Year: 2020

Off of the internet and into the streets

dmoseley Student Perspectives

By Patsy Newitt

Social media and the internet have, of course, altered the course of journalism. News cycles are shorter, Twitter is king and budding journalists are required to know how to do it all: audio, video, photos, live-tweeting and engagement.

But what’s forgotten throughout this narrative is the multitude of citizens who aren’t online.

The internet reaches a pretty homogenous group. Twitter users, for example, are typically younger, wealthier and of the political left, according to a 2019 Pew Research Study. 42 percent of Twitter users have a bachelor’s degree, compared to 31 percent of the general public, and they are three times as likely to be younger than 50.

In Chicago, there is a distinct digital divide, which falls, as many things do in this city, between the North and South and West sides. More than half of the households in Englewood don’t have internet access in their homes and in the South Shore, 46 percent.

Lack of internet access is a barrier — it’s nearly impossible to fill out a job application or learn remotely, let alone stay informed. And while journalists can’t singlehandedly fix access inequity and injustice, they can work to meet people where they are and provide crucial information and resources to those who need it.

But yet, there seems to be little to no effort by news organizations to reach community members offline, or at the very least being in tune with online communities.

This is the essence of community engagement. Newsrooms need to be looking for ways to reach groups that aren’t the Twitter demographics — white, upper-middle class and politically savvy.

Journalists need to leave the newsroom. Journalists need to reach people offline to figure out what they need covered, what information they’re missing and most importantly, how they want to receive it.

And while the COVID-19 pandemic has stunted the ability to meet in person, there are newsrooms that are putting in the work, finding innovative ways to engage with groups who are historically disenfranchised and under covered.

Injustice Watch, a non-partisan news publication for example, is sending copies of their ballot guides into Cook County Jail. Nonprofit journalism lab City Bureau hosts free workshops called Public Newsrooms to be more responsive to community needs.

If journalists and publications are going to paint themselves as those who speak truth to power and give a voice to the voiceless, then they need to be putting in the effort to reach past the digital divide.

You can’t expect readers to adapt to your standards and practices, particularly if those standards and practices are inaccessible in the first place. If you want to be making a difference, if you want to be addressing injustice, journalists need to be finding new ways to reach people.

A fact checker’s role amid a pandemic

dmoseley Student Perspectives

By Ella Lee

Fact-checking has historically been used to debunk urban legends and in newsrooms behind the scenes, ensuring the veracity of reporters’ work. But in this era of viral misinformation, the role of the fact checker has become more public and more vital than ever, especially as the COVID-19 pandemic rages on during an election year.

As a fact checker for USA TODAY, I witness the depth of misinformation online each day. Thousands of unfounded claims — from outlandish conspiracy theories to an intentional tweak to claims otherwise true — percolate online each day, many of which garner millions of views and interactions.

But when the COVID-19 pandemic enveloped the world, the stakes for fact checking were raised. Falsehoods about the virus and the ways in which people should protect themselves from it could do more than spread misinformation — it could kill.

Some of the first false information that spread online had to do with the effectiveness of masks. The mixed signals sent by the federal government at the beginning of the pandemic about whether masks are effective protectants against the virus led to a confused country, unsure of whom to believe as most mask messaging was divided down party lines.

At USA TODAY, we showed homemade cloth masks do offer protection, and confirmed the Occupational Safety and Health Administration doesn’t say otherwise; reported N95 filters aren’t too large to stop COVID-19 particles; explained HIPAA and the Fourth and Fifth Amendments don’t give business patrons a loophole out of mask-wearing; and that wearing facemasks don’t cause health problems, like hypoxia, hypercapnia or a weakened immune system.

While some of these claims may seem outlandish, each was shared hundreds of thousands of times online, many of the post’s creators and people engaging with the social media posts adamantly believing they were true.

Even more dangerous misinformation soon began to spread as talk of cures began to seep into the mainstream conversation.

Claims that the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine was a miracle cure to the coronavirus began to make rounds on social media this summer, after President Donald Trump lauded it as potentially one of the “biggest game changers in the history of medicine.” The drug does not work — not here, nor abroad — and some studies have found that it might be dangerous when used on COVID-19 patients.

