Chi Journalism Town Hall Reveals Creative Tension b/w Old and New Media

This week’s radioshow is now online, with audio from a national conference call on low-power community radio along with excerpts of last week’s Chicago Journalism Town Hall.

I meant to comment on the Town Hall earlier, but then all of a sudden already a week passed. First, I want to say that I was glad to be able to attend, and thanks go to organizer Ken Davis who was nice enough to squeeze me in after it looked like their RSVP list was full.

It’s tough to organize such an event and try to be balanced and fair with regard to representation. To begin with, the task of discussing local journalism in Chicago while the two major daily papers are on the ropes is not so simple. If you’re looking to get out of the echo chamber you want to be sure to include voices critical of the mainstream journalism status quo, but at the same time you risk alienating a lot of receptive participants if you don’t also include folks from inside that mainstream. Of course, since many observers pin responsibility for the newspaper’s decline on the internet, you need to have some new media newsies there, too.

Faced with that challenge I think the organizers did a fine job, including both current newspaper reporters and columnists along with bloggers and critical voices. Somebody with an axe to grind can certainly complain about a particular person or institution not being included. But I’d challenge anyone to come up with better representation across the local journalism spectrum in Chicago… nevermind actualy getting them to show up.

Lasting some three hours, it would be difficult for me to effectively summarize the Town Hall in a readable way. Instead I’ll reflect on what stands out to me most one week later.

Without a doubt the friction between new media and old media was present and palpable throughout the event. I wouldn’t say that it ever got hostile, but a level of mutual suspicion could be sensed. The beef of the mainstream, primarily print, journalists echoed a frequent complaint which was summed in one word by Chicago news veteran John Callaway: “theft.” That was his answer to a question of how newspapers might achieve a level of success, audience and revenue online similar to that achieved by the Huffington Post.

At many times the contention that news websites and blogs still rely heavily on the work of the traditional press was brought up. Sometimes it was during a discussion of the negative effects of major newspapers going out of business, noting that such an occurrence would leave bloggers without something to comment on (and, presumably, steal). Other times it was expressed with more bitterness, accusing web-only enterprises of failing to produce much original content, therefore not showing promise as the new guard.

The feelings weren’t much warmer from the other side, as those running web-only news sites, like ChiTown Daily’s Geoff Dougherty cited how profiteering by big newspaper owners began squeezing the papers to death before online was serious competition. Dougherty also forced the issue of original content, given that ChiTown Daily pays both experienced professional journalists and new citizen journalists to do original reporting for the site.

Another strong current was the issue of making money online, with traditional journalists questioning if online ads, in particular, would ever be sufficient to sustain a fully online newspaper. That question met with two different answers. Some panelists, like Community Media Workshop’s Thom Clark and In These Times’ Salim Muwakkil, pointed out that making a profit at reporting news isn’t guaranteed by the first amendment and has contributed significantly to the current crisis. Other commenters from the audience argued that there’s plenty of money to be made with online ads. Sachin Agarwal, CEO of Dawdle.com, was there as an advertiser who buys ads on many Chicago-based websites. Brad Flora of the social news site Windy Citizen invited Agarwal and also spoke up in defense of the vitality of online advertising.

In the end my conclusion is that the tension isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, if there’s a silver lining to the cloud of the current crisis it’s that it is forcing people to have the conversation not just about what the future of local journalism will be, but why it’s important in the first place, and what it should look like. Without rejecting the model of the daily commercial newspaper, at this moment it’s important to reflect critically on what features we wish to retain and what, perhaps, we can do without.

I forget who made the remark, but this line of thinking causes us to question why we have to stories about local government bundled with sudoku puzzles. Just because that’s the way the daily newspaper ended up doesn’t mean that’s the way it has to be.

Of course there are bigger questions at stake, regarding the place of objectivity and so-called advocacy journalism; about who gets to be a reporter, and whether future reporters will be able to make a living wage doing journalism. And of course, we still have the issue of who determines what gets reported and how.

I can’t say that I’m ready to dance on the graves of the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times. For all of my criticism for how their owners have done business, and for the gaps present in their coverage of social and economic issues, they nevertheless contribute a great deal of valuable original reportage that would be immediately missed if they went out of business. Yet, these two papers cannot and should not be the only game in town. One of the major underlying problems is the extent to which we all are over reliant upon too few sources of news. And, yes, we probably would not be here if consolidation across media, encouraged by regulation and legislation, had not occurred on such a grand scale in the last quarter century.

The revolution in online news gathering really got off the ground almost ten years ago with the first Indymedia center covering the Battle in Seattle. The notion of uncensored user-contributed news, including photos, sound and video, was radical, forward-thinking and utterly pragmatic. So much so, that a decade on we take it for granted. I’d guess that most folks working online news sites and blogs are largely unaware of this lineage.

