E&P Reports with Mike Blinder

Dave Stevens is an athlete, a seven-time Emmy Award-winning sports broadcasting professional, and the only person to ever play college football and minor league baseball without legs.

Stevens, a congenital amputee, always had a passion for sports. In high school, he was a three-sport athlete playing football, baseball, and wrestling. Later, he tried out for the Dallas Cowboys, the Cincinnati Reds, and the Minnesota Twins. Stevens even played outfield with former Major League players Barry Bonds and Oddibie McDowell.

Stevens entered media as an Assignment Desk Manager at ESPN, then as the Coverage and Content editor. He worked at ESPN for 20 years, covering 11 Super Bowls, 3 World Series, 3 NCAA Final Fours, and various other historic sports events.

Today he is a reporter for the Disability Channel, where he interviews some of the biggest names in sports and entertainment history. He co-hosts a Celebrity Amputee Golf tournament and is a professional in residence at the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, where he has founded Ability Media, a program that addresses the lack of representation of people with different abilities across all forms of media.

Stevens states, "Over 20.3 million families in the U.S. have a member with a disability — this includes service men and women in the U.S. Armed Forces who acquired a disability while in service to their country. Yet the disability community has no large single media platform, community leaders or geographic centralization. Existing mainstream T.V. generally lacks role models although people with different abilities appear in commercials and disability themes are finding their way into television and films."

In this 168th episode of "E&P Reports," we interview Dave Stevens, an Emmy award-winning broadcaster born without legs, who is helping others with disabilities find careers across all forms of media. Stevens chats with E&P Publisher Mike Blinder about his passion for sports, media, and motivating others to look beyond their personal challenges and those of others.

Learn more about Dave Stevens at https://www.davestevensspeaks.com.

Serving as a forum for personal and professional networking is a benefit of social media, but its global reach and popularity have resulted in the posting of information — often described as "news" — from less-than-transparent and unverifiable sources. In this environment, the public has difficulty trusting what they read, hear or see, even when it's the work of professional journalists and media organizations.

To make it easier for the public to recognize trustworthy journalism, Reporters Without Borders created the Journalism Trust Initiative (JTI) in 2019. It has a three-step process to help media outlets distinguish themselves from the myriad of other sources sharing information on the internet and social media.

This was the topic for discussion during a recent E&P Reports vodcast hosted by Mike Blinder, publisher of Editor & Publisher. His guests were Beth Potter, Ph.D., U.S. regional manager of the Journalism Trust Initiative; Paul Samyn, editor of the Winnipeg Free Press; and Kevin Rehberg, vice president of client development at the Alliance for Audited Media (AAM).

According to Potter, the three-step process was developed in Europe by a panel of journalists convened by the European Commission to determine a set of standards. A web application was created for the JTI website where media outlets can use a questionnaire to judge themselves against these standards.

The three-step process includes the following:

1. An internal self-assessment of journalistic policies
2. Public disclosure of that assessment in a transparency report
3. An independent audit from a licensed, certified body, such as the AAM

"As a former journalist, I don't think journalists and media outlets market themselves well enough. We should be proud of having standards and explain that we actually do the real work to serve the public. The JTI process can ensure the public that what they are reading comes from media outlets with stated ethics, and the AAM or similar independent bodies have audited them for those ethics and transparency," Potter said.

The AAM's traditional function has been to certify the audience a media outlet claims any advertiser will reach when placing advertising with that outlet. Rehberg explained that the AAM has been an independent, nonprofit identity for more than 100 years, differentiating quality news media from all other sources.

"When we learned about the Journalism Trust Initiative, we knew it was right in our wheelhouse. We decided to become part of the Initiative to support journalism in general, but also because JTI's mission fits so well with ours. We're now partnering with JTI as one of the certifiers," Rehberg said.

Samyn and the Winnipeg Free Press have completed the JTI's three-step process as an additional source of accreditation. The system works differently in Canada than in the United States. The Canadian federal government provides financial support to newspapers that are accredited by a journalism organization based on the number of newsroom employees. This was an effort by the government and the Canadian newspaper industry association to help newspapers overcome the challenge of social media and search engines, such as Google, capturing a substantial portion of advertising revenues those newspapers would otherwise receive.

"We consider trust a point of pride, giving us more strength to serve our readership. For years, any correspondence I have with readers usually ends with the following line before my signature: 'I hope we continue to earn your trust.' That's why we've taken the step to certify with Journalism Trust Initiative," Samyn said.

