From Statehouse to Newsroom: The Role Public Policy Can Play in Rebuilding Local News
3:00PM Aug 24, 2023
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okay good thank you sure if that was really Hello Welcome everyone to the session on public policy. And I am here with two real experts on this as well as everything else. My name is Steve Waldman. I'm the co founder of report for America and the founder and president of a new organization called rebuild local news, which is a organization that advocates public policies to help strengthen community news, and I'm here with Gracia Ella much kowski, the dean of the Newmark School of Journalism and what you may not know is that she also is a real leader in one of the pioneering experiments around public policy, which we will talk to and Bruce Putterman is the publisher of Connecticut mirror really one of the flagship nonprofit news organizations in the country. And what you probably didn't know is that he has also been leading a public policy effort in Connecticut. So we're going to talk about both of their experiences. But I wanted to kind of start by giving a little bit of an overview on this topic because it is a little bit unusual and not something we talk about a lot. And of course, usually when we the first reaction people have when you say what about government support for the news media is, Are you crazy, that's the worst idea I've ever heard to have government support for local news. So a few things about that, first of all, as a country and a community, we have had government support for news all the time, we just mostly didn't know about I mean, the founding fathers one of the first things that they did as a new Congress was to approve a massive subsidy for the newspaper industry and turn in the form of a postal subsidy in modern dollars, that would be equal to about 40 or $50 billion. So about the size of NASA is what they decided they would put government funds in. And it's reassuring because like these are literally the people who wrote the first amendment James Madison who had something to do with that thought that newspapers shouldn't pay any postage at all. He thought having even a subsidized version was a tax that was insidious. So and then there's other things throughout American history the the FCC is decision to grant TV licenses to local stations instead of national, as it's done in many other countries was usually significant. Their decision to have a quarter there always be for public broadcasting was significant. There's all sorts of things like that that have had a big impact on the development of the news media, and also some things that didn't happen that had a big impact. For instance, the fact that no one in none of the antitrust regulators for the last 20 years, batted an eyelash as hedge funds and private equity firms were buying up 50% of the daily newspaper circulation in America that was a significant lack of public policy, awareness and action as well. So one of the things that you probably are not aware of is that there's actually been like in the last really almost just the last year or two a flowering of new activity and new ideas about public policy. And the what you see from these, I'll just tick through them real quickly before and then dive into a couple in particular is that they all start with the with a a real consciousness of the risks, that it is true that you can you know, there are ways in which government support could really go badly and do more harm than good. But that it's possible like that you you shouldn't be paralyzed and I think that's our general approach is like, you know, when you've had 82% Drop in the size of newspaper advertising revenue in less than two decades, so that's like the size bigger than the collapse of the coal industry or the steel industry, things like that. And in undermining the core functions of democracy, we have to look at this. Like it's not we're not going to get there just with philanthropy and improve business models. This has to be the third leg and but we have to do it really intelligently and learn from other countries and learn from local experiments. Now we tend to think of when we think of it to the extent it happens at all, we think of public broadcasting as sort of a tax payer model, and that is still really important, but there's some other ideas as well there to kind of kick it around. Out there, then I'll just mention a few. And by the way, the organization that I run now rebuild local news. It started a few years ago as an informal coalition of about well, it's now 30 or 35 different, national and state organizations that are all interested in public policy to help local news and everyone was kind of running in different directions and we just got everyone together in the same room or almost everyone to figure out well, well, are there things we agree on and and is there a common agenda and it was interesting, because we got publishers and the labor unions, and we had black and Hispanic publishers and rural and nonprofit and for profit and a lot of people, especially the publishers in the union, so they would, you know, be attacking each other by day, and then come to our meetings and try to figure out a way of working together on public policy. So there's a few interesting ideas out there. There was just a federal bill that was proposed a couple of weeks ago that's really interesting, both in its substance and its kind of political origins. It has two components. One is a tax credit for small businesses that advertise or sponsor in local news. So the tax credit actually goes to restaurants and dry cleaners, but only if they advertise in local news. It's really an and this is the one idea I would say that has the most traction in in Republican states, because it's it's quite literally a small business tax credit, but one that really helps local news and it's also it has the advantage of it's not someone on the government deciding who gets what it's like the restaurant is deciding who gets who gets what. And there's a market element like you still have to prove that you're worthy of getting advertising. So and then the second piece of the bill was a payroll tax credit for hiring and retaining local reporters. So it's a little similar to some of the PPP that happened during COVID But targeted toward the hiring of local reporters. I really liked that too, because the incentives are on target. It's where the need is. So the what's interesting about this is that this was introduced by a woman named Claudia Tenney, who's a very conservative Republican from upstate New York Trump Republican and as well as a Democrat Suzanne del bene. And that's pretty interesting. Because it means there's like a Republican friendly route. And so we're starting to see that first idea get taken off and submitted as bills and state legislatures. So one is the tax credit for small businesses that advertised two is the payroll tax credit.
