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John Adams of Montana Free Press · A New Angle

• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: This is A New Angle, a show about cool people doing awesome things in and around Montana.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: I'm your host, Justin Angle.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: This show is supported by First Security Bank,
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: Blackfoot Communications,
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: and the University of Montana College of Business.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: Hey folks, welcome back and thanks for tuning in.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: Today,
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: we bring you an encore broadcast of my conversation with John Adams,
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: Executive Director at Montana Free Press.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: We needed to remind the public of the importance of a free press and that this is
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: something that is enshrined in the First Amendment of the Constitution for a reason.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: John and I talk about the Montana Free Press model,
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: the state of journalism in general,
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: and its future here in Montana.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: The first Montana Free Press Festival is coming up in early September,
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: and this conversation will give you some insight into the spirit of that event.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: John, thanks for coming on the show.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, thanks for having me.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: Tell us, where did you grow up and what did your parents do?
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I grew up in a little resort community.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, it was kind of a blue-collar shipbuilding community when I was a kid.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's called Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's in the northeastern corner of Wisconsin, the thumb, the peninsula that juts out into Lake Michigan.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: And my dad was a social studies teacher, and my mom was a journalist.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: She was a reporter for my local hometown newspaper, the Door County Advocate.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I kind of grew up with politics and journalism in my upbringing.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: And was that always going to be the career pursuit, journalism?
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: You know, not at all, really.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't actually take a shine to writing until college, where I'd gone to school.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to be a photographer for National Geographic.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: But,
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: there just isn't a program at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point for
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: wildlife photography.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's sort of an ambitious sort of target job as well.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: I mean,
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't really,
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: I mean,
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: like a lot of 18-year-old kids,
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: I really didn't know what I wanted my future to look like.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: But that was something that was appealing to me, something that got me out.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a big,
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a lover of the outdoors,
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: and I love wildlife,
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: and I had taken a real strong interest in biology in high school.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: Went to my first true old-growth wilderness in northern Michigan when I was a
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: junior in high school,
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: and that really...
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: really kind of inspired my love for the outdoors and open spaces.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I was looking for a career in that field.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: So I studied wildlife and forestry and a few other sort of outdoor oriented programs,
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: very similar to the programs here at University of Montana.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: And then I didn't do so hot in my math and science classes,
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: but I really excelled in my writing and English classes.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so that really kind of became my passion in college was the writing and the
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: I started working for the student newspaper my junior year of college,
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: and I think that's kind of where I started to be hooked.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: And my mom at the time,
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: who was still in journalism,
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: said,
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: well,
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm totally supportive of you switching your majors and pursuing journalism,
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: but just know that if you go into journalism,
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: you'll never be bored,
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: but you'll never get rich.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, well, being not bored sounded a lot more appealing than being rich anyway.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: Has that proven to be correct?
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, absolutely.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: I mean,
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: anybody,
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: I think most people who've worked in the journalism field have definitely felt the
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: financial pinch of the field.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, it's one of the reasons why I started the free press in the first place.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: But, but yeah, really, it just isn't boring.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you get to be an expert in so many different things, right?
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: And you get to interview the most interesting people.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: And you get to see, you know, you get to travel to interesting places.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're a curious person, which I am, I think it's the perfect field.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: So we'll talk about a lot of those threads over the course of this interview,
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: but give us kind of a brief summary of your professional experience.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you've worked kind of at all levels of news gathering in your career.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: My first writing job, the first time I got paid...
