Category Archives: Media

Chicago newspapers, television and radio plus movies and TV

Why I delete my tweets

Communities, Internet, Media, Race, , ,

In the wake of James Gunn’s dismissal as director of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 due to some offensive tweets in his past, director Rian Johnson and political commentator Glenn Greenwald both have deleted tens of thousands of their past tweets.

I’m not here to litigate Disney’s decision to fire a Gunn (sorry), deconstruct why he became a target of a right-wing troll or defend what he said (much of it is indefensible in any context).

But as HuffPost points out and Johnson/Greenwald’s actions demonstrate, Gunn won’t be the last well-known person targeted by people with suspect motives. Even those who aren’t bold-faced names could find themselves in a similar situation when they apply for a new job meet a new acquaintance or simply change their point of view. And it should go without saying, but this type of targeting has been happening to women and people of color for years.

With all this in mind, I’ve been looking for an opportunity to explain why I decided last year to I delete everything I tweeted from 2007 through 2013.

Here’s why:

What’s a tweet?

What’s Twitter for? Does that answer change as it scales? Is it for broadcast or narrowcast? Video or text? Everything and nothing?

The company itself has long struggled to answer these question and create a business model to match. The answer today will be different in six months as new features fundamentally change it. There is no agreed-upon use, style guide or set of standards for Twitter. Some people or organizations apply journalistic ethics to their work there. Others use it for comedy or as a press release distributor.There are governments and the governed. Then there are micro-communities like Weird Twitter or Black Twitter. Some people speak to thousands or millions of people they’ve never met with each tweet. Some speak to tens or a hundred people they’ve known for years.

The line between public figures and private individuals was blurred a long time ago (thanks, Mark!) but we’re all using the same tools. How can we develop a set of rules or guidelines for their use when the experience is always in flux with a user base of broadly differing knowledge and experiences and make it open to new users, too?

Because of all this, Twitter of 2007, 2008 or even 2010 or 2012 is fundamentally different from the Twitter of 2018, specifically in the way media organizations mine it for #content.

We’re all in this together, unfortunately

Feeding this frenzy is what some commentators have called “context collapse” – the removal of a tweet, comment or post from its surrounding discussion, leaving it open to a different interpretation – and what is derisively referred to as the content industrial complex. 

In 2014, The New Yorker compared this – while discussing the emerging problem of context collapse in relation to a tweet from The Colbert Report – to “delivering a punch line without its setup.” 

The problem with calling this “context collapse” in this …er, context is the term already has a specific meaning when it comes to digital communities. Nicholas Carr defined “context collapse” as “a sociological term of art that describes the way social media tend to erase the boundaries that once defined people’s social lives.”

Whatever definition you apply to context collapse is part of the problem here whether we’re discussing presidents or private citizens. There’s no clear agreement on the rules of engagement though Robinson Meyer of The Atlantic uses the term “conversation smoosh” to describe the Colbertian type of context collapse and that’s about as good as anything.

Then there’s the problem of how tweets and the collapse of media business models have created a lower standard for newsworthiness. Shrinking newsrooms and “doing more with less” have meant that tweets are now the coal shoveled into the boilers of content management systems.

Congratulations, you’re the news

It was a safe bet that a 2010 tweet of yours would not be picked up by, say, Buzzfeed or a Gawker site then copy/pasted by countless other digital publishers and later broadcast on your local 10pm news show. The watershed moment for “someone said a thing!” mass media content was probably Valleywag tying Justine Sacco to a digital whipping post at the end of 2013.

Similar to the race to the bottom that occurred when local news sites found gold in mining Anna Nicole Smith’s death for #content, the Sacco incident proved you could easily create a piece of “Twitter reacts!” #content from a set of related posts on a topic and get people to read it even if you hadn’t added anything new. “It exists and now you have an emotion” is reason enough. “Julia Roberts joins Instagram” might be the worst, most recent example of this.

Like most technological advancements, the discussion of an ethical, professional or legislative approach lags far behind. We should probably call this The Jeff Goldblum Rule.

Should a person’s professional or professional background act as a guide for how we use their content in mass media? I dunno, it’s complicated. I’ll use myself as an example.

I worked in news/journalism/blogging/commentary in a professional capacity from 2004 to 2016. I’m not a journalist now, but I’m the editorial director of a small media company, but one that’s owned and operated by a marketing agency and counts a museum as a partner. I’m also a board member at a non-profit organization with a 70-year-plus history in my community, a board member of a four-year-old activist group in that same community and a host of a storytelling series co-produced by an arts organization.

Does that make me a journalist, a marketer, a community leader or an activist?  Yes?

Even though it’s not currently my job/career right now, I’ve tried to use the standards of journalism and informed commentary to guide the things I say on Twitter and this blog even when they’re grounded in my work as a community member or activist. The fact that 11,000+ people follow me on Twitter means I have a greater responsibility for accuracy and truth than someone with 100.

Have I been consistent in this? No, because sometimes it would make me less effective in whatever role I am in at the time. And, quite frankly, sometimes I’ve fired off a tweet that I should have thought the better of at the time.

I think about this stuff quite a bit and try to understand the implications around it all. Still, I was surprised when one of my tweets was published as a roundup of Twitter conversation about ABC7’s 2013 New Year’s Eve coverage by the city’s most prominent media critic. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. I realized I couldn’t publish anything on Twitter that I wouldn’t say in a roomful of people or to the face of the person mentioned in that tweet. Again, I’ve failed to meet this standard from time to time.

Is this approach right? Wrong? I don’t know, honestly.

So it’s why I deleted seven years of tweets.

Why I deleted my tweets

From Twitter’s founding in 2006 to roughly 2012, tweets spoke to a relatively small number of people, many of whom were tech or media types. From 2012 to 2014, things changed dramatically. Meyer’s Atlantic article is a great exploration of this. Media changed. Conversation smoosh happened. Everyone became a “personal brand.”

I started tweeting in 2007. I was in my early 30s. I wasn’t a kid. But last year, I began a fool’s errand of trying to manually delete tweets I felt were dumb, overly reliant on swear words or otherwise inconsistent with my current worldview. After a couple days, I gave up. It was like trying to separate dirt from pepper. So I paid $12 to use TweetDeleter to get rid of everything I tweeted from 2007 through 2013 feeling confident that by 2014 I’d understood that anything I tweeted might end up in a news story with wide reach. (It happens.) I’ve also occasionally deleted recent replies to people which, devoid of context, might be read in opposition to their actual meaning.

I’m not saying everyone should do the same. I will say in the several months since I deleted all those tweets, I haven’t missed any of them or felt as if I could still have access to that work. So if you’re worried about that, don’t be. (I feel much differently about the loss of stuff I’ve written at previous employers thanks to website redesigns. Save your work locally, kids!)

How we move forward

Some have bathed in the delicious irony that Greenwald has apparently called people who delete tweets “cowards.” I understand that impulse, but expecting everyone to think of their tweets as the Library of Congress Archives misses where we are right now and where we’ve been.

We shouldn’t immediately think that someone who deletes their tweets has something to hide. We should consider that maybe they’re trying to become a better person and remove any harm they’ve committed. We should also consider that structures of misogyny and whiteness mean that women, people of color and others in oppressed populations are more likely to be ostracized for their expressions of thought because they challenge those structures. Deletion may be a means of safety and protection.