Three is an idea we're going to talk about quite a bit more in a sec. The idea of government, governments are advertisers themselves. And they spent in some cases, a lot of money on advertising. And a lot of it doesn't go to local news. It goes to national and, you know, billboards and Google and Facebook. And so there's this movement that this woman created, but has now spread across the land, which is to say, how about we take that you're spending this money anyway, wouldn't it be great both for communities and the effectiveness of your ads to actually push that toward community news? So that's, we're getting a lot of interest. There's other state California and other states and cities that are looking at that. There's a kind of burgeoning idea around well, maybe there's some way through tax credits or vouchers or something else, of subsidizing the consumer that subscribes to a local news organization. I would say that idea is like conceptually brilliant and wonderful. There's still like mechanics that honestly, I don't think they're fully baked yet. But it's it's sort of an exciting idea. In theory, there's New Jersey is doing a direct grant approach they have the New Jersey information consortium took money that was from the FCC spectrum auction when they were auctioning off airwaves and they put some of that into local news, very creative idea. I get really nervous about grant programs to journalism, honestly. But they've done it in a really thoughtful way. Like they really have looked at the at the firewalls and how to do it in a way that doesn't, you know, lead to problems. So that's a model fellowships sort of report for America style fellowships. So these are not just for a month or two, but the big example is California, the California state legislature gave $25 million for a program administered by the Berklee School of Journalism, $25 million for reporters to go out in local newsrooms for a year or two. So it's a really meaningful help of reporting, reporting help. And we're and there's a smaller version of that in New Mexico and Washington state. So that's starting to catch on there's a sort of, I think, on a legislative level, there's sort of an appeal because they're used to dealing with universities. There's already a line item. They know what that means, kind of they know what a fellowship is, so it's doesn't seem quite as alien. And then the last idea Well, two ideas more but the, the last of the less controversial ones I'll say, is something that we call replanting. And basically that's the idea that we have this in addition to needing to see startups and great new models. We have this other issue, which is there are 6000 existing newspapers. And some of them are theory is could actually be serving their communities if they had different owners, that some of the problem is the ownership structure. And so replanting refers to a series of different philanthropic and policy ideas to help local communities, nonprofits, usually, but could be other things by newspapers, or help convert existing for profits into nonprofits. So that idea is like it's sort of again, it's sort of no there's no state that's doing it in a concrete way, but there's a lot of discussion. The last one I'll mention, which is not been on our agenda of rebuild local news, but I want to mention it because it is on other people's agendas, is something called the journalism competition and Preservation Act. And that is if you've read about the Australia model, so this is the idea of the government setting up a mechanism that forces Google and Facebook to pay media companies. It's a bit of a controversy. Our particular coalition kind of divided down the middle so we stayed neutral, but there's a lot of people who think that really should be, you know, a key approach. Others who think it's not such a good idea. So I tend to talk about a little bit less but just in full disclosure, I wanted to put that out there because that is one of the big ideas out there. So let me stop talking and start getting a little more into the into the meat of this. Oh, before I do that, thank you to Microsoft for sponsoring this session. Microsoft has actually been a kind of, they're a supporter of rebel local. There have been a supporter of kind of, I would say creative policymaking on this. So let's let's start with you, Bruce about just tell us your journey. You probably didn't think when you started, Connecticut, Maryland, that part of your job was going to be walking the halls. Of the Connecticut legislature, but it tells the whole story.
Okay, so just one quick clarification. I was not at the mirror at the founding. So don't want just a quick fact check on that. The Connecticut mirror was is a nonprofit we were founded. We cover public policy in Connecticut. So while when I took this job in 2017, we were founded in 2010. I didn't envision myself walking the halls, even though all of our reporters in fact do walk the halls of the legislature on a regular basis. But I'm on the other side of that wall and don't typically walk the halls but in this past January at the governor's inaugural ball, a state rep from my town who I know well said, Bruce, you guys are doing such great work. What can we in the legislature do to support local journalism? And she asked that question because Connecticut while not a news desert, there are still 17 daily newspapers print daily print newspapers in a tiny little state, Connecticut is what Penny Abernathy academic refers to as news poverty. All of the newspapers in our state including perennial powerhouses like the Hartford current have shrunk to become you know, shells of themselves like is happening in so many other parts. of the country. So I recited for this state representative, essentially the list that Steve just recited for you of all of the ways that all the ideas for public support for journalism, and she said to me, what about that thing they're doing in New York? That sounds particularly interesting. It sounds easy, right? You know, and I said, Well, I'll get you some information about that. And a week later, she had submitted a bill into into the house. So we it wasn't a perfect bill. In fact, far from it. But because the mirror so all of the for profit newspapers in Connecticut, use our content so we already have kind of a relationship with them. Most of the nonprofit news organizations in the state also use our content and vice versa with the nonprofits. And so we were in kind of