Heather Bryant is the founder and director of Project Facet, an open source infrastructure project that supports newsroom collaboration with tools to manage the logistics of creating, editing and distributing collaborative content, managing projects, facilitating collaborative relationships and sharing the best practices of collaborative journalism: https://soundcloud.com/demystifying-media/heather-bryant
Original Title
[Transcript] Demystifying: Why The Future of Journalism is Collaborative with Heather Bryant
Heather Bryant is the founder and director of Project Facet, an open source infrastructure project that supports newsroom collaboration with tools to manage the logistics of creating, editing and distributing collaborative content, managing projects, facilitating collaborative relationships and sharing the best practices of collaborative journalism: https://soundcloud.com/demystifying-media/heather-bryant
Heather Bryant is the founder and director of Project Facet, an open source infrastructure project that supports newsroom collaboration with tools to manage the logistics of creating, editing and distributing collaborative content, managing projects, facilitating collaborative relationships and sharing the best practices of collaborative journalism: https://soundcloud.com/demystifying-media/heather-bryant
Hello, and welcome to the first Demystifying Media podcast of the academic year of 2018-19. I'm Damian Radcliffe, the Carolyn S. Chambers Professor of Journalism at the University of Oregon. And my guest today is Heather Bryant, the founder and director of Project Facet, an open source infrastructure project supporting newsroom collaboration, and an award-winning journalist and editor. In 2016, Heather was a JSK Journalism Fellow at Stanford where she researched how to make collaboration easier and more effective for newsrooms. Her wider work on collaboration has seen Heather work with a wide range of different organizations, including the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair University, the Membership Puzzle, and many others. Heather is our first speaker for 2018 in the Demystifying series, a program which brings to the University of Oregon inspiring thinkers from across academia and the creative industries. Heather, welcome.
H Heather Bryant 00:52
Hello, thank you.
D Damian Radcliffe 00:53
#17 Why The Future of Journalism is Collaborative
Page with1 Heath... of 16 Transcribed by https://otter.ai So as people will have guessed from that short bio, you are all about collaboration.
H Heather Bryant 00:58
Yes, just a little bit, just a little bit.
D Damian Radcliffe 01:01
Why is it so important?
H Heather Bryant 01:03
So I came up in a media environment where collaboration wasn't really an option for newsrooms. I worked in Alaska in public media, where you have one- to two-person newsrooms trying to cover a significant amount of space for their communities. And up there collaboration really isn't this thing that you do occasionally, or when you're working on sort of a prestige project. It is a daily necessity to be able to serve communities. And I was very fortunate to come in through this space where everybody was really open to the idea of what do we have to do to do the work that we need to do, right. It wasn't about "you're my competition, you're someone who's going to get this great story, and I'm not going to get it."
H Heather Bryant 01:40
It was really: "this community needs to be informed, they need to see these stories, they need to be spoken to, they need to be interviewed, they need a pathway to telling their own stories." And the way to accomplish that was "we need to help each other do this." So people really had their cards on the table in terms of "this is what we're working on, how can we help you with what you're working on?" And as we're sort of in this space now where everybody is struggling, right, we don't have the same number of people who used to have, we don't have the funding we used to have, we don't have a lot of the resources that we need to do our work. But every single day, we have the option to work with other people, to partner. That is an option that is on the table for every single newsroom. And that option is a really effective way for doing the work that needs to be done that might not happen otherwise.
D Damian Radcliffe 02:23
The picture you described in Alaska is very much "this was a necessity," not a nice-to- have, not some kind of buzzword or box to check. Do you think newsrooms in other places
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Page with2 Heath... of 16 Transcribed by https://otter.ai across the US also see collaboration as a necessity in 2018?
H Heather Bryant 02:38
I think it's starting to become a lot more common, yes, as people are experiencing the contraction of the industry, as we're reckoning with what it looks like when we don't have newsrooms and different communities. What does it look like to actually still serve them? A lot of places are recognizing that survival requires working together. And I think we're seeing more and more of that every year. Collaboration has always been the sort of, you know, informal thing. I mean, everybody can think of a time that, you know, they helped another reporter out, or someone said, "Hey, I missed that quote," or "do you have a photo from this event?" Like, we've always done some degree of of being helpful to one another, and, you know, professional courtesy.
