Reimagining local election coverage for community trust with NYU’s Jay Rosen (LNM Episode 36)

Jay Rosen, a prominent media theorist and professor of journalism at New York University, discusses the critical role of local election coverage and the Citizens Agenda model as an alternative to the traditional horse race approach. He emphasizes the need for local journalists to ground election coverage in the concerns of their communities, addressing local issues and fostering a sense of reality in election news.

Rosen also explores the polarization in American politics and the unique challenges faced by local newsrooms in this environment. He advocates for a more engaged and rigorous approach to local election coverage, including thorough background research and the creation of valuable voter guides. He shares his thoughts on the role of opinion pages and endorsements in local newspapers and their impact on public trust.

Additionally, Rosen reflects on the economics of local news, highlighting various subsidy models such as advertising, memberships, and philanthropic support. He underscores the importance of citizen journalism and the evolving role of community involvement in sustaining local journalism. The discussion also delves into the enduring relevance of Neil Postman’s media theories in the internet age and the potential pathways for the future of journalism.

Episode chapters:
(00:02:55) – Election coverage and the Citizens Agenda
(00:08:33) – The importance of local election coverage
(00:14:07) – Polarization in politics and the role of local journalism
(00:19:10) – Table stakes for local election coverage
(00:22:49) – Opinion pages and endorsements in local newspapers
(00:25:56) – How the national press is handling the 2024 election
(00:33:21) – Defending democracy without inviting accusations of partisanship
(00:38:02) – The economics of local news
(00:47:38) – The role of citizen journalism
(00:52:37) – Neil Postman’s media theories in the Internet age
(01:01:40) – Signs of hope
(01:07:53) – Media recommendations

Listen to the episode here:

Bio:

Jay Rosen has been teaching journalism at New York University since1986. He is the author of PressThink, a blog about journalism and its ordeals (www.pressthink.org), which he introduced in September 2003. In 1999, Yale University Press published his book, What Are

Journalists For?, which is about the rise of the civic journalism movement during the pre-internet era. In 2017 he became director of the Membership Puzzle Project, funded by the Knight Foundation, Democracy Fund and Luminate. It studies membership models for sustainability in news. Rosen is also an active press critic with a focus on problems in the coverage of politics. On Twitter he is @jayrosen_nyu.

Full transcript:

(recorded via Riverside.fm; transcript automated via Castmagic.io, mostly unedited)

JAY ROSEN [00:00:00]:Local journalists should consult their communities as opposed to consulting their peers in the national press on what they need out of their campaign coverage. And I think the reason campaign coverage at the local level is so important is now in the world that we are in and the election year that we are in is that, a sense of reality can come back to election news that way. So I think any kind of campaign coverage that grounds election journalism in an observable world is better. When people are talking about and arguing about something concrete in their environment, like, jeez, that bridge collapsed, and we need to fix that, or how can we have better schools, or our kids are afraid of being shot. What are we gonna do about that? Or how do we know how to persuade our young people to stay in town as opposed to leave or elsewhere? How do we restore local businesses? Think questions like that are grounding in a very important way. And they allow people to kind of like get their bearings in a real world. And I think that's what election coverage should be.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:01:31]: Welcome to the Local News Matters podcast, where we explore pathways to stronger journalism, better businesses, and healthier communities. I'm Tim Regan-Porter, CEO of the Colorado Press Association.

This episode, I talk with Jay Rosen, one of the country's foremost media theorists and critics. As a professor of journalism at New York University since 1986, Jay has been a pioneering advocate for citizen journalism and a prominent critic of “both sides-ism” and the “view from nowhere” in journalism. In addition to his academic and critical work, Jay was director of the Membership Puzzle Project and an advisor for Pierre Omidyar's First Look Media. Our conversation delves into his insights on election coverage and the Citizens' Agenda, the economics of news, and the enduring relevance of Neil Postman’s media theories.

If you like this episode and what we're doing more generally, please follow in your favorite podcast app, leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, and tell your friends about us. This is a side project and a labor of love, and your support means a lot. You can find past episodes, full transcripts, and relevant links, and sign up for our newsletter at localnewsmatterspodcast.com, or for lazy typists like me at lnmpod.com. You also follow us on most social media channels @lnmpod.

And now I bring you Jay Rosen.

Alright. Well, welcome, Jay Rosen. It's an honor and a pleasure.

JAY ROSEN [00:02:54]: Thanks to have me, Tim.

Election coverage and the Citizens Agenda

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:02:55]: So I wanna talk about a number of things during this interview if we have the time. First off, election coverage and the citizens agenda, and then maybe broaden it into a discussion of the economics of news and citizen journalism, and hopefully end with a discussion of Neil Postman and what he might say about this moment in time.

JAY ROSEN [00:03:15]: That's a good list of topics for me.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:03:17]: Why don't you start off and just and, you know, give me the elevator pitch of what is Citizens Agenda?

JAY ROSEN [00:03:22]: The Citizens Agenda is an alternative model for election coverage that doesn't begin where the national press tends to begin. That is the approach normally described as the horse race model for election coverage. The horse race model begins with questions like, who's gonna win? And how do they propose to put together a winning campaign? And what are the tactics that the candidates are using to get ahead, and, of course, what did the polls say. And the citizens of dead day is an alternative way of understanding campaign coverage and a different way of starting. The citizens agenda model starts not with the candidates and their programs and their tactics, but instead with the voters and the readers, viewers, listeners. And it begins by asking a very simple question of the people that you are trying to inform. And that question is, what do you want the candidates to be talking about as they compete for votes? What do you want the candidates to be talking about as they compete for votes? And the proposition is that if you can ask enough people that question, and by enough people, I don't mean dozens or 100, I mean 1, 000 or maybe even more than 1,000, you will start to find patterns, and you will begin to get a deep understanding of here’s what the voters expect from the candidates, which is a more reliable way to ground your campaign coverage. And if you keep going, you'll begin to hear themes in responses that voters give.