a unique position to convene everybody and mobilize all of these different news organizations around trying to advance this bill or some version of this bill that this particular state rep had filed. I testified I was I provided the lead testimony for the bill. The bill came out of committee, the bill was adopted in the house. It did not get called in the Senate by the end of the session. So the Senate adjourned and it was that was a good news, bad news. scenario in the sense that it does give us eight months to kind of figure out how to make this not perfect bill, better to figure out some of the nuts and bolts and administrative and logistical aspects of how this might work. So that's what we're in the process of doing now. And we're gearing up to hopefully have the bill reintroduced in in 2024. Now, the bill itself basically mandates if you will, that all state advertising and so Steve referenced this but you know the state spends money on economic development, advertising, tourism, advertising, some of it in state so there's out of state tourism advertising, there's instant tourism advertising, there's public awareness, health campaigns, you know, smoking secession, there's opioid money coming to all of the states in the States going to invest money in opioid treatment, awareness, sorts of initiatives. And on and on, there's lots of public service advertising that our state and all states engage in to some degree. In Connecticut, most of that advertising is spent on television or for TV stations are owned by out of state companies. Or in the Hartford current still the largest newspaper in the state, even though it's 15%. The size it was 15 years ago. And the Hearst papers Hearst own seven daily newspapers in Connecticut, so both the current and Alden slash Tribune paper and Hearst also out of state news organizations. So the state's marketing dollars, you know, these companies are all making profit margin on those marketing dollars and that margin is going to out of state stockholders and not necessarily being reinvested in the state and in the meantime, there are still a handful of locally owned newspapers. There's several nonprofits, there's two large public radio networks in Connecticut. And we are not benefiting really from that state. Spending at all. Which, by the way, is an equity issue, in the sense that if the state is trying to reach people, everybody with public awareness advertising, it's kind of bizarrely ironic that they're spending their money with commercial news. organizations that have a paywall for you in order for you to see their content, whereas we and the other nonprofits, and the and the for profit hyper locals don't have paywalls we're all free to consume. So that's that's kind of a key part of our argument, in our testimony before the legislature that this is if nothing else, an equity issue. So what the bill mandates then is that 50% of all state advertising dollars would be spent with locally owned for profit companies, locally based nonprofits and locally based ethnic media. And those are the broad parameters. There's lots of other details to work out. Like how do you define locally owned like Hearst Skynet? Hearst, Connecticut is technically Connecticut based, but the parent company is in New York and we all know that, you know, the surplus and they aren't they do make money in Hearst, Connecticut is getting sucked back into the Hearst Tower in New York. And it's not it's not staying in Connecticut necessarily. So the the details, we're kind of working through that, and Graziella and her folks have much more experience in terms of how to manage that process, and maybe this is a good time to pivot over to you.
Let me just ask one quick question and then we'll go over. So part of what's unique about the Connecticut bill, most of these have some language about it needs to go to a local news. The kinetics the only state that I know of that has locally owned and it's it's just a very interesting approach. And it's going to be fascinating to see the you know, how the politics work of it, of like, are they going to object and you know, will they push back and hasn't really happened yet?
No, I mean, the past I mean, Connecticut is a very politically is very democratic state, at the legislative level, in the state house. So it passed the House overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly on a partisan basis or well was I know you guys define it. You guys said it was bipartisan because four Republicans didn't absolutely so far. The Senate is even more tilted toward Democrats. So if we can get the victory here is going to be getting it called in the state senate in the next session. I don't think that the that distinction is going to matter.
When one area that you sometimes get resistance on these things is actually from the from the executive branch itself, not necessarily on ideological greens good but on hassled grounds. And is it did they push back at all saying like, well, if you're if you're excluding all the out of state folks, there's not enough volume does not have, you know, inventory for us to put our money into.
So they haven't pushed back. I think that was also because they were responding. The only formal response to them has been during the chaos of the legislative session. We will find out I think, this fall as we begin to engage more deeply in conversations with the Department of Administrative Services, which does what the name suggests. And so we'll figure we'll figure that out. I will say I think there's a hassle factor, both from the administration but the bigger hassle factor potentially is from the advertising agencies that the state handles to place the advertising and having having spent the first 12 years of my career working for an advertising agency. I understand the desire to minimize hassle and minimize activity related to placing media buys, you don't want to spend you know, $5,000 here and $7,000 here, they'd much rather just spend $25,000 here and $25,000 here and be done with it. That's a big that's the bare shoe. So and
by the way, I think that we went past quickly, but the fact that this was passed by the Connecticut assembly is a big deal. Like that's
first in the country. I believe. This kind of Yeah, right. Yeah. On the state law. Yeah. State level. Yeah.
Okay, so let's now talk about New York City. As you said, this idea was really pioneered in New York at CUNY, and walk us through both before during and after.
