Civic Information Media: Craig Aaron
May 4th, 2023
“Civic information is very simply the information that helps us live better lives where we live.”
Craig Aaron is the Co-CEO of Free Press and Free Press Action. We discuss the civic information bill in New Jersey and the promise of centering civic information in the media.
A vibrant multiracial democracy requires civic information media, which delivers the information that helps us live better lives in our communities. Journalism or civic media are a public good, and the public needs to invest in media along those lines. In New Jersey, bipartisan legislative support led to the civic information bill and the founding of the Civic Information Consortium. The best thing all of us can do right now is to support our local media. Read it and engage it!
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Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Craig Aaron
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producers: Zack Travis and Sara Burningham
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Craig Aaron Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:04] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos.
Today's show is about trust and information and democracy. We're going to be talking about one of the most essential tools for navigating civic life. Local news.
Five years ago, Yale history professor and author of On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder, described the loss of local news outlets as the essential problem of our republic. And why does it matter so much? Professor Snyder says, "The only way we can talk to other people is with some common understanding of the facts. For example, whether or not our water is polluted or whether or not the teachers in our school are on strike. When local news goes away, then our sense of what is true shifts from what is helpful to us in our daily lives to what makes us feel good, which is something entirely different." Studies show the demise of local news has direct impacts on democracy. People who live in areas with poor local news coverage are less likely to vote. When they do vote, they are more likely to do so strictly along party lines.
I don't know about you, but in the absence of local news reporting, whether that be radio or TV or newspapers, I notice more and more people getting their local information from Facebook posts or totally unverified sources like Twitter or even apps like Citizen, Nextdoor, or EveryBlock. And that doesn't seem to turn out well. It's a big problem.
But here on Future Hindsight, we love to hear from the citizen changemakers who are not afraid to tackle the big problems. And even better, those who roll up their sleeves and find local solutions.
We are joined today by Craig Aaron, the co-CEO of Free Press and Free Press Action since 2011. He's been a leader in major campaigns at Free Press to safeguard net neutrality, stop media consolidation, oppose unchecked surveillance, defend public media and sustain quality journalism. And he's been instrumental in starting the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, the first-of-its-kind effort to support local news and information for the benefit of residents.
Welcome to Future Hindsight. Thank you for joining us.
Craig Aaron: [00:02:39] Oh, well, thank you so much for having me. Really glad to be here.
Mila Atmos: [00:02:42] I want to start with a quick definition of terms. What do you mean by civic information? And can you tell us why you feel it's so important?
Craig Aaron: [00:02:50] Yeah. I mean, my perhaps unofficial working definition of civic information would just be the information that people need to participate in their communities, to participate in their democracy and to lead better lives. This is the information you need to know about what's happening around you that allows you to take advantage of opportunities to address problems and to be an informed participant in democracy and informed citizen who can actually cut through all of that noise and misinformation and disinformation that's out there. That's that's what civic information is. Very simply, the information that helps us live better lives where we live.
Mila Atmos: [00:03:34] Thank you. So, since Timothy Snyder warned of the serious impacts of the death of local news back in 2018, what was already a bad situation has gotten worse, right? Newspapers are now shuttering at the rate of two per week. Can you tell us about what has happened in New Jersey?
Craig Aaron: [00:03:52] Sure. Well, New Jersey has always been an interesting case study because in many ways, New Jersey was experiencing the dangers of losing local news and local voices long before the rest of the country. And that was a result of the fact that New Jersey happens to be a state sandwiched between two giant media markets, New York City and Philadelphia. And that meant that most of their news, especially when we're talking about television and radio, mass media, was serving New York and Philadelphia, and New Jersey was kind of an afterthought. And then over time, New Jersey was one of the states most impacted by media consolidation, by the concentration of ownership in fewer and fewer companies. The takeover of newspaper chains by hedge funds and others whose business model wasn't journalism. And how can we do the best journalism? It was extraction. It was, how can we get the most money out of these institutions? Sometimes by selling off their buildings and their printing presses, or just by squeezing the product down to the bare number of
journalists necessary to essentially still call it a newspaper as a vehicle for ads or as a website for ads. The story of New Jersey is the story of a lot of the country, but they were maybe the canary in the coal mine. They were one of the first states to really experience that. And that is decades, you know, well before 2018, going back to the '80s and '90s of runaway media consolidation combined with massive cutbacks. So where you used to have local DJs playing local music, now you have computers playing the same songs in New Jersey. When it comes to newspapers, you saw once very vibrant, healthy institutions running into this perfect storm of the Internet and the collapse of the advertising model that came with that, and this intense consolidation under the pressure to return so many profits at institutions that for the most part weren't based in New Jersey, cut reporters, they closed newspapers. And so a lot of local voices disappeared. And a lot of the reporters that would have been at that school board meeting would have been at that city council meeting, would have been covering the state legislature, were no longer there to do the job. So at a time the state was growing, at a time so much was happening, the people whose job it was to hold politicians accountable, ask the hard questions, were just simply not, increasingly not, there to do it.