H Heather Bryant 03:13
But over the past few years, we've definitely seen this become a more formal system, as more organizations have embraced, like, this is how we fill in some of the gaps. And this is how we do some of the stories that are frankly too large for any one news organization to tackle alone. So it's definitely becoming more common; it's becoming a bit more formalized. We're seeing more process developed around this. And I think a lot of news organizations are starting to embrace it as another tool that's available to them.
D Damian Radcliffe 03:38
There's clearly an economic imperative to this. Are there other potential reasons why you might want to collaborate with other news organizations or partners?
H Heather Bryant 03:46
Well, it speaks to a lot of the different challenges we have. So it's either a lack of resources, in a lot of cases; it can be, you know, a lack of diversity of perspective or background or understanding of an issue that you might be able to gain by including other people in your process, rather than, you know, trying to do your best to do that story without that perspective. There's an advantage in terms of the accountability and the trust aspect of this--we've seen a few projects where there's been some research following them that have sort of assessed did this impact, you know, how trustworthy the content was? What did it look like for newsrooms to be accountable to one another while they were doing their reporting?
#17 Why The Future of Journalism is Collaborative
Page with3 Heath... of 16 Transcribed by https://otter.ai D Damian Radcliffe 04:23 Its almost because you don't want drop the ball, you don't want somebody else to call you out.
H Heather Bryant 04:27
Exactly, you want to be a good partner and you can't rush things, you can't be cutting corners in any way when you have other newsrooms depending on you. And you know that they're going to hold you up to a high quality, you know, high standard of quality there. And then we also see it in terms of access to audiences or communities that, you know, maybe have not always had the best relationship with some news organizations, but maybe do have a good relationship with maybe a freelancer or a local newsroom or somebody who's been, you know, being thoughtful and paying attention to them.
H Heather Bryant 04:58
Using collaboration as a way to get that story out further has also been a thing that I think is quite positive and of use to a lot of organizations as we try to, you know, revisit some of the things that maybe we haven't done so well, historically. What options are there for being collaborative both with other newsrooms and with our audiences themselves to to do a better job in these spaces?
D Damian Radcliffe 05:19
We'll come back to some of the things that we haven't done so well a little bit later. But I'd love to just explore a few examples, perhaps, of some different kinds of partnerships that have really caught your eye and you think are good exemplars for people to go and explore further.
H Heather Bryant 05:36
I mean, I think the thing that I'm most excited about today is Broke in Philly, the collaboration that's covering poverty and economic hardship in Philadelphia, led by Jean Friedman-Rudovsky and her team and a number of organizations there. It has been a profoundly thoughtful, deliberate, considerate type of collaboration where they've really weighed what are the things we've done poorly in the past when we're covering this topic? And how do we, you know, switch that dynamic up so that this is not, you know, an exploitative, extractive relationship with our audience, what does it look like to truly do coverage in this space for people experiencing hardship, not just a story about hardship
#17 Why The Future of Journalism is Collaborative
Page with4 Heath... of 16 Transcribed by https://otter.ai existing, which does not really change things.
H Heather Bryant 06:18
I mean, we've been doing stories about problems forever. And we haven't seen a lot of change happen. What does it look like when we do those stories for the people? And I think they've done a really wonderful job there and have shown a lot of thought and everything from, you know, a language guide to how they talk about it. They don't use the phrase poor people or things like that, they talked about people experiencing hardship, and how common that is, and sort of reflecting, you know, a little bit more of the nuance in the circumstances here. So, that's one I've been very excited about.
