TheReporter'sStudio

Do Hispanic/Latino Audiences Want To Listen To or Watch What You Have To Offer?

It’s easy to put Latinos/Hispanics/Latinx folks into one big pot and kinda think of us as a monolith. I can understand how someone who is NOT from this group might not get the nuances.

We speak the same language, share history, food, and music, but we’re very different. Mexicans are very different from Colombians, or Ecuadorians, or Peruvians. Remember that many of these people have history going back to not only Europeans but also the Aztec, Mayan, and Inca peoples. When you look at the many different people who make up this ethnic identity, it’s a vast palette.

So, if you’re a member of the news media, and you’re asking yourself, how do we reach this audience, well there are a few things to keep in mind. Start by knowing your community. If you’re in Southern California then a large, very large, part of your Latin audience is Mexican and Central American. If you’re in South Florida then a big portion of that audience is Caribbean or South American. Approach this audience not from the label Hispanic/Latino/Latinx but from their nationality as one way to start.

I spoke with Hugo Balta, the owner and publisher of the Latino News Network. He’s also got a lot of experience at places such as: NBC, Telemundo, CBS, ESPN, ABC, and PBS.

Just a couple extra thoughts here if I may. I love what Hugo said to me. Sometimes Latin audiences want to stay connected to their families and the news back home. I can attest. My father still prefers watching the news in Spanish over English. It’s been that way for years. I also believe he preferred Spanish news because his first language has always been Spanish, even though he can speak English.

The reality may be that newsrooms won’t reach a large portion of the Spanish-speaking audience unless they provide news in Spanish. Remember though, there are a lot of us. Know what’s important to us, then use that.

TRS: Are there enough Hispanic/Latino voices in the news? Have things gotten better over the years?

Hugo Balta: In certain aspects, we are no better now than when I started out 30 years ago. And in some ways, we are. And that is all driven by technology. We’re having a conversation on this program that you’re producing because of access and affordability to technology. I am a life-long member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. I’ll tell you, part of the work of that organization and others that represent marginalized communities is to continuously advocate for a seat at the table. But because of technology, we no longer have to just continue to ask for a seat at the table. We can create our own tables. And that’s precisely what you’re doing; it’s exactly what I do as an independent journalist. We see more of ourselves and our community than before because of social media. But statistically speaking, even though there are more of us in this space, we are still a minority in corporate commercial media. Even in digital media, we’re still, when you compare the makeup of those newsrooms versus the makeup of the general population, whether it’s local or national, we’re still very much behind the eight ball.

TRS: When you look at the news media, regardless of format, what do they get wrong about the Hispanic/Latino population? What do they get right?

Hugo Balta: First, they treat us like a monolithic group. You can walk from New York City to Los Angeles and come across many different people who fall under being Hispanic/Latino. And they’re going to be all very different. A Hispanic Latino in New York is mainly from the Caribbean, led by the. The Puerto Rican community is very different from the Hispanic/Latino in the West Coast in Southern California, which is predominantly Mexican or Mexican-American. There are more than 20 countries that have a similar language, Spanish, and a similar history. But there are cultural nuances between Puerto Ricans versus Peruvians, Venezuelans, Argentinians, etc. Understanding those nuances enables a storyteller, a journalist, and a newsroom to produce stories that are much more authentic to the communities they serve.

To produce a story with a one-size-fits-all mentality, to see Hispanic/Latinos in the state of California as the same as those from New York is arrogance and ignorance.

Now, where do they get it right? I think more and more, especially in the last two years under COVID, we’ve seen the exacerbation of those disparities regarding education, housing, and health care. They have a better understanding of the community and issues. In the beginning, their coverage was very superficial, very one-dimensional. I’ll give you an example. The coverage of immigration is much more complex than just looking at people crossing a border. News outlets are getting better at understanding the nuances. I suspect that it will continue to change as Hispanics, Latinos, and others demand better transparent reporting from media, regardless of the platform.

