 Good morning, everyone. Again, welcome to Miami, and I'm just delighted to introduce Charlie Sennett from Ground Truth, Report for America. Is this mic on? Okay, Report for America is a project of Ground Truth, and to my left is Liza Gross from the Solutions Journalism Network, which has done an extraordinary job. Over how many years, Liza? Three now? Yes, yes, yes. Really bringing journalists and members of communities together to not just report and discuss problems, but solutions, and how to use journalism, a rigorous fact-based journalism to report on ways and opportunities to address problems. So first, Charlie, I'd like to turn it over to you and tell us about Report for America just a few days ago shared, you shared with us that you and Steve, that 250 journalists will be deployed to 164 news organizations across the country. So tell us a little bit about how Report for America got started and why it's important right now. Sure. Thanks. I mean, the success we've had this year, really a breakthrough year for us with 250 reporters in 164 newsrooms, never would have happened without night and without the support. So thank you. Not just the support, very tangible support, but the real challenge to us to get our model right, to really think about systemic change and to think how we're going to do this. So thank you. It's really exciting to be here. Thank you, everyone, for coming very briefly. So I am the CEO and the founder of the Ground Truth Project. We've been around for eight years. We support the next generation of journalists to tell stories that are under covered in under covered communities around the world. In 2016, we just added a comma and we said, including the United States. And we decided to do that because we decided in our, like the fourth sentence of our mission statement was, we really try to explore stories in divided societies and struggling democracies. We realized in 2016, we live in one. So why are we looking at stories in, you know, around the world? Really important stories that we were proud to tell in Egypt, Myanmar, Philippines. We did a lot of good work there. We're very proud of it. We continue to do that work. But there is no more important story than this one right here in the United States. I started in local news. We started in local news together. It was just about that long ago, actually, right? And I really think of all of the international reporting I've done began as local reporting. And I really mean that. I was a police reporter in New York City, loud bang in Lower Manhattan in 1993. The First World Trade Center bombing led me as a police reporter to start to cover the Middle East and what was nascent al-Qaida. I think the best journey to all reporting begins locally. Really deeply believe in that. So that's the origin story of how the Ground Truth Project came to launch Report for America. Report for America now is a program. As we've said, we've got 250 reporters out there this year. We have a big training in June where we're bringing these 200 new reporters on, which will bring us up to 250. The way we work is we have two big selection processes. We start off saying to newsrooms, share with us as a local newsroom where there is a place in your community that is not being served. That could be a geographic beat. It could be a beat like health or the environment or schools. Where is there a place that you need to do a better job as a newsroom serving your community? Where is there a news desert? And then what is your plan to address that? And what kind of mentoring and support would you bring to an early career journalist if we paid for that journalist to come into your newsroom? How would you really support them and make sure they do great work that serves the community? Report for America in its essence is a call to service for a new generation of journalists to understand that serving communities as a local reporter is really important and even downright patriotic. I think as Alberto has said, this crisis right now in journalism has become a crisis for democracy. So I really find myself doing things I never would have done 10, 15, 20 years ago as a journalist in terms of feeling a genuine pull to the sense of patriotism that's inside of journalism. All of us get so uncomfortable with that phrase and for good reason. But now is the time to really do a shout out to the next generation and to communities that we need your support if we're going to serve your communities. So that's the idea. We choose the newsrooms. Very selective process. We've chosen these 164 newsrooms and right now our national director, Kim Kleeman and our president, Steve Waldman are here and they're disappearing all the time because they're judging the 2,000 applications for the 200 reporters. So really competitive process. We have about 70 judges. We very carefully select the reporters. We put them in the host newsroom where we pay 50% of their salary and where we ask the news organization to do 25%. And then we help the news organization work with the local community to raise the additional 25%. So if you're a local foundation, if you had $10,000 we would do a 3X match, three times that, to help sustain a local reporter. So we're trying to really unlock the local funding and combine it with the national funding we were lucky enough to get from Knight and many others. Thank you. And one of the really great opportunities that Report for America provides for place-based funders and for community foundations is a tremendous partnership to begin tapping that local philanthropic support. Because at the end of the day the sustainability model for local journalism needs to be rooted in local communities. And at Knight Foundation we have a great opportunity to kickstart to be a catalyst, but the reason why we're so excited to have 650 people registered for this conference is because the future of local journalism it really needs to be rooted in local support. But before it can be rooted in local support it has to do a couple of things. A, it has to be trusted. And B, it has to be strong, really, really strong. So Liza, tell us how the Solutions Journalism Network is helping make journalism strong, making the reporting strong, but also helping journalists do a better job connecting with their communities. I certainly will say that. But before that I have to echo Charlie. A lot of the work we do would not have been possible without the support of the Knight Foundation. And beyond the financial support which is of course always greatly appreciated, no margin, no mission, it's the other support that you especially provide. The conversations about ideas, about challenging yourself, about iterating, about what is possible, about connecting. So thank you, thank you. It's been a wonderful ride for three years and I look forward to many more years to come. So the Solutions Journalism Network, and I want to clarify, the Solutions Journalism Network has been around for six years. Our work with collaboratives has been ongoing for about three years plus. Very simply our organization wants to promote the idea of Solutions Journalism which consists on reporting with equal rigor on the good things that a community is doing in addition to reporting about the problems. What are the responses that address challenges in a community that are having a track record of success? It is not happy journalism, it's useful journalism because when reporting on