H Heather Bryant 06:46
The Solutions Journalism Project in the Mountain West was an interesting project as well, because these are news organizations in fairly remote places, trying to talk to each other in a way that says, what are the commonalities between our different communities, spread out in the space that's, you know, frequently under-covered by a lot of the larger news organizations and national news organizations? What does it look like to coordinate and think about how our stories in one space reflects some stories in other spaces, and how can we support each other a little bit better? I did a few interviews with the reporters and the editors involved. And one of the things that they really took away from this was, you know, 'it's just so nice to have another editor who I can get feedback from, it's nice to get some more perspective. I'm by myself here, I don't get the chance to, you know, be edited, even myself sometimes because I'm the only one'--so even that sort of professional development aspect was really interesting to me to hear about.
H Heather Bryant 07:20
And the project itself was also--again, it reflected that slowness and that deliberateness that we tend to see in these types of things where, you know, team members from the Solutions Journalism Network spent a lot of lead time talking to people in these communities and talking to the journals before they ever even said, Well, we would like to facilitate some form of collaboration. So, it wasn't "we're imposing this thing on you," it's more "how can we support you?" I think that's something that a lot of us in our newsrooms would like to have, that level of support.
H Heather Bryant 07:37
So if we think about ingredients for success, you've talked about an example of that
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Page with5 Heath... of 16 Transcribed by https://otter.ai working in a very urban environment, but also in more rural environments too, which I think is really interesting. Is there a checklist of things that organizations should be thinking about when they're looking at collaboration?
H Heather Bryant 08:25
I think there's a lot of different questions you can potentially answer. And some of the work that I've been doing is about: "here are the questions you should be asking internally to figure out are you you know, ready to collaborate?" Will you be a good partner newsroom?
D Damian Radcliffe 08:38
Partnership is hard!
H Heather Bryant 08:39
Partnership is hard. And I think also the default position of a lot of organizations is "are they good enough to partner with me?" Not "am I going to be a good partner myself?" You know, everybody's pretty ready to evaluate others. But there's also some reflection that's really required about, you know, are we fully committed? Is everybody on our team, you know, ready and understanding the work that's going to be involved and ready to follow through and ready to be open and transparent inthe way that you need to be for this to work?
H Heather Bryant 08:52
And then when you're talking with potential partners: what are the details and the logistics that we have to figure out together because no newsroom's editorial process is the same as another newsroom's, ever. We follow, you know, a roughly similar path, but the details of that vary quite widely from newsroom to newsroom. So you have to figure out okay, what does this look like? Is it your editor who signs off on a story? Is it my editor? Are we doing a team of editors? Who do you communicate with when there's a problem in a story? How are we even communicating? Are we using a specific platform? What are the expectations?
H Heather Bryant 09:38
There are a lot of details and logistics that it really pays to consider before you get into this so that you're not, you know, partway through a project and someone runs into a snag
#17 Why The Future of Journalism is Collaborative
Page with6 Heath... of 16 Transcribed by https://otter.ai and they realize, "I'm not sure actually who I'm supposed to talk to about this problem that I'm having, I'm just sort of stuck."
D Damian Radcliffe 09:51
So the workflow has to be all thought through ahead of time.
H Heather Bryant 09:54
Yeah, absolutely. And I think communication is like the deciding factor in success. You have to be constantly communicating; people have to know the status of things. They have to know what's going on to that they can effectively and fully participate. I think some of the most successful ones have figured out, you know, we have to create these redundant systems of communication. Because it's not just, "I'm gonna send out an email, and everybody has to check their email. If they don't check their email, that's their problem, and it's their fault they missed something." Really, it's "I'm going to send that email because some people use email easiest. I'm also going to send out a Slack message. I'm also going to do this, I'm gonna do that..." Because the goal is that people understand what's going on, not that people understand it the way that you want them to.
H Heather Bryant 10:32
And I think there's been some really great examples of that with the Voting Block project that was done in New Jersey. Joe Amditis and I talked about his communication approach, and it was layers upon layers of just ensuring that everybody knew what they needed to know. Everybody got the notes from all the meetings, everybody knew exactly what was going on. And I think that really matters when you're trying to connect all of these different people with competing things going on. Sometimes they have their own breaking news to deal with. But they've also got this project that they want to see being successful.
