 Hello, good afternoon, and welcome to episode four of Informed and Engaged. The novel coronavirus has accelerated both the positive and negative trends that have been changing the local media landscape. That means that decisions that we make today will have a huge impact on what local news looks like in the coming years. Today we are delighted to bring you three rock star news leaders who will tell us why they recently overmade career choices so that they could play a larger role in nonprofit news. At Knight Foundation, we are dedicated to providing the resources and the networks and the connections to support a future of journalism, for journalism. And we are also thrilled to work with so many people who are looking to increase impact in journalism. And today I am so delighted that we will have a conversation with Stacey Marie Ishmael, who recently left Apple in November of 2019 to take on a new role as editorial director at the Texas Tribune. And with Stacey at the Texas Tribune is Millie Tran, who also just left the New York Times to take on an exciting new role for the Texas Tribune. And Neil Chase, who formerly led the Mercury News in San Jose, and news organizations across the Bay Area, and while he was there, won a Pulitzer for the horrific, for the coverage, for the horrific fire in Oakland. And in the last year, Neil Chase also made the decision to take on a new role in nonprofit news as the head of town matters. So today with these three people, we have news leaders who are responsible for one-fifth of the nation's population in terms of helping ensure that they are informed and engaged. So I am thrilled to have Stacey, Millie, and Neil here with us this afternoon. So Stacey and Millie, you both work together at Buzzfeed. So Stacey first, please tell us what drew you to the Texas Tribune, and then Millie, let's hear from you. Sure. When I left my role in November, I left for knowing that I wanted to do one of two things. One was go back into a newsroom or sort of double down on research into misinformation and disinformation, because those are like, that's something I've been really interested in and passionate about for a long time. And so as I was thinking about what the options were sometime not too long after I had left, I got a Twitter message from Evan Smith, who's the CEO of Texas Tribune, like, hey, I hear we should talk to you in the context of the needing to fill the role of editorial director after the recent departures of Emily Ramshaw and Amanda Zamora, who have of course started the 19th. And so we started talking and I confessed to him that I've been interested in the Tribune for a while. I had followed various of the reporters who had been very early and very aggressive on things like maternal health and elections and particularly voter suppression. The Tribune really fits my criteria of a news organization that was doing interesting things that was doing interesting things well that was covering a state that I felt having also lived in New York and California, which are convinced they are the only states that matter, but it was also a state that was, you know, important at the national level and in and of itself, right? There are so many people in Texas and from Texas and Texas is such a large part of the conversation about education or the economy. And it was a real opportunity to take what I had learned in various of the other settings and contexts that I've worked in and use those things to help, you know, take the Tribune into its next decade. Much of what Stacey said actually is the same for me. You know, I grew up in California, San Jose is my hometown, Neil. I'm currently in New York stuck here. And you know, Texas as I've talked with Evan about, it's a state of superlatives. I like reading the list of all those things, the biggest producer of crude oil, the most citizens in prison, the most people living without healthcare, the longest border in Mexico. There are just so many stories. And I think, you know, similar to what Stacey said, there was such a strong foundation that Evan Smith and the rest of the team built over these first 10 years that I felt it was a really exciting opportunity to kind of take it to its next decade. And using kind of all of the range of experiences and skills. And to work with one of my best friends. That is a real pleasure. Wonderful to have you back together again. And before we complete this conversation, you will have to tell us what it is like to work day in and day out with the singular force, the great Evan Smith, Neil, Neil. So you were running a rather large news organization in California. And of course, we had an opportunity to work together at the New York Times. Some years, years ago. And then you took a fascinating turn in that you, you really plunged into the business of journalism. Oh, no, it's, it's, yeah, so tell us a little bit about what you did after the left, after you left the New York Times, working with John Patel, why you took the role at the San Jose Mercury News and, and the news organizations up and down. Yeah, I, I left the Times to go to a company called Federated Media that was working with bloggers and, you know, bloggers were perhaps the original, you know, small or maybe nonprofit news organization, right? An individual person with, with great expertise and an audience. And they went out on their own to run their own publication of sorts. And a lot of them had, you know, brilliant minds for the content they were doing, but hadn't figured out the business side yet. So Federated Media was created to help them build a business side. And for me, it was a crash course in advertising and marketing and product. And perhaps even more importantly, thinking about the entire organization as one holistic organization, right? Most of the