EP 51 - City Hall Beat
The local media landscape is pretty fluid right now: extinct or shrunken newspapers, online-only outlets, freshly grown media entities that may or may not be objective. What's all this mean for local government? Is a reliable, objective media purely about watchdog dynamics? What about when local government needs to get its messages out? What happens when the local government IS the news source? It's too big a topic to solve on a podcast episode, but it's worth the talk. Episode 44: Chief Storyteller - http://municipalequation.libsyn.com/ep-44-chief-storyteller Michael Grass, Route Fifty - https://www.govexec.com/voices/michael-grass/8755/ The Source - http://thesource.metro.net/2009/10/20/welcome-to-the-source/ By the Bay - http://bythebay.cool By the Bay featured in Editor and Publisher - https://www.editorandpublisher.com/columns/business-of-news-by-the-bay-dives-deep-to-explain-local-topics-and-elections/ Adweek coverage of The Source - https://www.adweek.com/digital/l-a-metro-launches-blog-local-transit-reporters-contribute/ "To Inform and to Serve," sampled on this episode - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT5DtcPAjZ8
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Transcript
On this episode of Municipal Equation. There has been so much frustration with the media economics around local news. None of the newspapers
would have anywhere near the staffs that they had back then. Yeah. Success really looks like people being more engaged in their local communities.
The local media landscape is really fluid right now. Extinct or shrunken newspapers, online only outfits, new media entities that may or may not be objective, we can't tell. Well, what's all this mean for local government? It's not just a watchdog issue. My name is Ben Brown and this is Municipal Equation, a podcast about cities and towns in the face of change. From the North Carolina League of Municipalities, episode 51.
The success of a newspaper depends on many things, integrity, just plain honesty, service in the cause of good government, steel craftsmen, reporters and editors devoted to their calling. That the Buffalo Evening News has these is evidenced by the confidence of its readers, the largest daily circulation of any New York State newspaper outside Metropolitan New York. The city editor's desk is the focal point for local news coverage. Stories come continually from the many reporters who cover regular beats. Other stories are assigned by department editors. Every possible lead is followed where a new story must present facts completely, accurately, and on top of that, it is the responsibility of reporters to get behind the facts and to explain what they mean. Here are photographers dispatched to get a picture to supplement the reporter's story. So before I was a podcaster for the League of Municipalities
in North Carolina, I was a news reporter. Some radio, but mostly writing for newspapers, ultimately covering the North Carolina legislature, governor, and state agencies. But before all that, I covered local governments. A lot of local governments. Town councils, county commissions, an island municipality with a population of about 200, to a city that was the hub for more than 200,000 full time residents. This spanned about a decade, inclusive of the professionally scary time period that was essentially a cliff drop for a lot of local newspaper markets, being around 2008, 2009.
Yeah, Jackie, Andrew. I'm of history here, you might say. This is one of the final editions the 113
year old Valley Independent will print this week. And while the publication is shutting down For a reporter, like I was, it was like being in the final stage of Galaga. Watching layoffs and early retirements blow up all around you, while trying to avoid a dismissal yourself. I was really lucky to make it through, but it was a stomachache to be a part of.
And this stuff is still happening. The the story of newspaper contraction and consolidation
has something that's been going on for a while now. We'll get to who that is in a minute. But just wanna say first, this this isn't going to be a tour through the newspaper disaster area. That's not what this episode is about. But it will be a discussion of what happens now and what happens next with things being as they are for local news coverage. Specifically, coverage of local government. When I was plotting out this episode, I planned to venture out and link up with a local news reporter to get impressions from him or her about what the stakes are for any locality having objective coverage, and what happens when it declines or is lost. But, I realized I didn't have to go too far. Actually, I just had to turn around in my office chair and look at the gentleman sitting behind me. So So what are we gonna talk about here? So I guess, we well, okay. Well, first off, could you identify yourself, where you work, and what your title is?
I am Scott Mooneyham. I'm director of public affairs at the North Carolina League of Municipalities, and I'm Ben Brown's boss.
So I hope I get this right. Before Scott Mooneyham was my boss, he was and still is really a popular name in journalism in North Carolina, a long history with the Insider State Government News Service and the Associated Press prior to that. Prior to all that, did you also cover small towns and town council meetings and things like that?
