PAUL:
Welcome to Brainwaves, a podcast about big ideas produced at the University of Colorado Boulder.
I’m Paul Beique. This week, how do you get your news?
PERSON 1:
The newspapers or my phone.
PERSON 2:
NPR, mostly.
PERSON 3:
My phone sometimes feels the need to notify me about some news story, then I’ll look at it.
PERSON 4:
Geeze, I normally get it from late night TV shows and [censored] like that. John Oliver is my go-to.
PAUL:
Those are a few people we found at the 29th Street Mall in Boulder.
It’s probably not a surprise that the news landscape is changing.
For example, TV newsroom employment eclipsed the number of jobs at newspapers for the first time in decades last year.
That’s according to the radio television digital news association.
And that’s not because TV newsrooms got bigger, those jobs have stayed pretty flat.
It’s mostly because American newspapers have lost more than 11,000 jobs since 2013.
So how will news stay alive?
How will it make enough money to keep going?
And what do we need to know about the new digital world to keep all of the facts straight?
PAUL:
For more on how journalism is shifting across the U.S., Brainwaves’ Lisa Marshall talked to Pat Ferrucci, a CU Boulder journalism professor who’s studied these changes.
LISA:
One of your jobs is to train journalist of tomorrow, and I'm interested to hear what you think are the greatest challenges and the greatest opportunities facing those students right now.
PAT:
I think the challenges and opportunities are kind of one in the same, in the sense that we're seeing, you know, challenges being, we're seeing a lot of big legacy media organizations, whether we’re talking about newspapers or television start changing how they employ people, the amount of people they employ, and we're seeing a lot of those kind of industries, financially, not being, not doing as well as they were maybe 20, 30 years ago.
And that’s a challenge, because obviously, those are the very obvious, clear job opportunities in years past.
But I think what we're seeing is the same kind of opportunity, you know, with technology and everything else, we’re seeing so many more types of content-producing jobs, all over the web and a lot of those are journalism-based.
LISA:
I understand that a few years ago, you did a research project where you interviewed heads of newsrooms, and heads of both broadcast newsrooms and newspapers around the country, and you asked them what they were seeing in the graduates that were coming out of journalism schools. Can you talk a little bit about what you've learned, and you know, how that research might be applied?
PAT:
They weren’t necessarily heads, but they were people that were doing the hiring. And what we found was that journalism organizations felt like journalism programs had kind of course-corrected too much. And what that means is, essentially, they thought 15, 20 years ago, even 10 years ago, journalism schools we’re doing a good enough job teaching students technology.
And technology was such an important part of news production, and they believed, the hiring people, that journalism schools had heard that criticism so much, that they basically went overboard and started making a curriculum completely tech-based and about teaching students how to use Final Cut Pro, was something I heard over and over again. But at the expense of teaching them critical thinking skills, or how to interview people, the things that are essential to journalism regardless of what technology you’re using.
I think the opportunity, and what that means for journalism schools, is that there are skills that never go away. Students only really get good at them with practice, things like critical thinking, things like interviewing, things like figuring out what’s news, what’s not. That’s a learned skill that happens through practice.
Whereas, technology, while important, the focusing on the type of technology, I think is probably short-sighted. And I think here at CU, I think we’re doing a good job of that. We‘ve changed our curriculum a little bit to focus a lot on, we don’t do many classes that do just technology or something like that. It is all about storytelling, and storytelling across platforms.
LISA:
There’s been a lot in the news lately about media mergers. They're happening all the time. How is just increased consolidation of the industry impacting the industry, and two-part question, what do you see happening in the future? Will we see some alternative funding structures for things like local newspapers that seem to be getting squeezed out?
PAT:
Yeah, I mean, I think the mergers are scary in a lot of different ways. One, you have again, kind of, whenever things merge, jobs seem to disappear. And less jobs is a bad thing in a lot of different ways.
I think mergers also present less diversity of sources. You know, one company controls 50%, I’m exaggerating here, but 50% of the information that goes out, well a lot of the information is going to be the very same. And that's bad for democracy in general.
But I do think it also presents opportunities for other places to pop up, and I do think that kind of getting to your second question. We're already seeing a bunch of different types of market models pop up and try to fill the void. But, you know, what types of market models succeed, we'll see.
