Local journalists should bring light — and love — to their communities
These comments were prepared for the 2024 convention of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia in Charleston, South Carolina. The delivered text varied slightly from the written remarks.
Thank you for that introduction. It is my privilege to be here.
What a terrific conference this has been. You’ve had a chance to reconnect with each other and to hear some new ideas. You’ve brainstormed the future of your alt-weeklies. You’ve heard practical advice on putting AI and other tools to work in your newsrooms. You’ve heard from others on how to keep your financial house in order, addressing FOIA issues, how your arts and inclusion coverage should reflect and help develop your relationship with your communities. Your role in the new Press Forward initiative to get more philanthropic dollars into local journalism… It has been a deep immersion into both the peril and the promise facing journalism today, facing your companies and your reporters and editors, facing you.
But it has been a conference rooted in optimism, even as it nods to the challenges that we deal with every day. Because no matter the challenges, we know that our businesses can grow and improve, grounded in the hope that we can learn from the past, that we can learn from each other, and create better tomorrows.
Journalism thrives on the promise of tomorrow.
It thrives on the hope that we will fill the empty pages with words, whether they be in print or online. That we will fill the airwaves with sounds that people will want to hear and images that they will want to see. No matter the platform, journalism continues to deliver the daily miracle, even as it evolves and changes with the times.
At its best, journalism reflects the best of us. But we know it too often falls short, reflecting too little of the diversity of we, the people, whether it be omissions of ethnicity, class, political views, or just a fundamental misunderstanding of what real people’s lives are really about. But we pour our hearts and soul into it because most of us believe in its power.
Journalism tells us we can be better. We can be better entertained, better informed, better engaged with our neighbors, whether they be across the street, or across the country.
Journalism tells us that our communities can be better, that our institutions can be better. That our governments can be better. That striving appeals to our need to grow, to reach beyond the limitations we sometimes impose on ourselves.
Thinking about how we can be better, questioning what we are doing, why we are doing it, and how we are doing it must be part of each of our organizations, each of our communities, and part of the daily practice for each of us, even when it yields answers we don’t want to hear and evidence we don’t want to see. Our communities need that from our journalism. They need that from us.
At the American Press Institute, I talk a lot with our team about the need to interrogate our own work and to change based on how we can better serve journalism, to serve people in our communities and journalists and publishers like you. API has been around for a long time. It was founded in 1946 to train journalists in skills they might need throughout their careers as the business changed. Even then, there was a realization that we and our businesses would need to continue to change, to become better, to meet the information needs of our communities.
But as a result of this work, I’ve been combing through our archives, which contain decades of photos of people who traveled to our headquarters, first at Columbia University in New York and later at our building in Virginia for one of our seminars or conferences.
There are thousands of photos in our archives that catalog this history, representing news organizations across the country and around the world. And the sameness of many of those photos is striking and concerning. I think a lot about the faces that are missing in the photos and the voices that were not in those rooms. Our industry has changed so much–and still it is not enough.
Today, API helps develop, support and sustain healthy local news organizations. It doesn’t matter the platform. It doesn’t matter the business model. We ask, How can we equip journalists and media leaders with the skills and resources they need to do the job, to meet the public need for information?
At API we divide how we approach this work into four focus areas that we believe are critical for news organizations to think about every day:
First, and perhaps most important, civic discourse and democracy. In this country, freedom of the press is enshrined in our Constitution. It is impossible not to think about this in a presidential election year, when, if you are like me, you sometimes wonder if polarization and disconnection might permanently undermine the foundation of our country. If attacks on journalists and trustworthy information might signal the death knell for our freedoms.
The free press is at stake. Democracy itself is at stake. How do we repair and strengthen community relationships? How do we help the fellow residents of our communities navigate a complex media environment that grows more diffuse every year?
How do we listen to each other? How do we debate and discuss? How do we determine a course of action for our communities, our society, our world? How do we help cut through the noise so that people can focus on the issues that matter most to their lives and to our communities?
Living as I do now in Northern Virginia, where so many of our Founding Fathers lived, I think a lot about their imperfections and their flaws — but I also think about their ideals and their aspirations.
In his farewell address, George Washington warned of, quote, “unprincipled men [who might] subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.” In what was a fractious time, he wrote about the differences that existed in our country and the need for national connection. He believed that our shared connections and purpose were greater than anything that tried to divide us. Even as he chafed under press criticism, he believed in the need for open discourse, because he once wrote, and I quote, “if freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”
Not on our watch.
Even amid the political rancor of his time, Washington believed that reliable information was a fundamental necessity, that there was a public need for this public good. Providing the public with information to fully understand our shared interests and concerns, and a forum for discussing them, is one of the greatest opportunities and obligations of journalism.
You, whether you are a publisher or editor or an advertising rep for a media company, represent a social contract that binds our communities together. Our Founding Fathers like Washington and Thomas Jefferson recognized that the free press is a necessary conduit for information, to provide we the people with information that we need to make decisions and to help our democratic republic thrive. It doesn’t matter if you are a legacy daily or an alt-weekly, you are part of a vital network of news and information that powers our democracy. Our society cannot function effectively without it. As George Mason wrote, you are the bulwark of liberty.
