By Jonathan Aguilar

Journalism suffers when visuals are not taken seriously, or they are seen as secondary to written reporting. The Chicago Sun-Times a major publication in the third largest media market laid off their entire photojournalism staff in 2013, and their visual journalism has suffered ever since. The staff that they laid off included over 20 photographers and a Pulitzer prize winning photojournalist. After these layoffs occurred reporters were tasked with not only conducting interviews on the scene but were also told to shoot photos for their stories. This led to a decrease in quality of photographs produced by the Sun-Times. If a major publication felt that photojournalists were so unimportant to their work, then there must be a misunderstanding of what these journalists actually do.

In newsrooms across the country photojournalism is seen as a service instead of a type of reporting. While talking to a visual journalist from a major Chicago publication she opened up about how even at top media outlets they are seen as a service desk. She has to try every day to ensure that her team is treated as journalists and not just as accessory pieces to written reporting. Professional visual journalists are struggling to get the type of respect they deserve as storytellers.

Even at smaller publication visual journalists are still seen as secondary to reporters. In certain newsrooms, there are systems in place that allow reporters or editors to fill out a request form for a visual element to be created for an article. In the system, the reporter is supposed to describe what a story is about so that a photojournalist can go out and shoot whatever the story is. But often times the form is overlooked and visual journalist are left scrambling trying to figure out what angle they should focus on for their photo. If visual journalists are given the opportunity to create unique photos, then they will be able to add more depth to stories. It will also help media outlets get away from superficial images that so often plague newspapers. The problem is that in smaller publications where young journalists go to learn they are not being taught about the importance of photographs and the value they add to articles. By not teaching young journalists the value of good visuals they end up not having a deep appreciation for the power that strong visuals can bring.

As important as photographs and other visuals are to journalism, they are not focused on that heavily in journalism school. At DePaul, there is one professor who teaches photojournalism. While Robin Hoecker is an amazing professor who has elevated the visual journalism students at DePaul she should not have to be doing so alone. In a school that is putting out such great work in many different facets of journalism the importance of visuals needs to be emphasized. As great as written reporting can be standing on its own combing it with good visuals will make a piece unbelievably stronger.

In age where everyone is constantly scrolling through their phones something needs to catch a reader’s attention. By allowing visual journalist to tell stories through photos and not using them as accessories for other journalist’s articles it will lead to more well-rounded reporting and more intriguing articles.

For whatever reason, visual journalists were seen as expendable and many papers have lost great photo teams because of that fact. But now media outlets like the Chicago Sun-Times after suffering for so long with terrible visuals are starting to hire photojournalists once again. This shows that journalism and visuals go hand in hand.

By Mackenzie Murtaugh

When the Washington Post joined the video-sharing app Tik Tok last fall, many journalists, including myself, were confused. The 142-year-old established newspaper found an interesting, progressive niche that no other paper, at least for their caliber, thought of. The videos can be comical, informative and cringey — the triple-shot concoction that makes Tik Tok so addictive. The content of the videos usually intend to put a funny spin on the latest news, but the most bewildering, if not amazing, videos feature different WP journalists and editors trying to bridge the gap between their Tik Tok audience, most of which have probably never picked up a newspaper, and the news-making process. This content is the most cringe-inducing to journalists because of the desperation of increasing interest in the work exuding off of them. Or maybe I’m just cynical?

The account’s face, Dave Jorgensen, was hired as a member of the paper’s new creative video team, with his title being the head of the “Department of Satire.” According to an article from The Atlantic, Jorgensen found out about the app and immediately pitched it to his editors. Now, the account has 370,600 followers as of Feb. 6, and over 19 million likes. The only two accounts it follows are two fake accounts, one under the name “nytimes” and the other “ashtonkutcher.” This fact did make me laugh out loud because I know that Jorgensen or someone on his team thought “you know what would be funny?” And it worked. I did laugh.

