In Conversation

Poll-arized

Anonymous — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 21:08:32 +0000

Poll-arized Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 08/16/2024 - 15:08

By Joe Arney

Deepfakes. Distrust. Data manipulation. Is it any wonder American democracy feels like it has reached such a dangerous tipping point?

As our public squares have emptied of reasoned discussion, and our social media feeds have filled with vitriol, viciousness and villainy, we’ve found ourselves increasingly isolated and unable to escape our echo chambers. And while it’s easy to blame social media, adtech platforms or the news, it’s the way these forces overlap and feed off each other that’s put us in this mess.

It’s an important problem to confront as we close in on a consequential election, but the issue is bigger than just what happens this November, or whether you identify with one party or another. Fortunately, the College of Media, Communication and Information was designed for just these kinds of challenges, where a multidisciplinary approach is needed to frame, address and solve increasingly complex problems.

“Democracy is not just about what happens in this election,” said Nathan Schneider, an assistant professor of media studies and an expert in the design and governance of the internet. “It’s a much longer story, and through all the threats we’ve seen, I’ve taken hope from focusing my attention on advancing democracy, rather than just defending it.”

We spoke to Schneider and other CMCI experts in journalism, information science, media studies, advertising and communication to understand the scope of the challenges. And we asked one big question of each in order to help us make sense of this moment in history, understand how we got here and—maybe—find some faith in the future.

***

Newsrooms have been decimated. The younger generation doesn’t closely follow the news. Attention spans have withered in the TikTok age. Can we count on journalism to serve its Fourth Estate function and deliver fair, accurate coverage of the election?

Mike McDevitt, a former editorial writer and reporter, isn’t convinced the press has learned its lessons from the 2016 cycle, when outlets chased ratings and the appearance of impartiality over a commitment to craft that might have painted more accurate portraits of both candidates. High-quality reporting, he said, may mean less focus on finding scoops and more time sharing resources to chase impactful stories.

How can journalism be better?

“A lot of journalists might disagree with me, but I think news media should be less competitive among each other and find ways to collaborate, especially with the industry gutted. And the news can’t lose sight of what’s important by chasing clickable stories. Covering chaos and conflict is tempting, but journalism’s interests in this respect do not always align with the security of democracy. While threats to democracy are real, amplifying chaos is not how news media should operate during an era of democratic backsliding.”

***

After the 2016 election, Brian C. Keegan was searching for ways to use his interests in the computer and social sciences in service of democracy. That’s driven his expertise in public-interest data science—how to make closed data more accessible to voters, journalists, activists and researchers. He looks at how campaigns can more effectively engage voters, understand important issues and form policies that address community needs.

You’ve called the 2012 election an “end of history” moment. Can you explain that in the context of what’s happening in 2024?

“In 2012, we were coming out of the Arab Spring, and everyone was optimistic about social media. The idea that it could be a tool for bots and state information operations to influence elections would have seemed like science fiction. Twelve years later, we’ve finally learned these platforms are not neutral, have real risk and can be manipulated. And now, two years into the large language model moment, people are saying these are just neutral tools that can only be a force for good. That argument is already falling apart.

The U.S. news media has blood on its hands from 2016. It will go down as one of the worst moments in the history of American journalism.”

Mike McDevitt
Professor, journalism

“You could actually roll the clock back even further, to the 1960s and ’70s, when people were thinking about Silent Spring and Unsafe at Any Speed, and recognizing there are all these environmental, regulatory, economic and social things all connected through this lens of the environment. Like any computing system, when it comes to data, if you have garbage in, you get garbage out. The bias and misinformation we put into these A.I. systems are polluting our information ecosystem in ways that journalists, activists, researchers and others aren’t equipped to handle.”

***

One of Angie Chuang’s last news jobs was covering race and ethnicity for The Oregonian. In the early 2000s, it wasn’t always easy to find answers to questions about race in a mostly white newsroom. Conferences like those put on by the Asian American Journalists Association “were times of revitalization for me,” she said. When this year’s conference of the National Association of Black Journalists was disrupted by racist attacks against Kamala Harris, Chuang’s first thoughts were for the attendees who lost the opportunity to learn from one another and find the support she did as a cub reporter.

“What’s lost in this discussion is the entire event shifted to this focus on Donald Trump and the internal conflict in the organization, and I’m certain that as a result, journalists and students who went lost out on some of that solidarity,” she said. And it fits a larger pattern of outspoken newsmakers inserting themselves into the news to claim the spotlight.

I think 2024 will be the first, and last,
A.I. election.”

Brian C. Keegan
Assistant professor, information science

How can journalism avoid being hijacked by the people it covers?

“It comes down to context. We need to train reporters to take a breath and not just focus on being the first out there. And I know that’s really hard, because the rewards for being first and getting those clicks ahead of the crowd are well established.”

***

Agenda setting—the concept that we take our cues of what’s important from the news—is as old an idea as mass media itself, but Chris Vargo is drawing interesting conclusions from studying the practice in the digital age. Worth watching, he and other CMCI researchers said, are countermedia entities, which undermine the depictions of reality found in the mainstream press through hyper-partisan content and the use of mis- and disinformation.

How did we get into these silos, and how do we get out?

