesting in the sense that those data scientists might see the typical reporting projects in a slightly different angle or through a different light. And they might have different ideas about how to approach those types of reporting projects. So that’s something to try and generally kind of creating some collisions between different skillsets and different ways of approaching problems, I think can be a productive, productive way for making progress here.

IAJ: I interviewed a couple of computational journalists from The Washington Post last year about this special project that they had done. And it was a whole team of people, a whole team of reporters, a team of tech people who were, basically taking these large data sets about, crime rates across the country and sort of putting them into a system where they could search for certain types of information and lay them across the maps and, then build ways to present them. And it was definitely a team effort. And then when you got to the end of it and, the presentation was there, you saw the richness of the whole project. But, that’s something that they worked on for a period of time. But anyway, speaking of The Washington Post, it was a recently announced that you’re going to be joining the Post’s new computational political journalism R&D lab. So what are your aspirations for that position and what the lab’s going to be doing in general?

ND: I’m really, really excited about this. I have a sabbatical coming up this fall, and when I started chatting with the Post, Jeremy Bowers there got excited about the potential to work together. So, I’m going to be joining up with him and working on this computational political journalism R&D team. And really what I’m hoping there is that we can start to catalyze some advances in the quality and the scope of elections coverage that the Post can produce next year. And, I come from a kind of an applied research background and I think bringing that perspective into dialogue with folks in the newsroom, folks from engineering teams at the Post. I think that’s gonna be really, really productive. We’re already kicking around a bunch of different ideas to think through how we might capitalize on automated and algorithmic news production. How to augment the capacities of journalists and reporters there and how to develop new, unique experiences for readers. And I’m also kind of thinking about how computational techniques are changing politics more broadly or how they could change coverage more broadly. You know, how’s this going to change the way reporters and editors need to cover elections? In terms of say, the way that algorithms are used to promote different different perspectives in the media or the way in which bots are used to push different ideas and so on. So I’m really kind of looking forward to exploring a lot of these ideas and collaborating with different editorial folks in advancing some of these ideas.

IAJ: I know we talked a little bit earlier about bots that are used to sort of spread fake news or to gather information, personal information and things like that. One of the things that sort of separates journalists from somebody just posting information online is that we have sort of these ethical standards that we apply to how we cover a story, how we report something and how we present it. How do we sort of maintain these standards in a computational environment? Are they mutually exclusive? Is it something, do we have to change our approach to journalism or do they just work together really well?

ND: There are some new challenges that computational approaches bring up for the ethics of journalism. I think we’re still in the pretty early stages. Ethics is, you know, something that gets negotiated over time as people think through, where to draw the lines of what is kind of appropriate versus inappropriate. I can sketch out a few of the areas that I think are kind of interesting ethically through this lens. So, you know, take for instance, machine learning. Machine learning, you know, can be used in a data mining context to identify an individual that is maybe newsworthy for some story. Maybe it’s some kind of statistical evidence about that individual, but with machine learning there’s always going to be some statistical uncertainty based on the method. And that means that journalists need to understand that ethical issues of using uncertain statistical evidence, with respect to the kinds of claims that they want to make in their stories. So if you want to make a public indictment of malfeasance, that maybe requires a higher standards of evidence than a data mining method can provide. And so, you know, that will in turn kind of mean that journalists need to do additional reporting on the leads that our data mined.

Another example would be sort of the use of predictive modeling in journalism. So this is the kind of stuff that we see from election models that 538 in the New York Times publish. There’s an interesting ethical question there that kind of gets to the issue of feedback loops and the potential for a public prediction to then impact social behavior and social reactions in some way. So, is it ethical for journalists to publish predictions on voting day that could impact voter turnout? Uh, I don’t know. I mean, that’s, that’s something that maybe we need to think about some more.

Finally, I think there’s sort of the question of transparency, when journalists use machine learning techniques or other types of opaque algorithmic methods in their journalistic process. So, how can you be transparent with these types of tools? I mean, I think that that transparency isn’t as an ethics and ethical goal that I think a lot of journalists share. Um, but the question is, well, how do you be, um, as transparent as possible when you’re using these outward techniques? Those are the ethical issues that come up.

And another ethical issue that comes up is kind of the labeling of automatically generated contents. The question is if you generate content automatically, does the public have a right to be notified that content was automatically generated? In the same way that you, you would byline an article to signal who is responsible for writing that article. Should we also byline articles, if they’re automatically produced? I think there are some emerging, kind of approaches there. I think most of the major outlets like Reuters and Bloomberg and AP that routinely use automatically generated articles, they’ve sort of arrived at wanting to label that content as such. But I don’t think that there has been a broader ethical conversation about the overall standards there. And that might be something for industry to kind of think about some more.