D Damian Radcliffe 11:01
And of course a further challenge which you are tackling through Project Facet is that these organizations, they don't just necessarily have different kind of working cultures and practices but actually the tools the physical tools that they might be using to communicate and do their work are not necessarily talking to one another.
#17 Why The Future of Journalism is Collaborative
Page with7 Heath... of 16 Transcribed by https://otter.ai H Heather Bryant 11:18 Absolutely. I have a technology background, but I don't think technology will solve all of our problems. But as I was talking to newsrooms, there really was this genuine deficit in infrastructure to facilitate collaboration. Because newsrooms we never designed to work with other organizations, we designed to work as if they're competition or they just don't even exist, and we just do what we do. So every time these collaborations come around, you see newsrooms sort of trying to negotiate and assemble a series of third-party services that will facilitate communication and moving assets around and doing editing, and talking, and scheduling and tasks and all of these types of things.
H Heather Bryant 11:55
So, newsrooms are using anywhere between four to eight different third-party services. And I mean, one of the challenges that comes with that is that these are services from companies that did not design the services for journalism. They weren't made for the editorial process; they're not, you know, attuned to the needs of journalism, and, you know, also some of the privacy and security concerns that we have. So there's a real question from a lot of people about A) it's really hard for me to convince all my reporters that they need to sign up for this new thing that we don't usually use, just so they can participate in this project. It's hard to on-board people on a ton of different things.
H Heather Bryant 12:26
And then also there's the concern about data and security, and whether or not those things will remain secure. And I mean, if a company gets a subpoena to give away all of your chat logs, or show your content, then you might very well have your content being exposed to the world to and some of the conversations around that. So these are all very real questions and concerns, especially for really sensitive investigations.
H Heather Bryant 12:46
So what Facet is, is a place where a lot of that functionality is together in one dashboard. You can have all of your people together, you can have everybody able to be, you know, fully up to speed on what's going on, who's working on what. You can have those conversations there with the content, not talk in one place work in another--which is another, you know, complaint that I commonly heard: "I'm just really tired of logging into like, six different things to know what I need to do today." So it takes all of that and it puts it into one space. And then another thing that we're working on before the end of the year is end-to-end encryption, because my business model is not that I need to see your work,
#17 Why The Future of Journalism is Collaborative
Page with8 Heath... of 16 Transcribed by https://otter.ai that's not what I'm doing. That's not even what the point is.
D Damian Radcliffe 13:22
You're creating a safe space.
H Heather Bryant 13:24
Creating a safe space to do this kind of work and feel secure about, you know, that work having any sort of attacks coming from the outside. If I get a subpoena, then I'm just handing over gibberish that I'm storing because they're encrypting it on their end, and I'm just storing it, and giving them the space to do the work.
H Heather Bryant 13:40
So I'm really excited about the opportunities here and what does it look like when you create the space where people can work with whoever they need to work with to tell the stories they need to do, to coordinate things, and be able to publish however it is that they normally publish. Like, I'm not interested in changing that whatsoever. But I'm really excited about the opportunities for a piece of infrastructure that is independent, that is open-source, that is fully accessible to people, that can serve these needs and be specifically designed for, you know, the process and the interests of journalism and editorial content production.
D Damian Radcliffe 14:14
And it feels like that this work is sort of underpinning a momentum whereby we're seeing more and more organizations embracing some of the opportunities around collaboration, starting to understand the kind of philosophical and storytelling benefits from it. But I'm sure there is still some barriers and resistance to and you've kind of alluded to that. What are the things we need to overcome to make this perhaps more commonplace?
H Heather Bryant 14:38
I mean, tradition and nostalgia have their own desks in pretty much every newsroom. That occupies a space.
D Damian Radcliffe 14:44
Big spaces, in some places.
