An introduction to Media Policy and Local Journalism

Transcript of a webinar hosted by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, 12/16/21

Giving a Voice to Grassroots Media

Damian Radcliffe

Hello, everyone. And thank you for joining us for the third webinar in our five part series,
exploring the role that media policy can and should play in supporting a strong, sustainable,
vibrant local media sector in the United States. My name is Damian Radcliffe and I'm the
Carolyn S. Chambers Professor in Journalism at the University of Oregon and a Knight News
Innovation Fellow Tow Center for Digital Journalism, which is hosting this series. Last month,
our expert panel explored some of the transferable lessons for media policies, discussions,
taking place in Europe and Australia. And this month we're looking closer to home and asking
how media policy can support grassroots and community media. This matters because there
are many communities and local news creators who don't necessarily have access to the same
levels of access to policy makers or indeed the lobbying budgets of larger players. Yet at the
same time, they play an incredibly important and arguably an increasingly important role in the
local media ecosystem. So today I want to explore who some of these players are, what they do
and how we can ensure they have a seat at the table.

And when they do get to that table, what are some of the key policy initiatives that they would
like to see put into place? To help us explore this topic, we have three globally recognized
experts to chat with us today.

Graciela Mochkofsky is the director of the Bilingual Journalism program and the executive
director of the Center for Community Media at Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism
in New York. A native of Argentina, she's a multi-award winning journalist, a former Nieman
Fellow at Harvard University and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Graciela has also
been a fellow and visiting scholar at New York Public Library, New York University, and the
Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life here at Columbia University.

Tracie Powell is the founder of The Pivot Fund and the website All Digitocracy. She's the board
chair of Lion Publishers and a former JSK fellow and a senior fellow at the Democracy Fund,
where she worked on the Public Square Initiative. Tracie is a full 2021 Shorenstein Center
Research Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, where she's researching mechanisms for funding
and capacity building for media outlets run by and for black indigenous, other people of color in
traditionally marginalized communities.

Simon Galperin is the founding director of the Bloomfield Information Project and of the
Community Info Coop. A current JSK fellow at Stanford and a former Reynolds Journalism
Institute Fellow, Simon is a journalist, technologist and organizer working in media and policy to
strengthen democracy. He runs the Bloomfield Info Project in Bloomfield, New Jersey, which
was launched in response to the pandemic. The initiative has been recognized for news product
innovation and service journalism, and as an inaugural guarantee of the New Jersey Civic
Information Consortium.

Transcript by Rev.com
An introduction to Media Policy and Local Journalism
Transcript of a webinar hosted by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, 12/16/21

Graciela and Tracie and Simon, thank you for are joining us today. So with our introductions out
of the way, I want to try and set the scene a little bit now for people who are perhaps
unfamiliar with your work. I'll ask each of you just to give us a short four to five minute
overview of some of the main projects that you're working in this space, which really helped to
set the scene for the discussion that we're going to move on to have. Graciela, would you mind
kicking off for us, please?

Graciela Mochkofsky

Sure. Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me and for inviting us. I think this is a very
important conversation; very happy to be part of it. So I run the Center for Community Media at
CUNY's Craig Newmark Graduate School. So we're part of the public university. Our mission is
to assist and create resources and connect with resources, the community media; and by
community media, we mean media organizations serving communities of color and immigrant
communities across the country. So CCM was originally New York centric. We are based in New
York, at CUNY, at the university, and we used to serve for more than a decade, more than 300
media outlets, serving communities of color and immigrant communities and linguistic
communities in New York City. And in 2019, when I became the executive director, we
expanded nationally. So we now serve a network of thousands of outlets. Actually not
thousands, but about 1,500 outlets, serving these communities across the country directly or
through original partners. I think we have about 25 projects ongoing. Our focus is just of
sustainability and capacity for this outlet.

So we do a lot of direct support and training and workshops and public conversations. We also
do very, I think, important research, about this new sector. But I think the project that we are
doing and that we actually expanding now that is most relevant for today's conversation, is our
Advertising Boost Initiative. And I think Nick here is going to drop the link to the report where if
you're interested, you can get all of the information about what I'm going to say in very brief
three minutes. So this project is a project that is a pilot project that we launched in 2019 to
connect New York City government ad budgets with the community media sector. So the origin
of this project is in 2013 when the center conducted research to try to understand how more
than 50 agencies place their ads in the city. So where these dollars went.

And what we found then was that 82% of those ads went to, and this, of course, government
funding and tax money, it went to only a handful of so-called mainstream media outlets.
Basically, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, et cetera. And only 18%
reached the community medium, as I said, more than 300 outlets, serving a large population in
the city and basically serving most of our immigrants and people of color in the city. So that
seemed like an outrageous disparity and also didn't seem like the best use of tax money by the
government, because a lot of these ads were supposed to serve information needs and connect
these communities with city resources. They were targeted for these communities, but they
were not placing the outlets that would actually reaching these communities.