TRS: My father watches Spanish-language news first. What was essential for him was to know what was happening back home in Colombia. From your experience and data you’ve collected over the years about audience behaviors, what can you tell us about Hispanic/Latino audiences? Are they looking only for Spanish-language news? Or are they trying to move over to English-speaking news?

Hugo Balta: It’s very subjective, and I’ll use my parents as an example. My parents have been in this country obviously longer than I have been on this planet, right, more than 50 years. And when you look at my father, he’s fully bilingual. He gravitates to English and Spanish media. He’s going to English media for certain types of news, primarily local news. And then he’s gravitating to Spanish-language media for a different take. And then, of course, there’s the connection to life back home. Then you have my mother, who’s still predominantly Spanish dominant, and rarely consumes any media in English.

Does my father consume more English-language news than Spanish-language? No. I think part of that has to do with the fact that it’s always in a negative light when he does see himself. It’s never about his experience; a hardworking immigrant, born Hispanic/Latino, or another naturalized citizen who’s a small business owner. That’s not what you usually see in English language media. Often it’s a negative narrative, and it’s often a caricature of who they are. So one, it’s really about their preference. And secondly, it’s a lack of reflection and inclusion in English language media.

TRS: Is there a difference in how the English and Spanish-speaking news approaches doing the news?

Hugo Balta: There’s certainly a difference between some of the storytelling in local news versus national news, both in English and Spanish. To differentiate between Spanish and English-language news, one of the most significant faults of Spanish-language local news is the exploitation of women. It used to be if you were a woman and you wanted to break into the business of broadcast news, they would look for you to start in weather, and they would sex it up, from the way they used their hair to the clothing they wore, putting women in positions that were very uncomfortable and indeed exploiting them.

Now another difference that often comes up is advocacy journalism. You’d hear how Spanish-Language news is advocating for pro-immigration. The network or reporter must be pro-immigrant, et cetera. And Jorge Ramos from Univision is often criticized by English-language media for doing that. That’s changing now in English-speaking media. It happened in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd when African American journalists were criticized for not being objective in their coverage of the protests. That is a point of view based on privileged and from someone that doesn’t understand the black experience in the United States. What those journalists were doing and what Jorge Ramos and other Hispanic/ Latinos are doing is they’re being very transparent about their experience in wearing those shoes, and they’re providing audiences a reporting that is seldom seen that is transparent and authentic and based on their coverage of really sharing that aspect of their lives. We need to see more of that in journalism, especially in English-language news that often hides behind objectivity.

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Local Is Still King.

I started working at WLRN Public Media in 2014. The station had a relationship with the Miami Herald, and thus we had desks and a couple of studios in their offices in Doral, Florida. I loved working in the Herald newsroom because it still had that newspaper newsroom vibe.

WLRN had a little more than a dozen reporters for the station, but they were scattered between two newsrooms, and most of them were always in the field working. The Herald newsroom always had its editors and a couple dozen reporters working frantically day in and day out on assignments.

The old Miami Herald newsroom in Doral, Florida

There was a joy watching the editors meet a couple of times a day to discuss the big stories and top assignments. There was poetry to the banter between editors and reporters over the tiniest details in their reports. The energy of the room always filled me with joy.

Those days are gone, long gone. Covid-19 ended it all.

The Miami Herald no longer lives in Doral. One of the former most prominent papers in the country no longer has a home. Reporters and editors now work from home, and the paper isn’t even printed in the press room that existed across the parking lot. What’s happening? Was this inevitable?

As I watched the paper shrink even more over the past eight years, I’ve seen the newsroom at our station grow – though slowly. We can talk for days about the shifting sands under the feet of the news media industry these past twenty years, but instead, let’s focus on the future.

Local news is not disappearing just yet. Local is still the most important news we have. In some places, it’s having a sort of renaissance.