I think a lot about a survey by Gallup that measured trust. This isn’t about trust in the media. This is about the trust that people have in themselves. Gallup said that in recent years, Americans have become increasingly “negative about the ability of the American people,” you and the person sitting next to you, “when it comes to making judgments under our democratic system about the issues facing our country.” That trust has fallen almost 25 percent since the 1970s.
How do we build trust in ourselves, again? In our neighbors, again? How are you helping that process? How are you creating clarity? How do you connect people and ideas? How do you promote civic discourse in service to our democracy?
I’ve been at API since 2022 and in that time, we’ve awarded dozens of grants to news organizations to help them do this work. That group includes some of your members. The Mississippi Free Press has received awards from us twice, including this week, for its solutions circles, convenings of community members, to expand discourse across lines of difference, whether they be political or generational.
The Baltimore Beat is conducting listening sessions and then reporting on how people in power directly impact young people’s lives — from their schools to their transportation to their access to public spaces.
With our help, Atlanta Civic Circle will expand its Atlanta POV initiative, (That’s Priorities, Opinions, Values) conducting election-related focus groups with voters of color to inform and build toward a regional survey panel on key issues facing metro Atlanta. In each of these cases, these news organizations are bringing more voices into the public square.
You can get an overview of these projects and more on our website at pressinstitute.org. I also urge you to check out Knight Foundation’s Election Hub, KnightElectionHub.org. It is a collection of curated products and services that will help you cover not just the elections this year but life in our democracy.
Journalism has too often functioned as a closed ecosystem, with limited access to talent and ideas. That world can’t exist any longer, not if we want to reach new audiences and serve the ones our industry has neglected for far too long. The alternative news media is helping open those doors and can help open them even wider.
Our next focus area at API, culture and inclusion, must be part of it, especially in an election year, especially in a democracy. There is a lot of baggage around those words in some quarters today, but we cannot ignore them. Not if we are serving we, the people. Our news organizations are tasked with serving an increasingly diverse country. More than 2,200 newspapers have closed since 2005, but the U.S. population has increased by more than 40 million people in that time. The country as a whole is becoming more multicultural, more multiracial, more in need of news and information. That diversity, my friends and colleagues, is what democracy is actually about.
We recognize this in our leadership at API, which looks very different today than it has throughout much of our history and in the photos in our archives. API is led by an executive team that is 75% women, 75% people of color. Our entire team has diverse backgrounds, beliefs and voices. We live in diverse places, from San Antonio, where for almost 40 years, the San Antonio Current has been digging deep into life in the city; to Chicago, where the Chicago Reader has been publishing for more than 50 years; to Burlington, Vermont, where your member Seven Days links 100,000 readers with news, events and more.
At API, this team brings a diversity of experience in newsrooms, academia, and business to our jobs, but we all care about the communities journalists serve. They are our communities. Those differences make up one of our greatest strengths. And diversity and difference, in background and honest thought, is one of the greatest strengths of our communities, and this country, too. And it most certainly should be part of our journalism. It is an essential part of democracy.
When you get serious about culture and inclusion, you can feel its effect in the other elements of your business. It’s one of the reasons that in one of our most important lines of work we’ve started thinking about how news organizations fit in the overall picture of inclusion for a city or region. We call it the API Inclusion Index. We recognize that sometimes when people say they don’t trust the media often they sometimes don’t distinguish between the outlets or even the platforms. Everyone may get tarred and feathered with the same generalizations.
Under the API Inclusion Index, we examine both the internal and external practices of multiple news organizations in a city or region and help them develop plans to become better, better individually and better together, better internally and better externally, especially when serving communities that have been marginalized, overlooked or altogether ignored. And in examining this system, we think about the tools–they could be data analytics software, listening strategies, events, products–being used to improve this work and to improve understanding. How are they taking concrete steps to be more inclusive, to see the gaps in coverage and to close them?
The issue of internal newsroom culture and inclusion cannot be overlooked as part of this formula. Do journalists believe that they belong in your newsrooms? It is one of the most important elements. Coming out of our post-lockdown world, a time when we had to suppress the natural human inclination for fellowship and community, it casts a shadow over every workplace, and journalism is not immune. The surgeon general has declared mental health “the defining public health crisis of our time.” The threat of burnout, and of people feeling that they don’t belong, that they can’t thrive, that a newsroom might actually be harmful to them, is real.
This is why API convened media leaders earlier this week in Minneapolis to think about how we can improve internal work cultures in our industry. Fostering belonging and collaboration within our news organizations is an urgent mandate. It builds endurance for covering your communities. It is part of the foundation that gives us the core strength to better serve our democracy.
In your business, how are you navigating generational tensions and creating welcoming workplaces? How are you using data to measure, analyze and improve diversity, equity and inclusion? How are you effectively and respectfully addressing values conflicts in the workplace? How are you creating psychological safety for your teams, especially in an election year, given the rancor that we see emerging today, sometimes over what we think might be simple issues?