these responses we also report on their limitations. An initiative may be very effective in aiding let's say Hispanic community but not so effective in aiding the Vietnamese community and that is a very important aspect of Solutions Journalism. We started doing it individually with news organizations we would partner and in fact we have now a network of over 200 plus news organizations that have partnered or are partnering with us and we've also partnered overseas. In the United States 200 plus as I said. But a couple of years ago I also started understanding the value of creating collaboratives of news organizations that would come together to focus with a Solutions lens on a challenge particular to their community. It is unrealistic to think now with the complexity you know our demographic complexities and some especially in larger cities in America to believe that only one news organization can comprehensively capture the nuances of a challenge for that community and also we know and I was for many years the publisher at Exito which was the Spanish language newspaper of the Chicago Tribune and I know from experience how large swaths of communities are underserved by certain sectors of the media and not only underserved but they feel actively attacked, stereotyped not just neutral coverage but coverage that really is negative and stereotypical. And so how do you get away from that prevailing narrative that is not productive that it doesn't really reflect like Charlie says what is going on in a community and so the combination of creating collaboratives in a given community to focus for a decent period of time with a Solutions lens on a challenge of importance to that community this is the concept of the local media project. I have a one-pager frequently asked questions I placed it over there if you want to get more details but we started the big our big boost our big project and thanks to Jennifer we were able to really bring it to the level we wanted was in Philadelphia and it was the reentry project 15 news organizations in Philadelphia came together to report on issues of reentry and recidivism at a time when Philadelphia was redoing or reviewing its entire criminal justice system and this was the aspect of the criminal justice system that the 15 news organizations decided to focus on. For a year and a half they reported on this they produced 200 pieces they did numerous audience engagement activities at every level they involved community leaders they involved the business sector they involved the tech the techie sector in a hackathon to design apps that would help folks undergoing reentry and at the end of two years they literally changed the conversation around reentry for Philadelphia and what's more important also it changed the view of the journalist the journalists were transformed and they saw a different way of doing their work it didn't always have to be oppositional it didn't always have to be ripping the veil it didn't always have to be pointing the finger at the officials and saying you're doing a terrible job and leaving it there it just created a very productive open loop to discuss this challenge that Philadelphia faced now that collaborative has 24 members in it including also known news organizations like Temple University another you know civic actor and they are focusing on poverty on the coverage of poverty in Philadelphia different aspects of poverty ranging from access to health services to housing to educational opportunities they've been doing that now for a year and a half they are raising their own funding and they have constituted themselves into a non-profit now this doesn't cannibalize the work of the individual work of those news organizations because they have plenty of things to cover but the collaborative comes together to shine an extra strong spotlight on one topic at a time and make sure you change the conversation around that topic yeah that was an extraordinary extraordinary how this one grant again for funders it's we made an investment in a one-year project to see how journalists might collaborate together and since I used to work at the Philadelphia Daily News and my husband worked at the Philadelphia Enquirer and people at our wedding would not talk to each other because there was so much competition between and among journalists in Philadelphia I must say I initially had my doubts really journalists in Philadelphia are going to collaborate and coordinate on a story but it happened and as Liza said out of that has come ongoing work and has come a new organization called Resolve which is is leading that work and because of the success that we saw there on how the Solutions Journalism Network changed culture as well as provided new practices we made a five million dollar five-year investment to take this collaborative approach across the country and with report for America one of the things that I know Charlie we discussed early on because one of the concerns obvious concerns is what does it mean when a journalist is just arrives in a community how how can and how might report for America help ensure that that a journalist is prepared and also that a journalist doesn't do harm you know by not understanding a community and not being of the community and one of the one of the reasons why I was assured that you really truly understood that concern is because of your extraordinary reporting overseas and just the sensitivity and and just great just just great way that you worked as a correspondent abroad so tell us a little bit about how you prepare these young journalists and and how you work with communities thanks Jennifer before I say I answer that question there was a time before you held these amazing tribal gatherings where we all come together where I loved our time working together as reporters on the streets of New York City and you and City Hall and and just the feeling of camaraderie then is something that I still sort of yearn for I feel sad for a generation of journalists that doesn't have the sense that we were lucky enough to have where we competed like hell I mean we're out to beat each other every day but we had fun we supported each other and it didn't really matter also come on we can tell them we were Red Sox fans yeah we did have that we didn't secretly wear Red Sox hats on weekends I'm from Allington Massachusetts I heard Charlie speak and it was just don't you hate the Yankees so so we had that and we had Red Sox Nation and we had this this this real I don't know just this beautiful spirit of collegiality in New York where you really were out to win but we work together to there was definitely support for each other in the field I think I've tried to bring that into every corner of my career whether that was being in Baghdad or in Afghanistan or being in New York or being in Boston covering local I for me it's seamless local and global is a seamless approach to reporting you have to be respectful of the community you're in you have to be respectful of the country you're in you have to learn it you have to be careful to have in those communities to really deepen the partnerships that you can form and the bonds you can form with your colleagues so at Report for America we're very attentive to this couple things we're trying to do one we have an amazing recruitment team we've really tried to pay attention to how we recruit and we're really proud that the the core the 250 core