Latest / Journalism 2050 / What might a truly collaborative media—that sees the public as a partner rather than an audience—look like?

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What might a truly collaborative media—that sees the public as a partner rather than an audience—look like? · Journalism 2050

• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Hello everyone, welcome to Journalism 2050.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: This is a podcast about the future of journalism, and it's also a little bit about the past of the future of journalism.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: So, what have we been thinking about for the past 25 years and how should we be making ourselves robust for the next 25 years?
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: What happened and how did we get here?
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: And with me is my co-conspirator Heather Chaplin.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Hi Heather.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_03: Hello, Emily.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_04: I'm Heather Chaplin.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_04: I'm the founding director of journalism and design at the New School, and I am very happy today to introduce Sarah Alvarez and Candace Fortman, who are two of my heroes in the space of community journalism and have done some of the most important, not just thinking, but on the ground work in terms of what we need to be doing to make sure there is a free press in the future.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_04: And one of the reasons I'm particularly happy to have them both here today is I don't know what they're doing these days.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_04: We all know about Outlier, but Sarah and then Candace, could you tell us what you're doing today?
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: Candace, you go first.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, you want me to go first?
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_02: So I am hi, so I'm so happy to be here, and I'm happy to be anywhere that Sarah is because I also want to know what Sarah's thinking about so I can know what my next job is going to be.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_02: I am currently working with a number of newsrooms across the country and helping them to think about exactly this, about the future, particularly on the business and operations side.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_02: And as you might imagine, right now is an incredibly difficult time.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm particularly coaching newsroomsrooms led by people of color who are seeing some real attacks on the funding side due to the changes and everything in our country currently.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_02: But I'm also doing some dreaming work with a group of folks who are thinking about the future and how to create a more secure future, particularly for folks that are serving those same communities that find themselves under attack right now.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_04: Great.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_04: I can't wait to ask more details about all that stuff.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_04: Sarah, do you want to tell us?
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_04: I know you're at Temple, what you're working on these days.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yep, so I have a new job.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: I'm the chair of journalism innovation here at Temple University in Philadelphia.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I took this job because I really felt like I needed to take a step back from the day-to-day work of news to get some of the theoretical framework that I think we all need in order to move forward.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: So, Outlier, for those who don't know, is really built on this framework of identifying and filling information gaps and addressing the most serious information gaps first that cause the most harm to the most people.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's a great method.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: I think more newsrooms should be doing that.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: It is the way to create value that is predictable.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: But I also found that there are a lot of issues that journalists want to be involved in.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: We want to do something about, but they are not information problems alone.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: They're corruption problems, they're systemic inaction, they're our you know um habits, there's just so much polarization.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: And journalists, reporters, news organizations, citizen journalists really don't know what is our role in those kinds of problems, how do we use information in order to change things in the real world?
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: And also, like, how is our work how can it be better designed for a really truly multicultural society where there is always going to be disagreement?
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: How can we have that be part of the world and not sink us?
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: And like journalism is not equipped to do any of those things.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: Individual journalists are not equipped to reckon with those things, and I really felt like we need some stronger frameworks to start to work from in order to take on these next level challenges.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: I think that that's such a powerful thing and a powerful way to frame this.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I just want to I'd love to hear from um both of you, but maybe um Kansas if you can if you can address this, which is what has changed, because you know, Outlier I think was such a robust model in a way, because it really did take form and format that people had not thought about uh and really thought about how do we deliver in time uh information to people who really need it.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's not about like engagement and eyeballs, it's like who gets this at the moment of delivery.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: And now, as you say, we're seeing this unbelievable crisis in cities where communities are being targeted by their own government, um, and information about that has become something which is contested and blocked and criminalized in some cases.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: So, so can you talk a bit about that, the kind of the roots of those ideas outlier and how vital they are today, but also kind of what's changed about that environment into which you're publishing?
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: So, obviously, a lot has changed about kind of mobile um and a lot has changed about the communities and the political operating environment.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm sorry that's a kind of big ask.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_04: Can I s can I can I break it can I break it down?
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_04: Sure.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_04: Can I suggest first tell listeners who might not be as familiar the quickly the story of Outlier and the idea of the information gaps, and then let's get to more what's happening now and hear a bit more about your work, Candace.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_04: Is that yeah, sure.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: That makes it okay.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm going to let Sarah talk about the beginning of Outlier, and then maybe I can take the middle.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_04: Great, great, great.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: Because Candace is a much better storyteller than I am, so um, I'll be quick with my part.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: But Outlier was started in 2016, and it was really Outlier has always been about, and I think Candace and I continue to work in this frame of like what would public media look like if it truly served the broadest version of the public possible.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: That wasn't happening in public media where both Candace and I came from.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: So Outlier is like, what could public media really look like?
