Reflections from Washington D.C.
No Simple Answers

 

Marty Baron, pictured with Director Lynette Clemetson, was
generous with his time and gave a seminar for the Fellows during
their visit to The Washington Post.

Walking down the street on my way to the Online News Association’s annual conference at the Marriott Wardman Park hotel in Washington, D.C., a recognizable man with short gray hair and neon shorts ran past me. He looked like John Podesta.

If it was Podesta, it made sense that he would be running away from wherever reporters were gathering. As manager of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, Podesta led the post-election hand wringing about Russians stealing his emails, media fascination with the email saga and the need for a more intelligent way to report on politics. Broadly, I agreed with him. That’s why, after 14 years covering politics in New York City, with a popular newsletter under my belt and enough appearances on cable news shows to justify carrying a blazer and tie in my backpack, I decided to apply for a Knight-Wallace Fellowship.

I was so steeped in daily political coverage that when I heard my class of Fellows was coming to D.C., it seemed incomprehensible that we would do anything other than talk about the 2016 presidential election the entire time. I was surprised when the conversations unfolded differently.

Our group met with Marty Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post, and top editors at NPR and The Atlantic. All were adapting a digital-dominant approach to news and figuring out how to deliver more content to their core constituencies and paying customers. I wondered about the unseen costs of this faster, customer-focused approach.

I hoped to get answers at the conference. When ONA started in 1999, it was like a support group. Digital reporters were interlopers in the newsroom, afterthoughts sitting at the kids’ table, far away from the adults. Today, across the street from the conference hotel, an old Washington Post newspaper box sat empty, spray-painted black and locked. The conference, by contrast, was crammed with over 3,000 digitally-focused attendees. Surely this would be the place to offer direction on the issues nagging at me. How should we use the internet to better cover politics? How are smart reporters using Facebook and Twitter? Can I make a podcast about politics as popular as a cat video?

There was plenty on offer about the latest digital trends. Left hanging, though, remained the thorniest questions raised by the 2016 presidential election. For instance, can reporters clustered on the East Coast reliably cover Red State America? This topic was front and center in ONA’s first session, led by CNN’s Brian Stelter: “Trust, Truth and Questions for the Media.” Panelist Nikole Hannah-Jones, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, said the public is losing trust in the media because newsrooms aren’t diverse enough. Cenk Uygur, co-founder and host of The Young Turks, said it was less about race and more about poverty, an issue “corporate media” and well-paid reporters are not good at covering.

Both of those seemed correct, and yet, incomplete. I found myself nodding along when public radio reporter Asma Khalid said the primary problem was a dearth of reporters in the majority of American communities. She noted a disturbing trend during the presidential race. Reporters – often from the East or West Coasts – tracked down voters – often in the middle of the country – grabbed their quotes, then left. Practically nobody stuck around, let alone made return trips. Khalid did. “I never thought I’d see you again,” one voter told her. The anecdote reminded me of the “left-behind” places ProPublica reporter Alec MacGillis spoke about weeks earlier at the annual Graham Hovey Lecture back in Ann Arbor.

On the final day of the conference, I entered the main ballroom minutes before the start of a session called “When Satire is the Most Effective Political Coverage.” I sat down next to a man conspicuously older than most at the convention. It was Jeff Jarvis, director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism and a professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. We talked about the fact that the American Society of News Editors was slated to hold their annual meeting in the same hotel a week later. The ASNE conference, Jarvis speculated, would be much smaller. He was drawing a direct correlation between conference size and industry potency.

Jarvis looked out at the amorphous ONA crowd in the ballroom – many still ambling to their seats with tote bags full of CNN water bottles and Facebook notebooks – and said, “They don’t realize they won.”

I left Washington and ONA with more questions than answers. That’s similar to how I started my career at the Queens Tribune, often returning from press conferences with pages full of quotes and a head full of questions. Now in Ann Arbor, that confusion feels comforting. The questions wouldn’t be worth studying if the answers were easy.

 

Azi Paybarah is a 2018 Knight-Wallace Fellow and a senior reporter at Politico New York covering City Hall, politics, crime and the New York Police Department.

Alumni Spotlight on Tracy Jan ’15

Tracy Jan Washington Post
Tracy Jan ’15 provides 2018 Knight-Wallace Fellows with a behind-the-scenes
tour of The Washington Post on their fall trip to the nation’s capital.

Sitting in a hotel room watching propaganda videos from a racist hate group isn’t the way most people would spend a week in Boca Raton, Florida. But back in October 2016 issues like race, class and religion were front-and-center in a presidential campaign grinding toward its improbable conclusion.

At the time, Tracy Jan covered national politics for The Boston Globe’s Washington, D.C. bureau, a beat she’d had since 2011.

For this particular assignment, Jan spent a week in Florida writing about the growing Islamophobia that had taken root there – part of the Globe’s “America on Edge” series.