members can reflect not only the communities they serve but the country we live in so two thirds are going to represent our reporters of color this is going to be critical to our success if we're going to really help transform newsrooms that we can be an agent for change in that way and have real opportunity for people who really are part of the communities that they are going to serve I would say approximately one-third of the reporters are from the communities the regions the states maybe where they're serving and about two-thirds aren't so there's a real opportunity for people not from Appalachia to learn about Appalachia for people not from Mississippi to come to Mississippi and do great reporting and work alongside people from Mississippi one of my favorite examples of this is Mississippi today where we have two reporters one is Eric Shelton who is from Jackson Mississippi who had been a journeyman photographer who couldn't get home and he used Report for America as a way to get a job back in his home he works alongside Michelle Lu who's from California went to college at Yale sort of like really beautifully educated super smart but really I don't think she'd ever even been to Mississippi except to drive through and she has done some of the most amazing reporting and you've probably heard about it she uncovered the spike in prison deaths inside of Mississippi state prisons which is now and as she is really adamant about pointing out along with other great reporting by other reporters in the community has triggered a department of justice investigation into the way inmates are treated in Mississippi's prisons the photographs for the big series she did in partnership with Marshall project were by Eric so the two of them are working together to me that's the perfect world that's not unlike some of the successful models for foreign reporting where you have to work with local colleagues and really get to know them and you become a team of the way they've worked together we want to we're sort of inspired to try to replicate that where we can we really think that there's a chance here also to rely on a mentoring network which we've established if any of you here are journalists who are you know on that that outer edge of taking the buy out or you've moved on or something we want mentors we want people who can come and work with our emerging journalists we also ask the newsrooms to provide a local mentor almost like someone to welcome this reporter into the newsroom look out for them help them navigate their way and we insist that they have good editing and we're truth here we're seeing this as a crisis we didn't expect they're not getting enough editing so now we're like realizing oh my god okay we knew there was the crisis of the reporters now there's the crisis of the editing along with the cuts the dramatic cuts of reporting staff have come dramatic cuts of editors take for example Charleston Gazette Mail I don't know how many of you are following this on Twitter wonderful partner of ours our first ever report for America newspaper we put an amazing reporter there they've had great success so we decided to quadruple down and give them four reporters this year under the leadership of Ken Ward who is a MacArthur genius and the editing of Greg Moore who was one of the editors who led the paper to a Pulitzer for their opioid coverage in the last five days Greg Moore has been let go and now Ken Ward has quit in protest of Greg Moore being let go that's a Pulitzer prize winning editor and a MacArthur genius in a newspaper in West Virginia that needs their leadership they're vowing to continue the motto of the newspaper which I love which is called sustained outrage and all the Twitter feeds are we know that Ken and Greg will continue to sustain outrage but they're going to probably do it someplace else now or find something they can partner with so they're going to learn that partnerships are critical something we've learned and I'm telling you honestly I'm hearing Liza talk about what Solutions Journalism Network does and I really want to share we've grown up together and these two organizations are parallel we started at about the same time we're about the same size there is really truly no better partner we have than Solutions Journalism Network I came in a kind of grumpy old school journalist and I I wasn't rude I didn't roll my eyes at Solutions but I definitely was I was not a true believer in Solutions Journalism until we did it and when we did it when we really realized how transformative it is to think about reporting not only on the problems and revealing them but report just as hard on the solutions failed solutions and successful solutions so we've tried to make it a systemic part of what we do and to really think about how we can train every single report for America core member to go into their newsroom prepared respectful and thinking about the solutions to the problems they'll be highlighting as journalists doing their job on the streets so partnership is key we were talking this morning over coffee about this journey we've had together where we've done all kinds of different I don't know we've been just totally experimenting together and having fun which reminds me of my old days with you Jennifer on the street and it's like I don't want a new generation of journalists or I don't want those of you who support community journalism or who are community journalists to forget we're not only in this to really you know be of service but it is also a wonderful adventure and I want to kind of get back to that I think there's some nourishment of the soul that needs to go on in local journalism again and with with solutions I feel like you know I'm getting very good catechism on that solutions of the sort of nourishing of the soul well and that's the culture change that has to happen for journalism to rebuild trust in communities and to serve underrepresented communities so what we want to do is open it up for questions and just and also just get a time check on where we are thank you so much I'm Bill Adair I run the journalism program at Duke I'm the night chair there Charlie the point you just made about the decline in editing is something that we've seen with a lot of our students who are doing internships and it's something that I'm very concerned about and have tried a variety of solutions to help with the biggest is I've done editing and I have stepped in and helped my students who are working at local news organizations who will send me their story because they're just not getting edited right and so they'll send me their stories ahead of time and say what do you think of this and you know and I wonder if there's a more organized way to kind of institutionalize that that could take advantage of us both in academia but also a variety of journalists who are available to help with things like that because that's so important we've had some students who will come back to me after an internship and say it was awful I didn't get any editing and they didn't take advantage of me you know whatever and so that's so important because these students are fired up about journalism and they get into these places and they're like I sat around it's a real problem and thanks for highlighting it this is an area for innovation and partnership this is a place where we want to work with people who might help us figure out that piece of the puzzle how can