The same struggles that catalyzed independent and community media will continue to spur change in online journalism. Money is always an issue, but profit doesn’t have to be.

I left the Town Hall feeling unexpectedly stimulated and hopeful. Despite the overemphasis on making a profit online and the tensions between old media and new, I was heartened that such an open and frank discussion was happening in the first place. I doubt that the same broad mix of folks could have been brought together in the same way five or ten years ago. It’s a sign of both how severe the economic environment is, how much owners like Tribune have run their papers into the ground, and also how traditional journalism can ignore or minimize online efforts only at its own peril.

WTF? Pacifica Docks Free Speech Radio News $13 Grand a Month

Being kind of distracted the last few months, I missed the news that the Pacifica network has cut its contribution to the Free Speech Radio News budget by $13,000 a month.

For those not familiar with these two organizations, Pacifica is the nation’s first community radio organization, currently owning and operating five stations around the country, along with a satellite network interconnecting community stations. FSRN is a daily half-hour news collective the formed out of the ashes of Pacifica’s radio news program in the late 90s as a constructive protest against censorious policies being carried out by Pacifica during a protracted struggle over control of the network.

In my opinion FSRN is the best daily half-hour of news on the radio in the US. Because it is worker-run we hear regularly from reporters all over the world who are from these countries and regions and in touch with their local issues in a way that no American or western reporter could. To me it represents the ideal of community radio, where people have the opportunity to speak for themselves and their communities rather than only have their voices represented by someone else. As a collective the editorial control remains in the hands of all members rather than being consolidated in just a few.

In the end a settlement was reached over control of Pacifica ousting the former board which apparently had improperly consolidated control and was considering selling one or more of its stations. With the election of a new board came a reuniting of FSRN and Pacifica, as the network began carrying the program on its satellite network and providing funding.

Relations between Pacifica and FSRN have not always been rosy. FSRN is worker-run collective that is not under Pacifica’s control, and I’ve often heard rumblings that Pacifica would like again to have its own daily news broadcast under its direct control.

However, I don’t know if this recent budget cut is representative of such an initiative, or just simply a result of fiscal problems.

According to an article in NYC Indymedia’s The Indypendent, there are indeed finance problems at Pacifica that seem to stem from earlier and ongoing conflicts within the network:

Pacifica has lost several lawsuits filed by former employees, with others still pending. Some of its own producers allege the network may be paying its legal fees by pulling money from reporters who gather the news.

“They are taking money we bring in, in order to pay for mismanagement,” said founding FSRN producer, Aaron Glantz, who helped produce the Winter Soldier Hearings, where veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars spoke out publicly, for Pacifica in March.

Now FSRN is actively trying to raise funds through donations and, possibly, grants. I hope that they are able to make up the shortfall in order to continue production. By comparison to most nationally syndicated programs FSRN gets by on a shoestring. The annual $156,000 that FSRN is losing from Pacifica looks like the coffee and bottled water budget for a recently canceled NPR program that aired on many fewer stations.

Good reporting takes time, and therefore it takes money. If we want to hear incisive, thoughtful reporting, especially from people and places less heard from in the mainstream, then it needs to be funded. Even if a reporter isn’t working full time, every moment she spends reporting is one that she’s not working making a living elsewhere. For all of the feel-good boosterism we hear about so-called citizen journalism we can’t forget that in-depth reporting is more than showing up on the scene of some event with a cell phone or digital camera.

FSRN doesn’t have the same (cult of) personality-driven allure of Pacifica’s more well-known syndicated news program, Democracy Now. It’s too bad, if not unexpected. Nevertheless, I can’t help but think that cutting FSRN’s budget is an enormously myopic move on Pacifica’s part. At the same time, it’s also an object lesson as to why remaining independent was a smart decision for FSRN. Pacifica can revoke their share of the funding, but they can’t just shut it down. FSRN started without Pacifica, and I’d like to think the show can continue and survive without Pacifica.

The continued survival of FSRN will require the continued support of the community stations that carry the program. Many stations–like my old home WEFT–started carrying FSRN from the very start, contributing money directly. Perhaps its time for this to happen again, for stations and their listeners to support FSRN directly so that it doesn’t need Pacifica’s money.

In my fantasy world this would allow stations to disaffiliate from Pacifica in protest while keeping FSRN on the air. However, this is truly just a fantasy since Democracy Now is perhaps the most sacrosanct program on community radio, and nary a community station can afford to threaten its ability to carry it by dropping Pacifica affiliation. To do so would spark armchair activist riots in college towns and progressive urban enclaves all over the nation. But I digress….

Right now Free Speech Radio News needs financial support, and I urge everyone who supports grassroots radio journalism reflective of the true spirit of community radio to contribute what they can.