JAY ROSEN [00:05:18]: And after a while, you'll recognize that people's answers begin to repeat themselves, that there are clear priorities emerging from this question. What do you want the candidates to be talking about is to compete for votes? And those are the priorities of the voters themselves. And so the next step is to take what you have heard and interpret it, name and frame it so that you can create a kind of priority list of what the voters want the candidates to be talking about. And a key step after that is to actually publish that priority list, and that would be publishing the citizen's agenda as opposed to the candidates and the spin doctors and the political machines and the parties. And if you can publish the citizens agenda as you heard it from the voters, then there's lots of other things that you can do with it. For example, you can use that list of priorities as a list for your own priorities in deciding on what to investigate and where to put your journalistic resources. Obviously, when you have questions and concerns coming from the voters and you're using that to design your campaign coverage, you're gonna wanna ask the candidates the questions that the voters have, and you're gonna want the candidates to talk about the things that the voters said they wanted to hear about. Finally, one of the most valuable things that local newsrooms can do in their election coverage is usually called a voter's guide.

JAY ROSEN [00:07:09]: And a voters guide is a if you can imagine a rectangular piece of paper because very often it is a piece of paper with, the candidates down the left hand margin and then the important issues, problems, concerns across the top, and the guide tells you what each of the candidates says or believes or has proposed about this list of campaign priorities. Those kinds of resources are often the most valuable thing that local newsrooms publish, and these voters guides often are in a lot of demand, and you'll be able to create an outstanding voters guide because you're starting with really good information about what voters want the candidates to be discussing. Also, another thing, and that and then then I'll, I'll just close, is that one of the strange things about horse race journalism is that nobody really knows what it is to succeed at it. How do you know if you've won? In the citizen's agenda approach, you win when you get the candidates to address the priorities that you know the voters have, and that is success at Citizens Agenda style election coverage. And if you do it the right way, people will appreciate it.

The importance of local election coverage

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:08:33]: There's a lot to dig into there. But first, I wanna sort of set the background here for a lot of, you know, casual listeners, casual news readers. When they think of election coverage, they think of national races. Right? Maybe statewide races at most and maybe even some journalists. But election coverage at the local level is crucial, and I I think too many of our local newspapers, local newsrooms in general have abdicated that partly because their model is the national horse race coverage. And, you know, they know they can't do that and they aren't—even the polls don't exist often at the local level. But doing things like, you know, backgrounding candidates is something they can do. A voter guide is certainly something they can do.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:09:17]: And a citizen's agenda is something that takes time to do it well. But I think maybe — the one of the most important things they can do for their local community. So when you survey the landscape, you know, you've criticized the press a lot for its national coverage. What do you see at the local level? And maybe you can just address that that bit about, you know, why it's important and who do you see doing it really well?

JAY ROSEN [00:09:42]: What I would like to see is for the flow of influence to kind of go the other way. As you suggested, I don't think local newsrooms should be taking their cues for how to do good election coverage from CBS and, the Atlantic Magazine and, CNN, and the New York Times. I don't think that the flow of influence should run that way. It should be maybe the other way around or local journalists must, should consult their communities as opposed to consulting their peers in the national press on what they need out of their campaign coverage. And I think the reason campaign coverage at the local level is so important is now in the world that we are in and the election year that we are in, is that, a sense of reality can come back to election news that way. I think a lot of political scientists and, observers of politics in the US have noticed that the weakness of local journalism and the strength of, populism and and the MAGA movement and the threats on democracy, and the systems, and institutions that we have expected will be normal for us, that those trends kind of go hand in hand when local news doesn't do its job well. It's kind of abandons voters to a national and very polarized environment, that is sort of less and less real in many ways. So I think any kind of campaign coverage that grounds election journalism in an observable world is better.

JAY ROSEN [00:11:39]: When people are talking about and arguing about something concrete in their environment, like, jeez, that bridge collapsed and we need to fix that, or how can we have better schools, or our kids are afraid of being shot. What are we gonna do about that, Or how do we know how to persuade our young people to stay in town as opposed to leave or elsewhere? How do we restore local businesses? Think questions like that are grounding in a very important way, and they're they allow people to kind of, like, get their bearings in a real world. And I think that's what election coverage should be. Who's doing that? I can't tell you who's doing exactly that, but I think it's a current or a mood that exists in a lot of local places where people are highly aware of the culture war between left and right, but they're also exhausted by it. But I would, say it pays to to follow the Texas tribune, which is a leading nonprofit, well staffed, extremely serious newsroom that, I think does set a kind of standard for, local journalism, even though it's a very big state and it's not exactly same kind of community that you might find in Colorado. So that that's the place that I look for, leadership, but I'm also finding that all kinds of, local newsrooms from legacy properties to recently created digital news properties are looking for a better way to do election coverage because it's something that they can can create value with does affect their relationship to, readers, viewers, and and listeners. And I think that there we're almost not quite, but we're almost at the precipice where given newsrooms are more open to new ideas than they are likely to follow the lead of the national press. And that's taken a long time, but I think we're almost there.

Polarization in politics and the role of local journalism

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:14:07]: One of the reasons I think newsrooms have shied away from electoral coverage beyond, you know, sort of a basic who won is that everything we do these days is so politicized. There was a story a few years ago about a photographer showing up to a high school football game who got accosted as being, you know, an enemy of the people. But one of the things I like about the citizens agenda is I think it puts in a whole different dynamic that you're reaching out to your community and asking them what's important. And oftentimes, that does go beyond a simple left right divide. I mean, here in Colorado, you know, the reintroduction of wolves does not break down cleanly on a left/right divide. It's, you know, more maybe a rural/urban at best. So I think the the more you stick to a citizen's agenda and you're really getting the community outside of national politics to talk about their local community and what matters to them and what they want from their politicians, It has the potential to to reshape the conversation and and be able to have real conversations that aren't so polarized along traditional lines.

