Author: Jack Kelly

Photo: The Colorado Sun

It’s no secret that in recent decades the financial woes of traditional newspapers have continued to get worse. It’s also no secret that Americans’ trust in the news media has dropped over the past decade.

According to a recent report from the Pew Research Center on the state of the news media, total estimated newspaper industry advertising revenue in 2017 was $16.5 billion. That’s a 10 percent drop from 2016 and a 66 percent decrease from when advertising revenue hit its peak in 2000. And while circulation revenue has incrementally increased in the last 18 years, those gains are just a drop in the bucket when compared to the industry’s losses.

A separate report from Pew published earlier this year found that just 21 percent of U.S. adults had “a lot of trust” in national news organizations. The same report stated that 29 percent of American adults trusted the same outlets “not too much/none at all.”

Decreases in advertising revenue have left media organizations looking for new sources of income and, in some cases, turning to completely new funding models. But as journalism funding models change, so do the ethical challenges associated with them. Media companies have to keep the lights on and earn audience trust.

Ensuring the independence of non-profit news

One alternative to traditional, advertising supported media is grant- and donation-based nonprofit investigative journalism. According to Andy Hall, executive director of the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism (WCIJ), the model has seen a rise in popularity since 2009 but has been around for decades.

“Nonprofit investigative journalism has been a part of the American journalistic landscape for more than four decades,” Hall said. “But starting at about 2009, you did see a sharp increase in the number of investigative newsrooms being formed here in the United States.”

WCIJ was one of those newsrooms.

Having launched in 2009, WCIJ is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that receives approximately 85 percent of its funding from donations from foundations and individuals.

This model of funding presents some obvious ethical challenges: How does an organization maintain independence when it is almost completely dependent on financial support from donors?

WCIJ, Hall said, confronts this concern head on. The fundraising policy of the organization makes it abundantly clear that it maintains editorial independence from those who want to support their work financially. And as a second level of assurance, WCIJ’s board of directors has the final say on whether or not the organization will accept a contribution.

Additionally, those looking to donate must do so publicly, as WCIJ lists the names of all organizations and individuals who provide funds to the Center on their website, no matter the size of the contribution. Hall stated that he has torn up donations that did not have a name attached to them and has returned others that came from elected officials or other parties that might have resulted in a conflict of interest. Transparency is key to earning the trust of readers.

Launching with cyptocurrency

Maintaining editorial independence from financial supporters is not a challenge unique to nonprofit newsrooms. It’s also an issue for media companies that are adopting brand-new funding models.

Take, for example, The Colorado Sun, a journalist-owned, Denver-based news organization that began publishing in September.

The Sun is supported financially in three primary ways: Donations from companies and individuals, memberships — subscriptions — to The Sun and grants from Civil, an organization interested in using blockchain technology to build a sustainable model of local journalism.

The organization takes a similar approach to WCIJ in its handling of donations. The Sun publicly lists the names of its sponsors on its website and also includes the names of members who have contributed more than $1,000 in support on the same page.

Larry Ryckman, editor of The Colorado Sun, said the decision to share this information publicly is a commitment to being transparent to The Sun’s readers.

“We feel it’s critically important for us to be transparent with our community and for people to know where we get our significant money,” he said.

Ryckman also said The Sun is clear with sponsors that it maintains editorial independence, and that if they do write a story about a sponsor, the sponsor’s support of The Sun is noted in the story.

Support from Civil, though, is what makes The Sun’s funding model unique. Civil has provided the Denver-based publication with several grants to help it get started, Ryckman said, but the ultimate goal is to eventually be sustainably funded through memberships, sponsors and, potentially, investors. Journalists, though, would always maintain a majority stake in the company, according to Ryckman.

“The whole notion of Civil was … to give us a fighting chance to make our case to the people of Colorado. And that’s exactly what Civil has done,” Ryckman said. “We are adding more paying members every day. The [future] funding model to me is not unclear at all.”

Ryckman further explained that while the idea of being financially sustained by blockchain-traded cryptocurrencies is intriguing, The Colorado Sun is “about great local journalism. Not about tokens.”

“The only way The Colorado Sun can be successful and sustainable is for the people of Colorado to support it,” he said.

The Colorado Sun is advertisement-free and stories are available to anyone, not just members.

Tapping investors instead of advertisers

This advertisement-free model has also been adopted by The Athletic, a sports journalism outlet that has seen rapid growth since its launch in January 2016. Fueled by venture capital, the site, which requires a subscription to access stories, has been able to expand into nearly 50 markets in just two years, and has added some of the biggest names in sports writing to its staff.

However, venture capital-backed journalism and paywalls introduce ethical concerns. Adam Hansmann, co-founder and chief operating officer of The Athletic, said the sports journalism company has addressed these concerns straight on.

“Investors have zero involvement in any kind of editorial decision making,” Hansmann said. He also reported that there are “multiple filters” between investors and the editorial team, and that he and CEO Alex Mather, his co-founder, “rarely” have any involvement in the editorial side of The Athletic. Instead, they prefer to leave those decisions to the editorial team they have hired and to focus on growing the business.

Hansmann also acknowledged that ethical questions about the site’s paywalls, and whom they provide access to, are valid. In response, he pointed out that 30 years ago the majority of American households received a newspaper on their doorstep every morning, and that The Athletic believes a market in which people are willing to pay for the news they want still exists.

And based on the subscriber-retention rates of The Athletic, it appears the company is having success creating those markets. Hansmann said that more than 90 percent of users renew their subscriptions each year.

Additionally, Hansmann said The Athletic unlocks stories when it is in the public’s best interest, and referenced the media organization’s free coverage of the trial of former USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar.

In an era of real uncertainty about news media revenue, funding models for new organizations are changing. Whether this transition back to reader-oriented and supported local journalism will help return Americans’ trust to news organizations remains to be seen.

