From the UK to Oregon, 'The future is community-centered news media'
British journalist is working to transform how publishers produce local news
You’re reading the Your News Biz newsletter. My goal is to help digital media entrepreneurs find viable business models.
As I like to say, Today is Another Day of Opportunity, and today our opportunity is to speak with Damian Radcliffe, a journalism professor, researcher, and expert in digital media, particularly news media.
Our conversation will touch on several topics.
how a British journalist made his way through the Middle East to America
his latest research on community-centered journalism
examples of innovative media around the world
the power of newsletters to inform local communities
how the nonprofit model for journalism is being adopted in America
So let’s get started.
I spoke with Damian in January via Zoom. He was in Eugene, Ore., where he teaches at the University of Oregon, and I was in Cleveland.
is the video of our 34-minute conversation:
James Breiner: Damian holds the Chambers Chair in journalism and is a professor of practice and affiliate faculty member of the department for Middle East and North Africa studies (MENA), and the Agora journalism Center (his complete LinkedIn profile is here).
I've been following Damian's work virtually for a number of years but we’ve never met and never had a chance to talk in person. So I wanted to ask him first about how a British journalist, his wife, and kids made their way to the US. His accent is still strong, but his school-age kids speak like Americans, he says.
[The interview has been edited for space and clarity. The bold-face emphasis in Damian’s comments below is mine. — James]
A Brit lands in the US
Damian Radcliffe: I'm just coming up to my 10th year here in the US. Our route here was kind of an unexpected one. I spent most of my life living and working in the UK. I moved to the Middle East for three years in 2012, the year after the Arab Spring, to report on the impact of digital technologies on society within both the MENA region and also globally.
And then we were really thinking about, well, what might we want to do next? And I saw an opportunity come up here at the University of Oregon, which I felt was a moonshot. They liked me, I liked them, so we ended up moving here in September of 2015.
Here we are a decade on, and this is our home, and we love being here.
The Agora report
James Breiner: You’ve been doing a lot of research about local journalism. Could you talk a bit about the report that you just published, "Advancing Community-Centered Journalism"?
Damian Radcliffe: So I'm very fortunate that I work with my colleagues at the Agora Journalism Center, which is based in Portland, Oregon. It's the biggest city in the state, about 120 miles north of where we are here in Eugene.
And the Agora journalism Center has really focused on looking at engagement, particularly through sort of civic engagement and innovation in journalism. And then over the last couple of years, it has pivoted to how do we develop a more sustainable local news ecosystem within Oregon, our home state, but also across the US and indeed and beyond.
Community-centered journalism
James Breiner: Can you talk a bit about how community-centered journalism differs from traditional journalism?
Damian Radcliffe: The key thing that we're talking about is moving away from the traditional top down approach to journalism, where a group of of people in a newsroom — usually white, middle-aged, college educated men — determine this is the news, this is the information you need to know, and we're going to serve it to you in the manner that we think is best. The idea is to tip that whole model on its head and say, Actually we need to listen a lot more to communities, work with them to understand what their information needs are. What materials do they need to flourish and survive in their day-to day-lives, and, indeed, also what are the best ways to deliver this? And that might not be a traditional 800-word news article. It might be delivered in entirely different formats.
In some examples I've included in the report, it's not news reporting that communities are looking for but actually just aggregated information and resources. Where do I go to find out about x? How do I do more about Y? This landscape is really confusing. Can you, as a trusted agent, help me navigate this space so that I know how to move forward and to address these issues? The core part of the community-centered approach is to say, we don't know best as journalists, the community does, and our job is to work in partnership and in service to them.
Local focus in Belarus, Cuba, and London
James Breiner: To your comment about aggregating information, I was working with a newspaper in Belarus a number of years ago, and the most popular page on their website was the bus schedules, because they had several different companies providing bus service, and there was no place that sort of integrated it all together. Another example of that is El Toque, a website in Cuba, which publishes daily exchange rates for the dollar versus the Cuban peso, both the official rates and the black market rates. And that is the most, one of the most popular parts of their website.
Damian Radcliffe: Those examples you've given are fascinating because historically, this is what local journalism has always done. So in the days when newsrooms had a kind of a visible shop front in the middle of the town, rather than on an industrial estate miles away, we would always have walk-ins with people who had random questions that they wanted help with. You'd answer the phone, and somebody would be asking you the very kind of questions that you've just shared. And they would use all forms of media as an information directory.
And as we have seen the economic model of journalism, and in particular, local journalism, change, I believe that a lot of those local ties have been lost. The proximity to the audience that we have historically seen in local journalism has become more reduced with every passing year, and we need to find ways to to to reconnect and to be more visible and engaged with with communities.,
James Breiner: To your point, I just noticed a new London-based online daily that's launching. And they state as their main goal to provide information on all 32 boroughs of London, and to focus on what's going on in those local boroughs, rather than the big national picture, which everybody covers.
The power of newsletters
Damian Radcliffe: And a lot of new local media are newsletter-led. So if you look at things like Michael MacLeod’s Edinburgh Minute and a few others in the UK, where content traditionally would have sat on a website or in a print publication is being delivered to people's inbox in a newsletter format.
[Mill Media in Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Sheffield, and soon in London and Glasgow is another successful newsletter-based example — James].
And clearly that not only reaches audiences where they are, but is in a format that they find useful. And to that London example, you know, that's a great example. I spent most of my adult life living and working in London, and it's really hard to know what's going on in your own backyard. And the kind of traditional paper of record, the Evening Standard, has just got cut back and back and back every time I go back to London, it is a thinner and thinner publication, and there's very little about what's going on in specific boroughs. It feels very, very generic.
The future is nonprofit — and public funding
James Breiner: What sort of efforts do you see to support local news in the US? There’s the American Journalism Project . . . .
Damian Radcliffe: Press Forward is another similar initiative. What’s interesting is the shift that we have seen in terms of the conversation from how to create a sustainable commercial model for local news to recognizing that maybe there is no successful commercial model for news and that the future is nonprofit. Philanthropic funding is already playing a more significant part in the funding of local news and local journalism.
When I first moved to Oregon, I brought very strong European sensibilities in terms of attitudes towards public funding for journalism and news media, which weren't really shared.
The pandemic, for example, enabled a number of different community foundations that hadn't historically underwritten journalism to recognize that if we're a health based community foundation, and we want to reach hard-to-reach communities and get vital life saving health information to them, partnering with a local media outlet enables us to do that.
We've seen other examples, particularly here in Oregon, where we unfortunately have a large homeless and unhoused population and many issues with that. It's a real staple of a lot of the local news reporting that we see here, and foundations who are working in that space to make a difference are partnering increasingly with local media outlets, guaranteeing funding to ensure that a spotlight continues to be shone on that issue.
Coming next time, more conversation with Damian:
how public funding creates ethical issues
how students can jump-start a career in journalism and communication
how to spot phony news sites, or “pink slime journalism”
why publishers need to differentiate themselves to survive
Damian has kindly shared with us WAN-IFRA's World Press Trends Outlook: "It marks a milestone as news publishers’ revenue structures become more diversified and less reliant on traditional print sources. For the first time in our research, print circulation and advertising revenues account for less than half of respondents’ total revenues."
He is also the author of the new Thomson Reuters report, “Journalism in the AI Era,” which explores how journalists in the global south and emerging economies are using the technology.
Below is a video of our 34-minute conversation.
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