[heart beating] I don't think the news is that credible.

There's just some stuff that's, like, blatantly false on the news.

The local news.

I trust the national news, I'm not so sure about.

There's so much going on.

You never know who to trust.

What does it mean when the citizens of a country that protects press freedom in its constitution have the lowest trust in their news?

A free and independent press is the heartbeat of democracy.

It circulates the information we need to govern ourselves, to choose our leaders, to shape the society we want to live in.

But the volume and speed of information coming at us today makes it hard to know what to trust and where to find the truth.

When did this problem start?

And what happens if we don't solve it?

[continuous tone] Major funding provided by: The Institute for Nonprofit News leads a network of more than 500 independent newsrooms in communities across North America Learn more at FindYourNew.org Trust has been declining for decades.

When you ask people how much faith they have in the mass media to accurately and fairly report the news, the numbers have been going the wrong direction and continued to go the wrong direction, and the consequences are huge for democracy.

When it comes to our ability to understand each other, to debate ideas, which is at the core of how democracy functions, an important part of a democratic society is using the press to hold your leaders to account.

Business leaders or government leaders and the leaders of all the important institutions in the community.

My name is Nina Joss and I am currently the Littleton Independent Reporter at Colorado Community Media.

I was hired as CCM as an intern in August of 2022, and then I got hired on full time in October.

So Nina has covered the police shooting, with the video coming out this week, and some of the questions that Nina and I talked about is how when you get a story like this, that other news outlets are covering as well, how do we cover it too?

So I rewatched it, and based on that information, when the audio comes on, it means that he pressed the button after he shot the guy, which like is not good.

Probably like he really should have turned that on before he shot the guy.

So I'm not like hiding that in the story, saying he turned the camera on right after after he shot him.

So I am still including those things, but I'm also including the context of like, why was there no audio?

Well, it's not because he didn't turn it on at all.

It's because of how the camera works.

I think of myself, generally speaking, more of a storyteller.

I also try to use my stories to help people understand each other better.

So to help different readers and different audiences and different sources understand people who are different from them, I think that for me personally, that's my biggest, like, moral goal in this field.

One of my favorite parts of my job is working with young journalists and teaching young journalists.

And you do that through those meetings.

You talk about the issues in the communities.

You give them ideas on what they can cover or localize or how we can expand the story.

You know, from math being found inside a public library.

What does that mean to the public?

Why is it important?

Why should I care at the local level?

That's our job.

My name is Tatiana Flowers.

I'm the equity reporter for the Colorado Sun.

I've always excelled in communications based things like writing and reading.

They felt like a profession where I could possibly change people's lives.

Or make things better for people collectively.

And so that's why I chose it.

I try my best in the beginning of interviews to ask if the person I'm interviewing has ever dealt with a reporter, because the majority of people have never met a reporter.

And I just, I think the approach of just like not talking over them, really centering them, recording it.

Right?

And just trying to look at things with a critical lens.

I think that makes people feel safer in an interview.

And just knowing that you really care about the issue.

Journalism cannot operate without this relationship of trust because, one, we're relying on sources to trust us to tell their story, and then our audiences need to trust us to relay that information accurately.

Newsrooms are facing increased challenges when it comes to getting people to be a source for a story, so that we see that true and really high profile ways where public officials decide, I don't need to talk to a journalist, I can get my message out by myself.

Why would I why would I go through this third person and and somehow trust them to edit me accurately and to, you know, get the most important part of the messages out when I can just go on social media and probably get more views.

But journalists are also facing that from regular people that when they pop in to a small business to ask questions about the new traffic pattern in town, they're sometimes faced with potential sources who are suspicious of journalists motives and integrity, and are just wary of even talking to them at all.

I just wanted to call to clarify your last email.

I wasn't sure what you are referring to.

Taking a total pass on.

So I just wanted to make sure it's still on today.

Okay, awesome.

Well, if you change your mind, please do let me know.

We know that that the concept we're talking about right now is definitely present in a lot of our conversations with people throughout the story.

And that's exactly what we're trying to to change, is try to help people to understand that as a local newspaper, our job is to represent all voices.

If you change your mind and believe me on that, I would love to have the chance to speak with you.

And then he said, it's going to take a total pass.

And then I and then he said, I felt pretty hesitant at first when you asked to do the story, because reporters can just cherry pick and write whatever narrative they want.

And so I was already feeling hesitant, but I agreed anyways.

And then when you asked if it could be filmed, I was like, oh, I should have just trusted my gut so I don't want to do it anymore.

It has never been harder to report, period.

Because the environment is when it comes to the media and the perception of the media is toxic and has been, you know, for five, seven years where a popular narrative is that it is perfectly acceptable to attack and demonize the media.

(indistinct shouting) You ain't got no right to take.. Don't take a picture of me, man!

I'm with the media!

