- Good morning.

I'm Debbie DiCroce, president and CEO of the Hampton Roads Community Foundation, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to our forum on Declining Local Journalism & the Risk to Democracy.

Most of you know the foundation's rich history in the region.

We are the result of a merger in 2010 between the Norfolk Foundation, which has roots dating back to the early 1950s, and the Virginia Beach Foundation, which dates back to 1987.

The story goes that some 70 years ago, six businessmen pulled $2,500 to launch what became the first community foundation in the state.

Today with almost a half billion dollars in assets, the Hampton Roads Community Foundation is the second largest of the Commonwealth's 30 community foundations and the 54th largest of the 750 plus community foundations in the nation.

Since our humble beginnings in 1954, the foundation has awarded over $365 million in grants and scholarships.

Last year alone, we distributed more than $21 million in grants to include almost a million and a half dollars in scholarships to some 416 college students.

We count over a hundred nonprofits as our critical partners, and we operate with an expense to asset ratio of less than 1%.

Our donors come from all walks of life, many of them are here today, each with a shared intent to pay it forward, entrusting in us the privilege of doing good in their name.

Indeed, you'd be hard pressed to come up with a project or a cause of great import to the region that doesn't have the fingerprints of the foundation on it.

And our impact is everywhere.

In education, in the cultural arts, health and wellness, the environment, human services, all because of philanthropically-minded individuals wanting to give back and leave a legacy that's bigger than themselves.

Do good and do well, I was told years ago, and remember that doing good isn't the same thing as doing well.

The mantra is embedded in the very fiber of our being.

Which brings us to the crux of today's gathering and how we came to be here.

In 2018, as a part of our newly adopted five-year strategic roadmap, the foundation launched a signature series as companion to our larger work in civic leadership.

Branded Understanding Hampton Roads, the purpose of the series is threefold.

First, to provide a research-based forum for raising community consciousness on the region's most challenging issues.

Second, to inspire collaborative research-based actions to address those issues.

And third, to help the foundation itself determine where to put its future strategic stakes in the ground.

Today's event marks our 15th forum since the series launched some five years ago.

Past forums have focused on such looming issues such as children's mental health, affordable housing, racial inequities and law, health equity, talent alignment strategy, hurricane resiliency, and the list goes on.

For each forum, we identified key strategic partners, for example, CHKD on children's mental health, ODU on hurricane resiliency, the Workforce Alliance on talent alignment strategy, and each has resulted in impressive stakeholder follow up that has or is leading to substantive action.

Suffice it to say that the foundation's Understanding Hampton Roads Forum series is rooted in a key priority of our strategic roadmap, namely creating rigorous and intelligent community-wide conversation and research to help identify and to solve our most pressing issues, so is leadership to help create a more inclusive and equitable community.

These two priorities, as well as the roadmaps remaining for have reflected our resolve to tackle some of the region's greatest challenges, with regional economic competitiveness, neighborhood development, early care and education, and climate change resiliency, among the more recent ones.

Today the foundation's vision looks outward to a thriving, inclusive, equitable community with opportunity for all.

And our mission, what we've committed to do to help all of us together to realize that vision is to measure ourselves against the degree to which we make life better in Hampton Roads through leadership, philanthropy, and civic engagement.

It's an ambitious agenda, and we are very pleased that so many of you have been our traveling companion on the journey.

As for this morning's forum, my guess is that we're in for an engaging discussion on yet another critically important topic that has implications for all of us in Hampton Roads, how can it not?

With WHRO as our partner, our renowned moderator, presenter, and panelists you'll meet shortly, and all of you, thanks again for engaging with us.

Dr. Rice, the floor is yours.

(audience applauding) - Good morning, I'm Linda Rice.

And before I introduce our panelist, I would remind you that there are cards on the table.

If you'd like to ask the panelist a question, would you please fill out the card?

And two of my colleagues, Kate and Sarah, will be circulating and we'll pick up the cards and we'll give them to our moderator.

We hope to get through as many of those questions as possible.

This morning, we have a distinguished panel of presenters that I would like to briefly introduce to you.

Their full bios will be on a webpage on the Hampton Roads Community Foundation website.

Our key speaker presenting the national perspective is Penelope Muse Abernathy.

Penny is currently a visiting professor at Northwestern Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications.

While at Medill, she is collaborating with the school's local news initiative and Spiegel Research Center on local news related projects and research.

Prior to taking her position at Northwestern, she was an executive with The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and was the Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at the University of North Carolina from 2008 to 2020.

Among her many publications, Penny is the author of the 2020 book, "News Deserts and Ghost Newspapers: Will Local News Survive?"

And her most recent report is "The State of Local News 2020: Expanding News Deserts, Growing Gaps, Emerging Models" that is linked to our foundation's webpage.

From my experience, you can't read an article on the decline in local journalism without seeing Penny quoted.

We also have three panelists that will share the local perspective.

Denise Watson, a Norfolk native, is the features editor of The Virginian-Pilot and Daily Press.

She is an award-winning journalist who has had the honor of writing about the famous and the infamous international stories and pieces reported from dwindling factory towns and beloved roll diners.

Mechelle Hankerson is the news director for WHRO Media.

Prior to coming to WHRO, she was a journalist with The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, The Virginian-Pilot, and the nonprofit startup, the Virginia Mercury.

An interesting fact about Mechelle was that she received the Hampton Roads Community Foundation Bonney Scholarship in her last two years at Virginia Commonwealth University.

And our last panelist, but certainly not least, is Adam Chase.

He is the vice president and general manager for News 3 WTKR.

A recent transplant to Hampton Roads, he comes to us after working in Waco, Texas and Bakersville, California.

Our moderator for this morning is Bruce Bradley.

Well known to many of us, Bruce is the former president of Landmark Publishing Group and the former president of The Virginian-Pilot.

He is the former chair of the Hampton Roads Community Foundation Board of Directors and is currently the Old Dominion University Board of Directors' director.

Thank you to each of our panelists for being with us this morning.

Bruce, let's get it started.

- Thanks, Linda.

(audience applauding) Thank you, Linda, and let me add my thanks to all of our panelists.

We're delighted to be here.

And I'm gonna start out with a few quotes here to warm you up, so to speak.

The first one, you heard Linda refer to this book that Penny wrote, one of two that she's written.

This one is about news deserts and ghost newspapers.

Here's a quote from the book, "Strong local journalism builds trust in demographic institutions and it builds strong communities.

In a 2018 column in The Washington Post entitled, "The local-news crisis is destroying what a divided America desperately needs: Common ground," media critic Margaret Sullivan wrote, "One of the problems of losing local coverage is that we never know what we don't know.

Corruption can flourish, taxes can rise, public officials can indulge their worst impulses."

Here's another one.

This comes from a Peggy Noonan column from The Wall Street Journal.

Many of you're familiar with her.

She also worked in the Reagan administration.

This was a column that she wrote on January the 21st, and it has to do with George Santos, much in the news lately.

And in reference to Santos, she says, "All this should have been picked up nationally, but wasn't.

In a competitive local newspaper environment, it would have made waves, but the leader was small with students and retirees on the staff.

If you think the decline in local newspapers is only an abstract story or that Facebook posts can make up for local investigations, ladies and gentlemen, we give you New York's 3rd congressional district."

Here's one from The New York Times, which ran two or three weeks ago about Gannett.

Gannett, the largest newspaper chain in the United States, began another round of layoffs Thursday, joining a host of other media companies cutting jobs in recent weeks.

Employees at Gannett's Newspapers, which include USA Today, The Indianapolis Star, and the Detroit Free Press, began receiving layoff notifications Thursday, part of an effort to cut 6% of the roughly 3,440 person US media division.

