Author: cleggellen

By Ellen Clegg

MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, the award-winning Memphis nonprofit newsroom committed to reporting on “the intersection of poverty, power, and policy,” is staffing up. Wendi C. Thomas, the innovative and tireless founding editor and publisher, announced on July 29 that she has hired veteran journalist Adrienne Johnson Martin as executive editor.

“As we move from startup mode to sustainability, it’s essential that our leadership bench has depth and that’s what Adrienne brings,” Thomas said in a story posted on MLK50’s website. “I am elated that she’s joining the team and I look forward to building the organization together.”

The addition of top-level editing talent is a noteworthy pivot point for any news organization, but it’s especially significant for a four-year-old startup that is positioning itself for long-term growth and impact. When Johnson Martin starts in September, MLK50 will have six full-time and two part-time editorial employees. Thomas noted on Twitter that the MLK50 leadership team is all-women, and of the top five newsroom jobs, three are held by Black women, one by a Latina, and one by a white woman. As she tweeted: “It is so satisfying to build the newsroom I always wanted to work in.”

Johnson Martin brings a broad range of media experience. She was most recently managing editor of Duke Magazine, Duke University’s alumni publication, and was part of the Los Angeles Times team that won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for spot news for coverage of the Northridge earthquake. She covered radio, television, and film for The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, and served as associate features editor there.

“I love that I’ll have the chance to be in community with a team that knows we don’t have to live in a zero-sum world and is committed to telling the stories of those on the losing side of that paradigm — these are journalists who use their talents in service of justice,” Johnson Martin told MLK50. “What’s better than that?”

Thomas, an editor and reporter at The Charlotte (North Carolina) Observer and the Commercial Appeal in Memphis, launched MLK50: Justice Through Journalism in 2017 as a one-year project focusing on economic inequality in Memphis 50 years after the assassination of Martin Luther King. Her initial fund-raising round: $3,000 from friends and family. “I started with nothing,” she told me in a recent phone interview. “I lived off of credit cards for the first year-and-a-half while we were launching.” 

As revenue from philanthropic donations grew, she paid that debt off, and set a path for growth. In 2020, Thomas won the prestigious Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting for a series that exposed Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare’s rapacious debt collection policies. The MLK50 series, produced in partnership with ProPublica, got stunning results. Ultimately, the hospital erased almost $12 million in patient debt.

The Selden Ring prompted new interest from fund-raisers. But Thomas also speaks openly about the difficulty journalists of color face in raising philanthropic dollars. In fact, according to Borealis Philanthropy, which focuses on social justice and transformation, between 2009 and 2015 a scant 6% of the $1.2 billion in grants invested in journalism, news and information in the United States went to organizations serving specific racial and ethnic groups. Only 7 percent went toward projects that served economically disadvantaged populations.

“After our story published, funders that had told me ‘no’ called me,” Thomas said. “Now nothing had changed, they knew I was working with ProPublica when they told me we were risky, we weren’t big enough. This is part of why I’m so explicit and vocal about it, because people should not have to clear the bars that I’ve had to clear.”

I’ll share more of Thomas’ wide-ranging, wise interview in a future post.

By Ellen Clegg

Google and Facebook are the epitome of sheer American chutzpah — as American as, say, Mark Zuckerberg wakeboarding across a lake on the Fourth of July, waving the Stars and Stripes in an irony-free display of patriotism. But both tech giants also have a global reach — and ambitions that seem to extend at least as far as the Kármán Line. 

So it’s no surprise to learn that both companies recently signed deals with a slew of Canadian publishers, including digital startups as well as storied newsrooms like The Globe and Mail in Toronto. David Skok, CEO and editor-in-chief of The Logic, a digital news site that covers Canada’s innovation economy, provides a cogent explanation in his latest “Letter from the Editor” — and explains why he’s skeptical that Big Tech will ever truly have the public’s interest at heart.

(Skok founded the for-profit business, tech, and politics site three years ago, after stints at the Toronto Star and the Boston Globe, where he was managing editor and vice president of digital. Before landing at the Globe, Skok was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, where he co-authored a noteworthy white paper on disruption in the news industry with Clayton M. Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor. Entitled “Breaking News,” it’s still worthy of a read.) 

