#PPPC18 Public Newsroom session
The evening before the 2018 People-Powered Publishing Conference kicked off, City Bureau invited attendees to one of their Public Newsroom sessions, with James Thompson and Mike Rispoli from Free Press presenting "Reimagining Public Funds to Rebuild Local News" about Free Press' success in passing New Jersey's "Civic Info Bill" to fund local news.
Here's an excerpt from the event description:
This grassroots campaign to pass legislation to support the future of local news brought together a cohort of local organizers, universities, artists, students, media-makers, and other stakeholders. For New Jersey folks, this effort showed that the public will take action to keep their communities informed – but only if you build investment in them and listen to their concerns.
So how does it work? What lessons have emerged that can be considered beyond New Jersey? Could other newsrooms, nonprofits and civic agents try to launch a campaign where they live? What can journalists learn from organizers when it comes to getting people invested in supporting local media?
City Bureau records and publishes audio from the Public Newsroom sessions, so you can listen to this evening's audio on Spreaker or via this embedded player:
Listen to "Public Newsroom 86: Reimagining Public Funds to Rebuild Local News" on Spreaker.
While I arrived late, there were several things that stood out to me from the presentation and the recorded audio.
- Community organizing is a useful model for journalism.
- Journalism is a practice, not an ideology.
- Government funding for journalism is probably not limitable to just New Jersey; this law could be duplicated in other locations.
All of those come from this observation:
People are constituents for journalism.
— Mike Rispoli, captured by Mädälina Ciobanu
Which is to say: constituents, not consumers.
From that epigram, Rispoli and Thompson developed several guidelines for newsrooms who wanted to engage in community-building:
- Don't talk about why journalism is important; people have their own ideas about what "journalism" is and you're fighting that.
- Don't preach the gospel of Journalism. Ask questions. Exhibit journalism by doing. Journalism is an action, not an ideology.
- Don't center journalism and journalists. Talk about community.
- Don't listen to haters. Do try new things.
If New Jersey can pass journalism-funding legislation, so can your state, probably. Although, noted the presenters, there are unique aspects of New Jersey's situation that may have made it easier in that state. TV news was all out of NYC and Philadelphia, and that alienated locals. The local residents were tied into their hyperlocal papers, which all got acquired/merged/downsized until the local aspect of news coverage was mostly gone.
New Jersey is not efficient at legislating. The legislative effort spent two years going nowhere and then was passed in a couple of weeks. The people who were working on the bill were able to come to their state senate majority leader with a set of goals, and the senator worked with the Office of Legislative Services to turn that into a passable law.
So if you want to try to replicate New Jersey's public funding bill, talk to the folks at Free Press, grow a community, and give it a shot.