Transcript: Media Policy and Local Journalism - Fresh Ideas and Emerging Issues

Media Policy and Local Journalism - Fresh Ideas and Emerging Issues
Transcript of a webinar hosted by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, 1/20/22
Moderator: Damian Radcliffe, Carolyn S. Chambers Professor of journalism at the University of Oregon
and a Knight News Innovation fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism
Panelists: Jessica Gonzalez, Co-CEO, Free Press, Sue Cross, Executive Director and CEO at Institute for
Nonprofit News, Chris Ali, Associate Professor, University of Virginia, Knight News Innovation Fellow,
Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia University
Listen to this event on Soundcloud or Watch it on YouTube.
Damian Radcliffe (00:00:00):

I'm going to suggest that we make a start as we have a lot of stuff that we want to get through today. So
hello everybody. And thank you for joining us for the fourth webinar in a five part series, exploring the
role that media policy can and should play in creating and supporting a strong, sustainable, vibrant local
news sector in the United States. My name is Damian Radcliffe, and I'm the Carolyn S. Chambers
Professor of Journalism at the University of Oregon and a Knight News Innovation fellow at the Tow
Center for Digital Journalism, which is hosting this series of events.
Last month, our expert panel explored how media policy could better support community and
grassroots media organizations. And today we're building on that discussion by exploring fresh models
for funding, issues related to digital access to news and information, and the role that nonprofit
organizations can play in the local news space.

To help us explore this topic, our panel today features three industry and academic experts. Jessica
Gonzalez is the co-CEO of Free Press, an attorney and racial justice advocate. Jessica advances Free
Press's mission of building media and technology that serve truth and justice. Free Press's work in this
space includes the new voices initiative and Media 2070, two projects that I'm sure we'll hear about
later today. Jessica is a former executive vice president and general council at the National Hispanic
Media Coalition, where she led the policy shop and coordinated campaigns against racist and
xenophobic news programming. She's also testified before Congress on multiple occasions on issues
ranging from net neutrality and media ownership diversity to affordable internet access.

Dr. Christopher Ali is an associate professor in the department of media studies at the University of
Virginia and a fellow, Knight News Innovation fellow here at the Tow Center. He's currently leading a
research project exploring trust in PBS and how PBS's networks can play a larger role in restoring trust in
the media. Chris's latest book, Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity, unpacks the
politics of broadband policy asking why millions of rural Americans lack broadband access and why the
federal government and large providers are not doing more to connect the unconnected.
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Sue Cross is the executive director and CEO at the Institute for Nonprofit News, a network of more than
350 independent nonprofit news organizations in North America. She joined the Institute in 2015 to
build this emerging network in advanced social enterprise models for investigative and other public
service forms of journalism. Sue is a former senior vice president for the Associated Press Global News
Agency where she created digital news services, expanded Spanish language and Latin American
operations and introduced video to more than 1000 online news sites and managed a national news
cooperative. Jessica, Chris and Sue, thank you all for joining us today.
So, today we thought we'd mix up our kind of usual panel format. And instead of having a sort of
traditional panel discussion, we're going to do three 20-minute deep dives into a different topic
introduced by our panelists. We'll hear from them about what the issue is, why it matters and what can
and indeed is, or is not being done about it.

Of course, as with all the webinars in this series, there'll be opportunities for interaction throughout. So
please don't be shy about posting your comments and questions in the chat or using the Q&A function.
And Nick Matthews, my research assistant on this series and a former reporter and editor at the
Houston Chronicle and the Daily Progress in Charlottesville among other places, now a PhD student at
the University of Minnesota will help me to keep an eye on your questions and will also help us keep to
time.
So Jessica, you kindly agreed to start and get the ball rolling for us today. I believe that you are going to
talk a little bit about something that's emerged a few times during the course of this series about the
need for a new funding model for local news and how we might go about that.
Jessica Gonzalez (00:03:47):

Yeah. Thank you so much for having me here. Thanks to the Tow Center as well for putting this series
together. It's been really great throughout.
Free Press is a nonprofit media advocacy organization. And we do believe that media policy can and
should play a fundamental role in supporting a strong, sustainable and vibrant local media center in the
United States. And there's kind of two different functions here. There's a media policy function that
mitigates the harms of the existing corporate media structure and another one that I'll focus a little
more on today about rebuilding and restructuring our media system so that it serves the public good.
So we see and we know what we don't want, right? In the past decade, over 50% of local newspaper
journalists have lost their jobs. Conspiracy theories and bigotry proliferate throughout the media, a
digital divide is more likely to keep poor people, rural people and people of color offline with less access
to local news.


Our former president relentlessly attacked the fourth estate. The strategy there was to sow chaos and
distract from the real issues. And in fact, former Trump advisor and white nationalist, Steve Bannon
even admitted that his strategy was to "Flood the zone with shit," a strategy that a global project against
hate and extremism report found that authoritarians around the globe have embraced.
But yet as we kind of build the foundation for what we want, it's important to understand that this
disinformation ecosystem, this strategy is nothing new. It's deeply embedded in the United States
history of oppression. It was a foundational tactic to legitimize slavery, native displacement and
genocide, Mexican repatriation, Japanese internment, the border crisis, and every other mass atrocity in
U.S. government history.

