About the Guest:
Andrea Wenzel is an Associate Professor of Journalism at Temple University’s Klein College. She is the author of Antiracist Journalism: The Challenge of Creating Equitable Local News (Columbia University Press, 2023) and Community-Centered Journalism: Engaging People, Exploring Solutions, and Building Trust (University of Illinois Press, 2020). A former journalist, her research focuses on initiatives to create more connected and equitable communities and newsrooms. She co-founded the Germantown Info Hub and has been a fellow with Columbia University’s Tow Center. Prior to completing her PhD at USC Annenberg, she spent 15 years as a radio producer and editor at NPR affiliates in Chicago (WBEZ) and Washington, DC (WAMU), and as a trainer/project manager for organizations including BBC Media Action and Internews in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Iraq, and Ghana.
Episode Transcript:
Cory Barker: The year is 2017. Kellyanne Conway, senior counselor to President Donald Trump, is talking with Chuck Todd on Meet the Press. When questioned about then White House press Secretary Sean Spicer's false statements about the attendance numbers for Trump's inauguration, Conway responded with the now-infamous term "alternative facts." In the days that followed, President Trump began referring to the press as the enemy of the people.
Seven years later, with President Trump returning to the White House, public trust of legacy news organizations is at an all-time low, and the partisan media that people have turned to leaves a divided public struggling to agree on something as basic as what constitutes a fact.
What can responsible news organizations do to reverse this trend? And why does the survival of this public interest journalism matter?
Matt Jordan: To find out, we're going to talk with Andrea Wenzel, an associate professor at Temple University's Department of Journalism and a member of the graduate faculty of the Klein College of Media and Communication, the author of Community-Centered Journalism: Engaging People, Exploring Solutions, and Building Trust, and of Anti-Racist Journalism: The Challenge of Creating Equitable Local News. She's been a Knight News Innovation fellow with Columbia University's Tow Center for Digital Journalism, where she led projects on local news with a focus on marginalized groups in rural, small town, suburban, and urban communities, as well as engaged journalism and solutions journalism.
Prior to her work in academia, Wenzel spent 15 years as a public radio producer, editor, and media development consultant. Andrea, welcome to News Over Noise.
Andrea Wenzel: Thank you so much. It's so great to be here.
Matt Jordan: So, you've done a number of studies where you've observed and participated with newsrooms of different kinds. What are you looking for when you study newsroom culture?
Andrea Wenzel: I think—I'm not sure that I'm looking for anything in particular so much as trying to be useful in any way that I can be and explore different questions I have about not only just how to think about what can be a healthy newsroom or news organization, but what news and information do communities need. I try to generally center questions around what communities need and value when I think about their relationships with journalism and newsrooms, if that makes sense.
Cory Barker: So, in that regard, what role does the community play in that process in some of the newsrooms that you've worked with and observed?
Andrea Wenzel: That can vary pretty widely. I've done different studies and different kinds of places and with different kinds of organizations. And I think, in some situations, it's fairly traditional understanding of the model of journalism where journalists are kind of doing reporting based on what they understand as priorities for news and then engaging communities often kind of a bit later on in the process, like after the things are published or broadcast. Whereas other news organizations or even community media organizations that maybe wouldn't even think of themselves as news organizations are completely ground up from communities and centering that as their jumping off point. And so, I think that—I hope that more and more news organizations are asking questions about what thinking of community engagement, not as just a nice to have, but sort of an essential element of the work that they do.
Matt Jordan: You were part of a study on equity and inclusion in newsroom culture. Why is that so important for newsrooms? And what are some of the best practices that you saw and are hoping for in addressing that?
Andrea Wenzel: I mean, I think that in order for journalists to do the kind of core remit of their job, I mean, the idea is that, hopefully, journalists are reflecting their entire audience, their entire community, their society, and you can't really do that if you're not thinking critically about diversity and representation and equity in the work. It doesn't only do a disservice to communities of color when you're not representing communities of color, for example. It also does a disservice to everyone who's trying to understand the realities that they're living in. And so, I feel like, particularly in this moment when there's a lot of politicization and pushback of things like diversity, equity, and inclusion, it's important to think of this not as any sort of special approach to journalism, but just good journalism. This is what journalism should be. And that if you are it's skewing how you represent your society, it's doing just as much harm—well, it may be doing more harm to communities of color in more direct ways. But it's also harming white audiences because it's not reflecting reality. And so, I think it's central—it should be Central to just normal good journalism for everybody.
