can't be done alone. It's complicated. It's time consuming and it's rough. There is no final battle that we're going to be able to fight where
all of this suddenly gets easier.
The world isn't getting simpler stories aren't getting simpler,
but working collaboratively it's becoming more and more common and more important than ever. And that is the difference between standing in the fight and being rendered completely incapacitated. This collaboration through collaboration, effective,
ethically,
inclusive, equitable collaboration. It's an act of courage and
an act of hope,
by journalists and newsrooms. To know that the work could
be done to the work that matters,
and it will be done by those who are
courageous and brave and bold enough to face their mistakes
and try to build a better way
of doing this work
together. And by those we're trusting
the incredible work that we can do when we do it in
partnership.
And we're very fortunate because so many of the people speaking today are doing exactly that. And we get to hear about it.
I'm Randy Pickford. I want to
talk a little bit about equity and equitable partnerships, talk a lot about diversity, we talked about different ways of addressing this right here. A word that I think we tend to forget about a lot is power.
Power is everywhere.
Everywhere. everywhere.
Everywhere.
Everywhere.
Everywhere.
Everywhere.
Humans were programmed to do two things which is to reproduce the human species and to replicate power structure.
Everywhere. Everywhere.
Everywhere.
Everywhere.
One thing that I'm very aware of is the extractive nature of journalism, about what is getting done what can't be done and that's what our community wants to know we know we're oppressed, like, and I call it sometimes like say, there's some that we don't know journalism sometimes fall into this trap of like the I call it dumb journalism where it's kind of like hey, guess what's happening in your community and the people who've been living in our town like we want to go beyond just you telling us what the problem is being able to think about what we are
able to have time
and space to think through who we're going to partner with to make our work as impactful and meaningful as possible, different folks bring different things to the table bring different teams, and want to participate. It's just a matter of us saying, Okay, where
are you at, and,
and how can we support that work.
power is everywhere.
Everywhere. I'm wondering digit some
terrific thanks dr shivers.
I'm Danielle Purefoy and I'm the racing place editor at Scalawag today but yeah I'm just going to give you a bit of a story about our collaboration
is a five year old magazine and media organization headquartered in Durham, North Carolina, devoted to journalism and storytelling that eliminates the unsettled dominant narratives pursues Jefferson liberation stands in solidarity with marginalized people and communities across the south, and today I'm going to talk with you a little bit about one of our collaborative projects with a writer, who's currently incarcerated on death row in North Carolina
for you years ago, a former editor of Scalloway approached our team about a writing workshop and is facilitating with death row prisoners at Raleigh Central Prison. One of the participants a while may have already written a memoir, and was seeking an opportunity to write more for the public. Specifically, he wanted to write about the problems with the education and parole policies in
North Carolina's prison system.
While was sentenced to death in 1999 and 21 years old. He told me that prison was where he grew up, where he decided to pursue his education as he goes through the decades long appeals process to be released from prison in North Carolina did not have access to publicly funded education. The general prison population they are deemed unworthy of privileges. The resources are considered wasted on the 140 men currently on death row, Lyle is one of the only prisoners who has attained an advanced degree while incarcerated. 2016, he said, quote, there needs to be something more than the poison of prison, air that lethal combination of hatred, bitterness and ignorance that rots mind, body and soul to leave that for another grand possibility life without parole, simply another way to make prisoners disposable
life without parole is violent execution is still one of the best circulating articles and is now taught in courses on criminal justice reform at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and it's been taught in a writing seminar at Duke University.
Hi everyone,
good morning or afternoon or evening depending on where you're at. Welcome back to day three of the collaborative journalism summit and I am Stefanie Murray. I'm the director of the Center for Cooperative Media, and I'm so glad to have you back. I've had the hiccups for the last 10 minutes but they seem to have just gone way. So if you hear me, pick up. That's why. So to note before we get started is that we do have interpretation in Spanish going on so if you hover over at the bottom, click on the world where it says interpretation, you can change your audio to Spanish. So I want to start off by thanking our sponsors, which I've done every day but I want to do every day because this amazing group of institutions has helped us do this summit, so thank you to Knight Foundation North Carolina local news lab fund the Facebook journalism project, American Press Institute The Lenfest Institute for journalism to JFK fellowship program at Stanford education and see the Diederich College of Communication with the O'Brian fellowship in public service journalism at Marquette, the Center for Public Integrity blue Lena, in as much foundation, the Reynolds journalism Institute jornalismo collaborate TiVo and of course Montclair State University. That is where the Center for Cooperative Media is based and we're thankful to all of them. So if you've been with us for the last three days you know about all this stuff I'm going to go through, super fast about side activities just in case because I know there will be some folks who are joining us for the first time today. So we've got a panelist who's busy but silent that's Derrick dent he's doing graphic illustration for every session of the summit I've already seen some of his drawings, finished look fantastic we'll share them all next week. We've got an active chat, please participate we'll drop lots of links in it. If you have questions though for panelists Don't forget q&a Use the q&a box please, the same questions to anyone who's speaking today in our hosts will use that to pitch questions to the groups of people who are going to be sharing their wisdom with you today. I mentioned our Spanish interpretation. Click on that at the bottom. We also have transcription running on otter, in case you want to view the conference that way, you can click on the live streaming link, or we can also drop the link in the chat for you to make it easier. We also have our zoom bingo cards we hit several bingos today hiccups were not on the bingo card but they seem to have gone away, maybe we'll add them next year, and we'll drop a link in the chat that we've got music thanks for all the shout outs to the music, and also community award so today's the last day to nominate folks for community awards so we'll be promoting that quite a bit, because we've got $500 to give out to folks who win those awards we want to see some nominations, and today is our last day of meditation with Julio Jones, so she'll be back in just a little bit to lead us through some relaxing exercises and asks and offers the Padlet so going I know someone just asked for the password in the chat. Please keep using it keep adding stuff, because we want to keep that active and we'll be sharing that again after the conference next week so you can still access it, it won't be going anywhere. The dashboard is the way you keep track of all this stuff so collaborative journalism that org slash dashboard that's what it looks like go there you can click on anything you need to get to where you need to go. So with that, I'd like to now bring up one of our sponsors to the stage to our virtual stage Reynolds journalism Institute, this year is a sponsor of the collaborative journalism Summit, and Randy picked the executive director is here to talk to you so Randy,
I'm Randy pect Executive Director of the Donald W. Reynolds journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism. We're delighted to be a sponsor of this year's Center for Cooperative Media annual conference. So I thought this would be a good time to talk about cooperation and collaboration. Yeah, I know, there he goes preaching to the choir, yes. But also, I want you to know that collaboration is at the core of what we do at RJ AI. Like, right now we're collaborating on projects with the National Association of Black Journalists Chalkbeat and the Bangor Daily News in Maine. And of course, we especially look forward to working together with our RJ fellows each year. Some of the projects from our most recent group include researching the emerging topic of how to handle requests to delete digital information from your website, also known as unpublishing experimenting with a newsletter for obituaries and coming up with best practices to diversify your newsroom source list. You can read about what our fellows are up to, along with all of the other collaborations we have on the whiteboard or in the wild. At our website ArcGIS online.org So, if you're itching to collaborate, or just have questions, please let me know. And thank
you, Randy. That was pre recorded, I think y'all
saw that.
So now I'd like to move to our first session of the day, what something that I consider to be a historic conversation that we're going to have here. I'm thrilled to welcome representatives from the National Newspaper Publishers Association, the National Association of Hispanic, publications, and the Association of alternative news media to the stage. Together, they built a collaboration that includes more than 450. Local media organizations, many of whom are print publications, and their first order of business was an economic collaboration so we're going to hear a lot more about that. So I'd like to hand it over to Larry Lee, who is the publisher of the Sacramento observer who will lead this conversation, Larry.
Thank you so much Stefanie, can you hear me and see me Okay. Hopefully, that is yes. Well, welcome. Thank you all for coming, this, this morning in Sacramento, California, good afternoon for those of you on the East Coast. My name is Larry Lee I'm president and publisher of the Sacramento observer and I will be your moderator this morning for this panel discussing collaboration, the key to sustainability and local media, this is a really as Stephanie said this is a historic gathering of many organizations, advocating on behalf of many legacy publications around the country so we'd love to hear how a group of press associations are expanding the conversation around the future of local media. So what I will do is ask our panelists to introduce themselves. I'll start first and I'm hoping because I can't see who all is in the room but let's start with Dr. Ben Chavis Dr. Davis, are you there. Yes, I'm
here to learn. Thank you very much. On behalf of the National Newspaper Publishers Association. Just want to note that this year 2021 marks the 190/4 year of the black press of America since freedom's journal was first published in 1827 in New York City, the black press has not missed a week has not missed a year, publishing, advocating for freedom, justice and equality and representing not only the news interests of African Americans, people of African descent, but all communities of color who crowd for freedom, justice and equality. I bring you greetings from our board of directors chair back Konkan enriches these things publisher, Houston, power times and learn. We're very pleased to have the Sacramento observer as one of our vibrant members of the nmpa. So, I don't know what you want me to go into my remarks now just wanted me to introduce myself.
Now we'll just do a brief introduction so Dr. Ben as, as always, you did exactly as you always do with perfection. I will pass it on to Fannie Miller.
Good morning, Larry, thank
you, thank you for having us. My name is Fannie Miller I am in San Diego, California from shiny, beautiful San Diego, I've been publishing Latina for the last 33 years in San Diego, I am currently the National Association of Hispanic publications president. I came to the organization, being a really young, as a three year old, publisher, that's how to another organization I've had many mentors. Right now the organization is. We serve about 41 markets in 39 states, and we have also Puerto Rico and DC. We combined. We have a combined reach of about print and digital of 42 point 2 million. And the majority of members are female own. And also, about 80% of our publications are in Spanish. We do have some bilingual ones. And in the height and we also have a high number of female editors, and I just like to throw the, the woman numbers out there but that's, that's about us and I'm really happy to be here and for this conversation.
For fan, we're glad to have you and glad to see the women represented properly as they should. Next, but not least, John, he said, John, go ahead and introduce yourself in your organization if you could please.
Sure. My name is John Houston, I started an alternative publication in Omaha, Nebraska, in 94, and purchase an existing Hispanic publication in 2004 I'm currently the board president at the Association of alternative news media. It's about 100 independent alternative, mostly local media, in a lot of our major metros, and it is a big honor to be here. I'm with an NPA and an HP and the opportunity to work with them and to build bridges also with lions, so thank you for having.
Wonderful. Okay, so as moderator. My job is to kind of keep us moving quickly. And so I will do that. Oh, okay, well let me actually have our let's have everyone introduce themselves and. Okay so next, Amaro. Go ahead, introduce yourself please. Thank you, Larry.
Yeah, my name is Alberto worthy and I'm the Vice President of Operations for Lenovo CCM, which is a Spanish language media company in North Carolina, like you said an introduction where we are, we started a sprint, we're now we're strongly stepping into digital as we're talking today. I'm also the Vice President of the National Association Hispanic publications, and the treasurer for lines well.
Wonderful. Okay, then last but not least, our esteemed my esteemed fellow public servants Cheryl Smith Cheryl please introduce yourself to everyone.
Yes, good morning, good afternoon, hello to everyone, it's an honor to be here, especially anytime I could be with Dr. Ben Chavis because he's a legend, and I am the publisher, Texas Metro news garland journal and I Messenger, and we're located in Dallas, Texas, and I'm a longtime lover of the black press, and I'm a lover of collaborations as well. And I'm also the secretary of the National Association of Black Journalists.
All right, wonderful. Okay, so keeping to our script. Dr. Davis. Why don't you kick us off here. This is a historic collaboration. Tell us a little bit how we got here and what it is, this collaboration is trying to accomplish.
Thank you so much, since 2014 now being the president and CEO of the nmpa. And one of the things that we did about six years ago was to forge a collaborative Alliance or strategic alliance between the nmba the national newspaper publishers such as na hp. The National Association of Hispanic publications. We came together in Washington DC. The concern was, we were not getting the federal advertising dollars as we should have been getting. And remember, newspapers, and there was a tendency of these big ad agencies to play blacks off against Hispanics Hispanics off against blacks, and we were both not, neither one of our constituencies were getting what we should deserve in terms of advertising. And so, I was so pleased that this summit, and you know, to me, collaboration is not just a word collaboration is a interfacing, it is a bonding. It is a solidarity, it is a working together. And when in HP and NNPA decided to work together, it caused a little controversy among some of our members, some of them said man you a while working with the Latin as you can tell alluded to and I'm sure some of the Hispanic against white will work with these African Americans, you know, let's get all we can for our Latino brothers and sisters. So what happened, what we found out later was the extent to which we started working together, we get more attention, not only from the federal government agencies, but from corporate America itself. I keep in mind this is way before, what we're going through now with the resurgence of white supremacy the whole notion of systemic racism and after what happened to George floor last year. Now all corporate mergers talking about D, E, diversity, equity and inclusion. So our collaboration really preceded that, and it's a good thing because what we found out was as a result of the collaboration. When we got more advertising dollars to, we learned that there are mutual interests in major markets, or that we should be working to increase local advertising we also got regional advertising, as well as national advertising. As a result of the collaboration. And then we started attending each other's national conventions, I presented any HP convention they presented at the nmpa convention, and this collaboration I think has been mutually beneficial that's the point I want to make learn initially, and we're very pleased, what the solidarity between the NN PA and in HP as a great role model and I want to thank the collaborative journalism summit for having this particular workshop and the Center for Cooperative Media for being one of the key sponsors of today, what we have to learn is that we work together, we can win together.
Well said. I think what I'd like to get here from Fannie really telling us from your perspective about the Hispanic Association, participating in this collaboration, what did you want to see from this.
No, Larry. When you are asked that if you want to work, and you want to collaborate with Dr Chavis you there's no way you're going to say no I mean it's a, it has been a great opportunity has been a great partnership, and, and I still believe that they give the best parties and the best conventions, you know, and we miss him. But I think this is really important, you know, for us to come. It has been important and there's a lot of more work that we need to do. I mean I think we just started, but you know we're all different, we have three different four different organizations, but when it comes to Hispanic and African American we're very different by we have the same needs. You know the same needs for our publishers for our member the same in a lot of the same needs for our communities. So this collaboration is very important. And I just, I think we're just seeing the beginning of it.
Gotcha. So, give us an example of the impact the Hispanic press has had for example, during COVID. And what more could you be doing with more funding.
So during Krabi, I think, you know, when we when everybody went home and everybody everything shut down. The Hispanic press, and you know, most of the friends that are in I'm going to speak on behalf of the Hispanic press. We didn't go home, we actually became essential workers. We needed, you know the news were changing so fast, I mean by the hour. And I think it gave us many of us, many other publishers, seeing the importance of the digital, of being digital because we could only print a newspaper, once a week but you digital you know when everything was changing the numbers at the minute, or the hour. There was a press release every hour in some of our communities. I think that's what we realize we always have always known that we're important, but we realize the importance of going online, and being and having that that presence, you know, by the minute. If you could say that the way that we were affected, I mean we were affected like any other business, because you know our sponsors, stop advertising. So you know that shut down in many ways, but we needed to still continue in our lead in the communities our small communities know what was going on with coffee and, in, in all the services and other resources that were that were coming into place. So, um, you know, that you know, some of the programs that you're going to see in the collaboration that that you're going to speak ahead it's some of the things that we see now that are more important and we need to do more, you know, everything that has to do with digital, the resources for our members and also one of the things that I noticed and I have seen in in doing Coby, is how many he has brought us together, Even closer I think some of the plough publishers has brought us together, their organizations. The foundations, you know some of the corporations, you know, we have worked with a lot with their support local media, and that has really helped a lot of our publishers in many markets.
Great. Um, so, John, if I can come to you next, you know, on the surface, people may not see a connection between independent publications, and, and the black and Hispanic press. Tell us from your perspective, how did they come to gather How do you see this collaboration working.
Sure. Um, for me it really started locally so having started with the alternative, and also being a publisher the Hispanic publication. I learn about these relationships in the community and shortly after that was invited onto the board of the Mildred D brown Memorial Study Center, Mildred Brown is the founder of the Omaha star, which is the oldest black female founded and run newspaper in the US, one of the 22 publishers that helped organize and NPA. When it was initially formed. And so, had a real appreciation at kind of the ground level, the importance of diverse voices in the local media ecosystem. And that summer, and having attended the nhp conventions, getting a chance to meet Dr Shavers and some of the leadership some of the board leadership from NNPA to spend some time just kind of watching off with the strategic alliance and what it was doing. Um, but what really kind of got me maybe more involved was in the summer of 19 when I, when I became president at the Association of alternative news media, and as a board member at the Mildred D brown Memorial Study Center. I wrote, got a grant for the Omaha star, and that really opened my eyes to this billion dollar commitment to save local media, with this threat of underrepresented voices being important, but knew from my relationships in time that there was a big disconnect in how what I knew about the Hispanic and black press in the alternative press for that matter, and how funders and other organizations were trying to understand what the future of local media would look like. And so just started trying to bang it on some doors and help drive along you know, in pretty deep consultation with the leadership at the hispanic and black press a conversation around trying to shift some of that attention and some of those attitudes. And so it's, it's been a huge privilege of mine to be able to help and elevate you know, 130 plus years of publishers local publishers working together. And I think, you know, that's part of my role and the role every alternative news media plays in their market.
Gotcha. So, let's get into a little bit about the, the nuts and bolts into the weeds a little bit so you guys have been meeting with regularity you are working very hard at this, this is not just, you know let's let's talk every three times a year or something like that. Tell us in the mechanics of what's going on, day to day, week to week, on this collaboration, John.
Yeah, so we met, we had a meeting at the offices of the NNPA, the first week of January, 2020, and we hosted a NNPA hosted, it's in the Thurgood Marshall Center to which is just such a powerful building in such a powerful space. We host a Google News initiative that brought a great team LMA local media association was there, and we had representatives and publishers from all three associations to talk about all the commonalities that we had, how we fill out the local media ecosystem. We're the scrappiest local media operators we have some of the leanest overheads, We stand up for the voices that don't get represented, and that really kicked off kind of this ongoing work for. And in this case, you know, kind of building on what the strategic alliance between an MPA and nhp had already built. And so there was a small working group that met every Tuesday. Kind of advancing our conversation with Google News initiative and trying to open things up, um, we were going to meet next in person at the Hispanic legislative summit that nhp hosts in DC, which I think is a week after Black press week when an MP, an NPA meets with Congressional Black Caucus and others. And of course we know how that all went, and, and you know it was really about three weeks into, or just a week or two into the pandemic when it just was the reports were kind of rolling in and, you know, your, your head just started getting around how big this was and how damaging this could be. And along with an HP and NNPA convened some meetings at that time with a group of local funders, elevate Lion. Lion really stepped up to some leadership in those conversations, and over a series of four weeks talking about how can we help our local meeting and an eye, diverse local meeting and the ones that that really needed. and I think you see the fingerprints of that in some of the emergency relief funds that Facebook and Google announced that got I think a combined 80 million plus out to local publishers. Um, and so, you know, from there it was kind of expanding opportunities and just making sure we were reaching out and and knocking on doors and letting folks know that we were here and, and, you know, we were ready to engage. Um, and I think, you know, while the strategic. Strategic Alliances existed for a long time and we're kind of a new addition to this, as well as lioness. Um, the awareness that started around Floyd really kind of bolted this bit higher I think into the the consciousness of the thought leadership and the funding behind local media. So that's that's creating some events more opportunities but I think we all think we're just scratching the surface and it's just the tip of the iceberg. And now is the time that voices that haven't been represented or have been underrepresented and who have so much to show and teach us really need to be elevated. And so looking forward to the work ahead and because there's a lot of work. But as Dr. Schaefer says if we do it together we win together.
