Subscribe to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and everywhere you listen to podcasts (if you like the show, leave us a review!). Not much time? Watch short clips on TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube.Greetings from the Media Jungle! Welcome to new subscribers from Reuters Foundation, LSU, TikTok, and more. Simply reply to this email with thoughts or feedback!This week we kick off a segment where we focus on an entrepreneur in the creator economy space. Today we speak with:Tobias Heaslip (@tradingtv): Founder and CEO of Trading.TV, a livestream platform built for next-gen traders and financial content creators to stream, chat, and trade in real time. He’s also the former Director of Technology, Media & Telecom trading at Barclays Investment Bank. In today’s episode, we cover:How Tobias got his start in the stock market, and how it led him to start his own trading platformThe creator boom in financeThe nomad economy with traders looking for a platform that allows them to work from anywhereAn overview Trading.tv’s business model and opportunitiesWatch the full episode on our Youtube channel here:Missed last week’s show? Here are some clips from my chat with Bill Grueskin:Thanks for reading Media Jungle! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mediajunglenews.substack.com

Subscribe to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and everywhere you listen to podcasts (if you like the show, leave us a review!). Not much time? Watch short clips on TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube.Greetings from the Media Jungle! Welcome to new subscribers from Columbia Journalism Review, Vice Media, ViacomCBS, and more.This week he have:Bill Grueskin (@BGrueskin): A professor at Columbia Journalism School and contributor to Columbia Journalism Review and former managing editor for both The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News.In today’s episode, we cover:Australia’s content laws forcing Google/Facebook to pay for content and whether US will pass something similarRecent libel and defamation lawsuits, and what they mean for futureHow Softball questions can be a great interview tacticPodcasts grow from referrals, so if you like Media Jungle, please consider sharing with someone interested in learning about how the media industry works.Watch the full episode on our Youtube channel here:Here’s some links to some of the articles cited in the latest episode: “How the New York Times editorial page got sued by Sarah Palin” (CJR)“Stop calling racist rhetoric a ‘dog whistle’" (CJR)“Australia pressured Google and Facebook to pay for journalism. Is America next?" (CJR)“Facebook rethinks news deals, and publishers stand to lose millions in payments” (WSJ)“Judge says Sarah Palin ‘failed to prove her case’ against the times” (NYT)“The Times is allowed to publish Project Veritas documents until a full appeal” (NYT)“The most expensive comment in internet history?" (The Atlantic)Missed last week’s show? Here are these short clips from my chat with Martha Minow:Thanks for reading Media Jungle! Subscribe here: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mediajunglenews.substack.com

Subscribe to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and everywhere you listen to podcasts (if you like the show, leave us a review!). Not much time? Watch short clips on TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube.Greetings from the Media Jungle! Welcome to new subscribers from United Nations, Medill School of Journalism, CNN and more. Quick survey: do you find the transcripts of episodes below helpful? What types of interviewees do you like most? Simply respond to the email… thanks for your support!This week he have:Martha Minow: A professor and former Dean of Harvard Law School, and author of “Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve Freedom of Speech” among others. She is currently the co-chair of the Access to Justice Project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-chair of the advisory board to Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Schwartzman College of Computing. Check out more about Martha here.Podcasts grow from referrals, so if you like Media Jungle, please consider sharing with someone interested in learning about how the media industry works.Read the transcript of the full interview below, or watch the full episode on our Youtube channel here:Missed last week’s show? Here are two short clips from my chat with Jeffrey Dvorkin:Here’s a transcript of this week’s episode:Alex: Welcome to the Media Jungle video podcast. I'm your host, Alex Ragir, coming to you every week to break down the business behind the news industry, the future of media, and the creator economy. Subscribe to our Substack newsletter and YouTube channel, and don't forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. If you like the show, we appreciate your support. On this episode, I'm joined with Martha Minow, a professor and former Dean of Harvard Law School and author of “Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve Freedom of Speech.” Martha, thanks for joining.Martha: It's such a pleasure. Thank you.Should governments save independent media?Alex: Should governments save independent media? The constitution only mentioned one private institution: the press. They wanted it independent from government as a check on power, but the threat to independent journalism right now is not the government, it’s technology. The forefathers probably didn’t think Craigslist and LinkedIn and Google and Facebook would disrupt the business model of advertising. But since the forefathers saw it as such a critical part of democracy, should the government not be part of the solution? Stay tuned.Alex: Martha, what do you think the forefathers would have said?Martha: Understanding what the forefathers would have thought in our current world is a science fantasy game, but I can't say this: The Founding Fathers of this nation believe that the press was critical to democracy and to daily life; And that's why it's the only private institution that's mentioned and given its own private [protection] in the constitution. It's also the case that within the first five years of the constitution, the post office, which is also created by the constitution, created subsidies for the news media of that time. So it would not have surprised the Founding Fathers who were around at that time to see the government giving subsidies and other kinds of support to the media.Alex: And it's a little bit interesting because they did designate it as a private entity for sort of a reason. I guess for independence. How does that play into the logic of how the government should play a role?Martha: Well, quite right, and of course the government was smaller in all kinds of ways at that time. Over 200 years ago then it is now. But the idea that independent viewpoints would be expressed and propelled by a private press was very much the concept of the media that the constitution embraces. [It's] supposed to be a critical vehicle to criticize anyone in power, certainly those in government, but also those in private power. [To] have diversity of viewpoint was another major point, which is enabled by having a private industry that has many different providers.Alex: So now you think that the government should take action to preserve and mostly local news, right? Or it's also national?Martha: The local news is the leading edge of the crisis in news in America. But, in many parts of the country, there are problems even getting access to multiple viewpoints about national news or international news. To say that the government should take a role, let's be clear: I don't want the government making choices about content or viewpoint, but the government actually plays critical roles in setting up the rules of contract law, property law, antitrust law, consumer protection law, to provide the rules for common carriers that lie behind the media, to fund the inventions of the internet. The government is behind all of that.Alex: As a law professor, nowadays you have influencers, podcasters, comedians giving you the news. You have outlets that call themselves news, but it's all opinion. How do you define journalists now, and how do you define news?Martha: That of course is a big problem, and it's a problem, even with one of the solutions that I like, [the] Local News Sustainability Act pending in Congress right now. You know, the early media in this country, and it's true in other countries too, blended [what classifies as news]. You think about Ben Franklin and what he produced in his printing business. It was a mix of entertainment and advice and gossip and fiction and fact, so that's not particularly surprising. I think that when we do talk about government subsidies, [those] choices do come into play and there can be, I think, pretty dangerous and certainly not desirable manipulation. If there were a subsidy available to local news and it could be obtained by multinational companies or foreigners or people, as you say, who are not in the news business at all, [but] in the fake news business. So there are some tricky questions there for sure.Alex: Do you think someone could go about sort of defining what an “objective journalist” or what a “journalist” is so that they could get some type of subsidies?Martha: I think if we start with the local news phenomenon, I think we could emphasize the “local” and requiring proof that the outlet is actually located locally. That would screen out an awful lot of the abuses.Alex: And is it independence? Because you have, I think it's 90% of U.S. news is controlled by like six companies. AT&T, Disney, Comcast, NewsCorp, CBS, and Viacom. It seems like it would be hard to make the case that we should bail or give them any type of money.Martha: Well, I couldn't agree more. Although right now we do give them a subsidy through Section 230. We can talk about that in a little while they are exempted from the liabilities that attach to ordinary journalists. And so the government is subsidizing them and that shouldn't happen anymore. But you know, this is in some ways a devastating time with the loss of local reporting and even the ideal of news or objectivity, but in other ways, it's a golden age because you can have a local blogger or you can have somebody write about the what's happening on their block that nobody ever covered before in the conventional media. So one of the questions is how do we make sure that those voices are not drowned out by the amplification of some of those big companies that you've mentioned.Alex: Are those types of changes, like trying to figure out what news is and [what opinion is]? Are those things that you're thinking about how to create new policies?Martha: Well, again, I'm cautious and certainly concerned about the government getting into any content restrictions or even requirements of identifying a distinction between fact and news. The government shouldn't be in that business, but the government can do something that helps other people be in that business. The government can require a far more disclosure and transparency. The government can require the social media companies to make available and also accountable their own practices for how they harvest and how they amplify news. And when it would comes to cable [or] to Fox or MSNBC for that matter, the government can similarly require more transparency and also make available their data and our metadata for private researchers. I think that we should have rankings that are developed by private entities. It could be by researchers in the academic world or nonprofit organizations, could be by local faith-based communities. Let's have a war about that; not a war about the truth, but a war about the ratings of what's reliable and what's not.Alex: Of the credibility of the actual publication, is that what you're referring to?Martha: That's what I'm saying. And you know, we're much better about this with entertainment. [We] have different groups that rate entertainment [like if] is it child-friendly or not? We could have different groups rate the so-called news. Is it actually covering information? Is it providing a fair, balanced, understanding? The ideal of objectivity you mentioned, that's actually relatively modern. It's really turn of the 20th century. Although the scientific method emerged in science much earlier than it did in journalism, but that aspiration is something that actually helped to create the profession of journalism. The idea that there should be more than one source for a story; the idea that there should be no one who has a financial interest, who is a source, or that should be disclosed. Those are just some basics that are now abandoned by the current structure of the media.The Only Thing AOC and Ted Cruz Agree OnAlex: Everyone seems to agree to repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the legislation regulating the tech industry. You know, the one that lets Twitter and Facebook off the hook for whatever they publish. They're not responsible for your racist uncle, they can't be sued if they publish lies. Joe Biden says he wants to repeal it, so did Donald Trump. The Democrats want to change it because they want to stop hate speech and misinformation. Republicans hate it because they want to apply to social media sites the First Amendment, even if they're private companies that can take down whatever content they want. So AOC and Ted Cruz agree, but they totally disagree.Martha, you've written a lot about this. Do they agree or do they disagree? And what's the problem with Section 230?Martha: Well, Section 230 of course was an effort to create an immunity compared with the common law and statutory rules that otherwise apply to broadcast and cable and print media. What are those otherwise existing rules? Well, those otherwise existing rules that have been around for hundreds of years, certainly since the formation of this country, actually allow individuals and groups to sue for intentional or highly negligent publication of false material. They also allow for civil action, government regulation with regard to misleading consumers. Those rules that do apply to every other media are not applied to those that are identified as social media that are communicated by the internet because when Section 230 was created, it wasn't the early days of the internet, and fledgling institutions that encourage people to invest and create brand new companies. Well, fast forward to today: those brand new companies now are the biggest. They have the largest market capitalization, the largest user base of any companies in the world, and they don't need the government subsidy anymore. I think that you asked the good question: Is there an agreement to be had in congress? No, maybe not, but the fact that there is a uniform dislike of the current arrangement suggests that there is a possible deal on the table. Maybe one that is, as I say, not an elimination of the immunity, but an amendment that all parties could agree to, to produce more responsible action. I think that we should treat the internet companies as adult companies like other adult companies that have consumer protection duties, that have obligations to be truthful that have obligations to file reports. And if they're not, then let's have competition.Alex: One question that I always get asked is, for example, like the Tucker Carlson case where his defense was “No one should believe me. This is entertainment. I lie all the time.” So why should I? That's been a protection of a bunch of different of these commentators. How is that something that they can do that and make that defense, but remain with the news title, or how is that not something that you can actually prosecute for?Martha: Again, I think the problem is more lack of competition. We have many parts of the country where Fox News is the only so-called “news source” that's available. That's a problem about the structure of the industry and there is no constitutional problem with regulating the structure of the industry. Again, I don't think the government should be in the business of defining who is news and who is not. That is a technique of the Soviet government or even the current Russian government. Having independence from the government on those matters, I think it’s very, very important, but we won't have any choices about what is true and what's not true if there are no choices about what's presented and what's not. You know, the fact of the matter is Fox News has created a business model that's predicated on fomenting hatred and misrepresentation. That's just a fact, and we need to have more competition. But, I'm not sure that MSNBC is always that much better, and we need more commentators, more criticism. And it's interesting to me, how many people would rather just get the details of what happened recently rather than all of this angry stuff. And I think a lot of people would like, if not the Fairness Doctrine, something that one of my students calls the “Awareness Doctrine.” Let's just have more disclosure about who's picking, and what are the points of view they're not being presented, and what is a competing message that's being offered somewhere else?Alex: So is it illegal to knowingly spread misinformation? That's illegal?Martha: Such a good question. The Supreme Court of the United States has actually said that lies can themselves obtain a protection under the constitution. The same time, the Supreme Court has upheld laws that punish false information that harms consumers. So we're in a kind of nether-land. We don't exactly know what the line is here. But again, trusting the government to tell us what's true and what's not is exactly an anathema under our constitution. What's required is to create a healthy ecosystem with enough variety and viewpoints that people can call out someone, including a