Google/Village Media + University of Maryland
Media executive, CEO & business journalist
Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg, long-time journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.
We’ve been trying to suss out the future of media for the past few weeks by talking about the present of it. The rise of influencers, the decline of local media, the mercurial psyche of audiences. Okay. So where does journalism go from here? How does it fulfill its role in a democracy rebuild trust and sustain itself economically—assuming it’s even possible to do all three at once. That’s the big topic for today’s guests, which is fine because they basically spend all their time pondering just those questions: Tom Rosenstiel, professor of journalism at the University of Maryland and co-author of the profession’s bible, The Elements of Journalism, and Richard Gingras, former head of Google’s Local News Initiative and now chair of Village Media.
They don’t spare journalism. They’ll discuss why the long, slow rebuild of trust depends not just on accuracy, but on empathy. Why reporters should start with human-centered design. And why local journalism, despite the current five-alarm fire in the category, may offer the most scalable model for renewal in the long run.
This episode was recorded live at Eric’s University of Chicago class on the future of media. We hope you enjoy the episode!
Transcript
Speaker 1 (00:11.118)
Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media. I’m your host, Eric Schoenberg, longtime journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. We’ve been trying to suss out the future of media for the past few weeks by talking about the present of it, the rise of influencers, the decline of local news, the mercurial psyche of audiences. Okay.
But where does journalism go from here? How does it fulfill its role in a democracy, rebuild trust, and sustain itself economically? Assuming it’s even possible to do all three at once.
Well.
That’s the big topic for today’s guests, which is fine because they basically spend all their time pondering just those questions. Tom Rosenstiel, professor of journalism at the University of Maryland and co-author of the professions Bible, the elements of journalism, and Richard Gingras, former head of Google’s local news initiative and now chair of Village Media. Now, what we won’t do in this conversation as you’ll hear is,
spare journalists. We’ll discuss why the long slow rebuild of trust depends not just on getting things accurate, but on empathy. Why reporters should start with human-centered design, and why local journalism, despite the current fire alarm fire in the category, may offer the most scalable model for renewal in the long run.
Speaker 1 (01:49.08)
This episode was recorded live at my University of Chicago class on the future of media. Let’s dive in. Here are Tom Rosenstiel and Richard Gingras.
Speaker 1 (02:01.944)
Let me introduce Tom first. Tom, welcome. Thank you for being here. You are the Eleanor Merrill Professor on the Future of Media at the University of Maryland’s Journalism School. You, like me, are a recovering journalist, but you also ran the American Press Institute, the leading think tank for journalism. You wrote for Winder Institute, another journalism think tank. You co-authored the book that
is every journalism school required reading the elements of journalism. Richard, you’re the former global VP of news at Google. You were instrumental in shaping a lot of what millions see when they search for news on Google. And you’re now on the board of Village Media, which is a new model that I hope you’ll tell us about. Let us start the conversation. So let’s, if we could, let’s start with the reading. For Tom, you’re…
Your survey saw a way forward in emphasizing empathy as a way of an understanding audiences right now mistrust journalism. Richard, your essay challenged local journalists to rethink their role, their role in the community. So I’d ask you both, to start with you, Tom, has there been follow up to that research? Has it been acted on anywhere? And to the extent that it hasn’t been universal yet, how would you suggest it be applied?
by newsrooms in general. Well, so one of the things that we also did in the study was we noted, you know, we asked across the board, what is the support for these journalism values? And while people who are, and while it didn’t align completely with party ID, what we found is only 20 % of the public overall
agreed with all five of these foundational journalism values that you mentioned. So, you know, the message that the underlying kind of message of that is journalists think that people understand them and share these values, right? That the way to make society better is to spotlight problems and that, you know, we should give voice to the voiceless, etc, etc. It’s just recognizing that the professional worldview or mindset of journalists
Speaker 1 (04:24.032)
is not universally shared or understood is a start, right? That suggests not just that people who are conservative don’t understand you, but that, but even the audience that does is wary because they don’t really understand, you know, the journalistic mindset. That’s a call out for empathy. To answer your question.
have people adopt the AP, which is the partner in that research, was super intrigued by it. Then they had a leadership change right at the moment that they were about to experiment with that. So they didn’t go forward with that. There are several other news organizations that are intrigued. I left API shortly after we did it, whether they’ve taken up that or not. I’m not sure. We are engaged in experiment now where we’re using AI to rewrite these stories to different moral values.