Cory Barker: Your book, Anti-Racist Journalism, explores some of these efforts across more conventional newsrooms and then some small nonprofits. One of the things that really captured my attention across your four or five years of fieldwork is the thought among some of the journalists that DEI initiatives or anti-racist initiatives might be performative on the behalf of corporate ownership or management. Can you talk a little bit about how journalists navigate that idea of whether or not what's being asked of them to do in a newsroom is real or performative? And maybe how that's changed between 2019 and where we are in 2024?
Andrea Wenzel: Sure. I mean, I think there's a lot of reason for cynicism about these initiatives, because I think people can look back ever since the Kerner Commission and since the beginning of journalism and see that there's always been inequity and a throughline of racism and white supremacy, undergirding a lot of journalism. And yet every so often, there will be some sort of initiative to try to address it, either for one particular news organization or for many. And oftentimes, something kind of a little bit happens, but it's the structural things don't change. And so, I think I did a lot of this work for that book kind of around 2020—a little something like 2017, 2018. And there was a number of people who had been doing these efforts for a long, long time and were like, well, is this just going to be another one of those times? And so, some news organizations—I mean, I think the thing is a lot of these organizations may have had good intentions and been trying to do things. I mean, the problem isn't only about intentions. There can be good intentions, but that doesn't necessarily guarantee the outcome will be meaningful, structural, lasting change. And so, I think partly, it's a question of, is this performative? But also, it's a question of, how far is it going to go, and is it going to be sustainable? And so, I don't know that I would call, a lot of the efforts that I was looking at. I don't know if I would necessarily call any of them purely performative. I think there were people really trying hard to make change within a lot of these organizations. But I think where some of the biggest stumbling blocks have been is when there's not an infrastructure to support the work. When it comes down to it's this work is being done and people are trying hard, but it's sort of a project. And then that's very vulnerable if somebody moves on to another job or management changes or the budget gets cut. And then if there's not—it's not built into the structure of an organization, then these things are vulnerable to going away. And I think we've seen a lot of that since 2020 with not just the news organizations I was looking at but around the US, a lot of places where things have been rolled back. And then, of course, now in the political climate of people not even wanting to use the words DEI. And again, I'm not sure that what words we use are the most important thing, but I think, thinking about how to look at things structurally and the infrastructure of organizations is what's really critical.
Matt Jordan: Just in thinking a little bit about what some of the success stories were in terms of those initiatives. You talk about structural changes. And you maybe describe for our audience what one of those changes were that get at some of the baked in habits of news reporting or news sourcing or things like that.
Andrea Wenzel: Sure. So, I mean, there's a kind of big and small structural changes. So, I mean, you mentioned sourcing. I mean, one of the things that has come up—and a number of news organizations have tried looking at who's in their coverage. And so, I worked with Philadelphia Inquirer and WHYY on initiatives where they wanted to do sort of an audit of who's in their coverage. And so, we were looking a lot at who their sources, who were the people they were talking to were. That's a sort of concrete thing people can look at and try to track. And there's been a number of initiatives, and there's even different kinds of tools out there now for tracking the sources in your story and looking at—asking different questions about them, mostly demographic questions usually. But it's sort of a concrete way that journalists can look at their work. And I don't think it solves every problem because it's not only about who's in the story, but the framing of the story. And there's a lot more nuance that you can look at. But I do think it can be valuable, if nothing else, to encourage more reflexivity and thoughtfulness of the reporters and the editors who are involved because then they're going to take maybe take a beat longer to think about, OK, I've talked to five people in my story. They're all white, or they're all men, or whatever the case might be. And for some newsrooms, they were able to do an audit and take a snapshot of where they were at and then use that as a jumping off point for thinking about how to do tracking over time. And also, use it as a way to encourage some changes in their day-to-day workflows and practices. So, for example, at WHYY, kind of early on in their work, their editors had conversations about, OK, well, maybe we'll give someone another day to work on this story, so that they can make sure that they have their community that they're reporting on more represented and have it better reflected in the story. And I think, in some meaningful ways, like the process of doing source tracking for them helped them to adjust and tweak their workflows in ways that could have a better outcome for how representative their content was. I'm not sure if that's still happening there in particular, but I think that that's just one example of how that can be a useful thing. I think there's lots of different—when I think about community-centered reporting and equitable journalism, there's a lot of different tools in the toolbox that can get at some of these more structural pieces. And that's sort of just one of them.