Mila Atmos: [00:06:18] So you're describing a perfect storm, but also a decline that has happened in so many media markets around the country. When did your organization, Free Press, get involved in New Jersey?
Craig Aaron: [00:06:32] So that was a state we at Free Press got very interested in around 2015 as a place that there was some nascent media activism happening at the local level. There was a high level of public concern about how are we going to find out what's happening in our communities. New Jersey is also a state with a lot of communities with their own local governments and and a real need to pay attention to what's happening at the local level that was underserved. So we started going to the state of New Jersey and conducting public hearings and ascertainment events, bringing people together in different places like Newark and Asbury Park and New Brunswick, to just ask them, you know, what do you think of local news? What should it be? And what we heard a lot of, first of all, was people telling us, "what do you mean?" Like, "why would I have an opinion?" Like the news, you know, they all sort of felt like the news was just something that happened to them. You know, you get the weather, you get the headlines, you get a crime report. But they hadn't really thought of it as something that
they could shape or change. They often thought about it as something that misrepresented the places they lived. The news is something that only told the worst stories about what was happening in their city or their neighborhood, but never the good news and one that often did a bad job of the issues that they cared about the most. At the same time, we were able to surface and have conversations about a lot of misunderstandings, about what even the news was there to do, and how activists and others talk to reporters.
Craig Aaron: [00:08:04] Reporters do have to tell stories. They do have to make it interesting. They don't just write about issues. There was a lot of good dialogue, and a lot of that dialogue and organizing ended up colliding with some interesting opportunities. And this gets at your your comments about the Timothy Snyder raises about just how important local media is. But lots of studies show us, even before we get to authoritarianism and fascism, what we know is when there's less local media, there is less coverage of of local government. People don't know why it matters. They don't know what their legislators are bringing home. Corruption goes up. Nobody's watching. Nobody's in the till. Nobody's investigating. Nobody's following the money, to use the classic frame. Corruption increases and that disconnection happens at the local level. People don't know the value of what local officials are doing, you know, whether that's the people monitoring their elections, whether that's public health, whether that's, of course, their elected officials. That all starts to disappear because there's nobody out there to tell you what's happening where you live. And you're scraping it together from Facebook posts and neighborhood listservs and who knows what else. But what you're not getting is someone whose job is to go and sit in the back of that city council meeting or that school board meeting, because, you know, most of us don't have time to do that. We're counting on, or we were counting on, journalists actually doing that for us.
Mila Atmos: [00:09:23] Right. Right. Well, we know it's particularly bad also in rural, poorer areas. It is currently estimated that 70 million people now live in so-called news deserts where there are no local news outlets, places that get zero local reporting to what you said. You know, it's a computer that just plays the music. Well, you're clearly very passionate about this. Tell us about the work of Free Press. How was it founded? What's the origin story and what's your role in reimagining and reviving local news?
