 a privilege to have you here with us this evening for a very important conversation. My name is Dawn Martin. I am the director of the Soul Center. For those of you who might not know, but we're 17 years old, Soul Center has not to serve the diverse communities of San Antonio through programs that try to create spaces for innovative dialogue, peace building, and striving towards the common good. And we know that tonight's event will continue in this long tradition of education, discussion, and greater understanding. As part of our mission, you'll see on the front of the program, our mission is there. And what we do is to try to create space that is for folks engaged with another in the spirit of respectful curiosity. We therefore look forward to an evening shate by what has been defined as the bold rules of conversation. Some of these guidelines are be curious and open to learning from others as you wish they would be from you. Look for common ground with others as you wish they would with you. We have copies of these guidelines which are very helpful. You can take them to your next family gathering. If you would like to spend some more time, you're thanks. We're going to Thanksgiving. Plan ahead. It's never too early. It's already almost February. We have copies of these in the front that we'd like to spend some time reflecting on them. And now, I'm going to introduce a language for our panelists. Thanks to Theresa Bernie and to Elaine Ayala and Bernie's team. Thank you so much for putting that video together. I just want to take a moment now to turn our attention to the panelists after this thought-provoking video that will generate some questions for us. And we're privileged to have this amazing and the group of panelists with us to guide us and inspire us in our explorations together in the hopes of mutual understanding. It's my privilege to introduce the panel's moderator, Elaine Ayala. For over 38 years, Elaine Ayala has worked in and contributed to the newspaper business as a reporter and columnist for the San Antonio Express News. She has long reported on Latino politics, history, arts, and culture, together with covering the diversity, demography, immigration, and more recently, religion. I'm happy to report that starting in February, Elaine will be a full-time Metro columnist at the Express News. So, congratulations. You're the next panel member for today. And while we will misrepresent the big section of the paper, she has been very generous in her coverage of the Soul Center and other events that we were engaged in. So thank you again for that. We are very, we celebrate with you this new position. And now I'm going to turn it over to Elaine as our moderator. Thank you so much for coming out tonight. You could be, I don't know if it's, oh, should I be using, oh no, if you're not good enough in my life. I just, it's magic. We're coming out on a three-week, we know there's a lot of events out there that can pull you one direction or another. We're very happy that you're with us and with this wonderful group, really, all my friends, and it's like them having coffee or better yet, wine. So we'll pretend and discuss this important issue. We'll start with Benzisco Vada who worked a long-time reporter for the Express News who is now a national reporter and data specialist at Chalk Mead, Education Online Mead Service. And we'll ask him to reflect a little. He's working on the national level. Oh, hi, Michelle. I'm so glad you came. I love when I see friends. I haven't seen for a long time in America. So Benzisco is going from the local level to the national level, now working from San Antonio but doing stories all over the country. And one of my first questions to him is, we know it's Washington. This is very Washington-centered. That all of the stories that you hear on CNN and other, read on Arnie's paper and others is it's coming up in Washington. That, those two words, make me assume you're coming out of Washington. But you also work in cities all across the country. So what are you hearing? How is this another un-affecting people on the ground everywhere? Or is it just Washington-centered? I definitely think it's not Washington-centered anymore, especially for various reasons. I mean, you have the President of the United States staying in and broadcasting to you all every home. So it's kind of national now, international really, when you think about it. Journalists across the globe deal with a lot of singular accusations of being fake news and various languages. And so I think that when I traveled around the country, I think the last three or 40 years is it was starting to be used more in political rendering. You see it more in common. I think just going to any of our news organizations, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, you see it a few years and a lot. And that goes down to the local level. So I think it's really pervasive now. And I think after the capital design shooting, there came a point where newsroom management, I feel, understood that we need to talk a little bit more about the safety of reporters and the topicers that are going out there all the time. I think a lot of us for years just got in our cars and felt like we could just drive anywhere and do reporting and we wouldn't be called fake news. But I've had friends that have worked around the country that had been harassed, physically assaulted, you know, in St. Louis. And so I think it's further beyond this Washington. Bernie, is you more than a high-impact, fast-paced newsroom with photographers and reporters on the ground all the time. I think I've gone into your newsroom a dozen times and it feels like, oh, nobody's there because everybody's out all the time and they're reporting back. So you must experience this in a different way with your staff. I think Francisco makes a great point. And yes, that's definitely true. We, when the Capitol Gazette shooting happened, that's when there were always concerns about the safety of our staff members who were out in the field, especially the early morning or the late in the evening. I don't allow, for instance, reporters to go out by themselves and shoot their own stories or live shots. In the early morning or the evening, for that reason. But when the Capitol Gazette shooting happened and all of a sudden it was like, oh, we need to be talking about asset strategies for the people in our newsroom. We need to be talking about bulletproof glass. We need to be talking about razor wire. We need to be talking about making sure that the people within the building, the receptionist who's at literally the front lines of our station, making sure that she is safe. We institute a policy where you cannot get into our building and if you do not have a plan. And they will make you stand outside in the cold in the rain and then, you know, heat or whatever because we do not know who is coming into our building. And for years, I've been there for 25 years. I mean, we used to never even have locks on the doors practically. You could just walk in. You could just come in and say, oh, I wanna talk to someone with a reporter. I wanna talk to someone in sports. I wanna tell the news director something. And that is just, we can't do it. And that presents its own problems because we are part of the community and we're supposed to be reflected in what's going on in the community. And we're supposed to be giving, we are the voice of the community. And if they can't get to us, even for their questions, even for their concerns or their issues or real problems that we may be able to report on and make some significant changes to did that becomes a whole different conversation. I'm not just, just very recently had a photographer who was attacked in the street covering a fire and a house. So this isn't politics. This is not just politics. This is, and they said, you're fake news. He's like, look, I, and they hit him. They knocked his camera over. It cost many thousands of dollars to get that fixed and we're pressing charges because that is not the way a civil society should be working together. So this isn't just a political thing. This is a real world every day. People on the street, reporters of the tired person and journalists on the street who are having to deal with anger that is directed at the media for no other reason than we are very visible. Which is what happened at the Capitol to Zett. It wasn't a charge of fake news. It was a long time grudge that the shooter had against the paper. And this kind of goes back. This has been slow in building because we can remember after 9-11, all of a sudden, all our mail was inspected through in a different building other than the main building. We then owned a small historic home on the premises and all our mail had to be sifted through and figured out where, yes, because of that. So it's been a slow but steady build-up. Charlotte Ann Lucas, who is the Executive Director of Nowcast SA, and police explain what that is for people that don't know, although I'm sure many do, has been teaching and preaching what a safety is for a very long time. And she's been a professor and still does so much mentoring for young journalists, like the young woman who's at the camera in the middle of the sanctuary right now. So please tell us how to track, how to understand, how to best scrutinize whether we're over-reading is indeed there. Nowcast SA is, I just written in for it, is I'd say it's sort of like a local C-spam because we go and show up at things and we go bumper to bumper. We don't just do 30 seconds of coverage. And tonight we're at four different places, including here. And one of them is the third night that we followed the finalist city managers. And we will have a complete video and you'll notice the differences between his interaction with neighborhood on the west side and his interactions with neighborhoods and Carburger parking tonight at Big Town Hall, downtown at UTSA. And the whole thing would be different. So that's part of what we do. And I have to say it gives me a huge, huge advantage because an awful lot of folks out there don't confuse me with the media. They think of us as a partner. And so I don't have a lot of baggage frequently that gets in the way of things. But when I first went to the lab which was exactly 20 years ago, 20 years ago, August, I went to the street on Wall Street which was a startup for financial news and people behind it were from Wall Street Journal and like that, but it was the beginning of the online news only. It wasn't taking newspaper pension and putting it online. It was generating online news. And the folks putting it together did some incredibly brilliant things but it had to do with credibility in 1999. And that was the street.com launched with a code of ethics. The street.com launched with a corrections policy. The street.com launched with a complete transparency for all of the writers and including freelance writers and stuff. So unlike the CBS Market Watch, our competitor, they would, if someone told them that they made a mistake, they just changed it. And so you were left wondering if you had lost your mind or whether you'd really seen that error. And at the street.com all the corrections were made and acknowledged that we made this mistake and