JAY ROSEN [00:15:16]: Yes. And, I wanna add something to what you said. The question I recommend be at the heart of election coverage is, as I said, what do you want the candidates to be discussing as they compete for votes, or what do you want the candidates to be talking about as they compete for votes? And if you look carefully at that wording, it isn't starting with what the political class calls the issues, Because issues, the way they are treated in the national political conversation, are these sort of abstractions and political footballs. There were ways of trying to knock out candidates and dominate races. And often, we don't even know what we mean by them, so like when we say the economy is an issue, you know, what does that really mean, right? And the issues are themselves sort of part of this campaign machinery or industry that we've gotten used to. So I recommend starting with a much more open ended question, which is, what do you want the conversation to be? What do you want people to be talking about? Now that could be an issue like border patrols and what's happening at the border. That's a very concrete issue, but it could also be something much more incolate than that. You know, a sense of decline, for example.

JAY ROSEN [00:16:41]: That's not exactly an issue, but it might be something that's really important to voters. And so that's how I see the citizens agenda is it's a way of humanizing election coverage and creating room for people to talk about what is missing in their political life. And then to try and sculpt election coverage from that. Also, for new for newsrooms that are aware that they only reach part of the community that they want to address, which is a lot of newsrooms, then election coverage and the citizens agenda model can be an opportunity to begin to reach out to audiences and markets that you don't reach now, but you want to or think you should. And how do you do it? Well, you go there and you ask those people, what do you want the candidates to be recognized as they compete for votes? And you make a special point of listening to those parts of the population that maybe have tuned you out.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:17:56]: And one of the things, you know, I like about the way, you know, you and others have positioned, the citizen agenda is there's a, you know, there's a little bit of rigor to it. I mean, there's definitely an approach that it goes well beyond, you know, a Vox Pop or man on the street type of approach where you've got your central question you're trying to ask, and you have a certain threshold you're trying to get a sense of the entire community. And so it's not just random people that you find at a public event. And I think that's an important piece of it.

JAY ROSEN [00:18:32]: Yes. That's a very important piece of it. And that's why I say in my list of steps needed to take to do this kind of election coverage, the first step is to identify who your community really is. And, you know, the voters is not a very good answer to that question. So the first step is identify the people that you are trying to inform with your election coverage. And, obviously, that requires you to know something about them and to be realistic about who you're reaching and not reaching.

Table stakes for local election coverage

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:19:10]: In addition to—I mean, I think the citizens agenda is really about getting at those core questions and changing the nature of how you cover politics. But there are also some table stakes that I think if you're gonna be serious about your local elections, you need to do some background research. You know, you need to check criminal records and property records and find out—and those types of things. And I think a lot of local newsrooms as they've shrunk have given up on that, frankly. I was talking with an editor of a metro daily. This was (in) a small sized, midsized town, maybe 200,000. And it had, you know, shrunk over the years from a height of well over a hundred, maybe close to 200. Four years before this conversation, they were at 40, 50 people, and they were down to 12.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:19:58]: And the editor was lamenting, you know, we don't have time to do any of that stuff, but they still had 12 people. And this is a paper now that's practically a ghost paper. And I think a whole lot of communities of that size would love to have 12 journalists on staff. So some of this is about prioritizing doing some of that basic work. And I don't know if you've seen that around the country or

JAY ROSEN [00:20:19]: Yes, of course. I mean, this is the story of local journalism everywhere. Almost everywhere is trying to succeed with fewer people. There's, you know, disinvestment, on a large scale in this industry, but there's also a lot of people coming into it who are refusing to give up the dream of real local journalism, and they are part of the communities that they are trying to serve. That is to say, they care about local journalism because they care about that locale, which is a little different than a chain of newspapers that has properties across the country. And so it's true that lots of newsrooms are trying to do more with less, to use a cliche. But as you say, what is more important than election coverage that actually helps people make a smart choice? There's there's very few things that are more important than that if you wanna be trusted and you wanna be useful, and if you want to prove that you are a part of this community, I think it's one of the most important things that you can do. Now, ideally, at the same time, things like candidate profiles, who are these people, are important.

JAY ROSEN [00:21:49]: If there are, there also could be issues and problems that are already here or coming that maybe voters don't see the importance of at the time, but the journalists do. And there has to be room for that as well. So sometimes publics, plural, don't know what's around the corner over the horizon that they're gonna have to be dealing with in the next few years. And in situations like that, you want newsrooms to be able to say, hey, you're not thinking about this, but you know what? You should be. But the only way people are gonna pay attention to something like that, a warning, is if they respect you in the first place. And that's how the citizens agenda works. It's not just an alternative way of writing news stories. It's an alternative way of bidding for the audience's trust.

Opinion pages and endorsements in local newspapers

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:22:49]: Related to that, you know, a lot of newspapers have completely given up on opinion, and that's, you know, some of the smallest ones all the way up to some of the large chains. What's your what's your thought on that and how that might impact our coverage?

JAY ROSEN [00:23:04]: I have conflicted feelings about that. A lot of those opinion pages were really sleepy. You know, they contained syndicated columns, which were very predictable from Washington on either side of, you know, Democrats and Republicans, and they had editorials in an institutional voice from people sort of speaking on high and maybe a columnist or two. And there was a kind of exhaustion, reached by that format, I thought. And so I didn't really mind seeing it go away. On the other hand, when you risk an opinion and say, this is what we believe, or this is what I believe as your editor, you are in a way accountable for those beliefs. And it's a way of showing you care about this community. That can't be a bad thing.