we take people like Michael Boss who teaches at Duke and who you know who is working with Frontline often and also on their local news initiative and so one of the great editors of the Boston Globe and the Washington Post who is now at Duke there's a network of super talented editors out there who are underemployed or who are moving on we're really desperate to try to corral them and get their support bring their energy to our operation there's investigative editors network which is we're doing an experimental partnership with them we've done some editing ourselves you know we do this with great trepidation we never we assign the report for America Corps member to the newsroom and they then work for that newsroom they're an employee of the newsroom with benefits their employee so every time we approach I'm really feeling like I know I was a city editor at the New York Daily News I would have bristled if anyone from outside tried to tell one of you know our reporters what to do so I go at it with great respect but what I'm hearing is the sort of senior editors are saying absolutely if you have some time to work with Michelle Liu on the prison project and you can show her maybe a FOIA strategy how to get at that or how can you get like death certificates for the inmates we're finding that there's great openness to doing that but I still think it's a real sensitive thing you have to be super careful with it so any good ideas we'd be welcome to or any partnerships we should know about including funding partnerships yeah that too yes I was curious are you guys talking about primarily print journalism or television journalism the collaboratives have representatives from every platform from digital startups to tiny Hispanic radio stations to traditional black radio stations to public radio stations to the legacy newsroom and that is one of the most interesting aspects of these collaboratives where the growth professional growth happens when they are all sitting together and they are used to competing but they also have built-in ideas about each other and now they need to revisit them and they need to think about how to tackle a project as a team so there are some uncomfortable moments you know some moments that I call being in a crowded subway car in New York in the summer without air conditioning everybody's kind of looking at each other and not saying anything and well mmm but these things need to be aired and they are part of why some communities feel that they are not adequately covered because these things have not been talked about among journalists how are we doing our job where are the gaps in coverage what are we not doing that you are doing sure you may be a small scrappy startup but you have inroads into this ethnic community that I don't everybody brings something to the table those are very similar we again we are right in alignment with Solutions Network on that we have a combination of large newspapers like the Dallas Morning News or we have El Nuevo Herald here and we have small newspapers like the Charleston Gazette Mail I mentioned or we have the Bay State Banner in Boston African American newspaper with a long tradition in Boston also really struggling like almost every newspaper like Mississippi Today as a digital startup we have a lot of public radio stations we have 39 public radio stations that we are providing a reporter to so we also believe deeply in the digital future those that have shown a sustainable model we want to invest in them public radio is amazing at bringing community support in so they are a wonderful partner traditional newspapers are starting to wake up like their old business models are going to have to be more innovative they are going to have to think about a non-profit arm and we are seeing this and I have met great resistance from dear friends of ours at these newspapers who think that there is some cultural thing they are resistant to around the non-profit sector and I really deeply believe the future is non-profit newsrooms we are about half of our newsrooms now are non-profit half aren't I think we are going to start trending toward the majority being non-profit we have had family independent owners we have been really getting to know the next generation of family and independent owners yes and also local television there is a huge opportunity with local television with public television in many communities the largest digital footprint is the local television commercial station and the largest audience and we are now working with an increasing number of local television leaders who understand their opportunity to move away from the old broadcast formats formats and to produce journalism in the public interest because not only does journalism in the public interest serve their communities it's good for business and ratings as is really deep quality investigative reporting WCNC and Charlotte has been one of the most active partners in that collaborative and in our collaborative in New Hampshire public PBS has been one of the leaders really in that collaborative so definitely we have had a couple of investments in spectrum news and we are looking for more emerging journalists someone in their early years is how do you fit in are you on air, are you a producer it's harder to know how they serve the community and I think we're open we love it if people say we're going to open a bureau in this more remote region of our viewership and we're going to put someone young there but then you have to have the support services to really train them and produce them and we've struggled with it so if you have ideas we'd be all yours you know I was a journalist for five years and then I went to PR so I was one of those people when you talked about that mentor to kind of bring their teeter tottering on I got to get out of here I can't make it another day or can I make it another day but what I always thought was really essential and what was missing was management training for people who were running the newsrooms so it would be really curious if you could maybe start putting the people that are emerging maybe training some managers on how to have that different perspective because when you've got a journalist coming you know when I'm a PR person they are wanting to do stories all the time and they come to the event and they know nothing they're having to crank out stories for 430, the 5, the 530, the 6, the 7, 30 with no editorial supervision and you know and then the midnight or not midnight 11 o'clock show there's a lot of writing and a very short period of time and they're one man banding too when I started in this profession a very long time ago it was one to one journalist to PR person now it is like 5 and a half to one PR to reporter so we are vastly outnumbered as journalists these days something I've always wondered is how could you unleash the journalistic talent in public relations not just to serve their company or their mission but to come across and try to create some of these editing cores or find funding networks for us or say that PR societies are going to serve communities by helping support editors and training managers and look the need is so great we are in a full blown house on fire crisis in local news so ideas that are so welcome and the key is it doesn't take millions of dollars to affect change in a local community for relatively small dollars 10,000 dollars, 20,000 dollars you can be part