 I'm John Nichols from The Nation in Free Press and welcome to the panel on journalism. You remind me of my fellow Wisconsinites. We applaud and say thank you. Let me start out by, we've got so much great stuff we're going to do today and you are absolutely lucky to be here because we have a tremendous panel with us. Before we get rocking and rolling into everything, I want to tell you something, a quick story about almost a decade ago after 9-11 at a point when it seemed like everything was just about blown apart as regards progressive politics and also media. This notion of a skeptical, challenging media in this country that might ask the right questions and sustain a democracy and Bob McChesney and I were invited to Vermont by then congressman Bernie Sanders and Bernie Sanders said, let's go up to Vermont and talk about media and we will have town hall meetings on the media and we'll do it in Burlington and over in Montpelier and so we had no idea. We'd been writing these pamphlets saying we have to have a national movement for media reform. We've got to get people actively engaged in this issue but that is very easy to do when you're a professor and a small town journalist in Madison, Wisconsin. You can say that all you want. The question is whether there's going to be anything to it and the first night we went to a, I think it was a congregational church in downtown Montpelier. We had no idea who was going to be there, whether anything was going to happen and we walked into that church and people were hanging from the rafters. There were, there's hundreds of people, they had the National Guard in to control the traffic and not quite but history has a way of rewriting itself. Just ask Ronald Reagan. And it was an incredible event and off that event Bob McChesney and I wrote an article for In These Times Magazine in which we said we just went up to Vermont to talk about media policy and democracy and we are absolutely convinced that there can be a national movement for media reform and the people will get it and the people will get engaged with that. And over in the corner of the room doing just what she's always been doing is Renee Carpenter who's community radio up in Vermont and she was at that first meeting. Renee Carpenter right over in the corner, been with us from the very start of everything. Stand up Renee, let us applaud you. Fabulous community radio person from Vermont. I would be remiss as well if I didn't know. Phil where's Phil Cody? Where is Phil? I hope he didn't walk out of the room. He probably did from Wisconsin State. Oh there he is Phil, stand, I'm sorry Pete, Pete stand up. This is, yeah I love this because we applaud for everything. Everybody's been watching Vermont. This is Pete Cody. He's been coming to our conferences forever and actively engaged person. He is the former president of the Wisconsin State Employees Union. Everything you see about the struggle in Wisconsin, the backbone of all that and right up in the front row as he should be from Rhinelander, Wisconsin. So when I was 11 years old, I got on my banana seat bicycle and I drove down Main Street in Union Grove, Wisconsin, population 1,970. And I went to the office of the Union Grove Sun and I walked right in. The Union Grove is a good classic small town, classic small town weekly newspaper. They didn't have an office for the editor or publisher. There's a desk up front. And I walked up to Carl Krueger who was the publisher, the editor, the reporter, the photographer, the printer, the compositor, the janitor and the only employee except on Thursdays when Mamrie Bowden came in to actually set the type. And I said to Carl, my name is John Nichols. I have read the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I have watched what's happened with the war in Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, Watergate, Woodward, Bernstein. I know that journalism is the backbone of democracy, the essential work that we can do in a civil society and I am reporting for duty. And to give you a sense of what a small town it was, let me shut that off. Give you a sense of what a small town it was. Carl said, I will give you a dollar for every picture that turns out and $5 for every story. And I set out to cover my community. And a year later, because of a presidential primary glitch, Hubert Humphrey, the former vice president of the United States, came to Union Grove. And he had let it be known that he was interested in meeting with the local media. After his speech at the Legion Hall, I was ushered on to his campaign bus. And there I sat at 12 with my Polaroid camera, with the former vice president of the United States. And I took him through more than a dozen detailed questions, which he answered. It was the high point of my journalistic career. And remarkably enough, the low point of his political career at the exact same moment. I have spent the next 30 years trying to make a visit with me, the low point of politicians' political careers. I love the craft of journalism. I think it is simply the most vital aspect of any democratic experiment. The founders were right after they wrote a constitution that outlined the systems of government. They put on a bill of rights that told us how to make it work. And they put freedom of the press right up front because without a free press, all the rest of the promise is just that, an empty promise. And so we're gathered today to ask ourselves the most basic of questions. Is the promise being kept? Do we have a functional democracy sustaining free press in the United States? Can we? Well, there we go, we're out of here. No, panel's done. But at a time when we have three undeclared wars going on, and no press that even begins to cover them adequately, at a time when we are told that we have the money to bail out every bank and major corporation in not just the U.S. but the world, but not enough money to fund housing, high speed rail, both of which were cut last night to avert a government shutdown, do we begin to have a press that explains the fundamental issues in our civic and political life? And more importantly, and what we'll get to a lot on this panel is, do we have a press that doesn't just pay attention to Washington, D.C., but to the places where we live, to the towns where we live our lives, to the neighborhoods where our children are raised and educated? And this is an important thing because so often in media reform discussions, we talk about the national media, but the fact of the matter is, the collapse has come most profoundly at the local level. The Union Grove Sun, the newspaper I worked for, is shut. So, too, are hundreds of other newspapers across this country. Over the last three years, we've lost more than 250 daily and weekly newspapers, shut down major publications in Seattle and Denver and Albuquerque, and Santa Fe, well, no, Albuquerque and Poussin, all across this country, major papers shutting down. And we have the imagination that perhaps the internet will fill the void, that when we lose all those reporters going out and covering our communities, perhaps a blogger will step in and do it. We're going to ask today whether that's happening, what we need to do to make it happen, and how we can pull this thing together and give ourselves a journalism sufficient, not merely to our small d democratic demands, but that realizes those hopes and dreams that I had when I drove down or rode down that main street when I was 11 years old, because we should all believe in journalism as a redemptive and transformative tool. So I want to begin today with our wonderful panel by asking each member of the panel to talk for a moment, just a couple of minutes perhaps, about what drew them into journalism. Take them back to there that romantic, hopefully, or maybe unromantic initial moment, and ask them how we're doing on realizing their hopes and that promise today. And I think let's start with our friend Laura Washington. Now, Laura is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. If you live in Chicago, you know that you open that paper up, you go first to her, and then you read everything else. She's got a lot of tremendous journalism background, taught at universities, got all kinds of awards and all that. But my favorite thing was that she was, and this will show you my age and experience, she was the deputy press secretary to Harold Washington, who I will still hold as the best mayor Chicago ever had. So, Laura, what got you into this gig? I actually thought you were, when you said you were gonna show your age, I thought you were gonna mention Ida B. Wells. No, I didn't. That's going way back, because I was Ida B. Wells. And you are not Ida B. Wells' copy girl. I was Ida B. Wells' professor at DePaul University, which I think says a lot about my, and I was very proud to do that for six years. It says a lot about my philosophy of journalism. Thanks very much for coming this morning. It's just wonderful to see all these really smart, thoughtful faces in the room this early in the morning. I started, I think, because of my community, much as John describes the Chicago, I grew up on the south side of Chicago. Those of you that know the Chicago know it's probably one of the most segregated urban centers in the country, was then, still is now, saw a lot of injustice, social inequity around me, went to high school and on the south side, and thought I was gonna go into medicine, which would have been a really bad idea since I was terrible at math and science. But I had a teacher who I talked to her a lot about how I wanted to change my community, and I wanted to see that justice was done for my community. And she says, well, why are you going into science? You can do something much more direct and impactful if you become a writer, which she had noticed I had some writing talent, so she thought. And I also grew up reading Mike Roy Coe, who I saw as someone who was imperfect, but was a great Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist who often wrote about injustice. And so I wanted to hit at that, so went to journalism school in Medell, and went into a number of different things. One of the things