JAY ROSEN [00:24:07]: So when I started to see the headlines which did show up about the shrinking, disappearing editorial page, on the one hand, I was not upset to see something that had really performed poorly leave the stage, but I also thought there were better uses of that space and that energy. And so that a good way of approaching that would be to, okay, dump the old style opinion page, but replace it with something better. Engagement with the community, engagement with those that you're not reaching, or trust building projects, or an innovation page, you know, a place where you can experiment with different kinds of coverage. And so that's what I thought should happen with the somewhat moribund editorial pages, opinion pages, is not to just phase them out because opinions tend to enrage and divide our audience, which is another thing that was happening. But instead overhaul those, into something that becomes kind of an engine for progress.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:25:23]: And when it comes to endorsements and and as newsrooms, more newsrooms become nonprofit, that really goes out the window. Do you have similar conflicted feelings or do you think endorsements?

JAY ROSEN [00:25:34]: I mean, endorsements had their most powerful effects when you had low turnout elections, you know, and that doesn't speak well of the forum. You know? If it's working the most powerfully when most people aren't paying attention, that's not great for democracy.

How the national press is handling the 2024 election

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:25:56]: Before we move on to the economics of local news and citizen journalism, how do you think the national press is doing this election season compared to, you know, the more recent ones?

JAY ROSEN [00:26:10]: I'll start with the part that's laudable, which is I think they've sort of learned some of their lessons with Donald Trump. They're much more skeptical about him. They use one of the more commented upon parts of this, they are willing to call out the lies when he does that. That's good. They're unlikely to, just hand over the microphone to Trump and let him do his thing without fact checking, without discretion. That's a good thing. And they are at least aware that not it's not just the offices of president and vice president that are at stake in that election, but in many ways, American democracy is at stake. I think that they grasp that.

JAY ROSEN [00:27:08]: Sometimes they talk about it. There is widespread agreement among the national press that this isn't like any other election cycle, which is good to see because that's an important reality to face up to. But turning to a deeper sense of what's going on in our political system, basically, here's what I saw happen and that's still happening. The model for political coverage at the national level was based on a picture of American politics that no longer applies. What I mean by that is that coming out of World War II, there was actually, a pretty broad consensus, sometimes called the Washington Consensus or the American Consensus that underlied the 2 party system, and it was assumed that the two parties, were engaged in more or less the same kind of politics, and they just had different philosophies, but they operated in the same way. And there was kind of a symmetry between the two parties. And you really saw this, often in election years because first, the Democrats had their convention, then the Republicans had their convention, then, you had these rituals where each side named its vice president. And, it was all very, symmetrical, and it was on the foundation of that symmetry, that a kind of symmetry of practice developed in journalism where you could stand in the middle between the two parties, appreciate the tactics and, appeals they made to their respective electorates, and focused your energy on who's gonna win.

JAY ROSEN [00:29:05]: And that whole apparatus of horse race politics, along with the savvy style that I've criticized where journalists begin to, appreciate technique in political life and become themselves kind of expert pundits about what's going to happen. All of that was based on this assumption that there was a kind of consensus in American politics about who wins and loses and how you govern and what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. And what has happened, of course, since the—I mean, it started happening in the mid-90s, but it really accelerated with Trump is that Republican Party started to go off in a different direction from the Republic—than the Democrats did. And so now instead of this consensus or symmetry in the political sphere, we had asymmetry between the two parties. And I don't think that the national press corps has quite a—or has really at all regrounded itself around this fact that we now have one normal political party, not perfect, not good even, but just normal political party and the Democrats and something completely different emerging from the Republicans. And, basically, the national press has not adjusted to that fact. Instead, it took the tools and rituals and tactics that it had from a prior era and decided to go into the 2024 elections with that equipment from the past.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:30:52]: And, you know, many years ago, you know, for probably close to two decades, you can probably pinpoint the time period. You know, you've called out national media for both sides, climate change being a canonical example. But now that you've got this asymmetry, that becomes a real problem. I mean, it was a problem 20 years ago, but now it's something else.

JAY ROSEN [00:31:16]: Yeah. It's retina collapse, you know, I—we have a risk of backsliding and in our democracy that is extremely real and and extremely depressing in a lot of ways. And, it's not just the hostility to journalism that is telling us this. It's really almost every knowledge profession is under attack. It's not just journalists. It's also the people who, for example, brief Donald Trump when he was president, noticed that he wouldn't even listen to what they were saying, and they tried to dumb it down, and even that didn't work for him. So any place where he had to kind of confront reality as opposed to his own song that he would sing was under attack.

JAY ROSEN [00:32:20]: So, like the intelligence community, experts of every kind, academics, we can now see that attack starting to unfold. Law enforcement, Department of Justice, everybody who's responsible for finding out what happened, for asking the question, did that really happen, what's happening next, all these systems of accountability or or just adjusting the political system to observable reality. Everything in politics that did that is under attack or, powerless or increasingly powerless. And that's a huge kind of slow-motion crisis that I don't think we have the language for, and I don't think we know how to, reply to it, and it's weakening all of the institutions of democracy. And that is a massive challenge for the political class that I don't think is being met.

Defending democracy without inviting accusations of partisanship

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:33:21]: And I think, you know, I do see more conversation about, you know, not the odds, but the stakes. But one of the, I think, sad realities is it's almost impossible to do that without being perceived by a huge portion of America as being partisan on someone's side. I don't know if you can split that baby. It's a bad metaphor. But if you can do not the odds but the stakes and not come across, you know, to 40% of America as being partisan, do you have any thoughts on that?

