The online discussion took place on April 23, at 4:00 PM. During the discussion with an international expert on supporting local journalism from North Carolina, Lizzy Hazeltine, who currently serves as the Director of the Local News Lab Fund in North Carolina, we explored why quality local journalism is necessary in today’s world, why and how this area can be supported, what are the consequences of the decline of local journalism, and we will also compare the situation and strength of local media in the USA and Europe.
Kristína Kroková (Project Coordinator, Transparency International Slovakia):
There is a significant decrease in the number of independent local media and according to several foreign studies, mainly from the US, such environment can have a negative impact on the level of a local democracy. It makes voters more apathetic and allows for an abuse of power, corruption and spread of disinformation. In one of our studies we found out that almost one-third of Slovakia’s population is currently living in places marked as “media deserts”. We would like to discuss this topic and try to find out ways we can support journalism, media diversity and its quality. I am happy that we have Lizzie here, director of North Carolina Local News Lab Fund. The fund supports organisations striving for healthier local news and information ecosystem and tries to provide services to make the media environment more sustainable. This fund already invested over four $4 million into 37 organisations in North Carolina, with the goal to provide everyone with an access to high quality news and information.
So thank you again Lizzie, for being here with us today. I have a couple of questions for you first, but you are free to send your questions in the chat, in Slovak or in English, or raise your hands and ask Lizzy directly. So, to begin with, I would like to ask about the media environment in North Carolina. Lizzy, if you could share some insights into the current state of local media in North Carolina, perhaps highlight some challenges and possible problems you’ve observed in the recent years.
Lizzy Hazeltine
Gladly. And thank you so much for inviting me to join you. If you wouldn’t mind using the chat to let me know, who’s in the room, whether you’re an independent journalist, a freelancer, if you’re with an organisation. I’d love to get a sense of who’s here, because I want to make this as relevant for you as possible, thank you. So, North Carolina’s media environment inherits a lot of the trends that I know Sarah Stone Blue has shared with you all in previous conversations about consolidated ownership, closure of small independent outlets, major challenges for business models and the viability of an ad-based revenue model for local news. And North Carolina also has some of the bright spots or opportunities and possibilities that are also apparent in other places in the US and internationally – independent journalism, led by entrepreneurial leaders in service of communities and deeply based on community needs. Allies outside of media, in libraries, and even down to electric co-ops and churches who want to ensure that people have the news and information they need, especially in times of crisis or in moments of real danger. And we see in that both the kind of collapse of an old system and the rebirth of a transformed system. In that moment in North Carolina, there is both uncertainty and there’s the necessity of innovation. So we have also a deep bench in a long history of independent journalism in our state. The independent Black Media and the long history of the Black Press in North Carolina has been instrumental in recounting a full story of our history and the black press continues to be a strong force in North Carolina, along with Espanol, Latino Press, Spanish language. Both for folks who have lived here for generations as well as for recent arrivals. Something to know about North Carolina as we experienced a ton of immigration across racing class and have a really quickly growing population. So lots of people in our state, lots of need and lots of different places that people need to connect with their communities, get integrated to the state in various ways and then also this like legacy to build on, but not without its major challenges, especially around viability of businesses and revenue.
KK: You mentioned that you aim to deliver information for diverse people and communities. How do you ensure that the solution and strategies you develop are inclusive and responsive to the diverse needs of communities affected by local media deserts?
