Episode 7: Future of Journalism Transcript

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Host: About 10 years ago, you probably noticed your city newspaper got a little thinner, fewer pages, skimpier sections. Before long, it arrived just three days a week and then one day, there was no newspaper in your town at all.

Joel Kaplan: I had so many mixed emotions. Part of it was that it was the love of my life to be a journalist, and then it turns out I went into journalism education because I figured, “Okay, train the next generation.”

Host: Joel Kaplan used to be a newspaper reporter, but at Syracuse University, as associate dean of graduate programs at the New House School of Public Communications, Joel watched in horror as his beloved industry imploded.

Joel Kaplan: But for me, also as a news consumer who … I still read four newspapers a day in the print form, beyond what I do online, it’s like death in the family or death by 1,000 cuts.

Host: The killer?

Joel Kaplan: What happened was they didn’t know how to dominate the internet, and they allowed other upstart companies to basically steal all the thunder and mainly steal all the revenue, so they were left definitely flat-footed.

Host: The web ravaged newspapers in numerous ways, not all related to journalism. Every time you posted an old couch on Craig’s List, a newspaper took a hit. Free online ads were great for you, but for papers, it meant a dangerous drop in classified ads, a surprisingly large revenue source. The internet also gave rise to single focus news sites; Politico, Buzzfeed, Breightbart, TMZ, all of which siphoned off corporate advertisers, and while we all became way more informed about Kim Kardashian, it got easier to lose touch with the important stuff going on around us.

Joel Kaplan: Now you’re having areas of the country who really don’t even have coverage of basic news. There used to be every newspaper had people at the state capitol of any state, so what does that mean? It means there’s going to be corruption. It’s not just because I think all politicians are crooked, it’s just that when no one’s watching you, you’ll do things that you won’t do when people are watching you.

Host: Welcome to The Front Row and the future of journalism. To say the journalism industry has been disrupted over the last 15 years is a massive understatement. It’s been chewed up and turned inside out. Everything’s changed … What we read, the way we read it, the speed at which we receive it, how we pay for it. The web has introduced countless new opportunities, but the newspaper business was excruciatingly slow to embrace them, but things are changing. Today on The Front Row, new ideas in journalism, new ways of creating content, new forms of distribution. We’ll meet startup entrepreneurs, academic innovators, and journalists. All the news that’s fit to print.

Joel Kaplan: Print is dead in terms of people actually having a newspaper and reading it. We just went through an airport, five airports, in the old days, I could go in an airport and there’d be newspapers everywhere. Now there’s no newspapers, period. You couldn’t find one. You can’t even it in a newsstand.

Host: Okay, well, not fit to print, all the news that’s fit to post … This podcast is brought to you by 2U, a company working with top tier universities to create digital education programs, like communications at Syracuse.

Rich Gordon: I still have scabs on my forehead from banging my head against the wall when I was running The Miami Herald’s website because I could not understand why it wasn’t as obviously to everybody else I worked with that what we were doing was important.

Host: Rich Gordon launched The Miami Herald’s website in 1996, but he soon felt limited. Newspapers were just transferring the text from their printed articles online. They weren’t seeing how they could make their stories come to life in this new medium and like his old-fashioned colleagues, Rich had studied computer programming and was able to use the new technology to analyze data and find and tell stories, data journalism.

Rich Gordon: Digital changes every aspect of the journalism process, not just the publishing process. It creates both threats and opportunities for us. By and large, to take advantage of any of them, you need to either have programmers working with you or have systems that were built by programmers to accomplish goals that you have as a newsroom or a publisher.

Host: The idea of actually placing an engineer in the newsroom was a tough sell. Rich tried and failed. Frustrated, he and his sore head left the newsroom for Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where he’s now the director of digital innovation.

Rich Gordon: I’d say one of the clearest indicators of an organization that might make the digital transition is do they see themselves as a technology company as well as a media company. The Washington Post is a great example. They have now made an enormous investment in technology and software engineers, and they are selling that technology to other publishers as a new line of business.

Host: In 2013, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos purchased The Washington Post and implemented data driven practices on a large scale. Engineers now sit next to journalists in the newsroom and generate new storytelling techniques.

Rich Gordon: What they work on varies very widely. I’d say the most common functions they play are either in data journalism, investigative projects, analyzing data, or storytelling with data. Things like data visualization and clickable interactives and stories that include audio and video and text and all woven together. There certainly are some exciting new ways of telling stories. We can put a camera on a drone. We can mine social media for insights. We can … There’s obviously a lot of information available online that you used to have to go dig up paper records to get or call somebody to get.