Eight Canadian publishers signed up to partner with Google News Showcase starting in the fall. Google will pay the publishers for content, and in return, the media sites will be able to sell online advertising and sign up new subscribers. Google Canada is doing its best to sound like an advocate of robust and unfettered coverage of community news. Or even like a friendly neighbor you might want to have a Labatt’s with. “We’ve never relied on high-quality, community-based journalism more than we have during the Covid crisis,” Sabrina Geremia, an official at Google Canada, told The Globe and Mail (subscription required). But neither Google or the publishers would comment on the value of the agreement, or the duration of the license. Facebook is launching a similar initiative, signing up 14 Canadian partners for its News Innovation Test. 

Skok talked to a half-dozen publishers who were not part of the Google News Showcase deal. They asked to remain anonymous, but didn’t mince words: all told Skok they were angry that “the Big Tech platforms were applying restrictive and opaque criteria to privilege select publishers and employing a divide-and-conquer approach in a race to get ahead of the threat of legislation.” Skok points to a tantalizing initiative in Denmark, where a change in European Union copyright law has prompted publishers to join forces in order to bargain collectively with Google and Facebook. Google, Facebook, and now Amazon continue to rake in a significant portion of digital advertising dollars, leaving low-rent programmatic scraps for news sites. (Google’s share of the U.S. digital advertising market last year was 28.9%, and Facebook accounted for 25.2%, according to the Wall Street Journal. Amazon rose to 10.3% from 7.8% in 2019.)

“Big Tech’s sheer wealth, scale and influence mean these decisions will profoundly shape what you read, distorting the marketplace of ideas,” Skok writes. “This is not simply private-market players paying fair-market value in exchange for products — it’s private companies using their trillion-dollar market caps and immense bargaining power to steamroll an entire sector in pursuit of their own self-interest.”

By Ellen Clegg

You’ve no doubt heard of “pink slime.” To put it in polite terms, it’s the pastel-hued meat paste used in some processed hamburger meat. (I’m not linking to a photo: You can thank me later.)

Thanks to an episode of “This American Life,” it’s also a term that was used to describe Journatic, a company that outsourced hyperlocal “news” written by poorly paid offshore reporters — and marketed to mainstream newspapers. Ultimately, the fake bylines assigned to writers in the Philippines were a bridge too far for newspapers like the Chicago Tribune, so Journatic lost traction.

But the drive to try to automate local news — eliminating skilled reporters, assignment editors, copy editors, designers, photographers, product specialists, and engineers — hasn’t gone away, unfortunately. During the run-up to the 2020 presidential campaign, “pink slime” journalism came oozing back in the form of Metric Media, a vast network of “news” sites that aspire to a kind of quick-scan faux legitimacy. As Priyanjana Bengani reported in the Columbia Journalism Review, the number of Metric Media sites tripled over the course of 2020, constituting a shadowy network of supposedly hyperlocal outlets that were in fact funded by political operations and agenda-driven agencies and “designed to promote partisan talking points and collect user data.” Metric Media is run by Brian Timpone, and “is rooted in deception, eschewing hallmarks of news reporting like fairness and transparency,” according to an investigation by The New York Times. 

So how bad is Metric Media? Where’s the beef? Two professors at the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy at Duke University have applied some actual metrics to Metric in a new study released this month, and the results are deeply troubling — especially against a backdrop of greed-fueled corporate media consolidation that has created ghost newspapers and news deserts across the country. Duke researchers Asa Royal and Philip M. Napoli scraped the front pages of 999 Metric Media outlets every day for more than two months to assess whether the content was serving communities or meeting an audience. The results of their study, “Local Journalism’s Possible Future: Metric Media and its Approach to Community Information Needs,” show glaring gaps in coverage and toxic levels of contempt for local readers. Some of their top-line findings:

• Most Metric Media sites lack any original content, and, in general, old content is not regularly updated. An overwhelming majority of stories appear to be automatically generated.
• In one 78-day observation period, nearly two-thirds of outlets did not publish a single article written by a human being.
• Stories about state and national politics are shown much more often than local news.
• Instead of democratizing local news for individual towns, Metric Media operates hubs in each state; on an average day, those hubs generate around 45% of the content shown across the network, despite only making up 5% of the network’s population.
• Metric Media dedicated an outsized amount of coverage to stories about electoral fraud in states where Donald Trump was contesting the vote during the 2020 general election.

Their conclusion: “Though the financial prospects for local newspapers are suffering, automated large-scale national operations appear, in this case, to be a poor substitute for the capital-intensive inputs of traditional local news.”

Royal and Napoli bring bracing gusts of data and fact to the ongoing effort to define what constitutes local news. And a reality check about the resource demands. When I was an editor at The Boston Globe, I was part of an effort to ramp up hyperlocal coverage in scores of cities and towns by creating twice-weekly print sections that were replated to zone in on targeted slices of the Globe’s coverage map: Globe West, Globe North, Globe NorthWest, Globe South. We hired reporters, editors, copy editors and advertising executives.

