As the number of whistleblowers expands, Knight lends a hand
Conversation between Haugen and Horwitz sheds light on the complexity of leaking to the press, and the need for support
This newsletter focuses on Knight’s Journalism program, but that doesn’t mean we’re the only part of the foundation that touches on issues relating to journalism. A wonderful example of that was last week’s Informed conference in Miami, which was organized by Knight’s Learning and Impact team.
Informed featured a number of fascinating conversations on the state of democracy in our digital age, but the one that most touched on journalism was Tuesday’s session with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen and Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz, who wrote the story about her revelations. The conversation touched on many issues, but, for me, the most interesting moments came when Haugen and Horwitz discussed how their own relationship evolved while the story was being put together.
Horwitz noted some frustration at times trying to reach Haugen: “The first few months, I was a little frustrated with you sometimes because you were hard to reach, or there’d be periods of time you’d just go dark, and I think I probably didn’t appreciate the level of stress that this required of you.”
He also noted the tricky role journalists play when working with whistleblowers: “There were limits to what I could do. I could never tell you that I wanted you to do a particular thing. That would’ve been inappropriate from the Wall Street Journal’s point of view and a little presumptuous,” he said. “And then I also couldn’t tell you that it was going to be alright.”
Haugen noted her own frustration with how long the story took to come together. Initially, the expectation was the process would take six weeks, yet it took four months. “The amount of education that technologists have about the process of journalism is very, very thin,” she said. “One of the most valuable things the journalism community can do is provide a lot more education on the process of journalism, particularly to tech employees.”
This conversation was not only engaging and enlightening, it was also timely. Informed took place only a few months after Knight’s board approved a $1.2 million grant over three years to The Signals Network, a nonprofit that provides services for whistleblowers and journalists. I announced the grant at Informed, right after Haugen and Horwitz’s session.
Signals provides various types of assistance for whistleblowers, including legal support, psychological support and housing assistance. And this is an area of increasing need. Until recently, Signals was being approached by whistleblowers just a few times a year. Now, they are approached once a week. So, in the interest of trying to get more information out there that serves the public interest, we felt this was a smart investment, similar to Knight investments in legal services for journalists, keeping journalists safe and supporting the First Amendment.
All the conversations at Informed are available here. I’d also urge you to take a look at the research produced by Knight’s Learning and Impact team.
Other news around the horn…
Sustainability
🗞️Newspaper subscriptions continue to rise. The pandemic has ebbed. Readership for local news sites is down. But, perhaps surprisingly, newspaper subscriptions continue to rise. That’s the finding of the Medill Subscriber Engagement Index, which tracks 100 large, medium and small newspapers around the country. Of the eight larger newspapers they tracked, six had “sizable increases” in subscriptions from September 2021 to August 2022. The medium and small papers had less sizable increases. So what gives? “We are seeing that pageviews have gone down but publishers are getting better at converting subscribers so they are maintaining their numbers of new subscriptions. There’s been a learning curve and now the big thing is retention and monetization,” said Matt Lindsay, president of Mather Economics.
👏🏽Collaborative fundraising FTW. We’ve heard about many editorial collaborations and collaboratives, but how about collaborative fundraising? Not so much. That’s why it was heartening to see the Giving Tuesday collaboration between three nonprofit newsrooms that serve immigrant communities: Documented (New York City), Enlace Latino NC (North Carolina) and El Tímpano (Oakland). They shared social media copy and graphics and spread their fundraising message from coast to coast. In a joint email pitch, the outlets wrote that “we wanted to rise above the competition and show that we can tap into the greater good together, rather than in isolation. We believe lots of things––revenue building included––can also be achieved through solidarity.”
👎Meta leaves the news business for the metaverse. Back in 2019, there was guarded optimism when Facebook announced a commitment to spend $300 million to support news publishers. And many innovative programs followed: COVID-19 relief grants, a global accelerator program and a branded content project. But with the recent round of mass layoffs at the rebranded Meta, many of the biggest supporters of news are gone, including David Grant, Dorrine Mendoza and Jason White. Nieman Lab’s Sarah Scire said it’s now official: “Facebook is ready to part ways with the news.” Scire outlined five programs from Local Media Association alone that were funded by Meta, but LMA’s Nancy Lane is optimistic new funders will fill the gap. “More funders than ever before have stepped up recently and they will fill the funding void left by Meta, but nothing will replace the innovative spirit that defined this partnership,” Lane said. “And that is a huge loss for all of us.”
Diversity
🚀 Philly bilingual paper Al Día goes national. Many metro news outlets have shifted away from national and global news and focused more intensely on local coverage. But Al Día, the Spanish/English newspaper in Philadelphia, has gone in the opposite direction. According to a profile in the Inquirer, the paper is utilizing a grant from Lenfest Institute to invest in digital and broaden its audience to serve Latinos nationally. The publication has hired six journalists in the past year, and is boosting its digital presence. The key has been coverage of culture, politics and business, and reaching younger audiences who don’t gravitate to legacy Spanish publications. “A lot of the publications that meant so much to communities around the country have been swallowed up by larger media companies,” said Martin Alfaro, director of business development at Al Día. “It is what happens when you don’t evolve. . . To continue being independent and growing, to innovate and improve every day, we cannot stay small.”
Impact
🏈How HBCU Gameday hit paydirt. A website covering sports at historically black colleges and universities was great fun for the folks producing it, but it didn’t generate much income. That changed when HBCU Gameday joined the Table Stakes cohort, redesigned its website and partnered with iOne Digital for more professional advertising. The result was a 600% increase in revenue and the chance to get more investments, said Tolly Carr, a partner in HBCU Gameday, in a story on Better News. Part of their success came from improving the look of their videos, content and website to look more like broadcast. They also made sure that team members stayed within their wheelhouses of expertise. “Our team seemed to thrive and find more happiness when they were able to spend more time on the things they really cared about,” Carr said.
🦝 How eating raccoon can help save local journalism. Well, it’s not for everyone, but some reporters will do almost anything to help their local news outlets thrive. Take the case of the Richland Source and its sister publications in Ohio. Last year, the outlets asked reporters and business-side staff to craft personal fundraising pitches to their audience. Two reporters took the pitch to the next level, with Knox Pages’ Grant Pepper offering to eat raccoon at a local festival if they hit their fundraising goal, and Richland Source’s Tracy Geibel saying she would jump in a freezing lake for the Polar Bear Dip. That anecdote came from Angie Cirone, Richland Source’s former director of journalism sustainability, on a recent episode of the NewsGuest podcast. No word on which reporter suffered the most, but we all know that local news won.
🔎 ProPublica looking for three Local Reporting Network projects. If you’re a local journalist interested in investigating wrongdoing and abuses of power in your community, ProPublica is seeking new projects for its Local Reporting Network. These partnerships will start on April 1, 2023, and go for one year, and the deadline to apply is February 1.
Upcoming Events 📅
Lenfest News Philanthropy Summit
Online
January 31–February 1, 2023
Knight Media Forum
Miami
February 21–23, 2023
Nashville
March 2–5, 2023
Austin
March 10–12, 2023
International Symposium for Online Journalism
Austin
April 14–15, 2023
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News @ Knight Credits
Written by Jim Brady, with Mark Glaser
Edited by Jessica Clark and Kara Pickman
A Knight + Dot Connector Joint