The Future of Journalism

Transcript

[Sandro Galea]
Welcome to Ideas Matter, a podcast hosted by WashU. I’m Sandro Galea, vice provost of interdisciplinary initiatives and dean of the School of Public Health. It is easy to forget that just a few decades ago, the only people broadcasting like I am now would have been those with access to the tools of professional media. Now anyone can engage with the public through podcasts, social media, other online platforms. The digital revolution has reshaped how media is produced and consumed, with implications for the practice of journalism, both positive and negative.
So what is the future of journalism as a means of public engagement? How can we untangle the good from the bad of the digital media landscape to shape a better conversation? How can journalism tell stories that serve the public good without veering into partisan advocacy? I look forward to tackling these questions with today’s guest. Lisa Gibbs is an award-winning business journalist who serves as president and CEO of the Pulitzer Center. Before coming to the Pulitzer Center, she was vice president of philanthropic development at the Associated Press.
She was also a reporter for Money Magazine and executive business editor for the Miami Herald. I am delighted to be speaking with her today. Lisa, welcome.

[Lisa Gibbs]
Thank you for having me.

[Sandro Galea]
So let’s start by way of framing the conversation with a big picture question. What in your view is the core aim of journalism? What is journalism for?

[Lisa Gibbs]
Well, it’s actually a more multifaceted answer than you might think. We often talk about journalism as simply a way to inform the public. We also talk about journalism as a way of holding government accountable.
Of course, the right to freedom of the press is enshrined in the First Amendment, and it was seen as a government watchdog. I think about journalism in a more expansive way. Journalism, of course, does inform. It does hold the powerful to account. But it also is a real mechanism for education, for inspiring curiosity, for connecting people to their larger world, for building bridges between people and communities that help them understand issues so they can solve problems together. And I think especially in today’s world where the way we get our information has become so different, more and more people are recognizing the importance of these other purposes for journalism.

[Sandro Galea]
Now you use the word engagement. So talk us through how you define public engagement in the context of journalism today and how has that definition shifted over your career?

[Lisa Gibbs]
Yeah, think, I mean there’s a lot to unpack there. First of all, sticking with how we’re thinking about engagement in the broader sense. How do I not just passively receive information, but how does it inspire me to then take an action?
And so taking an action might mean I go look up other sources so I can learn more about that issue. I have a conversation with someone about an issue that’s impacting our world. Maybe I get involved with a nonprofit or a community organization in trying to solve a problem that’s been exposed. And so there’s this chain, you know, if we think about this kind of chain of engagement, that’s moving people from being informed and knowing more to taking some kind of action, we kind of think about the spectrum of engagement. I think that in the past, where primarily media was delivered to everyone through a newspaper in the front yard, or through nightly news on the television or maybe through radio, it was much more homogenous. And maybe we measured engagement by how many people were subscribing to that news organization or how many viewers were tuning into the nightly news. And we know today that that picture just doesn’t tell the whole story of either the power of what journalism can do, but also, you know, the realities of the information ecosystem today.

[Sandro Galea]
Let’s talk about reality for a second. So it seems to me as a non-media person, there are two modes of public engagement, right? There is engagement that generates clicks, shares, and online metrics. And then there is engagement that actually is out into communities, talks with real people in real time, and aims to convey what people are really thinking. So how do you balance these two? I recognize that they both matter, but how do you balance them?

[Lisa Gibbs]
So we can’t really talk about this issue without addressing the reality of the financial challenges facing news organizations today. In 20, let’s call it 25, 30 years ago and before, advertising really paid the bills for producing your newspaper or your nightly news report, and you as a consumer didn’t really have to pay very much and your choices were fairly limited. The internet completely, of course, disrupted this business model and ever since then there’s been this gradual erosion of, unfortunately, financial strength at most news outlets around the United States and including in the world. Declining resources or declining advertising, declining subscriptions mean there’s less funding for journalists to go out into the community and talk to people in the community.
There’s fewer journalists who have the expertise to tackle complex subjects that deserve real time and care to explain. Today’s media outlets have to reach you not only on their website or through their app, but also on TikTok and Instagram and maybe YouTube or podcasts like this one. So you’ve got this incredible fragmented landscape at the same time that you have fewer resources to serve them. So I think it’s just really important to understand that context that one of the reasons we have less or fewer journalists going out and talking to people in the community is that it’s just like become increasingly hard for news organizations to support that, even if they aim to do so. So again, getting back to your specific question, news organizations have to be viable as businesses in order to succeed, whether that’s getting subscriptions like the New York Times or the Financial Times or through donations, like many of the local outlets we see now in the US. But once you have that, you’re more likely to get the other kind of engagement, with journalists going out into the communities and talking to them. And at the Pulitzer Center, part of our mission is to provide resources that help journalists have what they need to be able to do the kind of community engagement with students, with youth, with policymakers that we see as valuable today.

[Sandro Galea]
Now it’s hard not to see this issue as contributing to the trust issue, right? Poll after poll show a lot of challenges with trust in institutions broadly, but media specifically. So how do you deal with these structural challenges, the real challenges as you’re outlining, and actually build trust and sustained engagement?

