Journalists Are My Heroes

In this episode I talk to Laura Dawn, chief creative officer of recently launched news aggregator FrontPageLive.com. The shorthand description is that it's a progressive response to the massively popular Druge Report. But it goes much deeper than that, as you'll hear from our interview. Among the team that launched the site is none other than former Fox News political reporter Carl Cameron. 

Dawn isn't a journalist by the traditional definition. She's an activist who for years has been a writer, director, strategist, and producer of social justice campaigns. She was the seventh employee of MoveOn.org. She runs her own agency, Art Not War, with her partner, Daron. She talks in this interview about how she was among those targeted by Cambridge Analytica in the final months of the 2016 presidential election. 

The way the political battles now rage online, with such sophisticated and micro-targeted information campaigns, makes it harder than ever to sort the propagandists from the activists from the journalists. And it's the journalists who seem to be struggling most of all to hold their line.

Larrison Campbell is a political reporter whose coverage for nonprofit news org Mississippi Today has an emphasis on public health. Her summer, meanwhile, has had an emphasis on viral news. That's because a married male gubernatorial candidate in Mississippi denied her a ride-along to cover him on the campaign trail unless Campbell and her editor agreed to send a male reporter as chaperone; the candidate feared that political opponents might exploit images of the two of them together for attack ads. That sparked a firestorm of debate over gender equity, "the Billy Graham rule," the #metoo movement, and a host of other issues. But that's hardly the totality of Campbell as a journalist. She has had a long and varied career across the country--including a long stint working behind the scenes for daytime TV and Hollywood. She joined Mississippi Today in 2016, the week before its official launch. Her work with the statewide news nonprofit includes its own podcast, "The Other Side." Here we talk about everything from the gender politics of political coverage to nonprofit news to "As the World Turns." Spend a little time getting to know @thisislarrison, a working journalist providing real news for her local community.

"I actually enjoy covering public meetings," says Ty Rushing, managing editor for Iowa Information Inc., a family news operation that serves numerous communities in northwest Iowa and whose flagship newspaper is the N'West Iowa Review in the town of Sheldon, pop. 5,100. Rushing, who began his first full-time journalism job in 2013 in Newton, Iowa, grew up reading the Kansas City Star and dreaming of a career covering sports. But he has come to cherish his role and responsibility in a land where "just about any food item (can) be turned into a taco or pizza variation, including soups and burgers." He has seen how his dedicated reporting on city council meetings and other public affairs -- both in his news stories and in his lively Twitter feed -- helps give his readers a voice and protect their interests. Local officials who meet in secret or a town of 125 threatened with losing its emergency medical services are issues that affect Rushing's friends and neighbors. 

Our latest guest is dedicated veteran journalist Doug Burns, co-owner and editor of a family newspaper that has delivered quality local news for nearly a century. With the Carroll Times Herald and affiliated newspapers in western Iowa, Burns manages to cover everything from colorful local characters to feisty national politics. (He even has his own interviews and issues podcast on Anchor, Iowa Political Mercury.) This conversation ranges all over the media landscape: the challenges facing modern community newspapers; Burns' new digital media marketing firm intended to claw back a little revenue from Facebook and Google; his nasty recent libel lawsuit; how to revive rural Main streets in the Amazon era; the enduring controversies around Iowa Rep. Steve King; the 2020 Iowa caucuses and presidential campaign; and many more topics. As always, thanks for listening. And please subscribe to and support the sources of local news that you rely on.

Nick Nurse, head coach of NBA's Toronto Raptors, began his sports career as a Catholic-school basketball star in the small town (population < 10,000) of Carroll, Iowa. That hometown connection has given Brandon Hurley, assistant sports editor of the Carroll Times Herald and sports editor of two other affiliated newspapers (Jefferson Herald and Guthrie County Times Vedette), consistent access to Nurse as the Raptors make their impressive run in the NBA playoffs. "Sports is the best reality show there is," says Hurley, who provides deep background on Nurse in this episode as well as his analysis of what the Raptors must do to win the title. We take a rare detour into sports journalism for this unique angle on how the only Canadian NBA team qualifies as "local" coverage for a rural Iowa newsroom. 