I think there's other ways of looking at—I mean, community engagement, I think is also part of this and thinking about ways to create two-way feedback loops with community members and kind of a regular way. And then there's also, of course, like big structural questions that are more challenging often because it gets at things like, who are at the tops of these organizations? And do they have any accountability to anybody? Or so who is it? Are they accountable to a board? Who is that board accountable? Are they accountable to anyone? Who's on that board? Is there any class diversity, even if there might be racial or ethnic diversity? Like there's so many things to look at there. And I think that's where things get really challenging. And some of the smaller organizations that I looked at had tried some interesting things, like having a community LED board that had governance power over the leaders of the organization. But of course, that's something that can be a tricky thing to change.
Cory Barker: If you're just joining us, this is News Over Noise. I’m Matt Jordan and I’m Cory Barker. We’re talking with Andrea Wenzel, an associate professor in Temple University’s Department of Journalism, about contemporary experiments in local news strategy. One of the things I really was taken by across your work is how the calls for consistent community engagement through things like listening sessions or office hours, this type of relationship building that you're discussing, it often becomes this additional thing that the reporters and folks in the newsroom have to do. It's another part of their job, and that squeezes them even more in a profession that requires a lot of you. Can you talk a little bit about how reporters in these different newsrooms are trying to navigate doing their job with also doing this new or recommitment to community-centered reporting?
Andrea Wenzel: Yeah. No, that's a huge issue. I mean, journalists are doing more jobs than they ever did before if they can keep hold of that job. I mean, resources are so strained that I have deep sympathy for people who are like, well, we just can't do one more thing. I understand that feeling, but I think the answer that I and some other colleagues, who I know who do a lot of work with news organizations would argue, is that you can stop doing some things. And there's an encouragement of thinking strategically about, what can you stop doing? And the thing is that really has to involve not just people at the reporting level. That has to be people with managerial power to make those changes. And that's the tricky part. But can news organizations consider stopping some iterations of crime reporting, for example? Are there things that they do out of habit that maybe aren't really filling a information need that people value? Are there things that they're doing just because they've always done them that way, that they could potentially stop? Have they identified their lane in their kind of news ecosystem effectively? Are there ways they could partner with other folks in the system that could free up some time or looking at collaboration as one element of that? So, I think and also thinking about collaboration on engagement. I have a friend and colleague and sometimes collaborator, Latrell Crittenden at American Press Institute, who has been doing interesting work in Pittsburgh, where one of the things they've been talking about is shared resources on community engagement, and are there ways to structure collaborations of news organizations in a region and sharing some resources on community engagement? So, I think there's a lot of interesting ways to approach it. I don't want to disrespect journalists by saying, oh, sure, it's easy to add one more thing. But I think that these are the tricky things that need to be figured out.
Matt Jordan: One of the things that we've talked about on this show a lot is the lack of trust in news in particular. There was a Gallup poll 2024 that the trust in media in general is the lowest it's ever been since they've been tracking it. What are some things that you think would be a good intervention in terms of that? So, when you're talking about different things that they could do, which things seem to help build trust?
Andrea Wenzel: I think community engagement is really important for building trust. I think that it's not just about audience engagement, but community engagement. So, it's not just thinking about engaging the folks you've already got, because you don't have a lot of people [INAUDIBLE]. There's so many people who are not connected to mainstream news organizations in particular. And I think it's really hard. I mean, I think that the combination of mistrust, distrust, and news avoidance is really a huge, huge obstacle for journalists. And there's many communities that have never had that trust and for good reason. And then there's folks who've lost it. And there's folks who are just can't see the value in it in this particular moment. So, I don't have a silver bullet for it. I think long-term relationship building through community engagement can be one pretty valuable tool. I think it's often easier to think about that at the local and hyperlocal level. I think it gets a little bit more daunting when you look more like at national scale stuff.