And the antidote, which is why we're here today is a vibrant local media sector. But to build that, we
must confront one truth, which is that our corporate media system allows hate and disinformation to
run rampant. Not because it's good for people, but rather because it's good for business. Corporate
media's incentive structures do not serve the public interest and quality news and information that
builds bridges. This is why former CBS chair, Les Moonves notoriously said, "Trump may be bad for
America, but he's damn good for us."
This is why Facebook, for instance, despite facing two years of widespread criticism continues to allow
haters and liars to proliferate on their platforms, even inciting violence, spreading lies about the
pandemic, the election and so forth. So we definitely deserve something better than this.
And so Free Press is fighting for three main categories of policy change.

One, which I know Chris will get into much more detail on later so I won't delve into is or open,
affordable internet access for all. I'll just say we can't have a free press if only some can access news and
information. So we're doing some work in Congress and at the federal agencies to close the digital divide
once and for all, and to reinstate net neutrality.
Two, while it's important that we build a new media ecosystem, in the meantime, we have to play some
defense. We need to reign in targeted online bigotry lies and surveillance. So it's one thing for
individuals to espouse bigotry and conspiracy theories, and yet another for targeted and often foreign-
driven hate and disinformation campaigns to target Americans based on our personal and demographic
data that the platforms are collecting. So we must defend against these maligned actors by passing
comprehensive legislation to protect digital privacy and civil rights. We must oppose and warranted
surveillance. And we're working quite a bit with the Federal Trade Commission on this as well.
So I'll get to the meat of it now. I know this is what I've really been asked to speak to today is how we
rebuild our media system to support the local journalism that we need for a 21st century democracy.

This is the portion of Free Press's work, where we really focus the most on building this local media
sector. But as I alluded to earlier, our Media 2070 project really pulls out the history of the media being
used to prop up anti-black racism. Those discriminatory practices run deep, some still exist today. So the
solutions that we're looking at then are not to prop up yesterday's gatekeepers because those really
weren't serving us all too well. And certainly that model won't work if the United States is to transition
to an equitable and multiracial democracy. The good news is that opportunities abound and we've seen
in the past year or two, some real momentum and interest in truly figuring out how to sustain local
journalism.

The creation of the New Jersey Civic Info Consortium, which is an independent nonprofit organization
that funds initiatives to benefit the state's civic life and meet the evolving needs of New Jersey's
communities. The establishment of journalism commissions in Massachusetts and Illinois, and the
introduction of several bills in Congress focused on local news, chief among them the Local Journalism
Sustainability Act show there's momentum to reimagine local news.
As my colleague, Mike Rispoli, who some of you may know wrote in Nieman Labs last month, we have a
chance to use public policies to shape an equitable and sustainable system. But today, greedy media
corporations and hedge funds, the very same ones that have contributed so much to the mess we're in
hold most of the political power. Recent efforts like Rebuild Local News Coalition, which is the main
advocacy group for the Local Journalism Sustainability Act show that journalists are hungry to take
action. And that's great. We are so psyched for this, but the hard truth though, is that big commercial
media outlets have outsize influence in Washington and in many state capitals, and they are well-
positioned to advocate for the status quo.

We saw this play out with the Local Journalism Sustainability Act, where large companies muscle their
way in to a bill that would benefit smaller community publications by providing payroll tax credits for
journalists. So as we build future policies to support local news, we have to be aware that they could fall
victim to the same political tradeoffs, unless we take a different approach.
There's a long history of journalists and communities and unions working together to change the media
system. And there's a lot of ideas out here, but here are a few key starting points. First, there must be an
examination of, and reckoning with the history of racist media policies. We've called for an FCC inquiry
into this alongside two dozen members of Congress as a foundational step toward media reparations.
Second, we must continue to oppose runaway media consolidation, which has led to newsroom layoffs
that have reduced local news. Free Press has advocated for a tightening of media ownership limits and
other rules that would incentivize local control role of media outlets.
Third, any policy must center the needs of communities and not the needs of the media industry. In the
past, we've seen how media policy is often used to protect incumbent news, industry incumbents,
uphold oppressive systems and fail still to inform the public.

And finally, we need policies that move us away from overreliance on the advertising market. Local
news is a truly public good and requires a significant investment of public funding for local media. It's
really hard to imagine at this point, a future for vibrant local news without innovative public policy and a
huge infusion of public dollars to meet community information needs. The losses that we've seen at
commercial media outlets, they will never be recouped. There is no amount of reader revenue to give
newsrooms the resources they need for the journalism that we so desperately need, and philanthropists
alone can't fill the gap.

One of the ideas we've had at Free Press is to actually tax online platforms, almost like a carbon tax for
the pollution they've put into our information ecosystem and redistribute that to build truly local,
diverse news sources in communities, more of a public media model, just much more robust than the
one we have today. But for new models like this to thrive, we need to organize. We have to have multi-
stakeholder, people-powered coalitions at local state and national levels to win public policies that will
create and sustain informed and equitable communities. So I'll stop there. Thank you again so much for
having me. I look forward to discussing further.

Thank you, Jessica. That was a fantastic overview of both how we got to where we are and a variety of
different issues that we need to address, some of the ways that we can do that. I think, I mean, there's a
huge amount to dive into, but I wonder if we could just start by talking a little bit about where you see
the kind of focus right now in terms of energies, is it focused on kind of propping up existing providers
and organizations, which is something you obviously being very critical of? Because it feels as if a lot of
kind of the defense is to maintain the status quo rather than, and this is something that Media 2070
does so well, provide a roadmap to say, "Okay, where do we actually want to go? And what are the
steps we need to put in place to make that happen?"