Moreover, we have to talk about moving conversation in the social space from “calling out” to “calling in.” We have to allow for people to experience emotional and intellectual growth and not judge them solely on their worst tweet. Confrontation, yes, but without a subsequent requirement for erasure.

With respect to my fellow white men, we also need to be ready to speak up and defend women and people of color who articulate something outside of what we perceive to be “the norm” and make space for conversations that don’t involve us, aren’t meant for us and don’t need our approval or contributions.

We’re getting there. Societal conversation has become much more intersectional than it’s ever been. There’s a deeper understanding of how racist and sexist institutions have driven our understanding of the world. Eyes have been opened. Hearts and minds have been changed. We have to assume a person in 2007 was fundamentally different than who they are in 2018. I know I am.

Personally, I’ve lost my appetite for Twitter fights. Not every @ is delivered in good faith. I’ve tried to spend less time being concerned that “someone is wrong on the Internet.” (My wife is thrilled.)

None of this should be read as a defense of truly bad behavior, actions or statements or arguing Twitter become a free-for-all. But we have to be able to reckon with the difference between, say, James Gunn saying stupid, deliberately provocative things about groups of people back in 2010 and Roseanne or Alex Jones singling out a specific person.

In the meantime, with context collapse and conversation smoosh still very much guiding how we view people and conversations, the “delete tweet” button is there for a reason.

UPDATE – NOVEMBER 2018: Since I first published this four months ago, I’ve deleted everything I’ve tweeted since October of 2018. It was something I’d meant to do for a while, but never got around to. I even tried to delete my likes using the same Tweetdeleter service. For some reason, it didn’t work. Then I tried to run a script I found online, but this had some unintended consequences.

Ugggggh. And then I was getting tweets and DMs from people wondering what was up. I stopped running the script because blowing up people’s phones wasn’t worth it. Apparently the only way to unlike old tweets is to do it manually. I have…12,000 or so. So that’ll be fun.

This feels like another example of how tech platforms don’t allow you to truly own your data, but someone else can write about that.

Chance The Rapper Buys Chicagoist

What will Chance The Rapper’s Chicagoist become?

Chicago, Media, Music, ,

Chance The Rapper Buys Chicagoist

(Disclosure: I was a writer and editor with Chicagoist from 2004 to 2007 and stayed in close communication with people who worked there up until the time it was sold to DNAinfo. While some of the below is based on knowledge gleaned during that time, none of this is based on off-the-record conversations. For my full ethics disclosure statement, read this.)

Last week, Chance the Rapper announced he’d purchased Chicagoist, a website which covers Chicago news and culture, from WNYC, which bought it from DNAInfo/Gothamist after the local news sites were shut down in the wake of a unionization effort.

Why? And what’s next?

Owning the medium to own the message?

A brief announcement about the sale divulged little about Chance’s plans, but lyrics in a simultaneously released song called “I Might Need Security” perhaps shed some light on his intentions:

I missed a Crain’s interview, they tried leaking my addy
I donate to the schools next, they call me a deadbeat daddy
The Sun-Times gettin’ that Rauner business
I got a hit-list so long I don’t know how to finish
I bought the Chicagoist just to run you racist bitches out of business

Genius can give you the background on the media beefs above and the Chicago Reader’s Leor Galil goes deeper into the issues between Chicago media and Chicago hip-hop.

Of greater concern for Chance’s new venture is the moment last year when Chance pressured MTV News to remove an essay from its website that he and his manager Pat Corcoran “both agreed that the article was offensive,” in Corcoran’s words.

Suffice it to say Chance keeps the media at arm’s length and has been savvy about managing his image, going all the way back to 2013 in this Chicago magazine piece from Jessica Hopper (who coincidentally was MTV News’s editorial director last year):

Chance the Rapper doesn’t want to show me his hood. The burgeoning hip-hop star sits in my car behind the Harold Washington Library issuing a flurry of excuses: It’s too hot. Chatham, the South Side neighborhood where he grew up and filmed his viral video “Hey Ma” (it’s on YouTube), is too far. He has to be at the studio in an hour. Anyway, that place isn’t really his story, he insists. His story is “here,” he says, motioning toward the library.

On one hand, you could imagine Chance is tired of being misrepresented by “the media” and like other savvy cultural creators he’s taken the means of production into his hands to exert more control over his image. The MTV News blow-up, the “Security” lyrics and the Chicago magazine excerpt all lend some credence to this theory.

Also of note is Corcoran’s $15,000 founding member donation to Block Club Chicago, the new hyperlocal Chicago news organization (disclosure: I am also a member of BCC but at 1% of that amount). Considering Chance’s philanthropic endeavors and he and Corcoran’s recent interactions with journalism it’s tough to know whether this is more in line with the former or an attempt to hedge bets on the latter.

To be taken seriously as a funder of independent journalism, he’ll need to address the questions around all of the above. But if I had to guess, I’d imagine he’ll be a media owner more in the mold of a Mansueto or Bezos than an Adelson.

Chance has been an undeniable force for good in Chicago culture. The erstwhile Chancellor Jonathan Bennett is the son of politically active parents whose lives have been devoted to public service. He is seemingly a devoted father, philanthropist and community advocate who has donated upwards of two million dollars to Chicago’s public schools, testified at the Chicago City Council and supported voter registration efforts. When we talk about a music community, it looks a lot like what Chance creates in Chicago by investing in its people.

Chance’s familiar critique of mass media is that it too often misses nuance in favor of an easy-to-swallow narratives and elevates conflict over conversation. Buying Chicagoist could be a way to put create another independent media organization in Chicago, albeit one run by a well-heeled single investor, that serves as a catalyst for the kind of social change he’s been creating.

A business plan for a business, man

Mike Fourcher, a former Chicagoist colleague and also the former publisher of a few hyperlocal news and politics sites, delves into the business and audience side of things in this post. In short, re-building Chicagoist won’t be easy. The business model it had as part of the Gothamist network is lost as a standalone site. With an increasingly mobile audience accessing news via phones, local news sites are competing for attention with not just national publications but also everything that’s in app form whether it’s Facebook, Netflix, Fortnite or text threads.

But with this sale, Chance and Chicagoist will have some valuable assets most startups don’t. When it was shut down, Chicagoist had a sizable social media audience of 500,000 across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, monthly unique visitors of 700,000 and an email list of 29,000 subscribers. All that’s waiting to be reactivated.

One possible way for Chicagoist to start re-engaging and building on its previous audience is to act as an amplifier/partner of news from the startups who cover underserved-by-news neighborhoods still trying to get to Chicagoist’s size like City Bureau and The Triibe Chicago. This isn’t about aggregating the work of others, but using Chicagoist’s already existing audience to support community engagement.

Going back to Mike’s post, he ends it this way:

Maybe Mr. Bennett wants to turn Chicagoist into a kind of “Players Tribune” for entertainers. Maybe he’d like to use the title as platform for something other than news. Perhaps he is thinking of creating a site about the experience of Black Chicago, a sorely under-reported topic. “Chicagoist” could mean so many things. We shouldn’t limit ourselves to what it’s meant in the past.

All of which leads to one a couple key questions: What is Chicagoist’s voice going to become and what does its audience need and want?

