Thinking about 40+ years of Star Wars

The new Star Wars trailer dropped online today, and my social media have been blowing up with a wide range of friends and acquaintances squeeing loudly about it (and a few grumbling).  Some have been sobbing quietly in the corner.

Obviously, I’m excited to see this come Christmastime.

Star Wars has been a part of my life since the summer before my senior year in high school when I went to see the original at least 13 times in the theater. (Yes, I went to see it every weekend that summer, and I did eventually get to see it at the River Hills 70mm theater in Des Moines.  This was before VCRs and before cable TV was common.  I have no regrets.)

I have since seen every Star Wars movie in the theater – from the rather terrible The Phantom Menace (though it does have one of my favorite Star Wars lines ever in it: “I can only protect you princess; I cannot fight a war for you.”) to the brilliant Rogue One (that accepts that heroes in rebellions do bad things and realize they are bad).

A quick peek through my blog archives shows that I have mentioned Star Wars in one form or another more than 25 times since I moved the blog onto WordPress. (I have no way of searching the old hand-coded blog.)

Here are a few highlights:

 

 

 

 

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Marie Colvin and the risks of covering war

Earlier this week I took my Global Media Literacy students to our wonderful local community World Theatre to see the Marie Colvin biopic, A Private War.

The film tells the story of acclaimed war correspondent Marie Colvin (played Academy Award nominee Rosamund Pike), who covered wars around the world from the point of view of the ordinary people who are the victims of the violence and disruption.  For 26 years, Colvin reported from strife-filled places – the Middle East, Africa, Chechnya, the Balkans, South Asia. She was instantly recognizable by the black eye patch she wore after being hit by a grenade attack in Sri Lanka. The movie is based on Marie Brenner’s profile of Colvin from Vanity Fair.

At a time when journalists are under both verbal and physical attacks, Colvin consistently stood up for the importance of journalism globally. In a 2010 speech, Colvin said, “Covering a war means going to places torn by chaos, destruction, and death, and trying to bear witness.  It means trying to find the truth in a sandstorm of propaganda when armies, tribes or terrorists clash.”

As I told the audience at The World before the screening of the film, it is too easy in our current environment  to lose sight of the value and dangers of journalists covering wars around the world.  Marie Colvin stood up for telling the story of the people who are war’s biggest victims.

You can get a bit of a feel for just who Marie Colvin was by watching her final broadcast on CNN sent out the night before she was killed by artillery fire directed on her location in Syria by President Assad’s military (Note – This video comes with a content warning from YouTube.)

Longtime New Yorker editor David Remnick wrote that Colvin was always recognizable when she showed up on CNN, wearing her signature black eye patch she acquired after losing her left eye from a grenade attack during the civil war in Sri Lanka in 2001. Remnick says it was Colvin who taught him how to be a foreign correspondent when he was covering the West Bank city of Jenin following an Israeli military incursion. The morning after Remnick watched the report by Colvin from Syria, he woke up to the news that the reporter had died from rocket fire.

The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Dana Priest wrote, “Her bravery was legendary. In the 1991 Iraq War, she stayed behind enemy lines. In 1999, when others fled, she remained in East Timor (an island nation in South Asia) to document the 1,000 refugees in a U.N. compound under attack by government-backed militias. . . . Her black eye patch symbolized her fearlessness and commitment to telling the story of civilians who, she reminded her worried friends and readers, ‘endure far more than I ever will.’”

The day after viewing the film, my students’ reactions were varied, but all of them said they were hit hard by the story, saying they weren’t really prepared for how intense Colvin’s story would be.

The theatre management tells me we had 140 people there for the screening Tuesday evening. I’m glad so many people from my local community showed up to see A Private War. It’s a difficult story to watch, but it’s an important one for all Americans to see.

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Questions Worth Asking – Journalism Edition

AFSP Guidelines for Reporting on Suicide

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Apollo 11 Documentary a Must for Space Fans

I live in a mid-sized town in central Nebraska, so seeing the latest documentary in a theater is not always practical. But this weekend I was going to be passing through Omaha on my way to visit my father in Iowa, and it looked like I could just make a matinee of the new Apollo 11 documentary at the Alamo Drafthouse being released for this summer’s 50th anniversary of the moon landing.