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: What does service journalism truly look like if it is meeting needs and identifying gaps?
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: So it started in 2016.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: The goal was to break journalism down into its kind of component parts, to move away from the story, which is more about curiosity, and to take vetted, verified, high-value information and get it to people when they needed it so that they could then act on it and create accountability in the city.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: Instead of the journalist being not just the gatekeeper for information, but also for accountability, everything flows through them.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: If we break it down into its component parts, how can people act on that information and create additional accountability?
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so our first product was a text message system where everybody in Detroit could look up information about every property in the city, which should not be a hard thing to do, but was very inaccessible and really allowed people to break down scams, um, avoid tax foreclosure, not pay money to someone who didn't even really own your property.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: All kinds of things changed in the housing system just with that information.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: And there's always been a very tight feedback loop with Outlier 2.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: So if people saw that information were like, that doesn't look right to me, or I'm not sure what to do about this, or I'm afraid to do something about this, they could connect directly with the journalist who could help them work through again the information parts of that problem.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, not advice, not legal advice, not social service, but really like what how did we get this information?
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: What have we seen other people do with it?
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: What might you do with it?
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, go for it, Candace.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I think an additional part of that is coming from a place of care, care for place, and really thinking of journalism as a tool for building healthy communities.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_02: If we're going to be in a place, we want that place to be as healthy as possible.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_02: Journalism is the tool we have chosen in order to build healthy and more sustaining communities.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_02: But that also goes into the building of the organization that is outlier, really thinking about how we were building the infrastructure of the organization to ensure that our reporters were making a livable, a living wage salary, that they had good uh access to health care, um, and also that our policies reflected their entire lived experience.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_02: The idea of building Outlier was about care from both the reporting side but also the operation side of what a newsroom could and shan't should be inside of a community.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's such a powerful point, and I think I've quoted you often, Candace.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was you who said this, um, about innovation.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and I've thought about it a lot, which is you know, we talk about innovation or other people talk about innovation in terms of technology, but actually, innovation is having a living wage and health care for your journalists.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: Innovation is about care, as you put it, but also, you know, just that like we don't talk about HR as innovation, you know, it's it's which it which and I think that outlier in a way was one of the first examples which took that language about innovation and really made it, I think, meaningful for uh communities to see this is it does this is not just about endless product.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_04: Not about gadgets and big beards, not about gadgets.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_02: I I used to um use this line all the time that because people got obsessed with the idea of the text messaging.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_02: They really got like like we had invented text messaging or something.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, this is just the easiest way for us to reach the vast amount of Detroiters, right, across all sort of economic barriers, right?
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_02: If we thought that we could do that best with pigeons, we would have to invest it in a pigeon farm.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_02: It's the tool, like you you have to like erase the idea of the method in which the information is delivered and get much more connected to the what the information is.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_02: Is it valuable once it hits the person's eyes or ears or whatever the delivery method is?
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_02: And can they then create action from that information to create change in their own lives?
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_02: If those things aren't true, then the tool doesn't matter.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_02: We can take SMS and replace it with any number of ways to deliver information if that was the best way to do it in our community.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and it was also people's preference.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: Like we did SMS because that's what Detroit's wanted, and they were clear about that.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: I also think this idea of innovation and what you're saying, Emily, it's like it's really important to for people to understand that innovation can go backward, right?
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's so many things that we have been building on that are weak, that are that have not been tested, that need to be repaired, that need to be fixed, and the innovation can go that way.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: And if it if we're always trying to move forward, we're gonna be continuing to replicate the mistakes that we have made over decades and decades and decades.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: And like people running newsrooms now have a relationship to their audience and their communities where we cannot afford those kind of mistakes.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that is different about this new generation of local um about of local news workers, is that like we just don't have that same relationship to make mistakes.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: Experimentation is important, careful experimentation is important, but there is nothing that I hate more than the idea of failing up or move fast and break things.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: Like shit is too broken already.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: We do not need more of that, especially coming from a place where we should see service.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_04: Well, also if you take a sort of systems or holistic perspective, every intervention in the system is going to affect every other aspect of the system, and that alone gives the lie to that bullshit about move fast and break things.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_04: And we all know who ends up getting broken when that happens.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's a it's a broken, but who has to fix it?
