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#17 Why The Future of Journalism is

Collaborative with Heath...


Sat, 02/23 06:42PM 27:49

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

newsroom, journalism, people, collaboration, organizations, stories, project, work, space,


experiencing, talked, news organizations, communities, conversation, challenges, audiences,
heather, media, participate, background

SPEAKERS

Heather Bryant, Damian Radcliffe

D Damian Radcliffe 00:04


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

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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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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?

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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

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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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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

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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.

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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,

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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.

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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

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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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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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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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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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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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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.

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