The new batch of Pulitzer Prize winners was announced today, with journalists awarded for deep reporting on coverage of presidential finances and mass shootings, among an array of other topics. This year's Pulitzer for Editorial Writing went to Brent Staples of the New York Times -- breaking a two-year streak in which the award was won by Iowa writers. Art Cullen of the Storm Lake Times won in 2017. I happened to share a panel discussion with him last weekend, thanks to an invitation from fellow newsman Harry Smith of NBC. The three of us spent 90 minutes waxing poetic on the topic of storytelling at the Iowa Broadcast News Association's annual convention. As part of that, Cullen told the tale of winning the Pulitzer -- the reporting that led up to it and the exuberance of clinching the win. As a tip of the hat to all Pulitzer winners past and present, here's that colorful story from the convention.

One of the undercurrents of this podcast has been that the relationship between the press and the public has gotten so fractured that it's almost as if we need to get reporters and audiences into a classroom to study the problem and find a new consensus on how journalism even works. Well, guess what? St. Louis Public Radio is doing just that with its new "Mini J School." People have paid STLPR good money to "explore the craft of journalism" -- not just for an evening but in an extensive six-week course. These two-hour sessions feature not only public-radio journalists but media professional from newsrooms (print, digital, TV, etc.) across the St. Louis metro. Mini J School seemed to speak to the core sensibility -- if not nagging dread -- that convinced me to launch this podcast. So I had to reach out to Maria Altman (@radioaltman), STLPR's newscast editor, to learn all about it. 

Please subscribe to, rate, and review Journalists Are My Heroes wherever you prefer to listen to podcasts. And share it with a friend who appreciates the fine wine of real news. 

Tyler O'Neil now lives in Austin, Texas, where he's a content marketing entrepreneur with yourbikergang.com and leads people on adventures throughout the city. But here we talk mostly about his year spent in the newsroom of the English-language China Daily in Beijing. O'Neil, who studied journalism and international relations at Drake University in Des Moines, talks about how he ended up at China Daily and his role in helping train his Chinese colleagues. He also shares what it was like to experience the 2016 American presidential election from his Chinese home and newsroom. You can hear and see more about O'Neil's time in China through some of his video work: a report from "Tofu Town," a story on workers who must commute for hours to their jobs in Beijing, and the famous culinary tourist trap of Wangfujing. 

In this episode I also mention two other podcasts that definitely are worth your time: "Just Go Bike" explores the fun side of bicycling culture, and "Sinica" is the leading English-language podcast on all things China, including U.S.-China relations. 

Please subscribe to "Journalists Are My Heroes" wherever you prefer to listen to podcasts. Rate and review us. And please considering supporting us through the Anchor platform. And be sure to subscribe to and stay actively engaged with your sources of local news. 

It was inevitable with this podcast that I would begin to spend a little more time talking with journalists as they stream through Iowa, the site of the first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses, on the 2020 campaign trail. Christopher Cadelago of Politico popped up on my radar after he filed a surprise story from the depths of a furious blizzard that stranded him in the middle of rural Iowa: "My bone-chilling adventure trying to cover Kamala Harris in Iowa." Suffice it to say that Cadelago was lucky to share the Oscars telecast and goulash with Mike and Janet Shock after they rescued the Californian from his snowbound rental car in nothing more than a paper-thin jacket. But this isn't an interview about road safety. Cadelago and I dove into numerous issues of modern political coverage, including the climate for reporters (where they get both booed and pestered for autographs) and how the rise of new partisan media affects his job. Thanks for listening to Journalists Are My Heroes, the podcast that talks to working journalists and journalism advocates everywhere. Because a healthy news environment helps build a shared sense of community, especially on the local level. 

When billionaire Joe Ricketts of TD Ameritrade and Chicago Cubs fame in 2017 shut down digital news network DNAInfo, Stephanie Lulay and two of her colleagues didn't scatter to other industries. They co-founded Block Club Chicago, a hyperlocal nonprofit news site dedicated to granular coverage of the Windy City's storied neighborhoods. The site launched in summer 2018 after a record-setting Kickstarter campaign that raised $183,000 from 3,000 backers. Lulay, managing editor, trusts her reporters to live and embed themselves in their neighborhoods and largely set the agenda for what they cover. One crucial component: Block Club doesn't focus only on crime and other sensationalism. The site's stories span everything from potholes to serious police misconduct. Block Club Chicago is published on the Civil platform, a digital news network on the blockchain. In this episode of Journalists Are My Heroes, Stephanie talks about her career path into hyperlocal news, how her site approaches coverage, and the newsroom's prospects for long-term sustainability. Please subscribe, rate and review us wherever you listen to podcasts. And find and support us on the Anchor network. 