By the way, to put that in perspective, 3,440 people in the US media division.

We were talking earlier, The New York Times currently has 1,700 people in their newsroom.

This is a company, Gannett, that has hundreds of newspapers.

The layoffs are the latest in a series of cost cutting measures by Gannett, which in August eliminated 400 jobs and said it would not fill hundreds of other open positions.

And then finally, this is from Harvard University's Kennedy School report that was issued just this past week.

"America's local newspapers are in steep decline, creating a deficit in local news.

In affected community, civic life is receding, social cohesion is declining, misinformation is increasing, and government accountability is weakening."

As they say, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how is the play, right?

(audience laughing) So that's a little to get us started here.

And let me tell you the format that we're going to follow this morning.

So we will follow... We'll have four sections that we wanna delve into.

We know we can spend four days on this topic, let alone we only have an hour and 15 minutes to go.

The first part will talk about defining and quantifying the problem.

Then we'll get into exploring the causes of the decline in local news coverage.

Next, we'll get into exploring why this is a problem for the future of democracy.

And then finally, maybe of most interest, outlining possible solutions.

What we can do locally here in Hampton Roads?

We'll begin each of the segments with comments from Penny.

And you heard her introduction before.

She is, if not... She's probably the most knowledgeable person on this topic in the country.

She's done incredible research and writing on the topic.

From a personal note, I must tell you that we tried to recruit Penny here years ago to work at Landmark.

We were close to getting her to come here.

As close as... She mentioned before, she was actually ready to put a payment down on a house.

However, she took a job at Harvard instead.

Imagine that.

She went to Harvard (audience laughing) instead of coming to Landmark.

Also, we'll spend a little less time on the first two topics and more time outlining the causes at the end.

And more importantly, like I say, focus on the local solutions that we have available.

We'll try to leave about 10 or 15 minutes at the end for audience questions.

and there's cards on your table as I think Linda or Debbie mentioned.

Feel free to write your questions down.

They'll be collected.

For the first part, we want to talk about defining the problem.

And so Penny is gonna focus on that alone.

And then, as I say, in the next three parts, we'll start with comments from Penny, and then we'll involve the other panelists from there.

So Penny, start us out with here.

- Thank you very much, Bruce.

And I'm delighted to be here.

As Bruce knows, I have a long-term affection for Norfolk and for The Virginia-Pilot.

It is... And it is one of, I must say, honestly, it's one of the job offers I have thought about several times over the last 20 some years and wondered how life would've been different to have been here.

It's a real pleasure to be here.

And let me start by saying, when I first...

I trained as a journalist.

I spent the first half of my career as a journalist working on regional papers like The Charlotte Observer, like The Fayetteville Observer.

My husband was a journalist.

He was at The News & Observer.

So we are North Carolina born and bred, and we owe much of who we are today to the newspapers, small and regional, that trained us as journalists.

Midway through, I started seeing something was going on in the business, and I got a good piece of advice from who was then the CEO of Knight Ridder.

He said, "If you care about the news business..." "If you care about journalism, you need to learn the business."

And so I went back to school, got a degree in business, and spent the last half basically working on problems for news organizations.

When I came back to North Carolina in 2008, it was right about the time the recession hit.

And what really struck me is even before the recession hit, how much the problems had kind of focused on small newspapers and on regional newspapers even then.

And we can talk about the reasons that had occurred even by 2008.

But, you know, I started saying, we've gotta have some way before I can fix the problem, I need to understand what's really going on.

So I kind of backed in to beginning to track what was actually going on in the news business.

In 2016, I published the first report, and it was one of those things where you felt like a tree fell in the forest and nobody heard it.

You know, people were saying, well, we're really worried about what's happening to The New York Times, we're really worried about what's happening to The Washington Post.

And my thought, having worked at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, they have plenty of intelligent people who could figure it out.

What we really needed was to understand that there is a pyramid if you will look on the material that's out there.

I don't wanna have to do the slideshow, but there's kind of a pyramid that has sustained us in news for 200 years in this country, and it relies on a vast network of newspapers.

We are a really vast country of 320 million people right now and 3.2 million square miles.

So, you know, even back to our earliest days, we relied on newspapers, which were the premier way to communicate at that point and pull us together and kind of help us set the agenda for what we were looking at.

So I started out thinking about how do we quantify what's really going on, and there are three ways to look at the loss of news.

One is, the loss of newspapers.

Since 2005, we've lost more than a fourth of all our newspapers.

We have 6,300 today.

And unless things change in the next two years, we will have lost a third of all newspapers.

Now, most of those newspapers have been small weeklys or small dailies.

Let's put on top of that, we have lost almost 60% of the newspaper journalists we had in 2006.

Most of the loss of the journalists have been at regional newspapers such as the ones that Gannet owns, where we have newsrooms that once had 200, 300 people in them that today have only a couple of dozen.

That has huge implications if you look at that pyramid for what, the reason we have George Santos.

We have repented on the small newspapers to highlight a problem first, and then for the regional papers to pick it up.

Mechelle and I were talking about the problems that regional newspapers have today, and that they used to have tons of stringers at all of these local newspapers who would report things that were of interest.

So you can think of lots of stories that we would have missed, that we have only gotten eight, nine, ten months after the fact because we didn't have that.

Finally, if you've lost newspapers and you've lost journalists, you can imagine we've lost news stories.

And so my colleagues at Duke have actually tried to quantify that.

So in 2018, they did a survey of a hundred mid-size markets scattered across the US, and what they determined is in any medium, whether it was television, whether it was digital, whether it was newspapers, whether it was radio, in any medium, 20% of the papers, only 20% of the communities in that survey had a locally produced story from that market that weekend.

Think for a moment.

20% of communities ranging in size between 50,000 and 200,000 had locally produced... Only 20% had locally produced stories.

So, if you think about what is really at stake on a national level, is that we've had the loss of news that has been triggered by the loss of reporters and the loss of newspapers down to the very limit.

The other thing I would say is, in addition to tracking newspapers, I've tracked digital sites, public broadcasting, and ethnic media.

And unfortunately the problem is, we cannot add reporters fast enough to replace the ones we've lost at the other mediums, and most of the digital sites that have been established so far have been only in metro areas or state capital.

So we still have a large swath of the country that is in need of thinking how do we rethink about journalism, and that's what I think is the real opportunity here.

As we consider, what do we want to do, how do we rethink where we want to be, what are our priorities?

And I think that you're in a wonderful opportunity as you consider where you wanna go to not only consider the loss, but what the opportunity is here.

- Thanks, Penny.

Let me add a couple bullet points which actually come from Penny's book as well.

"From 1996 to 2019, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution circulation dropped from 426,000 to 111,000."

Incredible drop.

The Tampa Bay Times, huge market, the result of the combination of the Tampa Bay newspaper in the St. Pete paper now publishes a printed edition only two times a week.

The rest of the editions are digital.

A friend of mine who was the publisher in Birmingham, Alabama told me last year that they were getting ready to go all digital.

So there will no longer be any print edition of the Birmingham, Alabama newspaper, only digital.

And then one final snippet from one of Penny's books.

"Newspaper advertising nationally went from 50 billion in 2005 to 15 billion in 2018."

Amazing declines, right?

So let's segue into the causes of the decline, that being one of them, the business model changing.

And again, we'll start with Penny and then open it up.

- There are two things I think that have really prompted this.

And, you know, newspapers took a bad rap in the very beginning because everybody assumed we were just dinosaurs.

We were all going to go digital and life would be happy, we'd all be connected.

We are now, and we see where we are, right?

What we're missing too.

And I think that to the degree, there were some newspapers...

I mean, things were really, really good up through...