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, who gets hurt, who gets who's hurt by it.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a kind it's a it's a sort of it's a frivolity, and I think it's also kind of just also never been true actually that you are rewarded in even these companies for breaking things.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you're fired when that happens.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_04: I always get an image of a of like a little of a kid just pulling the wings off a butterfly, you know, like that's that to me is the s the soul or the spirit of these guys.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_04: They're just kids pulling the wings off butterflies.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: I think it sort of feels to me that this is actually uh again a good place just to talk about the urgency of the moment.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: So you would serve in communities where that urgency has always existed, and now we're seeing urgency sp spread, I think, to um communities who are used to having it a bit easier.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: Communities are used to having it a bit easier.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: What is what is it, what's happening now?
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: What's is this how are you What are you seeing?
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, what are you seeing?
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: How are you adapting?
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um we are seeing the moment that was um mid-2020, and many of the promises that came in to secure newsrooms, particularly those led by people of color, um, really start to diminish.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_02: And particularly for those that are for-profit newsrooms, really thinking about those that are getting odd dollars, particularly those tied to corporate entities that might attach that to their DEI marketing budgets, which is a real phrase that people have, um, those funds have completely gone away.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_02: So you're talking about people losing 25, 30% of their budget in the first and second quarter of this year.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_02: And there is no great replacement for those dollars because, as we know, the business of journalism is not exactly a successful one on the best days, um, unless you own Wordle.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um but what we're also seeing, I think, is folks become um increasingly frustrated with the system that exists now and trying to understand how to attract the attention of both local and national philanthropy, how to make themselves attractive to those bodies, and really trying to figure out how to get in a game that is oversaturated and also is not going to be the final solution for any of us.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_02: And that is, as you might imagine, a very scary place to be.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_02: And then also, because I'm always going to go back to the people who actually make this work happen, that also means that we're seeing a reduction of staff, that people are having to let go of the one reporter they had in their newsroom.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: And what does that mean for communities that had a single reporter working?
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_02: Now they have a reporter, you know, who's also the founder and the ad person and the newsletter editor and all things.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_02: And so the destruction is both heartbreaking and also incredibly it's creating a road to damage for communities that really cannot afford not to have good information in place, particularly right now.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: And what's the so sorry, Sarah?
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: So could you maybe also talk about that a little bit from the perspective of the program now you're running?
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, again, you're kind of charged in some ways with not just uh doing this as a practitioner, but also is the model of the you know, the tiny newsroom collective, all those kind of things which actually have hold a lot of promise.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: Are these going to be resilient enough in this moment that Candace is talking about to get us kind of through the next five years?
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, let's hope.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think that there's a couple of things, right?
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I do think that I hope we are nearing the end of this fiction that like if you focus on the money first and you hope that the public good will come as a you know when possible, that that is like a very weak model for something essential, right?
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: Which is high quality news and information.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_01: So, and like as there's less money in the system, like we have seen, like Candace said, the lie of that, where like if a that the public good is coming less often to fewer people, and there's longer gaps between when journalism can deliver on its promise.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that what we need is clarity of purpose from these news organizations, clarity of purpose from supporters of news organizations, including philanthropy and local um folks.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: And then we also really do need to see us all building for a future where these newsrooms are fragile, right?
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: Like one of the most important things that we did at Outlier was to invest extremely we did not have much money, right?
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: We started on a serious shoestring with philanthropy did not believe in us until after the pandemic, when like everybody understood what an information gap was after living through COVID.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: That's when it clicked for people, but it didn't click before that.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: So even though we didn't really have money, we invested a lot of it in building an extremely strong documenters program.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: Documenters started by City Bureau in Chicago, where it kind of redistributes a lot of the functions of journalism to residents who get trained and paid to do that work.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: The reason for that is that we always knew like if this thing can last another year, we'll be so lucky.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: So we better have all these people all over Detroit understanding how to do what we do and being able to step in in lots of different ways to fulfill that function for their neighbors.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: We still need, even if things get better, we still need to carry ourselves that way.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: We should be equipping as many people as possible to do this kind of work because it makes more sense.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: It is like it makes us more resilient as neighbors, right?
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: And we it makes us all more able to step in when there's a crisis.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_02: But we have to be willing to redistribute power.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_02: And we have to stop thinking of ourselves as the holder of information power, right?
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_02: And that there is some magic that happens when you call yourself a journalist that removes you from you know the rest of society.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_02: That is absolutely one, untrue, but also incredibly harmful to whatever the future of journalism is going to be.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_02: So we really have to be thinking about how do we what is our journalism's relationship to power, and particularly what is its relationship to the redistribution of power.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_04: Wow, you're you're so speaking my language.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_04: Um no, I mean, as as you guys know, all the the work we're doing at the journalism design lab is building these these grassroots news networks, and it's it's really based on the premise that if there isn't gonna be any or a very strong uh formal news infrastructure, what are we gonna do?