Craig Aaron: [00:09:57] So Free Press is an organization that's been around for almost 20 years. We're actually a national organization focused on media advocacy and media policy. So the idea behind Free Press from the start was there were all these big important decisions being made about the future of the media. Who owns the media? How should the Internet work? Who's going to have access to it that were happening in the public's name, but without their involvement or consent? And so Free Press set out to do two things. One was to establish public interest advocates in the halls of power in Congress at the Federal Communications Commission. In these places, in conversations where there hadn't been much of a public presence. But to actually connect that to an organized constituency, to activists, to local folks, to citizens who are willing to come in and raise their voices at moments when it mattered most to try to make change. And, you know, whatever the insight at the time was, there were some great lawyers paying attention to the minutia at the FCC, but they had no public with them. There were some activists who were really mad about what was happening in the news media, but they had no way to make change. And we've tried to put that together, working across an array of issues, but most of them connected to journalism, media ownership issues related to the future of the Internet, increasingly things like platforms and, you know, the other ways we get the media. So we do a mix of organizing, advocacy, policy development all around those issues. And that's essentially what brought us into these conversations about the future of journalism was initially through a policy lens, through a who owns the media? How much should they be allowed to own? Through a long history of advocacy around public spending on media, we have long been advocates that the public needs to invest in media and that we should use public dollars to support things like public media, but not necessarily just in its current forms of PBS and NPR and things like that. But thinking of creative ways to fill in these gaps that the corporate media have left. And that's that's sort of what brought us to New Jersey. We'd been involved in a number of efforts to try to return the ownership of the television station in New Jersey to New Jersey instead of to Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, who wanted to operate it for New York and elsewhere. And we saw sort of a nascent group of people trying to create some new journalism outlets and connect them. At Montclair State University, there was a novel project, the Center for for Civic Media, that was beginning to connect these new innovators and practitioners who wanted to actually serve local communities. And that's what initially brought us to the state, was the opportunity to think about what does it look like to build a popular constituency that cares about the future of news, because we had a lot of good ideas
and they weren't necessarily going anywhere. And we were seeing loss after loss in states like New Jersey and elsewhere. And we wanted to experiment with what some sustained organizing would look like on the local level, built around this idea of how local news should actually serve communities. And we decided to conduct that experiment in New Jersey.
Mila Atmos: [00:13:07] Well, let's talk about that. Let's talk about the experiment and the basically grassroots effort that you helped get off the ground. You were instrumental in the founding of the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, which came out of the passing of a civic information bill in 2018. So how did it come to pass?
Craig Aaron: [00:13:26] I'm the kind of activist who believes every problem is an organizing problem, so you just have to kind of go out and talk to people about where they are and what they need. And that's what we tried to do in New Jersey around these questions of the news. I think what we learned first is most people are like, what do you mean? Like, what do I have to do with this? So that's the beginning of a conversation because people have really been conditioned to think that the news media is just something that happens to them or it's just, you know, weather on the 8s and sports on the 1s or whatever, you know, they're getting from the radio. But that becomes the beginning of a conversation, you know, often starting with community leaders and activists, but spreading out deeper into the community about--no, wait, you actually do have a say. How do you think they should serve your community? What stories should the media be telling? And that's that's where we tried to start. And the other thing we tried to do is bring journalists into the conversation, but not let them either hang out in the back of the room with their notepads or sit up on a stage talking out to the audience to actually create environments where people were sitting across from the table from each other, understanding, Hey, this is how my community is being covered, here's the stories that aren't being told. Why is it always bad news? Have you ever thought about doing this and beginning to build those relationships? And that became the foundation for more of a political project of, could we actually create a new kind of public investment in New Jersey? That was sparked because the state of New Jersey had this very unique opportunity where the state owned some television licenses that were essentially being sold back to the government so they could be auctioned off to cell phone companies. And so I'm a media policy wonk. This is where I get excited, like, oh, wait, the state of New Jersey might get hundreds of millions of dollars. How can we use
