 here to join us. And what we think is a very important conversation to be had right now. And it's not just so much, you know, I know we're titled Ethics in the Trump Era, but it's not so much, you know, Trump. It's just the changing world that we're in in journalism with social media and technology, really pushing us in so many different directions. And so I think it's important that we have this conversation and remind ourselves of the ethics, the foundation, and how do we apply those and mold them into dealing with today's social media and changing technology. So with that, I would like to introduce our moderator. She's Macarena Hernandez. She's a multimedia journalist and educator. She is currently the Fred Hartman Distinguished Professor of Journalism at Baylor University. Previously, she was the Victoria Advocate and Dow Professor in Humanities at the University of Houston in Victoria. But before Macarena entered academia, she was an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News. And the reason I know her is when we both worked together at the San Antonio News. I was a big headache. Yes, she was. No, she was interesting and exciting and challenging. And Macarena was a Rio Grande Valley Bureau Chief for the Express News. But even before that, Macarena had interned at the New York Times, Los Angeles Times. And she sort of gained a little bit of a fame, Fama. Macarena probably doesn't even want me to remember this. She does not want this to be the defining moment of her journalism career. But Macarena was the one who everybody's probably familiar with the whole New York Times, Jason Blair incident. Macarena was the reporter that Jason Blair plagiarized when he plagiarized one of her articles that she wrote when she was working at the San Antonio Express News. He plagiarized a bunch of people. Like let's make that clear. I was the last person he plagiarized. And the one who made the most noise about it. I'm plagiarizing you. Yeah. That's how it was about it. That is how the world found out about it when Macarena, because she had been an intern there, she knew a lot of people there. So she knew who to call to get things straightened out. So without further ado, Macarena will introduce our panelists. Oh, forgot. Don't forget to sign up for SPJ. Go see Taylor over there. Thank you. And I really wanna encourage a conversation. I'm gonna ask a few questions, but I really, I think this is, we could probably have an incredible conversation about Trump. I know it gets pretty dicey in my own family. But anyhow, I won't speak to that because sometimes I prefer not to remember our conversations. But I will start and I'll introduce Shelly Koffler, who's a news director and executive producer for TPR since 2004, veteran with extensive political and governmental radio news coverage in Austin, former news director and managing editor at KERA in Dallas Fort Worth, an Austin bureau chief and legislative reporter for North Texas ABC affiliate, WFAA. She has produced and moderated many statewide political debates and she's the winner of the Edward R. Merward's from the Radio Television Digital News Association. And I will introduce Bill Lambrick, who is the Express News Washington correspondent. He started at HRS newspapers in 2013 as an investigative reporter in Washington and before that was DC bureau chief for the St. Louis Post Dispatch. He has worked in Washington since the mid 1980s in a career that began as an intern and later a correspondent in the Illinois State House in his home state. He is the author of two books, Dinner at the New Gene Cafe about the birth of GMOs and the global politics surrounding biotechnology and Big Muddy Blues, an account of the politics destroying the Missouri River, America's longest since Louis and Clark. He is co-founder of his family's Bay Weekly in Annapolis, the largest weekly in the Chesapeake Bay. And to my left, Charlotte Ann Lucas, now cast managing director, has had a very versatile career newspapers, web and TV, business reporting in Philadelphia, Dallas, Phoenix, San Francisco and San Antonio, former content director of MySanAntonio.com, Pulitzer Prize finalist, founding member of the local independent online news publishers, besides teaching ethics to journalism students at this campus, she has also taught at St. Mary's and at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. She's also the managing director of now cast SA where they teach workshops in media literacy, which she calls Crap Detection, to help people determine the credibility of online information as a founding board member of the local independent online news publishers. She is working with several organizations, including the Trust Project, to find more ways that high quality journalism can signal its trustworthiness. So we have a very impressive panel with a wide range of experiences and I'm gonna give you guys each a few moments to maybe introduce yourselves or share some thoughts. And then Bill, I wanna go straight to you since you're in DC in the middle of all of that and I want you to tell us if we're right to be so scared or at least some of us that feel so much fear. But Shelly, we'll start with you. Okay. Good morning, everybody. I'm really glad that I was asked to participate on this panel because it has forced me to think about something that is extremely important. I think about it every day sort of somewhere back here in my brain as we go about our work and we do have certain rules and guidelines that address ethics at the Texas Public Radio operation, but this has made me think about some of the finer points that I think are extremely important always but maybe no more important than they are now. And when Nora asked me to participate and I saw that the title was Ethics in the Age of Trump, I thought, well, why should they be any different than they ever were? And I really mean that. I don't think that our ethics, how we conduct ourselves today, should really be any different than the way they should have always been. I do think we have to provide our message, there's a greater urgency to communicate who we are and how we do our work, but I don't think we should change the good journalism practices that we should have had all along. So I'm not gonna say a whole lot right now because I think your questions will probably get to some of the finer points of all this. I did wanna say though that, excuse me, I have allergies. National Public Radio NPR has a terrific ethics handbook and if you want to with your students or your staff or just in your own personal time, check into this. It addresses what I think are big overarching issues and I mean, this is a very deep, long, complicated but really wonderful document. It addresses accuracy, fairness, completeness in an article, bias, independence and partiality conflicts of interest which may include, for example, working outside of your news organization, what's proper, what can I say, what should I do with social media? Because we do live in a different age where we have different ways to communicate but what we tell our people in our newsroom is whether it's on Twitter, in Facebook, when you're speaking to a public group, whether you're writing for public broadcasting or any other news publication, you represent us and your personal bias shouldn't be part of what you're talking about. So I'm just gonna leave it there and really look forward to your questions. It is, let's see, it's ethics.npr.org. And I mean, it's really deep. This goes into questions like if you have a reporter writing a book or an article or appearing in public or if you're asked to be part of a board, what things should be considered before you say yes and you take it a step further. And some people might consider these rules just a little rigid but I think they're really fair and I think that they provide really good guidelines for all of us as we navigate this new era. We do, but I will say sometimes I have to look it up. Not because I don't know what we should, they're just little complicating things that come up. But it's important that