 Welcome back to Think Tech. I'm Jay Fidel. This is our Community Matters show, and today we're going to talk about national news and how national news is taking the oxygen out of local news, which is very important to us and into our democracy. And what can we do about this process? We're going to talk to Brett Overgaard, and he's the program director of the journalism program at UH Minoa. Welcome to the show, Brett. Nice to see you here. Thanks for having me back, Jay. Always enjoy it. Let's talk about, start looking at local news first. You know, I was somewhat disturbed to see that the Star Advertiser might be sold, or if not sold, it might close. What does that tell us? What's the state of affairs, the state of the press, if you will, in Honolulu in Hawaii? Well, there's definitely a collapse of the newspaper economic model, and I think the Star Advertiser reflects that, but if you were living in any other city in the country or in lots of any other town, you would probably see similar impacts on your local printed newspaper. And it's a real crisis of the ability to circulate local information. I mean, there's a lot of news sources, and a lot of people have ways to share information, but how do you get local journalism, that is something that mostly newspapers have been providing for centuries. Even with the collapse of their economic model, you're getting fewer and fewer newspapers in wider and wider areas, which is a term called news deserts. It's basically creating deserts of lack of local information. It's not that people are having no information, but they're not getting the local news anymore. And it's a scourge to democracy, and I think that's playing out on the national scale. You know, what does Chip O'Neill say is that all politics is local? That's not true anymore. But you can still say all news, the news you care about in your community and your life and your home and your family and down the block, that is local. And if local media fails, something is lost in our quality of life. Isn't that true? Can you have a democracy without local news? Absolutely cannot. And then the other part of that is we used to believe that all news was local, all politics was local, and there's been an inversion in the last maybe decade or so with the advent of social media, where all news has become emotional and scintillating and based on how many clicks it can get. And that has created this kind of destruction of the system that we used to have that was, like you said, based on a local foundation. And it's flipped it over into all local politics are national. Like, do you follow your dear leader or not? And then all local news has become sucked up in these national debates. And what we're losing out on is a lot of really the information that affects you personally every single day. It happens locally. The national parts do affect people, but every day, all of the government agents working around your whole city, all around your whole county, they're all doing things for you. And if you're not paying attention to that, you're in big trouble. And they're doing things for themselves. You talked about the failure of the business model and the local end of things. And one thing strikes me is that we think of local newspapers as paper, as print paper. We think of the news delivered boy or girl. We think of the newsstand on the corner and all that. But that whole physical brick and mortar kind of platform has gone or is going. And so you take a perfectly reasonable newspaper and all of a sudden it's different. And it has a different constituency, a different delivery system, a different appeal to them. Can you talk about that? What do we do without print press? Yeah, there's a couple of parts to it. So the news desert research that academics do focuses mostly on printed newspapers. And it talks about the desert that forms when there's no printed newspapers. And that relates to the local journalists in the area. But there are other types of journalists. They're radio journalists, TV journalists. The whole analog system is deteriorating. I mean, if you look at the newsrooms of the local TV stations, not so much like HPR, because it has a different model and it's actually doing pretty well. But there are multiple parts happening at the same time where the newsrooms are shrinking. The analog newspaper might exist even like in Honolulu when you have the Star Advertiser. But the newsrooms are getting smaller and smaller, meaning the paper may be there. You may be able to tally it. It's like, yeah, this place has a newspaper, but it's not a real great newspaper. It's not serving the interests of the readers. And there are lots of problems underneath even that kind of a shell. I recently was in the Olympia, Washington area. And this is the state capital of the state of Washington. In the middle of session, 48 days into session was when I was there. I picked up the daily newspaper. They called the Olympian. I went through it and there was literally one local story in the entire newspaper during the middle of the legislative session. One story out of all everything in it was wire copy and ads and things like that. There was nothing in the state's capitals newspaper. So I just think the complexity of it all is creating this kind of grill that everything's falling through. Like we don't know about so many things. And then there's not enough filling it up yet. Although I do want to talk about some of the promising parts of how the industry is changing. Thank you for being optimistic. You know, recently I got an email from the Houston Chronicle. And they had two editorial board opinion pieces that I really liked. One was they endorsed Nikki Haley for the Republican side. And the other is they endorsed Joe Biden for the Democratic side. And they were really straight about it. It was very good. It was well researched. You know, you expect that from an editorial board and expect the best. And I said to myself, that's very interesting. I want to take a look at the rest of the paper. And what was interesting, just as you said in Washington, there were a lot of articles about national stories. Now, the Houston Chronicle is holding onto local stories too. And we should admire them for that. But I agree with you because people are interested in the national stuff. That's the title of this program is the national news, national media sucking the oxygen out of the local media. And I think that over time, what you saw in Washington is going to be more of the case, that they're going to report on the things they think people will want to hear about. And since the, you know, the media, the national media is covering, you know, these raw meat stories every day from Washington and beyond, that they have to follow those issues those events, or people won't read them. People don't think that local news is as important at a time when the national media is calling everything at prices. Your comments. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. It's what vile, disgusting, horrible thing did Trump say today. That's what your first thing you want to know when you wake up in the morning. And then, you know, how is our American democracy about to collapse? That's the second thing. And then at some point, you might get down to, well, I wonder what they're doing with the Loha Stadium. That's been closed for four years, and they still haven't done anything on this. So, you know, not everybody has the capacity to go through a laundry list of news concerns that numbers in the 20s or 30s. Sometimes people just like, God, what horrible thing did Trump say today? And how are we going to deal with that? And then that's just like, that takes up all my energy. I'm done. I'm going to go take a nap because this is just too much. And I think that is part of what's happening here. We've revved up these machines. And part of that, really, is a reflection of how social media creates its money. This money is made by clicks. It's made by people staying engaged with things. And they've built these systems. And again, they're built systems. They don't have to be built this way. People are making choices. And they've built these systems to latch onto you, like a hook in your mouth, like you're a fish, and hold onto you for as long as they can. And then when you let go, and another shiny hook comes by and grabs onto you and yanks you into the boat. So these are really profound issues that I think we need to face as Americans who value democracy. Yeah, you know, I'm thinking of the business model, which you mentioned. So social media, the money comes into social media from national advertising sources, national sources. I mean, Joe Dokes on King and Bishop isn't going to be putting money into those clicks. Some national company is going to be putting money into those clicks. Likewise, the national media gets tons. Tons and tons and tons of advertising money from national sources, all kinds of national sources. And so there's a kind of consolidation of the sources. The sources are paying into national stories. They're not paying the used in chronicle all that much in terms of advertising. So any local paper media really has a problem because they're competing with national stories and national media. Therefore, the old model of getting advertising revenue isn't like it was. If they get a local company to put some money in for advertising, that's good. But they're not going to get national companies that put it into national media. So you have a decline of advertising revenue. And of course, because people don't read those papers not as much as social media and national media, the paper can't show the advertiser. The clicks, the paper can't show the advertiser as a circulation. And so the whole thing begins to spiral down. Your thoughts? Yeah, there's a big issue with just the analytics, like you mentioned. If I have a newspaper like Star Advertiser and I say that the circulation is 230,000, including midweek and everything they put out. And then the advertiser asked me 230,000 people, who are these people? And I said, well, I don't know. I just print the paper and I put it out there and some people pick it up. And they're like, so I'm paying for a bunch of stuff I don't need. Is that what you're telling me? Well, and then they say in Facebook, and they can put me right into the lane with somebody who's been clicking on buying a new car. He needs a new car, used cars in Honolulu. They can put me right into their account. So that seems to me like a better, and at one tenth of the price, that seems to me like a better deal as the advertisers. I think the fundamental part of that, that not very many people talk about, is that the advertisers with the newspapers, I think used to have a community responsibility. Like they cared about their community, even if they weren't necessarily getting a direct benefit. They're like, oh, I care about Honolulu. I live here too. My staff lives here. I care about this place. And then when that's all disaggregated and thrown into just click numbers, then they don't really feel that responsibility anymore to keep the place going. They just feel like straight line. I want to sell a car. I'm going to sell this to this person. That's all I care about. And then what's lost in between, I think, is an enormous amount of what makes a community work. You know, a couple of thoughts come to mind. Number one is, of course, social media. And for that matter, anything on the internet is capable of electronic analysis. And AI changes the calculus about that. Because you can do electronic analysis till the cows come up. You can find exactly what sample you want to send this news or advertising to it. Quite remarkable. And they're picking up on that, the national media and, of course, the tech companies. But one thing is, right now in Congress, there is this bill called the Journalism Protection Act, which is intended to protect local media in large part from national tech media like Google, Facebook, what have you, and the AI, the AI companies, from taking the content out of local media and putting it in their AI large language models. So I'm making a buck that way and without paying local media anything for it. And I don't know if this bill is going to pass. I'm not sure what the testimony has been. You know that Google, for example, as one of the companies involved, is going to oppose that bill. But at the end of the day, what they're doing is sucking the work product out of the local media and using it for their own benefit by including it in a large language model without paying them. Thoughts? Well, this goes back to the origin of the internet when the World Wide Web was created and newspapers decided. I think it was a sort of, I mean, I don't really blame them at that point. It was like it was sort of a novel, a small audience on the World Wide Web. They thought, let's just give away our news and we'll get more people interested in what we're doing. And we're just going to give this away. But what happened was they ended up not being able to turn that off at any point. As soon as they started giving it away, everybody started taking it, including in these situations you're talking about where open AI dumped every single digitized newspaper into its largest, its large language model. And then now it has all that information and journalism that have been stored up for hundreds of years available to its machine to make money off. But they're never paying all those journalists and newspapers and other types of news organizations who spent enormous amounts of money to create it. You have to pay people to do this type of work. You need professional journalists to do this type of work. And then these people are basically coming in at the last step. Imagine, for example, your paper boy, the newspaper goes to the effort of making the newspaper, prints it all out, it's all done, all set and done. The paper boy drives it up to your door steps, about to hand it over to you, and somebody jumps in front of the paper boy, grabs the newspaper out and says, I'm going to give this to you at 10 times the price, and I get all the money. This paper boy gets nothing, the newspaper gets nothing. That's really, I mean, you think about the enormous ill-gained riches that Zuckerberg and all these tech companies have reaped off journalism, it's just mind-blowing. I mean, there's some definitely responsibility on the journalism companies for giving them away, but I think we're starting to see some recognition that that's not a good idea for anybody. And now there's actually been several countries that have started to restrict this kind of use for the large tech companies, but the United States hasn't been one of them yet. You know, it's the golden goose thing, because, you know, okay, you take the content and you take the hard-earned product of the journalists and the newspaper and the delivery boy and all that, and you sell it under your brand and you get the money, you get more money than they do. So the golden goose is that when you're finished doing that to them, they don't exist, and now you don't have a source of local news at all that you can put in your large language model. You know, it is the golden goose story right there. It's absolutely the golden goose. And then worst of all, you're thrown into some kind of dystopian fascist society at the end of it. You know, you have this beautiful experiment in democracy that America has been for hundreds of years, and we're going to get tossed into this, you know, potentially horrific dystopian fascist state that nobody, you know, could even imagine before 2006 when these tech companies started coming in and strangling the goose. Well, that's a process, a phenomenon that's playing out or will play out in my opinion in November. Now, where people are misinformed, they're not getting enough real news. So I want to talk about Ian Lind, okay. You and I were in a program a couple of years ago, and he was there as sort of the representative of the investigative reporter, the independent investigative reporter. We need people like Ian Lind, okay. And then the story about Jonathan Katz that you and I talked about before the show began. This is really important. And I am concerned, Jonathan Katz, independent reporter. But you mentioned he was actually a comedian, but he was a citizen journalist. And he, why don't you tell the story? Well, basically the Republican response to the State of the Union involved an anecdote about a poor child involved in sex trafficking. He was repeatedly raped thousands of times. And the story was framed in the response of the State of the Union as happening in the United States during Joe Biden's watch, directly Joe Biden's fault. But none of those things were true. And this citizen journalist was the first one to break this story. I'm not sure how I'm not sure. I think this is the kind of story that probably would have been outed, just like in other circles. I'm not necessarily saying it wouldn't have happened if he wouldn't have done it. But it's an interesting case where somebody looking into this, this doesn't have to be a professional journalist at the New York Times, or somebody who gets a paycheck from it, finds interesting facts that are wrong or some kind of maybe context or framing that's clearly misleading, and then shares that information and somehow it gets a hold of a bigger audience. And I'd say, like with Ian Lin, is I'd say he's quite a different character in the sense that he is really devoted to investigative journalism and doing this, I think, full time or at least a lot of the time. So there, you can think about also like the George Floyd video that was shot when he was getting strangled on the street. That was just an ordinary person, not a trained journalist. She held up her phone, made the video of what was happening, and then shared it on her social media and that created the ability to tell that story. So I think there's a need for citizen journalists and then there's also a need for professional journalists and everybody really has the responsibility to protect democracy and operate as fair actors in that system of circulating real information, not misinformation and disinformation. And I think what has happened and this will happen more and more, I'm afraid, in the next decade with AI is we're going to get pummeled with misinformation and disinformation at rates that none of us have ever even imagined. Like thousands and thousands of times what we imagine we'll be getting hit with and that's going to be really hard for everybody to deal with. I'm thinking of Sinclair Radio which was able with the concurrence of the Trump administration last term acquire 300 radio stations around the country and a lot of people they've listened to radio they listened to Sinclair Radio all around the country and the remarkable thing come out of that is that if you went to city number one or better yet small town number one and you heard the news on Sinclair Radio and then you traveled 500 miles to the east west north south and listened to another completely other station of Sinclair Radio, of course it would be exactly the same news exactly the same slant exactly the same opinion. And so this whole notion of consolidation I feel is very dangerous. The other thing is if you look at MSNBC it's a bubble it's a sort of democratic bubble and you look at Fox News it's not a democratic bubble it's more like a republican bubble you get the same news every day from all of the democratic stations and different news from all of the republican stations on TV and furthermore they repeat it again again again again again and if you are wedded because of the bubble to one or the other you're going to get exactly what you want to hear but it isn't a whole story so that's another kind of consolidation there's only one MSNBC and there's only one CNN there's only one Fox News really or let me say just a few of them we don't have the same kind of diversity that we might have had in the days of the days of better journalism to me this is a problem that it's distilled it's focused and it's repetitive and if it's right that's good but if it's wrong it's having a much larger effect on public opinion, your thoughts? Yeah the consolidation issue has been around since the mid 90s when they removed some restrictions on the telecommunications act of how many channels you could buy and then with the obviously the advent of the internet and social media and things like that it's there is a I guess there is a strong argument that there's a diversity of information out there but probably the better argument is that it's all the same like you said it's like a amplification and reflection and recirculating of the same stories if you watch one of those cable news stations you know they'll have a panel on like I said what terrible thing did Trump say today and then the next panel's on Trump in court and then the next I mean this is like we're getting plenty of that information I guess my argument would be so what we really need for a healthy democracy is not more national information and that's where the money is being made that's why all these places are doing this or all these websites are doing this we need it on what is happening in your own community like imagine the corruption in Hawaii right now and how much of it's going on at all times and there's just not there's not enough guard dogs around keeping track of it all and I think I really fear that that is creating a crisis not only in Hawaii but all over the country in terms of accountability and and then the propaganda aspects like you're saying like you know we reached the point where people are so far into their propaganda bubbles they they can't even imagine a world outside the propaganda bubbles let alone do they ever step outside of it or venture outside of it they can't even imagine it some people and that is a frightening thing because that could lead to some really dangerous outcomes I mean we already had January 6th insurrection what's what's the next what's the next step from that one thing is we live in a world of press releases and if you're not paying your reporters very much money or you have reporters that are sort of mechanized that they don't go out and do any investigation not even fact checking or verification they'll they'll take the press releases and republish the press releases and so if I'm if I'm Akamai about this and certainly Donald Trump is Akamai about this I can I can manipulate the press by sending out these press releases or by doing other things to make them print what I want and I think local news is is is is falling subject to that it's just another part of the decline I think so the big question Brett is what do we do you and me care about this we know there's a nexus between local news and the preservation of our democracy our way of life our constitution what do we do and it's got to be saved the act pending in congress is not nearly enough even at its best we have got to restore the press to its former prominence is its former ability to positively affect public awareness what do we do well I think first of all we have to recognize the good efforts that are happening I'll say there I'll start just at the student level and universities nationwide there's a center for community news at the University of Vermont who has been tracking this and they found 2000 student reporters publishing 10 000 local news stories within the last year across the country there's a big push at the university level to provide a ground floor for you know journalism local journalism and I think there have been dozens of universities around the country who have stepped up some have even bought failing little newspapers in their communities and to turn those into like student journalism labs which I think is really really cool and amazing so there's there's the I think there's a support level of student journalists that can really help if people can like invest and and advocate for that there's a there's another level that's the non-profit world of journalism Honolulu has one of the best in the country called Sibylbeat it's a it's part of a network called the state's newsrooms and there are 39 states that have these types of newsrooms set up and this is these are affiliations they're not it's not like a it's not like a a single corporate arm or something like that it's an affiliation of non-profit networks news and they're they're doing some amazing work out there I just read yesterday about a republican rally type event in Kansas where the the actual leaders of the Republican Party in Kansas thought it was a good idea to set up a one of those karate punching figurines that people practice you know punching in karate and put a Joe Biden face on it and have people kick it and punch it and do horrible things to it and the reason that story started circulating was because of one of these non-profit newsrooms called the Kansas Reflector which I had not heard of before they um they were like a Sibylbeat or like the Texas Tribune there are a whole bunch of them around the country they're starting to get their feed and becoming really well established newsrooms that are telling their community stories there was another one in El Paso that I ran across recently where the former editor of the El Paso Times started this non-profit news organization and so a lot of times we think like oh Sibylbeat well they have a billionaire that's pretty easy for them to get started these there are lots of examples I don't know the story of the Kansas Reflector but I will say I did read a little bit about the El Paso version of this and this is an editor just that I want to start one of these and put it together started to get grants and pretty soon his newsroom with this non-profit organization was bigger than the newsroom he left when he was running the daily newspaper and I think that's um that's part of what's developing here is a ground up student journalists non-profits people who