“The absence of traditional gatekeepers has helped people create identities around the issues they choose to believe in. Real-world cues do tell us a little about what we find important—a lot of people had to get COVID to know it was bad—but we now choose media in order to form a community. The ability to self-select what you want to listen to and believe in is a terrifying story, because selecting media based on what makes us feel most comfortable, that tells us what we want to hear, flies in the face of actual news reporting and journalistic integrity.”

“I can’t blame the reporters who feel these moments are worth covering, because I feel as conflicted as they do.
Angie Chuang
Associate professor, journalism

“I do worry about our institutions. I don’t like that a majority of Americans don’t trust CNN.
Chris Vargo
Associate professor, advertising,
public relations and media design

***

Her research into deepfakes has validated what Sandra Ristovska has known for a long time: For as long as we’ve had visual technologies, we’ve had the ability to manipulate them. Seeing pornographic images of Taylor Swift on social media or getting robocalls from Joe Biden telling voters to stay home—content created by generative artificial intelligence—is a reminder that the scale of the problem is unprecedented. But Ristovska’s work has found examples of fake photos from the dawn of the 20th century supposedly showing, for example, damage from catastrophic tornadoes that never happened.

Ristovska grew up amid the Yugoslav Wars; her interest in becoming a documentary filmmaker was in part shaped by seeing how photos and videos from the brutal fighting and genocide were manipulated for political and legal means. It taught her to be a skeptic when it comes to what she sees shared online.

“So, you see the Taylor Swift video—it seems out of character for her public persona. Or the president—why would he say something like that?” she said. “Instead of just hitting the share button, we should train ourselves to go online and fact check it—to be more engaged.”

Even when we believe something is fake, if it aligns with our worldview, we are likely to accept it as reality. Knowing that, how do we combat deepfakes?

“We need to go old school. We’ve lost sight of the collective good, and you solve that by building opportunities to come together as communities and have discussions. We’re gentler and more tolerant of each other when we’re face-to-face. This has always been true, but it’s becoming even more true today, because we have more incentives to be isolated than ever.”

***

Early scholarly works waxed poetic on the internet’s potential, through its ability to connect people and share information, to defeat autocracy. But, Nathan Schneider has argued, the internet is actually organized as a series of little autocracies—where users are subject to the whims of moderators and whoever owns the servers—effectively meaning you must work against the defaults to be truly democratic. He suggests living with these systems is contributing to the global rise of authoritarianism. In a new book, Governable Spaces, Schneider calls for redesigning social media with everyday democracy in mind.

If the internet enables autocracy, what can we do to fix it?

“We could design our networks for collective ownership, rather than the assumption that every service is a top-down fiefdom. And we could think about democracy as a tool for solving problems, like conflict among users. Polarizing outcomes, like so-called cancel culture, emerge because people don’t have better options for addressing harm. A democratic society needs public squares designed for democratic processes and practices.”

***

It may be derided as dull, but the public meeting is a bedrock of American democracy. It has also changed drastically as fringe groups have seized these spaces to give misinformation a megaphone, ban books and take up other undemocratic causes. Leah Sprain researches how specific communication practices facilitate and inhibit democratic action. She works as a facilitator with several groups, including the League of Women Voters and Restore the Balance, to ensure events like candidate forums embrace difficult issues while remaining nonpartisan.

What’s a story we’re not telling about voters ahead of the election?

“We should be looking more at college towns, because town-gown divides are real and long-standing. There’s a politics of resentment even in a place like Boulder, where you have people who say, ‘We know so much about these issues, we shouldn’t let students vote on them’—to the point where providing pizza to encourage voter turnout becomes this major controversy. Giving young people access to be involved, making them feel empowered to make a difference and be heard—these are good things.”

***

Toby Hopp studies the news media and digital content providers with an eye to how our interactions with media shape conversations in the public sphere.

Much of that is changing as trust and engagement with mainstream news sources declines. He’s studied whether showing critical-thinking prompts alongside shared posts—requiring users to consider the messages as well as the structure of the platform itself—may be better than relying on top-down content moderation from tech companies.

Ultimately, the existing business model of the big social media companies—packaging users to be sold to advertisers—may be the most limiting feature when it comes to reform. Hopp said he doubts a business the size of Meta can pivot from its model.

How does social media rehabilitate itself to become more trusted? Can it?

“Social media platforms are driven by monopolistic impulses, and there’s not a lot of effort put into changing established strategies when you’re the only business in town. The development of new platforms might offer a wider breadth of platform choice—which might limit the spread of misinformation on a Facebook or Twitter due to the diminished reach of any single platform.”

***

Images have always required us to be more engaged. Now, with the speed of disinformation, we need to do a little more work.”
Sandra Ristovska
Assistant professor, media studies

CU News Corps was created to simulate a real-world newsroom that allows journalism students to do the kind of long-form, investigative pieces that are in such short supply at a time of social media hot takes and pundits trading talking points.

“I thought we should design the course you’d most want to take if you were a journalism major,” said Chuck Plunkett, director of the capstone course and an experienced reporter. Having a mandate to do investigative journalism “means we can challenge our students to dig in and do meaningful work, to expose them to other kinds of people or ideas that aren’t on their radar.”