Yes, so thank you, and thank you for having me here. So the idea actually started with two other women. Sara Bartlett, who was my predecessor as the dean of the, what was then called the CUNY Newmark director at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and is now the Craig Newmark graduate school School of Journalism at CUNY. And so she was my predecessor, and in 2011, she had just started, and she wanted to know where was the city of New York spending their advertising money and where was the money going? This the school had started at the Center for Community Media, which I then run before becoming the dean or the center of community media is this amazing institution within the school that serves community media, originally in New York and then now nationally, and we community media, women come in media serving immigrant communities, communities of color, linguistic communities, New York City has a very vibrant community media sector. It's more than 300 media outlets. That includes eight that serve New Yorkers in 37 languages, including English and those are the papers and digital outlets and radio stations and TV channels that serve immigrants and people of color. So it includes Black Media and Latino Media and Asian media and what's called ethnic media and immigrant media. And so Sarah, my predecessor knew that there was this vibrant industry or sector there, and they were rarely receiving any advertising funding from the city of New York. So she thought, Where is this money going? So she did see if she foil the city so she basically did a reporter's work and did an investigation and found out that only 18% one eight of the advertising funding from the entire city of New York went to community media to these 300 and plus outlets and that 82% went to a handful about six I think it was mainstream media outlets. So the New York Post, The Daily Post, the New York Times, etc. And she saw an equity as you were saying she saw an equity issue there. She didn't think the though that the city of NIDA would resonate politically because she thought that it was not the purpose of the city of New York's advertising strategy to to you know, find equity in distribution that is not our goal for the city. But the goal for the city cities have to advertise their mandate to advertise to keep citizens informed. And so the argument so what what Sarah did, she went to Julie Sandor who's another amazing woman who runs the rip some foundation and funded this project, and they went to another amazing woman. It's always women, I'm sorry, who was running who was the commissioner for Immigrant Affairs at the City of New York. And she brought it to this is what this is at the beginning of the Blasio administration. So when de Blasio starts his mayoral seat See, he, he received this report, and he went to his people and said, Let's do something about it. And what that led to was an executive order by the de Blasio administration in which the mayor decided that all of the 50 agents city agencies in New York that placed advertising in the city and this includes all advertising had to spend 15% of their budget for print and digital media, in community medium. That was signed in June 2019. And then what we decided at the Center for Community Media was I had just started as the executive director of the Center for Community Media and we thought that unless there was, we saw that piece of that was an executive order. It was not legislation but we thought that it was very easy for the agencies to that just disregard or ignore this. We thought what is the accountability piece, who's going to force all of the marketing directors in the agencies and then another intermediary organization which were which are the media agencies, the plate the agencies that place the ads in media? Why would there was no motivation? There was no punishment if they didn't do it, it was an executive order that said 50% should go there. And at the end of the year, the city will publish a report whether it's saying whether this was accomplished or not and, but there was no penalty or so we looked at it as journalists and we thought, okay, what does it take to get this to succeed? And we created a unit. A unit means one person, another woman, that literally who's amazing, and she was hired and her entire job was her full time. job was to reach out to all of these every stakeholder so the marketing directors, the media, agencies, the ad agencies, and the publishers, and the people close to the last you then who were monitoring compliance and create a serious create an infrastructure for these to succeed. So we created a list of marketing directors had their contact information so that every publisher knew who they were, and they could reach out to them. We let the publishers know what campaigns were coming and we created a whole information structure for these to succeed at the end of the first year, and then we created a lot of goodwill and relationship building. So we would have a direct relationship with the marketing directors to make sure that they understood what was the value of community media and why it was really important for the city of New York that this was successful and that they would send these ads because that would in place, create this you know would make the city you know, would keep these community communities vibrant and informed and that was good for everything else the city was trying to do. So that was very successful. And then we also have the account added the accountability piece. So we did we do we still do a report. As journalists report at the end of the year, we just report on how the how, where the money went. So we also signed an MOU with the city of New York at the time to make sure that they would share with us the raw data about advertising and ad placements, so we wanted to know because they were going to say at the end of the year okay, we did we complied 50% went to community media outlets, but they weren't under no obligation to say where and how and how much money. So we did that we fill that void and we created annual reports where we basically showed New Yorkers it's a public report, you can find it in our website, how much money went to each outlet and how and what were those campaigns and what were the ads and they can go to the outlets and see them. We also create had created a directory This is a key we've been talking about this with Steve for a long time. You know, who gets if when this legislation passes, who is immediate, who qualifies as a media outlet that should receive advertising, and that has become more complicated than in the past because it's now such a fractured and Eva, uneven
ecosystem and also because there are outlets that are not necessarily legitimate, you know, news outlets but then my apply for these etc. And and in New York, there was the also the complication of of language, you know, it was hard to maybe for the closer to they didn't have Chinese language, you know, expertise and fluency. So how did they know this was a legitimate outlet to get the ads? So we did that for them and we created a directory. We did full you know, every we did a map of New York. So because we learned that a lot of the city agencies needed to place geographically so they need to reach out. They knew for example, this GTS was launched, launched a year before COVID. So when COVID hit this was in full speed. And one of the city's, you know, goals was during COVID was to make sure that the people who were not getting vaccinated had access to the information about vaccines. And so that was, for example, they knew that, for example, black communities and black Caribbean communities in apps in Uptown, Manhattan. That was an area where vaccines were not being taken by people and so they needed to see in the map which outlets which community media outlets serve those communities, so they could go to Harlem and find all of the community media outlets and local outlets in Harlem, click on the map and they would have a pop up with all the information about the outlet and the contact information to place the ad. So it took a lot of it was a big infrastructure that we built around that. Then after that, so it was very successful. The first year $10 million went to community media in your city, practically, I mean, in practice saving them from a really bad year. This was 2020. So these outlets have lost almost all of them between 75% and 100% of their revenue, which came mostly from local businesses and, and member a members of the community. So this replaced that funding and we did a report and we also reported on how the publishers and the outlets use the funding that they got from the city and what was that use for and that piece of accountability also served to facilitate a very important part of this, which was that we wanted to make sure that there were no strings attached so that they were no, you know, media, you know, our place or saying we you know, you need to endorse, you know, the mayor if he runs for reelection, whatever it was so so we keep we kept an eye on that and we kept the publishers very close. We you know, we have a person serving them, they can call us when they don't have in when they need more information about how things are going. So in the when the last year ended his term and Adam Adam Erica Adams became the mayor before becoming the mayor he introduced he was part of a group of city council members who introduced legislation to make this into a law and that was built the legislation was passed in the summer of 2021 2021 2022. I don't know when was the I don't know, what year is this? 2020 I think it was 2021 because we did the first year report a few months ago. So and then the legislation there was a bit of this maybe too granular but they change with the legislation was that he brought anything up to all advertising and So originally it was just digital and print because most of community media are digital and print outlets. And then the legislation broaden it up to also TV and radio and change the mandate of the 50% to a goal of a 50% because of the budget change went from, you know, just the budget for print and digital and digital was very small. And the full budget is much bigger. So we went from 20 18 million to 260 million. So that's the difference and so now, the idea is that the legislation says that there's a goal of the city of New York to fund community and ethnic media 50% of the actual goal to them, but for that the industry needs to grow to be able to absorb such such a huge amount of money. But community media has you know, this has been three years gonna be the fourth year and every year there's been more money going there. So it was 10 years, the first year, sorry, 10 million the first year 15 million the second year, 26 million. The third year
was the typical amount that a single newspaper might have gotten.