Absolutely. And that's kinda how I began my journalism career. I started out in Goldsboro, North Carolina at the Goldsboro News Argus. And the very first year there, that was, a awful lot of what I did to cover small towns, small town councils, local government in smaller rural communities.
And at that time period and and could you kinda define that time period and sort of what the media landscape was like and how robust it was in terms of local media coverage? Absolutely.
It it's astounding to think about that you could go to a cover a town board in a place like Faison, North Carolina that may have two or 300 residents, maybe. And I might be the only reporter there, but I might not be. There might have been maybe someone from another newspaper or someone from a radio station, that kind of thing. I don't know, you know, today whether you would really see that kind of thing. You know, being as far as, like, the and this has been now roughly thirty years ago. I think it's clear that today that none of the newspapers that were, you know, around at that time, and some of them are no longer around, by the way, would have anywhere near the staffs that they had back then. If you were to walk through a lot of those newsrooms today, they're probably the same physical sizes, but there are a lot of, empty space, empty desks there now.
And and so the the talking point from the public angle, meaning just the everyday person walking around is, oh, dear. We've you know, we don't have the watchdog system like we used to have or some towns are not being covered at all anymore. And so there's that public interest side of it. But what does that mean for the local government from your perspective?
Well, yeah, there's certainly that watchdog perspective, but there's also the inability for towns and cities to try to convey information to their, you know, to their, to their public, to their constituencies.
The
economic crash in 2008, 2009 really hit newsrooms across the country really, really hard. I think when you think back to, you know, almost a decade ago now, because these things are playing out over many years, there were these moments of of carnage in terms of these mass layoffs. And then you didn't really hear all that much about these media blood and deaths, for lack of a better term. But reductions in force have continued to happen. They may not be as large, and sometimes they they do happen in these dramatic flash points, but it this has been going on. I'm Michael Grass. I'm the executive editor of Route 50, a publication from Atlantic Media that covers state, county, and municipal government around The United States.
Route 50, as of a couple months ago, has been around for about three years now. But Michael Grass has been around for a long time. If you're familiar with the DCist, the once defunct but now resurrected local news site, Grass was a founding co editor of that publication. Overall, he's been at it since the high school newspaper. So he's been firsthand witness to a lot of the change. The challenges,
for governments, governments have had complicated relationships with the news organizations that they cover. Yeah. You know, there are news organizations that have really champions or the watchdog role that they play in their communities or in their states to, sort of be that fourth estate check on or be be be a balance or be be a check on the balance of power. Yeah. But governments also have a vested interest in making sure that the information that is being written about day to day operations of, and priorities and initiatives of a government, is communicated accurately and distributed, to, you know, as many people in the community, so people you know, the citizens have a good sense of what's going on. Something as small as a weekly community newspaper that a Metropolitan newspaper put out, but they've cut back, they may choose to not cover a suburb outside of Kansas City, I'm just using a random example. They might not find that to be as newsworthy, and the government there can't really depend on, that news organization to relay a community news event or something like that. That's just, you know, one example, but you've seen and and and no two communities are alike, and that's where I think there's been so much frustration with the media economics around local news. There is no, like, silver bullet. There is no, like, one trick that every place can do to find a sustainable path. And so, every community's local media landscape is different, and so governments have to be ready to adapt to fill a vacuum. So if you go to a lot of the government management association conferences and conventions, like I do, let's say, like, the ICMA, the International City County Management Association. Yeah. At those conferences every year, there are sessions devoted to how your community can engage better with the pub public. Social media can be very challenging for some places. Yeah. So, you know, I think there are a lot of governments that are that have mastered or have been doing a a good job, and there's plenty of others that aren't doing as good job, using social media as a tool to communicate directly with their communities. And, you know, is is that a good alternative?
Scott Mooneyham.
Certainly, with social media, you have the ability to directly talk to a number of of people, but how many what percentage in of the populace in any place is actually following your social media channels.