Newspaper advertising peaked in 2000 and right before the bust, and then it started a decline.

But what was interesting too is if you look at Gannett, you look at the publicly traded newspaper companies, they actually had a higher return than the stock market through 2006, 2007, and then they just plummeted and fell off the cliff.

What happened?

We had a lot of mergers and acquisitions.

Well, what happens is that, many of the publicly owned companies had been...

Majority of the shares were now owned by hedge funds.

Hedge funds started... What do hedge funds care about?

Hedge funds care about returns, right?

And so when you had many of the companies that bought newspapers at very high prices, and by 2008 when we had the recession, suddenly the price of a newspaper stock was way down, but they had taken on immense amount of debt.

So that would include a Lee, that would include a McClatchy, a whole range of them, that include the Journal Register Company.

What happened then is suddenly, it was just like the housing market, right?

So you could buy...

If you wanted to buy a newspaper prior to 2008, 2006, you paid 13 times annual earnings.

Think about that for a moment.

That meant that you were obligated to stay in that community and invest in that community for at least 14 years before you would sell it.

By 2009, the price of most newspapers had dropped to three times annual earnings.

Now, think about that for a moment.

If you are a pure financial person, that means you can come in, cut costs, bring a newspaper to huge margins, and either sell it to someone else or continue to harvest it at that rate so you can get to three times earnings and recoup your earnings in less than three years, and that's exactly what happened.

We had a flood of investment that come in from private equity companies who already were involved in many of the major corporations and we also had a flood come in from hedge funds and the likes.

So they all took huge stakes in the public once they...

The ones that were in bankruptcy, the private equity companies swooped in.

And how did they manage the companies?

They managed them exactly the way they did a widget factory, which is you cut the cost and you assumed... And you start by cutting on the business side, and then it's not long before you're cutting across the board on the journalism side.

And the other problem is, they kind of set the tone for how private companies, well-run private companies had to do.

I mean, it was just, as you had the huge decline in the advertising and everybody realized they could not make up the lost dollars on the digital side, either through subscriptions or through advertising, you had the same kind of cycle begin where even the ones that held out by 2015 were looking at ways they had to cut back and go forward.

The second thing you had is you had the rise of Facebook and Google, who, by 2016, were taking as much as 75% of every digital dollar in a market.

So think about it for a moment.

If you're in television station, if you are a newspaper, if you are a radio station, you're competing for the 25% left over, you're competing for the digital scraps.

And that puts added pressure on the fact that you cannot make the transition to continue to hold the newsroom.

And so that's why we have a 60% loss in reporters and the newspaper over the last 15, 16, 18 years.

Let me make one more comment before we turn it over.

People have said to me over and over, why do you focus on newspapers?

And the reason I focus on newspapers, I wanna start with where I was in the beginning, good newspapers are good news organizations.

And good news organizations, regardless of what form you are delivered, whether it's print, whether it's broadcast, whether it is digital, they really help nurture democracy and they bring us together as a community.

In other words, they help us solve problems, they help us set the agenda for the problems we need to discuss.

And so I care not so much about preserving print newspapers as I care about preserving the function of newspapers going forward, and that is the real problem we're facing right now, is the economic underpinnings for what has served to bolster local news in this vast country is under attack.

- One supplemental point I'll add to Penny's comments in the salad days, if you will.

The New York Times bought The Boston Globe when they were paying 13 times earnings and paid a billion dollars for The Globe.

They sold The Globe in the early '90s, I guess it was, to John Henry, owner of the Boston Red Sox, and I believe they got 60 million for it.

- I think it's about 50.

I think that would be a $50 million.

- So 1 billion to 50, and I think they had to keep the pension liability also.

- Right, that's where the 60 comes in, right, yeah, from all of that.

- So let's open it up to the panel.

Feel free jump in, anybody who would like to like to start.

- I'm not a business person, so I've never worked in the business office at a news organization.

One thing that I've noticed over the years, and I started my career at a point where layoffs were very normal.

The fact that I got a journalism job in a newsroom right out of college was extraordinary.

That doesn't happen often.

And at a paper like The News & Observer, that's wild.

That was not something that happened to people who graduated around the time that I graduated college.

But what I noticed even then is that from the content side, from the creation side, newsrooms were a little slow to pick up on social media.

I graduated college in 2013, so the platforms that are popular today existed back then.

And obviously they have changed, and there are business components to it that impact a news organization's function.

Just from a content perspective, social media allows us to interact with, engage with, get immediate feedback from our audience faster and more directly than ever before, and a lot of newsrooms are very slow to use that to their advantage.

People will pay for content that they want, that they need, that they find important.

It's not gonna be enough to fix the industry, but it can be something.

And I think that social media was an opportunity for us as an industry to be responsive, and not everyone embraced that.

I think two, it was an opportunity for news organizations to change the way they do things, especially daily news organizations.

We don't need to tell you that there was a shooting on your street when you're on the next door app and your neighbor tells you, right?

Why would I... Why would we as a news organization send one of our 10 reporters out for a day to do that?

That line of thinking took a very long time for newsrooms to catch up with, and I think that was to our detriment from a content creation side.

- [Bruce] Thanks, Mechelle.

Denise or Adam?

- Yeah, go ahead, Denise.

- Okay.

No, I'm thinking from my perspective as an editor.

Over the past couple of years, like last year, we went through a hiring spree, and we had fewer people apply.

So I'm seeing fewer people go into the business.

And as I've talked to colleagues around the country, that a lot of that has to do with what has happened in the past 10 years.

Journalism has always been an easy industry to kick and make fun of.

But in the past 10 years, with the fake news and all of those accusations thrown at you, and then if you are a woman or a person of color, you go onto this business and you know that you're gonna be targeted by... And more egregiously and more publicly than you would have before.

So when I go and I recruit and try to get people to come into the business, and it's an industry that has not kept up when it comes to salaries and of other industries, and I hear a lot of, excuse me, I hear a lot of people... Young people will say, well, I can make more money at a Walmart warehouse than as a reporter.

And you have to try to convince them that this is work, not...

I mean, warehouse work is greater good as well, but, you know, trying to convince them that serving your community is worth a lower wage doesn't go as far as it used to when I got into the business.

- Great point, yeah.

Adam.

- Yeah, and Bruce and Penny, you'll be much more intelligent on this topic than I am on the distribution costs, right?

If we talk about the business models, the distribution costs for a newspaper, I don't know what it costs now versus the old printing press.

I assume it's still a great cost.

On the broadcast model of TV, it is expensive.

And so until we accept that the business has changed and people can go to market now with a cell phone as my colleagues alluded to, right?

How much a cell phone is?

A couple hundred bucks, I don't know.

Station based for it.

(panelists laughing) Whatever it costs.

But with the cell phone, people can go to market very easily.

So I think we have to address the distribution models and find efficiencies in that so we can invest back in paying somebody more than a five guys, which last I heard, it was like 17.85 an hour in one market.

Insane.

But we have to address our business model and accept that it's broken.

- Adam raises a great point.

The business model for newspapers has collapsed.

And so I mentioned before the decline in revenue.

And it used to be that the percentage of revenue at the pilot from advertisement was 82%, and 18% came from circulation, so the circulation revenue never really even covered the cost of the paper.

And so it was a little bit like giving away the razors so you could sell the blades.

And now, with that gone, all of a sudden you now ask the question, Okay, are people willing to pay for content?

Back to your comment about the business model.

A another question, let me ask this before we move on to the next topic, and that is, what impact do you think the decline in trust in media has played in the business model breaking down at this point?

- Yeah, I mean, I'll start.

I think I wrote down that has some of this been...

Majority of it been a self-inflicted wound.