I'm most proud about my career is that I've had so many jobs, it would take too long for me to tell you what they were. And that says something not only just about my interest in diversity in journalism, but also where we are in journalism. As John mentioned, I'm a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, but I'm also proud to be a columnist for in these times. I also do a lot of television political commentary on the PBS station, the ABC station in Chicago. I've taught, I've hosted a radio show, I've done a number of different things. And through all those things, I'd like to think in some small way, I've had an impact and made change, which is why I got into business. I think we don't have, and maybe we'll talk a little bit more about this later. I think we've lost sight of the reason, and I speak, we are speaking about my colleagues and myself, the reason why we got into this business is we wanted to make change. Many of us, and because we see ourselves as activist journalists, activist journalism has become a bad word in some circles. And I think we need to get back to the heart of making change and having an impact. Where are we now? Well, as you mentioned, newspapers are falling by the wayside all over the country. My newspaper came out of bankruptcy about a year and a half ago. It's still hanging by a thread. Chicago Tribune, supposedly the more successful profitable paper in town, is still in bankruptcy. So lots of threats there. And I think the reasons for that, and again, I'm sure we'll get to more conversation about this, reasons for that are not just because their business models fail, because they've lost sight of how to make money, because they've become in some ways antiquated by the internet, but because they've lost sight of who they're supposed to be writing for and what really matters. And I think once they start to think more about the communities they're supposed to cover and who they're supposed to be responding to, they will see much better days. Thank you, Laura Washington. You may applaud that. Tom, Tom Steitz, I would try to run through all of the newspapers and publications you've edited, but we only have a couple hours. And but let me just tell you, this guy has been in great newspapers across this country. And then also you did UU News, right, for about a decade. And Unitarian Universalist News, which, by the way, UU is a group that got this thing from the start. And I like to think Tom was part of help, folks who helped the people get it. And now he's active with something called the Banyan Project. But Tom, that core question, what drew you into this crazy craft and how are we doing on it? I was sort of born into this. My father was a reporter and editor for the Associated Press. And when I was a little boy, he used to take me down to the bureau with all the clattering teletype machines and ding, ding, ding, and bulletins and all this stuff. And I was sort of an honorary copy boy when I was five. So I may not have had a choice, but as my father grew older, he became more disillusioned with journalism, at least as he was having to practice it in his job. And he'd quit advertising after a couple of years writing ad copies saying that he didn't care to be a paid liar. But late in his newspaper career, he kind of came to understand that he was largely a paid conduit for paid liars. I'm serious, the guy with a pretty strong moral streak. And he started, from the time I was in high school, telling me that I should find something much more useful to do with my life than what he'd done with his. I did not work for my high school newspaper. I didn't work for a college newspaper. I took him in his word. And then one year I needed a summer job. I was not finding one. And he said, well, you know, they got some summer interns open for the first time at the Kansas City Star, which is where we live. And he said, here's the guy you call. So he helped me finally go into what he told me to stay away from and became my biggest supporter. So I just kept going. And I'm standing here with you today. The joy of this has been tempered by all kinds of disappointments, the ways that the press did not live up to its promise. I never put a newspaper on principle, although I have friends who did and for good reason. But there was always better. There was always the possibility of better. And it kept not happening. Now we're in a time where better is almost not even in the conversation. It's like, how can you be less bad? How can you be less, less emaciated? You know, I can less hollowed out. How can we get more at what's left? And it's such a terrible thing to watch that I'm glad that I left the business quite some time ago. Anyway, but I'm still in the heart of it here in terms of what I hope it can be yet. And on that happy note, let's turn to Dan Gilmour. And Dan is with the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, which is, I kind of think a horrible name for any operation. But it speaks in all that bureaucratic language to one of the more remarkably optimistic and really important players in thinking about the future of media. With a great new book, Mediactive, which I hope I pronounced correctly, and a terrific player in thinking about media and also somebody with a great journalism background. Dan, how'd you get into the gig and how are we doing? So thank you, by the way, all for coming. I got in completely by accident. And it was in between first and second semester of my sophomore year in college, I took out eight years to play music for a living. And as I was back in college and sitting in a bar room in Burlington, Vermont with the editor of the local Alt Weekly newspaper, which had covered my band a fair amount. And we were listening to a band playing and I turned to this guy and said, you know, the music reviews in your newspaper suck. They don't know what they're talking about. And he looked at me and said, okay, you do one. And that's how I started. And I ended up getting offered my first job by somebody who called from my town where I live and said, our reporter singular is leaving. And he had noticed I had been doing these freelance things and that's how I got my first job. So it was really by accident. So how are we doing? You used the word optimism a minute ago. And so I think I'm gonna be the optimists, the unremitting optimists on this panel. We are certainly in some trouble at the moment in journalism, there's no question about that. But I think we're also quite visibly in the early, early days of something powerful and potentially wonderful of a broadening, diversifying ecosystem of media that is being created all around us and by us. And by all kinds of people who never thought of themselves as part of it and the possibilities are just extraordinary. So we'll get into all this later, but we are, you know, if this is a baseball game, we're in the top of the second inning and I'm very, very optimistic. Dan Gilmour. So I wanna encourage you as somebody from Wisconsin, when you hear any optimistic note whatsoever, applaud. Let me introduce you to somebody. And it's definitely the age diversity representation on our panel, but somebody's done so much and still looks so fresh, compared to some of us who've done so little and look so worn out. It's a great intro. Arthi Shahani is a journalist now and she's taught at major universities and done all sorts of great things, but she comes to this from a fascinating place and I suspect she's gonna mention that in a sec so I won't step on her applause line, but I will tell you the cool thing that she might not mention. And I just say, this is what I want in my biography. She was born and raised in Casablanca. Born in Casablanca, I apologize. Well, let's, again, let's rewrite history and make it better. She was actually raised in Flushing. Please welcome Arthi Shahani. Thanks. Historical. So I now have experience in newsrooms that I didn't have before, but I feel like there's a fact of my personal life that I don't know that I have to hide it, but I'm self-conscious of in newsrooms, but in this room I feel like it's sort of like organizers anonymous. And I'm just curious, how many people here have a background in community organizing? You've done it. You sort of raise your hand very high. Great to know. And so there's a fascination and sort of a nexus between what you do as an organizer and what you do as a journalist. And I'm at the point in my life where I'm playing with that and transitioning into a new role, which is a journalist as opposed to an organizer. And I'm just gonna describe a little bit how that came to be. After September 11th, I accidentally started an organization in New York for immigrants who were being deported from the country. And I thought that the job of journalists, and just being very honest, was to take whatever documentation we had done, take whatever research we had done, and put it together with a lead and a nut graph for publication. And so I didn't actually understand for the most part what the added value of journalism was, besides telling a story in a specific form that anyone could learn. I'm just giving a very raw take of what I thought journalism was. And then a couple of years into organizing, an actor gave us a check, he cut us $7,000 to do whatever we wanted. And so we ended up flying a dozen women, and yeah, it's just actually all women, to Oakdale, Louisiana, which was at the time the largest federal detention center in the country. And the point of the trip was basically to have moms and daughters from Flatbush and from Washington Heights and from the Bronx to be able to go and visit their loved ones who were being deported for the last time in the US before they were shipped out. It's a national immigration detention as a federal system. And so people from New York are typically shipped down to the South for a detention. So we get over there, and it just so happens that we come two days after a 34-year-old man from Brooklyn, Richard Rust, had died on the floors of the detention facility. And the entire place was on lockdown. They wanted to deny our visit, and thankfully we had a fantastic lawyer with us who was