I’m so glad I got to see it.  I expect to list Apollo 11, assembled out of recently uncovered archival film and  sound, as one of my favorite films of this year.

Earlier documentaries have tried to  tell the story of the entire Apollo program (1989’s For All Mankind)  or simulated a visit to the moon (2005’s Magnificent Desolation), but Todd Miller’s film focuses in on just the journey of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins. It starts withe the roll out of the massive Saturn V booster to the launch pad and ends when the three astronauts emerge from quarantine. The story is told almost entirely using archival film with just a limited number of brief simple line animations explaining a few complex concepts.

The real treat of this documentary is seeing footage we have not seen before in dozens of anniversary of the moon landing TV specials. Much of it is drawn from a previously forgotten cache of 65 mm footage that had been hidden is archives since 1969.  Some of the most impressive of this is of the Saturn V being rolled out and of the launch itself. While these will look good on the small screen at home, it’s at its best on the theatrical (or if you are really lucky, the IMAX) screen.

There was also footage shot by a one-frame-per-second camera mounted in the LEM.  While it certainly doesn’t show smooth motion, it gives the viewer a much better picture of the moonwalk than the more frequently seen grainy television pictures.  Miller further makes effective use of still photos show on medium-format roll film shot with the ubiquitous Hasselblad cameras used by NASA at the time.

The film does not have a narration, per se, instead using an archive of period sound that includes audio from the astronauts, from mission control, and from the equipment required to make this incredible journey.  Occasionally Miller will use newscaster commentary from Walter Cronkite as essentially a narration, but never anything that wasn’t from the period.

If you watch the credits carefully – and who among us doesn’t – you will see that composer Matt Morton performed his electronic score for the film using late 1960s instruments, including the 1968 Moog Synthesizer IIIc.

I’ve been enthralled with the space program my entire life. I would like to say that my first media memory was the moon landing, but unfortunately that would not be true.  Instead, that first memory belongs to the fire in Apollo 1 that killed Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. But it is the Apollo 11 landing that has held my imagination every time I look at the moon. I had just finished third grade when my parents let me stay up late to watch the moon walk.

Over the years I’ve consumed almost everything I could find on the moon landing. Until now, the one thing that has held my attention over the years was Michael Collins memoir Carrying The Fire. Collins, of course, was the pilot of the command module who was the Apollo 11 astronaut who did not have to land on the moon. I just re-read Carrying The Fire this winter, and it is a worthy accompaniment to the Apollo 11 documentary. One of the things that makes Collins’ book so good is that he actually wrote it himself without the aid of a ghost.  Because of that, it is the authentic voice of one of those voyagers to the moon.

Miller’s Apollo 11 film feels fresh because it doesn’t view the trip to the moon through the eyes of history and all that has happened over the last 50 years.  Instead it keeps its gaze on what Americans saw and did back in the summer of 1969.  The film has been criticizes for spending too much time looking at this amazing journey by focusing on men in short-sleeved dress shirts staring at flickering video screens. For some, that is not the most engaging image.  But for me, the sound of each of the stations of Mission Control calling out “Go!” in response to the questioning of the flight controller is at least as exciting as any extended fight scene from the latest super hero epic.

If you have the opportunity, I strongly recommend getting out this week to see Apollo 11 in the best theater you can find. Thank you, Alamo, for bringing this excellent documentary to Nebraska.

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Columnists for your reading pleasure – 2019 edition

Here are links to a number of columnists and columnist index pages from newspapers around the country for my JMC 406 commentary writing students, and anyone else who’s interested.  It has been published here multiple times in different forms.

National Columnists

Critics

Local and Regional Columnists

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Looking at Hip Hop

Today in my media literacy class we’re going to be taking a look at hip hop, and these are just several examples we will be considering as we discuss the genre and cultural movement. More text to come…

The 44th Anniversary of the Birth of Hip Hop

Some old school bboying.

Break Dancing in Rural China

Draze – Irony on 23rd

“In his new Irony on 23rd music video, Draze, offers the nation a front row seat to one of the countries most heated debates concerning the impact of recreational cannabis retail outlets on communities. Set to the soulful sounds of rhodes keys and a live saxophone Irony On 23rd captures the thoughts, pain, and reactions of a community experiencing gentrification. Through the power of story, Draze paints a picture of how numerous ironies appear to meet at the intersection of 23rd and Union. The storyline focuses on Uncle Ike’s,  one Washington’s States top Pot shops which has moved within a few feet of one of the communities most prominent African American Churches.”