Tucker Carlson and say, “Hey, what you just said is just not true.”Alex: How [would] you create these policies? That sounds like it's like more pushing for transparency or moderation. How do you foment more competition amongst the moderators? How do you also create more competition amongst the media companies? What would you prescribe?Martha: So there is no silver bullet here. We got to this point because we have a very complicated situation with a lot of moving parts, but there are several steps that would really help. One is to actually require payments to those who are producing content. Take the legacy media companies, [for example], that have their content constantly ripped off and presented in social media. Australia and the European Union have done this and it required the social media companies to actually pay copyright surprise, surprise. Which would allow for the professionals to continue to do their work. Regulated concept is public utility regulation. If it's come to the point that having a social media is like having electricity, you can't really function in society without it, then it's a public utility and that justifies regulation. Even if it's a private industry and they're private profits, and the kinds of regulations are not about content; there are about service and, again, disclosure as you said. I do think that giving publishers tools to balance the media marketplace without government censorship can be offered by something like the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, which is a proposal to have a narrow, safe harbor from antitrust liability. If the news organizations get together and collectively organize and negotiate with the big tech companies for fair compensation for the use of their content, another collection of ideas would be to support or amplify a variety of sources. One way would be to tax the internet companies, and use the revenues to support public alternatives. To fund civic-oriented journalism, have funds for private investigative journalism. I am a fan of public media. I think that we could afford to give much more funding to public television, public radio. Even tiny rules, like adjusting the rules requiring of the underwriting practices so that private groups can more freely give their support to public media and revise the copyright acts treatment of public media so that they can be protected in the new distribution platforms. How about amplifying the tax exemptions for philanthropic aid; so that you and I, if we make a donation to a media source, we can get a tax deduction.Alex: You can’t get that right now?Martha:  Not if it's a for-profit. It has to be a 501(c)(3) and I think there could be even an amplified tax deduction for those kinds of donations to philanthropic entities. Take ProPublica or other media watchdogs. And as we've mentioned, the Local News Sustainability Act, there's even versions of this that are pending in some state legislatures. They would allow news publishers to actually gain some funding by making sure that there are tax deductions for those who make private donations, but also for those who take out ads in the local news; and also exempt them from payroll taxes for hiring new reporters. There’s lots of tools that would all help.Alex: Is this something that's totally divided like a lot of things in the country? Are there any things that actually could get passed or could just be something that all politicians want?Martha: The Local News Sustainability Act has bipartisan support. It is endorsed by Mitch McConnell. It is endorsed by democrats. And I think there's a good reason for this: Politicians know more than anybody that if you don't have reliable news sources, they can't do their job. They can't get reelected. And interestingly, public broadcasting also has bipartisan support. NPR has bipartisan support and, in many parts of the country, is the only news source. So, yes, these are actual solutions that could secure even more support.Alex: You've been studying this stuff for a long time. Do you have any kind of thing that you're sort of expecting in the near future that could potentially help save journalism?Martha: I think that more and more people are becoming aware of the problem, and that's gives me some hope. I also think that a podcast like this is a great resource. The fastest growing segment of the media industry is podcasts, and I think that there's a younger generation that is thirsty for reliable and interesting and funny information, and having more varied sources and not having it all coming from the same places. So more and more platforms that allow people to find this kind of podcast, that gives me hope. And I do think that public media is a big part of the solution. I'm on the board of a public media in Boston [WGBH] and it is serving the schools, it's serving communities, and I also think that the development of unbundled news, which is part of the problem. No longer is the sports page underwriting the news page, and no longer are the recipes underwriting the local reporting because you can get each separate area from whatever source you want. That also may be a solution because it may be that people will be able to make demands and have more producers. More people who say “I am going to the city council meeting and I am reporting on it.” Also, you know, a subscription is an important tool for financing any kind of media, and I think there's a place where the legacy media companies stumbled. They thought “Well, we'll make the content for free and then people will subscribe.” Well, unfortunately, that meant that people lowered their tolerance for paying what's basically the price of a coffee for a subscription to a news source. And that's beginning to be reversed. We're starting to see local news increasing their subscriptions and having more plural sources of revenue. And that's the future, not relying on any one single source of revenue.Alex: And you talk about the unbundling, which was almost part of the problem where you had the sports section subsidizing the real news sections, et cetera. Do you see the real heavy of investigative journalism or the local journalism, the parts that were cut right away once the business models started failing? How important do you see nonprofit as a way to fund those types of segments?Martha: Well, I'm glad you asked that. I do think that non-profit is a very important part of revenue sources now and in the future for investigative journalism, for journalism that actually holds power to accountability. Whether it's philanthropy, or it's you and I make our charitable deductions by making a gift, I think that those are important sources for, let's face it, documentary films and for public-oriented news and podcasts and so forth. I also think, frankly, we should understand that in many parts of the country, the only reporter who's covering what's happening in the state capitol is a student, so we should actually subsidize student journalism. Because in many places, they're the only ones who are there. Who are going to the police court and seeing what's happening, and is there abuse and is there corruption. I think that during COVID we all learned, we need local news. We need to find out what's going on in our local communities, and yet I do think that there's a nonprofit and philanthropic dimension to that.Alex: Thank you so much, Martha. You can find Martha, if you Google her name Martha Minow, send her an email. Also go to Amazon and buy her book, “Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve Freedom of Speech.” Martha, thanks so much for joining.Martha: Thank you very much. Thanks for what you're doing.Thanks for reading Media Jungle ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mediajunglenews.substack.com

Subscribe to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and everywhere you listen to podcasts (if you like the show, leave us a review!). Not much time? Watch short clips on TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube.Welcome back to Media Jungle! Welcome to new subscribers from Report for America, the Rebuild Local News Coalition, Twitter, the LA Times, The Defiant and more. Simply respond to this email with any feedback…This week he have:Jeffrey Dvorkin (@jdvorkin): Author of “Trusting the News in a Digital Age: Toward a ‘New’ News Literacy.” Jeffrey is a senior fellow at Massey College, as well as a former contributor for the CBC in Canada and NPR as a public editor.Podcasts grow from referrals, so if you like Media Jungle, please consider sharing with someone interested in learning about how the media industry works.Read the transcript of the full interview below, or watch the full episode on our Youtube channel here:Missed last week’s show? Here are two short clips from my chat with Steve Waldman, CEO and co-founder of Report for America:Here’s a transcript of this week’s episode:Alex: Welcome to the Media Jungle video podcast. I’m your host, Alex Ragir, coming to you every week to break down the business behind the news industry, technology, and the creator economy. In this episode, we have Jeffrey Dvorkin, who wrote the book “Trusting the News in a Digital Age: Toward a ‘New’ News Literacy.”He's a long-time top journalist from CBC in Canada and former public editor for NPR. Nobody Trusts the NewsNobody trusts the news. We have business model problems, misinformation, fake news. So many things in the mix and I always get the same question. People ask me: “Where do I find real news, and how can I be a good news consumer?” That's why we brought Jeffrey who has been studying this. What should I tell these people?Jeffrey: I’d tell him to slow down for one thing. When I was teaching 18, 19 year olds and they were overwhelmed, they were really kind of drowning in stuff. It wasn't knowledge, it was just sort of an information flow. I described it as like taking a drink from a fire hose: You don't get a lot of liquid, you don't get a lot of sustenance, and it kind of rips your lips off. This has been part of the issue. One of the reasons I wrote the book was to kind of help these young people, and maybe some not so young people, figure out techniques for handling this tsunami of information that we see all the time. Whether it's [when we turn] on our smartphones, or we turn on our computers and then we go to a traditional media and see what's going on. The flow is constant. What's happened is that news organizations, which used to compete amongst themselves, are now competing with Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and TikTok. And so the idea of a news organization giving thoughtful, contextualized, edited information has disappeared, especially over the last few years as things have become much more frenzied and the politics everywhere -- not just in the United States, but in Canada, the UK, and now with the war in Ukraine -- people are really finding it hard to manage. And so what I decided to do was to help people understand that they need to slow down, be a little bit skeptical, and to check the sources. This to me is the critical point. If you can verify where the information comes from, then you're ahead of the game. And what we're seeing is that media organizations, even the responsible, respectable ones, are finding the economic system that they're in now [to be] very complicated [and] not very easy. There is a desire to see if they can find that missing audience that’s disappeared into the internet and to reassemble it somehow in order to resume the kind of profit margin that they enjoy 5 to 10 years ago.Alex: And maybe we can even slow down and talk about what are the kinds of steps that a consumer should take to feel good about who they're reading or watching?Jeffrey: Right. I think one of the things is that because so much information is now put on the internet, it's really important for consumers of information to look closely at who's doing the reporting. Is this a familiar name? Where does this information come from? Has the reporter, the media organization been really clear about how they got the story, who their sources were? Are they quoting anonymous sources? In which case there should be a good, stated reason why they're not identifying their sources. That's sort of the first level, the first way to triage the information as it's coming across to you. And if you're looking at the information online, go to the bottom of that homepage, scroll down, and see if you can find a link that says “about us” and click on that. That should tell you a lot about who's behind this information, where it's come from, and how you can contact someone if you want to have an opinion about what you've just consumed. I think that when you go to a website and there's no “about us,” then I think we have to kind of consider that this is a little bit skeptical, that we're in a kind of sketchy area, and we really need to take a step back and say “well, maybe we shouldn't be consuming this information.” We think that when we go to Google and we have a Gmail account, that we have made a deal with Google that we can use their email accounts. When in fact, we the consumers are now the product, Google needs us in a way more than we need Google or any of the others. Every time we go online, somebody knows a little bit more about us, who we are, what we're watching, what we're buying, [and] what we're consuming. A few months ago, when it was really cold here in Canada, I needed a new set of gloves for the winter. So, I went online and I found a pair and then suddenly I'm being flooded with ads for other gloves [laughs]. I only have a pair of hands. I think that this just shows you that they are tracking us all the time. I don't mean to sound paranoid, but the reality is that we live in what's called now a “surveillance society”; that somebody is watching everything we do, every time we go online, all the time. Most of the time, that's fine. Sometimes, it might not be so good.Alex: So I look at websites sometimes, and [sometimes] someone sends me a website and I'm like, “oh, this is completely biased,” but it's sort of in my inherent brain because I was a journalist for so many years. Have you thought about how people can teach themselves how to see something [that’s] biased?Jeffrey: Well, that's a really interesting question, and I'll be teaching a course on media ethics this summer at the University of Toronto, and one of the lectures I've just finished creating is “Is there good bias, and is there bad bias?” And of course there's good bias, in the sense that if you are a journalist and you think that we should be spending a little more time covering issues in rural communities and not just concentrate on the big cities. That's a bias, and in a way that's a good bias. A bad bias is when people say “I'm only going to look at stuff on the internet that confirms my suspicions,” and that's where we get into trouble. There's a lot of what the sociologists call bias confirmation: this is where people go online and only deal with ideas and people with whom they are familiar, supportive, and/or entertained. I mean, the difficulty now is that as media organizations, the so-called “responsible ones” try to provide the information that people need as citizens. And not just as consumers. This is where the trouble starts because media organizations, even the good ones, take a list of the people who have clicked on their website and they're selling that information to political parties, to survey groups, to pollsters, [and] anyone who will pay for it. And I think that this is now also part of the deal that we as citizens need to demand a better way in which media organizations handle our information that we have handed over to them for free and they're profiting from it.Alex: Someone needs to be held accountable. That's a good segue into the next segment.Self-Cleaning OvenSelf-cleaning oven. The late and great David Carr called the internet the “self-cleaning oven” of journalism, basically saying Twitter critics will keep journalists accountable. But who are these people on Twitter? Now the top editors from CNN and New York Times are telling their journalists to get off Twitter because it perpetuates the echo chamber where journalists are living in silos and becoming more and more radical. It is an oven, but who knows how well it cleans?Jeffrey: When David said this, and I met him a few years ago, he came up to Toronto to speak to journalistic groups. He used that phrase and we thought “Oh, that's really clever.” But then when you think about it, I'm not sure that the internet works in that way. The theory is, and a lot of media managers believe this, and may still believe it as far as I know, that we don't need editorial smarts [but] the internet. There was a [meeting] in Toronto with the publishers of the three biggest newspapers in Canada: The Toronto Globe Mail, The Toronto Star, and Montreal’s La Presse. I asked them “What's the future of journalism now? Where do you see newspapers going,” and all three of them said “It's digital, digital, digital, and more digital.” And because they see it partly as a way to economize, to make their newsrooms operate more quickly [and] more efficiently. As a recovering news manager myself, I always thought “Well, how can we make sure that people are working not to overcapacity, but to their best capacity?” And so there was a time, maybe five, six years ago, and before that where news manager said, “You know that internet, this is going to be the way in which we can get rid of older, more expensive employees, hire younger people with digital smarts who can post stuff constantly because that's the way they live, and we'll be better for it.” And the problem [is that it] hasn’t proved to be true. The issue for media organizations is compounded because it's expensive to do news in a responsible way. You could put someone in a radio studio and have that person bloviate over a number of