So we’ll see what the panel does, know, with the respondents. But I’m pretty confident that, I mean, it’s a pretty easy thing to do. And in our teaching, and as teaching students, just to say, OK, how would a conservative, you’ve written a story that’s got a kind of a left leaning, you know, bias in the way you even the subject matter that you’ve chosen. Imagine how a concert, you know, has somebody who doesn’t agree with where you’re going here.
how this is gonna land and the students will rewrite it. They get this. One other thing I’ll just mention, since I did that research, I’m working on a book that among other things looks at the psychological research around how people receive information. And very well-known theory in psychology is the idea of motivated skepticism. If you encounter something that
challenges your worldview, your first reaction is sort of to trigger, no, no, I don’t really agree with this. And you can even imagine it in a scholarly landscape, right? Or a legal landscape. You’re a real expert on something and suddenly you encounter some research that contradicts things you’ve done or things you understand. Your first instinct, and this is in the literature, your first instinct to say, wait, I need to check their math. I want to see how the methodology here
Speaker 1 (06:47.808)
something’s off because I don’t, you know, this is a pretty fundamental way that we operate. It competes with another instinct, which is I don’t want to die, right? Is that snake poisonous? You know, is that car going too fast? That side of our brain is more empirical. But this other side of our brain is, wait a second, this is the way I understand things. And if you say something about that is completely
jarring to my worldview and discomforting, I’m going to be skeptical. And we need to bring that awareness into the way we produce journalism. So the first answer to your question is, I don’t know if people have adopted this, but there’s more and more evidence the more I dive into it that we’ve got to do this. All right. Well, that would certainly be a change in the way journalists see themselves. And journalists are as
as vulnerable as anyone to the idea that you just kind of gave him the example as well. This is not my worldview. There must be something wrong with it. Journalists are resistant to change like everybody else. Richard, you’re proposing some pretty significant changes in the way that newsrooms, especially on the local front, see their role in their community. So same question for you. Is it being acted on anywhere? It sounds to me like there’s a lot of village media in what you propose.
Well, thank you, Eric. Good to see you, Tom. It’s been a while. We meet in odd circumstances.
I know.
Speaker 1 (08:23.902)
I’m getting to look more more like you. grew up.
here.
I call it faux gravitas.
you
Speaker 2 (08:34.474)
In any case, I want to be clear, I’m not suggesting something that I think is outside the bounds of journalistic values at all. I’m just thinking that given the environment that we’re living in, that we need to step back and rethink things. Right? And two things lead into that. mean, one is, you know, we’re in an environment where, yes, so many people can express their thoughts and opinions that ever before. And not surprisingly, that has the
the result of it being harder to drive consensus, right? And everyone can find their own views. The second was I got really taken or retaken by the research of Robert Putnam, you know, who began his work back in Italy in the seventies where Italy had moved to provincial governments and they wanted to understand why some were effective and some weren’t. And after a whole bunch of research, what he found was that the key difference was
In provinces where it was effective, people were more engaged with each other in their communities. And by that, I mean, not that they were more involved in politics or running for city council, but they were seeing each other, they were seeing people who were different from them in environments where they could actually engage and get to know each other. Right. He wrote this great book called Bowling Alone.
And again, this is not a trend that started with the internet. In fact, it probably took a very big leap with the evolution of television. If you can watch a soccer game on television on a Sunday afternoon, you’re not going on a picnic. And so that key point, if you want to have a functioning democracy at every level, and particularly at ground level of communities, you want communities to be engaged with each other. So that’s what’s driving it.
And so when I say that about the mission of journalism, I don’t think that mission is different from what we’ve thought in the past. It’s just recognizing it. Then if that you should be an advocate for the community, for the society that you are looking to serve, you’re an advocate for its health, right? You’re an advocate for the fact that it knows how to engage with each other. I’m not saying don’t cover the car crashes or the crimes at all.
Speaker 2 (10:55.008)
I do say, yes, you should also cover the good things that people do for each other in the community because it becomes a demonstration of empathy. It’s a good thing for us all to know. So that’s really what’s driving me here. I do think that as the practice of journalism has evolved over the last five decades, I do think that in North America, we’re suffering a bit from what I call the Woodward-Bernstein effect.
Meaning that somehow the entire purpose of journalism is to hold power to account, you know, to take down that corrupt politician. And obviously that’s a critical component. But that won’t work if you don’t have the trust of the society or the community you’re serving. Right? No one likes the town scold. Yeah, right. So we need to kind of step beyond that.