Host: Reading news online is becoming more like watching Netflix or shopping on Amazon. Personalization engines curate your homepage. Algorithms determine the catchiest headlines for a story, and viral predictors can for emerging breaking news. Data analysis isn’t just used to create the story.

Rich Gordon: I think the big difference now is that the journalist’s role doesn’t stop with the creation of the story, potentially it now also involves the publishing, the distribution, the building of the audience, the engagement of the audience with the content, and I would argue that journalists also should be involved in the creation of the media product that the content is delivered in and even the business model that supports it.

Host: This is what Rich teaches his students, and they’re responded with some great ideas.

Rich Gordon: I feel very hopeful about the future of journalism, so I want to make that 100% clear. I think this is actually an incredibly exciting time for journalism, and I think we should stop worrying about the future of journalism, and we should start worrying about the particular sub-categories of journalism that are most at risk. I think that starts with local watchdog governmental affairs, public interest reporting. I’m still quite concerned about The Chicago Tribunes and The Miami Heralds and The Minneapolis Star Tribunes of the world.

Host: The New York Times has followed The Washington Post into the data driven future. Subscriptions are up dramatically, but Rich doesn’t see that helping a shrinking network of local newspapers. Increasingly, he and other experts think local news will benefit from partnering with non-profits and educational institutions.

Rich Gordon: In many fields, like medicine and engineering, the academy leads the industry. In journalism, that’s not historically been the case, but I believe we’re at a moment where that’s now possible, and I, in my role here at Northwestern, I’m trying very hard to create an environment where in fact we can lead the industry and help invent the future instead of just reacting to it.

Host: For example-

Rich Gordon: In 2006, I was an instructor in a class, along with another journalism faculty member and two computer science faculty members in which we had a team of students that included both journalists and computer science students. They built a piece of software that wrote baseball game stories from box score data. It worked.

Host: Rich’s team invented a robotic journalist, and this is having a profound impact on the future of journalism.

You’re listening to The Front Row, a podcast brought to you by 2U, imagining a world with no back row. Around the same time that students in Northwestern were experimenting with robotic journalism, an engineer at Cisco, Robbie Allen, developed technology that would turn raw data into sentences. Today his company, Automated Insights, supplies major news outlets with software called Wordsmith. Chief operating officer, Adam Smith explains how it works.

Adam Smith: What our Wordsmith platform actually does is take data and it writes stories or articles or reports that sound just like a human wrote them. They have the tone, variability, personality of a human writer, but they’re completely automated through software. A good example is what we’ve actually done with The Associated Press in their earnings reports.

Host: At the end of each quarter, a publicly traded company releases its earnings data. Before Wordsmith, The Associated Press would assign journalists to comb through all of this data.

Adam Smith: The problem is there’s thousands of public companies they could essentially cover, but there’s only a limited number of journalists that they have, so what they were doing is about two to three hundred of them a quarter, I think is the actual number … We were to structure that data in such a way that we have a data point for things that Wordsmith can then use, so if the earnings for the quarter were X, we already know the earnings for last quarter were Y, what we’ve given them the ability to do is now publish over 4,000 of them a quarter.

Host: Freeing up journalists to add context to the automated stories.

Adam Smith: We might see that Disney had its best quarter in the last 10 years, and we’re going to talk about that because it’s present in the data. What’s not present is that there were two Star Wars movies that came out within a year. The human’s going to know that, and they can go in and add color, add context, add quotes, say things like, “The force is with Disney,” and get that in the story where it really makes the human plus machine angle a lot better.

Host: Robo writers allow news organizations to cover more stories, which is actually the challenge facing news outlets in smaller cities or regions. If the story involves data, this would help address Rich Gordon’s concerns about a lack of local government coverage. Take election campaigns for instance.

Adam Smith: With natural language generation, you can write a story about every single race. You can have information as the race progresses, and any race that maybe wasn’t predicted to be close but becomes close, you can highlight. You can highlight what type of voting drove, to the extent the data’s there, drove that race to happen that way. It can get as high a quality coverage as a race that’s covered by the mainstream media but get it at the local level.

Host: Once the candidate gets into office?

Adam Smith: You could tell a story about that down to the individual representative level, maybe what they ran on versus what they’re voting on, how they adhere to party lines.

Host: While technology has eroded local political coverage, it can also provide a solution for journalists who are willing to adapt … People like Cheryl Phillips who saw the power in data.

Cheryl Phillips: It made my job easier, so for me, as a journalist, I wanted to cover stories that nobody was covering, that nobody knew about. It was like a reporting tool. It helps me tell better stories that other people can’t find.