And that brings up all kinds of things, generational issues and the parts of the country with really lackluster Internet access, so much that it's kind of just not the tool to use, even though it needs to be. But there are local governments getting creative with public outreach and creating connections online without it being a sort of cold, boring, mechanized kind of communication that you might associate with government. If you haven't listened to episode 44, Chief Storyteller, I really suggest it. It features Aaron Foley, who works for the city of Detroit as chief storyteller. That's his title. He has a media background and came to the city job by recognition that some of the neighborhood stories in Detroit just weren't getting any play. And so the city launched a news website with playful character and even a little, or frankly a lot of edge that might draw comparisons lightly to, you know, Vice News or BuzzFeed or that kind of thing. I gotta say that this is possible for other cities to do when it comes to filling a media void and telling stories from the city. But I'll say that Aaron is so good at what he does that he's really an exceptional talent, and that might be hard for many cities to duplicate, but the model is there. In Los Angeles is a website called The Source. It's a government website from the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, but it doesn't look like it. It takes a similar human voice blog like approach to covering its topic, being the metro. Steve Hyman is the main guy there. He's a former LA Times transit and city hall reporter. When the source was launched in 2009, the publication Adweek highlighted it and excerpted this from Hyman. Local media has taken more than a few hits. I was one casualty, although I prefer to look at it as the long awaited liberation of my soul. At the same time, the Internet has provided government a way to directly speak to taxpayers without having to go through the media. No longer can a government complain the middleman got it wrong or wasn't interested in doing a story. Readers will naturally wonder if an agency can honestly write about itself. Here's what I can tell you. The agency still very much wants and needs press coverage and invites and needs outside scrutiny. As for the source, I'm not here to invent some new form of propaganda, nor am I the agency's new inspector general. The goal is to honestly and fairly explain how Metro works. Where do you think this is going for and and and also, you know, talking about local governments and their interest in having somebody to to maybe even kind of launder the information so the public, you know, has a trustworthy news source that they go to. A local government could take it upon themselves to be the news source and try to get creative that way, whether it's social media or a new website or their newsletter. But Yeah. That's that's a lot of questions there. I mean, it's really hard to predict.
I certainly believe that as as a lot of, these trends evolve, that you will begin to see more and more Internet based small publications. Some of them will be and and you're seeing this now already, but I think you'll see more of this in the future. Some of them are are gonna be kind of labors of love. Some of them will probably be, you know, retired journalists or semi retired journalists that are, you know, with two or three person staffs. You know, I mean, the the the one good part about this story is that the barriers to entry now with the Internet and and and and and in this digital age are are much lower than they were. So you can have two or three people that could open a news operation on a shoestring and go out there and and provide some coverage and provide some information.
Yeah. Well, I think when there is a void to be filled, there will be certain community minded people who will do their best to fill it. And Yeah. So I think you've you've seen a lot of interesting
sort of digital news organizations spring up. One of the ones I found in my research, and there are a good number of them, but By the Bay is the name of one Internet based news and information source that sprung up specifically to get locals more engaged with and interested in local issues. In this case, it's in San Francisco, which, of course, has a major newspaper. But they see their model spreading to other markets that need it. Their About page, the last time I looked at it, said this. Maybe you've heard. Local journalism isn't doing so hot right now. Community impact is our bottom line. But a for profit structure allows us to stay nimble and think different. And Think Different has the TM next to it, so it's a wink to the Apple campaign. Elsewhere on the website, it says We're nonpartisan, but not boring. And the emphasis on making these local issues, not boring, not mundane, but not overdramatized, is one of the reasons I wanted to reach out to them and hear what void they're trying to fill with local news coverage and citizen engagement. Sure. My name is Yvonne Liao, l e o w.
It's like meow with an l. And Yvonne is a cofounder
of By the Bay. You can find it online at bythebay.cool.
And By the Bay is a local news site that basically explains how local issues and
elections affect Bay Area residents. So they soft launched in early January twenty eighteen following a predecessor website called ballot.fyi that explained ballot issues to San Franciscans in a simple, catchy way with really modern looking artwork.