thank you very much. There are other organizations that do that same kind of thing. BuzzFeed, funny name, Serious Struggles and they have a really, really, really excellent corrections policy and code of ethics. So that brings me forward to what I tell people now and tell students now. We've been doing workshops in what I like to call Crap Detection 101. And you can go to the website and sign up for a workshop and we do free workshops and we do them age-specific. So we'll do junior high level. I do it actually for every time I teach a journalism class, I end up having to kind of pull back and do 101 on Crap Detection. And I do it also for adults and seniors and all levels. But one of the first things I say to look for is does this publication that you're looking at, do they have a code of ethics? I mean that's a really important thing to look for. When we did launch it, there are other local that's really, really important that lets you know whether the publication takes ethics and transparency seriously. Can you find out who funds the organization on my site, on the Texas Tribune site, on a lot of other nonprofit news organizations like us? You can see every single sponsor and you can frequently see in the story whether there's a relationship. So we're fortunate enough to have the extraordinary credibility along with our address which is that our office is in Central Library on the 6th floor. And in exchange for free rent, we livestream things in the library which is why we have a YouTube playlist or PoEx and Laureate. But at the end of stories that involve the library, we say the library is in any kind of donor to now cast so that you know we're not arms-length, you know, we're friends and you need to know that. So throughout your examination of an article or a website, those are some of the key questions to ask and I have a little cheat sheet that I think they're enough for everybody here and would love to, would love to share and pass it on. And for some of the others, Denise Richter, who's going to speak soon, sent over to me a lovely cheat sheet that she uses for her students which we'll get to too because there aren't fit, there has been been. We're not just born on part of it, but so this is another handy guide for Thanksgiving too. I've had to explain at Thanksgiving and other times where what works like a legitimate resource, which you almost want to believe and you want to tweet and you want to share on Facebook, it's so easy to do yet you have to have safeguards because environmental videos as we saw just recently with the confrontation between these young white students and the Native American drummer and the first video we saw made out of it, we still, the jury's still out on it, but it's a more expansive story. There are still lots of good story about those kids, but it's not that that viral video might have been misleading. So we'll get to the teachers, the teachers on this panel are fantastic. They're on the front lines of creating a new generation of journalists and we need them and we're also very afraid that they're not going to be in our music dismount, okay. And just to remember, there's one really, really important thing that goes along with this crappy tension and that is that in the world that we live in, we're all publishers, right? When you publish it with your email, you publish it with your Facebook, you publish, you're a publisher and so that brings with each of us the obligation to not throw an empty beer bottle of crap out the window and think of this the way you thought it that if we don't mess with Texas, that we each have an obligation as citizens of the internet to not one-ass crap and to serve the things that are good. And she knows what he's talking about, this year is her first year on online journalism, so if you're sure about that, all right, Denise. Denise is a professor at Palo Alto and Kim Foxx are a long-time deputy metro editor of the Expressways, we still miss her, it's been a long time, and she's with Texas State and both of them prepare some of just the best young journalists, both of you really have better army's rooms for the journalists that do sensualists and other police papers and sites and stations in the city. So looking at this dilemma that we're in in which legitimate news reporters and editors are called fake and actual fake news sites are believed. How are you both going about preparing these young journalists? What are some of the chipmunks? What are some of the stories that they tell youth? Who's that microphone? I actually, today was my first day of class for the spring semester and I teach the Asian Party in Hawaii, and so one of the first things I do is explain to my students that they have an era of fact in any of their stories, which means a misspelled name, a wrong address, a wrong date, any kind of factual information that is incorrect, they bottom out if they were receiving F, period. And I learned that from my mentor at Trinity University, Sammy Johnson, who it only happened to me one time. I misspelled arctic because my father's name is art so I blamed it on him, and that was the day before a spell check where he'd get the little line underneath, so I spelled arctic, A-R-T-I-C. Well, that was an era of fact and boom, I got the F and that went in a great book. And as an A student, that didn't sit well with me, right, so, but he got my attention and I never made another era of fact. And so I did that with my students to this day and I tell them journalism is all about getting the facts right, about being not almost right, but absolutely right and you can't play around with the facts because too many people are coming on you for correct information. You heard their eyes and ears, they don't have the chance to go sit at the council meeting and listen to endless hours of whatever's going on in the city. It's up to you to relay the information factually to them in a fair and balanced way. And, you know, it's kind of a tough one thing. I'm not as hard as Sammy was. I do a lot of them to rewrite the story that I have to write in the next class period. If it was an A paper, it goes down to a B, B goes down to a C, C goes down to a D, but they are. And I think they appreciate knowing. And in fact, as a student my semester review comes from a very kind of conservative background. And she said after class, you know, one of the baddest and fortified things she learned, she said, I'm really relieved to know that journalists really try their hardest to get things right. Because she had been hard on it, it was all fake news. She had been told by people she's around, oh, it's all fake. And she learned that no, it's not. It depends on the source. And that's a lot too that you have to teach students who are you reading, who are you looking at? Because I'll tell you, there's some news organizations that they're not really news organizations. They're propaganda outlets. And I think they are harmful to our society. And I don't think you should pay attention to them. You should end that, you need to know what they're saying, right? So that you know it's out there. But you can't take it as the gospel treat. Because what is their motive? What are they trying to get across? And I find it very frightening right now that there are news organizations that have the public's ear and eye and people believe it. And it's an educational issue. We need people who are educated, who are critical thinkers, who do research, who take the time to figure out what is right, what are the facts. And then try to listen to different sides. But it's tough because we're all busy and who has time to do that. So we rely on the news media, credible outlets, to give us the news that we need to make decisions. And that's what empowerment is. And that's what the news media, I feel that, you know, I did my dissertation at the University of Texas on what the television news and viewer empowerment and frankly how the public's main source of news falls short. That people are not empowered with information that they need to make decisions in civic life. We could do better. We should do better. Talk a little bit about what the worries are of your students heading off into a news industry that has contracted, not just in these papers, which are the obvious decline. But in news broadcasts, radio stations, we basically don't want them in town. And there are cities that don't have a public radio station at all. So what do they say? What are their concerns? You know, I love students because they are just concerned sometimes about stuff like that. Their parents, on the other hand, are freaking out. So we have a lot of first gen college students, right? And so I thought I'd ask them, what do your parents think about this major? And somebody would be like, they don't know what you're living with this. And, you know, they can, right? And the other thing is journalism skills translate. I mean, can you think of an industry that doesn't need somebody who can write well, research well, distinguish the facts, distill it into something comprehensible, right? Those are skills that translate. So I love the ones who are really don't afford them or are really going to be journals. The thing that is worrying me more lately is actually what we talked about first, which is about journalism or attack. And unfortunately, I've seen that at the college level. You know, we're college journals. So this is a bit of a story. And you may have heard a little bit about it because it made national news. But Texas State has received more racist flyers and things than any other university in Texas. And so a columnist, a year ago, November, a columnist from the University Star, which is a campus newspaper. We have 38,000 students on campus. The campus newspaper is a fully independent newspaper, which means we hire an editor who applies, right? So we hire an advisory board, hire the editor. And the editor, the student editor, is in charge, right? She gets to make all decisions. She hires her staff. She has a full version of the protections, just like every media outlet up here, which is the way it should be. So they published a column, which is a column, right? Opinion column on the opinion page with the headline your DNA is an abomination. And it was basically calling for the death of white privilege. It wasn't calling for the death of white people. It was calling for the death of white privilege. And it was pretty much in your face. It was very important. And they said, our university has been under attack to a great degree of racist flyers, things like that. So it caused a stir. And it got some national attention because the student body government, they called for the newspaper to be defunded, all sorts of things went on. The really difficult part in there is that there was so much hate pointed towards the student journalists. They got death threats. They had their photos put on flyers. The advisor had her children threatened. The building had to go on lockdown. I mean, this went on for a month, right? It was a good thing. It was November, and we were about to go to the break. And it was horrifying. And it still kept up a little bit after the break. The editor of the newspaper was a young woman who was a first-gen college student. The single mom who was in