I spoke with Kristen Hare from the Poynter Institute about the importance of local news and to get a better picture of what’s happening in the local news biz.

Catch the entire conversation with Kristen Hare on the podcast.

TRS: Today, you have so many sources and information coming at us from everywhere. How do you help people understand the difference between national, international, and local news?

Kristin: In each instance, the media are responsible to a different set of people, and local journalists report to people who live in a particular community. People whose tax dollars are spent in a particular community. And that means we’re at school board meetings. That means we’re covering elections. That means we’re at the high school basketball games to report on who won. There is a deeper involvement and day to day life. It’s also really easy to take that for granted because so much feels national because we have social media platforms that have a tendency to discount the local and sort of wipe out that voice. And because we have had now more than a decade of struggles with a business model based on people buying advertising in a print paper or supporting television through advertisements, legacy media, through a model that doesn’t work anymore. The best distinction for me is who do you answer to? And in the local press, you answer to the people in the community you live in.

TRS: Most of my 25-year career has been in radio. I’ve watched friends in newspapers, and television struggle as their industries shift. I’ve seen local newspapers that keep disappearing, but I’ve also heard that local news is having a renaissance in some places. What’s happening to local news in general?

Kristin: Yeah, both things have been happening for a while. I would say that to me, from my perspective and my own experience since the Great Recession, local news and newspapers, legacy publications have been struggling. There have been rounds of layoffs. At the same time, we had the recession; we also had the advent of cell phones and the advent of the internet, and free information. And at the same time that the business model changed, and we had the economy crash, we also had user habits changing. And many newsrooms that before then were the only source didn’t adjust very well. They failed to imagine that they could ever be replaced.

I counted more than 100 newsrooms that closed during the pandemic. There are growing news deserts, places where people have no or few options for information, and news donut holes, where you might live outside in a suburban community; the city has coverage, but you don’t. You have ghost newspapers, which used to be a 40, 50, 100 person newsroom, maybe now have three people. Corporate owners are making decisions other than for your own community, and they’re mostly reprinting Associated Press or wire copy. What’s mainly happened is that there are fewer local media sources than when you began your career 25 years ago and, indeed, when I started my career 18 years ago. And at the same time, mainly through the pandemic, we’ve seen some really great innovation that has recognized that media. I could list up a lot, but Outlier in Detroit is an excellent example. They use text messaging primarily to answer people’s questions. El Timpano takes the same approach in California. I’m excited about BerkeleySide in Berkeley, California. The Richland Source in Mansfield, Ohio, a for-profit newsroom, is thriving and has found some smart ways through advertising, membership, community support, and merchandise. It depends on your community and where you live, what sort of media will fit, and that’s different from what we’ve had for generations, which is this is the newspaper. This is your public radio station. Here’s the broadcast news. Maybe here’s an alt-weekly. What we’re seeing now, I think, is a renaissance, and I’m excited about it because the journalists who are building it, unlike, maybe post the Great Recession, have come to the understanding that what they’re building primarily is a business, and if you’re going to build a business, you have to have a business plan, you have to make money.

TRS: You talk about a business model. And so I wondered what you’ve seen change? Public radio obviously depends on some public dollars, but also donor dollars and underwriting as well. I know that everything else on television is still advertising. Newspapers have really been hit hard, as you said, because that was such a big part of their business model, and that’s long gone. But what have you seen in innovations in business models?