That's right. I mean, that's why I mentioned how well healed the industry is because that's what we're
up against. That's what we saw in the Local Journalism Sustainability Act, which I think started out as a
really good concept that was truly invested and incentivizing more local journalists. The industry was
able to muscle in and to put provisions in there. So the likes of Rupert Murdoch and the broadcasters
that are, if anything, more profitable than ever would benefit from the program and we'd have no
safeguards in place to ensure that that money was actually translating into journalism. So that's the
concern that we have about that model. We actually want, even if it does give money to incumbents, we
want some safeguards in place to ensure that money is going to investigative reporting and journalism,
not to overhead or to shareholders, right? And that's what we need to protect for.

But yes, I mean, Media 2070 and our journalism policy folks at Free Press are really thinking about
reimagining what local news could look like. We have some models that are okay in PR, PBS, the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting. There's a model there, and there's a lot of good that can be done
through that model. Obviously, a lot of communities, including communities of color, I come from the
Mexican-American community, has not been shy about its critiques of the lack of diversity, the lack of
inclusion in those networks as well.

And so when I say we need to build the media we need for the 21st century democracy, I am talking
about race. I am talking about ensuring that we have the systems in place to correctly identify how
racism is showing up in, not just in our media system, but in our society.

And if we're to move forward and to build a multiracial democracy where people of color become the
majority in 2050 or so, we really need to a start investing in a common understanding of what the truth
is. And especially because, I'm a former educator, so I feel like I can say like, part of the disinformation
ecosystem is built on a foundation of lies that we learned in the public school system. So we actually
have a lot of education to do, and we have to like reimagine the media system as part of that. I'm not
saying the whole thing, but certainly as part of that puzzle.

Well, it's pretty damning when you basically described current providers as okay. And I love how you
described earlier on as saying, "We deserve something better than this." So where should these energies
be focused? And how do we support perhaps through your proposals, new entrance, new players, or
those who are breaking the mold in doing something differently?

Yeah. And I want to be really clear, Damian. When I'm saying those existing players are okay, I'm talking
about those institutions and not about the journalists within them, because there are so many
incredible journalists that are doing great work, not just in the public media sphere, but in the corporate
media sphere as well. So this is not meant... I'm not hating the players. I'm hating the game here. We
have to change the game. The game is not going to work for the 21st century.
And so yes, we are calling on the federal government through the Media 2070 project to take a look at
the history of racism in our media system, how the government has been a part of that. We are working
with community to hear what communities want, what does the black community want? What does the
Latinx... What do rural communities want? Right?

Where people who are living in places that have less access to local news. We have local projects in New
Jersey, Colorado, North Carolina, and some other places, what do the people want? And how do we
build from the ground up? What are the information needs that aren't being met? What's filling the
void? And that's how we are very centered on building out based on what the people are calling for. And
so, yes, that's investment in journalists of color. Yes, that's investment from the public kitty into robust,
local news systems that don't really exist. I mean, even if you look at NPR, for instance, we have three
local NPR stations here in LA, or...

There's a great disparity between how much local news and information is getting covered station to
station. We've lost our beat reporters, we've lost our city hall reporters, education reporters. We're
really feeling that I think during the pandemic as well. I see it in my local community as our kids are
going back to school and the parent groups I'm in.

People are like struggling to make good choices because we have such limited information. Like, even,
I'm in a huge county, I'm in the second largest DMA in the United States. But in my local city, I have no
information about the COVID rates, about the vaccination rates, about the ventilation in our schools.
That's the type of reporting that we need to invest in. And we simply don't have it.

No, and I think it was really striking is that's happening in one of the largest media markets in the U.S.,
which may surprise people that we see this in kind of big cities like Los Angeles and New York. This is not
just an issue for rural environs. Can you just very briefly tell us a little bit about some of the lessons that
you've learned from some of those projects in Colorado, New Jersey? What can other states learn from
the work that you've been doing there?

Well, the thing... I mean, we've learned a ton just from hearing from people. We've been so pleasantly
surprised by the number of journalists who have come to the table and wanted to just meet with
members of the community. We've learned a lot about the pressures that journalists are under, how
much ground they're expected to cover in a really short amount of time.
But I would say the thing that we're really excited about is what we were able to do in New Jersey. So in
New Jersey, we helped pass a bill that established the Civic Info Consortium, which is now in its second
year of grant making to local journalists outlets. And we found that the way that we were able to sort of
muscle up against the incumbents was to work with academics, to work with journalists and to work
with members of the community who really wanted something better.

And we learned that public engagement actually does make a difference. Like, we send a lot of petitions
at Free Press. People get tired of them, I get it. But phone calls, petition signing, letter writing, op-eds
and just engagement, showing up at the legislature, that really allowed us to move the ball across the
finish line and build something really different that really didn't exist in any other place.
And now we're hearing from other states that are really interested in this model. We'd like to see more
funding getting funneled into that consortium. So far the grants got bigger this year. So we're excited
about that, but we know that we need much more robust investments to really move the needle and
get communities the information they need.

