Podcast Archives – Page 3 of 37 – It's All Journalism

#317 — Making access to public records a public priority

In the greater scheme of things, getting the average person on the street to care about open government laws and the ability of journalists to have access to public records is daunting. It won’t put a roof over a person’s head or provide dinner for her family.

“Is it a hard case to make? Yes. But it’s a uniquely opportune time to make the case because the public is realizing the benefits of a transparent and open government,” said Frank LoMonte, a professor and the director of the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications.

Frank LoMonte

There are some very specific examples of things the general public does care about, and in fact knows about, due to public documents being provided to journalists. He points, specifically, to the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and high-profile deaths involving police officers.

“When we see people dying at the hands of police, obviously the first concern is to stop that from happening,” LoMonte said. “Why is it that we know there are Chicago police officers that covered up and lied about the shooting of Laquan McDonald, who put forth a false narrative about him threatening them with a knife? Because a journalist spent 11 months in court fighting to get ahold of the video the police persistently dug in and tried to withhold.”

The Brechner Center is a think tank and policy research organization identifies and tries to work in a collaborative manner with a broad group of interested parties to identify and address persistent legal issues facing journalists who don’t have the legal support of the New York Times or Washington Post.

“The first thing we published was about access to information from police agencies in the event of officer-involved shootings. That seemed a very timely and urgent project, and it was actually brought to us from the sheriff’s office in Seattle, Washington. They were concerned, frankly, that they had not always done the best job in keeping the public informed and giving out the most accurate information in the event that an officer was involved in a high-profile shooting and they wanted to do better,” he said.

Once a litigator, LoMonte says the Brechner Center doesn’t file lawsuits directly but will file briefs in support of a case where it makes sense to do so.

“In my years of doing this work, I’ve become increasingly convinced you can’t sue your way to success,” he said. “I’ve worked on the opposing side with government agencies that will lose a lawsuit and will turn right around the next day and go back to the old ways as if nothing happened because it’s not their money.”

Lawsuits are great and can propel an issue forward, but “it’s going to be by bringing together stakeholders that will make change” that the most substantial progress will be made. “What I’m talking about is broadening the coalition for openness in government. Not just journalists, they’ve always been bearing the load and carrying the weight of advocating for open government, but people like Black Lives Matter, people like environmentalists, who benefit from access to information, making open government their fight too.”

Frank LoMonte, director of the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at the University of Florida, joins producer Michael O’Connell to take a look at the role public records play in advancing public policy and why this is an “opportune” moment for the general population to support journalists’ fight for transparency.

#139 – SPLC fights censorship on campus

#316 — How much greater could your Facebook reach be?

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel was in a position all too familiar for most newsrooms: It had great stories from a hardworking, dedicated staff, but it wasn’t making the biggest waves on social media.

Emily Ristow, the social media and mobile editor for the paper, decided to try something new to shake things up. She and her team made a schedule.

Emily Ristow, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Audience Engagement and Mobile Editor (Photo by Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

“I think when we first started, it would be generous to say we had any sort of social media strategy at all,” Ristow said. “When stories got posted online, it was often tied to the print deadline. We were trying to get it up on Facebook at some point, send a tweet. It was not really organized or strategic. Our first step was to set a schedule for Facebook so we could figure out what was working and what wasn’t.”

Things were a little “chaotic” at first, but they developed a schedule down to the half-hour, skipping some based on when their intended audience would most likely be online and looking for news.

“We looked at what content we wanted to share at that time, whether it’s a certain subject or a certain type, a native video or photo versus a link share. Once we established that schedule, we followed it religiously for a few months so we’d have data to actually look at to see how we’re doing,” she said.

The result? The company’s digital reach has grown six times this year alone.

The Journal Sentinel was in the midst of taking a fresh look at how it was incorporating its digital presence across the board, Ristow said. “We were paying attention to posting stories throughout the day on our website,” which included separating the digital posting from the print deadline.

“Oftentimes, those digital posting times weren’t coordinated at all with the social posting times,” Ristow said.