Dallas, freaked out that her daughter was going through this. And she at first said, I'm like down to the journalist. I mean, she kept in there. She managed her staff. They did journalism. They did all that. But in about February, she was like, I don't think journalists are me. So we had a lot of heart to heart situations. You have to make those decisions. So we worked through a lot of things. I'm not the advisor to the paper, but I'm head of the journalism sequence, so the journalism students will kind of like all my kids. And so she was out. I was like, I respect your decision. By May, she had applied to grad school. I was like, no, Dan, I'm going. I am going to be a journalist. And she's doing a great grad school in New York City on top of everything else, right? So not only did she leave the little safe handle of San Marcos, Texas, but she's in New York City. But still, the building is still on lockdown. You still can't get into it. It's the campus radio station and the campus newspaper. You can't get in unless you have a key card or you like knock and wave at the door. And we sort of worked out the security stuff because it was such an emergency. So now that you have an intercom, you just have to like knock and wave. And it's just so that sort of has been pervasive, right? There's still that feeling of like, what do we do here? Like how do we handle it? So trying to teach them through that and letting them know there's hope and you need to be prepared. But we need journalists. I'm like, you know what, you guys, you're my hope. It's like, please, please don't give up. And there's, it reminds me that there are people also in the middle, and I want to call one person who was on the front lines at Sutherland Springs, who has been on the border covering it. And you know, people like me who sit in an office, I get out to interviews, but I stay in the city pretty much. What I get are nasty emails. So sometimes I'm even allowed to the rest of the staff. So like, you know, we get a good like, oh yeah, another one of those people who hates the ground I walk on. But then we let it slide. It's different when you're out there and you're so recognizable as a member of the press. So Sylvia Foster-Frow, who is, if you could come forward and grab a microphone, I'd love for you to tell her to put her on the spot. Come on. She is an awarding journalist, young journalist, who has spent a year at Sutherland Springs, I'd love for you to offer your, your remembrances of being there, of the people in this conservative town where, you know, everybody has a gun and reporting on guns in just yet another U.S. shooting was a typical experience, wasn't it? Tell them what you faced when you went to Sutherland Springs. I'm just gonna like sit down for a bit. Okay. I'm just gonna like sit down for a bit more. Yeah, so I was one of the lead reporters in the Sutherland Springs mansion, which happened in November of 2017. It was like the fifth deadly smash shooting in the States. And it's a rural, conservative, very religious community. And a lot of me year came down. I was down there that first day and then I was kind of like embedded in that community for a year. And so I really got to watch kind of the transformation of the community's perception of me and our photographer, Lisa, as a media and watch that change over time and slowly become like another family that are coming for a tour of the expressings tomorrow. But like, especially, that's awesome. Yeah, it's gonna be fun. But in the beginning, these weren't people that were media friendly. And in fact, they actually had a really bad experience. Those first few days, a lot of national media came and swarmed that town. And it was kind of bad on us, on all of us, on this town of 600 people with a lot of reporters and photographers. And because of that, I had the first experience of being part of that pack, like part of the media, you know? And so just facing people that were rude or mean to me or just didn't trust me. And really seeing that in people's eyes that they would look at me like I was an enemy and I wasn't used to like having that feeling of like, you know, before I even opened my mouth, they see my reporter and it's like, it's over, you know, done. And so I guess it's a tribute to like what real news and especially what local news does is that, you know, we stayed with that community and I kept trying. And so after the national media left, you know, me and Lisa, our photographer were there, you know, every weekend at church and like still trying to show them that we were just people too. And we're just doing our jobs. And I think it helped to like showing them, telling them about our mission and like what we wanted to do, which was to tell their story and then, and you know, why telling news was important and kind of our role in it and just being really transparent because I feel like a lot of people see the media as this like kind of other or like elite world, you know, and like who knows what goes on behind the scenes of the media kind of thing. Like in a similar way that we think about like politics in DC, you know, it just feels so like different than us. And so I felt like opening up to them and just being transparent and showing them my notepad and like this is what I'm writing. And yeah, I have this recorder. I'm gonna listen to what you say later and then we're gonna put it in and I'll talk to my editor. Do you want to meet my editor? You know, like just like really trying to open up and show them that this wasn't like some like conspiracy or some kind of like, I don't know, that we're just like all people doing our jobs too. And I found that was really helpful. And that relationship of the community really knowing the media is hindered by these locked doors. So we're battling this safety issue with how accessible we are. And I can admit that I went to the Castro announcement a couple of Saturdays ago and all of the media were issued a badge that say, you know, Castro 20 press and we're allowed in. And so you can tell who they are and then there was a huge batch of, and so even though one might assume that, okay, it's a Democratic crowd, maybe you're safer, but I thought twice with who was tapping me on the shoulder and wanting to talk to a reporter because you're out there and you're vulnerable. So, and you've been at the border too, what was the experience like there? Yeah, so I'm actually an immigration reporter that was like, some of them springs was like a separate kind of more random thing that I ended up getting wrapped into. And so I've been down to the border a few times and you know, it was like border patrol officials and government workers and also just like knock on doors to get people's opinion overall about the situation down there. And I still know it's like immigration is a really polarizing issue right now. And I've noticed just even on like a personal level like my meeting people and telling them I'm an immigration reporter, it like gets met, like my job is suddenly like a controversial job or before I was an education reporter, it was just like a lot more like every other who's like happy to talk about that. Not always, not always though. Yeah, with transition getting just to that. Yes, it's just a lot more, you get confronted with a lot more difficulty with access and with people being honest to you and opening up to you, it gets a lot harder when they don't want to talk to you and they kind of see, like you're not reporting on the two argument factions, it's like you're part of the story, you're one of the controversial aspects of it. Thanks. We wanna open up to questions and we'll all say yes. Thank you so much. Thank you Sylvia for us calling on the audience. Journalists, anything on their feet? You should be just fine. Well I think it's really interesting, I think the thing that she said about journalists being, you know, separating ourselves, right, being apart from real people is that it's interesting there was a study done last year and one of the findings was that, you know, it used to be that everybody knew a journalist, right, I mean journalists were like, they were everywhere, you know, everybody had one in their neighborhood or, you know, you just knew there were a lot of journalists. And like how many people in here actually know a journalist or a meta-journalist or whatever, you know, so, you know, I mean actually that's good. That's probably a testimony to like, we have local, right, we have more local journalists than San Antonio, we used to have a lot more local journalists than San Antonio. A lot more. And that's one of the things that happened is, you know, when I was at the Express News, we had more than 300 journalists. I bet there are 117 now. And 09 was probably the most devastating day I've ever had there or two days because it took two days to let go of about 90 journalists. And then there were smaller bouts of this. Playoffs and also files. And we're still the largest news gathering entity in the city. We're still bigger than anybody else. Than any one television station, than any other one printing or online site. And we're stretched super thin to cover all of the things that we used to cover. Like right now, since I'm now going to be a full-time columnist, we don't have a religion writer right now. How many of you follow journalists on social media like on Twitter, on Facebook, and on, see I think that's where maybe you have to knock away to get in. I feel like you are connected to journalists these days. We had social media then before, right? That you're able to kind of send a tweet or to send the direct message and say, hey, here's a story idea or here's something that you need to know about. So maybe that's answering. That is another way to keep that door open. You know, the visible lines close. Yes, Shirley, you're about to say something. I was just talking about the number of journalists in newsrooms. And I think that one of the newsrooms that Kim and I used to work in many years ago in Mesa was gay. And that was, we did some remarkable things with it. Yeah, and that was a, it was a small thing. Yeah, you think Mesa and Texas, Mesa, Arizona, and Mesa and Mesa. And the reality is that over time, so many of these papers have not just reduced their staff, they're closed off together. They've been bought off by weird sounding hedge funds and investment groups. One was actually called the News New Investment Group. And they gobbled up a lot of little papers that kept the most money, kept the money makers and closed the others that was. And so therefore the small communities would love for nothing. With no local media looking after their city government and therefore the less oversight. Can I speak to that? Because the same thing is happening with broadcast companies. So where as 20, 30 years ago you had a number of small ownership groups that they might own, one news broadcast TV station. Or they might have a group of five or a group of 10. That was pretty much it. Now you've got these mega companies that have bought and combined so that you've got more communities that are maybe served by only two media companies versus the four that they had five years before. So all of that is to say that that further complicates having truly local voices and