that to fund what's missing? That was the idea. That was the origin of our campaign, is let's take advantage of this moment. The first go around, though, wasn't successful. They sold the television stations and the state said, "Wow, we have a big hole in our budget. Let's use that money to fill that hole. Thanks for coming. Nice to see you." But along the way, we had still built all these relationships, including some relationships with legislators who had agreed with us that there was this problem, that New Jersey was losing local coverage or in many places never had it. And this dawning realization even that the good old days for news, we often talk about this. There's this sort of imaginary like, wasn't it great when Walter Cronkite and some some kid on a bike threw the paper on your doorstep? Those were the days. But for most people, and especially if we're talking about communities of color, you know, lower income communities, there were no good old days for local news. Those communities were never served by the dominant media. And that became the source of a lot of people saying, "well, maybe we should have something else." And so we kept working and we started going up to Trenton to meet at the state capitol and talk to legislators. And we discovered a lot of legislators, Republicans and Democrats alike, were like, "Yeah, what is the deal with news? And why is no one covering my campaigns and there's nowhere to send my press releases to? And it's harder for me to do my job." So we started to build a lot of new inroads with different advocates in New Jersey and with legislators themselves, and eventually came up with this concept of the Civic Information Consortium and something called the Civic Info Bill, which Free Press developed with some legislators and then worked hard to pass. We went up and lobbied. We held events across the state and eventually the stars aligned and we were actually able to pass this bill. And New Jersey became the first state ever and really the first new public media investment, maybe in decades to say, yes, we're going to use public dollars to invest in local news. And we set up an independent nonprofit funded by public money. It's a consortium because it brings together, actually and in order to make it happen, we worked with universities in the state to essentially provide a backbone for the project Rutgers and Montclair State and a few others to actually build this new publicly funded foundation, essentially that hands out grants to local news projects, working in partnership with universities and educators and often with community groups to provide and fill in the gaps that the media hasn't been covering or to support new innovations in local media in the state of New Jersey and through a lot of different ups and downs and ins and out. Eventually the state did pass the bill and did invest. Now, at this point, I think close to $6 million in the project and there have been two rounds of grants that are supporting local media in New
Jersey and are supporting reporting projects and different experiments and looking at questions like what do we do in a place like Camden, New Jersey, that is a news desert. There's not an outlet set up to take the money. So what does it look like to engage at the community level in other places? It's like, what is a collaboration between a community group and a newspaper and a journalist look like to cover a community that otherwise wasn't covered? And there's a whole array of other projects that the consortium has carried out. But what excites me about it is, it is one of the first new investments in public media. It is making new models of how we invest in local news. And it's very grounded at the local level and especially focused on meeting the needs of communities of color that simply weren't being served by the dominant outlets and especially in their diminished form. After all that media consolidation and other things that we talked about. So that's what we've tried to do. It's still in its early days, but it is a project that's growing and is still popular and in a bipartisan way. And the governor actually has now increased the funding year over year. And the consortium is about to give out relatively soon its third wave of grants, including some, you know, supplemental grants to people that's already invested in, but dozens and dozens of outlets. And these are right now these aren't huge grants. These are $50,000 grants. These are $75,000 grants. But if you're a two person news operation or you're a small community newspaper that can keep the lights on, that can allow you to hire that extra reporter, that can allow you to expand your beat. And it's a model that we think can scale, that can go in some other places. There's an experiment underway in California built on some of these principles. And I think other states are looking to New Jersey now and saying," well, if they can do it there, what's possible here." Might not be the exact same model, might not be the exact same legislation. But instead of us just lamenting the decline of news instead of us just hoping that a new business model emerge that will magically save journalism, we're flipping on its head and we're saying, "you know, what do we need journalism for? We need it to serve our communities. We need it to provide civic information. And if we want to have that, we're going to actually have to invest in it ourselves and invest public money." And New Jersey is proving that right now.
Mila Atmos: [00:19:58] We're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, if we're going to revive local news, it's clear we need a new business model. But how do we ensure media independence and freedom from government influence? More on that when we return.
But first, I've got to show you have to check out. It's Forum from NPR member station KQED in San Francisco. In an increasingly divided world, hosts Alexis Madrigal and Mina Kim share conversations that inform, challenge and unify listeners with big ideas and different viewpoints. Every weekday forum brings together remarkable people in conversation, all about the culture, art and news of the day happening around the country California and the San Francisco Bay Area. Telling true and noteworthy stories form grapples with the problems that threaten to stump us and the ideas that inspire us. Find Forum wherever you get your podcasts or visit KQED.org/Forum.
And now let's return to my conversation with Craig Aaron.
I love that the consortium really is exactly what it says it is. It's a consortium. So there are parties across multiple areas at universities, at colleges, also in the legislature and also everyday people. And it's bipartisan. So it has a lot of support and love that it's in its third tranche of giving out grants. So clearly it's having positive impact on places where there would otherwise be nothing. But how would you say it provides civic information? Do you like say you must do this thing in order to get the grant?