of putting a reporter in there to make a difference so anyone who has ideas really want to encourage you to talk with us and share with us what they are more questions thank you very much hi my name is Matt Hagman it's a pleasure working with Liza it's great to see you back in Miami and of course with Jennifer I formally was at the Miami Herald and Knight Foundation with Jennifer but I have a question for Charlie what is the hope for outcome when someone finishes their time for Report for America as a result of all these reporters being out there with newspapers and radio stations and the rest what is hope to be achieved and I'm also just curious what is the hope for a reporter to entrepreneur and what prompted that to answer the first question I think there are sort of two broad directions of outcomes that we're interested in there's the outcome for the community which we think is the most important outcome of all so if we put reporters in to serve that community we're seeing quantifiably that we are having impact in the increase in the number of stories in the areas where we're investing to fill a news desert really talented reporter two years ago our favorite front page from the Report for America program launching in a city was when the Lexington Herald said Report for America reopens Pikeville Bureau so Pikeville, Kentucky is the heart of coal country Lexington had shut down its bureau in Pikeville ten years earlier Will was there to reopen it like that is so exciting from Boston we confessed to this Red Sox nation thing already I knew I didn't know about coal country but what I didn't realize is Lexington, Kentucky doesn't know about coal country that's like a whole other that's that complex web we saw at the presentation today when they were looking at the map of America like so Lexington might show up as one of those blue prosperous cities and then you have this distressed Americana out in coal country I would say Will Wright overnight has increased the number of stories coming from that region by 300% for the paper he's deepened understanding and just by showing up he affected change because there was a lack of access to clean drinking water and he just went to a county commissioners meeting where that issue came up he reported on it next thing you know it is a statewide story and then it is a national story about lack of access to clean drinking water tens of thousands of people in poor rural areas of Appalachia as if it was all the way back to the great society nothing had changed it was really eye opening and it affected immediate change the person in charge of water was pushed into early retirement wasn't quite as good as getting fired but he got pushed out and about four or five million dollars was immediately put toward fixing the water so those are the real outcomes that's the one we want to focus on are like the Mississippi prisons I mentioned DOJ investigation those are real outcomes some of the other things we hope for are that the newsroom might be revitalized by having emerging talent in it if you bring digital natives into a newsroom you can transform the newsroom they're already thinking on different levels about how to share the story and really use what's available digitally the other one which I think you might be asking also is like what happens to the reporters so we have three reporters in Appalachia who are our first reporters and there are only three to graduate and they graduated in January because we're in our third year so we only have these three graduates by June we'll have ten more but I can tell you the three I hope reflect the future for the whole core which is one Will Wright has just been hired by the New York Times the guy who broke the water story he's now part of their fellowship program which is a really interesting model he's going to pursue that Katie Coyne has stayed at the Gazette Mail where she has dreamed of getting a job since she started getting into journalism as a freshman in college at West Virginia University she loves that paper she loves that motto, sustained outrage she's a fierce local reporter who wants to stay there the third one is Molly Bourne who is so badass I don't know if you saw the New York Times story on us and Molly was pictured standing on the streets in a small town in West Virginia and she's just there and there's like the classic water tower and it says God bless America and she's there and she has the tattoo of West Virginia motto the state motto tattooed to her back she's awesome she actually got a job with a documentary unit the ones that did heroin with an E a very famous documentary team so she's staying local it's a dream to come up and out of print and into documentary producing I think those three give you a sense one stayed one got a big job in a big city and another one stayed but shifted into a deeper narrative storytelling through documentary we'll see as we go through the years but our great hope is that people will stay that's the first hope serve the community deep in the knowledge the second one is maybe propel some careers really try to bring a whole new generation of journalists along who can say I started at a small newspaper and I worked my way out a dream that we got to live out that pipeline's broken if we can restore the pipeline I think it'll be great I'll answer later the entrepreneurial thing because I'm talking too much okay we have a lot of questions so we had a hand up here, here and then we'll go over here back and this lady here, here and then there so you know your order, got it right? okay because I just forgot that was good Patrick Butler with the International Center for Journalists just briefly introduce yourself yes and my question actually follows on that when you talked a little bit about it with the reporter who's staying at her newspaper and your funding model is really interesting the 50% I didn't realize that but if you could just talk a little bit and actually for Liza too make sure that the effect continues after the funding from your organization's ends well first of all we hope it won't end so when we have a reporter take the West Virginia newspaper the Gazette Mail just as an example when Katie Coyne graduates out this June or she graduated in January and stayed on when we have a paper like the Dallas Morning News where Obid Manuel is doing amazing reporting he is himself a dreamer and he's covering dreamers as a reporter really looking at second generation community in South Dallas where he grew up we're not leaving the Dallas Morning News even though Obid might graduate up and get hired that's the dream or maybe he'll go on to work with another paper in Dallas or shift whatever but we would like to think we gave him a start I think he'll stay in Dallas he'll stay in Texas but the next thing is we then bring in a new person we want to find the news organizations we can grow with so remember the Gazette Mail was our first we went from one reporter in the first class to four who will be putting you know under that team of Greg Moore and of Ken Ward now if they've left the question is where are they going and do the four reporters how do we work that out we don't know we're thinking what we care about is that we're serving the community what constellation they form how they develop where they want to take their energy we're going to figure it out but one thing we know is the news organizations that work well with us are