By Emma Oxnevad

I hear all the jokes about the less-than-ideal career prospects for post-grads. I laughed along—most of the time. But the pit in my stomach grows with every passing remark and with every thought of life after college.

In a move of extreme pragmatism, I threw myself head-first into the world of journalism, spending my four years as a student juggling positions in student media, internships, and various freelancing gigs. I even managed to get some sleep along the way.

I spent my time as a student confident that I was setting myself up for success, primed to enter the daunting realm of professional journalism with a well-equipped arsenal.

Then, the world was indefinitely shuttered by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The onset of the pandemic saw a staggering number of newsroom layoffs across the country, pausing long careers and leaving experienced reporters on the hunt for whatever open positions were left behind. Even though I still had another year of school to go, I had to shut my eyes. “This will all be over soon,” I told myself.

Well, it’s not over. As we approach one year of living under a global pandemic that has fundamentally changed life as we know it, it is high time to accept that this is the new normal.

My time as a student will end in four months. From there, I won’t be able to rely on the crutch of being a “student journalist.” The time has passed for me to laugh and mumble a joke when asked what my plans are after graduation. I’ll be on my own, and I’d be lying if I said the prospect didn’t terrify me.

The economic fallout of COVID-19 has impacted journalists at a disproportionate rate. But we are the profession best equipped to handle such a disheartening time for employment.

Journalists are, by the very nature of the profession, adaptable; working irregular hours, moving around the country, and previously facing the brunt of the Great Recession, in which media layoffs surpassed the 20,00 mark.

The job hunt amid an ongoing global pandemic is going to be a long, frustrating road, regardless of one’s career path. There are times where it may feel hopeless and one may feel inclined to give up and wait for life to “return to normal,” an increasingly abstract concept. But if there is one thing all journalists know, it’s that the bumpiest, most treacherous paths are often the ones most worth going down.

My expectations for my first reporting job have always been low, so as not to set myself up for failure and disappointment. The pandemic has shrunk them even more.

But I’m willing to pound the pavement—virtually, until it is safe to gather with others— and fight for my spot in a professional newsroom; I’m willing to hear “no” a hundred times over if it means I can hear “yes” even once. And it is the time spent as a student journalist—full of unanswered messages, getting stonewalled and spun by my university, and a few sleepless nights here and there— that has prepared me for this most intimidating endeavor.

Because reporters don’t give up.

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By Joanna Talabani

I remember being a kid and watching Christiane Amanpour on CNN. I was enamored with her poise and her elegance. She went into the trenches of fire reporting on trouble in remote parts of the world. She had a funny last name like me, and she still worked her way to the top of a global news channel. While I was lacking the British accent, maybe there was room for me up there, too.

The days where I used to stand in front of the television with a hairbrush as a surrogate microphone mimicking her live coverage are (mostly) in the past. And while I would love to one day be able to thank her for giving me such a profound reverence for journalism at a young age, I don’t know that I could do so without fangirling.

See, whenever I meet someone I admire, I have a hard time taking off the “let me appease you” hat and putting on the “ask tough questions” hat. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact I’m a student and most conversations go like this:

Potential interviewee: Hello?

Me: Hi, my name is Joanna Talabani and I’m a student at DePaul University…

Potential Interviewee: *click*

Me: Hello, hello? Did we get disconnected?

So, when a conversation doesn’t go like that and someone actually gives me the time of day, I feel indebted. I owe them an easy interview, not to be interrogated. Of course, the journalist in me knows that isn’t true, but it’s hard to persuade the googly-eyed fan sometimes.

I recently interviewed someone whose mind I put on the highest pedestal. We’ll call this person “Joe Schmo.” Schmo is an amazing journalist in his own right, and very accomplished. I was intimidated when we were still just chatting over emails. He uses hard-to-pronounce words in his text lingo. “Um” and “like” aren’t in his vocabulary. They are very much, unfortunately, still apart of mine.