Additional reading:

Ira Basen on Brand Journalism

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Craig Gilbert – Washington Bureau Chief, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

In less than a month, a highly divided American electorate will head to the polls for the U.S. midterm elections. Craig Gilbert, Washington Bureau Chief for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, has covered every presidential election since 1988 and written extensively about the significant partisan divide now separating Republicans and Democrats. The Center for Journalism Ethics recently spoke with Gilbert about the ethical challenges of covering politics and the upcoming midterm elections.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve covered numerous presidential campaigns, midterm elections and everything in between. What do you think the biggest shift has been in politics from when you first started covering them to today?

The biggest shift has certainly been the level of partisan division and the disappearance of political differences within parties, as the parties grow more homogenous internally, and they grow farther apart. I don’t know if that’s the biggest change, but that’s one that comes to mind. For example, in Wisconsin, you had some Republicans that were more liberal than Democrats. And some Democrats that were more conservative than some Republicans. You had people with different views, for example, on an issue like abortion within each party. So you had Democratic congressmen who were pro-life on abortion, and you had voters who were in one party routinely crossing over to vote for candidates in the other party. It was more unpredictable in many ways and took a bit of heat out of partisan conflicts. And so that’s been a massive change in our politics.

How do you think reporters have adapted to this new, hyper-polarized political climate?

I think it has made it more challenging to talk to people across that divide. And it’s not just true of journalism, but of lots of institutions. There’s always been an element of that, and there’s always been perceptions of bias, there’s always been partisan push back on journalism. But to the degree that you have people organizing in these camps, then you have more people seeing stories through a partisan filter. In many cases, on the same story, you’ll get flack from people on both sides because they’re reading the story differently. So the challenge is finding a way to write your stories that doesn’t pull any punches but can be read by both sides as straightforward. That’s always part of your job as a journalist, to try to see things from multiple sides, and try to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes and imagine how they might be perceiving an issue. But I think that task is even more important today, because you have to do all the things you’ve always done as a journalist, in terms of pursuing the truth, but you have to be careful to play it straight and be dispassionate as well.

So the most important thing for reporters to do is tell it how it is?

Absolutely, you have to be true to the fundamentals. When I say play it straight, I mean use simple, factual language. You don’t have to load up your stories with a lot of modifiers. You just need to tell it like it is. A lot of it is the way you tell those stories, and I think it actually enhances the credibility of your writing, the more restrained you are in your language. I think a lot of it is kind of the way you communicate, not just the substance of what you’re communicating in the story.

What are some best practices for reporters when using anonymous sources in stories?

We’re pretty conservative about that [at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel]. I’m very conservative about that. A lot of times people use anonymous sources when it’s not that hard to get somebody on the record. One of the problems in Washington is that it’s become somewhat routine, as an example, for staff members on Capitol Hill to ask to never be quoted. Which is fine, but one option is just to say, “If you want to be part of this story, and want to express your point of view, you have to go on the record. Or if you don’t want to go on the record, then your boss has to go on the record.”

So it’s very rare that you are actually in a situation where you’re faced with an actual choice between having a vital piece of information where the source won’t go on the record and having to decide whether or not to use it. Now, I’m talking about the kind of reporting I do. I think it’s probably different for White House reporters. I’m not a White House reporter. It may be different for some kind of quasi-investigative, Washington reporting. Look at the kind of stuff Bob Woodward does. Obviously, he uses a different set of rules when it comes to that, but most of the time in the reporting I do – political reporting, congressional reporting – there’s just no reason you need to do it. If somebody doesn’t want to go on the record, fine. But a lot of times when people want to go off the record, it’s just to say things that are very scripted anyway. So what’s the point?

In early September The New York Times published an anonymous op-ed written by someone in the Trump Administration. What are the ethics surrounding this kind of piece?

I think the biggest problem with a story like that is you’re asking everybody to trust you. And that’s certainly not the way we would normally operate. You want to operate with transparency. So [through publishing the piece], you’re saying, “You’re going to have to trust us about everything.” And I’m not questioning them or doubting them, but you’re saying to your readers, “You have to trust us.” A lot of the speculation is about how prominent is this person? And that’s a huge thing. If it turns out it was, and I don’t think it is, Mike Pence, that would be a very different thing than if it’s an undersecretary of state. Or if it’s the chief of staff, that would be a very different thing than if it were somebody at a lower staff level. That’s huge. And we don’t know. So they’re saying, “Trust us that this is a ‘senior official,'” but we don’t know what senior means. That’s one big set of concerns.

Finally, let’s transition to a topic that you, especially in your Wisconsin Voter blog, spend a lot of time on: polls. What are some things that reporters need to keep in mind when citing polls, given that they can sometimes be misleading?

I think polls are generally valid instruments. It’s how you use them. It’s just like anything else, any other piece of data. Take, for example, sports statistics. They can be totally misunderstood, they can be completely misread and misused and used selectively, it’s all about how you use them. I just think it’s so important that when you’re writing about polling that A, you consider the data and where it’s coming from. And you have to have faith in the in the survey data that you’re using. And B, you never want to put too much faith in a single poll or single data point. You just have to have some basic statistical understanding so you’re not writing a whole story based on a finding from a sample of 50 people.

When I write about polls, I try to check them in lots of different ways. I try not to get too hung up on one data point. I try not to get too hung up on the horse race part of the polls. I’m more interested in the trends in public opinion and finding the patterns behind the polls. I try, when I’m looking at one really interesting result, to go back and see if there’s evidence for that in polls by other pollsters, or in previous polls by the same pollster. If I’m trying to drill down in any detail I’ll aggregate a lot of polls so that I have a more reliable set of data to trust. It’s all about how you use polls.