LISA:
Are there any particular funding structures that you've seen that you think are pretty interesting? Might work?
PAT:
Yeah, I mean I think we're seeing a huge influx in nonprofit journalism across the country, and that goes in both cities and rural places.
And we, in Colorado you can look just to, you know, whether we're talking about Rocky Mountain PBS’ online news arm or the Colorado Independent, both located in major parts of Colorado, whether it be Boulder or Denver. Or we can look at something like the Sopris Sun in Carbondale, Colorado. Which, basically was started a decade ago because you know legacy media moved out and they all of a sudden were a news desert.
So in this little rural town, I mean there's obviously tourism nearby, but a relatively rural town, they started up an non-profit, and it's been going for ten years.
And I think we see this around the country.
You know, a lot of big cities starting things that are becoming more important than the legacy media there.
LISA:
How do they work? How does, how does, do they just like, you know, public radio
they just get funded by their customers?
PAT:
It's completely depending on the place.
So yeah, it's a lot of public donations, so like the, the PBS model, small little donations from people and you get a mug or whatever. But then they're also funded by large grants. Some of them do use some advertising, live events, you know, someplace like the Texas Tribune makes a significant amount of money of their operating budget through producing like big events. We see that in Aspen, the Aspen nonprofit does a lot of live events it's a diverse revenue stream. Which is actually really good, because as we can see with legacy media, when you put all your eggs in one basket, in that case, advertising, and that basket starts to shrink, all of a sudden you're kind of in trouble.
Whereas, if you diversify your revenue streams, you're kind of inoculated a little bit from one thing causing you to close up.
PAUL:
With newspapers employing fewer journalists, what are we left with?
And how does it make money?
I spoke with Larry Ryckman about that.
He’s what you might call an old school journalist.
He used to work for the Associated Press in New York and Moscow.
He was senior editor of the Denver post, and he’s seen a lot of the news disruption firsthand.
When the Denver Post laid off a big chunk of its staff recently, he was one of several employees who left to start “the Colorado Sun.”
It’s a digital publication with a totally different answer to the money problem in news.
Larry Ryckman, welcome to Brainwaves.
LARRY:
Thank you.
PAUL:
You've been up and running for almost a year now. Is everything going exactly according to plan?
LARRY:
Not at all, actually things are going better than planned, I'm delighted to say. We we did a lot of planning before we launched back in September of 2018, and we've had a lot of good friends, mentors and others who have helped us develop and refine our business plan. And I'm very happy to say we're ahead of expectations at this point.
PAUL:
That's great to hear. I think a lot of people are curious about the business model. How does it work at the Colorado Sun?
LARRY:
You know, we decided that the old advertising focused models that legacy media depends on just aren't working. So, we decided to try something different, and that was to depend on readers and members, a sort of like a public radio or public television sort of model.
We are a public benefit corporation, and not a nonprofit, but it basically comes down to, if you like our stories, you know, we asked readers to consider becoming a member at five dollars a month or more. And people have responded to that.
PAUL:
Can you give us a sense of what percentage comes from subscribers, and what percentage comes from other types of donors?
LARRY:
So, we were very fortunate to start off with a grant from benefactors, and, and that has helped us get up on our feet, and that has helped make us make our case to people in Colorado. And at this point, our, our memberships are covering probably, I would say 60 to 70 percent of our payroll, and that number is growing every day on top of that, we have a number of other grants that are coming in. We've been very fortunate to have underwriters who have come in and sponsored some of our newsletters.
So, through a combination of grants, memberships and underwriting, we're able to pay the bills and then some.
PAUL:
Well full disclosure, I am a member, and this morning, this morning's Colorado Sun morning email included links, as it often does, to other journalism being produced around Colorado. What's the thinking behind sending readers off to another source?
LARRY:
To me, it's all about serving Coloradans, and we have a talented crew with the Colorado Sun. We have some of the most experienced journalists in Colorado, but we're still 10 or 11 people.
And there's a lot of good work that's being done out there, and we want to serve Colorado and serve our readers, and say, “You know what? Good for the Denver Post, or good for Colorado Public Radio, or the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, and here's a story you ought to read.”
All of these news organizations across the state, including us, are too small. And to me, collaboration and cooperation is the new competition.
