These contemporaneous notes are more raw than is typical.

Documentary: Trusted Sources

(meta) ZERO TV STATIONS AGREED TO BE ON FILM. HM.

Director: Trusting News

• Joy Mayer

Colorado Community Media

• Nina Joss
• Thelma
• Michael

The Trust Project

• Sally Lehreman

SPJ Code of Ethics:

• I worry about this being a really bankrupt document today. It’s saturated in meaningless buzzwords without testability.

I don’t think it lands well to say that journalists are under attack. This can be true without needing to think it’s the keystone issue.

Partisans want to get specific activist issues done.

Before, it was never true that readers could know better than the journalists. Now the readers are wholly responsible for editing their work.

Don’t you sense the tipping balance of power?

When the Real Journalists start using LLMs to supply their Context, they will have yielded all of what they claim they’re good at to a robot they implicitly trust, but can’t and won’t fact check.

• How do we cover stories others cover?
  • What a prophetic subject. I could have a whole panel about this alone.
• Feedback about whether they’ve ever spoken to a reporter
• “Trusted editors” are “required”
• “Anyone can POSE as a reporter”
  • yeah and it’s pretty convincing. uh oh!
• “Trained to follow the facts”
  • how’s that working out. do you ever get refresher training from the training police
• “Why does it have to be included”
  • context vomit
  • partisan language, people are shrugging
• “When we make a mistake”
  • your editors?
• “You didn’t give people a ‘full view’”
• “Nothing came of it.”
  • do a better job of reaching out after
• Don’t cover people as perpetually “Struggling” but there’s more going on than that.
• “No you’re wrong, we did that you just didn’t see it.”
  • take a communication class please. if you’re explaining in this situation, you already lost the ballgame
• “because there’s an angle”
  • computes, but isn’t this literally the synthetic motive problem, just used by the Good Guys?
• The New Model for local
• “Most people don’t realize” their local news is in trouble
• “You don’t have to read them all but there are some you need to know/see”
  • THEN STOP BEING A WALL OF SOUND.
• “REAL JOURNALISTS”, fake journalists, these are simple mass nouns that they assume you share with them when they say it.
• Missed assumptions about intent. Embed education.
• “WENT OUT OF OUR WAY TO STEAL SOMEONE ELSE’S” ethics document?
  • Were your ethics not very clear before you pushed Like on someone else’s?
  • I can believe you liked theirs, but tell us why, why that one.
  • the explanations all sound like general excuses for why ANY document was nice-to-have.
  • I think they’re BSing on camera to rationalize the one they picked.
  • It’s good, it’s fine, but this explanation is not authentic.
• Preschool-tier definition of terms
  • this is so remedial
  • “if people take the time to read it” (okay)
• stating their goals up front in italics works!! (who knew!)
• strong separation of news and opinion, but they make it into different sections and then pretend it’s all or nothing.
  • This is a major strike, the longer I think on it.
  • They pretend they really can separate them, and that an underlined word “OPINION” is magic.
  • CLAIMS, HEARSAY, and FRAUD.
  • SENTENCE BY SENTENCE, WORD BY WORD.
• they talk academically but have zero concrete examples of “LONG LONG DISCUSSIONS” with the 6th group she named
• “try a web search”
• “missing a code of ethics means they’re not a real journalist”
• “Just pick reputable sources bro”
• “News is not free”
• Prove to me social media views are relevant at all. At all.
• Reporters without borders. US is 55th in world for press freedoms.
• Shared facts are assumed to be available
• Advertisers explicitly coopted the motivation of the press. What would you tell me if I told you I think it’s endemic and ongoing?
• Right-wing news is doing your job better than you, because they are obsessing with details every single one of you journalists ignores.
• TMZ and Daily Caller are BOTH writing “““journalism””” that far, far outpaces the 80%-copy-pasted bland say-nothing Associative Press article.
• Links to topic words instead of articles. A link desert, even the news entertainment spam outlets.
• Expertise in journalism is being viewed from the wrong side.
  • People are more expert than the journalists who get things wrong.
  • It’s not a purity test to be allowed to publish.
• Instant destruction of credibility to say that Rush was “nonsense”.
  • They can’t hear themselves circlejerking.
• Social Responsibility
  • Hutchins Commission
  • A normative commitment.
• (PL MEETING) By-hand coding of results
• what would happen to your paycheck if you spent 50% of your time being an actual journalist?
• What if the solution we need has nothing to do with you?
• Colorado Sun funding breakdown pie chart was one of the most misleading things I’ve seen in journalism.
  • They made the pie chart in two pieces, and one piece was a mashup of advertising money and everything else. They obfuscated their own damaged argument right in front of us.
  • They can’t hear themselves circlejerking.
• Lenfest Institute: how did you do money for that.
  • call them for new or converting news room.