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An introduction to Media Policy and Local Journalism
Transcript of a webinar hosted by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, 12/16/21

So that started a process that led in June 2019 to Mayor de Blasio signing an executive order,
executive order 47, that mandated all about 50 agencies, 50 city agencies, to place at least 50%
of their ad dollars or their budgets in community media outlets. We studied these projects at
the Advertising Post Initiative at that moment.

So what we wanted to do was to one, monitor the compliance with this executive order, and
then also act as a bridge between the city agencies and the ad agency and the outlets to make
sure that the outlets really got their fair share of this advertising funding. So just to clarify, in
case this is not clear, this is not a new budget that was created. This is not government money
that was now reallocated to go to the outlets. This is money that exists in every year's budget
that is always allocated to advertising. It's part of the government's mission and obligation to
keep their citizens informed. So the budgets all existed and they always allocated, but they just
did not reach most of the outlets serving the majority of the population in the city. So what we
did is we hired a full-time person, Darlie Gervais, who's been incredible.

What she did is she created first a series of guides and directories and information lists to assist
the outlets to understand how to pitch themselves to the agencies and how to understand
what the campaigns were and how to get these funding and these ads in their publications or
their websites. This only impacted this only included digital and print outlets, which is the
majority of the community media sector. And then at the same time, part of our mission was
also to educate the city officials who were making the decisions on ad placement. So that was a
very successful project. The year that we started was the first year of the pandemic. It was not
just the 50% that was mandated, but 84% of the ads went to community media outlets. And
that is about $10 million in a year.

This is most of 2020, so in a year in which we saw the outlets hit hard by the pandemic
economically. Our publishers lost, in some cases, 100% of their regular advertising revenue,
because a lot of the advertising that supports community media are local businesses that
advertise in the outlets that serve their own communities. And those businesses shattered, or
they didn't have the resources. And the communities were the hardest hit by the pandemic as
well.

These funding really saved the sector. And that's what we explain in this very long and detailed
report. You can just read the executive summary, but we have 40 pages explaining with data
and quotations from the publishers to explain what it meant. And so we are now, after that, it
was so successful that we expanded it. We are also brand funded and we are funded by a local
foundation in New York, [inaudible 00:09:56] Foundation. We just renewed the funding for two
more years. At the end of the second year, we are now expanding to New York state.

We are trying to also now try to work with state agencies, marketing directors, and advertising
people to expand to outlets outside of New York City and the rest of this state. What happened
in the middle of that is that the executive order was actually turned into legislation by the city
council in June this year.

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An introduction to Media Policy and Local Journalism
Transcript of a webinar hosted by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, 12/16/21

So now there's a law, there's a piece of legislation that mandates city agencies in New York to
place at least 50% of their ads in the community media sector, and now it has also broadened
to include broadcasts. So it's also radio and TV.

There's a new piece of legislation, a bill that was just introduced in the New York state
legislature, to also try to... It's closer actually to the other project that we are going to talk later
today, the bill to offer tax cuts or benefits to local media. So we are monitoring how those
pieces of legislation and how policy is shaping in a complete new way. This conversation and
our mission is to advocate for the community media and make sure that they are part of the
larger conversation about the future of news, and local news in particular. Was that five
minutes or was that longer?

Damian Radcliffe

I don't know, but it was great regardless. So thank you, Graciela. And that's fantastic news that
both in terms of that spending and also the fact to hear that this is now baked into legislation
and potentially providing a precedent that other cities and other states can also follow, which is
great. I assume that there are probably dual challenges with that, both in terms of government
understanding how to work with the sector and even being aware of the size and scale of the
sector, and also, as you alluded to, then ensuring that community media organizations
understand how to pitch to and communicate with city hall.

Graciela Mochkofsky

Yeah, well not with city hall; the legislation has been passed already in the case of New York.
But the actual challenge, and this is a very important actually question because legislation is not
enough. So [inaudible 00:12:25] and legislation is a huge first step and it's very important. But
then it's really easy for a big bureaucracy like New York City or New York state to actually not
comply with it or to find shortcuts or to find waivers. You can actually ask a waiver if you are an
agency and not place the ads in the community media or the local media sector.

So for us, it's really important there's an education piece of it. We found that, actually all the
marketing, the people who make it is decentralized. So it values people making these decisions.
So we work with the agencies that have the largest budgets, mostly, and that have media
budget; not all of them do. It's really an effort.

The effort has been in educating, and I don't say educating in a patronizing way by sharing
information and giving enough data for these public officers to understand or officials to
understand the value of the community media. So one of the things is, you're not going to get
massive organizations reaching millions of people in most of the community media sector or in
most of the local media for that matter. You have to see that these are the only outlets serving
communities that would be completely deprived of information if you're waiting for these
outlets. So they might be very niche.

