The more journalism and social media change, the more journalists are needed

We started this podcast because we had a shared interest in how technology influences journalism and vice versa, but also because we wanted to continue our education in the field. The attraction of interactive journalism and new media is that it's a new frontier in an old trade. But taking the tried and true tenets of journalism and applying them online is not that simple. That's where education comes in. Our guest is one of the leaders in the online education field who is constantly reassessing what's relevant, what works, and what skills are necessary to journalists in this medium that is constantly reinventing itself. Welcome to the 400th episode of It's All Journalism. I'm Michael O'Connell. What you just heard was actually the audio from our very first episode that we recorded back in August of 2012. And today's guest is actually the person who is on that very first episode, Amy Eisman, who's the director of the journalism program. I am the director of the journalism program at the School of Communication at American University. Okay, so it's been a long time. We see each other. I don't want to say we see each other constantly, but we do see each other at things here around AU. We see each other at conferences and it's always a nice catching up. It was on campus a couple of weekends ago for a presentation on podcasting and broadcast. Actually, it's more the future of broadcasting. And I saw you and I said, "Hey, we could afford to do that." So let's get you back in. I tried to get you in sooner. There were just so many people standing in the way, but I figured you're always there. I always saw you, so we get back. So welcome back to the podcast finally. Thank you, Michael. I have to say I'm really honored to be here. You're kind of the living history of contemporary journalism. And one of the early people to take on podcasting and since then you've written a book about it and it's pretty impressive what you've done since we last spoke. Well, it's very kind of you to say that. I'm always constantly rethinking this life decision that I made that I'm still for some reason doing every week. And for a part of it is the opportunity to for myself renew my batteries, recharge my batteries around journalism and sort of keep up to date with the things that are going on because I think it's really kind of important. Tell me where is journalism in your life? What role does it play? Well, I mean, it's an interesting time right now, all the institutions that I have devoted a lot of my life to journalism and higher education and basically the role of journalism and democracy. They're all kind of, you know, in the spotlight. And so the way I look at my life in journalism right now is we need to double down on why we got into this in the first place. Accuracy, verification and fairness. And what we are teaching students, some of them are the same values that have been taught time immemorial. At the other side, we're teaching them the new techniques and the new ways of storytelling. But the basics, the basics of the values of journalism and the ethics of journalism, those are still very high on our list. Yeah. And you and I had met through the program. I was a student in the Interactive Journalism Program, which you were heading at that time, as well as the two other founding producers, Jolie Lee and Megan Clority. You know, one of the things about having you come back on the podcast, you know, gave me the opportunity to go back and listen back to that first episode, which is always a daunting thing. And I was on the one hand, it was very pleased. It was not as bad as I had remembered it to be. I felt that the further away I got from it, the better. But as the introduction shows, our mission really hasn't kind of changed. And talking to you, a lot of the things that you and I talked about that you told students about, you know, way back when I was in the program in 2010, 2012 are the same. That being said, a lot has changed in seven years. I think we all have the same sort of concerns, but man, if things change, what are the things that concern you most right now in journalism? Let me start with things have changed because I don't like to put everything under the concern umbrella. The reason is, it brings a lot of blame into the tent. You know, I'm concerned that, of course, I'm concerned that corporate America hasn't been able to support a lot of the, basically, what's happening to local media and leaving, you know, news deserts around the country. But at the same time, I think we have an evolving technology. We haven't lasted it. We haven't figured out entirely how to pay for it. But that's not a blame game. That's kind of a, okay, what do we have to do to keep trying to get the right information to the citizenry so they can make good decisions about democracy? That goal is still there. What's changed the most? Who in goodness? There's so many things you mean in terms of higher education or you mean in journalism itself? Let's talk about journalism at first. I know that anybody who's listening to our podcast over the last year, a lot of her focus has been on this sort of label of fake news, the verification issue, you know, a lot of concerns about that. But you know, we still face the same sort of technological challenges that we did seven years ago. You know, how do we, how do we get news to people so they can use it in a form that they can use it? I find it funny. You know, I've had a couple of people talk to me about TikTok and I keep thinking, is TikTok just like Periscope was? We're all obsessed with it. You know, five years ago that there's always this new sort of brand of technology that comes up. And we all said, this is the next thing. And it really never is. It just sort of lasts for a little while. We're all rushing to master it and some do and some don't. So for me, that's