I'm Jonathan until three weeks ago, I was a data and democracy reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer. I hope you all are having a good time here in Philly and in Pennsylvania, a battleground state, a key swing state and very much one of America's Ground Zeroes for electoral misinformation disinformation, all of that. This is a state where and it's in the city, where in 2020, former President then President Donald Trump got on stage at a debate and said bad things happen in Philadelphia. Little charter This is a place where a Trump campaign staffer was thrown out of city hall for trying to take video while people were voting. It is a state where two men from Virginia got into a Hummer with Q anon stickers packed with guns and drove up here in November 2020 trying to sort out the electoral count. It is a sign of a lot of myths and disinformation, some of it violent. I'm here to tell you some of the things that we've tried to do at the Enquirer. Unfortunately, I don't have an answer. If we are looking for the answer or a couple of good answers that will solve it all. I don't have it. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to disappoint. You. But I'll tell you a little bit about what we have done and what we tried to do. And one of the most important things that I can tell you is I was a data and democracy reporter. I started I started covering election administration in 2017. That is a long time before 2020 I had covered more than six elections by that time of the 2020 election. I still did not feel ready for the 2020 election when it came. It is so important to have people who know what they are talking about. When it comes to how elections work. It is not enough to have your political reporters dive in and parachute in and try to respond to things as complicated as how voting machines work and how votes are counted, and how absentee and mail in ballots are cast and counted. How do people vote from overseas? That is not the kind of thing that a political reporter who is busy covering campaigns and going to rallies and going to City Hall can just be expected to swoop in and cover these are really complicated things. Not everyone is as well resources, the inquire to be able to devote somebody full time to be able to do that. But right now it is August almost September. We have the ability now to start preparing people for the 2024 election. If you know who you have in the room, talk to your team. Start preparing them. What are the things that you need to know Do you know who runs elections? Do you know how poll workers are selected? Do you know how polling places are set up and how they are run? How did the voting machines work? How are the votes cast? Literally How are the votes counted? It is these little details that become the seed of the missing disinformation that we see during election time. Because people don't understand it. And because people don't understand it, bad actors or misinformed actors have the ability to go in and exploit that lack of understanding. So you need to understand it better than them and then you need to be able to convey it. So what does this mean for us? This meant that as a beat reporter, I had the luxury of just writing a lot of stories over and over and over. But it also meant that we knew that we couldn't just write the same stories as we always did. And we cannot just do the same things as we always do for audiences that currently exist. Why we are a legacy newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer while we are doing better and trying our best, who reads us rich white people in the suburbs, black and brown audiences in Philadelphia and around the Philadelphia region don't read us. And a whole lot of white working class people across the rest of the state who are very key to the rest of the state don't read us. So if I'm just writing my normal stories for the normal audience, that doesn't help the people who actually need it. So what do we do? One of the things we did was we said, It is super important to just put out a firehose of good information, as much good information as we can put out there. So normally, as a journalist, My instinct is like I wrote the story. I'm not writing it again. That's not what we did. We write the same story over and over and over, repackaged over and over and over. So in January 2020, I read a story that says it is going to take days to call the election in Pennsylvania. And the next day I write a story that says, and while that that time is happening, the vote is going to shift from red to blue. I wrote that story in January 2020. I wrote it at least 10 Other versions of that story, the rest of that year. Why? Because people needed it. We wrote it over and over in as clear language as possible, right? So the first couple of times might be a story in the traditional sense, where we're just like, hey, here's an interesting thing. Here's what you need to know about it. After that. We were just writing direct stories. Some of them are just a few paragraphs, and we're just like, here's why the vote count is going to take a long time period. That's what you need to know. It's the same content. At some points. I was like, Am I doing journalism by writing the same thing and not doing reporting? It is? It is getting your journalism in front of the audiences that need it. What else did we do? So in addition to trying to just drown people in good information, we also have to try to get it in front of them in the right places. So that means it can't just put it in the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper and we can't just put it on inquire.com which is our website. A lot of people don't get that. So what do we do? We try to use social media. We made video about how to vote we chopped up all sorts of explanatory video we tried to put it out there. When I saw misinformation on Reddit, I was in there responding to people. I tweet back at people I sort of scrap with people on Twitter, whatever, whatever you need to do to try to get there. A lot of times keep in mind I'm not trying to change the mind of the person who originally posted the information. Because guess what, it's the internet. Nobody ever wins that fight. But I know that there are a lot of other people who might see my response to that person and I want them to have the right information. So whenever I saw misinformation, disinformation, I was out there responding to it. It's on Twitter, it's on Facebook, it's on Reddit. All of these places I tried to respond to it gets a little bit more tricky when we talk about closed channels and things like telegram and stuff like that we can try to talk about some of the stuff that like what's happened and all that kind of thing. But especially when it's public. That's because I'm trying to respond for people who would see it publicly. Right. What are some of the things that we did in stories themselves? In addition to doing fact checks, thank you for printing, pioneering that. We tried as much as possible to be very clear and direct with language. Right? So we're not going to be people who are like, Donald Trump's false claims about elections. We're just gonna be like Trump lied. We said that we said that early on, while everybody else is like wringing their hands about like, and is it a lie? What if he believes it? All right, he lied, we say that. We're going to say that we're going to say this is not true. We're going to say this conspiracy theory is not true. We're going to say this is true. This is not true. We're going to put boxes so we developed some like, aesthetically nice boxes, but also you can just put ugly ones. It doesn't matter if your CMS is bad, all CMS or bad. Just put a box in and call something out. So for example, do you remember like when Arizona was doing an audit of the 2020 election, Pennsylvania tried to do something similar? And we were looking at it and we're like, this is not an audit. This is just like, bullshit political theater. So what did we do? We did not call it an audit. We very specifically made the decision not to call it an audit, and then we put a box in every story about the audit. And literally the title of the box is why we're not calling it an audit. And we explained very clearly, here are the reasons why we're not calling it not it doesn't meet this standards. We don't know this. It doesn't explain this. We don't know how this it's very straightforward. It's very simple. And Margaret Sullivan wrote a whole column about it. So it is the kind of thing that like it's a low hanging fruit, but it's there and you do it and it can make a difference. What other kinds of boxes have we done? We do things like whenever I write about a really complicated topic, like what are called undated mail ballots in Pennsylvania, you don't need to know. I'll put a box in that'll say literally what is an undated mail ballot? Right? There's a lot of jargon and elections and sometimes it's hard to get around it and sometimes you have to use it. And sometimes in the boxes, I'm repeating what's already in the story and that's okay. Because not everybody's sorry, reads from the lead all the way to the kicker and so it is okay if I have a box that somebody's eye draws immediately to, and they read that and they're like, now I get it. Now I understand what I need to know. We also put out a lot of service journalism, we put out a lot of tools, we put out a lot of guides. So for example, when you write a story whenever we wrote a story that said polling places have changed we didn't want to just say here's a link to a spreadsheet, good luck trying to find it. We would build a map we would say here, type in your address. Here's where you can find your polling place. Similarly, the headline the framing, we wouldn't just say polling places have changed in Philly we would say Philly has drastically reduced its number of polling places find yours here. We always want to give people that information as much as we can. And then again, in addition to the fire hose that we're doing, we're trying to partner with other people when we can we're trying to put out the information. So in 2020, we do a lot of we did a lot of partnerships. We tried to translate materials, we tried to just get that out there.