we think about this every single day because there's nothing more than our reputation and once we lose it, who will trust us? When do we become fake news? And I think that just I'll leave it there and look forward to your questions. Well, according to Trump, we already are fake news. But Charlotte and I would like for you to go next because you carry around a folder with codes of ethics from different publications dating back, I think to the Philadelphia Inquirer, was that the first one you ever got? And you have such an interesting perspective because you went from newspapers to really helping the San Antonio Express News usher it's new media efforts, online efforts and the standards are different when you're talking about print versus the internet. We certainly had to adopt. So yeah, this is, I pulled it out. I still have the code of ethics that I was handed in 1979 when I showed up to be a freelancer for the Philadelphia Inquirer as a student at then Glassboro State College and came over to freelance and they said, you have to follow this. And it is, this is a lot of fine print. A lot of fine print. I mean, there is very, very detailed on gifts that you can accept and your responsibility, your responsibility to accurateness and relationships. Relationships is a big deal to the Philadelphia Inquirer. I will tell you a quick story about why this is so detailed. Right before I got to the Philadelphia Inquirer, news broke that a former Philadelphia Inquirer reporter, Laura Forman, had been called in front of a grand jury investigating a former Pennsylvania State Senator Buddy C. Infranny for tax evasion. And she'd been called in front of the grand jury. She was working for the New York Times at the time because it turns out that she was not only covering him but she was sleeping with him and had received gifts from him and so the grand jury wanted to know about the gifts that she'd received in pursuit of that. And it was a big mess. And Abe Rosenthal who was then editor of the New York Times was famously quoted about the situation saying, I don't care if my reporters are screwing elephants as long as they're not covering the circus. And at the Philadelphia Inquirer, they responded with this two page, very fine print type on things including relationships as something that everybody including little lowly freelancers like me had to follow. But over the years I did collect, I have collected codes of ethics from every newspaper where I've gone and in circumstances when I was named business editor at the Express News 20 years ago, I implemented the first ethics policy for the business section about not just relationships but ownership of stocks and bonds and stuff like that. Ethics has always been very important to me. And partly because as an impressionable child, I was hit with that code of ethics. But even after that, I went to the web in 1999 to be managing editor of the street.com and we then had to expand our code of ethics to include online realities. For instance, if we made a mistake, you could online just go fix it and blink and pretend no one noticed. But the ethical thing to do is to acknowledge the error and let people know that you corrected the mistake which will also encourage people to tell you in other instances when you've made mistakes. So when I came from there back to my San Antonio in 2004, I implemented and put in place a corrections policy so that we had a corrections policy so people knew what to expect and knew that we did want them to tell us if we'd made a mistake so that we could correct the mistake and acknowledge the mistake. So I mean, the ethics go much, much broader than just what they were when it was all print. We had to expand those realities. And now, when NowCast was born, it was born with the FPGA code of ethics on the site and it has been expanded to include also the Institute for Nonprofit News code of ethics which is editorial independence. We are a non-profit organization so we have to abide by IRS rules and we get funding from all sorts of organizations. So we have to do IRS transparency. We are a GuideStar Gold transparent organization but at the same time, we need to let people who come to the website know that funders do not determine the editorial content of the website. So we carry this code of editorial independence and at the same time, we have just as Texas Public Radio does, a code of ethics that applies to our board of directors. So it goes even broader than just the reporters and the newsroom people. The board of directors also have a code of ethics at TPR and at our organization where they cannot affect the news or try to influence the coverage on the site. So it goes into every aspect of what we do. Right, right, absolutely. But that's part of why that code of ethics is there that you can refer to it. I was just gonna say our CEO is there to enforce it. Right, exactly. But ultimately, I think it all still goes back to the STJ code of ethics which over the years has not materially changed although it has changed in some specifics and that is that our job is to seek truth and report it and now to provide a safe place for the truth which is under attack. Bill, I wanna know if you decided to cover politicians after interning with one. Did that experience working? No, I didn't intern with a politician. I interned with a major metropolitan base. Oh, okay, I'm sorry, I misread that. I've always kept a distance from politicians, hopefully in any case, but I wanna say how wonderful it is to be here today but mainly it's good to be out of Washington, D.C. It is, I've been there a long time and I've never seen it like this. It, I got to leave my flat jacket back in Washington. Usually it's adversarial but now it's beyond adversarial. You often see what's going on in the White House briefings and Sean Spicer doesn't really have a motorized podium. Not yet, but he might but that's really a sideshow to the broader issue in Washington of getting information and the relationship between our government and the news media. I got an email the other day from Newt Gingrich. Does everyone know who Newt Gingrich is? A long time silver-haired politician of the Republican faith, the conservative Republican faith. This was not an email, a friendly email but I got on one of those lists and it was seeking money. And these are some of the words that in a short, just a little bit of email. He's referring to people in our business. Biased, slanted, fake news, liberal media lies, biased media attacks, biased liberal media. And that was just in a small email and that it, this kind of exemplifies what's going on these days in the profession. There's to get money for the party or his own Newt Gingrich foundation, whatever he does. He's quite the hustler. He also gets like 60,000 for a speech. He's out there for himself too. So there's this widespread vilification and it's spreading. It's not just the executive branch but you see it in Congress. There's these efforts to manage the news constantly. Even on the other side of the spectrum, my Beto O'Rourke who recently announced that he's running for Senate. It was weird because he didn't put out news releases. He would try to communicate through Facebook and also through this odd platform called Medium. And you see more people in Congress, people at other levels of government trying to bypass the media. They may get 850 shares or 1,200 hits on their tweets but they're satisfied. They're in control and why is this important? Why is it important to take note of what Donald Trump says about us and what Newt Gingrich says about us? It's because throughout history their tyrants have taken aim at the news media. John McCain who's no liberal said the other day, the first thing dictators do is they shut down the press. So what we're talking about here is very important and the flow of information. And I think it's very important as we try to adapt to these new standards that we don't try to normalize the president of the United States. We don't wanna go too far in saying, well he sounded really presidential the other