like, you're not denying the visit, we have the clearance, et cetera, et cetera. So we go in there to discover that people are not allowed to make calls outside. People that witnessed the death or the collapse on the floor of a gymnasium were put in solitary confinement. And there was just sort of jailhouse conditions. Basically people are put on lockdown or phone access is denied, whatnot. And obviously the management was a little bit worried of having a death on their hands. So what we do when we're doing visitation is we start taking the testimonies, right, of people that are there, sort of one after the other after the other, and writing it, sort of scribbling it on paper and putting it in our pockets and trying to be discreet about it. And then when we come out, we're like, okay, this seems like a big deal. Sure, it's just one death. And you really do sort of, it's sometimes hard to know how significant something is when you're in it, but it seems like a big deal. And so we started to look around for who we should share this with, apart from, for example, the embassy of the person, the family of the person, not all of the family even knew we came back to FLAP was to start informing people, whatnot. And one thing we ended up doing was talking to a correspondent at National Public Radio, Daniels Wordling, about this story. And he thought it was significant and he decided to go ahead and start poking into what happened. And nine months later, very long nine months, he came out with a story called The Death of Richard Rest. And it was basically an account of what might be described by experts as the negligent homicide of an immigrant detainee in detention. So that story was very impactful for me for a few reasons. For one, it was the first time that I saw the added value of journalism because I heard his piece and I actually learned something about how this young man had died. I learned something about the hidden players involved who weren't, as an organizer, it's my job to know who the players are as well, but they weren't immediately obvious to me. And I also learned the importance of a fax confirmation sheet because what he had said was that when we were sending correspondence to the jail and to officials and he wanted to see what we were doing, he always asked for proof that we had actually sent it. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Of course we sent it. It's not good enough to say it, you have to show it. And so that experience of working on a story as a source really motivated me, sort of planted the seed in my mind to want to move from being a source to actually being on the side of an investigation. And so that's what I'm pursuing now. And you've done it for The Washington Post, Solan. Right. Also it's of other publications. And most recently NPR. So you've proven that you can break, that something can happen, but how's it going overall? What's your sense, how's craft of journalism doing? So I don't know the industry well enough to be totally pessimistic about it. That's good. And I feel to- And I can stop you and say that may be the best line of the day. Right. I mean, I also feel like, and I say this with respect, I feel like there's probably a generational shift, right? And so sort of taking that things will change for them and things always change for them and you find new opportunities along the way. All right. So now that we've had that, not knowing the industry well enough to be a pessimist, let's introduce the king of pessimism, who's actually in fairness, one of the most optimistic people I know. A guy I've only met this morning and seems a fabulous figure though. And I would recommend that any books that he's written or perhaps that he's written with someone else, you might wanna purchase. Bob McChesney, how'd you get into this gig? Well, glad you asked that question. I actually, like you, John, was immersed in journalism from a very early age. Unlike you though, I wasn't reading the Constitution, I was reading box scores. But that got me reading sports sections in kindergarten. And in those days, I would pause along the way to read the front page periodically. So I learned a lot about the world on my way to the box scores. And legend has it, I was told this was true, that in 1962, at age nine, I became the youngest paper boy in the history of Cleveland, Ohio, because I, 55 houses, because I was so eager to read the paper. I wanted to get up at five in the morning and go out and deliver them so I could get first crack at the paper before anyone else in the city. And so I've been immersed in journalism, wanted to be a journalist, wanted to be involved in journalism from the beginning. But what I think triggered my interest that led me here, I can remember the exact day. I dropped out of college in 1972 to date myself. And I was working as a voting rights activist in Oakland, California. And we were organizing people to vote. This was just after the amendment had passed so 18-year-olds could vote. So we were organizing students and we were organizing poor people. And we organized an enormous event in the early summer of 1972 in Oakland. And there were a bunch of us who'd worked on it. And we were very keen to see what the press coverage would be of this event because all the local TV stations had out crews. And it was a phenomenal event, really huge success. And then we went home, we watched the evening news that night and we were appalled at what dreadful coverage that had completely missed the point, had completely done a miserable job. And it made me think, boy, if they blew this one with all their resources out there, what about all these other stories I used to think they were getting right? I mean, because this wasn't a hard story to cover. And it made me instantly have like a quick switch went off and I said, well, maybe I gotta look into this. This is really strange. And what I discovered after that is, and I suspect for many people in the room, that's exactly what's happened to people who get involved politically. In the 1980s, you're in the Central America movement and the sanctuary movement, people would be active in human rights work and then pick up the newspaper, look at television and say, God, this has nothing to do with the scene I've seen in El Salvador, Nicaragua. This is completely foreign. Something's wrong with our news media that can warp this so totally. And I think just to bring it right up to date, anyone like John Nichols and myself who spent the last six weeks in Madison, Wisconsin and looked at the news media coverage or lack of coverage of the events there can tell you that even the generous media, even the media that has been done its best to cover it faithfully, has done nothing to convey what has been taking place in Madison, Wisconsin in the last six or eight weeks. Nothing whatsoever. And I think for then that's an education for a million Wisconsinites that way say it, this media thing is a problem. We're gonna have a real barrier ever to have justice in this country and self-government if this is the way what we're doing is being conveyed to the world. So I think that's where I got and I think I've implied where I think our media are at right now in that answer. You have implied. Let me flip off now into some questions here and I'm gonna let McChesney hold the mic for one sec and because he's my co-author and so I'm just gonna hog it for the rest of the day. No, but Bob, just in your sense, how our media system, this notion of a structure of media in this country, all the different vehicles, how good a job or bad a job is it doing at this point of sustaining democracy, the core concept of why we would have a media? I think it's due to a terrible job and I could go on and on and I write books about this but I'll mention two quick points. The two most important things that governance does is cover how our economy works and our foreign policy and militarism. I mean, those are the real tests of what our government does, what the state does and I think those are the two great, and to be blunt, Jefferson and Madison, when the First Amendment was being debated and crafted, it was militarism and economic inequality where the two core issues they said were the reasons we needed a free press, a viable, credible, independent fourth of state was to prevent empire and to prevent the rule of property owners dominating society and so I think that was their measure, that's the accurate measure today for the quality of a free press system on those two scores and I think on both those scores it's dreadful. I think it's absolutely horrendous and I'll just one point since it's very timely. There was a budget deal done last night as you all may now and it was absolutely horrific and it was horrific for one basic reason. The entire range of debate on economics in this country right now could have been scripted by Secretary of Treasury Andrew Mellon from the Hoover administration. It is premised on the idea that the economy is in trouble because there are deficits and that the key is to slash spending. It's sort of like the entire history of the depression has been lost to every single person in Washington DC and our news media with the wonderful exception of a couple of columnists, just a couple regrettably is bought into this completely because that's what people in power are debating, that's the range of debate and as a result we're basically driving our economy in the future for your generation off the cliff with the worst employment market for people under the age of 30 since the great depression and more downward pressure on wages right now for young people that at any time since the great depression with no end in sight and that's because our news media has been incapable of escaping the boundaries set by those in power in this country precisely what Jefferson was most concerned about. A lot of you have cards that you were handed that were you've written brilliant questions smarter than anything I will ask. If you hold those cards up, this wonderful young woman here will come and gather them from you. If you wanna write something on a card she will keep an eye out for you and she'll begin to