LH: We get to start our thinking with communities and what people need with an analysis of who was never well served by legacy commercial media in the US and particularly in North Carolina. So with that frame, we have a chance to think about who first and then build backwards from those needs about how. And in our assessment of different grant proposals and different organisations, we look for different dimensions of reflection and trust in those organisations. Does this team reflect the community it serves in its staffing? Does this teamwork in equitable ways in the sort of English conceit around language about this is reporting with and for, rather than on? So we think about, rather than extracting news and information or extracting pain and trauma. And then platforming it – does this meet a need to help people live their lives and to help them thrive? So again that kind of service orientation is core to how we think about what needs to happen inside communities. And it often hooks into the deepest reasons why journalists, entrepreneurs and other media leaders have gotten into this field in the first place. So in some ways, it’s this deeply resonant thing about returning to first principles for everybody. And the reality in the US is that media systems are deeply inflected with racial and class inequities. The work of the Media 2070 Project really clearly illustrates the origins of business models. If for most commercial papers included runaway slave ads and that the initial revenue for many of these papers was deeply rooted and connected to chattel slavery and the legacies of that specific harm, and the different ways that mistrust has grown. They are really tied in with the transformation that’s needed in the system. So we don’t have this kind of heavy, pretty harmful – well pretty harmful is the understatement of the century – a harmful legacy. And again, the Media 2070 Project has a really excellent piece on the details and the nuances of how racism inflects the media system in the US and how class is hooked into race in that way. The way around that is to get really clear about who we’re serving, where they are in our state. Again, because geography is another dimension of understanding who needs service and who has assets, we can build on it and people, people figured out how to get some of their news and information needs met or many of their news and information needs met without media service. So there are things we can learn from people who have long done without traditional “Journalism”. So those two things kind of converge in our work, both the clarity about how the system is and clarity about how people have in different ways worked around those deficits to create things that we can learn from.
Thank you. When we talk specifically about your fund, can you describe how does it work? Where are you funded from and based on what you choose the regions or the media that you support? And what are the indicators that say the funding was successful or not?
We are a pooled fund. What we’ve done and what we do is we build a coalition of funders who add money into a single pool and then we deploy that funding together. So it’s a collaborative effort among funders aligned around this idea that in order for communities to thrive we need to have a not only functional but sustainable, resilient and equitable local news and information system. So everybody’s agreed upon that and then what we do with those grants is we look for where have people been least served the longest, where are there again like I mentioned before strategies and assets beyond the usual ideas of media that we can bring into the fold and then ensure that we are filling reporting gaps that we are expanding distribution and that we are ensuring that there’s more democratic access to narrative power and to storytelling tools. So those are three kind of roles that we fund across the ecosystem. So yes, journalists are essential, and we need to reach people where they are in ways they can consume the content along a wide range of different needs from everything about the basics of daily life to investigative journalism and everything in between. And then also make sure that we’re telling a complete story of our very nuanced state and that people with the most positional power, or the most institutional power aren’t the ones who get to exclusively control the narrative. So that looks like everything from youth media to community journalism to supporting movement. Movement leaders and grassroots social movements who are really excellent at intervening when institutional sourcing wins the day around crime and especially around deaths and police custody in the US. I think there was a third question here too about like where do we focus?
According to what criteria do you choose the destination of your investments?
So this is where we get to zoom out from media deserts and think about what the overlapping systems are, whether that’s poverty, whether that’s disconnection from broadband, which is a tenth of North Carolina’s population. So a full million people in our state don’t have access to broadband at home or of device that can connect to the Internet. Or whether that’s because people speak and read a language other than in English, or they are not literate, there’s a wide range of access issues. Then we also think about geography. We have a mountainous western part of our state and a very flat coastal plain in the eastern part of our state and small hills in between them. So there are actually some physically difficult places to reach in our state because they get cut off at high tide because of sea level rise or because there’s just not a road there in some part of parts of the mountains. So there’s both the geographic things that make us think about where have people been left out of this system and where are the people who are doing the necessary reporting, distribution and narrative work and need support to expand them, deepen their service? And where do these other systems overlap and cause additional harm? And where have people been hurting the longest and where can we, frankly, deploy funding where funding doesn’t often flow too often? There are places where these other issues and deficits exist. There are both community assets that people have created for themselves, but there’s often a lack of intervention on the part of philanthropy.
We’ve been speaking about the problems that can appear when there is no local media or not enough independent local media. Have you done any analyses of other problems apart from the local level of democracy? What are some other problems of these media deserts?