Transcript by Rev.com
An introduction to Media Policy and Local Journalism
Transcript of a webinar hosted by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, 12/16/21

A lot of them are niche organizations. They're critical in the life of the city. For example, New
York City has, 40% of its population is its immigrant communities; people who are not born here
for foreign born. And we have in the community media sector, outlets serving communities in
more than 36 languages other than English.

There's outlets that all those speaking community get their information from their language
publications, and there's no one else serving those communities. Same thing with a lot of
Spanish speakers in the city, and a lot of Chinese speaking people in the city. So just to convey
the value and the importance of this sector that has been marginalized and ignored, not just by
the public sector but also by their colleagues in the mainstream media world and in academia
and by media critics, that is our job to make the case. And it's very easy to make when you have
the data, because it's true about their value.

Damian Radcliffe

Fantastic. Graciela, thank you. I'm sure there're going to be many parallels with some of the
things that Tracie's going to talk about. Really keen to hear from you, Tracie, about some of the
work you're doing at the Shorenstein Center this term, but also in particular to hear about the
Pivot Fund, which you recently established, which I think is a terrific initiative.

Tracie Powell

And yes, Graciela, you are a great. You're a tough act to follow, but I want to try. I think the
work that I've been doing for the last several years started really right after law school, when I
had a really clear vision about media policy and how it fit into my world of journalism. I wanted
to try to explain that to other journalists, help them understand what was happening in terms
of this changing media landscape.

One of the first things I started writing about a lot is broadband access. I couched it in terms of
The Times-Picayune deciding to reduce its print schedule and go to all digital for, I think three
days out of the week. They would print and the rest would be digital. I wanted people to
understand that even in New Orleans, there existed news deserts, and broadband access was
spotty in a lot of places. for a lot of people, being online means being mobile. It did not mean
having access to broadband.

So that was an issue, and I wanted journalists to understand why they should care about how
we were changing our business models and how that impacted communities who already had
limited access to quality, incredible information. That led to talking a lot about net neutrality,
ownership issues. And then eventually brought me into the world of philanthropy where
philanthropy, policy and journalism intersected.

Transcript by Rev.com
An introduction to Media Policy and Local Journalism
Transcript of a webinar hosted by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, 12/16/21

I began my work, as you said, with the Democracy Fund, trying to figure out how to best
support these community organizations that Graciela talks about; how to distribute those
philanthropic dollars more equitably to these community outlets.

Eventually I launched the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund. I was the founding fund manager
where we worked to increase the amounts of money accessible to these small, independent
BIPOC news outlets. I did that until May.

And then in May, over the summer, I decided to launch the Pivot Fund, which seeks to do the
same thing; to support community outlets led by and for communities of color and other
marginalized groups. We do that through providing general operating capacity, technical
assistance, project dollars as well, and also supporting and collaborative journalism.

I'll stop there because I know we are short on time, but I'm happy to expand on any and all of
that.

Damian Radcliffe

Great. Thank you, Tracie. And as I mentioned in the chat just now, please do feel free to send
questions our way during the course of this hour long session. We'll try to get to as many as we
can. I know there's so much we could talk about. We could talk for hours on this topic, but
we're going to cram in as much as we can into an action packed 60 minutes.

So without further ado, we'll hand to Simon to tell us a little bit about the Community Info Coop
and the Bloomfield Info Project.

Simon Galperin

Thank you, Damian. So my name's Simon Galperin I founded and run the Community Info Coop.
We're an organization focused on democratizing journals in media and technology.

Our chief initiative is the Info Districts Project, which envisions a public utility district model for
local news and information. In the United States, they're called special service districts. Often
they fund libraries or fire departments or sewage systems or sanitation services. We could
leverage those same models to fund local news and information as a public good in our local
communities.

So we've been working on that for a few years. In 2020, we launched the Bloomfield
Information Project, which is our lab to explore practical pathways to establishing community-
run news service that could eventually ideally be funded publicly. And ultimately just to create
a model and a new standard for hyperlocal public access media in the present day and age. In
addition, I do some other ecosystem support.

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An introduction to Media Policy and Local Journalism
Transcript of a webinar hosted by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, 12/16/21

Most recently I helped co-organize a cooperative fund for our community media publishers in
New Jersey, called the New Jersey Community Media Collective, where we are all participatory
in media projects coming together out how we can coordinate and grow the ecosystem for all
of our benefit.

Damian Radcliffe

Great. Thank you, Simon. If I'm right, you are enacting this in the community in which you live,
so you are absolutely living and breathing this in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, which I believe. Is that
right?