#17 Why The Future of Journalism is Collaborative
Page with9 Heath... of 16 Transcribed by https://otter.ai H Heather Bryant 14:46 And we're still very much in that culture shift. I mean, when I first started thinking about collaboration, like how do I convince newsrooms they need to collaborate and I realized, when I talked to organizations that actually that change is underway, it is happening. So the best use of my energy was not convincing those who aren't ready to collaborate, it was to support those who are. In a lot of spaces, it's, you know, smaller organizations, those who have fewer resources--nonprofits are very collaborative, public media is very collaborative, because for them, the goal is "do the work, we just need to do this work." That change was happening, and so it was a support thing for them.
H Heather Bryant 15:21
And then other organizations are sort of recognizing it from a survival standpoint of "I can't do what I need to do unless I work with someone else to do that." And then there are ones who are motivated by some of the quality of the work itself that is happening. I mean, it's been in the past, I think, was two or three years, five Pulitzers have gone to collaborative projects. I did a rough tally of the Online Journalism Awards--for the past two years, almost 20% of the projects recognized as a winner or a finalist were collaborations. So even though collaborations are still a small percentage of all of the content that we're producing, it's clearly bubbling up in terms of part of being the highest quality work that we're producing. And there are also organizations who are feeling motivated to participate in that as well.
D Damian Radcliffe 16:05
And Jay Hamilton, when he participated in this series earlier on this year (a professor at Stanford), he talked about not just the kind of award-winning potential and ratios that you've also referenced here. But also just that investigative reporting is so much more expensive, so much more challenging to do that with the range of data that we have access to that we need to be bringing in other people to help tell these stories, because most newsrooms cannot go it alone anymore.
H Heather Bryant 16:33
Absolutely. I mean, Panama Papers could not have been done by one newsroom. Paradise Papers? That could not have been done by one newsroom. And we're kind of in a world where data sets are huge, impacts are wide ranging, everything touches everything else, the stories are incredibly complicated. And even local stories have become incredibly complicated by just the degree of how everything affects everything else. And all of these
#17 Why The Future of Journalism is Collaborative
Pagewith 10Heath... of 16 Transcribed by https://otter.ai intersections of, you know, complicated political and economic circumstances--it's very difficult to do a lot of these stories, as if, you know, as one newsroom without all of this resources and without all of the, you know, support of another organization.
D Damian Radcliffe 17:08
But it also suggests that collaboration is not just about journalists shall talk unto journalists, that actually, we need to bring other people into that process, into that storytelling process. Could you just say a little bit about that?
H Heather Bryant 17:20
I think there's so much opportunity for a more cross-discipline approach to what we do. I mean, as a long standing tradition, we'll report, we'll talk to the experts, we'll understand the situation, we'll be able to report it out. But again, that complexity, I think, really requires including perspectives and expertise that's going to come from outside the industry. Especially as journalism has very rapidly professionalized and a lot of people in the industry, their degrees are in journalism, which means we don't necessarily have a depth of understanding of some of the other fields and the more complicated things that are going on in the world and in our community. So we have to figure out what does this look like to bring in people and include people and create pathways for participation from those who really have expertise that we need if we're going to do the best, most nuanced job of covering stories that matter.
D Damian Radcliffe 18:08
And you've talked about some of this stuff on Medium. Some of your blog posts on that platform have really kind of blown up over the course of the last year, year and a half. You've written about everything from mansplaining in newsrooms through to journalism's class problem, the fact that we don't represent large constituents of the communities that we purport to serve. Have you been surprised by the reaction some your posts have had?
H Heather Bryant 18:33
I think the thing that was surprising, after some of the class ones came out, was the sheer number of people working in the industry who got in touch with me saying, "I have experienced, you know, I told my co-workers I once worked in a factory or warehouse, or I have a blue collar background, and they've treated me differently since then." Or, "I've learned to not tell my co workers I moonlight with Lyft on the weekend, because we don't make enough in this newsroom for me to afford, you know, rent and groceries." And
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Pagewith 11Heath... of 16 Transcribed by https://otter.ai they've experienced very real different interactions with their organizations, if they have these sort of backgrounds. I was kind of struck by that. I was like, 'That's incredible.' You wouldn't think that that would happen.