It's an eye catching website, and Yvonne, as a San Franciscan, took notice. I came across that site, just as a user. Someone has shared it on my Facebook profile, and I was really amazed. My background's in journalism because in a year where everyone is creating some type of valid guide, this one really seemed to speak to me. Yeah. It he was, unafraid of using emojis and, used text message conversations as a form
to explain a lot of these more complicated and quite frankly boring issues. Which I thought was a brilliant strategy, using a text message kind of format to explain issues. Defaulting to that kind of format means you have to be simple and to the point without drowning in details, but also having a simple way to explain those details at the appropriate time. I was just like, who is this person? Let me meet them. And so we grabbed coffee,
and introduced ourselves. His name was Jimmy Chion. I really started talking a lot about local media, and we were both pretty energized by politics that year, especially at the presidential election. So our conversations kept going. By the Bay didn't immediately emerge from those conversations. We actually collaborated on a variety of different projects, including the Hello Project, something called Goat Talks, which was another evolution of the Hello Project. Mhmm. The Hello Project, very quickly, was just matching people via Google Hangout who sat on opposite sides of the political aisle. Oh, neat. And, yeah, they would essentially just jump into video conversation, anonymously and then talk about policy issues and things like that. So that was a really interesting experiment. We were able to get a small grant for that, but that was kind of the beginning of our partnership. We were both really interested in bridging people from different sides of the community and getting them to talk about really important issues.
And local just seemed to be an area that was just greatly overlooked. So they picked up issues that they knew would be on the local ballot in the next election. An affordable housing bond for one, and built an education platform for that. Again, with a goal of it not being boring or disposable news, meaning the kind of news where you only really need to know it for a particular point in time. In order to
really understand what you're voting for, we can explain that bond and the pros and cons of it, etcetera.
But more importantly, you probably need to understand affordable housing in San Francisco to begin with. So the explainers on the site are basically these easily understandable chunks of info that basically build you up to understanding what that ballot measure is all about outside of the current events silo. Really nicely designed graphics and charts that don't look like something printed off of Microsoft Excel diversify on the fly how they're communicating that information and impressing your memory with it. Again, it wasn't just an empty exercise or something catchy and fun to do. There was an actual void that they were trying to fill locally. We just realized that none of our friends were talking about these issues. Mhmm.
Very few of them. And it seems like there was just, like, this minority part of the population that was really involved, very civically engaged. But then there is the vast majority who were living in the city, either were relatively new to the city or were just checked out. Yeah. Never really, thought twice about local politics even in and outside of an election cycle. And I think partly because it's like as we were even just forming, like, our first piece of content, which was, you know, how to pass a law in San Francisco, a lot of this information is very opaque and difficult to find. It's just not translated in a way to reach residents or speak from their perspective. And so I think that's what we were trying to accomplish. It's, like, more than just explaining a policy issue because I do think there's, you know, Wikipedia, and there's a lot of resources that could potentially do that. But I think explaining it in a way that's relatable, approachable, and easy to understand so it doesn't leave people feeling confused Yeah. Or and interested was were some of the things that we wanted to really, integrate into the way that we covered this content?
Again, they're in San Francisco, and what yeah. It does have a big media presence as far as, you know, being a large and happening city. But the shift that's happening in how people absorb information or become impervious to it, per the onslaught of information sources, does bring about projects and new enterprises like this that could be scaled to really any city. They built By the Bay and secured funding from places including the Knight Foundation. As you heard earlier, they are for profit, and that's for sustainability, but also for ownership and stakes. So so what does, sort of success look like when it comes to By the Bay or where you wanna take it?
Yeah. Success for both of us really looks like people being more engaged in their local communities. We think information is just the first step to that. You have to be aware of, like, how your local government works in order to even be thinking about being politically engaged. Right. And so the end of that is really whether it's voting, whether it's volunteering, whether it's just, you know, collaborating with your fellow neighbors in dozens, I think we're very much interested in that final outcome. What's the fallout when a city or a community doesn't have a dedicated source of news or information? There's so many, I think. And there are so many areas that are that by the bay isn't quite hitting, but, like, one of the most important ones is just lack of accountability. Mhmm. That's why we're seeing, like, an emergence of investigative nonprofit Mhmm. Propping up across the country as a result, and I think that's definitely a very important consequence, for the lack of local journalism.
Going back to what we were saying about the sort of watchdog and the fourth estate type thing, I mean, you know, getting the word out. And if government does try to say, you know, we're gonna there's no daily paper here anymore. We're gonna start the daily paper. All of a sudden, that's automatically the the the propaganda machine. You know? It it's there has to be that sort of cleansed version, third party inspected version of the information that government puts out. And I say this as someone who's an advocate for local government, but but also, you know, understanding the realities of how people receive information, the skepticism that's out there historically of of government. But but it really is important to local government to have a good media presence in town to to get that information out there and and and and run it through that funnel so it's something that the public that the public can digest, in more of a trustworthy way, or a trusting way than maybe they would otherwise. That's right.