Trustworthy news relies on the ability of journalists to report the truth.

But the United States has fallen to 55th place in terms of press freedom.

That's among 180 countries surveyed annually by Reporters Without Borders.

The issue isn't censorship.

It's a number of structural factors that include consolidation of local news outlets, disappearing local news, the repeal of decades old laws, encouraging balanced viewpoints, polarization of the media, and the spread of disinformation that makes it difficult to know what news to trust.

Incidents of violence and harassment of the press are increasing.

For example, in September of 2022, a local reporter in Las Vegas was stabbed to death by a person he reported on.

In February of 2023, a local reporter in Orlando, Florida, was murdered while he reported on a shooting, and in August 2023, police in Marion, Kansas, raided their local newspaper, the Marion County Record, which is known for its accountability reporting.

After the paper began investigating the chief of police.

I've become a little bit uncomfortable with telling people I'm a journalist because, this profession is has become a political football.

It's almost become, you know, the most nonpartisan journalists in the world are now, you know, being accused of being partisan.

There is a bigger and bigger split among, people's partisan identities and how those affect how they see the news.

But more fundamentally, for the country, it's a problem of democracy and have shared humanity and have empathy building.

I was up in North Carolina this last Thanksgiving, and there were at least two people I ran into who are not invited to Thanksgiving with their families because what they tell me is they share the truth.

But when I talk to them a little bit more, it's because they are constantly sharing misinformation.

Essentially, at this point, it's tearing communities apart, families apart, and it is contributing to the rise in polarization that we're seeing in this country.

People began to lose confidence in news and journalism as the source of of quality, reliable information, disinformation, misinformation flooded in, which made matters even worse because now I can't trust anything.

Then came the pandemic.

[heartbeat] (dramatic music) Whatever you do, don't try this at home.

This clip, widely shared on WhatsApp, is just one example of the many coronavirus related stories circulate online.

A four year old boy in Colorado died from the flu this week after his mother was advised by members of an anti-vax Facebook group not to give him Tamiflu.

Mr. Ayres, when you entered the Capitol last year, did you believe that the election had been stolen?

At that time, yeah.

You know, Everything I was seeing online, I definitely believed that that's exactly that was the case.

So I think we see the stakes now.

I think we see, like, how, fragile, like our society in democracy can be, if we don't have a shared set of facts, if you don't trust your newscast or the stories that you read in the paper, we have no future.

[continuous tone] (electronic music) There's liberal bias against conservative issues in the media.

There are some notorious ones that are just constant lies.

Up to 80 and 90 percent are fictitious crap.

In the newsrooms, you don't see much diversity.

You know, you only get one point of view, so they tend to insert their own opinions.

It's just I think they're really searching for ratings.

And so whatever is going to get you to click that or watch that that night, they're going to follow up on, I think they have a point that a lot of the news is not credible, and if it's not edited by a trustworthy group of editors, then how can you have confidence in it?

[heartbeat] Any accusation you come up with about journalism, we can find examples of where it's true.

Plenty of journalism doesn't care deeply about getting it right, is more profit driven than mission driven, and makes your responsible decisions because of a profit motive or because of ratings.

Plenty of journalism is dishonest about, an agenda or preference or perspective that is driving the news.

The experience of being a news consumer is you're flooded with information, some from responsible, mission driven journalism and some from bad actors.

And it's really, really hard to tell the difference.

It wasn't always this way.

In the heyday of broadcast journalism, news reporting was generally aligned in terms of the basic facts of stories.

Not so today.

Technology has changed everything anyone can pose as a reporter on the internet, large corporations, public relations firms, and even foreign governments push the narratives that serve their own interests.

It seems like there are more bad actors out there than ever before.

To understand how we got to this point, it helps to know a little about the history of the press in the United States.

[heartbeat] It's not like we ever had a perfect press system in the United States, or anywhere for that matter.

But what we have seen throughout the history of the press are these moments of structural transformation.

And one of the first major structural transformations was when what we often refer to as the partisan press began to transition into the commercial press.

As newspapers began to commercialize.

As publishers began to see that they could make tremendous amounts of money through the press, they began to see their audiences as consumers, consumers whose attention they would try to capture, to deliver to advertisers.

Until the 1830s, newspapers were funded mostly by readers.

News organizations realized that the more readers they had, the more valuable advertisements were to the businesses that bought them.

Higher circulation translated to higher ad prices.

By 1879, advertising accounted for 44% of newspaper and magazine revenue in the United States.

Within 20 years, advertising would surpass circulation as the main revenue source for news organizations.

As you may imagine, in order to capture their attention, they would do things like sensationalize stories, trivialize stories, dramatize stories, focus on scandal, focus on fearmongering, and in some cases, even making things up.

This was the era of yellow journalism.

So when this transition happened, when we started focusing more on this excessive, commercialized press, I think there certainly was a loss of trust.