Thank you, Jessica. So it sounds if really we're looking at a, sort of a nexus of listening more to
communities, both by kind of existing journalists, but also other stakeholders in this space and then a
collective ground swell of effective lobbying and messaging to affect change.
And I'm sure that's also going to parallel with some of the things that Chris has seen in his research in
terms of how communities can get better access to the infrastructure through which so much of the
news and information that Jessica been talking about is increasingly delivered.

Chris, we're going to dive into a little bit about some of your work around broadband. And I think this is
a very timely conversation given that we are still living through a pandemic, one that's really shone a
light on the digital divides that we are seeing across the U.S. and the importance of access to digital
infrastructure. It's not something that people would desire, something they need to have to be able to
function in today's society.

Can you give us a kind of quick overview of some of your research in this space? And in particular how
this links to this kind of bigger theme of access to news and information and quality journalism.
Christopher Ali (00:23:35):

Yeah, absolutely. And great to be on this fabulous panel. So hi to everybody who's watching and
listening and thank you again to Damian and Nick and the Tow Center. So yeah, so my work focuses, my
recent work focuses specifically on the digital divide and how it impacts rural communities.
So just a couple of statistics and facts to get us started here. Upwards of 42 million people lack access to
a broadband network at home. Upwards of 120 million people lack access to the internet at broadband-
defined speeds, right? And this is particularly notable, Damian, just like you said, during the pandemic,
when people thought they had decent access, but it turned out that when four people in a household
were on Zoom simultaneously, their networks could not possibly keep up.

And these issues are exacerbated in rural and tribal areas, which often lack the infrastructure period to
be able to access the internet. But I'll also say that the digital divide exists everywhere. It is not just a
rural issue, but everywhere where we see systemic inequality, the digital divide is present. And this of
course includes cities, which are often grappling with subpar networks, networks that haven't been
updated in decades. As I said, rural and tribal communities, the digital divide often manifests as a lack of
access entirely.
And then of course, for low income households, broadband networks might be present, might be there,
but they're not accessible because subscription is too expensive. And, Damian, like you said, the
pandemic, I think painfully demonstrated why broadband is essential for everyday life. I mean, this is
about work, this is school and this is health, this is civic engagement.

The United Nations called the digital divide in issue of life and death during the pandemic. And a really
interesting study from the National Economic Research Bureau found that those with high speed
broadband at home are more likely to social distance than those without. Like, this is significant. This is a
matter of life and death as if we didn't already know beforehand how important broadband was.
But I think if there's one thing the pandemic did, it's hopefully stop the conversation around, is
broadband at luxury or a necessity? I mean, it is a necessity. It is a utility. It is a right.

I write in my book that there are five and now six pillars for why broadband is so important, not only for
rural communities, but for every community, economic development, education, healthcare, civic
engagement, public safety, and quality of life.

And Congress has finally woken up to this issue. And in the infrastructure bill has allocated $65 billion for
broadband, $42.5 billion of which will go specifically to deployment. And that's going to be targeted
really at those rural and remote communities. 14 billion is also allocated to an affordable connectivity
program that is going to subsidize broadband monthly subscriptions for low income households at $30 a
month. And this is essential, because here in the United States, we pay some of the highest prices for
quite frankly, oftentimes brutal service among comparable countries. So the average cost of broadband,
according to the OTI is $84 a month, which is bananas, right? Rural communities often pay at least 30%
more and that's when they have service at all. So I argue in my research that we need broadband
policies and funding programs that looks to our needs, not yesterday and not today, but five or 10 years
down the line.

And there's going to be a lot to look out for when these federal broadband programs get going,
especially for me around deployment. So Damian, to the big question here is what does this have to do
with local journalism and the revival of local journalism? So I'm going to say in short everything. And
Jessica, I love what you said, that we can't have a free press if only some have access. And that is so
absolutely true.
And I think as we're seeing a massive retreat of newspapers in rural areas, which has left a tremendous
number of news deserts, Nick Matthews and I have done this work where we've mapped broadband
deserts on top of news deserts. And oftentimes since they're existing, these kind of double whammys
are present in rural communities.

So where do people get news and information without an internet connection, a newspaper or radio
station or a television station? Right? And the answer we found a was word of mouth. That might be the
dollar general, and it might also be those few people who have internet access, either because they can
afford the extreme cost of connectivity in rural areas, or because they happen to live within a range of a
cell phone. So these people become gatekeepers and informants for local news and information. So
things to look out for, these issues are parallel and oftentimes they're layered on top of each other. And
the last thing I'm going to add, as we continue to watch these new broadband programs that come into
existence. And so we need to be very, very careful that history does not repeat itself.

And Jessica and I are totally on the same page here when Free Press and Jessica is arguing to be very
mindful and critical of corporate concentration. In my book, I look at the history of broadband funding
and find that overwhelmingly broadband policy and funding programs have favored the largest
telecommunications companies, who have taken funding and done very little to connect the country.

And so I argue actually that that broadband policy has been defined as what I call a politics of good
enough, that the whole thing has just been about getting something out there to rural communities and
to tribal communities and to low income, not the best, but good enough. But the pandemic has taught
us that good here is the enemy of great. We need great broadband, affordable broadband for
everybody.