I have a few thoughts on how to answer that.

What could Chicagoist be?

If he has the time, team and treasure to invest, Chance’s Chicagoist could be an exploration of, and a check on, emerging power in Chicago: who has it, how they use it and what are the ways that power affects the everyday lives of Chicagoans, particularly those on the South and West sides who often find a surge of interest in their concerns when something goes wrong, but not as often when something goes right. How is power being used for good as well as for destruction?

It shouldn’t be another variation on “watchdog” reporting though. It can, and should, be celebratory. Imagine this article as an ongoing content vertical with products and events built around it. Billy Penn is already doing something like this with Who’s Next in food, music, the law, education, schools, etc. Someone else will try it here if Chance/Chicagoist doesn’t.

Crain’s Chicago Business covers established power with a specific downtown focus and a high-income audience. Daily papers do this for politics and big business. Local publications cover some of this in a breaking-news, scoop-driven way. But it’s rare to see, for example, a deep dive into the history of a longtime neighborhood developer building condos with first-floor retail in a neighborhood that isn’t on a “hot” list. Not to mention those just coming up.

There’s also something to be said about being a voice for those whose views often go underrepresented in this city. Chicagoist could be the source that represents Pilsen and Humboldt Park and Jackson Park in the way that the Tribune represents…well, often, the western suburbs, bridging the gap between young progressives and older, passionate Chicagoans. It’ll mean taking stands, reflecting the grit of the city, avoiding both the middle ground and “both sides” reporting – pointing out truth, lies and agendas.

This kind of voice would mean elevating people on the front lines of these community issues, making sure the audience sees itself reflected in what’s discussed and giving the readers a stake in it, which increases relevancy, word of mouth and audience size.

We see these voices all over social media. They are guiding the conversation and too often the traditional news media products are playing catch-up to them or just throwing up a screenshot without delving into context. They should be a part of what Chicagoist does, even if, or perhaps especially if, it doesn’t involve traditional journalists.

While the Tribune seems to have cornered the market on op-eds by people who are leaving Chicago and Illinois, Chicagoist has an opportunity to talk about why people stay here and build. Young entrepreneurs who have never set foot in 1871 are creating businesses here. The national political organization Run for Something had an event here last year that was even larger than one in D.C. Who attended, why are they running? Can we track their campaigns in a way that is shows the path and doesn’t follow the patterns of who’s-winning-who’s-losing, horse-race journalism?

When we do this, we find:

  • The next lead-contaminated pipes before they harm the brains of our kids and make them more susceptible to violence
  • The next models for entrepreneurship in neighborhoods which others can replicate and build a hyperlocal economy
  • The next political movement leaders
  • The next…Chance the Rapper

It’s about giving the audience an understanding of power and how it’s used but also in reinvigorating the trust between reader and publisher by demonstrating that we’re listening to what they need, not just telling them what we think they need. Hearken, a Chicago startup with national reach, has been pioneering this approach. I’m surprised more newsrooms aren’t using their tech and process. Also, City Bureau’s public newsroom collaborations have showed that developing news products side-by-side with readers has tremendous value for the end product and develops audience loyalty.

This starts with research on not just on the previous Chicagoist audience, but also its potential readers – the ones who stepped away from Chicagoist and the ones it never appealed to – as well as the places they live. The geographic communities and the psychographic communities – their interests and needs. What do they need out of a media publisher vs. a mobile website vs. an email product vs. a social feed vs. ongoing coverage of a topic that’s created for the place in which it appears.

But more importantly, it allows Chicagoist to own the relationship with its readers and reinvigorate the entire model of useful products and information given to readers in exchange for trust, money and information about themselves. It takes work, but it’s how you develop a true business model.

It also makes the content actionable for the audience. For someone with Chance’s philanthropic leanings, a media organization that consistently says “If this is important to you, here’s what you can do…” could be an important next step.

Correction: A previous version of this article listed Pat Corcoran’s Block Club Chicago contribution as $10,000 based on this page. Block Club Chicago Director of Strategy Jen Sabella says the actual amount was $15,000 and said that “Pat’s contribution to BCC was not on behalf of Chance…he just liked/missed his neighborhood news and wanted to help us get going again.”

Image of Chance the Rapper by Flickr user Julio Enriquez licensed through Creative Commons

A guide to yesterday’s Chicago protests on the Dan Ryan – for people who are new to all this (and trolls)

Chicago, Communities, Media, Politics, Race, ,

The_Dan_Ryan_Expressway_Westbound_near_the_I-55_exit

I spent most of yesterday watching reactions to the shutdown of the Dan Ryan to protest violence in Chicago.

Some of the reactions were genuine – people trying to come to a better understanding of why protestors chose this tactic and why it’s effective.

Some of them were super troll-y.

This is for both groups.

What’s the point of disrupting traffic on the Dan Ryan? Most of the people affected aren’t the ones causing the violence.

One of the biggest problems with addressing violence in Chicago is that it is seen as a problem isolated to a particular area and only affecting certain people and neighborhoods. Yesterday’s protest was like throwing a stone in a pond and causing ripple effects.

If you ended up talking about this protest and the issues surrounding it this weekend, that was the point of the protest. Shutting down the Dan Ryan makes that possible in ways other tactics don’t.

Without calling more people into this fight, the problem doesn’t get solved. Without more pressure on the mayor, the governor, the City Council, it doesn’t get solved. Without a broad-based coalition of people from around the metro area who demand solutions, it doesn’t get solved. Shutting down the Dan Ryan made the problem impossible to ignore.

It was also about forcing people who access Chicago via the Dan Ryan to see parts of the city they otherwise are able to avoid. If you wanted to access the city via I-57, you got diverted to 95th or 103rd Street. You’d have to take State Street or Vincennes or any of the other streets that run parallel to the Dan Ryan to get into the city. You’d have to see the people, the businesses and neighborhoods that make up the South Side – all the places that are largely invisible if you’re taking the Dan Ryan.

At a minimum, this makes the problem more present, less a thing you hear about and more a thing that exists in real ways.

Why don’t they disrupt the spots where the drug dealers / gang members hang out?

People do this all the time. This article is from 2016, but trust me this kind of thing happens out of the reach of TV cameras and reporters frequently.

In fact, Father Pfleger himself leads marches like this every Friday night. His church, St. Sabina, also has an ongoing violence intervention program.

Bringing more attention to the people doing this work is also what the protest was about, not to mention talking about issues like low wages, schools, jobs, etc.

So why don’t they protest in front of the mayor/governor/Mike Madigan’s house?

People do protest in front of the mayor’s house. Often enough that it doesn’t create the kind of disruption or visibility that something like this did. But honestly, this is like asking why civil rights protestors walked from Selma to Montgomery or blocked the Edmund Pettus Bridge. There’s a tendency with protests to see them as either/or rather than “yes, and…”

This is just politics! It’s just a publicity stunt.

Yes. You’ve captured the exact reason why protests happen: to publicize issues and put pressure on political decision makers.

But I’ll agree with you on one point: The posturing by the mayor and the governor yesterday was not particularly insightful or helpful. Especially when you consider the mayor and the governor have both tried to crush unions and teachers, two groups that provide economic and educational health to the affected communities.