Like in that case, the falsehood-fighting cause isn’t helped when the country’s leaders are often where the misinformation begins. A study by researchers at Cornell University found that the “single largest driver” of coronavirus misinformation is President Donald Trump.

In addition to claiming some drugs are miracles before scientists have backed that up, the president has often pushed a false narrative about the severity of the virus, grossly misinterpreting CDC data as recently as last month. And, of course, pointing out those falsehoods only deepens the partisan divide which already exists in America. That it’s an election year adds fuel to the fire, too.

That’s not to say misinformation hasn’t also come from across the aisle. A talking point frequently repeated by the Biden campaign, and mentioned by Democratic vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris during the Sept. 7 vice presidential debate, is that Trump’s administration fired the White House’s pandemic response team in 2018. That’s not fully true — the Directorate of Global Health Security and Biodefense was disbanded under Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, but Trump didn’t fire them. Some resigned and others moved to different units.

It’s clear that 2020 has cemented the need for fact checkers around the globe. But the scope of the fact checker’s role in the COVID-19 pandemic is not yet fully known.

 

 

 

News Notifications: Necessary or Nuisance?

dmoseley Student Perspectives

By Crystal Hellwig

*ding* *ding* *ding*

I, like many Americans, have spent the last couple of months bombarded with push notifications from news sources and doom scrolling through my Twitter feed. Constant updates regarding Coronavirus, elections, protests and natural disasters have been at the forefront of my mind.

Even I as a journalist am often fatigued by the 24-hour constant news cycle. So, it is no surprise that readers are as well. A 2019 Pew Research Study found that two-thirds of Americans feel worn out by the amount of news coverage available.

The study also found that news fatigue was more likely to occur in those least involved in politics. This poses the question of whether or not notifications are helping news organizations to get more people involved or are pushing them away?

This doesn’t mean that we as journalists should take a break or do less work. As the distrust for the news media is at an all-time high, these past few weeks have provided a reminder for how important a free press is in keeping the public informed.

But push notifications from news sites are not random, people that sign up for them are interested in the news and want to be informed. Clearly, there is a fine line between keeping the public informed and inundating them with alerts.

With the changing news cycle comes the question of quality over quantity? News updates are coming in faster than journalists have time to write the articles. Gone are the days of daily deadlines, instead now a constant upkeep of information. This adds a higher chance of reporters making mistakes.

As newsrooms all around the country are shrinking, even more so with recent layoffs due to the coronavirus pandemic, a smaller number of reporters are left with the task of verifying information, interviewing sources and updating the public both on their sites and social media. So, the decision of what deserves an alert is an important one.

“These decisions are made on the news desk, based on each case, for a given notification. Whoever is supervising the desk has the ultimate call, but every potential notification is deliberated on by multiple editors in every case,”  said Michael Owens of the New York Times in an interview with NYT’s Liz Spayd  discussing how the paper handles push notifications. “One of the big objections people have to alerts is that they’re not ‘breaking news.’ Even though we no longer advertise them as only for breaking news, I think that’s still an expectation people have — that people will only be interrupted for really big stuff. But we’ve discovered that both as a way of amplifying our work and as a way to engage people, and get them into the app, there’s actually a pretty big appetite for things that are not breaking news.”

News alerts and mobile devices have transformed into the only way many people now get their news. Research shows that 7 out of 10 Americans get their news from their phones. So, it makes sense to keep it as well-rounded as possible.

News organizations have the same responsibility now as to deciding what push notifications to send out comparable to the difficult decision editors make daily of what takes precedent on a newspaper’s front page.

News notifications are the new front page.

Objectivity in the Modern Age of Journalism

dmoseley Student Perspectives

By Cam Rodriguez

My first – or most formative – brush with journalism was Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras’ Citizenfour, a 2014 documentary tracing Edward Snowden’s actions as he leaked information about international surveillance by the United States and United Kingdom to the international community. The documentary stunned me, particularly because it wasn’t a detached recap and analysis of the event after it happened – it instead showed Greenwald and Snowden side by side, evading police and extradition in Hong Kong. At times Poitras has to intervene in order to keep her source safe, highlighting a degree of involvement that was revolutionary to how I saw journalism at the time I was a teenager.