issues. It's much more expensive to create a foreign bureau covering the war in Ukraine. That is very expensive.Alex: So you're sort of saying that in the beginning, when David Carr said that, it was sort of the idea that this plethora of different voices and thoughts on the internet would really be much better critics than having one or two very experienced journalists critique the coverage. But now we're basically having very young journalists who have not had all of that experience. On top of that, are then every day, getting sort of influenced by the people who are critiquing them. They're essentially influencing the coverage.Jeffrey: That's exactly right. I think what we're seeing now is that news organizations have said “Okay, we need to do the right thing by our audiences. How do we do that?” Well, first of all, we have to hire young because young people know more than older people do. And then they can bring all of these digital skills into our news organization, that's going to be a good thing. And we want to hire young people who more accurately reflect the audiences, the public that we serve. [Many] news organizations have done a great job in the 1980s and 1990s in hiring more women, when there were accusations that news organizations were full of older white men. They said, “You're right, let's hire more women,” and more women were hired. And now they've come into a level of managerial excellence. A lot of news organizations, not all of them, but a lot of them are now run by women. What's happened more recently is that the idea of having a more diverse newsroom; a more diverse media organization, where you have journalists of color, you have issues around gender and sexuality, and the idea that these young people will bring a new way of perceiving journalism. A lot of news organizations have become much more diverse, which is a very good thing. But, and here's the interesting thing for me anyway: Older managerial cohort believes that journalism is not a profession, it's still a craft. You come into a newsroom, you're a young person, you learn the skills you learn what the culture of the places you do, you have a lot of really lousy shifts, you do stories that you're being handed by your assignment editor. And eventually, you reach a level of competence where you feel comfortable asserting your own editorial judgment inside the news organization. Young people now are saying, “I'm not going to wait for that. I'm here. I've got a degree from Columbia or the University of Toronto, and you're not listening to me. I have ideas about what is important for the people that I know about.” So we have a generation gap, inside many news organizations where you have the older managerial class saying, “Be patient, you'll learn, and you'll be fine.” And we have this younger cohorts, who some of them call themselves “resistance journalists,” because they're not willing to wait. They want their reality now, and so they're pushing very strongly for it. And it's creating a little tension inside news organizations. I’ll give you one example: The Toronto star, which is a kind of liberal newspaper in Toronto, been around for 150 years, [has] a long tradition of social justice, et cetera, et cetera. And very much part of the Methodist church tradition; not that they were openly religious, but they had that kind of social awareness. [They’ve] been very good about hiring people, especially young people, and a diverse newsroom exists at the Toronto Star. For the federal elections in Canada, the Toronto Star has what they call editorial boards; where they invite the leaders of the parties, there are four or five and two or three of them are significant. They always invite the leaders to come to an editorial board meeting at the Toronto Star. It's open, everything's on the record, and it's open to anyone at the Toronto Star to come in and throw questions at the leaders. So the prime minister came, the leader of the opposition, the head of the conservative party came, the head of the socialist party came, and then they invited a new, more right-wing anti-immigration party called The People's Party of Canada. There are some residents here in America as well. The leader of that party was invited in and he came to the editorial board and the young journalists at the Toronto Star boycotted that meeting because they said, “We’re not going to give this guy any oxygen. We think he's a racist, we think he's anti-immigrant, and we're not going to sit in the same room with him.” And the older editorial managers said, “Well wait a minute, your job as journalists is also to engage with ideas and with people with whom you may disagree.” And so boycotting doesn't work. Anyway, to me, that was a moment of truth, the moment of Zen as it were, that The Toronto star suddenly acknowledged the fact that there are two cultures struggling inside the newsroom for oxygen themselves. It's a very complicated situation, and it's not just at The Toronto star. The New York Times has had these problems, NPR has had these problems, and The Wall Street Journal has had these problems.Alex: Yeah, it’s wearing your bias on your sleeve.Jeffrey: Well, yeah. And as Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel wrote in “The Elements of Journalism”: Journalists should not leave their conscience at the door when they come into work. Their conscience [and] their awareness should inform their journalism, but not deform their journalism. How do you strike that balance? That's one of the things that I've been engaging with my students about; how do you balance your powerful belief in something, yet do it in a way that is fair to your audience. That to me is the critical choice.Alex: Yeah. That moves into our next segment.Verifying The NewsVerifying the news. By the time you figure out a story, the Internet's already onto the next one. And by the time it's verified, you have another story, and another story, then this one, until you forgot about all of them. It's like the Churchill quote: A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on. I didn't verify he really said that, but.Jeffrey: What Churchill said is that the truth is so rare, that it must be protected by a bodyguard of lies. That was war time. You raise a really interesting issue, which is how do you provide responsible, contextual journalism at a time when you’re being inundated with information from all sources. And I think that one of the issues is that until news organizations figure out a way that they can spend money in a better way. They need to make money, there's no question about that, but they need to also understand that their ultimate responsibility is to their readers, viewers, and listeners. When Bill Keller was editor-in-chief at The New York Times in the early 2000s, he made an announcement that they've got enough money that they're going to hire dozens more journalists, editors, and reporters. As soon as he made the announcement, the share value of the New York times on the stock exchange dropped because the money was not going to the shareholders, it was going back into the newsroom. And I think that it's only got only gotten worse since then. What we need to figure out is can news organizations not just go to the bottom of the barrel for news, fill the “news hole” as it's called, and to provide information that is both important and interesting. I'm not saying that we have to do a lot of stories about the price of wheat, but if we could do stories about how the price of groceries has gone up everywhere, and people are finding this to be appalling, that's the story we do. Not just the price of wheat.Alex: It's interesting that you mentioned Bill Keller, he's at The Marshall Project now, a nonprofit investigative organization. Is that the direction people should go, or where do you see the best mix? How can you do that when you have the realities of the market in America? Almost half of the newspapers are owned by hedge funds and private equity groups that are known to cut costs. They don't care about the future of democracy.Jeffrey: It's interesting. We're having that discussion in Canada now because there are a lot of “news deserts” outside of Toronto and Montreal. That there is a kind of an impoverishment of information in much of the country, and the same is true in the United States. One of the things that I think is going to be interesting is to find ways in which standalone independent journalistic organizations can partner and provide content to mainstream media organizations. So that Bill Keller's group needs to figure out a way that they can partner, provide content, serve the public in a much broader way, and see if that works. In Canada, the CBC [the public broadcaster in Canada] is the largest single news organization in the country. And if ratings are a guide, it's doing terrible. What's happened is that there's this terrific news gathering organization that doesn't seem to be serving the public as it once did. So, there are a lot of ways that we need to “unscramble the egg” as it were, and figure out better ways of providing information that is local, because there's a real dearth of local information, And in fact, there's such thin information at the local level because it's so expensive. So that news organizations are relying on what I call the “low hanging fruit” of local news, which is weather, traffic, and crime. Now you need that information, but that's not all you need. So how do we make sure the landscape, that the media environment [is] richer, and that's going to be the challenge for the next generation; for you guys. I've done my bit to screw up the screw up the media, so now it's your turn. I'm serious. What I tell my students is, “You guys get out there, get a job, and then ask your bosses, ‘Is this the best way to do it? Can we do it any better?’” And that's going to be the challenge. And I think I've created a whole bunch of radicals in various newsrooms [laughs] in and around North America in my students [that] are going in there and saying to their bosses, “Why are we doing it this way?” Not to be jerks or negative Nellies, but just to say that there must be a better way of doing this. One of my students, who came from Uganda actually, got a position on the website of the CBC. Pretty good gig. And his supervisor said to them, “I want you to go on YouTube, find something that's vaguely Canadian, write some copy around it, and then we'll put it up on our website.” And he said, “Why don't we do the story ourselves?” And they said, “Oh, we leave that to other broadcasters.” The pressure in newsrooms now to fill that “news hole” is so profound, and it's damaging journalism and damaging democracy.Alex: Anyone watching right now, make sure to like subscribe, share, follow the Substack, send me an email so we can get together, figure out how to “unscramble the egg”, or “re-scramble the egg.” If you want to find Jeffrey's book, it's called “Trusting the News in a Digital Age: Toward a ‘New’ News Literacy.” Thank you so much, Jeffrey for taking the time out of your day.Jeffrey: It was my pleasure guys, really. I appreciate it. I miss the United States. I became a US citizen while I lived in Washington and I know things are complicated now, but I miss the turmoil of journalism in the United States. It's really vital, and I think you guys do an important job.Thanks for reading Media Jungle ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mediajunglenews.substack.com

Subscribe to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and everywhere you listen to podcasts (if you like the show, leave us a review!). Not much time? Watch short clips on TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube.Welcome back to Media Jungle! We want to give a special welcome to new subscribers from Twitter, The Defiant, LA Times, Washington Square Films, and more. Simply respond to this email if you have any feedback…We have a great episode this week with:Steve Waldman (@stevenwaldman) : Co-founder and President of Report for America and the Save Local News Coalition.Podcasts grow from referrals, so if you like Media Jungle, please consider sharing with someone interested in learning about the media industry.Read the transcript of the full interview below. Or watch the full episode on our Youtube channel here:Missed last week’s show? Here are some clips from our episode with Mark Little, CEO and co-founder of Kinzen:Here’s a transcript of this week’s episode:Alex: Welcome to the Media Jungle video podcast. I'm your host, Alex Ragir, coming to you every week to break down the business behind the news industry, the future of media, and the creator economy. Subscribe to our Substack newsletter and YouTube channel, and don't forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. If you like the show, we appreciate your support.On this episode, I'm joined with Steve Waldman, a man on a mission to fix journalism. Co-founder of report for America, which [places hundreds of] young journalists and newsrooms to cover under-reported stories. He’s also the founder of Rebuild Local News Coalition representing over 3000 locally owned and nonprofit news organizations across America.Steve, so glad to have you.Steve: Thank you so much for having me. It's a big topic.Local News MattersAlex: Local news matters. I know a lot of you guys are thinking “local news was never good, and the newspapers look like teeny-tiny little tabloids now,” and it's true, but at least the politicians who someone was watching. Now there's more than a thousand “news deserts” in America, meaning no reliable local news telling you where your tax money’s spent, who polluted the water, which politicians are lying. And there's so many studies that say at a decline in local news increases corruption and wasteful spending. You've got more radical politicians. They just watch the national news for talking points and the people vote less. They think their vote doesn't matter. The real news is still trapped behind a paywall and still 71% of Americans don't even know that their local news is disappearing. (Well, now *you* know.)Steve, maybe you could give us a little bit of background and overview about the gravity of this crisis and where you're seeing local news solutions and why you've sort of dedicated your life to this.Steve: Well, you had just a great summary and you’re right. Most people when you talk to them about a collapse of local news, they look at you like “What are you talking about ‘collapse of news?’ I'm flooded with news, there's news everywhere.” It doesn't feel like we're in a shortage of news moment, but while there's an abundance of national news and social media, there is actually an extreme shortage of local reporting. And just as a comparison, there's been a [26% drop] in the number of reporters just in about 15 years. That's an incredibly sudden dramatic contraction. And as you said, in addition to that, there are all these thousands of news deserts where there's nothing going on. And then there's another several thousand that are, there's a term of art called “ghost newspapers,” and that's basically newspapers [that are] still publishing, there's still pieces of paper with words on them and websites, but the level of local coverage is low. There's a study that showed that 17% of the articles in a local newspaper are local, and that just gives you a sense that it's just evaporated in a lot of places. And as you said, more corruption, lower voter turnout, higher taxes, more pollution. That's all true, that’s all associated with what happens when you have less local news. So the vacuums are being filled and they're being filled by national media that's more polarizing, by social media, by misinformation. In other words, the collapse of local news is also connected to this other set of problems that I know you've talked about in other contexts of misinformation and polarization and things like that.Alex: Maybe you could give an example of something that would’ve been covered now that would have been covered if local news was there and how that really could affect Americans.Steve: Whether the schools have decided to close a bunch of schools, or spend less money on special education, or where the COVID testing areas are, or whether the mayor is actually doing what she said she was going to do. There's a famous example in California, kind of an extreme version, but in Bell, California, there was a community working class community that had no newspaper. Since no one was showing up at the city council meetings, they just kept voting themselves pay-raises to the point where the city manager is getting paid $800,000 a year. And it wasn't illegal. It wasn't done on a parking garage, under the hidden stealth mode with people with trench coats; they were doing it at the city council meeting. But there was no one there. And we don't really know all the examples like that that are happening because there's no one there. So it's a little bit of a “we don't know what we don't know” but there's overwhelming evidence that, from not just here but around the world, that when you have this, it leads to more corruption.Alex: Why exactly that connection between voting and local news engagement? Is that because people just get nihilistic and say, “This is just complete trash. Like, why do I even care?”Steve: That's a great question. I think some of it is even more pedestrian than that. It's just that you don't hear about it. You don't hear about the election at all. It's nothing interesting or exciting about it cause you don't even know it exists and you don't feel any investment or you may feel like, “I don't know anything about any of these people. I don't even wouldn't even know how to base my votes.” That's one level, but I also think it's what you said is that there are certainly are studies, and this feels intuitively right, that says when there's less local news, people in general feel more