Kristin: So there are several, and I would say that none of them, I think, work on their own. I think you have to have a portfolio of approaches that you’re going to take. Sorry to sound like a business person. The more I report on this, the more I feel like I should have gone to business school. So they include membership-like programs, right? So the membership programs are different than what you have in public media. Public media is, we’ll have a drive. I’m a member of my local public media station in Tampa. They take money out of my bank account every month, and I support their work. That’s almost more of a subscription model where it’s a transaction membership idea, and this work was sort of best documented by a group called Membership Puzzle Project. Membership is we’re going to have a relationship. What are the skills you can bring to us? What do you want to know about it? What do you like to learn about? We’re going to be in communication with you. We’re going to find out what our community wants, and they’re going to support us in a variety of ways, including through their time, talents, and money if that’s how they choose to do it. So membership is an exciting one, and member-supported newsrooms, mainly when you think about digital for-profit and nonprofit, there are some exciting possibilities there because people are involved and want to be involved in what happens. Often membership is what one pundit calls, ‘lets you have an open garden.’ Whereas you think subscriptions are a walled garden, right? And so you have to pay to get in is what membership is – I want to support this because I want everyone to have it. I think that that’s important. We have also seen an exciting trend of for-profit newsrooms, so newspapers included working with local philanthropy. The good news is that there is a lot of money in many communities. Often it’s in community foundations. There are community organizations that care about the financial health of that community. And so Richland Source in Mansfield, Ohio, is an excellent example of this. They have had several projects funded by community organizations with obvious explanations that we’re independent. They don’t have anything to do with what we’re covering. They don’t get to look at that ahead of time. Here’s the coverage that we’re going to focus on. That’s an exciting turn. Merchandise, I think, is a place that could go even more. We all live in a place there is an identity, right? There’s an identity residing in Tampa Bay, where I live. And if the Tampa Bay Times decided to sell Tampa Bay merchandise with our zip codes or mugs or T-shirts, I would definitely buy that. That would be something that would be important. And I think, a revenue stream. Before the pandemic, live events were really popular. The Texas Tribune has had a tremendous amount of success having live events where people want to pay and come and hear journalists talk to the public, storytellers nights, or basically live storytelling events from the USA Today Network, which has also been very successful.

Thank you, for visiting the website. Remember, you can listen to the full podcast in numerous places. This is a production of City of Dreamz Media Inc.

Can We Learn To Be Civil Toward Each Other?

I want to put you in a situation, and please, try and see if you can handle it. Imagine I put you in a room with people who do not vote the same way you do. In other words, they’re from the opposite party.

I won’t put you within any party; it doesn’t matter. Just saying that there will be people from the opposite party on the other side of the room is enough. Do you think it’s possible to have a conversation with those folks about politics and social issues without it breaking out into a screaming match or a fight?

Let me admit something. I don’t know if I can do it.

Wait, Luis, you’re supposed to be objective and not take sides.

You’re right. And I don’t. I’m not a Democrat or a Republican, but there are issues on both sides that do make me angry, and I find myself wanting to yell at both sides for the fact they sometimes buy into extreme views.

So, can we bring people from both sides together for an open and civil conversation about politics? Civil, in this case, does not necessarily mean it won’t be passionately heated. That was the goal for David Plazas, this week’s guest on The Reporter’s Studio.

In 2016 his editor challenged him, which led to Civility Tennessee. I asked him to better describe what it was about.

David: It was the midterm elections of 2018, and I went to a small rural town in Tennessee to a Rotary Club. It was the start of the campaign. We started the Civility Tennessee project to advance the civil discourse. After giving my spiel, a gentleman stood up and said, ‘why should we trust you?’ He said it was because we had called the election wrong. The man went on to say, ‘You said that Hillary was going to win, and we feel that we can’t trust you.’ I went back to that town to the Rotary Club again in February. It was a wonderful conversation. I had developed enough trust that I could bring up some tough subjects like January 6th. I’ve developed a better language, especially in rural communities where we talk precisely not about hyperbolic language, but we can talk about the fact that there were crimes committed on January 6th and that those criminals or accused criminals need to be punished for that. And often, I’d received a retort. People would say, well, what about BlackLivesMatter in 2020? And I come back and say, what about it? Which case? Which situation? I’d point to articles that showed that there are over 300 people who’ve been accused of crimes, dozens imprisoned stemming from the demonstrations. So there has been justice. But this is one of the things that can be frustrating is there’s kind of a what about ‘ism’ that is dangerous because if we Americans can’t agree on the same facts and we’re in a situation where, like in Florida or Tennessee or Texas, you have these completely different realities. Unfortunately, today’s politics have become so bombastic and personality-oriented that it can be challenging to cut through.