When I started pursuing reporting academically, the idea of being utterly unbiased was reiterated time and time again, and built on more traditional paradigms of what journalism is shown to be – I wasn’t supposed to intervene, I was to be a blank slate; I’m a mirror reflecting the two prismatic sides of an argument in order to best promote fairness and truth. But where should the line be drawn between reporter and stenographer? At what point can a reporter intervene, or at what point do we abandon this notion of “objectivity” and distance altogether?

The truth is that instead of learning how we can better address and incorporate our personal experiences and beliefs, we’ve been learning how to smother them. Instead of appearing as equal and on the same level as our sources, we’ve existed in a liminal and unattainable space, penalizing ourselves for living outside of our work.

And instead of acknowledging our lives, we’ve worked to hide them and ensure they don’t see the light of day, in fear that a random onlooker will call our entire portfolio into question.

It’s a counterproductive practice. In the same way that a sleepaway camper desperately wants to know their counselor’s name (and, of course, whether they have a crush on the other cabin’s counselor, too), by withholding basic and foundational information about ourselves and our beliefs, we fan the flames of people wanting some sort of discovery. We also create a falsity that we’re different from the people we interview – which can also come to haunt us as we search for sources and stories. We’re gatekeeping ourselves by subscribing to an outdated model of reporting that’s just unfit for the way that journalism is changing.

If we want to appear as trustworthy members of the community, we need to act like someone we would find trustworthy. If you were at a block party and someone toting a camera started asking you a bunch of probing questions about your life without answering any questions you had about them, would you give them the time of day?

There are grains of truth in our traditional understanding of an objective journalist as an impassive observer. Wouldn’t it be revelatory to have an impartial, unbiased look at news? To just have the facts? To have a clear view of the truth?

Of course, it would.

But our pursuit of objective reporting glosses over the very human process of reporting in the first place: someone picked what to study and what numbers to report; someone then took those numbers and picked which ones they saw as relevant for a story; the reader then picks relevant numbers of their own, and chooses which ones are important to share with others. The entire process of news, from start to finish, is entirely fallible, regardless of how much data is visualized or how many eyewitness accounts are acquired – and when the process is subject to scrutiny and is called into question, claiming objective reporting is just a fallacy.

Journalism, Adaptation and Doomscrolling: A Conversation with Karen Ho

dmoseley Journalist Profiles

by Cam Rodriguez

Karen Ho first popped onto my radar six months ago. At the start of a pandemic that has irreparably changed our lives, I found myself increasingly pushed online for long stretches of time – logging on for class at 9 a.m. and not stepping away until late in the night, after remote work shifts, Zoom happy hours and homework was done.

What started as an act of self-care and a practice of accountability for Ho became a series of daily reminders for Twitter users about the importance of taking care of ourselves in digital spaces. Through her account, Ho reminds herself and her followers to avoid the dangers of “doomscrolling,” or continuing to aimlessly browse online on platforms that incentivize bad news.

“Are you doomscrolling?” a tweet asked meekly, tucked between reports about rising coronavirus cases and anxiety about the then-upcoming election. “Maybe you should stretch, drink some water and go to bed. This scrolling isn’t productive.”

It was the reminder I needed, at 1 a.m., nudging me and others to take care of myself and take a moment – offline. And it was a reminder I and nearly 40,000 followers have gotten since then.

Ho is well-known outside of her ubiquitous reminders. An economics and finance reporter at Quartz, Ho has continued to establish herself in the business beat, fascinated by the role that money plays in society. After stints in print and web reporting, as well as traveling, being a bank teller and dabbling in design, Ho settled on business reporting in her 20’s, realizing there weren’t many reporters on that beat under 25.

“I realized everything had to do with money, and it was sort of like if you knew how to understand money, it was like the Matrix,” Ho said. “You could understand sports, culture, restaurants, industry… fundamentally, it was about power – who’s making money, who’s losing money, and who are all the key characters?”

She made the decision to start the reminders after dealing with her own anxiety and stress online. The tweets, she said, were ways to hold herself accountable in completing the goals for drinking water, taking medication and going to bed early that she had set for herself.

To Ho, this is service journalism. “I’m helping people go to sleep every night. Just like if you write a really good recipe, that can be a bedrock memory for people to take care of their families, celebrate a positive event – people remember really good recipes, and they pass them onto friends. That can change people’s lives.”