She was in her element, in a journalistic sense – even though it meant that Jan, who is Chinese American, spent her time attending hate group meetings and lunching with conspiracy theorists – all of whom were white Donald Trump supporters.

“It was cool to be able to peek into a world that was so foreign to me and write about how this hostility, fear and anger was being exploited by Trump,” Jan said over drinks this fall in downtown Washington, D.C.

When The Washington Post came calling about potential opportunities, Jan jumped at the chance to create a new beat covering the intersection of race and the economy.

As a 2015 Knight-Wallace Fellow, she studied “Morality and Money in Medicine.” In addition to covering politics, Jan was also The Globe’s national health care reporter, a role she had hoped to more fully inhabit after the 2016 campaign.

She spent her year in Michigan sitting in on confidential hospital meetings about patient care, learning about reproductive justice, medical ethics and public health. She also wrote a screenplay about Dr. Tim Johnson, chair of the U-M Health System’s Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and his pivotal role in the national debate over an abortion procedure called “partial birth abortion” by its opponents.

But she said she came away from her fellowship year with much more than a string of story ideas, subject matter expertise and sources.

“In a larger sense, the Fellowship helped me realize that one’s ‘work’ doesn’t have to be your life,” she said. “But as journalists, we tend to make it so. So we might as well be writing about the things we care deeply about.”

Having written about health issues for several years, she felt ready for change. When The Washington Post came calling about potential opportunities, Jan jumped at the chance to create a new beat covering the intersection of race and the economy. She saw the job as a pivotal platform from which to dive more deeply into the divisions that defined the 2016 campaign and widening racial and economic inequalities.

“I like that it’s not a general ‘race’ reporting job but one grounded on the financial team, which helps me bring a bit more focus and structure to this hugely important and oftentimes unwieldy topic,” she said. “The motto here is ‘A1 or viral.’”

“I felt like I had been preparing for a job like this my entire life,” she said.

Her new beat is broad, and Jan has the freedom to choose her priorities – whether it’s a quick piece highlighting the persistent wealth gap between black and white Americans or a front page story about how Facebook disproportionately censors black activists.

“I like that it’s not a general ‘race’ reporting job but one grounded on the financial team, which helps me bring a bit more focus and structure to this hugely important and oftentimes unwieldy topic,” she said. “The motto here is ‘A1 or viral.’”

That means juggling front page or Sunday enterprise and breaking news with chattier web-only pieces to inject The Post as part of the national conversation about race.

Since the beat is new, Jan said she’s focusing on making sure that it becomes seen as an essential part of The Post’s coverage – “so eyeballs are always a consideration, as well as impact.”

Closing in on her first year on the job, Jan said she still has much to learn. She doesn’t see herself as a business “wonk.” Instead, she is focusing the sensibilities she developed covering politics and health in a new direction.

“The things I learned covering lobbying, power and influence as a political reporter should also be front and center on this beat,” she said, “because at the heart, it’s about inequality – who has and wants more, and who is left behind.”

Adam Allington is a 2012 Knight-Wallace Fellow and an environmental reporter for Bloomberg BNA

Fellow’s Dream to Help the Deaf No Longer Silenced

Ann Arbor is a familiar place for me. It is where I grew up and it’s the town I’m proud to say my family calls home. An interview in the spring of 2014 for a Knight-Wallace Fellowship at Wallace House, however, took me to a nook of the city just east of the campus’ edge and it changed my life. I walked into 620 Oxford Rd. unsure of what would be asked of me, or what I would say or do, after responding to the “What’s your dream?” query that I knew was coming.

As I sat at the short end of a long, rectangular table my plan to impress the nine-member selection committee surrounding me seemed to be working. I was using American Sign Language while I answered the first question and that was playing well. “When you do that, make sure you have napkins to hand out because they’ll all be drooling,” friend and former Knight-Wallace Fellow John U. Bacon advised while preparing me for this very moment. What I could not be prepared for was what happened next.

After discussing sign language, deaf culture and my experiences as a child of deaf parents, Charles Eisendrath lowered his head, peered at me and asked, “Have you ever thought about putting together your knowledge and passion of sign language, deaf culture and sports?” That question put the wheels in motion for a journey I didn’t see coming like a linebacker making a blindside sack. “No,” I said quietly, knowing my response did not impress any of the assembled panelists.

“Well, why not?” Eisendrath pressed.

“With the day-to-day grind of my job along with being a husband and dad, I haven’t had time to think about it,” I said, trying to defend a dormant dream.

“Maybe you should,” he fired back.

“Maybe you should give me a spot in this Fellowship and I’ll come up with something,” I shot back with a disarming smile.

“Well played,” University of Michigan President Mark Schlissel said with a nod when hearing a recollection of the aforementioned exchange during his recent Wallace House visit with the Fellows.

“And someday,” I told Schlissel matter-of-factly, “this will be a Michigan Difference commercial.”