And we saw this in the late 1800s, early 1900s, which may have been seen as the first journalism crisis.

[Heartbeat] [Music] Commercial publishers didn't want to lose their profits, but they realized that in order to maintain their profits, they also had to maintain some respectability.

So it was during the early 1900s when you saw the establishment of the first major journalism schools.

You saw this adoption of professional norms, things like not just fact based reporting, but trying to be neutral and somewhat balanced in their coverage.

This early period of press reform spurred the formation of journalist organizations dedicated to raising journalistic standards.

One of those organizations was the Society of Professional Journalists, or SPJ, formed in 1909 at Indiana's DePauw University.

Today, SPJ is comprised of print, broadcast, and online journalists, as well as educators and students.

They provide journalists with training, fact checking tools, and a wealth of media ethics resources.

SPJ is really known for its Code of Ethics, which lays out what journalists should do to be considered a professional journalist.

Such things as the reporting is accurate, the reporting is fair.

They work with integrity, they're accountable for their work.

And some news organizations use the SPJ code of ethics, as a template for their own.

We tell our advertisers their payment doesn't give them additional influence.

We as a news industry, need to be brave in saying I'm sorry.

This goes against everything that we have, is our code of ethics that we work by.

So we follow the NPR Ethics Guide.

We follow SPJs ethics guide, and we have a few of our own ethics as well, is we publish all of that on our website so people can see the standards that we hold ourselves to.

We're trained as journalists, were trained to follow the facts, and we have a roomful of people who have different backgrounds, different ideologies, who will ask a question about a story if they think the balance or the fairness or the accuracy is off.

We have a editing system that stories go through, and then we have our readers and our listeners who might critique our coverage.

Journalism.

At its best, is a team sport, and it's done by a group of people who have consistent standards, who have goals that are clear and mission that is clear.

Criteria for decision making that are clear, and a team of people who hold each other accountable for those decisions.

Election denier keeps being brought up in all of our stories, and they ask, why does it have to be brought up?

I don't know if they would consider their platform denying the election they stand for election integrity.

They would use a different view.

That's very true.

But I do think that, like focusing on the fact that there's a differentiation among the party in how they saw that election is crucial because like in talking to Suzanne, that was like the main wedge that she sees in the party.

So many people are cynical about what we do, and they assume that what when we make a mistake, that it was deliberate, there was not a mistake.

The last thing that a journalist wants to do is to get a detail wrong.

Even a small detail Nina called me yesterday and was like, this guy calls and says I'm wrong, that the city clerk's misquoted.

What do I do?

Im like, you call the city clerk and say, hey, is this information correct?

I just want to make sure I'm wrong.

And then it was more of a full on correction.

I think it was the clarification.

She basically was like, yeah, I would have never said that.

And I like listen to the recording.

I'm like, basically what you said.

Like, yeah, I didn't put your exact words because you're speaking in legal jargon.

So I paraphrased it and based on what I stood, do you want to try again?

And then we like re-had that conversation.

I'm really glad that he found that, because it helped my reporting to be more accurate in the nuance.

[heartbeat] Many racial groups have not had trust in the media for a long time because they had been excluded.

Their voices had been excluded.

I think today that while there's improvement, I think there's still a lot of distrust because we have several decades of news organizations, just not including those voices.

If we look at some of the earliest newspapers here in the United States, many of them were focused on covering African Americans and Indigenous people as if they weren't entirely human.

Is the press system commercialized they would not always serve these communities very well.

And that's partly because advertisers were trying to reach these communities.

There was a kind of racial redlining that afflicted the news media.

So advertisers wanted to reach whites in wealthy audiences.

And so communities of color and poor households often were not well served by this commercial press system.

So that's why we had the Black press.

That's why we had the Native American press and the Latino press, etc.

by some estimates, there were over a thousand Black newspapers in the US by 1900 devoted to covering and advocating for issues important to black citizens.

One of the most effective was the Memphis Free Speech, edited by a Black schoolteacher who had been born into slavery, named Ida B.

Wells.

After three friends were lynched following false accusations in the white press, she devoted her career to exposing the epidemic of lynching and racial hatred in the US.

Her writing brought threats in the white press and the destruction of her newspaper by an angry mob, but Wells continued her investigative journalism from Chicago.

Her stories continued to be carried in the black press, but remained largely unknown to white readership.

Communities of color were often overlooked, and there are some really startling examples of this.

One example would be the Tulsa massacre of 1921, where hundreds of African Americans were killed.

The local press helped instigate this massacre, essentially worked as public relations for the Klan, and even after the massacre, the local press did a lot to try to cover it up.

I would say that the press has been complicit in those racist narratives that have warped our historical understanding of these moments.

In 1968, there had been a series of riots, including in Detroit, Chicago, and they were really bad.

President Johnson wanted to try to uncover the systemic problems that had contributed to this spate of race riots and uprisings.