Broadly speaking, her reminders are also an indicator of the way journalism is changing, and how both online platforms and newsrooms alike are adapting to virtual worlds. And even past that, the influx of reporters of color who are pushing to be “in the room,” a room historically dominated by white reporters.

“Journalism is going through a moment… young people are really challenging not just on the newsroom side, but from tech and engineering – people who gave up really well-paying jobs – to challenge how things are done,” Ho said, citing a story released earlier this week by New York Magazine, which outlined the shrinking divide between engineering teams and journalists when it comes to newsroom discussions about journalistic ethics. “Fundamental processes, like ethics and style, and other stuff as well. And also, who gets to be in the room – who gets to accumulate power? And what does that mean?”

Earlier this year, Ho attended the virtual 2020 Investigative Reporters and Editors conference, where Bob Woodward spoke. Famous for Watergate and, at the time, infamous for failing to disclose damning quotes from President Trump about coronavirus, Woodward spoke on a panel with a Q+A component that Ho engaged with.

“So in your explanation, to be clear, you did not consult with people in the medical community, or in the international health community regarding the possible release of this information?” she asked Woodward repeatedly, referencing his failure to publicly disclose that President Trump may have been aware of coronavirus as early as January of this year.

“There was no information to release,” Woodward shot back. “Can you understand that?”

Online, journalists jumped to Ho’s defense, calling out the long-held icon of investigative reporting for being condescending and rude about a topic within the scope of questioning. Ho agreed.

“Relative to him, I’m a nobody. I didn’t expect it would resonate,” Ho said, laughing. “I’ve been in this business long enough to not be patronized to, or at least I thought I was. But the important thing here is that journalism is supposed to be speaking truth to power.”

“I had never revered him in the same kind of way that I think a lot of American journalists do,” Ho, who hails from Toronto, said to me, commenting about how she didn’t grow up revering films like “All the President’s Men.”

“When it comes to heroes, the interaction really taught me about how, as journalists, we can’t be making assumptions about work… to be a good media critic means that fundamentally, there isn’t anybody that I think is outside of critique, and reassessment of process and ethics and values.”

“And also – I’m a minority. No one’s going to give me the benefit of the doubt. So why should I give it to other people?” Ho asked. “The only person who looks like me who’s been around as long as Woodward is Connie Chung. You can count them – Black, Latina and Asian women – who have been around as long as Bob Woodward on two hands.”

Ho discussed opportunity as a gamechanger for other journalists of color. “Who gets the opportunities to be on Pulitzer Prize-winning teams?” she said. “I don’t consider myself as a candidate for something like an investigative reporting team, because there are just so few of them when you go to a conference like IRE in person and you see people like me. I had nothing to lose. It’s not like the club was going to invite people like me anyway.”

Regardless of not being invited to the club, Ho has staked a claim for herself in the journalistic community. Whether it’s reporting on finance, writing TIME cover stories (“I have it framed above my desk,” she said with a laugh, “like, ‘Oh yeah, I did that!’”) or holding power to account, Ho’s ability to stand her ground and make space for herself like others have had to do before her is inspiring.

And with her reminders? “It’s just nice to help other people. Everything felt like crap for a really long time due to the pandemic. And if I could do, like, one good thing consistently, I felt less useless.”

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Challenging your own premise: a conversation with Rob Stafford

dmoseley Journalist Profiles

By Patsy Newitt

In lieu of Google and text messages there was file-pulling at the courthouse and knocking on doors when NBC Chicago’s Rob Stafford started reporting in 1982.

Now he co-anchors on weekdays at 5:00 and 6:00pm for NBC5 News. And despite the internet changing the industry, Stafford knows the core purpose of journalism has not shifted. Journalism will always be an effort, “to seek information and try to get at the truth, and to keep asking until you get some semblance of it,” he said, regardless of the medium or process.

This truth, however, hinges on what Stafford feels is the most important skill he’s learned in the past three decades — to always challenge your own premises.

“We have to work harder than ever to make sure we never assume anything when we’re doing a story,” he said. “Always challenge the premise of our own stories, of our own angles, and really push ourselves to do that.”

This in part springs from the millions of citizens and soon-to-be former administration hailing the media monolith as “fake news.” Stafford knows this message is not something to be shrugged off; it’s a message that journalists need to understand that everyone is coming from very different places.