bring them up here so we can get you into that mix. Laura Washington, down there on the end. So Bob scoped out some real concerns about what's going on in media right now, kind of where it's at, where journalism is at, at this, at that kind of the top tier of wars in the national economy. How's it doing at the local level? I'm glad you asked that. I thought you might. As a matter of fact, I wrote about this issue, this week and in these times on their website and I talked about it from the perspective of something called Community News Matters Program in Chicago, which I think is designed to address this ecosystem, to expand this news ecosystem and to bring more diversity to the table. It was a research project focused on the south and west sides of Chicago which happened to be African-American and Latino and low income in large part. And the idea was to reach out to folks living in those communities and ask them how they get their news, how the news is doing. And the results were very, very telling in the sense that most folks, and probably not so much different from folks who don't live in those communities, middle class whites and African-Americans, Latinos, they said that, to quote one participant, that they're living in a communications desert despite the fact that we had this explosion in media, despite the fact that we're supposed to have so many more objects now, thanks largely to the internet, that they find that they can't get basic information about what's going on in their communities, what's going on right down the street, much less what's going on in the world. They, and I think the reasons for that and they talked about this are the same reasons we've been disappointed and disaffected with the media for a long time, stereotyping of these communities, racial profiling of these communities, the lack of knowledge of the journals have of these communities. And I think we have a lot of work to do on that scale. And I think one of the issues that it points to is a lack of diversity, and John sort of touched on this, sort of the top down lack of diversity in the media. The American Society of Newspaper Editors is an annual survey of newsrooms, daily newspaper newsrooms to see how they're doing on diversity. They started doing it in 1978. And the goal at that time was to work toward newsroom parity with the population so that someday, and they set that day for the year 2000, there'd be the same percentage of folks working in newsrooms would match the percentage of people of color in the country. And by 2000, they kind of gave up and said, well, we have to start all over again because they were nowhere near parity. Just this week they released their latest survey that showed that the newsroom diversity was down for the third year. There were fewer journals of color than ever. Right now, people of color in the American population is around 36%. Newsrooms have about 12% people of color in the biggest drop. Ironically, it was among African American journalists who of course were among the first people of color to get into the news business. There was a 31% drop in African American presence in the newsroom. They also found in terms of internet-based newspapers a lack of parity. In many cases, most of the major, so-called important news journalism websites in the country refused to participate in the survey and that would include The Huffington Post. I want to name them, The Huffington Post, AOL, Political Daily Beast, Salon.com. They just refused to participate. The news media, and not just the daily newspapers, not just the TV stations, but the mainstream newspaper, and even to a certain extent, the alternative press, is in large part still run and governed by, and I want to forgive me, my colleagues, because you all do great work by it, but by white men over 50 who, white men over 50, or people who think like them. And I think, and I think until you can get real parity and real get, and get folks that look like and live in these communities, to cover these communities, you're not going to get real news out of them. Thank you, Laura Washington. I'm still thinking, our winning line today is still, it's very competitive at this point. We got the, I haven't been around long enough to know how to be pessimistic, and then, but I think that white men or people who think like them is doing very well. And it's something about that draws me to Dan Gilmore, who I know is not a white man, but he thinks like one. Dan, what Laura describes is something that we're, that you, I know, have been concerned about. We've all been conscious of. You've been very optimistic about the development of new media and new ways in. Can we create a new media in this country, new all sorts, and all sorts of different layers and levels that doesn't replicate all of the worst pathologies of old media, and how do we do that? We can, I think it's starting to form. But we can't just sort of sit around and wait for it. And one of the things in sessions like this that I want to just point out is that we're at some level letting ourselves as the audience in general off the hook. If we don't demand better, we're not going to get better than we have. And we, if we expect the top down process of traditional media to somehow work itself into representing all the people of the country, we're just not going to get there because that's just not, we do have the evidence that that doesn't work very well. So if we can get more participation starting at the consumption level, people actually getting active in the way they consume and then participating and creating, I don't see why not. Again, I just have to keep emphasizing that this is early and the most important part of what's happening that is really crucial to understand is that there's no barrier to entry anymore, zero. And that means we're going to have an unbelievably large number of experiments in both how we do journalism and how we pay for it. And the sustainability of things is paramount for sure. But the large number of experiments that's going on now and will continue means that we're going to find things that work and I think then replicate those. So I don't have a prescription. I'm not nearly smart enough to tell you what's going to succeed and what's not, but there are dozens of experiments already showing some promise. Let me unpack that for one second. You said that they've got some responsibility. How best do they realize their duty in this? Well, I think the people in this room pretty much get this, but I don't- They can work a little harder. Yeah, huh? Tell them some more things to do. Well, I think we've all in here, we've all pretty well internalized the notion that we have to be skeptical of everything we see and that we tell our friends and our children and everyone around us about that, but that's just the beginning. It's about the active consumer role means not just being skeptical, but being using judgment, not being equally skeptical, asking questions, going outside our comfort zone and learning the techniques of media and teaching that all to our kids and to our communities just as starters and then saying that you're actually not literate until you start participating as creator. If everyone in this room starts doing that, then we're going to get a lot more going on. I think that we'll start to move into this area of experimentation where we're going to find things arising and I will point to Tom. I'm just gonna- New experiment as one of the things that holds great promise in this regard. Well, on that nice handoff there. Tom is now, because what we really like here is one size fits all solutions that solve all the problems in kind of like a sentence or two. He's a gate, he's a gate. So I'm presuming the Banyan Project can do that for us. You bet. All right. Not really. I would like to say that I'm not a pessimist. I'm hopeful, which is slightly different from being an optimist. If I weren't hopeful, I wouldn't be here today because I'm working on it. And I hope that the idea that I've been banging on for about three years with the help of Dan and Arthe and several other people in this room who are members of the Board of Advisors of my Banyan Project actually is gonna happen and make a difference. The very short description of it is that the Banyan Project is a web journalism startup that is based on what for journalism is a new business model, which is the consumer co-op. It would be a reader-owned publication. The way that Credit Union is owned by its depositors or a food co-op is owned by its shoppers. And their revenue implications, their democracy implications, it has all kinds of rich potential in terms of being a business model for journalism. And it actually goes on in other countries. It goes, there is a national reader-owned newspaper in Germany. There's one in England, there's one in Mexico. There are listener-owned radio stations in Canada. There is not, so far as I can tell, and I have scoured the landscape, a single co-op journalism entity in the United States, the Chicago News Co-op calls itself a co-op, but it isn't, it likes to think like a co-op, but it's a 501c3. And there's KOOP radio in Texas, which is also not a co-op, although, again, it thinks that way, and I think this is good. Nonetheless, it just hasn't been done. There are three points that we're trying to accomplish with the Banyan Project. One that are just terribly needed by democracy in terms of what journalism does. The first is to get a sustainable business model. The legacy models are crumbling. Let's make sure everybody here understands what we mean when we say legacy model. That would be newspapers, magazines, and broadcast news media are all just shrinking and crumbling. So, and some will maintain, but basically, they have been hollowed out and have, and those that do survive will never have the potential for civic potency that they once had. It's not to say they all had that potency, but they always had huge potential for it, and some did better with it than others. So then you've got a rising in the web, a whole bunch of journalism efforts, but so far, only a handful are sustainable. And they are all one-offs. No, we do