Over the course of a semester, the students work under the guidance of reporters and editors at partner media companies to produce long-form multimedia stories that are shared on the News Corps website and, often, are picked up by those same publications, giving the students invaluable clips for their job searches while supporting resource-strapped newsrooms.

With the news business facing such a challenging future, both economically and politically, why should students study journalism?

“Even before the great contraction of news, the figure I had in my mind was five years after students graduate, maybe 25 percent of them were still in professional newsrooms. But journalism is a tremendous major because you learn to think critically, research deeply and efficiently, interact with other people, process enormous amounts of information, and have excellent communication skills. Every profession needs people with those skills.”

Where do we go from here? CMCI experts share their perspectives on journalism, advertising, data science, communication and more in an era of democratic backsliding.

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Questions about A.I.? Let’s Chat

Anonymous — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 00:16:06 +0000

Questions about A.I.? Let’s Chat Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 10/29/2023 - 18:16

By Joe Arney

When tools like ChatGPT entered the mainstream last winter, it was a moment of reckoning for professionals in every industry. Suddenly, the artificial intelligence revolution was a lot more real than most had imagined. Were we at the dawn of an era where professional communicators were about to become extinct?

Almost a year after ChatGPT’s debut, we’re still here—but still curious about how to be effective communicators, creators and storytellers in this brave new world. To examine what role CMCI plays in ensuring students graduate prepared to lead in a world where these tools are perhaps more widely used than understood, we invited Kai Larsen, associate professor of information systems at CU’s Leeds School of Business and a courtesy faculty member in CMCI, to moderate a discussion with associate professors Casey Fiesler, of information science, and Rick Stevens, of media studies, about the ethical and practical uses of A.I. and the value of new—and old—skills in a fast-changing workplace.

This conversation was edited for length and clarity.

"A.I. can seem like magic, and if it seems like magic, you don’t understand what it can do or not do.”
—Casey Fiesler

Faculty in conversation

Kai R. Larsen is an associate professor of information systems at the Leeds School of Business. He is an expert in machine learning and natural language processing whose thought leadership has been featured in the most influential academic journals.

Casey Fiesler is associate chair for graduate studies in information science. She shares her insights in technology ethics, internet law and policy, and online communities both in scholarly journals and in the public, especially through social media. She is a courtesy faculty member in the Department of Computer Science.

Rick Stevens is associate dean of undergraduate education at CMCI. His work explores ideological formation and media dissemination, including how technology infrastructure affects the delivery of messages, communication technology policy, and how media and technology platforms are changing public discourse.

Larsen: It’s exciting to be here with both of you to talk a bit about A.I. Maybe to get us started, I can ask you to tell us a little about how you see the landscape today.

Fiesler: I think A.I. has become a term that is so broadly used that it barely has any meaning anymore. A lot of the conversation right now is around generative A.I., particularly large language models like ChatGPT. But I do see a need for some precision here, because there are other uses of A.I. that we see everywhere. It’s a recommender system deciding what you see next on Facebook, it’s a machine learning algorithm, it’s doing all kinds of decision-making in your life.

Stevens: I think it’s important to talk about which tools we’re discussing in an individual moment. In our program, we see a lot of students using software like ChatGPT to write research papers. We allow some of that for very specific reasons, but we also are trying to get students to think about what this software is good at and not good at, because usually their literacy about it is not very good.

Larsen: Let’s talk about that some more, especially with a focus on generative A.I., whether large language models or image creation-type A.I. What should we be teaching, and how should we be teaching it, to prepare our students for work environments where A.I. proficiency will be required?

Stevens: What we’re trying to do when we use A.I. is to have students understand what those tools are doing, because they already have the literacy to write, to research and analyze content themselves. They’re just expanding their capacity or their efficiency in doing certain tasks, not replacing their command of text or research.

Fiesler: There’s also that understanding of the limitations of these tools. A.I. can seem like magic, and if it seems like magic, you don’t understand what it can do or not do. This is an intense simplification, but ChatGPT is closer to being a fancy autocomplete than it is a search engine. It’s just a statistical probability of what word comes next. And if you know that, then you don’t necessarily expect it to always be correct or always be better at a task than a human.

Stevens: Say a student is writing a research paper and is engaged in a particular set of research literature—is the A.I. drawing from the most recent publications, or the most cited? How does peer review fit into a model of chat generation? These are the kinds of questions that really tell us these tools aren’t as good as what students sometimes think.

Larsen: We’re talking a lot about technology literacy here, but are there any other aspects of literacy you think are especially pertinent when it comes to A.I. models?

Fiesler: There’s also information literacy, which is incredibly important when you are getting information you cannot source. If you search for something on Google, you have a source for that information that you can evaluate, whereas if I ask a question in ChatGPT, I have to fact-check that answer independently.

Stevens: I’m glad you said that, because in class, if a student has a research project, they can declare they’ll use A.I. to assist them, but they get a different rubric for grading purposes. If they use assistance to more quickly build their argument, they must have enough command of the literature to know when that tool generates a mistake.

Fiesler: And educators have to have an understanding of how these tools work, as well. Would you stop your students from using spell check? Of course not—unless they’re taking a spelling test. The challenge is that sometimes it’s a spelling test, and sometimes it’s not. It’s up to educators to figure out when something is a spelling test, and clearly articulate that to the students—as well as the value of what they’re learning, and why I’m teaching you to spell before letting you use spell check.