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: to do anything in the publishing world was for a magazine called Potato Grower Magazine,
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Idaho Falls,
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: Idaho.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I was living in Idaho Falls, looking for work.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: I was working in construction,
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: but really wanted to have a job in this thing that I was passionate about,
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: which was writing.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: And there was a publishing company, a trade publisher in Idaho Falls called Harris Publishing.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: I think they're still around.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: And they publish a whole variety of industry trade magazines,
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: and they had an opening for an assistant editor of Potato Grower magazine.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, well, it's a start.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's a foot in the door.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it was actually really interesting.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: I found – it doesn't sound like the most exciting or glamorous writing opportunity, but –
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: I just find that if you're curious about people and curious about the way the world
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: works in general,
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: you can find interesting things in almost any topic.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: And certainly,
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: an agriculture product,
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: the size of the potato industry in a state like Idaho is hugely important.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I just learned so much.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: And then I switched gears a little bit with that company and worked for a different
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: division within the company.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: So I was the editor of Skate Park magazine.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: Which is a little bit more up my alley at the time.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that really kind of introduced me to, again, all kinds of neat people.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the folks who built the skate park here in Missoula are folks that I had interviewed and met.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, nice.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: Montana Pool Service and the whole story there.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it was Grindline and Dreamland, I think, that worked on the original Escape Park.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I just really was then fascinated by it.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: But then I moved back to Wisconsin for various reasons and got a job working at a local newspaper.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so that was really my first foray into sort of straight news journalism.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I was a city government reporter for this small five-day-a-week afternoon daily
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: called the Daily Jefferson County Union.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh-huh.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's where I really started to see the connection between local news and the
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: impact that it can have on a community.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I think local news in particular is the news that matters most to people on the day to day.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: What happens in Washington, D.C.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: or what happens overseas is dramatic.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: It takes up a lot of our bandwidth.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: It attracts a lot of our attention.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: But in terms of like how it actually impacts us on a day to day basis, it's pretty small.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: Not that it doesn't have impact,
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: not that it doesn't matter,
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: but really what happens at your local school board or your local parks commission
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: or your local city council meeting,
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: that stuff is far more impactful to your day-to-day life and matters more,
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: I think,
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: to most people than what's happening on the national front.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: But it just doesn't get as much attention.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then in 2004, I moved out to Missoula, followed some friends of ours that had moved out here.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: Just looking for a change.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: Felt a little hemmed in in Wisconsin.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: And the Missoula Independent was hiring.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: And in April of 2005,
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: I got my first reporting job here in Montana at the Missoula Independent where I
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: was a...
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: Sort of a general assignment reporter,
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: but I was drawn to,
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: and again,
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: maybe from my background in covering local politics,
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: I was really kind of drawn to political coverage.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, in 2005, 2006, we had a big Senate race, much like we do this year.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I was really interested in covering those politics.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: Which I did for the Indy.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: Did that until 2007,
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: and I was sort of recruited by the Great Falls Tribune,
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: which at the time was,
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: I would say,
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: one of the premier newspapers in the state,
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: if not the.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I was recruited to cover the Statehouse for the Great Falls Tribune, which was...
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: Pretty intimidating, but it was a great honor and a great opportunity.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: And as much as I wanted to stay here in Missoula and continue my career at the Indy,
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: I realized what a great opportunity it was to go to Helena and cover state politics
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: from sort of the seat of power.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: And at what stage then after,
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: you're at the Great Falls Tribune,
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: and then at what stage did you decide to branch off and launch this new model of journalism,
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: Montana Free Press?
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well,
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: for many years at the Trib,
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: I started there in 2007,
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: and I would say for the first five years or so,
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: it was great.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: Great editors,
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: worked with great,
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: passionate journalists,
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: a lot of folks who had very lengthy careers in journalism in Montana.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: Chuck Johnson is a good example.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: Well,
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: Chuck was my sort of competitor at Lee Enterprises at the time,
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: but Chuck had been one of my predecessors at the Great Falls Tribune.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: So,
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: obviously Chuck Johnson was somebody who I had always looked up to,
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: but he and Mike Dennison and Gwen Florio and some of the other State House
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: reporters were sort of the people that I both looked up to,
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: but also kind of wanted to compete against.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: Sure, yeah.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: And got the opportunity to do that for many years.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: And it was great.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then in 2013,
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: 2014,
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: things started changing at Gannett,
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: the parent company that owned or continues to own the Great Falls Tribune.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: And you just started seeing, you know, I remember the day that my editor called me up.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: I was on vacation back in my hometown of Sturgeon Bay visiting family.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I got the call that he basically was forced with a pretty difficult decision of
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: either making cuts in the newsroom or taking an early buyout himself,
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: which I think he did.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so I started seeing the more veteran journalists in the newsroom being forced to take buyouts.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, well, I'm still pretty young in my career.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to have to deal with that anytime soon.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: But it really – I saw where things were going.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: So can we take a moment to just –
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: press on this particular time.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: We see that the business model for Gannett is changing some of the dynamics.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: There's a rise in what's happening with Facebook at that time,
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: like the like button had just kind of come into fruition and they're starting to
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: monetize their audience in new ways.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: Google had been aggregating news for a long time,
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: but we're really starting to see intense pressure on the traditional business model
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: in journalism.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: Talk a little bit more about your thoughts around those changes at the time.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: And the way those changes manifested for us in the newsroom was we went from being
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: sort of reporters whose job it was to go out there and collect information and
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: write stories and publish stories,
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: print stories to,
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: they gave us all iPhones,
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: which we were excited about.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: But then we learned that we needed to use those iPhones to shoot video and have
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: instant video published directly from the field to the website.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: So speed became a critical factor.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: I've said this over and over again.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: The folks in Great Falls,
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: the publishers,
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: the editors,
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: the folks who had been in that organization for a long time were forced with these
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: changes that were coming not from Great Falls,
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: but were coming from Virginia.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: And it was an attempt by the company,
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: I think,
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: to figure out a way to generate revenue in this atmosphere that you just described,
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: where so much of the online advertising revenue was going to these giant companies
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: that had the ability to just...