Obviously we want the Woodward’s and the Bernstein’s, but if people don’t trust us, we can’t get there. And so a lot of my thinking and work is like, well, how do we get there? And yes, at the community level, Village Media is the one that is doing that so profoundly more thoughtfully than anyone else. And by the way, they’re doing it profitably, which is a powerful thing because they engage with their community, they get depth of engagement, and it allows local advertising
that local jeweler who wants everyone in the community know about that Valentine’s Day sale they have to want to advertise. So to me, it’s win, win, win. How do we build trust? How do we engage the community? How do we come up with sustainable business models? And all three are…
Right.
Speaker 1 (12:38.4)
Eric, let me add one thing about the business model. know, American media in particular really was advertising driven. know, television, newspapers were, you know, 80 % advertising revenue. That shifted as advertising online has been dominated by the platforms, including a company that Richard would be familiar with. And in that model, journalism had to get people’s attention.
And then we rented that attention to advertisers. And the literature is really pretty clear. The way you get people’s attention is with alarm and sort of outlier events, know, man bites dog. Now that we are shifting to a consumer revenue model, subscriptions, membership donations is going to have to make up probably more than half of the revenue instead of 25%. We need to be thinking as journalists.
How is the journalism that I’m producing actually helping people live their lives? The old model in that, you know, a lot of what made journalism indispensable for people or a lot of what made the product indispensable was journalism adjacent. You you couldn’t buy a house or sell your bike or even know what was on television without the stuff that came in the package. But it wasn’t the news people who were thinking about how do I make this stuff useful?
So that’s another mind shift that I think has to happen. How is this story and the way I’m framing it and the reporting that I’m including in it gonna be useful to somebody because it’s the useful stuff that’s gonna end up being the basis of my revenue rather than I got your attention and now look at the tire ad.
Right.
Speaker 2 (14:24.014)
But it’s absolutely true, and I think one thing that publishers in the last 30 years at the internet have failed to do is just understand the evolving marketplace, to ask those questions, to do those studies, to understand what are your information needs. And I’ll tell you, interestingly, your information needs are proportionate to physical proximity. I’m more interested in my neighborhood than I am in the metropolitan area, than the state, than the country. I’m interested in all the…
The news that you can use, which is a phrase that Tom would identify with, about my community. It’s not just about the car crashes. Yeah, local sports matters. What’s going on in the community park matters. The fact that the potholes in the street haven’t been addressed matters. In fact, what’s important about those points is it becomes the basis of our shared reality, not the basis of our divisiveness, which is what we get with politics. Right? So it means focus on that.
Now there too is why the community, the neighborhood is the most important segment, right? As Tom pointed out, you know, with the internet, the business model of newspapers changed, went away. For a couple of reasons, you look at the major metropolitan newspapers and the advertising market changed completely. So, you know, I look at it and say, recognize that for instance, you know, the Dallas Morning News in 1985 was the internet of that community.
before we had the internet. went to it for everything. But now with the internet, do you go to your newspaper to find out what new fashions you might be interested in? No, you don’t. In fact, the Metropolitan Dailies to me were the most vulnerable because they are now no longer relevant as a source of national news, and they’re not local enough to be relevant to the communities that they’re serving. So we need to rethink these things. Every aspect of it, information needs,
our community’s perception of the role we play. You know, be careful about going into it with our presumptions of what they know and think, what journalism is, what democracy is, because I can assure you, it’s not what we think. It’s much more nuanced. And so don’t pretend we know what we don’t know. Right? So the whole point about Tom’s study, which I’m fascinated in that stuff, is, you know, how do we as journalists
Speaker 2 (16:46.592)
earn trust across the political spectrum. Right? I’m no big fan of partisan news on either side of the spectrum because it’s not helpful. It drives a divide. It doesn’t bridge us. So how do we talk to them about those things? Do we talk to them about with arrogance, telling them what they should think? Or do we talk to them with a bit of humility that says, here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t know. We’re going to give you the information you decide. Right?
Well, dig deeper on that, Richard. One of the classes we had was the speaker was Norman Pearlstein, who talked about the problems of dealing with an administration and a president is tethered to truth is questionable at best. And and who and by the way, whose hostility to the press is pronounced and is part of his strategy, apparently. So how do you report the news about someone who
is hostile and is not truthful without alienating the half the country that supports them.
Well, there’s a whole lot there to unpack. Obviously, you want to record on it with as much fact-based information as you can gather. You also want to report on it. In my view, if you want to continue to earn and re-earn the respect across the spectrum, is do it without an ounce of snark. Also, I would say in our political environment today, one thing I think that we need to really try to get past is this notion of there’s blue and there’s red.