This just creates a lot of chaos for law enforcement.

It definitely requires a significant deployment of resources. I don’t have the exact numbers, but I’ll bet it’s roughly equal to the time we closed down Michigan Avenue and most of downtown when the Blackhawks won.

We close streets, disrupt traffic and re-deploy law enforcement officers all the time for street fests, parades, etc. It affects people who aren’t participating in those events, too. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have those things. We should! But again it’s “yes, and…”

It’s a question of what we prioritize.

Also, you might have missed Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson marching arm-in-arm with Father Pfleger down the Dan Ryan. Was this more politics? Maybe. But most folks think better relations between the community and law enforcement are what’s needed here. So if this brought those groups together in a way that showed unity? That’s probably helpful.

Do you think people really don’t know about violence in Chicago?

I think most people hear about Chicago violence, but they don’t know much about it.

Do they hear it exists? Sure. Do they know why it happens? The real root causes of it and not just the stuff Hannity and his ilk spout? I don’t know.

Do they know the ways we fought gangs and dismantled public housing led to a less centralized, more violent gang problem?

Do they know we closed down mental health clinics in our neighborhoods which meant it was more likely that we are trying to treat medical issues as law enforcement problems? And that Illinois’s ongoing budget issues closed even more?

Do they know we closed 40+ schools in black and brown neighborhoods which meant their education was disrupted or kids had to cross gang boundaries? Do they know you end up gang-affiliated not by choice but by location?

Do they know the manufacturing and industrial jobs that were a large part of the South Side haven’t been replaced and that people there are (ahem) economically insecure?

People who live in this city – anywhere, from the North Side to the South Side to downtown and elsewhere – have a part to play. In part because resources to deal with the issue often flow to what demographer Rob Paral calls “the zone of affluence” which stretches from downtown to as far north as Lakeview and parts beyond. If you live in the suburbs, you benefit from the metro area being an economic powerhouse, not to mention the times you come into the city to enjoy its attractions and culture. Yesterday’s protest was about reaching you, too, and asking for your help.

I also find it interesting that some of the same people who say “What about Chicago?” whenever there’s a protest over a mass shooting at a school, church, movie theater, concert, etc. – to suggest no one is protesting over the violence here – are the same ones who are quick to decry this effort as well.

In order for all of us to be better educated on this topic, we need to seek out media, not just expect that it will reach us. More often than not, it’s in seeking out books, magazines and podcasts over TV, daily news and tweets.

It’s how we will know about Chicago violence and not just hear about it.

Why don’t these protestors spend their time calling for mandatory minimums or truth in sentencing laws?

Increasing the carceral state is a further drain on an already financially taxed system. Not to mention that mandatory minimums are usually implemented in ways that are racist and unequal. And Illinois already has truth-in-sentencing laws.

But if we’re interested in solutions that do more than warehousing people, we could start with restoring the funding to social service programs that try to interrupt violence in Chicago communities or provide jobs and other community services. Or we could work on re-opening mental health clinics. Or equally fund our schools.

Is a protest really going to solve this problem though?

By itself? No. And not even Fr. Pfleger thinks that.

We came out here to do one thing: to shut it down,” Pfleger said. “We came here to get their attention. Hopefully we got their attention. … Today was the attention-getter, but now comes the action.”

I’m going to put on my marketing hat for a second and suggest protests like this are about bringing in new participants through awareness and education. None of the other options above would have as much impact on awareness as what happened yesterday. It’s also important to talk through these issues and what else is being done to solve the problem so people know where/how they can spend their time and why it’s so vitally important.

Are the issues and their solutions complicated? Very much so. Chicago Tribune reporter Peter Nickeas talked yesterday about how the work that follows is about offering basic help and services to the people most likely to end up touched by violence:

Softball on Monday + Thursday, afternoon basketball, Tuesday night prayer group, twice-monthly tattoo removal, after-school probation programming w/ substance abuse, therapy, life skill classes, little league baseball. And of course, street outreach, violence intervention…they’ve done *tons* of work off the efforts of volunteers alone over the years, they still do. And people donate space, food, etc. But yea, things cost $. Space, vans, insurance, salaries, permits, jerseys and uniforms, etc.

Pete’s article from last year on how this work is being done in Little Village is a must-read on the topic.

So what am I supposed to do? I want to help, but I don’t know where to start.

Continue to ask questions and listen to the answers from people who’ve been doing this work.

For a regular deep dive into these issues, follow the coverage at WBEZ, Chicago Reader, City Bureau, South Side Weekly and Chicago Reporter as they often go beyond a daily news reporting model. This isn’t to say reporters at the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times aren’t ever doing so, but the approach is different. Having said that, the long reads and watchdog reporting from both those papers (like Pete’s article linked above) are worth your time. Again, “yes, and…” not either/or.

Here’s a list of social service agencies that could use your time, talent or treasure. You could also learn more about the places that fly under the radar who are trying to help.

If each of us takes a piece of this, the load becomes a little lighter.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Hugh Hefner: Janus in voluptatem

Chicago, Media,

7762422856_ef1a318171_b

I worked at Playboy for a year or so. I’ve written about it before, but it was filled with some of the best professional experiences of my life even though parts of it were the worst. (Shout-out to everyone in Playboy’s legal department for the time they sent me a cease-and-desist letter for talking to a reporter after they fired me.)

Turning this around in my head and reading some of the early comments on Hugh Hefner’s death, it occurred to me that what’s most striking about his life was its pronounced dichotomy.

The same man who championed sexual freedom as well as equal rights for POC, women and LGBT folk also reinforced misogyny, unrealistic standards of beauty centered on whiteness and a consumerist approach to living. When he advocated liberation for women, he did so to position them as “entertainment for men.” In all these ways, he was the best and worst of American idealism.

He simultaneously derided Midwestern values as he built a media empire in Chicago before abandoning it for a L.A.-based cocooned fantasy world. His was a family business, which his son and daughter both led, at different times, that occasionally preached contempt for the embrace of 2.5 kids and a picket fence. He imagined himself the picture of urbanity then built professional and personal worlds that never required him to leave the house.

He gave generously to support freedom of the press, public education and other worldly concerns, but lived a life of self-centeredness.

Hugh Hefner was a man of contradictions. Anyone who claims he was any one thing without acknowledging the other is not telling the whole story.

A conversation about leaving Chicago

Chicago, Media

2039914345_7db519f125_o

You saw this thing, right?

Whassat?

This thing where the kid from San Francisco talks about leaving Chicago?

If he’s from San Francisco how iz he in Chicago?

He moved here three years ago and it didn’t work out so he’s moving again.

Wait, he only moved ‘ere three years ago and he’s leaving already?

Well it didn’t work out for him.

So he’s black, huh? Lived on da West Side?

What? Why would you say that?

I mean, if he moved here tree years ago and he’s already leaving it musta been pretty rough. And if ya pay attention to all duh eggheads like I do then ya’d know da people havin’ da hardest time right now are blacks, especially on the Sout’ and West Sides. Dat’s who’s leaving town what with all the schools and clinics closed and da jobs lost and da violence and what not.

Oh. No, he’s not black. He’s white. And it sounds like he lives on the North Side.

Get outta here. White guys from da Nort’ Side don’t have problems.

He said he didn’t like the food and the beer is too expensive and he had a hard time dating.