I praised Schmo and his talented prose before our interview came to fruition. As prepared as I was research-wise, I don’t know if I could have fully prepared for how I’d feel actually probing him. Don’t meet your heroes, they say. I get why that’s an adage now.

Schmo, as polished as he always is, wanted to know what I was going to ask him beforehand. All my journalistic training has told me never to release questions to the interviewee prior to talking. At best, it ruins the live energy and prompts them to give canned responses. At worst, it will be used to rehearse an effective dodge strategy.

So, did I do what all my journalist professors have advised me to do since the beginning of (college) time? I did and I didn’t.

My journalistic training has taught me to think for myself. I don’t take things for face value and I question everything. Including this steadfast rule about sharing questions. I sent Schmo a few sample questions to peruse before our interview. Why did I do that?

Because of whom Schmo is. He is not a politician I’m trying to nail. He isn’t a controversial public figure. He’s someone who was gracious enough to share some of his expertise with me as a student. And if having a few questions helps him maintain the polished demure image he’s known for, what’s the harm in that?

Here’s where I think there could be harm. If Schmo was someone I, or others, were very critical of. If Schmo was convicted of wrongdoing, corruption, or misconduct. If Schmo was an allegedly guilty party and not just someone who has anxiety about public speaking. But I’m not aiding the next Blagojevich in worming his way out of tough answers. And my journalistic training has taught me to be able to identify this kind of gray line.

For the record, Schmo was not the most pleasant person to interview. His ego could barely fit on the screen with him. He spoke disparagingly of other journalists. Now, reading those books of brilliance of his somehow don’t hit the same.

Schmo was just someone I admired, but it got me thinking back to my journalistic hero, Christiane Amanpour. Could I risk ruining the physical persona of my childhood dream? If the opportunity arose, would I opt to keep her shelved away as inspiration to reference in the back of my mind?

I realize that what she represents to me is too precious—not just a dream, but a culmination of that dream. I might want to share a cup of coffee, but interview her? I think I’ll pass.

You know how they say don’t meet your heroes? I’m fine with meeting them, just don’t ask me to interview them.

 

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By Damita Menezes

The online world has been a saving grace for mankind during the Covid-19 pandemic. With economies shutting down and businesses moving online, there has been hope for folks who have the privilege to work/study in front of a screen. And social media has helped people connect with one another now more than ever.

Before the pandemic, it was common to be exposed to articles documenting the negative aspects of social media and how we must limit our online use to have social interactions IRL. When everything moved online, we relied heavily on Zoom, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Slack, Reddit, Discord, LinkedIn, etc to stay updated with one another personally and professionally.

Keeping up with all these platforms has been imperative and I couldn’t help but notice how different social media platforms are used differently to communicate different messages with different kinds of friends. The way one communicates and who they communicate with is different in every medium. But where do we draw the line between professional and personal content? How do we separate our styles of engagement and consumption? How do we express our personal beliefs and keep them separate from our professional? Do we need to do that? Also, in light of current situations going on with the Black Lives Matter movement and the involvement of social media activism, how does one find the balance between being “woke” and abstaining from performative activism?

Considering all these questions, this article will provide an idea on how we can manage and seize the power to control the media we consume and make the best use of it, if you are a media person or are an average user of social media.

A little background and Journalism before Twitter

I created a Facebook account when I turned twelve years old in 2012 because of peer pressure and because I didn’t want to miss out on what my friends were talking about every day in school. Facebook was “awesome” for my twelve-year-old self. I could share meme’s, comment on pictures, press the “like” button, tag people, type my thoughts out, etc. I was immediately addicted. My mind craved online validation and along with that came my anxiety and overthinking.

Over time, I have learned how to regulate my virtual being to some extent, but with a new social media platform popping up every 4 years or so, it gets overwhelming. And you will relate if you’re Gen Z.

I got Instagram 2 years later because it was getting popular among my peers and Facebook was deemed to be for older folks. Snapchat came about and was for the real connections; the close friends you want to keep in touch with on a day-to-day basis. I finally joined Twitter in 2016 and recently started using it regularly because it was encouraged by my professors as it is the perfect media to get the latest of the latest news. Having so many social media accounts get exhausting and it gets especially hard to keep up if you’re a journalist.