Right. So, so Dr. Davis, you know, there have been some real specific efforts to really build the capacity of many of our publications. And there's, there's one in particular I know that you want to make sure to highlight and discuss and that'll kind of slide us into bringing Cheryl and Alvaro into the conversation as well too. So why don't you tell us a little bit about some of the work that's
been going on. Thank you learn, because otherwise you're your paper to the Sacramento observer. Look after that meeting that John talked about in January, 2020. We will begin to engage, Google, Facebook, other groups particularly Google came up with a Google News initiative. And as you know, doing this pandemic. Over the last 12 months, also dependent on swinging faster toward digital. And so all of a sudden, on one hand, publishers had to contend with this pandemic, but on the other hand, catching up with the speed of the technology transformation of media have disseminated me to how so want to go digital. We know from print first to digital first and not seeing digital supplant in print, but compliment in print and not seeing print, taking place of digital book complementing digital, all the good news is that early on a proposal came up turning to digital, working with our collaborative associations to call the Google News initiative, G, and, and it was for digital transformation. And I'm so pleased that so many of the minimal publishers of nmpa, as well as nhp and when John's group worked together, and it's been amazing I'm hearing from the publishers already, as we about to conclude the GNN. The first phase of that is involved minute minute pubs minute opportunities, not only for the publishers layer who ended Google News and, but for others that are learning from this, our websites have been transformed, getting young people, Generation Z and millennials involved in this digital transformation has been very very helpful and I would say that the Google News in essence probably stands is one of the foremost examples of the benefits of collaboration of the benefits of working together. And I'm also saying just to be fair, that collaborations between some of our people call our own businesses and some of the major media companies also taken place So collaboration is across the board. One thing I want to say in closing my remarks. Digital is something that we all have to take more seriously from a business side, as well as from the professional side to the demographics are changing. Then when the 2020 census is gonna be reported out in a few months you're going to find out that the browning of America is going much more rapid than even the demographic calls the demographers have projected the Children's Defense Fund just reported last week that the majority now have children under 18. In the United States today in 2021, a majority of children of color, that's going to change the school school system is going to change the workplace. So again, this whole evidence of diversity, equity and inclusion is not something for rhetoric is something for implementation. And we have some good examples now in the black press with Latino press and others took with help from organizations like Google, I'm so proud of the Google News initiative.
Catching thanks for sharing Dr Pan so in that beautiful photo of the participants from the ad Transformation Lab, I saw my good friend Cheryl Smith face right up there and Alvaro, right up in there, trying to get as much learnings as possible so Sarah will jump to you real quick and I want to be very mindful of time we're at nine, It's or my for my time it's 930 We're about 30 minutes into our past, so we got about 30 minutes left so we'll try and move quickly because I know we want to hear from some of the some q&a and some of the viewers, so she'll tell us real briefly about your participation in the DNI at Transformation Lab.
Let me tell you i was so excited to participate there. We actually went out and hired someone to help us manage it because it was like speaking a foreign language, a lot of the lingo and. But what we didn't want to do because one thing is Dr. Chambers mentioned about the pandemic. It also shined a light on the deserts, the issues that we both have our Hispanic and black publications are having, and our communities are having so there are a lot of issues that we were being faced with, and we were determined not to be afraid because I'm old enough they've gone to hot metal and the law is compact graphic. It's machines that we use,
just showing them your age
And this is so important to know because some people find it just like they were fighting digital and we weren't going to fight digital and initiative helped us because we really needed help and growing and learning what was important for our audiences and how to build them and the JNI project put together a very aggressive agenda for us and helping, I was already working because I'm in a collaboration with the Dallas Morning News, and we call on them for help, but they also call on us for help because they were missing, major publications are realizing that they are missing our communities, and this pandemics show us their strength and numbers and I love what Dr. Dan said about us working together, and how we can win together. The GNR project is, I'm getting to hear from other people and other communities and what their publications are doing and the struggles that they are having and we're solving them together, and I'm getting calls from across the country, and emails from around the world from people saying your website looks better. It looks fresher and all these wonderful things are happening so I feel like I'm really smart. They made me feel really smart because I got to participate and such, and I took advantage of this opportunity which I would encourage anyone to not run from them, but we also just have to understand that when the pandemic hit it made our printed project equally more important because everyone could not access the digital.
and this is, this is part of the transformation for us. Overall I know you're going through some changes as well too with your organization, why don't you share with folks about how this collaboration has assisted you with your capacity building.
Yes, thank you very much like Cheryl we were really starting from the beginning which is both good and bad. We had to get some more hands on deck to do more of the work. We're very thankful for the opportunity from that we received from the collaborative as well as from, you know, Google, the GI team and taupe they've been very helpful in providing, best practices, and also providing them in a way that sort of we can act on them quickly. We, they kind of diagnose what where we were and give us a plan of where we should go. So it we are still in the plan the middle of the program so we're still executing those but many of the things we have acted on, much like what Cheryl was saying we do get positive feedback, and beside, and that's that feels good that fuels us to keep going but also because it is an ad lab. It also means we've been already been receiving more more ad dollars from better traffic and also indirectly which is also part of the lab is as you grow in visibility, your current and potential clients find you faster, so they reach out to you. So, I mean I've seen you, I have some trust in you you look you look, you looked apart I want to I want to be seen with you. So that's also a big change, as we like Dr Childress was saying as a compliment of our digital that goes with the history that we have in our publication, and it really helps us to do the mission that we are set out to do which is to help our community. We can't help our community if we don't have the economic needs. So it really is that virtuous cycle, which we are very thankful that we are now sort of stepping into, and also to our want to give a lot of things to our to a lot of our fellow publishers in the cohort trading information, what are you doing, what am I doing, is it working for you, why, how did you do it. That ability to come together and just be in and help each other, has been extremely valuable and something we had not come across before, but I'm certainly thankful that we got the opportunity and hope we can continue in the future.
Right, well as a publisher, I do know, like you said, there's nothing better than someone calling telling you that they want to advertise with you as opposed to you going to find them so we need all the help that we can get transforming our meteorites fairly I want to come to you from right before we go to q&a. Tell us a little bit about what you see as the future the next steps for this collaboration
that you know Larry there's so much to do and so many opportunities, and, and I think doing more of what we're have been doing, you know, coming together to continue develop pathways to, you know, more digital transformation, have, have more publications, more members benefit from the services so, you know, what we have been doing in in in a small in a small way, you know, we need to expand on that, you know, what the digital transformation for our publishers is key. You know, the DNI is I think is one program of the many programs that, that we should be seeking and then we should be, you know, partnering with to bring resources to, to, to the, to the members. You know when it comes to the Hispanic publications, they're not everybody's at the same level. You know, we have publications that are very, you know high up in the digital world and then some that are this, you know, barely starting and don't have a presence, and it's very important for us to continue the kind of programs like we have been doing with DNI, but I think we need to do more. And actually, my goal is to give more resources, such as the one that we did with DNI and in the lab that more members because, You know, we had a lot of members that apply, but it was, you know, a small number actually that is going through the, through the program.
Gotcha. Okay, so I want to get to the q&a but I want to close by asking one question very specifically to John. So John, as in my travels in this what I have heard from some who are not within the African American or ethnic media space that, as they have been trying to get funding for efforts like this that are specifically directed toward communities of color, their eyes have been opened, about the lack of funding directly set to ethnic publications, the inequalities, the disparities. Can you tell us from your perspective, have you encountered that. Is that something because family brought it up, you know, we need more resources to kind of do the work, and some of the mainstream publications and newsrooms might get a certain amount of funding, and we may get a fraction of that funding. Has that been something that you've encountered coming from outside of the ethnic media
where yeah I mean, you know, the history is pretty clear on it and even in the last 10 years of the reinvent local media, you know, push, I think the thing that I learned at the local level very early on is that even though I'm an alternative and I spent a lot of time in these communities and try and report for these communities, that these communities have their own voices they have all the skill, all the talent, and that if we're reinventing the revenue model around media, we need to rethink the journalism model as well, so that we aren't the gatekeepers, we're the referees moderators and we elevate these voices right and so I think, um, you know, the thing that I would say to that is, I think that there. There's a certain level of how you manage expectations and set things up and frankly you know, I'm earning a lot in this whole process, so that you get those funds. But what I do know without a doubt, is that if I'm going to support these voices these communities in the in the media that represent them, Then that investment needs to be directly with them in a, you know, a n lion we can play supporting roles, like I said there's 130 years between these two associations of publishers, paying for their memberships, coming together, frequently collaborating sharing I think every publisher here would say, I learned more at those conventions than I learned all year right and I get to share. And so, it might not fit the standard program model but I'm hoping program models are also opening up to this and adapting. Yeah, I mean, there's no doubt, you know, I mean that it's crazy that it's taken this long, you know, in my opinion, and I think people mean well. So it's also on us to make sure that we're there in making that opportunity as good as possible as it can be. But yeah that's that's the history of flat out, and, you know, despite all of that, these associations and their media, you know, they're still serving their communities they're surviving COVID US Census election coverage, um, you know, You name it, um, and you know there's no big corporate lending facility somewhere to float that boat, or, you know, some billionaire throwing money around and try and make it happen. They make it happen every day, you know his family owned independent businesses.
Gotcha. Well, Great. Okay, so we've got a few cute questions in the chat area or in the q&a area and, and we will try and run through these quickly so I'm just gonna read them. This is from Josie Gonzalez. To Dr Davis's point how is the challenge of the digital divide and the browning of America being addressed in the digitization of the press.
Yes, thank you very much for that question. This parallel. In other words, the browning of America the change of demographics. At the same time, the change in in technology, because even in the digital space, there are changes within the digital space itself. There are changes in say, direct digital ad buy and programmatic digital airbag, and the capacity building. Now all of our member newspapers, and all of our communities need to upgrade and access. So, the more collaboration that we've had, the better that we've been able to respond, both to the challenges, but also the opportunities. I think there are probably more opportunities today as the nation comes out of COVID than ever before for our members, newspapers, I can also say without fear of contradiction that today in 2021, the value of local media cannot be overstated. Local media is becoming the new media. If I could say that not that local media in the past was not a priority, but it certainly wasn't halide. We're now going from local media to global media, and global media, comes back to local media, and so it goes out member, newspapers to the person who asked the question, and advantage if we see advanced some of this is how do we see ourselves in the marketplace. How do we see how sales in the, in the news media industry, because it is an industry. And one of the things I think that the collaboration helps us to see is our business interests. A lot of times people think, well, you know, these minorities, they're just looking for charity. There's nothing wrong with charity, but empowerment is better than charity. Help us to help ourselves to better help us to increase our revenue streams, and not to keep us at the fringes of society, to bring member public case center, center of what it means to be a global citizen, what it means to be an American, and across lines of language across lines of culture. One of the things that think I would close on this point learn that what also gives us an advantage with a trusted voices of our communities, and that trust so we're not just selling metrics. We're selling influence, you know as sphere of influence in our command with a trust book when it came time where a lot of people had a hesitation to take the vaccine. and we were able to help some of these Pharmaceut comes in some of the federal government itself the CDC and particularly, get over hesitation of the vaccine hesitation of understanding COVID because they needed to turn to a trusted voice, and we were there as the trustable as a great example. So I'm optimistic I'm more optimistic about the black press and I tend to express the Pacific Allen, and Asian press Native American press, as well as progressive white press, we all need to work together. And again, as I said in beginning, we work together, we win together we transform together, and we make one for the next generation of freedom fighting journalist journalists to come up
again in the fall. That's fine, Dr. Baca and that's what you do. So, Josie also has another question. How is this collaboration, engaging with local non governmental agencies whether in education academia. Press local nonprofit news. I'll throw that to the group if anyone wants to answer that.
We are actually collaborating with several institutions in the Dallas area including our colleges and nonprofits or libraries. It's important that we realize, COVID helped us to realize what was really important and what was important, What was missing where the disparities whereas so what people are more inclined for collaboration is now now is a better time is, it's not just about feeling good, it's about knowing you can't do it all and where there's unity there is strength, and that was something that we did with the journalists actually when we had unity journalists of color we came together, and I'm glad to see that we're doing it again. So we've been very successful and we're getting ready to launch a project in Dallas.
Great. I love, I love this question here, this is for Alvaro is from anonymous attendee so you got a fan. Someone cyber stalking you. Because they know all about you, they see that you've succeeded in being selected to participate in the GNR lab hosted a Google journalism fellow, and every port for America journalists, you've received grants from Facebook and democracy find local or local foundations and others, are you unique. Eek, or are you ahead of the pack, or are you behind, I'm gonna throw that last for you, are you by
qualify, like this, everything's relative so I don't feel ever I had on the pack on anything, we are still a very small place, but like, I guess I'll put it this way, the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. So there's a lot of people that we've been learning from, but, uh, and I'll tip my hat, John Houston who did it started even before we did he was just preaching hey we have to start reaching out to nonprofits, a lot of these funders and grow that third pillar of fundraising that we were all about just hey we're a private enterprise that's that that's for nonprofits were for profit, we have nothing to do with that. We just committed to that mindset earlier, and I really mean committed like we, we reached out we investigate as much as we could. And one tip I will say is, reach out to people that either the funders, or the people that have won previous have received free previous grants, you'd be surprised how open they are to just you know what I did, how I did it and, and, worse presented in the second tip I'll say is become active, is get sign up as many of these newsletters from all these organizations have newsletters sign up, read it. I mean not just receive it and browse it really read it follow up, they have great tips about what grants are opening, who is running them, who received them. If you participate, the more they know you, the more you are likely to actually then win because you know what they're looking for and where you fit in.
That's someone putting that click and participate. I like that Cheryl that's, that's, that's a good term, Cheryl, you also have been the beneficiary of some of this work. How do you feel where you are. Compared to the ecosystem. Oh, you're on mute. I may have.
That's a good question because we have been, we're participating we're actively participating and we're not letting folks define us because people will try to marginalize. Our alright institutions, if you will. I remember going to presenting. And they said, Oh, this is wonderful for the black press what can you do with this for the Hispanic press, you know, and, and, when we, those of us who are in the majority now the black and the brown when we realize just how much influence we have, and even bringing like Dr. Ben mentioned our Asian. There is a weekly publication in Dallas that is Korean. It is weakly 162 pages.
Oh my.
Yes, just think about that and so we talk, they actually bought the radio station I used to work for that I can't listen to now because of language barriers, but when you think about what's going on. If you are constantly fighting with one another, I realized that black and brown, were more important now for our communities because after dealing with the last administration, as opposed to what we're getting from the Biden administration today in terms of the respect. Folks, looked at the media as like we were like car used car salesman, and they had no respect for us, but we were able to bring information to them about COVID that they were not getting anywhere else, we were signing a light on you saying that black and browns are impacted more by COVID but then the vaccines, you know, the majority of folks getting it are not black and brown, so so we we've elevated it and unity has helped us and we must continue with that same type of realizing that we're not fighting each other when we work together. Are the community, our audience's benefit and that's what we want. That's why we're here to educate, inform, We'll do the entertaining from time to time but empowering and uplifting, that's what we're here for this black press soldiers without swords, because we're fighting a number of battles on a number of fronts, and we can't be silent and we can't keep saying that. let's get a little piece of the pie and take it from someone else, I guarantee you, if someone is advertising with me, they're not giving me all their money. So I'm even asking them about others are you advertising in other, I'm not, they're not giving me all of their money, so they need to spread it around, and we can all benefit together.
Absolutely. What you say, when I, when I think of collaboration often you're reminded me of the African proverb, do you want to go fast, go alone but you want to go far, go together. And I think that that's what collaborations like this mean, a service to John or Fannie either one of you, what's one of the questions is, what's the biggest challenge to collaborations like this, and how can news organizations address what's being called this digital divide. I think Dr. Davis and we've got examples of the DNI Transformation Lab. What is the biggest challenge for so many different moving parts and pieces.
The challenge, um, you know, I think we have been able to work, and bring you know some solid. You know partnerships to the collaboration of course there's challenges. You know and I think the challenge is where our members are more than the challenge between the two organizations but that every member in our lives with a Hispanic membership it's there in a very, very different levels, getting them to believe that digital is first, instead of print being first. That's, that's a challenge, because, you know, in print, that's where we pretty much have made all our, you know, our business, it's out of the print publication so that that's the challenge within itself. I don't know, John, what do you see as a challenge with the three organizations but I would say it's mostly within our members, Allison my, my view,
we I mean, to echo that point. We've got a great program, we're seeing incredible results, it's serving close to 30 publishers. So that's 500 Plus publishers that are also, you know, looking to do this and that deserve the same investment. And I think that for a lot of these, there's a real legacy here that's so important to these communities and so important to our community as a whole. And so, I, you know, like anything, I'm, you know, by meeting weekly by attending each other's events, um, you just start building those relationships and, and so it's works, right, you just got to put in the time and you've got to really listen, um, you know it's doing that locally that really gave me the appreciation for why these associations are so important. So the investment at the association level then, you know, has been, you know, the rewards and a gift are all mine. Um, and so, you know, I expect to see more, it's always, you know, I think that we're talking about the Native American press, Asian American Pacific Islander President there's more to this constellation Right. Um, and so any HB nmpa The Hispanic and black press are very, you know, structured and organized they've had decades of working together. We don't have quite that scale on some of the other ones. And so I think that's going to be a little bit more time to make sure that we're reaching out, helping to organize they're building those relationships, they're getting those viewpoints into the conversation.
Okay, we're about four minutes we've got about four minutes left, I got a couple more questions, so I'll try and push this quickly. One person asked Do you have any recommendations for how to help encourage local news startups with in communities of color, particularly where there's a lack of publishers. Now, in those communities.
So I could answer that or I could give you a little bit of my personal experience, I started a Latina at the age of 21, you know, in 1988, and with pretty much nothing I mean No no no experience, no resources, nothing. And I just wish I had the need, you know, there were six of us a little bit after, print and news and news outlets, it's a very it's a hard business, but it's a very rewarding business so I would recommend if you really want to do this I think you need to be part of that community, you need to engage with the community, you need to live in the community. One of the things that I said, you know, in San Diego, I have had probably over 10 publications come and go throughout the years. And I always said, You know I always go back to basics, you know, why did I started the publication. It's a community oriented publication. So if you see a need, I would recommend you know, first getting involved with organizations getting mentorship that could help you. You know, if you don't know the industry but if you really want to get into the business of it.
Gotcha. And to John's point Lyon is a fantastic organization to particularly help digital first startups in this in this space. Okay. Two minutes left. How can journalism organizations collaborate with others, that usually don't cover specific communities like communities of color, and help their mindset change for the better.
Real quickly, Dallas Morning News contacted me because they were having really serious issues, and Mike Wilson, I have to say to his credit, he said, you know, he knew the black community was pissed with the Dallas Morning News he just just flat out he knew it. And so he reached out and, and, as you just heard and as John and others have talked about. You have to know the communities and Fannie mentioned get involved, get into it and one of the best ways they could do that was by partnering with someone who was entrenched in the community. And so we had very candid conversations but you have to go into and there is actually a guide that we just released it talks about the collaboration, you have to go into, and leave your feelings, somewhere else because you people have to be honest and you have to be able to take the honesty and go and help to build and that's what's really important. Our community has been marginalized people want to lump the Latino community into one. You know when I know here in my office I have someone from Spain Puerto Rico and Mexico. So, they're not all the same, and, and the only thing only Spanish word I know is no, not really. But when they ask for a raise. But we have to you have to have people who know it so it doesn't seem like you're pandering and that you are really interested in building and growing together. And and that's really that's what's helping us with the Dallas Morning News because I am very candid I bring all my blackness to the table.
Wonderful. All right, well, we at the top of the hour. I think that was wonderfully said unfortunately we lost Dr Chavis due to technical difficulties, but he said he of course is committed to this collaboration as well too. So with that, I'll pass it back to you, Stephanie.
Thank you. Thanks, Larry. And thank you, that was a fantastic discussion I'm sorry we lost Dr. Davis, but thank you to everyone. Thank you Cheryl and John and Alvaro and the entire group for presenting today and I'm really excited to see how this work continues to grow and strengthen, because you know I said at the beginning I think this is a historic collaboration, and you have very fertile ground to work on so I'm excited to see where you go. So now we're going to turn our attention to lightning talks. This is the last day of lightning talks. Everyone loves our lightning talks and we've got five more up for you now. Remember these are five minute very quick discussions of a very specific collaborative project, and they were all pre recorded this year we did that for the first time they're usually live, and under pressure, but this year they're pre recorded, but we do have a fantastic host with us today, welcome Tom Wong from the Dallas Morning News and the lightning talks are presented by the American Press Institute. So thank you to API for sponsoring our lightning talks this year. And so with that time I'll hand it over to you.