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 (18:23.074)
There’s left in there’s right, right? And we’ve got a hard line between them. That’s not the case. Right? I look at my friends on one side of the spectrum who didn’t vote for the person who’s in office who think that everyone who did is somehow an idiot. There’s some who had no good rational understanding as to why they made their vote. Well, you know, look at the data. Look at the data, for instance, that tells us only 20 % of Americans would recommend democracy to another country.
There are only 20 % of Americans trust their governments. Right. So maybe we need to kind of dig into that. Maybe we need to dig into issues like immigration without thinking it’s a binary, simplistic notion that we support integration or we don’t. Because it’s way more complex than that. Immigration policies around the world are hugely varied and different. We’ve had remarkably open borders, but we have challenges. How do we address that? And how do we get people to think about those issues, consider those issues?
without telling them some simple binary answer about what’s good or bad. Because that’s where we lose the respect of people because they think we’re telling them what they should think versus trying to guide them to be more knowledgeable about what we’re asking them to think about.
Good. Tom, how would you answer those questions? Well, I mean, Richard and I, who don’t always agree on everything, but I think we’re in agreement on this very much. You know, I think that the first job, ultimately the job of a news organization is to make the world comprehensible. And if half of the country, you know, voted for Trump, how is that possible? You know, if the outcome on Election Day is inexplicable, that’s a failure of journalism.
So we need to help everybody understand the people that they don’t agree with. Now, that doesn’t mean that you don’t fact check every falsehood that comes out of Trump’s mouth, that you don’t contextualize every policy, but you cannot start with the idea that if Trump says it, it’s wrong. An example of this would be the fact that there is more
Speaker 3 (20:32.493)
I think.
Speaker 1 (20:36.078)
suspicion that possibly COVID started in a lab in China. Not that it was some kind of conspiracy, but that it leaked out of a lab. That was dismissed out of hand by people on the left when Trump suggested it in 2020 because Trump suggested it. You know, and it was sort of, it was de facto suspicious because it came out of the mouth of somebody who said a lot of things that had no basis in fact. So, I mean, our job is more complicated.
Far more complicated, I think we have to start with the orientation that, as Richard said, we should be journalism for all. That should be our aspiration. And to do that, we need to make the world, and particularly this country, this very divided country, more comprehensible. One other thing I would say, I’m a consultant to NORC at the University of Chicago, which is the big research polling operation that is…
is a nonprofit arm. not part of the university per se, but it’s associated. And one of the things that happens with polling is we have these basic demographic categories, Republican, Independent and Democrat. And then we group people into that and then people say, my God, did you see that 70 % of Republicans think that 2020 election was stolen? How is that possible? Well, that’s
That’s not 20 % of the people. That’s not 70 % of the people who voted for Trump. If you look at the typologies, the more sophisticated typologies about the country, there are a lot of people who have deep reservations about certain aspects of what Trump’s doing. But as Richard said, they’re pretty deeply suspicious about whether the government is working at all. And they’re willing to take a flyer on this. But that gets conflated in the basic
demographic breakdowns that are at the top line of the survey research that we see about what is the public think? I just say this one last thing, because it’s a nice line. One of my mentors, he talked about how polling turns the public into an abstraction of the pollsters creation. They’re answering our questions, but it may not be exactly what they think. And when you go as a journalist, Richard, I’m sure you go back far enough you remember this.
Speaker 1 (22:57.582)
When you go talk to voters, their logic is not the logic that we would bring to it. That is one of the things I liked about the experiment that we read about this week was that it did not characterize people by their political affiliation, but by human impulses that all of us share, just to somewhat different degree. But it was so much easier to
Precisely.
Speaker 1 (23:24.174)
identify with someone who really values loyalty, because we all do to some degree. you know, likewise, it would be a slander to say that no Republicans care about helping people who are, you know, underprivileged or unfortunate. So I would like to move on to one of the challenges that journalism as a profession faces, which is, which reflects on Diana’s statement about how she determines who to trust.
So for throughout my career, the trust in the work that my publications did was kind of imbued with the reputation of the institution. People returned your calls from Fast Company or Inc because you called from Fast Company or Inc, not because you were Lee Buchanan or one of the writers. That seems to be changing and trust seems to be flowing kind of down the funnel.
towards individual contributors. had influencers, David Pakman and Eric Newcomber and Kate Bacon, all of whom have a follow-up difference way bigger than the circulation of any publication where I ever worked. How does journalism integrate with that?