It's very because it's such an uneven landscape where you have outlets that have 35 staffers and they're big outlets that are part of national networks, like the Chinese papers, for example. And then you have very small hyperlocal outlets that are just one person the average size is filled by people in for in every newsroom, but there is very uneven so and some outlets reach a very small group of people a few 1000 and some others reach a lot of people. So it's really the outlets and I think this is a good idea actually the outlets need to and this is something we did we have a full program to help the outlets create professional media kits so they can actually show their impact and the size of their audience because they were not a lot of them. Were not able to do that before. And the amount you receive is directly proportional to your audience and to your reach and to your or to your value. For example, there's three outlets serving communities in order in your city. And so they're the only outlets that serve communities in order. So the city knows that the publishers of these outlets are actually leaders in those communities and it's important for them if they want to reach those communities to go to those outlets. So but there was some some of them get 200,000 some of them get 2000 So it's very,
I saw a really cool example this which is the Haitian times used I think they got like 85,000 or
some 70,000 and they use that
to get to report for America reporters so they were able to, you know add to reporters as a result of the money from from AD boosts. The name of this initiative is as Ben advaced And by the way, rebuild local and CUNY have teamed up to create a kit that will be going live basically in the next two weeks or so. That will go soup to nuts of like how do you start one of these? What are the things you need to do along the way? It will have a model Bill actual legislative language model Executive Order language examples. Pretty much everything you know, we can think of that would because the goal is to really try to replicate this and refine it to like this is kind of new thing and we all know that this could go badly in some ways. So we're all very attentive to learning and that was actually one of the things I want to ask was like, we know, especially in other countries, that sometimes advertising is used by bad actors as the club. Has that happened at all.
We didn't see that in New York. And when you mean bad actors you mean governments. I come from Argentina I'm so this is a very bad idea in Argentina. And I've seen that used always all my career. They're like in bad ways. So if you're not, you know, everybody's supposed to get government advertising. A lot of money goes into that, but basically the outlets were more or less critical to the government's are the ones who get more money. And if you're critical, then it gets pooled so so it's a horrible idea. So how do you avoid that? So well here because there's first there's there's legislation, there's accountability. I think the fact that there was a third party watching was really really important. The fact that there's a report at the end of the year, the city has, by law now has to report where the money goes. So this is public information now, which it was not the case before. So just creating that and I think another thing that is very to me, it's very important. I used to, you know, for a brief period of my life I had I was a publisher of a digital outlet, and it's very important that this is not just your only source of revenue, because then that that also creates a dependency from government funding. So I think this is a really great idea if it is part of a of a, you know, family tie, you know, source funding, you know, probably, you know, the program and a model.
So just one thing to add to that is that to me, this all works best when we we as publishers maintain all of our autonomy. So if there are bad acts, you know, if the governor of Connecticut three months before an election, puts out a bunch of state funded in state tourism ads to kind of tout his economic development prowess or whatever, we still have the opportunity ability to say, you know, no, we're not going to run that advertising, just like we do with any advertising right now. And that's especially important for nonprofits who can't be partisan at election will ever and we don't just as a matter of being overly conservative, I guess relative to our 501 C three status. I don't endorse candidates. We don't run political advertising. We don't get near elections and so
on the political stuff so we there's the the art of making the policy have firewalls and have third party independent. But there's also before you get that there's the awkward moment where you're lobbying, you know, where you're advocating for a policy before pub before politicians. What was that like? And do you know, do you have any tips on how to do that in a way that feels comfortable and ethical.
The day I testified the morning of the testimony, one of our reporters said something tells me you would be involved in something like this. Are you well, yes, I am. So we didn't really talk about it. But they didn't know before that I didn't know. I didn't really want them to know, I didn't want the newsroom to necessarily have to be caught up in that. But then that afternoon, of course, we did have the first of several conversations related to well how are we going to cover this? It actually advances out of committee. We can't ignore it. Because first of all, it's a first in the state first in the nation state initiative. It would be kind of innovative. And let's face it, we are as a news organizations, particularly interested in those first in the country kinds of stories. So we decided that we didn't really decide anything, we kind of thought okay, maybe we'll have some other news organization, a sister organization of ours and another state cover the story if it was worth covering instead of us trying to cover it.