the ones we want to continue to support and fund and deepen so it's not as if we go for two years and then we leave ideally we stay and we just did a big partnership with AP a non-profit to put 16 state house reporters in places where they were under covered in state houses local newspapers by having an extra state house reporter so we're not only working with the smaller sort of local public radio news papers or digital we're also thinking on a big scale how can we have impact in the regions thank you and then we had you know what I think that why don't we just get some of these questions in and incorporate answers as the questions come in and who is next hi I'm Peter Klein from reporting center Charlie you referenced how the first World Trade Center attack sort of brought the local into the global most of us here kind of grew up in newsrooms where there was local national and the foreign desk really siloed but of course the world is not siloed that way and increasingly less siloed you look at something like American Factory the documentary that won the Oscar amazing that Julia Reichert the director is a local from Dayton Ohio she was following the story of a former GM Factory and the transformation it was at least 50% I would say more than 50% a foreign story because it was about China coming in in this glass factory and the culture clashes and all of that I mean this is really a question to all of you how do you see the global aspects particularly when it comes to supply chains and investments and jobs factoring into the local I'll answer by with a great shout out to Solutions Journalism and because we just worked on a project that I think really gets at that question which is we did a project on AIDS we looked at AIDS in Southern Africa in Namibia and we looked at how they are really doing a good job in some of their programs and not only addressing the crisis with AIDS but also in sort of addressing some of the community needs for helping those who are HIV positive and then we compared it to Atlanta and we really looked at Atlanta where there was a deep crisis with AIDS right in the shadows of the CDC and I think Americans can learn a lot from this global local approach where hey Atlanta CDC you could learn a lot from Namibia about their programs and what they're doing on the ground we have since ground truth started 8 years ago we have always been global and local we've looked at income and equality around the world through that prism of global and local my dream is that we continue to work with Solutions Journalism Network on these global stories where we could take stories like say a post-cold distressed society what does it look like in the rest of the world in Poland, Brazil, China where these other communities are going to have to extract themselves from the reliance on a coal economy what strains and stresses and economic themes could we bring forward so we can think of these forces in a global way but stick to local reporting that's the big dream down the road for ground truth is that Report for America creates this inspired network of really talented local reporters who maybe we can help fund them to think globally in the next phase of their career so it's going to take us a few years to get there but that's the dream a little bit also on the fact that we are not siloed anymore at the local level where we firmly believe the energy is at, you have communities within the same city that have no idea what's happening 10 blocks away and that is part of what we strive to bridge with these collaboratives you're all part of the same community, you're all living in the same city and you have no idea how your neighbors live, what they have or they don't have access to and what should be addressed and what should not be addressed, you can go your whole life without meeting other members of your community so I think technology has given us sometimes the illusion of connectedness and it does wonderful things but also has sort of created this mirage that we're automatically connected and then so we look at Namibia but we don't look at 10 blocks down this is for example specifically Miami is a very siloed city where you have patchworks it's a patchwork where you have patches that have no idea what the other patch is doing just a caution so great opportunity for local journalism so I wanted to go back to Teya Ryan from Georgia Public Broadcasting and one thing I'd like to do before we close is for you to tell Charlie and Liza how people in communities can get in touch with you and bring this funded resource that Knight Foundation funded to your community and the opportunities for local matching funds so hi. This is a fascinating conversation I'm very we do a lot of partnering and I believe that is certainly our future for leveraging our resources at public radio and public television in Georgia but I'm really interested in this idea and I know Jennifer you've been experimenting a bit with this with public, private organizations coming together, journalistic organizations coming together and we have good relations with everyone so good approach of what you're talking about a good place to start taking one idea like you did with the re-entry. Yes, exactly is a good place to start not to say oh hey let's just in general partner but pick one topic and bring in say five commercial stations and five newspapers the only worry I have is that the way we sound in public media is not the way they sound in commercial media and we each have to sound our own way we've all learned that and so that kind of partnership seems to me a delicate one but one that only works if you recognize what each other's medium is and expectation is but I'd really like to hear about the right place to start pick a topic together because I believe I can get a group of people around my state together to do that but I want to know what the trip-ups are I would say that one place to start there have been multiple different models around the country and Liza I think one of the things that I learned and deeply appreciated about the approach that the Solutions Journalism Network took in Philadelphia is they didn't just say you know hey let's go to the barn and put on a show and you do this and you do this and you do that it was a lot of work there had to be a lot of trust built among and respect different organizations had to put aside you know their way of doing business and really learn in some cases to respect that different organizations did business differently so if you could talk a little bit about that I think that's so important I don't want to disappoint you too much when I tell you that Philadelphia's collaborative started in a bar which is where most journalistic endeavors start that's exactly right I wrote a piece for Medium on this and it's called you have to want to be there that is the essential it sounds like a pedestrian comment but it is really true all of these factors that Jennifer just outlined are real and so when you come together you have to believe that reporting together on an issue of importance to the community and making your community informed and engaged around this issue is the paramount goal and for that you have to make some adjustments to your thinking your competitive spirit your idea that yes perhaps you have more resources or you have a style that is not the same style as that ethnic publication most of our collaboratives create a common website