not yet have business models that are both sustainable and replicable. Dan wisely points out that we're in the second inning of this ballgame. Doc Searle says that as far as the internet goes, in terms of the big bang, we're about five seconds out. There's gonna be a whole lot that happens, but we need lots of people to be working on new models and things till we find stuff that's sustainable and serves democracy and serves all kinds of different populations all different kinds of ways. So I'm working on that. I'm too old to do a fool's errand. If I can't make my project be sustainable, why am I doing this? So I'm working on that. The second is that there's a huge population in this country that is at best ill-served by the media that we've got. And they're pretty much invisible. What's happened is that since about 1970, the mission of newspaper publishers particularly has changed quite a bit in terms of the audience that they serve. It used to be that every newspaper in this country's goal was 100% market penetration. They wanted to sell one newspaper to every house in their community. And nobody ever got above much about 80%. That's about as good as you could do. But as times have changed and retailers, the patterns of retailers have changed, that the discounters, the Walmarts, have driven out of business an awful lot of merchants who used to be bread and butter advertisers for newspapers and the discounters don't advertise. This is one of the things that's killed newspapers. But what happened is that the display advertising that are left are all upscale. And as a consequence, they don't wanna pay to reach to have their ads delivered into the homes of people who are not gonna shop in their stores. When I was an associate managing editor of the Chicago Tribune in the mid-80s and even by that time, we'd go to the news executives, go to meetings and we were always told, you're editing this newspaper, the top two quintiles of the income distribution, don't forget that. And if you think about the newspapers you read, that will be true. So what that means is they've discarded 60% of the people in terms of who they choose to serve for the most part. There are happily a few newspapers that don't aim there. And Laura works for one of them. I used to work there and I was at joy. But it's gone in almost every community. I did some research in 2006 about who had stopped reading newspapers. And the Pew Center does good statistics on that when I got them over time. And it was amazing. We were all wringing our hands back in 2006. Oh my God, nobody's reading the newspaper anymore. Oh no, no. And it turned out that the people in households of 50,000 income and up were not reading newspapers less. But the bread and butter readers of newspapers, which was everybody else, had stopped in droves. They had been devoted newspaper readers and they stopped. And the reason was that the papers didn't serve them anymore. This is a not widely followed thing. So the Banyan Project sets out to serve those people. Tom? Yes? I love you so much. I want to have you get that. A little too much detail. It's the weasest amount too much. I'm editing, yeah. Yeah, so I'm hopeful, I'm hopeful. I also want trustworthy journalism. That's the third thing. I don't think I did do anything. Close out on that point. Close out on that point. And then let me too. Okay, great. There's several polls that track people's trust of differing institutions in our country. And I've reviewed them all over time. And newspapers and television news still have higher trust ratings than Congress, but not much. And Congress is running at about 11%. Yeah, maybe it may have gone down as the last poll I saw. Anyway, newspapers have lost more than half of their trust ratings in every poll in the last 25 years. And television has lost more than that. We're down to under a quarter of the people who routinely who think that the news media that they're dealing with are routinely trustworthy. You know, in terms of democracy, even if the journalism is good, if people don't trust it, how can you make sound citizenship decisions because you are not confident of the information you have to work with? This is not part of the usual journalism discourse. I think it's crucial to it. So, I'll close on that. Thank you, Tom. And, Dan, you want to, I want to bring, now, I want to point out that every single person in the room has written a question. And several have written two. So we're going to try and integrate some of these. And, Arti, I think it's only fair to have you answer all of them. But, one of the questions that I especially like, it goes a little bit to something you were touching on this notion of a generational divide. And it says, young people are transforming the way the news is gathered and reported. They are largely the ones rebuilding our media. And what do you think about the efforts of, what do you think about the role of young people in maybe thinking differently and maybe not even thinking about whether it matters if we have newspapers but something beyond that? Get that microphone for it. I'll show two things. So, I was recently in the Golan Heights and something I had learned over there was, in fact, yes, young people are transforming how news is produced and consumed. When the Tunisian man had set himself on fire and sparked Arab Spring, one of the effects of that that I learned just from talking to people of my generation in the Golan Heights was that, immediately on Facebook, all sorts of new membership groups popped up and then there became a little game that you played. So, how long does it take Al Jazeera to report something that came on the Facebook group first and then how much longer does it take CNN to report that same fact? And it was sort of an interesting granular detail about the fact of social media and the fact, like you say, of the entry barriers to being media are gone and that seems to be the structural difference between now and before which is that everything and person can be its own media platform and so I wanna share on that something that I've been really watching as a case study in the relationship between legacy media and new media. There is, anyone who has a laptop, please go to this, uncoverthetruth.org. This guy is actually doing it as we speak. Please do, yeah. If there was a projector, I would have put it up here and then we could all web surf together which half the rooms should be doing anyway. But uncoverthetruth.org is a very interesting collaborative of the National Day Labor Organizing Network, the Center for Constitutional Rights and a few other nonprofit organizations to basically extract from the Department of Homeland Security information about its flagship program for deportation which is called Secure Communities. And to me what's been very interesting about watching this documentation effort is that you have a legal and an organizing set of nonprofits come together and do a FOIA which is a very sort of traditional tactic. But what's different about it is that they get the FOIA results, like the first batch was 15,000 documents and then they sift through what is relevant in their eyes, scan it and put it online and from that do their own reporting on what does this mean and then generate a whole bunch of other reporting. I mean, slews of articles from the Washington Post and the New York Times and then also a lot of local media for their neck of the woods. And so I think of, and just for anyone who's interested in this, there is in the back, Carlos Garcia, who's an organizer from Arizona who's been involved, he's waving his hand now, who's been involved in this effort. And something that's been interesting to me about Uncover the Truth is it is a living case study of new media and old media and how they interface and a question I have, so it's not so much I have a prescription or an idea about this is the ideal relationship, but something I've noticed is one clear difference in between, for example, how the Times might approach the content that's given and then how the people who are generating it through the FOIAs might approach it is this question of, you know, telling, there's always more than two sides, I don't get the whole two side saying, but sort of telling multiple sides as well as sides that don't exactly support your point, right, and so I think that one challenge for new media that's trying to basically do very transparent, high quality reporting and frankly, the Uncover the Truth coverage of secure communities is the best coverage in the country of the program, even though it's deeply biased in that it's clearly coming from stakeholders that have a demand and a standpoint, the fact is their coverage is phenomenal. There's a question for them that they'd have to deal with along the way, which is when you encounter things in your FOIA that don't go towards what you're trying to prove, what do you do with it, right? So that's sort of like, it's a tough question and it's to me a very deep and ethical question. I think another question that comes up is by way of the quality of reporting, is there actually a difference between what, a fantastic Times journalist would do and a fantastic researcher on this Uncover the Truth side would do by way of sifting out information, calling up relevant sources, taking down reliable quotations, things like that. Is there a difference in technique or is it really a difference of branding? So for example, Uncover the Truth, they're a direct audience or stakeholders that are interested in this specific program that are going to have a specific viewpoint and the Times has a sort of a mass public of an elite sort. And so I wonder, as I watch this documentation campaign unfold and rely on it for my own reporting, sort of in the back of my head is this question of, huh, this is an interesting case study in the relationship between old and new media and how that relationship can be as robust and efficient and powerful as possible. Very good, thank you. And now, let me pass that mic right over to Dan Gilmour there. Dan, let's come off what we were just hearing there. Uncover the Truth sounds like it's doing a lot of what you and