TRS: I get the sense that one of the things we have to be careful about, we as journalists, is listening and talking to people and not talking down to people. We need to be on their level.

David: It goes to the issue of empathy, and it goes to the point of meeting people where they’re at. Research from Pew Center and the American Press Institute shows that only about a fifth of Americans has ever met a journalist. So they’re assuming that the journalist is someone who just has a gotcha mentality that they’re going to try to embarrass them, that is going to look down upon them, especially if they’re not college educated or if they live in a rural community. Because there’s this perception that we are elites who are out to just go after Republicans. But the reality is when we look at journalism across the country, even where there’s a supermajority of Democrats in California, journalists are relentless about scrutinizing power. And it just so happens that in Florida and in Tennessee and in Texas, that supermajority Republican legislators are there, and they’re the ones making the decisions that are having real impacts. I’ve been following one of the things because Florida passed its so-called don’t say gay bill, and now there’s a proposal in Tennessee, and this is catching like wildfire. I asked the question in a recent column, why are we doing this? We already know that there’s a curriculum. We already know that teachers are held to a high standard. What are we doing this? Could it be fear-mongering? Could it be that we are trying to scare people into feeling like it’s dangerous to be in school? And COVID has allowed that mentality to exist because people’s lives were so disrupted. You had issues with kids suffering from learning loss and mental health situations. And so suddenly you can say there’s some boogeyman in school who’s going out to get your kids. So my latest column was about if you’re going to say that – show us the proof. A couple of celebrities went to testify that school libraries were pushing porn on kids. Nobody dared to say, where’s the evidence? When they were asked, they couldn’t substantiate their claims. But no, they’re taken seriously because it fits into the narrative.

TRS: What are we (journalists) doing right, and what are we doing wrong right now?

David: I think what we’re doing right is staying committed to our values of telling the truth, being fair and being accurate, trying to get to the story, and using the power even with limited resources to get at what the truth is. I think what we’re doing wrong, though, is not being present enough in conversations with people in the spaces that they’re in. People can create these assumptions to create this bombastic rhetoric, and we need to be in the spaces where people are. We need to be present, and we need to be accessible. And I don’t think we always are. I think related to that – punditry – is one of my least favorite things because the idea of people screaming at each other to try to make a point is, I think, very dangerous because our democracy is very fragile. It still relies upon people trusting each other and working with each other, compromising with each other. I am a huge proponent of local politics and government, people getting involved in their city council races, going to board meetings, and being informed at that level because there’s more minor controversy over building a sidewalk than funding something for Congress. And you get to know your neighbors.

TRS: I know you’ve heard this phrase – as journalists, it’s not our job to be popular. Is it on us to help people understand who we are – to promote ourselves? Should we be out there doing a PR campaign trying to help people understand this is what we’re supposed to be doing?

David: We found in terms of studies with advertising that usually it takes about 13 times before somebody notices an ad and makes a call. So the question is, we have to be repetitive when it comes to what we do because too often, people don’t know. Frankly, we have so many distractions out there, and I think that sometimes some people are tuned out. The number of people who, over the last two years who I know personally, who tune out the news, they don’t want to watch the news. They also want to know what’s going on. We did a series about affordable housing. And it was a yearlong series where my goal was to help explain the issue and then come up with a couple solutions that are finally being implemented over the last year here in Nashville, and it’s a very tough issue. But it was a very proud moment for me because we were able to gain trust and credibility in the work that we did on a very important issue where people said, you know you, the Tennesseean, and me as a columnist, you were the authority on this particular subject, and we will listen to you when you write about it, and you’re going to help us understand. We may disagree with your approaches, but at the very least, we respect the fact that you’re giving us options to think about.