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: The sheer scale of their platform was so much bigger than what a local newspaper
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: could possibly compete with for online advertising.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: And they were scraping the content too.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: And they were taking the content that you all were developing and using that to monetize their audience.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I think newspaper publishers made a mistake many,
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: many years ago,
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: which was when the internet came around,
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: there wasn't a forward,
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: there wasn't a visionary model for how they're going to adapt to this new tool,
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: this new technology,
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: this new information superhighway.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the attitude was, well, we got to have a website because everybody has a website.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: But then what do you put on your website?
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we produce news.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: So we're going to put news on our website.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so it was this attempt to sort of cut and paste what was done in print and
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: apply it to a digital platform.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: And that just wasn't going to work.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: Especially when you're giving it away.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: Especially when you're giving it away.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: And the thing about the internet is it's not like a news,
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: you and I finish a newspaper,
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: we leave it lay on the coffee counter and the next person who comes by can read the paper.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: With the internet, with a paywall, it's not really like that.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: You need somebody's password to get in.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: So I understand the challenge of how do we make sure that we're informing the
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: public without putting up barriers that make it difficult for folks of modest or
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: low income to also have access to that information.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: By 2015,
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: I kind of saw the writing on the wall,
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: and then the Great Falls Tribune went through this process like all Gannett
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: newspapers did at the time,
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: which was we were essentially laid off.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: The entire newsroom was laid off,
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: and those of us that wanted to continue working at the Trib were going to apply for
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: new jobs,
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: which meant some of us weren't going to get jobs.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: So we're now competing against each other in the newsroom for those same jobs.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: Got to do great things for culture.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: Quite frankly, I thought it was insulting.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: My ego was such at the time that I was unwilling to go through that process.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I was lucky enough that I had a partner who supported me in wanting to pursue a new endeavor.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm the kind of person who can live out of the back of my truck, which I did for a little while.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I kind of took the opportunity to just I said, look, I'm not going to do this.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: I told my editor at the time that,
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry,
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: but I'm not I'm not going to take part in this process,
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: which on the one hand opened up the opportunity for somebody else to have that position.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: You know, so it's one less cut somebody was going to have to make.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: The free press wasn't really the thing that I was thinking about at that time.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: At that time, I was thinking I'll go out and freelance.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'll try to figure out what my next move is.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: But I knew it wasn't going to be in, you know, corporate print journalism.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: You just didn't want to be in that space.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: No, and I mean, I had other opportunities for other news organizations.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, when I looked at what...
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: was going on with those news organizations, I saw it's the same thing.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's me now, but I could be in that same position six months or a year from now.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't want to always be looking over my shoulder,
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: wondering when the next shoe is going to drop and I'm going to be laid off again.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, you could look all over the country and it was happening everywhere.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: There were entire blogs dedicated to this.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: There were Facebook groups dedicated to this,
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: where people were sharing stories about what was happening in their newsrooms.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: We'll be back to my conversation with John Adams after this short break.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: A New Angle is proudly presented by First Security Bank,
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: Blackfoot Communications,
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: and the University of Montana College of Business.
• 14:27
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• 14:30
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• 14:33
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• 14:38
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• 14:43
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• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: This is University of Montana President Seth Bodnar, and you're listening to A New Angle.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome back to A New Angle.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: I'm speaking with John Adams of Montana Free Press.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: And is this about the time when...
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: The New York Times pivots its business model and decides to get giant and monetize
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: a bunch of different channels.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: The Washington Post is bought by Jeff Bezos around this time as well.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: Some bigger papers are going under.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: Give us kind of the state of play on a broad sense.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: this has affected local news,
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: of course,
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: but it's also affected the information economy in many ways.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, nobody was immune from it.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: It had been happening slowly for a long time.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: Craigslist had basically eviscerated the classified market.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's a piece I don't think many listeners realize is like how much of the revenue
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: model was tied to classified advertising and just in an instant that was eviscerated.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and that was cash flow that those newspapers could count on.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it was very consistent cash flow.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: Without any kind of influence on editorial as well.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so with Craigslist, you saw the print classifieds kind of disappear.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: And that was a huge part of what,
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: for every page of classifieds,
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: that's a page of editorial somewhere else in the paper.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: The traditional print model,
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: whether it was at the local level or the national level,
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: they were not figuring out
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: Without just squeezing their subscribers,
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: their readership,
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: if advertising revenue is the thing that is going to essentially subsidize news gathering,
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: how are you going to do that?