and that's where they control of their content that they have produced and then they have the right to take from that common website and reproduce that content in their own respective outlets but the interesting thing also and we talk about editing as the collaboratives get together and again we always say this collaborative is not a one night stand it's not light dating it's a marriage and so as you keep on talking and as you keep on finding things about coverage where are your gaps what did you miss how could this be made better the issues that you are telling me organically start to resolve themselves and they are not a cause for conflict they are a cause for discussion and to make each reporting or each outlets reporting richer and then better as a group I was very touched about a month ago when I went to the periodic meeting with the Charlotte collaborative when the Spanish language newspaper asked for money from the common pot that they have to spend so that they could do some translations from English into Spanish to publish in her paper everyone approved it they thought it was great but then the Charlotte observer said we are exploring now the possibility to do some stories in Spanish we have not done that before we want to explore that and we see we can better serve our constituency by doing that and for me that was success success this is something that they would not have thought about before came out of this periodic collaboration but it's a lot of quantity time until you find your quality time and then your quality time gets more and more and more frequent and that's how you do things and we know that forced marriages don't work all the time so we have 10 minutes left and I know we have a lot of questions so we're going to do 140 character the old fashioned character twitter limit to get your question and we promise that we'll do short answers I'm Kristen Jones from the Colorado Trust a foundation in Denver I'm curious if you can talk specifically about what you've done to recruit journalists of color and whether there is any special attention to retaining those journalists and making sure they're supported and stay in the field thanks we've hired a director of recruitment who's very active in NABJ and he's based in Chicago we've really tried to make an effort for him to go out into historically black colleges to go into all the different conferences for Asian, Hispanic and black journalists and say we are really open for business we want to encourage you if you're having a hard time as a journalist finding the pipeline to get started think about applying for a report from America and then we can help assign you to newsrooms because the truth is nationally newsrooms want reporters of color they want reporters who can reflect and understand and report on the communities where they live so we think we become a national talent agency we bring in really talented emerging news organizations that want those reporters and we can actually make some change and so we're aggressively trying to do this and we're using all tools, social media every speaking engagement we can get any of you who want to offer a speaking engagement in your local communities for example our reporters are fantastic ambassadors of our idea and our mission we'd encourage you to think about doing that trying hard would be the short answer to your question. Okay Steve Cox with the Wichita Community Foundation and a question about the collaborative just real quick does it in Philadelphia does the collaborative ever produce an article that is specifically referenced as the collaborative do they ever produce something online from the collaborative or do they always go back to their own outlet and when they publish do they ever reference a collaborative or do they always do it under their own byline? This is an excellent question and yes they use the tagline collaborative CJC, a Charlotte journalism collaborative resolve Philly and they once a collaborative gets more comfortable they do a lot more joint reporting so they have two or three outlets that will get together to focus on this particular story for today and produce it in a multimedia format so the TV station will bring the video print will do its thing the digital start up will do some data crunching so as a collaborative gets comfortable there is more common reporting but then all the individual reporting they always reference that they are part of the collaborative in their community. Just for a quick on Twitter if you look at the hashtag broke in Philly you will see all of the work that has been produced in Philadelphia around covering the economy and the impact of the economy on people. Another question? Michael Shapiro from tap into I heard that you said that you have about 2,000 reporters or potential reporters that have applied but you are going to take a very small number have you thought about creating some public database of those individuals who don't make it? Yes, this is the short answer. We realized that first we had to ask them if it was okay if we did that so we didn't in the time before but now we have we have said we would like to share your great talents with other news organizations that might be looking to hire someone but even if you don't get accepted into a report from America is that okay with you and we are getting resounding yeses so now we can start to build it out as a real database and a real talent pool from which we can draw because I swear you know one of our funders asked us how much do you want to scale this? And Steve Waldman the co-founder who really was mentioned by Alberto today who really I think is one of the most important voices in recognizing this crisis in local news. He talks about we are going to get to a thousand reporters. We are determined to get to this goal. It's in the grant agreement. Thanks for reminding me. I have to be sitting down So is diversity, equity and inclusion. Exactly. We're on track with 250 we will get to a thousand because we have to but even when we get there it will come nowhere near replenishing the 35,000 journalists who have lost their jobs in the last 15 years. Even if we could bring in a billion dollars to local reporting it will nowhere near replenish the tens of billions that have been taken out of journalism in this crisis. So we have a huge, huge mountain to climb and if we could become a hub for talent for young people to anyone who wants to grab them at any point we're working on that. And if you're interested in that we could talk about it. Also I have a colleague Lauren here who's really one of our team leaders. She has one pagers. If anyone's interested in the model or how to reach us or anything we'll have one pagers for you. Just so that you know after lunch we have a longer break than usual because lunch Kara Swisher is going to be producing a podcast with Jorge Ramos. Both Charlie and Lauren and Liza we've set up tables outside the ballroom so that you can also come and speak to them directly. So you know we're going to just take this one last question and I'd really love Liza and Charlie for you to share with people in the room and our broadcast audience live stream audience on how people can find out how to bring these great projects to their communities and not just to their newsrooms to their communities and that includes funders. I'm Ken Henson from Columbus, Georgia and I'm curious as to how you select the cities