PAUL:
You sound like you're quite hopeful about the state of journalism or the future of journalism, is that a fair assessment?
LARRY:
You know, you have to be an optimist to start any new business whether it's, and, and for goodness sakes, a news organization may be above all, I am optimistic.
I mean, look we've all seen, the, the dire headlines and you know, I can't sugarcoat that. We have had tremendous losses in the news business. Just in the last year, even this year. And I want to emphasize, it's really not the journalists who are losing out, journalists are often very capable people who can go find other jobs.
Communities are losing out when news organizations cut back and when newspapers close.
I was just in California over the weekend, and I drove through Oakland. And Oakland, California, you know, one of the biggest cities in the state, has no newspaper now, because the Oakland Tribune, owned by the same people who owned the Denver Post, has been closed. And they've done that to paper after paper across the country. It was terrible.
PAUL:
I worked in newsrooms for a long time. I worked at the Burlington Free Press in Vermont for over 20 years as a copy editor and a page designer, and I saw the, saw it all happen right before my eyes as layoff after layoff…
LARRY:
You know, it's just heartbreaking that the Denver Post, once upon a time with 307 journalists. And today, it's 65 journalists, and we just felt that there had to be a better way.
And we could stay, and be victims, and lay off our friends and colleagues, or be laid off ourselves, or we could go do something better.
You know it's risky to start a new business, but it's better than waiting for the inevitable.
PAUL:
Are you having fun?
LARRY:
Absolutely. You know, I was just talking to one of my colleagues, and we both said that you know this is the most fun that we've had in our careers. For the first time in our careers, we're really working for ourselves, working for each other and working directly for readers. You know, we're not putting money into a hedge fund’s pocket.
We're just doing great journalism and doing it for the right reasons. Still early days, we're not even a year old, coming up on it, but I'm incredibly optimistic.
PAUL:
Well, Larry Ryckman, good luck with your mission and the future of journalism.
LARRY:
Well thank you so much, and thank you for your support, and if anyone wants to come check us out we're at coloradosun.com, so thank you.
PAUL:
And as we talk about digital news, there’s a question of trust.
PERSON 1:
It seems balanced, and I suppose it aligns with my viewpoints, and a lot of people tend to get their news that way.
PERSON 2:
Relatively, I’m sort of hyper cynical about everything. So I, sort of, take everything with a grain of salt.
PERSON 3:
If there is something that matters to me, or there is something that I want to know more, I’ll try to like Google it and find more articles and see if they all support the view that’s being provided so that I get a more wholesome perspective.
PAUL:
Beginning with the 2016 election, we started hearing a lot about internet trolls, untrustworthy websites claiming to be news, now even fears about so-called “deep fakes”, the doctored video version of “fake news.”
For more on all of that, we talked to Sandra Ristovska, she’s an expert in visual media online, and an associate professor in journalism at CU Boulder. She spoke with us via Skype from Macedonia.
PAUL:
You study images in the media. How has the role of images and journalism changed over the years? Are they valued more, or treated with more respect now than they once were?
SANDRA:
Images have always mattered in journalism, and they continue to matter. I think the change that we're seeing right now is that images are becoming central piece of evidence and kind of mode of information, really.
And what do I mean by that? We've seen a lot of crises and events around the world
where journalists are unable to go themselves, such as the conflict in Syria, such as the conflict in Yemen, Myanmar included, etc.
And so that meant that people had to turn to other forms of information to figure it out, what's happening in those countries.
And here's where I witness imagery, and that is all kinds of visual materials, coming through social media where they have become important.
And so, they were no longer just like, ‘Okay here we have the story for journalism, and let's see what is the visual counterpart.’ Right?
How do we represent the story visually, what are the kind of images that we can add to
the story, but here we had something where the central piece, the lead evidence of an investigation becomes the visual itself.
And so, I think that's the change that we have seen in the last few years.
PAUL:
Can you offer some specific examples where video shot by citizens or activists really had a journalistic impact?
SANDRA:
Really all, all of Syria whether we're talking about chemical weapon attacks, whether we're talking about use of other kind of materials that the Syrian government has used, that rebel have used.
2018 BBC Africa, in conjunction with Amnesty International, won a Peabody Award for a story in Cameroon about extrajudicial killing. All that had going on was a piece of video that circulated online.