news organizations I've been in before that were so large that even at a management level, you might have some interaction with people who were bringing in the revenue, but not enough. And this was really, it was a startup, it was, you know, high speed and fun. And right in the middle of all the marketing work we had to do. And that, after about five years of doing that and went out on my own and started doing some consulting work, we had built the business of content marketing, did a lot of research and work in that field, helped some publishers build new ad models, new revenue models. And then the Mercury News reached out and was looking for somebody who could be the editor, but who could also figure out what role the newsroom has to play in the financial future of the organization. And on my first day, I ingratiated myself with the staff by saying, look, I hate to tell you all this, but you're all product managers now. And it took a while for some people to kind of wrap their arms around that. But we were able to turn the newsroom into a bunch of people who understood that we have to run a business here and we will run the business by doing great journalism and then figuring it out, how to get it to people and how to get them to pay for it. And those things are not separate. I learned a ton and I was working with, as you said, they won a Pulitzer Prize. All I did was show up to work and the staff did amazing work day in and day out, especially on that story. And it's the hardest working people who, no matter what's going on in the financial side, are still dedicated to doing a great job covering their community. And it was a tremendous experience and I learned more than I possibly could have imagined. And then this is going to be terrible for Evan's ego. But I, too, had Evan involved in my decision-making, because I spent about an hour talking to Evan about the Texas Tribune before I took the Cal Matters job. And I, too, had a fascination with what they were doing and what they were able to build and the kind of work they were able to do. And when I was invited to talk to Cal Matters, it just seemed like a tremendous opportunity, not just to cover stories, but to really rebuild journalism in California. So we're going to come back to, Neil, later in the conversation about the role of not-for-profits in generating revenue. Because many folks think, oh, it's a not-for-profit. Generating revenue is not my job. But of course, that's not the case at all. And it would be just really interesting to hear how you have transferred some of the lessons from working with John Vitale and working at the Mercury News. So Stacey, so at Apple, you were senior editor with broad editorial oversight and control. What is it that's working not only at BuzzFeed, but at Apple? What is it that you learned that you think will best be helpful to not only the Texas Tribune, but local journalism across the country? Yeah, it's an interesting thing to have an audience of a billion people. And kind of a big responsibility. But it makes you think about all the ways that there are certain messages that are broadly universal. And then there are things that are hyper-specific. And I think one of the interesting challenges for local is understanding and balancing that we want to talk about things that are immediately urgently super relevant to a particular community. And we want a broad base of people who may or may not directly belong to that community to be engaged by interest and supportive of the work. And that those two things don't have to work in contradiction to each other, that they're actually highly complementary. So I'd say that that sort of daily lesson in this is interesting and this is going to be interesting only in Korea or this is going to be interesting in a hundred more countries. How do we know how do we package what are sometimes like the same kinds of stories? You sometimes you change the art. Sometimes you change the headline. Sometimes you change the lead anecdote. And I think there's a lot of interesting lessons there for local media. I think the second thing really that I learned and really, really appreciate every single day is the importance of design and the user experience. And this is something that, as you know, I have been very much a broken record on for a super long time, but being in an environment that filters almost every decision through, is this a good experience for the person using it was just like an invaluable education and how to think really deeply around. It's not only about the headline. It's not only about the photo. It's not only about the art. It's like how fast is the website load, right? Like how easy is it for the people to find what they're looking for? Like Millie and I have this conversation all the time, which is obviousness is not the enemy, right? Like make it really easy for folks to find what they are looking for. And I think the challenge for a lot of local media organizations is we have internalized that design has to be very expensive and that this isn't something we can afford and that user experience is only for people who have entire product teams with 30 people on them. And the reality is there are a lot of fairly straightforward things that we can think about, adapt, adopt that would be a really meaningful benefit to our audiences. Absolutely, absolutely. And I'm going to have to dig up that excellent presentation that you've made to Lightning Talk that you made to News Guys, a couple of years ago. Oh my goodness, oh my goodness. And you called it then about the dreadful user experience that so many people now have with local news organizations with their news experience and national ones too, national ones too. And Millie, so joining the Texas Tribune from the New York Times and having