I would note, by the way, I don’t think that the process whereby people gain a degree of trustworthiness is any different today than it was 100 years ago. What is different is the environment that we’re in. mean, people’s first line of trust is through someone I know. They’re a member of my tribe. Right. As I say, you know, if the head of the tribe tells me the moon is purple, well, I’m going to say, I guess it is because I don’t want to lose a leg of the calf at dinner.
Right. Tribal, our social, in fact, I remember after the 2016 election, I made a speech saying, we need to appeal to the intrinsic reasonableness and rationality of the human, our ability to reason through things. Well, what I found is I dug into that ain’t no such thing. The first filter of our understanding is through a social construct. And that just continues to be true. So not surprising, for instance, that influencers on TikTok
Speaker 2 (25:39.212)
can be more compelling to people because that person looks like them, talks like them, thinks like them. That, by the way, is not necessarily trust or respect. It’s affinity. To your point, if you ask me, how do we do that today? First of all is understand that, right? There’s a social construct starts at the individual institutions. Yes, but institutions have faded. But there’s also other dynamics at play. One eyes references information architecture.
How are you presenting the information that you’re trying to get into somebody’s head? Right? I look at the nature of a scientific journal, which is thoroughly footnoted, a straightforward narrative that everyone understands, good points of reference and endorsement helps me feel that that is worth trusting. Same to Wikipedia, right? It has an architecture that helps that out. One of the problems I feel with today’s media, as you pointed out,
They used to be in the world of newspapers that it was largely fact-based coverage, but for columnists in the editorial page and the op-ed page. Now, I can’t say this is factually true, but my bet is that the opinion content on the Washington Post is more voluminous than the fact-based journalism. And if you put the two together as they do, how can you not form
a incorrect opinion about the trustworthiness of the fact-based reporting if it’s wrapped around a sense of partisan expression one way or the other. So I think we need to take those things into account. The last thing I will say is if we want to re-earn trust, we need to keep asking people, we need to keep researching it. How are you perceiving this? We need to look into our linguistics. Like I like Tom’s study, I like the work at Janet Coates at the University of Florida.
who’s looking at the linguistics in journalism, right? Politicians look at linguistics all the time, journalists don’t. And sometimes we make really unfortunate and unconscious decisions. A key point of your research was the coverage of the George Floyd murders in Minneapolis. And she said across the board, the language describing the protests used terms that suggested conflict. They erupted, they ignited, they exploded. were fury protests, even if they weren’t violent.
Speaker 3 (27:40.397)
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:07.918)
But that gives you a perception that they were. So, you know, should we not carefully consider how we talk about things to greater and give ourselves a greater opportunity to earn and rear in the trust of the people who we want to respect our work? In fact, what I would ask of any publication, you know, if you’re doing research, I would ask them as part of that research, place yourself on the political spectrum and then tell us whether or not you respect us.
Because the real measure to me of respect is, people respecting me across the political spectrum? Not just because I am providing you affirmation to your beliefs. Which again, is, you know, that’s really popular. I’m telling you what you want to know. That’s confirmation bias.
Yep.
Speaker 1 (28:54.892)
That is an easy thing to sell. Tom, what do you think is the answer to compete with influencers? Do we integrate them? What can we learn from them? this is something that I’ve spent a lot of time looking at, and there is a lot of research now on trust, a lot more than there was a few years ago. To boil it down and to oversimplify it little bit, there are three essential elements in
the kind of what they call relational trust, which is the kind of trust we’re talking about here. It’s a little different than, well, I buy stuff from Amazon. I don’t have to like Jeff Bezos. I just really need to know that the stuff’s going to get here and I can return it. But with a news organization, it’s a little more complicated. And the three key legs of the stool are, do I think they’re competent? Do I think they are accountable? Like if they make a mistake, will they cop to it? And
the most complicated one, do I think they’re benevolent? Do I trust their motives? Affinity really helps the people who are in that confirmation business win the affinity war. We haven’t really thought about that very much in the journalism world. weren’t even, we were pretty grudging about even making corrections. We mainly wanted to suggest we were competent.
And in fact, we adopted the voice of the omniscient narrator to suggest a competence that we didn’t really have. know, the first thing I was taught in journalism school was how to write around that stuff I didn’t know to make myself sound more authoritative and my stories more authoritative than they were. So what can we learn to get to your question, Eric, about are there things to learn from the people who are emerging on Substack and in social media and social influencers? Yeah.