local coverage of a community. Whether, I mean I remember the days when we had two daily papers. You know, when you lost the light, you lost half of the people who were asking tough questions, elected officials. How are your tax dollars being spent? Where is the infrastructure being, dollars being committed to? And so that has not just happened in newspapers. That has definitely happened in newsroom, broadcast newsrooms, digital newsrooms now and just everything. But that's a really very big deal. And the company I work for is one of the smaller in terms of how many stations we own, we own six. We happen to be in larger cities for the most part. But San Antonio is the second smallest. And then we have a station in Rome. But we are the number one station in town. So we've got the largest broadcast staff. So we've got 90, 95, we will be 96 people total. But that's very competitive for a broadcast. And the most beautiful newsroom in town. Okay, well one of the things we want to do here is also have some interaction with you so that you get an opportunity to tell us how your local media is doing. And how you can decipher fact from fiction. And what are your concerns? Don, do you want to come in? I'm just going to grab a microphone so I can take, we'll take it up to those. I would love, also while we're preparing for that, some of you might reflect on echo chambers. So we haven't had, we haven't done that just yet. So well, people are thinking of questions. You might want to talk about echo chambers for a little bit. Although the acoustics in this place is so fabulous that, you know, I'm warm and pranked. I don't really recognize my voice too often. So, you know, we've talked a little bit about where people get their news. And I think there's a couple of concerns I have about echo chambers. Like one is, would you sign up for Facebook or Twitter or Instagram? You are, there's so many algorithms. So you're already, already when you're clicking on. So that's one method that I think we're seeing that the change is right. And then also, and now you can, you know, avoid, I think, news packages that are, like if you, I notice like when you download an app on like Roku, you can kind of have stuff select the news reports brought up. So they'll be through Fox News or MSNBC. Kind of whatever is more of the ideology of the news network. And so you're starting to see, I think, that in a polarization way that's really troubling to me because I remember growing up with a paper and it was like, whether you like it or not, you saw a variety of stories and writing information. And so there's been an argument about, are we just serving the consumers like we should from a market-driven perspective or what is our responsibility as journalists to make sure that you're getting what we call the meat and potatoes and not just the cotton candy. And so that's something that concerns me and I think also an aversion to who the storytellers are sometimes or skepticism about them. And this goes back to like, I didn't do politics right now and that people feel, you know, I think younger news consumers want to see themselves reflected in the content and in who is delivering the content. They want to see less older white men running these media organizations. And I think for a lot of us, we're classically trained in journalism. You know, we wanted to stay away from art and news in a lot of ways because we wanted readers to feel like we were impartial, we were in bias. But, you know, when I go out into the community and I can speak Spanish or I have some other kind of identity connection with the groups I'm covering, there's a certain appreciation that I see and that I feel of that information I did. And so it's something that I feel like sometimes when I read stories about immigration as a Latino, there has been some skepticism about maybe where my bias might be or, you know, whatever my ideology is or what people think I am and I'm like, oh, of course you're going to write that or present that. What concerns me is that I think we naturally go to places we feel comfortable as humans but now we have all this technology that kind of predestines what we're going to see and so you kind of get reinforced in that way. And so that's something that you just have to push yourself out of those zones. That's what we're supposed to do as journalists. And we get in trouble too because sometimes we go to the same sources all the time and, you know, who's the most reachable and it's going to be some elite people at some universities as opposed to spending time in the community. That's another kind of a change. So you really just have to recognize are you getting the full picture and nothing is just being out there in the community with the people because that's when you know what the truth is. You see a more representative picture and not like in this case of this video where you see one sliver but you don't see all the other components and that's what it's all about. But I'm concerned about our delivery methods Okay. Yes, there's a question back here. Just as an aside we've been subscribing to the Express News for decades now. We're very happy to be assuming to that. We also get a lot of our news from Texas Public Radio and I was wondering if someone could comment on the place that TPR now occupies and the news we need to see. Is that a good question? The question was what is the place that a radio plays in the local news area? And I think actually now has partnered with Texas Public Radio as often as possible and I've also been worked in Philadelphia, Wellington, Dallas Phoenix, San Francisco and Austin and always had a really good relationship with the public broadcasting people in those places and I think Public Radio is just one of the bright spots here and across the country in terms of local news and I've watched Texas Public Radio grow and really expand and become just a huge part of this community from when we first got there in 1995 it was way less than a lot of other places. They're one of the places that's hiring journalists now. And they're going to move into a lovely building behind the Alameda Theater the building already existed it's being built for them and the general the CEO and president of TPR says that it will be able for many years double its death. And what we're seeing is that they're nimble enough, they were small enough to be nimble and to be trying new things and you see Joe Palacios out there saddening without a tripod but and doing it because he can and because it adds to things just the same as we see Sue Cowher doing a lot of that as well so that people are taking opportunities to do more and I also think they're aiming their focus really strategically at things to cover but and they're also partnering with us guys although for being a subscriber and for listening to TPR and hopefully also making your making your money, put your money where your mouth is and add to those pledge drives because that's what keeps us afloat I mean we we're very cognizant of subscriptions, we're very cognizant of who is buying advertising even though there's a great big divide we're all in one building now, it used to be so big that we were spread out at four buildings the light building was sold it was going to become a multi-use retail living center it's going to be gorgeous and the other two buildings were sold along with it all of us are in one building any more questions? comments? I'm your average coward I'll let you hear on a true story I wish you would have been there several years ago at the meeting we're all at the perfect zero talking about the future there's a few weeks away crazy what happened, what happened Homeland Security was there Homeland Security the floor one of the people saying this they look Homeland Security is going to be at the event so we guys need to know that and kind of like broke it with you and they're going to be working the event and I was for and of course I said I was a coward inside was telling me to get up and say hell no this is one of the first years I was in front can't believe what happened Homeland Security several reports a bunch of said MCRE again and again I saw it I didn't see nothing I've been in my ground ten times they have these huge generators with a pole camera zoom and it says Homeland Security I asked the cops what's that I don't know the cops the cops they didn't know I had to go with them read the sign on the side of the deal like I said we were in the hell do you have a question or well yes where is the phone number where is the place when we see something this bad and how are we going to do something about this to slow it down get it out there so the average American knows how it's going to go that's the beauty of Twitter I'm a huge fan of Twitter I know a lot of people aren't but I think we're all citizen germans so if you see something it's like in the airport see something say something that we can have the ability to capture it photograph video whatever and upload it I really do think that that's what we all can do with citizens is to deputize ourselves as getting information and the full story if you can do it so it's not just a snippet that is biased but if you're trying to get the information out there tell the story tell the full story I'd like to go back just a little bit Elaine to what you mentioned you approached the topic for the first question and we approached this also in the description of this event is that mind between non-profit and for-profit how is being for-profit how does that impact the mindfulness now that you're all in the same building for the express news but also for other folks that are engaged in an industry that requires revenue to generate to be productive and even thinking at universities there are donors there are boards or trustees of that impact and then may not that's a little bit removed but just to cause that question about for-profit non-profit how that shapes coverage and topics discussed newspapers have always been for-profit we're called for the state because we're removed from government we are independent but as you know hitting back to the beginnings when Benjamin Franklin and several others were putting out newsletters before newspapers it's always been a profit business the model has worked for a very long time the internet crushed that model and we still haven't figured out how to make money at a model in which so much that you click on is free so when you go to our site you might be allowed to see a little portion of the story but you can't see the full story I can't tell you how many religious will call me up and say the rest of that story because they don't have subscriptions so I'm not sure I have the answer but I do know that the non-profit model is being tried in a lot of places including San Antonio to varying success and it brings with it other sets of problems because in the non-profit model you will accept funds from foundations you'll get grants you might sell an ad from time to time you might be you might be told to whomever is buying that ad or buying influence of course that's been said of the newspaper industry from day one what I can tell you is that and Kim and Francisco and Charlotte who've been at the paper there's such a separation church and state we even