worked with Stacy at BuzzFeed, what are some of the lessons that or what are some of the best practices that you'll be bringing to the Texas Tribune? Well, before I talk about the times, just to go back a little bit in time to BuzzFeed, but not with Stacy, which was when I was global director of global adaptation, which is another job we made up. It was all about identifying what does well in one of BuzzFeed I think at the time 11 non-English editions and seeing how we can translate and adapt it across kind of the network of sites. And I think understanding that how you make a thing and deliver it to people was such a simple and powerful insight. Yeah, it was a powerful lesson that doesn't have to just be on like a global market level, right? You can scale it up and down and how you understand that. So that was an unintentional kind of benefit. And very similar to what Stacy was saying about her lessons from Apple, right? It's about I'm going to jump around here. But I was just actually talking to a class. Stacy, I think it was your class. It was my class. One week ago. And I was asked to describe. So in my role, I oversee our audience, engineering, data, design, marketing, and loyalty teams. And I was asked to explain audience and product. And I think I like hate those two terms so much because they're so broad that they're almost useless. And Neil, to your point about like trying to get a newsroom to understand product. And I remember in my interviews with the Texas Tribune and this segment with our reporters and editors, I'm asking you like, what does like, they keep telling us to like bring product thinking. Like, what does that mean? And I said like the easiest way I can describe audience and product to people is like making things for people. And I think like, again, like simplicity and kind of the easiest way to understand something is not the enemy. And it actually is very clarifying. And once you get that, like the news is the product, right? And the audience is your people. So like, I think those two things are really simple but really important lessons that, again, sounds so obvious. But, you know, just now to go back to the times, just what I learned at the times, I'll list out, it's just what it takes to work in a world-class newsroom at the top of its game. I don't think like it's not an hour goes by that someone doesn't share like a New York Times or a Slack link or a Lincoln Slack, right? And whether that's like being intentional and strategic applying the best qualitative and quantitative data or what's really important too is just being fiercely competitive and protective of its brand. So that's a fun thing that I get to work on now with Natalie who leads our marketing and comms, so. Absolutely. And Millie, speaking of famous presentations and memos and I saw it shared again this morning. So if you wouldn't mind sharing in the chat, it's a wonderful guide that you have provided to people on how to think about a new role, a new job. And I'm sure you maybe looked at that memo that you wrote and that it has benefited so many people. Natalie calls, what am I gonna do with my life? Yeah, what am I gonna do with my life? Via Millie Tran, it's a gem, it's a gem. So we'll share it in the chat and we'll share it on Twitter after this conversation. So Neil, not for profits, why do not for profits have to generate revenue and what is it that you're bringing from your experience in San Jose and working with John Patel in generating revenue and what are the major sources of revenue for not-for-profit news organizations today? It's fascinating because people are rightfully focused on not-for-profits and the potential of them. But in a lot of cases, there's not much difference between a nonprofit and a small to medium-sized news organization, a small business running a news organization. You're trying to make enough money, whether it's coming from the readers or coming from sponsors and advertisers or whether it's coming from philanthropy and major donors. And you're trying to use that money to do journalism and pay the people who do it. And unless you're owned by a large, horrible hedge fund, the money you make goes back into the business, right? Either way. And the thing about a nonprofit is, I think in our case and in many cases, they're started by one person or a small group of people who think this is important. In our case, there was somebody who thought the coverage is missing from the state capital. We've lost that. Somebody who's very involved in journalism are founder Simone Cox. She had the resources to get it started and the contacts with people to get it going. And it's now up to us to take that initial start and make it into a more robust news organization. The Tribune's done an amazing. And the Tribune is twice as old as us. We've learned a ton from the Texas Tribune over the years, partially because you steal from the vest and partially because they are so giving about sharing everything about the business and how it works. And what they've done and what we are working on doing is changing the model so that whatever was your original revenue source, you're getting other sources as well. You're building an events business. You're building up new kinds of sponsorships. You're finding ways to run the business. And the biggest challenge I think is to get the entire organization on the same page about how and why we run the business and what the goals are. And so the Mercury News, these conversations we had about, here's our circulation, here's where it's going. We've got to do something about this or we're going to go away and the community is going to lose its journalism. There were some wins across the board, but there are also these fascinating individual conversations where somebody says, I've been thinking