Thank you Stephanie, and to all of you a very warm welcome. I'm Tom long assistant managing editor at the Dallas Morning News, where I edit Sunday page one oversee newsroom de ai efforts and our talent development, and have recently launched our community funded journalism initiative to raise foundation support for our most important public service journalism in Texas. I'm happy to say that we're also preparing to launch the Dallas media collaborative with several news outlets including Cheryl Smith's great publication, community partners and the solutions journalism network on the side I also edit API's better news stories which focus on best practices and newsroom digital transformation. And I just want to thank API for sponsoring these really great lightning talks. Folks, please remember that the presenters will be available to discuss their projects and the q&a so please feel free to ask them questions there. And now to the videos. First up we have Kathy bests and Sean Mussenden from the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism, they helped spearhead a multi University collaboration that had student reporters investigate homelessness evictions and worker safety across the country. Now to Kathy and Shawn. Hi,
I'm Kathy best I'm the director of the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland.
And I'm Sean Mussenden I'm the data editor for the Howard Center at the University of Maryland.
We're going to talk to you about the five multi University reporting collaborations we've done since the Howard center started two years ago. We've partnered with Stanford University, Boston University, the University of Arkansas, the University of Oregon, Arizona State University and the University of Florida, to produce deeply reported investigative projects on homelessness evictions and worker safety. These student driven projects have been published in partnership with organizations like the Associated Press and USA Today, And they've appeared in The Washington Post's The Boston Globe, and hundreds of other news outlets. They've won national and regional awards, and they've had local impact. We're going to tell you what we've learned about collaborating with other universities on investigative reporting projects and offer you some tips. Here's some things to consider. First, identify people to work with at other universities that you trust in these collaborations, we often publish each other's work and it's key that everyone has the same dedication to the truth, to accuracy, and to fairness.
It's also important to trust, but verify. It's key to have a robust fact checking process that everyone buys into. We found this step is critical to building credibility with distribution partners who will publish our students work.
Take full advantage of each partner's strengths. For example, in our most recent project on worker safety, We relied on Rob wells at the University of Arkansas for his deep experience in business reporting. We sent, University of Maryland students to Him for guidance when they were doing reporting at Stanford, Cheryl Phillips, a data and computational journalist designed a survey tool that all the schools could use when doing their worker interviews.
It's important to also develop a system for constant communication between editors to keep everyone on the same page. We also think it's easy to create opportunities for students at different universities to communicate directly on our collaborations we use Slack, zoom, GitHub, Google Docs. We're still searching for the perfect project management tool in case anybody has suggestions.
So, you need to make sure that you develop project ideas that are suitable for students skill levels, and that can be completed during a semester. And remember that the students also have other classes and responsibilities. This may require extensive pre planning by faculty, and perhaps even some pre reporting or data work, and it will also require flexibility as the project unfolds.
At the beginning we think it's really important to define how students and faculty at each school will contribute to the project. We also think it's a good idea to formalize the relationship with Mo EU or memorandum of understanding because of legal liability issues around the final published work.
Pick one organization in the collaboration to be the project lead. And that organization will be vested with the ability to make final editorial decisions. This doesn't mean a top down management approach, but it guarantees consistency in publishing stories.
It's also critical to identify a project manager, somebody who's going to keep everyone focused on the end goal, and keep everybody on deadline, the role, another role they should play is holding everybody accountable for completing pre tasks that were already agreed upon.
Go in with your eyes open to the work that this is going to require. It takes time, it takes energy to do journalism, while also managing a collaboration.
Also be cognizant of the fact that universities all run on different schedules and plan accordingly. We've worked with Stanford as we mentioned, which runs on a quarter system, while the University of Maryland runs on a semester system. Further complicating things Stanford is three hours behind us.
Hi everyone, happy to be here.
Hey folks, thank you Kathy and Shawn. Several new project managers have taken the helm of collaboratives recently and one of them is Rob Collins, who came on as project lead for the Oklahoma Media Center earlier this year, the collaborative launched in 2020 and has since examined COVID impact on the state's education system. So let's go to rob to find out more.
I'm happy to be here. Last year I had five jobs, working for, for profit legacy media. And that wasn't sustainable. On the day I interviewed for the Oklahoma Media Center job, I found out my boss was retiring, and he asked me to apply for his newspaper publisher position. It was kind of like deciding between crash landing a 747 plane, or launching a brand new aircraft. In my heart I knew that entering the purpose driven realm of nonprofit journalism was my next chapter. You all know about collaboratives but they are new to Oklahoma so we've kind of formed a coalition of the willing. After I started my new job this year, UCLA Media Center partners helped us craft our new mission statement, that is to support and strengthen Oklahoma's local journalism ecosystem and spur innovation through statewide collaboration that benefits, diverse audiences. LMC supports our ecosystem in three ways. The first way OMC helps is through funding. This year we launched the Oklahoma Media Center Innovation Fund, totaling $100,000 This is a great opportunity for media partners to test new business models, or to find innovative ways to engage and reach diverse audiences. Earlier this month 15 stipends were awarded to our media partners in the first wave of the Oklahoma Media Center's 2021 Innovation Fund. This program is designed to test new business models and find new ways to engage and reach diverse audiences. Our ultimate goal is for the winning projects to be replicated elsewhere where these ideas can help sustain Oklahoma journalism. We were inspired by the creativity exhibited in the inaugural year for this fund to take innovation to the next level. Another big way LMC helps is through training for one example, Joy mayor of trusting news did part one on explaining the importance of how journalism works, because many do not trust us, or understand us, Or even though how we do it. The third way we help is sharing through collaboration. Last month the Oklahoma Media Center announced its new project for 2021. Our news collaborative will show how the landmark McGirt vs Oklahoma decision will affect both tribal and non Indigenous residents in the state of Oklahoma. LMC media partners recently selected the name. Promised Land, a Supreme Court decision places Oklahoma at a crossroads for our shared topic in 2021, the collaborative will cover the affirmation of tribal sovereignty after the Supreme Court ruling last year. Angel Ellis, Director of Muskogee Creek nations tribally funded news organization, and an OMC partner said Promised Land incorporates the language of law, it reflects historical context and in a broad sense, it's something any American can understand. Settlers looking for a better life and means to provide an indigenous people who have had close ties to land stewardship, for centuries, can all identify with Promised Land, she said, Graham Lee Brewer, a member of the Cherokee Nation and a board member of the Native American journalists Association based in Oklahoma, recently provided training for OMC partners, uncovering indigenous tribes nausia also is helping us facilitate conversations with tribal media, not just suggested we consider forming an advisory board of indigenous stakeholders to serve as a sounding board. In more trusting news training we're wanting to focus on listening and thinking of new outreach ideas. We recently put together our diverse nonprofit board for LMC Trey savage of the non doc online media, Cecilia Hernandez with Telemundo Oklahoma of broadcast, and Ed Choate the Choctaw publisher of the Muskogee Phoenix of legacy media have expressed interest to serve on our OMC media board, as members, they're joining thunder in as much and Bianca Gordon with a United Way agencies serving homeless, high school students in central Oklahoma has volunteered for our at large board seat. She's a descendant of the Choctaw freedom. When I first started my LMC gig, Dick Pryor the GM of kgr a radio and NPR affiliate described my job as three dimensional chess. We literally had a catfight in our first meeting in January. And one of our media partners, Cats started fighting during that initial zoom. So I am indeed a herder of cats. But I have one job.
Thank you.
Thank you Rob. When it comes to audience engagement, Sammy edge and Nicole Foy, know what they're doing. The two veteran reporters head up the Latino listening project, a collaborative focused on the educational outcomes of Latino students in Idaho. So here's Sammy and Nicole. Hi
I'm Sammy I work at Idaho education news,
I'm Nicole Foy I work at
the Idaho statesman
and we collaborated on a project that went for over a year on focused on Latino student outcomes and I know it kind of all came about when I was lucky enough to get a fellowship from me, from API, focused on community engagement,
and I knew I wanted to focus on Latino students.
And one of the things that came up at one of our first trainings with API was, you know, is there somebody in the community that you live in that is already
doing the work that you want to do. Are you replicating work is there somebody that you could partner with as opposed to trying
to redo the work,
somebody else has already done. And Nicole came to mind for me right away. Yeah,
I had been covering at that time I had been writing about Latinos around Idaho on a variety of issues for a couple of years. And so, when Sammy approached me with this project idea, it seemed like an awesome way to collaborate because at the time, my newspaper also didn't have an education Focus reporter, and so it was really
cool and good
idea for both of our outlets to partner together, we had a reporter who was covering Latino issues already, and an education, only outlet that was already doing really deep policy work in that area.
So our goals around our project.
Really it was it was based on engagement, we really wanted to connect with Latino families around the state, and learn about the ways that Idaho schools were or were not working for them. And we know from data that Latino student outcomes are below white student outcomes in most avenues and most school districts in the state. And so we wanted to hear from them like, what could be better, how could Idaho schools be serving you better.
We really wanted to bring a broader awareness of the achievement gap issue to Idaho policymakers in particular, but it was really about engaging with and highlighting the voices of Latino families.
Yeah and so we really got to dig into doing a number of listening sessions without an agenda, you know, we didn't even write stories out of some of these initial sessions we did our best to meet with stakeholders in various areas and in various regions of the state, just to ask them, we have this broad slate that we want to write about what are things that you think are not being covered things myths that you see that you would like to see busted, or just stories that no one's ever asked you to tell before, and you know that was everything from Latino parents to students to a great round that we did with teachers and educators. And it was really insightful so that once we started getting into those bigger picture stories and writing stories kind of first like I think our first story was like just mythbusting like this is what you need to know about Latino students was really just drew from a huge amount of feedback and engagement that we felt really confident went launching into the story.
So what worked
well with our engagement efforts. Let me start with what didn't work well when we tried to so we covered the whole state here, and when we tried to go into a community where we didn't have a lot of connections and broadcast that we weren't going to have a listening session we wanted to connect parents. Those really had not great attendance, even if we if we tried to broadcast for weeks
beforehand.
Really what we discovered worked well is partnering with, with agencies in the community that already have deep connections with Latino families. Once we explained our project to them they were almost always willing to have us come in, connect with their families, and that was really where our greatest audience was. We also had good success with texting families in Spanish, often they told us they would rather text than do email a lot of family said they didn't have an email address that they check regularly. And then we also did some, some live video sessions was the pandemic hit with a stakeholder in the Idaho Latino community and I think those reached a lot of
parents.
Yeah and I think that's one of the biggest takeaways from this project is in many ways and just like for many people, the pandemic did derail a lot of the plans that we had for this project, I mean we had a whole slate of listening sessions scheduled for the week our state shutdown. And so that kind of had to change things, but it was really amazing to see how easy it was to switch to online engagement, which is really hard when you're covering a number of isolated communities across the state. But it was really great to see that not only did we have the knowledge, but we had a ton of connections with stakeholders, which really is a good example of why you should you should be doing this type of engagement work always in your communities is because a disaster or a big news item is going to affect some of these communities that you cover, and unless you put the work in ahead of time to get to know them, to get to, you know, just make sure their voices are being a part of the larger conversation
when that big
news thing hits or when you suddenly have your resources very much narrowed down like we did during the pandemic. You're going to need those connections and you're going to produce better stories if you've already been doing the work.
Thank you so much Sammy and Nicole. Now we turn to North Carolina, where the North Carolina media equity project is working to advance diversity, equity and inclusion and news here is Melanie cell to Don Marshall and Rochelle for it to explain. Hi, I'm
Melanie Sewell I'm the Interim Executive Director of ancy local news workshop at Ilan University, and we're here to talk about a project we call the NC media equity project, and it involves six news organizations in North Carolina, ABC 11 PBS North Carolina W FA public media. The News and Observer in Charlotte Observer, and education and see. And last summer, as we were all beginning to come to terms with what we needed to do in our organizations around diversity, equity and inclusion. The ANC local news workshop reached out to these organizations and others. And we learned that leadership in these organizations were very much immersed in how to advance diversity, equity and inclusion in their organizations and for their audiences. The idea was to bring them together as a learning group, and to elevate the conversation in North Carolina media about how we make progress. So with me today. I'm going to introduce Rochelle Ford, who is the Dean of the School of Communications at Ilan University, and Judah Marshall, who is the Executive Vice President and Chief Content Officer for W FA public media English serving the Charlotte region. Well as we when we all go to go the first time, one thing we noticed that there's no lack of good intentions and people always have the right intention setting out but it takes a lot to get changed to happen. So the important I'm wondering if you can help people understand specifically what is an example of one thing that the workshop has done to advance this conversation with the group.
Absolutely, so we gather monthly to talk about issues from audience to content to recruitment and retention strategies, but we also have a coach that works individually with each of the newsrooms to challenge them and help them to advance their own plans. So one of the things that was a collective project and a challenge to each of these organizations, was how are we communicating this commitment, how will people know that each of these six organizations are committed to enhancing the the diversity and making sure their workforce feels included in their organizations, how can they show their commitment to their audiences and understanding their audience's needs better and creating stories that that really fill that gap. So we had one of the students at Ilan University do a content analysis of their web presence and to see how far down into their websites, would we find their commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion and what they were doing, what their commitment was and what we're going to be some of those action steps that they would do from an internal perspective, as well as to the content and how they're trying to partner with their local communities. And we took that study, and we presented it to the news organizations and some of them looked at it said oh my goodness I wasn't even aware that we weren't telling our story, and they have begun to make proactive steps to tell their own story about what their commitment is and what their actions are. So that's one example of how we provided news and information specifically information about these news organizations presented it to them, then they challenged each other, to begin to make change, and they're it's happening now.
Great.
Well, one last question for Don. So, how does the work of the, the media equity project connect to some of the initiatives in your own news organization, how do you link those up.
Well, we've really been focused on diversity training, as well as audience building, and I will just use a recent example, when we recently got together with the equity workshop we invited several more members of our team to participate in that conversation, and in which we heard from leaders of ethnically focus publications about how they said their audiences, and what they think the demand is for mainstream media, right, and what approaches they should take, and certain communities of color, and I just pulled our newsroom afterwards the people who participated, you know and they walked away with that. For with so many more insights. And, you know, and that's really important because this is something that we talk about all the time, internally right but there's still ability for us to learn from others. And that's the real value of the workshop that we are coming together. And by coming together, we're learning and it's going to make us even better than we would be if we were going this alone. Hi.
Thank you Melanie Chu Don and Rochelle. Our last lightning talk for CGS 2021 highlights the toll that climate change is not only taking on our physical health but mental health as well. Here to tell us more about their hidden epidemics reporting is Jamie Smith Hopkins, from the Center for Public Integrity and Kristen Lombardi from Columbia Journalism investigations.
Hello everyone, I'm Jamie Smith Hopkins with the Center for Public Integrity and I'm delighted to be here today with Kristen Lombardi of Columbia Journalism investigations to talk to you about our project
in epidemics, Columbia Journalism investigations which like many nonprofit newsrooms runs on a partnership model. We hire recent graduates from the journalism school as postgraduate reporting fellows and our teams of fellows partner with professional newsrooms to produce in depth reporting on issues of public interest, our hidden epidemic series was done in collaboration with CPI. The project was a larger project that aimed to connect the dots between the warming planet and Americans health today and scrutinized what governments are doing or not doing to address those health outcomes, We wanted to focus on one story in particular which was the closest thing to a multi newsroom collaboration among all the stories, our second story paired a CGI fellow with Jamie. They co reported a national story, looking at the link between mental health and repeated disasters. We partnered with 10 newsrooms around the country, and we asked them one basic request. I'm going to let Jamie describe that. So for this project,
looking at the, at the mental health impacts of climate driven natural disasters, we knew be important to gather more data about the impact on people. And so we worked with newsrooms to develop a survey, we also talk to academics and other professionals about the survey, and, and then share it in regions where people have been impacted by more than one disaster in recent years. And so this was a process where we reached out to partners in regions that had had disasters that we thought would be interested in covering this, and explained the project. And the bottom line was really all we were asking for was to to help us with the survey and then after that it was up to partners they could. They could choose to run the story we were writing or not, they could choose to write their own story if they wanted to, they could localize the national story. We wanted to be really collaborative and allow partners to participate in the way they best could.
One of the best lessons learned had to do with coordination and communication at the suggestion of the Institute of nonprofit news, we held monthly logistics calls really mostly with the editors of the newsrooms that were working on this project with us sometimes the reporters the local reporters on the ground, attended those logistic calls. We also did a recap of each call so that whenever a partner was, you know, unable to attend. And that happened a lot during the past year year of a pandemic. They were not missing a beat, they were able to understand what other local partners were doing, and they felt like they could pick up where they left off,
we also made sure to use the to let partners know as survey results came in that would be helpful to them, everybody had access to the survey results on a platform we're using, but we could also sort of give a heads up to people. So the survey helped with reporting in terms of finding sources and helping to develop stories, and then it also provided some, some data, you know, as part of the spine of any story people were doing. So it was a great collaboration. And I think, I think being flexible was really important, especially last year because we were reaching out to partners, right before that pandemic kit. And so people were signing on and suddenly realizing they had so much more on their plates than they were anticipating, and I mean I'm hoping at least that it was a stress reducer for partners to know that the, they didn't have to do that much, you know, once, once we got past the survey was entirely up to them and what worked for their audience. So Kristen any final words for folks about this partnership.
Well I think that the key to remember is to, to not be rigid in your requests of partners and to let people decide how much ownership or investment they want to make, you know, our very basic request was just sign on, if you if you're going to commit. Commit to distributing the survey by putting it on your website, more than once, and by distributing it through your social media channels. After that it's up to you how much you want to make of the results. It's up to you how much you want to, you know, contribute to the stories themselves you can either create your own story, or localize the national story, and I think overwhelmingly we heard from local partners that they really appreciated that. Great, thanks again for having us.
Let's please thank all of our lightning talk participants and now I'd like to toss it back to Stephanie, thank you.
Thanks, Tom. And thank you everyone for participating in our lightning talks we will make all the lightning talks available via YouTube link which we haven't already we'll drop it in the chat shortly. All the lightning talks with 16 total over the last three days will be on you are on YouTube right now, And we will also send all of these links back out to you early next week. Once we compile all the slides all the recordings of their Derek's fantastic graphic illustrations and you'll have it delivered straight to your inbox. So now I'd like to welcome back to the stage for our last collaborative meditation session together. Dalia Jones of the Texas observer. So DeLeo welcome, she'll be with us for the next 15 minutes and then we'll go into a break, we come back we'll be talking with the OCCRP the organized crime and corruption reporting project, so delea The floor is yours.
Toronto, Miss Oh,
there we go. Hey y'all.
Well thank you all for coming to the third day of the summit, it's really great to be back this one last time. So for today, I kind of wanted to take a few minutes for actually like very intentional meditation, I'm actually just like looking for the link to the song I'm trying to send here there we go. But you know, yesterday we talked about actually activating the vagus nerve, nervous system and kind of how those releases like Docu means, especially you know when you're really overwhelmed or you're stressed you know putting your hand over your chest and just taking a few deep breaths, or just like tapping during the butterfly taps that we did yesterday, and then also I wanted to take this moment to just stretch, and to relax, just for about five minutes, and then kind of coming back. Oh thank you, Sarah, and then kind of come back to kind of talk about what what were your biggest takeaways here and kind of how are you going to be very intentional about your your restoration your wrist, about like really being patient with yourself and giving yourself breaks as well. So let me go ahead and drop this link here. And for about five minutes again, I want you to stretch. So if that means just like getting up or if that means like stretching in your like chair. I want you to either put your hand over your chest and just breathe and listen to the music as it plays. You can also do your butterfly taps and tap very slowly. It's not a rush, right, we really just want to take this moment to really feel our bodies and kind of how we're feeling. So I want you to go up from like your feet all the way up to the top of your head and just really give your your body a chance to kind of just chill out so I'm going to stretch because I've been in the same spot, this whole time, all day, so I'm going to turn my camera off, but I'm just going to ask the music be played for about five minutes.