I spent a good part of a summer in the mezzanine-level production offices, the mailroom, and even on the loading dock on Morrissey Boulevard in Dorchester learning about the complex logistics of distribution and the timing of press runs. (Drivers knew the dimensions of their truck interior and calculated how many bundles of zoned sections would fit as they timed out their delivery route.) We experimented with different labels for the bundles and tested which were the most readable coming down the chute from the press. We leased office space in each region, bought scanners and copiers and computers.

Reporters attended town meetings and zoning board hearings and wrote everything from news stories to profiles to arts and entertainment features. Certainly, local government, schools, and police forces generated data that could be automated — data that readers wanted. And with a modern digital strategy, that data can be scraped and turned into news bites that are readily consumable, even welcome. But local doesn’t really scale — even if the cost structure of the rumbling, industrial print production cycle is stripped away for digital. Journalism that matters still means sustained investment in on-the-ground observation, in humans who can produce sustained beat reporting, painstaking investigations, pinpoint editing, and memorable visuals and design. Add in live events that allow for a robust exchange of ideas, even if only on Zoom, and advertising and marketing. “Pink slime” sites neglect a signal fact of human history, much in evidence during pandemic isolation: Connection and community are enduring. Storytelling is a timeless craft, which strengthens those bonds. In the end, that seems unlikely to be hijacked by an algorithm or a reporter-bot.

By Ellen Clegg

After George Floyd’s murder last year ignited protests across the country, Troy Patterson, writing in The New Yorker, observed that despite a glut of cable news coverage, viewers might “still feel starved for context.” While it is a “moral duty to witness the scenes of uprising,” he wrote, a shift in focus could help viewers make sense of the sometimes chaotic scenes that were unfolding on their streets. “It may be wiser to attend to this nationwide conflagration as a local news story,” he wrote, and went on to commend one outlet doing just that: Unicorn Riot, a free-ranging, non-hierarchical media collective, was providing video feeds from protests in a number of communities and continuously updating them with interviews from local residents.

I checked in with Dan Feidt, a reporter/producer for Unicorn Riot who helped launch the site in 2015. Feidt, a web developer living in Boston, had seen the power of on-the-ground reporting that provided an alternative point of view during the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. Feidt and others set up video channels to stream live media from Occupy encampments. “The audio was a kind of murmuring buzz of activity—the sound was really intriguing, and putting it out live had a  grip on people’s attention, and it spread really fast,” he said. He was inspired: “Let’s take the lessons we learned and try to do live video, but also written pieces, investigations, FOIA requests … and let’s make it non-commercial and nonprofit.”

In 2015, Unicorn Riot was started on a shoestring; in 2019, revenue amounted to just over $115,000, from audience donations. In addition to investments in video equipment, Unicorn Riot had to buy helmets and flak jackets after reporters were injured by flash-bang grenades and rubber projectiles launched by police during protests after Floyd’s murder. 

Current staffing levels are small—about 10 people—with reporters in Boston, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Denver, and South Africa. Freelancers contribute as events warrant. There’s no both-sides-ism here. Unicorn Riot is committed to amplifying marginalized voices, to elevating social justice campaigns—on July 1, Unicorn Riot videographers were recording as climate activists put their bodies in front of heavy equipment to stop construction of an Enbridge tar sands pipeline. In a media-saturated culture, where audiences are used to packaged television broadcasts on the one hand, or the maddeningly fractal ecosystem of Twitter on the other, there’s value in watching a raw, live video feed, observing the size of the giant pipeline drill bit, and weighing the conviction it must take to get in its way. There’s foreign coverage, too. In a recent story, contributor Emici Thug conducts a Q&A with a Brazilian poet participating in the nationwide protests against President Jair Messias Bolsonaro.

“I think there’s a huge problem with generational access in the media in the United States,” Feidt said. “I don’t think that millennials have much access to newspaper editorial pages or analysis and commentary in media institutions. Because we actually did try to talk to young people, our stuff came across so differently. There’s a lot going on, and you’re not hearing from them anywhere.”

More than 100 years ago, writing in The New Republic, journalist Walter Lippmann and his co-author Charles Merz asserted that “a sound public opinion cannot exist without access to the news.” It’s unclear what Lippmann might make of Unicorn Riot, but the site’s raw feeds from protests around the country and around the world are nothing less than a first rough draft of history. 