They are, they establish their benevolence. They engage with their users a lot. If they make a mistake, they are very willing to sort of talk about it. It’s messy. It’s a way messier world than we’re used to in traditional journalism. And there was a study at Schornstein Center at Harvard where it looked at how people, how influencers establish their credibility.
Speaker 1 (31:15.106)
They’re super transparent in a way that we in the news business, even with our very incremental steps towards transparency or not, they tend to write their stories the way social scientists do. I wanted to go find out this. This is the question I wanted to answer. So I took these steps, these steps, and these steps. So the first thing they do is they establish their hypothesis, and then they establish the process by which they did, you know, I wanted to try this product, so I did, and here’s what I did.
and to establish their credibility. like, am I getting paid for this? Yes or no. It’s it’s a form of transparency that is more far reaching than what we’re doing with, you know, our little bio boxes and, you know, the thing that might show up in the scroll of the story about how we treat anonymous sources or why we use anonymous. When we write our stories in the inverted pyramid, we tell people the findings and that’s it.
and then we establish a little bit of proof. I think we’ve got to adopt a story forms where as more as often as possible, we could say we set out to answer this question and here’s what we did to do it. And here’s what we found. You can establish your findings up high too, but we’ve got to show process a lot more. We’ve got to bring people into the process. We actually have a lot to learn from the people who are establishing their credibility in social platforms.
which is the Wild West. So I have to trust Richard because of the way he wrote it rather than, well, he’s on TikToks and I trust everything on TikTok. I want to move on to the inevitable question about AI. Last week we had Jessica Chan of Perplexity on with Troy Thibodeau of AP. Large language models are
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:11.928)
content producing machines and they do in seconds what journalists do in days or weeks. How can that not be the thing, the technology that shapes the future of media?
Well, first of all, I’d have to disagree with that characterization. They don’t do what journalists do. Journalists are about finding new information, right? What language models are doing, they’re very, very good at probabilistically writing sentences. And if you give them the right grounding in, you know, fact-based knowledge, they’ll produce great content, but they won’t surface the new, right? They’ll do a tremendous job with the old. And I think that’s enormously valuable.
I mean, we all know there are potential risks with any technology. There’s certainly risk with AI. As I always said, technology has value. It doesn’t have values. But I think it also has tremendous benefit for people to get a deeper understanding of things in a non-judgmental way. I’ll just, don’t want, I could go on for a long time on this stuff, but I’ll try to keep it short. Back in the day when we were doing work with fact checks,
I had some research done to understand how to fact checks work in a social media environment versus a search environment. And what I found was this in a social media environment, they don’t work very well because in a social media environment, guess what? You’re challenging the social construct of the user. You’ve just told him that post my friend or my uncle shared was wrong. And I’m going to go into a defensive crouch as a result. Whereas if you come to a search engine,
It’s a very private experience. I’ll ask search questions. I’d be embarrassed to ask my spouse, right? That’s a powerful thing, but that’s also the same characteristic that you will behavior that you’ll bring to a language model. Now, again, we have to, as ever, we have to guide people in terms of what are the sources, what are the language models you should trust versus not. But the idea of anyone from young to old having the ability to go to a answer engine like that.
Speaker 2 (35:24.0)
and learn about stuff that they’d be afraid to ask others is an extraordinary thing.
Bye. Okay.
Tom, you’re… Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I mean, this is a little too glib and it’ll probably become obsolete, but I think the thinking at the moment, and Richard knows much more about this than I do, is that AI is gonna be helpful for aggregation, but not creation. understanding the patterns here in this database and things like that, incredible. And I think the other kind of guideline that we’re thinking about, and I assure you,
but he’s thinking about this as much as they can, is that we need to, that journalism needs to run at AI and not let it happen to it the way we did with the internet. And what that means is we need to build tools that help journalists do better work and not wait for some company to come along and say, well, I don’t, can have a newsroom without people in it.
and it’ll curate, aggregate, and write crappy stories for you really fast.
Speaker 2 (36:34.158)
Yeah, I think that is so, true. I think the true danger in the world of journalism is not adapting and adopting to the capabilities, because it allows a report. In fact, the phrase I always use is don’t talk about efficiencies, talk about superpowers. Six years ago, I had a team at Google develop some incredible tools for investigative journalists. They’re called Pinpoint. And it was all done with AI, though we called it machine learning at that time, where you could feed it 100,000 documents.
and have it go through and organize and understand those documents to help you find the needle in the haystack, to help you find the story that you did not know was there, right? To let you do something that you wouldn’t even try to do because of simply the amount of manual effort in it. So yes, on the one hand, AI is not going to go find new information from someone who doesn’t want to talk with you, but…
It can do an extraordinary job of monitoring vast amounts of information and data to help you understand problems that you did not know. You know, I’ll give you an example. Years ago, I was looking at this and saying, if we were looking at it in the right way, could we have found simply through analysis of Google search queries that there was a problem in Flint, Michigan with the water? And guess what we could have because if we looked back historically six months, a year before that,
There were all kinds of queries that were saying, gee, why does my water not smell right, taste right? But no one had a real finger to analyze that to say, gee, maybe we have a problem here until it was too late.
