News Fix #58: Balancing encouragement and protection

I'm back with your weekly news fix, and I'm happy we're in this together. If you're new here, welcome! Get in touch anytime; I'd love to hear from you.

Next week our new semester begins at Temple, and I'll be in the classroom on Monday, teaching a Media Law and Ethics class and a Reimagining Public Service Reporting class. I remain conflicted about teaching journalism. It's not the applicability of the fundamental skills I doubt. It's almost everything else.

I took a position at a university because I was thrilled to work at the field level. There are so few of these jobs in local news and civic information. We really need more of them. The challenges we face in local news are largely systemic, so individual newsrooms will have a hard time solving them. We have to transform the insufficiently valuable news and information system we have now into the system we need; local reporting that is community centered, service driven and high utility. Despite its utility and value these news and information providers will nonetheless have limited commercial growth potential. This is a huge field challenge. We need to design a system built for sustainable service, not growth. Given that this is the work I see as necessary and urgent, it makes sense that I would have a hard time training students to enter the industry we have now.

Every young adult deserves to be both encouraged and protected. It's a balance, even as a teacher. I want to encourage students to develop and hone journalism skills and practices because I believe these skills can be useful and powerful throughout their lives regardless of the work they do. But my instinct has been to protect students from journalism as an industry. Jobs are scarce, wages are low, not all newsrooms are supportive, not all newsrooms are invested in their staff or communities, not all news jobs are safe.

Is it fair to ask them to spend precious money and time on a degree they hope will increase their opportunity and economic security and to also ask them to transform the informational ecosystem they're just learning about? If that's what they signed up for, sure. But I don't know that they did sign up for that. These young people are already being tasked with improving so much in the world.

More multipurpose skills

I'm trying to strike the right balance between two things this year as we work to build a better field. I do want to encourage students to demand the information environments they deserve. And, I want to provide them with enough practical skills to find and produce useful information for themselves and others in any context, professional or otherwise.

Darryl Holiday and Sam Pressler's recent conversation about journalism skills and connection articulates the reasoning behind this approach. “Journalism skills are civic skills,” Darryl says. “They are skills people need when they feel that urge to be a part of things, and they need the information to know how to do something about it.”

Teaching most journalism skills as civic in nature rather than professional is something I'd love to see more of in high school and college settings. I try to load my classes with practical skills like creative approaches to record creation, fact checking strategies and practice, and of course FOIA's. This year all my public service students will train as Philly Documenters.

The reasoning Darryl gives for why to train this way is what really sticks with me. It's about love.

“Most journalists want to change the world in some way, and that’s why they get into journalism. They believe in people, they love people, and they want to know people and understand people. And so they naturally want to convene people, and they want to facilitate conversations, and they want to create events and sessions that get people moving and thinking. Those are the new skill sets for journalists, and the future skill sets that we need in our communities.”

A question we don't have the answer to

I hope I've begun to convince you that we all need to hone our civic and journalistic skills. That reminds me, I want to plug Tom Rosenstiel's new book, The Next Journalism. It provides several frameworks and case studies of how to news can be more community focused and community driven. I read an early copy and found it practical, hopeful and helpful.

But here is the question. If we blur the lines between the skills journalists and civically engaged residents have, what exactly do reporters and newsrooms add? With fewer reporters and fewer newsrooms, how can they best be additive?

I spent some time in the Documented newsroom a few weeks ago for a reporting project that I'll tell you more about soon. I started to get some ideas about these additive functions while I was there. I did have my reporting hat on, but I also came away with even more respect for the people who work at Documented and their reporting model.

Documented is a community newsroom inside America's biggest city. It serves New York's immigrant communities with reporting and information in English, Spanish, Chinese and Haitian Kreyol on WhatsApp, WeChat, NextDoor, TikTok and the plain old internet. A lot of the people Documented serves are civically active and engaged. They are networked. Still, people are always reaching out to the newsroom to get information they need and can trust. I watched it happen.

Reporters at Documented have a few things most members of their audience don't. This isn't a difference in skill, but in resources and privileges that come with working as a professional journalist.

• They have an audience. It includes immigrants, service providers and officials.
• They know how to verify things their audience either does not know how to verify, don't have time to verify, or don't have the access to verify. That access is an important distinction.
• Documented reporters have better access to a broad range of people than most individuals, and they always give everyone implicated by their reporting a chance to respond. They know when to keep pushing beyond a “no comment” for their audience.
• Documented also has institutional protection most individuals, and especially most immigrants, do not have. Documented has insurance, editorial processes and checks, safety protocols, constitutional protection, and lawyers that make it easier for them to report the truth, even if that truth is unpopular.

I want to keep thinking about the resources journalists have that help even civically active residents and communities get information and accountability they want and need. I would love your ideas about this, please send them to me.

I've gone on long enough, thanks for your indulgence. Last question, do you want to join our News Futures working group? Our kickoff meeting is 9:30am PT / 12:30pm ET this Thursday. Our working group is finding and learning from community-based groups and networks doing “civic media” work without being a newsroom. This will be an opportunity to learn about this area and learn directly from and with local civic information actors about what makes their work effective and what they think they need. Abby Kiesa is leading the group and Megan Lucero, Andrea Wenzel and me are co-stewards. If you want to join let me know, and I'll get you signed up.

Take care of yourself until next week. If you're going back to school, how are you feeling about it?