Yes, and we found that in our funding coalition and elsewhere, there are huge impacts on health when people don’t have the information they need. The pandemic and the most urgent days of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US were a very clear picture of the human toll of not knowing what positivity rates were where you could get a vaccine where you could get tested or even get reliable information that wasn’t inflected were tainted with political overtones about what the pandemic was – whether the pandemic was a real thing or not. So there are even more immediate term consequences for many people in their health and well-being. And especially there’s a particularly poignant example that comes out of the Western mountains of our state. In one county, people can get easier access to political news, kind of a horse race coverage or conflict and almost political news as entertainment. They can get easier access to that than they can get access to where they can get treatment for substance misuse disorder. So folks who are addicted to painkillers can’t find a place to get the help that they want, but they can hear all day on their televisions about how awful the national politics in the US are, and it creates this wild sort of alienation that a researcher has been following about what that does for people’s political participation, their mental health and their sense of belonging. It’s deeply consequential and incredibly and an incredibly negative cycle.
This is very interesting. We haven’t discussed these areas – like health, in our studies, that is really something to elaborate. Can we compare the times when there were just printed news and now when the information is mostly spread via online platforms? Is it more difficult to support social and online platforms or are you using any innovative funding models?
Oh, that’s a great question and I love the premise. It’s not we have taken sort of a philanthropic shortcut, or we have figured out the best way that we can support a community. Centric model of news is to actually be less prescriptive about the funding that we deploy. Where we are legally able to, we make general operating grants, so the leaders of these organisations can decide how to deploy the funding, how to apply it, how to use it and most often what we see is that they use it to hire people. To reinforce their operational base and sometimes even to do things like hire consultants to figure out how to do their taxes more efficiently. So it’s the kind of sometimes it’s this unsexy sort of stuff that’s about fundamentally, how do you get this work done in an even more basic sort of way than what is an elaborate or an optimised digital strategy, because we see across our network that some of our some of the organisations that we support are slipping A1 page printed document into a food distribution bag for farmworker families with information about how to renew your visa and where can you get a TDAP vaccine? And in some places, we have grant partners like in Lester Latino and see that staff a WhatsApp channel and receive questions from people and answer them in this concierge sort of way. They know that questions from their audience is one way they can build trust, and they also can aggregate those into hey, we’re getting a lot of questions about this topic. We should write a piece about it. And then deploy. It so deep engagement through digital channels is definitely a part of what our network of organisations does and there’s a lot of different other things that flexible funding, like the funding that we deploy helps our partners do beyond that kind of digital distribution.
If we move on, how do you view the increased amount of disinformation spread via social media? Is it a bigger problem in media desserts? Is it easier to spread disinformation there?
This would be an even. One of the dimensions is that the easiest way to combat misinformation and disinformation is with trustworthy information, not with debunking, not with some of these. And you all know this better than I do with your work at Transparency International. Where you don’t have anything that people trust, where you only have uncorroborated, unverified information where you don’t have the basics of the process of journalism, you create more space for there to be wildly inconsistent, misleading, and manipulative information that is aligned with someone else’s interest in not aligned with the interests of an audience or communities. So yes, where there is more space, there’s more room for misinformation to grow, there’s more space for people with positional power, whether they’re politicians or in other powerful institutions, to create and own channels that are not independent, and again, can’t be verified, can’t be audited in the same. My perspective is that where you don’t have reporting, where you don’t have trustworthy messengers, you can get more rapid acceleration of misinformation cycles and it’s everywhere, even in our most well-staffed media markets. Charlotte NC is one of our largest cities, there are so many excellent news leaders in that area and there’s public media, there’s great television, there’s amazing commercial media, there’s really excellent legacy media, there’s also the black press. I mean, I could spend the next 5 minutes telling you about the nonprofit sector media alone in Charlotte and yet still, there are plenty of WhatsApp channels spreading misinformation about elections, about housing, about individual people, and all of that goat takes its route back to like the motivation for misinformation. It’s designed to mobilise people in service of a specific agenda which is not aligned with people’s interests. The antidote in my mind to this is the community centric vision – what do people need? Let’s provide trustworthy, high quality, reliable, consistent information and news that fills in these gaps where otherwise other actors, entities, organisations and movers will take over the space and we’ll create and foster their own agenda rather than something that’s based on what people want to need.