Somehow, Jorgensen and his team have infiltrated this niche-comedy app and made a pretty good name for themselves amongst the app’s majority 16-to-24-year-old demographic, according to statistics from December 2019. The question on my mind is: is it ethical? Is it just marketing? Obviously, yes. It’s a great marketing strategy. From those same statistics, only four percent of the United States’ social media marketers use the app. WP is ahead of the curve because, soon, most media outlets and public figures will attempt to replicate what the paper is doing. I doubt they will be as successful.

Jorgensen is a funny, probably talented journalist, but his job has now evolved into social media marketing manager. At the moment, he still produces content for the paper’s video team, but let’s be honest — now everyone knows him as the Tik Tok guy. Now, I understand that Tik Tok is not the platform for hard-hitting, breaking news (though with its reliance on virality, that might actually work one day), the WP account serves the simple purpose of entertaining young people. This demographic is obsessed with fast, bite-sized bits of content, and WP is serving them up a perfect dish.

The account’s content has made a huge change since its inception. It used to give little glimpses into newsroom life, reporting how-tos and self-aware funny clips. Now, Jorgensen and his team have realized their unique position on this app. They don’t have to report on mass shootings or family annihilators — they can get lost in making a 20-second clip about a popular dog and receive more clicks than the hard news. This is a sad reality of the news today.

It has and will always be difficult to reach the younger generation for news outlets. The old-school producers probably don’t understand why Jorgensen’s Tik Tok makes headlines or gets clicks. Maybe, young people are easily amused? No, that isn’t true in the slightest. Hillary Clinton failed to bridge the gap between her generation and the young ones now — “Pokemon Go to the polls” still haunts me. Jorgensen must spend hours on the app and analyze what trends consumers want to perfectly cultivate his content. It’s hard to say if I’m impressed or saddened by this. I think I feel both simultaneously. I’m very impressed from a marketing standpoint, but that’s just the problem. Instead of creating groundbreaking videos, Jorgensen and his team spend their days making fun of themselves on an app. The only respect I can give to them is that they have expertly bridged the gap between the media and the younger generation. I just hoped it would have been through different multimedia tools than a viral-video app.

Okay, fine. I am cynical.

By Nikki Roberts

I have learned many important lessons during my undergraduate journalism career at DePaul. One of these lessons is that sometimes a reporter finds a story, but the best stories often seek out the reporter. In my five years working in student media, I’ve found this to be true because not only have great stories found me, but journalism as a field found me when I had no direction.

As a high school junior in Aurora, Illinois, my only ambition was to work at my three part-time jobs so I could move out of my parents’ house and to Chicago the moment I turned 18 — or once I graduated high school. I knew the importance of obtaining a high school diploma, but it was never a primary goal for me; whenever I had the money saved, I would leave the suburbs.

I had no plan or direction for my life after high school graduation (yes, I graduated, and with a decent GPA to boot). I was in honors and AP classes because school work and test taking are skills that I never had to practice or study for in order to master, but I spent more time roaming the halls and confined to the dean’s office than I did in class on the days I actually made it to school.

However, my lack of ambition did not mean I was an apathetic teen with a lack of interests. In fact, the opposite was true. I was a music obsessed bookworm — I read every rock ‘n’ roll biography at my local library by the time I was 14 — who never stopped writing. I would write several times a week in a journal, I dabbled in non-fiction personal essays and I internally celebrated every time an English teacher assigned a composition assignment instead of a multiple-choice exam.

At the end of my junior year, a friend who was on staff at our school paper, The Stampede, recommended I apply for a position in the school’s only journalism class. I wrote a sample article about the differences between medicinal and recreational marijuana since I had heard many students express contradicting views on the upcoming medicinal legalization bill, and the story ran in the last issue of my junior year. After seeing my name in print, I was shocked to realize I was actually excited for school to begin in the fall.