Cory Barker: With so many of these different experiments to make local journalism work and regain trust or find a new audience, in your research, are some of these efforts being translated into financial success or an increase in subscribers or an increase in community support or financial support, if that comes from a sort of nonprofit model? I think it's great to talk about the ways in which journalists can engage with the community. But obviously, the journalists need to eat. They need to be paid to do their job. The news organization has to exist. So, are these approaches paying? Financial dividends as well?
Andrea Wenzel: This is such a hard question. I mean, I think that the business model of journalism in the US as a whole is pretty not functioning in general. So, I think that the same holds for engagement efforts. There are people who've tried to look at, does doing engagement have a revenue benefit? And there's been, I think, to my understanding, there's been kind of mixed results to that, with some like positive indicators but not super solid, like clearly this is going to lead to this. And I think in a number of communities, it's probably not going to be a revenue benefit. But I don't know that—I think it might be in some places, but I don't think it's going to be—it's going to fix a lot of problems. I think one thing that it does offer advantages for is for folks going after philanthropic foundation, funding, where there is often a recognition and interest in doing public interest, community-centered work, where if a news organization is able to do some of this work, they're more competitive for funding from XYZ foundation and initiatives like Press Forward have this as one of the things that they look at. So, I think that that's—I don't think philanthropy is going to solve journalism's financial problems as a whole. But it's one part of the current puzzle. I think that, hopefully, if we can ever have a serious conversation about public funding, which I don't know if that's going to happen in the next four years, probably not. But in the long game, there's folks who do a lot of really important work on that. And there's been a number of initiatives like the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium that does, I think, really valuable work where they get some public funding and then it's distributed through this consortium that's independent, that definitely centers like community-engaged and community-centered work. I think that there are models for tying things more closely to participatory funding that could really make doing engagement work connected directly to having some financial support. But that's not the dominant model, so.
Matt Jordan: A lot of what I like about your work are the success stories that you look at. And when you're looking, especially at the hyperlocal level. And I was interested in this study you did with the Germantown Info Hub and the way you were looking at narratives about the local community that news orgs they were circulating. Tell us a little bit about what you mean by news narratives about the community that are circulating and why that matters.
Andrea Wenzel: Sure. So, when I talk to residents of this community, this is a majority Black, socioeconomically mixed neighborhood of Philadelphia, where people shared that they were super frustrated with the way the community had been represented in media, that they felt like mostly they were only shown on their worst day when there was a crime or a fire, something terrible that had happened. And that they felt that their neighborhood had been stigmatized by all this negative coverage over the years. That all the narratives shared about their community were negative. And that this was kind of doing harm to them, that people didn't want to go to the neighborhood. They thought it was unsafe. People didn't want to invest in it. And that there is so much good going on that nobody ever heard about. That they knew in their own lived experience that they didn't see in the media. And so, they wanted to have narratives that resonated with them that they could kind see themselves in. Not that they only wanted positive stories, they wanted exploration of what are the real problems and issues in the community, because it's not like they weren't having issues. But they wanted to have a richer tapestry of their reality. And so, they wanted to try to connect the things that were already going on through this. We did this study and then got folks together to figure out, OK, what do we want to do next? And it led to the creation of the Germantown Info Hub project, which it's kind of a community journalism project. When it first started, it was a community organizer and a community reporter and then a community advisory group. And they did some community reporting. A lot of what they did, especially early on, was just kind of gathering people together for different kinds of community discussions and having opportunities for the residents to connect with journalists, not only like folks working on the project, but also from other news organizations. And so, it's grown over time. Community engagement has always been the foundational part of that project. Now it's part of Resolve Philadelphia, which is a multifaceted organization that does a lot of different things. But the Germantown Info Hub is sort of now kind of one of their key projects. And they're hoping potentially in the future to add to it, so that you would have multiple information hubs that are centered on a community, their geographic, or another kind of community that can then form a network of sorts and potentially sharing things with each other, potentially sharing things with metro-level news organizations that you'd have narratives that are being told by people from those places and better reflected their experience.