Based on the business model and broadcast, if any of you have watched a local news product, traditionally, we'll give you a minute 30 for the big story of the day.

A minute 30, right?

15 seconds as an anchor intro, then we go live in the field, then we set up the story.

So we leave you with about a minute to try to digest something of massive impact to your lives in Hampton Roads.

That being a headline news model in broadcast has not given us the reputation that I love about newspaper journalism of depth and context.

People don't want headlines.

They want to know, okay, what's being done, what are the solutions, what's the impact on my life?

Don't just come to the party and give me the bad news, and then see you later.

Figure it out yourself.

And so I think that's one thing that has hurt us, that we're always trying to adapt.

To any of you former broadcasters in the room, we have...

Yes, recovering broadcasters.

(audiences and panelists laughing) We've had packages on, if you remember the Brian Faulcon story, former Governor Northam pardoned him last year.

We covered that story for years, and we dedicated, instead of a minute 30, we were doing four, five, six, seven-minute packages, which for news, like, that's a lot for broadcast news.

And it was uncomfortable getting people to say, okay, well, wait, we're gonna do a seven-minute package?

Yes we are.

And this is an impactful story that should get more than seven minutes.

And so we need to continue to challenge ourselves to earn that trust because trust isn't given to us anymore.

It's if someone shows up to watch us, which if I took a poll of the room, most of you probably tune in on broadcast a couple days a week.

Some of you watch on your cell phone or your iPhone app or your Apple Watch app.

When you show up those two times, hopefully, I have to earn that every time, because if I miss one time, the likelihood of you saying, okay, that was an investment in my time, I'm gonna burn that bridge and not earn that trust.

So I think earning the trust is where we all have to be better.

- Yup.

Okay, let's move on to the next segment, and that is why this is a problem for democracy.

Let me start this with another quote from one of Penny's books.

In "Democracy Without Journalism?

", University of Pennsylvania professor, Victor Picard, writes, "It is through local journalism that communities stay connected to and informed about what is happening in their backyards, especially in their schools, their governments, and other critical institutions and infrastructures.

They rely on local news to find out about the quality of the environment, whether they're air and water are safe, and who is running for local office and why.

It is precisely this kind of journalism that is quickly disappearing.

If we as a society want to encourage this sort of reporting, we must find ways to support it."

So why is this a problem for democracy?

And we'll start with Penny again.

- Yeah, so, you know, they say journalists only cover what's in their backyard.

That's what's most important to us today.

And so let me tell you my backyard story.

I live in the North Carolina 9th congressional district.

Does anybody remember why that one's important in 2018?

We were without a representative for almost a year in the House of Representatives because of election fraud committed by the Republican candidate for congress.

Now, here's the disappointing part, and this is why this is important for democracy.

You would assume that it would've been one of the regional newspapers or the local newspapers who would've uncovered the fraud.

Guess who noticed it?

A professor at a university 200 miles away who was looking at election returns posted on the state election commission website, who noticed that in Bladen County, which was heavily Democratic, all of the absentee ballots came in for the Republican candidate.

Now, this wasn't a reporter who uncovered it, it was an academic.

Let me just say, having been in academia, it moves at a very different pace from journalism.

(audience laughing) And if we depend on academics to uphold democracy, it's going to be a very slow decline from all them.

The three things up there, there have been what we are blessed with, as I mentioned in 2016, it was kinda like feeling like a tree fell in the forest.

What we are blessed with right now is we have scholars and researchers across disciplines, whether it's political science, whether it is history, whether it's sociology, whether it's economics, taking a look at what it really means to lose news in a community.

There is a great book that just came out called "News Hole" that looks at what happens to voter participation.

And let me just say, even in the 9th congressional district, you have a hard time finding any kind of information on who's running for state office beyond the governor or maybe the attorney general.

It is next to impossible.

I spent three hours trying to research just the people running for a local office in the past election cycle.

And I think I'm a journalist who knows how to research this.

It is a huge problem.

You have corruption.

It starts out small, but when you don't have transparency, the person who takes the thousand dollars trip and charges it, family trip charges it, and nobody's there to question that.

You have... And as a result because there's no transparency, when you do bonds, taxes increase because you pay more, and then of course, what we now see are these large PAC-based sites that are masquerading as newspapers who come out with the kind of names that you would associate with a newspaper.

Instead of the Pilot Dow, it'll be the Norfolk News and Register or something.

And their whole notion is to inject a partisan kind of relationship into covering everything.

So you get misinformation and disinformation flourishing on social media, which should be an aid to the news organizations, but it's not.

So, I mean, this is a really important issue as you think about how you get people engaged in democracy and why it is important that we have a strong network of committed local reporters.

- Other thoughts from the panelists?

- To your point, Penny, when we don't give the journalists the time to commit journalism, then journalism won't happen, right?

- Yup.

- And so a lot of time what we found is news comes out every day, right?

News is just what's happening in the world.

Journalism is the impactful work that's been done to see, okay, what are the solutions, what's the impact?

One thing we've addressed is, if our editorial meeting is at 10 o'clock in the morning, our journalists come in the room and they get assigned at, say, by 11.

Okay, so they're, here's your story of the day.

You have until two.

Best of luck to get all your interviews and write it and shoot it and edit it and get it back into the newsroom.

That's insanity.

And so that's how things get overlooked.

So we're looking at models of really breaking down the time.

Do we cut a whole day out of the week to give people more research time and more work days and more time and breath just to say, what is going on in this world, how do I make sense of it, how do I inform the public, instead of let me just hit this crazy deadline every single day?

And that also leads to burnout.

We are burning out journalists left and right because we're expecting too much work to come out too fast just to meet archaic deadlines.

- Talking about the importance of local journalism specifically to democracy, one thing that I have found myself repeating a lot as WHRO stands up its newsroom 'cause we have to... Well, I have to, and our CEO, Bert, goes out and we have to tell people that we exist and why WHRO decided to go into this.

But for me, you know, I'm from Virginia Beach, grew up here, right?

And I grew up reading the Pilot.

And the quality of news that we got in the Pilot, like, is so far and above anything I could find locally now.

And I think about the way that my parents interacted with the world having access to that versus the way I have to interact in the world.

Like, I became like conscious of things outside of myself in like the 2000s.

That's when I was like old enough to have a brain.

And so 9/11, right?

As, however old I was, like, 10, I was 10, I didn't understand that.

I didn't understand the war that we entered.

I didn't understand any of it.

My only understanding came from the news.

And not just the Virginian-Pilot, but my parents liked Channel 13.

So Channel 13.

(audience laughing) And so I think about how... And my parents are not educated people.

Like, my mom didn't finish high school, my dad left high school, went right into the military.

Like, they're not people who go out of their way to find information, but they're still very well informed.

Well, they were.

My mom's still pretty nosy, but not in like a useful way.

(audience and panelists laughing) So I think about that, and then I think about like me and my friends, how hard we have to work just to understand like one world event.

Like, how am I supposed to be an active citizen when I don't even know how a city council functions?

I don't even know when my city council meets.

I don't know the difference between a city council and a school board.

That's not how we create a community that can function, a community that's gonna work for everyone who lives here.

And I think, obviously, there are groups of people who have different interests and different priorities in the community, but that's our job as journalists to try to fulfill that, to give them the information that they need to make decisions about, what neighborhood do I wanna live in?

Like, what school system do I wanna put my kid in?

What person do I wanna vote for?

Like, what route do I wanna take across the water?

When can... Like, maybe I'm just gonna avoid going across water until they finish construction.

When does that mean I can leave?

You know, stuff like that.

We're here to give people information to make better decisions, but we're also here to build community.

And so as a young journalist, I really sort of shied away from doing what we call soft news, right?