JAY ROSEN [00:33:58]: One way that I try to conceive of this is, to suggest that the central conflict on which political coverage should revolve is no longer this party against that party because that has been crashed by the asymmetry that I would've been talking about. Instead, the challenge was to reconfigure election coverage, as well as public discussion around a different pair of actors. One would be the people left and right, Republican and Democrat, who are willing to defend the institutions of American democracy and still believe in them versus the people who don't. And if our news or national newsrooms could have found a way to shift their coverage onto that dynamic, they would have been better off. But as I said earlier, they decided by not deciding, you know, how you can decide by not deciding. They decided to go into this election cycle with the same tools that they had from, you know, previous decades, even though they knew that they didn't really apply to the MAGA movement.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:35:23]: And I would just add, defend the institutions and defend reforming of the institutions. You know, the Times Siena poll showed just how much there is sort of a blow it up mentality. And people of color, people in underrepresented communities know that the institutions have failed, but there's a difference between reforming an institution and blowing it all up.

JAY ROSEN [00:35:45]: Right. There this movement of people willing to blow it all up shows that there had been deterioration of the American democracy for a long time that neither party addressed, and we are paying the consequences for that now. But you're right. It's not just that if you do look at the stakes clearly in this election, you will sound like a partisan. That's part of it. And I think you articulated that well. But there's another thing that's even more elusive. It's and it's almost impossible to explain, but I'll give it a little go here.

JAY ROSEN [00:36:27]: When you begin to contemplate this different conflict that's going on between the people who wanna blow up all the institutions and those who wanna retain them, some very basic things become suddenly threatened. Like, for example, reality itself, truth. And what happens is that those words then become so get taken up by this totally polarized debate. And within a few months, they become meaningless themselves. So the tools that you have for dry —- for drawing attention to the threat to democracy kind of evaporate in our hands because both sides just quickly pick them up and start using them for any ill thing, which Steve Bannon actually described well when he said that the Democrats aren't the real opposition. The real opposition is the media, and the way to deal with the media for the MAGA movement is to flood the zone with shit. And that was a very, not wise, but accurate assessment of how this kind of mechanism works. And, we're still seeing new examples of flooding in the zone, which is also, of course, making politics and mistakes illegible.

The economics of local news

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:38:02]: Well, as a way to transition to the economics of news, I wanna go back to my table stakes example of these newsrooms doing that basic research. When George Santos first ran, you know, his—a local newspaper did uncover some of the malfeasance and the lies, and it did not get picked up. And it I think that's a change from, you know, the heyday of local news where you almost have, like, a feeder chain and people were paying attention and a story like that would have made it to the New York Times or the New York Post or the Wall Street Journal or someone would have picked up on that. So we're at risk certainly of losing those local newspapers doing it in the first place and having local newspapers to do it. But we're also at risk and it happened, you know, where they did the work and it didn't get amplified. How do we — you have any thoughts on just starting to address that crisis in local news?

JAY ROSEN [00:38:55]: I don't know how to address it. I think it is first our task to try and describe it better than we have. One way of describing that is to say that journalists are in competition, not only with the other guy down the street who has a competing publication, they're in competition with every other thing you might use on the internet that might occupy your time. And we were raised, I was at least, under conditions of sort of information scarcity. And now our problems are much more problems of information overload, abundance. And the effects that the openness of the Internet where anybody can say anything or any individual user can reach every other user, are those new conditions are basically unbuilding, to use a word that doesn't exist, unbuilding the systems that we had for distributing the news and arguing about it and influencing public opinion, and it's just much more of a free for all where the voice of journalists saying, here's what's going on, is a minority voice. And one of the things that I have tried to describe about this shift, I call, verification in reverse. Verification students in journalism school me, often learn is to me really the heart of the journalistic enterprise.

JAY ROSEN [00:40:35]: Verification is asking, did that really happen? And, how do we know? And who, what, where, when, why? Checking your facts. These are like the basic skills and contributions that journalists have and if they have authority, they have to build that authority on their skill and determination in verifying what actually happened. So for example, yesterday, the president of Iran, his helicopter crashed and apparently he's dead. Right? Verification would be finding out what actually happened and why did that helicopter get crashed, and where did it happen, and, was it natural, or was it a crime, or whatever? This is the basic act that journalists are involved in. But, and there and and there are ways of proving what happened, and those are what you learn when you take an investigative reporting class. So documents are really important. Donald Trump came on the political scene when he discovered the power of verification in reverse, that's my term for it. If verification is taking something that we have heard of or might be true and nailing it down with facts, with evidence, with documents, with interviews, then verification is in reverse is taking something that's been nailed down and casting doubt on it.

JAY ROSEN [00:42:06]: And when you do that, there's a bit of a reaction and the reaction is full of conflict and controversy and noise and charge and counter charge, and you can take all of that action and power your candidacy or your political campaign with it. And that's a description of how Trump bounced onto the scene in 2015 when he became a birther. It questioned whether Obama was actually a citizen of the US. And journalists had an answer to that, which was, here's the document. He was born in Honolulu. He was born in Hawaii. That's it. It's over.

JAY ROSEN [00:42:51]: But to Trump, it wasn't over. So this is fascinating to me that casting doubt on what is known to be true, doesn't injure your cause in this kind of politics. It actually can be the foundation and the energy that you need to succeed in MAGA politics. And we don't know how to describe that. We don't know why we're afflicted with that. And we certainly don't know what we are going to do to change that. And this is the kind of problem that I stay awake at night trying to just get my mind around, let alone begin to address. And I'm sorry it took so long to explain.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:43:42]: And so I'm wondering, you know, you worked on the membership puzzle project. You worked alongside the correspondent. You see, you've done some things to try to address the economics of local news. What have you learned about what works and maybe what doesn't work?