Expanded Remarks

Star Wars: The Frog Awakens

Larsen: That’s an interesting thought. What about specific skills like critical thinking, collaboration, communication and creativity? How will we change the way we teach those concepts as a result of A.I.?

Fiesler: I think critique and collaboration become even more important. ChatGPT is very good at emulating creativity. If you ask it to write a fan fiction where Kermit the Frog is in Star Wars, it will do that. And the fact that it can do that is pretty cool, but it’s not good, it tends to be pretty boring. Charlie Brooker said he had ChaptGPT write an episode of Black Mirror, and of course it was bad—it’s just a jumble of tropes. The more we play with these systems, the more you come to realize how important human creativity is.

Stevens: You know, machine learning hasn’t historically been pointed at creativity—the idea is to have a predictable and consistent set of responses. But we’re trying to teach our students to develop their own voice and their own individuality, and that is never going to be something this version of tools will be good at emulating. Watching students fail because they think technology offers a shortcut can be a literacy opportunity. It lets you ask the student, are you just trying to get software to get you through this class—or are you learning how to write so that you can express yourself and be heard from among all the people being captured in the algorithm?

Larsen: It’s interesting listening to you both talk about creativity in the age of A.I. Can you elaborate? I’m especially interested in this historical view that creativity is one of the things that A.I. would never get right, which might be a little less true today than it was a year ago.

Fiesler: Well, I think it depends on your definition of creativity. I think A.I. is certainly excellent at emulating creativity, at least, like Kermit and Star Wars, and the things A.I. art generators can do. One of the things art generators do very well is giving me an image in the style of this artist. The output is amazing. Is that creative? Not really, in my opinion. But there are ways you could use it where it would be good at generating output that, if created by a human, people would see as creative.

Stevens: We have courses in which students work on a new media franchise pitch, which includes writing, comic book imagery, animation, art—they’re pitching a transmedia output, so it’s going to have multiple modes. You could waste two semesters teaching a strong writer how to draw—which may never happen—or, we can say, let’s use software to generate the image you think matches the text you’re pitching. That’s something we want students to think about—when do they need to be creative, and when do they need to say, I’ve got four hours to produce something, and if this helps my group understand our project, I don’t have to spend those four hours drawing.

"It’s not that A.I. brings new problems to the table, but it can absolutely exacerbate existing problems to new heights.”
—Rick Stevens

Risky Business

Larsen: What about media and journalism? Do we risk damaging our reputation or credibility when we bring these tools into the news?

Stevens: Absolutely. The first time a major publication puts out a story that gets fact checked incorrectly because someone did not check the A.I. output, that is going to damage not just that publication, but the whole industry. But we’re already seeing that damage coming from other technological innovations—this is just one among many.

Fiesler: I think misinformation and disinformation are the most obvious kinds of problems here. We’ve already had examples of deepfakes that journalists have covered as real, and so journalists need to be exceptionally careful about the sources of images and information they report on.

Stevens: It’s not that A.I. brings new problems to the table, but it can absolutely exacerbate existing problems to new heights if we’re not careful on what the checks and balances are.

Larsen: How about beyond the news? What are some significant trends communicators and media professionals should be keeping an eye out for?

Stevens: We need to train people to be more critical at looking not just where content comes from, but how it’s generated along certain biases. We can get a chatbot to emulate a conversation, but that doesn’t mean it can identify racist tropes that we’re trying to push out of our media system. A lot of what we do, critically, is to push back against the mainstream, to try to change our culture for the better. I’m not sure that algorithms drawing from the culture that we’re trying to change are going to have the same values in them to change anything.

Expanded Remarks

Capitalism and computational power

Larsen: What’s a big question we’re not asking about A.I. and our work?

Stevens: I think the biggest question is, what does A.I. free us up to do that we haven’t been able to do before?

Fiesler: Agreed. Let’s say A.I. and automation really could replace a lot of jobs. So because of ChatGPT, you now need two copywriters to do the job of four copywriters. You could fire two copywriters, but another option is, your four copywriters work 20 hours a week instead of 40 and still get paid the same. Because it’s not like you’re making less money, or you put resources into building your own A.I. If this technology can replace some things we’re doing, that shouldn’t mean we don’t have jobs, it should just mean we have to work less.

Stevens: It’s actually in cultural producers’ interest for something like this to happen. There’s this assumption that, oh, we can do the work of four people with two people now, so let’s fire two of them. Well, better rested, more thoughtful workers can produce better, more thoughtful content. The content we create forms our social identity, so the more thoughtful we are, the better a society we’re going to have, because we’ve inspired people to think about their world differently.

Larsen: I have to tell you both, I’m very impressed with your level of optimism when it comes to A.I. Why don’t we end on an optimistic note, as well? What’s something you feel communicators should be excited about from the dawn of this new age of work?

Stevens: One thing communicators should be excited about is that these tools exist because the process of communication is valuable. Our ability to produce more culture is not a bad thing, we just want it to have a higher fidelity and have the values we want to have, and I think those are questions that thoughtful communicators can bring to the table and help shape.

Fiesler: I agree with that, as well. Young people in college are some of the most well positioned to make an impact on how this technology is going to influence our future, with the way decisions are made around how it’s actually going to change our lives and industries. There are ways in which some things that are happening are scary, but it’s an interesting time to be on the ground floor.

