so yeah just to give you a little bit of context on where i'm coming from i was the book's editor at the stranger from two thousand and eight to two thousand and early early two thousand and fifteen i also  where i do political messaging i also in my spare time co founded a website called the seattle review of books which is a book review news and interview site so that is something so i'm coming to this as a former reporter and also somebody who runs runs a media site you will have plenty of opportunity to ask questions we have microphone we have two microphones one on either side i'll let you know when it's time to line up and and and to ask your questions  and i promise you'll you'll have plenty of time so without further ado let's get to the panel on the far end here we have adrian russell she's the mary laird would professor in the department of communication the center for communication and civic engagement at university of washington her research explores journalism and activists communication and how they shape coverage of various pressing social issues including climate change corporate and government surveillance and tech policy she's written two books on journalism networked a contemporary history of news in transition and journalism is activism recoating media power in the center we have clifford cliff cotton a professor of political science right yeah yeah no it's not clifford cliff oh yeah he's a professor of political science and culture and cultural nothing studies a bellevue college and a local freelance journalist he's reported on housing racial justice and local politics in addition to his work journalist he's also been a workers rights and community organizer working on historic campaign such as the fight for fifteen currently he's living and thriving in south seattle and to my immediate left here we have peter jackson and you step on my lines of the plaza and i give your good good space and you just you just missed it peter jackson is a freelance journalist he's the former editorial page director of the everett hair everett herald he also worked across cut dot com shortly after its inception writing the daily scan a compendium of local news as well as original stories on local state and national politics during his efforts service peter wrote a series about a jury is questioning the wisdom of pacific northwest coal export facilities which received the dalai c award for excellence in environmental reporting he also experienced and survived the herald's ownership transition from the washington post to british columbia based sound publishing as a graduate of georgetown university of former vista volunteer and a co founder of the university of washington center for human rights he and his wife laurie werner live in seattle so first i guess i wanted to ask each of you about your personal experience with the decline of traditional media and journalism either as a as a consumer or an expert or participant and we'll start with you yes sorry this is being recorded for several different outlets so i would say that my experience with the decline of journalism or the transition that has gone through sort of mirrors my my experience as an academic i got my ph d in the early nineties in a journalism school and i thought the internet was a trend it was you know they they were sure it was going to pass and it was sort of my topic  was the influence of the internet on journalism and they thought that it was probably not a great career move for me but it ended up being a good career move for me because it was such a significant influence or what happened in not just american journalism but journalism all over the world so i have been from you know for many years raising and researching and thinking about these issues and so i've lived a bunch of different places of these past fifteen years twenty years i've been in the middle of that transition and really adapting to the new landscape and fact we're talking a little bit about this in the green room but my experience of it is the is basically instead of the idealized kind of digital landscape that we have that we are given the outset of the internet in the rise of digital media that i've seen increasingly become an even battle battlefield base upon the of digital media meaning instead of creating content to critically and gauge challenge and to invite people to engage with each other it's more in some of this is clich but it's more become a battleground for a rather a platform for reactionaries to be able to spew their bile in it has become in an even i would say even a treacherous battleground for whether it is critical critical journalism to be able to fight against the current of reactionaries and also on the one hand a really great platform for grassroots grassroots journalism so essentially the new media landscape in the decline of print media and the rise of digital media is a double edged sword because on the one hand you have blogs like black girl dangerous and you have websites like color lines you cross that you have all these great things coming out yet on the other hand you have just as many platforms for things like local t v stations all remain nameless info wars so on and so forth right so in just to kind of put a pin on my answer i think that we're in a very interesting time requires that if we have an interactive media it requires us now more than ever to approach it just like civic engagement that we can no longer be spectators we have to be participants to some degree and look forward to exploring this thanks can you hear me yes well you know i kind of want to take the positive view on this that it's media is transforming whatever the clichs might be it's it's going through a pretty bad phase obviously right now and i starting in high school i worked at a place called the you know clark courier herald which is a a weekly that was very important to the people and claw at the time and since that time and in my varied and my own career the importance of local news i mean that was the touchstone and everyone would everyone would read it you know clark or harold in there in that area and my greatest concern whether you call it a transformation whether recall it disruption whether we call it