alienated from their communities. They just feel ineffective. That actually is connected to how much local news there is, and if you're feeling ineffective and alienated, then you're also going to feel nihilistic and not bothered to vote.Alex: It is so true that the whole political debate has become so nationalized, right? It's like people are talking about these national issues, which a lot of times are these abstract issues, that are not necessarily going to affect your day-to-day. It's more like “this is how I identify with this side I identify with that side.”Steve: Right. It's more what tribe you’re in. One other effect of that is that, when you're dealing with national issues, it's easier to demonize your opponents. It's easier to view them as cartoon characters because they're abstract. They're far away. They're in that community, across the country that's doing crazy things. And it's not like local news isn't controversial. Local news can be really controversial, but it's a different sort because first of all, you're seeing the person face to face. And that same person who you might be disagreeing with about the school board thing, you may be seeing them at the soccer match that Sunday or you may be agreeing with them on a different issue because the issues don't fall on a left/right, you know, MAGA/non-MAGA spectrum. It can still be very controversial, but I think you're a little less likely to completely de-humanize your opponent and a little less likely to become quite as vicious and polarized.Alex: So it's more kind of something that you actually both care about and you all kind of want your city to do better. You want your politicians to do better. You can all agree on that.Steve: Filling potholes is not really a democratic or republican issue, and a lot of the issues that come up locally just split along different lines than they would nationally. And it's true that people know that you're the person who's disagreeing with you, they're doing it because they care about the community. Whereas on the national level, it's “you're the enemy.” The people who disagree with you hate you, and they hate your country. It's not like “Well, we all want the same thing or the best for the country.” That seems to be gone. Now it's the people on the other side of this that are trying to destroy the country.Alex: How did it get so bad in terms of the business model? People always say, “Craigslist came and destroyed local newspapers because they didn't have classifieds.” Was it that simple or were there other factors?Steve: That was kind of the first step, but even looking back, the internet did break the local news business model. Because the way I like to think about it is in the olden days, which isn't that long ago [15 years ago], advertisers supported local news because the way to reach your customer was to be next to local content. And now if you're an advertiser, you can reach your customers in all sorts of other ways. So initially, yeah, Craigslist was like the first example, but it wasn't just Craigslist. Those early days of the internet, it was like Monster.com took away the job ads, Autotrader took away the car ads. LinkedIn took little by little. The ad model of a newspaper got kind of picked off by different parts of the internet. Then Facebook and Google came along and just accelerated basically the same phenomenon. All these local businesses that used to advertise in papers now don't, and this is like to an 81% drop in advertising revenue for local newspapers. 81% in less than two decades.Alex: People called it a monopoly on distribution. They were the only way you could really get in touch with that many people was through newspapers or TV on local stations. [That] supported quality journalism in a lot of cases.Steve: Yeah, and that's why I don't tend to be moralistic about the companies that came along, Craigslist or whatever. You could argue the newspapers were using their monopoly status to charge way more than they should have been, and Craigslist broke the monopoly. I don't think of it necessarily as like the tobacco industry or something coming in [being] nefarious, but this is just the reality. That this new world, the internet, had all these great advantages, but a massive unintended consequence of the whole thing was the destruction of the business model for local news.Alex: Which is a good segue to the next segment.Pink Slime NewsAlex: Pink slime news. Remember when McDonald's got caught filling its hamburgers with pink slime to save money on real beef? That's what's happening in the news industry right now. Over 2000 newspapers have shut down since 2004, but Americans are still hungry for news about the place they live. So to fill the vacuum, more than a thousand faux news sites, masquerading as local news, have popped up funded mostly by conservative think-tanks, a few liberal ones, along with PR firms and whoever wants to influence you. I got beef with these pink sign websites. You should too.Alex: Steve, talk to us about how big this problem is and how we can prevent it.Steve: The vacuums that we talked about when the collapse created these vacuums, one of these forces that is flooding the vacuum are these pink slime websites. And pink slime is a little bit of a catch-all phrase for a few different types of unfortunate actors. So you have political partisan ones, and they're basically saying, “Oh, there's no local newspapers here. We can pretend to be a local newspaper and we'll be more credible.” And it allows some local news for it, but mysteriously, the articles about that member of Congress will always be positive about that member of Congress. Everything else is actually straight. So that's one kind of thing. And as you said, it's political money, so far it's more conservative, but there's definitely some that's progressive, and my guess is the progressives are going to try to catch up. So that's one group. Then you have this group, you mentioned the PR firms that’s sort of pay-for-play. And this is maybe non-ideological, but kind of nefarious in its own way. [It’s] like you own a hotel, you pay the local news site to write a great article about the hotel, and it runs, but it's not labeled as an ad. It looks like an article, [like] the newspaper happened to do an objective story about how this is an awesome hotel, and it's not disclosed that they paid for it. It's really an ad, but it's not disclosed as being an ad. I think pay-for-play is kind of the way I think of it. as it's driven by non-disclosed ad money and those are like the two big buckets of these pink slime sites.Alex: And so there's these two buckets. Is there any ways that we can fix it?Steve: One level, if you go back to the vacuum metaphor, is we have to fill the vacuums with actual journalism and journalists. I think that's the most important thing is to just get more local journalists out there. And there's lots of ways of doing that. There's lots of different formats for websites and public radio stations and for-profits and nonprofits, but the bottom line is more local reporters. And so the program that I run is called Report for America, and that's what our mission is, to get more reporters out there. We have 315 reporters that we're putting in the field embedded into local newsrooms of various sorts. It's kind of like a Teach for America for journalists, sort of based on AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and stuff like that, and we have these great, spirited journalists that we put in newsrooms that we pay half the salary and the newsroom pays the other half. And that gets support from the community, from donations, to support it.Alex: You had a grant from the government, like the Peace Corps?Steve: No, actually. That's a great question. It's all private in our case. Our national money, the part that we're putting in, comes from foundations and donors [like] the Knight Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson, and then individual donors. We put that into the local system through subsidizing the salary of a local reporter, and then working with that newsroom to try to become more sustainable, in part by developing a philanthropic arm to their organization. That's the heart of Report for America. There's other interesting groups out there that have popped up just in the last few years that are doing, and so there's a very exciting world, actually, of social entrepreneurs that are trying to fix this system.Solutions to Fix Local NewsAlex: What are the things that normal Americans can do to help?Steve: Well, I think at three things. One is [to] subscribe to a local something. A local newspaper. If it's a nonprofit, donate to it. That's the most important thing, because at the end of the day, you're not going to have good community journalism if the community doesn't support it. And in a way we all got used to having a free ride on this because advertisers were basically paying for it all, and that’s not true anymore. It's not that much money. When you think about how much it costs for a subscription compared to how much you pay for coffee. And there is that this philanthropic sector where people are doing donations. So if you have the resources, donate also to nonprofit news organizations or places like Report for America or local versions of that. And then I think the third thing, which is a little less well-developed but is coming, is public policy. There are some things that can be done in public policy waves, and people can split that. People can communicate with their members of Congress saying this is an important issue. We need to save local news if we're going to save democracy and if we're going to deal with the issues like healthcare and climate. It's honestly in the early stages of [regarding] People getting their hands around what kind of public policy things could you do that wouldn't make it worse and wouldn't have First Amendment problems and things like that. I'll give you one example: there's a bill called the Local Journalism Sustainability Act, and it's a really clever bill. It provides a tax credit to consumers to help them buy subscriptions, so essentially [underwriting] your subscription or a donation. It provides a tax credit to small businesses and the community that advertise in a local news something, and it provides a tax credit to local publishers to higher-retained journalists. It's pretty clever because it doesn't involve a government agency sitting there deciding to give out grants in some subjective way based on articles. It's more universal than that. [There are] more objective factors and part of that was in the Bill Back Better Act. It almost passed and it might still pass if they ever get around to doing like a mini-version that they're always talking about doing. And so my second hat, as you mentioned, is something called the Rebuild Local News Coalition, which pulls together all these [different groups] that can really help with that.Alex: You're sort of acting as a lobby, representing those groups to try to enact policies?Steve: Yeah, yeah. They’re also doing their own thing, but it's a way of coordinating. We do our own lobbying and advocacy and we sort of help coordinate all these other groups and get everyone working in the same direction, focused on the same thing so we have more impact.Alex: So do you think the future of quality real journalism is nonprofit?Steve: I think nonprofit will play a much bigger role than, than it has in the past, but I think it could be a bunch of different models. I'll give you an example: Report for America. We are a nonprofit, but we actually place journalists in both for-profit and nonprofit organizations. And the for-profits, it's kind of interesting to see how that works. Cause it's like a nonprofit injection through this person who's working in a for-profit newsroom and it kind of creates this hybrid, but it works really well. Like it ends up that they're doing these beats that they weren't doing before. Covering certain communities that had never been covered well before, and that's kind of an interesting model. It makes me think you could have some versions where you’ve got the website that [has] basically creamed off the parts of the local business that work like [things] that you can get advertised that aren't that hard. And then the philanthropic sector is kind of underwriting the more labor intensive, accountability beats. I could see some, some combos like that. And then in other places, yeah, there's some really cool nonprofit things. In other places you have the kind of billionaire owner model. That works sometimes if you've got a good billionaire.Alex: Yeah, you're just betting that the billionaire's good.Steve: It's not really where you want to hang your whole democracy on, but there are definitely cases like Minneapolis and Boston and Washington Post, weirdly enough, are cases where the benevolent billionaire has remained relatively benevolent and those can work out well, too.Alex: I feel like local news has been declining for my whole life, and everyone's just like “Eh, I don't know, [no] one ever comes up with a solution.” So I feel like there's no real push for telling philanthropists that they need to put their largest into local news. There's gun violence, climate change, a lot of these big issues. It feels like there's no real movement or push.Steve: I totally agree. It drives me crazy. [There are] exceptions. There's half a dozen foundations that are doing amazing work in this space, so what I'm about to say doesn't apply to them. But I'll give you an example: I just saw a list of the top hundred grants from “democracy” funders. These are things that are striving to strengthen democracy, right? So already you've narrowed it down to just democracy. Only one of the hundred was for a local news project. So that means the democracy funders are not even thinking that journalism is important for democracy.Alex: Yeah, we're focusing on the short-term wins on the short term election.Steve: And this is kind of ironic. You work on having structurally sound elections, but then no one's voting because no one knows who the candidates are.Alex: And I feel like there's an issue too. I think that a lot of people are like, “Local news was always about ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ anyway. Why should I support that?” But the idea is if we can re-imagine local news and actually create a nonprofit of local news, then you can actually create a case study where it's like, “This is what you're paying for.” You're not paying for “the cat was lost in the tree,” like people envision of the old local news.Steve: Right. Or in the worst-case scenario that we saw is like “all blacks are criminals.” So you're totally right that we don't want to romanticize the golden age of local news because there were lots of cases where local news was either not really covering their community or covering them destructively, in some cases. It’s a really important point that as we try to fill the void, we need to re-imagine local news also, to make it much more inclusive and better. And I do think that having a much bigger role for the nonprofit model and sector can be a very positive thing for that reason, because you are looking at it that way. “If it bleeds, it leads” doesn't work if you're trying to make a case to donors. And by donors, I don't just mean rich people. A $10 donation from someone in the community, but it's kind of the same thing. They're not going to give for “If it bleeds, it leads” either. They're going to give their $10 if they feel like you're covering the schools better. Having that little extra philanthropic motivation to it can pull the system in a better direction.Alex: Maybe you could even fund beats. Like the education beat.Steve: That's actually, interestingly, [the] way we do it with Report for America. It's all beat-based, and what we find is that when they then go out to pitch the community, help us support this Report for America position, they do it exactly the way you just said. It's not abstract “save democracy,” it's “we have someone covering the schools now. Here she is. Here are the pieces she's done. Here are the pieces that literally would not have happened about your schools if we didn't do this, so help support us.” [That's] a much more compelling pitch than general “Help us. The news organization. We're sad. We don't have enough money.” Or even the more abstract “save democracy,” which [is] true, but kind of vague.Alex: Cause it goes back to that national discussion where it's like “I hate mainstream media.” And people say the media and it means so many different things. Most of the time they're talking about TV news, “I don't like CNN, [Fox News], NBC,” but they're talking about cable TV, a particular opinion guy and they're not really talking about [the conversation]. It just gets derailed when actually, almost everyone wants someone covering the schools [or] certain issues that you care about.Steve: Yeah, that's a great point. And if you get [people] to pause for a second, they really do make a distinction in their minds. I mean Regular people between national and local, but it usually just gets all mixed together.Alex: Steve, I commend you for all the work that you're doing, and if you're watching this and you want to give to Report for America, or reach out to the Rebuild Local News Coalition, or find Steve on Twitter. Thanks so much for joining us, Steve. And to everyone else, I'll see you next week. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mediajunglenews.substack.com