Like I said. You know what’s expensive here? Housing.

Housing?

Yeah. It’s like 12 hundred a month for da average person. And then da minute somebody tries to bring in some actual affordable housing and make things livable like dat guy up in da 45th ward who’s trying to help vets then everybody starts screaming “Section 8! Section 8!” and other racist crap like we don’t know what dere talkin’ about, you know? Dese people wouldn’t know a Section 8 anything if a damn CHA building fell on ’em. What else does he say?

He says we’re not “sex-positive.”

We’re not what?

Sex-positive.

Buddy, I’m telling ya this guy never lived here. Ask any-a dese guys in dis bar and they’ll tell ya they are pos-i-tive-ly going to have sex tonight. They’re wrong, but dere pretty positive about it.

No, he means Chicago just has traditional views of gender and relationships and…

Oh and how did dis genius dat lived here for five minutes decide dat?

Apparently a table full of women thought he came off like a real jerk. He interrupted their evening and then he got mad when they didn’t want to talk to him.

Where was dis?

From what I hear, it happened at Estelle’s.

OK, well dat’s his first problem right dere. Nobody goes to Estelle’s to date. It sounds like dis guy thinks Chicago isn’t sex-positive because everyone here is positive dey don’t want to have sex with him and I don’t blame them.

He has some good points though.

Oh yeah? Like what?

Well he says it’s cold, we’re prideful and the CTA is kinda bad.

Stipulated.

And we’re kind of insular and a little on the conservative side.

He said that was a good thing, right?

No, he said that’s bad.

See, dis guy never lived in Chicago. Maybe he spent time here but he didn’t live here. Yeah it’s hard to break in here sometimes and people are kinda standoffish at first but that keeps out the dicks. Like guys who move here from San Francisco and expect Chicago ta worship dem because dere talkin’ about how sex-positive dey are.

I think he’s raising some things worth talking about though. We’re way too boosterish. We never talk about the problems of this city.

Excuse me, but dat is horseshit. Fire on da Prairie, Da Third Coast, Da South Side, Division Street, Boss. Alla dose books will gladly tell you what’s wrong with Chicago and dere right. But nonna dem are gonna say Chicago’s problems are because you can’t get laid or da beer’s too expensive.

Fair enough.

So where’s he moving to?

New York.

Wait, his complaints are that everything is too expensive and dating is hard and the transit sucks so he’s moving to New York?

Yeah.

Well good luck to him. Ask the bartender to put da Bears game on, wouldya?

With apologies to Mike Royko and Slats Grobnik

Photo by Flickr user Kylio licensed via Creative Commons

A few musings on why DNAInfo bought the Gothamist network

Chicago, Media, , ,

Today DNAInfo announced it is buying the Gothamist network. Why? Well here are a few thoughts.

(Full disclosure: I used to be a Chicagoist editor though it’s been a while since I’ve had any inside info on what goes on there. And I’m friendly with people at DNA but, again, I have no inside info on this deal and haven’t talked to anyone there about it. I’m merely an outside observer with a lot of time spent observing and working in Chicago media.)

First, this solves DNA’s need for more audience and Chicagoist’s need for content. DNAInfo New York has 2.5 million uniques, 108K newsletter subscribers and a combined social audience of about 160K though some of all of those numbers are duplicative, obviously.

But I think Chicago is the key to this sale. DNAInfo Chicago has about 1.8 million uniques, 168K newsletter subscribers and a combined social audience of 200K. Again, some duplication there. Chicago is DNA’s only other city site and has a larger email and social audience than NYC.

I’m not sure if the Gothamist figures here are rolled up or not, but I think it’s safe to say they are. So that’s 8M uniques across all their cities (including LA, DC, etc.), 846K of which are in Chicago.

The deal terms weren’t announced, but if Politico is to be believed and the deal is in the low seven figures, even with audience duplication you’re talking about significantly less than a dollar per user acquisition, not to mention DNA’s new footprint it all the -Ist cities. This was a bargain just in terms of numbers.

Again, you assume some duplication there but DNAInfo and Gothamist are all trying to own the very localized, neighborhood-focused stories. So either way you look at it, each network is going after the same type of reader though -Ist skews younger and DNA with a higher HHI.

But look also at the mission of the two companies and what’s been happening competitively in Chicago.

With ProPublica IL’s impending launch and Billy Penn’s rumored Chicago entry, there’s more competition in Chicago for local news eyeballs and DNA needed to shore up its presence here. Buying Chicagoist was an easy way to do that.

And, again, the types of stories DNA does well used to be the -Ist sites bread and butter (as well as Huffington Post Chicago’s local outpost which has since shuttered). -Ists aggregated DNA and both companies chipped away at each other. I don’t know what it means to be “DNA’s official blog” as it says in the announcement but I’d guess it means DNA can get aggregation eyeballs without damaging the strong reporting of the DNA brand. And it grabs back the lost audience that would read -Ist aggregation of DNA stories but not click through.

Gothamist has been trying to get bought for at least seven years now. Ricketts’ politics aside, ownership by a company who believes in local news is a much better ending than Kabletown.

If I was going to produce a Chicago news show, here’s what it would look like

Chicago, Media, ,

illinois

A little over a year ago, I was reading The Third Coast. The book is full of stories of how Chicago was a hub of innovation. Not innovation in the way we currently think of it – as “the Uber of X” – but innovation in poetry, architecture, television, print, music, business, etc.

The television and media part stuck with me. I hadn’t ever really understood what Dave Garroway did and how Studs Terkel’s worldview was given life through the medium of TV and how important it all was before this book.

It seemed like TV – or something akin to TV with a heavy social media component – could still do that. To take the idea of the Chicago school of experimentation and apply it to conversations we’re having now. What is Chicago’s place in the national conversation? Or why isn’t it more prominent in that discussion? And what can we do to change that through media?

So I asked the question “What’s missing from Chicago media?” As you can see from that link, I had a lot of help answering that question.

All those answers informed the below: a way to tell national stories through a Chicago lens.

I have no agenda in posting this now other than it was an idea I spent some time on and the results of it have never been published. And I wanted to get it out there before the ideas around it seem too old. Since I started the discussion it public, it feels right to continue it that way.

There’s so much I love about Chicago media. So many reporters and producers are doing vital work. We need more of it. We need to know how to pay for it, too. But I wanted to know what we could do that’s different.

This is that.

—

What is this show?
This show will look at what’s going on in the U.S. through personal stories based in Chicago.

But it’s a daily news and information show combined with advocacy. It delves deep into a single topic each day across TV and social and shows both how it affects the audience and what they (or others) can do to contribute to a solution.

In doing so, it answers three questions for the audience:

* What do we know?
* What do we think?
* What are we doing?

We do this by making sure the audience sees itself reflected in what’s happening on-screen and giving the viewers a stake in it, which increases relvancy, word of mouth and audience size.

This should not be driven by media talking heads or “experts.” Sure, there’s some of that in the “what do we know” portions but we should hear more from the people living the issues we’re exploring.

Most importantly, this will solve for the biggest problem viewers under 40 have with these kinds of shows: understanding how it affects them in their daily lives and what to do with this information in order to make a difference.