My only regret about high school journalism is that I didn’t apply earlier. Our class functioned as a newsroom with periodic, news-focused assignments. As an online writer, I was guaranteed a voice on the paper’s website, Metea Media, while also having the freedom to contribute to the print edition of the paper whenever I had an idea for a feature story. Most importantly to my success in school, “newspaper” — as the journalism kids called it — was the last class of the day, which kept me from cutting out of school early. This isn’t to say I didn’t skip morning classes or sneak out of the school mid-day only to return in time for newspaper, but joining the school paper gave me a duty to be involved and informed about my school.

I may have ditched class and fallen asleep during AP tests, but I flew through my ACT exam with perfect marks in the reading and English sections. My mother begged me to apply to at least a few colleges so, without doing any research, I cast my line out to three Illinois schools — Northern Illinois University, Loyola University and DePaul University — and reeled in three acceptance letters that each included the respective university’s largest merit scholarships.

I was a wild teenager, but I wasn’t stupid. Few of my close friends were going away to universities in the fall, and those who were continuing their college education planned to attend our local community college, College of DuPage. I decided to enroll at DePaul University and declared myself an English major, since I wanted to write but couldn’t see myself as a reporter.

A month before I graduated, The Stampede staff swept the NSPA Pacemaker Awards and my Meta Media team accepted four online awards. After the ceremony, I attended a keynote speech given by Sun-Times reporter Maudlyne Ihejirika. She spoke passionately about covering police shootings of young black men and the recent shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida. I sat in the back of the room beside my journalism teacher but, at the conclusion of her speech, I was in her face with a notepad and a pen, eager to learn how I could be involved in exposing systematic injustice through my writing.

When I moved to Chicago a few months later to begin my academic career at DePaul, I reached out to Ihejirika and regularly asked her for advice, a phone call or coffee. When our schedules never lined up, I accepted that I would have to remain in digital conversation with her via Twitter and email, and the next three years of my undergraduate experience flew by.

If I have learned anything as a student journalist, it is that everyone in the field knows each other and what might seem like a causal connection will always lead to deeper connections or a shared network of colleagues.

Last fall, I attended the “Power 25,” a gathering of Chicago’s 25 most powerful women in media and their colleagues at the Union League Club. When I saw Ihejirika walk in, I knew I had to re-introduce myself, but I wasn’t sure what to say. Would she remember me? Was it worth noting that I was the eager freshman who had harassed her by email three years ago?

Quite out of character for me, I approached her timidly and began, “Hi, Maudlyne, I’m Nikki Roberts. I doubt you’d remember me, but I heard you speak three years ago and…”

“Oh, my God! You’re the senior from Metea Valley who was going to DePaul! Of course, I remember you!”

I’ve had many small victories that have helped me beat imposter syndrome and feel like an equal among my intelligent journalism peers at DePaul, but there is nothing quite like having a highly respected reporter remember you from when you were a completely unexperienced high school student. I am not one to place much of a belief in fate, but it is hard to convince myself I don’t belong in this field when journalism found me, and continues to find me, in the smallest, unexpected ways.

 

 

 

 

 

Blog Post

February 6, 2020

 

The Best Stories Find the Journalist, and Journalism Found Me

By Nikki Roberts

 

I have learned many important lessons during my undergraduate journalism career at DePaul. One of these lessons is that sometimes a reporter finds a story, but the best stories often seek out the reporter. In my five years working in student media, I’ve found this to be true because not only have great stories found me, but journalism as a field found me when I had no direction.

 

As a high school junior in Aurora, Illinois, my only ambition was to work at my three part-time jobs so I could move out of my parents’ house and to Chicago the moment I turned 18 — or once I graduated high school. I knew the importance of obtaining a high school diploma, but it was never a primary goal for me; whenever I had the money saved, I would leave the suburbs.

 

I had no plan or direction for my life after high school graduation (yes, I graduated, and with a decent GPA to boot). I was in honors and AP classes because school work and test taking are skills that I never had to practice or study for in order to master, but I spent more time roaming the halls and confined to the dean’s office than I did in class on the days I actually made it to school.