IAJ: When we’re talking about automatically generated articles, I think AP, like last year, they were experimenting with a certain sports stories that are like super basic. Here’s the box score, here’s who won and here’s who’s lost, rather than have a reporter spend time on that, generate those. So is that what you’re sort of talking about stories that, all the elements are pulled together by an algorithm and not so much with reporting?

ND: Yeah, that’s right. So, if an algorithm has kind of produced a story from end to end, shouldn’t we also label that as such, so that the audience understands where that content came from?

IAJ: So this is all really fascinating, and I appreciate you coming in to talk about it. Looking forward in the next five years, how do you see the new newsroom changing? How do you see computational journalism changing our industry?

ND: I think there’s some really exciting things to sketch out. Where I see this all heading. One is I think there’s some opportunities for news organizations to start developing their own algorithm and tools and technologies that better reflect editorial values that many journalists have. So, for instance, The Washington Post has been developing machine learning techniques to help them moderate comments on the site. By developing the technology on their own, they’ve sort of better been able to reflect editorial standards of how to moderate those comments. So they’re not just using some generic algorithm to do it. It’s really kind of a journalistic algorithm. I think this is a really interesting direction for journalists to think about. What are the journalistic values that they want to build into this algorithmic, automated AI future of media that’s emerging? Or, are they just going to be content to pull off the shelf, some generic technology that Google gives them, or that some other big tech company gives them? That’s one area.

I think another interesting area is just thinking more about this whole hybridization of work. How are journalists going to work effectively with algorithms and AI and what are the jobs of tomorrow going to look like? I think they’re going to be more and more hybridized, but I think we also need to think as managers and designers of this new hybrid labor, we need to consider the very human concerns of what does that work look like? Is it good for the journalists who were doing that work? We want to make sure that journalists don’t just become cogs in some bigger technological process where the algorithm is your boss and the algorithm told you, you have to call this person and get this piece of information. We want to avoid that. But I think it really kind of boils down to like, how do you design the work, so that it’s efficient but also satisfying for the people that work.

#314 — Data reporting fuels Washington Post’s massive homicide project

#371 NLGJA continues to transform how newsrooms cover LGBTQ issues

Twenty years ago, the media landscape was very different for the LGBTQ community. Years after Ellen DeGeneres became the first mainstream actress to confirm she was gay, the sitcom Will & Grace brought prominent gay characters into American homes on a weekly basis in a way that wasn’t shameful or audacious.

It was also about 20 years ago that Sharif Durhams first started working as a professional journalist and, shortly thereafter, he joined the NLGJA — The Association of LGBTQ Journalists. As an “out” gay man himself, he wanted to learn more about how to be a full participant in his newsroom.

Now president of the organization’s board, Durhams says things have gotten much better in terms both of coverage of LGBTQ issues and of the language journalists use when covering such topics.

“The industry was so different back then,” he says. “A lot of the discussion back then was, would some of these large organizations have policies that recognized they’d treat LGBTQ people the same” on matters of insurance, in particular, as well as other workplace benefits. “That’s a big fight NLGJA led. If you were to google it and find when large companies adopted these policies, it’s because of NLGJA. Since then, things have changed so much. We’re looking at the policies of newsrooms, are they using appropriate language to describe our communities.”

Now the new coverage emphasis is on issues relating to the trans community, but there’s a new challenge here that goes beyond how a person identifies.

“Unfortunately, we’ve been dealing with so much violence against trans people and so many trans deaths, where people can’t speak for themselves,” he says. “We’ve had to school news organizations, making sure they get the terminology right, making sure they deal with issues when the police misgender someone, making sure that they might be diving into a story in a well-meaning way but making sure they have the information they need.”

While newsrooms have received information and stylebook suggestions from NLGJA on pronoun use, sometimes the organization needs to get ahead of the news cycle. They issued a press release immediately when Chelsea Manning affirmed her name and identity, which happened to occur during the organization’s annual meeting. The editor of the New York Times happened to be speaking at the meeting the next morning and confirmed she’d informed her newsroom that the suggestions from NLGJA were immediately adopted as the paper’s official terminology.

NLGJA’s suggestions aren’t taken to heart because of the advocacy of its members alone, but because they’re journalists talking to other journalists about a community of which a reporter might not be a member.

“It’s that kind of ability to connect that’s been very valuable,” Sharif says.

Producer Michael O’Connell is joined this week by Sharif Durhams, a senior editor for CNN Digital and board president for the NLGJA — The Association of LGBTQ Journalists, discussing how media coverage for the LGBTQ community has changed in the past 20 years and where it needs to go next.

#362 What is the future of LGBT media?

Survey: What tools do you use to do good journalism?