Do you have any tools to fight disinformation?
Yeah, I mean the tools to fight disinformation are not really a digital tool or something, it’s not reducible to that. But one of the strongest tools is relationships among news leaders. What are you seeing in your geography? How is this happening over there? How can we support each other in reporting consistently on this same topic? We also support a few different organisations that generate especially around elections and around voter ID laws and other things like resources that can be reshared and republished so that each individual organisation doesn’t have to come up with A1 pager or a graphic about what do you need ID wise in order to vote. So some of these interventions aren’t necessarily technological, they’re more about supporting organisations that have the expertise to generate really high-quality information and factual information, and then taking that and having that be shareable across a network of people.
Thank you. You also mentioned during our previous call that you’ve been travelling a bit, also in Slovakia, in Bratislava. From your point of view, could you compare the level of local media in Europe and in the US? Do you have any insights into this comparison?
My insights are entirely as a complete outsider. I think the biggest difference that I see is that the funding models, it seems that there is more US philanthropy. It might just be because of the economics in the US about how this kind of wealth was generated and how these foundations function. But it seems like there is more government support which comes with its own complexities in Europe than there is in the US, and less private funding in Europe than there is in the Us. It seems like one of the cruxes of the differences is how do you fund this work? How do you ensure that people can persist in it because they’re being paid enough to be housed, fed and safe? One commonality that I think I see in both, the real threats to journalists both in Europe and in the US seem to be growing. We have invested time and energy and money into safety trainings, both digital safety and physical safety trainings for our partners and I am horrified and angered to see that that is a national and international issue for journalists and reporters.
Maybe with the growth of digital age and the social media and online platforms, the journalists are more endangered. I mean, we’ve seen this in Slovakia. Are any specific questions from the audience? Feel free to raise your hand. I can see at least three questions in the chat, so let me read it to you, Lizzy: Do you think it’s crucial to have representative coverage within the local media and do you have any feedback on how lacking the represent representativeness affects the consumption of media?
Representative coverage is essential. If people do not see themselves in your coverage or see the reality of their lives and your coverage, they will not consume it, and you only have a few shots before people just don’t read what you create. A lack of representation affects consumption in that exact way. It’s a one to one. So in many places in the US, Oregon different media organisations have conducted content audits, source audits and worked to understand who they’re who they’re representing. One of the classic examples is in some US newspapers, in doing these audits, publishers found that they were only featuring black and brown people on the crime page in the police blotter, with mug shots. There have been some great case studies done about how removing mug shots and thinking in a more complex way about what stories you tell about communities of colour enhances your representation, gives you opportunities to rebuild trust. But that’s an entire other discussion, we could do hours and hours on that, and I would want to include some of my colleagues, who do this work on a day-to-day basis.
Thank you. Another question, in a polarised world we live in, how do you go around validating providing the funding for media on both sides of the political aisle? And how do you communicate to both sides?
Yeah, political polarisation is a reality in a lot of different places. I mean, I think about some of my recent travels in Germany and some of the dimensions of the political economy there. We do not think about this. We are nonpartisan organisation; our funding is nonpartisan. In the US, all of our funding is organised under the 501C4 public Charity Nonprofit Legal Code. There are other types of organisations that fund specific political campaigns and other things. That’s not what we do, because we focus on community and specific people and have this racing class equity lens that we apply to how we prioritise that funding, we get to ground ourselves, not in politics, but in what people need. If that is politicised, that’s another conversation; many people needs and what people need in order to not only survive and thrive has become politicised, but that’s somewhat outside of our control. I am grateful that there are so many different people in North Carolina who see that people having information to make decisions about their lives is not a political thing. Much like informing people about COVID was politicised, but it wasn’t political. It was entirely based on what do people need to be well and OK and survive. And there are lots of different ways that that same kind of thing applies to food access too. Things like understanding what your county commissioners do to understanding when there’s an election, to understanding what ID you need in order to go vote. Those are not actually those. That’s really basic information, and if your goal is to make sure that people have the information and the news, they need to make decisions about their lives, it can be politicised, but it’s fundamentally not political.