that klein of media is is losing that because i think as most people agree that mean the new york times and the washington post and a few others are going to continue on and there's there is brief time that i was editorial pitch out or you know i witnessed the transition from the washington post which was which actually only ever herald and it was the only daily paper that the graham family owned other than the washington post ironically katharine graham decided that that paper's grow north and so she nine hundred and seventy seven she her family bought the ever herald and then it was it was sold to sound publishing which is a little bit more of a troubling enterprise for various reasons including not being particularly worker friendly and it was difficult to witness that in part of it too is is what kind of community spirit has her civic spirit and and  so my hope and i think the hope of a lot of people at the herald and a lot of good writers and journalists and all of you who care about an issue like this that the hope is that with the transition to digital media that we're going to still have a local audience and maybe that is another thing in a nother topic that we can talk about at some point is what's going to happen in terms of questions of equity i mean to low income people are they even going to  be able to subscribe to online version of some of these outlets and i worry about kind of a common conversation so yes transforming but hope there's hope  actually had some modicum of power in a media outlet so i was yes i was affectively the editor in chief of buffalo in the media when i was younger and this was goodness i'm both can date myself and probably it was my st time in a position of power side start thinking about not just ethical journalism standards but also what kind of media source what kind of media outlet we wanted to be and in this evolution of the media we also have to start defining and creating a new type policy when it comes to media in fact adrian just to shine a spotlight on someone we're talking about in the green room again one thing you highlighted was the advocacy or the nature advocacy media and i remember you know doing a bit of research my postgraduate at the university of manchester and during my undergraduate buffalo state shut off for suny say university in new york  about the rise of advocacy media in for me i think that when that we don't really have a common language in we are just starting to create that type of that type of consciousness around types of media because these and i talk to my students about this a lot because these days there is at sea media there's edgy tain  what one could consider objective reportage or objective local reportage or if there ever was such a thing as objective reportage because of course we as we know that there's a history of racial and class bias in terms of conflated with advocacy the reporting that needs to happen but more importantly you know the really critical in great reporting where we will call something what it is so you know we will call a crisis a crisis or we will you know a lot of that is being curbed and locked in you know experience this when i was doing freelance work you know for emeralds back in the day when i was much younger in the media you know even today i have to think twice when i do freelance articles essentially what is that we have to curb that critical if you will that critical calling out of objective crises or really reactionary regressive behavior because backlash because we don't have that consciousness around the type of media that exists today or does these different types of media as time goes on and as we have  evolves ok everybody here has said something that i could spend ninety minutes on so well be trying to throw bacteria to address those issues adrian i guess i wanted to ask you we know that this is  a faster rate or a slower rate or do you even suspect my promise deterioration is as real as you well i'm not sure exactly you know how the numbers compare so i can't say that irrigation in terms of for example the number of reporters who have lost their jobs or you know the number of dollars that have left you know the seattle times for example in the last several years or the journalism industry in general but i can cite my colleague matt powers who's here today work who's done a lot of research on specific instance of seattle and especially compared to loose france  which is a city of similar size that has experienced similar decline in journalism and i think what one of the interesting things that he's found is that what's unique about seattle is that there has been huge influx of start up money for a start up ventures because of the need to clear the cline of traditional journalism and that has bred a lot of innovation and so in that sense i'm not sure if it's the only place where you can see that that dynamic certainly there's other cities that are you know experimenting with really interesting online platforms but the number and sort of innovation that's happening here i think is unique but with that said funders tend to like on new things and so it's very difficult these innovative forms even when they are successful because if you can only get a grant for a startup or a new a venture sustain yourself so in that sense i think it's unique in some senses i think it's you know mirrors what's happening in the national level for sure on the one hand there you know absolute bottoming out of the business model on the other hand there is all of this innovation and i think maybe ten years ago most people were much more optimistic about it and now we're seeing you know what happens if you don't have traditional institutions news institutions in at the beginning and that's one of the to my mind that's one of the few really bright spots in terms of growth that they've they've delivered i guess full disclosure crosscut was founded by david brewster founded what was it like being there at the beginning trying to establish a new a new media organization because what adrian was saying about about that level of trust is important and you can't sort of manifest that out of thin air yeah i think a lot of because of the trust and respect in the kind of gravity