A few months ago, we asked readers to fill out a survey and provide some of their favorite journalism tools.

The good news is, most of them are free and available to anyone and everyone who needs them; the better news is that we have multiple people singing the praises of common tools including Scrivener, Evernote and the omnipresent Google programs.

What tools (apps, programs, etc) do you use to help organize your workflow?

Here, respondents gave us everything from a trusty ol’ reporter notebook to some higher tech, 21^st Century capabilities:

Microsoft OneNote was touted by one person: “Catch all notebooks for project memos, form letters, emails on projects, organized by topics. Coupled with the OneNote add-in for Microsoft Outlook to make it easy to move emails from one inbox to project folder.

Trello project boards were upheld for the ability to “keep action items in the proper priority buckets.”

Scrivener and Evernote appeared multiple times in different answers. “I use them to categorize and organize my folders and sub folders for topics and related content towards my true crime newsletter and my blog focused on local independent pop-punk and punk bands.”

PowerPoint Design’s Ideas feature was praised because it “quickly and automatically creates clean, eye-catching layouts from multiple photos, which you can then export for an alternative featured image.”

And sometimes the simplest answers and tools are best: Email inbox organizing tools, from Outlook to Gmail to Chrome extensions. “I keep emails unread until I am ready to act on them. I use the search function to find what I need and slide stuff to save into a special folder.” Another person sang the praises of If This Than That, calling it “simple and streamlined.”

For something different, try using not a tool but the Airplane mode: “To prevent phone call and Face Time disruptions of recordings during an interview. Airplane mode makes certain that calls won’t stop the recording like it usually does.”

What tools (apps, programs, etc.) do you use to help with your writing?

Here again the responses ran the gamut, including nothing in particular but an organized mind to some simple add-ons.

Microsoft Word Fast Fox Text Expander has been praised for allowing a user to “store repetitive text material and recall it into documents or emails with a few keystrokes.”

There was another vote for Scrivener and Endnote for keeping content in one place, in addition to Microsoft Word and Microsoft Sway to design digital and print versions of newsletters.

For those who have to transcribe their work, two suggestions: Temi.com, which offers “automated transcriptions of audio, 10 cents per minute. Not verbatim but 80-90% accurate, with text synch’d to audio.” This helps to provide “a roadmap to a long interview, helping me go back and quickly find the portions I want to transcribe verbatim to use in a story.” The other tool for transcription suggested is the Rev app, which will “translate a recording in less than 24 hours. It’s great if the interview is an hour long or more,” but here, too, there is a fee for service.

Another person really likes Werdsmith, calling it an “easy app to just pull up a blank page for note taking and easy location later.”

Don’t discredit Notes or email, tools so simple they’re built into most phones as a default.

What tools (apps, programs, etc.) do you use to help with research/collecting data?

Here, again, we’ve got some repeat entries: notebooks, Google tools, OneNote, Scrivener and Evernote.

New entries include Hunter in combination with the LinkedIn Sales Navigator plugin for Chrome and Gmail. Using the two tools in combination can help track and confirm email addresses, while Hunter can help find email addresses which can be verified via LinkedIn. There’s a free version that can do all the work without a payment.

AppleNews+ was suggested for “reading and researching long-form magazine pieces for content and quotes.”

Microsoft Excel was suggested as it assists in “collecting data, creating graphs from that data and it’s easy to copy and paste in other documents.”

One respondent relies on Feedly for managing RSS subscriptions.

Our friends with Pew Research get a nod as well: “One of the best national organizations that collect and observe data.”

What tools (apps, programs, etc.) do you use to help with visualizing data?

Data visualization isn’t quite a big concern or need among our survey respondents yet, but they do have a few suggestions:

Easy Dynamic Charts from Data Wrapper and WordPress tables were mentioned as simple tools for easy integration.

Microsoft Excel also came up for “creating easy to make graphs,” along with Prezi, a plug-in for PowerPoint.

What is one piece of technology you can’t live without?

No surprise here: smartphones are top of the heap here. From voice recording apps to digital notepads and email within a few taps, they can do everything and we rely on them to do just that.

Runners up including Adobe Audition, a recorder, SD card adapter for smartphone (“makes it easy to transfer pictures from a DSLR or other camera to a phone for quickly posting high-quality images on social”), and voice dictation.

Did your favorites make the list or are there other tools you’ve used in your journalism work that might be of help to others? Feel free to add to our online resource by taking our online survey. We’re also conducting an online survey on how we can improve our podcast. If you fill out one of our surveys, we’ll send you an It’s All Journalism mug while supplies last.

#346 Helping journalists decode research

#370 What’s your Credder rating?

Two years after launching TribeWorthy, pegged as a kind of Yelp for news consumers, Chase Palmieri is back with a revised and improved platform.