really care about their communities are starting to to establish themselves and I think that's our future and I would say can we build on those think tech Hawaii like getting this kind of information out letting people have these kinds of forums this is where I think the future of journalism is is going to be strongest yeah from your lips to God's ears you know I would agree that non-profit is a better model than trying to get people to pay for a print press newspaper or people to subscribe if you will to you know to getting an electronic newsletter but I'd say that every community is on its own merits because we're talking about local news here mostly and you have to raise the money locally and it's a question of whether the community cares enough to spend that money so to me the jury is out depending on the community on whether you can raise sufficient money to keep a non-profit going but I agree the future is in electronic not paper and the future is on non-profit you know non-profit rather than you know put your dime on the on the on the newsstand the newsstand table but what else can we do what how is it going at the school of journalism make that the the professional journalism program that you direct how is it going are what kind of motivation do you see your students have are they going off and and participating or you know creating these news structures or they are they going to do other things yeah I'm happy to report that in the last four years our numbers a number of majors has tripled I mean there's a quantitative part of that like the numbers of majors and there's a qualitative we have I think a really high commitment and engagement from our students in being these journalists of the future the future generation of democracy coming out of programs like ours and and around the country I've heard a lot of heartwarming stories about how students really see journalism as a way to have a voice and and how communities turn out I I think it's exciting to have we've had a partnership this this semester in the last three years with civil beat on a project called uhb or our students participate in covering the legislature and we're doing so we're doing that again this spring and this is this is similar to what student journalists are doing all across the country we've also created our own websites so we're we're now officially the operators of the Manoa mirror newsroom yes so talking about putting our money where our mouth is we're like okay if if we we think the future is nonprofit student oriented local journalism then what are we going to do about it so we created this fall a new news organization in town called the Manoa mirror we've published hundreds of stories already just since starting that site and I think it's made a big difference in the way our community particularly at UH because we focused a lot of our coverage just on the UH campus and getting people to know about like what's happening here and like you know how are you gonna find out what's happening at UH if you're not reading CALEO and you're not looking at the Manoa mirror so we've made our focus on digital breaking news a lot of our stuff is breaking news a lot of our a lot of our stories are just about what's happening on campus today and how can you be involved in it so I think that's that's part of what needs to be done I I don't want to in any way imply or or or make the suggestion that we don't need investigative journalists at the highest level investigative journalists at the medium level and investigative journalists at the local level we need those those people need to be paid they need to be paid well and they need to go out and do that kind of work or the corruption will just faster and grow but I will say that that I think students and nonprofits can do a good job with filling in some of those blanks and I think we're in a really great we have real great momentum right now in that in that area so I'd say we're feeling good we're doing good but there's there's also got to be this big national commitment to journalism and that's that's the story I really want us to tell and focus on as you know if we don't if we don't invest in this idea of journalism as a pillar of democracy then democracy will fall there's no there's no denying it this is not debatable there are zero democracies in the world without professional journalism zero so if we think the united states is going to be one of them it's we're not going to be one of them there's zero and and there you know it's this it's just such a critical part of democracy is the circulation of trustworthy information if you might be able to get lots of information but if it's all propaganda misinformation disinformation setting you up to turn into an unruly mob to storm the capital or whatever that's not healthy for for us and we need to change this and I think everybody listening to this needs to take that responsibility and do something to help will these will these students stay here are there jobs for them here what can we do to create jobs for them here well the like I said the civil beat newsrooms growing Hawaii public radio has been hiring a lot of our students and their newsroom is growing I think there are a lot of opportunities for students to be entrepreneurs and create their own there you go yeah that's a great point why not why not I hope somebody take take your suggestion on that well one thing is clear sorry I could say I would say I'll tell you a little secret I started the Manoa mirror with a web software that that we purchased the entire thing the entire newsroom basically like every cost I have for that is about four thousand dollars a year that's it that's great you could make and you know basically an equivalent newsroom to any anything anybody else can do we can do it with four thousand dollars a year so the investments extremely low and all yet but the but the investment I mean the investment for that part but then the investments in the journalism you know you got to hire people get people to do the great journalism and that's what I think like a lot of business people and entrepreneurs should be looking at the value of trustworthy local information the value of investigative journalism people out there can make a lot of money and do a lot of good at the same time by investing that I think yeah make tomorrow a better place print over guard the director of the journalism program at UH Manoa thank you so much for joining us and for these very important thoughts aloha okay thank you