about that and I've been thinking about what I cover and I think there's another way to do this. I think there's another audience for this and a product we could build out of this and you don't need everybody thinking that way but when more people in the organization are thinking that way and when you can get everybody thinking about the same metrics, the same goals, the same North Star, we announced some new positions last week and when I showed some folks on the board or a new work chart, their first question was, okay, but who's responsible for audience? And the answer of course was, everybody's responsible for audience. The only reason we do this is for the people who we're serving. And so the question becomes, what's each person's role in building that audience? But just changing the way we think and getting everybody focused on the whole model, the whole thing we have to do. It used to be that you wrote a story and went to the bar, right? That was journalism. Once your story was filed, you were done and we have to get everybody engaged in the conversation about who's reading it and why and how. And getting everybody engaged in the conversation is critical for journalism to survive. And we have seen, of course, with the Black Lives Movement, the growing, important, critical, crucial conversation about the role of journalism and dismantling systemic racism and the role that journalism has played in upholding systemic racism. So as leaders of not-for-profit news organizations, two of the most successful and largest in the country, what opportunities do you see for your organizations to lead in this area, to address the crucial critical concerns about the role of journalism and dismantling systemic racism? I can start on this. I mean, at a baseline, and this is something you would have heard from Millie as well as me, the only way to change our coverage is to change what we look like, right? It's like there's, it is an utterly pointless exercise to be like, let's write different stories when 90% of your newsroom is white dudes. And I think this is a real problem for local media. There are a lot of people starting them right now. When you look at the team pages and you look at the staff pages, we are very much replicating models that have been true in media for generations and we are undermining our message about being mission-driven and community-focused when we don't look anything like the communities that we say that we are serving and it's very difficult for our mission to actually line up with what we're saying. And so certainly one of the things that the Tribune that's a focus and the Tribune that was on the record of saying this in its strategic plan long before Millie and I got here is we have to take the, we have to have a workforce that represents Texas and Texas is an incredibly not homogenous place by any metric that you might imagine. And so if our newsroom doesn't look like Texas, then our newsroom can't represent Texas, right? So that's certainly an area that we are taking super seriously and will continue to forever pretty much. And then I think the other part is what do you cover and whose voices do you elevate, right? So if you have the right people in place who are making and leading coverage decisions, what kinds of stories are you telling? I think one of the more interesting discussions that came out of the past couple of months was for the first time, a lot of people realize the extent to which statements by police are not always accurate. And that's something that a handful of reporters, including Wesley Lowry and various other folks who went to Ferguson and have been reporting on these things for a long time have been screaming at the top of their lungs for ages, but it isn't something that we were able to broadly convince our own newsrooms and the rest of the industry, right? And then suddenly there were video recordings, reporters broadcasting live being shot at with rubber bullets or tackled to the floor or arrested with their press badges out. And it's not so much about who was being arrested. It was about the fact that this was so visible and so obvious and so overt that when half an hour later, there was a statement like, oh, we didn't use tear gas. And everyone was like, no, we saw the tear gas. You know, that I think allowed people who have worried about will this upset the status quo to have a way in, even if they didn't necessarily have the courage or conviction to do that before. That's right. We, you think about this on a couple of different levels, right? There's the internal, how are we constituted to Stacey's point? If you don't look like the people you're covering, you can't do a good job of covering the community. And then there's the external. Our job, both at the Tribune and at Cal Matters is to hold at least state government and to some degree, local authorities accountable and transparent. And so if news organizations are gonna do that, then what you're covering is the institutions and the institutional structures that allow long-term institutional racism and how to break that down. It's a huge journalistic challenge. And I think it's frankly, it's as important externally and internally. It's a little, you can look at the internal scope and understand it more quickly than it is to figure out where are these structures in a giant government like the governments of Texas or California. Internally, we, California and Texas are very much similar, right? Tremendously diverse and changing very rapidly, growing rapidly. We, our organization is 43% people of color at Cal Matters, which is a higher percentage than some organizations, but California is 66%. So we got a ways to go until we really reflect at the state that we're covering. What's really energized me in the past two months