have a church and state separation from the editorial page and the newsroom and those that gather the news and write the news in unbiased straightforward ways and those people that write opinion those barriers still exist even though we're all in the same building we famously somebody said the coffee machines are a lot better on the third floors where advertising sits and we have a little trouble with our coffee machines but even so very few wander off to the third floors and I know they have a better theory but I just think we ought to be separate so it's a we respect what they do and when I see advertising on the elevator I would say please do a good job but we're very separate and once there are an attempt to break down that wall when someone in advertising makes an effort to call a reporter and the editor doesn't know of it there's help to pay I'll tell the editor the editor to say if you have an idea there are advertisers send to me let me handle it so they're still very much even though we're so close together they're very much in place I'm not sure I have a quick story about newspapers and advertising in Dallas when I was in Dallas I did a story about the largest Mercedes-Benz dealership in town rolling back the dollars and all of the Mercedes stands advertising and I was in the cafeteria one day and the ad salesman who had lost the entire account pulled back to take a swing and he was actually banned from the floor for life by our editor I can't believe he was actually about to continue working there yeah exactly but it was a long time ago but the non-public model which now has adopted when we were incorporated in 2009 I can't believe it's been 10 years but initially we felt like oh we'll just do the same thing as Texas Book Radio and KLRN and we will have a whole bunch of people who will buy memberships and we'll get grants and we'll get donations and we'll all happily ever after and it's proven to be a lot more complex than that and I'm a founding board member of the local independent online news publishers there are more than 200 of us across the country trying to invent the future of news and information some are poop scrappers, some are nonprofits and we're all figuring out ways to be sustainable our model at Hellcast grew to after we livestreamed so many things so well people said how much would it cost if you we developed a business in live streaming events and so what we do to Sunday we're going to be live streaming the Blessing of Peacemakers and they probably won't give us the sponsorship of about $500 to do it which is nowhere near what it costs us to do that but there are other instances where somebody like CPS Energy will say would you please come in and live stream our 75th anniversary which is completely about porn they're paying this we're not changing content and they can afford to pay for it in a manner that lets us stream Blessing of Peacemakers on Sunday but we have to diversify our revenue streams and that's something that newspapers did as well so years ago when newspapers realized that the most popular section was the obituaries newspapers I would argue took the first step of suicide by starting to charge those things and charge such a solid such an incredible amount of money that it becomes part of the deaf industry that's bizarre and so I'm going to get into the obituary business at a much lower level than that and preserve some of the oral histories in this community and also it's another step for sustainability for us so I mean it's a question of we're all trying to figure it out by the way the big section exists and persists because the obits are in there every Sunday and I've always said that if the editor decides you know I'm going to put those in the business section once again we'll have a Sunday business section it will be sustainable too I just want to throw in one thing that really concerns me and that's it all the universities are different you know we are the training around with tomorrow's journalists and a number of college newspapers are shutting down because they are also advertising based it costs money you know whether or not you have a print edition it still costs money right to put out a newspaper even if it's just online and so we're especially seeing some private universities close their papers because there were like foundations that funded the paper and as they start to amount of money the private university says oh we'll just take it on into the journalism department the problem is that private university newspapers don't have the same version of the protections so at private university it's like a business running a newspaper that says we're in charge of the content so if the president of the newspaper and the president of the university doesn't like a story they can you know actually and that's a problem so it's you know it's a problem and that's how all of us have known that they have it at a private board thanks when they shut the newspaper down I just wanted to say if you while you're not a subscriber should express these I really think you ought to be think of it as a terrible controversial the reason why I say it I really do I really believe this because they do the hard-hitting journalism and we need to find journalists doing good work I also wish to hearst who owns the Express News would some help do like HGV does with their employees and if the journalists become like stockholders and help sharing the wealth because I don't think people at the Express News have and not only have they had layoffs they haven't had a raise in about it's 11 years that's just not right but very very few yeah that's not right so I wish that there could be a more equitable way to share the wealth because somebody's making money we got letters from we got one today in fact a letter from First Corp congratulating all of us for creating such a favorable financial year and of course the first is very diversified so on the top of that list are some of their health care entities that are that they invested in in medical businesses and they're the fastest growing and the most money-making ventures but all together and one of our reporters he was close to retirement and he called me over to me and said what do you think of this note and it was just two sentences and it said congratulations on the great news of our financial success it was met with some dismay at the San Antonio Express News Newsroom where we have now had a raise in 11 years couldn't you share a couple of a little bit of your money with the hardest working people on your staff and so we'll see how far that note is but it was sent today and so it's constantly on our mind because you know the only way people be forwarded by shaving expenses just like governments do and many many many of my colleagues including me I've not had a raise in 11 years. I need to point out in terms of for-profit newspapers you go back to the 1980s the return on investment for newspaper owners was somewhere north of 25% in Phoenix when I was there it was 27% when I came here I was aware that it was somewhere around 24-25% now the return on investment at General Motors really good year is 3% so really really really highly profitable and I think I don't know I think grocery business if they have a 5% year it's considered a lot of years and so when these newspapers said they were losing money it really was a question of making less money than they used to make and the publicly created ones like the Knight Ritter had to be had to just leave the market because they couldn't return those as a private entity and still do it because it doesn't go to the schools Francisco wanted that so one of their going back to the series of the theme of tonight talking about media and polarizing rule I think also a challenge for us as an industry is to explain to folks these lines and it's not always the most interesting and the most sexy story we're there to record what's happening in the community but I've noticed that there's been more of a desire in the last 3-40 years to try to explain how our industry works because folks still don't know sometimes the difference and so I remember being a reporter to the Express News and this editorial board would write something and they would basically say they disagreed with something and they thought this politician made a bad move or they, you know, I have new colleagues that during the presidential election in 2016 the newspaper, George Hillary Clinton had not endorsed the Democrat I think it was 78 years ago yes, I think it was in construction so my colleagues all of a sudden they would just start talking to people and they were like oh, I don't talk to you because you guys support Hillary and it had nothing to do they were like, I'm reporting on grocery prices going up are you central independent school? it has nothing to do with it nothing to do with it I think there's a mesquite we're still trying to break down about some of these words between editorial views and also just like our animals and that there is this line between advertising, working both in for-profit and non-profit now, there are those lines that are drawn up in contracts with funders but I mean all that's new and I don't think a lot of people understand that so that's kind of honest to figure out how to get that message out I don't think we have an obligation as publishers always to make it really really really really really really clear what is an opinion or a commentary piece and we do that and some other local organizations do not do that and I think that's really important because I think people confuse if you don't label it opinion analysis or commentary, people confuse that with straightforward and even when you label it just confusion I read it on radios so we read the Express News for the blind and they have special radios to listen in and almost the entire paper gets read almost every day and so there's a lot of volunteers and even after reading the paper for a really long time there's confusion among them too that this is the editorial page so you guys read that one because the news goes on an hour before and so we have to continually train and I noticed that for a while if my byline or my column would say columnist and it was recently changed to commentary it was a personalized decision but it was like another effort like you should have told you this is not a straight news report this is someone's opinion and sort of on the same lines but something that I think is really important for people in the community to understand with regard to reporting and the way media works now in a very fast world we talked about Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and all these other things and the way reporting has evolved and the way the deadlines have shifted it's almost like there are no more deadlines the deadline was five minutes ago and we are feeling we the collective we and I'm sure the same could be said among all of us we are in a big hurry to get information out to people because people are in a big hurry to find out what's going on and so we where it used to be tune in at five, tune in at six, tune in at ten tune in the next morning at five or six or whatever that that world no longer really exists because people have an expectation of immediacy and