where I see a lot of the change. Well, yeah, I kind of remember the Periscope videos of a, it was a crane hitting a building in New York. Was that one of the ones that we saw early on? Yeah, sure. There's the shiny new object that comes along every once and a half. Frankly, I do think that we should look at new ways to reach audiences. People used to make fun of you of USA Today, where I was actually one of the founding editors saying, oh, you're writing all your stories so short. And our answer would be, well, we're getting people to read the news. And so that's how I feel with a lot of this technology. But the biggest thing facing us right now, I mean, let's be honest, it's got to do with accuracy and objectivity and fairness. And right now, the time when every single day journalists are on the line being questioned, questioning, questioned as to why they're saying what they're saying and how they're saying they have to be better than ever before. Right now, I teach journalism to graduate and undergraduate students. And think about when perhaps you and I were a lot younger. We didn't worry about our digital footprint a whole lot. These are students who are having to think about what have I said, what have I said publicly, is it going to get in the way for me getting a job? So I would see the biggest change that's happened in the seven years is how ubiquitous social media has become, how it's been used, how it's been manipulated, and how it's really totally changed the playing field. Yeah, I definitely see that. The other thing is that I would imagine the students who are coming in now are even more digitally native than when we were talking about seven years ago that they actually lived, they grew up and they lived in social media for their adolescence. And so they learned a lot of hard lessons or maybe they didn't learn hard lessons. At that point. So when they come to school, they have a very different perspective. One of the lessons I wish they had learned was that what you see on a screen is not exactly necessarily correct. And I do think that there is a cognitive difference in terms of how people read content online or on your screen or on your phone or whatever is being beamed into your head versus reading it actually on a typed page. I think the fact that we have to teach sourcing in a whole new way, you know, okay, yes, the website said, yet. Who made that website? Who's funding that website? Did you see who started that website? Did you see what other organizations have said about that website? We have to walk them through a whole set of things that we didn't use to have to walk through in terms of where is that information coming from. Yeah, and I think we've become, we certainly don't think necessarily of master, but I think we've become better understanding that there are bad actors out there that there are people who are actively putting out, you know, false information to try to do whatever, to influence your vote or to influence you to purchase something or to stop something or to do something else. And I think maybe in our naivete, this idea that we're going to have all of this freedom of speech that the Internet is giving us, that we didn't realize that we would also be dealing a lot with the sort of negative aspect of it. And we're seeing it playing out in very public ways. And I couldn't agree with you more. I think that the idea that disinformation, misinformation, whatever you want to call it has spread, you know, in milliseconds and is impossible almost to capture and last so in bringing back is the number one thing that's facing us right now, particularly in terms of digital media. But I would say number two is just as bad. It's the trolling of the people who are trying to put information out there in accurate formats. So you look what's happened to women on social media, women journalists. It's outrageous. And now there are news organizations out there, for example, that are taking off the ability to comment on the bottom of news articles because they don't want their reporters to be accessible to the public, to for people to make comments. So the good things about the social media, which was get your, promote your story, get your story out there, became quickly bad things. Who's writing that story? Do you know who the source is? Oh my gosh, look, you've written it yourself and you're going to just be slammed and people are going to say terrible things about you. So it's a very, we're in the middle of an evolution here, but it's not an easy one. No, I agree with this. I agree. So this we sort of started this discussion about social media. social media. I'm going to play a clip from your -- Uh-oh. Yeah, we're going to -- Yeah, I'm going to pull out all these embarrassing clips from your 2012 interview. Just sort of give us jumping off points here for us to talk about certain things. So here's the first one. Twitter right now is huge. Twitter played a huge role at NPR through Andy Carvin in following the Arab Spring. Twitter has been a tremendous way of people, journalists, communicating with each other, fact-checking. One of the things I love about Twitter and social media, for example, is you can watch a vice presidential or presidential debate on television and then you can watch your Twitter feed and somebody within seconds will combat what somebody's saying or have documents posted to say if that's accurate or not. So Twitter is one of the things right now. But there's all kinds of things people are trying, storeify, tumblr, story full, and the big movement right now is actually towards mobile. You said a couple of times in the interview mobile and it was like we was really kind of like being back in kindergarten, like doing finger painting. Everybody talks about mobile. Yeah, duh. Yeah, mobile. But mobile was a big thing. That was a word that we used a lot. You know, we got to be mobile. We got to write for a mobile. We