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Transcript for
2005 Batten Symposium
and
Awards for Innovations in Journalism
Sept.
12, 2005
National
Press Club, Washington, D.C.
Michael Skoler
Managing Director of News, Minnesota Public Radio
It’s
exciting to be here, as a number of people have mentioned, partly because
you don’t get a lot of chance to talk to other people
who are trying new things and sometimes you wonder how crazy you are
for what you’re trying to do. So it’s just wonderful to
have a whole morning – and I really hand it to J-Lab and Jan and
the Knight Foundation for providing an opportunity like this – to
just sit and think about what people are doing and talk about what our
lessons are. It’s very exciting for me and I’m very pleased
to here.
What we’re doing is less about a site and
more about a system for engaging the public.
Some
of the things that I’ve seen here are things that have caught
fire in the newsroom. Certainly what we just heard from John is something
that all of journalism is talking about. Adrian, when he spoke about
chicagocrime.org, I was remembering people in the newsroom gathering
around that site saying, “Look at what these guys have done!” So
there’s just a maelstrom of stuff going on.
What we’re doing is a little quieter, but
I think it actually is making a ton of change in our newsroom.
How many of you yell at the radio or at the TV
during the news or at the morning newspaper over coffee? Well, I’m one of those too,
and my wife is one. And as I drive around I often see people yelling
in the car and most of the time I don’t think it’s the cell
phone, I think they’re yelling at the radio news. That’s
why we created what we call Public Insight Journalism. Ultimately, we
wanted to capture the knowledge that people had because often what they
are yelling is, “Yeah, but you missed this!” or “Why
didn’t you talk to this guy in my organization? He knows more than
the people you had on.”
We started with the premise – and the president of Minnesota Public
Radio said this – that there’s always someone out there that
knows more, and if we can get that in the newsroom before we do the story
or quickly after so we can do follow-ups, we’re going to do better
journalism. That’s the simple premise that we began with, and what
we’ve done for the last three years is basically turn that into
a systematic way to tap the knowledge in our audience and the public
and bring that into the newsroom.
We’ve built processes, we’ve created some knowledge management
tools, we’ve taken some things that have been off the shelf and
we’ve created a new role in the newsroom – a position we
call public insight analyst – to manage the relationship between
the public and the newsroom.
We feel this is important because I think – and I think many people
think – that we are really on the verge of the death of quality
local news. It’s vanishing for a whole variety of reasons in the
commercial media, due to consolidation, do to attention to the bottom
line and the attempt to improve the bottom line by pulling resources
from what’s most costly: the news. And there’s a move toward
infotainment.
We wanted to own local news – just as commercial media are leaving – so
we wouldn’t lose it when media organizations all of a sudden realize
that there is an important market in local news in terms of the money
sense and in terms of the public service sense.
Our
measure of success has always been if we are creating better journalism,
and that’s really our standard for involving the audience. It’s
not involving them for the sake of involving them or to get them to do
anything, it’s whether or not we can actually do better journalism,
and this is what Public Insight Journalism has done for us.
This
was a series we did last fall, “Whose Recovery Is It?” It’s
an example of what we couldn’t have done any other way except through
Public Insight Journalism. A business reporter said that the macroeconomics
show the nation is in recovery, but what we want to do is figure out
how it’s effecting people’s lives, because I’ve talked
to a lot of people who said it’s not touching them at all. So we
sent to a targeted group of 500 people – which is pretty much our
standard push now – a survey that said, “Were you impacted
by the recession? Have you been effected by the recovery? And what signs
do you look for to determine whether or not there is a recovery happening
in Minnesota?” And what we got were 87 incredible, thoughtful responses
from people. We had a truck mechanic saying that he was working overtime
for the first time in three years. We had someone who owned a floral
shop saying, “I tell whether there’s a recovery by the amount
of money people are willing to spend on weddings and funerals.” We
had a bunch of public servants, teachers, government workers, and hi-tech
workers saying that not only did they not see any improvement, but that
it was still getting worse for them. So what we were able to do was create
a news story that was built from the ground up. Instead of going to the
federal reserve economist that we often use as a source, we went to CEOs
and asked about the trends, then we looked for examples of the trends
by finding the person in hi-tech that’s lost a job recently.