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_04: And how do we get people in their communities doing this work?
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_04: And Candice, you and I have have talked about this in the past that wherever you go, there are people already doing it.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_04: There are every every single day.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_04: Every single day.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_04: And I still use that an example you gave me of uh a woman in Detroit who was keeping track of do you remember this this story?
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_04: Who was one of my neighbors?
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, right, right.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_04: So, and and one of the one of the things that it's interesting that you mentioned documenters, because I would love to hear what you guys have seen or think about this is the JD Lab, we're about to release this finding that we have discovered there's basically sort of I think it's seven basic categories that people tend to fill in their neighborhoods, that there are the documenters, there's also the archivists, there's the facilitators, there's the enablers, there's the reporters, that there are people who are fulfilling all the different roles that it takes to keep news and information flowing in their community.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_04: Considering that, considering we net we know that non-professionals in their communities are playing really vital roles, what should the relationship between newsrooms and those communities be?
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_04: What might that look like?
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my goodness, it should look like an open door.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_02: I went to I visited a newsroom in Spain last year or year before last.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_02: And it was one of the most beautiful experiences I've ever had in a newsroom because it was built to be a part of a community.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_02: It is literally sitting in the middle of a community where right here are apartment buildings and a grocery store and a restaurant, and then in the middle of all of that is this newsroom that also has a community center that the community can rent for baby showers or you know, community meetings or whatever you want to use it for.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_02: They can also have access to the podcasting equipment and TV equipment if that's a skill they want to learn.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_02: There's also a store in the front of it.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_02: So if you want to come and buy a book, you can walk in.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's your also your local bookstore, and on the back of all of that is the newsroom.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_02: And so it is this idea that the newsroom quite literally is a part of the community, and that there is Is a flow of both information in and out of that place, but also a flow of teaching and resources and understanding.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_02: That is the idea of what you have.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_02: Now, short of being able to have a building with a TV studio in it, it's also building something like documenters where folks are bringing us their time, their energy, also their historic knowledge of the city that they live in, because that is incredibly useful in a newsroom.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_02: And then we get to give them some of the tools of journalism that they can then use to use in other ways.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_02: And also in some cases, and I think in at least two of our cases, to then go to J school and become reporters themselves.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_02: That is sort of of a dream that you can't you don't dream in the beginning.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_02: Like you don't dream that's gonna happen.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_02: But if you do have an open flow, if you really are respecting people's gifts, if you're not treating them like some side project or like some, you know, idea, you know, like, oh, you know, we're gonna do this little side project called documenters, and instead it really becomes an anchor of your reporting, then you can really build something beautiful that gives people autonomy and power in their own right to create the kind of reporting that is necessary for their block or for things they care about.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_04: And it'll be resilient.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, that that's sort of my argument too, always is that people sometimes want to think of this kind of community work as like touchy-feely or or do good work.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm like, no, this is actually what will be resilient and will survive.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_04: And I often have felt that the the news industry really likes to just say, oh, the internet came along and destroyed anything.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_04: Whereas I I think you guys might be sympathetic to this, that if they had actually been providing anything of value to their communities, they would have been less brittle.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: And we're in the same place with AI now, right?
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: Like we're we're having the same conversation again with AI and people feeling very threatened by it.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: And again, it's like, yes, this is going to be incredibly disruptive.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: This is a thing that everybody's gonna have to adapt to, but there are things that you can do.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's just another you have to prove your value.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: But if you're always in that space of like you have to prove your value every day, then like you are not going to be as vulnerable to these freak outs.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um and Heather, real quick, I want to say like the thing that you're saying about like the different types of roles in communities, I think that there's like a lot of overlap there with what I think about as like the essential functions of journalism, which is not a framework that a lot of newsrooms use yet, but I hope that they will see and use it more, which is like not how do you figure out whether a story, where whether or not you're going to cover a particular thing.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_01: Again, there are better ways to figure that out, but really like what should your work do?
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: And every piece of work that you are doing, can you track it back to something essential in your community?
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: And then, like, once you've done that, then there's plenty of other time and space for other things, but like we have all of the fluff and not the things that like people really need to make the places that they live the kind of places that they want, and like we have got to fix that.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: J just on that point about AI, Sarah, I think that's a really great point to and also to sort of look at what we're talking about here a little bit, which is what what do we do now?
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know, how how do we get there?
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: What what do we do now?