Publishers and news and media outlets interested in more information about the Journalism Trust Initiative can visit its website at journalismtrustinitiative.org and contact Beth Potter directly at [email protected].

Rob Tornoe is a journalist/ cartoonist for the award-winning Philadelphia Inquirer, where some of his work (including political spoofs from Al Gore to Peanuts) is syndicated and internationally recognized. Tornoe also writes & illustrates each month for Editor & Publisher about the many aspects of the news publishing industry.

In this 166th episode of "E&P Reports," internationally recognized journalist/ cartoonist Rob Tornoe reviews some of his 2022 monthly contributions to E&P Magazine, which include his March 2022 interview with The New York Times's David Leonhardt on "The polarization of pandemic reporting." An April 2022 column looked at editorial cartoonist David Fitzsimmons. May 2022's look at how the Pulitzer prize category changes left illustrators feeling slighted. An August 2022 in-depth column looked at Twitter's possible overuse by newsrooms. A well-researched and sourced piece in September 2022 examined how to keep political reporting from becoming polarized. And there's so much more.

See all of Rob Torne's monthly cartoons for E&P Magaine.

Doug Phares is a passionate business consultant who helps executives find ways to get past all the hurdles and challenges that slow us down. From small-scale work like examining product bundling to assisting decision-makers in developing 3-year plans, Phares has seen it all over the course of his career.

In his news media career, Phares was most recently the CEO of the Sandusky Newspaper Group (SNG), a media holding company operating in Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee. Before that, he was Boone Newspapers's group president and managed Copley properties.

Today, Phares is managing director of Silverwind Enterprises, a Florida-based firm that provides executive-level business services. He's also the board chair of the Professional Association of Résumé Writers and Career Coaches, an organization with 3,000-plus international members comprised of independent business owners and non-profit career centers such as colleges and universities, military bases, workforce development offices and state Departments of Labor in North America.

In this 165th episode of "E&P Reports," we review this year's contributions to Editor & Publisher Magazine from consultant Dough Phares's "The Corner Office, his monthly advice column for c-suite executives. Topics we cover include how to better onboard and retain quality talent, increasing productivity with what he calls a "Big Mac Presentation," and how to bolster sales by "Getting to the no," increasing a manager's self-awareness by asking, "Are you managing or doing?" And there's much more.

Recently Meta (formally Facebook) made it official that it was leaving the news business, as they included most of the staff that worked within their "Meta Journalism Project Accelerator Program" in the 11,000 company positions eliminated in their mid-November 2022 mass layoffs.

Since 2019, the U.S.-based Local Media Association (LMA) and associated Local Media Foundation worked in partnership with Meta as a facilitator providing administrative services and publishing case studies about how over $16.8 million in funds were distributed across North America to local publishers. The funds were to assist them in initiatives that included building reader revenue, monetarizing branded content and others.

Some within the news publishing industry have criticized big tech companies like Google and Meta's journalistic philanthropy, stating it was just a means to help them lobby against pending legislation. That legislation — the Journalism Competition & Preservation Act (JCPA) (H.R. 1735 and S. 673) — would allow news publishers to collectively negotiate with the tech platforms for fair compensation for the use of their content.

Others, like former ProPublica president Dick Tofel, have been adding their voice to many who feel that there are flaws in how these hundreds of millions in big-tech philanthropy have been allocated through organizations and not directly from the providers themselves.

However, LMA CEO Nancy Lane has been very outspoken lately in defending the positive impact the Meta Journalism Project has had on the industry, posting a statement about their organization's Meta dollars, "Most of the $16.8 million ($12+ million) was distributed through the COVID-19 relief fund and nearly 80 percent of recipients were family- or independently-owned."

Lane stated: "More than half of the funds were used to benefit publishers by or for communities of color; nearly 40% were digitally native publishers, and over 1/3 were nonprofits." She also stated that "82% used the grants to expand their local reporting on COVID-19 issues. 23% said the funding outright saved their newsrooms from extinction."

In this 164th episode of "E&P Reports," we go one-on-one with Local Media Association (LMA) and associated Local Media Foundation CEO Nancy Lane on her impressions of how the millions of dollars that Meta/ Facebook has donated to the news publishing industry since 2019 has benefited local journalism and the impact it may have in the future as those funds cease to exist. We also posed questions on the future of local news enterprises and what she feels are viable, sustainable business models for local journalism.