got to do this for a mobile. Now it's so second nature. It's not even discussed anymore. But of those platforms, beside Twitter, which ones are still around and are still being used by journalists? Thank you for fact-checking me, Nellie. I know what a politician feels like when their old quote shows up again and in front of them. The part that's the same is that we're trying new things. The part that I didn't foresee at that time was the amount of discourse and uncivil conversation that took place on the social media. And what we didn't talk about that back then were the social media giants, the Twitter's and the Facebook's and the reddits and all of them who are maybe in some way contributing to this disinformation, maybe our Google, maybe on purpose, maybe not, maybe to make money, maybe not. But I think that was something we didn't see back then. Yeah, I agree. And here's another little thing that I was talking about. Stop. You'll like this one. What happens is that the rush to be first sometimes gets in the way of the rush to be accurate. And I do think news organizations stopped and looked at themselves more seriously to figure out how can they stop this rush to be wrong. Once you're wrong, people fly away from you. They just fly away from your brand. And once you're right, they're going to stick with you. And people are not as loyal to brands, obviously, as they used to be. They're really just looking for the information. Has that changed much? Oh, I wish that was so true today. Just looking for the information. They want the information. Right. But there are too many people looking to edit through a filter. They're using their sources. Those so-called brands, they're going to ones that they're comfortable with. And so if you've always looked at something through one Fox News lens or MSNBC lens, you might not be getting the information that's somewhere in the middle. Yeah, and it's funny. We just did a podcast about this sort of erosion of truth, truth decay. It's what it is. It was like a random report. And one of the things I said was people will frequently go to a new source that they know disseminates false information regularly because it's easier for them to do. I found I don't have the exact percentage in front of me, but there's a huge number according to one of the most recent studies of people that actually stopped having conversations with their friends over political issues because it's so difficult because people are so stuck in their partisan points of view. And that is something that I worry about when people, yeah, I think they're looking for information. The truth is, I think the public media are doing much better right now because people will trust a PBS or an MPR because they think it's a little bit more neutral. And I hope it is. It might not be the flashiness that you get from some of the cable programming where everybody's pretty much screaming at each other. But I do think people want that information. Just give me the facts and I'll figure it out. Yes, I agree. It's sort of the same thing. I mean, this goes back to kind of something we talked about a little while ago about our standards about the things that, you know, I always think back the early days to the program that I was in here at AU. And one of the things that the discussions was around the idea of citizen journalists, what makes us different city, you're laughing at that time. You remember that phrase citizen journalist? But this idea that what makes us journalists, what makes us different than just somebody taking a picture and putting it on Twitter or on Instagram or whatever. And it's, you know, the easy answer is applying our ethical standards, do the things that we're going to do. But now we're finding that those things are things we just like are super important, especially in areas like transparency. So it for us to restore trust because, you know, people don't trust the media. Unfortunately. I'm glad you asked about that Michael because right now I'm teaching a course in journalism ethics and two of my colleagues have taught it before me. It's one of our most popular and most interesting courses that we have here because every single day there is an ethical journalistic issue that comes up. So tomorrow I'm talking about an older one having to do with Rolling Stone and Halle and handled the story of an unnamed young woman who was allegedly a victim of mass sexual assault and turns out that there was no evidence to prove that that had indeed happened and everybody had to retract the story. So we're talking about that. But there are ethical issues that come up every single day and I want to talk about this for one moment because the reaction from the students is a little bit different over the last I would say over the last five to ten years. We'll talk about political bias, we'll talk about racial bias, we'll talk about implicit bias, we'll talk about all of these things that we're trying to get right down to the facts of history. We don't even talk about balance anymore, we'll talk about fairness. But a lot of the ethics codes don't talk about balance because that brings up the whole idea of a false equivalency. The thing that is so interesting right now with students is when we talk about maybe objectivity is the new transparency. They're not so sure that there are multiple sides to things. Sometimes it's kind of like well there's no other side as most people would agree to Charlottesville, you know what happened there. They'll say well of course I feel this way about something. There's no other point of view to get for that story and this confidence in themselves of having a perspective that they think is right is a little bit different in terms of how we've been teaching journalism over the years. Now we are still going for basic values but we're not going for false equivalency. You rarely would hear me say in a class now get the other side. More