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, just sort of point about AI, as you say, you know, kind of scares a lot of people, it's going to disrupt communities much more outside journalism, I think, than it is inside journalism, just in terms of jobs and um, you know, kind of ownership of data and things like that.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: But uh it also opportunities it sort of seems to produce present a potential opportunity to be able to stop worrying about some of the technical costs to doing resilient work.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know whether that's actually just a pipe dream of mine, because I've been railing against platforms for as long as I can remember.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_00: But just when I see really small newsrooms now saying we could not have done this three or four years ago because it was just too expensive.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: We can't have a full stack developer helping us kind of keep the archive up or keep publishing up.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: And now actually, you know, we can do it or we can go.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: Is that is tell me what you're kind of thinking about that?
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's a really good question, Candace.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: I'd love to hear what you uh think about this too.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: I I think that you're right.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I think that certain things will be much more possible for smaller um outfits.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: I think that cost is a prohibitive factor for fewer newsrooms than we think.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_01: I think that it's often really a question of will.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_01: If you have the will, you'll figure it out.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_01: We had no money, we figured it out, right?
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: And like, yes, now our small newsroom can do more with AI.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: For example, like here's a good example of a positive thing that I think.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_01: So AI is now allowing has been for like a little while, but now it's pretty good at um providing transcripts of public media, of public meetings, which is something, you know, the note-taking function of the documenters was really important because nobody was going to these meetings and they were relied upon to take these notes.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: But that takes a lot of time to also edit to go through two different edits at two different newsrooms, right?
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's a lot of time to create that public record.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: Now we can rely on these AI note-takers to provide incredibly good notes, that doesn't mean we're not sending the documenters there.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's an opportunity for us to say what is the value add besides just notes that having these people at meetings with their judgment, with their um, you know, kind of reporter eyes on like what does that bring to us?
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: And now that we can kind of like stop spending so much time on that note-taking function and on editing those notes, we have like so much more potential to take documenters to the next level.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: So that is like a good example of a positive way to use AI.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_01: I could also see newsrooms being like, oh great, we don't have to send documenters to these meetings anymore, we'll just use AI.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: That would be a nice opportunity.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: As you say, actually that vital kind of witnessing the fact that if you're a person in a room, you change the energy and the orientation of the room, and if you show up, then members of your community can see you, which is that I think that I think the thing about AI which scares me more than anything else is the abstraction from human presence and the idea that these things can be done without people there, because you know they can on a creator or creation level, but not on a reportorial and and actually is kind of you know Candace's point about like when you're in a community and you're from a community, then people have to see you as well.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_00: Right, I think it's that's a that's a good that's a great point.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_04: How about you, Candace?
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_04: Are you seeing um uses of AI with the newsrooms that you're working with that give can give us some hope?
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_02: Particularly on the on the business side, people are utilizing it for campaign writing, for grant writing, which I think are really necessary uh use cases for many particularly small newsrooms.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_02: And also um those same newsrooms are often in communities where data centers are being built.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so they're dealing with the environmental impact of those tools in a very direct way.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_02: And I am really struggling personally with the ethics of using AI right now and also understanding the need for a very small newsroom to be able to offload some of that capacity to this useful tool to be able to do more work in those communities.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_02: And so I do think, as many people much smarter than me are thinking about the ethics of AI, that that is a conversation journalism is not having.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_02: We're talking about the ethics on the reporting side, but I do think I um wrote something recently about going to the University of Arizona, and in one of their glass display cases, as you walk towards the restroom, there are these old newspapers.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_02: And a colleague asked me, had I read those new any of those newspapers, and I said, No, I hadn't.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_02: So he said, You should step down and like read it.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_02: They're pretty faded, so it's hard to read.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_02: And you go through and you see this is from like 1782, perhaps, um, you know, person selling hay, person selling pile of wood, person looking for their runaway slave.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_02: And the reward for that slave was a part of the ads that fell in that newspaper.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_02: And so the question I was striking in the post was we've already lived when with what happens when journalism doesn't think about where its money is coming from and how it impacts its community.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_02: And I feel like we're in another moment like that, both with AI, also what we see happening with ICE.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_02: Those are the same things.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_02: Like, should at should, you know, um would newsrooms take uh advertising dollars from ICE?