is the way that our staff has stepped up and said, you know, we, as a staff, we own this. We, the staff has created committees to look at hiring issues at the pipeline for new candidates, style issues and things like that. We're looking at some things that are internal structures that definitely have the potential to perpetuate racism, things like the annual review structure, the way you do raises and classifying people, the hiring pipeline, a lot of things internally to look at. And then we've been on a two-year project to document and understand the solutions to income inequity in California. And a lot of these same structural issues, we have to look at externally or statewide. So we have a lot of work to do. Neal, I think one thing that Cal Matters is doing, which is very, very positive is really helping support the local community and ethnic news organizations. Because there's such an opportunity for organizations like the Texas Tribune and Cal Matters to be the hub, you know, of a network of smaller organizations serving their communities. We've seen great success, for example, in Philadelphia with the role that Resolve has played. And Milly, you had, we had talked the other day about the role of collaboration. And that is just one of the major differences and major opportunities that you're seeing in your new role in not-for-profit news. So tell us more. Yeah, so the Texas Tribune has a policy where anyone is free to republish any of our journalism. So we got a note from another Texas publisher a few weeks ago. Oh, it was so nice. One of our stories about the hospitalizations in Texas. It said, because your journalists cover the state, so thoroughly, I can keep my focus on reporting the news at the local level. So again, just to reiterate the people and kind of internal resources, resourcing aspect of this, there's also this broader kind of ecosystem part. And we actually just got another note a few weeks or a few days ago saying, about one and a half years ago, my husband and I bought a small community newspaper in Northeast Texas. Since we have a very small staff, there's obviously no way to cover such a big state. So it's great that Texas Tribune provides content which helps a smaller community paper. So I just really believe that a collaborative ecosystem is the future, well, present. And Heather Bryant actually- Oh, thank you. I was gonna say, like Heather Bryant is the OG on journalism collaboration. Yeah. Doing the work of journalism as part of a collaborative ecosystem rather than a competitor in a market is the best way to strategically use limited resources and ensure depth and breadth of coverage and center decisions on community news needs. So I think all this kind of works together as a system, right? And I think the limited resources is really important. It's allowing people to kind of cover their own niche, allowing cover people to focus on different levels. So I just think a collaborative ecosystem is the present. Yeah. I mean, collaboration across like, obviously we allow people to republish our stories, but we have also through RevLab, for example, which is about to launch its very first events cohort, which is really a training program for other media organizations with a preference for local media organizations, particularly ones serving diverse communities to understand, hey, here's what we learned with our events business, and particularly an events business that had to shift hard in March to going entirely online. And so there are opportunities to give back across like all kinds of levels of expertise, of thinking, of business strategy, of folks teaming up on what CMS should I use? Like I just think that there's so much information that is often very siloed and these opportunities don't need to be as siloed as they currently are. Yeah. So it extends beyond just coverage, right? It's about kind of systems and processes and decisions and how do we kind of reduce the friction for other people to do news? That's music to our ears. So we'd love to get your questions folks joining us on the call for Millie and Stacy Marie and Neil. And one very important question and it was addressed today in a naming lab post is about the rise of hyperpartisan, hyperpartisan as in nonpartisan news organizations across the country. And a very disturbing trend that we've seen too in Florida, Wisconsin and other states where news organizations stating that their nonprofit nonpartisan are funded by progressive supporters who are not transparent about where the money's coming from. And so one of the questions that we have from Millie Schubert is how do you keep separation between the business and news side of your organization and how do you address transparency and partisanship at a time when news organizations are becoming increasingly partisan? So I would slightly distinguish between folks that are engaging in hyperpartisan misinformation and disinformation, which is an industry and a highly profitable one in and of itself and that in addition to being run by particular groups, whatever their political affiliation, often run by people who have zero political affiliation, couldn't even vote in an election in the US, but have figured out that there are ways to monetize types of content that people will be having a very strong emotional response to. That is a failure of the information ecosystem and something that we could do a whole different session on. But as it relates to financial incentives in newsrooms, my first real reporting job was at the Financial Times and we were a financial news organization and I was always fascinated by the extent to which even in the context of a news organization that specifically reported on business, finance and economics, the newsroom at the time was very happy having no idea how