So we need an all hands on deck policy approach that understands that the digital divide is not only
going to be solved by big telco and big cable. Certainly not, right? They've even failed, but electric
cooperatives, telephone cooperatives, local and regional providers, municipal and county networks, and
of course states. And this is going to involve a tremendous amount of public funding. And the last thing
I'm going to, because I know I'm just... This is my soapbox here is that I think broadband, like journalism
is not at actually about policy or technology or corporations or markets. It's about people. And if we
have a people-centered policy approach, a local policy approach, a community-focused policy approach,
then we're going to be so much better off and so much better equipped to make these vital
connections.

Okay. Thank you, Chris. You can serve in your soapbox for a little bit. One of the things I wanted to
explore a little bit was one of the things you've talked about in your book and kind of as you've been
promoting that is the importance of local solutions to this. So similar to what Jessica was talking about in
terms of how can these kind of national broadband policies actually support local providers who are
emerging from communities providing the solutions that those communities need rather than sort of a
top-down infrastructural solution.

Yeah. So we see, again, the parallel between the kind of news organization market and the broadband
market, this massive amount of concentration and the lack of community service that happens when we
have a policy approach that favors the largest and the loudest. So I argue that local broadband is the
best broadband. And that's because these local, be they public networks like municipal networks or
county networks, or from cooperatives, or just local providers see broadband deployment as an
investment in the community, right? Rather than demanding that quarterly return on investment that a
shareholder investor-driven company might. So in other words, they're willing to take a much longer
return on investment, sometimes upwards of 20 years, because they're seeing that's a community
service. So that's one thing, right? There's commitment to the community that is that found in a local
community-oriented approach.

The other one is accountability. I mean, it matters. It is important when you can run into your
broadband provider at the grocery store or at the high school or at church and say, "Hey, my service has
been out." There's going to be more responsiveness there than if you're trying to connect as a company
in Dallas or Philadelphia and you live 2000 miles away. So that local accountability is absolutely vital.

And last but not least, these local companies, these community companies, these nonprofits have a
proven track record of deploying fiber, fiber field fixed wireless, future-proof technologies in the ground,
in the air rather than taking massive amounts of public subsidy and deploying connectivity that's just
good enough, right? Upgrading rotting networks rather than trying to use the thresholds as ceilings to
meet rather than floors to build upon. And that is being driven by these local and community
organizations rather than the national providers who have largely done it, the disservice with very little
accountability for the policy makers.

And Chris, within that, are those providers also weaving in news and information solutions as part of
that mix? So it's one thing to just provide the pipes, but also where's the poetry that comes with this? To
take a very old policy quote from the UK. But that's an important part of this mix that yes, you can build
the infrastructure, but that doesn't mean necessarily that then the news providers will come. So how is
that interplay developing?

Well, you're absolutely right there that broadband connectivity in the ground, in the air means nothing
unless people actually use it, right? And that just doesn't go for businesses and news organizations, but
also goes for everybody, right? It's dead weight unless we do something with it. But what we do know
on the flip side is that a lack of broadband is a disincentive for a community, right?
So I haven't seen, and this is going to be something really interesting to watch is how these community-
focused broadband providers are acting as news and information anchor institutions. I don't think any of
them are actively involved in either the production or curation of news and information, but these are
pillars in the community oftentimes. They sponsor community events. So they are invested in the
welfare of their communities.

And I think one thing that, particularly in rural communities that I hear a lot, is that what broadband
does, and this is tangential to news and information, but important is that it keeps, or at least attracts
young people to stay in rural communities, right? I mean, particularly in a time of telework, particularly
in a time of virtual community, you can live so long as you've got a broadband connection, you can live
almost anywhere as long as you can afford it and it's high quality or what my good colleague, Jonathan
[Selick 00:34:51] calls high performance broadband.

So there are so many opportunities for news and information to flourish when you've got an affordable
high speed, high quality, robust network. And I think that's the really exciting thing to watch as so much
of this federal policy money comes down the pipeline is the innovations that can now happen because
of this connectivity. And this great quote from Bernadine Joselyn, who's at the Blandin Foundation of
Minnesota. And she says everything is better with better broadband. And this might breed a resurgence
of rural news and information that has been lacking over the last decade or two.


Well, and we also know there's research from Arthur D. Little and others that shows that GDP income
increases as broadband vision is provided. I'm curious, before we move to Sue, if you could also just say
a little bit more about how you have found communities are responding to these information. I guess
what are some of the solutions that they are putting in place? Some of the sort of more lo-fi, or kind of
traditional methods that are having to be utilized because of the absence of digital possibilities.

A lot... That's a great question, Damian, and I'm going to draw a lot from the work I did with Nick in one
county here in Virginia. So a lot of folks are getting their news and information from Facebook when
they can have a connection. Again, the dollar general in some of these communities ends up being an
information wholesaler for what's going on in the community. But social networking seems to be
particularly absent of a news organization or any sort of coverage of the community seems to be
absolutely vital. But I, again, I think the thing that I worry about here is we're talking a very small
number of people in a lot of these communities who even have connectivity in the first place. And so
there's a tremendous amount of data management that goes on.

And so I think we often take connectivity so much for granted that we don't think about, does one even
have the luxury? You've got, okay, you've got, I don't know, a hundred megabytes that you're able to
use in a month or something like that. And then Facebook even becomes a luxury, even these where we
would consider lo-fi platforms become a luxury when you're trying to juggle school and work for
instance. And so we need to make it easier, because I think if we make it easier on everybody, then
we're going to see different ways of communicating news and information. I really do. I don't think it's a
naive thing to say. I really do think. We make it easier, we make it more affordable. And there's so much
more opportunity for communicating and for the sharing of news and information.