We were able to get a map of what sectors or what
parts of Minnesota were being affected by the recovery. And what we
were able to do was
tell a story of why Minnesota’s recovery was so incredibly uneven,
and it was a story that hadn’t been told. We were able to do it
because we started at the bottom and brought the trends up to the experts
to find out more.
We’ve broken a number of stories thanks to Public Insight Journalism.
One that really surprised us was that we had done a story about public
transportation and one of our public sources came back to us and said, “By
the way, did you know that the Department of Transportation is diverting
its funds into new road construction so that the number of unrepairable
roads is increasing at a huge rate?” It was kind of a “pennywise,
pound foolish” approach, and it made a great story.
Most recently we’ve been using this for the Northwest Airlines
strike, which is our backyard – we’re based in the Twin Cities.
In a way this has been a breakthrough for our newsroom to see how you
can use this network of public sources that we’ve created to help
your reporting day in and day out. One of our public sources helped us
break a story on an FBI investigation into potential tampering by some
flight crews on a particular flight. We’ve tapped flyers to get
a handle on how Northwest has been performing in terms of its service
to customers in this time. We’ve tapped FAA employers and inspectors
as well as former Northwest managers and current Northwest employees
to try to get their story of what’s actually going on with the
airline.
We broke a story recently through some of our
public sources and some good, hard-footed reporting on an FAA inspector
who three days into the
strike wrote a memo that said, “I have serious safety concerns
and I think people are jeopardized.” So we just broke the story
that there are two investigations going on based on that. When we found
that, what we did was use this network of sources to check into information.
We have targeted sources now at Northwest – and I’ll go into
how we did that – but when we found out that this FAA inspector
had written this report and had been put in a desk job while they were
investigating this report, we went out to our network and said, “Do
you know about this guy and his allegations?” And more stuff poured
in.
So
this is where we are at this point: We've got 10,000 people who have
agreed to be public sources, typically not by saying, “Sign up
and be a public source for us,” but by us going out and saying “Do
you know anything about this? Do you know anything about schools? About
transportation? About crime?” People come in, and when they do
we tell them that they’re giving us permission to ask questions
for future news coverage. We’ve gotten 10,000 people that way – from
CEOs to social workers to students.
Diversity is something that we’re trying to track now. It’s
hard to do, but we are asking people to provide voluntary information
and we’re getting a fair bit about income. We haven’t started
asking about ethnic background, but we’re thinking about that.
We do get everyone’s zip code, so we can kind of determine diversity
partly based on zip codes.
We’ve
used these sources for over 100 stories and now we’re
in a mode where we’re typically doing one to four queries a week
for reporters.
We’ve found fresh sources, we’ve defined and reported new
series – including that “Whose Recovery Is It?” – using
these sources, and we’re increasingly trying to use it to set our
coverage agenda, not just to get information about stories we want to
cover, but by actually pulling in a wide range of perspectives on story
ideas from the public and bringing it into our editorial meetings. To
me that’s the most exciting part of what we’re doing – it’s
changing us.
We have a ton more work to do. By no means is
this established and running smoothly, but we’ve made a great start and we’ve
got plans to extend this in a number of ways.
What we’ve done is we’ve basically added a new layer to
the newsroom – a layer of analysts and feedback – where we
ask for input from the audience and then the audience comes back and
tells us something.
These
folks who are analysts are journalists. We only have two of them at
the moment but we’re hiring a third in a month who is
going to do some work on the national programs that we have, and
we’ve added a bunch of software tools to enable us to handle the
huge volume of information and tips that we get from the public.
The
heart of the system is something we call the Audience Insight Repository.
It’s something that our IT folks created – we’ve
got an IT department of six that handles far more than just our newsroom.
And this is what the Audience Insight Repository looks like to an analyst,
and this is a president and CEO from a town outside of the Twin Cities
and he’s
into health care and fly fishing and he’s a retiree of the U.S.
Air Force with an income over $200,000. All that information was voluntarily
given to us when we went back and asked him to tell us a little more
about
himself. Our analysts
use this to target queries to people who are most likely to have expertise
about a story.