So, if I can have everybody, you know, just kind of come back into the room, take your time, know, open your eyes when you're ready if you had your eyes closed. Sit down, just kind of walk around a little bit before kind of engaging again. And we have about four more minutes. And you know one of the first things that we talked about the first day of this like, you know the Summit and the meditative session that we had was gratefulness. And I want to ask folks, you know, what are you grateful for what are you what are things that you're grateful for in the summit, what are the things you're going to be taken back to your own newsroom or community from this particular session, and then we can talk about that a little bit, and then after that, you know, thank you all for joining for the third day in a row. think the things that I'm grateful for, for sure, is just being able to do this meditative session for the summit in general. I'm also just grateful for the community, within journalism as well and making sure that we're very, like, I'm very intentional on like, not only doing these bricks myself within the realm of my work but also sharing these breaks with other folks as well, so don't be afraid to just like dump them in there in the chat. Stephanie says that she's grateful to hear optimism and positivity about how people are working together.
Yes,
absolutely.
Christine, we're able to take a walk and water. Yes water plants while we're listening. Yes, I'm actually looking at my plants now like, yeah, Maybe that'll be the next thing I do.
Yes, Joe said he's thankful for the coming weekend, same, same here, and I'm hoping that everybody gets the chance to rest and just chill out. And we'll do like maybe like one more minute, Coco is grateful to see so many people doing important work and reaching out to each other, and deep sharing this beautiful. Mark Taylor Canfield, I will take the true spirit of collaboration back to my org democracy, watch news I'm inspired by all the attendings I take breaks by kayaking during breaks. That sounds amazing. All right, and then we'll wait for just like maybe one or two more grateful for this reminder that we're not just brains. Absolutely, and grateful, or let's see grateful for the coalition and community represented here too. Absolutely. Sarah de Irwin's, it's been inspiring to hear visions from a more equitable and people centered future for news and it's easy to get discouraged and in that day to day. Absolutely, and Mickey I'm grateful that a co worker has to take my computer for me today to upgrade Oh is so I cannot work this weekend. Yes, you know, sometimes those boundaries have to be put in place regardless of how that comes across. But thank you all so much for just just sharing your feedback and kind of sharing what you're grateful for
today.
I do want to encourage folks, you know, even after this particular session go outside and just go take a walk, go look at flowers go look at the plants outside, even if you're not able to go look outside right, look at like maybe photos maybe funny videos on tick tock, but not for too long. And then just, you know, engage in some of these like deep breathing practices like, you know, on a regular basis and kind of remember that we like, as part of changing journalism, we also have to remember the humanity of communities. We also have to remember our own humanity as well. And remember that we're not machines that we're not again like somebody said earlier, not just brains, and that you have to care for yourself just as much as you care for the work in order to do the work effectively. So, I think I have about like 45 seconds left, I just want to say thanks, everybody who did come, thanks for everybody who did join us for like three days in a row. This is really great if you ever have any questions or need any, you know recommendations on meditative sessions or work or anything, I'm always here, my email is D Jones at Texas observer.org And I'll actually drop it in here.
If I can, it's boom,
there we go.
Alright, feel free to reach out and Y'all have a great day. Have a great summit and have a great weekend. Bye,
common thread in these projects is that organizations, reap the benefits of content sharing, while maintaining a high level of autonomy and editorial independence.
A local ongoing and separate collaboration that we looked at in the report is between Charlottesville tomorrow, and the Julie progress was in Charlottesville, Virginia. And here, Charlottesville tomorrow began as a newsletter focus on education issues, and the daily progress of the area's legacy
print newspaper.
Progress began to print on pro tomorrow's education stories when they downsize. And now, hundreds of stories later, they're still involved in collaboration and mutually beneficial.
Autonomy enemy and editorial independence autonomy and editorial independence
autonomy and editorial independence
autonomy and editorial independence.
The next model ongoing
ongoing projects, creating means they're producing the content together.
Usually, these types of collaborations have regular editorial meetings or calls
and successful in this model have a project manager, who oversees the collaboration
where all your partners may have been sending a report. Now just wonderful
collaboration
model also allows reporters to gain insights from other geographical locations or topic areas, They wouldn't have had access to working alone
autonomy and editorial independence autonomy and editorial independence autonomy and editorial independence
autonomy and editorial independence.
While we were researching corporations in this model we found several that began with a grant, usually from Corporation for Public Broadcasting. And then they decided to continue after the grant and they agreed upon an amount that each partner with pay. And that would work being for the preparation manager for other resources.
And we see in our report that this is a promising path forward for leverage to begin within an initial brand, and wants to continue after
the final model is ongoing and integrated
editorial independence,
ongoing collaboration, more organizations are sharing resources at the level of
the organization.
Model is not yet very common but we do see it as a really innovative way of addressing some of the challenges that our local media landscape.
Editorial hiring and promotion decisions are made, completely independently, but they share an ad network, a proprietary platform, or accounting services or sometimes
collaboration using this model find that sharing back office services creates efficiencies, and allows them to hire professionals to do this work, which are usually not a strong suit.
Marks Fanime and editorial independence.
Enemy and editorial independence,
undergoing an integrated collaboration or not for the faint of heart. You have to be willing to cede control of major aspects of the operation.
Those who, taking the funds to find this
ongoing income creating
going into
temporary and separate
ongoing and CO create
marks enemy and editorial independence.
And with that, I will introduce our panel. Our moderator will be the center's director Stefanie Murray. Murray.
So now that you've come with me thus far, I've got just a bit of a confession to make.
This talk is not going to be about six Bureau, we're going to talk about power.
Yours.
Ours, collectively, and how we use it.
What we mean is that power is the ability to produce
power is the ability to apply force. Power is the ability to commerce or prevent
controversial opinion, maybe it's gonna reflect journalists, but in journalism. Another word for power its impact,
after us. We have a lot
of power.
Sometimes talk around it,
we sometimes need objectivity.
But what we do as journalists, influence and change society for better or worse.
Fortunately, power is infinite. Better repeat this a few times so I want to just unpack it a bit and take a step back.
Eric Lu writes about this in his book, you're more powerful than you think. Power. Power concentrates, as does powerlessness, as good as impacts. The second is that power justified, so
it creates narratives to explain why the people who have power should keep that power.
We have
this third law.
There is no limit
on the amount of power, citizens can generate.
I want to
unpack.
Say impact is another word for power because impact is the ability to produce intended effects.
When your stories prompt the pothole to be fixed, or a financial audit of the government or the mayor defined for corruption, or the President be impeached,
someone working on them.
That's,
that's impact right there.
Engagement is a growing field in journalism that many of us here at practice I've been hearing a lot about today and really loving the conversations I've been hearing.
The core tenets of engagement can be described in many ways, but one of my favorites is that build partnerships with people, formerly known as an audience
engagement can lead to a variety of positive outcomes like social media engagement was two different questions, our parents had here events between the newsroom, and the public, among many, many others,
equipping, however, is about agency is
about providing access opportunities for participation and production. Equipping is about teaching and learning. It's about actually skills and resources.
It is a redistribution of power between institutions individuals. And it scares the hell out of people in power,
flipping is recognizing that there is no cap on the amount of power. People can create.
Hi, welcome back everyone, sir. Just a minute late here, I'm Stefanie Murray, I'm the director of the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University. Welcome back. Hope you had a good break. So, I am thrilled for this next discussion. So, I am welcoming to the stage one of the most sprawling and impactful collaboratives on this planet for our next discussion, how the organized crime and corruption reporting project leverages a unique worldwide network of Independent Media Centers and journalists to hold power to account. This is a really unique organization that works, unlike any other in the world, and I'm so happy that you're all here today to tell us about OCCRP work. So I'd like to hand it over to Dan a priest of the Washington Post who will be hosting this discussion, and now the floor is yours.
Unmute him. Okay. Um, can you hear me now. All right. Um, so I have a real. I have a story to tell you about Si, si OCCRP because I can't help not telling it which is, um, I really discovered the organization. When I started teaching, eight years ago, and I just couldn't believe that I had never heard of it before. Um, and I discovered it through Discovering. I did a class on imprisoned journalists and each of my students at the University of Maryland had had a profile of an imprisoned journalist and one of them got Khadija Ismayilova in Azerbaijan a country I'd never thought about before. Now I'm, I'm obsessed with it, and I'm obsessed with Kinesia, but, um, then that led me to Paul readies dashboard, which really, which has, you know, now I don't know how many millions of financial documents, and this whole time I'm thinking how do these people do this, really. I am so impressed with the organization. I mean, I love to, to show it to students because they complain about the public affairs person in Maryland, calling them back and I want to I want to show them what what journalists overseas and authoritarian countries where there's barely a free press or not at all, goes through. And so really, you're my idols. And so, with that. And one of my interns, one of my students has worked for you as an intern, Laila. Siri check. She's and that changed her life, it really did change the direction of her career. So, for all the students out there, you know, just know that they do take interns I hope still and but you too can do do some of this work, it's, it's, it's more important now than ever. So I want to I want to introduce you to the people who know much more about it than I do. I'm first Camille, ice, who's the Chief of global partnerships and policy, which means she she deals with civil society and policy makers and donors, and think strategically about the direction of the organization. And we have Miranda Patru chick who I keep running into in various places she's joining us from Sarajevo. I'm Miranda, and she's been with the organization for a long time and has seen it grown, she's the deputy editor of regional stories and Central Asia. And then we have paavola a whole Xover, who has been with the organization. Also for a while, and she's the head of the regional editor for Central Europe, and also the founder of the Czech, Center for Investigative Reporting which I'm sure was not an easy thing to do given the direction that the Czech Republic is taking now. So I just want to finally say before I start in on your questions that even though you all have been doing this for a while, we in the United States could not be more needing of this and I understand that you're opening a bureau as a US Bureau or hiring an editor or something you can talk more about that, you know who would have thought that we have, we in the United States had had to worry about democracy. But we do and know that what undermines democracy, more than almost anything is corruption, so I'm hoping that you can talk about later how, how you can lead us to do the kind of reporting that has been as impactful in your countries. In the US, where money laundering, through US banks and us real estate schemes and all the other schemes is is such a big such a big deal. So with that I'll start with Camille and just set the foundation Camille, how, how does it work, how do you do this, and what makes you different from, really there's only a handful of groups that do this kind of collaboration so it's not a it's not a big universe but I feel like you're you're different, and you certainly are experienced so if you could just sort of lay that foundation from for us, that'd be great. Sure.
Great.
Thank you, Donna, and thank you to the Center for Cooperative Media. Stephanie Sarah all the work that you guys are doing. I'm really happy to be here and to have the opportunity to talk a little bit more about OCCRP I thought just to kick us off I could talk a little bit about our model and what makes it so unique and try to give you guys the the key components. And then we can talk a little bit about our story work which my colleagues can weigh in on. Um, so I think what makes our model so unique. You know, in the wider media world and also in collaborative media, is the fact that OCCRP is both publishing the stories and producing the content that empowers a whole range of actors to push for accountability in different ways, while at the same time developing and equipping the global network that it takes to actually do those work to do that work and to produce those stories with a whole range of staff, partners, the data, the tools, and then make some security. So there are four areas that I thought I would quickly kick us off with and highlight. The first one is really just to say that we have a laser focus on organized crime, financial crime and corruption. The content is critical to the wider change, You know, we hope to see in the world by doing this kind of reporting that really holds power to account, but it's also critical because of the level of expertise that is developed by the participating journalists in the network. And that can build over time by working on a series of these kinds of stories. The second element that's so critical, is that we are cross border. Again this stems from the subject matter from the content, corruption is inherently cross border, it does not stop at the borders. So neither can wait in terms of our work. It's something we often like to talk about. If we think about the founding of the organization that's really illustrative of how we've grown since then, and the basis for our model. Since that time in 2006 when the organization got off the ground, or two co founders, they were actually at a training and they found that they were investigating the same energy trading situation, they found that they not only needed each other because they had different parts of his story, but they needed partners and about eight other countries. They needed data from those countries they needed journalists, they could trust, and they needed common insurance, and that's actually how OCCRP got off the ground. Historically we've been most active in Europe and Eurasia. In the last few years, and that's including the caucuses Eastern Europe, Eurasia, but we've pushed out in the last few years, with our first set of Africa editors in Latin America, and starting to get underway in the Middle East, and Asia, and As Donna mentioned, we're very excited to be hiring our first US editor, but that cross border nature really underscores the collaboration is at the heart of the OCCRP model, we couldn't produce the stories that, that we have been without that presence in several countries. The third aspect of this is really that we talk about ourselves as an investigative reporting platform more than an outlet OCCRP has more than 40 editors a set of core editors at our headquarters office in San Diego that coordinate across the regions and also more than 20 regional editors at this point, that is work that are working with more than 50 at this point 50 to what we call member centers around the world. So members centers are typically smaller investigative outlets, independent media. In some cases the last slash standing independent media and countries where it is significantly under threat. Members centers themselves are regular partners on these investigations and over time they're at our conferences, they're working with other journalists and editors across the network, to really build that trust and understanding of who has what to produce these stories. In addition, we worked with all over 16 state last year it was 60 Publishing partners around the world this is the guardian Suddeutsche Zeitung and other bigger papers, and his model. It both I'll get into the other part of the platform in a second. But it's really critical to understanding the kind of reach and impact we've been able to have over the years, in that it allows us CCRP to take these cross border stories publish them in English for a global audience, but also work with our local partners that are publishing locally for local audiences and in local languages.
The fourth part of this just really comes down to all the tools and resources or the stuff that it takes to do this work in the first place, it's basically the second part of what we mean by a platform, but central to our work at OCCRP is the technological development that's happened over the years, the building of in house open source software and tools OCCRP Alice in particular, which has become a real, a leading tool in the industry for tracking down financial crime with over 2 billion records at this point. Lots of banking information, and it's just a common tool that shared throughout our network, and that also facilitates secure communication. So just, there's more to all this that we can get into I'll just highlight that that wider platform and support system. It's all critical to the collaboration around the tools around security, and having those trusted partners to be able to tell the stories in the first place.
Okay, great, that's very clear and we'll come back to questions everybody in about 240 So, if you have any cinnamon. So you gave a big view. How about how about we go to Miranda for a minute and talk about actually trying to do stories about organized crime and corruption. I mean this is, this is dangerous work and Miranda has been there since the founding. I met her in Washington. Two years ago, introduced by one of Washington's leading anti corruption Crusaders, Charles Davidson. And then, as I said I have run into her. Since then, she seems to be all over the place. But I thought you could tell us about, Well you can tell, any particular story would like to but, you know, the Ziri laundromat, is just such a great example of what real deep dive, digging you guys do. And, and also the breadth, It's, it's just, it's just this, you know, one story after another, I don't know if you're even done with the laundromat series, it seems like it could go on forever. Unfortunately, one brand that you want to. Hi.
Um,
I mean laundromat, is really a gift that keeps giving in a way that I think we probably have exploited maybe 5% of the data. And what's amazing about it is that, you know, every once in a while, and I say that like every couple weeks, we would come across a new name, a new company, and then we would go back to Olive, and suddenly, it would pop up in the laundromat. So, I can't even count the number of stories that have come out of it. And what's been great is that, You know our colleagues were able to share an exploit this data together and produce story for years, really, as a vagina laundromat, I remember the first meeting we have in it, it was just few of us, and we met in Romania in Bucharest. And I remember that day when we were going through, you know, transactions and then seeing the major names in European politics, and realizing that, you know, Azeris have been paying off people in Europe, in order to basically bribe him not to speak about a human rights record and the political prisoners in all these topics that Azerbaijan has spent so much money into trying to hide and present themselves as a modern democracy. So that's one of the examples and you know I wanted to build on. I was actually one of the, you know first people who joined OCCRP. And I remember when we first joined it was like a small serie of office, and it was. Drew, are one of the confounders. It was one of the researchers, Lila, and another Lila, and me, and we were sitting in this tiny offices Cerebro and then you know we had few colleagues in Europe who were working with us and I remember our first conference was probably just 10 of us. And then now it's, it's basically a huge organization with hundreds of journalists and, you know for me personally, What's most important is you know when I got to Gnosis your p when I first met Drew, you know, he was my mentor together with Rosemarie and some of the other people who joined, and they taught me everything I know and what is amazing about OCCRP is that for example now I'm teaching everything I know to journalist in countries we don't have tradition of investigative reporting in countries which are you know not democracies they're dictatorship, they don't have public records, and we are able to produce amazing, you know, investigation about, you know, crime and corruption. And you know, I'll just mention one was most recently, and this is I think really the power of collaboration and like working with great people, we produced our first investigation in Turkmenistan, a country that is. I mean, so close. And we were able to obtain not just documents to prove it, but we actually did the story that really is about lives of people, you know we uncovered that they've been having massive food shortages for the past five years, and we got the documents to show that one of the people tasked with bringing food to the country is, nephew of the President. I'm very, very real, very human story and the most difficult place in there to do investigative reporting next to South Korea. Sorry North Korea.
All right.
Well, fantastic. So first of all you students out there, look up, Turkmenistan, my guess is, you have never thought about it before. But can I just follow up Miranda, how, how does
been I mean,
I don't want you to talk too much about security because it's not something you know you probably want to talk much about, but how does being part of an organization. Help them that way, help you personally
have us in a great way. First I'm not alone.
And I'll, I'll actually
speak about, from the point of like reporters who work with that but also from my own perspective. I remember, like many reporters in the world, basically, are faced threats, and they have nobody to speak to. And I remember I was once mentioning to reporters that she found itself in a dangerous situation she sent an email to her editor saying if you don't hear from me I'm in trouble, and the editor never did back to her. I remember the day when I received the death threats, my editor was left and right, you know, getting me out of country finding somebody to take me out. I mean, all the things that you would need to feel safe in a really bad situation, but also the safety is in the numbers. and for example, when we work in these like really dangerous places. You know our Azerbaijani journalists never go and expose themselves. It's always one of the editors who will make a call or sign the document and, you know, sign the request. So they would not be exposed. And then, You know we, you know, we spend a lot of time teaching our reporters, how to be staying safe and actually discussing every story, we're working on, and thinking about what's the say what's the risk, how we can mitigate the risk and how we can continue to do job in, you know some of the country's and that's sometimes mean that, you know some of our reporters don't put their names and stories. So you know you will see that there are some, with the big exposit in Kyrgyzstan, about 700 million, theft, and none of the reporters, put their names on it. Our source was killed as we were reporting it, you know, very great reporters from Central Asia were, you know, facing threats and many risks doing that story. We were able to do it because we were, you know, one, one unit, working hard, and nobody had their name out. So that's, you know, the power is in the number and the securities a number.
Okay,
thank you, that's hard to fathom, really. I just wanted to turn to you for a minute Are you, are you in Prague. Well,
right now, I have not, but usually I am based in Prague.
Okay, okay good. Um, I noticed you're still on the security matter, it's not just personal security but it's the story right, and I know that your motto is killing the journalists won't kill the story. Americans might not relate to that. Can you tell us a little bit about, you know what the motto, how that motto came to be and maybe talk a little bit about the cartel project that you were involved in I was involved in for the first time. So,
thanks for being here. Yeah.