Right. And I think one of the things I know that we've seen and I've certainly seen through my research is
examples of people doing things like printing out news stories and ping them on the notice board in
their church or at a bus stop or in a library or digital outlets putting together kind of print... Embarking
on reverse publishing because that's the way they can reach larger possible audience.
And it feels as if, I think this is one of the reasons I really want to explore this question was because I'm
not sure that this reality that you and I are just describing here it is one that many policy makers are
familiar with. And that is fundamentally, if we're going to resolve and solve this issue, you have to be
able to have an innate understanding of how communities are responding to the digital deprivation that
they live with as standard.

Absolutely. And to put it a different way, Damian, how do we humanize this policy apparatus? Right? I
mean, when we're talking about broadband, it is so technical and so technological that it is so very
intimidating, I think, to have these conversations. And then to realize, this is why I say that it's really
about people, how these policy decisions are lived or not lived on the ground, right?

This is absolutely vital. And even goes down to conversations. One of the big conversations that are
going on right now in Washington is the very definition of broadband.

And I think one of the reasons why we haven't solidified on a much more ambitious, forward-looking
definition of broadband is because people really do think, who have connectivity, well, all connectivity is
equal or connectivity is just good enough. We just give them a Camry and not a Lexus. We don't need
gold-plated. All this terminology when really a family of four trying to Zoom simultaneously cannot have
a connection that was defined back in 2015, which is how we currently defined [inaudible 00:39:32], 25
megabits per second down three megabits per second up.
We need to think about connectivity, what connectivity is going to look like 10 years, 20 years down the
line to set this. Otherwise, the $65 billion that we're about to spend from the infrastructure package is
going to be wasted to be perfectly on this. And that comes with putting a human face on the digital
divide rather than a technological face on the digital divide.

Great. Thank you, Chris. That's a big warning shot for everybody there. And I think also one of the things
I potentially take away from that is that we shouldn't be defining broadband based on speeds. It's
actually about services and what you can do with that connectivity and kind of the expectations of this is
what a digitally connected household and community would be able to do.

Right. Right. What does meaningful connectivity look like, rather than good enough?

Yes. Absolutely. Let's turn to Sue as our third and final panelist for today. I mentioned when we
introduced Chris about how the past couple of years has really kind of shone a light on the importance
of broadband policy.
I think arguably when we look at your numbers and how your network has grown over the course of the
last couple of years, it's also shown us the importance of nonprofit news and the nonprofit model. And
one of the reasons why I was so keen for you to join us today is that in my most recent Tow research,
journalists that responded to a survey that I ran recently were pretty negative about the future for
commercial newspapers and commercial local news. And they overwhelmingly saw the future as
nonprofit. So that's a great way, Sue, for you to tell us why they are right.
Sue Cross (00:41:14):

Thank you. And thank you for inviting me and to you and Nick and Tow for having this conversation. And
for those of you joining in, for taking the interest in it. We've heard a bit about policy and the financing
of journalism and these distribution issues. When we talk about nonprofit news, we're really talking
about the raw materials of news, the most fundamental part of it, and that is reporting, going out and
getting the information so people in a community can know.

And that is what has brought about this tremendous renaissance in local journalism, but also national,
under these nonprofit models and the most critical part of what nonprofits do. It might be helpful, I'll
give you a sense of the lay of the land out there of what's happening. And then what's different about
nonprofit news. Because if you read a given story, if you're just any one of us, you read a story, you may
not be certain if it's produced by a commercial media outlet or a nonprofit news outlet, but there are
very fundamental differences that are spreading.
Sue Cross (00:42:25):

The first thing I'd say is I won't talk a lot about the decline of commercial media because I think you've
already covered a good bit of that in this series. But the scale of it is profound. It's, we've lost 60% of our
newspaper journalists in this country in under 20 years and tens of thousands of reporting jobs just
during the pandemic. So everyone's seeing this loss of news and that's a part of a global market failure.
It's not just digital transition, it's not cyclical, this is a long-term change and it's global. So our news
outlets have become more like our libraries or our hospitals or our fire departments or roads, you name
it. They are a public good. And that's what we mean when we say that.
Sue Cross (00:43:13):

So while this decline is happening though, there has been really the reinvention of journalism using
these nonprofit models. My organization formed back in 2009 and it was just a handful, a couple dozen,
mostly investigative outlets, looking ahead, seeing the trouble coming, and saying we want to save
investigative journalism and form this consortium. They were about it when it came to nonprofit news
at that time.
Today, there are more than 360 newsrooms in our network. What that means is out across the country
there's now more than 2,500 journalists working out of nonprofit newsroom. That's more journalists
than in the whole NPR network, NPR central and affiliate. It's more journalists than Reuters fields
worldwide. So we're really hitting this critical mass of a reporting resource for the country.
And I call it that, a reporting resource, because it's a shared resource and that's part of this nonprofit
model. The nonprofit share content with each other, but they also are providing it to thousands of other
news media during this transition.
Sue Cross (00:44:28):

So you really have in nonprofit newsrooms, the reason they're growing and getting public support and
philanthropic support is they are maintaining the whole ecosystem and bringing information to a lot of
communities that wouldn't have it both directly and shared.
I'm often asked what's different about the nonprofits. And as we said, any given story may not be there.
It isn't just a tax status. It's not actually the most significant thing. Isn't the business model. But if you are
in the U.S. of 501C3 and a nonprofit, it changes everything and it's what flows from that. Your legal and
your financial commitment is to the community you serve and a public service. And that changes the
journalism. It's, as both Chris and Jessica alluded, it's much more tied to community needs because it
has to form that public service.