Well, and I think that transparency is is the key. This comes up a lot like we have this we get this question a lot and rebuild local on various things. So what's the right way to do it and, frankly, on the newspaper side on the traditional newspapers said they do this all the time that publishers are constantly lobbying for, for this and that says and, and to some degree, it's, it's sort of, you know, it's the same kind of ethical standards that you need to do when you're dealing with an advertiser. Don't let you know you have to decide not to let it affect your your coverage. And if so, stick to it. But we've had some instances that people said we actually don't feel comfortable lobbying, but we'll write an editorial, because that's aboveboard and when we're just, you know, we're just saying what we think and everyone will know there's nothing hidden about it so that's another way how about for you was there any awkward moments and
they don't We don't we don't know we we don't do that piece so how did it just just we what we did is we No no I did we was at all but but we there were other people who are you know when the with the executive order. There was this? You know, Commissioner within the de Blasio administration who got the report and she went to De Blasio and we were not part of that conversation, but we provided the report and the information and we had conversations with her and she was a member of the circle of the Center for Community Media because she was serving immigrants in New York City. And then for the legislation we hadn't we just saw it happen. I mean, we did we don't. We didn't participate in that we did. Before that legislation passed we did offer a platform for all of the publishers to sign an open letter, and we published the Open Letter advocating for that and asking and we held many town halls and conversations and we invited during the electoral campaign when Eric Adams was running for mayor we invited we usually do traditionally we host debates with the with community media and the candidates for mayor. And so we hosted and in every we made sure that in every one of these debates, there was a question asked about this initiative once. They will, they will know about it. But we didn't we're not we're not allowed to do lobbying. So that part we don't we don't do
so but I want to open up for questions. Yeah, because they're gonna want you to go Oh, sorry.
So we kind of talked about the impact in terms of Is there enough money from just requiring state government to spend their ads this way, you know, to save local news or, you know, or or is the next step of this also trying to require businesses to spend money in this way?
Well, I Yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, you know, we actually don't exactly we got the foi request going in to understand well, how much state advertising money would are we actually talking about, and then divided in half because the bill only requires 50% of that money to be spent with local nonprofit news organizations. So none of us are under any illusions that this is going to have a significant impact on our newsrooms, and from my perspective, I'm not even going to, you know if we get $25,000 $50,000 out of this, that would be great. I'm not sure it would be even that much. That will not go into operating costs because I you know, it's not going to be money. We can necessarily count on I see that as kind of for investment or one time sorts of costs. The I guess the broader hope is that, that it kind of is a first step. It's a beachhead in modeling for other advertisers who also are largely ignoring us. from an advertising perspective, they consume us, you know, voraciously, and they always tell us, you know, you guys are doing great work, but they don't actually pony up the advertising dollars, which is a separate problem that we have to manage and have to deal with. But the hope is that this becomes a little bit of a model for others to emulate as we go forward, including in state government, municipal government, and we haven't even talked about public notices, which are a huge expenditure still in our state at the state level and the municipal level and we shied away from it a little bit because that would our coalition is comprised of for profit, local news organizations and nonprofits, the for profit, family owned Connecticut based news organizations still do generate a fair amount of money from from public notices. And you know, so one of the questions is do we kind of try to go for some of the public notice money as well or do that separately, but
in any event, I think I don't know if you can talk about New York State, but I mean, you know, at least on the federal level, at least a billion dollars. They spend at least a billion dollars a year on advertising. We have heard it's not confirmed yet. But the California government by itself is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. I don't know if you have a sense.
Thank you for that question. I think there's two things about that one, this should be information that is public, because this is taxpayers information on every city and every state should actually my opinion, as a journalist, you know, just be more transparent about how
our kids we sort of say First Step Find out
so we're about to release now we did with we found the city of New York first and now we're doing it with a state so we're gonna have for the first time if anyone is from the state of New York here, we're going to release within a month now in September. The numbers for New York State and we have to FOIL because the information is public but is not publicly available available. Another important thing to say is that and it's a lot of money. So in your city we know is 260 million. It depends every year changes because it depends on how much it's allocated during the budget, you know, see some to the to the CD, but it was 260 less than the year before, and we'd see how much it's this year. And I think an important point is and we've discussed this many times, too, that this is not. This is not an ad no one's advocating that I know for a new kind of funding to be created, like pots of money created to go into local media, but these are big budgets that are spent every year and that have been, you know, part of the city budgets and the state budgets and the federal budget. Forever. And so there's that money spent it goes somewhere a lot of that money goes to you know, billboards and street kind of advertisement and the MTA and you know, in the case of New York, subways, etc. A chunk goes into TV stations and there's never been a policy that connects that spending with the value of local media and and media news media, as as an instrument to keep people informed, which is the goal of this advertising efforts.
As another point of reference, you know, if the federal government has a billion dollars or so, if we were able to get a 50% set aside, that would mean you know, $500 million, which is bigger than the entire budget of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. So it's decent size.