And now oftentimes this is not done, just, you know, one piece of video is never the story, or never, you know, can't tell you everything.
So, what happens often is, you have one video that you can tell something is off, or it begs of us to ask certain questions, and then you look for other information.
So, for example, in the context of Cameroon, what was very important was video shot by BBC in Cameroon a long time ago that they were able to see the uniforms that the people were wearing, and to be able to verify that it was actually the government behind this.
PAUL:
The comedian and actor and director Jordan Peele recently produced and shared a video of President Obama making a speech, and it turned out that was fake. How easy is it to fake a video, and do you have any examples of that happening?
SANDRA:
It's becoming increasingly easier, so that was one prominent example, we just few months ago we saw a video of Nancy Pelosi in the U.S. that was also faked.
Here's what I have to say about that. Whatever the available technology has been at the time has been very convincing.
We can go back to painting Napoleon times, where Napoleon was able to communicate things he was not doing through paintings. There is a crowning of Napoleon, famous painting, that had incredible impact with the people at that point in time, because for them that was the medium of truth-telling at the time.
Now we we've seen this with film, we’ve seen this with photographs, we're seeing now with video, the technologies far more sophisticated. But I, along with some journalists and commentators, are worried that if we're trying to kind of emphasize the discussion about deep fakes and synthetic media, what we're doing is we're kind of normalizing a
discourse where everything can be faked. And then we give ammunition to bad actors who don't want to tell the truth, that they can say “Oh that's fake.”
And suddenly a lot more people believe it, because we've kind of created the discourse where that can be faked. The truth is, with deep fakes we're not there yet.
People who do this kind of fact-checking work can easily detect fake video today. That may be changing, but also what's happening kind of as a response in the investigative journalistic community or in the human rights community that I also study, is that people are saying one video is never telling you the truth.
You need more videos, you need more information, you verify, and if you're doing that, a fake video will not necessarily do much harm, because you'll be able to tell that it's an outlier in this kind of massive amount of information.
PAUL:
So this kind of cuts both ways. You can upload a fake video, but you can also call a real video fake?
SANDRA:
Yes, and so that's my concern. If we are focused so much in the discussion of deep fakes, A. we're missing out on the historical context. In the ‘90s, in the early ‘90s, there was a lot of concern about fake photographs. Photoshop becomes very important, and people were so concerned about that. And to meet these fakes today is just an extension of that kind of long attitudes and, or fear about images that they can be fake.
And the truth is, we have those examples historically, we have them today.
Right now, you can, there are ways to detect deep fakes and some, actually, commentators are saying companies who are creating the software for deep fakes should make it as easy for people to detect the fakeness as it is to create the video.
With Photoshop, for example, in a photograph we can tell immediately where it's faked or not when we look at the pixel numbers, and we can see whether it was doctored or not. There can be ways we can do that with the fakes moving forward.
PAUL:
So, you have to be somewhat sophisticated in the use of this technology to detect a fake. What can consumers of media do? Who do we trust?
SANDRA:
That's a very important question. I would say there has always been, even among the
public skepticism, and love of images, and here's where the concern with video is very big.
Studies after studies have shown that video is better at correcting disinformation and misinformation than any other mode of storytelling or a mode of communication. And at the same time, if video is fake that means people are even more convinced by the video.
All I would say is, never base your information just on one source or in one piece.
Look around. Has there been a pattern? Have journalists tried to do the investigative work behind that piece of evidence?
I think, just like anything, it does require us to be much more savvy about our media environment.
PAUL:
I think we also run into trouble when you have a population of people who might want to believe the fake and have no interest in debunking it or discovering the real truth.
SANDRA:
Oh, absolutely, but that's not just of the imagery that's just of our media environment.
PAUL:
Sandra Ristovska, thank you very much for joining us today on Brainwaves.
SANDRA:
Thank you so much.
PAUL:
If you haven’t already, please like, subscribe, and share Brainwaves wherever you get your podcasts.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Brainwaves.
I’m Paul Beique.
Dirk Martin, Lisa Marshall, Cole Hemstreet and I produced today’s show.
Andrew Sorensen is our executive producer.
Sam Linnerooth is our digital producer.
Cole and Andres Belton created our introduction.
See you next time on Brainwaves.