JAY ROSEN [00:44:00]: What I've learned is I start this way with my students. Every public service newsroom is subsidized by something. And subsidy systems come into practice and fall out of practice because of changes in the larger environment, changes in the media system, essentially. And there is no subsidy system that has ever emerged without drawbacks and weak spots and threats, as part of it. So advertising is a very well known subsidy system, and everybody has a sense of what some of the disadvantages of that system are, primarily news coverage that is conservative or doesn't risk in any way any part of the market, is a familiar weakness in advertising based subsidy sources. But every other system known to humankind for supporting serious journalism has its weak points. And, subsidy systems can falter and break and stop working. And so we need to find new ones.

JAY ROSEN [00:45:23]: And I think this portion of the subject is changing a little bit at the local level when you would know this as well as I. There are, you know, different kinds of subsidies being imagined, discussed, fought over. You have government subsidies coming online or at least being debated, proposed. You have massive efforts. They're not massive enough, but they're still pretty big in the foundation, and philanthropy sector, giving a boost to local journalism. People who are themselves part of one or two person news organizations are oftentimes are subsidizing that work through one partner's salary and spouses who have another job or any way that they can. So we're seeing a shift in the subsidy superstructure of all journalism, and I think we're in the middle of it, so it's sort of hard to see. But the old system is clearly breaking apart, and even the not so recent system like digital advertising is kind of falling apart at the same time.

JAY ROSEN [00:46:42]: And so that's the way I saw membership. Membership is another subsidy system that has its advantages and disadvantages. And so I spent four or five years researching that and trying to clarify what was different about membership compared to a more common subsidy system that we hear a lot about, which is digital subscriptions, and that's important too. We need both. We need many more than that. And I believe that there are probably many subsidy forms out there that could be effective in funding journalism, and we just haven't tried them yet. We just haven't imagined them yet. We have been too conservative in our thinking, And I think there's lots of ways we could subsidize serious journalism if we kinda went back and started over.

The role of citizen journalism

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:47:38]: And, you know, I think regardless of those subsidy systems and whether we find something that works better than what's currently working, Press Forward, membership donations, you know, some new advertising model. I don't think we're ever going back to the heydays of local newsrooms, you know, with hundreds of people in them outside of, you know, a small handful. And I think citizen involvement is going to be crucial, and you've been a proponent of citizen journalism or public journalism for a very long time. You were very early on that, beating that bell, ringing that bell. How do you see that going right now, and what future you know, how would you like to see that evolve, or what ideas do you have?

JAY ROSEN [00:48:28]: Well, what I'm seeing is things that weren't a part of the subsidy system at all are now opening to it. That's what the discussions about government funding are about. You know, you see it in Canada. You see it in California. I don't know how far that that discussion has gotten in Colorado, but wouldn't be surprised if it starts there too. So but that used to be a no no, and now it's more like, maybe, you know, and that's a change. Similarly, in the philanthropy realm, local philanthropy, community foundations always had an interest in the local media system, but they expressed that interest as essentially, please print our press releases about the wonderful programs that we have funded. And they did want that system to exist, but it took them a long time to realize that they're not gonna have any way of reaching the community if they don't support it themselves as community foundations.

JAY ROSEN [00:49:35]: That is that little shift right there, which is basically a shift in mind that took like 10, 15 years. And this is one of the problems in this whole discussion, Tim, is the adoption curve in journalism, it's just too damn long. It takes too long for the profession, the industry, the institution to recognize that something has to change and change it. To use a very different example, it is now common practice in networks and local TV to say that the shooter at a mass shooting event shouldn't be the focus of your coverage and shouldn't get a lot of airtime because that actually encourages other shooters to shoot. Right? And that this is a pretty common, ethical step that many newsrooms have taken now, and it's sort of like that's basic practice. But that took 10 or 15 years to come to. And we don't have that much time. So I'm seeing shifts.

JAY ROSEN [00:50:42]: I'm seeing openness to more models than used to be, standard. Membership would be one of them. I think the move to digital script subscription is a good one, and it's positive in the sense that if you are trying to sell people on subscriptions that they will renew indefinitely, you have to listen to them. You have to understand them much better. And that's a positive thing. Membership takes that even further and says not only do you have to understand those people, you have to offer them ways of participating in the support of their news source. So those are all positive signs, but I think we need more entrepreneurial energy here, and we need new institutions, not just government and community foundations to come along and be part of this movement of figuring out what the new sources of subsidy are. I'm kind of, I'm not not fully, but a little bit, optimistic here that the fact that journalism is still really important, clearly of civic significance, and also for those people who have done it, a lot of fun.

JAY ROSEN [00:52:12]: That is still a magnet that draws people into journalism. And I think it's still there. And I think it can be drawn in such a way that this puzzle that we're talking about, the next subsidy system and how we can get it to work, is an attractive problem to creative people, and I would like to see more of those people drawn into the discussion.

Neil Postman’s media theories in the Internet age

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:52:37]: And so now I wanna pivot to talk a little bit about Neil Postman. You and I, when you visited Macon, at least for me, it was a great opportunity to geek out a little bit. You studied under Neil Postman. I believe he was a bit of a mentor. He was your dissertation advisor at NYU. For those who don't know, Neil Postman, one of the most influential media theorists, I would say, of the last half of the 20th Century. People might know his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. I would also highly recommend Technopoly, which is a book I read actually in my MBA program.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:53:14]: And he's got a number of others. They're all worth reading. You know, he wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death as a response to the TV age and what TV as a medium was doing to our politics and our culture. And of course, we're now in the internet age, and he passed before that had really taken hold. I think he had addressed a little bit. But how would you say he would modify his critique of media's influence on culture now in the Internet age?