Why does this show need to exist?
There’s a need for a daily news/information show that goes deep into a topic and isn’t ruled by a “news peg” or the 24 hour cycle. Look at the response to Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. That show is revelatory because it exists outside the regular news cycle and motivates the audience to act.

There’s also a need to treat culture, food and arts with the same rigor and conversation as politics.

And we are perfectly positioned do all this here.

Chicago is a microcosm of the country, good and bad – in a way that NYC and LA can never be – while still remaining a national influence thanks to its geography and demographics.

Consider:
* Our struggles between public vs. charter schools
* The crime problems, whether in the “inner-city” or the suburbs and their drug problems
* A world-class mix of fine dining and street food has helped turn us all into foodies
* Neighborhoods that all have their own personalities, adding up to a larger whole  
* Arts and culture that’s the home of Lollapalooza, Pitchfork, the Goodman Theatre or the next Wilco

The subtitle of the book The Third Coast says “Chicago built the American dream.” We were and still are a great testing ground for ideas. In many ways, Chicago’s problems and successes still explain what’s going on in the rest of the country.

The knock on younger news audiences is that they are uninterested in news. This isn’t true. News is important to them.

What they dislike is how most news is structured: it features the same old players in the he said/she format and doesn’t demonstrate how it’s relevant to them. They get their news through social so their news needs to be inherently social.

“Simply put, social media is no longer simply social,” the Media Insight Project report says. “It long ago stopped being just a way to stay in touch with friends. It has become a way of being connected to the world generally — to send messages, follow channels of interest, get news, share news, talk about it, be entertained, stay in touch, and to check in and see what’s new in the world.”

We also need a show that explores a broad range of viewpoints. The second part of this post on Medium lists recommendations for news from a still-relevant 2002 study on youth (consider that this cohort now makes up part of the older millennial segment):

“Let youth speak for themselves.” “Highlight root causes and trends.” “Examine solutions other than increased punishment and incarceration.” “Link social problems to public policy.”

Right now, some news organizations – mostly national – do parts of this. But no one does all of it and especially not in video or live TV.

WBEZ’s public radio programming often does deep dives with community voices. Chicago magazine, DNA Info Chicago and Belt magazine do mixes of long features and personal stories that explore topics outside of news cycles. Some TV stations will do special reports like this – think Fox 32’s “Chicago at the Tipping Point” series. This format could mix all of these approaches in a much more exciting way.

What is it like? What makes it new/different?
We’d see two co-hosts, preferably late 20s/early 30s. To be demographically specific, the relevance of this kind of show would be increased with at least one person of color and a woman (two women of color would be ideal). They’re our guides, but they’re us: they’re asking questions, they’re asking for more detail, they’re exploring. They are not approaching this as the all-knowing journalist who keeps an arm’s length from the topic. But they have expertise and experience. More importantly, they’re entertaining. They approach these topics with humor, when appropriate, but can handle serious topics, too.

Also, there are three things about this that make it new/different:

Socially-sourced: The 13-week editorial calendar will be planned out in advance and posted online for viewers to see. Viewers will be encouraged to email/tweet/message us who they’d like to see on the show. This will help us ensure we’re not getting the same voices we always see in these types of shows and showcase more of the people who are affected by or living these issues.

Socially-driven: In addition to the video conversations, we’ll see curated tweets, FB posts and photos pop up live throughout the show. Viewers will be told how they can contribute to the conversation through an onscreen hashtag. (Yes, this kind of thing has been done before but it’s rarely relevant to what’s happening onscreen, it’s usually just noise).

Socially-relevant: Even though we’ll have planned our topics in advance, the social conversation will keep it fresh and of that day.

Here’s a rough outline of how this might work as an hourlong version (weekly) or a half-hour long version (daily). Keep in mind we discuss a single topic throughout the hour.

FULL HOUR

Segment 1: WHAT WE KNOW (11 minutes)
A mix of of host-led explainers with infographics and animation that introduces the topic. Provides context for the discussion to follow. Consider this like watching a live version of your favorite blog – maybe Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish in its time or one of the better Vox videos.

Segment 2: SKYPE INTERVIEWS / LIVE VIDEO CHAT – “WHAT WE THINK” (8 minutes)
From the social conversation we’ve seen before, we’ll choose some people to speak with live via Google Hangout, Skype or similar video setup. We’ll either do this one-on-one or in groups. This will help guide the conversation in the roundtable to come.

Segment 3: ROUNDTABLE INTRO – “WHAT WE THINK” (4 minutes)
Short profiles of the people we will meet in the intro. Who they are, what their background is, why we’re speaking to them. Quick thoughts from them on this conversation before we cut to break. We could do this live in-studio or – more ambitiously – as pre-recorded pieces that morning that are edited into the show. These should be people who have a stake in living with these issues, not people from think tanks or the heads of NGOs. Think block club captains, rather than aldermen.

Segment 4: ROUNDTABLE – “WHAT WE THINK” (11 minutes)
Our guests talk with the hosts about the topic. Conversational, open, not argumentative. This will be interspersed with social posts in the lower-thirds. Some of the social conversation will be used as the basis for discussion.

Segment 5: WHAT WE’RE DOING (8 minutes)
Conversation about people and places that are working on solving the problems we’ve discussed. Specific information about how the viewer can participate.

This could include more live Skype video interviews and/or an in-studio interview with a person who works at a social service, agency, a neighborhood organization or an advocacy group.

(More ambitiously, this segment might include a pre-recorded piece from time to time.)

Segment 6: THE PUSH/THE MIC DROP (3 minutes)
This is a straight-to-camera essay that summarizes what we know, what we think and what we want to do. Most of this is written in advance but it also includes drop-in excerpts from what we’ve heard in the show. This is our final call to action. 

HALF HOUR

WHAT WE KNOW:
Segment 1: INTRO/EXPLAINER (5 minutes)
Intro / explanation of topic: Discussion of how the topic is normally presented. This is an antidote for the “this person vs. that person” style of discussion. Maybe a couple anecdotes about why we’re discussing it how. (2 mins) 

Three-minute mix of animation, stats and facts  (3 mins)

BREAK

WHAT WE THINK
Segment 2: ROUNDTABLE (8 minutes)
Interspersed with video-submitted questions from the audience and questions via social
Need to break this up into a series of three issues about the topic, would see that on-screen similar to how ESPN shows the various topics it’s discussing 
BREAK

WHAT WE’RE DOING (3 minutes)
Segment 3: 
Conversation between the hosts and perhaps a guest about how someone can take part or solve this problem. Could be research, could be volunteering. 

Mic Drop: A one-minute straight to camera about what we’ve heard and seen
Possible show topics:
Why are so many people here killed by guns?
How can you make a living as an artist?
Is Chicago’s food scene the most innovative in the country?
Why is Chicago so corrupt?
What would it take for Chicago to become the next Silicon Valley?

Some final show notes:
Each piece of the show will exist in parts that will be broken down into social-friendly components.

It will be extremely important that this show is not shot in a typical studio environment. If this comes across like a CNN panel, we’re sunk. Think more about the average co-working space or a “teaming area” you’d see at an agency. The roundtable segments will need to feel / look as if the viewer is eavesdropping on a conversation. They shouldn’t start with a moderator controlling the conversation nor should we be aware of the camera through showy zooms, etc.