Host: An early adopter of data journalism, Cheryl Phillips used to be the data innovation editor at The Seattle Times. Now she’s working on a new focus as a founding member of The Computational Journalism Lab at Stanford.

Cheryl Phillips: The best stories are local stories, but that’s also … Those are the hardest ones to get data and documents for. One of the things I want to do is lower the cost of doing accountability journalism, so it would make it easier for these folks, the newsrooms that are kind of cash strapped.

Host: Cheryl’s most recent initiative just launched, The Stanford Oakland Policing Project.

Cheryl Phillips: I had done a story on Washington State patrol and whether there was racial profiling in the past. It’s not done very often because it’s hard to get the information, takes a lot of time and resources. My students went out and collected this from every state that has it, so 31 states, 130 million records. We just released the data. We provided training for 50 journalists from a whole variety of small to large newsrooms on how to use the data. They build a whole new statistical measure to measure discrimination, so now there’s a site. You can download the data. It’s cleaned. It’s processed. There’s a tutorial. This is what you might want to look at for your community, and you can do a local story on your state and what’s happening with possible racial profiling and discrimination, which is … It’s a very important subject right now.

Host: Cheryl’s team essentially created a digital journalistic toolkit that can be applied to hundreds even thousands of local newsrooms.

Cheryl Phillips: I think we’re going to see a continued increase in non-profit journalism and hopefully continued effort to make the journalism, this kind of journalism, this accountability journalism easier to do for smaller newsrooms.

Host: You’re listening to The Front Row by 2U. In this episode, we’re looking at the future of journalism. Robo and data journalism might be emerging resources for cash-strapped local news organizations, but that doesn’t make them any more money. Subscription rates are up for media outlets, like The New York Times and The Washington Post, but would you find the cash to scale a paywall at, say, The Poughkeepsie Journal?

Jesse Brown: We give away everything we make, all the podcasts, all the news stories, for free. My name is Jesse Brown. I am the publisher of CANADALAND, which is a crowd-funded news organization and podcast network.

Host: Jesse lives and works in Toronto, which explains the name CANADALAND. Prior to launching it, he was a freelancer working in print journalism, radio, TV.

Jesse Brown: That ended when I decided that what I wanted to do is media criticism and media reporting. Americans are familiar with everything from All in The Media to the late Gawker website, in Canada we had nothing like that. I was unable to successfully pitch columns, TV shows, even stand-alone articles about the media to the Canadian media.

Host: Still, there was a hunger for it in Canada’s small and often incestuous media industry. Like everyone else in the world, Jesse decided to start a podcast more as a hobby.

Jesse Brown: The audience grew and grew, and I reached a point where I said, “Well, this is great that you’re listening. I love making this, but I can’t keep doing it without revenue.”

Host: So, he posted his project on Patreon, a monthly subscription based crowdfunding site.

Jesse Brown: I swallowed hard. I was afraid nobody was going to fund this thing. I thought it’d be just me and my uncle giving five dollars a month, and within hours, it became funded to the point where I could keep doing it and within a couple of weeks, it was my full-time job.

Host: Today Jesse has 3,000 monthly subscribers who can donate whatever amount they choose. Even just a dollar.

Jesse Brown: I said, “Well, if I get $10,000 a month one day, I’ll turn this into a company, and I’ll put out a politics show, and I’ll start hiring people.” Within months, we hit that. We hit $10,000 a month, and I had to actually follow through on my promise, and now there are seven of us full-time and a whole bunch of part-timers and all kinds of freelancers doing stuff for us as well.

Host: Canada Land isn’t just responding to a niche gap in Canadian media coverage. Now they also offer digital print news, and they’re breaking news stories regularly and up in mainstream media.

Jesse Brown: I think it’s something that really does allow a lot of independence. Since I’ve been crowd-funded, it’s just disappeared. The only thing I care about now is serving my audience, and serving my audience of paying subscribers is a very different thing than trying to write the story that’s going to get the most clicks.

Host: Following that model, similar crowd-funded sites now cover unreported local news, right-wing politics, indigenous news and more.

Jesse Brown: I see huge potential for crowd-funded journalism. I think that it hasn’t really been attempted to the volume, to the degree that it should be. I think that it works best on micro scale. If you’re trying to launch a big organization, and you want the public to voluntarily pay for it every month, and it’s not through a direct cash-for-access kind of a deal, though that does work and we’re seeing The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, you could call them crowd-funded, they are moving from advertising reliance to subscription reliance, and their subscription rates are two to three times what they used to be. Their journalism’s very good, so the idea that people won’t pay for news is simply not true.

