 In your bag there is a copy of Knight's Statement of Strategy and I wanted to read from page four one sentence it won't be a long read. We believe and engaged equitable and inclusive communities. So now just a mention for the students of history in the room. In 1968 125 cities in the United States were in flames after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. President Lyndon Johnson had appointed a commission to issue a report it was the Kerner Commission and they studied the issue of a divided America. I want to quote from that 1968 report. The journalistic profession has been shockingly backward in seeking out hiring and promoting Negroes. Again that's the Kerner Commission report in 1968. So we've been talking about diversity and journalism since 1968. Diversity being invited to the table. It's 2020. Today we're talking about inclusion being welcomed at the table and equity shared power at that table or perhaps building completely new tables. Diversity in 1968 inclusion and equity in 2020. Please join me for this conversation this very important conversation and welcoming our moderator Jenny Choi of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. Yes it's working technology. So I'm so excited you have no idea how thrilled I am to be here. This is my I think fifth night media forum and last year I did a breakout session on diversity and I facetiously put it out there that we should be on the main stage and you know all the years I've been here and I've seen folks on the main stage I thought oh my gosh look at the cool kids and today guess what we're the cool kids. So I am so grateful and this is such a gratifying moment I wanted to thank Jennifer Preston, LaShara Bunting, Paul Chung, Karen Runlet and the journalism team because I want this is this is about the panel in a sense that we are recognizing the gift of being seen and seeing others and that is really a gift we should not take for granted as journalists and as funders who support journalism and strengthening communities. So I wanted to thank you Karen for just beautifully framing the conversation. I wanted to put a few things out here. So the night media forum has been a critical convening space around trust right and the declining trust in journalism as a democratic institution. The night commission on trust media and democracy last year put forth a set of recommendations on how we can restore trust in journalism and one of the four recommendations included making sure that our newsrooms were authentically reflecting the communities that we serve. However we're seeing that we're struggling with this in our newsrooms this has been tracked by the American Society of News Editors Diversity Survey which is annual and we're seeing that from Pew we're lagging actually in diversifying our newsrooms compared to any other sector. So how does this play out and in the context of trust and healthy democracy. While we're seeing from Norrick research at the University of Chicago that young age 30 18 to 34 African American and Latino Latina audiences are not happy are highly dissatisfied with how they are being conveyed in mainstream media and they distrust the news media compared to any other constituent group. We're also seeing that misinformation campaigns that undermine voter engagement target at disproportionate rates African American communities more than any other community because they're exploiting this trust gap. So what can we do amplifying underrepresented communities is an opportunity. We need to reframe this conversation as audiences of opportunity and how do we recognize cultural competencies by journalists who gets to say who gets to tell whose story right and really do a deep dive on the structural issues that keep perpetuating this newsroom issue as we've seen as Karen mentioned with the current commission report over six years ago. So I just want to say one last thing at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. A lot of young people we see the next generation of news producers and news consumers. We see these young people come to our school because they love that we promote community centered journalism and that we promote journalism as a powerful tool for public service a powerful public service right for a healthy democracy where we all can thrive and make healthy civic decisions. But what we're seeing is they learn all of these wonderful skills and they get hired and what we're hearing now is they're struggling at newsrooms at their newsrooms and at their jobs and these journalists of color want to not only leave their jobs but leave journalism altogether. So if we're talking about addressing this decline of trust that's an issue that we really need to look at structurally. And the second part of that is some of these journalists of color want to become media entrepreneurs of color and start their own news organization to have their own power. But the access to capital is another structural barrier that a lot of media entrepreneurs of color face. So we have three exemplars and all of us are wearing a lot of different hats to address this issue on multiple levels. So I'm going to start with Maria Inajosa and I'm going to you know sometimes when folks tell the bios like you forget who the person is so I want to try to keep it in context. So Maria Inajosa I wanted to start with you. You are the president and co-founder of Futuro Media Founder and what I love about the name is it's Futuro and before we talk about why you started Futuro Media Group I wanted to talk about you as an anchor and executive producer of Latino USA because about a month ago you I want to get the dirt on the episode called digging into American dirt. I think on so many levels on so many levels it really encapsulates why Latino USA was uniquely positioned to bring much needed context to a very contentious debate especially around identity and the audiences that you serve and that you are loyal to. So could you talk a little bit more about digging into American dirt? Yes. I want to know the how of that journalism and some of the decision making that went into that. Thank you Jenny. Love the dress. What's up everybody good morning to my fellow panelists. This is great to be back at the forum so it was interesting because you know Latino USA which is produced by Futuro Media we're trying to drop the group so Futuro Media is now the only show on NPR that is growing a substantial audience. We produce it at Futuro Media which is the nonprofit that I founded 10 years ago and NPR distributes it and you know Latino USA has been around you may not know this but it's been around for well I started anchoring when I was five so it's been around for 25 26 years now I know it's amazing I had a really deep voice when I was born so Latino USA has always been a show that is kind of thought-provoking it's not really a breaking news show we're not set up in that way but interestingly within our newsroom we've had to have the conversation about how Latinos and Latinas are actually leading a lot of news and therefore we've had to respond which is a challenge for a small nonprofit newsroom but I'm going to give you a couple of examples over the summer there was Puerto Rico where massive protests in a part of our American democracy led to the resignation forced resignation of the governor then there was the El Paso massacre of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in a targeted hate crime right after that it was the detention and a rest of 700 poultry workers in small towns right side of Jackson Mississippi where I was just last week where we're doing a follow-up and then you know our newsroom was like oh my god this is so much and then American dirt happened right at the beginning of the year and we had to make a decision of like so this is not a massacre it's not a political protest it's not you know but it is a massive cultural moment in the United States where we're talking about American dirt if you don't know about it then just listen to the episode and then you know you'll understand you're right Jenny and I won't go on for much longer about this but we when you say uniquely positioned we were because we are a small nonprofit community-based national newsroom we're based on 125th Street in the heart of Harlem come visit us and because we have this long history of all of these words that just came up just this morning uh trust authenticity Sir Tim wherever you are talked about love because I was like do I talk about love on this panel I don't know but yeah he talked about it so now I can talk about it the way we approach our journalism the fact that Futuro was founded by a Mexican-born American city citizen who was raised on the south side of Chicago now lives in Harlem our executive director is a black woman from Mississippi Boston now based in Harlem Erica Dilde who's over there our board chair is Deepa Donde who is of Indian American descent from New Jersey where are you guys raise your hands over there in the corner so we are an all-woman led multi-ethnic newsroom where it is about bringing your whole self into the newsroom and that doesn't mean that we don't have editorial battles we had a lot of battles around American dirt to finish with that we just realized we have to do this story I called Sandra Cisneros I was like will you do this she was like yes called Luis Alberto Rea who I know right because we've been reporting on these authors for years will you do this called este Miriam Curva who wrote the scathing takedown of American dirt would she do this and Janine Cummins said yes and what we did was that we did not push our perspective and by the way it's very complicated if you want to know more about how I feel listen to in the thick which is our politics podcast but for Latino USA we let those four interviews stand alone and let these people speak for themselves and it was just wildly applauded because of the fact that we were not putting a you know this is how it must be looked at and we're going to tell you this and you can't let other people you know write these stories no we let the authors and in this case just they're all authors speak for themselves and I think that just to end it's it's really quite beautiful to realize that a show that's been around for all of these years that frankly NPR thought would when we created it 25 years ago 26 years ago I think they thought it would be around for maybe five years we're going gangbusters how does that happen it happens and again I'm going to go back to serve Tim because of the passion and love and commitment writ large for American journalism writ large very specifically for the telling of these stories with heart and we Erica myself Deepa have created a newsroom where we encourage that all of that to be brought in and then to be critically dissected and used in a in a newsroom that is filled with people of different generations and we go at it as journalists but what you said cultural competency is actually where we start as a media executive we talk about this a lot with our leadership team how do we understand bring cultural competency into our newsroom and audience opportunity we know that's why our numbers are just because we've been saying for the longest time it's about being representative right in our newsrooms but also hello demographics who's going to be your audience who's going to be your donors we've been focused I've been focused on that for the entirety of my career and thankfully it's paying off that's great so I wanted to actually have you wear your entrepreneur hat it's been 10 years since you founded Futuro Media Group and that's how I'm going to bring Martin into the conversation who's the co-executive director of the Maynard Institute so you founded Futuro Media Group as a non-profit news organization and finding capital and securing philanthropic dollars as we know and we have to kind of go there is difficult painful women and folks of color a stat the democracy fund had done really great research on this and found that from 2013 to 2017 of the 1.1 billion dollars that went into journalism about eight percent of that went to diversity equity and inclusion focused efforts so how did you find that money to start Futuro and how's the sustainability problem or challenge pen for you okay so a quick story you don't please don't tweet this out but it is in my upcoming memoir ooh shameless self-promotion comes out in September anyway um it was 10 years ago that I went to have a meeting with 60 minutes that's why I don't want you guys to and I was so thrilled I should have understood that they asked for the meeting at a starbucks so maybe that was a clue it was a great meeting um nonetheless and they drew you know they were like oh my god we love you you're so perfect but can you wait until one of these old white guys get sick or dies and I was like am I laughing am I crying I didn't know I got in the subway I cried and I said what am I gonna do and so what I'm saying to you is that it was just this kind of like what what am I gonna do what am I gonna do how am I gonna figure this out and I thought about not other women who had created independent nonprofit newsrooms I thought about actors actresses in Hollywood I was like what did they do they created their I'm gonna create this how am I gonna do it I had learned how to raise money because I was working it now on PBS um and I was very blessed that a woman who had done Reiki on me to heal me from PTSD post 9-11 turned out to be a multi multi-millionaire philanthropist I know and she treated me for free okay it's Fiona Druckenmiller uh some of you may know Fiona um Stanley Druckenmiller's Fiona was my healer um and so in frankly in desperation I was like this is I was like who am I I can't call the fourth foundation MacArthur night you know they don't know I mean they don't know me I Fiona knew me she knew my heart in fact and I said I want to do this and she was without Fiona nothing this would not exist so that is strange and crazy and a bit of an opportunity it's also as a journalist I was a journalist even when I was on the Reiki table because I was like who is this woman who's doing this for free I need to find out and there you have it but that you know luck part of it you know gangbusters but it is hard and one of the arguments I made to Fiona I remember and this was 10 years ago I was I don't know what the statistic was but it was like of all the money that is put out there for you know investment in women in in in any news company media whatever the amount given to women is like 1% and I was like that's the number that I need you to help me and that's how it all started thank you now we're funded by every well not by everybody we please come talk to me so on that Martin Reynolds the co-executive director of the Maynard Institute a training ground for journalists of color so all of the things that we're talking about but I wanted to start with you and some of the provocative ideas you had in sustaining as a nonprofit organization this effort to support journalists of color you embarked you were key to a new strategic planning for the Maynard Institute after Dory's passing and it was so interesting how the strategic planning process was so ambitious and I'm thinking you looked up and saw two people to do all that work so I'm just curious how you've sustained your business operations well you know people of color we don't it doesn't need a lot of us to get a lot done and everybody that person of color knows that so I mean I think what I mean we had help obviously we had help from night help with the funding the strategic plan we had help with we had friends in in in the philanthropic community because of the the organization's long history the Maynard Institute's the oldest journalism nonprofit dedicated to help America's newsrooms reflect the diversity of the nation and we've done that and some of its founders it really was born out of the Kerner Commission strife that talked about the lack of diversity in mainstream media and some of our founders include Bob Maynard who went on to be the first African-American to own a major metropolitan daily they'll contribute where I was editor-in-chief and then of course Dorothy Gilliam who just came out with an amazing memoir trailblazer she was the first African-American woman at the Washington Post in 1963 so these people were trailblazers of their time and the goal was to train journalists to enter into news organizations and make their way I'm not only a journalist but also was a graduate of Maynard Media Academy in 2005 so I believe in its mission and it helped me go from managing editor to leading my newsroom but then after Dory had passed in 2015 and the organization is really making asking the question should we even exist right because at that time news organizations were still trying to navigate coming out of the great recession obviously the industry had vastly changed and the primary customers of the Maynard Institute were newspaper companies and they were going through a lot of struggle which many are still today and so we had to ask ourselves well I guess we could have waited six more months until after the 2016 election to ask should a diversity organization still exist we got that at affirmed yes we should have but we also then robustly thought about what are how do we serve this industry in the 21st century and one of those programs was Maynard 200 and it was a training program we were going to focus on the next generation of journalism entrepreneurs advanced leaders and storytellers of color and the reason we said storytellers is because we found we ran a program called Oakland Voices in Oakland California where we trained residents to be storytellers started in 2010 before much of this was even happening and it helped to inform this notion that the people who are contributing to the narrative of community are more than just journalists right they are members of community so we called them storytellers and thank you and so the thinking there also was we still want to train middle managers and advanced leaders people who people who are working in organizations and leadership roles at mid-level but also those who could become CEOs because the reality is the way change happens in news organization is from the top down there isn't an Arab spring of diversity that just comes out of the ground and is just going to happen it doesn't work that way if it doesn't happen from the top it's not going to happen and the third was journalism entrepreneurs why because we cannot in good conscience continue to funnel people of color into legacy news organizations that are inhospitable unwilling to change and are not places that are healthy for young people of color in different generations to go and so that's where and so this training organization we're now in our third iteration we've had support from google news initiative from news integrity also from night from ford and democracy fund and others to help support this effort but it's under capitalized and in fact we think it's so essential and to see these people who are creating their own narratives who are have the opportunity to step in and lead organizations and storytellers who are learning skills like around investigative reporting the love in the room in those in that training space hopefully helps to give them a cake a cape to walk into these organizations and undertake these incredibly challenging ventures that they're doing across these three areas of learning the other work that we're doing is we want to go from having conversations about diversity to creating workplaces that are equitable and inclusive in the service of diversity it's not dei it's eid because you can have people that are diverse in the newsroom but if they have no agency and no influence they leave so what we want to do is help organizations do that and so we got a a grant from night to to pilot thanks to leshara and jennifer to pilot an embed where we are going to go embed ourselves burrow in like a tick with two news organizations over the next year and help them create a plan craft training all of the things necessary to to actually make transformation and i think what's really key here is it can't be the moral obligation in the business case hasn't really sunk into y'all either even though in 2045 14 million people alone will be multi-racial twice that will be asian three times that'll be black and four times that will be hispanic so i want to do two things one let's not sing voices from underrepresented communities let's say voices from your future audience thank you and if you want to survive and thrive in the 21st century we are your audience and lastly but not leastly i also just want to say that um we have to as we think about how do you address the diversity challenge it has to be tethered to outcomes right the outcome being what is the key to your most prosperous and sustainable future as a news organization not simply the moral obligation uh because that hasn't worked in the business case hasn't necessarily worked either the other part is what you alluded to which is a notion of trust the trust project headed by sally lerman funded by craig newmark and contributed by many news organizations to articulate transparency standards on the web two they have eight core indicators and of the eight two explicitly speak to diversity so at a time of great distrust in our society if you want to be viewed as trustworthy incredible diversity has to be at the center of your strategic plan so i just encourage folks to think strategically about how does this help you reach new audiences to connect to communities and uh build subscriber revenue and the reality is is that it takes time to build relationships to communities that you have ignored uh and don't think you can just walk in with a bouquet of flowers talk about why don't you subscribe we're so happy to have it it's not going to work like that it's going to be take time and it's incremental it's relationship by relationship person by person and to all the community foundations in the room i would say this and then i'll stop is that this is an opportunity for you to get behind narrative change work and your respective communities and to collaborate with libraries and people in communities because libraries are heavily trusted community foundations was often focused on workforce development and economic development the reality is a community cannot be healthy it cannot be prosperous if local journalism is not supported so uh there's a number of foundations that do this like the california endowment and others but the opportunity is is great you just need to go grab it and lucky for us we have a community foundation ceo right next to you um this is jeff eroda ceo of uh community foundation boulder county and uh i really appreciated um you looking at the 150 community social and health indicators of the boulder county region and um putting forth this intentionality around utilizing an equity lens in your funding so jeff you've heard maria and martin just kind of throw the gauntlet and as a community foundation i'm curious what using an equity lens looks like and would love to hear some of the community listening tours and cultural brokers that you've talked about um to strengthen your community yeah so note to self um never follow maria and martin especially if you're not a cool kid um you're cool but with regard to the equity lens and by equity we mean creating systems where all can thrive and it really boils down to three core principles for us the first is prioritizing those most impacted by inequity the second is something we call do nothing about us without us which is simply trusting the wisdom and agency of the people with lived experience to know their own issues and to create and implement their own solutions and the third is not to do anything on our own that we can create more change by working together in partnership and the form that that's taken has been through the the work that we've done as a community foundation that has begun to fold into and intersect with journalism i can think back to the school readiness initiative where richard garcia a trustee at the time asked two key questions of us um who are we really talking about and who's not here and who we were talking about were latinx kids who were experiencing the largest school achievement gap with their anglo peers of any county in the state and who wasn't there were their parents um which led to a movement of school readiness coordinators principally latina moms going from house to house providing resources recruiting leaders which led to 50 such coordinators uh 250 cafecitos and 1900 latino families that were reached and demonstrable results in school readiness as well as a burgeoning movement of community organizing that changed for example the school lunch principles with regard to latino kids and then through the night community information lab we began to learn more about human-centered design and cultural brokers and how they could create structural change this sort of dovetailed with open listening sessions that we were doing throughout the community where we just asked three questions of people uh in your lived experience how are you feeling about your community what are the most important issues to you and what should we do about them together and when we got to 15 people we just opened up another one but we came to realize pretty early on that there were some people who had never come to an open listening session and that we needed to go to them again with trusted relationships and cultural brokers to where they gathered section eight housing lgbtq support groups and one particularly memorable listening session with simultaneous translation with permatoras who were working and living in mobile home parks organizing for clean water and human rights and when we asked them the last question what can we do together they said tell our story to the powerful people which was heartbreaking because we knew no one could tell their story better than they could themselves that they were powerful and compelling and that we needed to find a way to help them do that so that empowerment was not conferring power but recognizing power and agency this led to sort of a question about the community indicators report that you mentioned this is it this is trends it comes out every other year it has so for the last hundred for the last 23 years feels like 123 years and we began to ask how might a community foundation act at the intersection of journalism and community action we're fortunate in the chris barge who is the managing editor of this report is also a former newspaper reporter with the rocky mountain news and the boulder daily camera and i worked at the abc affiliate for about five years and lily weinberg helped connect us to lindsay green barber who helped write a concept paper and research a concept paper on how we might work at this intersection which led to something we're calling the equity reporting initiative which is a big title for something we're just trying the first aspect of it is to respond to the community request to expand trends to a year-round dynamic storytelling resource and so we launched a podcast in conjunction with kg and you the public radio station in our community and hired a latina bilingual cultural broker as its first reporter who's already a trusted voice the first story was indeed the story of the promotores and then we are now telling stories of census outreach and combining them with community foundation resources and solutions that way and that's been supported by both knight and caron runlet and the jocke and littlefield foundation the second aspect of the equity reporting initiative is something we call the solutions fund which is when these stories surge up from community storytellers one of the frustrations that chris and i had as former journalists as we would tell these stories and then we kind of have to leave them at the water's edge hoping that somebody would pick them up and act upon them and we thought could we not do that as a community foundation is that now what we're supposed to be doing when we learn these stories to to act as a catalyst for the solutions and then the third aspect which you're way ahead on in fact i sort of buttonholt barton yesterday on an equity reporting lab which would be a cohort of equity fellows emerging storytellers and journalists as well as seasoned journalists who have been sidelined with the hollowing out of local news in our community and the acquisition of the denver post the boulder daily camera and the longmont observer times call rather all acquired by all the global capital and despite the heroic efforts of these journalists really a need for a new and diverse ecosystem of local news so that cohort bringing people together and providing resources of learning as well as stipends for their reporting these are things that we're trying with the lessons of resident leadership community organizing cultural brokers pointing toward this north star of equity we're very much in the beginning stages and we hope that if we walk this road with some humility we'll be granted some grace as we stumble our way through learning and we're very inspired and honored to be with all of you who have been doing this work for a while now learning from you and your support so i just wanted to ask all of you a couple of questions it's on everyone's mind and maria you touched upon this and jeff in your work census and elections 2020 how does all how does all of your work kind of inform how you're going to reach your audiences to inspire folks to get counted folks to engage and feel that sense of efficacy which is the strongest driver for civic engagement efficacy meaning i actually have the agency to make a difference if i do this thing for through for my community so um anyone can take a stab at it you know i think when i think back to a decade ago when i was imagining futuro i it was a very um visceral understanding that by giving representation and voice we are also acknowledging their power and in telling the story my dream vision has always been that in telling your stories you begin to recognize your own power and then you act on that power um i would say that in the decade of futuro media we and i i actually now i'm like how would we prove that like what would be the data like what how would we get that and i'm sure that we could but i think what we're doing now it's not so much because we're a nonprofit newsroom where you know we put out four podcasts every week um just weekly so it's not like we're doing a you know this is the census and partake no it's not that way it is much more understanding so for example we just got back from mississippi we're outside of jackson there was this rate of 700 people the largest rate ever in um in this country's history of a poultry plant of workers and the census actually says that the population in these towns of latinos and latinas is minuscule but on the ground if you're there i was there for four days um for three days i didn't see any white people at all in these towns that i was at and yet the census says that they are i don't remember the exact number but maybe five percent seven percent latinx what's when actually it feels like much more like more like 25 percent 30 percent maybe more is actually on the ground so i hope that in the doing the deep deep reporting that we're doing by spending all of these days by giving voice that then we are able to kind of again push people to say we need to be counted we need to be seen there's another problem though which goes to your question of trust we have a real issue of trust now while all of this is happening and there are presidential debates happening and people are looking at you know nevada and south carolina i'm getting texts from people across the country including in new york city frantic texts texts from people who are saying ice is everywhere ice is everywhere because you may have seen the headline that said that it was a couple of weeks ago that said that the administration was going to be sending out tactical teams of ice in you know high profile whatever you know just kind of massive presence in the community it was a big story most people forgot about it but right now that is happening in these communities how do you tell them to answer a census or open the door for a census counter when everything that they're hearing is you don't open the door to anyone ever sadly saying to people don't open the door to the police unless you absolutely see a warrant because also ice agents misrepresent themselves as police we know this right they wear uniforms that say police everywhere and ice in smaller letters this is a central a tension in that we're trying to say we're giving you voice we're giving you recognition we're giving you power by reporting on you telling your stories authentically with love and respect but at the same time people are saying if this if this administration is reelected and DACA is not re-uped the government has the data of all of these tens of thousands of people who signed up for DACA and they're the knock on the door is real we're doing this but the knocks on the door has happened this morning right here at five o'clock in the morning ice went out because that's when they go five six o'clock in the morning when everybody's asleep that's when they're taking people that's happening at the same time that the census is happening yeah you know we've been sort of looking at this from the perspective of you know how to talk to new journalism organizations about their role in local communities and you know I when the whole newspaper business was collapsing I had to sort of reinvent and I got to be any a community engagement editor in 2009 or excuse me 2011 and I had no staff and no budget so that was fun and but it gave me a real glimpse into how to rethink the role of a journalist in community and most last last year and then this year the institute held a convening one with community activists and journalists to talk about what can activists teach journalists about rebuilding trust and then we doubled that up again this year and had a collaboration with our friends at Free Press and Alicia Bell who put on this fantastic training about sort of mapping your community with community organizers to talk about what can how what organizing principles journalists need to use to reconnect to community and I think this is really important because this notion of trust that Maria just mentioned is real the lack of trust and journal and one of the things that the activists and organizers said is that they're a lot more journalistic than we give them credit for and we're a lot more activist than journalists would like to admit and what we activate around is news and information right and so we are seeking to transform ourselves in many cases from ad-based revenue to subscriber-based revenue and how are you going to build relationships with community with folks who don't know you trust you and in service of informing them about what is happening in community and so I think that there's all this conversation about engagement and it's so often data driven and the reality is engagement is person to person I think we need to go from having simply engagement editors that are looking at you know screens and analytics to organizing editors that work in news organizations to build trust in relationships with community and to think about what that would mean the way in which and I also think when you look back on sort of the role that advertising has played in news organizations imagine if from the very beginning particularly mainstream news organizations the relationship not the advertiser the relationship to community how different our approach to people would be and now here we are in 2020 so many organizations are seeking to pivot from advertising some are nonprofit and so on and so forth but those in mainstream pivot from advertising to subscriber-based models so we want people to support us when we have mischaracterized them and the other part is that are we going to recommit the original sin of journalism so who is getting money now to invest in these new ventures and are they explicitly being asked what is your plan to connect with community what are the benchmarks and deliverables we sure get a bunch of deliverables from foundations to do this and do that but where are theirs and who gets the tens of millions of dollars to start ventures and here's what I'm gonna say I'm just gonna be real if you want to recommit the original sin of mainstream journalism which is to disenfranchise whole swaths of community I suggest that they go by the way of the pterodactyl and that we then redirect those resources in the philanthropic community to institutions and organizations that have a commitment and see the value of the audiences of the future that would be my suggestion my hope my belief that is necessary thank you we have time for a couple of questions super a couple of questions one in the back hi thank you so much for this fantastic panel my name is summer Lopez I'm with pen America and I'm thinking a bit about the panel we had yesterday as well about hateful content online and of course we all know much of that is targeted to silence individuals of color and particularly reporters of color so I'm that's something we're thinking and working on but I'm wondering how you're all thinking about that and addressing it in your work so I just went through an experience actually this weekend maybe I'll just use it as an example I'm not a contributor to MSNBC but I'm often asked to be on so I'm not a paid contributor it's an important distinction for me but I did happen to when Nevada was happening I did happen to throw a question out to Bernie Sanders it was a journalistic question but it was like and on Twitter and you know I think what I tried to do is I was like okay so how am I gonna how am I gonna use this and actually flip it and try to create dialogue so that so that whatever is perceived as anything hateful can somehow I can model how to say talk to me I'm listening to you if you put words in my mouth and you make misconstrue what I said it's not gonna be good but I'm gonna try to listen so that's one way a tiny way in which and again as we've been saying a lot of this is just human to human right so I'm trying to model how we take a situation that could have just like exploded and gotten really nasty and to try to to revert it into something that I hope could model a little bit of being productive and I was just gonna say this notion of this notion of hate is very real if you're a journalist of color so I like to make a joke because I think laughter is also really important so the joke is that I'm five things that this president doesn't like I'm Mexican I'm an immigrant I'm a journalist I'm a woman and I'm flat-chested so you know so when people are like talking about feeling fear right now you know I'm like hey I wasn't born in this country I wasn't born here I became a citizen and so I understand when people are talking about fear and how that fear looks and I every single day have to just be like it's good I think a lot about Martin Luther King and he rest in peace and that it's just it's good it's good this is all good nothing is going to happen it's going to be positive but at the same time in the peace that's coming up on Latino USA I think next week or the week after we went to Milwaukee because a Peruvian American citizen went to get a taco and some guy threw acid on his face battery acid on his face and create crimes against Latinos are the fastest growing have surpassed now hate crimes against Muslims so this is real the hate is real our last question hello first of all great panel thank you so much my name is Kyra Kiles and I represent a non-profit media organization called wire media formerly youth radio and my question is you know I've spent 20 years in journalism I think one of the fixes that mainstream media has tried to offer up is fellowships fellowships fellowships I know and so what I'd like to hear from the panel is a meaningful way that we can make change within these mainstream newsrooms that are not hospitable so that we can end the you know fellowship apocalypse as I would call it I think that's so well said you know fellowships are an interesting thing right because they seem like tremendous opportunity especially the good paying ones that actually have benefits now right but what ends up happening with folks is that they're often the least senior and the tethered too often grant funding that can be fleeting because foundations have obviously a lot of priorities and there's a ton of need and and they are and so all of a sudden they they create this mirage of diversity because you have people that come in they're doing great journalism but they aren't in the c-suite they're not making strategic decisions about the organization they're not tethering things to revenue initiatives that are key right it's not connected to money it's connected to content but nevertheless they're still incredibly important and they provide great opportunities I think what needs to really happen here is that there has to be a collective understanding that pipeline is key and that news organizations actually need to think of themselves as their own dare I say farm system that you need to grow your own from within with a plan to bring people from here to here that they don't just come in they're not transient right they are a part of a strategic a positive part of the strategic goals of the organization because fellowships while they're wonderful they are not a fix for the diversity problem that is facing these organizations so I think one thing philanthropy could do is maybe creating a collective pool that funds early on a fellowship program that could be sort of almost for the entire sector right but I think for organizations that are larger have revenue that they need to actually think of a strategy around diversity how does this align they do this all the time with revenue initiatives so how does the people how does making people a part of your the hierarchy in the organization to go from junior to senior to leadership to heading it how is that tethered to your most sustainable future so it can't just be a program it has to be about what the business tethered to the success of the operation and on that thank you Martin I think when you put it also back to newsrooms to ensure that journalists of color don't have to be poor to continue on fellowship after fellowship to thrive and get a full time paying salary job also I think Maria Maria to your point on addressing online hate speech we also have to hold newsrooms accountable what can newsrooms do to protect journalists who are targeted and create conditions of safety it shouldn't just be on the journalist to handle it we need new systems and protocols to to support journalists of color and ensure their safety and that they can thrive and do their best work so I want to thank my well-esteemed panelists Jeff Faroda Martin Reynolds and Maria Inosa and thank you all for sharing in this conversation with us