Craig Aaron: [00:21:43] No, it's a great question because there's always a fear when the government's involved that somehow they're going to pick and choose what you cover. So I would say two things about that. One, this is very much an independent entity with firewalls in place. There are political appointees on the board, but the universities also pick. And so it's a diverse board that represents all parts of the state and the legislators themselves. They appropriate the money, but they have nothing to do with how it's spent. They don't have any input. The way we try to address the problem of, you know, how are these grant makers deciding what gets covered and not is by doing open calls to all the communities and all the outlets and taking it on the road to say, what are the stories you think need to be covered where you live? So it's a mix of getting some broader public input and also getting an array of different projects presented saying like, Here's the story or the topic or the issue that needs to be covered where I live, from people who actually live there. And I think ultimately that when we talk about what kind of civic information infrastructure we need to build in a lot of places, that's really what we need to be paying attention to is how to make sure folks from those communities themselves are able to tell those stories, amplify their voices, that the civic information is very much indeed. What do people in the place you're talking about want
to know about? And it's not necessarily what journalists think is the most interesting. It's not necessarily -- in fact, in this case, very much not, 10,000 word think pieces on things that I would love to read in The New Yorker next week or something -- It's what do I do about my corrupt landlord? Where did all this public money go? Which hospitals are doing the best job of dealing with the pandemic? I mean, these are the kinds of questions it is a in many cases, a lot more basic how to be part of society, how to get things from the government and from other local stakeholders kind of resources. But I think when you actually go into community and you do things and we've done experiments, you know, both, you know, going in and holding events and using things like text messaging to be in dialogue with folks about what needs to be covered, where is there confusion, what information isn't getting out there. I think at its best, that's what this project is trying to do. And what a focus on civic media and civic information makes possible. It's a shift. It uses journalism techniques. It uses the approach and the spirit of journalism in a lot of ways, But it is very much built around what are the community needs that need to be addressed and are there opportunities for communities to actually speak for themselves, which is very different than the traditional media model, which is a little bit more like how can we get people interested enough to read these car ads? And that served us for a long time. It really did created living wages for journalists to do those jobs, and that still matters. But it's a little bit different. And I think we are at one of these junctures where we need to be rethinking what is journalism's purpose. Who's it for? It's not for journalists. It's not just for publishers. If it's actually grounded in community, providing the information people need to make their lives better, that's really kind of a higher calling for journalism and maybe one that journalism a lot of ways needs to rediscover.
Mila Atmos: [00:24:59] Right. Right. Well, you released a report in February of this year entitled "The Roadmap for Local News." Can you tell us some of the key takeaways from that report?
Craig Aaron: [00:25:10] Thank you for asking about that. And my colleague Mike Rispoli at Free Press, who led the work in New Jersey and is one of the co-authors of that report with a very talented journalist out of Chicago named Darryl Holliday is from an institution called City Bureau. And Elizabeth Green, who is the founder of Chalkbeat, which is a set of education reporting websites. They put their heads together to and really challenge themselves to answer this very question what should journalism's
purpose be and how are the systems we have providing or not providing that? Because so much of this debate over the future of journalism and I'll admit that a lot of the debate over the future of journalism has sort of happened at conferences among journalists who are sort of shaking their fists and saying, why doesn't everybody love journalism? And I really wish high school teachers had done a better job of saying how important we are and not as much thinking about like, how do we actually ground it in in community? And I think their great insight is we need to start there. We need to start with civic information. And we need to start with civic media and we need to begin investing in media along those lines. Frankly, whether it's profitable or not. If the commercial system, and it's capable of providing it, but where it's not, then we need to actually step forward and come up with alternatives. It's also a call to philanthropy to say you need to invest through this lens of civic media and civic information if you want different outcomes. And it asks philanthropists to to make a significant investment in starting to set in motion the kinds of projects that we're also trying to seed in New Jersey that could actually meet local needs, starting by asking local people what they actually need. It also looks at issues of how do we provide infrastructure around this growing emerging field so that they can be focused on local community and we can answer some questions about sustainability in the back end. And lastly, I think in the part that free press cares about the most is it raises questions about what are the policies and investments that we need to actually make this viable long term. We think that includes public investment, but it also ensures things like how do we make sure people can become nonprofits? How do we support education and fellowships so people can get trained to work in these ways? And how do we experiment in a lot of different places to figure out what works and then spread that and copy that in other states, other localities to find new ways to fund a civic information infrastructure and to make sure we're creating, you know, real valuable living wage and then some jobs in these places. So we're not asking our people to do civic information and civic media on the side like, oh, you know, get your kids down and then go to the school board meeting. We do need people, professionals, who can actually go out there and tell others what's happening in the community so they know, well, this might be a really important one that I do need to get a babysitter and go in there and yell at my city council people, but they can't necessarily be there every time. So I think there's some really exciting new models, including places like City Bureau in Chicago, experimenting with how we do this. And the roadmap is a call for much greater investment and a little bit of a call to the community themselves of innovators to see themselves as part of something. Yes, as
journalists, but also as journalists committed to doing journalism in new and different ways.