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_02: Like those are the questions I'm sort of wrestling with right now.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_02: And AI is a part of that same sort of ethical framework that I'm really challenged with, and I don't have a great answer for.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't think that journalism is the place I'm gonna find the answer.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_02: I'm probably gonna find it um in some seminary or somewhere.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's but that's a really interesting point about funding because the other thing that we do a lot of at the Tower Centre is this stuff called Pink Slime uh journalism, which we started as a project in 2019 when these things started popping up, and we actually just looked at one network.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and now and you know, me and my researchers are looking at them going, we don't really know and nobody seems to be reading them, but yet this is a weird new flex of the business model, which is pay-to-play for political and lobbyist firms, and you know, at various points where we thought, well, maybe these actually just don't have an impact on local communities, and yet here we are five or six years later, where I think that this is like a I would love to hear from you guys.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like it's a major concern, which is who is paying for messages which are reaching other people in your community where it's really not actually very obvious.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: I don't as I say I find it really hard to know how to think about this as a problem.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_00: Like, is it but is Canvas?
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's the same thing about like, do you take advertising money from ICE?
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't take advertising money from ICE, um I think I would struggle to do that if I was running a local newsroom.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: But ICE may well be producing its own news source and feeding it into your community.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_03: That's a great question.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: Just to cheer all up.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: Just to lighten the mood.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I mean, yeah, I think I do think that when we think about service, there are two things that we can and should be doing as information providers.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: And one is to provide better information for people, right?
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: More valuable, more useful.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_01: And then the other thing that we really do need to think about is how to help people navigate the information environment that we all find ourselves in.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_01: But journalists do not have enough trust to do that work yet.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: We will not have it until we get our act together and start doing our own job better, and then maybe people will trust us to do an additional job, which is to help them navigate these spaces.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_01: Because I do think that it has a huge effect.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_01: I also think that consumers of all this information, which is just all of us, regular people, don't like it, are tired of it, want a less overwhelming information environment where they can have more trust, where they and they have so much power, but they don't know how to use it and they haven't come together to use it.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_01: And again, that's because these are huge interests who are you know benefiting from the confusion and from the overwhelm.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_01: So if we want to be a part of changing that, I think first we have to become trusted messengers and not be contributing to the problem.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: And like, to be honest, so many news organizations are contributing to that problem by just putting out it's not that you have to take money from ICE, you can also just be doing stupid articles, non-stop fitness, what's the problem?
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_04: Stupid articles.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know, like there it is so clear that we have lost the thread of our value proposition as journalism, not as journalism businesses, but as like reporters, that like we just are not trustworthy sources on this, on like how to how to use how to identify and use high-quality information.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: So until we get our act together, we cannot move on to that problem.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: The stop stupid articles movement is under completely underestimated as a really important thing that we have to do.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: I think.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I want like high quality news I can use to like find food and like ensure a quality education for my kids, and I want articles about that 15-year-old in the Louvre photo.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: You know, like I want those two things.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it better be high quality information or like really useful information, right?
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_02: And nothing else about how I'm destroying the workplace.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_00: So we I was I feel that we should be ref rewarded for destroying the workplace.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know, like I'm welcome.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_00: I was I was like, you're welcome.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: When do we get our rewards for that?
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_04: Um so let me ask one of the things we're asking everybody that we have on the show is how you define the problem.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_04: And the origin of that was Emily and I, you know, met in probably 2012 when the future of journalism seemed to be was predominantly how do newspapers get online?
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_04: And I don't think many people would define the problem that way.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm just a firm believer that you cannot develop a good strategy forward if you haven't actually thought about what problem you're working on.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_04: So I would ask you today, what is the problem?
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I think I felt this way for a long time, and it ultimately is why I was attracted to Sarah and the work that she was doing.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um we we all suffer, I believe, to a high degree from a lack of belief in the possibility of the future and that and and the possibility of our hand in the future.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_02: If people, particularly right now, I think about people being attacked by their own government, how that sort of disassociates you from the belief that you have any capacity to build for your own future.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_02: You are sort of at the whim of some other bodies that are outside of you.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_02: And that can be uh that is an incredibly hard place to build anything good from or to even dream of being able to build anything.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_02: I find often that journalism lives in that place because of the business model problem, because of the challenges of the pipeline, and go on and on and on.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_02: That and all of these things I feel like are defined as things happening to us.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_02: Look at these attacks on us, right?
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_02: The internet killed our business model, or you know, Craigslist killed our advertising model, as opposed to um an understanding that once things shift, you have to build something new and that you have the capacity to build something new.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_02: But you have to be thoughtful enough, caring enough, and actually believe in the future enough to want to build something new and different, as opposed to just wanting what already exists to be.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um that is a very philosophical way to say we have to get out of our own way and really believe that tomorrow is coming, but tomorrow is not going to require what yesterday required.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's such a good point.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I know that sucks because you've gotten used to yesterday.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_04: But also, I mean, that's like you know, that's like the premise of Buddhism.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_04: Like it's a thousands of year-old idea, like change is inevitable.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_04: Like, why do we as humans struggle with it?