so we get dinged a lot when the story is evolving and we are telling the story as it evolves and information changes go out to a scene and the police officer searching on the scene they understand this to be what happened and then as they conduct their investigation and talk to witnesses and do crime scene analysis and do fingerprinting and do whatever the case may be that story over the course of an hour a day a week a month a year can evolve very differently we weren't spreading fake news because we reported one thing when the incident occurred we were telling the story as it continued to evolve and I think I know because my reporters and photographers told me today about these things when I asked them to tell me what they wanted to make sure that the audience understood is that their stories are never quite 100% done there's always something else that happens to change the story to change the information or to evolve the facts that's new in the last 10 to 20 years really it's no longer a point of television it's no longer just the newspaper gets delivered to your front door at 6am and there it is for the rest of the day they post stories all the time they tweet we put out information all the time and especially in real world scenarios that are quickly evolving Sutherland Springs being an excellent example of that we need the public to understand that we too are trying to get to the truth and we're trying to get you the truth as quickly as possible one of the things that the express needs to do is to have a board advisors that were selected for the entire year it fell off the grid because all the people that used to do it used to have the time to do it and now they're doing 2 or 3 jobs but one of the things that came out of that first of all we got terrific story ideas from a diverse group of people that were selected from all over town but also that they learned more about our business and they often came into the newsroom and some of them were real critics of the newsroom they were champions of grammar who were just mad gas that here you have this big story and on the jump there was a misspelling and the wrong verb used and I remember one little guy came and said he just like why are we and it was just very upset that we get things wrong like that and after half a day with us learning how we decide we think thoughtfully this is the biggest story of the day let's give that the most play and this is a softer lead let's put it down below and all of the conversations that happened and he said to us at the end now I just don't know how we get it done so quickly and so well so there is an appreciation at when you know more about what we do yes sir that's a comment I think it's a pretty good idea you were saying about the paper I really think it would be a great time to go network marketing on you or MLM you're not going to become a millionaire you're not going to get paid you'll be recognized and excited to people they excited to people become subscribers they excited to people they excited to keep people we might be revolutionized this is in this country because if it catches fire prescriptions will go 1000% or 10000% like I'm clean off your idea you're saying you should become subscribers about why don't we ask the paper we can make it MLM like all these women will become millionaires to marry Kate you don't get paid you just get the recognition hey so and so Mary she sent 100,000 people down the line seriously maybe we have a question are there some new creative ideas what do you think about the idea I just showed they're out there the idea I just talked about can somebody make a comment did you want to make a comment the creator of dream week is with us today thank you I'm 15 minutes late for one next I know because it's so interesting your views and what you've shared is really engaging and we probably need more of this so you were always there for us I remember the very first you described me as what was it? Jesus I don't know what I won some Oscar from Nigeria the thing about show is here is San Antonio, Nigerian board educated in England lived in New York and of course falls in love with the woman that brings him to San Antonio I love those stories you know love conquers all amen I'm glad we got more women thank you thank you so much I'm just going to this 80th event of dream week and my dears don't mention me to the members I just want to really thank you for your support of dream week I just support of exchanging ideas in all of San Antonio as well now cast express news I just really want from bottom of my heart this is my dream come true I'm going to 4 or 5 events and everybody is hating me as some miracle worker but ultimately we every single one in this room is doing exactly what dream week is about and it's only going to get bigger so thank you so much why do you still have opinion in these people you know that's a good question editorial and there are there may be some newspapers that don't have editorial boards there has always been a voice of the paper the official voice of the paper it's been the priority not the priority but the privilege of a publisher to establish those pages not only for the opinion of the editorial board which is usually made up of very small group of people who are great thinkers good writers and do a lot of reporting to draw on for their editorial and then they also showcase the opinions of others not only in letters to the editor which I think are a great institution it's a great barometer of what people are thinking and I love reading letters to the editors and I also love reading commentary from across the country which we see from our wire services I mean Russell Baker just died and was a tremendous tremendous writer and he was a long time columnist that appears throughout the country and so these are people who we go to for advice there's the other good ones of the world now there's a whole new array of people who have the right opinion I personally love it I'm glad the institution exists some editorial boards have stopped endorsing candidates I do know that that's a trend ours still conducts interviews with every candidate except they stop at the judicial level with J.P.'s Physician Tumenio so all the higher courts every judge gets interviewed and they decide on which judge they're coming it's quite a feat and I'm glad they exist I mean the other thing opinion pages do is they try to have sort of multiple perspectives so they exist so that there can be opposing views too so that they're purposely see that opposing view which we don't see in a lot of other places I really like the idea that you're telling the public what you do and how you do it I think the New York Times has started doing some of that more on page two of their conversation but for the express news does it have a public editor or a non-visual through the technology we had a wonderful public editor and we loved him because there's always a great writer one of the wordsmen who went back to El Paso at the week and wrote a review in El Paso El Paso is now just a terrific guy and he was sort of also our buffer so a lot of really heated callers or heated writers who just had a lot to say about how our coverage was not good enough or someone should be fired or you who got the story all wrong he was the first line that defends for us and not that he just defended us and he listened to people and sometimes called us on the carpet and sent always a respectful and professional note and said this guy seems to have a good point can you also respond to him so it's it has fallen away because of cuts every paper would either have a public editor or an ombudsman and it was actually a position that people strived to get on a walkie spot and you were sort of independent and fewer and fewer of them are out there do you have anyone want to respond I have here and then thank you we hope that the supposing tonight with the impact that Trump has had on the media and journalism I'm curious with the lessons learned give me your thoughts how do you see the function in journalism in life I just want to share an interesting story I had a student last semester we had a lot of returning veterans in Powell College one of my students is a huge Trump supporter and was putting out information on Twitter that was not factual so as a journalism professor I feel like it's my duty to counter that with the facts and to kind of broaden her perspective of things that are actually out there and I don't know if you know that the Washington Post has been doing a really great county law number of lives that have been told from day one and I just shared that link with her I don't think you've ever seen it before so I really do think again as citizens it's our duty to inform our friends our families, our neighbors that hey you may think that this is the truth because that's all that you've heard but actually take a look at this and I've had to do with my own family and even my mom sent out an email just luckily to her one of my oldest four her four children that was just like I was like oh my god thank god I should have put it on Facebook and I said mother where did you get she said Beverly gave it to me and Beverly in her mind had a credible source she was my Texas History teacher in 8th grade and so Beverly sent it and so I then sent my mother to Snopes there's also factcheck.org and pull it back pull it back so there are resources that you can go to check facts we don't have to do all the research but I think people need to know about those resources before they put stuff out they run it through Snopes they run it through these organizations so that bad information isn't repeated and please we offer free workshops please sign up and share but I think as journalists we have an advantage in the online world and that is to with every single piece we publish, show people why they shouldn't just take our word for it so we think of many of our stories as sort of a toolbox so there are more links in those stories for more information click here for more information go here to figure this out go here we're also starting to take action and go here but I think we have this incredible ability and during campaign season and we're getting ready to go into a race again I publish all of the League of Women Voters Canada forums on video but I also pick up your great videos when they're the non-partisan things that are moderated by you we just link everybody together so that there's a way to find out of all factual information and I'd like to add to that because this is actually a conversation that we've had both in my newsroom and in my companies within our company and then outside some programs that I'm part of and a lot of us are very competitive news organizations are competitive we compete against other TV stations newspapers compete against newspapers websites compete against websites but I think that as part of that transparency as part of the education of our constituency we have to look and say you know we've got to set aside our ego and if KSAC is going to be a leader in trying to educate the world our little world our little corner of the world then we have to be willing to link out to the paper we have to be willing to link out to nowcast we have to be willing to say we have