Like, the cute stories about like a kid who did a lemonade stand for whatever reason.

Those stories matter too, right?

Because it's important for us to build those connections as a community.

You're not gonna be invested in your community if you don't care about the people around you, and I think that is probably one of the overlooked parts of journalism, local journalism, that is important.

It just as important as the accountability, as showing up to city council, as covering the elections.

- Speaking of democracy and trust, one thing that we have to be better at every day is bias.

Understanding we all have our own biases.

Understanding that our role in the world isn't to sway you left or right.

My role is to give you information and news.

Your role is to consume that and make your own decision.

I think all of our goals, and I know our goal at WTKR Channel 3, (audience laughing) if you can tell that we sit on left or right, we have not done our job, and that's something we talk about every day.

We're trying to have more involvement in the newsroom, understanding where people sit, and then having open conversations of, "Hey, I think your story might lean left."

"Hey, I think your story might be leaning right because these couple words."

"How can we do we do a better job just getting right down the middle?"

That's, I think, what builds that trust.

That's what ensures that we have a future in our communities.

- [Bruce] Yup.

Denise, anything you want to add?

- Yeah, I mean, I'm the old timer up here, and I remember when my parents would go to the newspaper.

We used to endorse candidates.

We can't do that anymore.

We don't have the staff to do that.

And so...

I mean, I still remember my grandparents, "Okay, this is who I'm gonna vote for."

"I'm reading the editorial page to see what's going on."

So we still...

I mean, this year, it's such an election year, and we're already thinking about what can we do and what can't we do.

Can we get freelancers, even though it's difficult to find, talented, experienced freelancers to help us cover the elections?

But it also gives me hope because every year we still publish a voter's guide and where to vote, how to vote, don't forget this, and we know that that's one of our more popular.

You know, even online.

When I vote, I see people have the newspaper tucked in their bags and things like that.

So that part gives me hope that people still want that.

But, yes, we need to get... We need to get the journalists in the door so that we can provide people what they need to make those decisions.

- I remember years ago when Virginia Beach first had elected school board candidates.

Before that, they were appointed.

And Dennis Hardick was the editorial page editor and I remember that we invited the 60 candidates to come in for interviews.

60.

And so we went through that whole process, and like you say, the money's not there.

In fairness, for those people that say, boy, my Virginia-Pilot has shrunk, the revenue was not there 'cause the business model has changed.

And so you can't afford to do certain things that used to be done.

I remember years ago also we had...

I'd forgotten the story, but an investigative piece and it went on for several days, was like a four or five-day series, and I remember asking the reporter, one to Denise's colleagues, how long did you spend on this work?

And she said, "Probably better part of three months."

And I did the math being on the business side and thinking, wow, we just spent 20, $25,000 on this story when you're take into account the reporter's salary, the editing expense and the newsprint expense.

Can't afford to do that anymore.

So you have really important investigative things, things that need to be investigated that are not investigated.

- Can I add one thing?

One of the things I first started hearing from newspaper reporters as the profit margins decline from what had been 20%, not unusual, 20% for many down, to 5%.

And I had numbers of editors tell me that really worried them because at 5%, you're just profitable, and that subconsciously they weighed every time there was a story that they knew they were going to get sued for.

Can I devote the resources financially to this story?

So you've got a self-censoring mechanism that goes on that precludes many of the small corruption cases that would've been shown the light of day at a 20% margin that never make it and that mushroomed.

- That's a great point.

And again, when our margins were in the 20% to 30% range, you never thought about, is there a possibility we might get sued?

That was just part of the way we did business.

That was part of doing business.

But now if you gotta think about that, you may have a really important story that doesn't get covered because of fear that you're gonna end up being sued about it.

- If I can just say something real quick, kind of piggybacking off of that.

One thing that occurred to me, Bruce, when you mentioned that the Pilot's... You know, 82% used to come from the advertising.

I think about when the Pilot was fully in local hands.

I would imagine that if you are devoting your career to local journalism, you, to some extent, probably see your job as a public service, and so maybe the profit is not gonna be as big as you want it, but that's okay because what you're doing is important.

When we have people like Alden buying up newspapers, they don't care.

They don't even know the name of the newspapers they bought.

That's like a real thing.

That happened when... Well, they were Tronc at the time.

When Tronc bought the pilot, they didn't know the name of the Daily Press.

They called it the Newport News.

(panelist and audiences laughing) Like, I remember that very clearly.

Anyways, when companies like that get in the local news game, profit is all that matters.

So like a 2% profit drop, as long as you can still pay everything.

When you are a local owner, you're living in the community.

So, whatever, a 2% profit drop, you gotta figure that out, but you're not gonna abandon the news organization.

When we look at these hedge funds, they don't care.

Like, the minute it's not helpful to them, they'll just clean it out and take the money and go.

And I think that's a really dangerous, scary thing that we could start seeing.

- To Mechelle's point, the statement of purpose at the Virginia-Pilot, which came from Frank Batten's inspiration years ago, which has still emblazoned my mind.

We will serve and inform the public with skill and character and by honest and intelligent journalism work to improve our community.

That was the main purpose.

And the prophet motive is not in that statement, as you noticed.

That came as a result of what we did.

Okay, let's move on to... Let me leave a question for you to pose to think about, and that is, can you have democracy without journalism?

We could talk a long time about that.

I think the answer to that question is you cannot, but let us move to what the possible solutions are.

And I've asked each of our three local panelists to take three minutes and talk about what they're doing to focus on the problem.

But we'll start with Penny again also.

Penny.

- So let me start by...

I think I wanna address it three ways.

One is, what can journalists do to a address this?

Second, what can we know about business models going forward and what we need to do on the economic side?

And then third, what can you do out there to support that?

With journalism, I think what we have to acknowledge is we've lost 60% of the journalists that were there.

You're not going to replace them overnight.

You may replace them over a 10 to 15-year period if things turn around.

So you have to think about journalism differently.

And I love what has been set up here.

You need to think about what it is you're offering, right?

You're offering journalism, and that's the difference between what's on a Facebook page that could be biased or not about what happened in the town council meeting, right?

So you need to think clearly about how you provide the context, the options that are available for solutions for that, and that's where you need to focus it.

You need to also think about how you collaborate.

As a one example of collaboration, the one that I love... Actually, a major network called me about the other day.

I had mentioned it in the most recent report.

The Charleston Post and Courier, which is still privately owned has committed itself to doing something called the Uncovered series, in which they put together a network throughout the state of...

It started with 11, it's now up to 21 other small newspapers.

It's news organizations, and includes digital sites, in which they ask them, what is the story you haven't been able to do?

where is the George Santos that you haven't been able to get any kind of traction on?

And then they work that story as in a collaboration together with that in South Carolina.

They have focused on areas that lack newspapers.

They've focused... Or any other digital outlet, or any other news outlet.

They've focused on places that have reporters stretched to the bare bone and have come up with a wonderful series.

I would encourage you to look at that looks at corruption as well as climate change, which is of course a big issue for South Carolina when it depends on tourism so much for so much of its business.

So I think that, there needs to be, instead of thinking competition, there's a collaboration, and I beginning to see that happening a lot.

There needs to be a notion of, what is important, what isn't being covered, what is the trend that I can give to Norfolk that you wouldn't get somewhere else going forward?

On the business side, I think we need to acknowledge there's not one business model as there was in the past, there're gonna be many, and that includes for-profit.

There's still some for-profits that are, as Bruce would say, not worried about the profit as long as it stays profitable, but committed to doing well by the community.

And so there we need to acknowledge there will be some for-profit, we need to look very strategically in non-profit of what we can do to support the ecosystem and refurbish it in communities.