Subscribe to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and everywhere you listen to podcasts (if you like the show, leave us a review!). Not much time? Watch short clips on TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube.Welcome back to Media Jungle! Welcome to new subscribers from Twitter, The Defiant, LA Times, Washington Square Films, and more. Simply respond to this email with any feedback… We have a great episode this week with:Mark Little (@Marklittlenews): Co-founder and CEO of Kinzen, and founder of Storyful. He’s also worked as a VP at Twitter and a foreign correspondent for RTÉ News.Podcasts grow from referrals, so if you like Media Jungle, please consider sharing with someone interested in learning about how the media industry works. Read the transcript of the full interview below. Or watch the full episode on our Youtube channel here:Missed last week’s show? Here are two short clips from the chat with Camila Russo, founder of The Defiant:Here’s a transcript of this week’s episode with Mark Little, recorded May 11th, 2022:Alex: Welcome to the thirteenth episode of the Media Jungle video podcast. I'm your host, Alex Ragir, coming to you every week to break down the business behind the news industry, technology, and the creator economy.Misinformation is destroying the truth and it's a terrible thing. Unless you're a company that gets paid to stop misinformation, then it can be good for business. Mark Little is here. The founder of misinformation-fighting platform Kinzen. He's also the founder of a little-known company named Storyful, sold to News Corp for $25 million about 10 years ago (not to be confused with another company called Storyhunter, my company). I'm really excited to talk to you again.The Misinformation BoomAlex: Mark, you seem to pick some of the toughest enemies.Mark: Yeah, I suppose I'm one of those people in media who sort of runs toward the fire. Wherever I think there's going to be something like a clash, a seismic shift between technology and journalism and media, that's where I've always just been obsessed. Wherever the problem is, right? If you're a good entrepreneur you're supposed to start with the problem, not the solution, and wherever I am is trouble. So that's kind of how I marked my career.Alex: Ten years ago we saw the boom of social media disrupting breaking news, and you were at the forefront with Storyful. Now you're at the forefront of this sort-of misinformation boom.Mark: Yeah. So with Storyful I think there was kind of two waves of the social web. I think the first wave was everybody thought this was a liberation. I remember with Storyful we got founded because in the Arab uprisings, we were find these amazing videos, but then we were also realizing that was misinformation, and there were governments trying to pull the wool over our eyes on social media. And so we thought back at Storyful, we were fixing a bug in the system, like pollution, right? “There's a fabulous new way of communicating in the world. It's got a couple of problems. We'll fix them with Storyful.” That wasn't the case. I went to work for Twitter, and started to realize that it wasn't just a bug in the system, but misinformation and hate speech were kind of parts in the system. They were being promoted by the algorithms, and that second problem is what I got obsessed with. [That] this was far deeper than just a bit of a side-effect. There was something really deep in the roots of the business model and the algorithms that run the internet these days. And we had to go and see if we could fix that. That was the small, tiny problem I set out with Kinzen to solve.Alex: Maybe you can help break down exactly how Kinzen works and what you do for people.Mark: I got obsessed with the impact of machine learning, right? So if you're sitting on Spotify, if you're on Netflix or you're writing your emails, there’s machine learning in the background recommending what happens next. So I got obsessed with all of that and I realized, as a journalist, if I could match good old fashioned editorial analysis with these machine learning algorithms, we could do a way better job at finding the really terrible stuff that's on the internet. Because at the moment you've got these content moderators are overwhelmed, making decisions every day on millions of pieces of content. So we wanted to bring in trained analysts, match with machine learning, to give early warning of where we could see the most serious misinformation, the most damaging hate speech. Give the technology companies a heads up and say “Hey, this is where you should be looking right now in the world, because there’s some really bad stuff happening with real-world harm.”Alex: So your clients are the platforms, their governments, or NGOs? Who do you work with?Mark: Yeah, we generally don't work with governments, we do work with public health agencies, but primarily we work with big technology companies. These are people that have got a lot of audio or video on their platforms. We also work as well with the content moderators. Many of these big platforms outsource the content moderation to other workforces, and we've also worked with fact-checkers with a wide range of people. We’re interested in brand safety, so hopefully helping advertisers make better decisions about whether to put their ads on the internet. But right now, it's the tech platforms that use us as a kind of radar or early-warning system of where in the world they need to be worried about it. For example, we had just big elections in the Philippines, and we were watching there because we saw the dominant candidate, the guy who won the election, was using a lot of misinformation and manipulation in the background to drum up support online. So that's one of the things we were watching out for is that kind of threat.Alex: So maybe you could take us in there, like what types of things are you looking for? How does, how do you detect it? How does it all kind of work?Mark: So we are in about 17 different languages right now. We've got these well-trained analysts in these different places around the world, essentially watching out for the trends that are coming from different platforms and that are coming from different networks as well, also in different languages. So we've got machine learning, helping us translate and transcribe audio and video for us spawning patterns, and then telling the machine or the human being “Hey, keep an eye on this.” So it's a, what we call human-in-the-loop machine learning system. Where the human being is playing a role in correcting and priming the pump of the machine learning all the time and it just gets better and better.Alex: So what types of things can it come up with and can you do this in any language?Mark: We're benefiting from major advances in machine learning. And I always think with media people, we think the biggest change over the last ten years were subscriptions and paywalls and the creator economy. I would argue that for media and communications in general, it was the birth of what they call these big language models, where the big companies like Google Microsoft and Facebook have developed these massive natural language processing models. A good example would be what's called GPT-3. This is powering things like translation, transcription, and auto-complete, but they've now outsourced them. So a tiny company like ours in Ireland can actually use these open source models, a bit like the way that in the birth of home computing, twenty, thirty years ago, we all got access to this massive computational power. So we're using that and we sit on top and we build our new models on top of that. It's all down to this rapid advance in the last couple of years that allows us, with a human eye exponentially scale the skill of a human editor. And that's, what's so exciting about this. It's kind of old-fashioned editorial skill matched with, in some cases, just cutting-edge technology,Alex: And then you notify the platform or the client that this looks like it's developing into something that might go viral, into a conspiracy theory, or into something that might be damaging?Mark: Yeah. We're also helping them sort out between people expressing a good opinion or a bad opinion. Just to explain, [but] someone who might be against the conventional wisdom versus someone who's actually trying to create real-world harm. So for example, someone online say “I don't like this religion,” but we want to make sure we distinguish that from someone who says “I'm going to go out and harm people of another religion.” So we're helping these big platforms make very fine, calibrated decisions. And in that way we're hoping that we're helping make a contribution to freedomof speech, to better expression to distinguish between what's a real threat, and what's just someone saying something wrong in the internet or expressing an unpopular viewpoint. So making that difference between harm and opinion is one of the things we're watching out for. To give an example, we'd be watching elections in Brazil coming up or in Kenya, where there might be violence because of one side going on the internet and manipulate debate and try and sense people and make them go out and commit violence. It's that kind of early warning that we're looking for. Can we see a trend that might result in someone getting hurt in real life as they did in Myanmar a few years ago, where Facebook just didn't have eyes on the local community and there were literally genocidal acts created because people on Facebook were using that platform to create real world harm. So we're very informed by that experience and so are the technology platforms.Kinzen’s beginningsAlex: Was this the same direction that you always had with Kinzen?Mark: No. We started out thinking about how we could push the good stuff, right? So we started out thinking to ourselves that the reason why we're so screwed up in particularly social media, is that the real quality media, that people really feel and need some sort of intentional need; The quality political news, or even just news about your profession, it has to compete with all of the draws. It has to compete with the algorithms, constantly feeding you things that feeds your worst instincts. So we what we wanted to do initially was use this machine learning to find out, for example, what Alex wants. He lives in a certain place. He works at a certain job.Alex: Miami.Mark: There you go. You're in Miami [laughs]. You want to know about the Dolphins, you want to know about your local community, but you also want to know about your media business. You want all have control over your algorithm, and that's what we started doing. So it was a positive idea, like push the good stuff faster to Alex, but we got a phone call from a friend of mine who used to work at Twitter and said, “Hey, can you also use that machine learning to detect the bad stuff?” And it turned out we can. So it's almost like a reverse recommender. So we started out looking at a consumer facing aggregator, so it was a bit like smart users. Some of those folks doing really good work in the aggregator space, but the difference was we wanted to give the ordinary person the control over the algorithm. I want to change over to audio, I want 15 minutes in the morning at this particular time, I want to show you, almost like an app for fitness, what does your news look like at the end of the week. So that was the thing we tried to do initially. We came across a huge problem: publishers don't want to do deals with new tech platforms, right. They've been bitten by the last wave of dependence they've had on platforms, and so we would have had to go out and do deals with every single publisher to maintain a high enough quality of content for consumers. Meanwhile, as I say, we got a phone call from somebody who said “Listen, we're having a problem. We don't know what's in all of this vast amount of audio and video. Can you use machine learning to detect the bad stuff?” And that's exactly where we went. We decided, “You know what? We can actually do a much better job providing enterprise software play for the big tech companies to be better at detecting the really bad stuff and making sure they can make the right decision.Alex: So then it's like a SAS model where you charge a subscription?Mark: Yeah, so it's a pretty big enterprise software play. We're doing very big deals across multiple markets and it's got to the point now where it's very much like a big software play, and I think that is only increasing in size as we go forward, as people become dependent in a good way on the services that we're providing. And more importantly on the technology, because we've got to the point now where we're building stuff that is absolutely cutting-edge. And we've been benefiting a lot from one of the biggest changes in the media space and that's these new, big learning models. We've all heard about GPT-3 and BERT, and what's happening here is it's a bit like the revolution of the home computer back 30 years ago; these big NLP models are helping a small startup out of Dublin, like ours.Alex: What’s NLP?Mark: Natural Language Processing. What this means is, think about your auto-complete on your email, right? You're writing your email and it's detecting what is in the words you're writing and it's suggesting words to complete the sentence. Essentially language models, these massive, big computational models that are being built by the big platforms. They've been open-source now. So small startups like us can build a new model to transcribe Arabic. And we use this machine learning model and essentially build on top of it. And that's where we've got this cutting-edge technology that can understand Arabic for example is like one written language, but it's actually spoken in about 12 or 13 dialects and we have to transcribe the audio. And that's where the machine learning starts to get really smart.Elon Musk and the future of TwitterAlex: Next segment, Elon Musk bought Twitter. You used to work for Twitter. There's a lot of misinformation I'm sure you're identifying on Twitter and, uh, they're trying to figure out how to control it and balance it with free speech. Elon Musk is a big free speech guy. He’s probably going to let Trump back on. They have to try to control bots. There's a lot of things he could do. What advice would you give him as a way to make Twitter better and allow free speech and fight misinformation?Mark: You know, I'm a big admirer of Elon Musk. I've met him, I admire what he's done. This guy will be considered to be the greatest entrepreneur in this generation and many generations. Even what he's done with Tesla. And I actually think, in some cases, he's got some good ideas about Twitter. I worked for Twitter and I can tell you, it was a pretty dysfunctional kind of place. It was not managed the way you would like, and yet at the same time, a lot of very good people working there. For me what's happened with Musk over the past couple of weeks. He's got some great ideas potentially about running it as a better business., introducing things like payments and tipping and subscription products, maybe some other elements that you can bring to the table. Better organization, more focused on product, all great ideas.Here's the problem: He's outside of a swim lane when it comes to the big issues of content moderation. He's got a particular view on Donald Trump being de-platformed, and I think a matter of opinion, he's probably right that taking people permanently off Twitter is not a good idea. But when he starts to explain what he's going to do about content moderation, you suddenly see him losing his way. Like last night, for example, he came out and said de-platforming Trump was a really bad idea. Again, nothing wrong with that. Then he goes on to say that if there aren't tweets that are wrong and bad, we should make them visible or maybe suspend them or temporary suspension, but not a permanent ban. Everybody who knew anything about content moderation was tearing their hair out, because for years they been realizing it's just really difficult. You know, one guy that I like is Alex Stamos [former Security Chief of Facebook], and he said that watching Musk last night trying to make these simplistic solutions is like watching a baby play with a blender from behind a plexiglass wall. He was coming up with these solutions on the huff, and he hasn't looked under the hood. So in the end of the day, it comes to these high-profile decisions like Trump, content decisions in the United States that form a tiny proportion of the rules and of the moderation decisions being taken every single day. And for the rest of those decisions, there's lots of good reasons for them. So, in the end of the day, good content moderation is never going to be perfect, but good content moderation is the best thing for free speech.Alex: So maybe Elon seems like he's a bit naive about some of these things now, but you have sort of trust that he will try to get to the bottom of the complexities of it?Mark: Yeah. Like he met the other day [Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner], one of the people responsible for bringing new rules in here in Europe that will be making these platforms more accountable and more transparent. He said he agreed with everything he'd heard, which is a big surprise to me, because I thought he was on a collision course with Europe. So he's showing signs that he is educating himself really, really quickly. I think the key for him is to be listening to the smart people inside Twitter that have been doing this for quite a while and making really tough decisions in a tough environment. So learning a lot about what happens when you look outside the United States, when you get to a country like Kenya or Myanmar, or you look at a country where the language at the moment is not being protected. Nobody knows how people are fermenting hate. So you've got to really have a deeper understanding. And I think just like he saved SpaceX and he saved Tesla from constant threat in the early days, I would hope he brings the same kind of openness to problem-solving, and not get stuck on the tiny proportions of content moderation cases that get such huge publicity and think about the responsibility to the couple of hundred million people who call Twitter their daily home, or at least use it on a basis and get some service of it. I think to defend free speech, you can't just say everybody can say something. You can’t say we’ll let Trump be on the platform. You have to make sure that people are protected from the bullies and the abusers on the spam armies. So there is a need for a good content moderation.Alex: Yeah. It's almost like we're going to meet Elon Musk like we meet our politicians when they run for office. He's put himself at the center of this important communication platform. Mark, so glad to have you. Hope to have you on soon. You can follow Mark at @Marklittlenews on Twitter, and also check out Kinzen.com. Until next week. Thanks for reading Media Jungle ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mediajunglenews.substack.com