Panel

1. Vanessa Otero
2. Martin Carcasson
3. John Young
4. Hannah Manier
5. Amanda Gilbert

Critical Thinking (3) terms that are fact-based, targeted info vs masses (1) asking questions in the process of reading. hard with audio/video (2) tap best nature, get away from worst nature. intellectual humility. Summary: thoughtful, analytics, procedure, willing to be wrong, question self’s thoughts

Media Literacy (is/was) (1) media -> news (2) don’t have biased sources -> grok bias (4) look for bias so you can have opinion (5) info ecosystems, where does it come from. ownership of the outlet (3) it’s targeted, confirmation bias is the product

SAME/DIFF (3) less shop talk, has adopted it (2) financial model is find your audience and tell them what they already want to hear. rethink the business model (1) non-profit is gone now. market for truth, but hard to deliver it. solos can get rich (5) deeper and shorter, in conflict (1) short format is compulsive

Focuses on biases (1) 110 substacks (4) (5) decent humans (2) de-nationalization of news, introduce people to journalists (1) “what is true” and “who do i trust” are different questions, reputation, evidence, likelihood, y-something (2) credibility salesman

Impact of loss of Journalism (3) misinformation vs missed information. Omissions are bias (5) work a lot more (4) (5) newsrooms have more discussion about what they do (2) DJP, brought back opinion page, CO Conversations, sunday paper, message board for 2 weeks and vet and talk, then, Recap of it (1) media bias chart seemed like a “new” problem. AI: fundamentally unreliable. look broadly not deeply. deeply false media done as if for fun (2) financial impact of AI: aggregated from AI

• Obsession with click through.

Keep sanity (3) politifact, snopes. active consumer instead of passive (4) going extra step (5) “if they’re all reporting on it, it’s probably true”

PAYWALL (2) (5) Just pay bro (1) Cope - read for others, habits. Just own all their apps (lmao) (2) overwhelming is the point (don’t just own all their apps)

Scares you about Press freedom (none of them replied to the question) (3) in a text universe, more readers (population inflation?) (4) journalism doesn’t last if the little stories aren’t read (5) storyteller segment (1) lost trust in journalism: “I know! What are we doing about it?!” (this is meta hilarious to me.) (5) (3)

Literacy with unsupervised kids (3) talk about reality so that the mirage is obviously a mirage, disconnected from their world (2) rethinking civic education (critical thinking, more). spot the mirage (1) media literacy for K-12 (i hear this, but yikes. who would teach that? none of you are worthy of it. do you know a supply of worthy people? who would even be viable??) (2) schools seeing results from taking phones [5] Watching/listening with kids (6) Know our own limitations to think critically (3) Too many specialists, need generalists

My Question: How do you think about the diminishing returns of injecting all your context, in a world where you admitted everyone is writing the same articles, and nobody looks at them anyway after a few hours?* (The people behind me immediately said “ohhh that’s a good question”) (3) fewer distractions and statistic (5) investigative and race and culture teams and can’t go away. we take those stories and go away and dig deeper and do the critical thinking. (1) Re-reporting. media bias chart is about what is reliable and re-reporting or lacking context. The very top is the stuff only journalists can do. original fact reporting that is high effort. the investigative stuff is easy for people to go find real stuff. context as value. the rest of the ecosystem. the podcasts wouldn’t exist without the Real Journalists (???) (5) learn how to do query requests

News platforms you suggest (or not) (3) The contrast is good (1) Ground.News good, not MSN. Not thrilled with Apple News (It seems to me that mass distribution and syndication is the important part of misinformation. Drops don’t work, blasts that go through the armor do.)

(something about Curation) (5) go look directly at the source apps and stuff (4) some few are different and useful (1) getting familiar with the beats of your news outlets

Continuing program at Old Town library (2) Students working in a news desert are such an interesting counterexample of the supposed expertise required to do journalism.

Supplemental:

There was some of the traditional “bias isn’t always bad” talk. Nothing was wrong with this discussion, but I didn’t note it as it came up.

If their content had any value, they wouldn’t be mud wrestling on social media for likes. It’s literally all they care about.

There is a rampant obsession with click-through here, and the precipitating cause isn’t even on their tongues:

Ads.

They don’t care if you read their content. They literally don’t. They just want the power to police you when you disagree without them present.

These incentives are so perverse, and they’ve never known a life out of financial captivity.

I am fascinated by this repeated insistence that the government shutdown is “about” ACA extensions. You’re right, but are you Right? ACA is a bipartisan issue, and yet the government is still shut down.

Isn’t it about Something Else?

You can reach Autumn Ryan to be heard about this subject at [email protected]. Do not transmit sensitive or private information if it’s unsuitable for others to have.