We’ll also need to see a variety of viewpoints. Again, this can’t be set up as “one side thinks this, another side thinks that.”

The 13 week editorial calendar will likely include a handful of topics that we go back to again and again in each season/cycle like gun violence, equality, civil rights, climate change, privacy. But instead of broad topics like this, we’ll delve into micro issues through personal stories. But it also lets us follow up on topics and people so viewers can follow the ongoing story. (Our social and web presence will also be key to this in our off-periods.)

Who is the audience? How do we know this will work?
As we’ve said, this is tailored to an under 40 audience. I’ve outlined above how this is tailored to their news interests. Some of these same values are shared by the Gen X audience, particularly the community aspects of it.

I look at stories like this that show how a broad issue – gentrification – is told through a personal story and see that it works.

And how there’s usually a deeper story to be told in these kinds of viral conversations.

Also, I’ve been asking people what they want more of in media. The above outline reflects a lot of that but puts it in a national context, instead of a local one.

Plus, this social-driven approach is something other news organizations are doing. For instance, Pro Publica does it. Their Get Involved page shows you how it’s done.

Final thoughts
The above should be the start of a conversation. From a production standpoint, there may be things we need to scale back on and begin as an experiment.

But there’s something here that would be unique and meeting a consumer demand.

Touchvision ends with a proud legacy

Chicago, Media, ,

touchvisionYesterday, the staff of Touchvision was informed our company would be shutting down, effective immediately. A bunch of my fantastic and talented colleagues are looking for work today so if you need writers, producers, editors or any other kind of content-slingers, I got a list for you.

A little more than a year ago, Justin Allen – a guy I’d briefly worked with on a video series for Chicago magazine – said he was rebooting the two-year-old company into a place that allowed for creative risks and asked if I wanted to join as the editorial director. For someone who looks for fun and creative challenges in his work, it was perfect. Plus, I got to work with Jessica Galliart again who makes everything she touches better. (Hire her.)

This piece in Crain’s by Lynne Marek talks about what it was like to turn around that company. I give her an enormous amount of credit for getting what we were about and digging into what we do.

While its end may suggest we didn’t succeed (media critic Robert Feder calls it a “noble failure” and says we did “a lot of good work”), I’ll say here that a company trying to move from a traditional TV model to one informed by digital and social media has a lot of challenges. We just ran out of time. Maybe the task was greater than us. But we worked our asses off trying. We had a lot of support from our board and our investors, too.

I still think something like this can work and make money. Touchvision’s end and the shutdown of Al Jazeera America’s TV outlet may seem like a counterargument but I’d point you to its digital arm, AJ+. They do excellent work in the vein of what we were doing at Touchvision and have had a lot of success with it.

Feel free to skip the rest of this if you like but I don’t want to wrap this without calling out some of the excellent things that Touchvision created in little more than a year and would not have been possible without someone like Justin at the helm and many talented people behind-the-scenes.

(Click these links now because I’m not sure how long they will be around).

On my first day, I saw a preview of a feature we did on cleaning up a former meth house. It’s bracing and sad but I knew then that this was a place that was capable of wonderful things.

One of the first things I helped produce was this four-part (!!!) series on Uber and its effects on the economy. If anything, the issues we raised there have become even more prevalent since then. (Check me out in part 4 as I moderate a discussion between our two producers and briefly fulfill my dream to host a news and civic affairs show!)

We also did a great job at making TV seem more like the Internet. This daily news series called Speaking of News started on the live streaming platform Periscope. I’d point an iPhone at the incomparable Molly Adams while she sat in our company’s kitchen talking about whatever important stories and angles she felt were being ignored that day. It evolved into this shot-in-the-newsroom show mainly made for Facebook and YouTube and aired in a shortened form on our daily TV show.

Using that model, we launched another Periscope show called We Should Talk About This with Gwen Purdom and Erik Niewiarowski. It was pop culture-focused and would run for fifteen minutes on Periscope while a three minute version ran on YouTube, Facebook and TV. The show was a joy to watch because of Gwen and Erik’s incredible chemistry and really hit its stride when Gwen brought in a stuffed deer head to hang in the background.

WE PRODUCED A TV SHOW WITH A STUFFED DEER HEAD IN THE BACKGROUND.

Also worth noting here that WSTAT was produced every day by our social and digital producer Angie Jaime. For years, I’ve been in places that talked a good game but never quite empowered their social/digital teams to make, produce and improve our content. I’m really glad we did and we were the better for it.

We had one of the best social commentators anywhere in Felonious Munk. You’ll see more of him soon as he’s already appeared on The Nightly Show. Working with him on his pieces was always a highlight of my day.

Plus, our docs team – run by Lauren Mialki – did some of the most beautiful, moving work you’ll ever see. A look at youth affected by Chicago violence, a profile of a guy who runs The First Church of Marijuana and what it’s like to be a 25-year-old with cancer. Our special projects group, under the guidance of Julie Svetcoff, cranked out new, experimental projects every week with some of the best comedians in Chicago.

We did long pieces of cultural analysis, we talked about Internet harassment, we had series on everything from science and psychology to marijuana to cocktails to bullying to gender issues.

Every single day we produced a morning news show (with headlines, culture and business news) and figured out how to make it work as social media content.

And we held a Chewbacca impersonation contest.

That’s just a few highlights. We got to hire and work with people I’d long admired. Every single day, I was stunned a place existed that was doing this kind of work and my team and I were a part of it.

I say all this not to brag on us too much but to tell you that there are some peerlessly talented people out there looking for work. And anyone who tells you it’s not possible to run a high-caliber media company in Chicago is trying to sell you something. We had some pretty solid plans for how to make money at it, too.
And if you’d like to know how…well, I have some time on my hands and I know some other folks who do, too. Get at me.

At Mizzou, the tension between the message, the medium and the marginalized

Media, Race, , , ,
Graduate student Jonathan Butler leads the protestors in a chant in Jesse Hall at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, on Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2015. (KOMUNews image via Creative Commons license.)
Graduate student Jonathan Butler leads the protesters at the University of Missouri on Oct. 6, 2015. KOMUNews image via Creative Commons license. Link

I’ve been struggling to reconcile competing thoughts on what’s happening at Mizzou, specifically between students and reporters.

This Vox post, quoting a Washington Post article about the parallel conversation at Yale, talks about an important part of these stories that’s often ignored:

One of the purposes of college is to articulate stupid arguments in stupid ways and then learn, through interactions with fellow students and professors, exactly how stupid they are. Anyone who thinks that the current generation of college students is uniquely stupid is either an amnesiac or willfully ignorant… As a professor with 20 years of experience, I can assure you that college students have been saying stupid things since the invention of college students.

The difference today is that because of social media, it is easy for college students to have their opinions go viral when that was not the original intent… If you are older than 22 and reading this, imagine for a second how you would feel if professional pundits pored over your undergraduate musings in real time.

So on one hand, I get it: Nobody wants an unintended gesture made or statement said in the heat of a chaotic situation to represent you on the Internet for the next 10-15 years. On the other hand, a cause that’s just and fair should withstand the scrutiny of an open press. The most newsworthy part of the Mizzou story was the black football players banding together and refusing to play – a story that touches on lots of hot-button issues: race, the ongoing conversation about unpaid student athletes, worker protections, social justice, etc. These issues should get a proper vetting in the press.