Line up at the mics. Yes. Yeah,
please everyone that is
so a lot of conversation today has been about local media and local news and saving local news. I run the community info Co Op. Part of that is a local news program we run in Jersey called the jersey b We're dedicated to serving people's news and information needs. And a lot of the conversation today has not been about meeting community information needs but instead had been a bit about like meeting the bottom line of local news publishers, though there's a variety and there is equity in that industry. We have actually discussed the efficacy of the policy as it relates to like actually serving people's needs. So could you address how it does that and if it doesn't, why is that not a priority?
I'm not sure how we have not addressed that. So I think I mean, one of the points I think we made is that we in New York, for example, what we did is to make the case that this was important because we communities needed to reserve in terms of their information. It's that this was not for the city issue. It was not a question of equity. I mean, though equity is very important and critical, but it was a question of getting the information to the outlets that could serve those communities who's who are served by those outlets. And if they were not going to those outlets, so they were not serving the information needs of those communities. So I don't know to me that the line is very clear. And it's very
I also I don't think there's a difference between helping the bottom line of community journalism and helping equity like that. The reason the way that community organizations can serve their communities better is is to have viable business models, whether they're nonprofits for profits, but there is a real issue with public policy which is that one of the hard things about public policy is very often probably the norm is that public policies tend to get written by the legacy players and usually the bigger players and policy tends to favor those people. And sometimes it's intentional and blatant and power grab to keep other you know, innovators and startups behind sometimes it's just that's who's at the table and that's what they think of. So it is it's quite challenging to come up with policies that are sort of future friendly, that are open to especially will help smaller players, which I think is part of of what you're you're getting.
My question specifically is about people have information needs and there's plenty of research and documentation that shows that existing media companies and mean news media don't do a good job of understanding people's information needs and meeting those needs. So what we're talking about this just sounds like giving money to like, like we need to support health care. So let's give money to health insurance companies, because they facilitate these transactions for us with community members, but they don't necessarily serve their needs. So my question is not in general news organization exists so people have access to something, but how does this policy ensure that that something is actually good quality and using information? Right,
that is not the role of government? I don't think I think it would be very dangerous for the government to have a plan that where the government is requiring quality in new
in New Jersey, I'm gonna sit down by New Jersey that New Jersey civic information consortium, all it says is must meet people's news and information needs. It's a very basic requirement that is generally applicable. So I think it's so like, yes, this policy doesn't meet that but to say it's dangerous, and it won't work. There's a multimillion dollar fund. It's the biggest media funder in New Jersey now, mill millions of dollars have gone to meeting people's news and information needs. So I just want to make sure that and how do
you prove how to cook who who measures that that is
there's a it's a nonprofit, it's a public charity created and funded by the state. There's a board of there's a board of representative stakeholders. There's a program officer, it's the direct grant model, and it's serving the needs of people in a lot of different working with libraries and high schools and really working to meet people's infant needs, not just subsidize the news media.
But I think the key thing is it's not a government agency. It's government funded or from the spectrum auction. But the smart thing that they did in setting that up, was setting it up as an independent nonprofit, with a board of folks small all over the state and universities and stuff like that. And I think that's the right way to do it. And I did mention that as one of
the guys want to make sure that doesn't get overlooked in the conversation. Of like, it's not possible for you.
To Carmona with the Latino Media collaborative. Big fan of the work and that's happened in New York. We've been leading a lot of work in California. Over the last three years in establishing helped supporting establish a $25 million fellowship program. We also passed legislation that sought to create a report to understand well how the state spending its dollars. Unfortunately, it didn't have the teeth that you're talking about. So we're now doing a second version to figure out what the agencies are spending because they're actually doing the spending. So it's been a big learned experience. We also have a piece of legislation now that seeks to do a set aside of 50% of state advertising money which is in the hundreds of millions of dollars and fluctuates depending on on the budget year. And one of the things that we're starting to see is that you have an ethnic media community and super people of color super majority people of color state where ethnic media is not well organized, doesn't have infrastructure doesn't have that lobbying advocacy. capacity, but yet has the biggest news deserts, the more largest needs, and you have a community media sector that's more active, more vibrant. How do you deal with those dynamics, when real competition for resources are emerging? And how do you prioritize those communities with the greatest need? How are you guys managing? We look up to the model of New York and most closely mimics from a population demographic perspective, the work that we're doing in New York
when we didn't make those decisions and we worked with from an analysis perspective. So we work with groups with outlets in California to see if the New York model could be replicated. We work with a group of independent media in Chicago SEMA also and they did get an executive order passed. They are one thing we discovered and I think it goes to what you were saying at the beginning is that the the structure of you know, every city and state are they they allocate advertising budgets and they work differently the way the ad, you know, place placement happens is very different and the budget sometimes are completely scattered in different pockets of you know, the government. So I remember we work with when we were with SEMA in Chicago just to do the FOIA. It took like two years or something because it was just so hard to understand where those budgets were because they were just all over it was not more kind of consolidated as it was. in your city. And I know California was very hard to get the information because of that because all of the counties and it was just very, very difficult. We didn't do really any this I don't know maybe you have an answer for that. But we didn't do any decision in terms of we were make we make sure that we were not going to be the arbiters or how the money was allocated, we will not sometimes the agent marketing director would call and say I have this budget, who should I give it to at the beginning and we were like we can we're not going to be making that decision. It should be based on the needs of you know the the purpose of this
I think this is one of the real riddles of this whole thing is like you if you get very, you know, I always say like you have to design any public policy on the assumption that someone you really don't like is going to run up and you can't just imagine what would it be like if, if we were, you know, giving out the money you have to imagine what would it be like if people you don't like are giving out the money. And that makes it different from foundations like if we were writing foundation we did we'd have a completely different approach and we would actually be way more focused on quality and factors like that. So that pushes public policy a little more in the blunt instrument direction, but you don't want it to go too far in that direction, because then you just end up like slathering money on people who don't companies that don't need it or companies that have ignored communities and it doesn't get to the communities that you're talking about. So it's finding, you know, the sort of neutral types of rules that are relatively objective, but point the resources in the direction that where the need is that is kind of the riddle. So as an example in California, as you know, you know, there's another bill also, which is a kind of California version of the jcpa. The make Google and Facebook pay for content and our approach, meaning rebuild local news is approach is to say, putting aside the merits of that particular approach, it doesn't do enough to help community news. Maybe it has other it has merits too. It has arguments to it, but it could be better. It could be it could be altered to make it more likely to help, you know, ethnic media and also smaller media in general rural media. So we proposed that, hey, why don't you pair that with the 50% set aside that you talked about? And have some chunk of that really be your marker or kind of targeted toward community media or another idea we floated is that if you're gonna have a pool like this have a guaranteed minimum that would be targeted towards smaller players. So it's hard to figure out how to get at those goals, but in a way that meets that first test of like, will this still work when it's being run by someone you don't like?