Well, Kerner Commission was called by Lyndon B. Johnson to address some of the root problems of what was going on.

What the commission found was that the press had played an important role in really exacerbating these relationships between different communities.

The coverage of African-American communities was sparse.

What was there focused heavily on, crime and poverty and did not give a fuller picture of African-American life.

And it noted that for white Americans, their view of who African Americans were came from the media.

The current commission said to improve the diversity of your coverage, you need to improve the diversity of your staff, and that diversity should not just be in the report or ranks, it should also be in the management ranks.

That's when they started hiring people of color to fill positions, specifically black people.

At the time.

The thing about the Kerner Commission, though, was that while it was spot on and sort of identifying the problems, nothing was really made and implemented into law.

So I think it has to come from the institution as well as from individual journalists who are working with the public.

Right.

So, the institution has to make a better effort of reaching out to communities of color, communities that it hasn't normally had contact with.

Journalists need to put aside, or at least be aware of how their biases might be getting in the way of their connecting with the people they're trying to cover.

They should be asking questions, reflective questions like, am I stereotyping this person that I'm talking to?

Am I seeing this person as a full human?

Am I being arrogant at this very moment, acting like I know everything, but I really know nothing?

Black people, for example, have been among some of the most resilient people in this world, and have contributed in many ways.

And I don't always I think a lot of reporters and other black people don't necessarily think that that is ever been a focus, or that it has been enough of a focus.

And one thing that I grapple with is trying to shine a light on those things, because they are still an issue.

However, I try my best not to have all my stories about a specific group just be about their struggles or people who are regularly discriminated against.

That's an issue and it should be talked about, but you have to be careful to not paint them as a group that's perpetually struggling, because there's so much more than that.

I mean, people are so multifaceted that I just think that is something that we need to be more aware of.

[heartbeat] (threat music) So there was this trend of deregulation in the 1980s, especially during the Reagan administration, but then continued, and arguably accelerated under the Clinton administration.

During the Reagan administration, you saw the dismissal of a whole host of public interest protections, the one that's best known as the Fairness Doctrine was thrown out in 1987.

The Fairness Doctrine stemmed from a decision in 1949 where the FCC determined that for broadcasters to hold on to their licenses, they had to cover issues, controversial issues that were important to local communities from a diverse range of perspectives.

As a result of that, in the 1980s, we saw a rise in programing such as Rush Limbaugh's where, you know, was just outrageous things.

He was saying in many ways because it made him a lot of money.

Well, we saw the 1990s under the Clinton administration was the throwing out many of the, media ownership, restrictions prior to the 1996 Telecommunications Act.

Any one broadcaster could only own 40 stations.

The 1996 Telecom Act threw that out the window, so that soon you had Clear Channel One company owning 1200 stations.

This problem of media ownership, concentration often means fewer voices, fewer viewpoints.

I do think this also has contributed to the lack of trust in our media institutions.

[heartbeat] (dramatic music) Cable television was first deployed in 1948 to provide television signals to areas with poor reception.

By the 1990s, programmers such as Fox News and MSNBC dominated cable news.

Most television news competed for viewership across all segments of the population, but cable programmers targeted niche audiences on the far ends of the political spectrum, and because they weren't broadcasting on public airwaves, they were not bound by many of the public interest regulations imposed on broadcasters by the Federal Communications Commission.

I think round the clock cable coverage has created this ecosystem of news as entertainment, news as a way to incite people.

High quantities of opinion content really erode trust.

They don't announce when they're switching from news to opinion.

These networks have the name news in their name, but you can watch it for 4 or 6 hours in primetime and all you hear is a handful of news stories.

But 30 to 40 peoples different opinions.

[heartbeat] The growing power of social media platforms has affected the way we consume news.

The way the news is produced, because increasingly we all are getting our news and information from these platforms who are now acting as the new gatekeepers.

They're able to set algorithms that determine what kind of news stories get elevated in our news feeds, what kind of stories we never see in our news feed.

They're often trying to encourage engagement.

This is how they collect information on us that they then sell to advertisers.

In fact, to be correct, we probably should think of them as advertising companies.

That's their primary business model.

So what this means is that we're often being exposed to information that will cause a reaction by other things that we like, or that we want to share, or things that we hate.

On top of all of this, we have section 230, which shield platforms from any sort of legal liability and the kind of news and information that they are amplifying, even dangerous mis- or disinformation.

Facebook knows that content that elicits an extreme reaction from you is more likely to get a click, a comment, or reshare.

And it's interesting because those clicks and comments and reassures aren't even necessarily for your benefit.

It's because they know that other people will produce more content if they get the likes and comments and re-shares.

They prioritize content in your feed, so you will give little hits of dopamine to your friends so they will create more content.

And they have run experiments on people, producer side experiments where they have confirmed this.