So
in the case of the Northwest strike, people who told us they work for
Northwest were among the first folks that
we went to. So we ask people
to tell us about their experience with Norhtwest as an employee, as a
flyer, or as a former employee, and people come into a Web site link
where they’ll fill out a little survey. If you’re in the
system already, it will recognize you and pre-fill in the information
about
you. And we ask very simple questions: How have the Northwest labor disputes,
present or past, affected you? What’s your relationship with Northwest?
And we give you a bunch of options so that we can quickly sort these
things.
And this is the response we get: “I’ve worked as a technician
for 15 years, I’ve been laid off five times and moved four times
to keep my job.” That was one of our sources that we got just a
couple of days ago.
We
have analysts who read every one of these responses and annotate them
and classify them by the type of response so that we can find them
quickly and put them together. Then they prepare a summary of the key
themes and issues and the best sources to provide a very compact, two-
or three-page memo that goes out to the reporters and editors working
on the story. The editors and reporters then follow up with an added
pool of resources and some knowledge of what those sources actually
know and what they can provide.
The strike coverage, as I mentioned, has been
a breakthrough because it has shown how Public Insight Journalism can
keep us ahead of a story
day to day. We’ve put out tons of queries and new information is
coming in all the time. We sent one of our public insight analysts out
to the airport handing out cards on the first day of the strike – a
Saturday – that said, “Tell Minnesota Public Radio your experience
with Northwest Airlines.” It has an 800 number, it has our Web
site on it, and it has a little explanation of Public Insight Journalism
and what this network is.
We always, always thank people, which is huge.
We send a thank you note and it always comes from a person. People
tell us, “I didn’t
think anyone was actually listening. I thought I was sending this into
oblivion.” We try to thank people at least twice and tell them
when the story that they actually helped provide information for is going
to be on. Even if they didn’t provide information we used, we tell
them they helped us design the coverage.
We’ve got a bunch of tools. What I’ve just outlined – a
targeted query to a specific group – is really a lot of what we
do. We also do open queries on the radio where we give an 800 number,
but we’ve got a bunch of other tools. We have simulations like
a game to balance the state budget, we hold meetings around the state
where we gather people, feed them dinner and talk about what’s
going on that the media aren’t covering.
At the bottom of every story on our Web site we
have a button that says, “Help
us cover this story.” A ton of leads come in from that, and it’s
the simplest thing you can do on your Web site.
We occasionally send out these surveys that say, “What are we
missing? What is the media missing?” And we also do what every
other newsroom does, which are listener calls, mail, complaints and other
things that aren’t often widely read, but we have our analysts
read it all and pull in any information and tips we get, and we get a
lot from there.
This is a quick example of one of our simulations
that drew in tons of people. It’s a game to balance the state budget, and people
really responded to it. We had thousands of people use it. We’ve
done it twice, and the first time we got 11,000 budget plans submitted
and this year we actually enabled people to save different budgets and
send them to their legislators. In terms of impact, we got notes from
legislators saying, “Thank you. I was finally able to have an intelligent
conversation with constituents because they sent me their plan and I
could talk about issues with them.” But most importantly – because
we don’t really do it for that, we do it for us – we read
every comment. Whenever you click on aid to local government or higher
education, you get a series of options for adding money or subtracting
money and there’s a box saying, “Tell us why you made that
choice?” We read all those comments and we aggregate all of the
choices people made and then we sit down and say, “What does that
tell us about what our coverage should be?”
In
this case, we saw that people didn’t like the gambling tax
the governor was proposing. We got a bunch of comments saying, “I
didn’t realize how easy it was to balance the budget. There are
so many options.” So we looked at what those people were doing,
and they were going to rather obscure taxes that weren’t even on
the public debate. So we did a story talking about all the different
options for balancing the budget by providing new revenue, when all the
governor was talking about was gambling, and in a few weeks they were
all of a sudden talking about a gas tax and a tobacco tax. The gas tax
was thrown out, but the tobacco tax was hugely popular and was adopted.