often you'll hear me say well what are all the different perspectives on that. But the students are sticking to it and they're also sticking to how much because of ethics. They might not want to give up as much of their life for the front row seat to history that people like you and I had. They might say wow I can't put a political sign on my lawn. Wow my partner can't run for office. Wow I can't carry Narcan with me when I'm a reporter covering opioid crisis that I might want to save somebody's life if they're you know riding on the floor. These are things that they're thinking about a lot differently than I did when I was their age. I think about this a lot about how things have changed and you know being an older white male journalist the experience I had in J school and working in newsrooms and being in newsrooms as an authority you know as an editor and then you know looking at how our industry is sort of unraveling at this moment and I don't think all the things that are unraveling are necessarily a bad thing. I think there are some good things that are going on. I think you know for example this thing I mentioned before that I was here at a you a couple of weekends ago one of the very first things that somebody said is we all know that newsrooms need to be more diverse period and that's the first and almost every conversation I hear about the future of journalism is we need to be more diverse we need to reflect the communities better than we are both you know culturally racially you know gender wise because those old structures I mean you know I was a bit of a bomb throw away back when when I started this podcast you know one of the attitudes that we kind of espoused was you know these old structures of these like daily newspapers needed to go and they have slowly kind of faded away and there are lots of people who are very busy trying to prop them up trying to we need to try to keep these because of whatever reason part of it was brand part of it was controlling the news but with those things gone now we have a very different environment we're seeing some really good organizations come up I was just listening to a box podcast you know that's one of the ones we talked about in the early days about you know it was really kind of exciting to see these people coming out of the post to start something that was a explanatory journalism that was based on line it was very you know they went into the weeds you know they have a podcast called the weeds and you know that's an example of something that's come up there are other ones out there that do sort of the same thing that are that they're digitally-native that are really powerful they're really doing good journalism things like that give me hope well there should be a lot of things that give you hope the number of non-profit organizations that are going to be a lot of people who are profit organizations that are supporting investigative journalism has definitely gone up. And a lot of nonprofit organizations like Different Radios and television stations are really bumping up the size of their digital writing staff. So they kind of taking up the role of what local media, the whole that local media newspapers left behind. So and also in the Washington area, we're actually very well suited to be training young journalists because this is kind of the media capital of the world. We have all of these opportunities to work for everything from trade and proprietary media to mainstream media, to advocacy media, to nonprofit media, to international media, to everything from you know, voice of America to NPR. I mean, it's a pretty wide swath here. So I think there are still a lot of opportunities out there and a lot of our students are getting them. I think we do students at disservice if we're training them for a world that doesn't exist anymore. So what we do here is we are focusing hard. For example, you were here a few weeks ago. We had an event about the future of investigative broadcast journalism. And it was really fascinating. I didn't realize how much of true crime played in a role in that all the way over to the more traditional broadcasts, deep dives into environmental issues or health issues or social justice issues. So that spectrum was really very interesting to me and how it's changed over the years. Yes. I'm going to play one more thing. This is the last one I promise. I see us as educators as the guides to have the students learn through experiential education. If we're sitting there sage on the stage telling you what we think, that's not going to work. We're out there making your mistakes, learning how to do it, doing it on deadline. That's much, much more effective way for you to absorb what we have in front of us. Yeah, I don't think that's changed. Do you? No. I astound it and lucky. Every single day I get to stay up for a class of students every single day. They challenge me as much as you did back then. They're pushing us. They're questioning us all the time. Why did you do that? Why would you do that? How could you do that? Where they need help has to do with their ability to interact with people one-on-one because they have grown up as digital natives. And I think that part is a little bit more challenging for them. So now in addition to teaching people, perhaps interview skills, we're also teaching them kind of life work skills. How do you interview? How do you navigate a newsroom during the Me Too movement? How do you get somebody to notice your resume or your digital portfolio would be more like it? So we're teaching a lot more of work life skills than we had before. Yeah. I think before I said that there's a lot to be helpful for here as an educator, as a journalist. It's been seven years since we did our first episodes, since we last talked to you. A lot has changed, but what hasn't changed is the need for journalists, the need for people who do their jobs, who pay attention, who