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: And in the digital space,
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: that was really just sort of an all-out attempt to just chase CPM,
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: clicks per thousand,
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: which is the unit of measure that advertisers use to sort of gauge whether or not
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: their advertising dollars are being used wisely.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: Local newspapers cannot compete with CPM when it comes to platforms like Google and
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: Facebook that collect so much user data that they can deliver ads directly to users
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: that they know are the type of users that the advertisers are seeking to attract
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: the attention of.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: And if you want to have a relationship with your audience as a newspaper,
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: you can't be harvesting that kind of data from your users and expect them to trust you.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think anybody trusts Facebook or Google or any of these giant tech platforms.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: But they used to trust their local newspaper where they could pick up the phone and
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: call an editor and complain.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: We don't trust them, yet we willingly give them so much information about our lives.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: and I mean,
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think most people realize how much information they're harvesting,
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: and that's part of the problem,
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: and I think where we need to get – where the federal government needs to step in
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: and help provide some transparency and regulation around this massive harvesting of
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: personal data.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: That being said –
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: At this time,
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: while traditional newspapers were struggling,
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: there were other models that were starting to come up and show some real promise.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm looking around at places like the Texas Tribune and the Vermont Digger and
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: nationally organizations like ProPublica and Grist.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: And there were these online digital-first nonprofit news sites that were starting
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: to pop up all over the country,
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: including in my home state of Wisconsin,
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: Wisconsin Watch.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: That we're doing really first-rate journalism and starting to build a presence.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, well, why couldn't we do that in Montana?
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: Montana is a small enough state.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: I've been doing this long enough that I kind of know what the stories are.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I know in my heart that there is an appetite for this kind of journalism, even if it's not...
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: generating the thousands of clicks that a mugshot gallery or a you know celebrity
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: gossip column sure some buzzfeed list or something yeah listicles and those kinds
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: of things maybe not as many people read it but the people who read it really truly
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: value it yeah and so i just had a sort of a field of dreams approach to if you
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: build it they will come
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so I set out to just start a news organization and worked with some close
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: friends of mine who were collaborators of sorts.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: They were the people who were sort of fanning the entrepreneurial flames that were
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: starting to burn inside me.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: And we kind of came up with an idea for this Montana Free Press.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: And once we settled on the name Montana Free Press, I was like, that's it.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: That says- That feels right.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: Feels right, because it's free.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: All along, I always said that our content will always be free to the public.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: And that was, as my friend Evan Smith of the Texas Tribune likes to say, free is a business model.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: So I wanted it to be free for the public.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: But also, you know, press freedoms have been challenged of late more so than any time in my lifetime.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I felt like we needed to remind the public of the importance of a free press
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: and that this is something that is enshrined in the First Amendment of the
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: Constitution for a reason.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's a great name and a great concept.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: Let's draw out what the nonprofit digital first model,
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_01: how does that enable you to do things that the Great Falls Tribune could not,
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: for example?
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: Well,
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: I will tell you that one of the reasons I settled on nonprofit right out of the
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: gate was simply because I had no idea how to sell advertising and I had no desire
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: to learn.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: I really liked the idea of being able to create a product and say,
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: look,
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: if you value this work,
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: support it.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's the same model that fuels public radio.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's the same model that fuels public television.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: There were already models for public supported media out there.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: And my view was,
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think there's anything different about doing it in the digital space as
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: doing it in the broadcast space.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: People sign up and call into the pledge drive at Montana Public Radio every year
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: because they value that service.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's something they rely on.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's something they depend on.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: They might not use it every day, but they're glad that it's there and doing its thing.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: That we were serious about this model and that that there was that this kind of
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: journalism had a place in Montana that we would find the money to do it.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't really know where we were going to get it early on.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: There were some folks out there who had sort of indicated to me that if I did it,
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: that they would commit some significant financial resources to it.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: My advice would be get that in writing.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: OK, we can read between the lines on how that played out.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so the first couple of years were pretty rough.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: It was just me.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: Anything and everything that was the Montana Free Press for about the first two
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: years was basically just me.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: So you've got a website.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: You're writing some stories yourself.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: You're maybe throwing a couple bones to reporter friends to pay them to write
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: stories freelance if you can.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then I was using content from other nonprofit news organizations.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: Very early on,
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: we joined the Institute for Nonprofit News,
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: which at the time there were maybe 100,
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: 120 organizations around the country that were members of INN.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: And INN had some really strict rules about membership that was you had to be
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: transparent in your sources of funding.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: You had to have editorial guidelines that were published and transparent on your website.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there were these sort of like these check boxes and I liked all of those boxes.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: I thought all of those were good practices.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: And my hope was that once we got going with this,
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: people would see it and the donations would just come flying in.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: What I didn't realize is just how difficult it is to elevate in this atmosphere,
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: in this digital space where it's just a complete wild west of information,
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: so many sources of information.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: How do you break through?