we made money. But people would have very strong opinions on things like distribution times and whether the paper on a Saturday showed up at 8 a.m. or 10 a.m. And I was like, this is the same conversation. If you care about distribution, if you care about the trucks and the printing presses, then you care about how we pay the people who drive the trucks and run the printing presses. And so often this conversation about how we separate those two operates from this place of assuming that understanding how the business works means you're going to be unduly and nefariously influenced somehow and give inappropriate amounts of power to usually in this case advertisers or sponsors. And I think that increasingly it's really important to understand that not knowing how things work puts you in a worse position because you are not having useful conversations with the folks who are pitching you on contracts. You are not informed about the risks and the opportunities and you're not making decisions that then are going to inform like how do we need to be thinking about our newsroom, right? If you don't know what your financial position is, you don't know how many people you can hire in the next 12 months or that you can't hire in the next 12 months. And if you don't understand why we are in the middle of an advertising recession and how that might affect your newsroom you are not in a position to make sure that you are taking all appropriate steps to shore yourselves up against even worse conditions. So I have long been of the belief that it is possible and actually it is the responsibility of newsroom leaders to not just want to know about but to like be an active participant in the conversation around how our newsrooms stay or get sustainable in any environment. You said that so well. I mean, this is not a new problem, right? We forever advertisers have tried to influence editorial and in the old days, the publisher would meet the advertisers at the country club and then the publisher would try to say something to the editors, maybe overtly or not and it would be up the editors to kind of referee that and keep some of that influence out of the newsroom. The best way you keep the journalism high quality and accountable and transparent is first of all by hiring high quality journalists and secondly, by having that transparent conversation it doesn't matter if your newspaper 100 years ago was mostly funded by Macy's and now your news organization is mostly funded by a group of nonprofit foundations. Either way, there's always money behind or just the owner of the publication. The owners of some of the publications and some of the for-profit publications in America today are just terrible people with very one-sided political beliefs. It's about how you operate in that arena and how transparent you can be. And one nice thing about an entrepreneur is that you can be completely transparent to a ridiculous extent, which helps I think a lot with people trusting our work. Absolutely. I think with our transparency we also have to be accessible, right? Because like, if you're the kind of person like me who will like read 990s, then of course like nonprofit financials are super transparent. I think there's a difference between the availability of that information and helping our audiences like really understand what those things mean. Yeah, and I will just note there that we go out of our way to be as transparent and accessible as possible, whether that's who donates us, who funds us, who our members are. And right now there is a pretty robust debate about the role of journalism and questions around the role of journalists as activists and advocates. And do you see any change in journalism ethics and principles around transparency, around the role of journalists in not-for-profit organizations? I think when people talk about activism in the context of journalism, it's often actually a conversation about like what status quo are you happy for us to hold up? And going back to the example of reporting about police, it was fascinating to me that when we reported on, for instance, the Austin Police Department using force on protesters, we got a string of emails, comments, such as being like, how can you be so biased against the police for like the mere fact of saying, this is a thing that happened, right? And so we have as an industry for a super long time, internalized a very particular definition of who you're allowed to challenge and that's okay, cause that counts as objectivity. You know, like way back in 2014 when folks were talking about the fact that merely quoting a presidential candidate's statements is increasingly journalistic malpractice when those statements are in fact imaginary or elusive at best and that not contextualizing that for your audiences is not in fact providing a degree of transparency or objectivity, right? And so our understanding of the what is often weaponized as an accusation particularly among journalists from like black and brown communities is that talking about things that make other people uncomfortable and reporting on those things accurately and fairly is not the same thing as being an activist or having a partisan position for a cause is just actually doing our jobs better. Yeah, and I want to add one more thing about the framing around, you know, diversity and objectivity as like a social justice issue when it's really a matter of journalism and making our journalism better and a more accurate reflection of our reality, so. Yep. Yes, absolutely. And, you know, look at the difference that data-driven journalism can make and of course, Millie and Stacey, early days you were also very much involved in user-generated content and the incredible increasing role that video and from user-generated content creates. I