[Lisa Gibbs]
We believe that public engagement is both critical to this ultimate financial success and sustainability of news organizations, but also it’s critical to building trust. And I’ve answered the trust question in kind of the same way.
There have been tens of thousands of journalism jobs that have been lost in this country over the last 20 years. So the likelihood that you might even meet a journalist in your local community, the chances of that are way lower than they ever were. And so when you don’t have that possibility of interaction with a journalist, you don’t see journalists writing about the issues that matter to you and your communities. All you see is coverage of what’s going on at the national level or at the world level, and you start to feel this distance from that that does erode trust and understanding over time. So I think that building back an understanding of what even journalists do and pulling back the curtain and helping to show just simply how journalists go about their work, how they decide what stories to cover, how they decide who to talk to, the data behind their conclusions. There’s so much more discussion now about journalists needing to respect the fact that people in the communities don’t necessarily any longer really quite understand what we do. And to your polarization, I think when all everyone sees is what’s happening at the national level, it’s the same kind of thing. The political nature of the world and what’s covered by national news ends up kind of filtering down into this overall sense of whether we have trust in journalism. And I also, like I have to say, there’s no question that as AI techniques and tools have enabled content to be produced faster and cheaper by actors who don’t have, I mean not only training in journalism, but respect for the truth, who have their own agendas to advance, it becomes increasingly hard for people to tell the difference, and especially on social media, and so that also has been a huge contributor to declining trust. And you’re so worried about being stung by something that’s not true that you start to question what is true. And we see that happening, unfortunately.

[Sandro Galea]
Let me ask you question that I’m always curious about from a journalist’s point of view. So what role do you see for journalism as a way of advancing solutions to social problems? Like is journalism, is that part of the core mission? And if it is, how do you do that without tipping into advocacy that often becomes partisan and ideological? How do you balance all that?

[Lisa Gibbs]
So journalism’s superpower is its independence and its incredible commitment to facts and evidence. I think that we see journalism as a powerful resource for educational organizations, advocacy organizations.
Take those facts, take those stories, and you can use that to advance change. But we don’t believe that it’s the role of journalists to advocate for any particular policies or any particular kind of change. But I mean there’s no question that journalists believe and want to see a more just world. And I think that we believe that we’re going to present you the facts and we’re going to tell the stories of people you might otherwise not hear from and let you all make your decisions. Now, there’s no question that there are certain media organizations that have chosen to take a more, I don’t know if it’s partisan, but certainly to have a certain kind of worldview that leans a certain way. And unfortunately, that’s why you see these very different media ecosystems that, depending on who you watch, will be presented with very different points of view. But in general, I mean I think what people forget is that that type of work is actually the exception. But these, you know, certain very large media companies who make a lot of noise get a lot of the attention. Meanwhile, there’s just thousands and thousands of journalists all over the world who are digging through that data, digging through documents, talking to people, trying to figure out how to explain the world to everyone and how things works. And that’s really, that is really the experience of journalism, not these other actors that get a lot of attention.

[Sandro Galea]
So on the other side, let’s talk about technology for a second. So we talked about the mission of journalism. So what do you think are the most promising uses of technology now in terms of moving to a way to engage with audiences in a meaningful way, moving beyond a one-way broadcast to audience engagement from your lens as someone who thinks about this all the time? What do you think is most promising?

[Lisa Gibbs]
Yeah, I think that one of the great opportunities with AI tools in particular is actually being able to create versions of stories that can be delivered on multiple platforms for audiences who choose to receive it in that way. So imagine that I’m a journalist and I produce a story and I might write the thousand word version for my website. I might then use an AI tool that creates summaries, shorter summaries of that story that can be delivered by other platforms, can be read out loud, can populate the daily newsletter. It can create short videos that become social posts. So AI tools that can save the journalist’s time and preserve their energy for critical thinking, talking to people, all of those things that only human journalists can do, but then being able to deliver that story to as wide an audience as possible and as multiple formats as possible, I think there’s actually a lot of opportunity and power in that.
So that’s something that I’m excited about. What we do need to make sure of and what there’s been tremendous work done on is creating the right guidelines and standards for how that should be used without infringing on, without risking errors or debilitating trust further.

[Sandro Galea]
Well, you anticipated my AI question, so let me ask perhaps a harder question. So let’s talk about how newsrooms and journalists should cover polarized and polarizing topics. So how do you cover those topics in a way that engage people across ideological lines without resorting to, let’s say, false equivalence?

[Lisa Gibbs]
I mean, I personally think that journalism is a service. It’s underlying what we do is this need to be useful to people. And I think that our ability to explain and help people make sense of things is one of the most important things we do. So when tackling a topic that is considered controversial or polarizing, I think we absolutely need to put our explainer hats on. What’s behind this issue? What are the different points of view? What do you need to know about this? How might this be relevant to you? I think that it goes back to my days writing about personal finance and people’s personal savings and investing. You know, we need to remember that we’re delivering a service, which is information and understanding. And I think that that’s especially true when it comes to some of these harder topics. Sometimes I think we should be doing all kinds of Q and As, but let’s just do Qs and As.

[Sandro Galea]
Well, you’re anticipating my next question, which is give me some examples where journalism really has gotten it right, where you feel like examples of recent efforts really have engaged the public in issues that matter.

[Lisa Gibbs]
Well, I’ll talk a little bit, selfishly perhaps, about the more than 200 journalism projects that Pulitzer Center supports every year. I mean, part of our mission is to make ambitious quality journalism on some of the world’s most important but also most complicated issues, to give journalists the resources they need to produce those stories and then help them reach bigger audiences and engage with them. So I’ll talk about a couple types of examples. There are examples of great investigations that are really very much needed that help expose kind of systemic failures or flaws in systems that lead to deforestation or human rights abuses and things of that nature that then lead to actual policy change. And there are really tremendous examples of journalists doing that kind of work even occasionally when it’s dangerous to do so. And we need that kind of courageous journalism. And then there’s also that incredible ability to explain. So if we can help a journalist spend three weeks in the Arctic, or three weeks in the Amazon, spending time with researchers on the ground or indigenous communities on the ground, or really like bearing witness, I mean there’s no AI substitute for that. And there’s still plenty of great journalism like that that’s happening out there. It’s just, you know, it’s expensive and it’s time consuming and newsrooms need help doing it, but they very much want to. So I think that there’s examples of journalists getting it right everywhere you look from your local news outlet all the way to national TV news. And then I think the trick is that it’s about investing the time and thinking about how can I engage? What else? Publication is not the end, it’s the beginning. What else can I do now to organize a community talk, visit a university classroom, think about ways to bring the issues raised by journalism into communities in different ways so that they don’t just have to go to the news app or the news website to have a chance of benefiting from it.

[Sandro Galea]
So I think it’s a very good answer. So let me ask an even harder question now, because I want you to look ahead 10 years. And I realize this field is evolving. So how do you imagine a highly engaged community center newsroom looking in day-to-day 10 years from now? What are we doing? What is that newsroom doing?

[Lisa Gibbs]
Well, I think that there will be as many answers to that and models to that, too many for me to say right now, and that’s a good thing. There are gonna be so many different things people do depending on their audience, but I do think that the notion of community, first of all, like you say community-centered, you know, actually building better communities around stories and issues so that, who knows what the technology will be in 10 years, but right now, for example, more WhatsApp groups, more communities on social where there’s a two-way conversation going on between the journalists and the audience. It’s not just we’re delivering news to you and then you go do with it what you will. We’re seeing more and more newsrooms open coffee shops. Come talk to us about local community issues and have a cup of coffee or partner with libraries. Maybe the newsrooms will be in the libraries.
So I think that there’s just so many exciting things actually happening right now that contain the seeds for the future. And in an AI-driven world, I think we all believe that that’s important and necessary, but also what people are going to actually want. More authenticity, more connection, more opportunity to contribute.
So I’m looking forward to that future actually and Pulitzer Center sees itself as a part of that and driving toward that.

[Sandro Galea]
So what advice would you give to an emerging journalist who wants to be at the cutting edge of that, at the cutting edge of journalism for public engagement, civic renewal 10 years from now?

[Lisa Gibbs]
First of all, the skills of reporting, writing, critical thinking, those skills are just as important as they always were. And they’re important whether you’re writing for a website, producing content for TikTok, or producing video for YouTube, or any of those things. The same core skills really matter. I do think that having an understanding of the importance of audience and thinking about who your audience is before you even start to report your story is going to become even more and more essential, as will the ability to produce content on multiple platforms. Like, we’re never going to go back to a world where people are getting their information only one or two ways. And so if we really want to serve communities, as journalists, we need to be thinking about reaching audiences in very different ways. And so what I would say to journalism students is you need to develop those kinds of skills to be able to understand the audience and how to design for impact and really to be able to produce your news in multiple platforms.

[Sandro Galea]
You know, it’s been implicit in this conversation, but you sound like a very hopeful person.

[Lisa Gibbs]
I am, yes.

[Sandro Galea]
Distill that for us. What gives you hope in the moment?

[Lisa Gibbs]
Well, I think what gives me hope is I go back to the incredible journalism that actually is being produced every day. I think we maybe don’t see it enough. It doesn’t come through our channels or we get caught up in the scroll of daily news headlines that gives us a certain picture of what journalism is.
And I guess I’m here to show you that there’s this whole world of journalism out there that is ambitious and really helps you make sense of your world and does something way more than worry you about the state of the world. And I see, we get more than 2,000 proposals every year from journalists wanting to do those kinds of stories.
So I see that. I see the ambition. I see the desire to serve communities and get the word out. And so that very much gives me hope, as does the increased interest that we’re all showing in the importance of engaging the public.

[Sandro Galea]
I’m Sandro Galea. I have been talking with Lisa Gibbs about the future of journalism as a means of public engagement. Thank you, Lisa.

[Lisa Gibbs]
Thank you.

[Sandro Galea]
And thank you everybody who has joined us for this Ideas Matter. I look forward to continuing the conversation.