For A.I. to be useful, it needs to grow alongside communicators—not replace them. CMCI experts share their vision for a workplace with ChatGPT and other tools.

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The Real People Behind the News

Anonymous — Thu, 24 Nov 2022 05:52:19 +0000

The Real People Behind the News Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/23/2022 - 22:52

By Malinda Miller (Engl, Jour’92; MJour’98)

How do journalists connect with audiences? What are the biggest challenges they face? Has social media changed how they report a story?

As news media have fundamentally changed over the years, the Pew Research Center has regularly tracked audience media consumption and gauged the public’s perceptions of the industry. But in an effort to “capture the other side of the story,” last spring it surveyed almost 12,000 journalists, said Amy Mitchell, the center’s director of journalism research, in a Q&A.

The Pew study found that 77% of journalists surveyed would choose their career again but identified several areas of concern, including political polarization and the impact of social media. Researchers also found that journalists think the pandemic has permanently changed the news industry.

CMCI Dean Lori Bergen had many of the same questions. She talked with three alumni from across the country—John Branch (MJour’89), Jackie Fortiér (MJour’13) and Vignesh Ramachandran (Jour’11)—over Zoom last summer about their day-to-day experiences as journalists.

Lori Bergen, PhD, is the founding dean of CMCI and currently on the boards of the Poynter Institute, Colorado Public Radio and the Colorado Press Association. Before joining academia, Bergen worked for several years as a journalist. She has co-authored several books, most recently News for US: Citizen-Centered Journalism.

John Branch (MJour’89) joined The New York Times in 2005 as a sports reporter. He won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2013 for “Snow Fall,” a multimedia story about a deadly avalanche in Washington State, and was a finalist for the prize in 2012. He is working on several months long multimedia projects. @JohnBranchNYT

Jackie Fortiér (MJour’13) is the senior health reporter for KPCC and LAist.com in Southern California and has also worked in public radio in Oklahoma and Colorado. She has won two regional Edward R. Murrow awards in California and one in Oklahoma. She works on quick-turn stories and hopes at some point to not just be reporting on infectious diseases. @jackiefortier

Vignesh Ramachandran (Jour’11) is a multiplatform editor for The Washington Post and co-founder of the Red, White and Brown Media newsletter on Substack, which focuses on South Asian American stories and community engagement. Previously, he worked at the PBS NewsHour, ProPublica, the Stanford Computational Journalism Lab and NBC News Digital. @VigneshR

Bergen: As we’ve been talking, it’s great to hear the differences in the work that each of you are doing. There’s this common thread of storytelling and the way each of you have applied your interests and skill sets in ways of connecting. I’m curious, what are some ways you engage with your audience?

Ramachandran: The last two years the number of in-person interviews has dramatically dwindled. A lot of it has been sourcing engagement through social networks. This year I’ve been experimenting with the audio function on Twitter to host conversations and see what issues people want to talk about. Some of the discussions ended up being more substantive and more engaging than I had expected, so it’s been a good experiment so far.

“I just want people to remember, there are real people behind this news.
—John Branch

Branch: Most of my connections are still pretty traditional with readers. It’s the usual social media and reader comment kind of channels. I’ll give you an interesting quick story, though. We did a big multimedia piece on a story I wrote about 18 months ago about the threat to some of the iconic tree species—the redwoods, the sequoias, the Joshua trees in California. A musical director at a pretty big concert hall here in California was moved by it and was trying to figure out how to connect arts to climate change. He commissioned several composers to write pieces off of that story. They’ll be performing unique and original works based off something I wrote, which has never happened to me before.

Bergen: Amazing. Whoever thought you’d be the muse to an orchestral performance? Jackie, has social media changed how you engage with your audiences?

Fortiér: I’ve never not had social media as a journalist, so it’s not that different than what I was doing before. (The pandemic) has meant a lot of over-the-phone interviews that I would really have preferred not to do over the phone, but that’s just the way it had to happen. It’s been really difficult to have patients, family members, nurses, doctors crying to you on the phone, talking about how difficult it’s been treating people or going through COVID, and you’re not there in person. A lot of them didn’t want to have video on while we were talking. I think that has been the hardest part of the pandemic for me.

Bergen: That’s interesting. I brought my generational perspective to this because I wanted to delve into how social media may have changed some of your work, but you’re reminding me that this has always been part of your reporting.

Fortiér: I covered the Planned Parenthood shooter in Colorado Springs. None of the institutions were on Twitter so I couldn’t pull any information from that. I was doing live updates because there was this shooter on the loose in Colorado Springs, and it was when people were traveling. It sounds morose to say, but we’re going to have another breaking news situation, and so now that institutions are actually putting that information out there, it helps from a journalistic perspective.

Ramachandran: In some ways it’s broken geographic barriers to reach people around the country or world. But in another sense, particularly when trying to reach marginalized communities, are we self-selecting the sorts of people who would want to speak out anyway or who are comfortable with engaging on those platforms?