toss that that david brought to it you know was exciting and it was about ten years ago it's interesting there was optimism ten years ago and things like for example yeah i don't want to go i don't want to go off subject but there's something kaiser health news is a good example they started around the same time and because this way i have my man purse of chemo i don't know where to go for health news for you to kaiser health news which is outstanding but it's still kaiser and so it's interesting that you know you do have these agendas at times before it certainly gives you a frame of reference but i think things were optimistic i think a lot of it ended on david's reputation so you know it was a for profit model at the outset and he quickly ran into and the team there really ran into problems within i think the st couple years and then there was the switch to the nonprofit model which worked for a while and now they're on me now they're one of the biggest newsrooms in the seattle area and that's largely i want to say not only because of the hard work overtime but because they partnered with p c t s right and so that has been a huge i think it was a lifesaver for for crosscut so no it was exciting it was it was kind of like you know you felt like your present creation and i was almost ancillary to a lot of the same you know it was sort of the old guard kind of and i should say david has a new thing called  org or so i really heard about this the other day and so he's got it and so you know it keeps going the brewster the producer legacy but i think as as was mentioned before i mean the there is still no real sustain business model and the only sustainable business model now we have is with crosscut is that you can you know you can give your your nonprofit you can give your tax deductible contribution to it and what would be interesting would be to find out more about how the seattle times version of this is working because they have partnered with the seattle foundation to believe to to if you want to contribute just to investigative reporting you can give your tax deductible contribution to the seattle foundation it then gives it to this unit within the seattle times even the seattle times the private enterprise and that maybe that's the answer but yeah it was exciting i mean there was a time longer than ten years ago now where the internet seemed like it was going to democratize all this in a really astounding way right everybody had a platform everybody had a voice and it was it is easier than it's ever been in history to publish something and so the idea was that there were going to be all these little newsrooms popping up everywhere direction because they couldn't monetize so i think it's important and also that yeah different communities were going to finally have a voice in a way that they were never going to and then i mean it seemed like to me that sort of social media came along an eighty eight dollars news news media's lunch and did a horrible job of it and so can we talk a little bit about what what ownership means it seems like unless you can find a you know like a billionaire with with with a hankering to start a newsroom you're kind of out of options including you know i mean it's the name of the game these days where seeing is the rapid consolidation of the media in fact this is one of the this was one of the things that i was thinking about the most on my way over here and you know scribbling again i'm not going to name names but we all know which station whether it's publishing gobbling up all of these local weekly papers right now or on the national level where we have major film studios  major corporations gobbling up other major competitors in this in this is the interesting thing that when we see and i really want to bring this and because this is a point that needs to be discussed and i actually come from a family of journalists in fact my mother met my father when they were both writing for i believe a syracuse courier and one of the interesting things growing up was i always had this consciousness about how whites the news media and even to this day despite you know i want to give a shout out to both the south seattle emerald and the national examiner not just because i've written for them quite a bit but also because they've both taken or made great strides in really empowering bringing on providing opportunities to young journalists of color self included that being said when you see this trend towards media consolidation that journalists of color tend to be those who are most adversely affected feel free to correct me if i'm wrong and that's what we're seeing that we see  opportunities higher in terms of hiring in terms of the ability for and this actually goes back to and this goes back to be lack of support you or you are spaces for really journalists of color and even media outlets from under represented communities to grow these days and that is a real challenge due to ownership and how we break that up besides revising antitrust legislation especially for modern media outlets that's one thing but also peter you touched on this a bit really some smaller local online publications embracing embracing the membership and actually this is where all of you come in and this is where necessarily to you but it sort of builds on that in that what do you do when the when the when the media outlet is dedicated to covering communities that don't have resources like for instance we have real change news which you know you you support by buying from from street vendors real change has has shrunk a lot in the last you know one thousand and fifteen years and you know seattle's homeless community has grown but but they're not going to be able  to to to you know they don't have enough money so that a newsroom is going to pay attention to those they don't have the resources right they certainly have a voice but there is no avenue for them to get that voice into mainstream media outside of real change so what do you do when when you know when when it's not a middle class problem or even or there's no no money involved at all like how do you how do you account for that in a space where the the media environment is shrinking i just i just rather not