Simon Galperin

In Bloomfield. Fair Lawn was my hometown where I thought of it, the original space, but now
Bloomfield; it's a slight larger community, it's a more diverse community with more challenges
that I think are actually really symbolic of the state as a whole and ultimately the nation,
probably.

Damian Radcliffe

Great, thank you. The clue was in the name there, I should have clocked it. Of course, it was
going to be Bloomfield, New Jersey!

We'll quickly go to a question that we had from Joe Amditis at Montclair University, just picking
up something that Tracie was saying about the Pivot Fund. And because I do want to get as to
as many questions as we can, so Joe asked Tracie whether you received any pushback from
traditional funders when trying to launch the Pivot Fund.

Tracie Powell

Push back in terms of not wanting to support BIPOC media?

Damian Radcliffe

I would say resistance. One of the things you've also talked about elsewhere, I know, is that
you've said you want to bring in people who perhaps haven't traditionally supported journalism
and that's a really important part of your mission, but those organizations may also be the ones
that get interrogated by the journalists and the journalistic efforts that they are supporting.

Tracie Powell

Yeah. So Democracy Fund has this really great study that they commissioned right before the
REJ Fund was launched.

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An introduction to Media Policy and Local Journalism
Transcript of a webinar hosted by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, 12/16/21

That showed, I believe less than 2%, maybe less than 1%, of philanthropic dollars went to BIPOC
led media. Now that's still increased in the last couple of years, thanks to [inaudible 00:22:10]
and Democracy Fund and other players right now who are really emphasizing more equitable,
philanthropic giving, but it's still I believe less than 8% that goes to BIPOC led news
organizations.

So when you say pushback, I would say I wouldn't characterize it as pushback. I would
characterize it and say that philanthropy needs to change just as journalism needs to change.

Disruption needs to happen. Funders, donors tend to want to flock together, follow each other
in terms of supporting certain organizations. There's still dollars heavily going to white led
organizations who say they serve people in communities of color. And nobody on this phone
call is guilty of that. But there are quite a few organizations out there who are guilty of building
their business models on the backs of publishers of color. And a very few of those dollars go
directly to publishers.

The Pivot Fund seeks to give directly to community led news outlets. Directly to the folks who
are out there providing and producing critical information for the communities that they're
embedded in. So sometimes it's hard for donors to see, I'll say "scale" because these
communities are so small. So we have to talk about a different definition of scale.

When I go in there talking about wanting to provide dollars to these two to five person news
outlets, sometimes donors really, they see the large, regional, Metro daily newspaper in the
community or the big ProPublica like organization and it's harder for them to see and
understand the impact of these small organizations.

It's incumbent upon folks like me and Graciela and Simon to explain that these are the
organizations the people who are already in trusted relationships with communities, they serve,
and sometimes that Spanish language radio program or radio station or the black newspaper, is
that community's only source of information because the larger players just don't have the
relationship or the trust from that community.

So I wouldn't say pushback; it's more of a process of helping donors to understand exactly who
is creating and doing the work that's meeting the information needs of hyperlocal communities.

Damian Radcliffe

Thank you, Tracie. And I'm so glad you mentioned scale there because one of my suppositions,
when I was working with Nick to put together this panel as part of this series, one of my
assumptions was that it can be very hard for smaller players to get a place at the table. Is that
fair, or have I got that wrong? Simon, what's been your experience? How easy is to get a seat at
the table, and if it's difficult, what can we do to remedy that? And then we'll hear from others
on that question too.

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An introduction to Media Policy and Local Journalism
Transcript of a webinar hosted by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, 12/16/21

Simon Galperin

Probably it depends on who you ask and whether or not they expect to have a seat at the table.
Some people will say they're realists and the best they can do is a tax credit that mostly goes to
the media conglomerates that already run the world, and doesn't really do much for local
journalism and community information needs; that's what we get because that's what we got.

But I think that the most progressive, thoughtful, substantial solutions aren't even on the table
when it comes to media policy discussions. I think it's because a lot of bigger players are taking
up oxygen and a lot of people with resources aren't letting those resources flow, and there's a
false scarcity being created in the ecosystem, which again, like we described with where capital
concentrates in, instead of going to of community ethnic media, it goes to where it's easiest,
where capital already is.

So I think that that's a larger systemic challenge. And fixing that, policy, organizing...

At minimum, one thing we could do without any legislative change, which is its own question, is
have foundations begin to spend down their endowments in a significant way, because I think
there's a major systemic crisis have happening in journalism and around planet in variety of
ways. And those resources might not just are going to be less effective in the future when the
crisis is worse.

Damian Radcliffe

Thank you. We're going to talk more about aspirations and some of the things that we would
like to see in a bit. That's a great example of one potentially actionable thing that foundations
can do.