And then thirdly, we need to look at public subsidies.

I'm amazed I'm saying this from 10 years ago, but the truth of the matter is, we like to pride ourselves and we never took government aid.

In fact, one of the first things the Congress did in 1792 was pass a postal subsidy for newspapers, right?

It has been an indirect subsidy that hasn't affected our ability to cover anything.

There are several bills before the congress that have been introduced among others, senators from Minnesota, from Washington, from Delaware, that have got very close to being passed, that we give indirect subsidies to small newspapers that actually hire reporters, right?

It's an indirect one.

You're not dictated by any of that.

We need to think creatively.

If we've used the postal subsidy for 200 plus years and it's been to our benefit, what are other indirect ways that do not let the government interfere, but actually support us through this period of transition?

there is a lot of discussion among people who have been on the corporation for public broadcast about whether you should... We give a disproportionate amount of the public funds to PBS.

And of the several hundred PBS stations, according to the annual survey done by Syracuse University, only a dozen of the PBS stations actually have local news, whereas NPR thrives on local news.

So how do you kind of reallocate what we're even currently giving to public broadcasting?

And then there's lots of...

I've gotten calls from people in Virginia who wanted to introduce similar proposals at the state level.

So, you know, in addition to you supporting local news when you can and paying for it and understanding you've gotten it basically for free because advertisers wanted to reach you, and good newspapers put a wall between that.

There's I think an opportunity for you to kind of educate yourself of what can be done to support, in a variety of ways, public funding, non-profit funding, as well as for-profit funding.

- Thanks, Penny.

All three of these panelists locally have engaged in collaboration with various other media, and you may want to hit on that too.

But if each of you would take a few minutes and tell us what you're doing to respond to this challenge.

And, Denise, we'll start with you and just go down the table.

- It sounds simplistic, but we try to give people what they want, which means we do a lot of reader surveys, we track what is trending as far as what people are reading online.

Now, I'm in charge of the Daily Break and my readership tends to be older, they tend to be more print, and we recognize that.

So I still get a lot of reader feedback.

And s a reader will say, "Hey, can you print more recipes in the flavor section for working people, 30 minutes?

So I will change my focus and do that.

But we also, like for example, our 757Teamz, which is our sports, I think that is one of the most popular sports media.

I don't even know what to call it because it's so many things.

It's Twitter, it's now TikTok, but it's one of the most followed entities in the country when it comes to high school sports.

So we make sure that we promote that, we brand that, because I talk to young people who have never heard of the Pilot, but they know 757Teamz.

So we have to make sure that that's front and center where we allocate our resources.

We're also re recruiting.

When we recruit, we also give a focus to local people because one of the things we've learned, Mechelle is local, I'm local, you tend to get people who are more committed because they're a part of the community, and then they also have that institutional knowledge, which feeds into the reporting as well.

And so that's... Those are some of the things that we've been doing.

We have an internship program, that's one of the things that we haven't gotten rid of.

A lot of newspapers had internship programs for college students and they got rid of them.

We still have ours.

And that's another way to make connections to school because media literacy and talking to college students about that is real important.

But then also getting that pipeline going to get those people into our newsroom has been important.

It's paid off.

- [Bruce] Interesting.

Mechelle?

- Well, we're the only nonprofit up here, and we're new as a newsroom.

WHRO, obviously, is not new, but our newsroom is fairly new.

And so as a nonprofit, we're able to play with some of those funding ideas that don't rely on revenue generating effort.

So we don't need to worry about advertising, we don't need to worry about a paywall, we don't need to worry about a lot of the things that news...

I say newspapers 'cause that's where I'm from, but that newspapers did to make money.

So one of the things that we're doing, and I believe it's unique also in the nonprofit world, is that WHRO is creating an endowment fund for its newsroom.

And so that means that donors can contribute to our newsroom.

It goes into an invest... Now, okay, don't like...

I don't know how bank accounts work.

If it's not a checking or savings account, I don't really know.

(audience laughing) So just follow me.

It goes into an investment account, and then the like dividends, the whatever, thank you.

The dividends from that are what will ultimately fund us year to year.

And so obviously it'll be a large endowment, but that accomplishes a couple things for us.

It gives us a sustainable funding source, which is really important when it comes to serving the community and making sure that we're not... Obviously, when the market changes, things will change, but we're not susceptible to like some owner who doesn't even know the name of our organization.

We're susceptible to the market.

We can make that work.

It also creates a separation between us and donors.

When I took my position at the Virginia Mercury, one of the things that gave me a lot of hesitation was that I did not understand how a nonprofit newsroom was going to operate ethically.

Like, if we were gonna get donations, how could we do our job?

They had a system in place, whatever, but this endowment model here at WHRO gives us a very clear separation between us as editorial... Like, content creators, and the money, right?

Like, even though you are putting your money in our endowment fund, I don't... Like, the interests that we're operating off of, I don't know who that came from.

I don't know whose dollars that came from.

And I think that is a really important part of non-profit.

And as someone who is transitioned from like a traditional news organization into non-profit news, that is one of the most important things to me, is to maintain that editorial freedom.

I think the endowment model sounds great.

I mean, it's working so far.

We're raising money.

People are supportive of it.

It allows donors to feel secure that we're not gonna fold in a year.

Like, we're gonna have some money to operate for a while.

And that also goes into what Denise was saying, something that's really important to me personally, is being able to build a newsroom that is service-driven because that is when I think you start to get the content that people will actually want to use.

And like Denise was saying, it's important that you find people who are actually committed to the community.

We're not like a huge major market, we're not super well known.

I think we're very important market, personally, but in the journalism world, we're not the same as like going to DC or going to Nashville or going to Austin or wherever.

And so one of the things that we need to be aware of as we're building this newsroom is, we need to remind people that we hire that we're sustainable.

You're not gonna come in one day and not have a job unless you've done something very, very, very wrong and we're able to pay you fair salaries.

Not salaries that are just like a little higher than newspapers, like actual salaries that reflect the amount of work you put in.

And that's something that's really important to me, and I think that that's one of the reasons we've had really great success in hiring.

I'll say that.

We have had very great success in hiring very talented journalists, and I think that is a big reason why, that we're able to offer them security and fair wage.

- [Bruce] Thanks, Mechelle.

Adam.

- Yeah, so I think one thing that I'm always...

I appreciate telling people is, so all three of us sitting up here from newspaper to non-profit, to traditional broadcast, we are, I call us selected representatives.

We've selected to serve the community.

So we weren't elected, but we have selected, and we can all be voted in or out of office.

And so the power is really on the roughly 300 people in this room and in Hampton Roads to say, if you want to see more local journalism, if you want to invest in local journalism through endowments or donations or readership or turning on your TV, downloading the app, Channel 3, (audience laughing) those are the ways that you can participate in the local journalism.

Also, my email is very easy, adam.chase@wtkr.com.

I love criticism.

If you are not happy, email me.

If you do not like our product, email me.

I will respond no matter what time of day.

My cell phone is on my signature.

Text me, tweet me, whatever you have to do.

We have to be better representatives for the communities that we serve.

And serve as the most important word I think for all of us, is we are here for Hampton Roads.

So you have that commitment from us.

I've already talked on devoting more time to depth and context.

One thing I didn't touch on, which I would probably unanimously the whole group would agree in here, positivity.

Who likes to wake up in the morning and turn on your TV and it's like, "Hey, here's all the horrible things that you're gonna encounter today."

"Good morning, best of luck."

We have to focus on accurately reflecting the entire community, not just the the low, easy commodity crime coverage that, do we have to do every story on a 7-Eleven robbery?

No.

Can we be inspiring to the communities that we serve?

I was talking to somebody earlier about how my thoughts changed when I had a child.

