By David Gordon, associate editor
Journalists in the digital age face an array of challenges that didn’t exist 25 years ago, plus those stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, three online panelists told their audience Tuesday night.
The panel, hosted by the Chippewa Valley Civil Liberties Union, raised alarms about fewer journalists increasingly being asked to do more as well as the increasing misinformation that competes with accurate reporting.
But the panelists also told the audience of about 30 people that there are ways to cope with at least some of the obstacles that have arisen.
The panelists were Katrina Lim, a multimedia journalist at WQOW-TV since August, 2019; Jesse Yang, formerly on the WQOW news staff and now a marketing specialist in UW-Eau Claire’s Integrated Marketing and Communications department; and Julian Emerson, a long-time reporter at the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram and now part of the staff of the online publication UpNorthNews.
Emerson said that attacks on the news media have increased in recent presidential election years and were inflamed this year by President Donald Trump. But the problem goes beyond Trump, he said, with an increasing number of people who believe their own set of “facts.”
“There’s a whole large segment of America that’s looking to react to things that way,” he said. “That frightens me and it makes me question what I do.”
Need for personal connections
Lim stressed the need to create personal connections with the news audience.
“Being connected is very important to me but during COVID it’s very hard to stay connected,” she said.
That has reduced her opportunities to gather story ideas directly from audience members rather than relying on social media. It has also limited her efforts to let them know her as more than just a face on TV, she said.
“A lot of people don’t realize that there are real people” involved in producing news reports, she said.
Citing a study showing that 60% of the public has little or no trust in the newsmedia, Lim said this results in part from the perception that the media have become part of the power structure rather than standing up to power. She said she uses social media to show a human touch and to “let viewers know you’re listening to them and you do pay attention to what they said.”
That is particularly important for journalists of color, according to Lim, whose family is Filipino. She said she wants to share stories of the Chippewa Valley’s varied population and tell the untold stories of marginalized people, but knows that sometimes she must first make sure her co-workers understand why such a story matters.
Safety and racial issues
In answering a question about whether they felt safe now while doing their reporting, the panelists acknowledged the constant need to be wary, but said they generally don’t fear harm. Yang, a 2013 UW-Eau Claire graduate, said she is particularly cautious in small rural communities, especially since the fatal on-air shooting in 2015 of two journalists in rural Virginia.
Lim said she takes various precautions and is “always on high alert. Most of the time I’m very aware of my surroundings.”
Emerson recalled approaching a group of Trump supporters outside Zorn Arena during the 2016 campaign and being greeted initially with considerable hostility, an experience he called unnerving. He said that he was eventually able to get some interviews after convincing people he intended to do only straight-forward reporting.
“That was the first warning sign to me that things were going to be different” with Trump as a candidate and then as president, he said.
Yang also noted racial incidents and comments “that can be pretty unsettling when I hear them or when I come across them.” Lim said she has encountered some incidents of “micro-aggressions” rather than outright racism since graduating from Loyola (Chicago) University and entering the journalism field in 2016.
Additional observations
Emerson said that the existence of many new sources of news, often run by non-journalists, increases the chances that information may be false. He drew a sharp contrast to the time less than 50 years ago when national and international news came from three commercial networks and PBS – a time and when Walter Cronkite gave people the truth and they believed it.
Lim said the public should use multiple sources for news, but news consumers need to educate themselves about the reliability of those different sources. She added that she looks at how others have covered stories she’s worked on to see if there was “something I missed.”
Emerson said that when he started at the Leader-Telegram in 1997, the newsroom was crowded and loud, especially on deadline. Then, the Internet came along and “we didn’t capitalize on it like we could have,” he said.
“We in the newspaper business didn’t realize at the time what it was going to mean for us,” he said.
What it meant was steep declines in revenue, staff layoffs and not filling vacant positions. It also led to reporters supplying material for web pages and social media as well as becoming photographers and their own copy editors, he said – and papers closing down.
Emerson noted that, even before COVID, the current L-T newsroom was far emptier than when he arrived, like many other papers that have become “shadows of their former selves.” Those papers are no longer able to keep up with the demands of daily coverage, much less do the kind of investigative reporting that illuminates important issues and keeps people responsible, he said.
Journalism is more important now than it has ever been, he said, and expressed hope that journalists will help bridge the current divide in American society. He also noted the crucial need to report on “the people who have been overlooked and who aren’t doing well in society.”
NOTE: to access a recording of this program, click here.
If you liked this story, please remember there were costs involved in producing it. The CVPost has no paywall, and we rely on our readers to help us meet the costs of reporting community news and information you often won’t find elsewhere.
Annual CVPost membership is $50, but contributions of any amount also matter. Please consider helping community supported journalism survive by clicking the Donate button below.