Actually the motto for me is much more personal, much more personal experience, unfortunately, I'm living in Prague, which means in the center of European Union, and in 2,018/21 of February, my colleague and close friend was murdered. He was investigative journalist, young kuciak and he was murdered at home together between visits fiance that he had like a couple of weeks before the before the wedding and actually they last call with their families, it was about the wedding you know they were talking about the wine, and about a dress, and, and then assessing for hire came to her, to their home, and showed them both. So for us, it was kind of priority, not to let it be, because only a couple months before, Yano, Patek was killed another journalist in European Union was murdered as well. Definitely karawal Nagar detail. And we were really scared that this could be some kind of accent that you know we are not safe anymore, within the borders of European Union. And, you know, of course, after my after Yana, my friends and my colleague with whom I work on a story that was about to expose the ties between the prime minister of Slovakia out of the theater to Italian Mafia ndrangheta. I just wanted to, you know, lock me in a bathroom and cry, but there was no time for it and and you know, drew from OCCRP and Miranda came to Prague and they just all talk me and explain me like, Hey, you can't give up. And you, you really needs to work on because if you, if this will silence you as a journalist. This is what they actually want it. What support those people who hide or those assistance for hire, they wanted to silence, journalists, so if you will, you know, Don't speak up now than they won. So we just gathered a team of people, including like people and the families of Yana and Martina those who those victims of the murder, and we kept on working, and it was last three years. Work crazy intense, it was really super intense and I didn't have any holidays I worked most of the weekends, but we were able to actually finish all or 95% of the stories, Yano started, and we were able to expose corruption in one tiny Central European country, but on the level. It is not usually exposed. And, and I think this is one really one of the biggest accomplishments in my life.
Yeah, no, congratulations. You know, Americans can read all these stories in English so that's, that's another thing that's really nice about your platform, and opens it up to a much wider audience. And for those of you who are you surprised to know this is the point of journalism and journalists in parts of the world but the habit creeping into Europe, is, is, is, is so terrible, and again to refer to ourselves makes us wonder if someday. That can happen, here I am no doubt if we keep on this trajectory that we're on and it can, it will
actually this it's
wanted to talk about
that that's one of the things I wanted to highlight we really didn't see it coming, we believe that you, that the journalists in in European Union, they are threatened by the law so it's not by being bothered. So if you believe that it can't happen in your country, think twice.
Yeah. Do you feel that that has gotten better in the sense that OCCRP you have your organization, maybe the authorities are gonna think twice about taking that kind of step again.
Because, you know, after Yana was killed. We not only exposed how the murder was done by our own investigation, but we also gathered 57 terabytes of data from the murder investigation that police collected and 57 terabytes just in all four to have some, some idea. All Panama Papers, it was four terabytes. So this is more than 10 times war. And because we understood that it's not in human power to actually go through all the data and understand what was happening in Slovakia, if we were talking about state capture or if we were talking about Mafia state. So we created with my colleague from Slovakia, apart from investigative center of Yakutia, that only became that was founded after the murder of the Uncle Jack. We created a team that was across all the Slovak media, actually, not all the Slovak media that, that the Slovak media we crossed it. And we share those data, so we created probably the best investigative team of journalists within central Europe, and we went through those 57 terabytes of data and actually impact 21 judges were are now being persecuted, all police residency the top police management of Slovakia is now awaiting trial in pretrial detention. One of the police presidents actually committed suicide, and it was really like really close collaboration between journalists, but also between the civil society who actually went to the streets and stood up for us. And they show to politicians, that it's not okay to kill journalists.
Now, wow, that's, that's such a feat. Well, you talked about civil society, ask me about your collaboration sometimes with civil society groups that we would see as advocates in journalism. And that's a tricky thing for journalists. So, I know you've got, you've collaborated before with Transparency International, which is all about money laundering and and disclosure game and all this sort of thing and it takes a policy position. So can you talk about that collaboration but also how does it work for journalists to make sure that they don't get that they aren't viewed as, as, as advocates, even though they're using the data from some of these groups.
Thanks. So, so yeah, as you mentioned, advocates have a very different job than journalists, they also have distinct competencies and skill sets, and just really different missions, but where this really came from was recognition that there was a lot of redundancy in terms of new actors on the scene undertaking investigations, and just across the wider world of actors that are doing as investigations investigative journalists NGOs increasingly that we're doing investigations in house and then of course, law enforcement, where, as you know for our particular subject matter that OCCRP journalists are looking at, you know, certainly on the other side of the equation, very corrupt officials and highly organized criminal networks have no qualms working across these silos right they're very organized on their side. They are very okay to work together. So the idea was that, how could these efforts, you know, add up to basically achieve more impact at the end of the day, what kind of collaboration could allow investigative journalists that have the skills that have the access to data, and the ability to really mine a stacks for this kind of information and put it out there. You know how could that be brought together in a way where that information, got into the hands of advocacy groups, in a way that allowed them to do advocacy in a more effective way allowed them to move more quickly, and frankly do the kinds of, you know, pushing worldwide advocacy campaigns are working locally, but pushing for change, pushing, pushing for policy reform, and frankly pushing for legal action in ways that journalists, just can and should not. So our main partnership and way to do this is called the Global anti corruption Consortium. It is as you mentioned Danna a partnership chiefly with Transparency International's global anti corruption movement. The idea of being at OCCRP as this global network of Investigative Journalists ti has chapters all around the world. It is a method that I would say is still very much a work in progress, but over the first couple of years that this has been in effect if you will, um, there has been significant impact that's been achieved. So I think maybe I'll highlight that just a little bit, and also some of the lessons learnt, you know, Miranda and I have talked about this extensively so I'll probably pass it over her to talk a little bit in terms of how her own reporting has gone further because of this partnership, but certainly you know a key priority is ensuring that that editorial independence is maintained that journalists and our journalists are telling stories that are chiefly in the public interest not determined by some advocacy campaign. There's also super high priority in terms of when that information is shared with key factors being that editorial independence, but also frankly the security of our reporters and our partners around the world. That is closely tied to that credibility. The Azerbaijani laundromat, maybe we can just talk about that because you guys talked about that investigation a little bit earlier but that is really a great illustration of how this has allowed for more impact over
time so that investigation was the fall of 2017. It exposed a $2.9 billion slush fund that had run from Azerbaijan, through the UK through Scottish limited partnerships, and it allowed for parliamentarians in the EU to be paid off. Essentially, for not criticizing the human rights record in Azerbaijan. That story is a clear example of OCCRP is collaborative method of model and network on the ground doing work with the fact that we had this partnership with Transparency International and could get them some of those findings, you know, right before release, meant that TI, you know, was at the doors of the Council of Europe, pushing for action for official action. We saw immediate impact in terms of official resignations and an official investigation that was launched. The introduction of unexplained wealth orders in the UK, which was a key policy reform for getting out some of this lack of transparency in terms of where the money can move, but also you know, Randy's the tournament's a gift that keeps on giving. Um, that is totally true. On the data front, but it's also true on the impact front, just from this investigation. We saw, you know, in the millions of dollars penalties for both Deutsche Bank and DOJ Danske Bank in 2019 and 2020 for their roles in moving that money and laundering that money or turning a blind guy when it was coming through their systems. So I'll stop there, just not to go on too long. It is something that we are, I'll just say, asking ourselves a ton of questions about this, you know, a few years in in terms of what, what things work better than others. You know this was very much envisioned as advocacy groups, being able to use the findings of investigative journalists to be more effective. But of course, in reality, you know, advocacy groups have a ton of information. They have contacts, etc. So thinking about how that information is shared and what kind of change it can create as a result, we've now got a body of evidence, you know, a few years under our belt anyway and are delighted that that Sarah, and the center is, is looking at this because we do believe there's real room to scale here, and to help share some of these lessons because it is not a traditional way of working, and there are certainly some guardrails in there that are really important. Okay. Add to that, but all. Yeah.
Well Joe weighs in with this is so badass and I feel the same way, you know like you don't have to wait for the FBI to do their job because they're out there doing it, and hopefully I think there's been some times right that they've actually taken up some of your work and and push them further right, I can, can you talk a little bit about that, arrests, maybe people on the sanctions list.
What else
do you know about that.
Well maybe you want to talk a little bit about Kyrgyzstan, but that's you're hitting precisely on it, that these groups can actually file these kinds of dossiers make submissions to for global Magnitsky sanctions and others in ways that certainly can. But,
I mean your most recent example really is, um, The investigation we've done in Kyrgyzstan where we uncovered how the former customs boss at the time he was in a head of class, a deputy head of customs was helping a weaker family, you know, smuggle goods into Capistan and then down to Pakistan, and you know neighboring Russia, and they basically profited with over $700 million, which they moved out to purchase on using, you know, Western banks, a lot of that money ended up in Germany ended up in UK to purchase the real estate in in Dubai and so on. So, you know our source was killed. Just before as we were getting ready to publish this investigation. And after we publish. Ti but also some other groups have worked on. Basically, filing a dossier on this customs boss, and recently he has been added together with his wife to Magnitsky List of sanctions which was the first high profile name from Kyrgyzstan that was added to the list, and you know this is something where we didn't even know it was going on. You know, people have used our findings are documents that we have published on the website to take this action, and the only learned about it afterwards. But another example which I think is great you know we have published our Turkmenistan story last week. And one of the key reasons we were able to publish the story is because the company that was owned by the nephew and was bringing food to Turkmenistan, was a UK shell company. But as you can introduce the beneficial owners Registered. Registered, they had to disclose that he's a beneficial owner. So, ti actually sent us an email this week and they wanted to have a meeting and chat about, you know what our findings are. And you know nothing that we, you know, did not publish, and it was amazing that they were interested actually to take action on that story, and you know the marathon is, you know place where very few people care about. There is very little written about, you know, a big humanitarian crisis that's been taking place in the country. I mean if you think about it, you know they have food rations and a family can buy two chicken types, a month. I mean that this is the rationing that's taking place in the country they have a limit on how much oil they can buy and how much sugar. So you know we can publish stories and people will read it and obviously there will be some outreach to those who can access the story in Turkmenistan. But the fact that somebody in the West is actually listening, has seen the story see that they can do some, some action on such a story I think it's really, really. I mean, it's really amazing to see and, you know, for me that's a very rewarding part of what I do because you know when you work in a places that very few people know about like, You know, Kyrgyzstan, which is this tiny country in Central Asia, or you know, was Pakistan or Azerbaijan even in some way, having people take action and actually tried to, you know, because one part of like working these countries is that people who rule these countries and then be ruling them for decades. Those are people who act with full impunity, there's no action that will happen inside the country. So the fact that there's somebody listening in the west and actually is willing to take action is I think really encouraging and a very strong message because rulers in these countries are used to. They're used to, you know, intimidate journalists imprison them, and you know face no consequences and this way you know it shows the power of investigation and that you know somebody's paying attention.
Absolutely. And even though those countries are pretty far from the US. Can one of you talk for a minute about the about the financial links to the US, we know there are many with the Azerbaijan ruling family. But what will it mean that you if you if you start an office here, what will that mean for your cross border, collaboration and your ability to tell the story of the US and how it's linked to the to corruption all over the world
can be very important in a way that you know, you know, the more people you have, you can call to and say hey, we have this story there's a US link. Can you, you know, dig into this, you know, you know you're there will be somebody who is gonna not say, Well, I'm busy. I have many other projects as we all do, there'll be like okay I'll go and do it. And you know I remember, you know, first time that US played a big role. It was when we were investigating one of the biggest drug lords in Europe Dr shortage, he actually had a number of companies through deliver in us, and nobody knows knew that he was behind this company and we actually had to fly a reporter to go to Delaware pick up a records. I mean, imagine if we were you know having a report that would just go there and like get the record and share it and obviously, you know a lot of it is about sourcing I mean us, you know, DOJ they're conducting amazing investigation, especially in some of the people in our part of the world and, you know, being able to develop sources and have somebody on the ground and then obviously some of the places like New York, Miami, very, you know, top places with where people put a lot of money so that it will be amazing opportunity for even better and stronger journalism that can come, you know, from well if
I didn't have two jobs already joining you
would love to have you figure
out a way to have my students do investigations, you know, that's a good thing,
we still take interns so your students are very welcome to apply to join us and hopefully our offices three ever will be open and running, soon, soon, and COVID will be over and they'll be able to physically be present
with you, right.
If I can just feel. Yeah just also because there's a real, I mean, I just think a key part of this is the moment that we're in data you know you noted at the outset of the conversation. It's no secret that our democracy in the United States needs some work. And for all the talk about the role of dark money in the United States, and the various things that that opaque money can fund or has funded from, you know, election interference or foreign influence or the rise of polarization in the United States. The reality is that a lot of the money that's coming into the US is laundered before it gets here. There are a lot of vehicles outside the US, that make that possible but also within the US, you know, looking at real estate for example there's a lot of place to put that money. And if you ask me to continue telling that story, And really, you know, excel at accountability reporting and meet this moment OCCRP you know we have this, we have this global presence we have these reporters and this ground game around the world. You know people who know the local contacts who can get the land records. You know who are already part of this network and excel attracting that kind of financial crime. And in this moment that we're in, you know, financial strains for us newsrooms. Just thinking about partnering in these ways you know our US editor is our first official editorial presence here, but we really hope that it's just the beginning of a larger operation. And, you know, Center Network won't work the same way with US media but really getting to figure that out, and how we tell these bigger stories and look at the origins, you know have some of that money
locally, a missions like Washington Post, New York Times, others are much more open to collaborations, than they used to be so I mean that's one good thing. So, I've got other questions now and I have one from a science and healthcare journalist too, who says, How can I how can I help if I don't cover these particular topics. Um, do you ever need for science and healthcare specialists journalists, and, and just generally how can journalists in the US and Canada, who aren't restrained yet.
Help OCCRP
mean healthcare sector huge issue right now. Why do you want to take that, have you ever done a science type investigations, healthcare products, things like that.
I mean recently, obviously you would call it we have been following a lot of stories involving COVID, and a lot of it has been. Follow the money type of COVID stories with you know investigating the public procurement and, you know, quality of equipment and masks that our governments around the Europe have been buying and obviously we have been we have built a big database and collected all the records on the procurement across Europe. In order to do this project, but I think you know anybody who has a story really is very open to pitch it to us and, uh, you know, reach out our editorial team and talk to us about ideas, and you know if you need help when one of the, you know parts of the world we cover. Obviously, we will try to do our best and help, I think, you know, science is a big topic in our traditional expertise is more of like follow the money side so it's always great to partner with experts in different Heathfield who can actually contribute and make our reporter better by having another angle in the story.
Yeah, and if you, if there are reporters in, in the US or Canada for Europe who have great international stories in mind and might already have some sources, I think, you know, letting letting you all know, to see if you can help is, is a great thing, which leads to another question which is how do you vet the reporters that you, that are in OCCRP.
I mean,
for the measuring of the story. Yeah, it really is. I mean we you know we, you know, welcome people to do, if they have a good idea or if we, you know need the help from somebody in in a part of the world, you know, we'll try to work on the story, and, you know, many of those who have started with single story, you know, are still with us. And I remember when we first started working with Pablo and you know she would come to us and actually power, You know I was leading the, you know our Central Asia submission team and Pablo would come to us and say I have this data series in Czech Republic. I don't know who they are but these stories will be good. And that's, you know, and I remember we did our first project story with public data about you know properties owned by head railways and his wife, I mean this was public coming to us and you know, obviously we love public and we'll never let her not be part of this therapy, but basically that's it. If you have a good story if you want to, you know, and one thing I really appreciate about, you know boardroom and Paul, there are believers in in humans, and they give opportunity. And if you, if you deliver, you get more opportunity, it's been always like that. And I, you know, it's a great environment to do stories, because the mean as long as you have stories, you know, everybody's welcome.
So problem we have a question about security again, and, and one of the questioners asking whether some of the well known, press advocacy groups like Committee to Protect Journalists or Reporters Without Borders has been helpful in providing advice or anything else to journalists who need to protect themselves against harassment they.
Yes, they are great when actually raising awareness about the threats on journalists and they are also very helpful when you feel you are threatened, if the politicians are threatening you because of your reporting. If you are threatened, on, on social networks and so on. They keep the archive of such a threat. So it's much easier than to persuade the police that you need police protection because something's really happening to, because they have the track record and they can stand up for you. And they also were very useful, in my case because during the murder investigation of YakAttack. I went to Slovakia to give witness testimony, but it ended up as interrogation and the police seized my phone and I could not really do anything about it. The police took it they just said that there's no way you can not give us your phone. So they, together with OCCRP started a campaign. And as a result, the police didn't touch the phone and give it back to me untouched, without any copy of the data. And, and they even to get to the European Parliament so so it was a really great help from their side. Yeah.
Yeah, and I know they both have some emergency funds for people when they need to get out of their countries very quickly. I mean there's nothing more important than not kind
of, so yeah, yeah.
Fortunately I never needed to deal with those emergency funds. Yep.
Um, well okay this is such a softball question, what is the best way to ask one question or to donate or for net financially support the work you all are doing at OCCRP. Give me.
Um, so the short answer is to become an OCCRP accomplice. An accomplice in our fight. I'm a compost program is our membership program that is primarily based of readers, our newsletter readers and other supporters of our work. This is a program that we just got off the ground last year, but just finished up a spring campaign that went quite well but it's really, you know just scratching the surface of what we hope support from the wider public will be going forward and really investing in this investigative journalism as a public good, so I'm sure Lauren if she hasn't already, yes. Okay, it's already. The link is in the chat matter. It also comes with some conversations with a number of our editors and getting a little bit of a deep dive into the investigation so I would really love, members of this community to become part of that.
And I'm sure that you always need forensic financial analysts to, you know there's probably I'm going to just guess that there's some volunteer help that you can use now and again, for some of the financial records that you're trying to understand that's just for my own experience, so I'm okay we have another question about ici da, which is probably the oldest collaborative organization, and they would like to know whether your work has overlapped with their Panama Papers the paradise papers or the fin FinCEN investigations do you do work together with them.
We do and actually I'm a member, and I'm a very proud member of iCj and of what is really really amazing is that, you know, there's our work is so complimentary. I mean like, you know the data set, they bring into the game with you know this parent papers paradise paper, I mean this is a mind blowing investigation but at the same time. You have great other sets of records that you can pair so you know very often what happens you have paradise papers and then you have Lunger bathroom like Panama Papers and Lunger mud, and you know, again, These are all you know these are you know, resources for investigation that's the investigation that are going to last for many years, you know, like literally years after Panama Papers we ended up uncovering a big story involving Azerbaijan and a company that was in the records in Panama Papers, so it's, I mean like, you know, I think. I cannot imagine the world without, you know, iCj without forbidden stories, obviously without OCCRP, I think we need each other and we need to work with each other and you know public is a member too and she's been, you know, working on investigation with iCj and I think, you know, we do. Together, we do a great work, and very important work for this society.
Yes. Oh, okay,
you're another good question here about how is how is this branch in the US going to work are you you're hiring an editor, but are there going to be reporters too.
Begin to hop in on this one editor as mentioned as the first hire for this new editorial presence. The idea is that initially. This work will build on our collaboration with us outlets in the past, you know, Buzzfeed is a key one where we did some pretty big work in the last couple of years, but I will just say that we want to be pretty clear that, you know, we know that things will work differently in the US than they do and certainly a lot of the parts of the world that we've been working in to date, you know, US media is historically not as collaborative, as in some of these other places. The idea is the editor will be working with existing outlets and seeing where we can do joint stories, you know, clarify what that means for publication, and then be building that team out over time. So, you know a lot of our OCCRP staff currently is almost everybody but the reporters because we have this network of member centers, and publishing partners, but that additional team will have a mix of probably editorial and reporting responsibilities, you know as that plan is flushed out.
Yeah. And, again, as more outlets, except collaborations as part of their model. I'm sure you're gonna have lots of people wanting to work with you,
so
I didn't know first was the cartel project recently and it was, it was a it was so fantastic to work with all these foreign journalists, it really was. So I have a I have two questions. We're getting close to the end here. So, One of them is,
how do you do fact checking, like
cross border problem. How, how do you do fact checking, especially if you're doing something original where we can't just turn to the clips. Now you pull your hair out right and is laughing already.
I'm laughing because we actually have this amazing lady called Bill Gates, she's a German. I think she speaks about nine languages, and she has trained the army of factory workers, who basically grill us until we are you know we scream in pain. But then I know that these stories are, you know,
bulletproof.
And really ours I mean that's I think fact I can use one of the prides of OCCRP and we really have a very painful system that causes a lot of grievances and people suffer a lot but like once you pass the OCCRP factchecking after some counseling and, you know, rest become really good. So I was recommended this is a very good medicine for good investigative report.