chase out facts and verify things. But now we just need to be more diverse. We need to be more open to other opinions and other ideas. Make ourselves receptive to feedback from our audience. We need to let them communicate a little bit better to us, so you open ourselves to be receptive. That's something we didn't really talk about. That's another thing. One of the words that has come up a lot over these last seven years has been engagement. From the very basic social media thing, how are you engaging with your reader on social media to how is the newsroom engaging with the community to better cover it? I love those discussions when they're had the right way. Engaging with your community about how to cover something or crowdsourcing to get information to help you cover something or are all good. If you're talking about engagement just to get clicks to get eyeballs next to advertisements, then you're not doing a service. That really has sent people running the other way. I think that was a problem for some organizations just to try to get the numbers so that they could get the eyeballs, so that they could get the advertising. That really wasn't going to work as a sustainable model. The truth is, Michael, you said it better than I did. I am fairly optimistic always about where we are and where we're going. I'm not going to be myopic about it. I realize the challenges that we have right now are biggest challenges. You've touched on them. One have to do with diversity of thought and diversity of participation and the other has to do with the local news coverage and smaller communities around the country. Those are huge, huge issues that we need to solve. On the plus side, we have people that are really hungry about getting to the truth and the facts. Right now, you look at, we're talking about this during the week when coronavirus is, there are some deaths reported in the United States. Right now, people really need information about coronavirus. They don't need the political perspective. They don't need opinions. They don't need something that happened during other viruses. They need to know what is going on. What do I need to worry about? How can I be safe and how can I keep my family safe? All the basic values of journalism, my world, my life, my family, my kids. That's really what we're talking about here. The focus right now has to be on accuracy, objectivity, and telling the truth. I love the fact that I still see students every single day coming in here and saying, I want to do a story on this. I want to investigate this. I want to explore this because that's pretty much going to be our future. Yeah, I agree. Amy, thanks for coming on the podcast. It was a pleasure. Thank you for listening to It's All Journalism. My name is Michael O'Connell. I just had a conversation with Amy Isman, the very first guest that we had on this podcast way back in 2012. This particular episode started out with the audio introduction that we did in our very first episode, a sort of a mission statement. I was surprised listening back to it that our mission really hasn't changed a whole lot. We're looking at journalism and how it's changed and how each of us is journalists as writers, as reporters, as editors are trying to figure out how we need to move forward in this digital environment. We as journalists we like around numbers, so 400 is a big round number. It's an opportunity for us to look back and take stock and see what's the things that we're proud of, but also things maybe we could learn from. Doing this episode with Amy, giving an opportunity to go back and listen to that first episode. I always dreaded it thinking it was really going to be terrible, but I was pleasantly surprised it wasn't as bad as I remembered. In one sense, it gives me a great deal of pride in seeing where we started and that we're continuing to do our mission. It took a lot of people to sort of get to this place, and some of them are still around there. They're still contributing their time, but I wanted to mention a few people who were involved throughout the eight years of our podcast, throughout the 400 episodes, it helped us to reach that milestone. Making clarity in Jolulee, of course, were our founding producers with me, Anna Myers, who was a classmate of ours. She came on board for a while and helped us produce episodes. Julia O'Donohue was a friend of mine that I invited to come in on the podcast. She came on as a guest, and she was one of our producers for several years. Ellen Cortezoja, that somebody we knew who we worked with at Fetal News Radio, she helped us out with our production for a year or so. At Juan Juan, it was a DC area podcaster who was looking for some experience, and he helped us out for a little bit. Then I also want to mention, of course, our current team, Nicole Lugrisco, Amber Healy, a many of you, a breast Nicholas Hunter. They're all plugging away, helping us to make our deadlines, to produce these episodes, and bringing you something that we hope is helpful in intriguing and entertaining. Of course, I should mention Nick DePrey, who's the guy who wrote our theme music, which we just love listening to every time we do an episode. I don't have a whole much more to say. I do want to thank Jason Zaragoza over at the Association of Alternative News Media for supporting us all these years. They are our partner in moving forward. We've also developed a partnership with the American Press Institute. We're going to be doing some more better news podcasts in the coming year, so you've got that to look forward to. Hopefully, this is something we're going to continue to do for a while, maybe another eight years, maybe another 400 episodes. We will have to see. Thank you for listening. Thank you for sticking around after the episode. Tell us a little message here. We look forward to bringing you more podcasts about the changing state of digital news. (upbeat music)