I'm also curious for Graciela and Tracie, whether one potential solution for getting a seat at the
table is the networked effect that you see through LION and through CCM that actually this
becomes a much stronger voice and body when speaking as a collective voice.

Is that a fair assumption? And again, what are the challenges of that? Because just organizing
that is not easy as we all know.

Tracie Powell

Right. So yeah, I think as chair of LION, I can honestly say that some of the peer learning and
existing relationships, not only among membership but staff and the board as well, lends itself
to opening up resources and capital, particularly for the member publishers themselves.

Transcript by Rev.com
An introduction to Media Policy and Local Journalism
Transcript of a webinar hosted by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, 12/16/21

I think that one of the things that LION is working on right now is really diversifying its
membership and making sure that we are truly reflective of the communities that our news
outlets serve, so bringing in more of those voices that tend not to be at the table. But I do think
we've done a great job channeling resources and trainings and expertise to our membership to
make their businesses more sustainable.

Graciela Mochkofsky

To add to that, I just wanted to actually to connect that with the previous question about scale
and size. I think the issue is not just the size. It's not that the small guys are not invited to the
table because they're so small nobody sees them.

I think the issue, it's still a view of what the news media industry is in this country and for
decades and decades, there's been this idea by mainstream media, by policy makers, by
decision makers, that the media system or the media industry is just a series of organizations.
Most of them white led, very mainstream, that don't really necessarily represent the
communities where they are meant to serve the general public. And this assumption that those
outlets, like the Metro papers in this country, the LA Times is a great example; the assumption
that for decades that they were serving the entire city of Los Angeles.

Then you go deeper and you look at the data that has been published by themselves last year,
and you will see that they only serve a small part of that city, leaving out, for example, the
Latino population, which is almost half of the city population.

The same thing with all of these news desert projects, that until recently you saw these maps
with all of these deserts. And then we would go and look at those deserts and say, "Wait a
minute, there's 400 outlets in this desert that are black media, Latino media, Asian media,
native media." And they are still there. There's no desert for those communities.

And maybe those cities are most, a majority made of those communities. So it's you who're
seeing the desert that is not really, it's just because the outlet that you knew once served you
disappeared.

So I think that is a mind frame that is very hard to change. There's enough data. There's a
history of the media told by this side of these communities. So these outlets have been there to
serve those people who were never served by the mainstream outlets in the first place.

So it's still very hard to be seen and to be recognized and to be treated as equals by their peers
and by others. But what I've seen is that coalitions, as you were saying, are effective. You see
that there's a task force, a coalition of outlets and organizations in Illinois now, trying to come
up with legislation to empower local media. The community media had to fight their spot at the
table, but they got it. They got in and they're part of that.

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An introduction to Media Policy and Local Journalism
Transcript of a webinar hosted by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, 12/16/21

Same in California. There's a legislation that has been passed there and that is now being
considered. This has been pushed by coalitions of outlets that include outlet serving
communities of color. So I see in that two things. The power of the collective, but also the
recognition of the value of these outlets by their own peers.

Damian Radcliffe

And is there a risk that that recognition, what one person in the chat referred to Journalism
with a capital J, continues to risk being overlooked? We are having this conversation at an
interesting time, with the House having passed the Build Back Better Bill that we're now waiting
on the Senate to hopefully pass that in quarter one.

Graciela Mochkofsky

They just pushed it to January today.

Damian Radcliffe

Yeah. They pushed it. They have pushed it to January. And I'll post a link to Rick Edmunds'
update on that, that was in Poynter earlier on today. There's obviously some enthusiasm and
excitement for this, and potentially some positives from these moves to support journalism.

But I think there are also some systematic weaknesses in it too. And perhaps we could unpack a
little bit about those strengths and weaknesses before moving on to what you would like to see
instead.

Tracie, do you want to start off with this? I know you've openly said that you think this
reinforces a broken media system. So perhaps we could hear from you first and then we'll hear
from Graciela and Simon.

Tracie Powell

Yeah, I think you're right. It reinforces the status quo, which in my opinion, reinforces a broken
system. Part of why we still have this issue is because there weren't enough voices, I believe, at
the table to inform the solutions that were created or drafted. So if there had been more
diverse, inclusive voices at the table, the drafters of the bill would've had a better
understanding of how these smaller, independent news outlets work.

For example, with what's in the Build Back Better Bill right now, the $25,000 tax credit, if you
employ a certain number of journalists at a certain sized news organization; had they talked to
us, had they talked to more of us, it would've been understood that a lot of these organizations,
especially hyperlocal community organizations, have fewer than five employees. In fact, they
might just have one or two. They rely heavily on independent contractors; freelancers.