Back when I began the fellowship my plan was to write my first book. Scotty Bowman, Mike Babcock, Larry Brown, Jim Leyland, Tom Izzo, Lloyd Carr, Bob Bowman, John Beilein, Mark Dantonio and Carol Hutchins—some of the best coaches in a handful of sports—agreed to help me. Those interviews about leadership and communicating will have to wait. Since my first semester individual mandatory meeting with Eisendrath, relentlessly pursuing a platform to make media accessible to my parents, my nephews and about one million people in the U.S. has become my mission. Attempting to make the most of an opportunity with infinite possibilities, a slew of experts in and around the University have set me up for success by graciously sharing tips and connecting me with other people, all of whom have been eager to help. Five students in Len Middleton’s course that focuses on creating a business plan are helping me put my dream on paper. A 12-minute pilot program was filmed on campus and has been reviewed by two focus groups of deaf people meeting at Wallace House.

A second pilot has been scheduled for April. Hopefully by this summer, a Deaf Access Media website and YouTube channel will feature a 30-minute weekly show that will give deaf and hard-of-hearing people news, business, politics, sports, entertainment and more in American Sign Language for the first time. The show will attempt to address the failure of closed captioning, which is in English, a second language for some deaf and hard of hearing people. In some cases, English is a distant second language. My plan is to expand to a daily show and repurpose radio and podcasts along with all forms of media for deaf audiences.

My project is as close to my heart as my rib cage and my fellow Fellows and the Knight-Wallace Fellows are not far removed. Each person, including the staff, who has the good fortune to walk through the doors at 620 Oxford has provided me with encouragement. Some have chipped in with their expertise behind cameras and at keyboards.

When our year kicked off with the Hovey Lecture in the fall of 2014, Bacon implored the new class to come away from the fellowship with something tangible to show for the opportunity. I’m thankful that with a team the late, great Bo Schembechler would be proud of, I will do just that this spring. I also hope something else Bacon said isn’t published for many decades. “Man, Lage,” Bacon said, shaking his head from side to side when he heard about my project. “If you pull this off, it will be in the lead of your obituary.”

Learning to Wear Many Multimedia Hats

What’s the best way to get to know new people who share a common interest? Join a club. As we settled in for the first semester of our fellowship, we noticed a recurring theme in discussions at Wallace House: the growing need to be your own everything on assignments. We would have to become the videographer, photographer and audio technician on every story. The message came in loud and clear, over and over again: newsrooms are looking for more content to post on the website, on Facebook, on Twitter, and it’s up to us to be efficient providers.

With these ideas in mind, we started the Knight-Wallace AV Club. Think beyond the high school version; there are no film projectors or running slide shows. This AV Club focused on digital world problems including improving camera and audio skills. Print, radio and television journalists joined the club. Most had basic knowledge of professional DV cams and audio setup but some were starting from scratch. My biggest concern stemmed from past experience. After I had completed my former company’s training program, I went for months without needing to use the equipment and suddenly, I would need to haul out that box of gear, hoping my memory didn’t fail me on deadline. However, the club’s built-in mandate to practice together gave promise to committing these techniques to our long-term memory banks.

We quickly found that this fellowship organization needed a faculty advisor. New Knight-Wallace board member Jim Burnstein and Assistant Director, Birgit Rieck, found just the right fit in Screen Arts and Cultures instructor, Victor Fanucchi. He navigated around our busy class and seminar schedules to create a program tailored to our individual needs. Working out of both Wallace House and Michigan’s Instructional Support Services Media Center, Victor covered a different topic each week. Club members got the chance to focus on one area of learning: lighting, audio, composition or a complete overview of each topic. The same amount of time was spent on the science behind shutter speed selection as strengthening a person’s comfort level handling the equipment.

Television producer Eric Strauss said, “Even as someone who has already had experience using videos cameras, lights and microphones as a producer at ABC News, I found the KWF AV club very valuable. Victor was able to combine introductory and advanced elements in the same class. For me, the sessions proved to be refreshers and an opportunity to learn some advanced techniques.”

I am left-handed by nature. Working with Victor, however, I realized I was faster and steadier working with my right hand. Beyond learning from Victor, we learned from each other. Jason Margolis, correspondent with Public Radio International’s program “The World,” shared his audio knowledge. He offered tips for handling sound in spaces with less than ideal acoustics and how to get the best microphone position for interviews on the fly. Associated Press reporter Samantha Henry recounted her experiences as a multimedia journalist, reassuring us that with patience we, too, could successfully navigate this new way of covering stories from a multitude of different angles.

Even after completing the formal sessions, Club members are still in action. As fellow Larry Lage develops his project, a news platform for the deaf and hard of hearing, we are video documenting his progress and conducting on-camera interviews as part of his audience research.

Bottom line: the future favors multimedia journalists. As newsrooms rely more on social media to promote content and engage viewers, we can find more opportunities to extend coverage and raise our digital profiles by improving our abilities across all platforms. The Knight-Wallace AV Club brought us all a little closer to reaching that goal.