The next question: Can speak more about the results of the Fund so far, and maybe also about your ambitions? What kind of market share has been covered so far by local media funding this way compared to other approach?
Oh my goodness. A total addressable market question. Thank you, I appreciate this. Today we’re announcing another round of grants and we have deployed just shy of $5,000,000 directly and we’ve advised on and at least that much in aligned funding, so funds where we have not written the check, but we have helped people understand who they should make grants. The funding flows, I’m really proud that we’ve moved that much money since 2018. That’s a major difference in the two excellent media funders that were operating in North Carolina in in 20/17/2018, and now the coalition of more than seven that are directly participating in the pooled fund and the places where we think where we can add more people and more organisations. Those dollars have resulted in 60 of North Carolinas 100 counties, largely the counties that are most rural, largely the counties that are poorest, largely the counties that have the highest populations of people of colour receiving service from at least one, if not multiple partners in our network. So a really wide geographic coverage, nice growth in number of funders, nice growth in total dollars out the door. I don’t have a market share number for you, but I do have clarity that in those sixty counties there is the specificity of service that connects back to that theory of change I was sketching out for you before that. There have been deficits and service that need to be filled. There’s an expansion of reach that’s necessary and that might not look like, but it does look like building resilience and in fundamentally achieving our ultimate goal of making sure that everybody in the state can find and then trust and then use the news and information they need.
Thank you. We have another question for from another participants participant: How can you, as journalists, fight against the SLP – the strategy, the lawsuit, and public participation in the US? Is there any US legislation government programme?
To my knowledge, there isn’t a specific program to protect journalists from slaps. There’s no national shield law for journalists. Some shield laws and policies exist in specific states, but that’s largely devolved from the federal level. Even in municipalities, you can imagine in a country as large as the US, there’s wide variance in application of those shield laws and policies. One thing I’ve seen and been grateful for is the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and their pro bono program. They’ve built a national network, including a chapter in the US, to help provide pre-publication review and representation should people be sued. Many US law school legal clinics also help journalists alongside non-profit organizations or other public servants, activists, and defenders of democracy.
OK, another comment from the chat: The situation here in Slovakia that we have a local newsroom, we are members of the International Federation of Journalists and yet communication within local governments and politics is limited, including ignorance, not responding to questions, hiding from answers, and so on. Can say whether it’s similar in the US? If so, how do you try to solve it?
Yes, I mean this is also a trend in the US. There’s many Oregon local news organisations in the US provide voter guides in the run ups to local elections, where you have a tonne of tiny offices and it’s not always clear who’s running and what their platforms are. Often one of the techniques to fill out these voter guides is to send a questionnaire to a candidate. Many candidates, largely Republicans, some Democrats too, but largely Republicans, don’t answer the e-mail, and don’t fill out the questionnaire. There have been some kind of organising techniques that some organisations have tried to collaborate on what’s called the citizens agenda related to this and figure out ways to demonstrate to their readers and to their audiences that they are not getting responses from their elected officials and make that kind of make that the story. But that kind of disengagement is a pretty alarming trend, right to just entirely ignore the press. But it’s it’s showing up here too.
Thank you, there’s another question? What is your opinion on so-called citizen journalism performed through social networks or small web platform? On one hand, these active citizens are often highly motivated and involved in community issues. On the other hand, they sometimes do not follow professional and ethical journalism standards. What is the situation in the US from this perspective, and what are your expectations in this respect for the future of local journalism?