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Life Of A Reporter, Kinda Dangerous

Being a journalist comes with risk. That’s pretty much been the deal. Granted, for many years the danger was minimal within the borders of the United States. For this conversation we’re talking specifically about reporters in this country.

It seemed appropriate that for the first episode of The Reporter’s Studio I needed to talk with the group that has devoted itself to educating and protecting American journalists. Meet Kirstin McCudden of Freedom of the Press Foundation. She is also the managing editor of the US Press Freedom Tracker.

She talked about the increased risks and dangers that reporters have faced these last five years, especially in 2020 and 2021. We started by discussing the reasons behind the launch of the foundation and the tracker.

Kirstin: So FPF (Freedom of the Press Foundation) is about eight years old and the tracker itself was launched in 2017. A lot was happening in 2017. Before that, groups, advocacy groups, news orgs were getting together and realizing there was no one place to track what was happening to US journalists. If a journalist was arrested, that person’s news org might write about it or an advocacy group might write about it. But there was no way to say how many journalists have been assaulted in 2016? We don’t know, because there wasn’t one place that kept it all and did what we do, which is also work to verify that information and put it all together in a way that’s really easy to digest for the public. In 2017, the U.S. press freedom tracker launched. That was the start of then-President Donald Trump’s heated rhetoric around press freedom. We’re now in our fifth year of documentation, we’ll hit our five year anniversary this August.

TRS: When the tracker came out the first year, what did you find and what surprised you?

Kirstin: I always say about the tracker is that it mimics what’s going on in the world. I’m going to explain. The first year and into 2018, we captured a lot of border stops of journalists, and that’s a category we track because we want to see when journalists are traveling outside of the US or back in, are they stopped for secondary questioning or are their devices searched? If you remember back then, there was a lot of talk about the migrant caravan, so we were tracking a lot of journalists who were being stopped at the border. In 2017 we also, at the time, was tracking – one at a time – every time President Trump said something negative or threatening against a journalist. We realized that that was a much larger project. And actually, our senior reporter, Stephanie Sugars, had started when Trump was a candidate and went all the way through to 2020. And through January of 2021, actually, tracking every negative tweet about the press that Trump put out on his account.

TRS: What have you seen over the last five years (according to the tracker)?

Kirstin: In 2020, seeing it from the lens of the tracker, we saw more assaults of journalists than all the years of our history combined. We saw more arrests of journalists than all the years of our history combined just at the end of 2020, really that into May, into June and July, and from cities and states across the entire U.S.. There was a very strong law enforcement reaction, not just to the protests themselves, but to the journalists covering them. And that’s why I say journalists really are that mirror of society, from covering the migrant caravan dimension in 2017, 2018, into 2020 with the massive national protests. You also talk about the coronavirus pandemic when there are protests for that, either for lockdown measures or against lockdown measures. Journalists are covering it and we cover what’s happening to them covering it. It’s almost meta, but it really is this mirror of society. So what we’re seeing right now is 2022 has been a, I really hesitate to say, quieter year, but from the viewpoint of the tracker versus what we saw in 2020 and 2021 for those national protests.

From the Freedom of the Press Foundation

TRS: Is the training the same for journalists in the United States in dealing with danger compared to a reporter who is out reporting a war?