Sue Cross (00:45:25):

In commercial models, why did they lead to polarization and this kind of journalism that can be very
dividing? Is because they're driven by advertising or algorithms, and they tend to drive more profit if
they're more divisive in many cases. So you may see many kinds of media out there that are repeating
news, but they may not strengthen our community, strengthen our civic life or our democracy. The
nonprofits, because they have a little more space, they don't have to produce that margin, they're not
driven by corporate profits. They do have to build community support. So they have to be tied to
community needs. They're community-driven. But they also are transparent and independent. They're
serving the public and stay very oriented to those needs. Any money they make, and some do make
clear profit, it's rolled back into the community. It's not skimmed off. And you can see that, they have to
be transparent in their tax reporting.
Sue Cross (00:46:29):

Philanthropic funding of news is also enabling this enormous amount of innovation. And it's not just in
big places. It's in small places across the country. We have seen a dozen or more organizations launch
really new experimental uses of mobile connectivity to both report and to serve the public, for example.
We have found digital natives actually creating some innovative types of print products that they may
just do once a year, several times a year, but it's different than what we've seen in the past. And so
there is this high level of innovation and sharing the results of that, that then spread throughout the
community. It does, the INN, members act as a network, they share information continuously, and that
gives them a stability and sustainability that if they were operating in isolation or operating at for
profits, it would be incredibly difficult for them to have.
Sue Cross (00:47:34):

The couple other things that are really different about nonprofit news are the communities they serve.
People who are rich will probably always have news. They can pay for highly customized products,
they're very attractive to advertisers, but that doesn't necessarily serve our democracy. The
community's so affected by every equity issue, education environment, access to jobs, access to
broadband, climate change. Those communities may not be the most commercially attractive. And
nonprofits, 70% of our members have efforts, specific efforts underway to deliberately serve
underserved communities, that may be rural communities, it's communities of color, communities that
just are not affluent. And so that is a really significant differentiator and an increasingly important one in
this nonprofit news world. The encouraging thing that I'm seeing, and we talked about this growth from
27 to 360. So we're now in our third year of like 25% growth.
Sue Cross (00:48:50):

Some of that's coming from for-profit newspapers converting to nonprofits. And I think we'll see a bit
more of that. We have some public media that does reporting, not all public media has newsrooms, but
those that do, we have quite a few members in that.
But by and large, what we are seeing that is so exciting is journalists and community leaders go in where
there is no news or it's diminished and create something entirely new. And we are seeing that across the
country. And then we are seeing these communities and individuals step up and support the news. I'll
share just a couple interactions we've had lately. Gig Harbor, Washington, I got calls from civic leaders.

They said, "We don't have any coverage. How do we hire a journalist? How do we create a newsroom?"
And we walked them through a lot of that. And they've created something new and it's off and launched
and Gig Harbor, Washington now has a local newsroom.
Sue Cross (00:49:49):

Also, a harbor town on the flip side of the country in Maine, the Harpswell Anchor was a newspaper. It
closed, I think it was about two years ago and a local group just said, "No, we're reviving it as a digital
outlet." And they just told me their first year they had very modest goals. It's a small community. They
hoped to raise $200,000. We just helped them through this end of year fundraising campaign called
news match and they raised, the community gave them 350,000, which was far more than they ever
expected to get. So you see communities stepping up and saying, "Yeah, this is possible and we can do
this."
Sue Cross (00:50:32):

Damian, you had asked me to talk about why it matters so much. I mean, I think those two community
examples tell why it matters, but the story in the last year that I love the most coming out of this whole
community. Our members produce a thousand stories a day. So it's now very robust as a news source.
One of them that really stuck with me was out of Memphis, Tennessee. In all the racial equity issues
across the country there's been a lot of coverage of how communities were destroyed by highway
projects and public domain projects. And we tend to think about it as in the sixties and the seventies,
right? That was back then. And in Memphis, MLK50 of our members that covers the black community
wrote about an oil pipeline project that was once again, going to use eminent domain to go right
through a black community.
Sue Cross (00:51:29):

And two, there were a lot of other financial questions about the whole project and the viability. And
they wrote, and it changed the course of the project. And that reporting was done by a really young
reporter, 23 year old guy named Cunningham Tatum. And he wrote after that he didn't know that there
was still that kind of journalism, that he could make that kind of difference and do that as a young
journalist. And that has just so stuck with me. The publisher there wrote about his work, and said it's the
most poignant example she has seen of the quote, from one of the country's first investigative
journalists, who's Ida B. Wells, who wrote, the people must know the truth before they can act. And
there's no educator to compare to the press.
Sue Cross (00:52:26):

And so, I mean, I think that just sums up everything about why this matters so much. It's, how do we
support our communities? How do we connect with each other and make decisions in our lives? So for
me, that's why we're doing this, that's why this news field is being reborn and it's hard and it's
challenging and it's financially challenging, but it's working and it's really happening on a broad scale.

Thank you, Sue. In the time that we have left, I want to try and unpack perhaps a couple of
misconceptions that people might have about this sector. One of which is the reliance on foundation
funding.