I’ll give you a couple other examples. So one thing that we’re building at Maryland is, and we’re not the only ones, everybody’s trying to do this, how can you scour minutes of civic meetings to look for patterns within a community and across communities? Something that would have been real hard to do with people and we don’t have enough people anymore. But that’s gonna aid journals and not replace it.
Speaker 1 (38:34.826)
Another example is we evaluate stories in journalism. We evaluate our coverage story by story, but we rarely look across time, across beats and communities. How have we covered this community? How have we covered this beat? AI is going to be great for that. It’s going to be, it’s going to allow us to know what we’ve done and know what we’ve not done. And, you know, source analysis, all kinds of things that are going to, that can help us create better journalism.
Another thing we’re thinking about is the reporter toolbox. What are the tasks that I have to do as a journalist that the machine can do faster for me to save me time so I can do the stuff that only I can do?
In fact, it can help us on some of the things we talked about. Janet Coates, I mentioned doing that work about linguistics, right? She’s working on a tool that says that would make it easier for me to say, look at my piece and tell me if I’m using language in there that might get twisted and interpreted in an incorrect way. That piece that you shared of mine that folks read, as I was writing it at one point along the way, I fed it into a, into
Gemini, I think I did it with chat GPT as well and I said give me some positive and negative criticisms of this piece Right because I just wanted it to just help me understand am I getting it right? Am I getting it wrong that I say that in a way that maybe isn’t understandable to people Right, so it helps you perfect your craft and in remarkably efficient ways
Because.
Speaker 1 (40:07.726)
You could even do it with the moral foundational theory. You could say, can you rewrite the story in a way where people who think more about loyalty and authority, care more about loyalty and authority might be more responsive to it. What I’m hearing you guys say is that there is a future for reporters, but editors, that’s like, they’re all going to be unemployed. Finally. Spoken like a writer.
Yeah, okay.
Speaker 3 (40:31.864)
Yes.
Speaker 1 (40:37.024)
All right. Here’s the challenge question for you guys. If you were to start a newsroom from scratch today. What would it look like? How would it build trust? How would it make the world understandable to people? And how would it be financially sustainable? Tom, you’re making the mistake of nodding. So the first thing I would do is I would go deeply into the community with a human centered design approach. mean, I think the problem.
that we have with a lot of the journalism reform efforts is we’re trying to replace a product with the same product that already failed in the marketplace. I think we need to reimagine and reinvent local news. So you start by getting closer to your audience and trying to understand in a new product design way, what do they need to know? What will help them?
make their community better? What are the things that they’re passionate about? What do they think about their community? Things like that. And develop beats that are conceptual rather than oriented around a building, right? I you’re going to have to do some of this stuff to cover the mayor and all of that. But you really need to turn, instead of thinking of journalism as I monitor the powerful on your behalf and you’re a passive bystander to my product, we need to be thinking
How do I help you live your life? You’re the focus of the product, not a bystander to it. So I would start by getting close to the community. I would think of my beats more conceptually. There’s an even a very simple exercise called the dinner table exercise where you ask people to talk for a half an hour about the last time that they had a personal involvement with the healthcare system or education or the government.
and they tell their personal stories. And you could do this in a newsroom or in a community setting. Then you say, OK, stop now. Let’s make a story list. And that story list is so different than the one you would do if you just sat down with a bunch of journalists and make a story list about health care. So we need to get closer to the audience and build a newsroom that is essentially built around certain pillars that are oriented to the way that the
Speaker 1 (42:52.322)
that our audience is worrying about or thinking about or passionate about things. And then the other thing is when we do our traditional accountability journalism, the data is pretty clear. Most of it is incremental updates that people don’t read or game frame coverage about winners and losers. Very little of it helps the audience or helps equip the audience to be civic actors. What will this bill do to you or for you or what are the implications here?