When I was doing a lot of reporting on the pandemic spike in anti-Asian hate crimes and incidents, there were a lot of folks on the forefront talking about the issue on social platforms. But when talking to some of the folks who have been personally impacted by these issues, it’s trying to build rapport with someone whose child has been stabbed in a parking lot because of a hate crime. Trying to do that interview over Zoom is just a very different dynamic versus really ingraining yourself in the community and trying to understand the story and all its nuances and complexities. I think in some ways (Zoom) is such a useful tool, but in other ways, I think it’s a means to launch a conversation in a traditional way.

Branch: I think it’s just a different conversation when you and I are looking at each other, even if it’s through a camera. But I do worry that media companies will use it as a crutch and not send people out because it’s too simple and much cheaper to do it this way. I still think the best reporting is face to face, in person, not face to face over a monitor. It’s a totally different dynamic. I mean, I can see you in your little box right now, but I don’t know what the environment is around you. There’s not a whole lot of spontaneity when you and I are talking like this. There’s no, “Let’s just jump in the car and go get coffee somewhere,” or I can’t see what you have posted on your refrigerator that might elicit a whole line of questions.

Bergen: Good point, John. I’m curious, what form is most of your content being created in and how is it distributed to audiences?

Fortiér: Everything I do is multiplatform, from a 20-second spot to a full-fledged feature. If I go out to do a story, it’s pictures, tweets while I’m there, video, hopefully, depending on what’s happened. We create content specifically for TikTok. Usually I’m trying to find sources, but sometimes just to engage audiences. I kind of feel like the legacy journalists are just kind of catching up, to be honest with you, now that The New York Times and The Washington Post are like, “Oh, audio is a thing.”

Bergen: Well, that sounded like you guys need to respond to that one.

Ramachandran: Honestly, the last 10 years have been everything from print to writing for the web to audio work to video work to data analysis. I think the best editors have always given me the advice to just tell the story in the medium that tells the story best.

Bergen: I love that. It’s what we try to teach our students, but it always sounds so much better when somebody else says that.

Branch: I’ll say that what has been one of the changes post-“Snow Fall” is we have had a lot more conversations about the best way to present the story. Now, it’s like, what if this is nothing but a photo essay? What if this is actually a big, dynamic graphic? What if it is text? What if it’s video?

I’m working on a story now that we hope to make a full-length documentary. Some of my stories they’ll have me read so we can deliver them to podcast and audio audiences.

I think it has kind of exploded the environment and the imagination that we have for what’s the best way to deliver this to people. It’s exciting times to be a part of it.

Making a difference

Bergen: Could each of you talk a little bit about your experience with how journalism has made a difference?

Fortiér: I was the only health journalist in Oklahoma. We had a huge opioid lawsuit against Purdue (Pharma) settled, but Johnson & Johnson was the one that actually went to trial.

The trial happened to be in the town that I lived in, Norman, Oklahoma. I did a bunch of stories leading up to it, and then I just filed and filed and filed with NPR’s newscast. I was the only reporter that was there every day.

Because I tweeted the whole thing—and that was really the only way that people knew it was happening because it wasn’t being broadcast live—I had a ton of people following me on Twitter, both for and against opioid companies, which was interesting.

It showed me how important local journalism is because I was there. I had other journalists telling me the only reason they came was because their editor heard what I was doing and thought, “Oh, we better get over there.” Parachuting in has its merits in some cases, but most of the time you need local people who know the ins and outs and the subtleties of what’s going on.

Bergen: Although my question was, how does journalism have an impact, what you’ve really underscored is, journalists have an impact.

Ramachandran: Before the pandemic, I worked for ProPublica’s Chicago office. We were local reporters living in the communities that we were reporting on. There were tangible impacts of laws changed. We had colleagues who did investigations on the tax assessment system there; the corrupt assessor who ended up getting voted out the next election; how they were targeting Black and brown communities of Chicago in disproportionate ways; and then how those policies were kind of changed in Chicago.

In my own reporting on Asian American communities, it’s interesting to see a different sort of impact. I did a few stories on how South Asian Americans have a higher risk of cardiovascular ailments, and I got emails saying, “Hey, I signed up to get a heart scan,” or, “I’m going to be talking to my primary care doctor.”

Branch: One theme I’ve had the last 10 years has been stories about CTE, the chronic brain disease caused by repetitive hits in a lot of sports. I’m here in Colorado right now, and I just saw a friend the other night who said, “I can’t watch hockey the way I used to anymore, thanks to you. I can’t watch football the way I used to because of the reporting that you and your colleagues have done.”

You know, anytime you hear somebody talk about political news or sports news or celebrity news, or on global news of some sort, I want to say, “You realize that’s media, right? You’ve been bashing the media, but you realize everything that you talk about, everything that connects us through conversation is media.”

I just want people to remember, there are real people behind this news.

Moments of joy

Bergen: I’m just curious, are there moments of joy in your work?

Ramachandran: I think when you tell the stories that you want to tell, tell the stories that impact folks, that kind of stuff is what keeps me going.

Branch: I find joy in small places, like when I’ve written a nice sentence. Most of my joy comes in very private moments: When I’ve received a callback that I’ve been waiting for, or just got off the phone on a really good interview, and I can’t wait to tell my editor what I’ve just found out.

Fortiér: I think I find the most joy when I get to take a listener somewhere that they don’t normally go or hear from someone that they wouldn’t think to speak to. What I really love about audio is that I can take 20 seconds and let that quote breathe. It has a pacing to it. It’s very experiential.