 

However, my lack of ambition did not mean I was an apathetic teen with a lack of interests. In fact, the opposite was true. I was a music obsessed bookworm — I read every rock ‘n’ roll biography at my local library by the time I was 14 — who never stopped writing. I would write several times a week in a journal, I dabbled in non-fiction personal essays and I internally celebrated every time an English teacher assigned a composition assignment instead of a multiple-choice exam.

 

At the end of my junior year, a friend who was on staff at our school paper, The Stampede, recommended I apply for a position in the school’s only journalism class. I wrote a sample article about the differences between medicinal and recreational marijuana since I had heard many students express contradicting views on the upcoming medicinal legalization bill, and the story ran in the last issue of my junior year. After seeing my name in print, I was shocked to realize I was actually excited for school to begin in the fall.

 

My only regret about high school journalism is that I didn’t apply earlier. Our class functioned as a newsroom with periodic, news-focused assignments. As an online writer, I was guaranteed a voice on the paper’s website, Metea Media, while also having the freedom to contribute to the print edition of the paper whenever I had an idea for a feature story. Most importantly to my success in school, “newspaper” — as the journalism kids called it — was the last class of the day, which kept me from cutting out of school early. This isn’t to say I didn’t skip morning classes or sneak out of the school mid-day only to return in time for newspaper, but joining the school paper gave me a duty to be involved and informed about my school.

 

I may have ditched class and fallen asleep during AP tests, but I flew through my ACT exam with perfect marks in the reading and English sections. My mother begged me to apply to at least a few colleges so, without doing any research, I cast my line out to three Illinois schools — Northern Illinois University, Loyola University and DePaul University — and reeled in three acceptance letters that each included the respective university’s largest merit scholarships.

 

I was a wild teenager, but I wasn’t stupid. Few of my close friends were going away to universities in the fall, and those who were continuing their college education planned to attend our local community college, College of DuPage. I decided to enroll at DePaul University and declared myself an English major, since I wanted to write but couldn’t see myself as a reporter.

 

A month before I graduated, The Stampede staff swept the NSPA Pacemaker Awards and my Meta Media team accepted four online awards. After the ceremony, I attended a keynote speech given by Sun-Times reporter Maudlyne Ihejirika. She spoke passionately about covering police shootings of young black men and the recent shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida. I sat in the back of the room beside my journalism teacher but, at the conclusion of her speech, I was in her face with a notepad and a pen, eager to learn how I could be involved in exposing systematic injustice through my writing.

 

When I moved to Chicago a few months later to begin my academic career at DePaul, I reached out to Ihejirika and regularly asked her for advice, a phone call or coffee. When our schedules never lined up, I accepted that I would have to remain in digital conversation with her via Twitter and email, and the next three years of my undergraduate experience flew by.

 

If I have learned anything as a student journalist, it is that everyone in the field knows each other and what might seem like a causal connection will always lead to deeper connections or a shared network of colleagues.

 

Last fall, I attended the “Power 25,” a gathering of Chicago’s 25 most powerful women in media and their colleagues at the Union League Club. When I saw Ihejirika walk in, I knew I had to re-introduce myself, but I wasn’t sure what to say. Would she remember me? Was it worth noting that I was the eager freshman who had harassed her by email three years ago?

 

Quite out of character for me, I approached her timidly and began, “Hi, Maudlyne, I’m Nikki Roberts. I doubt you’d remember me, but I heard you speak three years ago and…”

 

“Oh, my God! You’re the senior from Metea Valley who was going to DePaul! Of course, I remember you!”

 

I’ve had many small victories that have helped me beat imposter syndrome and feel like an equal among my intelligent journalism peers at DePaul, but there is nothing quite like having a highly respected reporter remember you from when you were a completely unexperienced high school student. I am not one to place much of a belief in fate, but it is hard to convince myself I don’t belong in this field when journalism found me, and continues to find me, in the smallest, unexpected ways.