Mila Atmos: [00:28:30] Yeah, Well, it's interesting about how to make this sustainable, right? Because it can't be something that is under-resourced or it'll just die over time. And you mentioned that some of these grants are really small, but if you're independent, then it makes a big difference, which is still true. And there are all these different models. So of the models that you've seen, the philanthropy model, the public funding, partial public funding, maybe hedge funds, what have you seen that has in your mind worked well? And when you saw it, you're like, Ah, this is the one that actually might have legs?
Craig Aaron: [00:29:02] Well, I think the short term answer is it's going to have to be a mix. And I think what journalism needs to open itself up to is the idea that it's going to take experimentation and it's going to take a bunch of different inputs. There are still things in the commercial system that are worth paying attention to, and some of those institutions might need support in terms of being able to hire journalists. A lot of journalists work in traditional newsrooms and they have the sources and they're covering the things. We should be looking at that, but we should be looking at in ways that say, how do we replant ownership? Not with those hedge funds that I definitely don't think works. I think that's only been cuts. So how do we take those institutions and replant them with local owners that might involve buying off hedge funds. It might involve incentivizing people to sell and return these institutions to local ownership. I think that's something to look at. I think, you know, tax breaks and tax credits and things that encourage outlets to hire more journalists, that's a good thing for communities. But long term and honestly, not too long term. Five, ten years, 15 years, I think we have to make a shift and I think we have to make a shift if we're talking about civic information and civic media like holding government officials accountable, saying what's happening in your community? I think we've run this experiment for long enough that the commercial system simply isn't going to provide what we need or not enough.
Craig Aaron: [00:30:14] So it needs to be supplemented with or in some cases replaced by a non-commercial system whose responsibility is community service and not just turning a profit. There was a time when you could run a newspaper and you could have 50% profit margins, and those days are over. And again, the good old days
really weren't that good for everybody. So what does it look like to actually say like, no, we need public investment, which we're talking billions of dollars now. Billions of dollars sounds like a lot. But we spend a lot on fighter jets and we spend a lot on tax breaks for the rich. And we spend a lot on other things that we could invest in a civic media infrastructure that was a mix of, yes, philanthropy, support to get new folks off the ground and then public support, you know, built on the success of public media, built on the success of public media around the world. You know, if you look at England or Japan or South Korea, they already spend one hundred times what we spend in the United States on public media. So there are models we can build on. But really what we need to do is recognize that's going to be part of the mix, encourage philanthropy to support the experiments and the advocacy to make those changes and start to go out and talk to the public about what a new public media infrastructure could be because they're only used to sort of the well, something something Sesame Street or, you know, the NPR model. And I think we are talking about new locally grounded models and new opportunities for people to build their own media businesses, nonprofit, but media, businesses and institutions. That's what I think will work. And I think we can see you have to squint a little bit, but you can see in the institutions that are there today what the possibilities are. So I look to folks like City Bureau in Chicago that are training people to go out and be those watchdogs at community meetings and report back. That's now expanding. It started in Chicago. It's moving to Cleveland. It's moving to Detroit. Detroit has an amazing project called Outlier Media where they use text messages. And, you know, that's how people are getting their news and information now. But they've actually set up a two way conversation about what needs to be covered, where they talk to the community about what the priorities of their newsroom should be. And they found out what people wanted to know was how do I deal with my corrupt landlord that's trying to rip me off? So they then took their reporting resources and put it on those stories. I think that's a great model. There's El Timpano out in the Bay Area, which is a Spanish language outlet, really looking at serving immigrant communities and undocumented communities, communities that the San Francisco Chronicle is never going to serve, is not designed to serve. NPR is not designed to serve, but is doing things like putting out literally like a listening station out at community events where people can go El Timpano. It's a giant ear and they can they can talk to it and ask questions about like what needs to be covered or something they don't understand. And then they take journalism resources and go out and try to answer those questions. Those are the models of the kinds of things that are possible and that you can start to imagine. If we
did that at scale, there'd be a lot more, and there would be a lot of new things. And relatively, it doesn't take that much money. It's not no money, but it doesn't take that much money to get the rewards. And that's, I think, at the core of all of this is this notion of journalism or civic media as a public good. You benefit. Your life benefits even if you're not the one who paid for it. When government corruption gets exposed and you get better local officials, that's a public good. It's a public benefit. You know, when pollution, somebody who's illegally dumping gets exposed, there's a lot of benefit. So I think the future model looks like that. It's yes, investigative reporting, but it's also a real public service reporting. And most importantly, it's reporting that's grounded in community being done by people who live in those communities themselves.
Mila Atmos: [00:34:01] So you mentioned earlier that New Jersey is now a model for proposed legislation in other states. How is that going? And what is it that other states are picking up from the legislation in New Jersey?
Craig Aaron: [00:34:16] I think a great example is in the state of California, which is built on the New Jersey model. And in fact, my group, Free Press got involved in the California legislation because people were coming to us saying, well, what worked in New Jersey? And partly because some opponents of the bill in California were misrepresenting what happened in New Jersey, so we we went in to testify and educate legislators about what actually happened and who received the money. And so there was a bill in California to try to create a new state entity to fund local media with potentially a substantial investment. It was interesting because it ended up being, there was a split. Some of the traditional media decided they didn't like the bill. They actively lobbied against it and they were able to defeat it, unfortunately. But a very smart state legislator was still able to hold on to the money and was actually able to redirect the money to the University of California, where they granted the University of California $25 million, like real money to set up a new local media program. That's a program that my colleague Mike Rispoli serves on the board of. And they're beginning to take shape. They're figuring out how do we use both students and professional journalists to go out and cover community in new way, and now it's backed by a real investment. Again, the state has nothing to do, now that money is already in Berkeley's bank account. Like, they'll be building it out. They're building an advisory board. They're going to be accountable if they ever want to get more state money for what they did with it. But I think it's a great example and a really a direct outgrowth of the kind of success we've
had in New Jersey. So now that that's happening, we're beginning to see some other states in the early phases. New Mexico has been looking at some options on a smaller scale. States like Illinois and Massachusetts have gone as far as sort of study committees. It's a first step. And of course, at the federal level, we've also started to see some movement in interest on what does this look like if you begin to scale it up, what are different ways? At the federal government, which is ultimately who has the real resources could do to support this. So I'm very encouraged. It's early days in a lot of these other states, but we now have these examples of it's possible. You can do it, maybe you do it a little differently. Maybe you do it at a hyper local level. I mean, there have been efforts, for example, there's one in Colorado where they tried to do a local bond initiative in order to fund, you know, an outlet to cover local media that would be based at the local library. I mean, this is the kind of like creativity and experimentation that I think we need. There are other states that have legacy programs, you know, where they record what happens at the state legislature, or they fund a small bureau to cover the state legislature. I'm sort of for all of it, you know, as many experiments as we can get. But I think we finally sort of crossed the line of, well, the government has no business in this because we know what happens when you make that choice is then you don't get these alternatives, you don't get these opportunities and experiments. So I think we're seeing that we can build institutions. We can properly insulate them from political interference, and we can actually experiment and focus on community need. And that what makes me so optimistic that I think in the next 4 or 5 years we'll see, you know, another half dozen states start to move in this direction, maybe more.
Mila Atmos: [00:37:23] Right. Right. So what else is Free Press working on that fits in with, you know, with promoting more local news or rethinking journalism?
Craig Aaron: [00:37:33] Yeah, a lot of our work on the, you know, the sort of policy and research side is really trying to investigate and interrogate which models are the most promising. How should we hand out and spend this money? So what institutions, you know, we don't really want 1 or 2 people deciding where all the money goes. So how do we learn from, you know, the ways we fund science or the ways we do block grants for health needs and other things? Thinking about how we're going to fund journalism, that's something we're very interested in. We're, of course, taking this roadmap project we talked about on the road and trying to get different philanthropists and other stakeholders excited, and we have this new project, the Media Power Collaborative, that
is a gathering of 150 or so innovators in this space, some of them from very established local outlets like the Texas Tribune down in Austin to a bunch of people doing start ups to academics, to other activists, bring them together to do some shared education. What's possible, what's happened before, what's been tried and what hasn't, to really develop a deeper policy agenda that they can actually get behind and pursue. So sort of step one is really building with those folks. Then with those folks and other allies were, you know, doing outreach to legislators and others, letting them know, hey, here are the local innovators where you live. Here's what they're up to if you don't know them already, although in many cases they do because they're watchdogging and covering them, but beginning to have people see each other, learn from each other's experiments and sort of seed this idea of, you know, journalism can have a new and different purpose. So that's some of what we're working on while, you know, continuing to try to make broadband more affordable so people can access all of these outlets and making sure the free and open Internet stays that way. So you get to choose what information you