There is certainly a gray area. I think, overall, one thing was the expansion of digital media and sort of the decentralization of sort of, of things that, would have been covered by a legacy Metropolitan newspaper. Mhmm. I think you have to, sort of recognize where the boundaries are, where the information is coming from. Yeah. Because the public doesn't always know, the difference. They might see a brand, but they might necessarily understand where the sourcing of certain information was. Scott Mooneyham.
Another aspect, though, of your question is that I don't think it's any coincidence that public confidence in public institutions has declined during the same time that we've seen the decline in in newspapers. And it's exactly for the reason that you mentioned that you had in the past a certain level of public confidence that what you were seeing there was not filtered in in certain ways, that it was, it was reliable and trustworthy. So now you no longer have that, or certainly not to the degree that you did. I think that, you know, as far as municipalities themselves or or local governments, it is more incumbent upon them to, though, try to try to connect directly with their residents. And we see that, you know, Ben, you've covered a lot of of of different aspects of this here while you've been at the league for the podcast and for Southern City Magazine. And we're seeing a lot of innovative ways that municipalities are doing that, and and not just with written or broadcast communication, but even direct communication. You know, you you went out and talked to the folks in Salisbury where they're going directly to citizens to try to engage them. By the way, that's covered in the same episode as Aaron Foley in Detroit. That's episode 44. So, you know, it it is kinda we are in a very fluid landscape right now. I don't think for newspapers we've even hit the bottom yet, and that's unfortunate. But I believe I believe we are going to continue to, though, see more of kind of a entrepreneurial approach to news coverage here in in the future.
Is there anything in particular you miss about the, the local news days for, for, for you?
Wow. You know, it's, that was a long time ago. I feel like covering the, the, the, the, the smaller towns and the local governments. I really like the people. There's, there's, there's something covering small town councils. There's something very earnest about, about the folks in those towns that are doing that. I mean, for someone to serve on a small town council, they have to really have a love of their community to want to do that.
So I guess as appropriate to this discussion, I work for a municipal league representing those cities and towns out there and elected officials and municipal staff. So consider the source. But back when I was a news reporter, my experience totally mirrored what Scott just said, in that when you've got a town of about 300 people, for example, and huge growth issues on the horizon, for instance, Yeah, that really requires dedication and a unique appreciation for hard work. And it was, as I hope you expect, quite difficult to objectively convey that through the hard news stories that I had to write. And these folks still seem to appreciate what I was doing as a reporter. So just want to throw that in there. For any reporters listening, I hope you're glad that this wasn't a lecture on media not covering local issues in-depth or anything like that. I mean, as a former reporter, and I think the other current and former reporters interviewed on this episode will agree, you guys are awesome for doing what you're doing, often with long hours and limited resources. Totally get it. Would love to hear from you any thoughts you have about this conversation. You know, what do you think about these less precedented news outfits popping up and the quality they deliver or the approach they're taking or how they're supposed to cultivate followers who trust what they're reporting. We could talk forever about this, really. But any feedback, any glaring omissions, as there may be many given the time and format here, I'd love to hear them. Email me at bbrown@nclm.org or reach out to me on Twitter through the handle at muni equation. News is a conversation keeping us engaged from a lot of angles. The public needs it. Elected officials and city managers and planning directors and utilities directors and police chiefs, they all need it too. Thanks so much to Yvonne at By the Bay for letting us check out their model. Bythebay.cool is the web address. And thank you to Michael Grass at Route fifty. And a special shout out to Kate Queram, who I learned recently was hired as a reporter at Route fifty. She was an awesome local news reporter in a town that I used to work in. Michael, you made a good hire. Also, Michael, if I veered between pronouncing it as Route fifty or Route fifty and one of them is incorrect, I apologize. Thanks again for listening. Municipal Equation is made possible by the North Carolina League of Municipalities. Nclm.org is the website, and all past episodes of the podcast you can find through nclm.org/municipalequation. Subscribe on iTunes or Google Play and leave a friendly review if you'd like to. We appreciate it. And keep sending your ideas for episodes. Dbrown@nclm.org is the email. Alright. Thanks. We'll talk to you again soon. This is Ben
Brown.