JAY ROSEN [00:53:47]: Yeah. We didn't really get to see that happen because he passed, too quickly. He was also, in many ways, kind of anti-technology in the sense that he would always say things like, I'm being served with solutions to questions I never asked. You know, that's how we saw the internet. It's answering for me a question I never asked. So why do I wanna spend my time online? And he didn’t, he never went even to the step of having an email account. He did give his letters to secretaries to type on the Internet and send via email, but as far as I know, he never used that himself. But I think he would be drawn to the sheer overflow of information that you can see in that remark by Steve Bannon flooding the zone with shit.

JAY ROSEN [00:54:54]: I think he would pick up on something like that right away. The idea of information abundance as opposed to information scarcity would, I think, be a critical part of his explanations. And also, he would see the Internet as very much fulfilling a kind of a prophecy that he had that finding a pleasurable way of passing time and being alive, which is what he saw as entertainment values were continuing to grow and over, the values of the printed word or the era of reading and writing. And I think he would he would see the Internet as a vast confirmation, but also complication of his argument in amelting ourselves to death where he said what we should be fearful of is not the next Hitler, but of these machines that are gonna sort of coax us to do their bidding by being more satisfying, being more fun, to being more of, more of a kick than sitting down and reading a book. And now with AI, there might be an intensification of that, where forms of entertainment, which are basically ways of spending time in a fun way, the Internet is going to be, and computer technology is going to now be put to that cause. And I think he would see this as sort of successive iterations of what he argued in his books about the death of print culture.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:56:43]: And, you know, those aspects of of the flooding the zone critique, if people read nothing else other than the introduction to Amusing Ourselves to Death where he contrasts Orwell with Huxley, where, you know, Orwell feared that that the government would censor information and And this is kind of how Postman posits it and Huxley feared they wouldn't need to because we would just be so flooded with information and entertainment that it wouldn't matter what was out there. And I do think we see that increasingly in this era whereas our power has waned, but also all of the other changes, politicians increasingly don't care what you uncover. They don't even have to spin it that hard or or even claim that it's false. It's just almost like a so what? You know, it's today's story. Tomorrow will be on to something else.

JAY ROSEN [00:57:32]: Yeah. Or it's even worse as I tried to explain with verification and reverse it. In some ways, they court the controversy that comes with public lying and misinformation and disinformation. It's not like they are afraid of it. It's more like they're embracing it.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:57:54]: The other parallel I see in Amusing Ourselves to Death that he captured very well that applies even more so now is what today we might term sort of the vibe's take on things. And, you know, he talked about it in terms of television and political candidates and how it's just the impression we get. How do they look on TV? And I think you see an entire political system now that is run by vibes, vague impressions rather than people understanding the nuances and the substance.

JAY ROSEN [00:58:24]: Yeah. Or as Donald Trump likes to say, he looks like he comes from central casting. That's the kind of thing that I can easily imagine, you know, post some picking up on, you know, an underlining central casting.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:58:38]: And what do you think about, you know, if you were to update his theories, you know, one of the big changes, I think, from when he was critiquing this, you know, he was critiquing largely sort of the reliance on visual information, visual media, and how that changes things. Now it might be less reliance on visual, although, you know, there's plenty of TikToks and shorts and that sort of thing. But I think that it's the shortness that is in common. So it's tweets, it's headlines only. We tend to have, you know, he talked about the Lincoln Douglas debate and how people would sit for hours and how TV has shrunk our attention span. That is certainly on a whole another level now. How do you think that's changing our politics and our culture?

JAY ROSEN [00:59:21]: I think he was still fixed in the age of mass media with the emphasis on mass. And that is really being undone brick by brick by the internet. There's a very well formed phrase that the critic Raymond Williams developed about this who said, I put this on my sticker on my computer once it was, there's no such thing as the mass. There's only ways of seeing people as masses. There's no such thing as the mass. There's only ways of seeing people as masses. And I think Neil was at the tail end as a critic of seeing people as masses because the internet comes along and allows for specialization and personalization. And I think the dynamic there of how the internet kind of seduces us and creeps into everything has a lot more to do with personalization than with mass thinking or mass media. And I think this is one of the challenges to interpreters and critics is to try and describe that difference..

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:00:49]: And, you know, I think one of the things that points to one of the chief problems I think we have because of that personalization is we increasingly lack a shared base of facts.

JAY ROSEN [01:01:00]: And this is really devastating to subjects like journalism, but also to us as academics because we thought we kinda had a handle on that. You know? And now it doesn't seem that way at all.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:01:16]: Do you see any paths out?

JAY ROSEN [01:01:19]: No. At the moment, I don't. I think about it every day. Literally every day, but, it's one of numerous puzzles created by this attack on our institutions that have left me kind of floored.

Signs of hope

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:01:40]: Well, so as not to leave us on a total bummer of a note, I'm gonna ask you for signs of hope that you might see, and, and I would be remiss and might have trouble showing up to our next team meeting if I didn't talk about voter voices, which is, a statewide project in Colorado that you've been kind enough to to talk a couple times to the people involved, where we are trying to do basically a citizen's agenda. I think we know we're still working out — how do we incorporate some of the pieces that we think would be good, like the actual writing of the agenda at the end. But we have something in the neighborhood of 40 newsrooms statewide who are collaborating and doing a statewide survey to try to ask the central question. I think they phrased it slightly differently, but the basic concept there, what do you want your, you know, your politicians to to be addressing? And so we've had thousands of responses so far, and I think we will continue to refine that. And, I look forward to seeing what comes out of that project. But, so what gives you hope in what you see out there?