I would think of as good journalism, but there are these challenges of, is it advocacy, is it journalism? Should we care, whether it's advocacy or journalism, or are they the same? And also, can you give me a sense? I got like five questions here off something you said about a new ecosystem. And they basically come down to say, ecosystems require nutrients. Where's the money for the uncover the truths and also all sorts of other experiments that are coming down the line. The first thing, I wanted to just emphasize something she said when she asked about the ethical issue involved in taking the result of the FOI search that is not going to support your argument, your side of an advocacy position. Actually, that's the most important stuff to make sure that you tell people about in some ways. The most important thing of someone doing media creation, well not the most, but among many important things is to be independent enough in your thinking to say, I'm gonna include the people who don't agree with me, because my argument will be better in the long run and people will trust it more in the long run. That's what we're working for is trust. If we don't get that part, then the rest of it's just pure advocacy, which I'm not against. But the pure advocates, they actually fail at one level of doing media because they're not presenting a variety of viewpoints that don't support their own. And I think that journalism requires that of any kind. Because that's a good place to pivot here because pure advocates sometimes can get some funding to do their project, whereas somebody who does a journalism online or in a hybrid sometimes finds a harder time to put out a journalism that asks a question or raises a challenge. It's a great point. And I mean, look, who's done the best journalism in terms of the reporting, the gathering of information, collecting documents, interviewing FOIs, et cetera, about Guantanamo? Well, that famous journalism organization, the American Civil Liberties Union. And they're a media operation. In the past, what they would do is do a great report and run it down the street to the New York Times and hope they'd get a story out of it. And now they put it on their website and they still hope the New York Times will do a story and they usually give it to them first because that's the best way to get a story. But it's a different trajectory. What I wish the ACLU would do more of would actually be to incorporate the arguments of the people who disagree with them. I think it would be better for them in the long run to be more persuasive and even more trusted because they automatically exclude people who are gonna just say, it's the ACLU and the hell with you. That sounds, it's a little simplistic and I recognize that, but I think the trust element is important. So your question about the nutrients, it's important. People like Tom and others are working on it. We have all sorts of interesting experiments going on. There's a young guy named David Cohn who's here working on a crowdfunding for stories and journalism among many other experiments. Let me pull the break on you for one second. I wanted to keep going here for a second. Let's make that, everybody knows what crowd sourcing is, right? Okay, that's where we, let's say you get a huge document dump, you get a thousand pieces of paper and the notion of you get all sorts of people to look at different parts of it and then feed in to a whole of analysis. So you get a lot of smart people helping you be your citizen journalist, feeding in to create something. And crowdfunding, a similar concept that, you got a big story, you got a hot story, maybe Dan's doing, or let's say, he's doing great reporting out of Louisiana on some horrible stuff going on, but she's about to have to fly back to New York and she doesn't have the money to keep doing it. And so we've got a structure there to kind of feed resources in to keep her on the ground doing the story. This is one of the things we can do now more easily than we could do in the past, which is to get a lot of information and have a lot of people looking at it and helping collect it as well. I don't have, when people talk about what's going to be the business model, that singular is wrong, it's models plural and we're again in the early days we're finding a few that are having some promises, advertising's not totally disappearing, but it's certainly not the only one. Bob and Chesney, you've been hunting for what's gonna work and as I recall from reading a fine book you wrote last year, that you actually have some ideas about what won't work and what will as regards funding. Yeah, and I should add that the book that I see you've got a copy there of that you all have a free version of, well the last reporter please turn out the lights, that book, the title sort of gives it away, but that book includes a range of opinions including several people who are, it's a big debate in the book, it's a series of 32 essays that cover the entire spectrum of debate over this issue, including the position I make and I'm about to make right now. I think the core, I think what Tomstein's fantastic and I am a big fan of it and I work with a lot of new ventures and journalism online and digitally. My concern is I think while they're necessary I don't think they can ever be sufficient and I think that that's the argument I make looking historically and specifically talking about the type of journalism Dan just outlined, which is exactly what we need as sort of a foundation on the GERDS, the GERDS the opinion journalism, which is we need a journalism of scholars, not lawyers, a journalism that's willing to take dissident facts and say, well if these facts don't corroborate the story then I change the story, they're factually based. It's not like I just ignore them like a lawyer because they don't prove my case and that's really the core of a journalism I think we're trying to get at and generate in our society. I think the evidence is quite clear to me historically and internationally and economically that the market won't give us that and as long as we're talking about business models and we're framing in terms of who can make money doing journalism, how can someone make a buck doing journalism? At that level, we're never gonna get into the end zone. We might get to the 20 yard line to use the sports analogy. You might not even get on the field and I think the way to understand it is that journalism is not a business enterprise, it's not a private good, it's information, it's a public good and public goods means it's something society desperately needs but the market can't produce insufficient quantity or quality. Now the public good nature of journalism has been disguised for the last 125 years in the United States because advertising came to provide between 15 and 100% of the revenues but as everyone knows, advertising didn't support us they gave a darn about journalism they were doing this for business aims and now they found better alternatives they're jumping ship and journalism is less standing naked in the cold winds and if we're gonna have journalism the type we're talking about it's gonna require massive public subsidies there's no other way around it and this country in American history the first 75 years of American history we had enormous public subsidies of journalism the founders of this public had no illusion the market could ever provide sufficient journalism. John and I went for our book and we actually looked at the data of the postal and printing subsidies in the 1840s the hard original documents we calculated what percentage of GDP would the United States today have to spend if it supported journalism to the same extent that the government, federal government did the United States in the 1840s and would have to spend $35 billion that's how enormous that subsidy was the post office was basically the distribution arm of the entire newspaper industry in this country until the 1820s or 30s and it was 80% of all federal employees that's what our government did it created a free press and it created the most extraordinary democracy in the world at the time as a result and they understood that and if you look at other democratic nations today don't compare us to Nazi Germany don't compare us to Paul Potts Cambodia compare us to Canada, Britain, Germany, Sweden, Italy Japan, South Korea compare us to other democracies where civil liberties you get meetings like this without getting arrested we have advanced economies and what we find if we spent in this country the same amount subsidizing public media and or journalism as other democracies instead of spending $1 billion which we currently spend if you add it all together for public broadcasting just public broadcasting alone, public media at the low end the New Zealand, Canada, Australia level would be spending $7 to $10 billion at the middle end Japan and Britain $20 billion at the high end Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden $35 billion we're the ones who are off the grid of democracy the rest of the world has got an idea how you solve it now that doesn't tell us exactly how we do it that doesn't mean there are ways to experiment we can learn from our own history we can learn from the past it also doesn't mean because these spectacular technological revolutions the cost can't plummet because distribution is so much lower we don't have to necessarily spend that sort of money but it does mean I think that we're serious about really having this sort of journalism that gives us the power to keep people who run this country and runs the economy in check we know what they're doing and they answer to us we don't answer to them a revolutionary journalism it's not gonna happen unless we make a commitment and invest in it much like we invest in national defense or public education otherwise I see no evidence that will happen we'll get some good stuff but it'll be necessary what we're talking about but it won't be anywhere close to sufficient I think the historical international record makes that clear I operate on the kind of shaking your head rule so Dan Gilmore was sort of shaking his head a little