Episode 205: Vertical Journalism: The Future of News?

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Emily Ramshaw is the CEO and co-founder of The 19th*, the nation’s first independent nonprofit newsroom at the intersection of gender, politics and policy. The 19th* aims to elevate the voices of women and LGBTQ+ people — particularly those left at the margins of American media — with free-to-consume and free-to-republish daily journalism, newsletters and live events. Prior to The 19th, Ramshaw was editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune, an award-winning local news startup and the largest statehouse news operation in the nation. She is on the board of the Pulitzer Prize, where she is serving a nine-year term. In 2020, Ramshaw was named to Fortune’s “40 Under 40” list.

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Enrique Anarte is a Berlin-based reporter and International Relations graduate with a passion for producing high-quality, audience-focused journalism that can build bridges and shed light on underreported topics. Currently, he leads the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s first-ever TikTok team - for Openly, its LGBTQ+ news brand - and is a regular writer for TRF covering queer stories across Europe, with a focus on the human impact of politics and policy. He previously reported for DW, NBC News, Reuters and EFE, among others. Recent, Enrique joined the Poynter Institute’s MediaWise ambassador program with a focus on countering mis/disinformation targeting LGBTQ+ people.

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Stephanie Edgerly is a Professor and Associate Dean of Research at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. Her research explores how features of new media alter the way audiences consume news and impact their engagement. Stephanie’s research has won several top prizes. This includes the Outstanding Article Award in 2020 from Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly and being the 19th recipient of the Walder Award for Research Excellence at Northwestern University. Her recent projects have explored why people don't consume news and the varied ways people define news. Stephanie earned her PhD from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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Karl Bode is a Seattle-based freelance reporter with two decades of experience covering tech, telecom, media, politics, and consumer rights. His writing has appeared at Techdirt, The Verge, Vice, Ars Technica, and numerous other publications, and he tracks the progress of the community-owned broadband movement for the Institute for Local Self Reliance. Karl began his career in tech by doing legal industry IT support in NYC and helped build the broadband comparison website DSLReports.com before moving into reporting full time.

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Jessica Gall Myrick, PhD, is the Donald P. Bellisario Professor of Health Communication in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State University. Her research investigates the psychology of how people respond to media messages about health, science, and the environment. This work has been featured in academic journals, books, and news reports and has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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Will Bunch is national opinion columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer and author of several books, including Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy, The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, Paranoia Politics and High-Def Hucksters in the Age of Obama, and the e-book The Bern Identity: A Search for Bernie Sanders and the New American Dream. He has won numerous journalism awards and shared the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting with the New York Newsday staff.

In this special U.S. Media Literacy Week edition of News Over Noise, Matt Jordan speaks with NAMLE Executive Director Michelle Ciulla Lipkin and Education Manager Megan Fromm. NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education unites a community of educators committed to advancing media literacy education and hosts U.S. Media Literacy Week. The mission of U.S. Media Literacy Week is to highlight the power of media literacy education and its essential role in education all across the country. U.S. Media Literacy Week calls attention to media literacy education by bringing together hundreds of partners for events and activities around the country.

Special thanks to guests:

Michelle Ciulla Lipkin As Executive Director, Michelle has helped NAMLE grow to be the preeminent media literacy education association in the U.S. She launched the first-ever Media Literacy Week in the U.S., developed many strategic partnerships, and restructured both the governance and membership of the organization.

Megan Fromm is NAMLE's Education Manager. She has taught at both the university and secondary levels and has spent more than a decade working with student journalists and journalism teachers to better improve their craft and serve their communities. Megan is a former journalist and was the 2019 National Media Literacy Teacher of the Year. She is the co-editor of Transformative Media Pedagogies (2021) and co-author of Student Journalism and Media Literacy (2014).

Do you feel discouraged or even defeated about the state of the world? So much so that you find yourself disengaging? What if we told you that there was another path? That there’s a form of reporting that doesn’t just tell you what's wrong in your community but actively works to empower you to help set it right?  On this episode of News Over Noise, we talk with James Causey a projects reporter and columnist at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, about solutions journalism and the potential it holds for strengthening democracy.

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James E. Causey is a projects reporter, columnist, and former editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He's also the former president of the Wisconsin Black Media Association. In 2008, Causey was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. These days, his work focuses on solutions journalism and how the media can be a tool for responding to social issues rather than just reporting on them.

Who owns the news? Media buyouts and mergers have become so commonplace you might not even realize that your local paper or news station is owned by a massive corporation in some far-off place. You might think, “I’m still getting access to information, so why does diversity in media ownership matter?” To find out, hosts Leah Dajches and Matt Jordan talk with Michael Copps, a former commissioner for the Federal Communications Commission.

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Michael Copps is the Special Advisor for Common Cause's Media & Democracy initiatives where he provides guidance on the program's work to promote an open and accessible media ecosystem. From 2001-11, he served as a commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, where his tenure was marked by a consistent embrace of the public interest. As a strong voice in opposition to consolidation in the media, he dissented in the FCC vote on the Comcast-NBC Universal merger. He has been a consistent proponent of localism in programming and diversity in media ownership. Though retired from the Commission, he has maintained a commitment to an inclusive, informative media landscape.

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Sydney L. Forde is a Ph.D. candidate in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at the Pennsylvania State University studying the political economy of media industries. Specifically, Forde studies journalism as a merit good, and broadband infrastructure as a public good, while advocating for public media and municipal broadband (respectively) as non-commercial alternatives to existing commercial dominated markets. She was recently nominated as the first student member to join WPSU’s board of representatives, was a COMPASS fellow with Annenberg’s MIC Center in Washington DC in the summer of 2022, and has been closely involved in the development of the university wide News Literacy Initiative at Penn State. Forde has published articles in the Canadian Journal of Communication, Communication, Culture & Critique, and Journalism, as well as public scholarship pieces in Yale’s Law and Political Economy (LPE) project and The Conversation.

“My experience is that audiences want us to be truthful and fair, but they don’t want us to be robots.” That’s a quote from a blog post by journalist Lewis Raven Wallace—a post that led to him being fired from Marketplace. Wallace has become an outspoken critique of the notion that “objectivity” is a catchall for accurate journalism. In this episode of News Over Noise, hosts Leah Dajches and Matt Jordan talk with Wallace about the concept of journalistic neutrality and about what can be done to restore some lost public trust in journalism.

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Lewis Raven Wallace (he/they/ze) is an award-winning independent journalist based in Durham, North Carolina, the author and creator of The View from Somewhere book and podcast, and a current Ford Global Fellow and Abolition Journalism Fellow with Interrupting Criminalization. He previously worked in public radio, and is a long-time activist engaged in prison abolition, racial justice, and queer and trans liberation. He is white and transgender, and was born and raised in the Midwest with deep roots in the South.