JAY ROSEN [01:02:48]: Well, the Voters' Voice project does give me hope because it's many institutions agreeing to make a shift at the same time, and I'm very hopeful that, it can, solve some of the problems that are bound to arise and trying something that big and show the rest of the country, really that there is another way to do election coverage and that it can come from the states rather than from the journalists at the capitals and the media capitals, in the US. And I'm very encouraged by just the way that that project came together with all of these institutions, some of them nonprofit, some of them businesses, some of them recently founded, others that go back to the 19th century. Big, little, the largest newspaper and newsroom in the state is involved, and two or three people newsrooms that are involved. It's very exciting. It's kind of a democratic institution in itself. So I know that there are gonna be hard times and it's going to be much difficult to do than it is to describe, but I'm still very hopeful that something will come of that. Other signs that matter to me is the simple fact that young people still wanna go into journalism, is really inspiring. And the people who do the work—the most important work, like investigative journalism and exposing people like Epstein, for example, showing the power of the press and also showing how it can be used properly, the people in the profession who continued to do amazing work.

JAY ROSEN [01:04:47]: One of the paradoxes, at the moment is that there is in fact, more great journalism available to an individual citizen who wants it than there's ever been in the history of journalism. That is true. Of course, it's also surrounded by all these other forms of information that are kind of leeching power from journalism, but it's still generating lots of great work. And that inspires me. Also, I think there's a dawning recognition by people in journalism that, not only is journalism, good journalism, necessary for democracy, but good democracy is necessary to have any journalism. And the awareness of that interrelationship, that combination is higher than it used to be. And that gives me some inspiration as well. Also, I don't hear as much as I did when I entered journalism education in 1986.

JAY ROSEN [01:06:04]: I don't hear as much of this idea that journalism is the only profession mentioned in the first amendment, which to some of you, I've always hated that concept because it just isn't a good description of the first amendment. The first amendment is not about an individual per profession. It's about every citizen's right to say what they think and also publish what they think. And the first amendment belongs to the American people. It does not belong to a profession or an industry. And I think that there has gradually been a learning of that distinction over time, and I think that's a good thing too. And as I said earlier, I think problems in sustaining serious journalism and creating a public interest press are so deep and so important that they draw in talented people. I think that is something that also gives me a lot of hope.

JAY ROSEN [01:07:09]: I mentioned earlier, but I wanted to reemphasize that because I think it's a really important point. And this semester, I'm gonna teach a class in NYU to undergrads, freshmen, in fact, as it means 18, 19 year olds. And the title is “The Figure of the Journalist in American Film.” And what I'm gonna try and uncover with my students is, what do Americans think journalists are for? Which is the title of my 1999 book. So I hope to come away from that class with other reasons to be optimistic about the future of journalism.

Media recommendations

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:07:53]: And then the final question, we ask all our guests, Ezra Klein style, is, three to five media recommendations. They don't have to be books. They don't have to be news related. It could be entertainment that you would recommend for listeners.

JAY ROSEN [01:08:07]: Well, one of them would be what's called the Innovation Report that the New York Times produced about itself in 2014. That is now seen as a key document in the evolution of that institution. And basically what it said was we're falling behind because we're not adapting ourselves fast enough to the internet. And it's a really interesting self study that was not supposed to be a public document, but it leaked. And now it's considered to be something of a classic in this field.

Another study that I would recommend is called something like Beyond Objectivity. And it's a report from Arizona State journalism school, and it's written by two former journalists. Well, not just journalists; they were major figures in the field. And they took a look at this very, traditional notion of objectivity. And they wrote a report that signals that the generations entering journalism now don't see objectivity in the same way that Leonard Downey's generation did. I think that's a really important point.

And then the third thing I would recommend is what you talked about. Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death is probably the single best work of media criticism for the last, 30 years or so. And that's a great place to start.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:09:42]: Great. Well, thank you very much, Jay. I appreciate your time.

JAY ROSEN [01:09:45]: My pleasure. Thank you for asking me, Tim.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:09:50]: Thank you for listening to the Local News Matters podcast. Never miss an episode by subscribing in your favorite podcast player and sign up for our newsletter at lnmpod.com.

And thanks to our production partners at Pirate Audio. Pirate Audio believes every community deserves great things to listen to, and they're on a mission to help local newsrooms reach their communities via audio. If you're interested in starting a podcast or need production support for an existing one, let me know, and I'll be happy to connect you.

If you have guest recommendations, others doing interesting and innovative work in local news, let me know through the contact form at the website, lnmpod.com.

Past guests on the Local News Matters podcast include: Sue Cross (Exit interview, INN), Mary Margaret White (Mississippi Today), Amy Kovac-Ashley (Tiny News Collective), Michael Shaprio (TAPinto), Kenny Katzgrau (redbankgreen and Broadstreet), John Garrett (Community Impact), Shannon Kinney (Dream Local Digital), Larry Ryckman (The Colorado Sun), Frank Mungeam (Local Media Association), Kelly Ann Scott (Alabama Media Group), Sara Lomax and S. Mitra Kalita (URL Media), Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro (National Trust for Local News), Mike Rispoli and Richard Young (via When the People Decide), Sarabeth Berman (American Journalism Project), Rabbi Hillel Goldberg and Shana Goldberg (Intermountain Jewish News), Lyndsay C. Green (via The Journalism Salute), Rashad Mahmood and Mark Glaser (New Mexico Local News Fund), Christian Vanek and Barbara Hardt (The Mountain-Ear), Dan Grech (BizHack), Zack Richner (Easy Tax Credits), Tracie Powell (Pivot Fund), Dan Oshinsky (Inbox Collective), Linda Shapley (via What Works), Yehong Zhu and Jake Seaton (Zette, Column), Charity Huff (January Spring), Joaquin Alvarado and Dave Perry (Aurora Sentinel), Steve Waldman (Rebuild Local News), Maritza Félix (Conecta Arizona), Michael Bolden (American Press Institute), Jeff Roberts and Corey Hutchins (CFOIC, Colorado College), Eve Pearlman and Erica Anderson (Spaceship Media), Jennifer Brandel (Hearken, Democracy SOS), Corey Hutchins with Bay Edwards, Todd Chamberlain and Raleigh Burleigh (Sopris Sun).