or the news organizations where you send these reporters. So for us the selection process is really straightforward. You open it up, all newsrooms are free to apply of any size, stripe, whatever your medium that could be radio, could be television, could be newspaper, could be digital startup. As I said we really love public radio stations. Just come forward with an application. Three things you got to share. One, that you have a news desert and you have a strategy to fill the gap. So however you define it, if you need better health coverage, if you need better coverage of the agricultural community, whatever is going on that you need better coverage of, prove that to us and that you have a plan. The second is that you are a news organization with a real track record for public service. That you have a sustainable business model, you're going to be around for a while and you've got a mission that really serves your community. And the third one is mentoring and editing and we're getting to be candid, we're getting gamed on this one. The news organizations are saying to this reporter, and the truth is the editors are so understaffed and stressed out that they, even if they wanted to be the greatest mentor ever, they can't be. So we insist that you have a good editor, a mentor, someone to watch out for this emerging journalist, but we understand that is a stress point for small newsrooms and we were, as I said, we want to find out good ideas. How could we solve that equation? Thank you. Liza. Jen. How can, one of the things that I think it's important for folks here to learn is, yes, you can seek to bring a Solutions Journalism Collaborative to your community, but Solutions Journalism Network offers so many different resources and services. So tell us a little bit about that. Absolutely. The local media project is one of the many initiatives that Solutions Journalism Network is working on. We have initiatives to partner with newsrooms individually if you want to, and any newsroom can approach us and say I would like to embrace Solutions Journalism, please come and teach me how to do it. We work with individual professionals, whether you're affiliated with an organization or not. We conduct seminars, we conduct webinars, we have a huge what we call our teaching lab in our website with resources such as case studies, webinars, research talking about Solutions Journalism. We can connect you with people who are doing Solutions Journalism. We can connect you with organizations that are doing Solutions Journalism. We aim to serve in the altar of Solutions Journalism. Whichever way you want to approach Solutions Journalism we reach all constituencies. We think that we can really transform journalism not only in the United States, but in the galaxy. It's a good weapon that allows us to regain trust with our audiences. As journalists we have talked a lot and losing that special connection that journalism has with audiences. We have heard a lot about how relentlessly negative narratives simply make people walk away from journalism. As a journalist I've been to a hundred activities parties where I am asked what do I do for a living and I say I'm a journalist and someone says I don't watch news anymore it's all negative and it's all terrible. Well that's a terrible answer. You should watch news. A part of being an informed and a productive citizen of your community is to be engaged with the news. It's to be part of the discourse and we feel that Solutions Journalism is a very powerful weapon to do that and so it changes the minds of journalists but it also changes the minds of the news consumers. And there's also lots of foundations such as the Lore Foundation which has been a great partner of the Solutions Network and has produced success in small communities, rural communities and city neighborhoods. If I may give a shout out to the Wichita Community Foundation that has been incredibly supportive and trying to get together collaborative in Wichita, Shelly Pritchard and Courtney Benson have been absolutely outstanding understanding how transformative this can be. How do people get in touch? Solutionsjournalism.org Solutions Journalism, all one word and of course we wrote it out it's in here as well but please make sure www.solutionsjournalism.org you can go to our website explore, we have the largest database of solution stories about 8000 solution stories now many produced by reporters from Report for America on any subject. You want to look at gun violence see what has been written you want to do achievement gap in public school systems you can key in that and by author by state, by city so it's a very versatile and very searchable database among our other resources. Excellent and also a great way for foundations to listen and to learn about the concerns of people in their communities. Charlie how do they get in touch with you? So reportforamerica.org is our website and I'm at csenate at reportforamerica.org and really please get in touch and be ambitious I was thinking about the question from Georgia public media and the question the other question from Georgia be ambitious in a region where there's need think about working together I am from print but I began in public radio and headquarters at ground truth we're now based at WGBH we're independent but they give us a really great newsroom and I would say there's tremendous partnership between newspapers and public media especially and there's so much to be done there I'm trying like you know I feel like the child of divorced parents newspapers and public radio if you could get those two together the power to serve the community is extraordinary they haven't always been easy to stitch together right but it really could be powerful so I'd say be ambitious think about applying for a cluster of reportforamerica organizations think about solutions in partnership with that like how can you build something from scratch create a lab I don't know maybe it's health maybe we did this AIDS project maybe there's a real need for better local reporting on a crisis in AIDS in the shadow of CDC or maybe there's completely different issues around rural health or whatever but think about how you'd be really ambitious and reach out to us and we're all yours well we do have a Macon Georgia we have a wonderful partnership with public radio and Macon and with Mercer University and Macon Telegraph and with Macon Telegraph which is owned by McClatchy which just went bankrupt and caused a lot of a lot of concerns about the future of that collaborative but we're confident with commitment to delivering and producing journalism there I forgot to mention this Jennifer I'm sorry just at our desk today I want to this is a report Steve Waldman and our really great colleague who's here Todd Franco who's our director of sustainability who's the direct contact for regional foundations to try to raise the local piece of the funding they've put together the impact we've had just in the last year of raising a million dollars from local foundations these are in like increments of about ten to twenty thousand dollars from local foundations to pull forward as part of our national match so there's real information in here that might help you I have a couple of copies of it we'll have more at the table but if you're interested we can share that with you data is good everyone thank you so much for joining us and look forward to more conversation