Credder allows both reporters and readers alike to rate the trustworthiness of an article, publication or reporter, resulting in a ranking that’s posted publicly.

“We believe news should compete for trust, not clicks,” he says. “What we’ve created is a platform where journalists can review articles under a critic category and the public can review articles under a user category. What they’re doing is essentially reviewing how much they trust individual articles. If they don’t trust something, they have to pick out an exact reason why.”

Anyone in the general public who wishes to critique articles can do so, but there are requirements, as journalists, to be accepted as a critic, Palmieri says.

Credder founders, from left, Austin Walter, Chase Palmieri and Jared Fesler

“You need to be working for a publication, you need to be a full-time journalists and you need to be creating and writing articles yourself,” he says. “What we want to do, as soon as we’re able to, is stop deciding who’s in the critic category and just take the top authors from our own Credder leaderboard and let that be the deciding cutoff for who gets to be a critic. The authors themselves that are writing really great articles that are getting reviewed; those authors that get rated and are on the leaderboard, those are the ones that get to review as critics.”

On any given day, there are between 5,000 and 6,000 users on Credder, which is impressive for a platform that launched less than two months ago. “We’re at the point where an article gets posted and, by the end of the day, it’s going to have a rating,” he says.

Chase Palmieri, one of the founders of Credder (formerly TribeWorthy), joins producer Michael O’Connell to talk about the platform that allows journalists and news consumers alike to rate the trustworthiness of articles.

#251 – Tribeworthy wants to be ‘Yelp for news consumers’

#369 How journalists can avoid rising to the bait in covering Trump

Jay Rosen is a media critic and professor of journalism at New York University. He’s also an observer of the trends and troubles affecting the media industry, which he documents on his blog, PressThink.org and on Twitter. Since 2015, Rosen has focused his critical eye on how the press has covered the candidacy and subsequent presidency of Donald Trump, whose effusive and combative style Rosen says has altered the norms of political reporting

Recently, Rosen posted a thread on his Twitter feed outlining a set of strategies political journalists and newsrooms can employ to more effectively navigate the “new norm” and not rise to the bait of Trump’s rhetoric. He joins Producer Michael O’Connell on this week’s It’s All Journalism podcast to discuss this thread.

Michael O’Connell: You’re on the podcast because a recent thread that you had on Twitter addressed some of the frustrations that political journalists are facing in covering the Trump administration. The pattern is something that I like to call the Trump conundrum, which is Trump says something outrageous. The press is compelled to cover the outrageous comment. Coverage, negative response ramps up Trump and his base. And then Trump doubles down and now the press of course feels compelled to cover the ramping up and it all sort of spins wildly out of control. The end result is greater coverage for Trump, an electrified base and greater opposition and mistrust for the media. What worries you about this scenario?

Jay Rosen: Well, there’s several things going on there. One is that Trump has incorporated into his political style the use of journalists and the national news media as a hate object. And when he says outrageous things and gets critical coverage of it, instead of that being a kind of a warning or a trouble sign for him, it actually helps him with his core supporters who believe that journalists are trying to take their guy down. And so in the past negative press coverage and criticism across the news media would be considered for our president or our presidential candidate a negative. Trump has turned it into a positive. So that’s one problem.

Another problem is that the criteria for what constitutes news include outrageous remarks and surprising statements and the trashing of norms and offensive comments. And those are things Trump does every day. And so if an outrageous or crazy comment is going to create news, that means that it’s like incredibly easy for Trump to control the news agenda because all he has to do is say something else that kind of like busts through normal behavior for presidents. And so the conclusion is that a lot of things that journalists do are based on premises and expectations for how public actors, especially presidents, will behave and Trump violates all those expectations. And unless journalists adjust to that, they are going to continue in this spiral.

O’Connell: So do you feel that this is a conscious effort on his part? That this is how he’s going to, you know, push out his message?

Rosen: Not particularly.I’m not of the belief that he has much of a strategy. I don’t think that this is very well thought through. The proof of that is he has the highest negatives of any recent president, he’s never passed 50% in approval ratings. So there are huge costs to him to doing it as this way. But I think it’s a reflection of his personality. It’s just who he is. It’s not a strategy. It doesn’t have a plan behind it. It’s just the nature of the man.

And one of the things that’s extremely unusual about Trump, and it’s very hard for journalists to wrap their minds around, is that he doesn’t care if he is humiliated publicly. He has no gene for public shame. He doesn’t care if he’s shown to be a fool or a buffoon or ignorant or a racist. And because he doesn’t have this gene or this personality that flees public shame, it’s very difficult for journalists to cope with him, because he’s constantly saying things that violate expectations. And if you take toward him traditional news values, then he’s going to dominate your news agenda every single day. And this is the trap that I think the national press caught in.