Collaborative journalism has become more of a trend in recent years. Newsrooms, struggling to remain ambitious as they cope with a sour media economy, are launching all manner of projects in which they're colleagues rather than competitors. The Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University has tracked some 180 such projects in the last year. For this episode we focus on one collaborative series that investigated how some communities across Iowa have been left with scant if any options for child care. It involved four different newsrooms, including the Iowa Fall Times-Citizen and Editor Sara Konrad Baranowski. Please subscribe to this podcast, rate and review us, support us on the Anchor platform, and follow @JournalismHero on Twitter and Instagram. 

Veteran journalist Sam Quinones is a self-described "immersive journalist" with the heart of a punk rocker. He began his career as a crime reporter in Stockton, Calif. In the decades since he has roamed around the U.S. and Mexico. He has been a full-time staffer for newspapers such as the L.A. Times but today prefers the life of a freelancer -- without a boss breathing down his neck so that he can spend the proper time investigating each story. The approach has worked out for him, considering his 2015 nonfiction blockbuster "Dreamland," a deeply reported and richly detailed book on America's opiate epidemic, won numerous awards and is working its way through Hollywood. And now Sam is writing a sequel. As the nation sees more fierce and familiar partisan battles over immigration and a border wall, Sam is a good voice for a gut check: Here's a tireless journalist who has spent decades on the front lines of these monumental issues. As always, please subscribe to this podcast wherever you prefer to listen. And find us on Instagram and Twitter, @JournalismHero. 

Laura Belin of Bleeding Heartland has spent more than a decade and produced more than 7,000 posts as a progressive political blogger. She's also on the front lines of changing notions of journalism in this scrappy era of digital media. She's a research analyst by training who once covered Russian politics and now sees herself occupying a "no man's land" somewhere between traditional journalism and academia. Some of her staunchest critics tend to be fellow Democrats -- something that can't help but be on her mind as she covers a new glut of presidential candidates who will compete in the 2020 Iowa caucuses. Belin is an example of the rise of partisan digital media that includes other sites such as Big League Politics that first uncovered the racist yearbook photos tied to Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam. Now that everybody with a smartphone qualifies as a "publisher" or potential news source, who should be considered a journalist, or credentialed as one?  Listen in as Laura and I roam through a conversation on reporting, transparency, technology and politics. 

Investigative reporter Amber Hunt of the Cincinnati Enquirer built a news career that led her through Iowa and Detroit before Ohio, where in 2016 with colleague Amanda Rossman she created the hit podcast "Accused." Hunt had no idea how drastically her career would pivot to podcasting, as "Accused" shot to the top of the iTunes charts and spawned sequels. "Aftermath" is a podcast that roamed the nation to report on the lingering trauma that haunts victims of gun violence. Meanwhile, Hunt was part of the Enquirer team that won a 2018 Pulitzer for its local reporting on the heroin epidemic. Her LinkedIn bio lists her as the current CIA director. (You'll have to listen to the interview for the explanation.) She's also a true-crime author; her latest book, "Unsolved Murders," is due to be published this month. Hunt and her colleagues now are in production on season three of "Accused." Much of her work, Hunt says, is meant to encourage empathy so that a listener one day "maybe will stop and not pull the trigger." Hit play for all the gritty, fascinating and heartfelt details.

Nikki Usher, associate professor of journalism at George Washington University and the University of Illinois, joins JAMH to share some of what she's learned from years of interviewing journalists and studying their industry. She also discusses the "three sins" that she fears national media will continue to commit in 2019, based on her recent article for Nieman Lab. We talk about: the different frustrations audiences have with national versus local media; "horse race" coverage of political campaigns; journalists making the mistake of making the story about themselves; the fallacy that facts alone can change people's minds; the fact-checking trend in journalism; "day-to-day systemic outrage" in modern journalism; "the objectivity police" and "the view from nowhere"; objectivity as a method versus a philosophy; what happens when journalists legitimize fringe groups; how coverage of mass shootings has changed for the better; how journalists should approach 2020 campaign coverage; the need for more diversity in newsrooms; the "place-based realignment" in journalism; and how digital scale is shifting power in media away from local newsrooms.