All right, I love that. Okay. Oh, yeah, I can't remember that one. How about a question about, let's see, I have one from an organization called democracy watch news, which says it could be a potential partner. So how do partners, How would you like them to try to, or potential partners get in touch with you to the web's something other than the website is there a person
that they can talk to.
But, so for now, as Miranda said you know if there's particular story ideas you can simply send an email to info at OCCRP that org for now, we'll make sure that that gets to the right place. The ideal so I would just say is you know if you have candidates or friends who would be strong candidates for this US editor position, the sooner we get that hired. The idea is that we have someone here on the ground from the editorial side to really get into those potential stories. So the sooner we get, well that would be an immediate contact or your primary contact rather in terms of figuring out those collaborations, and then the meantime, by all means send an email to that
address.
Okay.
I just want to finish up with the question about the murder of the Slovak journalist. What, if anything, the investigation has led to, in terms of long term systematic change. That was such a stunning, terrible thing.
Yeah, we, we,
we actually still don't know, it's too early to say. The immediate change was enormous. There is new president there is a new government, totally different that from the previous one that ruled Slovakia for 12 years. And, but to see if this is a long term change. Well, yeah, there is one very visible long term change and there's kind of a emancipation of Slovak society, they understand that they don't pay that if they want to change, they need to go to the streets and demand a change. And those people who are the change makers, they, they can't just sit and wait for someone else to do it. They just need to do it themselves. And I think like this could be a really long term change in the society this kind of emancipation and and will to take part in in political decisions. But regarding the system. We still need to wait and see it's it's very fragile. It's very revolutionary still. And actually there was one more question. We will know about the trial on the 15th of June. The Supreme Court will decide if the lead suspect in the murder investigation is going to be set free, Or if they are going to return the case back to the special court. Okay. Well,
it's three o'clock went by really fast. Thank you all for being here, but more than that for your work. And I can't imagine anything more valuable, honestly, and I'm going to say something that was not asked to say
but you know journalism costs money.
And
it's not free, unless you have Jeff Bezos, and then, you know, you don't have to worry so much. Don't tell my editors I said that but no I'm serious because we kind of take that for granted. So thank you for making your website for free for all of us to, to enjoy and be inspired by. And I'll turn it over to Stephanie now.
Thanks Dan. Thank you. Thank you all. What wasn't an amazing discussion what an amazing group of women journalists, thank you for all that you do your work is
staggering. Thank you.
I also want to thank our interpreter, Martha Rodriguez, who has been doing a really awesome job over the last few days, especially today so if you want to listen in Spanish, just click on the interpretation button and click your audio over to Spanish. Wow, that panel Oh, my God. You said it right, Joe, you said bad ass. So, to keep us going on with his global mindset. Now we're going to hear about a global research project that the Center for Cooperative Media has undertaken led by Sarah Stonbely, and Heather Bryant, which is examining how journalists, and civil society organizations work together around the world and how we could ethically continue to work together and OCCRP I know has been very active in their research. So with that I'd like to turn it over to Sarah and Heather. The stage is yours. Great, thank
you, Stephanie. I'm really thrilled that we could follow that panel because not only are they doing such amazing work, but it's also very relevant to the research that Heather and I are leading, which we'll discuss shortly, but first let me just briefly introduce myself. My name is Sarah Stonbely I'm the research director at the Center for Cooperative Media. I, along with our team devise and implement the research agenda which supports the center's mission of growing and strengthening strengthening journalism and collaborative journalism in the collaborative journalism research at the Center began in 20 Well really began in 2015 When I started the project we published a paper comparing models of collaborative journalism 2017 And the project that we're doing now, builds on that by looking at a subset of collaborative journalism, which is a collaboration between civil society organizations and journalism organizations which I'll discuss more briefly but first I want to turn it over to Heather, my co author to introduce herself.
Hi,
so glad to be here. I
absolutely love this summit, so I'm really excited that this is happening. My name is Heather Bryant, I work with the Center for Cooperative Media on various projects around collaboration guides documenting projects. I've been studying and documenting advising on collaboration for the past five years now and I also work with news catalyst around news organization sustainability so I'm excited about this project because it's a nice intersection of all of these things.
Yeah, great.
Thanks Heather.
And thanks for being my co author because I probably really would not be able to do without you how there is like the best wing person to have ever
collaboration about collaboration, right.
Anything and everything really. So I'll just give a brief overview of the project and then we'll sort of get into some of the things that we've learned so far. So it's a 12 month project we are in month five of this project so it's you know about almost halfway through. It's a bill, it's funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And like I said it's an analysis of collaboration between civil society and journalism organizations. Here we define civil society very broadly, civil society organizations very broadly so it includes not only what you would probably think of first which is NGOs, but also you know universities arts organizations civic tech kind of the whole gamut. And it's certainly not a new phenomenon and we're not the first to study it, Anya Schiffrin who we saw yesterday has studied it, others as well. But it does seem to be gaining prominence in terms of its commonality and the willingness of these two spheres to cooperate. So we're going to talk about, that's really what the project is focusing on kind of looking at best practices looking at tension points, you know, trying to get an idea of really the structure that these projects take. So, this is something that, like I said, it's still it's becoming more common, but there's still this sort of inherent tension between journalists, organizations and civil society organizations which as Camille was just mentioning, you know are advocates, you know they're advocates and journalists you know tend to have sort of a more of an emphasis on neutrality. Until recently, you know, when most, a lot of journalism organizations are not as concerned about that but a lot still are so that's been, you know, that's sort of one of the tension points that we've been seeing. At the same time civil society organizations are increasingly sort of performing journalistic functions themselves, they're often bringing journalists in house, and they are recognizing that with the platforms that the internet and social media provide, they can become their own information purveyors right they don't, they don't need journalists in the same way that they used to. So that's creating another interesting dynamic between these two fields. At the same time also journalism has we've been hearing you know resources have become more scarce. So, a lot of times you know journalism organizations that used to have someone in a country might not anymore so now they're looking to the advocacy organizations who have people on the ground, and that's another symbiotic feature of these collaborations Elson I want to say about that. So one of the main hypotheses is that by collaborating, civil society organizations and journalism organizations can increase issue salience right. A lot of the things about journalism journalistic collaboration in general apply here so if you have more organizations who are participating. The, the greater the reach, the number of greater number of different audiences you can reach, and we're seeing that in these types of collaborations as well. Accountability journalism investigative journalism is really where we see these types of collaborations, really taking root, and is it the, the impact piece is also so important as Camille was just saying because you have, you know, often journalists, uncovering corruption, you know, advocates, you know, wanting to call out corruption and these two streams coming together really does increase issue salience and make it less likely that the, the corrupt will not pay a price, as we just heard, which was so awesome. Finally I want to be clear that when we're talking about, you know, in our research on these types of collaborations, we're not just looking at them through rose colored glasses. There are of course, again as Camille just said like there aren't there do need to be guardrails, and they're not the same, you know, we don't, I don't think anyone thinks that journalists should become advocates or advocates should become journalists like they have, they have very specific functions that are very important. And so one of the things that we're trying to, we're trying to talk to people. We've had some really great interviews which Heather will discuss but we've been trying to talk to people too, who are taking like a more critical eye you know so asking, you know, Where does the money come from, you know, what do you what do you do when you have a collaboration between a journalism organization, and an advocate, and there's a power imbalance, you know, those types of questions, so we're definitely thinking about those as well. So with that I'm going to hand it over to Heather who's going to talk about what we've done so far.
Yeah, so we're you know we're a number of months into this and we really started from the perspective of like let's get a handle on what is going on out there. So our initial field scan led by Smetana identified more than 100 collaborations like this going on around the world and Sarah is going to dig into some of the numbers a little bit more. And one of the challenges around doing this. Identify and collaboration is the way that people speak about doing partnerships, it varies quite widely, and we've, we found a number of these projects because we talked to someone about a different project and they're like, Oh, well, this one also is another thing and then we would be sent in another direction, and learn about about other things going on that you know hadn't quite turned up so it's been an interesting kind of game of Whack a Mole chasing all of these projects down to find out about them and how we function, and all of the data that we're collecting is has formed the basis of our databases civil society and journalism collaborations and we're tracking the project specifically, the organizations that are involved all of the people who were involved in as much as the metadata around all that as we can find the topics of coverage the language that they're publishing in trying to get a handle on all of the distribution that they're doing and just really get a sense of the scope and the extent of these projects, as we've been identifying them we've conducted about 17 preliminary interviews about half with journalists who are doing these types of projects and half with folks who are coming from the civil society organizations. And this has been, you know all around the world. These people are located to trying to just really understand the work and guide our outreach to additional projects, and this has been really key for forming the questions that are part of the survey that we're going to be doing in a more structured manner together even more information about these projects. We want to understand the organizational makeup of these projects we want to understand how they're formed the kinds of goals that they're, you know, kind of creating together as they set out to work together, understanding the topics that they're trying to do the kinds of journalism they're doing as an explanatory and investigative as an accountability. Is it more visual journalism to explore like complex data, how they're distributing them and specifically how are they managing them and how are they making decisions about how to manage these
projects,
how does it work to share power between a journalism organization, and a civil society organization,
their approach to identifying impact measuring impact and then the outcomes, not just for the content that they're pursuing but also for the organizations. One thing that we were curious about is, like, do the civil society organizations and the journalism organizations see an impact for them as a, as an organization as a result of participating in these projects,
it's really quite exciting the amount of things that, that we're hoping to learn from everybody involved, and Sarah has some more specific numbers just about everything that we've identified so far. Yeah, exactly. So yeah Thanks Heather. So, um, as Heather said, we started with a field scan. And this field scan our mandate from the Gates Foundation was to look globally around the world, you know, as to find as many of these this type of collaboration as we can. Because really we, as you know, as we said like the identify the structure, you have, it's ideal to look at as many as you can. The challenge is that no one has the total acts like no one knows the total number of these types of collaborations that exists so even with very painstaking methods that which Samir, again very painstakingly documented starting with, you know, funders, and, you know, contacts and lists of nonprofits, I mean he just had many many lists that he went through websites but it's really like a rabbit hole once you start going down these a lot. I mean especially like OCCRP which has like hundreds of chapters and you go to each chapters website and then you find more contacts from them and then you go to their websites and they list projects and then they're partnering with different, I mean it's just really like, I mean it's seems never ending. And so, the 103 projects that we've identified I'm happy with but I know there are more I mean we come across new ones every day. So, if anyone out there knows of a list of all these types of collaboration that exists to be amazing, but we're happy with the 103 we've gotten a lot of really good data from them. Let me just give you some quick numbers just to get an idea of what we're looking at the 103 projects include 549 different entities that are involved. So these are you know primarily journalism and NGO journalism organizations and NGOs or civil society organizations CSOs, they span, the largest project spans 64 countries. That's the panel, the paradise papers, sorry. And the entities involved. There are 331 journalism organizations that we've identified as being involved in this type of in one of this type of collaboration and 232, civil society organizations, again this is globally so Africa has a large number of this type of collaboration, I don't have the country's number in front of me, we're still we were just still this afternoon like putting this data together because it's all still fresh and new and still coming in but all really Africa, Latin South America have a large number of these types of collaborations, Europe, obviously, Eastern Europe, and not very many in the US. Somewhat surprisingly and I have some ideas about that, which maybe we can talk about in a minute but. And we've had a really hard, summon India summon Australia and we've had a hard time finding any in the Middle East or in Asia. And I think a lot of that is due to the language barrier, but also I think there's just not as robust probably journalism's fears. There is one of our hypotheses on that of the journalism organizations we've identified 170 are legacy and 156 are digital native which is really very, very, very similar in size so I think that that's really interesting because I think the hypothesis up until now has been that in journalistic collaborations digital natives or digital leaning organizations are more likely I know that's changing but I feel like at least as of, a year or two ago that was the thinking, how they're I don't know. Do you think that's still true that digital natives are more likely to collaborate than legacy journalism organizations. I think we're still kind of on the edge of that I think the change is happening but it does
that, those, those pop up first.
Yeah.
And you know what's interesting too, I mean I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that like in Africa. A lot of the new organizations are digital natives right i mean that's, so it's like maybe there's predominance there, the topics we've identified these collaborations falling into are largely three buckets. So we have a number of different topics and we've been logging, you know, each collaboration we identify we log like what topics, it covers the most prominent is the bucket that has like issues around democracy, transparency, governance and corruption, so the panel we just saw the OCCRP. The ICFJ like a lot of a lot of collaborations around that, and that has to do with the fact that, you know, there's so much data, a lot of different expertise is needed. And just like a lot of time, right, I think just a lot of hours to figure that was out. So that makes a lot of sense to me. The second one, where we've been seeing a lot is the environment, climate, biodiversity and water issues. So there are a lot of collaborations between and it's and again if you think about it it's like okay, well, yeah, there are a lot of advocacy organizations around those issues, And then a lot of journalists are coming into those spaces as well. And then the third that is really the most predominant topic is around health and reproductive health, and that's not really. I looked and it's not really because of COVID. There are a ton of collaborations around women's health. And then there are a lot around like pharmaceuticals and stuff like that so there's there's a lot in that bucket as well but I thought that was really interesting. And then the number of people so again 103 Total collaborations identified so far 1196 people involved, So you can see sort of the exponential increase from the number of projects to the number of people needed to undertake this type of collaboration I think that's something that's come out in the panels we've seen so far today as well. We want to leave time for q&a. But Heather and I are going to now discuss some of the themes we've also, I think Heather said we've also conducted, like 17 or 18 interviews so far with people who we've identified so again like snowball sampling, you know, you talk to one person and then they tell you oh you really need to speak to this person you need to speak to this person. So, we've had some really fantastic interviews so far and we've identified some themes that have come out that we're really excited to explore in the final paper.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think they really reflect you know the the topics so far that have kind of been the the bulk of it, but really hearing a lot about collaborations based on making sure there's access to people want subject matter expertise and this particularly comes up with like the environmental the climate anything really science related or things that are very technical, those are coming up a lot for those types of projects where they're requiring people to be able to do, they're kind of working to make sense of data, and that kind of flows into, you know skill sets is another thing on the journalism side, looking for, you know people who have a deep kind of awareness of issues on a level because that's their whole thing like that's what they work on all the time, and then from the perspective of a lot of the civil society organizations working with journalists has been really helpful because of visual storytelling data analysis, being able to take that take interviews take insights from people and turn that into something that can actually be distributed for, for everybody is something that's that seems, you know,
really valued.
Let me, let me actually I'm sorry I don't want to interrupt you. Guys, let me, let me just supplement that by saying exactly what we have found that so many of the advocacy that not even advocacy civil society organizations have been data science and computer science. Because of the visual element right like they can build a website, they can like build an interactive map they can you know make it visual in a way that journalists, usually aren't trained to do.
Yeah, yeah.
And then the great piece that kind of fills that in then is like turning that into a story turning that into a narrative is a really great skill set that journalists can bring into that. It's not enough anymore to just have like a data portal that just shares all of your numbers there has to be something with that that brings people in, and there were a number of collaborations who talked about like that's been one of the big benefits of this partnership is they have data, they have insight they have research, but what they can do beyond that with journalists is a bit more. And from the perspective of, like, journalists, and we've all seen this right and this is a reflection of the retraction of news organizations, not just here but around the world is access to communities looks a lot different than it used to be newsrooms aren't everywhere, and they don't have relationships they don't have trust built in many cases, and a lot of these CSOs, are there and they are doing things with communities and they do have access to communities that are relevant for a lot of these stories and so these collaborations become an opportunity to to do journalism with, in places like that, and make sure that the journalism is actually useful for those places. And then the region distribution is also a big part of it and I think everybody you know, on the CSO side and also on the journalism side they all want to see the work that's being done, reach the communities that need the information to reach the stakeholders who actually have a role to play in whatever the issue is, and to reach people who might support their work, and it's mutually beneficial to be amplifying each other.
Yeah you reminded me of, we had some a couple really good interviews with people from the world Justice Project. And they do an annual survey in Mexico have like a governance indicator, I think it is something like that, and they do amazing amount of work they go door to door they do surveys they do focus groups to to gather this data every year about Mexico specifically. And what they realized after a couple years is that, you know they were publishing it through their website they were, I think they were printing out some print editions. And they realized that it just wasn't having the impact that they wanted it wasn't reaching people the way they wanted it to, you know, not only decision makers and people in power but also like day to day people you know who can use this information as well. So they partnered with a journalistic organization called ottimo politico and they who are like, amazing storytellers amazing with visual graphics, they made a bunch of YouTube videos, English, Spanish, and using, and we saw this reminds me yesterday that we saw a couple, like, like I'm not manga, but who, there were some, some group some panel presented yesterday that had also lit, but just all sorts of different visual ways of representing the data that they had gathered and it. The impact was huge. After that, so if that's exactly the kind of thing where graphic novel Thank you Joe. And they. So this is so that's exactly the type of thing where it's like the advocacy organization the NGOs is out doing the work doing the amazing work, and then they, and then they, they partner with a journalistic organization that can then take that out and publicize it in a way that has such greater impact. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I think there for all of the things that everybody's still trying to figure out on what it looks like to do these partnerships together and there's a lot to figure out when you have organizations coming from these different backgrounds. I mean there are a lot of journalists who are frustrated that they can do a story and the story is published and then there's no follow up and from CSS perspectives. There's a story maybe an accountability project but then there's no follow up and these collaborations seem like a path forward to digging into things more in depth rather than a story that's done and that's it. Because you have organizations that can contribute their, you know respective skill sets, and then you also have people who are invested in the topic and entrenched in the communities as well to see it through.
And I think that's that's really interesting. One of the things that I wanted to mention I think just came up in the q&a is about trust. We had a, an interview recently with an Italian journalist who is with code for Africa, and he was talking about, so they're, you know they're in a civil society, outside, and he was talking about the fact that they have so many partnerships, all over the continent, and you know I was like, how do you, how does that work like how do you how do you partner up with with these organizations, you know, how do you find them, how do they find you or how does it work. And he said, Really, it's so much about personal relationships that, you know, one side has with the other, and they're all on Slack, and they're all just like talking about projects they're doing they're talking about and we find this with other groups as well. Talking about projects they're doing. Oh, maybe we should partner up with those we wish for both, you know on that on that element or on this project on this story, and it's really comes down to trusting each other, and he said humility as well. He said, You know, he never goes into newsrooms like here's how you have to do this because you know, this is how we you know this is what we know. He said it's always about humility and trust and I thought that was so interesting because I mean, as with any partnership. You know, those have to be key elements but especially when you're coming in from, you know, as a coder or a data person going into newsroom or vice versa. You know, they, it's really like you really have to trust that person in order to partner with them and give them your information or give them your source or, or whatever it is, so I thought that that was, I thought that that was really interesting and our wonderful amazing research assistant Hannah has just posted the link in the chat to that animal political story.
And shout out to Hannah for holding a
shout out to Hannah who has been amazing. Yeah,
I could, I could build off your point here and John mentioned this in the chat as well about just having this more expansive definition of collaboration to include, you know, NGOs and universities and other types of civil society organizations I think that's one of the, you know the intriguing parts here because collaboration already requires the news organizations kind of stretch their thinking about who is part of doing this type of work and so I think this also this direction of collaboration where partners are there's a there is a wide variety of partners kind of represented here is kind of, is quite fascinating. In terms of what that opens up for you know what journalism looks like who gets to do it, and how these types of projects manifest there and one of the things that we found is that there are more CSOs who have former journalists and a fair number of these organizations have former journalists former professional journals, working with, with these organizations
and I think that's an interesting aspect of this as well. Yeah, thank you for reminding me one of the things that Heather and I have been talking about after the interviews as we've been sort of drafting the outline of the paper is this idea. Yeah, it really taps into right this this project this, you know, looking at the sub, the sub genre of collaboration really taps into a few really like key themes that are happening now in journalism, which is one, right, like you said, who is a journalist right what who counts as a journalist like what counts as journalism. I think that especially with partisan media becoming so common, as you know, especially in the US, I know it's been elsewhere for a long time but. And right at with a CSO is bringing journalism, journalists in house. And so there's just like so many interesting dynamics, there's something. Yeah, and there was something else I wanted to mention about that too because it really touches on oh the digital, you know, sort of the digital revolution and like what digital communication affords right like with social media and stuff like that, like who can, who has a megaphone, who's a broadcaster now, all of those issues are raised with with this type of collaboration because it really touches on a lot of these sort of core themes that journalism is grappling with in general.