And we were able to anticipate issues like these that would be coming
up quickly. Also, we used those results to help us determine poll questions
so that when we do scientific polls, we actually take some hypotheses
from this and we test it and get real results on it.
We’re now broadening our initial idea of one-on-one communication
with people to try to connect people so that they spur discussion among
themselves, because ideas come out of those discussions that are surprises
to them and to us. Then we assign reporters to cover them
if they’re interesting enough.
We
created something we call the “Idea Generator” software.
It’s very simple, but we did this for the future of small towns.
Small towns are dying in Minnesota and many places, and we posed the
question, what are the key problems and how do you solve them? We give
people certain categories – people, economic opportunity, human
services, telecommunications – and people submit ideas, then they comment
on each
other’s ideas and they rate each other’s ideas. The green
balls you see are the ratings, and the front page has the most highly-rated
ideas. You can click on it and read the ideas and you can read the comment
thread, and we read all of that. We also provided it to the University
of Minnesota, who had a small town symposium, and we fed this to facilitators
for their discussions. Then we sat back and said, “What are the
issues that people are seeing that we want to be covering?”
Why are we doing this? We’re raising money, but we’re also
spending a certain amount of money and certainly a lot of time trying
to do this, and we’re putting in a lot of effort trying to change
the newsroom. We’re doing it because it’s part of our core
strategy for growth. We really feel that mainstream journalism is heading
toward an evolutionary dead end unless it changes.
The trends that are pushing this – and this shouldn’t be
new to anyone in this room because you folks are the ones that are understanding
this – is a huge rise in the online culture of sharing information.
There’s an explosion of user-driven media, just in the blogs and
the comments John was just talking about, and there’s an increasing
public distrust of the media.
It’s
really incredible the amount of time that people are willing to put
in to just write an add-on for Sim City 4 or whatever. And you
see that everywhere – Epinions and a million Web sites – including
citizen journalism, which is taking off thanks partly to the funding
that J-Lab is providing. At the same time, mainstream journalists are
losing their connection to the public – and some of you worry about
this more than others; I know I worry about it a lot. This is how Nicholas
Kristof put it in a New York Times op-ed: “We
in the news media are widely perceived as arrogant, out of touch and
untrustworthy.”
The Carnegie Foundation of New York just released
a report earlier this year called Abandoning the News about how youth
were abandoning the news,
and their conclusion was that news organizations must bring the public
into news gathering and delivery in ways unimaginable a few years ago.
And again, I feel like I’m preaching to the choir because I don’t
think these are new ideas for anyone.
Where are we going with all of this? We’ve come a long way but
there’s a far longer road ahead. We have a national set of programs
under our national brand, which is American Public Media, and our next
step is to test this on a national basis rather than a community basis
in Minnesota. This is a big stretch for us. Can we actually find
networks of people interested in certain topics nationally and tap that
for series?
We’re
working with Marketplace Money and soon with the Marketplace business
show that many of you may know about. American Radio Works is
our documentary unit, and we’ve got a series on international adoption
that will be airing in October. We’ve been doing a lot of work
with them and are conceiving databases about youth and children’s
issues that will spawn a number of documentaries, so we’re going
to be testing this nationally.
Finally, we’ve just started piloting a new radio show that is
all about public insight. We’ve created an online community that
literally sifts themes, suggests stories and interviews, and we even
invite those folks to come in and help produce the segments. So it’s
an attempt to actually create a community that determines what’s
going to be on a radio show. We’ve done one pilot, we’re
going to do another, and our vision is to have a weekly radio show with
a group of people that basically are figuring this out along with us.
Question – Are you doing
anything with podcasting so that it’s
not just text?
Skoler – We are. In the
newsroom we’re in the midst of figuring
out our podcasting strategy, which we’ll be rolling out in about
two weeks. We’re thinking about ways to have podcasting and audio
blogging and the like as part of Public Insight Journalism. Right now
we’re just trying to figure out how to get the information in and
how to distill it in a way that journalists can actually use it.
And before the question gets asked, journalists
in our newsroom were incredibly skeptical. The first reaction to this
was, “Oh god,
another hoop we’ve got to jump through on deadline to do a story.