day. I think we wanna keep in mind what he has said over the period of months and what he has done and what he might do. I think it's incumbent upon us right now to turn up our game in this business. With it's much harder to get information out of the federal government. As I said before, I think that the Sean Spicer briefings every day is a sideshow. The real issue is information in the federal government where governing lies. I've often said that news organizations spend so much time and money focusing on Congress and especially when Congress has done so little in recent years to deal with the problems of the American people. But on the other hand, we spend so little effort on the federal government. And now that information is much harder to get. I'm working on a story on the EPA right now and how that agency is getting slashed and cut and bludgeoned and what the impacts of that might be. And I've been trying to reach out to the EPA through channels, going through the press office. I can't get a call back and I'm not alone. There's a lot of federal agencies these days that are not responding to journalists at all. So what this means for people in our business and some of you are in the business, some of you will soon be in the business, is it means moving to a much harder source work to try to find people in these agencies who will tell you, oh my gosh, they've cut out the environmental justice program and what the impact of that is gonna be on trying to, for instance, prevent the location of toxic dumps in areas of low income. This is very difficult work to do. Often you need to plant the seeds that may not grow for a couple weeks or months or even years. I get calls back occasionally from people that I worked with when I was purely an investigative reporter a few years ago. But I think what we need to do in this era is to make sure, there's a lot of talk about journalism ethics and we can certainly talk more about that in the questions and answers. But we need to maintain our integrity and we need to present unvarnished truth. And it's my sense that although we have to deal with the whole narrow casting issue and that's people going to outlets to reinforce what they believe and leaving the mainstream media behind. And I never thought that the mainstream media would be a pejority but certainly is now. Certainly we have to deal with that but I don't think that the anger and the enmity that exists right now with Donald Trump is gonna last because I don't think Donald Trump is gonna last. That's my own personal view here. I think we see other politicians who try this, this hard edged anti-news media approach. It's not seeming to work. And I think we will get beyond this but we have to hang tough and present that unvarnished truth and do a lot of good source work and be brave. So I wanna thank you again for having me here and we're open to questions. That you don't get called back anymore. Is there also fear or is there just a new administration of people that told the Trump line or is there fear of talking to the press? Well it's a combination of the two. And oddly things started to change under Obama where the information became more centralized and there was more of an effort to put out the company line and there was more fear of what exposes and negative information could do but now it's a whole other order of magnitude of that. And I was at a dinner party last week with a top EPA person. We were talking off the record and I complained. I said, well, I've been trying to get to you, get to people for two weeks about issues on the border. She said, they're not gonna call you back. They're not gonna talk to you. And that's playing out across the federal government. And I think what we need to worry about we don't wanna see that also take root intensively in the state governments and local governments. And that's a fear of mine that this anti-news media sentiment that's so pronounced in Washington spreads across the country. I would just say something about that last point you made about it spreading to state and local government. We have a reporter in Austin and actually some of this not to the level that you're experiencing in Washington with the federal with the Trump administration but some of this has been going on for a long time. And I'll use an example. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick was supported the Trump administration, supported Trump's presidency. Shortly after the session began in January he tried to change all the rules for access in the Senate and it was really difficult for us because we're collecting sound in addition to writing notes down on a piece of paper. He made it very difficult for the broadcasters to be in the chamber with the lawmakers so they had access to the lawmakers and he has limited his own access and he started the whole conversation about fake news. It was I think, as I recall, it was with the issue of school vouchers, private school choice and basically said we weren't telling the truth. And all I can say is what you have to do is double down and do your job, gather the facts, attribute, attribute, attribute, be accurate because if you make mistakes once or twice people don't trust you either. But it's going on there and I do think that it's a spreading phenomenon for those lawmakers and those elected officials who see the media as the enemy, being too intrusive, standing in the way of doing whatever it is they wanna do, their agenda change. But it's not all lawmakers by the way because, and I'm gonna say it's among Republicans too, there are plenty of people who are well-intentioned whether you agree with their politics or not and Ryan has found that some of them will come to him and say okay, here's what it is. So you have to work your sources maybe in a different way and you have to double down and do what you're supposed to do and do it with all the accuracy and with all the fact-finding that we should be doing anyway. But there is that happening and it is spreading. I'll talk about this as much as I know because this is sort of on the marketing side of our... Yes. Correct. I think public broadcasting stations across the country, first of all, here's the good news. Since all of this started and the whole questioning of reliability and accuracy in traditional media, since that started, we have actually seen a surge of support. Public radio stations in particular across the country, we have fund drives, we're doing one now, if you know what I'm talking about, and oh yeah, and we have actually found a tremendous level of generosity because people are concerned. I think that there is a very large group of people out there from all political perspectives who want, who value news that's attributed accountability news. I think that's how Pew refers to it as accountability news where you tell us where you get the information, how you get the information. If you're using unnamed sources, which is not something I love doing, but you have more than one end-named source, that you work very, very hard to ascertain that what you're telling the public is correct. So I feel very good about that. Our marketing department, which is one person, along with our CEO, we wanted to communicate to the public that this is where we are and what we're trying to do. So we've adopted a branding, we're calling, we're saying you'll hear it on the air, real, reliable Texas public radio. You know, every time you change the way you refer to yourself, people like it or don't like it, so I'm sure it's being evaluated at this point, but what we're trying to say is we're trying to do the hard work. We're a small group of people, but we are trying to do the hard work to give you unbiased, whenever possible, and certainly accurate information. That's such an important thing, it seems to me. Recently, all sorts of people have come out to try to support credibility in news, and even Craig Newmark of Craigslist fame has put a million dollars of his own money into supporting credibility in journalism, and what he says is that journalism is the immune system for democracy. That's how important it is. I mean, it's a fabulous, wonderful, wonderful line from him, but it's very, very important, so he's come out and put in a million dollars of his own money. There's another 14 million dollar effort that includes Facebook, trying to help people determine what is credible news and what is real news, and then Omidar, who is the co-founder of eBay, just gave a hundred million dollars to boost journalism and also to fight hate speech, and I think those things are very, very, very encouraging because at Nowcast, we were founded with a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation under the Community Information Challenge, and that was built on the premise that information is a core community need, and accurate information is a core community need, and in fact, that goes right back to the FPGA code of ethics which is seek the truth and report it. I mean, it all kind of comes around. What we have right now, obviously, back when I ran My San Antonio and it was the Express News in Kent, we had a 52% market share. That doesn't exist anymore. Even just a few years later, people got their information from as many as 18 different places, right? So you go wherever you go for your information needs. We know with as many as much propaganda and hoaxes that were perpetrated during the last election that an awful lot of news is coming from an awful lot of different places at people and people are getting their news from, I mean, we're all publishers, right? We're all publishers, whether it's our Facebook or whether it's our Twitter or whether it's our email. We're all publishing the news. So the next challenge becomes how do you determine the credibility of that news that you are consuming and you're passing along? And so it's really, really important to news organizations to try to help people understand we actually are a news organization with a code of ethics that does check the facts and we are accountable and we have integrity and you should be able to trust, we're a trustworthy source of information and that I think is one of the biggest things that we all have to do is help people out there who are friends, family, and the community and help our fellow publishers of news, people who are passing along news on their Facebook piece determine what's credible and what information is good to pass along and to make it socially unacceptable to throw an empty beer bottle out the window full of fake news, right? Just regarding anonymous sources, something that struck caught my eye the other day, quite interesting. It was a story, the Associated Press now for several years has asked its reporters to please include why a source is requesting anonymity in your story when you have to use an anonymous source. So the AP had a story about Tillerson's upcoming trip to Moscow. It's gonna be in a week or so. Quoting senior State Department officials and it says, the officials briefed reporters on condition of anonymity despite Trump's condemnation of the press for using anonymous sources. It didn't really explain why they wanted to be anonymous but they got a dig in it, Trump, which I thought was, I think I detected perhaps some frustration in that reporter's writing. That happens every day. And it is this profound contradiction. We have Trump administration officials who brief us but they declined to be named at the same time that their boss is castigating us for using anonymous sources. The only way that we can quote them is anonymously. So it makes no sense but it happens every day. And I think just for these readers and listeners of news it's frustrating for them to, who are these people that are telling you this stuff? We would like to know. You just finished this working? There's a real clamp down on official sources but if you read the New York Times and other sources there seems to be, this seems to be the best of all times for leaks and unofficial sources. I mean, nothing happens in Washington now but it's in the New York Times eventually. I mean, is this happening where there's a multitude of people speaking without attribution that they're providing such a rich diet of news every day? I think we've seen several levels of that. At the outset we saw intelligence agent, intelligence agency people speaking out because of this difficult relationship that between the president and the, it was the president-elect and not the president and the CIA and the NSA. In fact, he likened them, Trump likened them to Nazis. And I think that that raised the ire of a great deal of people and for good reasons so that they were speaking out. And since then, there have been more and more people speaking out, not for attribution. You have to be careful because there's a battle within the administration right now between the Bannon part of the administration and the Kushner part of the administration. So people are sending messages and trying to denigrate one another. And that's occurring at the New York Times and Washington Post and Wall Street Journal level. And indeed, it is a good time for that. I don't think we want to go too far down the path of the politics of personality. I'm troubled but there's so much focus on that rather than the substance of governing and what the cuts in the EPA would mean, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act will mean. I personally would like to see more source work devoted to those kinds of issues, to the flow of that type of information. But yes, these are the solid days for source work at that level. I just want to respond to what you just said about the story you're working on with the EPA and some of the other public policy pieces that journalists should be pursuing. You have to shut out somehow, and I watch it sometimes, but the cable news, talking head stuff, that should not be news of the day. It's entertaining from time to time but follow the policy, follow the money, follow the facts. And I'll just say I had a very, nothing like what you're dealing with now but when I covered the legislature and David Dewhurst became Lieutenant Governor, he was new to his office and it was in 01 when the budget wasn't in such great shape. So going into the session, the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor and the House Speaker at the time all agreed to cut their budget 7%. We're gonna do it, everybody's cutting their budget 7%, every agency. So we pulled David Dewhurst's numbers and David Dewhurst wasn't cutting his budget 7%. He was increasing the budget that Bill Ratliff had had before him exponentially. So in the first, I think it was week or so of the session, we, I did the story and he shut me out and I wasn't on any email lists, I wasn't on any call lists, I didn't get the press releases, I sometimes I never got an interview and this went on for a couple months and at first I was really frustrated and upset and then I said, well, I'm just gonna go do my stories because the press conferences I'm missing are his message, not necessarily the news of the day and not necessarily the biggest stories we need to cover and so I found a different way to do the stories and I think a better way to do the stories. So I'm looking forward to that EPA story because that's the kind of stuff we need to be doing. Dig into the details and let the personality stuff, let them talk about it on cable TV, that's fine. We just need to go do our jobs. I think some would say that Obama was the master at crafting his own narrative and some people are better at doing it in a more nuanced way than someone that's used to being a TV personality that speaks in sound bites. But I do wonder that there were things that came up during this conversation, this election, conversations I had with my students that made me very jealous that I wasn't in a newsroom because I was wondering when they were having the discussion about Trump's comments about grabbing women and newspapers deciding whether to use the word or not. So I'm like, I wish I could have sat through those conversations because I wanna, this is probably the first time newsrooms are having that conversation about that word. I also read a lot about the coverage, the ongoing coverage and what do we call it? Do we call it falsehoods? Do we call it lies? The New York Times ran a story days after the inauguration talking about Trump's repeated assertion that millions of undocumented immigrants had cost him the popular vote. And from the New York Times article by Dan Berry, he says, not to worry, as far as anyone knows, the president's assertion is akin to saying that millions of unicorns also voted illegally. But such a baseless statement by a president challenged the news media to find the precise words to describe it. And so I wondered about those conversations in newsrooms too, like our newsroom saying, what are we gonna use in the headline? Are we gonna use liar? Are we gonna use falsehoods? And what went into that thought process? The New York Times for that story though ultimately chose a more muscular term opting to use the word lie in the headline after initially using the word falsely, it switched to lie online and then settled on meeting with top lawmakers, Trump repeats an election lie for Tuesday's print edition. So now you kind of get to play with it on different platforms, right? But I do wonder, are these one, how have the conversations changed since inauguration? And are these conversations still taking place or what did they look like in your newsrooms? I can address the issue of lie. NPR spent a ton of time on this question, I mean days, I think, and they have an ombudsman, a guy who, you should really dial in his Twitter feed because he's amazing, Mark Mehmet is his name and he's sort of the ombudsman who is the ethicist for NPR. Mehmet, and I will, I'll be glad to, I don't want to spell it improperly, I think, yeah, but I'll find it for you. But, so they had this conversation and we took advantage of it. We weren't writing about the national Trump stories in the way that NPR was, we localized a lot of that. But the conclusion they had, and I have to say this was a really good way to view it, if you say somebody lies, you imply that you know their intention. I think you, if you can say it's false or not true, and you can say that with real affirmation, then that's what we decided to do and that's what NPR decided to do. So instead of saying Trump lied, you don't really know what is, what yes, what his intention was, maybe he got it wrong, maybe he purposefully got it wrong and gave it to us wrong, but we don't really know that. So we've been saying, and we still do it this way, we say it isn't true, and we cite why we say we know it isn't true, because that's important to provide some context anytime we say something like that. Yesterday, in fact, we had a discussion in our newsroom because NPR didn't provide guidelines about whether to use the word attack with respect to the missile strike in Syria, because for some people, attack implies an act of war. So we are conservative sometimes on these points and we just continue to write about it and talk about it as a missile strike. So I don't, maybe we're too conservative on that, but we decided to do it that way. Words matter and the words that we use in all of these instances matter and that is not something that's relegated to Washington, I mean, how we frame it, how we respond to it, whether we frame something in the affirmative, for instance, you can say, you can talk about that Trump administration's new direction at the EPA is rolling back regulations, or you can say rolling back protections. The laws were designed to protect people, that's the environmental protection agency, right? So words matter, the words that we choose matter in everything that we do and it's worth being thoughtful about those words. Locally, we saw that during the whole discussion about Uber and Lyft when some news... It's counterproductive. I wanted to bring up a case that we're going through right now in San Antonio in regards to the candidacy of Manuel Medina who is running for mayor and Nora might want to actually jump in and speak a little bit, I don't know, but the fellow seems to be using some Trumpian type rhetoric and tactics and I don't know if you all are familiar with it, but if you look at the Express News, he's having a big fight with one of our local columnists, Brian Chasnoff, and again, it goes back to words. Medina's saying that Chasnoff has challenged his patriotism and his citizenship and stuff which is not really true. So how do you handle that, Nora? In all fairness, I should say that I am Brian Chasnoff's editor. I edit his columns, so I was particularly amused by Manny's assertion that Brian's column was an insult to all naturalized U.S. citizens because I'm a naturalized U.S. citizen. I only became a naturalized citizen in 2008. So as his editor, that filter is always on, so it didn't even occur to me that it was in somehow an insult to naturalized citizens. The whole discussion, the whole point of Brian's column was that, as Charlotte Ann said, words matter, and Manuel Mendoza in his live story when he gets up before audiences, he talks about how Medina came to the U.S. when he was three years old and he has lived here continuously. And that was really the part that Brian was sort of challenging the continuous part that we have a lot of documentation that shows that he has a very rich, involved life in Mexico. And nobody was saying that's wrong or that's illegal. We're just saying how you seem to have a significant life history still in Mexico even as you live here, including he ran for office. So how can you run for office in a place that you're not living? And I thought Brian's column, actually considering that he's an opinion column, he actually wrote this column pretty straight up. He did not do a lot of editorializing in the column. He just very much relied on the documentation we found online that showed he had gotten married, he had gotten divorced, he ran for office, he was working as a part-time professor with a university there. We found the social security forums where they were paying him. So this is more than I would think, and we leave it to the reader to decide, is this more than just going to visit, as he says, and I was just going to visit and spending the night every now and then in my dad's house. And so our point was this is up to the reader to decide if this matters to them. It's not our job to decide if it matters for you, it's just our job to point out inconsistencies, and that's really what we did. John McCormack is probably the other expert in this room on Madina, because he has a profile that will be in the paper tomorrow. So read it, it's very interesting. Madina is hassling everybody. He has called our vice president for publishing, Mr. Aldum, he's called our publisher, he's calling everybody at Hearst Tower in New York City. Yes, he is, I think he's very Trumpian, yes. His motivation and his redirection is very reminiscent of Trump. I know some of us would like to blame Donald Trump for everything that's wrong with newspapers, and obviously he doesn't deserve all that credit because newspapers were struggling before, and I'm speaking specifically of newspapers, but in general the media was struggling before. I would say when I left newspapers, it was like a really sad time in 2008. People were getting laid off left and right. Newspapers were more concerned with making money. Editors at the Dallas Morning News were asking me, how does that affect the Plano soccer mom? You know, when I would pitch a story. So obviously the business aspect of, I mean I always say that the media is an idealistic institution trying to survive in a corporate world because money did become a factor. I came into newspapers in the 90s and I saw a complete shift within my 15 year career where it went from Dallas Morning News having bureaus in Cuba, several reporters in Mexico City to Texas newspapers fighting for that one reporter in Mexico City, so can you guys talk a little bit about how the business started changing and maybe this is the lack of trust in the media is kind of a long time coming if someone has articulated what a lot of people unfortunately feel and sometimes when I talk to friends who are like, oh the media is so biased, I always feel like it's such an oversimplification but I mean I want to give you all the floor to explain or maybe you disagree with me but. I will just refer briefly to newspapers. When I came to the St. Louis Post Dispatch Washington Bureau in the mid 1980s we had eight reporters. We used to gather around the table, this was the Pulitzer family's newspaper, the flagship newspaper, we gather around the conference table early in the year and declare where in the world we like to travel and report whether it's India or Yemen, both of those places where I went or Europe. When I did it, I did a lot of reporting on GMOs and I wrote a book about it but I would go back and forth to Europe, I spent time in the Amazon, I was all over the place as was everyone else in the office so things gradually changed to the point where when I left I was the last reporter at that newspaper when I joined Hearst in 2013 and it was a matter of seeking approval for a train ticket to travel a couple hundred miles rather than say, well I'm gonna go over to Brussels to report on something. So that's rather anecdotal but there's no question that with the rise of the internet and all these things that we here know that it's finding a business model has been quite challenging for newspapers and it still is, that is still the case. We see a lot of public efforts like ProPublica which is doing a very good job in New York although I'm always seeking more money and it comes down to finding that business model there is some hope these days of a renewed interest by people in newspapers, New York Times and the Washington Post are making declarations about how their circulation is going up and they're hiring lots of people. We're certainly hope that that, we hope that that hope spreads widely to newspapers across America and that people understand the role we play in a democracy which is really what this is about. I just wanted to say and point out that newspapers in their heyday and I earned that Pulitzer finalist by flying everywhere for a year every time the plane crashed I flew toward it so that we could produce that incredible series on aviation safety at the Dallas Times Herald. But at that point in time most newspapers in this country were showing returns somewhere north of 17%. Now in a really, really, really good year GM has a return of 3%. So newspapers are basically printing money and they had a very good life of printing money and making a whole lot of money and obviously in the 80s or in the early 90s the San Antonio Express News had about 250 editorial employees and now it's 100-ish, right about 100-ish. So I mean that's the change in terms of what's happened to newspapers and what's happened to newspapers in terms of circulation and ad revenue. And those dollars, those advertising dollars have gone other places and we can get into the business of when Craigslist came around he allowed people to put up an advertisement immediately with photos for free and then take it down as soon as that item had been sold. And newspapers were never really good at making that easy for the consumer. They were very good at charging lots of money for it. So I mean that was the business model that worked very well for newspapers and newspapers are trying to change that business model and it's tough because those advertising dollars have gone other places and for the longest time in the world the newspapers had owned the game and were not particularly flexible about changing the rules of the game to accommodate the customer. I know we're all struggling for the business model that's gonna work and I would have to say right now things are pretty good for public radio. I know you've probably heard about all the CPB Corporation for Public Broadcasting sort of being targeted for cuts in Congress. I would have to say that for us at our station here and for most of the big city stations by that I mean Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Dallas here in Texas. Long ago the general managers at those stations recognized that at any point in time our government funding could go away and so we don't put it in the budget as an necessity for keeping the stations operating it's there and if we lose it we'll continue. Will we miss it? Yes, we'll miss it. But the stations that are really gonna struggle are the smaller stations like Corpus Christi which has one person to pick maybe two now in their news department. The question is will they still be able to afford the national public radio programming, the morning edition, the all things considered will they be able to pay for that and offer it to their audience? They're not really producing local content to any great extent but they really do rely on that federal funding so for all of our sister brother stations out there we do worry about them but I just wanna say that feel reassured that here in San Antonio we'll continue. I would say that for me it's really interesting to think back on what's happened to newspapers and then look at how the broadcast landscape is changing. I have to say I worked in television for a very long time. I was very fortunate, I worked for the great Bilo organization when we actually did what I think was pretty good news for WFAA and I felt very fortunate we had a full-time legislative bureau when nobody else did but that went away too and with respect to public radio what we're watching is the advent of radio on demand and by that I mean people don't wanna have to tune in at the top of the hour and the bottom of the hour and at some specific time they want their news when they want their news. It's the same with print publications. Give it to me now because this is when I want it and so we have and you might find this interesting we're still working to build it out here but there is an app called NPR One and so when NPR the national newscast is broadcast at the top of the hour it goes into the app we have automated our newscasts, our local newscasts to go into that app and so when I'm driving home at night if I have missed the six o'clock newscast that our newscaster has produced and broadcast I hit the app and I listened to it on the way home I can hear that at eight o'clock at night if I missed it at six p.m. We haven't perfected that yet but we know we need to do this because it's only a question of time before all of the new cars have internet on board and like I said our listening and our news consumption habits have all changed so we know that this is gonna continue to change how people consume their news is going to continue and we have to somehow figure out how to adapt. I don't think the great reporting that newspaper reporters are doing is going away. You know, where would we be without it? Pardon me, where would we be without it without the deep news and one of my little bugaboos something that really bothers me is that national public radio has a pretty big staff but when I turn on NPR they have to many times interview the Washington Post correspondent or the New York Times correspondent or Bill Lambrick from the Express News to talk about a really big deal story I would like to see our broadcast organization invest more money in the investigative reporting and the deep reporting that needs to be done to suss out all of this information. I'm grateful for what the newspaper reporters are doing and I want us to get on board and do more. We have a newsroom with 12 people so you know, sometimes it's challenged. Yes, please, this is a conversation. Any question? Raise your hand and I'll come to you. How about that? I do want to say that there has been a distress of the media that before Trump and being at Baylor University that's a Baptist Christian university I hear it a lot from white Christians who feel that the mainstream or mainstream media does not reflect their experiences and that it has a liberal tint. I hear it from my Latino and my black friends who say that they don't feel like they're represented in newspapers or in the media in general unless it's a story about culture or a protest or food and so it brings to mind a speaker I heard who was from Oakland, California had moved to Texas, was reporting out of Marfa and he spent like three paragraphs describing these city council people in their, is it 10 gallon cowboy hats? I never know, it's 10, 20. 