Journalists cover the ills of society — civic, criminal, environmental, technological and more — and do so in resource-limited newsrooms, on deadline. And this has been exacerbated by the buckets of online harassment and abuse that many journalists, especially women and journalists of color, experience every day. Culture and inclusion, inside our newsrooms and out, is about putting people first, people the backbone of our democracy. We can’t forget that.
Of course, culture and inclusion is fundamentally tied to our third focus area at API, community engagement and trust. How do we embrace our role as part of we, the people? There is a pressing need to place news organizations at the heart of American life. In some communities, news organizations once did this. In others, they have always failed. In some places, they left people out, both intentionally and unintentionally. And many of you are trying. Some are even succeeding. But we cannot ignore the function of news organizations as connectors, as conveners, our role of actually being a part of our communities, of understanding our communities. Think of it as love for our communities. How does your news organization express its love for its community? Love.
That’s not a word we talk about a lot in our journalism work. We think it may compromise our objectivity. But when we are talking about local and community journalism love is essential. Sometimes we are talking about tough love: When someone’s hand is in the till, or local courts or governments are failing the community, we have to administer tough love. Sometimes, in a place like Charleston, it is about resurfacing the buried history, history that people would rather hide away, that a building or a football field, like the Charleston City Paper recently reported, is built on top of the dead, who have gone unremembered and ignored.
But this love is rooted in caring, rooted in the fact that we are part of these places, that we live in these places. That we love these places.
It becomes even more important when we think about the thousands of journalists that this country has lost over the past 20 years. Do people in your community know a journalist? Do they even understand how journalists work? Do they understand how your news organization works? Do you ever tell them? We get caught up in the everyday and we don’t realize how big that gap is. Most people can live their entire lives and never come into contact with a journalist. What are we doing to engage them and to build trust?
If you need ideas, let me point you to TrustingNews.org. Trusting News is an organization that is all about building trust, increasing engagement, and being transparent with the communities you serve. If you don’t know where to start, or are looking for ideas you might have overlooked, it’s worth your time, TrustingNews.org.
In the world of the alternative weeklies, you are closer to the communities than most, you see the impact, you see the possibilities, you see the effect of showing love.
At the Baltimore Beat, that manifests in many ways, but one that I find especially appealing is their use of Beat Boxes. Beat Boxes are distribution points for their print editions, but they are also community exchange hubs. They are little microcosms of democracy. They provide spaces for people to “take what they need, and leave what they can.” What does that include? It could be toiletries, boxes of Hamburger Helper, cans of soup, books, face masks, and Narcan. They help fill a need, and they show that Lisa Snowden and the Baltimore Beat love their community. It is an everyday demonstration of caring.
This demonstration of caring helps build trust and it matters when you are delivering news and information. As part of our election research this year, we surveyed about 2,500 people, and we found that people said they were very engaged with news sources for election information. However, they weren’t sure they could trust it. Only about 1 in 10 expressed a great deal of confidence in the election information they receive. A majority expressed only moderate or little confidence. There is a lack of trust. Community trust is a muscle, and you must work to develop it, so that people will listen to you, and trust you, when it matters.
Finally, revenue and resilience. Let me be clear. Revenue and resilience are not divorced from anything I have talked about. They are tied to the work you do on civic discourse, with culture and inclusion, in building trust and engaging the community.
Sustainability is not just a matter of dollars and cents, because in the long run that focus will fail you. At API, we are guided by these questions: What does a healthy, sustainable local news organization look like, and how can we help local news organizations realistically assess where they are, and move in a positive direction?
Notice that I said healthy, sustainable local news organizations. It is not enough to look at just the newsroom. But the practices and approach must be aligned across the business. How many of us have seen ideas come out of one department only to die as they encounter obstacles elsewhere in the company?
Check out our case study site at BetterNews.org for some examples worth imitating. We detail many case studies there that will help you with organizational transformation and building resilience.
What does that mean? A healthy, sustainable local news organization is resilient, identifying challenges and weaknesses before they become points of failure. Resilience is about the preparation you make to respond to challenges on the horizon that may not even have come into view yet. A healthy, sustainable local news organization maintains resources, skills and infrastructure that enable the organization to adapt, whether it be to the growing prevalence of artificial intelligence as part of our work, or the changing news habits of our audiences.
Despite the challenges, though, we live in hope. Your participation this week is a sign of that hope. The promise of stronger communities and a stronger country unites us here. We believe we can be a better industry, a better people, a better world.
No matter the tumult of our times, the growth of technology, the whims of business and markets, nothing can erode the need that people have for news and information that enables them to participate in our democracy. Nothing can erode the need for people like you — because we know the consequences when the spotlight of journalism goes dark.
Deceit and disinformation thrive in the dark. Bad actors take advantage of people flailing in the dark.
Our industry must bring the light. You bring the light.
You have a capacity for understanding your communities, of loving your communities, borne of your everyday experiences, because you walk the same streets and live in the same neighborhoods. You know every little happiness and every little heartbreak. That is why this work matters. It matters to your neighbors, and it matters to democracy, not just in 2024, but every day of every year, for all time.