I mean, just real quickly that I mean, we're thinking about this least in Connecticut, in terms of the way you think about any kind of a movement, which is, let's get something passed and to get something passed right now. It can't, to me interfere with the mechanisms of the market all that much or else we're not going to get the support. I mean, part of the big benefit of the advertising bills is their revenue neutral. And so to the degree that we start adding on other elements that minimizes the chance to passage, so it's kind of what it says it's almost, you know, it's the camels nose in the tent, and then we burrow in deeper and deeper Yeah,
some places are going to be able to do things that other places aren't Seattle is looking at a really interesting experiment around a voucher system. That would be like a credit to subscribers. To think that's I'm really excited that they're doing that but I don't think it would pass anywhere else. But I think it's great to try something and then I think actually we're Oh, are we out of time? Is someone giving me there's no one to give me the hook. So I guess we can you were up first. Just go ahead.
Thank you, Casey Palenik with Google News initiative. Assuming or like in a dream world where all these advertising sort of reallocation to community media passes at the state level or even federally. Something that we work with really closely and are really challenged with is spending our own money with community newspapers and local publishers, especially in the ethnic media group. I've run a number of different advertising campaigns, like specifically designed to put dollars in pockets. And one of the issues we have is working with our agencies. They just it's too difficult. It's it's challenging. So we've designed all these programs to essentially like up level and upskill the publishers to get those dollars in pocket. So I'm curious, like, yeah, in an implementation world, what can we be doing? What can CUNY be doing? Like what can the local or I guess the funders of journalism be doing to support that implementation?
Right, thank you. That's very interesting. We were involved in some of those in New York. And the same, if I understand correctly, the same problem happened with a lot of philanthropic with other donors, because most of the Community Media is commercial is not nonprofit. And so and there's no expertise and there's no kind of tradition of accessing these types of funds. What we do is we train the funder with it, sorry, not the funders. We train the publishers and we try to find ways to we've done a lot of workshops and, you know, direct coaching, to publishers to find ways in which they can make it simpler because they just are just so thirsty for funds. And everybody else was getting them so why not them? You know? I'm happy to share more, if you want, right. Well, we are getting the hook now. Yes. So he's asking a question because she's okay.
I'll try to make it quick. I'm genuinely curious about this. When I think about the infrastructure that's in place to try to move forward these policies who has always been lobbying legislatures, especially in places outside of like New York or California. Press associations in states have always lobbied legislators and they've lobbied them on open government, but they've also lobbied them on the business interests of uncommon publishers. And a lot of what I saw it's been a minute but when I've covered the legislature was them basically trying to keep the wagons around public notice advertising and keep emerging digital publishers from accessing that and we know that those press associations are now diminished because their memberships diminished, but are you in touch with them like what does that look like? are that they're still there. So what would that look like in terms of getting them on board with this or have you talked to people about it?
That's a great question. I mean, first of all, I view part of rebuild locals job as being to build up capacity for advocacy for good public policy on the low on the state level. And that's complicated. In the places where there's no Press Association, you have the issue of starting some, you know, getting people together and doing it in the places where there is a State Press Association. Some of the State Press associations are very enlightened and progressive, and we've worked with them and it's great on the ones that are more like what you're describing. It's, it's really hard. And all I can say is there are issues where the Press Association is aligned with the broader community. And I would say start there, you know, let's and it doesn't solve the ones that you're talking about. But we found that even in our coalition is like, you know, there's things that are people in our coalition disagree on and we say, you know, outside this off, you know, go at it. But let's at least first figure out if there's something we can agree on and work on that first, and maybe over time that'll lead to relationships or trust or changes. I think we do actually have stopped but I have we're, we're here and we're happy to keep chatting informally. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. Thanks.
Can we stop this God see? It keeps bringing me down