Yeah, this is a very hot topic, right? In the root of this question I hear that something is better than nothing. In many parts of the rural US, including in rural, Western, Central and eastern North Carolina, the main source of news in some counties is a Facebook page where people contribute information. Things like hey, I found this dog by the side of the highway, whose dog is this? Or there’s one particularly memorable post somebody’s cows got out and they keep getting out and somebody keeps posting pictures of this person’s cows. Like, please come get your cows off the highway. Now that’s really necessary information. Those cows could get hit. That dog needs to go home. And what we’re missing and you’re pointing to in your question is these questions about how do we know that this is verified information, what kind? Where is this person coming from? Is there good disclosure about their interests like? Is there any accountability? What is an engagement loop around this? One of the conversations that are very live right now is how do we not say – this person has to go to journalism school and rack up $100,000 in debt and take four years of their life. But how can we teach them a portable set of journalism tools so that they can apply them in the place that they’re already convening people in the place, they’re already delivering information and advance the quality and credibility of what they’re doing rather than saying oh, this is too far out. We can’t call this service. We can’t call this journalism. How can we support what’s already kind of working and improve it where people have the appetite to? I think that edge is interesting and intriguing to me because it again, it points to this asset framing that I’ve used before. People are going to motivated people like these community journalists or citizen journalists or community messengers or trusted messengers. You can call them lots of things. What could we do to support their work getting better? What resources might we offer rather than saying no, you’re doing a bad thing, or you’re not doing it just right? So we need you to reel it back in, that can harden people in a way that’s not useful for our ultimate goals of people having access to information communities, feeling like they’ve got something that’s reflective of their lives. And that they can trust. So there have been some great cases and we’ve seen some great work, especially in eastern North Carolina, around hurricanes where mutual aid groups that cropped up around Hurricane Florence, a really nasty hurricane that impacted much of our coastal plain, turned into really excellent resource sharing, mutual aid. Information sharing around COVID too, because people had already worked together, they already trusted each other and people that were pillars of the community were the ones saying – hey, I put my credibility, my relationships and my myself behind this and I’m going to stand on it and that was invaluable. People and expanding distribution during that, the really turbulent early days of the pandemic.
Do you remember any remarkable piece of local journalism related to protecting the rule of law on local or regional level?
OK, so there’s an organisation in four rural counties called the Border Belt Independent and recently they’ve checked up on a local sheriff whose behaviour is questionable. There’s been some financial malfeasance that they uncovered, and they found out. That a specific church was getting tonnes and tonnes of money for a substance misuse rehab programme, and they had no capacity to run this programme. They reported on this and a local organisation. contacted the church and said – hey, we actually run a behavioural and substance misuse rehab programme, how about we partner up on this and it turned into an actual provision of service for people where the funds had just been hung up in an account? There was no rehab, there was no support, there was no services, no counselling being offered. So that’s the again, this sort of the financial consequences of rule of law, it’s not necessarily a piece of journalism that got people to City Hall to interrupt a meeting to do this thing, it was very focused on what does it mean for a budget to function, what does it mean for a local budget to be transparent to people so that people can take the action that they need. So rule of law in like a little R sort of way.
Thank you. So another question is whether there are some independent media in North Carolina without organised funding from parties, government, political major donors like your fund, just group of citizens or bloggers who are doing the journalism in their free time?
Yes, the vast majority of the folks that we support are. And again I want to draw the distinction official major donors; we’re a foundation yes, we’re a major donor, and we are radically different than government funding. We are radically different than politically motivated 501C4 funding. Most of them are nonprofit news organisations. There are some independent for-profit organisations like independent weeklies like the Triad City beat, and we’ve made grants in the past, just small rural papers to stand up, Spanish language, media and other services like that, but any of the people that we support run newsrooms are journalists, identify as reporters and are not, as you say, just a group of citizens or bloggers. They do digital distribution; they’ve got the credentials and there are also organisations that we support that are community organisations who are focused on farm workers and have a really clear communication function. We also support some organisations who have a core of health workers who do door to door canvassing and are really great mess. So we support a really wide range of people, but definitely more than just group of citizens or bloggers.
Thank you very much. I don’t see any more questions, in the chat, but if you have any questions, feel free to ask. It was a quite wide discussion, and we opened a lot of topics and I hope we opened a few doors to possible future analyses. Maybe the last question I would like to ask: Can you can give any advice to individuals or organisation, in terms of what they can do to tackle local media in their own communities?