be heads of monic tonight i mean you know but right a nice one too mark makes dreamwork so in term so there are several things and there are several points of responsibility and the reason i use the term responsibility a lot is because it's not easy and there is really we get out we get from it what we put in so just remember that for you i saw my duty as going to those who are most affected and those who perspective may make white no class america uncomfortable or tell us something about ourselves that we might not know or reiterate something that we know but really goes on addressed in mainstream policy debates right in some you maybe i'm speaking to acquiring some new it you know my fly in the face of you know what you would think in terms of reporting because there's this idea of objectivity the media's not objective objectivity i find to be kind of farcical sometimes because when we just look at in this goes back to ownership and we look at the structure of  not like we make this stuff up right it happens in real life but at the same time that there is a person that there are politics behind whether it's a keyboard whether it's a camera whether it's a printing press or politics or so for us as journalists that especially for publications that cover under represent populations like real change or the emerald or the international exam arsenal and so forth right there we have to take that responsibilities seriously and that may sometimes just require going to who is usually not considered newsworthy or trustworthy to write in and then the other thing this is where all of you come in and there's two sides of this one there is that you know kind of consumer responsibility if you're not a member or if you don't subscribe to a local publication i would highly suggest you do because there is a very objective need for that for that sustaining capital for these local publications but to in this for some you might catch a bit off guard i would engage with the news outlets that you consider to be right wing propaganda or you consider to be an reputable and actively in actively pushback against a number of these misconceptions and you know i i would suspect that you're we're going to be talking about the echo chamber but you know i talk to my students i say when i got back to america after studying game my masters in england i would watch fox news for an hour a day i would watch fox news for an hour a day actively just  myself to american political discourse did i find it to be reprehensible oh absolutely i find to be racist oh absolutely did i find to be sexist or revolting and all the things i that i you know i personally find distasteful absolutely but at the same time i you know i need to be able to engage so that's another thing and then last but not least it really goes i say of really goes to those publications having level of courage because and i'm sure i know adrian and peter that you both have stories about publications particularly smaller publications i focus on you know on to represent communities for days for myself but i will say this that for the publications that are focusing on the represent communities an kerry sells standard and don't be afraid to ask yourselves despite how challenging it is and how essential centrally it's easy to you know it may seem like the smart thing to focus more take your focus off those populations but they do need to have courage and to say rooted in those communities by a creating leadership positions be creating some journalism i think is fairly new i think it it didn't really take root for until the past century or so i think the newspapers were always fairly opinionated and and not objective a so do you think that as as people bubble themselves in on social media and in rural and urban communities do you think that out of advocacy journalism is is a solution to this problem or would it only make problems worse oh i would say that we would st have to sort of unpack the notion of advocacy journalism because i think when we hear that you can think of anything from like big news just stuff that's made up to advocate for you know a political cause whether or not it's true but advocacy journalism can also be things like you know reporters reporting on the impact of climate change in local communities and also including possible solutions in their reporting so i mean i think to answer the st part of your question i think that yes the notion of objectivity is as not zero is not inherent to journalism it's something that socially constructed and it's also something that more recently i think it's much more useful to think about things like truth or transparency or you know a rigorous engagement with  facts rather than objectivity because objectivity is a very fraught term and obviously we're all coming from different perspectives and you know the most famous example of the flaws and objectivity is around climate change  communications you know if you quote a climate denier and a climate scientist in every story you give the impression of the journalists that fifty percent of climate journalists i mean of climate scientists believe that it doesn't exist which isn't the case i think journalists especially around certain issues like issues of the rise of white supremacy issues of you know political speech from the highest office issues of climate change are actually seeing it as a moral imperative to call out what is true rather than and seek two sides of the political spectrum of a story so i do think that advocacy is a really important part of journalism and it always has been you know it's the idea that watchdog ing the powers that be is not about advocacy for the public is you know it's that's what it is that's exactly what it is so  all right that is conclusive and i would just i would just echo everything that you said i think people like myself and in a way as sort of more opinion journalists and editorial pages have messed things up for traditional journalism in the sense that we think traditional media you can have a really bad editorial page that's crazy right wing or crazy left wing and you can have wonderful objective investigative reporting which is advocacy of its own kind but more kind of advocacy of here's the