mean, data journalism is a really good example of something that is like not at all neutral, right? Like what, which data sets you pick, how you describe that data sets, like how you filter them, how you slice them, you can make data tell you anything you want and I think that when you have, when we as an industry have like relied on official sources for data sets, like we're seeing this with coronavirus right now, right? Like how many people of from particular communities have died is you would think the world's most straightforward if depressing question that, you know, we need to be rewarding on and the reality is it's like a very, very hard question to get an answer to because that data is either not available or available only in PDFs that you cannot scrape or available only if you call a hundred different counties every single day to get updates, right? And so that I think is a really good example of something and I think data journalists have been prone to this for a long time of believing in the inherent neutrality of a practice without interrogating all of the ways that every decision that we makes is actually very consequential. That's so true and applies to every story that's ever been written, right? Nobody, nobody left the scene of a car crash when they covered it to go interview the junkyard dealer to see if he was happy there'd be two more wreck cars in town. Like you pick your story angles and you try to tell the story in a way that's meaningful to the society and the community. And if we're lifting a little bit of this fantasy that there's something called objective journalism that every journalist is just a robot with no feelings, I think that's a good thing. Yeah, I think objective journalism is to Millie's point the process of the reporting, right? Like are you taking every possible step and then 10 more to make sure that you are interrogating your own assumptions as well as those of the folks that you are reporting on? Tom Rosenstiel, who's the executive director of the American Processing Institute who I worked closely with there had a great thread on kind of the history of objective journalism and how it is in fact about the process of how we do not about the individual. So I can share that. Yeah, actually I was speaking with Tom earlier today and we were talking about his Twitter thread which got almost a million engagements on Twitter. So we'll also share that later on social and in the chat. So we have a question from Damien Forman in Colorado where the Colorado journalists and funders are supporting a new collab, a new news collaborative. And his question is, do participants, do any of you have any advice from your experience to deepen their programs and strategies? Yeah, this is a time when, you know, with the Tribune with the Revenue Lab, right? They have taken the practice of being nice about sharing their lessons and turned it into a thing with the name and a business and people assigned to it which is wonderful. But we're at a point right now where so many of these organizations are closing down in a panic because of the economy and the virus and the pandemic that we have to take some emergency action, right? So in California we've raised almost $2 million now to take a number of the smaller, primarily ethnic and local community organizations, some of the black newspapers, the publishers that are in languages other than English and give them some emergency help, not just cash but we're gonna fix your business model. We'll set up your website and your email and stuff like that. Take all the things off your plate that you can't deal with so you can just do the news. I think anybody who's trying to organize groups of journalists locally now has to find ways to take out the friction. So all they have to do is the local reporting and editing and some marketing in order to keep some of this community journalism alive. Yeah, I'm gonna go back to Heather Bryant because she said something the other day that really stuck with me which is she's like everybody is looking for better ways to get involved in collaboration and nobody's asking how they can be better collaborators. And I think that really comes at the heart of some of these issues, which is like, yeah, we all wanna join the thing. Like, yay, let's all collaborate. But how easy is it to work with us? Like how easy are we making it for folks to get access to that information that we're sharing through things like RevLab? How easy is it for folks to even know that these opportunities exist? And I think one of the real challenges that we have is we have like a seriously fragmented network of people doing individually interesting stuff. And if you were to try to keep up with every one of those things, like it becomes your full-time job, right? So like, what is the filter on top of those that can help someone make better and more informed decisions when we're operating in a like information dense but time poor environment? Yes, absolutely. And that's a huge challenge. And we have some resources that we'll share with folks after today's show. Thank you very much, Stacey, Neil, and Millie for joining us today for such an important conversation. And for anyone interested in starting your own not-for-profit news site, there has been, oh my goodness, 67 new nonprofit news organizations that have started in just the last couple of years. And so we put a link in the chat to the Institute for Not-For-profit News where there's pathways and resources and guides to get you started. And we are so thankful that we have Stacey, Millie, and Neil to help lead the way with great new products and great new ideas and great new ways to ensure that journalism is keeping all communities informed and engaged. Thank you for joining us. A pleasure. Thanks so much for having us.