10 gallon cowboy hats, belt buckles and I remember telling him after I said, had you not been from Texas, I wonder if those details would have struck out for you. So I tell my students, we all have filters, Nora editing with her naturalized citizen filter, you know, that kind of shape the way we interpret the news and even we edit the news and even we report the news and so I wonder what your thoughts are on that because there is a deep distrust that this has been going on for many, many years. I mean at least as long as I was in the business, people were always calling me a sell out or I was part of that machine, you know. And I worked for very mainstream newspapers. I think that online I have a terrific advantage and that is that in every single article that we publish, I can say, don't just take my word for it, here's a link to the source of that information or here's a link to an earlier article or here's a link to this. So we routinely publish stories that I, in house we call them optimized where we've gone through them piece by piece and said, here's additional information, here's additional information, here's the backup, here's the slideshow. And so like old fashioned footnotes, you know. Everything has that attributed to it because to me it is again important to say this is, we have checked this out, we have verified this. This is a trustworthy source of information because in the end that is what our job is is to make sure that what we're doing is seeking the truth and reporting it and providing accurate information to people and also persuading people by the way we behave, you know, our ethical behavior that the truth matters, right? That's my absolute panic right now is that with when we have a president who is sending out Twitter that are things that are blatantly untrue or aimed at, you know, cause I hate speech towards the media that people will say, I don't know what to believe. And so I have this overwhelming responsibility as a journalist to say, here's true facts, here's integrity, here's something done with an ethical conscience behind it to say to you, we really did reach out to try to find the truth and the truth matters. Well, just kind of speaking to what you just said, you can go online and find any social media page and some person who's a blogger maybe has done the exact same thing that you've done. So they cite articles, research, whatever to back up a story about how, let's say it's a story about like how women with big butts are smarter, right? So they've tagged, yeah, they've tagged things in there that, you know, you go to and you read it and it's a research article backing up what they've said but it really doesn't back up what they've said. You know, they just kind of thrown it in there to make it sound credible but the average person probably wouldn't be able to discern that research paper. You know, they wouldn't be able to go through it and understand the facts themselves. So when you're doing what you're doing, you're obviously doing with a very sharp eye, educated. You're doing it in a way that's investigative, you have a lot of information but people that are, I guess, trying to model what you're doing but not really doing it, you know what I'm saying? How do you differentiate amongst the regular people that you all are at a different level? You know, because the average person can look and say, well, they're citing two, like, there are things in here that seem like facts. This seems credible. That's a really, really good question and actually the Knight Foundation just issued a challenge for applications around the world for people to say, how can we help ensure a flow of accurate information and how can people better tell and tell what information is accurate. We have, obviously, a toolbox on Nowcast that is our crap detection toolbox that helps you say, starting with, who's the author? What is that author's digital footprint? Is that author somebody who has written other credible things? Who is the publisher? Who pays for this organization to publish what it's publishing, right? What are their funding sources? If they're not telling you their funding sources then that's a pretty big red flag. If the author has no digital footprint, that's a pretty big flag. So we have a whole bunch of things that you can go through this checklist to say, you know, is this real or is it not real? And a bunch of ways to track down hoaxes that are well-known hoaxes and propaganda. So, I mean, I think I'm connected with an organization, well, a network of people around the world who have put together more than 100 resources for people, including journalists, to fact-check information and to figure out how to determine the credibility of online news. And I think that's really... And we're doing it, we're doing it, but I feel like it's, like really, there needs to be a bigger effort. The effort, actually, the effort is global right now. And if anybody noticed, if you did a Google search this week, did you notice that Google is starting to say, this is not a proven fact? So Google is in the game as well, saying, hey, this has been shown to be spurious. That's a brand new thing from Google. Facebook is coming up with some similar things, and it is a huge effort by, and every one of us who is engaged in publishing journalism is very, very concerned about distinguishing ourselves from that. I think that you're talking about what will have to happen. If social media doesn't reach those people who don't, you know, not everybody listens to national public radio or Texas public radio. I don't think we alone, meaning our organization or the Express News and the so-called traditional media, I don't think we can change the landscape without the assistance of the Googles, the Facebooks of the world, those locations where people go to peruse information, but they may not have a sophisticated mechanism. They may not have a sophisticated set of principles for analyzing it. I really think that's what has to happen. It has to be bigger than the old traditional news organizations doing a good job and saying, hey, listen to us. It has to be something that's more on a mass scale. Two quick points. The San Antonio Express News is involved now with a very aggressive campaign to interact with readers. Yesterday, the managing editor, Jamie Stockwell, met with some of those readers who were reading the paper and seeing it online and being provided by the newspaper. I talked to their last night. I said, well, what did you glean today from these people? And she says, well, one of her points was that they wanna know more about how stories go together. And I think they wanna understand the process. And I think that that's one small answer to demonstrate the integrity and the effort that goes in to a story. And the other, my point too, is a pet peeve. I wish that newspapers would stay away from all these goofy sponsored content, clickbait websites, because I think that confuses people. They can't tell the difference between what's at the top and what's at the bottom. And but in this constant effort to try to find a business model, I don't think publishers understand that point. Okay, great, is this on? Yeah, I have a question for Macarena. It regards campus media. And Baylor, you have been rocked by a big scandal over sexual misconduct among your athletes and you lost Ken Starr and all kinds of stuff. How has Baylor media, campus media handled those issues and have there been ethical challenges in doing so? I'm not over student publications. Actually, we're looking for someone to fill in our student publications. She's dodging. Job. So Baylor is a private institution, so it's like writing press releases. I was a grad student, I