issue that's going on in your local community here is that the abuse that's going on in the port and so i i agree with david goldstein and others who've been saying this and i did not subscribe to it when times that that people sign their editorials so you know who on the editorial board said this and that you know if it's supposed to be the i used to love writing those things it was like the voice on the high of the the god like you know this is and  know and trying to get various opinions in a way because i think for i will say this there my understanding is that in journalism schools today they are overflowing they're getting great applicants people want to continue to go to places like columbia northwestern and the university of oregon and other great programs and they are being they are depth into some of the the new modes and and recognizing the fact that technology whether people like me are willing to accept this we aren't oftentimes is the fact that younger people do not are not going to want to wake up and get a newspaper to learn all the news that they've just learned on so i'll be brief and i want to actually build on echo what both adrianne and peter said but we i would love it i would love it if an element of advocacy journalism became mainstream and we and i could see many of the mainstream punk pundits on major major news stations stop with the false a quick false equivocation when it comes to white nationalism or when it comes to sexism in terms in particularly in terms of treating these trainees perspectives as somewhat legitimate because quite frankly they're not and in i say i say that and i know you know for some might be controversial but let's call it as it is you know there are a number of times on major outlets where you know where you will have the where you have objective lee racist positions being trotted out as oh this is just in our perspective so you know what does the other you know what does the other side say or oh this is a perspective that exists so therefore let's put it on at the same level his side which was basically either the extermination or the outright forced removal of of nonwhite races from america they treated him as though that was a legitimate  position and and that was that was a big moment and of course they did apologize after the fact and and they seem to have learned some lessons from that but something that i learned from that is that the far right the ultra right is getting very good at working the refs and employing both sides as them to get to get some outrageous positions on the air and we've touched on this a little  bit and we've also seen very wealthy people suing publications to into oblivion and that's something that i warn people who come to me and saying you know i want to start a news news site now i'm like well you've got to be prepared for what happens when a very rich person who can hire a fleet of lawyers decides they don't like what you have to say about them because that is a real problem now so when we have these these this this is a very an even battlefield now where where one side is super good it's kind of like watching the raptors interested part figure out how to open the doors it's like oh my god you know they've they've figured out the game like we can't hide anymore  how can newsrooms sort of protect themselves from that sort of that sort of manipulation of the system and  they did you have something i just i think it's this is part of the reason why the conversation about objectivity and the changes in the news media environment need to be addressed both at the level of journalism training in journalism newsrooms among journalism audiences because if if these conversations aren't had then journalists don't actually know what the harm is going to be if they allow somebody you know with a swa go quoted anonymously and i mean that i thought happened around the charlottesville is a little while so and there was if you remember there was like a really famous video of vice video that was super successful that actually deployed a similar tactic that sort of went up close and personal with these leaders of you know these white supremacist leaders but it was so clear that they were terrible that the video really worked and i think that that's what they were trying to do in seattle with that story but it didn't work as well because they hadn't thought it through  the things that can be done to prevent such things from happening and actually major and i really liked what you said around having this conversation because once we have the conversation you have to start changing our practices and for me if i was a journalist and i'm at an anti fascist rally i'm sorry i'm you know i'm going to folk i'm going to focus on fascists i'm going to focus on you know i'm going to focus on the looking at the looking at the people who are going to be most affected by the hate that is being spewed out there because we know what it is in fact you know we have a long aside when they come you know that would be my st question so well why interview that person instead of someone who you know someone from the crowd who may have had an experience with you know may have had experience changing practices in that way i think is rather important in this actually goes back to the previous question right and i want to you know adopt a kind of long view of this because  speaking when it comes to people when it comes to people of color in the media that you have actually for very short amount of time have had the mainstream that representations of folks of color  developed represented communities where we were able to get our message out there and be able to challenge those narratives right so you know when the media is focusing there and in fact actually reminds  in you know in fact that chi those kinds of stereotypes and the what was it that that really the lack of critical questioning that that dynamic lends itself to many different many different things we see in many different things we see in real life particularly the militarization over policing  of black lives matter protesters and protests so far since i'm going to ask one more question but if you have questions feel free to line up on either side of the