 

 

 

 

 

By Michael Abraham

Picture this. You’re flipping TV channels at night, trying to catch up on the events of the day. You land on a channel with two talking heads, discussing the previously ongoing impeachment proceedings of President Trump. When the commercial break arrives, you flip to the next channel and find two more – perhaps whiter, more chromosomally diverse – talking heads discussing the same topic. It takes you a moment, though, to realize that the topics are the same because this news station is framing the same stories in completely opposing ways.

Your palms grow clammy. The hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. With every goosebump the realization becomes clearer. You have entered the Twilight Zone.

Or, on the other hand, you might have just flipped from CNN or MSNBC to Fox News.

News organizations have had partisan leanings since the chisel met the tablet. That’s nothing new. However, with the introduction of cable news in the 1980’s and the accompanying 24-hour news cycle, networks were forced to fill more time than incoming national news provided. The result paved the way for programming based on political commentary and analysis both of which are significantly more susceptible to bias than traditional news reporting.

Thus, we find ourselves today in a media landscape that is virtually split down party lines. Ask anyone not living under a rock and they’ll tell you, in a variety of ways: Fox News is for conservatives and MSNBC or CNN, liberals. Add arguably the most polarizing president in American history into the mix and it seems that these networks are sprinting in opposite directions at times.

Data from Real Clear Politics suggests that, while outlets are generally talking about the same topics, their takes are quite different. Further, it shows “that there are very real systematic differences in the coverage we see across the media landscape and that there has been a genuine fracturing of the media since Donald Trump’s election. At the same time, that divide is still small, meaning that rather than entirely disjointed pictures, news outlets present different takes on the same shared universe of stories.”

This didn’t start with Trump, though. The schism began with the cable news network founders. Take media mogul Rupert Murdoch, for example. Murdoch sat at the helm of Fox Corporation for many years. Politico reported that during his leadership, then Fox parent company News Corp, contributed millions of dollars to GOP-aligned groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Republican Governors Association.

If that wasn’t enough to make consumers and competitors question the network’s objectivity, Murdoch was also very outspoken in his support for Republican politicians and criticism of Democrats. In 2012, he came out in support of Mitt Romney, saying, “Of course I want him to win, save us from socialism, etc.” Several years later, in 2015, he tweeted: “Ben and Candy Carson terrific. What about a real black President who can properly address the racial divide?”

Even today, with Murdoch having passed control on to his son, conflicts of interest exist. How about the fact that former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan sits on Fox Corporation’s Board of Directors?

A similar narrative can be told about Murdoch’s main rival, CNN founder Ted Turner, who was often outspoken about his support for Democratic initiatives and candidates. Although these figures have moved on, the culture they created survives and perhaps even grows. Current CNN chief Jeff Zucker reportedly previously hosted private events for both Obama and, more recently, Kamala Harris. He also hasn’t been secretive about his own political beliefs.

It is generally accepted that an organization’s culture trickles down from its leadership. As a young journalist, I find it odd that, while journalism preaches the importance of objectivity, ethics and avoiding conflicts of interest, the organizations that employ journalists throw caution to the wind regarding the same set of standards. If Pete Rose can’t bet on baseball, why can news executives be in bed with parties and candidates? There is an increasingly fine line drawn between what is and isn’t a conflict of interest for the media and it is becoming grayer by the day.

Accomplished journalist Katy Tur mentions in her book “Unbelievable: My Front Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History,” that she doesn’t even vote so as to remain an unattached observer. Many high-profile journalists, even when their affiliations are obvious, avoid officially declaring a political party in order to maintain the illusion of a balanced opinion.

Nevertheless, each network’s TV line-ups, themselves, emphasize how partisan bias might exist and how echo chambers are created as a result. For example, Fox News features a nightly primetime program called “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” They describe the show as an “hour of spirited debate and powerful reporting.” Rather than focusing on the hard news, Fox allows Carlson to insert his own subjective views on the topics of the day. His opinions become conflated with actual facts and the entire primetime viewing audience is left to find the truth.