So I would focus more of our accountability coverage around how is this actually gonna help a reader, which probably, and the one last thing and then I’ll shut up. I would build a newsroom that thought fast and slow. And what I mean by that is I would have a real time news desk that would take care of the stuff that we would do briefly. And then instead of thinking that every story has to be the next day story, slow down and actually say what story, what’s a more meaningful
that people are gonna be wondering about this, that might take me two or three days, but I’m gonna do that. You’ll probably in the end produce fewer stories, but more stories that produce real engagement. And those fast real-time stories are gonna be short.
Good, all right.
Richard, how would you?
Speaker 2 (44:11.54)
I mean, frankly, it’s something that I’ve had the great benefit of working for about a decade on, which is what the folks at Village Media. I mean, I did so informally for a long time, and now it’s formal. I’m chair of the board. But that’s exactly what they did was, again, rethink what a local news property can be for its community. And some I’ve mentioned, but part of it is, yes, do a lot of research, understand the user needs of the community, and do that on an ongoing basis. Get feedback. Do they like what you’re doing?
are the things you’re not covering that you should be covering. Are you doing the service journalism, all of that news that you can use information that’s so valuable to the community? You know, so I do all of those things. The other interesting things that Village is doing is again, in embracing the community, as they’ve introduced and are rolling out across their properties, a community interest network. It’s a social network that’s all about topics of common interest. You could think of it as next door done.
thoughtfully. You’re not following people. You’re not writing a post and sending it into the void. You’re saying, no, I also like to make sushi. I also like to do back country skiing. I do needle point, whatever it is. I’m a member of the woodworking club. And we say, let’s get people to engage on topics of common interest. Maybe the woodworking club meets every Friday, every fourth Friday at Joe’s pub and Joe’s pub sponsors it. Great.
Great. Can we build that kind of architecture? One thing that’s valuable about that, there was research done, organized by the Sanford University several years ago, how do we deal with divisiveness in our society? You know what the number one answer was? The number one solution was engage with the society, with the community first on matters that aren’t controversial so that you can build engagement and respect for when you want to talk about the issues that are.
controversial. And that’s an effect that we’re trying to do here. I can imagine going from that community interest network, that community focused news organization, to saying, we’re actually going to mount a citizen assembly to get us all together, know, representing all the interests of the community to see what are we going to do with that 36 acres where the steel mill closed and we need to develop it, right? Can we assist?
Speaker 2 (46:37.388)
the political sphere that’s not operating properly with mechanisms that help might draw degrees of consensus on on tricky subject. It’s a vision. Can it all play out? Do we snap our fingers and let it happen? it happens? No. But I believe if we don’t have a vision for how we get ourselves out of this morass, we don’t have a vision for how we can have functioning democracies in complex societies. Then I don’t know what the answer is.
I would add two things. One, and this is Mason and Glib, all journalism should be service journalism. We should be thinking about ways to make even the, you know, the exposes and all of that actionable and useful. The second thing is that if fact-based journalism fails at this, fails to create a journalism for all, then our audiences will just be drifting off to partisan sources and we will have failed.
failed the country. spent a large chunk of my career in what was called service journalism and feeling therefore less fancy than people who were doing accountability journalism, it’s good to see it come back. And also I was very taken by the term that I encountered in your work, Richard, of cohesion journalism. Did you coin that?
I did not coin it, but when I heard it, I went, my God, that’s perfect. Because again, you know, what service journalism does is it helps develop that shared reality. Yeah. And through that shared reality, social capital. So it’s a perfect term for it, which I had invented it and I’m going to steal it, but I will give attribution.
All right.
Speaker 1 (48:23.746)
Let’s go to some questions.
Speaker 1 (48:27.79)
That’s it for this episode of In Reality. Thanks again to Tom Rosenstiel and Richard Gingras for sharing their hard-won insights. My takeaway? If journalism is to have a future, we in the profession need to stop looking inward and look outside and listen. We journalists think we build trust just by doing our job and earning the praise of our colleagues, but we journalists need to understand what audiences want. Remember Richard saying,
Survey audiences said the greatest value of local news to them was to save them money. Reporters may think service journalism is less cool than news, but it adds value to audiences’ lives. places journalists in the community. Look, it’s going to take generations to rebuild trust. It’s going to be hard. But that’s a place to start.
In reality is a production of the Alliance for Trust in Media produced by Tom Platts of SoundSapien and Meg Talikov of the Alliance. More at AllianceForTrust.com. Please give us a rating on Spotify or Apple and review us if you can and tell someone about us, someone you trust. Thanks for listening. I’m Eric Schurenberg.
Created & produced by: Podcast Partners / Published: Aug 11 2025
All episodes are streaming on these platforms:
