KETC readies space for an experiment in citizen journalism. Pictured above right: station President Jack Galmiche.
Public media and local news
In St. Louis, stations stretch usual model to expand reporting
Media business models nowadays aren’t a great fit for the model of democracy that relies on journalists and other civic busybodies to help keep the citizenry informed and the politicians accountable.
Look at St. Louis, a mid-size middle-American news market. There the business model of daily newspapers is faltering for the Post-Dispatch, causing it to cut its newsroom positions 40 percent, from 330 to 200 in just five years.
With advocates for journalism urging public broadcasters to fill vital reporting gaps, the larger St. Louis pubcasters would like to jump in, but the potential of their business model also limits what they can do.
KETC, the public TV station, is training 150 citizen-journalist hopefuls and building a new 5,000-square-foot digital media center where they will work at 20 video editing stations. But support for the initiative is extraordinary, beyond the revenues that the public TV funding machine ordinarily can generate. A local foundation has contributed generously, and the project’s sustainability is unproven.
KETC is also leading public TV’s multicity experiment in informational outreach to families hurt by the mortgage crisis, but support comes in large part from CPB — and cannot be expected to continue year after year.
KWMU, the city’s biggest pubradio operation, likewise is expanding its news coverage of state government, but for that it counted on grants from local foundations to hire a full-time reporter in Missouri’s capital, Jefferson City. While the statehouse reporting may continue, paying for it is a stretch beyond the normal business model.
What if other media can’t maintain a healthy level of local news coverage?
“We’d need the public to really step up,” said KWMU News Director Bill Raack. “We’re not going to see more money coming from the state or feds. So that leaves us with grants, underwriters and members. If we had to be the source for local news, we’d have to add a bunch of reporters and tell listeners, ‘Here’s what it’s going to take.’”
Expanding a station’s objectives to that degree may be hard to contemplate, but it’s the kind of extraordinary capital-campaign pitch that pubradio development leaders may start drafting in a new CPB-funded project (separate story) — stretching the business model of pubcasting to cover an increasingly ambitious mission.
Decisions by city councils, legislatures, courts and school boards all have the potential to directly affect residents’ lives, but the frontline beat reporters mostly have been newspaper employees, paid from ad sales, which have shriveled, leading to extensive and accelerating layoffs.
In 2008, newspapers nationwide lost some 5,900 newsroom jobs, about 11 percent of the 52,600 working at the beginning of the year, according to the latest annual stats from the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism. By the end of 2009, head-counters predict, newsrooms will have lost 14,000 total positions, or about 25 percent of the newspapers’ reporting workforce, since 2001.
The Post-Dispatch, founded in 1878, is the paper of record in St. Louis. What gives when it loses two-fifths of its news staff in five years?
Gone are the commentary page editor, copy editors, online news producers, news clerks, news researchers and an assistant photo editor. Arnie Robbins, editor in chief, said management is doing “everything we can” to hang on to reporters to monitor local stories and is now looking to hire three reporters. “There are not as many as we’d like, but we’re doing everything possible to keep reporters on the street.”
But what valuable reporting is being lost? “Accountability journalism, particularly local accountability journalism, is especially threatened by the economic troubles that have diminished so many newspapers,” according to “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” the study released last month by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. It defines that coverage as “independent reporting that provides information, investigation, analysis and community knowledge, particularly in the coverage of local affairs.”
The study asks public broadcasters to do more accountability reporting. It recommends that CPB require every funded station to do a minimum amount of local-news reporting, and, while ramping up, report publicly to CPB on their progress toward the goal.
This would require a big boost in resources and a shift of emphasis at most public stations. Their news staffs tend to be measured in single or double digits, not the triple digits of major-market newspapers. Their forte has long been selective, in-depth, explanatory reporting, not detailed, extensive coverage that lays part of the foundation for what they do.
Tryout for citizen journalists
An exception is under construction in St. Louis. PubTV station KETC plans to try covering the area in a different way, and online, under the banner of the Nine Network of Public Media and funded by a grant from the Dana Brown Foundation.
In mid-December, those dozens of citizen-journalists in training at KETC will begin a two-week class in digital storytelling and editing, their projects bound for on-air and multiplatform use. They’ll learn to use HD and Flip cameras. They’ll edit video with Apple’s Final Cut Express. The station’s frequent editorial partner, The St. Louis Beacon — a nonprofit online daily news service now housed in a corner of KETC’s offices — will move into the new shared space by the end of November.