By Ellen Clegg

When Mukhtar Ibrahim, a longtime Minnesota journalist, launched the digital nonprofit Sahan Journal in the summer of 2019, he was determined to fill in the blanks in coverage of the state’s vibrant immigrant communities. Actually, it was more of a relaunch. Ibrahim, a former reporter for Minnesota Public Radio and the Minneapolis Star Tribune, first put up a website in 2013 in order to provide “authoritative, fair and original reporting and analysis about issues related to Somalis in the diaspora, in East Africa, and the greater Horn of Africa.”

His early website showed potential, but without the support of an organization or wealthy donor, publishing out of his apartment in St. Paul on a voluntary basis got old. He turned his attention back to his journalism career, but his dream remained. (On a pre-pandemic visit to the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, I noticed that Ibrahim’s portrait is displayed in an array of prominent alumni biographies in Murphy Hall, home to the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication.) Ultimately, Ibrahim got the backing he needed from Minnesota Public Radio, which agreed to pay his salary for 18 months, and found space to create his own newsroom at the Glen Nelson Center at American Public Media in St. Paul, an incubator for new ventures. Funders and partnerships now include the Emerson Collective, the Knight Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and the Facebook Journalism Project, among others.

A recent look at the Sahan Journal home page shows a broad range of coverage, with compelling stories and photos on the Minneapolis City Council race, an investigation into failing charter schools, a deep dive into data that show how immigrant communities are contributing to the Minnesota economy, and four videos explaining the Covid-19 vaccination process in Spanish, Somali, Hmong, and English. Eight years after his first foray into digital publishing, the timing seems right. As Ibrahim explains his mission on the Journal website, “Nearly all of Minnesota’s population growth is coming from populations of color; since 2010 the non-Hispanic white population has grown by 1 percent, compared with 26 percent among populations of color. So, who’s telling their stories?”

The International Institute of Minnesota, a nonprofit that advocates for immigrant communities, estimates there are as many as 150,000 Somalis living in Minnesota—80 percent of them in Minneapolis. (Ibrahim was born in Somalia and moved to Minnesota in 2005, part of a wave of immigration that began in the early 1990s when faith-based organizations and refugee resettlement groups began sponsoring Somalis fleeing civil war.) Minnesota is still predominantly white, and a sometimes uneasy mix of urban gentrification, burgeoning communities of color, rural burgs, struggling Iron Range towns, and sprawling exurbs. But if anyone can put the Marge Gunderson Fargocliche to rest once and for all, it’s journalists like Mukhtar Ibrahim who are determined to tell new stories and spotlight emerging voices in communities of color.

Perhaps as important as the launch two years ago is a recent pivot, a hard-won insight crucial to defining what “local news” is. Like any number of media entrepreneurs, Ibrahim keeps a watchful eye on data, on audience, and on engagement. When a pioneering charter school that serves Somali families was set to close, the Sahan Journal’s education reporter, Becky Dernbach broke the news and began calling parents. For many of her sources, it was the first time they’d heard the news. Dernbach and Ibrahim realized they couldn’t just press publish and assume the story would automatically find an audience. Sahan Journal reporter Aala Abdullahi wrote a separate story about what happened next, when the Journal pivoted to use targeted social media and Somali television to reach parents. “We had to find a creative, culturally relevant, and digestible way to communicate the months-long reporting that Becky had so diligently put together,” Abdullahi wrote.

The Journal recognized that there was a language barrier—parents spoke Somali, Spanish, Oromo, or Amharic as a first language. And there was a higher level of engagement on Facebook and WhatsApp. That’s why the Journal partnered with Somali TV Minnesota, a Somali-language channel on Facebook Live that reaches a large Twin Cities audience and allows live questions from viewers. “Essentially,” Abdullahi wrote, “we realized that we needed to create a version of this story that came to life through video or audio, produce it in a more familiar language, and publish it on a platform where our audience already existed.” As of early June, the show, which aired May 27, had been viewed 9,000 times.

It was Sahan Journal’s first live event, and the staff hopes it won’t be the last. Other ideas in play include fliers summarizing the key points of the charter school story, which could be distributed to parents and concerned neighbors in the Somali community. The most important lesson? Abdullahi nails it: “We also recognize that one size does not fit all. That is to say, we expect that with every community we want to develop deeper relationships with, there will be a specific avenue or method that works best. And we intend to keep asking the most important and relevant audience-centric questions—Who do we want to reach? Who is left out? What is the best way to connect them with news?—in order to get there.”