to be competitive on this particular issue and not be afraid to send the reader to them that is a heavy, heavy lift for a woman like me who has been deeply competitive in a very real at the same place and have worked very hard to be the number one who's casting and all of that but I think there's a shift and you see it on the national level where the New York Times is linking to Washington Post and Boston Papers are linking to LA and it is more than good and that's it that is a radical shift from a competitor's standpoint but if you're looking up how can we elevate the conversation so that we're truly being informative and those pieces of information come from a variety of sources and that speaks to diversity issues that speaks to really understanding what people need versus what we think they want then that is a very big deal and I can't do it all the time but it is a shift but it's a shift that needs to happen and I don't journalist combating the accusations primarily from the White House that we're all fake news is that I think there's more solidarity between us it's just a sense, it's maybe I've done no study but there seems to be while we're still helpfully competitive there's also more solidarity and there's groups that bring us together that are very strong in this city and we have a very healthy society of professional journalist chapters, we have a very very big association of Hispanic journalists and living communicators and black journalists that have so there's been a sense of solidarity that has come from the attacks which I think is a positive life problem we have some questions over here but just to follow up, I'm wondering if you can envision what the role of media will be once we can sort of shake out once the dust has settled so to speak about what's happening now can you look two years ahead can you look four years ahead or is that just a crystal ball not only is there immediacy right now with regard to news but the global, we're so interdependent and interwoven that maybe we can't even I don't know, Canada is a profession you look one year, two years, five years and think what is the status and role of my industry post whatever happens I think that I have no idea what the 2020 election is going to look like I have no idea what May's election is going to look like I don't think I personally don't want to try to do the crystal ball thing in terms of that what I hope is that more conversations like this will at least get a little bit more civility with the opposing views and I think that at the heart of what I've seen and it hasn't just been in the last year and a half but I feel like in the last really ten years or so there has been a shift toward incivility in understanding and appreciating and then diving into diverse opinion and so I think hopefully maybe what we've seen is we've gotten to the peak or to the valley whatever metaphor you want but we've gotten to we're at the bottom of the barrel on the incivility and maybe these kinds of conversations happening with much more frequency than just once a year in January can help facilitate a better conversation that is really all about making the community a better respectful community to one another. Like you said, it reminded me of something that Jeff Jarvis wrote very recently after the real scandal at Derspiegel where the quarter of Derspiegel was down to have invented multitudes of non-existent material and people and it was very, very, very harm-like and he said perhaps it's time to cut back on the whole notion of the narrative of ourselves as storytellers so often and in order to suck you into some really heavy duty issue we want to give you a story that connects you with it and he said perhaps we need to step back from that narrative a little bit and think of the new role of journalists as to be those who help promote and help create an informed conversation which I can remember this whole phrase and he said and I thought it was absolutely brilliant and it's not just because our non-profit mission is to promote and facilitate an inclusive civic conversation but I really do believe that our role as journalists is to help people have a productive civil conversation that informs them and helps them empower them to be better members of society so I hope that's part of the future for your day and the day. I was wondering just piggybacking on that also while other folks may think of questions when you said about the last 10 years it's kind of rights and instability what role do you think I mean something I noticed about 10 maybe 12 years ago was posting online comments with anonymity there's something about anonymity that changes there's not accountability so I'm wondering if y'all have had a long conversations about early ways that people could comment on our stories and some people really just would hone in and let it just germinate whenever somebody would say just horrible things about the reporting and you know I've never really paid much attention to them until someone said ah that guy is really awful on your story and he's going on and on I mean there's five comments and we pulled back on that a little but everywhere else it's so anybody can make the comment I'm more shocked by those comments that come from people that you can see their entire they're married to they don't care they're making these shocking allegations and comments and I know where it works who is married to he's all out there that's what kind of sort of shocks me commenting can be very very very useful and we we used to allow anonymous commenting we got people who were being well I mean we had someone was threatening to come down to the station they had outed someone else it was a big mess we cut off commenting for a while we changed vendors so that we could force some kind of now you can't comment without registering now there's always ways to gain the system but what I have found and we've been really working with this over the last few months and especially the last couple months is if someone from the staff monitors those whether it's a reporter who wrote the story or a producer or a manager or whatever and we start engaging with the people who are commenting a lot of times the negative or the trolls the ugly the comments that don't forward the conversation they start to die off and then the conversation really does become a great way for us to be listening to our audience and we when we start to nurture that relationship to the earlier gentleman's question about how can he give us information about something if he sees it go on our website and post on a story you know post on almost any story that's locally produced that something's happening that has anything to do with it and we will find it we have you can email us but when we started nurturing those comments and it's not every story sometimes a wreck is just a wreck you know but when we started nurturing those comments we got better comments it's funny because I've been doing the Zoom publication at Colorado for the past 20 years and one of the students this past semester said no miss what people want is interaction the content is good that's what brings them to but what they really want is the interaction y'all need to work on your interaction more and I thought that was from the mouth of Bayes right he's right because people want to feel listened to and heard and I think as journalists that's our job to get out and listen to people and get the stories the Express News is behind on that I was just talking to a colleague at the Dallas Morning News who's on the team called engagement managers and so all they do is engage people online to you know interact come back to the site click on us again you know follow us on Twitter share our story on Facebook so they're there as part not only getting game readers but I think when you're getting more readers you're getting subscribers they're getting advertisers question I'm kind of cheating because I am a journalist and I've worked for a couple local publications and TV news and everything but my question is about false equivalencies and how sometimes like you could say that there's an echo chamber happening depending on what publications you subscribe to the people that you follow on social media or on the internet but it can be different like if some people consider following the Washington Post and New York Times and major publications being part of an echo chamber while following Fox News and Drug Report Drug Report like another echo chamber bright part of things like that but there is kind of a distinction particularly when it comes to things that are true or false and sometimes newsrooms can get caught up in that I once had an argument with a superior of mine because I believe it was our former DA Nicola Wood was speaking about an anti-vaxxer documentary that was in town and I could see you guys reacting to that you guys remember this and there was a debate about whether we should talk to anybody having to do with that documentary and I was saying in the first sense, no we should not it's propaganda that's been proven to be false that should not be a part of the story and I got into basically a shouting match in the newsroom over that can you guys think of an example where saying something or defending something in the in sort of trying to be fair would have meant promoting something that is false I don't know if you've heard of George he's a former professor at Berkeley and he wrote a book called Don't Think of an Elephant which talks about how we respond to news and information and his latest instructions to at least media people on how to deal with all of the falsehoods that are coming out is that we need to be providing a truth sandwich instead of repeating the falsehood and then saying it's false, he says we should say the truth and then without these those same words use the false statement and then come back to the truth and so start creating some truth sandwiches as opposed to the BS of he said she said which is one college professors who just can't serve everybody except the reader I noticed maybe for DC maybe CNN and ABC News when I watched their national broadcast that they like Celia Vega said like this is what the president said that is not true and that's something I did not that's very new I have never seen that before so so I've got a lot there are lots of levels and layers to this particular issue so that's actually something that has been going on a little bit longer but they are being much more overt on some of the ABC CNN's NBC's everybody is okay anyway but that started out actually with Washington Post they started with the Pinocchio report and that started years ago that started with I think I don't know if it was President Clinton I think it was then so and they would do a thing where they would visually tell you how long Pinocchio nose got depending on the lies that were coming out or the countries or the half trees or the partial trees or the whatever and so yes there is much more and I think it goes to Elaine's point that it seems like journalists and I will say specifically national media outlets are kind of they got each other's backs a little bit to an extent when they're talking about when he said this and he reported this so and so no I'm coming to Jack to