[heartbeat] Local news as more trusted the national news, people feel a connection to their neighbors who are covering the news in a very different way than they do in a city that's two hours away, or certainly on a national level.

We see the people at the grocery store or we see them at a restaurant, sources that we're talking to, we live in the neighborhoods where we're writing and reporting about.

We're also accountable to our community.

They can write a letter, or they can write an email, and they can take exception with coverage, or they can object to coverage, or they can say, you got something wrong and we'll respond.

Nina did a great job with Haley on the housing series regarding bias.

So we got multiple letters to the editor.

I'm quite happy with your biased journalism and liberal journalism.

And yes, these letters are printed because I do believe the public has their right to say their opinions.

(Nina): I was hoping wed get some of those.

[Heartbeat] And it's a short daily about households that have sort of started rebuilding or on the process of rebuilding after the Marshall fire.

And I decided to do it because there's kind of an equity angle.

It's a study done by the Urban Institute, and it's unsurprisingly shows that households with fewer financial resources are falling behind in the rebuilding process.

How did it turn on her DPW water story, by the way, is this the company reading the meters, or is this somebody else sending out the bills?

I think it's billing because they added like a a small fee also to the bill.

They've outsourced the billing.

And when you get the receipt, it looks very spammy.

It's just red flag after a red flag with a receipt.

Depending on what shape that's in.

That's potentially a good story.

Procedurally pretty clean.

Okay.

Smith and Chris will continue their work on the jail escape, and we hope to have a story at some point today on the investigation into how this happened.

And it's focus on the possibility that the two men who broke out of the jail had some inside help.

Local news is where a lot of the things that affect your life happen the city council meetings, the county commissioners meetings, the local board of health, these are the these are the bodies that make decisions that affect your life directly.

If we weren't the ones who were there asking questions and scolding these leaders accountable, then nobody would be.

Somebody has to be watching.

And that's the journalists.

The state of local news today is quite dismal.

It's very hard to discern any sort of silver lining amongst the wreckage.

Some 80, 85% of local advertising goes to Google, Facebook, other digital platforms and local television.

They've lost classified ads, they've lost some of the big department store ads and some of the big display ads that help to subsidize the big newsrooms that they had.

In the past year, I've seen two of the newspapers that I worked for disappear.

We often hear these things about news deserts and increasingly entire areas, entire communities are losing access to any local news media whatsoever.

The fact is, the United States is currently losing more than two newspapers per week.

That's according to research by Northwestern University's Medill Local News Initiative.

To put that into perspective, the country has lost more than a quarter of our newspapers.

Most are not replaced by an online equivalent, leaving more than a fifth of us living in news deserts.

The few newspapers that are still existing are often where referred to as ghost newspapers.

If you actually look to see how many journalists are there, they've been completely hollowed out.

The ones that are still standing can't get to everything like they used to, or might be more under pressure.

And it means for the wider community that stories are that should be told and not being told.

So in 2023 and 2024 budgets, we are looking at cost saving measures for newsrooms to keep journalists on track and keep newspapers printing.

So part of that became cutting our office in half.

So as you can see, this is our former newsroom.

This is where I used to sit over here.

And so we're taking all of that down.

We're going to bring it over here.

And that should be how we work in the next year.

So I think until we find a new model, we're going to see local news media continue to wither away.

Hedge funds and other financial buyers of newspapers have been quite active over the past several years.

The most voracious and destructive of them is Alden Global.

holding Global Capital.

And, you know, a number of other hedge funds, specialize in finding distressed properties, Alden identified.

The Denver Post and its parent company as an area where they could go in and make a lot of money.

They took full control of the Tribune Corporation, the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun.

Within a year after I got here, it was sold and then bought by, Alden Capital.

They come in, they sell off the real estate, they cut the staff, they cut the paper and consolidate sections and do whatever they can to throw things overboard to jack up the profits.

The Denver Post isn't even in Denver anymore.

There's a public awareness challenge in that most Americans don't realize that they're a local news organization is in trouble.

I think people take news for granted.

People didn't understand the value that they were losing out on by unsubscribing to their local paper, or not reading their local paper online.

You know, you may not read every story, you may not care about every story, but there are some out there that you're going to need to know.

[heartbeat] When you called and you asked me to comment, I was like, hit peace.

No thanks.

I asked Suzanne while I was talking to her on the record, what changed her mind?

She said one Thelma reached out to her personally.

She was like, Like they actually care.

And I said, actually, I value Nina's writing very much, and I teach my stuff on a regular basis.

To be fair, and I made that very clear.

I'm neither Republican or Democrat, but I do believe in being fair.

So by the end, she said, You know what?

Tell Nina to call me.

I believe you.

I don't know how you're going to restore the faith.

True journalists need to kick these other people out of the pool.

Think you got to get back to saying you're not a journalist.

unless you have some separation from your sources.