Forrest, he's fantastic.

(audience laughing) To where I could only imagine Forrest watching the news with my wife and I And am I gonna leave him with something that he feels inspired or does he feel, "Okay, this is a dangerous world."

"I don't have a place in it."

And so how can we all inspire the communities that we serve?

So positivity is one way.

Meeting viewers where they are with the content they want.

An old traditional approach to digital is, okay, I do an investigation on broadcast, I put out the story on our website, as soon as the broadcast airs.

I clip it, I throw it on the website, and I've done digital.

That's a hundred percent wrong.

For those of you who are digital news viewers, you don't want broadcast or you go to broadcast.

You want that information now.

You don't wanna wait until 5:00 PM.

You want that information sometimes vertically in video.

And so we're testing everything now.

If you follow us on any of our social medias or on our website, we're trying new things to attract viewers with the content they want to see in the format they wanna see it in.

And that transitions us from, I hope someday soon, we are no longer referred to as news Channel 3, a TV station, but we're actually a news outlet.

That I don't care if you follow me on Facebook.

I would hope that you leave Facebook and go to our website 'cause that helps us.

But I have to serve you where you are.

I can't convince you or coerce you to, "Okay, well, I need you to just watch broadcast at 6:00 PM."

We have to do a better job giving you that news information when you want it, not when we wanna give it to you.

And I think on the collaborations that Bruce mentioned, WHRO and our team, and thanks to Bert.

I know you're in the room.

There he is.

I met with Bert and was new to the market and said, "Hey, I really want to support this market in a way I can't do on my own.

I need to find partners that are invested in the community, and what if we start tackling issues together?

And Bert was a very generous person and allowed some knucklehead like me to come into his office and pitch this idea.

But we've since had a couple community conversations.

We have another one coming up in March, I believe.

- Yes.

- Where we can impact communities better when we collaborate and have a focused effort.

And so I'm excited to see what comes of that.

And then investing in local communities.

What many people don't know is, through our parent company, the E. W. Scripps Company, we have a charitable arm.

And so every single person that works at our station, roughly 165, has access to $2,500 a year if they volunteer for any charity that's a 501(c)(3).

- Wow.

- That it takes five minutes to fill out a form, we cut checks.

We are dedicated to improving this community through the nonprofits, through the organizations that create change.

We don't wanna just take from Hampton Roads and North Carolina 'cause we good on that far, but we wanna give back.

- Very good.

So it is nine o'clock.

We have a stop time of 9:15.

I have a stack of questions here for the panel.

We will obviously not get through the entire stack.

Many of you submitted questions in advance and we have two pages of those questions.

So the foundation, thanks to Debbie and Linda, are going to include some of those questions on the foundation website, and I guess you'll keep updating it with answers from our panelists.

So you can check that out.

If your question does not get answered, maybe it will be found on the website.

So let me start with the first question.

"Can you speak to the shallow pipeline of experience and lack of government knowledge and how this is a possible hindrance toward covering balanced stories about the government?"

- Yes.

I can't speak for every like college journalism program.

I can speak for the one that I went through.

I love VCU.

I would go there again in a heartbeat.

If any of you guys have college-aged kids, I would tell you let your kids go there.

It's a lot of fun.

I didn't learn a darn thing in the classroom.

Everything that I learned how to do when it came to journalism, I learned because I worked at the college newspaper and I got internships.

And so I feel like I can speak fairly knowledgeably about programs in Virginia.

There aren't a lot of opportunities for young journalists getting an education in journalism to actually practice journalism.

And so when I was in journalism, the basics were city council and crime.

Like, that's what you did for the first couple years of your career.

That's what I did in Raleigh for a while, is city council and crime.

Raleigh was a huge city council to do.

I don't know who let me do that, but it was a great experience to be thrown in the deep end like that.

I think part of it goes back to something we mentioned earlier where because of limited financial resources, there may be leaders in the newsroom who are hesitant to put young reporters in these positions where you really only learn to do journalism by doing it.

And when you learn that way, you're gonna make mistakes.

And I think there are folks who, there are leaders who are very concerned, and rightfully so, that that a mistake is gonna bankrupt them or ruin their standing in the community.

When it comes to like corrections and mistakes, be transparent, right?

Be transparent with your audience.

It's going to happen.

No one's perfect.

Someone at some point that you manage, or you yourself at some point in your career, you're gonna have to issue a correction.

That's okay.

Like, as long as it was an an honest mistake, as long as you're transparent about it, great.

So I think there needs to be some sort of connection between professional newsrooms and institutions that are providing journalism education.

Internships are great but we have to recognize that internships sometimes are prohibitive to certain students, and so it's important that if an outlet has, if an organization has the resources and ability to do it, that sometimes you going into the institution might be the better solution.

We've been in... WHRO has been in talks with the Howard Center for Democracy and Journalism to stand up some sort of program with Hampton University and Norfolk State University to get their communication students covering city council meetings for us, 'cause we don't have enough people to get to all the city council meetings.

That is something that they would be coming out of college ready to do what would probably be one of their first tasks.

- Yeah, and I think with the... As we focus less on commodity coverage and more on depth and context, we will get away from the old model of just having a cast of GA reporters, so general assignment, which is, let's be an inch wide... An inch deep and a mile wide and allowing more focus board development into government policy and understanding council meetings and how government works.

If you're a headline news approach, you can get away with just the GA model because then you just have to have the headline.

You don't have to provide the depth.

So I'm hoping that as we start to transition more and more of our newsrooms to depth and context, some of us, hopefully, more of us, we will see more education go into these tough topics.

- It's an interesting question because there's no substitute for experience.

And how do you get the experience?

I remember at the Pilot we had a guy by the name of Jack Dorsey who covered the Navy and Tom Sheen who covered banks, and they covered those beats for 20 years.

So the level of their knowledge in those areas was deep.

So I guess the challenge is, how do you keep people for a long period of time- - To get that done.

I mean, if I could just jump in.

I'm seeing when I talk to college students, and this is a question or an answer for a sociologist, I believe, but I'm finding a lot of college students, they don't know how to go deep.

They've sort of grown up in this social media thing where you do a quick video.

- Yeah, yeah.

- And a lot of the college students I come across aren't interested in writing.

They don't know how to write well, but they will take a job if they can produce a really quick video.

So that's something going on with how they grew up in a household maybe, where they weren't taught the literacy or they didn't see people read and have those kinds of discussions.

- Yeah good point.

Next question.

"How do you ensure stories of marginalized people's are told?"

"How do you ensure stories of marginalized people are told?"

- Not to take the easy way out, but as a newsroom leader who is not white, it is natural for our newsroom.

And I don't know if my reporters feel like they have to be aware of this or if they are just naturally aware of it, but it is something that naturally occurs in our newsroom because of who I am.

Obviously, not every newsroom is led by a woman of color.

And quite frankly, there are probably newsrooms where there just aren't enough people of color, period, for those discussions to happen.

And so there really is no big strategy to addressing that issue.

It is about reporters feeling comfortable to go places where they've never gone, to talk to people they've never talked to, and to do that with an open mind.

When we talk about bias, I think a lot of people think about political bias, but we don't think about the fact that the majority of journalists are, for a very long time, are white, like middle class affluent men, right?

The way that they see the world is very different from the way I see the world, is a very different from the way a white woman sees the world.

Everyone experiences life differently.

So, you know, the way that you think through a story, the way that you formulate a story, the questions you ask, that's all impacted by who you are and the way that you experience and see the world, and so it's really important that we check those biases and we go out of our way to make ourselves uncomfortable.

There is no, like I said, there's no big strategy to that.

You just need to... Reporters need to be pushed to do that.