Transcript by Rev.com
An introduction to Media Policy and Local Journalism
Transcript of a webinar hosted by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, 12/16/21

So they would not be able to benefit from that piece of legislation in the way that a larger news
organization would. Now, I think there's a cap on the number of employees, but if you look at
some of these Metros, they meet that cap. And these are the same Metros that have created
tons and tons of harm in communities. They're going to be able to benefit from this.

There are Hedge Fund on newspapers that would be able to benefit from this at the expense of
news organizations that are really in the business of providing and meeting critical information
needs of their communities.

Damian Radcliffe

Simon, you are in an interesting position of being somebody who would potentially be in this
space with your work and projects and presumably ineligible?

Simon Galperin

Oh, yes. Ineligible. Yeah.

Damian Radcliffe

Could you say a little bit more about... That must be frustrating given the important work that
you're doing. Perhaps you could say a little bit more about how that could be fixed or
remedied?

Simon Galperin

Right. I think that the conversation, and not to take away from the conversation around the
specific policy that's in the ether right now, but I think the issue is more of we need to invest
money in creating new things and less into invest money into sustaining the current thing.

Because the current thing, it has a lifetime and that lifetime is going to end at some point and
we're just stringing it along. The comparison I make is giving tax subsidies to fossil fuel
companies while we wait for them to transition to a green economy. Ultimately, we can just
create alternative systems and put those same workers and that same talent to work in a
different space.

So they can increase the tax credit, great. Make it more expansive, more inclusive, but that's
not going to change what's really happening on the ground, which is there are no local news
organizations to invest in a substantive way across the country. And if they are there, they need
massive investment; serious infrastructure, technical, financial operations, all these different
things.

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An introduction to Media Policy and Local Journalism
Transcript of a webinar hosted by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, 12/16/21

So we really need a movement for a new local public media leveraging the existing community
ethic and language like community media. We need libraries, we need PEG stations, we need
FM radio. We need all of that and we just need to realize that we need it so we can start
working towards it. Because if we're always relying on whatever Gannett says because they
have the best lobbyists in Washington, we're just not going to get it very far.

Tracie Powell

Can I just add real quickly, Simon, under that? We've been here and done this before.

We did this with the Public Broadcasting Act when the government decided to inject money
into PBS and Sesame Street is what mostly comes to mind. Lots of independent and people of
color media was left out. They are still banging down the door, trying to get their fair share of
some of those federal dollars.

I think while this act is a start, and people like to say this is a start, it's still a conversation about
saving newspapers instead of saving local news. And there's a really nuanced distinction there.
I'm not in the business of trying to save these local newspapers. I think it's about time that we
acknowledge that we are past that now. We really need to be talking about saving local news.
And that looks a lot different than trying to save what's left of McClatchy or Gannett or
whatever.

Damian Radcliffe

Yeah. You both make such great important points that this doesn't work for small organizations,
those that are reliant on freelancers. And it also is about supporting existing providers rather
than helping to fill gaps. And of course, as you've also both alluded to, that this is about really
supporting journalism that looks like "traditional journalism."

So what does this mean for communities that are supported by newsletters or podcasts or
WhatsApp groups, for example, which are absolutely legitimate information sources that are
incredibly valuable to those communities?

Before we come onto solutions, I do want to hear from Graciela; I'm really curious to hear what
your community and your network is feeling about the proposals that are currently on the
table.

Graciela Mochkofsky

So I'm not a policy expert, but I think I've been following this and talking to the people behind it
and to our outlets. The community media sector is a very uneven and very... It's not like
everyone is the same and there's plenty of outlets that we serve that are larger newsrooms.

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An introduction to Media Policy and Local Journalism
Transcript of a webinar hosted by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, 12/16/21

We've been mapping these sectors because we found that it's really hard to say anything that is
true unless you have data and you can prove it. I'm a journalist by training so I've always looking
for data to support my assessments and the programming that we launched.

So one of the things we found, we have a map and a directory of more than 600 Latino media
outlets. Most of that is Spanish language, but it's more complicated than that. There's other
languages and many formats and very small and very large and medium, and very local and
national and by identity or by issues and topics. Same thing with black media. Black media, we
have around 400 media outlets in our directory and map.

There are papers who've been serving communities for a hundred years, who have more than
five employees and who have full-time staffers; 25 staffers, 50 staffers. There's a lot of Chinese
media papers that are big and robust operations. There's a Japanese paper in LA. I can give you
so many examples. So I do think that a lot of those outlets, a big portion of the community
media sector and many outlet serving communities of color would benefit from this.

I don't know if that's the best piece of legislation you can have to save local news. I think it was
not meant to be the only one. There were others that were just killed by politicians. There was
actually a proposal, a bill to allocate federal advertising funding to go to local media that didn't
make it to the bill in the end.