Social media is a great tool to stay updated with friends and family, but it is also great to stay updated with the news. Many folks rely on their social media feeds for their daily dose of the news. An Instagram poll I conducted involving around 50 participants with an average age of 23 showed that Twitter and Instagram were the leading platforms for their news consumption. A newspaper subscription, TV news and podcasts ranked in 3rd, 4rth and 5th place respectively.

For journalism, social media has enabled reporters and news agencies to promote their work and compete with one another with the latest scoops and commentary. “Journalists are under incredible pressure to not only do their stories for their publication or broadcasting station or network, but they are also under enormous pressure to report on social media,” said Chris Bury, a Peabody and Emmy-award winning reporter and a journalism instructor at DePaul. “My main concern is that it doesn’t give reporters enough time to do their jobs and the result sometimes is that the reports that they do are not as thorough and full as they might be because they’ve had to spend much of their day worrying about Twitter or Instagram.

Before Twitter, longer news cycles enabled thoroughly investigated work. With the advent of Twitter, the 24-hour news cycle has been trimmed to just a couple of hours or minutes and with this conundrum comes the question of journalists’ opinions on social media and the separation of personal from professional.

Keeping up with the Social Media posts and The News

For the common folk, the struggle to “keep up” comes about; The struggle of having different types of friends on different platforms.

“It is hard to keep up with everyone being on different platforms because some of my friends aren’t on Snapchat, some aren’t on Instagram. So, for some people, you don’t know what is going on in their life unless you reach out to them,” said Joey Cahue who studied PR, Advertising and Journalism at DePaul.

It gets even more complicated to keep up because all these platforms have different communication modes. Instagram only does pictures, graphics, and videos. Twitter does tweets, pictures, links, trends, news etc. Facebook is more closed with groups, private profiles, etc. This tempts people to have all platforms to keep up with different modes of communication.

Eight out of the 10 interviewees for this article confirmed with me that they are overwhelmed with keeping up. And with the current unprecedented events, social media hasn’t been too kind on the mind.

With the Black Lives Matter movement lifting off again, on June 2nd, Instagram was filled with black images with the hashtag #BlackOutTuesday to show solidarity and raise awareness. Following those posts were people accusing one another of performative activism.

The positive side of activism on social media is that people have been using their accounts to educate one another and learn more on how they can help the movement and put an end to systemic racism. Without the marriage of a camera phone and social media, the reaction of the injustice that George Floyd endured would not have been this passionate.

It is important now more than ever to keep up with the news and there are many resources out there. If you don’t have a news subscription, I recommend following a minimum of 3 news social media accounts: one for local news, one for national news and one for world news. Listen to news podcasts (BBC’s Global News Podcast and The Daily). Sign up for newsletters that summarize the news very easily.

Tip from an old school news junkie

If you’re a journalist and you’re finding it hard to keep up with the news online, I asked journalism professor Rick Brown who has no online presence whatsoever on how he keeps up with the news. “I read the New York Times cover to cover, and then I move on to the Washington Post. Then I will go through a whole series of websites like NBC, ABC, CNN and that’s giving me more stories that are more recent. Then I will head to local news like Chicago Tribune and Chicago Suns Times. I will then move on to Politico and the Sports Websites. I will also check the DePaul news media. I repeat the process all day long every 3 hours, for any updates.”

Understanding Algorithms and The Hack

Overtime, these social media platforms have received updates and changed their designs and consumption styles. These changes have either attracted or pushed people away from their platforms, therefore changing user demographics. Examples: Instagram including Snapchat’s stories feature, Snapchat moving the celebrities feed with the friends feed, etc.

The New York Times Podcast Rabbit Hole is an “audio series about how the internet is changing, and how it’s changing us.” While listening to this podcast, I started thinking about algorithms, how we consume media and the ability to customize our media consumption. Algorithms have the ability to shape what we like and dislike. This kind of power can be pretty intimidating and therefore it is up to us to be able to think in retrospect and control our consumption.