Unless you have subscribers that you're trying to appeal to, unless you have an ethical code, you have an editor, you have like guidelines that you work with.

Because otherwise you just get drowned out by, you know, these other sources.

And so I think local media in particular, I mean, it's always been sort of the more trusted.

It was kind of a last to go.

[heartbeat] (hopeful music) Trusting news started as a project at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri.

We do a lot of in-person trainings at industry events and conferences, and also sometimes one on one with specific newsrooms.

So the fundamental question of trusting news is what can journalists do day to day to help people decide how to spend their trust?

We need to work to build relationships that are based on trust.

We need to explain to people really specifically why they should trust us.

Journalists are faced with so many misassumptions about why and how they produce the news, and there are a lot of ways that they can, within their journalism, educate people about the topic they're covering.

And also educate people about their journalism, their ethics, their integrity, their decision making processes.

We have gone out of our way to post our code of ethics on our website.

We actually liberally borrowed it from another news organization, the Colorado Sun.

John Ingold, one of my reporters, took the lead, on crafting the ethics policy.

But the entire staff had input into it and readers did, too.

Transparency is part of being trustworthy, and just as we are deeply committed to public service, we are absolutely committed to ethical conduct.

One of the reasons why I liked their code of ethics so much is because it actually takes time to very clearly describe certain journalistic terms that we think everybody knows, like off the record.

What does that mean?

It defines our, policy for anonymous sources.

It talks about the relationships that we have with our sources, and the agreements that we make or do not make with them.

If people take the time to read it, it should go a long way to helping them understand how we do our job a little bit more.

There are a lot of ways that journalists can explain why they chose to do a story.

One recent example I loved was from Radio Partners in Pennsylvania, WITF?

They were doing a story about critical race theory, and many people will come at that story with assumptions about what that is.

Assumptions about the journalist based on why would you even cover something so polarizing?

So by attaching a note at the top of the story saying, here's why we're doing this story and what our goals are with the story, they diffused a lot of potential knee jerk reactions to the story.

One of the things that is critically important, and I think relatively unique about The Philadelphia Inquirer is a very, very clear, bright line distinction between opinion and news, the opinion pages and the opinion articles.

Each columnist op eds are labeled opinion.

And that's then underscored by a yellow line.

In case you missed the point, one of my favorite recent examples from a TV newsroom we've worked with is when, in doing a story about police cam footage of an incident where someone was injured being taken into custody.

Throughout the TV story, they answered a bunch of questions really seamlessly about their process and their goals.

You know, we asked the sheriff's office for more body camera video as well.

That's just kind of our job, more information, the better we can tell the story.

I also want to note that I did reach out to experts and attorney, prior law enforcement about this video to try to get some context or understanding of what is actually happening in the video.

We had a lot of conversations about this video in our newsroom.

We also met with our newsroom leaders and reached out to our race and culture team and had some very, very long discussions to ensure that our coverage was not going to harm anyone.

[heartbeat] My name is Sally Lehrman.

I'm founder and CEO of the Trust Project.

What we do is, news organizations may approach us or we may approach them.

And once they apply and then we go through a whole process of really vetting them and ensuring that they do have the public interest in mind, that they are reporting from this perspective of not trying to promote a product or an issue or a political agenda, but really are doing their own original reporting and bringing in multiple perspectives.

The Trust project came up with eight trust indicators that news consumers in the U.S. and Europe said make news more trustworthy to them.

Those indicators are best practices for funding an ethical standards journalist expertise in the topics they're reporting on type of work, labels indicating news, opinion or paid content, citations and references to source material.

Methods for choosing and reporting stories locally sourced, indicating firsthand on the ground knowledge.

Diverse voices indicating that the story isn't just one sided and actionable.

Feedback where the news outlet takes action on the feedback from their audience.

So, as a member of the public, can you go look at a site this participating in the trust project, you will be able to find the eight trust indicators on their pages, and they show up on the article pages, and they also show up on site page.

So the best practices is your policies and practices that are all contained in one place, that you can click on an article page.

And then you get to that.

And because a lot of video is now moving kind of throughout the internet, separated from its home source, if you will, what you'll see is that Trustmark logo on like a slate at the end of a video.

Transparency and labeling make it easier for news consumers to learn the standards news organizations set for themselves, and whether watchdog organizations like the Trust project to verify their practices.

But this kind of transparency is entirely voluntary, and not all publishers are open about their practices.

But you can find out for yourself if they are digital news outlets usually have it about page.

It lists their owners, publishers, editors, reporters, and their ethics policies.

If you can't find that, try a web search.

And if all else fails, reach out to the news organization using the contact link on their homepage.

If there isn't one that could be a red flag that it isn't a credible news organization.

[heartbeat] I created the first version of the media bias chart literally just as a hobby, because I wanted to talk to my friends about their news, consumption habits and how some news sources are better.

