In the week where it was rumored
that CBS may be getting out of journalism and when the ABC
"debate" outraged many, I called Michael Skoler of American Public Media/Minnesota Public Radio, to see how he
saw the opportunity for the public radio/TV system to step up to the
challenge of delivering high quality news to Americans.
"Today’s
journalism was born in a time when there were few alternatives to
mainstream media and it was tough to gather reliable information from
diverse sources. Only a small number of organizations had
the resources to gather news and to distribute it. Journalists
took on the role of finding and sharing the news that they deemed
important, and many in the news business saw this as a sacred trust".
"But for twenty years, public trust in journalists has been eroding
and, in some cases, lost."
I asked Michael
how this trust had been lost.
Michael made the
point that many news organizations have become disconnected from the
people they serve. With media consolidation, there are fewer
reporters, and those reporters are asked to produce more stories,
usually by phone rather than by spending time in communities. With
fewer resources, the major media increasingly rely on the same set of
expert sources to explain the news – people with titles who may
not have direct experience or knowledge of the news, such as the
military analysts that were the subject of the recent exposé
by the New York Times.
Journalists have become more vulnerable to
those that try to manipulate the news agenda.
Another trend is
the fragmentation of the audience. As the numbers of cable channels
and Web news sources has expanded, it has become harder for the mass
media to gain and hold a large audience. A network news show can no
longer be assured of 30 million viewers a night. A city newspaper can
no longer be assured of a mass readership. To get the numbers, many
news organizations believe they need more flash rather than more
substance. They invest in hyping stories, fancy graphics, and
celebrity coverage. In short, they have shifted toward
"entertainment".
Getting attention is often a case of a
louder voice.
Michael feels
the current crisis for mainstream media is a crisis of relevancy.
He cites a recent Zogby Interactive poll
(http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1454)
where 70% of Americans acknowledged that the news is important to
their quality of life. But 67% said that traditional journalism is
out of touch with what they want from their news.
I asked if this
was not "good news" for public radio and TV. After all,
many believe that the large increase in the audience for public radio
in the last decade may well have been driven by this vacuum of
relevancy and truth at the network and cable level.
Michael agrees
that this might be the case, but he fears that public media is
vulnerable to the same resource pressures and growing disconnection
between journalists and the public.
His concern?
That the newsrooms of public media are also relying too much on the
usual sources of news – the officials, analysts and
self-appointed spokespeople who often have their own agendas to push.
"We too rely on ‘experts’. Our ranks are not very
diverse. We can miss what is important to our listeners in their
daily lives. We have to be careful about taking our relationship with
the public for granted.
Trust is built on understanding and that
means engaging and listening to the audience. I think we compete best
by becoming more relevant and more trusted."
I asked Michael,
how this might work. How would relevance break through the noise of
today’s media? How would his organization’s model of
Public Insight Journalism, PIJ, help increase relevancy and hence
trust and how it could help to deliver very high quality news at a
cost that public media could afford?
Michael made it
clear to me that PIJ is not about filling the airwaves with listener
opinion. It is about drawing on the experience of the public to
inform the news process.
How does this
work?
People are
invited to join the Public Insight Network serving Minnesota Public
Radio and American Public Media’s national news shows. Here is
what those who join can expect:
• Up to one e-mail a month asking for your insight on issues we
plan to cover — you respond only if you have knowledge;
otherwise ignore the request
• An
occasional follow-up call or e-mail to get more information, if we
follow a lead you provide
•
Confidentiality: We won't quote you on the radio or the Web without
your permission
• An open
line for you to tell our radio programs what stories are important
to you, your family and your community and help us set our coverage
priorities
• An
occasional invitation to public insight meetings we hold in your
area
• No spam,
marketing calls, or requests for money — your information is
private and is not shared outside of a small circle of public radio
journalists
"We ask
people for knowledge and experience, not their opinions. So if we are
exploring the impact of rising gas prices or looking at problems with
public education, we target those in the network we think will have
knowledge and ask for their experience. What they share helps us
understand how people experience the issues and enables our reporters
to focus on the most relevant angles and stories."
I asked how the
newsroom makes sense of all of this information - how does it turn
data into news?
"Our
relationships with the Public Insight Network are managed by a new
breed of journalists, which we call public insight analysts. Their
job is to engage people and gather information on stories, and then
synthesize the knowledge and experience of the network and bring that
information into the editorial process. It’s a daily process
that connects the newsroom to the audience."
"We aren’t
turning over the reins of the newsroom to the public. We are
creating a partnership, where a journalist’s skills and
judgment are still on the line. In the PIJ model, almost nothing
from the public goes direct to air or the Web. As we gather public
insight, our journalists do what they have always done – vet
the information, check out multiple sources and then tell
well-crafted stories that provide truth and context.
“We have
built knowledge management tools that allow just 2 1/2 analysts in
Minnesota and 3 in L.A. to manage relationships with over 50,000
citizen sources. Our tools enable us to target groups of people
within the network who are likely to have knowledge on a specific
issue, so we are not constantly surveying people. We respect their
time and privacy. They are sources and we don’t share their
names with our membership department or anyone else. Our goal is
journalism, not marketing. If we break the trust, we would be
finished."
The result is that
relevancy and impact are increased, he says. Stories, or
perspectives, that might have been missed in a more closed approach
are often uncovered. And trends are spotted. For example, Michael
says, his analysts first uncovered stories about the middle class
squeeze from the network – before papers like the New York
Times ran a series. Recently, some in the network revealed that they
plan to give their tax rebate checks to charity and that this is
causing quite a stir in the charity sector.
I asked Michael
about the metrics.
He says the network now has more than
53,000 citizen sources, with about 24,000 in the upper Midwest and
the others spread across every state and two dozen foreign countries.
In the last few months, he says 10,000 people have responded to
requests for information and 190 stories have been informed by the
network across APM, MPR and 4 other public radio newsrooms that are
PIJ partners – New Hampshire Public Radio, Colorado Public
Radio, Oregon Public Broadcasting and North Carolina Public Radio.
The network grows by
about 2,000 a month. That is a lot of people who now have a much more
meaningful relationship with their stations, says Skoler. “So
not only does our news improve, but so does the overall relationship
with the audience.”
I asked whether this has helped the
bottom line. "MPR’s member numbers are at an all time
high" was Michael's response.
So if this is working for
you, what about other stations I asked.
“The 4 stations
that we have trained are very happy with how their local networks are
helping their journalism. New Hampshire has about 1,200 in its
network, Colorado has about 2,400, North Carolina has 500 and Oregon
Public Broadcasting has over 2,600. That growth has happened in a
year or less.
"We train 2 people in each station –
a journalist/analyst and a news manager – and APM provides the
software tools. We learned from our early mistakes and these stations
can move so much faster and with greater assurance as a result.”
If
you want to learn more about PIJ - here
is a link to the main site that opens with an
invitation for you and I to join the network. I append the opening
words in the follow-on to this post because they speak of the new
relationship that is surely at the heart of a more trusted and
relevant news that public media can afford.
I close in hope
that this is a process that only a public model could offer. Is this
not a great advantage? Conventional news can only turn up the volume
and in the end defeat themselves and fail the nation.
What will
happen as public media calls upon the experience of the people in
this way? What will happen to the news? What will happen to the
station? What might happen to American
Society?
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