I have come up with some changes you can implement on your social media accounts to serve you better without having to create separate accounts for different purposes. At least until Biz Stone and Mark Zuckerberg don’t give us the ability to fully customize our feeds. Also, Stone and Zuckerberg, if you’re reading this, hire me so we can work together to create the best algorithms for the best user experience.

For Twitter:

When it comes to personalizing your Twitter feed, you can really only switch your feed from receiving the “Latest tweets” or the “Top Tweets.” This is limiting when you follow so many people and follow different kinds of accounts. Twitter’s “lists” feature got me pondering over how we might be able to separate celebrities/influencers from close friends from politicians and news companies. When you create lists and pin them, they will appear as separate feeds in your Home feed. In these lists you can add people without having to follow them.

Have a look at my lists for example. And because I have created these lists, I only follow friends and fellow journalists. I have sorted everyone else into these lists. If you think these lists can be limiting to your main feed, there is the option to show the latest tweets from the lists to appear in your main feed.

For Instagram

Instagram doesn’t let you do much either when it comes to taking control of your feed. However depending on how you want your Home feed to look like, I recommend using the “close friends” and “muting” and “post notification” tools to your full advantage. If you want to share something with only close friends, share them in your story under the “close friends” option. If you don’t check Instagram regularly but want to be updated whenever friends post, enable “post notifications” on their profile.

Another important thing to remember is that you have the ability to follow who you want to follow. That person’s content is going to pop up in your feed. If you don’t want to unfollow, you have the option to completely mute them.

The Personal and the Professional for the media creator

It is often discouraged for journalists to voice out their opinions because of the perception that it might be interpreted as biased reporting. Bury mainly uses his social media platform for professional purposes and tries to comment mainly on the 2 topics he thoroughly knows: Journalism and politics. “I feel compelled to as a journalist to stand up for journalists and journalism when we are under attack. I have no problem standing up for journalists when the President of the United States calls them the enemy of the people,” said Bury. “But some journalists can’t stand up because of company policies and they have to be very very careful and I have certainly followed those policies when I was at ABC news.”

Late millennials and Gen Z journalists who also use social media for personal reasons, are often subjected to this dilemma of personal and professional. Student journalist Cam Rodriguez, has tackled this by creating different accounts for different purposes. “I had my first Twitter account when I turned 13 and that account is more for personal stuff and I found that as I got into college, it became harder and harder to maintain a professional outward facing appearance while I had personal interests and profanity and things that I wouldn’t necessarily want an employer to see.” Rodriguez made that account private and created a new public account for journalism only. On the public account, she is more careful with liking and retweeting and strays away from anything overtly political.

This tactic of creating separate accounts is employed by many social media users. On Instagram, this is known as the “finsta.” It is an Instagram account that is extra private to an individual. “Finsta for me almost falls along the lines of trolling,” said communication and media studies graduate John Cotter. “It’s people projecting their complaints and insecurities to a small percentage of people that are in their close friend group.”

Cotter doesn’t believe in the idea of a finsta. “You don’t know who you’re trusting. Anything you put on social media, it’s there and glued. Even if it is private. There are screenshots everywhere of anything controversial. As private as you want it to be, it is never private,” said Cotter.

For social media influencers or Youtubers, their lives are often the content. Finding a balance between personal and the professional can be tricky. Youtuber Reese Regan has close to 400k subscribers and portrays her life on social media as it really is. “I don’t really have any private or personal accounts. I don’t have anything to hide that is super private; I don’t have the most interesting life. What you see on social media is how my life is living.” Regan promotes her YouTube content on the same social media accounts she uses to stay updated with a few friends and family.

This minor issue between the personal and professional mainly only arises to folks that make media. For folks who work in other sectors and only consume media, finding the balance between personal and professional can be easily separated with websites and apps. LinkedIn is for the professional and Instagram, Snapchat etc. for the personal.