Some are okay and some are worse, and some are left and right, but some are just extremely left and right.

And I want people to understand that the news sources they consume are really different from the news sources other people consume.

So what we're doing is looking at the content, looking at the source of the material to rate reliability and to rate left to right bias.

We have panels of analysts and they're politically diverse.

So we have centers lefts and rights.

And we have these shifts going on in Zoom all day every day.

There's cherry picking here.

This opinion is designed to convince you that the changes actually suppress voter turnout.

So here's our, interactive media bias chart.

So here's the overall rating for the Washington Examiner.

This main logo is somewhere in the middle of a bunch of these different dots.

Each one of these dots are articles that our analysts have rated.

So if you click on this one, you'll see the, article that we rated for that.

And you can explore and compare how you would rated those articles to how we've actually rated them.

We provide a course for members to learn how to do it themselves, because ultimately we think it's most valuable if people actually learn to do it themselves instead of just taking our word for it.

[heartbeat] (upbeat music) MediaWise provides people the tools to be able to identify misinformation on their own.

In a minute or less.

They can learn how to fact check their own feed, do a reverse image search, craft a good search query to be able to verify something online.

I came across this tweet where the person is reacting to a Reddit post, writing, this is child abuse and I'll die on this hill, the Reddit post reads.

Anyone else have trouble convincing your teen kids to continue transitioning?

My 14 year old daughter a me up birth, has started refusing her estradiol, so I've been crushing the pills and putting in her cereal in the morning.

Obviously this post is alarming, but guess what?

That's a huge sign that we should stop and fact check.

This was a disinformation campaign organized by anonymous users online and as you saw, that Twitter user believed it and worse, showed it to their own followers.

My name is Bella Otay.

I'm 17 and I am a YouTube host, a video editor, and a TikTok host for MediaWise Teen Fact-checking network.

Most recently, I did a, claim about jetpacks and whether or not one was real or not.

So, keyword search would basically be going into Google and typing in jetpack, U.S. Marines, whatever.

You're seeing that claim originally.

And so with that, you usually will get a bunch of sources that are kind of backing it up.

And so what you want to do is you want to be conscious of the sources that you're clicking when you do this.

So you want to look and see like do I see .edu .org, .gov.

Those sources you can definitely trust.

If you press the three dots that are next to a source, you can see about this source which shows you any biases, any credibility issues that the source might have.

A great source can be a reverse Google image search.

With this you can take a screenshot or you can download the photo that you're seeing and you can place it into Google, and it will show you all of the times that this photo has ever shown up.

When you see something that shocks you, you immediately go, okay, before I freak out about whatever this claim is, I go make sure that it's worth worrying about.

Another red flag is crossed posted content.

So online, what you'll see sometimes is a tweet that's posted on Facebook or TikTok is posted on Instagram.

It might completely lose context.

So that's a big red flag that you might be looking at at misinformation.

As far as like reading news stories.

Lack of a byline.

If you don't see an author that's always a little bit suspect.

If there isn't a clear corrections or editorial policy that they have on their website, that's always a kind of a red flag.

You can become media literate whenever you decide that you're going to make having the correct sources your priority.

[heartbeat] Journalism is no longer profitable, so we have to find ways to incentivize news organizations to transition into a nonprofit or a low profit, status so that they are no longer simply focusing on journalism as a commodity, but they're seeing it as a public service, as a commitment to local communities.

The first few examples of this were national organizations like ProPublica or the Marshall Project, or Inside Climate News.

I have seen research that shows nonprofit journalism is more trusted.

That that feels to people like money is sort of removed from it.

However, the flip side of that is that people do want to pay for the news.

A wealthy Pennsylvanian named Gerry Lenfest applied this strategy to save his local newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Lenfest, who became wealthy by building the nation's ninth largest cable television system, sold it to Comcast in 1999.

He devoted the rest of his life to philanthropy.

In 2014, when The Philadelphia Inquirer was financially struggling, he bought it and donated it to the nonprofit Philadelphia Foundation, now known as the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.

In the process, he converted the newspaper to a public benefit corporation.

Jim Friedlich explains.

The definition of a public benefit corporation is that it doesn't have to purely optimize shareholder value and maximize profit on behalf of its shareholders, so that no shareholder can say, hey, you should be giving dividends rather than hiring or retaining reporters.

In 2018, the Colorado Sun was launched as a public benefit corporation.

They converted to a nonprofit in 2023 because they felt that nonprofit status better aligned with their public service mission.

Our business model is built around paid memberships, advertising, sponsorships, grants, and public events.

We don't have a paywall at the Congress, and we've created a membership model.

We have premium newsletters, including our politics newsletter, our outdoors newsletter, and a couple of other things.

The Baltimore banner is the brainchild of hotelier and local businessman named Stewart Bainum.