Still, how do Mizzou students exercise their collective right to protest and make change, do it in a transparent way and protect their rights to privacy? Honestly, I’m not sure. Yes, this is all being done in public space and on some level this isn’t private. But the coverage often outlasts the moment and at some point it affects the comfort level sources have with the press.

Is it possible to protect the right to make a mistake in protest efforts but also keep traditional media close? Does that get you anything as a protest group in 2015? It’s as much a risk as a benefit. If you have access to social media, which – thanks to Black Twitter and other groups – can amplify a story to its intended audience and understand it in a way traditional press cannot, why risk talking to CNN? Yes, there’s a First Amendment right to a free press, but these student groups aren’t a governmental body. Late today, the groups seemed to realize they’d perhaps started to do themselves more harm than good.

Prior to the last year, the national media has often undercovered stories on race. Even with an increased effort to cover these kinds of stories, they’re usually filmed through a Manchiean lens – this view vs. that view. A story like Mizzou is far more complicated with some folks seeming to act in a contradictory way. After a year of watching the way on-the-ground stories have been twisted by a virality-driven national media, I’m not surprised there’s a distrust of people who parachute into an event that has a complicated backstory. Somewhere in here, the affects of all the cuts that have happened to newspapers’ local and regional bureaus have prevented an ongoing dialogue between the press and their potential sources and the press now finds itself literally blocked out.

I don’t have a clear set of answers or a way forward here, but it’s clear this won’t be the last time reporters will be challenged in how to cover on-the-ground stories with marginalized groups. Just like their counterparts on the business side, they’ll need to stop insisting on a return to a previous model and adapt, perhaps – as local stories like this blow up into national stories quickly – by rebuilding the bureau model around beats, rather than geographic areas.

EDITED TO ADD: Having said all that, I pretty much sign on to the views expressed in this Atlantic article, too.

Chicago media is getting rid of what it needs the most

Media, Politics

5409137739_ce149aa951_b

Last week, a new report from The Knight Foundation said a lack of local news and information was the biggest cause of declining turnout among millennial voters.

Meanwhile, these three things happened in Chicago media:

* The Chicago Tribune laid off ten people from its newsroom
* The Sun-Times cut its Homicide Watch editor
* WBEZ canceled The Afternoon Shift, cutting two hours – or half – of its local programming

I’ve often heard the phrase “cutting into bone” when describing particularly painful layoffs and it’s hard not to see the above that way. Especially when you consider the Knight Foundation’s findings.

(Full disclosure: One of the people Tribune cut is someone I’m friendly with, I’ve had an op-ed published on Homicide Watch and I’ve been on Afternoon Shift a bunch of times – including its last show – and became friends with its host, Niala Boodhoo, as a result. I’m not exactly a disinterested party here but I’m trying to keep my argument separate from all that.)

In the case of Tribune, the average person probably doesn’t recognize most of those names. Copy editors, image techs and associate/planning editors aren’t exactly star columnists or even as familiar to readers as reporters with a byline. But you’ll notice them when they’re gone. They’re the folks that keep bad grammar and typos out of the copy, ensure the photos look front page-worthy and decide what gets covered when and how. If you want quality local news coverage and not just filler, they’re the people that make it happen.

Yet it’s often easy to think those cuts can be made without damaging the organization. Your average copy editor doesn’t have a big Twitter following so the outcry will be limited to those in the know on a couple media-focused blogs. Everyone who’s left will be asked to “do more with less.”  The mistakes will slip by and everyone will hope no one really noticed.

But hey, at least the the three nationally syndicated columnists who published transphobic nonsense still have a spot on the op-ed page.

With the Sun-Times, you’d think a person whose entire job is to track the names and faces behind the numbers of murders in Chicago would still have a job. But no. How do you not have a spot for that guy in your Chicago newsroom in 2015? Especially with all the evidence that the CPD has previously played a shell game with the true murder count?

When you have something no one else has it puts you at an advantage but only if you realize what you have and know what to do with it. How does the editor of Homicide Watch seem less crucial to a news organization trying to create an engaged, loyal, paying audience than a strategy of Buzzfeed knockoffs with content scraped from social media and other news publishers? Publishers with deeper knowledge and pockets have tried and failed at the latter. Even something like Circa which attracted the best and the brightest, eventually learned that technology and distribution won’t matter unless a unique content strategy underpins it.

As for WBEZ, the Afternoon Shift‘s mission was to feature voices other than the usual slew of bold-faced names, pundits and academics. It was a two-hour show that devoted itself to issues like segregation, crime, jobs, arts and how all these topics interrelate. Award-winning bartenders were juxtaposed with authors, sports figures with community activists. A typical recent show looked at whether local doctors understand nutrition, Illinois’s state budget cuts, NASA’s plan to launch a flying saucer and the Blackhawks. It was unique, it was local, it was entertaining and it informed the public – the latter is a mission critical aspect of public media. It’s all the kind of thing listeners are willing to support with money.

Admittedly, I’m a novice about public media’s overall business model. Perhaps a strategy that creates more shows like Sound Opinions, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me and This American Life – shows that can be syndicated throughout the public media universe – and fewer that only appeal to a purely local audience make more sense for WBEZ’s bottom line. And hey, those are good shows! But in just a quick perusal of their financial documents (page 4 of this doc is a good summary), it seems membership contributions, community service grants and other program-specific underwriting drives 70% of revenue. (As a comparative, Wisconsin Public Radio is 59% listener/grant/underwriting-supported.) That all seems driven by local programming, which WBEZ says it’s committed to in shifting staff from The Afternoon Shift to The Morning Shift (though the length of the show won’t change as of now and firing Niala, the show’s host, a journalist with several years experience reporting on Chicago and the Midwest, seems misguided, at best).

But again, maybe the health of the organization overall is in better shape if you’re less dependent on those three buckets so local programming isn’t a great bet for the future. How that delivers on a public media mission and less on a capitalistic one will be for them to figure out.

On the whole, it was a damn awful week for people who believed in the value of quality local news. Discussing it this way gives me no thrill. I want vibrancy in local media.

Now, back to that Knight Foundation report and a quote from the release about it:

“The report highlights that young adults care about their cities and have many concerns that local government can address, but these potential voters lack the information, habits, and social cues that would prompt them to engage and participate in local elections,” said David Mermin, partner at Lake Research Partners.

Chicago recently had a mayoral runoff election. It was historic. Never in the history of Chicago elections did something like this ever happen. The two candidates could not have been more different. Stakes, financial and otherwise, were real. Both candidates cranked up their get out the vote efforts…

Turnout averaged 40%.

I’m generally an optimist, even about the state of journalism and media. This week put me back on my heels a bit. In large part because I work in media so this is a direct concern of mine. But it’s one thing for me to be worried about the future of my friends. At this point, I’m worried about the future of democracy.

UPDATE: My friend Mike Fourcher has a response to the above. I don’t see my argument as “If only someone would provide good local news, people would care” so much as it is “Your audience says they need something and you’re choosing not to provide it.” And if you give an audience what they’re asking for they’ll probably see you as valuable and your chances of survival are better.

“Winter apocalypse” image by Quinn Dombrowski. Used through Creative Commons license.