Trust and credibility

Bergen: What are the biggest challenges you face as journalists?

Branch: Credibility and maintaining trust with audiences that are as fractured as ever. I work in what’s derisively called the mainstream media. I worry about how we get that mainstream news to a wide swath of people, across socioeconomic lines, across political lines, across racial divides, so that we’re all working with a core set of facts. That’s become trickier and trickier as the years have gone by.

Bergen: And that’s probably not going to change in the future.

Branch: Our goal at The New York Times is to keep delivering truth as we believe it should be told and hope that people come around, and not try to bend to certain people, not just play to your audience. I think that’s what the original journalism tenets were—deliver truth as unbiased as possible and let people absorb it as they absorb it, but don’t try to steer your news to an audience necessarily. That’s tricky, because you get into conversations about bias and unintended biases and so on. We’ve been doing it for 170 years. We’ll keep going and hope that more people keep believing what we’re delivering.

Fortiér: I would add to that: staying relevant. In order to be consumable by younger audiences, we really need to get more Black and brown people in newsrooms and in positions of power within newsrooms. You know, I can think of one public radio station that has a woman as the CEO or president off the top of my head. So, we talk about diversity all the time. We talk about diversity in sources, but we really need more diversity
in journalism.

Ramachandran: I feel like earlier in my career, I would’ve said it’s the economics of journalism, which I think is definitely a concern, but it feels like we’re going to figure that out. But to John’s point, I’m personally very concerned—and I feel like it’s a challenge for journalism—this credibility and trust question. I think that’s just the biggest thing we’re going to be grappling with for many years.

Fortiér: I will say having been a reporter in Oklahoma at a public radio station where people don’t really like journalists, that as I consistently did accurate, solid reporting, I got respect. It took a little while, but as I kept doing the good work, people realized that I wasn’t biased.

Bergen: Just a good reminder how much relationship building can have an impact on this.

Branch: To what Jackie said, that’s my mission, just keep doing the good work. I don’t know what else we can do.

CMCI Dean Lori Bergen talked with three alumni from across the country—John Branch (MJour’89), Jackie Fortiér (MJour’13) and Vignesh Ramachandran (Jour’11)—over Zoom last summer about their day-to-day experiences as journalists.

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We Are the Stories We Tell

Anonymous — Tue, 23 Nov 2021 22:28:06 +0000

We Are the Stories We Tell Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 11/23/2021 - 15:28

CMCI faculty Lisa Flores, Angie Chuang and Harsha Gangadharbatla remark on how stories—those we tell, pay for and reimagine—intersect with our identities and industries.

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Jailed Without Justice

Anonymous — Thu, 23 May 2019 22:54:27 +0000

Jailed Without Justice Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 05/23/2019 - 16:54

In 2015, 24-year-old Jamycheal Mitchell—who had schizophrenia and bipolar disorder—stole a Zebra cake and Mountain Dew from a convenience store in Norfolk, Virginia. Police arrested him on April 22, 2015, and about four months later, on August 19, he was found dead in his jail cell.

The case brought up a lot of questions for reporter Gary Harki, who covered it for The Virginian-Pilot and won the 2018 Al Nakkula Award for Police Reporting, co-sponsored by CMCI’s Department of Journalism and the Denver Press Club.

As he learned more about Mitchell’s case, Harki was left with as many questions as answers.

“Why was this guy in jail for so long? He wouldn’t have gotten that much time had he been tried and convicted,” he wondered. “It was that small of a case, but he was caught in this criminal justice system that is not prepared to handle people that have his type of illness.”

Harki decided to look for similar cases, both locally and nationally. To his surprise, he found dozens of other cases throughout the country that were just as troubling. His attempt to build a more comprehensive investigation revealed another issue: No agencies or individuals collected the information necessary to document the extent of the problem.

After some urging by his editor, Harki applied for, and was awarded, the O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University. The opportunity allowed him to spend the 2017–18 school year working with Marquette students to further his study. With Harki’s guidance, the team built a database to track 404 deaths of people with mental illness in jails across the country since 2010. According to their reporting, at least 11% of people with mental illnesses who died in jails had family or friends who warned the jails about their condition.

Based on these findings, Harki published “Jailed in Crisis,” a series illuminating the deaths of mentally ill people in jails throughout the country—often under horrific and preventable circumstances. His reporting led to a U.S. Justice Department investigation into how the Virginia jail was treating inmates, especially those with mental illness.

“Harki’s reporting discovered highly disturbing trends,” says CU News Corps Director Chuck Plunkett, who oversaw the 2018 Nakkula award selection process and discussed the investigative series with Harki and Rebecca Carballo, a Charleston Gazette-Mail reporter who helped build the database while she was a Marquette student. “Too often, those being held against their will for lack of appropriate beds in clinical settings are subjected to inhuman treatment.”

Plunkett: We’ve seen horror stories for decades about problems that result when people suffering from mental illness are housed in jails, when what they need is treatment at a mental health facility. Why has it been so hard to find useful data about what happens when those jail stays go wrong?

Harki: I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that nobody collects the data. The federal government doesn’t track it, and the states don’t really track it. The Bureau of Justice Statistics tracks things through a death-in-custody report, but they have never really tried to track what somebody’s medical history was, which mental illness would be a part of.