The same can be said for CNN’s “Cuomo Prime Time” or MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews”. Because ratings drive success in television, the most popular personalities are able to put their own, sometimes hyperbolic, spin on the news. Therefore, the news that many Americans consume isn’t necessarily news at all; but, instead, the news as viewed through Tucker Carlson – or another show host’s – lenses. Have you ever tried on someone else’s glasses? Sometimes they distort the way you see things.

This has a significant effect on the way each networks’ audience views the state of the country. Months ago, as Newsweek pointed out, NBC and Wall Street Journal poll data found that 73% of Fox News viewers approve of Trump’s presidency. On the other hand, CNN and MSNBC viewers responded with approval ratings of 34% and 30% respectively.

Viewers consume the content generated by their parties’ unofficial news sources and continue to seek out information that aligns with the beliefs they’ve been fed. Repeat this process on a nightly basis and viewers become fat with their own confirmation bias. All the while, network executives continue the spin with one watchful eye on the ratings and the other on the party-supporting opinion buffet.

Or maybe we’re in the Twilight Zone.

As the line between news and opinion blurs, journalists must clarify

By: Lacey Latch

The 24-hour news cycle has completely transformed the journalism industry since its widespread implementation in the 1980s. Three decades later, nonstop cable news has become commonplace and so too has its programming and the personalities that lead it. At the same time though, this process has eroded the divide between news and opinion that was once separated by specifically marked newspaper sections or had very little presence on television altogether. Now, Americans are bombarded with more news-related content than ever before, but their ability to sift through that content has come into question.

“The causes of America’s deepening political divide are many and much disputed, but the differences between an opinion show and a news show might be difficult for people to discern,” Paul Farhi of the Washington Post wrote in 2017. “The reason: Programs such as [Sean] Hannity’s and others on cable news are often a mix of many things — news, commentary, analysis and pure, unadulterated opinion.”

In the fall of 2018, the American Press Institute released a report analyzing a survey of American citizens about their news consumption and this exact question: Can people tell the difference between news and opinion? It turns out that for the most part, the answer is no. Their surveys found that “just over half of Americans say it’s easy to distinguish news from opinion in news media in general.”

This statistic is certainly alarming in its own right but the implications of this reality are far-reaching. With a President who routinely dismisses the press as creators of “fake news,” the American public is already more inclined to question what they’re reading and seeing. That is only compounded by the fact that when they turn on “the news,” there really is no saying what they’ll get in terms of punditry, analysis or hard reporting and there is rarely any label indicating which of those categories the program falls into.

The consumer is of course to some extent responsible for their own media literacy but journalism as an industry also plays a critical role in the formation of that literacy. In another survey the American Press Institute found that “Fully half of the U.S. public is unfamiliar with the term ‘op-ed,’ and nearly three in 10 said they were unfamiliar with the difference between an editorial and news story (27 percent) or a reporter and columnist (28 percent).”

This clearly indicates that there is a disconnect between journalists and the population we are supposed to be serving, one that directly impacts the efficacy and trust placed in our work. It also further erodes the public’s trust in journalism as a whole. Commentators who offer opinions but are presented as reporters reporting fact only support the perception that journalists are inherently biased.

Notably, an overwhelming majority of journalists surveyed about this issue correctly believe that “most people misunderstand the difference between news and opinion content.” But despite the fact that journalists might be aware of the problem, fixing it has become something of a nonstarter in the industry.

While touring newsrooms in New York City in December, I asked DePaul graduate and MSNBC producer Kat McCullough if the network feels it is responsible for making the distinction between news and commentary clear for viewers. While she acknowledged this issue is something the industry needs to reckon with, MSNBC, like so many of their counterparts, has yet to determine the best way to start that process.

Journalists exist to serve and inform the American public. However, that mission can’t be accomplished if readers and viewers don’t know how to interpret what is being presented to them and journalists are responsible for making that easier. By labeling content and defining what those labels mean, journalists will be better suited to do their job because they will be reporting on and for a more media literate audience. Overall, if reporters and the public develop a better understanding of each other, both parties will benefit indefinitely.