Final Words

The pandemic has pushed us all to stay connected online but it is important to take breaks from our online lives. I recommend listening to this episode “Dial D for Distracted” by The Happiness Lab which is a podcast based on Yale’s most popular course taught by Dr. Laurie Santos.

Make up what you want after considering all these ideas and conversations, but I implore you not to ignore the real news out there; the news that reports on the decisions that shape our lives.

 

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 Our Weapon Against Distrust

How we all benefit from a more engaged, approachable media landscape

By: Francesca Mathewes

Whether we as journalists wish to admit it or not, our work is all consuming. Between the often long and irregular workdays, the pervasive nature of social media and the immediacy and relevancy wrapped into nearly everything we do, it becomes easy to feel like “the news” is synonymous with “the universe.” Sourcing, writing, fact-checking and editing feel like muscle memory, obvious processes in the work of truth-telling. We spend years committing ethics and principles of free speech and accuracy to heart –– there is a deep sense of honor and passion that every journalist I know carries with them.

So, it was a bit jarring to learn that most Americans –– 78 percent according to a 2019 Pew Research poll –– have never spoken to or been interviewed by a local journalist. It made me think anecdotally about conversations I have had with friends and family about what I do. Aside from my partner, who stopped journalism in high school, I don’t know if I have any friends who could confidently explain how I approach writing a story. Most of the people I know who have been interviewed by reporters were connected to those journalists by myself or another colleague, and despite my casual rantings and ravings about the legitimacy of certain publications and my constant suggestions of ‘who to follow’ on Twitter, I’ve heard people close to me refer to “the media” in complaints about coverage of the presidential election or metro news.

It perplexes me –– how can the collective media landscape be more diverse and fragmented than ever before, but media literacy be so low? How can we as journalists combat the uphill battle against “fake news,” and the ease of lumping outlets across all mediums together into large accusations of distrust?

I don’t have all of the answers and you’ll never please everyone –– but I think that bringing journalists –– from network affiliates to small online publications alike  –– more face to face with community members and creating more built-in engagement are some crucial steps in the right direction.

Newsrooms can start by asking some important questions internally, first. Although American trust in ‘the media’ was down to 41 percent in a 2019 Gallup poll, that’s not zero –– who are your most loyal subscribers? On what platforms do they listen the most frequently and for the longest? What are you doing to keep the subscribers you have, and what reservations do they still have about news?

Understanding what is working about your newsroom’s connection to its audience and who is tuning in regularly is the first step in understanding who isn’t and why. It could be that some groups aren’t tuning in or logging on to outlets where they feel misrepresented or left out altogether, or perhaps have a negative historical relationship with media that has been left unreckoned with. Perhaps it comes down to more practical issues of access –– Internet connection, cable, time to tune into a show.

It will take time, effort and (when possible) financial investment into the sort of analytical tools needed to have a newsroom that has a data-driven understanding of where it’s just not meeting people. But I believe it’s worth it –– to assume you know what’s working and what’s not is just as heinous as assuming a story before you’ve set out to interview. And if we need a reminder of the danger of a media mistrust problem in this country, the past four years under President Donald Trump and his campaign against media outlets should serve as a warning for the future.

Make no mistake –– trust is still earned, not calculated. It is a complicated human emotion, not a data point. Investing resources in identifying areas where audience trust might falter is the first step towards (re)building relationships with those audiences.

Embracing audience engagement has not only proved to increase the stability and improve the future of online business for already-well established publications like The New York Times in their “2020 Plan,” but can also expand coverage to be inclusive of communities of color, particularly in newsrooms with white leadership (many of them).

This isn’t about letting audiences “drive” 100 percent of the coverage. Journalists, at the end of the day, are trained with an editorial eye that enables us to make final calls about what is pursuable about a story and what isn’t. But to continue to make assumptions, and often miss, about who our audiences are and what questions they have, will be our downfall.