a Coastal's defense when he gets called out and barred by the White House or whatever the case may be and then there's the perspective of the little ABC affiliate in San Antonio who and I just had this very interesting conversation in our newsroom about this very thing we are an ABC affiliate we are also CNN affiliate we run ABC stories or CNN stories in our newscasts and CNN content is part of the website and CNN and ABC are both routinely called out for being more liberal leaning than a fox or a drudge or whatnot NBC gets the same MSNBC and all of that and it more than anything else the complaints and the phone calls I get and I'm the public editor of our newsroom because that's an idea and we don't have a public editor so I get those calls it is you reported something that CNN had and it is false you didn't tell the whole truth that's only part of the truth ABC is routinely doing XY or C it is to the point that several people in our newsroom have questioned very openly during a good very healthy conversation in our newsroom today we'll be using ABC or CNN content on our website because we are not in Washington there are issues of trying to make sure that we are getting all of the information and we are getting all sides and that we're not repeating falsehoods or repeating half truths and as a local news organization should we just stay in our quote unquote lane and be really going and doubling down local news especially on our website which can get shared and it can get construed and it can get pieces taken out of context I don't have the answer it's certainly a conversation that we probably need to have on a larger level and that again goes back to cross posting and being open to multiple media voices and this is one perspective here's another perspective and here's a third perspective because it's not just black or white very many shades of gray in between so you're right that you have seen a lot more of the this is what he said that is patently false this is what he said that is absolutely true whatever the case may be but even that may not be enough for you the animal probably be able to see the movie that posts if you haven't I recommend that you see it but one of the things that Bradley said in that movie and I'm sure I read Catherine's Graham's autobiography which was also worth reading if you haven't read it but Bradley said if we don't hold them accountable who will and I think that's the role of journalists is to hold those accountable also Carl Bernstein Robert Woodward Bernstein who wrote The Watergate Story I saw him recently like it was a now cast kind of event did you see that interview and what he said that was great if you can just google Carl Bernstein you know I can't remember what event it was at he basically said that journalists have to call out the lives maybe that's what we're saying more of because they're finally saying you know people don't have time to do all the research we've got to do a form and say that's false and not repeat right and not repeat the false and let's do we can have maybe wrap up comments because we're going to close to the end and we have just a moment of appreciation from our board chair that's that wrapping up okay well that kind of that's what I was going to say so my before I returned to San Antonio a few months ago I was working in Washington DC I arrived a couple of days before President Trump's inauguration and I was in a these room for public teaching and education and it's a non-profit around since 1981 and got started writing with the first education secretary and taken office and Reagan and also taken office and so they've seen a lot there's supposed to have been there almost the whole time and they were telling me just the trying to figure out in the last two years how to keep up with the news cycle is something that they just never envisioned and there are so many it's like we're even one and ever there aren't enough of us and yet we're still struggling to like where do we put one in the news cycle do we write about the border do we write about Stormy Daniels what figures where and recently I was just watching my mom's documentary about the Monk Lewinsky Bill Clinton scandal and you just see how much has changed in those 20 years you see the seeds of what was happening and we have a lot of info teaming and I think that it's been a slow path in our politics for that so it's going to really take I feel like the image of the citizenry and journalists coming together to really prioritize what is important to us and sometimes things have to get worse before they get better and I think anyone up here we're here because we're eternal optimists in a way aren't we and I think people really create good news and community news and I think that's just something that we have to we can't decide on in the midst of all this but the silver lining is that I feel people care more than ever about policy and government I think if the administration have been a different administration I don't know if we have as many people looking up how to vote and how to register and how to support a local news organization and so I see a lot of new people in TPR and Amazon that encourages me that there still is hope there I think I'm also an incredible optimist I mean I'm continuing I used to say I have bangs to cover up the brick wall straight fence in my forehead continuing to believe that we can make it through and I do believe that media non-profit, for-profit media will prevail because I think once again this administration has helped to underscore the importance and particularly the importance of local media I mean you have a lot more ability to trust somebody who is local because as you said we're not in Washington what do we know but we do know when to trust local media and what I've also seen that I love is the collaborative nature as the larger organizations get smaller and some organizations just flat disappear leaving these deserts out there the collaboration to me I find it to be really, really terrific and I came from a really competitive background with the Dallas Pancero and the Dallas Morning News one of the best newspaper awards in the country but in the end it didn't end well for the Dallas Pancero or for the San Antonio Lighter that these composed and the world is less good because of that when I see cropping up and the partnerships gives me a lot I guess final thoughts are can I go ahead and give a journalist a break or give us a hug it is not the easiest job it is a good job it is a calling and it is such a necessary thing that we do we do not go out trying to get it wrong we always go out to try to get it right and I would say continue to do this kind of thing, continue to come to places or conversations where you can learn from one another, from people in your community the importance of continue dialogue because that is I think where the truth is always going to come out it sometimes needs to take a little time to get full out in those various conversations I too am hopeful because I am also an internal optimist and I do think the students coming up are engaged for paying attention they are registering as though they are taking an active part in society and that is what we want so I think as journalists the more that we can get citizens interested and at the table the better offer can be as a society so thanks for being here because that is part of it all the things they send and I think we don't have a healthy democracy if we don't have journalism we need journalism to be a part of this you can appreciate good journalism first of all, share it when you see a story that you call them any lane rights it is clearly labeled commentary it is her opinion when you see a good story that touches you or points out something important you can share that this is what good journalism looks like this advocate for the journalism that is being done and tell your friends share anything about it because that is not real I have a browser extension my browser is called the BS Detector which is very helpful because when you call the site it is questionable it says the site may not be a reliable source it is like a quick way to do this what is a BS Detector to you? I am an internal optimist because I have been at the paper for 11 years but I am getting a raise and I still love that we die hard and you are ambassadors now you get that from us today that you have learned from people who do this that we are just regular people we have been things wrong sometimes we have to correct it that is our policy and the big news slogan has become all too easy to throw around policy and a lot of times it doesn't hurt one bit we go on there is so much a person can sustain so we are ambassadors we are champions I am really old school about it there is really nothing as great as getting an angry letter to the editor and then the editorial page decides to publish it I love it I want you to do that wild up that you can have a paper and send it in and the first one is a great team but we want to be read we want to have a discussion that is all we do all day we listen to each other and then we go out to coffee with each other so that is what we want with you thank you thank you who is our board chair, and we are going to take a few more wishes to say thank you. We have just some tokens of appreciation. So I really appreciate all the time that they have taken. We've been in conversation for two months. At least. Two months. And so this was something that just came together. They have put a lot of thought and energy and reflection and drawing on years of experience. So heartfelt deepest thanks. And I think as a soul center we can pledge to try to create more conversations like this. So it's not just a once a year event. So be engaged, be involved. We'll be offering more things. You might be getting more emails from me, so be prepared. I will extend tips so I can see all of you. So I know, and I know this is for a fact, that it's very difficult to get a hold of just one of you. So to actually have six of you here on a weeknight is nothing short of a miracle. So can we just give them a round of applause? I would like to, on behalf of the soul center board and Greece, I will just go ahead and make myself on your behalf as well. Really, really truly, from the bottom of our hearts, thank not only our panel but our executive director, Don Martin, Dr. Don Martin. Without whom, very little appreciation for each one of you. And if you know we have a hidden agenda. So every time you see it on your desk, you'll be like, I should go back to the soul center and do something for you, right? And before we let these wonderful people go, how many of you think this panel, this discussion should really be an annual event? It's already one that's here. All right, so we'll just put it on show. Of course, we appreciate how you have this open forum for discussion, not just the issues that are relevant to you but also to the audience. And we welcome you and thank you for all you've done for us. Thank you all. So, Charlotte, it just may be, you have to run it and see if this is good. No. No, it's not. There's just a T and something. There's no use. Yes. Amazing. And last but certainly not least, and I promise you your things have been solved right now.