The Beacon and KETC have been collaborating on news coverage — quite successfully, both say — for nearly two years. One main focus, since June 2008, has been their Saving the Mortgage Crisis project, backed by CPB. While KETC has coordinated local organizations to reach struggling homeowners, the Beacon has provided long-form reporting on the impact of home foreclosures on families and the economic distress that has rippled into the community.
Beacon Editor Margie Freivogel, a former Post-Dispatch reporter, heads a staff of 17 full- and part-timers. She sees the Beacon/KETC work as transcending traditional local news coverage —“really an opportunity to do things in a better way than they were done,” bringing a richer depth of understanding to community issues. Emily Rauh Pulitzer, who married into the family that founded the Post-Dispatch, gave the Beacon a challenge grant of $500,000, which it used to help raise nearly $1.5 million more over two years. Its budget is about $1 million this year.
KETC President Jack Galmiche feels a special responsibility to his hometown. When he was growing up, the Post-Dispatch and its competitor—the Globe-Democrat, closed in 1986 — had “an abundance of good journalism and coverage,” he said. Now, “I think it’s not being too critical to say, compared to 30 years ago, the Post-Dispatch is a shell of what it was. The resources aren’t there any longer.”
Galmiche is hoping more collaborative efforts will pick up some of what’s been lost. The Post-Dispatch art critic recently left, and pubradio KWMU, KETC and the Beacon are considering sharing a staffer who would specialize in visual arts.
Empty press tables
Pubradio station KWMU is also relying on local foundations to bolster a key part of its coverage — supporting a full-time reporter at Missouri’s capital, Jefferson City. The contributing foundations choose to remain anonymous. “They just want more coverage of lawmakers,” said Bill Raack, news director.
Statehouse coverage has been waning. Raack said his capitol reporter had no problem finding a desk and parking place. There are so few reporters in the chamber that Senate staffers have taken over one of two press tables. The other is nearly empty.
Phill Brooks, a University of Missouri journalism professor who has covered the statehouse since 1972, says the volume of state-government coverage in all media has “substantially fallen off’ over the years.”
Covering all that local, state and regional news remains a challenge for pubcasters. In the KWMU newsroom at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, where Raack has a staff of seven reporters, “we don’t do breaking news — we have no [police] scanner in the newsroom,” Raack said. “If it’s a huge breaking story, we try to cover it the best we can.”
He says pubradio listeners want issue-oriented coverage: going deep on the economy, politics, race, religion. Just last month that brand of news won reporter Adam Allington a national Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio-Television News Directors Association for his three-part series, “Gangs of North St. Louis.”
Locals do value KWMU stories. Frank Absher, a longtime radio man and local media historian, is often contacted by news outlets when a notable person dies. “I get the most people commenting to me ‘I heard you this morning’ when I’m interviewed by KWMU than by any other media,” he said. “That tells me that the people who listen are active listeners, they’re paying attention to it.”
KWMU General Manager Tim Eby, who took the helm in January, is cognizant of the falloff in local reporting. “It’s very hard to go anywhere and not see what’s happening to newspapers,” Eby said. “If there’s a place in accountability journalism for public radio, it’s important to do that. But we’re still trying to figure out a business model.”
While the business end of news media shakes out, users expect continued service.
“One of the goals of media policy should be to inform citizens on the nature of governance and keep people atop local public affairs,” said Steve Wildman, who’s leading a National Science Foundation–funded study of media localism and ownership at Michigan State University’s Quello Center for Telecommunication Management & Law.
The Michigan State researchers are trying to pin down empirical data on local coverage, using random samples of media in 120 markets during the first three months of 2009. One focus is city council coverage. They locate dates of city council meetings by market, then pore over newspaper hard copies and websites of television and radio stations to track down what stories were generated.
Figures aren’t available yet, but Wildman can say in general that there is “very little” city council coverage going on. He has no data on how well it was covered during the newspapers’ heydays, he said. “But in small markets I think it was covered pretty well.”
Eby at KMWU said the station is “having conversations” with and gleaning ideas from new nonprofit reporting efforts including the Bay Area News Project, a venture involving KQED, and the recently announced Chicago News Cooperative, which includes WTTW.
There’s more work to be done. “While public radio listening is still strong, we are not on the radar” of people seeking news online,” he said. “We have got to find a way to change that.”
Web page posted Nov. 10, 2009
Copyright 2009 by Current LLC