A Hamilton Remix of “Immigrants”

A Hamilton Remix of “Wrote My Way Out”

Hip Hop and the Mash Up

This is Chapter 3 – It Goes Like This

 

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Girl Talk, Girl Walk, and the Art of the Long Tail Mash Up

One of the least pleasant parts of writing new editions of Mass Communication: Living in a Media World is making the decision of what material to cut in order to make room for important new material. Some of the cuts aren’t that bad – the material is dated and really doesn’t belong in the book anymore.  But sometimes I have to cut materials that I really like and is still relevant.  But textbooks can only be so long… so the example has to be cut.

For me, one of the most painful cuts for the seventh edition was taking out the material on mash-up artist Gregg Gillis, better known as Girl Talk. For me, his masterpiece was a 71-minute long mash up called All Day that featured more than 400 separate samples. The following post brings together and updates several posts I’ve written on the topic over the years.

Please note that most of the links here to video or audio content will contain offensive and/or NSFW language.

Girl Talk All Day album coverTrying to explain what Gregg Gillis, aka Girl Talk, does to someone who grew up in the days of the Doors or the Ramones can be a bit challenging. He’s a DJ who plays clips from multiple songs at the same time. Put more elegantly, Gillis is a mash-up artist—someone who combines two or more pieces of music to create something new.

As an example, one of the most famous mash-ups is Danger Mouse’s “The Grey Album” that combines the a cappella vocals from rapper Jay-Z’s “The Black Album” with samples from the Beatles’ so-called White Album.  While Jay-Z had created the a cappella version of his album specifically for mash-up use, the Beatles publisher EMI was not amused and attempted to get The Grey Album suppressed. Despite EMI’s efforts, The Grey Album remains available and is considered an artistic success.

As great as the work by people like Danger Mouse may be, nothing really compares to the level of mash-up done by Pittsburgh’s 29-year-old Gillis.  Gillis has a degree in biomedical engineering, but several years ago he quit his day job to create the incredible mixes that go into his five albums.  His most recent album, All Day, reportedly contains 400 different samples — typically some kind of rap combined with some sample of pop, rock or soul music from the last 40 or 50 years.

All of Gillis’ music is given away online, and none of the samples he’s used have been authorized or paid for.  Were he to attempt to license the music, Gillis estimates that it would cost several million dollars, and that many of the songs wouldn’t be available at any price.  And yet, so far no label has sued Gillis for his sampling.  According to Duke law professor James Boyle, speaking on NPR’s One The Media, says there may be a range of reasons no one has gone after Gillis:

There is the story that the labels learned from DJ Danger Mouse and don’t want to risk creating the Che Guevara of the digital sampling age, the lost hero to which all of us will offer reverence and thus make him even more popular.

Another story is, they’re going, hmm, this is really interesting. Let’s let him run a bit, and when we finally see how things are playing out then we’ll figure out a way of getting a revenue stream out of this. A third story is they realize it’s actually fair use and they don’t want a bad precedent brought against them. And then a fourth one is that they are gibbering in terror and are so scared by this new phenomena, they’re incapable of rational action of any kind and so are caught in a kind of fugue state, as the digital music scene develops.

BTW, if you really want to get the full flavor of the OTM program on mash-ups and sampling, you really need to listen to it rather than read it.

Without further ado, here are a number of fascinating videos and links dealing with Girl Talk and mash-ups.

Girl Talk – Bounce That animated video
Note: You need to go to YouTube to view this video.

This video was created by Professor Matthew Soar and his students at Concordia University in Montreal using rotoscoped video. (BTW, to the best of my knowledge this video does not contain offensive language)

Visual Breakdown of Girl Talk’s All Day

Here’s a great visualization of All Day that displays what samples make up each track as they play.  It was put together by @adereth.

Download Girl Talk’s All Day at Gillis’ lable Illegal Art.

For those of you who are fans of mashup artist Girl Talk, there is a now a fascinating dance film out that is essentially a 71-minute long video for Girl Talk’s latest album All Day.

There’s a preview below, but here’s a link to the entire film.

The film was funded through Kickstarter, the long-tail funding website, with director Jacob Krupnick raising almost $25,000 from 577 backers who committed amounts ranging rom $5 to $500 or more.  (Most of the backers were under $100.)

This is Chapter 3 – It Goes Like This

And finally:

An extended lecture on Mash-ups, Borrowing and the Law
from Professor James Boyle


 

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Opportunity closes out 15-year mission to Mars

Opportunity's tracks.

The Opportunity Mars rover left more than 28 miles of tracks on the red planet over the last 15 years.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab finally declared the mission of the Mars Rover Opportunity had come to an end today after having lost contact with it following a massive dust storm in June of 2018.  for several months.

Opportunity left Earth on the summer of 2003 and landed on Mars in January of 2004. The little rover was assigned a 90-day mission, but Opportunity and her sister rover Spirit kept on running.  Spirit lasted five years before getting stuck in a sand trap.  These two rovers are responsible for some of the most amazing planetary science ever.

Eleven years ago I heard the project’s manager give a lecture, and he was amazed at the time that they had kept exploring for four years.  I don’t think anyone imagined their missions run so long.

I know I am anthropomorphizing a non-sentient robot based on my reaction to android and robot characters from science fiction, but I don’t care.

God speed, Opportunity. You were a great explorer.

(sniff, sniff, no, I’m not crying, well, maybe a little…)

XKCD Remembers Opportunity

Satirical Sarcastic Rover remembers Opportunity in the WaPo

And a tribute from Oppy’s younger sibling, Curiosity:

Oppy’s last message from last summer

 

 

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2019 State of the Union Blogging Contest

Every time I teach Commentary and Blogging at UNK, I have a blogging competition or two.  This year, my students had the opportunity to do an instant blog post somehow related to the president’s 2019 State of the Union address.  While they were welcome to talk about the speech itself, they were also free to take any approach to the theme they wanted.

There are links to all the entries below.  After you’ve read as many as you like, you can vote for your favorites here. They are listed in the order in which I received the links from my students. (It’s ranked voting, so you get to rank order your top three choices.):

  1. Amanda Hendrickson – President Trump’s Motives with SUTO
  2. Keegan Francl -Dear Politics: Give Us Millineals Something to Care About
  3. Treygan Gowen – My First SOTU
  4. Cassidy Sleicher – Best of: The State of the Union (according to the internet)
  5. Alex Eller – My Take: 2019 State of the Union Address
  6. Madison Yeutter – My Response to the 2019 State of the Union Address
  7. Nicolena Boucher – Washington’s Precedent, Our Tradition 
  8. Ian Khaler – SOTU POTUS IDK
  9. Hannah Maupin – The Memes of the Union
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Guest Blog Post: Jeremy Littau on what’s gone wrong with the news industry

On January 24, 2019, my friend Jeremy Littau, a journalism professor at Lehigh University, started a tweet storm of 30 or so posts that outlined an argument of why news media layoffs keep happening. Within three days, the thread had nearly 7 million impressions. As of this writing it has more than 18,000 retweets and 39,000 likes.

Here’s a lightly edited version of the tweets Jeremy provided to Living in a Media World:

Guest Blog Post by Jeremy Littau
Lehigh University

Dr. Jeremy Littau

For those who aren’t quite sure why these media layoffs keep happening, or think “It’s the internet!” or “People don’t pay to subscribe!” there’s a lot more going on. Those factors are a part of the problem, but their contribution to the distress the news industry is facing is amplified by larger forces.

Here’s a cliffs notes version. It’s not exhaustive, but it hits the highlights.

What is considered The Golden Age of Newspapers ended around the late 1980s. Subscriptions began dropping in the ‘70s year over year, but not enough to show cracks in an industry that was still tremendously profitable.

Newspapers spent most of the 20th century consolidating into chains, but in the latter half of the century they increasingly became part of conglomerates and were publicly traded. Profit margins for companies like Gannett and Knight Ridder were commonly around 30-40%. That’s an insane margin. For comparison, your local supermarket (which arguably is more necessary for you to live) is lucky to clear in the low single digits, often in the 1-2% range.

Anyhow, most of those profits went to shareholders, who came to expect them over time. Because of that, newspapers became, as the joke goes, a license to print money. So chains started gobbling up papers all over the country in the ‘80s and ‘90s. They took on debt to do this because with 40% margins, there wasn’t much downside in that model. During the golden era, newsrooms didn’t invest in innovating their news product very much. They invested in technology to make it easier and require less hands, and soft cuts in the form of job freezes or unfilled open positions were used to serve investors and stock prices; little was invested in the people who made news or the product itself.

This model would have worked fine if newspapers continued unthreatened, but the Internet came along and the bill for shortsighted, quarter-to-quarter thinking came due. They were caught flat-footed, but not immediately because it took some time for the Internet to fully work its way into American households.

I remember as a college student in the ‘90s attending a journalism conference and hearing publishers boast that newspapers were here to stay. They believed their product (not the news, the physical object) was essential. It was a type of hubris that ended up being the problem.

By the mid-‘90s you had chains saddled with MASSIVE debt and already had readership shrinking year over year, things that were a result of the glory days of the previous two decades. Newspapers had a short-term advantage because easy self-publishing on the Internet required technical skill. But along came Blogger in the late 1990s and that was your sea change. Anyone could publish, and publish they did. Blogging software, first with Blogger and then WordPress, led to the proliferation of independent reporters and news efforts across the U.S.
Suddenly, publishers who weren’t used to competition and didn’t invest in innovation were competing with more than their crosstown newspaper rival (if they had one anymore …. consolidations and mergers killed those too). Circulation levels continue to drop, and the trend accelerated in the early part of last decade.

With less readership and huge debt service commitments, it became a vicious spiral that required more cuts to meet debt goals and satisfy shareholders who were used to big profits. And less quality meant fewer people found value in the product, and so they subscribed less. This is what Phil Meyer famously called the Death Spiral.

Lower ad revenues->Newsroom cutbacks to meet profit goals->Less news coverage, less users ->

Newspapers ate their own seed corn during bumper crop days of the ‘80s and then had no resources just when things were getting bad during the last decade, when self-publishing and then mobile were transforming the media industry at incredible speed.

Fewer subscribers didn’t just mean less subscription money. By early 2000 about 75 – 80% of a typical newspaper’s revenue came from display and classified ads. And while subscriptions only account for 10-15% of revenue, a loss of subscribers means less ad revenue. Basically, advertisers will pay a lot if you deliver them a lot of eyeballs, and they’ll pay less if you deliver them less. Losses in subscriptions and rack sales were a double whammy.

And then came free classified ads on Craigislist (among others). People have said Craig Newmark killed newspapers, but that is nonsense. I’m surprised it took people that long to invent free classifieds, to be honest. SOMEBODY was going to do it. At least Newmark cares about news. Classified ads were a damn boondoggle ($500 in a mid-metro to place a car ad, for example). The more expensive your item you needed to market, the more you got charged in classifieds. No wonder people rebelled the minute they were offered the ability to do it for free. Newmark didn’t kill classifieds; news publisher greed did.

Anyhow, by 2006 the storms were gathered. Readership was dropping, which meant less subscription/sale revenue and less display ads, and the classified ads as a business was decimated. And all the while, that debt service from the buying spree years was hanging like the Sword of Damocles.

This is a great illustration of it. I call it the Oh My God graphic in my intro course.

Newspaper advertising revenue: Adjusted for inflation, 1950 - 2013

So within 10 years, the industry lost about two-thirds of its revenue. And so the Death Spiral accelerated. More cuts, less quality, fewer readers, more cuts, less quality, etc.

But advertisers weren’t spending less. They were redirecting it. The hope was they’d invest in digital, specifically newspaper websites. And while that did happen to some extent, the numbers never came close to matching display ads because how we get news online is way different.

First, social media changed distribution. A print newspaper controlled content and the way you got that content because it controlled distribution. You were basically paying it to point you to the best news. If that sounds familiar, that’s because it’s what Google and Facebook do now.

The value proposition for advertisers is in showing you the way. Consumers value curators. The newspaper was curatorial, it’s just we didn’t realize it because they had a monopoly on the content process from end to end.

So let’s go back to Oh My God, with revisions.

Newspaper advertising revenue: Adjusted for inflation, 1950 - 2013, with digital media added

There is money out there. Google and FB have something print newspapers used to have: a reliable, captive audience. That’s what advertisers will pay for, because they know people will be there.

Since the middle part of last decade, newspapers and media companies in general have been accelerated their investment in innovation. There are some GOOD, profitable examples of new companies doing this well. What they have is no debt service millstone tied around their neck.

Some of the big players like the Washington Post and New York Times, they have experimented with innovative products and also paywalls with some success. Long-term their brand and reach are big enough they’ll probably be OK. Yesterday it was Gannett, HuffPo and BuzzFeed announcing layoffs. The latter two were a surprise, but those are digital-first companies that probably have some way through this. The real worry is Gannett.

Here’s what Gannett owns, according to CJR’s excellent Who Owns What database; although it hasn’t been updated since 2011, it is a great way to see how huge these companies are. They own newspapers big and small all over the country. This is the real crisis right here. Most of those small newsrooms have already been cut to the bone repeatedly the past 20 years. We’re way beyond trimming fat. This is a stab to the heart of democratic accountability.

And the crux of this thread is that’s the real worry. I’m less concerned about the national players or a lot of the digital-first operations. We are on the cusp of a country full of news deserts, medium and small communities with no newspaper to watch those in power. And it’s not going to be solved by subscriptions alone, although that can help in big ways. The news model needs to be completely reinvented. Paywalls don’t work for local media, as Brian Moritz has noted.

And who’s moving in right now to pick through the scraps? Hedge funds. They’ve destroyed several papers, and are working their way through some biggies like the Denver Post. When hedge funds are in the game, you’re being stripped for parts to sell off. They have no interest in growing the paper or finding a sustainable model. That’s not what they exist for.

And there’s a demographic bomb out there waiting to go off. The print product is still bringing in large amounts of revenue relative to digital. And guess who reads the print version? Old people (by and large). But this isn’t something that perpetuates. That is, as people like me age up, our likelihood of subscribing to print doesn’t go up. For each successive generation, it’s diminishing returns. So to put it crassly, what happens when that generation of loyal subscribers dies?

And so there’s a limited window before that bomb goes off. But in truth? A healthy product likely would have solved some of this by now. I am resigned to the fear that existing small/medium newspapers are out of time and are simply playing out the string.

So, all that said, what can you do?

First, we need to realize the greedy publishers that didn’t invest aren’t going to realize their mistake and plow money into the business now.

So guess who needs to step up? US. If we value accountable democracy, that is. Subscriptions are a good place to start, yes, but look for opportunities to support things like foundation journalism (what ProPublica is doing, for example) and moonshot ideas like what Civil tried to do (and still might be trying to do; their idea has merit but I’m more skeptical after their token sale failed last fall).

As community members and citizens, we need to look at investments as things that might fail but also might succeed, as investments often do. But we need to invest for the sake of our communities and our democracy.

What I’d implore you to do, though, is look for ways to invest in local news because that is where it matters most. Good god, you think Washington is corrupt? Try City Hall. Some of the worst stuff I saw as a reporter happened there. Local news keeps powerful people accountable, and often it is the only institution advocating for citizen and taxpayer interests.

Your local paper might be toast or dying. So who’s stepping up, needs help creating a new way to do local/regional accountability? Support them.

I’m seeing more of these than I used to. The Nevada Independent is one example. Some of these are laid-off reporters that go-it alone. They’re good at this because they’re not just journalists, but embedded in the communities they serve. I’d point you to a few others. The Texas Tribune for their focus on community. The Correspondent, a startup that is using a membership model to reimagine news coverage and raised more than $2.5 million via over 45,000 people who love journalism and want to help make its future bright. ProPublica, which is doing incredible foundation investigative journalism that is winning Pulitzers. But at the heart of this is community, which is why I always say check out Joy Mayer’s Trusting News project, which offers free training and strategy for journalists to re-engage with readers.

The people in industry, those still there and even those getting laid off, are trying like hell. They really are. But it’s not their fault. It’s not their bias, or mistakes, or them being bad. The seeds were planted decades ago by greedy, short-sighted owners.

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