Editors need to be pushed to be aware of that.

There are a lot of great resources in the industry that have like actionable things that reporters and editors can do.

And so it is important that leaders prioritize that in their newsroom.

- That's when you also get to the importance of diversity in the newsroom.

Right now we don't have any Asian Americans in our newsroom.

I'm one of maybe three.

I'm the only minority in leadership position.

And people gravitate to the people who they feel look like them or can...

I just think of this email I got over the weekend from somebody complaining about Norfolk state coverage, which is out of my realm, a sports coverage, but they felt that they could come to me and say, "Hey, the pilot dropped the ball."

"They should have had that Norfolk State-Hampton game, especially since Norfolk State beat Hampton on the front page (audiences laughing) and not on the inside."

But that's when you need people in the newsroom who reflect the community.

- The one thing that we've done in our parent company and with our local station, yes, it's having a diverse newsroom, having a diverse staff, but also having the opportunity and the comfort level to have uncomfortable conversations.

So becoming comfortable being uncomfortable and allowing our EDI committee at our station challenges us on multiple fronts.

And they have changed station policy and it's been a blessing to watch because they're bringing up things that I might never think about or our leadership team.

And so being diverse is, half of it being open to conversation is the most important part, because if you build a diverse newsroom but you don't have a culture built around honesty and vulnerability, then it doesn't work.

- Can I add a couple of things?

Having looked at it, and let me just say, I start with in the '70s when I was one of only two women in the first newsroom 32 that I was in.

And part of the... That was definitely a minority at that point, but you look back at how much women... Women now are 80% of the graduates of communication schools, how much they change the way we cover news with everything from consumer reporting, to the trends, to even investigative reporters we do.

So I think it's all of what you're saying, it really has to start with a diverse newsroom.

And then you have to give people the ability to say, "That's not what I saw."

I can't tell you the number of times I would see people say, "We're going to hire an Asian American."

"Oh, we can't hire that person because they don't speak Mandarin," right?

It is just like, yes, as an Asian American who's lived in the US as a second generation American, but he's going to see the world very differently than you or I see it going forward.

And so I think it is one of those things where it starts with diversity and it starts at the college level where we encourage people to really take this on.

And I find that it's really interesting...

In my experience at both Northwestern and at UNC, you find more and more people of minority populations that are very attracted to local news right now because they see that it can make a difference, and that's what what we need to give people, that latitude, because as you said, some 2010 on, it's been like, "Oh if I go to this, are my parents going worry about whether I get a job or not, and are they gonna be supporting me till I'm 50 from all of that?"

So I think it is a burden on both the colleges and on what we tell colleges we need too.

- You know, quick editorial comment 'cause some people that undoubtedly you run into also will say, "Well, the diversity focus is all something that's kind of politically correct."

But it was hammered home to me when I was at the Pilot that you can't cover a diverse audience if you've got a homogeneous staff.

And it was hammered home, especially when we started a product called Link.

And this was in like 2006, 2007, and it was focused...

It was a different newspaper.

It would be rack distributed, it would be free, it would come out five days a week, and we targeted 25 to 35 year olds.

If the old white guys like me had designed that product, no one would've read it.

And so you had to have people that were in that target designing the product, which fortunately we did, and it was successful.

Unfortunately, 2008 and the sale of the Pilot came shortly thereafter and so it was folded.

But you couldn't do something like that unless you had the staff that you needed to reach that audience.

Next question.

"What can we do to capture the digital generation of people in their 20s and 30s to engage meaningfully with local news sources?"

How do we capture that generation?

- I'll speak anecdotally.

So I'm in my early 30s.

All my siblings are around like...

I have six siblings.

Most of them are in their 20s.

So I try to keep up with them 'cause I don't wanna be made fun of by younger people.

And they put me on to TikTok when the pandemic started 'cause they were doing all these dances and I was like confused about where they were learning them.

And I even have found myself, as time goes on, I'm actually getting a lot of news from TikTok, right?

And I know the dangers of just like taking news as it comes to you on social media because whether it is purposefully curated or an algorithm is driving it, you're only getting what the computer decides you want to see, right?

So it's very limited what you're getting.

And I'll say also anecdotally, TikTok news is like almost always wrong, and that's very hard to explain to someone whose only news consumption ever has been on social media.

That like, yeah, it's great to get a headline from your Twitter feed or TikTok, but you need to go check it.

I think to engage the younger audiences, we just need to be creative and we need to be willing to ditch some of the old ways of doing news.

And we also like, it's really a perception issue too.

People think of news outlets as being full of like, no offense to any old white guys, right?

But the more that we can show that there are, especially in our market, there are a lot of young people in our local newsrooms, there are a lot of people of color in our newsroom, especially on the TV side.

And the more that we can show that, I think the better, but also the big thing is like, we need to be better at identifying and presenting content /\ in a way that matters to them and not just as far as like the platform, but the way that we pick out stories.

Actually, this dawned on me when I left the NNO, came back, and started working at the Pilot.

I wrote a story about like funding for beach replenishment at Chic's Beach, or like, I don't know, it was like a property dispute.

It was very in the weeds.

It started in the courthouse.

But it's a popular beach.

And I started seeing it organically shared on my Facebook feed from people who I know do not read the news.

I'm not even sure if they know how to read, but I saw them sharing the story and they were interested in it because they were like, "I love this beach."

"Like, if the impact of this is that potentially I don't have access to the speech, this story matters to me."

And that goes back to what Denise was saying, like, it's imperative that we have reporters who are pushing and pushing to figure out the why, the why this matters, right?

Like, I can go to city council and I can write you a a five inch... That's not... Like, a 30-second story, but if I never explain to you why that matters as a millennial-aged Hampton Roads news consumer, you're never gonna... Like, you're not gonna keep listening to me, right?

You're gonna be like, "Ugh, they just talk about like some weird vote about something I don't even understand."

And so I think it's really important that we, whether we do it from our connections, like our personal connections with the community or if it's data or research-driven, whatever it is, it's important that we give people what they want to know.

- Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we are out of time.

I want us to join in a round of applause to thank the foundation and also... (audience and panelists applauding) And also the co-sponsor, HRO.

And HRO has videotaped this so it can be viewed at some point.

I guess you'll promote when.

And also there's a little card on your table there with a QR code beginning in, I think it was mentioned in April, there'll be a daily newsletter of local news that'll (indistinct) from HRO.

So if you're interested in that, you can sign up there.

And then most importantly, I want us to thank the panel.

Thank you all very much.

(audience applauding) And I'll turn it back over to Linda.

- I too wanna thank the panel.

It was amazing.

There's a lot of information for us to think about and process throughout the next week.

I do appreciate each one of them being here.

And you can tell from Penny that there is so much that she knows.

And if you have a chance, please read her book.

I wanna thank my colleagues at the foundation who helped put this event on.

And I also wanna thank WHRO for being our partner and for recording today's event.

Bruce mentioned the card that's on the table.

If you want to receive their daily newsletter, please use that QR code.

After this morning's program, we will release a webpage about declining local journalism and the risk to democracy on the Hampton Roads Community Foundation website.

We will have the recording of this event on that website in about a week, but currently on that website, you will find a number of articles and reports provided by our presenters.

So I hope that you'll go to that website and stay engaged with that website.

Our three local panelists have agreed to respond to your questions that you submitted during registration and we will post those answers and some...

I think there's something called a blog and a vog or something that we will put out there.

(audience laughing) I'm of that older generation, but we will have some of that on our website.

Thank you so much for being with us this morning.

I hope you have a wonderful day.

And keep talking about this topic, and I hope to see that declining local journalism becomes the opposite.

Thank you very much.

- Thank you.

(audience applauding)