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_00: Don't drag the Buddhists into this.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_04: But I'm just saying, like, keep the Buddhists alive.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_04: My point is, like, why do we still need to be like saying this?
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_04: Like, this is not it's not it's not new.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_04: Why is that why is that so hard?
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_04: Is it because when people are and you know who are the people who don't want to hear it?
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_04: It's the people the system's working for.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_04: That's the people who don't hear it.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_02: So our our our industry is run by people who the systems work very good for.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_02: So either because they work well for them or because they work well, they can't identify that they're working poorly for other folks.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_02: What does it matter?
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_04: And and I don't know if you guys feel this, but like I am so amazed how like when I think back to I often track the way things are changing by like going to the night media forum, you know, every every year, one of those things.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_04: I saw that face there.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_04: Video, video, but don't start Emily on it.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_04: She'll No, I'll be I'll be ruled too.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_04: You know, you go, and I feel like when I was talking about informal news networks five years ago, people were literally like, What the fuck are you talking about?
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_04: And not you guys and not you, Emily, but people literally are just blank, like what what do you mean?
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_04: But they're not professional reporters and just sort of and now see themselves in that future.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_00: And right, and now things have got the people who the system was working for are now unemployed, and they're like, Oh well, I had the sad same thing with non-profit news because I come from the Guardian background, and when I got here, everyone was like, Oh, you've arrived to fix the business problem so we can make loads of money.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, You are not gonna make loads of money.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_00: That is not your future.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_00: The future is building non-profit news, and again, it's like it wasn't just me, like lots of people had re or or this is a way you might be able to make money, but it's not gonna make you rich in the same way.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_04: Well, and I and I it this thing about that when it's working for you, you don't understand why either why change is necessary or how to make change, it's just frightening.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_04: But it has been fascinating watching that group of people suddenly, or not suddenly, but over time as things get worse and worse and worse, to even they are affected now being willing to try solutions or ideas that they were just completely dismissive of five or ten years ago.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_02: That's always a little bit more.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_02: I'm a little more cynical.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_04: Wait, no, that is wait, how can it be more cynical than that?
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_04: How can it be more cynical than that?
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, what do you what do you mean?
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_02: You I think that your um statement disavows the fact that that they are also following trends and money, that the money sits in the language, right?
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_02: We watched as the as the language on foundation sites changed the language we have been using.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_02: Totally journalism.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_04: Totally.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_04: You don't think that they're actually being affected.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_04: You think they just see that the Knight Foundation's now talking about the community, huh?
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_00: Chasing shiny things.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_00: Chasing shiny things.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_02: Not in all cases.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_00: No, we love the money, but it's not our game.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_02: But I do think in too many cases, and you see that because once those dollars go away, those projects also go away.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_00: I was gonna say, so that's the problem actually, which is it's there's nothing inherently wrong with the idea of oh, something new is happening, we should focus on it, but it's that inevitability of the money washing in and out without a kind of commitment to the long arc of change, and saying this is not a four-year project which you can then hand off.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_00: This is like something that we are gonna have to commit to for 50 years, for 25 years.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_02: This is the way it's going to be.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_02: Like this is a new kind of journalism, it exists as a new thing, and this is what it is.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_02: And I a lot of people are really struggling with the idea that journalism itself is changing.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_06: Right.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_04: But you you don't think the money is going there because the people who have been in power are realizing that that they are not gonna be in power longer if they don't rethink things.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_04: You think it's just fashion?
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's both.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_01: Right, and it's it is, but it is more of I think it is both.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes there is like true change, right?
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_01: And people are really like embracing these new ideas that they just did not that they had not previously um either known about or something.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_01: Or fear has forced them to take it.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Seriously.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: But then there's also how they're training us.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_01: But then there's definitely also an attempt to just stay around, not change, and capitalize on these ideas.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why we're always talking about this problem of will.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_01: The money doesn't fix it unless you really want to fix it.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_01: And if you really want to fix it, you need some money, but you don't need all this money.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I totally Candace, I mean, I agree with Candace's diagnosis of the problem for you know, kind of like where we are.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_01: I think that a way to get out of it is to really orient reporting and news and information towards service.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_01: Like service is resilient.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_01: We have to have a strategy that allows us to be responsive.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_01: And all of these other strategies are not responsive, right?
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_01: Like fix the business model isn't responsible.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what are you gonna do when that one breaks?
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_01: Like they're just not strong enough foundations coming from a place of service, coming from a place of care.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_01: It does feel squishy to people.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_01: They want to put it in like some engagement ghetto or some like whatever.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_01: But it is what works.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_01: It is what works over the long term.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_01: It would it gives you value, it gives your community value, it allows you to not be working from this.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_01: One of the biggest changes that like I saw Canvas go through during like the very long years that were how when was that?