There’s now a point person on each shift who is responsible for scheduling and writing Facebook and Twitter posts for the paper’s flagship page, as it has the biggest audience and drives the most traffic to the paper’s website. This also helped to establish a consistent voice for the posts. Suggestions from reporters on which articles to post and the language to use on social media are provided through a dedicated Slack channel and have been helpful, she said.

Of course, when something breaks, it gets priority over the established schedule, but the digital staff also will find ways to supplement the initial post or story with other elements, including photos and video, throughout the day to keep coverage moving forward, Ristow says.

Emily Ristow, social media and mobile editor for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss the straightforward approach her team applied to expanding their social media reach, developing a strategy based on good old-fashioned research.

#315 — Journalism for, of and by local audiences

Chicago is a story filled with stories. But who’s telling them?

Andrea Hart is the co-founder along with Darryl Holliday, Bettina Chang and Harry Backlund, and director of community engagement at City Bureau, a non-profit local news organization based in Chicago’s South Side aimed at telling the city’s stories by people who live, work and study there.

Andrea Hart (Photo by Davon Clark)

“A lot of people are hungry for quality information but also really care about where they live and want to identify ways in which they can participate” in what’s going on in their city, their community and their neighborhood, she said. National politics can be difficult to figure out and it might seem pointless or overwhelming to try and make a difference on such a large level, but local news and information can help people feel good about engaging in the immediate world in which they live.

City Bureau, in the 3 years it’s been around, has tried to establish efforts not only to share local stories, but to engage people who live in the South and West Sides of Chicago, both as writers and as participants in making sure the stories that matter to communities are told.

City Bureau got its start when a group of media people, including Hart, started discussing the limitations of their respective jobs and the challenges of local news coverage. “Local news doesn’t get taken seriously enough. People don’t really have the on-ramps to journalism in the way you would think,” and in some locations across the city, quality coverage didn’t exist.

Now there’s a paid fellowship program lasting 10 weeks that happens three times a year, helping journalism students get real-world practice while working with professionals on projects that get published and shared. There are free training programs as part of the Documenters program, open to anyone with an interest in learning how to document public meetings or better keep tabs on the important issues in their neighborhood, sometimes providing that information to the fellows and City Bureau organizers to help bolster local coverage.

And City Bureau hosts a public newsroom every Thursday for two hours in the coffee shop attached to their offices, opening the doors to “identify issues of journalism and assets in the community. We’ve had a range of journalists presenting the work they’re trying to do. We had a woman who organizes block clubs on the South Side. She did a whole session on what does it look like, how do we organize them, what’s the potential there to try and leverage this local agency,” Hart said.

Now some of the block club’s members are receiving documentarian training to attend meetings and help provide information, she said. “We try to figure out what they need and what we can provide, how we can work together.”

Producer Michael O’Connell talks with Andrea Hart, co-founder and director of community engagement at City Bureau, about the importance of local coverage and an inventive way to bring better representation and authenticity to not only the stories being told but empowering the people telling them.

#197 – Solutions journalism: Recipe for engaging local communities

Creating a Podcast: How to Edit Audio in Audacity

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell explains how to edit and mix down multiple audio tracks to create a finished podcast using the free open-source Audacity program.

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

Depending on who’s talking, the homicide rate in the U.S. is either skyrocketing in some cities or has been brought under control. Obviously both can’t be true – or can they?

As part of a larger project looking at homicide rates in 50 cities across the country, and the rate at which those cases are closed, Washington Post database editors Steven Rich and Ted Mellnik set out to collect information on murders to see what patterns they could find.

Ted Mellnik and Steven Rich are database editor at The Washington Post.

Mellnik now has 50 different paper maps of municipalities on the walls near his desk. Some are “speckled,” while others have clear areas indicating a high rate of homicide and low rates of closure, or cities where most cases are solved or closed in some way.

“Government records have a lot to do with journalism,” Mellnik said. “It used to be, the business was going through filing cabinets and looking for reports and forms, but now all that’s kept on computers and databases. If you’re going to do reporting these days, in some kind of depth, a lot of times instead of asking for paper records, we’re asking for data files.”

That also means it’s crucial to be able to analyze those files and find the real nuggets of truth that indicate patterns and outliers. But requesting data from 50 different departments often meant getting data sets that could not be easily compared: they first had to develop a system in which information could be uniformly categorized and analyzed.

With this particular project into homicide events and closure rates, they wanted to take a deeper look not just into the cities they were studying, but where within those cities rates were going up and down and whether cases were being closed.

“A couple of years ago, a few of us did a rudimentary version of this in Chicago,” Rich said. “We mapped points to figure out which neighborhoods (homicides) were in and figured out which neighborhoods had the lowest arrest rates. We did a story about the neighborhoods in Chicago where murder was effectively legal because they were not arresting anybody for it. Out of that, the question sprang out: what would this look like in other cities?”

With a clearance rate of 20 percent, meaning killers are seldom brought to justice in Chicago. In other cities, like Richmond, Virginia, the closure rate is much higher.

They also looked at the racial disparity among both homicides and case closures, finding irregularities in some cities where certain parts have high closure rates while others, not too far away, have lower rates. “It’s the same city, the same police force, the same budget, the same detective,” Mellnik said.

They’re hoping people who take the time to review the maps will be able to fill in the gaps, identifying whether there’s a certain point in a neighborhood with a high homicide rate and low closure rate where “people with weapons tend to gather,” information that might not come from the data provided by police departments, Mellnik said.

Washington Post database editor Steven Rich and Ted Mellnik join producer Michael O’Connell to discuss their massive undertaking: requesting and analyzing homicide and case closure rates from 50 cities across the United States. They talk about the disparities that exist in a single city and how data reporting no longer requires looking through filing cabinets but, instead, requires the ability to read and interpret data files.

#313 — Journalists would rather have answers than mysteries

Two years after exploring the kidnapping case of 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling, the In the Dark podcast team is back with another case of mysteriously lapsed justice.

“As journalists, we don’t like mysteries,” said Samara Freemark, senior producer of the In the Dark podcast. “Mysteries are not a good thing for us. We want answers, we want to be able to state things clearly and tell people what’s going on. Anything that can lead us in that direction is good for us.”

Samara Freemark is the senior producer of the In the Dark podcast.

Just before the first season’s final episode aired, there was a massive break in the Wetterling case and a suspect confessed to being involved in the boy’s disappearance. The podcast’s coverage had focused on why it took so long for the crime to be solved, as it seemed a “pretty simple case to solve,” Freemark said. With a little reworking and some new transitions, the story was wrapped up. The resolution “didn’t end up changing what we were doing very much; it just allowed us to be stronger in our findings. All these things had been hypothetical before. We could be more definitive.”

After taking a break to have a baby and for the team to regroup and tend to some housekeeping issues, Freemark and her team, including co-founder Madeline Baran, asked for suggestions from listeners as to what case to explore next.

They received thousands of submissions, some lengthy in their pitch and others very brief.

The one that stood out the most was only a few sentences long. It suggested the podcast explore the odd case of Curtis Flowers, a Mississippi man who’s been tried six times – with possibly a seventh pending – for the same crime. And the person who submitted the suggestion thought Flowers might be innocent.

That’s what captured the producers’ interest, Freemark said. It opened up “all these questions about prosecutors and accountability and prosecutorial discretion and what’s going on in this case. It’s a story and an idea we couldn’t get out of our minds. This story was the one none of us could stop thinking about.”

With its second season wrapping up, Samara Freemark joins Michael O’Connell again to discuss the In the Dark podcast and the latest crime story it investigated: the case of a man tried six times for the same crime in Mississippi.

#225 – Investigative podcast sheds light on 27-year-old abduction

#312 – Podcasting: A way to promote press freedom abroad

It seemed like a crazy idea, traveling 7,000 miles to talk to Tajik journalists about podcasting. According to Reporters without Borders, Tajikistan ranks 149th out of 180 countries on the 2018 World Press Freedom Index — the U.S. ranks 40th. Podcasting was the last thing the country needed.

At least, that’s what I thought at first.

But spending 9 days in country talking to young people and media professionals, I realized that podcasting could be something of great valuable in Tajikistan.

Certainly, the country, its people and those journalists striving to tell impactful stories there, face many challenges.

From an economic standpoint, the country is poor. Many people emigrate to other countries in the region, primarily Russia, to earn money to send back home.

From a technical standpoint, Tajikistan does have the internet and many people own smartphones, but service is slow and expensive.

Much of the information the public receives originates from state-run media and there are laws against criticizing government officials, in particular President Emomali Rahman. There is an independent press, but it struggles, both politically and economically, under these restrictions.

So how does podcasting make a difference?

: Guzal Mahkamova interviewed me for Tajik radio and then I interviewed her about what it’s like being a journalist in Tajikistan for It’s All Journalism

: This group of young journalists helped me to record a podcast in Khujand.

: My home base for much of the trip was the American Space in the capital city of Dushanbe. I recorded several podcasts in both English and Tajik.

: I got to talk about podcasting and being a journalist with members of the journalism club at the American Space in Isfara.

: I spent a Saturday in Bokhtar recording two podcasts with students from Bohktar State University. This group recorded a conversational podcast in Tajik about things that scared them.

: This group of students from Bokhtar State University recorded a podcast about learning to speak English.

Podcasting is a bottom-up form of storytelling. It’s cheap to produce. You don’t need a big media outlet to create or distribute it. The creator controls the content.

It’s also a personal medium. Unlike video or text which requires the audience’s full attention, podcasting is consumed passively, often alone. Audio stories consumed this way have a powerful effect on listeners, they are moved emotionally by what they hear and inspired to take action.

The students and journalists I spoke to wanted to tell stories that made a difference in their communities. Most of them had never heard a podcast before. Those that had certainly hadn’t heard one in their own language.

Part of the presentations I gave involved playing American podcasts to demonstrate the different styles of audio storytelling. However, I quickly figured out what was more meaningful for my audience was to help them create a podcast in Tajik or Russian, the second-most commonly spoken language. Once they heard their voices in that format, it all clicked.

The highlight of my trip took place in Bokhtar, where we recorded two podcasts, one in English and the other in Tajik. While the first was a simple Q&A interview, the second was a free-form conversation about what things the six participants were most afraid of. There was no structure, just six young people talking and cracking jokes. It was a true podcast.

It’s All Journalism Producer Michael O’Connell travels to Tajikistan at the invitation of the U.S. State Department’s Speakers Program to train young journalists in podcasting.

#311 – Trump, Obama and ratings gold

Charlie LeDuff isn’t pulling any punches.

His new book, Sh*tshow: The country’s collapsing and the ratings are great, spends time on the campaign trail during the 2016 presidential election, taking him from Roger Ailes’ office to a Trump rally in which he makes the eventual president suggesting himself as a running mate.

Charlie LeDuff by Frank J. Parker

“We wanted to take a camera and look at real people, not issues,” he says of the book. “We wanted to do something entertaining, amusing, emotional and true. We went to the Texas border, where women and children are coming over, and you look over and see shiny new factories (in Mexico). Then you realize those factories came from Flint. Then you go to Flint, where there are no factories hardly anymore and you realize everyone’s mixing the water with Kool-Aid because it tastes so bad, and then you find out the water’s poison because a couple contractors, couple politicians, couple trade unions wanted to make some money. Then you go to Detroit, to Baltimore, to the campaign trail with Trump carpooling with the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the Bundy ranch, the Oregon takeover – we were everywhere.”

Early on, during a press event, LeDuff stood up and suggested to Trump that he could win the presidency. Why?

He suggests the Obama win and the Trump win aren’t all that different.

“In a way, (Obama) ran the same campaign as Trump did, maybe more refined, but he was running against the same person and his message was it’s a corrupt, elitist establishment that’s not doing much for you. Trump ran against the same person and, in his own bellicose way, did the same thing.” An estimated 9 million voters who supported Obama voted for Trump; 4 million African Americans who had supported Obama “saw nothing good and stayed home. That 13 million people, a good portion of it, is the Rust Belt that delivered” Trump into the White House, he said.

The book isn’t without some lighter, comical moments.

“We’re at the border and the women and children are being smuggled in by jet skis – Jet skis!,” he recalled. “So what do we do? I put on a Speedo with USA tattooed across the ass, I blow up a yellow rubber kayak, put on a straw hat and I’m padding around in the smuggling route … just to see what kind of reaction I’m going to illicit. The whole thing is absurd.”

Author Charlie LeDuff joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss his new book, Sh*tshow: The country’s collapsing and the ratings are great, and recounts the time he was this close to becoming Trump’s running mate in 2016.

#304 — Fighting for truth through transparency and sunlight

#310 — Teaching journalists to trust each other

It’s purely coincidental that journalists started asking questions about trust within their industry at the same time accusations of “fake news” started becoming the fodder of political tweet storms.

Sara Catania

Isn’t it?

“There’s nothing new about the question of trust in journalism,” said Sara Catania, chief storyteller at GroundsSource and creator of the short-lived pop-up newsletter JTrust. “I think it’s very closely linked to some larger shifts, some very important shifts we’re seeing where different communities are saying what about us. Journalism isn’t a monolithic thing.”

To overgeneralize, anyone who’s worked in a newsroom knows that journalists love to navel gaze, debate, talk and think about the state of their industry and what’s happening in it. It would stand to reason that questions about trust and ways in which media types can work to improve trust in this particular institution would be openly explored and discussed across the media world.

But it’s not. These conversations are happening in disconnected pockets because reporters, editors and others in journalistic settings tend to not play well with others.

“We’re independent, we work on our own,” Catania said. “We don’t have … the temperament to work together, and that includes when we think about ourselves and what we do. It’s unnatural.”

That’s why she created JTrust, a newsletter that examined not only issues of trust in journalism but offered a repository of sources and information for those asking the same questions. Started in late 2017, the newsletter lasted about six months. The final issue, which recapped the publication’s lifetime of resources, is available on Medium as a way to help seekers find the answers they’re after.

“It’s really important for people to come together and work together, pool resources, eliminate redundancies and find ways to tackle these questions in a much more collaborative way,” Catania said. “It’ll benefit the industry and it will benefit the public at large to do that. Getting journalists to embrace that is not an easy thing. That is one thing that became very clear to me as I worked on this.”

Sara Catania of GroundSource and the JTrust newsletter joins producer Michael O’Connell to explore the widespread resistance among news people to collaborate even as they struggle with questions of trust in their work, an ironic struggle as “fake news” threatens democracy.

#279 — Collaboration key to combating fake news

#309 — Does your local news anchor look like you?

When you turn on the television news, does the person reading the top stories look like you?

A new paper on representation in broadcast news examines the diversity of anchors and reporters responsible for the stories leading off a late-evening newscast.

Keren Henderson is an assistant professor of broadcast and digital journalism at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

“Newsrooms are talking about diversifying their reporting staff. I was curious whether that was actually the case,” said Keren Henderson, assistant professor of broadcast and digital journalism at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.. “Academics have made the case that news ought to be representative of the community.”

Reviewing 1,000 news clips from the top 200 stations in the country for local news, Henderson and her team anticipated seeing more white reporters and more people under the age of 40 leading off the late evening newscast. “This is an image-conscious business that tends to hire pretty young people,” she said.

They also looked at what types of stores aired first and therefore could be considered the most important story of the day in those markets. “Unsurprisingly, half of the stories were about crime. Next down on the list was weather, which account for about 15 percent of the stories that led newscasts. The third most popular topic was public affairs.”

As for the gender of the person delivering that news, Henderson said they found about a 50/50 split between men and women, but there were a few more men than women in the tapes they reviewed, with about 5 percent uncertainty “because we couldn’t see (the person reporting) or there was more than one reporter on the story.”

But 70 percent of reporters leading newscasts were white in their sample size, Henderson said. Another 25 percent were journalists of color and 6 percent were unidentified either because they were off camera or there were “pluralities.” Similarly, approximately 71 percent of the reporters were under the age of 40; another 23 percent were over 40 and 6 percent were unidentified.

Henderson also found, when it came to reporting on the weather on later evening newscasts, the reporting “seems to be heavily represented by older white men.”

Keren Henderson, an assistant professor of broadcast and digital journalism at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, joins producer Michael O’Connell to review her research on the makeup of local news broadcasts, breaking down the age, gender and race of the reporters along with the stories they cover.

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