So there's a question about the balance of for profit and nonprofit news orgs and these collaborations we've really broken out the data
on that yet.
New York, that are not. No, but one of our interviewees was very insistent on this on this point. And it is a really good question because, you know a lot of times it's like, well, where's the money come, you know, where does the money come coming from, and and how that would influence the content, it is it's not something that we've really collected a lot on although maybe we should you know maybe we should maybe we should make this, and the funding of these things is kind of a whole separate animal. I'm the person who put together our fields can Samir patania has done a lot of work and is doing a lot of work on the funding of, you know, sort of international journalism and advocacy, like investigative journalism. It's not really something that we're focusing super heavily on in this project but, but it might be a good idea to think about what the funding is behind the specific journalism organizations, Rob That's a good idea. Good point.
We should do that.
Anything else like we have, like, a minute or two.
I think it's gonna be exciting. We're gonna, whereas the survey starts to go out, just everything we've already learned from the interviews everything that's going to come in from the survey. I think there's going to be a lot of different angles to look at this work through.
That's going to be quite fascinating.
Yes, I agree. So we're sending out a survey that is going to be a little bit broader in scope than the interviews, obviously, but it's going out to about 700 people, if any of you get it, who's who are watching this webinar, please fill it out. We've tried to keep it manageable at 30 questions. And that's going to be super interesting I'm hoping we get a decent response rate. But yeah, so the paper is gonna be that the deadline is December 31 of this year, and we're going to be publicizing it after that and hopefully going around to conferences and stuff in person, hopefully, to talk about it, and any input really, I'll type my email in the chat, but really, any thoughts or input is really greatly appreciated, it's still very much in the early stages and it's really exciting so thank you. And thank you, Stefanie, and Joe for giving us this platform to discuss it.
Appreciate it. Of course. Thank you Sara
Thank you, Heather. Absolutely and I will drop this in the chat and I think Sarah mentioned it so you know we're trying to get this published by the end of the year. And we'll be publicizing it toward you know in early 2022 And I hope that you all read it if you sign up for our collaborative journalism newsletter, You will get notified about it that way, you can do that by going to collaborative journalism.org and scroll down and you can sign up for our newsletter, we'll let you know. So next, for our last but one of our most important conversations of the summit, we're going to take a look at bilingual collaborations, and especially bilingual collaborations that can help all partners reach more diverse and a broader audience. So discuss this topic, I am really honored to welcome my colleague here at the center, Anthony Advincula to the stage to host this conversation as doing translation and multilingual work is a focus of ours in New Jersey at the center. So od stage is yours.
Thank you Stephanie and a warm welcome to you all. It's truly an honor to be moderating this session, beyond translation, how bilingual collaborations work and how they can better engage diverse audiences. This is the last but certainly not least, my name is Ollie Advincula, and I am with the Center for Cooperative Media, where I manage our ethnic media projects I work with some of our distinguished panelists today. When I was in that when I was the national media director and editor with new American media, and a correspondent for The Jersey journal, focusing on immigrant communities in Hudson County. So, working for ethnic media for over 22 years now. I have seen how bilingual news outlets thrive. How collaborations between in language and English language news outlets greatly benefit each other. As a journalist, especially now with the Center for Cooperative Media, where we closely are collaborating with ethnic media in New Jersey, and in language general market media such as New Jersey New spotlight nj.com We have seen how crucial translation is to read, to reach our target audiences and inform our communities. Today we will hear firsthand from seven experts, they are publishers, leaders of their communities and award winning journalists have been involved in bilingual collaboration projects across the country. I know their work. I know how awesome and how passionate they are in what they do. So I will give a little background about each of their projects as well as their affiliation, and we invite participants to please post your questions in the q&a box. So let's start with the first group, both Jew Dan Marshall, Chief Content Officer, an executive vice president of WF a he inhaled a good John, publisher of pcea in North Carolina, knew that immigration issues affecting Latinos in Charlotte needed more coverage. The best way to address it together was by sharing a reporter, which allowed them to expand the coverage and make news and information accessible to all members of their communities. So let's welcome Geodon and Hilda.
Thank you only. So, I am so proud to be here today with Hilda, who is my partner and covering the Latino community here and in community engagement, we're just going to share some slides with the group, and walking you through our work. So, our team is set up to have a daily focus, and also we do periodic updates with a larger team. Our daily team consists of the reporter Laura Bracci, our assistant news director Catherine Welch and Lana TC is editor Diego Barahona the stakeholders in this project I held it and myself and we are joined by Mr Director Greg collard and Alvarado, who's the vice president for Lanham CSEA and he'll this son. One of the reasons I wanted to do this project and I reached out to Hilda in one week, we got to know each other a little through another cooperative, we apply for this cooperate this collaboration at the beginning of our start of the CJC project. And I reached out to her because I knew that her commitments covering the local community aligned with our own, and I also knew that there were things that I didn't know about covering the Latino community, and I thought instead of trying to do this myself, that I could increase the cultural competency of my newsroom, by working closely with Hilda, and together we could amplify each other's work. Tell them we can't hear you,
why we partner thank you to them. North Carolina has one of the fastest growing Latino populations in the country. And more than one in four Latinos in our state, live, either in Wayne County or in Mecklenburg County, where our newsrooms are located at the same time we have seen aggressive detention and deportation activities here, which has had a downstream effect on the Latino communities access to health care, education, employment, public safety, and more.
So, a question that we've heard throughout the conferences. So who pays for this work. We were fortunate that at the time we were thinking about this, there were a couple of grant opportunities in the state, and one was report for America. So I reached out to Hilton together we put together an application to apply for those of you who are not familiar with report for America. They, they find reporters and under covered areas in terms of topics or in underserved communities. And so they pay the 50% of the first year base salary, and then it's up to us to find the rest of the money. So we turned to local and community foundations. We found support to the Foundation for the Carolinas, and through North Carolina News lab Fund, which is a program of the democracy fund, what was really important for us because unlike some places in the country where there's a lot of support from media, North Carolina is really catching up. And so we were fortunate that the democracy Fund had come into North Carolina, and started that conversation with Community Foundation's, and so that helped us get some support there. And then we had to cover the rest of that funding, and now we're looking to raise funds for year to RFA and the Foundation for the Carolinas will contribute again this year.
Let me explain briefly how it works.
Number one,
we have a joint assignment process to determine who leads the edit on each piece, and to set deadlines. Already articles are written in English and in Spanish radio features are created in English, in London, these arise the story in Spanish, and we also run a piece on audio piece in Spanish community discussions hosted in English and Spanish.
So here's just a look at some of the work that we've been able to do together. What's important to note about this is that our, our partnership was really funded or formed around the idea of covering immigration, but through the strength of that partnership we weren't able to do so much more. So we decided to join together to do the local voters guides leading up to the election. In addition, we formed another collaboration with a wider group of publications to cover the high costs of COVID-19 as particularly the financial toll that was being taken on black and Latino communities. And so we have one reporter who focuses on covering that the black community, and another who focuses on covering that for the Latino community, and often times their work gets cross posted in English and Spanish, and for the various partners. And then conversations and engagement are a big part of what we're trying to do. And so we are trying to connect with the community COVID Of course has tempered AI ambitions, a little bit there but we've moved into virtual spaces to hold those conversations, and we're looking to do even more that going forward.
So as you can imagine, all of this work has bring a lot of impact in our community. And let me tell you a few of those. The collaboration allows each of us to reach a more diverse audience. The community benefits from increased coverage of issues that affect them. The collaboration has elevated our reputations and credibility within the Latino community and in the community at large. We have heard from Latino leaders that they view us even more positively, as a result of the focused coverage, and in our approach. For example, our reporter has been told that people appreciate the steps we take the report about vulnerable residents in a way that doesn't cause any harm.
And I think that's really important, um, one of the examples of that is for instance when we talk to folks who might be undocumented, you know, we make a decision, how to present to the audience. Oftentimes we use only the first name. A lot of these people, you know, step up and are very courageous to talk to us because they know the risk of talking to media. And so that's been noted in the community and has resulted in that positive feedback. So what's next for our collaboration, we are looking at expanding our focus, you know, we've been really focused on immigration. As you can see the partnership has given us opportunities to go beyond that. And so we want to consider to pursue those opportunities. We want to increase our community forums. This year we need to understand every assess the new needs and news needs and information needs of our community post pandemic. We want to create more community conversations, it's important for us to be in person and face to face with the community. And so we're looking for opportunities to do that. And we have a new team member joining us. Maria Ramirez you Reba, who is currently working with us on the COVID-19 project is going to assume the role of the reporter, our current reporter is relocating, unfortunately. So we will miss her, but we're happy to have Maria join us. Thank you.
So I'm Hilda and do Dawn, you mentioned earlier about the benefits of collaboration for the communities that you serve. But can you talk about the economic benefits for both the WFE and Len pcea having a share reporter.
Well it definitely allows us to have a resource that we couldn't afford alone, right I, you know my budgets when I started this were where they were. And so the only way to do this was to think about a creative funding structure, sharing that, you know, the responsibility for that with one and CSEA is definitely a help. It's also helpful because Hild him I can go out together and talk to funders and seek that support and so because it is a collaboration that was more interested in just funding one publication alone.
Hilda, do you have any addition to that,
Yeah, I think the same la noticia would have been unable to write all of these stories, if it hadn't been for the partnership, the collaboration that we have with Wi Fi, we couldn't possibly afford it, I mean this is really been great for us Atlanta desea. And, of course, I said, we said, great for the community for both the Latino community and the community a lot.
Thank you. We actually have one question in the q&a box but I, I believe this is absolutely refers to all of you. So, we'll, we'll save this and then we'll go to our next panelists. Our next speakers will talk to us about libre Agha, a bilingual podcast series about Puerto Rico's past and present. It's a CO production between Peabody award winning radio producers, Lana Casanova burgers of W NYC studios and Marlon Bishop of Futura studios, le Braga, is one of the few fully bilingual podcast series that serves audiences in two languages. So let's hear from Alana and Marlon.
There's an expression Puerto Ricans use all the time, is that in Nebraska. We use it to describe how we're feeling, what we're doing. And for many, it's another way of saying,
the struggle is also winding
elaborate rigor, it's not just a word. It's a state of mind. It shows us something about our Puerto Rican pneus our history, our present, and maybe where we're headed.
A line of the future, or country of the future.
great about that's the breakout in Puerto Rico.
Stories of the Puerto Rican experience, a seven part podcast available in English and Spanish about Puerto Ricans by
Puerto Ricans CO produced
by W NYC studios and Fudo studios,
bill a break, showcasing our true Puerto Rican brilliance.
Classical of Puerto Rico Susanto LTM por estar en la Vega, la some of our equity we look at the masa siendo comando centimos e para muchos es otra manera de si Qadiani that
UNCF in the hustle.
La Vega noise solamente en Express young, as soon as tallow mentale. So also not moitra algo sobre la Puerto Rican either Mr. Toria, Mr. Press Enter. He says, I don't know Ramos
know my order of dope.
That's the breakdown for the Regal.
Never Degas, he studied yes they still experienced every podcast, the CSI episode to hang penjual in English, so variable requests. Poor boy requests when a CO production, the double DW NYC studios evil doodle studios
are in our area. Hi, everyone.
Thank you so much for having us this afternoon. I see some notes in the chat that people really love libreria which is always so nice to see. As you could hear from our trailers there we are a bilingual podcast, we produced seven episodes in English and Spanish so in fact we produced 14 episodes. I like to remind everybody, and we did this because the Puerto Rican experience is really bilingual when Marlon and I got together to think about producing this podcast, we decided that we really wanted our foremost audience that we were going to talk to speak to to be a Puerto Rican one, and because we have such a large diaspora, it makes sense for it to be bilingual. It's a conversation that we had early on in production, although originally our plan was actually not to be entirely bilingual. But as we started thinking about the stories that we were going to tell. And even, you know in journalism, we talk about the explanatory comma, which we were trying to avoid. You know, speaking to ourselves and doing journalism about our own experience. We realize it only made sense to, to make this in two languages, and we didn't just translate the narration. As you could hear in the trailers we also use different tape. Sometimes we refer to what we did as a bespoke translations because we also did new fresh interviews with people that we had spoken to in one language in order to get fresh tape for a second version, we realized that there were some anecdotes that didn't work in one language, and, and we change them out in the script for a different version. And so, so it really was a collaboration between not just Marlon and I but our team of producers and reporters who both come from the diaspora and from the island it was really important for us to try to capture as fully as we could. Puerto Rican experiences plural. There are obviously many different ways to be boutique Well, Marlon himself is an honorary boutique where we have, we have inducted him to our group. And anyway, Marlon if you wanted to add anything about soludos role in this. Yeah, so
it. We photo has is a podcast company and independent nonprofit newsroom that specializes in telling stories about electronics experience. We've always covered Puerto Rico, and Latino USA which is the flagship show of the company. And yeah, I think this was a really brand new experience for both Ilana and I even though we both work in with Spanish language tape all the time in learning how to really production wise create two versions of this podcast at the same time, it hasn't been done very often in podcasting, up until now and it's been done a few times very clinically, because it's difficult. It's difficult because we don't have the, the easy thing you could do in the audio visual realm which is just to put subtitles. You know we have to in order to create like an interesting listening experience it involves really thinking about how to engage the listener every moment and you know in podcasting if you bore somebody for a second because they can't understand what's happening or, or they can't follow along, then their attention goes away and then they're gone, you know, and so, so it was, yeah, it was an interesting challenge to figure out how to assess, you know, in a way that wasn't starting from scratch, but at the same time was taking very seriously the mission of how do we create the best product possible in each of the two languages, and not just it'd be this kind of add on or like this afterthought oh this Spanish version oh the English version, it'll just be whatever it'll be like, we didn't have. We were like these works in narrative structure, it'll be the same story, but it'll be a different story a lot of ways, John, the way it's translated the choice of tape that we used, and as I said, we went back and reviewed people, I might have frozen for a second, I apologize my internet is so great. We went back and we interviewed people, and, you know, in order to make sure that, for example, we didn't, it would be weird to you, into the Spanish version to hear a Puerto Rican from the island, English, you know, in the Spanish version why that would make any sense really.
Yeah,
I mean those cases we want to re interviewed the person, and, and we end it was all approaches. Yeah, Lana, take it from here.
Oh no I was just going to jump in and save you from your internet, um, since this you know, in the spirit of cooperation and collaboration. Yeah, we, you know, another thing that, you know, Marlon comes from this world, more of bilingual production work so I learned a lot from him. But I think that we also developed as he's saying, a new style of doing this, there were interviews that I did at the same time, in one language and in another, and you know we were constantly in communication with each other and with everybody on the team, thinking about how to do this in the best way, and to bring the strength of W NYC which is the organization that I work for public radio station in New York with Marlon, and actually this is a much larger collaboration than just our two organizations because we also worked with the Center for Investigative Journalism, which is based in San Juan, and part of our mission with this project was also to bring Puerto Rican journalists and thinkers who had not worked in audio journalism before into this medium, so all our reporters had not reported or produced work themselves before, and, and we were really just trying to expand audio storytelling in Puerto Rico and among Puerto Ricans in order to make this, also an educational project.
Thank you. Lana and Marlon, I know our participants here would love to hear from you about voice overs right. The bragger doesn't use voice overs, meaning you allow your sources to be interviewed in their dominant language, there's no interpretation, whether either English or Spanish, how, how do you address some of the challenges when information can get lost in translation.
So, hopefully my internet is a little better now. I'll try to take this one which is that you know I think there are two basic considerations around the choice not to use VoiceOver. This is kind of a style that we've developed over time at Latino USA, where we use a lot of Spanish tape in an English dominant show all the time, and we decided years ago to doing voiceovers one is artistic it's just corny, to be honest. Voiceovers was the traditional way that people would handle foreign language tape, and, you know, in a lot of news, settings, news like, you know, news radio settings, and it just always sounds canned you lose the emotion you lose the connection to the person. And so we figured that technique. And sometimes we call it glossing over, or where I'm after, you know where we do translate it's not that there's no translation but we don't translate everything word for word, after you hear the foreign language tape in whichever version is the foreign language, you've been here a short description of what the person said, but that doesn't cover everything. And we also use very short clips of audio of foreign language tape so that people can hear, you know, they can try to catch on to little bits and not get lost. And and the other reason is is is not just artistic is the how to best serve the audience, and, you know, for a bilingual audience which a lot of Lebra and let's universities audiences, but but especially for a lot of the audience, they do understand both languages and they could probably listen to it in either and they just choose which one they'd rather listen to it in, or there, they can listen fully in one of the language versions but they can catch enough in some of the tape, and in some ways it allows there to be, you know, a better listening experience for them because then you don't have the same ideas repeated, one after another. In the podcast, and then the other factor there is that there's kind of can be Easter Eggs also for the bilingual listener you know like someone who understands both languages can get little can get a little extra thing and we think that's okay, you know, and sometimes you know, like, you don't have to translate every single word because there isn't, you know there is an audience that that that kid can get it. And so that's kind of the philosophy we've taken to these things.
Yeah, no, I'll just say that we, we know that our listenership in Spanish is equal to the listenership in English, so we're clearly reaching, you know, both audiences, equally well. We've actually heard from a number of even like couples who are bilingual where the partners are listening in their preferred language and then they're able to like talk about the episode afterwards together which is really nice and I think something we weren't expecting. And also, we've heard that a lot of people are learning about Puerto Rican slang, like I don't. There are a few Puerto Ricans in the chat right now are kind of Spanish is very particular, there's a lot of really interesting words. And so as Marlin said there are some Easter eggs in there for people who, who want to listen in both languages.
Wonderful. So, from Charlot in New York, let's go to the Bay Area. This project collaboration is not just between two news organizations but three l tech a lot a LPN panel and the Oakland side are doing community centered news outlets in the San Francisco Bay area, with each bring their distinct strengths to a collaboration otaku latte is one of the nation's longest running bilingual newspapers that has become a jumping off point for emerging Latin X journalists, poets, and artists, LM panel. On the other hand, is a participatory REPORTING LAB designed to inform, engage, and amplify the voices of Oakland's growing Latino and Mayan immigrant communities, and the Oakland side is a nonprofit newsroom that launched a year ago to fill a gaping hole in journalism for and about open. So without further ado, let's welcome Alex Tara, Alexis process, editor of alpaca latte. Jacob seamers Managing Editor of the Oakland side. Good to see you here. And Madeline Bair founding director of elfin panel. Welcome to be here.
Thank you for having us, honey. Sure, yeah.
Oh,
I'll just
kick us off by saying I really appreciated what Marlin had to say about the fact that, you know, reaching bilingual audiences with content is not easy. And there's no one way to do it, you know, so I've really been appreciating just hearing the different approaches that everyone's taking in all of these different formats, it's just, it's really fascinating and awesome to hear, but I'll hand it over to either Alexis or Madeline to maybe kick us off,
sir.