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_01: Like the the pandemic was like 2020 to 2022.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_01: It was for every elite, it was so long, it was so difficult.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I was just like, you know, dying, just like texting so many people every day, and just like I had no idea.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_01: And then Candace was really struggling too, but she was like, we have to get out of a scarcity mindset, we have to move to an abundance mindset.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, what are you even talking about?
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_01: And that work was not what we're saying here.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't just like let's adapt the language and act the same way, let's talk about abundance mindset while we try to take everything for ourselves.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_01: I watched you, Candace, do that work, which was so hard, and really switch your mindset over to that.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I then was able to be like, okay, I think maybe I could get there too, and I could stop like being such a fighter and try to be like a little bit more expansive.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_01: And it really did change so many things.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_01: Until you do that mindset work, until we embrace ideas around care and service, we will not fix this.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_04: And and how I I the thing I keep thinking is, and I know that we're running.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_04: Wait, I was gonna say we can like it.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's always good when we don't have enough time to say we want to say.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_04: That how do you guys think about articulating, and then we and then I I really will stop that that perspective, the care, that that's that it's not squishy, that that is the tough ass approach.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we are who we are, and people still don't believe us.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_01: People are like, I think it's squishy.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, have you met us?
• 47:16
  unknown: Do we look at us?
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_04: Like, do we look squishy?
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_04: Don't answer that question.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_04: No, but like that's exactly it.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_04: I I how how we've all had this where you walk into some room and it's all these dudes and they're navy blazers, and they're just looking down at you because you're talking in the product bros.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_00: I have a product bro problem, I'm afraid.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_00: Which is like and I love product bros, but I'm also like, this is not actually what people miss when it goes away.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_00: I think that that thing about years ago we did a local um we did local sites of the Guardian, which were and I was like, kind of this is these should be small and they should be based on things that can really help people, and we should just go and report on town halls where nobody else is reporting.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_00: And it was an experiment, and the kind of you know, Top of the Guardian was like, this is great, but we're not really a local outfit, we're gonna kill it.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_00: The comments from people when we killed it, and I was like the it the test is what happens when you are not there, and there's a lot of our journalism we could have killed, and nobody would have turned a hair, but it was perceived as being more important, quote unquote.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I kind of think that's the squishy thing, isn't it?
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_00: Which is is like you take that away, it's not squishy, it's a harder thing that people notice and that they value.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_04: And it's feminist.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_04: I feel like there's it's so gendered too.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_04: But sorry, go ahead, Candace.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_04: Well, sure.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um I I'll tell I'll just say this it doesn't actually matter at the end of the day, and it's not that I always have this in my brain, but it's what I have to go back to eventually.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't actually matter what the folks in the suit say because I have to walk into my community and be accountable to it.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_02: I live amongst my my neighbors.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_02: I lived amongst Detroiters.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_02: Detroiters raised me.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_02: So when a Detroiter tells me, texts me, and says, hey, so I sent the SMS service to my aunt because she's about to lose her house to tax foreclosure.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_02: That is the way I reminded that it doesn't matter what they think about me.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_02: Because I know that this is actually working, that people are staying in their homes, their lights are staying on, their water is being kept on.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_02: And that ultimately, and that goes right back to the beginning.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_02: Do I want to see a healthy Detroit?
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, that's my value proposition for even being in this work, that I want to see healthier communities.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_02: So the endorsement of people in journalism who don't live in my community believing that I'm doing something useful doesn't matter at all if in fact Detroit is healthier.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_02: And that I believe is true, not just because of Outlier, but Outlier is a part of that health.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_02: And so what else would I care about?
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_03: Full stop.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_03: Fantastic.
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_03: Could not end on a better note.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_00: Sarah and Candace, thank you so much for giving up time to talk to us.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_00: To talk to us.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's so important for people to hear this.
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thank you.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_01: Candace.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_04: I know.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_04: And I feel good we facilitated you guys getting to connect.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_04: So it's an added bonus.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's only been like a week now.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's been a whole week since we say to each other.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks very much indeed.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_00: And and and hope to speak to you again.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_03: Keep up the good work.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_03: Bye.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_00: Journalism 2050 is a co-production of the Town Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, the Columbia Journalism Review, with help from our friends at the Journalism and Design Lab at the New School.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_00: Our producer is Amanda Derek, our production coordinator is Hannah Joy, and our researcher is Sam Earle.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_00: Find us wherever you get your podcasts.