H Heather Bryant 19:09
But you know, as in any organization, we are not exempt from the same challenges that are in society. Sometimes we think we are, but we very much have the same problems in our newsroom that we see in the world at large. And this is one of those very real challenges, I think, and part of that has contributed to--I mean, we live in a country that says very much "If you work hard enough, you will succeed. You will make money, you'll be able to afford your life. If you don't, then, you know, your inability to pay for things, your inability to make a living as a result of a personal failing of some sort."
D Damian Radcliffe 19:39
"It's your fault."
H Heather Bryant 19:39
"So it's your fault. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps." Even if you can't afford boots. And I think that has also existed in our newsrooms as its own kind of bias. And I mean, we have a lot more attention on what does bias look like in a newsroom, even unintentional inherent bias that you don't think about actively. I mean, we talked about that from a racial and gender perspective. But I think class bias is also something that is worth considering, especially because it does deeply intersect with those other two. But because we're also trying to provide news coverage in a country that is experiencing extreme income inequality, extreme rates of incarceration, which is related to poverty and economic hardship. And we lead the world in child poverty.
H Heather Bryant 20:21
And a lot of the issues were dealing with today, the storytelling and the reporting that we're doing is not necessarily servicing these spaces. And you can sort of trace a line from that to, you know, some of these challenges we have in newsrooms about how are we even representing people who come from these backgrounds? If everybody's coming from a background, that means you can afford a degree and unpaid internships and living in an urban city that's really expensive to be in, do you have, you know, some exposure to the challenges in people's lives? And can you, you know, adequately represent that in your editorial focus?
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Pagewith 12Heath... of 16 Transcribed by https://otter.ai D Damian Radcliffe 20:53 Do you feel we're starting to have those conversations now?
H Heather Bryant 20:56
I do think we're having these conversations. I mean, there have been people who, you know, always wanted to have these discussions and move things forward. But I do feel like we're having them more publicly, which is really nice. We did have a really excellent panel at ONA this past year, the Online News Association Conference. I was very fortunate, I kind of feel like I got my heroes on this panel, because Jay Hamilton from Stanford, Emily Goligoski with the Membership Puzzle Project, and Sarah Alvarez with Outlier Media, who are all people who deeply understand some of these challenges, we were able to have this conversation about what we call the journalism's poverty problem. And it's these threads of, you know, that there are a lot of journalists who don't get paid enough to really do this work and make a living.
H Heather Bryant 21:36
We're in the space now where newsrooms are pivoting to this idea of, okay, audiences have to support journalism, they need to subscribe, they need to donate. At the same time, we're not necessarily doing the journalism that provides audiences with the resources where they have enough money to subscribe and donate and participate in the financial models. And then also thinking about what does it look like when we depict hardship, and all of these challenges in the world? And what does that mean for, you know, the way we support our audiences?
H Heather Bryant 22:02
And it's a complicated space, because that's a very multi-threaded, complicated number of, you know, tangents that all intersect there. But I do think we're at a space where people are talking about it a little bit more. We see this with the conversations about unpaid internships, you know, that's becoming a more prominent conversation as well. So I think there's movement on it, and that's a very positive thing. And I would like to, you know, keep pushing that conversation and contributing to it, where I can.
D Damian Radcliffe 22:26
I think those conversations really speak to and spoke to our students during your time here on campus, that many of the issues that you have so successfully articulated really
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Pagewith 13Heath... of 16 Transcribed by https://otter.ai resonate with their experience and their fears, moving into this industry. What advice do you have for them? And what potential solutions do you think the industry needs to embrace?
H Heather Bryant 22:48
I mean, I think one conversation that has come up during this visit that I think is interesting is even for journalism students now who are going through programs and they're getting ready to graduate, the number of them that have to have jobs that aren't not just journalism-related, while doing programs like their degree, and then feeling like they're missing out, because they can't work on journalism full-time because they need their jobs. So we have this great conversation about what does it look like to take the work that you're doing, no matter where that is, and getting journalistic value out of it, by using that experience, and that exposure to other things in the world, other jobs, people doing that kind of work, think about those jobs as a reporter.