Hi Alec Great
to be here. I'm also very much learning and inspired by my colleagues here. And I think we're going to talk about you know different approaches to what has brought us together, and not necessarily one reporting project but different ways that we've worked and and are working together. To start, I can just give a brief background about the inferno and why collaboration is really at the heart of our strategy, and I found it out you know about four years ago. And because let you know in my in immigrants. We're the fastest growing communities here in Oakland, but you certainly wouldn't know that by looking at local media, because their stories really have not been reflected in local media and at the same time, Spanish language news outlets in the bay area had been dwindling. And so, you know, I started by simply talking with Latino and Mayan immigrants, and to hear you know what they want to see in Spanish language media. And from there we developed our mission of informing engaging and amplifying their voices. And we do that in a few different ways. Our core approaches is through a community microphone and a participatory text message reporting platform that are really designed to meet people where they're at, and through accessible strategies and tools, and very much in partnership with local community organizations and collaborations are key part of that strategy because, well, community members told us that they want simply more news and information to help them make informed decisions, and be engaged community members. They also said that they want other communities. They want political leaders, and they want folks who aren't immigrants to hear their stories. And so we've really worked to create an engaged audience of primarily folks who don't speak English, And so that Spanish speaking immigrants as well as mine indigenous immigrants who speak Spanish as a second language. But there are other outlets, including ethika lo de un including the open side, that have built really engaged audiences of community members who would want to hear their stories, and so we're very much experimenting and learning in by collaborating with different news outlets to really share the stories of the community members that LTM funnel is is in direct relationship with. And so, you know, we did that I'm a longtime fan of El piccolo de and friends with the team there. And so with our very first pilot when we took a community microphone around East Oakland to ask community members how they were affected by the rising cost of housing. It was kind of a no brainer for me to go to El piccolo de as an outlet that has kind of collaboration built in its DNA, and to partner with them to publish some of the stories that we gathered from our community members in that way. And since the Oakland side launched a year ago, it's been great to have a partner right here in the city to collaborate with, to do the same. So with that I'll hand it off to, to my colleagues. Yeah,
thank you, Maddie, and my name is Alexis editor in chief of El Tecolote and I remember that project really well, Madeline because you guys took something that was, you know, audio, and we were able to print it in our newspaper, right 10,000 circulation every two weeks. And that's always been bilingual, and for those of you who don't know, every two weeks, our paper comes out in both languages, meaning every headline every photo caption every story is in both languages and I think when we first collaborated with Dean Bono and Maddy, you know, sharing the transcriptions of those interviews, it kind of really for me emphasizes this guiding light in this collaboration that we have between the three of us here, The three of our news organizations and that's accessibility like we want to create stories that are accessible back to our communities, you know a lot of times my observation has been when you have either mainstream media like kind of organizations go into a community they mind stories and parachute in and just leave. Well we really tried to do is create media that is accessible for these very same communities we don't want to just capture their stories and leave them out of it like we want them to, you know, to amplify their voices but that they're able to utilize that information and access it. And for us, we've been around for 50 years creating this bilingual, newspaper, you know, so it just made so much sense that if we're all doing kind of this community work, you know, to join, and to you know to, you know, collaborate, and maximize like that effort, you know, for the sake of better journalism but also for the sake of serving our community for those of you who don't know, there are a lot of things happening here that have been happening in the Bay Area, whether it's the rising cost of rent housing access to health care and Navid kind of again folds into this pandemic, which we're starting to crawl out of it seems, and even to, you know, police violence, you know, so the way I see this partnership is all of us are doing really, really interesting things and all of us are bringing this our powers to the table to better serve our community in an accessible way, you know, that's my spiel, and Jacob, love to hear what you have to, you know, you know, I'm a big fan of the Oakland side as well and we're probably barely a San Francisco publication but we definitely this is one of the other really neat opportunities, is that we're able to amplify the voices of our East Bay community as well.
Yeah,
thanks. Thanks Alex and we're, we're excited to partner with without the colada. For that reason, and, yeah, I mean, you know, as oni mentioned I mean we're a new organization we launched about a year ago to fill this void in the news landscape in Oakland, that really had been there since the Oakland Tribune, you know, went away, some years ago. So, you know, for us, you know, when we launched our newsroom we actually launched with some founding values, and a couple of those values like they included reflecting Oakland's communities, and also amplifying community voices and so as an English first, you know, news organization, how can we really do that without partnering. That's a tough task, You know, so for us it was like just essential to establish partnerships from the early going and el tiempo was one of our first like founding partnerships, and they've been instrumental in really helping us to, you know, I think in part reach a wider audience but I think the real, I think, maybe even the larger value for us as a, as a news platform has been surfacing the voices through as de Bono's network, right Madeline's done an amazing job of building up a network of, you know, engaged folks who are, who are tapped into the panel, who are oftentimes, you know, not just Spanish speakers but folks who speak indigenous dialects, so really like growing population in Oakland and East Oakland. And so, You know the partnership has made our reporting better, because we've been able to include those voices and perspectives in our work, and then our audience is really like we're reaching, you know, a lot of different people but we're definitely reaching folks who are decision makers in Oakland who are following our work. And so for us to be able to include the voices of indigenous, you know, migrants in East Oakland on issues like vaccine access and how distance learning is impacting kids on issues like housing, or Like Alex said, public safety, and what do Latinos in East Oakland, think about this huge debate that's happening right now in Oakland around police spending. This is just a great service to us as a news organization so yeah thrilled, thrilled to be partnering with all three and then I have all three of us and I just wanted to say that the other thing that just, in addition to being values aligned as news organizations, you know, we also have very different platforms, you know, you know, the quality of course like print publication, they're reaching certain folks that way. We're primarily online kind of traditional online publishing in English mostly reaching folks that way and then, you know, Madeline with her network that she reaches, you know, primarily via SMS, like text messaging. Right So combine that all and we're really able to like just you know amplify these voices and
stories, much more throughout openness.
Now, you mentioned that you have different platforms, but your origins overlaps, you know, at some point they do overlap. So how do you make sure you complement each other rather than compete. Yeah, that's
a, that's a great question. You know, I would just kind of go back to I think naturally only. We do have different audiences and different ways that we reach them and so you know I don't view us as being in direct competition with each other as media outlets. But that being said, even if we were and even for those media outlets that, you know, you might say like we are in competition with as a news organization, one of our other values is that we do not approach other journalists organizations or like individuals with a spirit of competition we actually really want to collaborate because we, We understand that like Oakland just needs good journalism, you know, everyone needs that. And so, you know, hey, if the, you know, East Bay Times is doing great stuff like we're shouting them out in our newsletter, you know, it felt like a lot de la Timpanogos is was doing great work like we want to partner we want to lift that work up to, and that's just a really like core part of our values as a news organization and something that we really try to like, you know, walk that walk. So,
I'll just say that. Yeah, I just add
to that, I mean it's really going back to your introduction of us it's really like finding and I think this is really crucial, at the outset of any collaboration is, you know, really having an understanding of what are the strengths that we all bring to the table, and how are they unique and how can we work together to produce something that's greater than the sum of our parts. And, you know, for, for El Timpano, we're the smallest organization at this table, and we don't have much reporting capacity but we have a very engaged audience, and so we're able to reach folks who are directly impacted by issues that other outlets are reporting on or would like to report on. So how can we bring that to your newsroom. You know we we've collaborated with the open side and a few articles where we've worked in collaboration with the open sides reporters and el tiempo did some reporting really based on what we were hearing from our audience, and the open sides reporters did other reporting, really looking at the more public accountability and angle of the story and I think Jacobs, sharing one of those articles in the chat on virtual learning when classes were going online in the fall and LTV no was hurt hearing from so many community members that, you know, weeks into the school year, their kids still weren't attending classes. So I think really, you know, using a strengths based approach to understand you know what are the assets that we can all bring to the table, you know, from my point of view I see I'll take the low day as like a pioneer of really bringing art and creativity into its community journalism so you know when I'm approaching them about a collaboration. I really think about it that way is like how can we work with, with they'll take a load day and its strength and its network of artists to do reporting in a different way that LC Penelope, wouldn't be able to do on our own.
Yeah, I don't have much else to add, I think Jacob and and Maddie, like really summed it up. All I really want to say is that we recognize also that we're living in a really busy time, you know, and all of us are at like maximum capacity and if we're already doing this really great work. It just makes sense. And I feel like this archaic kind of journalistic model of like everybody competing is, you know, is no longer like viable, I really feel like it has to be all about the journalism now more than ever we see the trust in media like plummeting, you know, as we march forward. So I think it's just about producing the best possible journalism and we can do all of that together, and that's really the spirit that's rocking this project
so right. Thank you. Let's bring back our other panelists into the conversation we have, we have actually a few questions here and in the chat box. The first one, beyond Google translation. Do you have any suggestions of how people whose first language is not English or Spanish can access new stories, originally written in Spanish. Is that, is that clear. I actually read that question twice.
You want to start Lana or marlin
actually was about to say I have no idea what the answer if
I made a
cringy face because I can't think of anything, I don't know if any of the other panelists have an answer.
I could take a stab at it I'm not sure if this is totally answering the question, but I also saw in the chat and Sebastian's question about elk infernos, you know, research on our community's information needs, and, and I'll drop a link in the chat on a report that we produce about that but, um, you know, everything for now we before launching anything we invested about nine months of just really getting to know the community that we are seeking to serve and understanding, you know what are the ways that they get news and information. And you know what it really illuminated to us is that there are so many layers of translation and I think when we talk about translation, we're really talking about how can we make information accessible to different audiences, and you know language is one way, and and is for many audiences a big barrier to accessing information, You know, but there are also levels of technology. You know that so many of the community members that we talked with told us that they don't have a computer they don't, they don't use home computers. There's also education level, and for the communities that we're reaching, there's their high levels of low literacy, A lot of people didn't graduate high school. And, and so, you know, regardless of whatever community that you're trying to reach, and you really want to think about, you know, how can we meet this community, whether at and, and, and what is the different entry point for for different communities to a particular issue.
So,
you know, right now we're, we're working on a project and reporting on the intersection of health and housing and working to collaborate with, with a few different reporting outlets about on this issue and, you know each of our outlets may reach a different community, and we won't produce the same story for those communities will will produce stories that really, you know, speak to those communities in the way that, you know, that is most relevant to them, and through the tools and the languages and the platforms that reach them best.
I have two blog in one of our programs at the Center for Cooperative Media to what we do when we translate the story, let's say from Spanish to English. We post both, both of them both of the versions, and then when you click the store it's in English, it goes back to the original content, where it was. So if it was it's a report Hispano, then you could see the original source of that story, Or if it's in Hungarian when you click the, the English version of it. There is a hyperlink there, that's one of the ways that we would been doing to answer that question. But again, like what, what Madeline was saying there are several ways of doing this at New America Media and Jacob, you know, knew about this, to work together, it's, it's kind of similar platform but we provided a News Digest, you know of all news every day and every week and then we send it out to media. So that's another way of doing it. Um, the second question here, coming from the same person, Mark Taylor Canfield. Do we know any organizations that specialize in distributing and translating news stories from Spanish speaking communities and nations in other languages. So that content can be shared with non Spanish speaking populations around the world,
held up. Do you know any of those organizations.
Unfortunately I don't but I think madaline has an answer for that
question.
Yeah, I just shared in the chat
and Global Voices, which comes to mind as a platform that you know shares articles from different communities across the globe and into different languages, but I'd love to hear, you know what, what, what other platforms or services they
might, maybe.
Well this question, you really need to answer each one of you are all of you, reporters are all your reporters bilingual, or do you ever pair English speaking reporters with Spanish speaking for interviews. It would seem that having bilingual staff is really important for this to work, he or she doesn't have anyone on their staff, who is fluent in both Spanish and English right now. What can be done, what can we, what can we do
for for our collaboration, it's definitely a requirement, and, you know, Hilda and I interviewed the people together and Hilda, will actually interview them in Spanish. To check the fluency, and you know there's a writing test involved to make sure that they can write both in English and in Spanish.
Yeah, absolutely. I agree. I mean, that's what we do, do, don't deny is very important to really be completely bilingual, so that we can maybe he can, or she can produce a piece in English, and another one in Spanish, in both audiences are served at sea level, a very very high quality level, they have to produce high quality journalism in both languages.
I mean, oh sorry, sorry. No, please go ahead. I was gonna say that at fuutarou, you know, we're a company that focuses on serving the that like mostly serving, like a US Latino audience, so a more English dominant language, audience, but all of our reporters are bilingual, but many people are kind of this, who may have trouble writing a story in Spanish, you know, but, but few are comfortable interviewing in Spanish and working with the tape library was a very interesting project in terms of this because our entire team was bilingual in fact our meetings were fully in Spanglish like completely like we had one member of the team who is, you know, more of a heritage speaker, you know, who is like second or third generation Puerto Rican and, you know, we would understand in Spanish but would mostly respond in English, and, and it was just it just, it was really fun it would work, we could just completely, you know, change languages mid sentence and, and, and that and it was a lot of fun and as far as, you know, we made sure that that everybody used their strongest language to do their parts, for example, we would have our Puerto Rico based journalists and producers on the project, you know, right, in Spanish first or make sure that they were in charge of the Spanish episodes, and then we had the you know the more English dominant reporters sure that they were doing the translations and stuff for the for the English episodes. So it's kind of, you know, using everyone to play to their strengths, you know, you know, most bilingual people are stronger in one or the other in the end and we were lucky enough to have enough, you know, a kind of diverse level of language fluency that that kind of allowed us to do that. Yeah,
we even for tracking for example when reporters would voice their parts and record their parts of the script, we would have a, like a buddy with them, who could help them like coach them with that particular language I mean everybody has a dominant language, even if they're fully bilingual, and just to help them out with thinking about what is a synonym for this word if I can't quite like wrap my tongue around how to pronounce it. And everybody had that even, even for people who, you know, have lived for years in Puerto Rico, so we're very supportive of one another in the challenges of being bilingual.
We have a question from an anonymous attendee. And I was thinking about this, actually, during our conversation now. This partnerships that you have seemed like a better way to do this kind of work, multiple languages, not just bilingual multiple rather than the legacy news organization trying to hire bilingual staff itself and begin publishing in another language, bit, bit, what are your thoughts on that.
I completely agree, being a legacy organization. You know, there's a, there's more than just covering the Latino community having a reporter do that work. There is a cultural competency piece that a newsroom needs to have to do this effectively there, you know, and we've seen this repeatedly right when mainstream media covers communities of color, oftentimes, the lack of understanding creates more harm than good. And so by working with Hilda, and her newsroom we're able to build that cultural competency, as we go. We're so much smarter from working with them than trying to do this ourselves.
Yeah I would say I am, I'm really the only staffer at W NYC who worked on the content production of lab Degas, and if I even think about even the small part of I mean not small, hugely consequential but engineering for example like mixing the episodes and doing that technical skill for Pluto has bilingual engineers, and it would, I don't know how W NYCs engineering staff would have handled that part of the work W NYC contributed in other ways, but it would have just been like, hugely difficult so the partnership even just in that way, I think was worth it.
Anything from your group, Alexis, Madeline and Jacob.
I'll just say quickly, I
mean, I am. Yeah I think that's a really good question. I've been in conversation with you know with reporters and editors from, from a number of other news outlets, who are interested in collaborating in some way, and, and, you know, sometimes, I've been approached by news outlets to, you know, share reporting to reach out to the nose audience, and when, you know, we've actually already been doing the work to inform our audiences about XYZ issue. So I think, you know, having an understanding of, you know,
of what
the outlets are, who the outlets are that are reaching communities that you know that your outlet isn't necessarily reaching of what they're doing already, and again, just going back to like, you know what, what are the strengths so that you know you don't try to reinvent the wheel. But you know, how can you actually work together to do something, and to do something different, and build on the work that's already being done in your community.
Now we have about five minutes left, and before we wrap up, I would like to ask this questions to all of you. How do you see the future of translation in the newsroom. You know how crucial is that going to be in our stories, anything that we do in the newsroom in our audiences.
Anyone who wants to take that first.
I'll just say that I hope in the in the podcast space that we'll be seeing a lot more willingness to reach as English speaking communities, you know, both in the US and abroad. It's, you know, like I said more than in some other mediums it's it's it's difficult in audio to, to just kind of translate because of the nature of the medium and it means that a lot of people, you know, there's a huge audience that can't access, so much of the work that's being made. And so yeah, you know this this was extremely exciting and I will say, every time, you know, we're talking about making new podcasts, etc, you know, we are constantly being asked to make bilingual podcasts, and everybody wants to do it and so that's been very encouraging, whereas a couple years ago. Everyone's like, I don't think it's really worth the expanse, you know like a lot of people have wanted to reach Spanish speaking audiences and in radio and audio but haven't been willing to put their money where their mouth is, you know, and I've seen there to be a little bit of a change in that where, you know, companies that we're talking with about making podcast seem really excited about the possibility, you know, and they're not, you know, we're nonprofit so we come from a mission based perspective which I think pretty much everyone in this panel. We're now, with a lot of for profit companies where they're, they're thinking, you know, markets and profit motive but I think, you know, to some degree, there's those two worlds are aligning right now in the in the in the search for creating more bilingual and Spanish language content and in podcasting,
how about for you don and held. How do you see the future, especially of your partnership.
I think this is very important and what we haven't figured out yet is how to do it at real scale, you know it takes a human to sit down and translate a story right because I, this is something I've learned in this process that it's not as simple you flip a switch and translate a story from English to Spanish right so you know when we have projects that are outside this partnership that we want to share with OneNote CCM, we work with a freelancer to translate that work for Hilda and so have we haven't figured out how to scale that so that everything that we produce can be available in Spanish, but, but I'm looking forward to those answers as well. Hilda, what are your thoughts.
I think it's the future of the Spanish publications in is brilliant. I mean we are going to continue in that direction, especially hearing in Charlotte, and in North Carolina when the Latino population is the fastest growing segment of our community and is the youngest, so we're going to have that audience there to be served for many many years so our blind with Wi Fi and Linda desea is to continue doing that and to continue producing this covering this stories in both languages, because it's, it says a lot for a minister of the Latino community, but it also serve the, the English speaking audience. They really want to, to know what is going on in the Latino community, and sometimes they want to breathe. Breathe it in Spanish, and also one more thing that I like to add that by having this partnership, and doing our stories in English, in Spanish. The, the community a large, really appreciate the appreciate that we are doing something so valuable for the Latino community here in Charlotte, in, in, in the state.
One. One quick thing I'll add only if this was any indication closer is actually replicating this project now with another public media station elsewhere in North Carolina and so the interest is growing from non Spanish speaking newsrooms to do this kind of work. So we're excited to see where that will take the, the audience.
Wonderful, thank you very much. On that very positive note, we would like to thank all our speakers for this panel, and the participants, and I would like to hand this over back to Stephanie. Thank you. Thank you, oni.
Thank you. Thank you everyone. I had that slide ready and I barely used to say thank you. That's what I want to like stand up and just scream now thank you thank you thank
you
thank you to everyone on this last panel. Special thank you to Jude on who you know previously ran this center, and who's doing amazing work in Wi Fi and who has been on three panels for this year of Summit, so thank you thank you John. I'm just so grateful for everyone, thank you to Derrick dent who you can see on the screen right now. We are going to be sharing all Derek's illustrations, next week. Also we've gotten a bunch of questions about videos, yes we will be cutting those videos from all of our presentations and sharing them with everyone next week you'll get a couple of follow up emails with from us, that just include everything you might want if you forgot the link to the attendee list. If you want to look at slides, if you want to rewatch videos all of that. And most important, please please please take our survey. We'll send a survey out about the summit, that really helps us plan for future years, because every year we consider whether we should host the summit again, because we want it to be useful, if it's not useful, we won't do it. So, please fill that out. So without further ado, let's go to our community awards. We have more awards to give out and I'm going to turn it over to Joe, who is going to give those out so thank you.
Hello, ladies, gentlemen, our beautiful nonbinary grants. The first ever inaugural or for our business. For our second for our cedars, And for you, is the model. This goes to the person who engaged in our chat. Ask thoughtful questions, and probably sitting up in front of the room that decided to help the person. This year's award goes to
Andy we're gonna shoot this and make a few graduations Joey and Nick graduation for $100. Our next award is the session we have sound off about this award goes to session that I saw. Sire, challenged and loaded as long as it is open and close to you. Course building equitable
partnerships.
So how we're going to do that.
Next door is our community cedar we wish to cap seating award orders the most energized engaging speaker of the site, this person could do a five hour TED talk and we would all be activated on the edge of our seats, the entire time thing is definitely the award goes to look at Kansas ordinay on down, graduation status is a no brainer. It's up in our national word and final award goes to the social butterfly or universities in sharing the most, and most interested citizens on all social media
award goes to
carrybacks. Congratulations, fair, and that does because that is the end of the normal 4041 collaborative journalism Summit. Thank you all for coming and tagging your vehicle beautiful people we love you and we hope to see you soon in person, and they will be well. Thanks, and have a wonderful, wonderful weekend. Nice.