there Dan? as you knew I would I mean okay I'm the analogy it's absolutely true that we supported media in a fundamental way in the early days of our republic through the postal system and the building of roads and I think that's a great thing and I think we have a modern analog to that we could do that would also keeping in mind one of the byproducts of the roads in the postal system was newspapers getting to people and journalism getting to people it wasn't done solely to create journalism it was done to create to boost an economy as well in general to further the growth of the nation the modern analog to that which would help us in some so many ways and it would not try to pick winners in the journalism community which is what I worry about the most in government subsidies but what we could do that would be the same thing roughly would be to put broadband everywhere high real broadband not the thing we laughingly call broadband in this country dark fiber essentially and then let other people light it up it would be good for commerce it would be good for media in general and I think we'd see a million flowers bloom in that world and have the kind of government subsidy which I agree with in that case that would give us the base from which to grow new kinds of media that's the thing I would support rather than government saying let's pick some winner Laura Washington let's get that mic down to that Laura okay you got mitchesney crazy talk over here Gilmore crazy talk over there uh... you're doing the trenches you're working for a daily newspaper that is as you will acknowledge very central to its communities and yet hanging by a thread sometimes economically how do we what are we going to take from this and get us to what we need I am optimistic but as listening to Dan and Bob I kept thinking get real and I mean this totally respectfully we're talking about public subsidies at a time when the public subsidies for PBS and for NPR are in great danger and may be pulled out to some extent from under them and I'm not saying PBS and NPR are our panacea are all that to begin with but those those two entities at least are much more publicly sensitive and civically engaged than mainstream corporate media you have a time when you have a Huffington Post who doesn't want to pay anybody for anything except for a very small segment of the journalism community you have a time when as I point out earlier you're losing a journalist in the field when I went to general I would say that I got two degrees from middle school journals which was one of the quote unquote best journals in schools in the country and I could count on one hand the number of people that I went to school with were still in the business there's no there's talk about being no business model there's no I gotta eat every day model for journalism anymore and most the folks like me who are still in it are in it because we're doing five or six different jobs because we're teaching in many cases because we're crossing that that terrible line that you were taught you could never cross where you could you know work for an advocacy organization or work for an institution and then still do journalism at the same time they're doing it thankfully but they're doing it undercover in many ways so I'm and I and I'm all for all all these new experimental projects like the community you should call them news cooperative like many of the things that Dan talks about but many of those are non-profits they're funded by foundations which we as I know from someone who work for publication for over ten years that relied exclusively on foundation funding that's a very fickle source of funding which will disappear the next three to five years no doubt about it foundations move on as in what makes it in many ways they should because they're responding to a number of different interests and they're responding to responding to vast numbers of societal needs so what do you do then so what I'm really really worried about is that we can't even sustain these models these these exciting promising futuristic looking models because people who want to do the kind of journalism that we're talking about doing are going to have to leave the field or they're going to go broke and and while we're looking for these I think public subsidies while we're looking for this revolutionary shift in thinking about the way we build economically build our news organizations they're going to disappear it sounds pessimistic but well I think it's essential at this point that we bring Tom in because you know now you got your charge brother so a lot of big ideas we're pretty much on the cliff about to go off there's almost no hope and so what rope are you going to throw us out of your banyan project there I got it maybe a threat I'm not sure I got a rope let's find a lightweight person that can be held up by a thread that's good the uh... the whole I mean this this panel is about democracy and journalism uh... we tend the folks in this room of whom I absolutely am one tend to think about journalism in terms of issues and policies and uh... coverage of big things that the federal government does but it's also very crucial to the operation of communities uh... good information I define journalism as reliable information that people need to make sound life in citizenship decisions it's not just issues in policies the banyan project which I can talk about with some confidence because I'm working on it myself but there are others that are working very hard they're all over the country there are uh... is is is quantum room that uh... the oakland local here I don't see if there are in in this building right now there are people who are doing journalism at the community level uh... one of the business models I was talking to one of them with about yesterday's called starvation the uh... the uh... the uh... the feed yourself business model their people who really are are putting their hearts in in in in their livelihoods on the line to do community-based journalism and some of it is just terrifically good the civic engagement happens at the local level civic is local uh... it is where people engage with each other journalism has always been a nutrient to civic life uh... who are nutrients are drying up we need to find ways to bring more nutrients into our communities and make sure they thrive as as as democratic uh... you can do that with uh... that one of the joyous things about the worldwide web is that it's an interactive medium uh... newspapers and radio stations and television stations have presses and in transmitters a great big megaphones and hardly any years you know there's not much feedback that that that gets back to the people who are but it's printed on the web you can have immediate uh... uh... uh... feedback and if you do the software well enough it can actually be constructive meaningful and voluminous there are things that you can do that make the draw the community closer together engage it with the nutrient of journalism and you can give them space in the same platform to to come together uh... on civic issues there are things that are really possible that uh... there are new doors that are opening this is where i'm getting in with dan's optimism i'm sounding optimist stop me but anyway there there are there the the web holds out tremendous potential for bringing community journalism to a really high new place and on top of that we would hope democracy can could rise up from the local level and uh... drawn into into the larger picture as well thank you tom bob quickly can you uh... can the web do it without the subsidies you talk about uh... i'd have seen no evidence yet that it would be it could do some good stuff but not nowhere near enough and i just want to add that when we talk about government subsidies the striking work in democratic nation shows us and these are actually business week excuse me the economist magazine freedom house that he studied other democracies and the evidence shows the scholarship shows and and some of it's in the book that uh... the countries that have the largest journalism subsidies have the most independent dissident uncensored press systems in the world by the standards of freedom house in the economist magazine you can have your cake and eat it too we did in the first hundred years of american history you can have public subsidies and have a feisty of an oppressor no one in government pushes the buttons as you get it and you don't uh... believe me i'd be the last person who would stand for that because in this room i'm going to first of all down the gangplank once the government has that power we're getting we're getting down the path here we're getting toward the end of our of our morning have we beaten the optimism out of you at all you haven't developed the pessimism of uh... okay uh... you got a good question here and i think it's a good place to pivot on some stuff what are the essential skills that a young person going into this game now should bring what what what what somebody and should they go into the game should they do it i love that question i remember the first journalism conference i ever went to as a as a young journalist uh... there was a sort of list of you have to be an issue expert on at least one preferably two issues multilingual is very helpful you should know programming in these different languages you should also be able to produce in multimedia so not just in print but some form of broadcast as well uh... and preferably you would be able to uh... do some sort of uh... data-assisted reporting quantitative analysis statistical analysis like and how much do you pay for this nothing that's the unpaid internship uh... so i'm very much sort of you know i guess for the people here that are trying to to break in uh... looking for that path my experience is that i'm in graduate school right now as well and i've basically been doing freelancing and internships alongside my coursework i don't know that there is a a silver bullet of skill sets it seems like like it really is a combination of those skill sets that you have to learn uh... so for me it's been interesting that i think that