Now we’ve got to use Public Insight Journalism.” That was
about two and a half years ago, and that’s completely changed.
Journalists have found that they can get sources faster using this extended
network of sources and they can find stories they wouldn’t have
found.
Not all the reporters are using it, especially
some of our bureau reporters because we don’t have enough sources in their specific area, but
increasingly people are jumping on the bandwagon. Now the big change
for us is to get their thinking from, “How do I use these tools
to get the story I want to do?” to the editors thinking, “How
do I use all this information to decide what stories to cover?” And
that’s tricky in a newsroom that’s used to basically saying, “This
is what we think is the news that you should be hearing,” rather
than, “Help us understand the news that you want to hear.”
Question – What is your relationship with your public?
Skoler – That’s a tough question, so I’m going to
kind of veer off to the side of it. Often we’re asked, “Is
this civic journalism?” And the answer is no. We don’t think
of it as civic journalism, partly because civic journalism at Minnesota
Public Radio was this bolt-on unit that was not part of the newsroom
that was an attempt to get citizens engaged in issues based on reporting
or issues that we determine. And in a budget cut we lost the person doing
civic journalism, and it went away and no one noticed.
Our aim with this is to make this such a part
of the newsroom that it can’t go away. It’s the way we
do journalism, and these analysts just happen to be reporters who are
doing this sort of work rather than
reporters doing other sort of work.
There are many tough questions around it and we
try to approach it with that basic notion of “are we doing better
journalism?”
As a byproduct of that, we tend to pull people
together. I showed you a meeting we had about a series we did on the
education achievement gap – the
gap between minority and white students on standardized tests – and
at that meeting we got 200 people and it was an incredibly diverse group.
It was the end of a series and the end of an Idea Generator about how
to solve the problem and we got these people together. And the end result
for me was 200 very diverse people in our database who we know care about
education and that we can tap again. For them, there were a lot of discussions
that came out of that, but if this were civic journalism I would worry
about where that went and whether or not people mobilized, and we haven’t
really been tracking that.
Our aim is better journalism, and I suspect that
it’s changing
our relationship with the community. John mentioned that he thinks of
his consumers as niches, but I would argue that we think of our readers
as names and addresses, and that’s what that database is. They
are people who we know what their interests are. They tell us a ton of
information about themselves and we’re trying to use that information
to figure out where they can help us and where they have expertise. So
it’s a slightly different perspective.
Question – Can you tell
us how you verify that all of these people are who they say they are
and have done what they say they’ve done?
Skoler – One thing that’s built into our database is this
thing called “confidence level” that we’re just beginning
to figure out. It is something that’s partly automatic and partly
manual, and it can be adjusted. It shows how much confidence we have
in the source and the information we’re getting. It’s mainly
based on our prior experience with the source – whether or not
we’ve met the source face-to-face or if we’ve had conversations
on the phone with them or if we’ve just pulled their information
from a query. Their confidence level starts at 50 percent and you can
lose confidence or gain confidence based on the comments you get. It
also has something to do with the number of interactions we’ve
had with the person and when information they’ve had has actually
been helpful and when it’s matched certain things that we’ve
wanted.
We’re trying to actually build in a system that gives us some
guidance because what we want to do is build a system so new analysts
can come in but the relationships are maintained. We don’t want
it to be the typical reporter-source relationship that dies when the
reporter moves on to another publication or radio station. So that’s
that part of it.
How do we verify it? We take the information that
we get from our sources and we put it through the standard journalistic
practices of vetting
information and double-sourcing material. I’ve got a bit of a tug
of war with our online news editor, who likes to have us take whatever
we get and put it on the Web as extra content. That’s not really
the idea of this.
We promise people that we won’t put anything on the air unless
we’ve checked with them beforehand. The purpose of this is that
we then have analysts go back to prime sources, call them, get more information
about them and pass it on to the reporter. If it’s an important
bit of information, the reporter will try to meet with them, and if they
can’t meet with them then we treat it as kind of an anonymous source
who we use as a lead to get to a source that we meet face-to-face and
know, hopefully to go on the record. So
it’s standard journalism at a certain
point.
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