In his 20s, Stafford described getting an idea for a story and then setting out to prove the idea. It’s easy to find evidence to back a premise and ignore the rest, but he’s learned since to challenge his angles and challenge his sources by questioning their motives.

Challenging our own premises is the first step in combating the widespread misconception that journalists can simply write and report whatever they want and don’t care about accuracy.

“I think a lot of people think we just write something and throw it out there which is not the way it is,” he said. “We have standards… [NBC] wants to see the whole transcript of any interview you’ve done to make sure you didn’t take things out of context. You’re really challenged to defend your stories before you put them on air.”

It’s also a matter of transparency — showing people how journalism works and the ways that our work is checked. We have to show our audiences the process and how our work is vetted by editors, lawyers and fact checkers.

“It’s good to take, in my case, the viewers along in the process of doing something. It’s important to show how you do things and give them a look behind the curtain,” he said. “I think people a lot of times don’t understand the process and it’s important to let them in on that.”

He ended our conversation with key advice: when journalists do make mistakes, we learn from and own up to them. We don’t shy away or deflect. This, paired with journalist’s own efforts to question themselves and question others, are important steps to improve trust.

“I learned that by challenging [ourselves], you always made the story better because people will be asking at home ‘Well what about so-and-so’ and ‘Why didn’t you ask about this.’” he said. “You should never let those questions go unasked.”

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Reporting on the election with all five senses – and from home

dmoseley Journalist Profiles, Uncategorized

A conversation with the New York Times’ Peter Baker

By Ella Lee

Peter Baker’s best ledes just ‘pop up’ in his head. That’s not because the New York Times reporter has all the answers, but because good journalists use all five senses — and ledes combine those senses, as succinctly as possible, to reflect what the reporter has witnessed.

But 2020 has changed the job. Baker, along with most Times journalists, has been working from home since mid-March due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“Reporting journalism is about seeing and hearing and experiencing and feeling and touching and smelling and all those things,” he said. “You can’t do that over a Zoom call, and you can’t do that watching a stream.”

As the 2020 election got closer, those challenges became more apparent. The Times determined early last spring that its reporters would not go to the White House unless it was their turn to staff the press pool, Baker said.

“In the fall, when [President Donald Trump] was doing these rallies, it put us in an awkward position, because rallies are clearly unsafe,” Baker said. “Thousands and thousands of people there, who were not socially distanced and generally not wearing masks.”

Still, he and other Times reporters attended some of Trump’s rallies until a colleague got sick with COVID-19 and the bureau decided not to send reporters anymore.

Reporting on the election from home all-but-eliminated the fundamental aspects of covering a political campaign — sights and sounds, witnessing what energizes and motivates a candidate and their supporters.

“You don’t get any of that doing it from home; it’s nothing the same,” Baker said. “It’s the difference between playing video baseball, and actually playing baseball; you can play a video game, or you can actually go to a park and hit balls. And those are two very different things, you know, it’s just not it’s not even close.”

Despite the world turning on its head in March, one aspect of Baker’s job remains the same, and has for the past four years: Trump. That’s made covering his administration both “wildly unpredictable and wholly predictable” at the same time.

“I don’t think he’s changed; I think he’s just more,” Baker said. “A lot of things he did were shocking, but they were not surprising. He did a lot of things in Washington that just aren’t done for a lot of reasons and he just blew past all sorts of norms and boundaries that other presidents respected. And yet, none of that is really a surprise in the sense that that’s what he clearly made his political career about.”

Trump’s presidency has required journalists to learn quickly — relying on fact checkers to ensure the veracity of the president’s words and adjusting coverage to most productively reflect his antics, like non-stop tweeting.

“I think all journalists kind of wrestle with figuring out what the right level of attention was to give to the various attention-grabbing things he did,” Baker said. “And I’m not sure if anybody ever came up with a completely satisfying formula, but clearly it did evolve over time.”

As the pandemic continues and American politics evolve, so too will journalism. But what Baker says is the most important skill for young journalists to achieve is one that can be harnessed regardless of the circumstances they find themselves in: persistence.

“If you can’t get the information going through the front door, then try going through the window,” he said. “Do whatever you need to do to get what you need for your story.”