mean, an undergrad at Baylor, and I ended up going to grad school for journalism because even though I felt like it was a good education, I wanted to go work under professors in a campus Berkeley where the media was independent. Because it is, I tell my students, this is part of the game. You have to learn what it's like to work with different people and every publication has a restriction. Not every publication I've written for wants to run the stories I'm interested in because they don't, as one editor in the Dallas Morning News told me, hit the sweet spot for our core readership, which, so yeah, the newspaper though has been very diligent because they can't get away from the story, so I'm very glad to see constant coverage of the Ken Star being fired, about the coach, about the football players. I think that in all the coverage of Baylor, and they deserve all the coverage they're getting, and I tell my students, this is a great, for my students that are public relations students, this is a great teachable moment in public relations. What do you do? What has Baylor done wrong? Baylor did a lot of things wrong when handling the scandal, and I always tell people, tell the reporter the truth because that is be honest. And if you are sorry, say so, and if you don't mean it, you're gonna get torn apart, especially if it's caught on video and you look like you really don't care. So, you know what the most disturbing part about that story is for me, is that the campus sexual assault is a national epidemic, and we have hundreds and hundreds of cases that don't involve football players that are being investigated on our campus, and Baylor is not alone. There's a great documentary called The Hunting Ground, which kind of documents the process in which sexual assault are finally taken seriously in college campuses, and they interview young women from Harvard, from Berkeley, from students going to state schools in Alabama, so I think sometimes, I mean for me, as a journalist, the interesting thing was just like, wow, what is this day, what is the national story about these sexual assaults? Because, yeah, I mean, definitely everyone that got fired should have gotten fired. I mean, Kent Starr, well, they've been running stories and they haven't told them not to, and kids have been writing commentary, but we are also a newspaper that has to go through administrators before stuff gets printed. So, we're still looking for someone. I think it's time to wind this up. Anybody else have anything else to say? Yes, sir. Here you go. How you doing? Brandon Edwards, I work for the Ranger over at San Antonio College, and I just came in the journalism about maybe a year and a half, maybe two years ago, and I think my biggest thing with me is, how do I, well, as professionals in the professional world, how do you separate yourself and your feelings from what you write? Because about a year ago, a lot of police brutality and things like that were going on and me being a black man kind of scares me a little bit just because I don't know what could happen to me. So, I would like to, personally, I thought about maybe how could I write that? How could I express myself in ways of that nature? But then, actually in a meeting I had yesterday with my newspaper, they said, it was a quote from a TIPPA professional. He said, you can't really be about the cause and be in journalism. So, my question to professionals, and to you guys, anybody in the room, how do you separate yourself or how do you maintain your unbiased in journalism and your work? Well, I would just, I just say, you look for other perspectives. If this is how I feel, how do other people feel? And I mean, I have lots of opinions, but my opinions are just mine and it's not how I feel, it's about what I know. And so, I need to seek out other opinions and put that into perspective, you know? I've covered local and state politics for a long time. It's a very opinionated arena and sometimes there's no right answer, but there are a variety and a diversity of opinions. So, I think you can explore your thoughts by talking to other people who may not think the same way. I just say briefly, I think that the issue of justice needs to underlie all reporting. I think we need to seek that. But when you write the story, I think you need to have both sides in it, but it's okay to have a sense of the need for justice. And that's kind of why I've actually decided to stay with journalism, just because it's not necessarily just about my voice, it's about everybody's voice. And that's what I was, I talked to one of my editors about that as well, and she said, you know, when you kind of have to give up your voice to make other people know or make other people heard. So, that's just my question, I just want to ask that. You know, it's a really good question and I don't want you to give up your perspective. That's really important. It's really important, I can't give up my perspective as a woman, right? I mean, and that's really important, that perspective that I bring to the situation, and it's important to be upfront with that, but we can't lose your perspective. Okay. I know the idea that there's some truth, you know, or objectivity, you can, I think I'd encourage my students to be objective because that's our job, but we also have to be very honest that we all have our own filters and how we see the world, and they're dictated by how much money your parents had or didn't have on their bank account by where you went to school, but what neighborhood you grew up with at, whether you went to church or not. And if we pretend like how we grew up does not shape how we see the world and how we interpret it and how we regurgitate it to the rest of the world, we're not being completely honest. So with that, but we'll keep talking because I have more to add. But Mike Drudge is gonna come and give closing remarks to the president of SPJ. Thank you all. First off, everyone for coming out today. I know you have a lot of other things to do on a Saturday and we really appreciate it. Let's have an applause for the panel. They did a great job. Thank you all so much for coming. I want to say, for you who may have come late, I'm the president of the San Antonio Pro chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Michael Drudge is my name. My colleague over here, Taylor Mobley is our vice president for a membership. I encourage you, if you are not a member, please consider joining SPJ. We have various categories you can join as a professional student, a post grad, retired. You get some price breaks for some of these categories. And you can even join as a supporter, an associate member for $20 a year. And if you like programs like this and you want us to continue to grow, we need all the members we can get. And with that, I want to say that my colleague, Jerry Townsend, is on the faculty of Texas A&M San Antonio and is anyone who's interested may go with Jerry after this is over for a little tour of their facilities here, their communications department. It's quite interesting and it's a good place to check out. This is a really great school and it's got a great program going. Anything I'm forgetting, Nora? No? Oh, yes, I'm sorry. We have a drawing to give away some express news medals. I should thank the express news. Let's have an applause for them. They gave us all the coffee and the sweet rolls and everything. And so Nora, come in. How do you want to do this? I- First of all, did everybody get to enter it? Did everybody enter for a prize? Yeah. You didn't get to enter it? But did you get a medal? Sure, you got a medal. Thank you again for coming. This year's medal has proved very popular. It says a free press is essential to democracy. So I thought this audience in particular would be very appreciative of it. So I brought a handful that we could give away as prizes. So without further ado, where's Mike? Macarena. Macarena, pick one. Teresa, Telerica. We're ordered, so these are really special. Cynthia, ha ha ha. Garen, come on. Who is, who is, and the other winner is Samuel McDaniel.