when i started i had over overvalued the importance of being able to do reporting in research as opposed to the more technical sides of things right so sort of like the knowing how to to record on radio something that i would keep in mind uh... and i guess the other thing that uh... uh... for people i'm not sure how many people here in that sort of i'm trying to break in but i do think that uh... at the end of the day you have to do a lot of free work to build your clips right uh... and so that seems to be the ammo that you need to keep moving forward and so the experience that i've been having is just hustling different outlets to give me the chance to work for them for free or nothing uh... in order to to build our repertoire thank you arty now we've reached the point i have tried to integrate a lot of your questions in which is the lie that moderators say uh... and what it means is that we have taken elements of them some of them exactly but there's many things we haven't gotten to i will tell you this the biggest pile of questions has to do with wisconsin and that's lovely uh... and as a wisconsinite i always say great estate in the nation all questions should be about it blah blah blah we'll have a panel tomorrow morning on wisconsin and how journalism is covered in on labor issues and a lot of other stuff uh... moderated by our great comrad from great britain grandville williams and so come to that you'll get all your wisconsin questions answered there's a lot of other great questions here many of the panelists will be around for a little bit don't hesitate to come and grab them and say why what what kind of crazy talk are you involved in here uh... but i want to ask each of our panelists and i'll go we'll go down the line here uh... to give us a minute or so on you know where they think you ought to go from here as you think about journalism as you think about these issues that we're dealing and particularly that intersect of journalism and democracy and it's unfair to start with anybody but i'm going to start with our good friend tom style com sites thank you i think one minute one and a half thank you uh... for what the what the folks in the room these people know that there are problems they know the issues but give them some give us a place to go and work in focus well actually i think that dan is going to have the best answers to that because that's what his books about and i'll plug his book for him since he's not doing it uh... but i i i think that whatever you can do uh... i'm i'm a great believer in followership there's a there's a huge uh... premium in this country placed on leadership we train our kids are all leaders you know they're all above average they're all leaders the fact is that each of us spends no matter how much we lead spends more time following than we do leading and i think that that that this is it a place if you're not a journalist uh... you now have tools to to actually uh... commit acts of journalism in ways that uh... that help the the whole thing move forward uh... but i i think that that if there's places you can put energy this it's civic energy in the communities where you live would be to to do anything you can to support any efforts on the part of anybody that is doing reliable community-based journalism i think that without that all the rest of journalism is going to be weakened thank you to a wonderful panelist thom states is from the banyan project uh... well you know thom said that dana gilmore was going to give the greatest answer ever so dana uh... what he said thanks a lot okay democracy is about participation voting is only part participation the core go home please and participate and convince other people to participate to fundamental levels the core of a modern version of media literacy which are to be active as consumers to demand better to find better and demand better participate by being creators and help our communities join in that process of both of those if we do that it's at least a start dana gilmore dana gilmore bob mccessing well in a nutshell i think the crucial thing for us is understand this is a political issue it's a public policy issue and even for the stuff that the really great stuff that people are trying out and experimenting with it will depend on public policies that will make them happen or not like well-paid broadband that's uncensored with network neutrality uh... and i think a lot of the subsidies that are being broached and talked about in the book that is available to you are subsidies that would funnel public money to independent groups that any government strings attached so people have the resources to start a website or to start some online local journalism and pay reporters a living uh... because the market is not going to generate sufficient funds to get us anywhere close to where we've been what we're accustomed to uh... and it may do it i'm not gonna say it's impossible we don't know the future may do it ten twenty thirty years down the road but i don't think we've got a ten or twenty year period we can go journalism light well till we get there given the state of the world today fact i think that is a recipe for suicide bob mccessing arty shahani i mean i guess the the fleeting thoughts i have on it i heard arianna huffington speak a few weeks ago and she said in defense of her business model that she was smart enough to recognize that self-expression is the fastest growing uh... industry and practice in america in other words people like to express themselves that's not a bad thing that's actually a phenomenally good thing for democracy the fact is that people are interested in blogging and reporting and researching and sharing their thoughts more than they're interested in watching sitcoms at eight p.m. that's actually a fantastic thing uh... and so i would just caution that we should keep in mind the really phenomenal breakthroughs in democracy that are happening by way of participation by way of a network rather than hierarchical worlds uh... as we sort of approach the relationship between new and legacy media and whatnot and the other thing i would say is that you know at the end of the day uh... what i see happening the people that really inspire me who are new entrants into journalism are a lot of just small business entrepreneurs that have started hyper locals that have incorporated as l l c's as opposed to non-profits and that understand that as with any small business you know you're really you're in the grind making it work finding revenue from different places whether it's ads whether it's selling products whether it's convening events fundraising what not and it's actually a robust and exciting practice arty shahani at the end of the party always needs somebody sober to drive you home that come off that bad that's all i know you're good i think you're the sober voice of reason in this uh... great moment my dear i do have hope that's why i'm still here that's why i'm at the table today uh... i want to pick up on something that tom said about committing he said commit acts of journalism i think that's a very important way to raise the you know the significance of what we're doing here and anybody can commit an act of journalism doesn't have to be the folks who support like me who went to journalism school or people come out of legacy media it can be people like arty came out of community organizing there is such as she points out that such a strong tie between activism community organizing advocacy in journalism and i think we need to stop being afraid to say that and and and and and you know dismissed this this myth of objectivity and realize that all of you can bring something to the table and all of us can participate by supporting some of these new emerging websites through crowdsourcing the crowdfunding uh... by making sure that we protect our public media but getting involved and in particularly getting involved in supporting the communities that have never gotten their fair share of good news or media coverage the marginalized communities particularly urban communities latino and african-american and low-income communities across the city across this country i love laura washington i wish that i could bring about i think i think i wish i could bring each and every one of you up here and introduce you to the folks because i know that you so many people in this room are so passionately involved in the activism that's going to get us out of this mess that we're in and into that next place that we can get to america has always always had a challenge of journalism which never we have never had the journalism sufficient to a democracy but we have always had citizens who are willing to step up and make those demands that tom talks about and have that optimism that dan is displayed and have the willingness to go in to the craft that arty has shown us the critique that bob's given us and that passion for the this connected not by choice but by but downward push communities that laura cares so much about i'm struck by the fact that in our room right now in the back corners he so often is is one of the people who twenty five years ago founded fairness and accuracy in reporting our good friend and comrade jeff cohen we forget that a quarter century ago a lot of people trusted media not to lie to them and it wasn't a pleasant task but jeff cohen went out and exposed the lies and showed us that we could have a media critique that broke through big media and started to teach us where we had to go so the fact of the matter is that over time evolve our critique we evolve our activism and as somebody who's been out there in wisconsin for the last month and a half i can tell you one thing media doesn't do a very good job the people do i'd like to say as we close out probably the best answer to any of these questions about journalism and democracy is to go out and get a whole lot more active go out and march a whole lot more write a lot more letters make a lot more demands and start creating your own media because you're gonna see us out of this mess thank you so much for joining us for this panel today please thank our panelists please thank our panelists