I think it’s frustrating to a certain degree to sheriffs, too, but it’s also part of a larger problem of criminal justice data in general, which is that there’s all these questions out there—police shootings, different things with jails and prisons and isolation—and none of it is tracked very well. Part of it is there’s just not a lot of will from jailers or communities to track the data because then you might have to deal with a problem.

Plunkett: That might be the better way to fine-tune it. Is there some kind of institutional bias in these entities that’s just too embarrassing or too much trouble or too many potential pitfalls?

Harki: I think a lot of it comes down to, one, it is work to try and track this stuff, and two, a lot of the time the data that gets collected is with the federal government, where you’ve got a carrot and a stick. It’s like, ‘We might withhold funding from you if you don’t provide us with information.’ That’s how the uniform crime report data gets collected. That’s never been the case with this jail data, and it’s also a lot more decentralized.

Carballo: No one really seems to have the data looking at why people are dying in jails. A lot of states had it where they tracked jail deaths, and they tracked how many mentally ill people were in jail, but they didn’t track how many mentally ill people died in jail. And some of the states had data where they could have figured it out, but their open record laws would say, ‘Well, that would require us to create a record and we don’t have to create a record for you,’ so they don’t give you the data. So some states actually do have the capability to figure it out, but that’s time, effort and money.

Plunkett: This was quite an ambitious project. I’d like to hear your thoughts on a state newspaper uncovering social injustices across the country.

Harki: It was a tricky thing to do a national story at a local paper, but I had written about this issue since 2015. It just seemed like, look, here it is and it’s a national story. We need to write it because it’s not just happening here in Norfolk, Virginia. It’s happening all over the country.

Once I got the O’Brien Fellowship for Public Service Journalism from Marquette, the question was, ‘What do we do with this issue? How do we go at this again?’ It was almost like a movie or something. We just needed to pull the camera back and look at it through a broader lens. My editors were thankfully on board from the beginning, saying, ‘Let’s create the database and let’s do the story. We think we have the knowledge to do it and the right location to do it because of Mitchell.’ And that’s what happened.

Plunkett: Let’s talk about the role that data journalism played in your work. How should newsrooms think about equipping their journalists with these skills? Not every beat accommodates the time and resources for this kind of work, but what’s the right mix?

Harki: On some level, I think everybody should have a basic level of data journalism or a basic knowledge of it. It’s just going to help you as a journalist. You’re going to know a little bit more than other people about how to handle some of this stuff because everyone comes into contact with data.

I feel like in terms of skill sets in data, I’m not that advanced. But I can look at something and know what the data is, and know that we need to work with it, and know what’s out there or find it ourselves to be able to do stories like this—to be able to look at it and say, ‘OK, what is the best we can do? What is the best information we can have so that we can speak about this on some authority?’

It is easy to dismiss things sometimes because it’s one story—it’s anecdotal evidence. Being able to put a number on it and say there are patterns to it and there’s a reason behind those patterns, that’s a really important thing to be able to do as a journalist and at the heart of why I believe in data journalism.

Plunkett: Your reporting highlights comments from jailers and sheriffs who argue that more resources should be invested in mental health treatment facilities, even if it means pulling funds from traditional policing budgets. What research needs to be done to help policymakers bring this kind of reform?

Harki: It gets really complicated. This is such a localized issue because of the way mental health systems are decentralized in the United States and because jails are decentralized. In a lot of places there’s not a lot of oversight over county jails, including Virginia. What really needs to happen—almost on a municipal level, not even a state level—is sort of a cost-benefit analysis and people saying, ‘Hey look, if we put more money into treatment, then you’re not going to have as many people getting into jails and into the criminal justice system, and that’s going to save money in terms of court costs, lawyers, housing.’

Carballo: As Gary was saying, treatment is a more long-term solution. It’s definitely something that might help with recidivism, and in a lot of the cases we looked at while building the database, sometimes they weren’t in there—this wasn’t their first offense—so it is definitely a more long-term solution to the problem.

Harki: If you look at places like Miami or Tucson, they’ve done that analysis over time, and they’ve recognized that not only is this better for us as a society because we’re keeping people out of jail and keeping people from suffering in these places because we don’t have the ability to treat them there, but we’re also likely saving money and resources by doing it this way. It’s just easier on everybody for both moral and monetary reasons.

The 2018 Al Nakkula Award for Police Reporting went to The Virginian-Pilot reporter Gary Harki, whose series "Jailed in Crisis" tracked deaths of people with mental illness in jails across the country. Harki and reporter Rebecca Carballo––who helped him with the project as a student at Marquette University––spoke with CU News Corps Director Chuck Plunkett about their work for the series, and the need to track such instances more thoroughly.

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Your attention, please

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Nov 2018 22:11:20 +0000

Your attention, please Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 11/01/2018 - 16:11

Fifty years after their seminal study on coverage of the 1968 presidential election, the founding fathers of agenda-setting research and CMCI’s Chris Vargo discuss how the media continue to shape what we think about.

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Wildfires

Anonymous — Wed, 25 Oct 2017 06:20:30 +0000

Wildfires Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 10/25/2017 - 00:20

As a journalist and a communication scholar discuss the growing issue of wildfires, they reveal there is more to firefighting than extinguishing flames.

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