I believe, like Simon, that is good that we need to build new things, but I do think that a lot of
the things that have been there are really worth supporting and keeping. And that includes
mainstream media outlets and that includes community media outlets.

I think there is an expertise and a value and trust that was built through a couple of
generations. And I do believe that that deserves serving. I don't think everything should be just
nuked and start from zero. But I think there's actually, and Tracie supporting several of these
organizations, there's this very powerful movement of entrepreneurs of color who are building
incredible news organizations. I think there's room for all of these in the conversation and in
the... The question is where the resources are coming for this. And I think people are getting
very creative. Particularly the younger entrepreneurs are getting very creative in ways of
finding resources. I was just talking today with Madeleine Bair, who runs El Tímpano out of
Oakland. I don't want to speak for her, but this was published.

It was a piece that just came out, about... I think I saw it, Tracie, in the Lions Newsletter or
something but it's about having these civic partnerships where she partners up with the
Department of Health in the city of Oakland and they fund a sponsored content that actually is
information that needs to get to these Mayan and Spanish speaking communities in Oakland.
It's one of her main sources of revenue. So I think this bill is just one solution that was
proposed. I don't think it's the only one. I think there's so much happening it's actually hard to
keep up.

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An introduction to Media Policy and Local Journalism
Transcript of a webinar hosted by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, 12/16/21

Tracie Powell

So Graciela, I want to talk a little bit about that advertising tax credit that was in the original
language and was dropped. It provided tax credits to businesses if they advertised in their local
newspaper.

So if I am a business and I'm already planning on spending that $1,000 to advertise in, I don't
know, let's just say... I'm trying to think, of the Chicago Tribune. And then I get a tax credit
where I can spend an additional $1,000, what do you think I'm going to do? I'm going to buy a
bigger ad in the Chicago Tribune. I'm not going spend that second $1,000 with the Chicago
Crusader or Cicero Independiente, which is a really incredible independent local news outlet.

What I suggested with that piece of legislation, with that particular language, is that you
provide bigger tax credits to the business to advertise in Cicero, so it's just a little bit more of a
carrot to go to that independent news outlet instead of sticking with what businesses have
always done, advertising with the big boys.

And the response that I got was, we cannot introduce race into this conversation because
what's going to happen is they'll get sued and then the legislation will be put on hold because
the administration will get sued because now we're carving out a space based around race. And
I'm saying that wow, I'm not saying we need to burn everything down and start fresh and new.
And I don't think Simon is saying that either.

I am saying that we need to take a few more risks and we need to push that envelope. I think
the same thing happened with the black farmers. And I know they're still trying to get their
dollars based on discrimination that happened at the hands of the federal government, but
they were successful. They were successfully sued.

I think that while this is not exactly the same thing, I think the principle is. And I do believe, not
just the federal government, but Simon and I have talked about this a little bit, but the media
industry as a whole has created significant harm against communities of color, in marginalized
groups in this country. And one of the things that I hope we get a chance to talk about, is Media
2070, because as I believe that it started trying to address some of those in terms of
reparations.

Damian Radcliffe

Great. Well, we have about 10 minutes left, so hopefully that's something we can go to on that.
Let's talk about risk. Let's talk about the fact that I think, one of the messages perhaps that I
take away from this, is that Build Back Better is better than nothing, but it should be the start of
a conversation and a dialogue that brings in a variety of different types of support for a wide
range of different organizations and information providers.

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An introduction to Media Policy and Local Journalism
Transcript of a webinar hosted by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, 12/16/21

In the time that we've got left, perhaps I can ask each of you to talk about the one thing that
you would most like to see happen from your perspective. And I appreciate, there's a raft of
them. You may want to just list a bunch of things and then go deep on one Simon, I'm going to
ask you to start with this difficult and thorny question.

Simon Galperin

Sure. I'm going to list a couple of big things and short order though, just to shout out to Media
2070 again, Alicia Bell and I wrote a Nieman Lab Prediction last year about media reparations
and envisioning a billion dollar fund from the Knight Foundation, which profited all off of the
ads for the sale of enslaved black people and a slew of other media wrongs that have occurred
over the last 200 years. So we could see major philanthropy begin to spend towards media
justice in a significant way.

I think we need federal investment in new hyperlocal, public media and working with people
who are actually comfortable centering the conversation around race and inequality to address
those underlying systemic needs that have been, for so long ignored.

And then at the local level, I think state and municipal governments need to really begin
thinking about mimicking what Graciela has accomplished at CCM, and really more broadly
thinking about how are they insourcing their local news and information dollars.

How are they investing in the people who live there and the residents who live there when they
spend their public access dollars, when they spend their communications to dollars?

And ultimately, I think that like all public goods, these local news information should a base
level local news information. Not necessarily capital J Journalism, but should be a right in this
country, access to community and civic engagement and civic participation. And I think those
should be managed as public utilities. So I think that there's a long way to go, and a lot of these
solutions I think are hopefully one day add up to that world and that place for all of us.