After senior management positions at Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, Dick Tofel helped start and eventually led the well-known, nonprofit investigative journalistic entity ProPublica for 15 years. Today he consultants the industry as the principal of Gallatin Advisory. However, Tofel recently "lit up the Twittersphere" when he posted on his blog, "Second Rough Draft," an unabashed and unvarnished assessment and warning about how philanthropic funds are awarded to journalistic enterprises. He stated how there may be flaws within the process that some organizations and associations employ today — questioning that "Given limited resources, shouldn't more money go to news orgs directly, even if that means making hard choices?"

In the November 3, 2022 post entitled "A Few Words of Warning About Funding Intermediaries and Philanthropy's Leaky Bucket," Tofel states that he is concerned that organizations like LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers, the Knight Foundationand others "may be getting a bit out of scale" in handling the millions of dollars of funds they allocate. He sees a "more pressing need for funding nonprofit news organizations directly." Tofel states, "To put a finer point on it, I am increasingly worried when I observe what I see as the increasing fragility of many nonprofit newsrooms juxtaposed with the robust growth of the intermediaries whose mission is to support them."

Within the piece, later "picked up" and published by Harvard's NiemanLab, Tofel cites data showing how half of LION Publishers' members, between the years 2020 and 2021, showed no revenue growth at all, while the association itself had in the same period revenue growth from less than $700,000 to $3.8 million. And The Knight Foundation spent more than $10 million on staff and trustees in 2020 to make $71 million in grants, while the much larger and more diversified Ford Foundation spent on staff and trustees in the same year about as much as Knight spent on grantees ($71 million again) to make about $805 million in grants.

In this 163rd episode of "E&P Reports," we go one-on-one with ProPublica founder Dick Tofel, first on his latest opinion piece on how there may be some flaws in how organizations like LION Publishers and the Knight Foundation award millions in philanthropic journalistic funds. And his views that the only sustainable model for local journalism will be nonprofit enterprises.

As the news publishing industry continues to fight the big tech giants, Google & Facebook, for what is considered fair compensation for the content journalists create and that the tech companies monetize via clicks and posts, one voice tweets to over 170,000 followers: "Klobuchar's JCPA is shit legislation" and "Protectionism is not a business model. Whining is not a business model. Handouts are not a business model. Lobbying politicians is not a business model. Adding value to communities and their conversations, helping them meet their goals: that is the only model worth pursuing."

Those tweets and comments belong to the director of the Tow-Knight Center at the Craig Newmark Graduate School at CUNY, Jeff Jarvis, who also posts that "paywalls damage democracy." He states, "When disinformation is free, how can we restrict quality information to the privileged who choose to afford it?"

Jarvis is not a newcomer to our industry, starting in the '70s as a columnist at the San Francisco Examiner, spending most of the '90s as president and creative director at advance.net, the digital arm of Newhouse Newspapers, Conde Nast magazines, Fairchild Publications and Bright House Cable. He eventually began consulting and blogging about digital transformation and teaching at CUNY. He has authored over five books, including: "What Would Google Do?: Reverse-Engineering the Fastest Growing Company in the History of the World (2009)" and "Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live."

In his latest Kindle Single offering, "Guttenberg the Geek," Jarvis claims that Johannes Gutenberg was our first "geek" and our "patron saint of entrepreneurs," being the original technology entrepreneur, facing the same challenges a Silicon Valley startup deals with today. He even draws a parallel between Guttenberg and Steve Jobs on how they both had to raise capital and mitigate risk to innovate how we would receive our content for centuries.

In this 162nd episode of "E&P Reports," we go one-on-one with the director of the Tow-Knight Center at the Craig Newmark Graduate School at CUNY, asking Jeff Jarvis his reasons for not supporting current congressional fair compensation efforts and antitrust legislation to help local news publishers continue to find sustainable business models. Why is the industry making a big mistake moving toward paid content models? Why he believes "Media forms have half-lives, newspapers & magazines are fading, and broadcast's age is ending."

In 2005 John Garrett started Community Impact Newspaper from the game room of his home with his wife and best friend, Jennifer. They began with the creation of the Pflugerville, Texas edition. Today that one paper is part of a growing empire of over 30 monthly printed and 24/7 digital hyperlocal community news platforms that serves four Texas metropolitan areas.

In 2016, printing and mailing over 2.5-million papers required John to open a 36,000-square-foot printing facility housing a $10 million press operation that works twenty-four hours a day.