O’Connell: Yeah. And this is not something that just happened recently. This is, I mean, people were beginning to notice this and being critical of the way news outlets were covering the 2016 campaign, like giving his speeches much more exposure because he said outrageous things and people wanted to hear what he had to say. And it became a sort of a ratings driver, certainly in the cable world.

Rosen: Yeah. We’re in the fourth year of this pattern. We’ve been through it since 2015, so it’s now four years into this.

O’Connell: So why can’t journalist just ignore his outrageous comment or the falsehoods he may put out?

Rosen: Well, they can’t ignore him because in a word, he’s president and his comments can have geopolitical significance, as, for example, with North Korea. They can also expose parts of the population to hatred and resentment. They can mobilize a kind of nationalism, racism, prejudice. They can encourage some of the worst instincts in American life. And so when a president who represents the entire nation is saying these things is, it isn’t as easy as a lot of people say to just ignore him. I don’t think that’s, it’s not a practical solution. On the other hand, just letting him dominate the news of the day with his hatred and his racism and his resentment, that’s not a practical solution either.

O’Connell: Now I know that one of the initial reactions after the 2016 election was really kind of this push toward we’ve got to get it the lies. Cause that’s the thing that as journalists, we should be able to sort of tackle this. We create these fact checkers. We expose all, we you look into every crazy comment and we say this is wrong, this is wrong, this is kind of wrong. This is misleading. And we build up these lists of lies. I forget what the number is at at the Washington Post.

Rosen: It’s over 10,000.

O’Connell: I don’t think people who have not been convinced that Donald Trump is a liar are going to be convinced if we report 12,000 lies.

Rosen: Right.

O’Connell: I mean, any rational human being would look at that number and say, yeah, I think that’s probably enough evidence. Probably a hundred lies would have given us enough evidence. But it certainly gives us sort of a magnitude of what we’re dealing with and that just reporting, you know, that something is a falsehood and explaining what the truth is isn’t a cure or isn’t the only cure to this. Personally, I think it’s important that the press expose untruths, but I don’t think that that’s the remedy for this. But you know, I mentioned before that you had to put this thread up on your Twitter feed a couple of weeks ago and you’ve been writing about this issue from, I think, even the early days of the Trump administration, what sparked you early on to sort of jump into this?

Rosen: it was the violation of all assumptions that political journalists have about how candidates and presidents are going to behave. So the fact checking is a very good example. Glenn Kessler, who’s The Washington Post fact checker, has pointed out several times that in the past when candidates or presidents were fact checked, Republican and Democrat, it isn’t that they necessarily conceded that the press was right and apologized. But when they were fact checked by more than one new organization and what they were saying was shown to be false or dubious, they would generally change what they were saying. They would alter it so that it, it passed the test. They would either change the claim or they would slightly revise it so that they didn’t get criticized again in that way. And that was the power of fact checking. That was the system working as it were. But as Kessler has noted several times with Trump, there’s absolutely no effect whatsoever. He gets fact checked and he not only continues to say it, but he would often double down or or add to the outrageousness of it. And so this is clearly a case where standard practice doesn’t work. The premises or assumptions that journalists could reliably have are busted. And the press, if it’s going to continue its role as an accountability institution, has to come up with something different because clearly fact-checking Trump makes absolutely no difference whatsoever.

O’Connell: Yeah, and back to this thread that you had on Twitter, you came up with a handful of strategies and some of these are sort of based on things that some newsrooms have done but others are kind of a rather interesting approach to it. Let me go through through them sort of one by one and we can talk about each one of them.

The first one is, well, this all sort of goes under the umbrella of, how can newsrooms avoid taking the bait? When Trump says something outrageous or he says something false, how can the press avoid just repeating that falsehood, repeating that outrageous comment and sort of having it go spinning out of control? So, the first thing you put forward is suspend normal relations with the Trump administration. How can newsrooms not cover what the president says and does? I mean, because that’s what their job is. What do you mean by suspend relations? Normal relations?

Rosen: Well, it’s borrowing in use of analogy from diplomatic relations where one country will occasionally suspend normal relations with another in order to register a protest or to say you’ve gone too far or this is beyond the norms of civilized conduct and in press relations, suspending normal relations would mean that this is you’re declaring that this is an extraordinary situation that normal rules don’t apply, that the president himself has violated the expectations for presidents so dramatically that the press that covers the president has to change what it does as well. So, I didn’t prescribe a particular measure to take, but what I said was each newsroom can decide which part of normal press relations it’s going to quit. So for example, for the Washington Post, it might mean not participating in background briefings for the producers of CNN. It might mean not going live to Trump events for, as I pointed out in my piece for Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, she’s decided to almost never, not never, but almost never use tape of Trump talking at a rally or a speech because the chances are he’s going to say something that’s false and she doesn’t want to misinform her viewers. And it’s not that she’s ignoring what Trump does. She talks about him almost every show, but she doesn’t play his speeches because that’s going to let falsehoods through. So that’s an example of suspending normal relations.

So what I tried to argue was that every news organization has to decide for itself what the consequences of that will be. But suspending normal relations makes it possible for journalists to make different decisions than they would for a normal president.

O’Connell: Yeah. I remember when the New York Times, the publisher was invited to the White House and that was sort of an example of here’s an unusual opportunity. Yeah, I’ll go down and I’ll talk to the White House. There were good things and the bad things that kind of came out of that. But you know, looking for different ways to cover the White House so that you actually are controlling your news cycle and your news choices.

Rosen: Well, at that meeting and the publisher of the New York Times basically lectured Trump on the dangers of his “enemy of the people” rhetoric and tried to get him to stop. That’s unusual.

O’Connell: Yes, that is unusual. And it’s a different sort of role for a journalist to typically play, I think, reading the riot act to a president.

Rosen: Yeah, exactly.

O’Connell: To remind them that this is the reason why we have a free press and your negative reactions — and we even sort of touched about the negative comments directed towards the press, but we can talk about that after we, after we talk about the, these sort of solutions that you’re putting out here. And the next one was, report but don’t make Trump the, the main character. How do you accomplish that?

Rosen: Well, I don’t think this is all that difficult. He doesn’t have to be the center of every story. You can talk about some of the things he’s done without making him the protagonist of the story. So for example, instead of focusing on his frankly racist and extreme comments about Baltimore, you could focus on what people in Baltimore are saying about that, that you can focus on the people who are affected by his comments. Or you can focus on the struggle of Republican office holders to maintain some dignity and still be part of the president’s team. So I think there’s lots of ways of mentioning and reporting what he’s doing, so you’re not like blacking out the news, but you aren’t making it about him and he isn’t the central character. I don’t think it’s that difficult. Once you think about it is it’s actually pretty easy, but it’s not the natural way that journalists think because they have for so many years considered everything the president says and everything the president does as news.

O’Connell: Yeah. And it goes back to just recognizing that this is not a normal, normalized process.

Rosen: Right.

O’Connell: It’s something that you have to adapt to.

Rosen: Right and then it goes hand in hand with suspending normal relations with the Trump government.

O’Connell: Now this other one is, it’s a pretty nifty strategy as well. It’s called a truth sandwich. How does that work and what are the advantages of it?

Rosen: Well, this is the recommendation of George Lakoff, who’s an academic at Berkeley who has studied rhetoric and political behavior, and what he recommends is that when you report on something misleading or false that the president says, you first report what the case is, for example, that immigration has been going down, right? First you report that, then you report what Trump said, which is we have a crisis on the border. We’re getting flooded by this caravan of migrants from Latin America. And then you repeat what the actual situation is. So you start with the truth. Then you mentioned the distortion and then you repeat the truth. So that’s called the true sandwich. And that’s a different way of reporting on some of the outrageous and false things that the president says.

O’Connell: This last idea that you present is the one that I kind of really find really kind of fascinating and this is like establishing in larger newsrooms establishing a gaslight desk to sort of identify when somebody is very blatantly telling you a mistruth and sort of doubling down on it to say, no, that’s not what I said, even though you might have film of them saying it. So what are the dangers of gaslighting and how to reporters’ coverage help to spread it inadvertently?

Rosen: A really clear example of this was after the send her back chat at one of his rallies drew attention and the criticism, Trump tried to say the next day that he had not encouraged this and that he tried to prevent it and that he tried to speed up what he was saying, just sort of accelerate past it and that he had taken steps to kind of like prevent the crowd from doing this. And anybody who watched the tape knew that was false and it was very easy to prove that it was false. All you had to do was like rolled the tape.

And so that was an example of gaslighting, because gaslighting is telling you that what you can see with your eyes and your ears is not true. It’s attempts to make you doubt the evidence of your senses. And instead of just reporting that and making news out of his own attempt to deny what is flatly the case, I think the press to just say that’s gaslighting and send it to the gaslight desk rather than treat it as normal news, give it this designation. And then let people who have been dealing with and accumulating evidence of Trump’s gaslighting report on it and also frame it as gaslighting from the first to the last. So that’s what the gaslighting desk ideas about.

O’Connell: That’s interesting because it’s almost like a second generation of the fact checking.

Rosen: Yeah. It’s similar because that’s what happens now. It’s like sometimes Trump will say something and you kind of like, you send it to the fact checking desk, right? But instead of sending it to the fact checking desk, because it’s ridiculously easy to fact check you send it to the gaslighted desk because that’s what it is.

O’Connell: Yeah. And then then you presented that by presenting it that way you’re informing your, your audience. So look, this is something that’s going on. It’s not just that it’s a lie. There’s a double down of a lie. It’s, an ongoing way to try to get the gaslight. I’m trying to think of a better word, but gaslight’s the word.

Rosen: Yeah.

O’Connell: We’ve mentioned this sort of in passing, but you’ve also written about how part of all of this is Trump’s attacks on the media. What is it that disturbs you about that or troubles you about that?

Rosen: It’s extraordinary. It’s part of a larger attack on many of our democratic institutions. So when the president of the United States or a candidate for president says that the election is rigged, that’s an attack on our institutions. When he claims that the FBI and the intelligence community is trying to undermine him and is lying about him and inventing evidence, that’s an attack on our institutions. When he and his cabinet and his aides shove aside the knowledge and professionalism and expertise of our diplomatic corps, that’s an attack on institutions and his rhetoric about “enemy of the people” and “fake news” is an attack on one of the key institutions of democracy. Political scientists, when they ask themselves what is a democracy, they start with four or five key institutions you have to have. Obviously elected government is one, the rule of law, independent judiciary and a free press and for a president to attack the free press, not as mistaken or biased or sloppy, but as fundamentally corrupt, which is what his rhetoric about “enemy of the people” is about, it’s just an extraordinary thing.

Why do we need the head of American democracy, the most powerful person in the American democracy to be undermining our democratic institutions? That’s like extraordinary. And in addition to that, the United States has always been a leader in press freedom. And the American president when he went abroad, always brought the press with him. And when, for example, the president would have a meeting with a foreign leader who was an authoritarian or where there wasn’t much free press like the president of the Philippines or the president of China, it was always a point made by the White House that they would bring the American press with them on the trip and they would have a joint press conference with both leaders and both press corps. And this was a point that presidents made and that State Departments always made because they wanted to bring American democracy with them when they went abroad. Now the situation is completely different and the American president is taking the lead in encouraging authoritarians across the globe to attack their own press. So that’s an example of just how bizarre and norm busting the current president is.

O’Connell: Yeah, and you even see that in the United States. For local reporters covering City Hall, they may run up against a politician who says, oh, that’s fake news. Or you’re just, you know, you’re biased, you’re liberal, you know, you can’t trust you, you’re corrupt. And that makes it difficult for us to do our job.

Rosen: That’s right.

O’Connell: And also, unfortunately, it also puts us in dangerous situation sometimes, which is also scary.

Rosen: Yes, it can do that. And it’s persuading office holders that they don’t have to engage with the press.

O’Connell: Yeah, which is always a problem, because it sort of cuts right into our role as a watchdog on government and our elected leaders. So since we’re talking about government elected leaders, let’s just sort of wrap this up. Just a couple of thoughts about the 2020 campaign. How would you describe, 2016 and before, I mean there’s, it’s sort of a general feel that people aren’t particularly happy with this horse race approach to covering the presidential race. Do you think that we’re just going to have another one of those in 2020 or, or do you think we’re going to sort of evolve into something else or is it too late?

Rosen: I do not think that the American press or the news organizations that are responsible for covering the campaign at the national level went through any evaluation of their election coverage model. I don’t think they believe that they need to change it. I think they pretty much assumed that they could go into the 2020 campaign with the same mental equipment that they have used in previous campaigns. And of course they wanted to not make the same mistakes that they made in 2016 and they have done certain things to make sure that they address those. But they believe that the model of election coverage that they have used in the past is fundamentally sound and it’ll be able to do the job in 2020 and I don’t think that’s true.

O’Connell: And this sort of goes in with this whole sort of overarching concept that this is a non normal situation.

Rosen: Yes.

O’Connell: That we need to treat this different and we need to approach this different.

Rosen: Well it’s not a normal situation. It’s the premises on which the press built its practices have collapsed. So, for example, it was always assumed for candidates and presidents, Democratic and Republican, that they wouldn’t want to violate the norms of democracy because the criticism that they would get from office holders, from the public, from the press, would make it not worth it. And Trump has created a different model of the presidency in which criticism from the press and from, let’s say one whole side of the political spectrum, is not only not a bad thing, it’s a good thing and it helps mobilize your supporters. We haven’t had, at least in the last century, presidents who deliberately polarized the electorate as they did their politics. That wasn’t something that journalists were ready for it. We used to be that you put together the coalitions that you could, you got elected and then once you got elected, you tried to persuade people who didn’t vote for you to be supporters, even though they didn’t vote for you. And the presidential approval rating was the way that we measured how well presidents were doing at reaching out to those who didn’t vote for him. This is not something that Trump even contemplates. Instead, he tries to polarize the electorate and then hopes that his half is bigger than the other half. And when you have a president who is doing that, a lot of the routines of political journalism don’t even make sense.

O’Connell: Yeah. And what’s interesting is that you can back and you look at George W. Bush where I think at one point he even talked about is, “All I really need to represent is 51% of the electorate.” But the fact is we elect a president and that he’s the president for 100% of the people.

Rosen: That’s right. Which is why after 9-11 George W. Bush made a very public show of saying to Muslim Americans, “You are part of this country.” Even though they may not have voted for him, but it was very important for him to make that statement. Whereas with Trump, it’s the opposite. It’s like he’s trying to divide, to polarize and to drive people into their warring camps. We’re just not used to that kind of behavior from a president.

O’Connell: So just to wrap this up, I’d like to end on a happy note. What are your feelings or what are your thoughts about where we’re headed at the moment? Do you think that the press will sort of rise to this challenge? Do you see signs of newsrooms of journalists, you know, saying, “Hey, we need to change the way we do things,” or do you think you know, what we see now is what we’re going to see in a couple of years?

Rosen: If there had been after 2016 a kind of industrywide reckoning, if we’d seen leaders in the press get together and air some of what had gone wrong, if we’d seen reflection and re-evaluation after that debacle, I would be a little bit more optimistic. If we had seen going into 2020 public re-evaluations of how to do election coverage, I would be more optimistic. But I really think that the American press is still clinging to what it knows how to do. It’s still using assumptions from previous presidencies. It’s not that it doesn’t see what’s happening. I think that journalists are very good at sort of observing, but in changing their routines and changing their assumptions, I just don’t think that they are willing to do that and so I’m not very optimistic. I don’t see anything on the horizon that’s going to result in a different outcome in 2020 than we saw in 2016.

O’Connell: OK. I think I’m going to leave it there. Jay, thanks for coming on the podcast. Once again, people should follow you on on Twitter. They should also check out your blog, PressThink.org. Thanks again for being on the podcast.

Rosen: Thank you very much.

#330 Lawsuit against Trump aims to counter assault on free press

#368 Amplifying young international voices to tell stories that matter

Young people have the passion and energy needed to make real change in their communities and to help move the needle, albeit slowly and in fits and starts, for the world at large.

A group of 130 young writers from around the world are getting together to do just that this week, attending The International Congress of Youth Voices in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

This is the second year for the event, which focuses not only on letting these young activists share their stories, but helps them learn how to communicate their concerns and their priorities on a global scale, making their issues resonate on a larger level with people who have very different backgrounds.

The congress grew out of 826 Centers, a writing organization with a presence in 27 countries, where Amanda Uhle worked with the congress’ co-founder and the creator of the centers, David Eggers.

Amanda Uhle

“We believed there was this great power in getting young people together, physically, in the same space,” she says. “We know young people have important perspectives and thought there’d be great power in uniting them.”

The congress is supported in large part by News-Decoder, “an effort to help young people around the world better understand big international issues and become better global citizens,” says Nelson Graves, the organization’s founder. It was created after Graves, a former journalist and teacher, saw many of his international correspondent friends “out to pasture” after taking buyouts. News-Decoder “brings experienced, skilled foreign correspondents together with young people to help broaden their perspective and learn from each other.”

Writers in News-Decoder can help the young congress attendees understand how to portray their ideas in a way that limits bias and preconceived notions, creating persuasive pieces that are suited for an international audience.

Among the central topics of this year’s event: Climate change, immigration and gun control.

Immigration and gun safety are “two issues the young people in our partnership and beyond are very concerned about, primarily because they’re existential issues. Along with climate change, these are existential issues that call into question a young person’s sense of identity,” Graves says. “Immigration has a direct relationship with a young person’s definition of self and sense of identity. … Guns represent a physical threat, particularly in the United States where there have been so many shootings at schools.”

News-Decoder “offers this incredible platform for our students to publish their work,” Uhle says.

Some of the congress attendees from last year worked with News-Decoder staffers to publish their work, both from the United States and internationally.

“It’s such a great match. I think we all see that young people come to us with knowledge and passion,” Uhle say. “It’s true of the youth writing centers. The gap is having young people think about their audience and who they’re writing for and to. Having experienced journalists like Nelson’s organization does is a tremendous asset for a young writer who needs to frame writing in terms of who’s going to read this and how do I sway them to my opinion.”

Amanda Uhle of the International Congress of Youth Voices and Nelson Graves of News-Decoder join producer Michael O’Connell to discuss this year’s conference and why giving young people support when speaking on issues of importance to them is the most important role adults can serve.

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