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: How do you get your website in front of people who've never heard of you before?
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of that takes money and talent, right?
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_01: And Facebook.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: And given that the donations are not flying in,
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: like you mentioned a few moments ago,
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: your colleague at the Texas Tribune says that free is a business model.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_01: Explain how this business model works.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: Early on in 2016,
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: the main story that I had been covering for the Great Falls Tribune and a story
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: that continued to be a major news story in Montana was the story of dark money.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: And how those dark money political campaigns had influenced the outcomes of
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: primarily Republican legislative primary races.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: And we should mention that the dark money line of inquiry led to some award-winning
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: documentaries down the road,
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: right?
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: and a lot of what we've talked about here,
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: that period from 2013 to the time that I left the Trib and then a little bit beyond that,
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: I had been talking to and working with a documentary filmmaker who is exploring a
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: sort of similar reporting track as I was.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: For the local newspaper,
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: I was covering who's behind these groups that are trying to influence the outcome
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: of these primary elections in Montana.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know how much money they have.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know how much money they're spending.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know who's providing the money.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: Post Citizens United.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: And this documentary filmmaker,
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: Kimberly Reid,
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: a Helena native,
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: was interested in what was going on in her home state.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so she was coming back to Montana,
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: looking at kind of tracking the state's attempt to overturn Citizens United through
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: a defense of our 100-year-old Corrupt Practices Act.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: And meanwhile,
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: I was reporting on the sort of the on the ground impacts of that dark money in the
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: legislative arena.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: And those tracks kind of came together in 2015 and 2016.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: And in 2018, the documentary film Dark Money was premiered at Sundance.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that really was the point at which,
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: the rest of the world kind of saw what I was trying to do with the Montana Free Press.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: And once we had that attention on my...
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: my effort to build this independent online digital first investigative news outlet,
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: once people saw and heard about it for the first time,
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: then those donations that I was so hoping would come through the door in 2016 and 2017,
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: they finally came in in 2018 and 2019.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: And we finally had enough revenue that I could start hiring reporters.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: So by the time 2019 came around,
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: we had two reporters covering the 2019 legislative session,
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: plus myself doing the low down podcast.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so we had essentially three journalists for one news organization that was
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: essentially brand new,
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: covering the Montana legislature top to bottom.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's really where people saw what the potential for the Montana Free Press really could be.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: Essentially, you were grinding away on a beat.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: You had your own audience that you had cultivated,
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: and now to get to your work,
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: they had to access Montana Free Press.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: And you have this tipping point with the documentary.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: I'm assuming that maybe because it premieres at Sundance and Gaines,
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_01: kind of a national claim that this maybe attracted some national benefactors or
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: something like that?
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_00: There were a handful of individual donors,
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: people who I had never met until the film came out,
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: who saw the film and were inspired by what they saw depicted and wanted to be helpful.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_00: They had the means to do it.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: They were philanthropic in nature.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: They had their own family foundations.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: that they used to fund causes that they believed in.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: And they believed that journalism was a cause worth investing in.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: I had enough cash in 2019 to hire two reporters to cover the legislature.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: And we started growing our audience.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: Back to your question about free as a business model.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: As we were producing this journalism,
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: we were publishing it on our own website and in our own newsletter,
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: email newsletter.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: But we were also making it freely available to any other news organization that wanted to republish it.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: So if you were a local news editor in a community in Polson or Augusta or Wolfpoint,
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: you had access to our journalism and so if your local legislators were we were
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: covering what they were doing in the in the montana legislature they might want to
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: run that story for their local readers and so our perspective was make it free make
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: it available and make it easily distributed so that montanans no matter where they
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: are can can find out what their local officials are doing once they're in helena
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for listening to A New Angle.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: If you like what we do and want to support us directly,
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: please consider a subscription at anewanglepodcast.com.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: A New Angle is recorded at Studio 49, a generous gift from UM alums Michelle and Lauren Hansen.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_01: Our presenting sponsors are First Security Bank,
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: Blackfoot Communications,
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: and the University of Montana College of Business.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: Kelly Larson is our producer.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: Maddie Jordan is our production assistant.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: VTO Jeff Ament and John Wicks made our music.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: And Jeff Meese is our master of all things sound.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks a lot and see you next time.