get, holding social media companies accountable and doing all those other things. Ultimately, for us, it does all connect like it's just these fundamental questions of if we're going to have a vibrant, functioning, multiracial democracy, which is something I think we should all be for, we're going to have to pay attention to the structures that support and sustain it. And the media is pretty close to the top of that list. And it's going to have a huge role in determining whether we succeed in that transition to a multiracial democracy, whether we have a true functioning democracy, or we go down the road that Timothy Snyder is warning us about, where we don't pay attention to the importance of news and information, where we don't pay attention to the importance of local ownership, local connection. We've had a glimpse of what that can look like. And, you know, that's a path I hope we'll avoid. But the media is going to be intertwined with it in every way. And I think this moment in politics, this moment in, you know, sort of existential crisis for our democracy is absolutely intertwined with the health of our media system. And it's why we need to pay attention to it and invest in it in different ways. The positive side of that, though, is that I've seen in New Jersey and in a number of fights in Washington, DC and elsewhere, that when people show up, when they care, when they get involved, they can actually have a huge influence. That bill passed in New Jersey because hundreds and hundreds of people called their legislators and said, this is important to me. And they weren't calling on something else. So the legislator said, "well, it must be important. This is an easy lift. Let's do it." It happens to me all the time in Washington, where a congressional staffer will call me up and say, like, Why are you
driving all these calls and emails my way? It's so annoying. And I get to say, Well, you never called me. And so we started driving all these calls and sending all these emails. That's why and I think we've seen time and again because nobody expects not the media institutions, not the government institutions, for the public to be paying attention to these issues, to be caring about these issues, when they do, they sit up and take notice and they can respond. And there are these critical junctures, these intervention points, where we can make new cool things happen. We can not just say, well, we're just stuck with the media system we have. We can actually lay the foundation for something different, something better, and something that actually serves community. New Jersey proves that we're at the beginning of that experiment. There's a long way to go, but it is that that opportunity and possibility. And I just think there's a lot more of them out there.
Mila Atmos: [00:41:44] Right. Right. Well, I was about to ask you, what are two things an everyday person can do to restore the health of local news and civic information? You just mentioned one, call your legislator. Tell them that you care. This is what you want and what's another thing you could be doing?
Craig Aaron: [00:41:59] Yeah, and of course you sign up at Freepress.net. We'll tell you when those calls can be most impactful. That's not my second thing. That's just my supplement to the first. Okay. My second thing is support your local media. Read it. Engage it. Tell the people making it that you're reading, engaging it. And if you can't find that local media or that local media is serving you, isn't serving you, it might be time to start your own outlet. It might be starting to tell your own story. And we'd love to talk to folks about how you do that, too.
Mila Atmos: [00:42:28] Excellent. So here's my last question. Looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
Craig Aaron: [00:42:35] Every time I go into a newsroom, every time I go into a community meeting, there are people that just want to tell amazing stories about what's happening where they live. There are journalists who got into this not to rewrite press releases and not to just write down what those in power said, but they actually became journalists because they wanted to tell stories. They wanted to make a difference. I think we can give them the jobs doing that, and I think there's an audience for it. So
ultimately, I'm very optimistic because I see people putting their heads down doing the work, and now it's just we have to just solve these questions of how we make sure people see that work and how they get paid to do it. But the desire to do it, the necessity of doing it is right there. And and that motivates me all the time to, you know, solve these technical problems about how we make it easier for them to do so.
Mila Atmos: [00:43:25] Hear, hear. Well, I hope you're right. I think you are, because clearly there's a lot of grassroots support for civic information and a new kind of media. Thank you very much for joining us on Future Hindsight. It was really a pleasure to have you on.
Craig Aaron: [00:43:38] Well, thank you so much for the opportunity. It's really great to be with you.
Mila Atmos: [00:43:41] Craig Aaron is the co-CEO of Free Press and Free Press Action.
Next week on Future Hindsight, we are joined by Judge Victoria Pratt to talk about one of the most important but hardest to find values in our justice system and in our democracy, and that's dignity. Judge Pratt was chief judge in Newark Municipal Court in New Jersey and is currently executive director of Odyssey Impact, an interfaith nonprofit driving social change through innovative storytelling and media. Her book, The Power of Dignity, opened my eyes to the realities and the possibilities of our criminal justice system. That's next time on Future Hindsight.
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This episode was produced by Zack Travis and Sara Burningham. Until next time, stay engaged.
The Democracy Group: [00:44:57] This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.