 

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Reporting on the election with all five senses – and from home

dmoseley Uncategorized

A conversation with the New York Times’ Peter Baker

By Ella Lee

Peter Baker’s best ledes just ‘pop up’ in his head. That’s not because the New York Times reporter has all the answers, but because good journalists use all five senses — and ledes combine those senses, as succinctly as possible, to reflect what the reporter has witnessed.

But 2020 has changed the job. Baker, along with most Times journalists, has been working from home since mid-March due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“Reporting journalism is about seeing and hearing and experiencing and feeling and touching and smelling and all those things,” he said. “You can’t do that over a Zoom call, and you can’t do that watching a stream.”

As the 2020 election got closer, those challenges became more apparent. The Times determined early last spring that its reporters would not go to the White House unless it was their turn to staff the press pool, Baker said.

“In the fall, when [President Donald Trump] was doing these rallies, it put us in an awkward position, because rallies are clearly unsafe,” Baker said. “Thousands and thousands of people there, who were not socially distanced and generally not wearing masks.”

Still, he and other Times reporters attended some of Trump’s rallies until a colleague got sick with COVID-19 and the bureau decided not to send reporters anymore.

Reporting on the election from home all-but-eliminated the fundamental aspects of covering a political campaign — sights and sounds, witnessing what energizes and motivates a candidate and their supporters.

“You don’t get any of that doing it from home; it’s nothing the same,” Baker said. “It’s the difference between playing video baseball, and actually playing baseball; you can play a video game, or you can actually go to a park and hit balls. And those are two very different things, you know, it’s just not it’s not even close.”

Despite the world turning on its head in March, one aspect of Baker’s job remains the same, and has for the past four years: Trump. That’s made covering his administration both “wildly unpredictable and wholly predictable” at the same time.

“I don’t think he’s changed; I think he’s just more,” Baker said. “A lot of things he did were shocking, but they were not surprising. He did a lot of things in Washington that just aren’t done for a lot of reasons and he just blew past all sorts of norms and boundaries that other presidents respected. And yet, none of that is really a surprise in the sense that that’s what he clearly made his political career about.”

Trump’s presidency has required journalists to learn quickly — relying on fact checkers to ensure the veracity of the president’s words and adjusting coverage to most productively reflect his antics, like non-stop tweeting.

“I think all journalists kind of wrestle with figuring out what the right level of attention was to give to the various attention-grabbing things he did,” Baker said. “And I’m not sure if anybody ever came up with a completely satisfying formula, but clearly it did evolve over time.”

As the pandemic continues and American politics evolve, so too will journalism. But what Baker says is the most important skill for young journalists to achieve is one that can be harnessed regardless of the circumstances they find themselves in: persistence.

“If you can’t get the information going through the front door, then try going through the window,” he said. “Do whatever you need to do to get what you need for your story.”

 

-30-

Policing polarization

dmoseley Uncategorized

Journalists are meant to inform not polarize––a deep social and political divide persists when the truth is shadowed by bias.

By: Quinn White

During a time where factual, unbiased reporting is needed most, there is an extreme polarization plaguing the truth and encouraging bias in the United States. Politics in the U.S. have forced many to feel pressured into choosing the lesser of two evils. The tumultuous social climate–birthed out of unrest between Blacks and police officers– continues to feed hate and anti-police or anti-Black vernacular. The pandemic persists feeding the sorrow that’s consuming the nation.

We are living in a polarized state of chaos where each side screams their opinion demanding that it’s heard while closing their ears to the thoughts of the opposing side. When nobody will listen to each other, who are we supposed to trust? Journalists–or so you would think.

It is the job of journalists to expose the truth and inform the populace of said truth. When there is so much bias and blatant, shameless polarization infecting the minds of so many, it’s more important now more than ever for journalists to keep their opinion out of their reporting and simply seek out the facts. For journalists to coat their reporting in blatant bias is a much more dangerous act than many choose to realize.

It’s important for the truth to persist– it is the only way to halt the growth of the budding unrest that’s deeply dividing the nation. If the reporting at networks like Fox and CNN remain biased, so will the divide. People who are deeply biased and take no time to recognize opposing opinions are going to seek out reporting that only further supports their thoughts– feeding an “I’m right and they’re wrong” mindset.