H Heather Bryant 23:25
Think about the stories you see, when you are doing whatever kind of work it is you're doing. Think about how you tell the story: if I was a reporter, I would report on this work that I'm doing in this way and here are the story opportunities. There's still value in that kind of work, and I don't think anybody should should be worried, you know, that I have to have a job so I'm not, you know, doing journalism-type work outside of class. And I think that's the thing that, you know, we can be thoughtful in a lot of journalism-school settings is that there are students who need to work, and that means they're not going to be, you know, doing full-time journalism work in addition to their classes. So I think that's a conversation that we can be having. And I know there are people here who were being very thoughtful about that, so that's exciting.
H Heather Bryant 24:03
When we think about the structures of who gets to be in journalism and who gets to participate in the process, who's more easily welcomed into the fold when you can follow some of the arc of journalism-school degree, to internship, to newsroom, to maybe bigger newsroom--do you actually have to follow, you know, the newsroom to newsroom to bigger newsroom thing or does success for you look like something different? And I think there's a lot more flexibility now to think about where it is you want to end up.
H Heather Bryant 24:30
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Pagewith 14Heath... of 16 Transcribed by https://otter.ai So one of the things that we talked about was, you know, in addition to you want to report or you want to do some sort of newsroom role, also think about the kinds of decisions and conversations that you want to be a part of in your career, and figure out how to find a way to get into those rooms. That's also a part of, you know, getting to the work that you want to eventually do. And that's also the opportunity to use whatever power you may have as an individual, whatever social capital you have, or perspective or experience, to affect the structures themselves for the better. And so how do you make use of your own power to make things better for the next person who comes along and create a pathway for someone to come from a nontraditional background to get into the newsroom?
D Damian Radcliffe 25:08
Great. Well, I think those are messages that students need to hear and that industry also needs to hear. This is not just all about ending up in LA, DC, or New York--there are many different paths and many different ways in which you can conduct acts of journalism that derive and deliver huge value, both on a personal and professional level, and also to the communities that you serve.
H Heather Bryant 25:29
Absolutely. And so much more opportunity to tap into unique stories that aren't being told, because it's in a space that doesn't have so much saturation of media jobs. I mean, I have always loved the advice for people to go to Alaska--if you want to go do crazy great journalism, go to Alaska, because there's not a lot of people there. But there are a ton of stories. And that's true for every place, especially in the markets that don't have as many newsrooms. There are crazy, great, wonderful, high-impact stories just waiting to be told in those spaces. You can be the one that goes into, you know, go do that work. And do it in a place where you can afford the cost of living, which is also important.
D Damian Radcliffe 26:04
Yeah, absolutely. And we mentioned at the beginning you have a rich portfolio of different things that you're busy with. What can we expect to see from you next?
H Heather Bryant 26:14
So I'm currently doing some work with the Membership Puzzle Project and that's going to be the next published thing, the work that I'm doing with them. And what we're looking at is what does it look like for newsrooms who are thinking about membership projects, thinking about membership programs to create pathways for people in their audience
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Pagewith 15Heath... of 16 Transcribed by https://otter.ai who can't participate in the traditional financial sort of donation membership fee kind of dynamic.
H Heather Bryant 26:37
What does it look like to create the pathways for them to be a member, to have a mutually beneficial relationship with a news organization as a low- or no-income audience member? And what does it look like for us to serve those audiences who cannot, you know, participate in financial models? What does it look like for them to volunteer or lend expertise or participate in some other way where they benefit from it and we benefit from it and they are better served as a result of those interactions.
D Damian Radcliffe 27:04
Great. Well, it sounds like more important work and something that we will look forward to seeing in the not too distant future. It just remains for me to thank our guest today, Heather Bryant, for joining us here in the studio and also on campus here in Oregon over the last couple of days. Do keep an eye on our website for Heather's full talk and other materials related to her visit. Our website is demystifying.uoregon.edu. And if you enjoyed this conversation, you might want to check out our podcast archive which is available on iTunes and SoundCloud. Until next time, thanks for listening.
#17 Why The Future of Journalism is Collaborative
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