Subscribe to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and everywhere you listen to podcasts (if you like the show, leave us a review!). Not much time? Watch short clips on TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube.Welcome to new subscribers from Committee To Protect Journalists, CNN, Vox, Harvard University, Bloomberg Media, Oneof.com, Report for America, and more. Simply reply to this email with feedback or comments!Also, the best way people discover this newsletter is through a friend or colleague. Please consider sharing Media Jungle with someone interesting in learning about how the media industry works, and where it’s going. We also highlight entrepreneurs and pioneers building sustainable media businesses. In that spirit, this week’s episode I’m joined with entrepreneur and former colleague at Bloomberg News:Camila Russo (@CamiRusso) — Chiefess at The Defiant, a newsletter covering crypto and decentralized finance, and author of The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-hackers Is Building the Next Internet with Ethereum. Watch full episode/clips and subscribe to our Youtube channel here:Below is a transcript of this episode:Alex: Welcome to the Media Jungle video podcast. I'm your host, Alex Ragir. Coming to you every week to break down the business behind the news industry, the future of media, and the creator economy. Subscribe to our Substack newsletter and our YouTube channel, and don’t forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts if you like the show. We appreciate the support. On this week's episode, we have none other than Camila Russo, who built one of the most game-changing media publications covering crypto and decentralized finance. I worked with Camila in a previous life when we worked as foreign correspondents in Latin America for Bloomberg News. WHAT IS DEFI?Alex: What do you think differentiates The Defiant in the way that you cover crypto and why do you think you've had such success in growing the audience and attracting subscribers?Camila: So I left Bloomberg in January 2019 to finish writing The Infinite Machine, my book on Ethereum that I published in 2020 with HarperCollins. And in that process of researching Ethereum, I saw decentralized finance emerge. I realized this is the biggest thing happening in crypto. I think it's the biggest thing happening in finance. Like the financial system is being rebuilt using open-source technology and smart contracts, and nobody's paying attention. Not even crypto media was covering it. So, my approach to The Defiant was to cover DeFi using Bloomberg standards. Just covering professionally, objectively. I don't want to be a cheerleader. I just want to tell what's happening, interview sources first-hand, look at the data, do what I had been doing at Bloomberg for the past eight years, but for DeFi with my own newsletter. And people liked it, and that's how it started to grow.Alex: So you took it very serious when a lot of people in the crypto space are just really cheerleaders talking about "we're going to change the world. Let's have a DJ party." Because a lot of times when I talk with people at crypto, I'm like, "What do you do? What's your business model? What's your product?" and they just don't have anything to say. A lot of it seems like it's a lot of fluff and it's not like a lot of the people who did it do not necessarily come from the tech world, do not necessarily come from the finance world, and they like the idea of starting a revolution, but it doesn't seem like there's a lot of substance in a lot of things.Camila: That's what I like about DeFi is that the substance is there. So I covered crypto in 2017 and that was all fluff. The ICO market was just tokens playing around with maybe a website on a white paper, but nothing there. DeFi was the opposite. In 2019, there were tons of working applications with users with volume, and many times they didn't even have a token. So it was the opposite thing going on.Alex: For the audience, in a few sentences, what is DeFi?Camila: DeFi is decentralized finance. It's the ecosystem of financial applications being built on open blockchains like Ethereum. So what these financial applications do is they automate financial transactions and they take out the need to have third parties and humans in the equation. You take out the need of financial institutions. You interact directly with programs, with computer code being run autonomously and on a blockchain, which means it's open-source, but anyone can verify transactions and see what's happening. It's not MasterCard or Visa because you're not giving away your assets to a third party. You're always in control of your assets. So you're not asking an institution to take your money and do whatever they need to do with your money. You are transacting directly with a computer program and you're never seeding custody of your assets and giving away your information. You never log in to DeFi applications, you're just directly transacting with these applications. It's really seamless, it's global. That's the other thing: when you're transacting in the U.S., you're in this self-contained financial system. And to do anything outside of the U.S. You need a bank account in a different country, you need to wait five business days for international transfers, pay like 50 bucks, but DeFi is a global financial system. So it doesn't matter where you are. And everyone can access it.Alex: And in some places like Argentina and other places, it's even harder to move money outside the country and inside the country.Camila: In DeFi, for example, someone in Argentina can have access to dollars. They can buy a stable coin that is a cryptocurrency picked to the value of the dollar, and not only that, they can access a lending platform where they can deposit those stable coins and start earning interest on dollars. Imagine that for an Argentine, that's mind-blowing. Or for a Venezuelan. [Even] someone in Cuba can access DeFi.Alex: So this sounds like what I think most people know of Bitcoin, which kind of acts like a currency, right? You can take money in and out. That's the decentralized finance part?Camila: So Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency, it's the first blockchain, and it's one of many digital assets. Right now, Bitcoin is very volatile, so it doesn't serve that purpose that I was saying before, like someone in a country that has very high inflation. Maybe they can use Bitcoin as a store of value, but they'd be better off probably using a stable coin, like a U.S. dollar stable coin than Bitcoin. And that's what this new financial system evolved after Bitcoin. It takes Bitcoin's innovation further. So Bitcoin was kind of the first blockchain innovation. Ethereum and all the DeFi applications being built on it and other smart contract platforms take that initial step further and give it more functionality. So the reason why it can do that is because Bitcoin is built very simply. It's a network that allows the transfer of value, but it doesn't allow much else. Ethereum and others might contract blockchains like Solana, Avalanche, and Near, allow for programmable money, which Bitcoin doesn't allow. They're what's called smart contracts. So instead of just running money transfers, they run computer code. Whatever code you throw at it, you can build applications on top of Ethereum and these next generation blockchains. And that's what enabled DeFi to be, which couldn't be done on top of Bitcoin.Alex: You kind of got lured to this while you were in Argentina. The place is very in-stable and has inflation issues. That makes total sense that finding some other system would work for them. Is DeFi good for the U.S.?Camila: For sure. So, I mentioned the use case of someone in Argentina putting stable coins in a lending platform and getting 5% interest on that. That's really attractive for someone in the U.S. who's getting like 0.1% on their savings. They can also go to a DeFi application, buy stable coins and open a 5% interest rate savings account. And not just that, every kind of money transaction is more seamless. Like I said, you don't need a login. You don't need five different financial apps on your phone anymore. You can just directly log in to this system. Applications that we know and use in traditional finance, they're being rebuilt in this new system, but new applications that weren't possible before are also emerging. Like last year there was this big NFT boom. That's something that just wasn't possible before in the previous system, the ability to have digital ownership of digital assets. Like before, you have a JPEG file or an MP3 that's reproduced millions of times.Alex: I know how to do it. You just right-click, save. That's how I do it. That's how I do it. That's an NFT. [laughs]Camila: [Laughs] Not really. It's non-fungible. In the same way that you can take a picture of the Mona Lisa: you can take a picture, but you don't really own it. This innovation allows actual ownership, provable ownership of digital assets, of something that you couldn't have ownership of before. It's allowing artists and content creators everywhere to monetize their work for the first time. This is like the intranet of value that we're seeing emerge right now.Alex: A lot of times when a new asset class or a new type of thing emerges, it starts off like a revolution, and then the big money moves in and it becomes normal. Right now, you see a lot of institutional investors, hedge funds, et cetera, moving in. Does that just mean it becomes regulated and it becomes another way of doing the transactions and similar things that we see now?Camila: That's a good question. I think right now the big money is moving into Bitcoin. You see all the big hedge funds and money managers just adding Bitcoin to the portfolio. They haven't come into DeFi yet, but I think it's a matter of time, and regulators are still kind of grappling with what to make out of this system because a big requirement for regulation is for money services to perform KYC AML. And like I said, The C5 applications simply don't collect data. So it's not that they won't do KYC AML, it's that they can't do it. That's an issue that regulators are still struggling with right now.Alex: I think on the regulation front, a lot of the big proponents of crypto are the ones who are going to benefit the most from crypto. A lot of the big billionaires who are tweeting and saying that they liked this crypto or that crypto, they own that crypto. So it's not the first time that they have a big way to affect the market and their upside is going to be so much bigger. So there is sort of a Ponzi scheme where the first people that were in are just going to benefit the most. So it makes sense that they're going to say this is going to change the world. Is that concerning?Camila: If you're equating crypto to a Ponzi scheme because investors are pumping their bags, that's the same thing that's happening in the stock market. Crypto is a Ponzi scheme as much as the stock market is a Ponzi scheme, I would say. Of course, investors are shilling their investments, but that happens with all investments. I don't find that to be any different than in any other market. BUILDING A CRYPTO MEDIA COMPANYAlex: You were reporting on crypto, you wrote a book about Ethereum, and then you started this newsletter. Talk to me about how that was in the beginning and how you started to build an audience and how you got the confidence to go off on your own.Camila: The newsletter just started to grow very organically. At first, it was supposed to be a side hustle to what I thought my main job would be as an independent freelance writer. When I finished my book, I just decided to go all-in on The Defiant because I saw the potential there in both the DeFi space and in what I was offering. It just grew very organically. People started recommending it, I added the podcast to it, partnered with a video producer who started leading my YouTube channel, and continued growing The Defiant from there.Alex: How many subscribers?Camila: I think had over 2000 subscribers.Alex: Was that easy, starting to ask people for money? As a reporter, you're making this transition, how was that psychologically?Camila: Asking people for money wasn't the hard part. It was just more like having my own content out there without the oversight of anyone. That was a bit scary at first. And also having my name out there without Bloomberg attached to it.Alex: Imposter syndrome.Camila: Yeah that was the hardest part starting off The Defiant. Being on my own, not having any editors, not having the Bloomberg name. I was wondering whether people would trust me, and they did. After getting 2000 subscribers, I opened the paid subscriptions and started gating some of the content and people were willing to pay for my content. That was super cool.Alex: I'm sure there's a lot of Substack journalists and reporters too who are also looking at making that transition into video and audio. How was that for you? Cause at Bloomberg you were very much a written reporter.Camila: The podcast just happened pretty naturally. I started doing weekly interviews for the newsletter and I was recording them. So I was like, "I'm already doing this. So I might as well turn it into a podcast in the end. I still struggle. My main comfort zone is writing. I don't love talking in front of a camera, like now, or like interviewing in front of a camera [laughs]. I don't think my talent is on talking. I think it's more writing. But I've evolved and learned and I'm hopefully getting better at it. I enjoy doing the interviews, but I don't think I'm the best on-air person. But I try and do my best. Alex: It’s interesting that your differentiators can’t give a clear answer, as if there’s something for them to gain. Everyone's like "buy Ethereum." And it's like, "oh, is cause that, cause you own Ethereum?" And then you meet someone from Bitcoin, they're like "buy Bitcoin." It seems like there are so many cheerleaders that you're like the anti-cheerleader.Camila: Yeah, I can't stand cheerleaders. YouTube channels that are shilling crypto and telling people to buy stuff, that's not us.Alex: Are you critical of a lot of things in crypto? I know at Bloomberg they often pushed you to be critical of some of their biggest clients like JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs. Is that something you do? Are you, do you guys write hard-hitting critical things about crypto or it's just too nascent that it's not even fair to do that?Camila: It’s definitely fair. Like whenever there’s something wrong or off, like a scam or a hack or regulatory issues. We cover everything, we cover the good and the bad. I think we can do a better job at holding people accountable and just doing more investigative reporting like uncovering dirt. That sort of reporting we haven’t done.Alex: Are you saying dirt in the metaverse?Camila: Yes, digital dirt [laughs]. I definitely want to do more of that. We haven't done it because there are just two reporters and we're trying to cover the bases. So there's not much room for investigative reporting. But it's not because there's an editorial line. We want to go there. So for now, we've been covering the good and the bad. The next step will be to really dig deeper and uncover digital stories.Alex: We covered in this show the ConstitutionDAO. What's your takeaway after seeing what happened there?Camila: There's so much potential for doubt for decentralized organizations. It's like people banded together behind that big concept and a big idea. They were able to raise millions of millions of dollars in a couple of days. Thousands of people from all over the world pulled capital from all over the world in just a couple of days. I think that would have been very hard to do.Alex: But then a lot of people lost their money. Gas fees rose. There were all these kinds of issues in the execution in the end.Camila: Yeah, we're super early. Nobody's going to argue that this is the end state of crypto. There are a lot of tech and UX issues to be improved. The good news is that there are very smart people working on layer two solutions and scalability solutions that will make transactions a lot cheaper. These solutions are live right now. It's not like it's some vaporware like empty promises. These scaling solutions are live and working. I think that's part of the takeaway. The potential is huge and it's proven that these are ways to coordinate people and capital very efficiently. But there's also a lot of improvement to be done in the execution and specifically on transaction costs and scalability issues with Ethereum, and those are super well known and they're being worked on. So I think it's a matter of time.Alex: You were a journalist in Argentina for a long time. I'm sure for a lot of people that sounds like some mystical kind of job. Can you share with us the biggest mistake that you did when reporting? What was your biggest f**k up in journalism basically? [both laugh]Camila: I remember one time that I had finished the credit column. It was done, dusted, edited by the end of the day. I realized I had done this very stupid mistake of not realizing the terminal was in pesos and not dollars. And it was like the key to the story. Some bond investments were the biggest in X, I can't remember, but the main crux of the story, I had assumed it was in dollars, and it wasn't.Alex: So the whole case that you made didn't even make any sense?Camila: Yeah. I remember just like calling Papa [David Papadoupolous, managing editor of markets at the time] being like, "Oh my God, I fucked up," [laughs] and we worked it out.Alex: My biggest f**k up was in Rio de Janeiro, I had moved to become the economics reporter and I had to go cause back then they didn't have automated economic data. So we would go and we would have to turn a page in a group of 10 different reporters and they'd time off. They go 10, 9, 8. And we turn the page and I have to say "5.6! 5.6!" on a cell phone, and it was the first time that I was told to do this. And this is like people automatically trade millions of dollars on the Bloomberg terminal, depending on if it's above or below expectations. So I was on it. I turned the page, I saw 5.6 and I was like, "4.6, 4.6.!"Camila: Oh my god, no. [laughs] Were you able to take it back right away?Alex: After that, I was like, "don't send it out. Don't send it out," and then they didn't send it out. In the end, we changed it and we were like a few seconds behind cause they count people off on three seconds. So I made it, and then I started doing sort of meditational things and became the best at turning the page. The best financial monkey.Alex: So you got turned on to crypto in Argentina because there's a big crypto space out there, or because it's the instability of the country makes it more prone to want to embrace crypto?Camila: I think both. It was 2013, Christina Fernandez was in her second term, inflation was out of control as it always is over there, and she had just implemented the harshest currency controls since the 2002 default. At the same time, Bitcoin was in a huge bull market. So in 2013, Bitcoin crossed a hundred bucks for the first time, and then it crossed a thousand. As there always is with a crypto bull market, interest in crypto stories. Do you know Rodrigo Orejuela?Alex: Yeah.Camila: He was in Spain at the time. He had his network in Argentina and he messaged me and said, "Hey, I'm hearing about this thing, like this digital money Bitcoin. It's becoming popular in Argentina." So I was like, "oh, that's interesting." And so I went and checked it out and that's how I pitched the first Bitcoin story that I ever wrote.Alex: [When you transitioned as an entrepreneur,] were there any transferable skills, and on the other side, what was difficult to make that transition?Camila: It's a steep learning curve. I don't think many skills are good that you can take from reporting to building a business. It helps to tell a story and know how to tell a story, communicate a message, that helps for selling your business, selling it to your audience, to investors. Storytelling is a very undervalued skill and talent, and that's helped me a lot in building the Defiant for sure. But other than that it's been a huge learning experience managing a team. I had never done that before. I wasn't a team leader or an editor at Bloomberg. I was just on my own reporting on stuff, and now I'm managing a 17-person team in different areas, not just reporting. I think that's probably the biggest skill that I had to learn hiring, finding the right talent, managing people. And it's been really fun. I really enjoyed building up the Defiant from scratch and having people on board and getting people excited about my dream. So yeah, from reporting, I think not many people realize how valuable storytelling is. So I think we writers are very lucky to have that.Alex: Yeah, and in journalism, you always like try to see cut through the crap and you see through the sales pitches and that type of stuff, how do you make that transition to actually sell and feel good about it?Camila: That's another great skill. Being able to cut through the b******t. I get so many sales emails for The Defiant and PR pitches for it as well. And I feel like I'm super well-trained to know what's good, what's bad. What's fluff or not. So that's been very useful. My business is content, so, for me, I focus on making content that people want to consume. That's my sales pitch. So it's not so much about going out there and selling The Defiant as a business. The time that I had to do that was when I raised money. So I raised 1.4 million seed rounds between the end of 2020 and I closed around the beginning of 2021. And that was when I had to do sales with a deck. That was fine. It was just like showing people what I had done, telling people about my vision. Some people were like, " you're juggling too much,” because I want to do a data platform too. I am building a DeFi-focused data platform, like the Bloomberg of DeFi. And the main concern investors had was like, "You're doing too much. You want to do a data platform, you have the content, you have the newsletter, the podcasts, the video, and you want to do data. You've never built a technical product." I was like, "Yeah, I'm doing everything. I'm doing everything like you either trust me or you don't." [laughs]Alex: How was it as a female entrepreneur, especially in the finance space, which is very male-dominated. Did that create any extra challenges?Camila: I was pretty lucky. I can't say that it has, but at the same time, I don't know what it would have been like as a male. Maybe I would have been very cocky and doubled my evaluation and maybe raised a lot more money. I don't know. So who knows? But I'm happy with how things have turned out. I got a bunch of people to invest in me and trust me and have hundreds of thousands of people who tune into the Defiant every week. I see a lot of just bro-ism and misogyny on Crypto Twitter but I kind of tune it out. Before I used to get comments on interviews about my appearance, and that annoyed me because it's, I'm talking about DeFi and finance and all this stuff and who cares what I look like? Now I don't get that anymore. I don't know if it's because I've aged and people don't focus on that or [laughs] maybe they respect me. It's happened so much throughout the years that I think I've learned to tune out all of that stuff to the point that it doesn't bother me.Alex: What advice would you give someone who's working at a big news organization? Who's going to move and go on their own to Substack or wherever it may be?Camila: I encourage everyone to go for it. I think it's extremely fulfilling to be on your own and running your own kind of mini media company. I think for me, the thing that worked well is to be constant and consistent. Show up every day, hopefully around the same time, with similar quality of content and then people start to get used to you and expect you, and they want to see your email in their inbox. Pick a frequency that you think you can keep up with, pick a topic that you won't get sick of, explore your voice because people also want that personal connection. That's something I had to work on. Have my own voice and strip out all the Bloomberg stuff and dare to have my own kind of analysis and sometimes opinion on things. People really value that. I'd say pick a topic that you're passionate about, diving very deep and becoming very specialized, show up at the same days and times and let people know to expect you and to trust you. And then find your unique voice and way of covering that topic. Alex: Great. There you have it. Thanks so much, Camila. It's great to see you again, and thanks for joining.Camila: Yeah, this was fun. Thank you so much for having me!Thanks for reading Media Jungle ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mediajunglenews.substack.com

Subscribe to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and everywhere you listen to podcasts (if you like the show, leave us a review!). Not much time? Watch short clips on TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube.Welcome back to a new season, and new look ;) for Media Jungle! In this season we’re changing up the format a little to go deeper into the state of the news industry, the future of media, and focus on new media businesses that are changing the game. As always, would love to hear from you… Simply respond to this email with your thoughts, ideas and comments. Thanks for your support!In this episode, I’m joined again with my panel:Robert Mahoney (@RobertMMahoney) — Executive Director of the Committee to Protect Journalists and author of Infodemic, as well as the current Executive Director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. Joel Simon (@JoelSimonSays) — A fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, and a former Executive Director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. He’s the co-author of Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less FreeWatch full episode/clips and subscribe to our Youtube channel here:Below is a transcript of this episode:Alex: Welcome to the 11th episode of the Media Jungle video podcast. I'm your host, Alex Ragir. We're back for a new season. We'll be coming to you every week to break down the business behind the news industry technology and the creator economy. In this week's episode, we're joined. Joel Simon and Robert Mahoney, two guys who have been studying the censorship evolution over the pandemic, and for years defending press freedom as the directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists. Their new book is called the INFODEMIC: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free. We're going to get into how this has played out in the U.S., Russia and Ukraine, and in China. But first:Censorship has changed. It used to be the government scaring you into silence. Now there's social media platforms, troll farms, bots, fake news, shadow-banning. Nowadays, censorship is noise, with screaming and yelling in every direction. Steve Bannon calls it, “flooding the zone with sh*t.” So even if you find the real news, it's kind of messy.Alex: Joel, Robert, thanks so much for joining us.Joel: Thank you. So great to be with you.Robert: Great to be with you. RUSSIA MEDIA MANIPULATIONAlex: Russia. Their propaganda machine is at full throttle. We're seeing what information control is in this era. What do you think about what's happened with Russia since the invasion, and now it looks like the polls at least are showing that Putin's approvals ratings are up. I don't know if that's real or not. For me, it's very hard to understand what's really going on.Robert: Russians, at least most younger ones that have access to Telegram and other channels knew this was going on, but the bulk of the Russian population, which is a demographic that is middle-aged and older, get their news from television. And television presented everything as hunky-dory in Russia doing the pandemic just as it's trying to do [in] Ukraine. So that was a classic dictator’s kind of way of doing it to bring in repressive legislation, churn out propaganda, and a crackdown on anyone who tells a different story from the one that you want out there.Alex: Could talk a little bit about the new kind of mechanisms they're using to suppress ideas or cause confusion.Joel: Let me first say, this is typical. Let's face it. Democracies were in disarray, the United States was in disarray, Europe was in disarray, they were really polarized and divided. China was ascendant in a certain way because they've managed to control COVID even though they did it in very draconian ways. It's not impossible that Putin felt very emboldened as we emerged from the pandemic that he was more in control domestically, and that the west was in disarray and obviously wanted to go into Ukraine for a long time, but maybe he calculated that this was the right moment because of the post-pandemic reality. We may see other surprises like this because, you know, Rob and I judge that like many authoritarians feel very empowered by the way things played out during the pandemic and they perceive the leading democracies as very weakened and more divided.THE IMPORTANCE OF UKRAINIAN JOURNALISTSAlex: Is there anything that was the most surprising or alarming thing about what's happening right now with the war?Robert: Well, I think it's the cynical exploitation of people's health which gets me. You talked about Putin's approval ratings, and they were in the toilet before the pandemic. It's very difficult in Russia to get genuine opinion polls. If I called you up on a landline and say, "what do you think of comrade Putin," you're not going to tell me. It was clear that people were losing trust in him, and he sees the way that the United States is bungling the response to COVID. Putin built a narrative that Russia was winning, and when it suited him, he would say, for example, if the dissident wanted to have hold a rally or a demonstration, he’d say “no, you can't gather because of COVID restrictions,”; but at the same time, he got 80,000 people put it into a football stadium and held a rally to laud Russia's response and the rollout of the first vaccine, the Sputnik V. So, he was able to the disarray in the west to bolster what he was doing as something that showed how good the Russian system was. And rolling on that, he was able then to reach these great heights in Ukraine of popularity by again, building a narrative that everybody is out to get Russia and [they] have to stand strong. Putin has come out of this pandemic and this misadventure in Ukraine, as more popular. Whether he's stronger is a different matter.Alex:  It's a sad moment for journalism over there.Joel: Oh, yeah. We've spent years fighting for the rights of Russian journalists when they were under siege and making so many trips to Russia, to support them and engage with the government, and all the journalists we defended over years and years are in exile. Now they've had to leave. So that space that was so limited already as now, it's now been annihilated. On the other hand, it's interesting what's happening in Ukraine, where there was a strong, but small and somewhat marginal independent media. The information environment in Ukraine is kind of aligned with the war effort. It's interesting to see how agile these journalists are, then they're also doing an amazing job. Let’s also recognize we're seeing a lot of reporting out of Ukraine from the international media; that is all made possible by Ukrainian journalists. You need a team of Ukrainian journalists if you have an international reporting crew to move around, function, to know the landscape, and some have been killed doing this work. It's certainly a difficult and dangerous and dynamic information environment in Ukraine, but we've also seen some positive and inspiring happening there and journalists doing amazing work.CHINA CENSORSHIPAlex: Now we're sort of seeing kind of an alignment with Ukraine and Russia. China really seems to have taken advantage of the new COVID surge that they're apparently having over there with Shanghai getting shut down. How do you think this is this like with them taking two years of continuously controlling a lot of the communication? How is that going to affect journalism in China and freedom of press there moving forward?Robert: The freedom of the press in China is disappearing before our eyes. The last real free press hub in Asia that actually could report on what was going on inside mainland China was Hong Kong, and over the last two years or so, you see the slow strangulation of the free press in Hong Kong, and that that's a sign of what's going on inside China. The fact that there is no one publicly who dare criticize or bring up for debate China's approach to the whole pandemic, which is zero COVID. In other words, sealing down whole neighborhoods or whole cities and trying to prevent the movement of people to hold the social spread of the disease. No one can question that. So, the Chinese authorities have locked down Shanghai. That's 25 million people in one city, which is the. Economic and financial hub of China. Anyone that tries to question that publicly is shut down. They're either arrested or their social media accounts are closed down so that the voices are silenced.Alex: Does that affect the whole world, just by the fact of them proving and testing and using all these methodologies to our new technologies and different ways of controlling human psychology? Is that something that will sort of affect us and other countries?Joel: I think so. you could also see it much more practically, which is that information is a global information system, right? So when China suppresses information about the origins of the disease or suppresses information about whether it's airborne or not, it affects the whole trajectory of the pandemic. If there were a free press in China, when this pandemic first emerged in Wuhan, maybe the outcome would have been different because people would’ve known about people getting sick and there was, you know, this disease that was spreading. And when you had medical professionals sounding the alarm, the Chinese government response was to suppress all of this and to control it. And, yes, it's true. Once they realized that there was a public health threat, they imposed the full authority of the state and to mobilize the society in ways that, you know, would have been impossible in a democratic society. But we have to recognize that the trajectory of the pandemic was set by Chinese censorship. And the other thing we need to understand is that around the world, according to a study carried out by Human Rights Watch, 83 countries suppressed essential rights under the guise of protecting public health during the pandemic. Rob and I call it the “COVID crackdown.” We saw