It’s difficult to imagine just giving advice to people who are in this room who are clearly already doing it. So with that as the caveat, I would encourage people to think about how they can create that two-way engagement loop with the people you want to serve. How can you check whether your work is having the effects you want it to have, so you can really say yes to the parts of your work you need to and that you can divest yourself and your energy from things that aren’t working or don’t achieve the outcomes you want. Because there will always be more than any one or two or three people can do, and I’m acutely aware of the of the risks of burnout and overwork for people and hope you can streamline to the core of what your audiences and communities from you and that is wildly underselling the complexity of your work. So the fundamental advice is, please take care of yourselves, because what you do is really necessary and there aren’t a lot of people doing it.
Thank you for your kind words. We have two more questions: What are the trends of ratio between paper and online publishing reading in North Carolina?
The most consumed media in North Carolina is actually television. So television and radio surpassed the consumption of both digital and paper publishing and I’m assuming that we’re talking, we’re talking about paper publishing, we’re talking about newspaper publishing as opposed to the wide variety of different kind of printed materials that have information that in a wider perspective, we could think of as publishing. And this is a pretty common trend across the US that commercial television is usually the number one source of news and information for people and commercial TV is not always in the mix as we’re talking about community service, community centric things and there are some great stations in North Carolina like WLS and WSOC that are that are engaged, but it’s less common.
So when we are back to the topic of this information, what can local press do to spread media literacy in order to tackle the disinformation challenges
This is an entire nest of research and links that I should just send to Kristína to send on to you. I am not an expert in fighting disinformation, but the local press has a different kind of angle on trust and a different proximity to people, so the local press is one of the key points of engagement with disinformation, with people about why they believe this stuff, what does it do for them. Because often it has this very intrinsic value to their identity, a sense of belonging, or a motivation, or a sense of agency. If disinformation and misinformation is feeding those things, how could local media feed those things and bring people back to trusting. What is factual trusting, what is corroborated and verified so it’s a deeper process and there isn’t like one specific strategy, but part of media literacy is also making your work legible. Most people outside of media don’t understand what reporting actually looks like, how we corroborate, what do we do to verify information. So sharing your work and humanising yourself is a technique that some journalists in the US have taken up with some great success.
We have one final question: What is your opinion on state municipal support for local journalism despite possible conflict of interests if they should control public official single simultaneously?
As we look toward what are viable models for local journalism, if local journalism needs to be a service that everyone has access to, then it need we need to have a really broad base of support. I see that including philanthropy for a long time and in many places, it should also include some sort of government support. There are so many different ways that government funds can be passed through intermediaries can have controls on them to create independence. I agree with that fundamentally, if someone is paying you, whether it’s a fund or whether it’s the local government, whether it’s the state government or whether it’s an advertiser. There is power that comes with that money, so organisations need to have diversified revenue in order to maintain their independence. And with diversified revenue, with good controls on government support, I see that it could be part of a healthy revenue mix. There are a couple of examples we could point to about how that’s working in New Jersey with the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium that they’ve built a foundation that makes the grants they’ve got good governance around the funding. There’s also a programme at the Centre for Community Media in New York called AD Boost, where the City of New York’s government allocated a specific part of their communications and the ad budget for Community Media, and they have this service at CCM that helps organisations get ready to receive the funding and then acts as an intermediary. Those are just two examples. It doesn’t just have to be a payment right from local government into a news organisation which creates that risk that you describe. I agree that it’s a real risk of control and manipulation and I do see that there’s I see real potential in government funding for the fundamental public service that is local media.
So thank you very much, I don’t see any more questions. We opened a lot of topics today, thank you very much for your time, Lizzy, and for clarifying many of our questions. If you have any documents or any links to share with us in relevance to the topic we discussed, I will be happy to share it with the participants after this call. I hope we can build a better media environment here in Slovakia, similar to how you do it in North Carolina.
Thank you all for the work you’re already doing. It’s been a treat to be with you this morning. Thanks for the wide-ranging discussion, I feel like I’ve had my mental gymnastics for the morning.
Thank you. Bye.
We would like to thank, our volunteer Zuzana Sopoligová, for transcribing the audio recording.
The discussion was financed by the U.S. Embassy in Slovakia as part of the project “Mapping the media environment in Slovak regions and supporting local journalists.”