And Bainum tried to buy the Baltimore Sun.

He wanted to buy his hometown newspaper, as did Gerry Lenfest.

That didn't work, so he started his own standalone digital newspaper station.

I always felt that the highest calling for me was was public service, and I'd been in the General Assembly for the eight years I mentioned, and back then we had six robust daily newspapers covering the General Assembly during the 90 day session.

But now there's just two of those papers are around and, not nearly as robust, obviously, as they were and don't have the number of journalists.

And so I got to thinking about that and thought, well, wait a minute, the school boards and and zoning boards and county and city governments as well.

So does the public really know what's going on in their community?

And if they don't, how can they govern themselves?

We started something called the Lenfest News Philanthropy Network, sharing best practices as to how did you raise money for this?

How did you raise money for that?

If someone wants to start a local news organization or wants to acquire and convert an existing news organization, that's what we do.

In 2020 someone did just that.

We are three women who are working hard to keep local news in local hands.

Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro had studied the structural challenges of local newspapers at Harvard Business School.

She had theories about how local news outlets could become more sustainable.

So in 2020, she teamed up with Fraser Nelson and Lillian Ruiz to put her theories to the test.

The team was alerted that the owners of Colorado Community Media, a group of 24 small town papers, were nearing retirement and wanted to sell with assistance from the Lenfest Institute for journalism and others, The National Trust for Local News was formed, and in 2021 they teamed up with the Colorado Sun to buy the newspapers, keeping them under local ownership.

We really feel like there's a third way for an organization like ours to work with communities to replant their papers, to put them inside of new ownership structures, to give them new owners who have a totally different set of expectations that aren't about profit and profitability, but are about long term sustainability and really about the quality of the service and the journalism.

We purchased this little set of papers, and we're not just going to take the papers and flushing down the toilet and go all digital.

We need to be able to understand the balance between what these papers are doing really well, and how do we build upon that and expand upon that.

On the digital side, our hope is that this model can travel other places and inspire other groups to do the same because, you know, you don't necessarily need to have a billionaire investor to make a huge difference in the quality and sustainability of your local journalism.

[heartbeat] Today's media landscape has been shaped by public policy as much as it has by technology, but the idea of government involvement in media is controversial.

I don't like the government funded news, that's for sure.

There's a real disconnect among Americans about the relationship between government and media.

There's this kind of lazy libertarian narrative that government has never been involved in our media system.

But the fact is, the government has always been involved in our media system.

And the question is how it should be involved, from the building of postal roads to the formation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Public policy has both encouraged and regulated the dissemination of news since the beginning of our country.

Government has a legitimate role in labeling food or drugs or transportation, and we need that for the information environment.

So I think we have to build out or expand our already existing public media system.

We have to create what I refer to as public media centers in every community across the country that's owned and controlled by local communities themselves, by the journalists themselves that look like the communities that they serve.

This alone will help build trust in media institutions better than any other policy approach.

When you look ahead at the advent of artificial intelligence and what we expect to be an explosion of content generated by software and by a machine, the average reader's ability to understand whether what they're reading was auto generated by a piece of software consciously created as misinformation by a political force here or abroad, has to be addressed.

There's a storm on the horizon that I think makes the algorithmic challenges of regulating the platforms look de minimis.

In fact, there's a long list of bills introduced in Congress over the last several years aimed at limiting the spread of misinformation and regulating the use of social media algorithms, and even promoting media literacy.

None have passed.

[heartbeat] Everyone is in charge of their own information diet, and the danger is there that something really bad for you will crop in.

And it doesn't always have a flashing light saying this is bad for you.

We have to be more active users of news and think about not being controlled by those algorithms and thinking about how do I broaden my news diet.

You can decide right now that I'm going to be media literate, and it really is skepticism and deciding that instead of just taking what you're seeing, you're going to, decide that you're going to look other places.

It's going to require work on the part of the news consumer regardless.

the starting point is to pick reliable, reputable news sources.

Local news is important.

It is a life or death matter when it comes to things like public health.

Here at this sun, we run a lot on grants and donations from people who want to be subscribers.

Even though our news is free, people need to step up and support their local news organization.

She tweeted my story and then she said, I have to say that I took a pass on Nina's first call.

I'm wary of hit pieces, but after some conversation with CCM I went ahead and I'm glad I did.

It's thoughtful.

Well done.

Local journalism worth the read.

I even subscribed.

Major funding provided by: The Institute for Nonprofit News leads a network of more than 500 independent newsrooms in communities across North America Learn more at FindYourNew.org I read the news every day on my phone.

And we watch the evening news a couple times a week.

The news outlets or the news stations They need to connect with the community more.

It makes me wonder who's pulling the strings.

I think that a more transparent process in keeping journalists accountable and ethical would be better for the readers and the viewers.

Every community had its own newspaper at one time.

Now no one does.