Damian Radcliffe

And you've offered some suggestions about how to fund journalism like a public utility. Would
you like to just quickly summarize that before we move to the other panelists?

Simon Galperin

Sure. So the chief initiative for the Community Info coop, which was actually envisioned at
CUNY when I was at grad school there; so CUNY connections, the best J school in the land, we
came up with tax policy solution for funding local news and information that mimics business
improvement districts, library districts across the country. Effectively a community would elect
to tax themselves per household depending on what you see fit.

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An introduction to Media Policy and Local Journalism
Transcript of a webinar hosted by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, 12/16/21

And Bloomfield, that's a population of 50,000 people. If each person paid a $5 tax every year to
fund local news and information in our community, that would be $250,000, which is plenty to
run a community newsroom here. But there's also existing public dollars that are being spent
willy-nilly on other nonsense. We could really focus on reorienting towards information needs
in our community because that's the ultimate question, and then we just need to put public
accountability and public governance on top of that.

Damian Radcliffe

Great. Thank you, Simon. We will post that. There we go, we'll post out some information to
that proposal, which I think one of the things that I really like about that is that it builds on an
existing precedent and just treats journalism in the same way, as you said, as a utility.

Tracie, let's come to you next and we'll hear from Graciela and we will do a hard stop at the top
of the hour. But these are really important topics. So Tracie, what's the big thing that you would
most like to see enacted that you think would make a real difference to the communities that
you are representing and advocating for?

Tracie Powell

I've already mentioned a couple of things that I think can be done, but I think the biggest thing
for journalism, period, is that we really start focusing on centering community.

That's something that we just... We complain about democracy, saving our democracy, but a lot
of people don't even know what's going on in their own backyards. They don't know. They're ill-
equipped and ill-informed to really understand how the system is working around them. And it
creates apathy.

I also think that because there's so much focus and the tension, again on saving our local
newspapers rather than local news and really being of service to community, that our mission
gets lost. People have lost a lot of trust in this industry, in journalists themselves and
journalism. They don't understand what it is and really don't care anymore.

So the people that Pivot Fund invests in are those journalists and news outlets who are already
in conversation with these communities. They are part of the conversation that's happening on
WhatsApp and other platforms.

And I think that if the industry focused on those innovative ways that people are actually really
consuming information and supporting that, we'd wind up on the right side of things, rather
than focusing on a particular news organization or a particular name journalist, or what have
you. We really should start at community and I think we can build from there.

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An introduction to Media Policy and Local Journalism
Transcript of a webinar hosted by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, 12/16/21

Damian Radcliffe

Thank you. Tracie. And Graciela, a final word from you on this; what's top of your...

Graciela Mochkofsky

I totally agree with Tracie. I would say for the community media outlet, I would like to see more
resources go in their way. If you ask any anybody to share what is the one thing they want,
they'll tell you money. And they're severely under-resourced.

But most of them do have the trust of their communities still very much. And we've seen that
during the pandemic. And so more resources and to be taken seriously and to be seen as equal,
even if the type of journalism they do is not the type of journalists that most funders or
advertisers consider the only acceptable model.

This is outlets deeply serving their communities. Its service journalism is very creative.

There's also extraordinary writing and reporting. And at the same time, there's long tradition of
being of service and of doing specific interventions when things get difficult for their
communities or the mainstream media newsroom, I would say that, and I know many are trying
and that's a huge conversation taking place now in journalism, but is that they finally find a way
to look more like the communities they serve. It's been decades and decades trying to diversify,
vote and vote, and it's not happening. So I hope to see that effort to succeed.

Damian Radcliffe

I know that was one of the topics I hoped we'd have time to explore, but unfortunately we
haven't. I could very easily have chatted with each of you for an hour and then some on this
really interesting topic, but I do want to be cognizant of the time of everybody who has joined
us today and also for our expert panelists. So we will draw to a close there. Lots of great ideas
on the table and Nick is going to make sense of this conversation and distill it into a write-up for
the Tow Newsletter. We'll also publish the audio and video from today's session on Tow's social
channels in the next couple of weeks. So do keep an eye up for that.

In the meantime, thanks to our three expert panelists today, Graciela Mochkofsky, Tracie
Powell, and Simon Galperin. Thank you very much to each of you for joining us today. We will
be back in 2022 on Thursday the 21st of January at the same time, 4:00 PM Eastern, the third
Thursday of the month. We'll be discussing some of the new and fresh ideas on the media
policy table from a number of great people who are thinking about this topic very deeply.
Thanks again to everybody for joining us today and to our panelists for such a wonderful
discussion over the last hour. Thank you.

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