Over the years, Community Impact has now received 106 awards for writing and design from the National Newspaper Association. It was also named to Inc. Magazine's top 5000 fastest-growing companies for seven consecutive years.

In this 161st edition of "E&P Reports," we go one-on-one with John Garrett, CEO and founder of Community Impact, a community newspaper publishing company that mails over 2.5-million editions monthly to over 60 Texas communities while employing over 200 journalists, salespeople and support staff. E&P Publisher Mike Blinder and contributing writer Victoria Holmes ask Garett how he maintains growth and profitability in a news ecosystem that has compressed and shrunk its commitment to people and print.

Andrew Conte, founding director of the Center for Media Innovation at Point Park University, has been receiving wide industry acclaim for his latest book "Death of the Daily News," which tells the story of how residents in one Pennsylvania community have identified and sorted local news and information since their local newspaper stopped publishing after 131 years. The book also addresses how "citizen gatekeepers" run a new local newspaper and an online news outlet, post to social media sites and seek other platforms for sharing information.

"The massive changes that have caused so much disruption and pain for our industry also are creating opportunities for the future of local journalism," Conte stated. "While the book focuses on a motif of 'death,' the narrative tells a story of rebirth that should give hope for all of us who care about local news and the democratic institutions it supports."

"The hardest part was probably getting people to trust me enough to talk about what was going on in a community where people are wary of outsiders," says Conte. "They want to know your intentions and why you are interested in their community before they start talking to you and opening up. And so that took a long time."

In this 160th episode of "E&P Reports," we interview veteran reporter-turned-educator Andrew Conte, who founded the Center for Media Innovation at Point Park University in Pittsburgh. He is also the author of "Death of the Daily News," his latest book, which takes an in-depth look, via local reporting, at what happens when one local community loses its newspaper of record and flounders to find other forms of local journalism.

Most United States municipalities have laws requiring that all public notices must be published by a third-party independent newspaper — a concept that dates to the 1700s. This practice is based on the idea that the people of a democracy have the right to know what is going on with their government and the legal proceedings that occur within their community.

There is no question that the newspaper industry, especially on individual state levels, spends a good deal of resources to maintain that precedent, not only because the public notice linage creates necessary revenues that fund our newsrooms. These small, innocuous postings have helped provide, in many cases, another level of transparency within local governments that has uncovered and delivered a final check on graft and possible theft of tax dollars.

Over time some states and municipalities have found various reasons to try to stop the practice of placing public notices within newspapers of record. For example, in a March 2022 episode of "E&P Reports," this magazine reported on how the state of Florida passed sweeping legislation, reversing their stance on the practice in what was rumored to be the result of a vendetta between the state's governor and a hard hitting investigative reporter ("Florida's public notice reversal").

More recently, the small town of Westmorland, Kansas' city council took advantage of a loophole in the state charter that allowed certain city governments to opt out of having to place these notices within a newspaper by declaring home rule in the exemption. The council's claim for the change was simply a way to save taxpayer money.

On August 11, 2022, Ned Seaton, the GM and editor-in-chief of the Manhattan (KS) Mercury and the Times of Pottawatomie County Kansas, the newspaper of record of Westmorland, stood in front of the council and pled a case that reminded the council members of the three key implications of the government's choice to remove notices from newspapers: Budget, transparency, and liability. Within the very text of the recorded speech, Seaton stated to the group: "I am asking you to reverse your vote last month and instead continue to stand for transparency. I am asking you to designate – as your predecessors have designated for decades – an independent, subscription-supported printed newspaper as the verifiable method of notifying the public of what you're doing. By doing so, you'll be not only supporting a regional family-owned business and its employees who cover your meetings, and you'll be using a cost-effective medium and making a statement that you value government accountability — at least to the extent of four-tenths of one percent of your budget." His compelling argument worked; the council voted to reinstate the practice directly after.

In this 159th episode of "E&P Reports," we interview Ned Seaton, the GM and editor-in-chief of the Manhattan (KS) Mercury and the Times of Pottawatomie County Kansas, the newspaper of record of Westmorland, KS. The town decided to suspend the placement of public notices in the local newspaper and then reverse itself when reminded by Seaton of the value and overall benefit the practice itself has for the community as a whole. Also appearing is Emily Bradbury - Executive Director of the Kansas Press Association. She offers her perspective on how important it is that news publishers help in all ways possible to keep this practice in place.