I think one thing that's really interesting is you've talked about how the organizations that are doing this
well are engendering reader revenue, getting donations, philanthropic support from individuals, and
actually reducing their dependence on kind of large scale grants from foundations.
Sue Cross (00:53:26):

That's very correct. I will say, philanthropy and foundation philanthropy, I believe will continue to be
central in three ways. First, seeding, local giving and innovation. So the seed funds that get the field
started, help them build local support, investigative and highly in depth expert news. It requires deep
investment in reporting, and I don't think reader revenue alone or government support alone, or these
others will adequately support that kind of deep investigative work.
And then again, making sure communities that may not have an individual wealth base for individual
contributions, that we get news to everyone in the country, not just those that are affluent. So I think
philanthropy will continue to play a role in this stable, sustainable ecosystem that's forming, but we do
see a profound shift. Just a few years ago when Pew was taking a snapshot and night was, the first
nonprofits, the first waves that formed largely around 2008, 2009, there were about 80% foundation-
funded. It was almost entirely foundation-funded.
Sue Cross (00:54:40):

And now foundation funding is under half across the country in our members, so it stands around 47%.
And individual giving in the community is now paying for nearly 40% of that reporting. And that to me is
so profound that people are stepping up and saying, "No, this is my news. I'm investing in it as part of
the community."
Earned revenue is still a fairly small... By earned revenue, [I] mean advertising, some kinds of
underwriting, sometimes there's event revenue or fees for training people. That's still running around
15% overall, but it's growing as these new organizations get established. The great majority of our
members have three or more revenue streams. So even when they are very small, they are stable.
They're building a sustainable path really from the time they launched.

And this is a difficult question to answer concisely, because I imagine there are entire workshops on it,
but for those who are interested in either launching a nonprofit or transitioning to a nonprofit status,
what are the kind of top of mind, key most important things that organizations and individuals need to
keep in mind?
Sue Cross (00:55:53):

I'm just going to put out three things and anyone is welcome to contact us. And there are other
organizations helping do the same at this point, but there are three things.
The first is it needs to be rooted in the community's needs.

Journalists and philanthropic funders and civic leaders all tend to have this mental image. They're very
devoted. They think they know what the community needs. In many cases they do, but you need to go
out to the community and say, "What is that big information gap? What is it you don't know about the
local schools?" Or this or that. And then focus on that, because news used to be very broad. It's hard to
support that. You need to start and meet the most crucial needs and expand from that.
Sue Cross (00:56:38):

The second is to go talk it up and build a wave of supporters.
News tends to historically be separate from its communities. There is a continuing importance of
independence, editorial independence that nobody who financially supports the news can shape a story
or the coverage. That's fair, but it is in and of the community, whether you define as a national or local
and building those supporters and saying, having just these kind of conversations, "Here's what went
haywire. Here's what's happening globally, but yeah, you can do something about it." And having that
kind of conversation starting there.
And then the third thing I'd say is at launch, spend half your resources on figuring out how to build
financial support in a business model. That's really hard to do. You want to put it all into the journalism,
but it takes experimentation, it takes some hard work. So investing that up front is really important.

Great. Thank you, Sue. That's a really great list. I'm conscious that we are almost out of time. So I want
to just end with a very quick question for each of you, which is very difficult, but if you could see one
thing that would make a difference from your vantage point to building a more sustainable local news
sector in the U.S., what would you like to see? So let's go to Sue first and then we, we'll go in reversal.
We'll go to Sue, Chris, and then Jessica.
Sue Cross (00:58:08):

It's a great question. And I think we are in the very early days of a big cultural shift. And so it is that
helping more of the public understand that this news is a community asset. It's not a business, it's
something we support and that can connect us as well as divide us. That's not an economic or a news
thing. That's a much bigger cultural shift and it's starting to happen now.

Great. Thank you, Sue. Chris.

Okay, I've got a pie in the sky one, which is, wouldn't it be great if we removed all these market
imperatives from things like journalism and broadband and made it all exactly, Sue, like you said, with
communities and community and grassroots works. I think that's going to be really important. But since
we're not yet at a place to defeat global capitalism, I would say both for news organizations and for
people, like this is, from my line of work, this is about affordable, high speed broadband. We can get
affordable, high speed broadband to upstart local journalism organizations, "Hey, let's make it free."

Right? Let's do the same thing for low income individuals, for rural areas, for tribal areas, everyone
should be able to have access to these networks to do what it is they want to do. And I think that's going
to be so essential for the future of local journalism.

Great. Thank you, Chris. And the last word to Jessica.

Well, I love the last word. I would say the right of the people is paramount and if we could agree on that
and build back from that, we'd be in a lot better place than we are today.

Excellent. Okay. Well, thank you very much to our three expert panelists, Jessica Gonzalez, Christopher
Ali and Sue Cross for joining us today. Thank you to everybody who joined us for this discussion.
We will be back next Thursday for our fifth and final panel in this series, where we'll be looking ahead to
where media policy goes from here, particularly in light of progress or not that we might be seeing to
the legislative agenda on the Hill, the upcoming midterms and elections happening at a state level
across the country. Do keep an eye on our social channels and Tow's this newsletter from more details.
And we'll be back at 4:00 PM Eastern, next Thursday. Thanks again to our panelists for joining us today
and to everybody for tuning in. See you.

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