If you think you’re doing the right thing by reporting with bias weaved in, think again. It’s time to rid reporting of bias altogether and leave those seeking fellow agreeance in their news with no answer other than the truth. If the truth is what dominates our news, then people are left with opinions that are formed based on factual evidence rather than blurring bias.

It’s human to have ethical and moral beliefs that drive your thoughts and actions. However, it is not the job of a journalist to spread their opinion–their duty as the voice of news requires the exact opposite. Bias, opinion, and polarization have no place in the world of journalism–– its time more people speak out on this topic without fearing being cancelled or criticized, journalists will always be criticized regardless.

The social and political unrest has gotten to such a toxic point that if it isn’t thwarted by fact, journalists may forever be labeled as “fake news”–even if their reporting is fact based. This is not to say there aren’t journalists out there reporting on fact–there most certainly are. This is to say that the major news corporations dominating our television and phone screens need to stop feeding their own agendas and start doing the true job of journalists–reporting the truth. A quote by the former co-owner of The Washington Post, Philip L. Graham, comes to mind that states, “journalism is the first rough draft of history.” History is meant to recount facts of our world’s past, not provide a look back through a blurring lens. Journalism is more than just a job, it is an honorable duty to present, future, and even past generations.

Events like 9/11 are remembered because of the honorable work of journalists. Instead of reporting from the safety of news stations, courageous reporters like Carol Marin took to the front lines––wading through noxious clouds of dust and rubble––to ensure that Americans could see with their own eyes what was happening in New York on that soul crushing day. The fact of 9/11 is that many innocent people lost their lives to the blinding hatred of terrorists––nobodies’ death that day was justified.

To be able to report on the truth is a privilege that should never be taken advantage of––we must always keep journalism honest, and in turn, keep our history books honest.

News Notifications: Necessary or Nuisance?

dmoseley Uncategorized

By Crystal Hellwig

*ding* *ding* *ding*

I, like many Americans, have spent the last couple of months bombarded with push notifications from news sources and doom scrolling through my Twitter feed. Constant updates regarding Coronavirus, elections, protests and natural disasters have been at the forefront of my mind.

Even I as a journalist am often fatigued by the 24-hour constant news cycle. So, it is no surprise that readers are as well. A 2019 Pew Research Study found that two-thirds of Americans feel worn out by the amount of news coverage available.

The study also found that news fatigue was more likely to occur in those least involved in politics. This poses the question of whether or not notifications are helping news organizations to get more people involved or are pushing them away?

This doesn’t mean that we as journalists should take a break or do less work. As the distrust for the news media is at an all-time high, these past few weeks have provided a reminder for how important a free press is in keeping the public informed.

But push notifications from news sites are not random, people that sign up for them are interested in the news and want to be informed. Clearly, there is a fine line between keeping the public informed and inundating them with alerts.

With the changing news cycle comes the question of quality over quantity? News updates are coming in faster than journalists have time to write the articles. Gone are the days of daily deadlines, instead now a constant upkeep of information. This adds a higher chance of reporters making mistakes.

As newsrooms all around the country are shrinking, even more so with recent layoffs due to the coronavirus pandemic, a smaller number of reporters are left with the task of verifying information, interviewing sources and updating the public both on their sites and social media. So, the decision of what deserves an alert is an important one.

“These decisions are made on the news desk, based on each case, for a given notification. Whoever is supervising the desk has the ultimate call, but every potential notification is deliberated on by multiple editors in every case,”  said Michael Owens of the New York Times in an interview with NYT’s Liz Spayd  discussing how the paper handles push notifications. “One of the big objections people have to alerts is that they’re not ‘breaking news.’ Even though we no longer advertise them as only for breaking news, I think that’s still an expectation people have — that people will only be interrupted for really big stuff. But we’ve discovered that both as a way of amplifying our work and as a way to engage people, and get them into the app, there’s actually a pretty big appetite for things that are not breaking news.”

News alerts and mobile devices have transformed into the only way many people now get their news. Research shows that 7 out of 10 Americans get their news from their phones. So, it makes sense to keep it as well-rounded as possible.

News organizations have the same responsibility now as to deciding what push notifications to send out comparable to the difficult decision editors make daily of what takes precedent on a newspaper’s front page.

News notifications are the new front page.

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