this wave of censorship and information control that swept the world and changed the global political structures and power relationships in ways that are significant, and we're just becoming aware of it because we live in the information age and if you can set the narrative and control and manage information, then you have power. We saw that play out during the pandemic in very negative ways in ways that compromise public health rather than affirming it, and in ways that empowered autocratic and repressive, regimes, and weakened democratic governments around the world.Robert: Chinese scientists gained knowledge of what was happening in Wuhan towards the end of 2019, and we're afraid to say so publicly. They’re the very opposite of what scientists do, which is to publish results and let people know what's going on. If we and the rest of the world had had that knowledge in November, December, January, February, we would have had a jump start on the pandemic, but it was suppressed. It was suppressed by the Chinese state [which} put its full weight into crushing anyone that came out with that information. And so that policy has gained currency because other countries wanted to keep control of the narrative did the same thing. We saw it with Iran, then onto Egypt, and throughout the middle east, and all of those countries failed badly in terms of the COVID rates of death rates and infection. And then to answer your other question, the Chinese also introduced mass surveillance. They already had great surveillance there, but even more, because surveillance technology enables you to exercise social control. You can influence people's behavior, and you can restrict it. And those Chinese companies that make this stuff, facial recognition cameras, temperature scanners, CCTV cameras, sell this stuff abroad. And so I think that one of of the outcomes of this pandemic is going to be an increase in biomedical surveillance and in just general surveillance. Because now in China, if you're infected, the government has your DNA, it has all your biometrics and it can follow you anywhere. It can prevent you from traveling. It can prevent you from buying a train ticket or a plane ticket, and it can quarantine you. It has all the surveillance equipment it needs to keep you in your home. It puts an electronic lock on your door, where if you open your door, it immediately sets off a digital alarm to say that you're breaking quarantine if you’ve been put in quarantine, and if you step outside, facial recognition software will grab you immediately. So you've got an incredible surveillance state that is enabled by a very sophisticated propaganda policy and very sophisticated surveillance, equipment and technology.Alex: So they have a case study for implementing this in other places. What can the people who want to fight for press freedom and freedom of speech do?Joel: This is an information environment in which political leaders can and are able to exploit in ways that undermine public trust, but perpetuate power. So I say if you're a concerned citizen, we need to find a way to break that cycle, and that means, if you live in a democratic country and you'll have the opportunity to participate, it means ensuring that we have leaders who act in a responsible manner. And instead of using these powerful new information tools to divide and polarize us, regardless of the consequences for our society and our health and anything else, try and find ways to a public square, a public dialogue, a public debate, a political debate that is healthy and where differences are recognized and engaged with, but not exploited. There's no magic bullet here. I do think that the path to a better future is clear in the sense that our political leadership in so many countries failed us during the pandemic. We need to hopefully use the tools that are available to us to hold those leaders accountable, and we need to make sure that future leaders use these technologies to manage and ensure a healthier public discourse.HOW THE ‘INFODEMIC’ MADE AMERICANS SICKER AND LESS FREEAlex: What is an “infodemic” and how are we as Americans less free?Joel: Well, an “infodemic” was a term that was used to describe the deluge of information, the misinformation, the confusion, the lies that accompanied the pandemic, and the basic idea of an “infodemic” is that governments are exploiting this opportunity, this moment of confusion to undermine and sabotage public understanding in ways that advance their own political agenda. It happened in the United States, certainly under Trump. It happened in almost nearly every country around the world. And the way in which it makes us less free is sometimes a little bit counterintuitive. In the book, we talk about positive and negative liberty and a lot of people think of freedom in terms of negative liberty. That's like the freedom from government constraint. The fact that we had to wear masks or stay home were curbs on our freedom, but we also talk about positive liberty and that's the ability that people have to participate in the political process in ways that allow them to hold their governments accountable. And when you are subsumed in lies and half-truths, and if you were misled, then your ability to participate in the democratic process is compromised. And that's the way in which so many people around the world, their freedom was compromised. It wasn't only about mask-wearing, it's about the ability that people, that citizens have to need to fully participate politically.Alex: In what ways did the Trump administration or the U.S. government confuse what's happening?Robert: Well, there are many ways, but one of the things is to just sow confusion. I mean, you want people to take measures to protect the health of the people around them during a pandemic. You cannot, you cannot compel people to do things, especially in the United States for very long. Therefore, you need to co-opt them and you need to nudge them and their behaviors, and for that you need trust. If the government says I should wear a mask in order to protect myself, I have to have trust in the government. That trust was totally lacking [when] mask-wearing became politicized because we couldn't get it at the beginning of the pandemic. You’ll remember how confusing it was? We couldn't get real information on which to base informed decisions, and Trump and those in the administration capitalized on this and just sewed confusion, and we had a politicization of a public health crisis which left us all sicker. I mean, the figures tells the story! Look at how many Americans have died and how many of those deaths were needless.Alex: How did the media play a role in this? Where they also complicit to sewing confusion?Robert: Well, the media, especially the national media, tried to do a decent job at reporting. But if you don't have access to the right experts and you're not getting accurate information from the government, the media is left to work it out on its own. Do you remember that press conference where Deborah Birx, the advisor is sitting, saying nothing while Trump is telling us that we maybe have bleach and sunlight? I mean, you know, we had to make sense of that. So the sense-making institutions, whether it's the CDC, whether it's the media, weren't working properly and it sowed confusion. And it allowed for the politicization of basically a public health crisis, and we paid the price.Joel: Another way to think about it, and the way that we sort of described it in the book, is we profile this former police officer, who now teaches at a university in Arizona, named Charles Loftus. [We] described his process: He's a Trump supporter, got COVID and took a antimalarial drug, and [the book focuses on] how he tries to navigate within this immediate environment. He's someone who genuinely wants to understand what's happening around him as a pretty sophisticated news consumer, but people don't understand that people consume news, not necessarily as rational individuals, but as part of communities. So the people around them and the way they think, and their political orientation really informs our understanding. So what politicians did, and notably Trump, but not just Trump and not just in this country, was [recognize] the way in which people consume information and how it reflects their political beliefs. [They] exploited that with these lies and created a kind of self-reinforcing information environment in which whole groups of people were completely alienated and disconnected from the science and from the experts. And this was a strategy that was very effective politically in this country and was actually weaponized and modified in many other countries around the world.Alex: How does this play into to a lot of people we know from a lot of studies with people [who] trust local news more than any type of news? And we also have a crisis in local news where they're shutting down everywhere you look. We have “news deserts,” places that do not have any local news or very little. How did that play out in this whole problem?Robert: We've got whole communities without any news outlets at all, and then in others, where you have the remnants of a news outlet, called “ghost papers,” they've basically been gutted and there's very little reporting. So if you were trying to work out what was going on as an ordinary citizen, you have national media, some of which was very politicized and it was viewed as “pro-Trump” or “anti-Trump” [with] very few actually down the middle, but your local paper may not have been there. Your local radio station may not have been there. In those communities, there was a functioning local news outlet that we’re able to give down-the-middle news about mask-wearing or where you could get vaccines when they came in. Basically actionable information. The kinds of stuff that people want coming from people that lived in that community. And there was this element of trust because in the end, what we show in the book is that without trust, you cannot effectively handle a pandemic. Local news organizations build that trust over years because the reporters come from the community where the readers are; you're all in that together. And this pandemic showed us what exactly is happening. We tell a story of a newspaper [crossing] the border to Tijuana, Mexico, which did do a great reporting [on] the official narrative of how bad the pandemic was and how many people were dying. They sent people to the morgue to count bodies. They sent people out into the streets to build a counter narrative to the official one. In many thousands of U.S. communities, that kind of work just isn't being done and people end up doing their own research. How many people became expert virologists thanks to Google during this pandemic?PROBLEMS WITH PLATFORM MODERATIONJoel: If you're in this space, you recognize that [social media platforms] are private companies and they're not constrained by the First Amendment. We don't actually want the government in there dictating what the platform can and can't, and how they have to moderate their content. But the reality is that they are way too powerful, they're extraordinarily powerful. And a lot of information circulating on these platforms is highly damaging to public health and democracy. And there's a kind of expectation that they'll intervene in some ways to manage the information in a responsible way. The problem is that the platforms are completely reactive. Nobody understands how their policies work. They're not transparent, they can't articulate and explain how they make decisions. They seem to respond to public pressure. One day they have one framework, another day they have another. They are inconsistent in their application of human rights principles. They have different standards from one country to another. It’s all a big mess. So the feeling that people have that the platforms are moderating content in terms of what they should [moderate]. Their sort of responsibility is that they should be moderating this content in a more effective way. The problem is that they're just doing a lousy job and this really had an impact during the pandemic.Alex: I mean, you're in an interesting place right now as big advocates for freedom of the press and freedom of speech and sort of saying we should suppress some views.Joel: I don't think we're saying that. What we're saying is the platforms have a social obligation to act in a responsible manner because they're powerful, but we're not saying specifically that this is exactly how they should do it. I think that's really our argument.Alex: Well, I commend both of you so much for doing this important work and trying to figure out what happened. I think you're really touching on something that a lot of people are feeling, which is what just happened over the past two years. It's just been a whirlwind of information and confusion that we may not have had in years past.Joel: Well, thank you. This was a great conversation and hopefully there are some actionable ideas in the mix here. Because you're right [that] this has been a very confusing moment. And I think everyone, everyone feels somewhat overwhelmed. No question.Robert: Well, I certainly feel overwhelmed by it all. [laughs] And I’m very glad we had this opportunity to talk. I would just say to people to don't lose heart. This may be a once-in-a-century occurrence, but there is a way out of this. And I hope that by reading this book, although we don't come up with great solutions, but pointing out the problems, maybe people who are more intelligent than I am, can think of some ways that we can dig our way out of this mess.Thanks for reading Media Jungle ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mediajunglenews.substack.com

Subscribe to Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher (if you like the show, please help us by leaving a review!)Welcome to new subscribers from Valuetainment, Radical Media, Coinfund, Ethernity, CBS News, Harvard’s Neiman Labs and more. I truly appreciate your support. If you’ve been enjoying the content we are creating, please forward this on to a friend or colleague! A little housecleaning: You can also help improve our deliverability to help us grow by — simply pressing reply and sending an email response here and/or move this email to “primary” if you use Gmail, or click on a few of the links in the email. Thanks so much for the support! Also, if this newsletter is no longer useful to you, simply unsubscribe (no hard feelings at all!) In this episode, I’m joined again with my panel of friends:David Berkowitz — SVP of Marketing for Mediaocean and previously ran marketing for Storyhunter, MRY, 360i, Sysomos and more. Keynote speaker and founder of Serial Marketers community, he minted $CMO crypto coin. Mosheh Oinounou, IMO the best news account on Instagram (@mosheh), and former exec producer for CBS News, Bloomberg TV, Fox News. Now he’s prez of Mo Digital.Watch and subscribe to your youtube channel here:In today’s episode, we cover:The Joe Rogan & Spotify controversyEntertainment journalism in generalHow crypto has changed brand marketingLaunching your own crypto coin as a creatorHow hackers found a loophole in the Oceansea NFT platform and successfully stole $1M & what it means for the evolution of the industryAlso, pick and choose topic you’d like to watch in our short clips playlist below or our even shorter clips on TikTok or Instagram, or other links here.Have someone you think should be on the podcast or any topics you’d like us to cover? Or just want to say hello! Simply reply to this email.Programming note: we will be taking a coupla’ weeks off for the normal podcast (off to Rio de Janeiro :) — but will continue to come out with short clips and will come back better than ever in a few weeks!Have a great week!-alex This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mediajunglenews.substack.com

Subscribe to Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher (if you like the show, please help us by leaving a review!)Welcome to new subscribers from Billboard, Oneof.com, Bloomberg’s Quicktake, Reuters Foundation, IHeartRadio and more. I'd love to know what you think about the podcast.Also, if you have any feedback, comments, or ideas, just respond to this email! In this episode we learn about the practical implications of the boom in in NFT & Metaverse investments, the role social media platforms will play in Web3, and discuss video streaming subscription fatigue. I’m joined again with my panel of friends:Adrian Baschuk, founding partner at Ethernity Chain, the platform that launched NFTs for Pele, Mohamed Ali, Messi, Maluma, Associated Press and more. He’s an old video journalist friend and Storyhunter, turned Crypto exec!Pavan Bahl, founding partner of Bellwether Culture, a content & innovation studio in NYC, host of Fashion is Your Business podcast, a leading B2B podcast covering retail innovation. Mosheh Oinounou, IMO the best news account on Instagram (@mosheh), and former exec producer for CBS News, Bloomberg TV, Fox News. Now he’s prez of Mo Digital.Watch full episode here:In today’s episode, we cover:Microsoft’s Acquisition of Activision - biggest acquisition in gaming historyThe state of Metaverse for collectibles, art, gaming, content, and retailTwitter integrating NFT’s in their profile pics for subscribers only The role of the large social platforms in the NFT spaceNetflix’s 20% drop last week and what it means for video streamingHow content creators can take advantage of the NFT boomAlso, if you wanna see the podcast in video form, subscribe to our youtube channel or watch Media Jungle Clips…Short clips on TikTok or Instagram. Have someone you think should be on the podcast or any topics you’d like us to cover? Or just want to say hello! Simply reply to this email.Have a great week!-alex This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mediajunglenews.substack.com