Cory Barker: In one of your other pieces, you explored the idea of a project that frames journalism and news through the lens of mutual aid. Can you talk a little bit about what mutual aid is and the ways in which journalism is maybe interfacing with that conceptually in communities across the country?
Andrea Wenzel: Sure. This is—I've been thinking about the idea of journalism and mutual aid a little bit more recently. I hadn't kind of thought about it for a little while. And I want to think about it more.
But that particular project that I wrote about in that context was the WHYY, the public Radio station had an initiative called the News and Information Community Exchange. They call it the NICE Project for short. And it is a really interesting project that got together different what they call grassroots content creators. So, some of them were podcasters. Some of them were traditional ethnic media outlets like newspapers and various languages. Some of them were like influencers or all different kinds of grassroots media makers with a range of skill sets and experiences. And they would meet every week. And they got a stipend. And then through meeting, they kind of shared resources with each other because they were each kind of bringing something different to the table. And then they also had kind of opportunities to think about different ways of collaborating. And so, it wasn't so much about those people ending up on the airwaves of WHYY, but that did happen sometimes. And so, it was a way of expanding who the public radio station was connecting with. But it was also like, how can these grassroots media folks kind of support each other and kind of nurture the larger, Philly ecosystem by kind of trying to find ways of supporting these folks who are each serving a different community.
And mutual aid, it's also defined quite—like how it's defined varies wildly. And I like this project at WHYY, according to many definitions of mutual aid might not actually be considered mutual aid because mutual aid usually has an association with a certain political analysis. And that's not necessarily the case for that project. But I think that, I mean, it had there are some elements, you could think of it as like challenging representations of communities. That is political, but I think given the political precarity news media is in the US at this moment and the resource challenges, I think it's probably an interesting moment to think about what could mutual aid look like in different situations now and what might we need to think about. So, I think it's a question that I want to think about more.
Matt Jordan: Andrea, thank you so much for being with us today and sharing some of your insight about local news and about some of the innovations that you've seen. It's really great to talk to you.
Andrea Wenzel: Thank you. I really appreciate the conversation.
Matt Jordan: I learned a lot talking to Andrea about local news initiatives. Cory, what were some of the takeaways that you had from the episode?
Cory Barker: I think the biggest one for me is just how many different experiments there are in trying to make local news work. And when we say trying to make local news work, that means both for the journalists and for the community and the ways in which it ultimately becomes financially successful, so that everybody is well-served by that situation. And I think we're seeing so many different experiments and so many different models that it's hard to keep track of them. But it's great to talk to someone like Andrea to learn about some of the success stories or the ways in which maybe it's getting a little bit better, slowly but surely. What about you?
Matt Jordan: Well, I always am drawn to questions of framing. And a lot of times, when we talk about the news industry or news in general, we talk about economic framing. What's going to get more revenue to news organizations? And it's refreshing to talk to somebody who really centers their work on public interest and serving communities. And I think that's a frame that we should all be trying to adopt more and more.
Cory Barker: Yeah. And I think it feels in conversations like this with great researchers like Andrea who has experience in the industry as well, it just you can sense how difficult this is for people who are working in news. And I think it's only going to be more important for local news organizations and the journalists in those areas to find ways to help their communities while also protecting themselves in some regard.
Matt Jordan: Yeah. Mutual care, indeed. That’s it for this episode of News Over Noise. Our guest was Andrea Wenzel, an associate professor in Temple University’s Department of Journalism. To learn more and to hear an extended version of this interview with additional content, download the podcast at wherever you subscribe to podcasts or at news over noise dot org. I’m Matt Jordan
Cory Barker: And I'm Cory Barker.
Matt Jordan: Until next time, stay well and well-informed. News Over Noise is produced by the Penn State Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications and WPSU. This program has been funded by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost at Penn State and is part of the Penn State News Literacy Initiative.
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Episode Credits:
Producer: Lindsey Whissel Fenton
Audio Engineers: Mickey Klein, Scott Gros, Clint Yoder
News Over Noise is a co-production of WPSU and Penn State’s Bellisario College of Communications. This program has been funded by the office of the Executive Vice President and Provost at Penn State and is part of the Penn State News Literacy Initiative.