If you give people a product that they can’t get anywhere else that’s really high quality, they will pay for it.

Host: At Northwestern, Rich Gordon has also seem smaller communities rally behind a journalism product that serves their specific needs.

Rich Gordon: Hyper Local is a very interesting space. It’s one that I’ve been involved in in a lot of different ways.

Host: Rich and his students have created several digital first, hyper local journalism projects. Hyper local refers to a neighborhood or a very small town or, in the case of Skokie, a single suburb of Chicago.

Rich Gordon: The starting point the students had … There are people already in our community who know things that we need to harness to share with their neighbors that, in some cases, those are institutions like, say, the library or the city council or the YMCA. In other cases, it’s just average, ordinary citizens who know things that others should know about, so the students set out to build on, I would say, it was actually one of the first, probably one of the first 10 hyper local news sites in the country. Now there are hundreds of them, and I’d say all of them, to some extent, one of their differentiators is that it’s not just about the journalists and their reporting and what they tell, but it’s also how do you harness what the community itself knows to share with others.

Host: The project was a vital one.

Rich Gordon: After the class was over, the Skokie Public Library actually absorbed it and continues it today essentially as a community news source for the village of Skokie. I think sometimes journalists can help provide the platform and the venue and the audience for that to happen.

Host: You’re listening to The Front Row by 2U. Back at Syracuse, Joel Kaplan thinks there are other reasons people are more willing to pay for journalism, niche or mainstream.

Joel Kaplan: It’s very hard to get people to pay for something when you’ve given it to them for free for so long, but why now? It’s Donald Trump is the main part of that. He is making journalism great again.

Host: Joel is feeling [inaudible 00:20:48] by recent events. Newspapers were slow to respond to the disruption of their industry, really slow, but they are finally embracing new technologies, and this is dovetailed with one heck of a presidential news cycle.

Joel Kaplan: Who’s leading the way? It’s the companies that have paywalls. It’s The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and people are now willing to pay that because this is affecting them directly.

Host: But there’s still the matter of social media and mobile to deal with.

Joel Kaplan: No one’s going to be getting news from anything other than their phones. The phone is now the computer, and it’s the media and it’s everything you’re going to want from it.

Host: But on mobile, most people get their news from social media for free.

Joel Kaplan: Legacy media are kind of, at this point, they have them over the barrel. It’s not like they could tell Google to go screw … Because then they’re screwing themselves. Now can they cut a good deal with them? Can they cut a good deal with Facebook? Can they cut a good deal with Google? Say, “Okay, fine, we’re going to get you use … Facebook use our product, but we want to share the revenue here.”

Host: While they haggle with Facebook, The Washington Post and The New York Times are working on faster loading mobile sites. In the meantime, a backlash against fake news might also be a savior.

Joel Kaplan: I noticed that there was a newsfeed that would be poli, P-O-L-I dot co, makes you think it’s political, but it’s not political, and that’s where people were kind of creating their own stories, fake news. People would believe it. You had that pizza gate situation where someone actually wrote a story saying that Hilary Clinton and John Podesta were running a child abuse ring out of this pizza parlor, and a guy actually read it and believed it and brought a gun to it to save the children, so that gatekeeper function is gone, and you have this immediacy of everyone saying, “No. That’s true. That’s not true,” and the notion of facts becomes a very amorphous type thing.

Host: Fake news has also reinforced the need for trustworthy news sources.

Joel Kaplan: I think there’s an underst- … There’s a realization and understanding that you can’t have a democracy unless you have a vibrant media, a vibrant press, and if you start losing that then you’re going to lose the democracy.

Host: People will always want credible, informative news, but how we’ll receive it and how it’s made in years to come is always evolving. Print, even digital print, will become less dominant as virtual reality, interactive data visualizations, podcasts, and technology we don’t even know about yet will shape news production in unpredictable ways. In this environment, academics like Rich Gordon, Cheryl Phillips, and Joel Kaplan will continue to explore and teach the intersection of technology and journalism. Entrepreneurs like Jesse Brown will find new ways to fund the news and Adam Smith will extend the reach of robotic journalists.

It’s not so much a question of whether journalism has a future, it’s what that future will look like.

Next time on The Front Row, we’ll look at the future of education. This podcast is brought to you by 2U. 2U is a company that partners with great colleges and universities to build the world’s best digital education. To find out more or to get in touch, visit us. We’re at 2you.com/podcast. That’s the number two and the letter U, or tweet us at @2Uinc. Listen to us on Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.