Once the gaps are identified, there are near infinite ways to let people in. Block Club Chicago, an online publication with a strong local readership, has a tip line front and center on their website and note at the top of each article the reporting techniques used in the story to increase credibility. Their reporters are embedded in communities they report on, assigned to neighborhood beats where they are able to get news about local businesses opening, conflict with aldermen and the trials and triumphs of people who live and work every day in the city’s neighborhoods.

Other publications, like Chicago Reader and City Bureau host regular events like Second Tuesday and the monthly Public Newsrooms series, which allows publications to join arms with community organizations, activists, teachers and other people who normally serve as sources in order to bring stories to life. This is all about creating more and more avenues for the reader to enter your newsrooms and to engage with the story. It gives citizens –– avid readers or not –– a chance to meet face to face with reporters and understand more about what we do, revealing that we are not anonymous masterminds behind the mask of “the media” at large.

This of course, can all require more funding, I can’t ignore that. Not every newsroom has the spare staff or spare time to be doing things that aren’t direct content production. But creating more sustained opportunities for engagement whenever available –– be that surveys, webinars, newsletters or neighborhood events –– we can expand the reach of journalism and fold more people into the conversation. It can strengthen subscriber bases and solidify the importance our craft amongst the public.  It can be a process that happens alongside communities rather than aside or above them, hidden downtown and seen only on live broadcasts.

If we want to bolster public trust and ensure the professions’ survival, it’s time for every publication to integrate engagement as a more serious part of what they do.

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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.

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.

 

 

 

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.

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.

by Brita Hunegs

What does the public need to know? What does the public have a right to know? Who is it incumbent upon to make sure that what the public needs and should know gets to them?

These are questions that have been churning in my head as we enter a second month of rapid change inflicted by the novel coronavirus. The media’s role as the “4th Estate”, as Thomas Carlyle first coined what he saw as the press’s job as protecting the balance of democracy, is overtly apparent.

Even the Founding Fathers appreciated the importance of a free press. James Madison said, “a popular government, without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy.” Self-governance and a truly representative democracy are facilitated by access to knowledge.

But not all dissemination of information is created equal. It is important to distinguish between the act of spreading information handed down from officials, versus finding the information and getting the word out to the public. There is a difference between a conveyor of information versus an excavator of it. This dichotomy can be summed up as the “art of communication” versus the “machinery of communication,” as 20th century American philosopher, John Dewey, framed it.

The more questions that we ask, the more accurately we can triangulate the truth. This is especially pertinent to our current moment in time, when we are all facing down the crisis of a global pandemic with all-consuming implications, and with protruding tentacles that touch nearly every aspect of one’s life. Journalists are currently engaged in probing at the pandemic from many angles, from the government’s response to it, to creating resource guides, to making the dense scientific data digestible. Indicative of the press’s role in the wellbeing of the public health, the state I am currently in, Minnesota, included newsrooms on its list of “essential workplaces” under its Stay at Home guidance. Public information that is reliable and complete goes hand in hand with public health.

Sun Tribune columnist, Lori Sturdevant, said during a forum on April 30 that this is a moment for journalism to be lifted up and be held in esteem, “We can’t allow detrimental rumors to circulate that could adversely affect people’s health,” Sturdevant said.

A time when the public is more dependent than usual on what officials are telling them requires even more diligent oversight by reporters.

Additionally, the commitment to liberalism that has been the backbone of American foreign policy since World War I has infused the common zeitgeist with the notion that American moral authority should be taken as fact. But a muscle can only grow when put under stress and it is the job of the press to question that moral authority so that a more robust democracy can emerge.

Yet the idea that the government is always working on behalf of the greater good is a potent force and is often wielded, especially by the military, to curb transparency. The embedded press system that emerged during the Iraq War was the culmination of a historically contentious relationship between the military and the press. Although the two entities both see their missions as protecting the public, their modes of carrying out that goal can be contradictory. While the press works towards transparency, the Department of Defense puts parameters in place that can, for better or for worse, deter this.

Whether or not you conceive of the COVID-19 crisis as a war, there is no doubt that the virus is an enemy to the functioning of society. Right now, the press needs to continue to dedicate itself to documenting how this “enemy” is handled.

 

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