stage and we'll probably bounce back and forth so so if you have a question lined up now but peter i wanted to ask you as somebody who's been in the industry for a long time do you what do you think people should know about being media consumers is is there something people should know or is it is it not anyone's is it is it not the audience is responsibility to be a smarter consumer it is the audience's response ability to be a smarter consumer there you go there's the answer  i do i want to push back on this notion that there is an object that there is an objective journalism i think we all come with our own our own biases and my feeling is that for smart consumers to recognize that mainstream media is not as evil as as it is portrayed in social media i think you've had this intersection of a whole series of things including technological changes that we can't do anything about but you also have i mean without mentioning the elephant in the room but the elephant in the room being the president united states who is harness social media in a way that has been more destructive i'm sure than any thing that's happened in at least in my lifetime and and that kind of hatred and demonization of enemies repeated over and over and over again as i believe made it difficult and  required people to be more discriminating with media i would hope that the smart consumer would do sounds solves the stick or whatever the do what i do which is and what my wife does which is subscribe and read the washington post the new york times the wall street journal we read on the weekends and then find those special niche places that are of interest to you so i know technically there's no you know but so it's going to be harder and i it breaks my heart i mean when we i think many of us in the room are old enough that in rd grade or th grade th grade we had to cut out there's newspaper articles and report on the news story you know president nixon is doing blah blah blah and and give your compendium on and i think that was not only an important writing exercise but an important civic engagement exercise my assumption is that that doesn't happen anymore i don't know but yeah that i know no great insight there i do think we're going through at a really difficult time and and i think president trump who had a  summit today where there was a fistfight in the rose garden between different factions of the crazies here there's a more i'm sure there's a better way of putting him out but the crazies  yeah i have a question directed to adrian can a city function without a robust independent media this sounds like the tagline to this event here well i would say it depends on what you think functioning is it functions must be much better of it has a robust media and it's not just because of the for the obvious reasons like we need investigators to keep government officials and corporations in check but also journalism traditionally ties communities together and especially seattle has so many people new to the city there's so many different groups and different communities and different ethnicities that live in the city and without sort of common identity or a common you know sort of meeting point in terms of information and stories about what's going on it's very difficult to sort of all ourselves a community so i would say no it cannot function without a journalist who did not perform journalism that showed me there was a void in the journalistic industry itself they didn't come out of school understanding what journalism was what free speech meant and that was a shock to me so what they can snatch you up off the street without due process and that's going on today people being arrested for their facebook postings and that only affects everything you write it affects everything and everyone in this room when they post something online and i'm aware of it when i'm posting online so that affects everything and that is something you didn't touch and so the  r in fact it was you know a big watershed moment but one thing i will say is this and actually i do want to touch on a couple things that the importance in actually i to speak to us on just self but the importance of investigative journalism is this is especially specially pressing now because of media consolidation and you don't have that much space for investigative journalism by media outlets actually going to your question before paul without you don't have that much space for investigative journalism from independent media outlets because of the possibility of retribution from you know from very wealthy people very wealthy people and you know one thing i do want to say about you know this kind of comes from i don't buy i sees honestly i feel like i feel like the logs itself in the legal logs these days are conflated are the importance of that is conflated with whether or not to believe legit sexual assaults by him because i personally believe in believing victims could make a quick comment on that i mean i think julian assad is a tricky case as cliff pointed out but i do think that the leaks were important and i think that they gave people a lot of information that we would have otherwise not had obviously and i think more importantly leak culture today is a really important part of information and journalism that we get almost everything we know that goes on in the white house comes from leaks you know the press corps is not getting information at press briefings and you know if you take edward snowden for example it's easier to see the contribution to you know civic discourse and informing the public that he made because he isn't his that case isn't shrouded in questions of his personal ethics or morality but also he benefited from the leakers that came before him julian assange has mistakes were you know what drove edward snowden to leave before he made the you know the before he leaked the documents to make the videos to come out and say who he was all these things and at the panama papers are another even more sophisticated example of all of this information that was delivered to you know and sort of through by by news organizations without any person becoming associated with them or being blamed for them so i don't know if it's it is an