Kirstin: The U.S. still has some of the broadest and most comprehensive safety measures for the press. It’s written into our constitution, but there definitely has been this feeling of what we are hearing, what the tracker hears from journalists on the ground of – well I didn’t expect that. I didn’t expect to cover a protest in the United States of America and be targeted with crowd control ammunition. When you’re asking me about comparison, Mexico has lost six to eight journalists already this year (2022), we’re in March, but there are other countries and our great partners, reporters without borders to protect journalists, they have really robust data to compare across the world. While we see an uptick, you do still have to compare it to the rest of the world. But those feelings of being able to go out and not being worried about your safety, I think they have been eroded and I’ll use an example. During the inauguration, I was asked, what are organizations doing to keep journalists safe? And we have to remember that that inauguration was rolling right off of the very tense presidential election, contested, a continuation of Black Lives Matter protests, and the coronavirus pandemic. A major photography outlet said, we’re sending our journalists differently prepared than before with bulletproof vests, with helmets. On the other hand, you have journalists who tell us now they prefer not to wear ID when possible because they don’t want to be a target. So you’re really seeing two different reactions and both valid reactions to this. Portland had protests for more than 100 days straight, and journalists covering it nightly would be in the goggles, vest, helmet, knowing that so much munition, crowd control, tear gas was being used. That was the only way they’d be able to stay out and keep covering it.

TRS: If you’re talking to a group of average ordinary citizens, how do you define for them what we (journalists) do?

Kirstin: It’s OK to have differing opinions on it. But one thing I always say is you have to remember journalists aren’t card-carrying professionals in the sense it can be likened more to a calling than a profession. I was editor of my high school newspaper. I did my undergrad in journalism, I did my master’s work in journalism, and then I spent the last couple of decades at newspapers, magazines, digital news outlets, and so I’ve created my journalists bona fides that way through what would be considered a very straightforward path. I have always loved journalism. I’ve always wanted to do it. But the truth is, it’s for everybody and anybody who wants to do it. You do not need an undergraduate degree in journalism to want to follow a code of ethics and show people what’s happening, which is how I think of the base of journalism, like I want to show you what’s happening and I want to disseminate that information and I want to do that purposefully and I want to do it with through any means. What’s difficult about calling somebody a journalist and trying to define it is that it has evolved. I’m probably as card-carrying of a journalist because I did my undergrad and my master’s. But we also consider those who completely use the medium of social media. You can still be a journalist that way. We’re on a podcast. It’s about disseminating information, following a code of ethics, and bringing it to a wider subset is how I see one working definition of who is a journalist.

Catch some of our conversation with Kirstin

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Here’s Your Ticket To The Reporter’s Studio

Welcome to the Reporter’s Studio. I hear you. What is the reporter’s studio?

Let me answer that with a couple of questions. What do you know about the news media? Is your answer, my local newspaper, my local NPR station, my favorite television network news? Maybe you think the news media is fake. But, seriously. Do you know a journalist? Do you know what they do day in and day out to bring you the news? Better yet, have you ever wondered what life would be like if there was no news? How would you know what politicians are doing? How would you know what the economic markets are doing? How would you know if there was a dangerous person whom police are seeking now in your neighborhood?

All of those questions are the reason for this website and podcast. We’re here to help you understand what a journalist is and isn’t. We’ll tell you about how the news is made. And we’ll tackle those questions about fake news. And no, this is not just for people in the business. This is for anyone who consumes the news.

Every week we’ll talk to a journalist about their day to day, and about their thoughts on the way people view the news media. By the way, you’ll hear me say news media industry and not just the word media because we need to be accurate.

If we define media, well this is the best way to look at it.

The term media, which is the plural of medium, refers to the communication channels through which we disseminate news, music, movies, education, promotional messages and other data. It includes physical and online newspapers and magazines, television, radio, billboards, telephone, the Internet, fax and billboards.
It describes the various ways through which we communicate in society. Because it refers to all means of communication, everything ranging from a telephone call to the evening news on television can be called media.
Market Business News

That’s not the same as what we’ll be discussing. We’re talking about news.

The news media are those elements of the mass media that focus on delivering news to the general public or a target public.
Science Daily

So now you know why I do that.

I want to hear from you. What questions do you have about the news and the people who create it every day? Post your thoughts on the LinkedIn page or the Youtube page.

When it’s all said and done, I hope this podcast helps us answer your questions about what the news media is supposed to be, and who journalists are supposed to represent.