Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media. I’m your host, Eric Schurenberg, long-time journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

You cannot talk about the future of media, or the future of anything for that matter, without talking about AI. What generative AI does is pretty much exactly what journalism does: digest information, highlight what matters and render it to an audience in a fetching, attention grabbing way. For journalism, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Well, judging from history, it’s both or either: all depending on how it’s used. There’s already alarming evidence that Google’s pivot to AI summaries in its search, rather than links, is decimating referral traffic to newsrooms. It’s also undeniable that those same newsrooms are using AI to automate the grunt work of information gathering for journalism.

To explore both the peril and promise, I’m joined by two guests who approach this upheaval from opposite sides of the media-tech divide. Jessica Chan is head of publisher partnerships at Perplexity.ai, a rising player in AI-powered answer engines. Troy Thibodeaux leads AI strategy at the Associated Press, a legacy newsroom that’s long been a leader in automating journalism with integrity.

This conversation—recorded live at my University of Chicago class—dives into the licensing dilemmas facing publishers, the safeguards newsrooms are building around generative content, and the hopeful ways AI is being used to personalize, streamline, and even monetize trustworthy journalism.

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www.in-reality.fm

Alliance for Trust in Media
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Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
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Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media. I’m your host, Eric Schurenberg, a longtime journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

In previous episodes of In Reality, when we’ve talked about media, we’ve focused mostly on legacy outlets—and their simultaneous crises of evaporating trust and shrinking revenues. But that neglects the far healthier and arguably more influential part of today’s national conversation—influencers. In terms of audience size and engagement, many influencers have eclipsed most legacy outlets, especially among younger audiences. Today, we’ll correct that oversight. 

Recorded live at my University of Chicago class on the future of media, this conversation features three creators who’ve built large followings without the backing of legacy brands. Eric Newcomer left a cozy traditional journalism job at Bloomberg to create an eponymous Substack newsletter and launch the Cerebral Valley event series. David Pakman runs a multi-platform progressive political opinion shop with millions of followers. And Kate Bacon translated her pre-med degree into viral science videos on TikTok before stepping away to pursue an MBA.

We talk about what makes their models work, how they build trust from scratch, and what guardrails exist in a world with no fact checkers, no editors, and no tradition of journalistic standards. We explore the tension between popularity and integrity, the business incentives that shape their content, and the lessons mainstream media might learn from the parasocial newsroom.

Website - free episode transcripts
www.in-reality.fm

Alliance for Trust in Media
alliancefortrust.com

Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
soundsapien.com

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media. I’m Eric Schurenberg, longtime journalist and founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

We talk a lot about the economic challenges, not to say cataclysm, that news media has been through in recent decades. Even the most storied brands have found themselves striking advertising deals they’d never have considered a decade before, or scrambling for scraps of revenue in dark corners like Award programs? Branded content?  Paywalls? Today’s guest, Cindi Leive, former editor in chief of Glamour and Self has ridden the media revenue roller coaster from the big-spending peak of women’s glossies through the grueling disruption of the digital era. Now she’s starting over in this new environment leading The Meteor, a feminist-forward for-profit collective focused on storytelling for social change, where she needs every bit of her revenue gathering skills. 

In this interview, recorded live at the University of Chicago’s Graham School, Cindi and Eric dive into the unraveling of legacy business models, the rise of programmatic advertising, and the existential question of who owns the future of journalism. As she jokes at the beginning of the session she expected to be talking about easy questions like freedom of expression and the First Amendment. Instead we’re dealing with a much more wicked problem: How media companies can make money today.

Website - free episode transcripts
www.in-reality.fm

Alliance for Trust in Media
alliancefortrust.com

Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
soundsapien.com

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation and the media with Eric Schurenberg, a longtime journalist, now executive director of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

Have you ever thought about what you are really doing when you scroll for news, or click on a headline that pops up in your feed? The quick answer is, “I want to know what’s happening in the world.” Or, more pompously, I’m seeking the truth.

Sure. But when you’re honest you have to admit that you’re mostly sucked in, like the rest of us, by unthinking instinct -- by news that lights up your emotions, that confirms your prior beliefs, or especially news that warns you of a threat. Today’s guest has spent her research career trying to divine how our media affects our view on the world and vice versa. She’s Dannagal Goldwaithe Young, Professor of Communication and Political Science at the University of Delaware, and author of Wrong: How Media, Politics and Identity Drive our Appetite for Misinformation.

She argues that much of modern media - sometimes deliberately more often unconsciously - reinforces political division and intensifies what she calls people’s mega identities, the set of beliefs that define our political allegiance and our sense of who we are. There’s a lot to unpack here about the perverse incentives in news media, about the differences in how conservatives and liberals consume news, and about the need for us news audience members to consume news consciously, deliberately, not instinctively. The conversation was recorded live in my class at the University of Chicago.

Website - free episode transcripts
www.in-reality.fm

Alliance for Trust in Media
alliancefortrust.com

Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
soundsapien.com

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation and the media. I’m your host Eric Schurenberg, long time journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media

The news business has been in freefall, as every listener to In Reality is aware. The plunge has been steepest in local journalism. We lose two local news outlets a week, on average. Half the counties in America have only one news outlet or none at all. 

Dousing that five alarm fire is the mission of today’s guest, Mackenzie Warren, director of the Local News Accelerator at Northwestern University’s Medill School, hands down one of the premier journalism schools in the country. Mackenzie is a long-time local newspaper executive himself; at Medill, he now helps local newsrooms in Illinois discover innovations aimed at putting themselves on a path to sustainability. Mackenzie joined Eric recently at his class on the future of media at the University of Chicago. 

They discussed the role of local news in counteracting polarization, the incoming class of new journalists and how they view their careers, as well as a few bright stars in the local news firmament, like the Minnesota Star Tribune, Chicago’s hyper-local Block Club and Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Website - free episode transcripts
www.in-reality.fm

Alliance for Trust in Media
alliancefortrust.com

Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
soundsapien.com

Americans have long had a conflicted attitude about political news. On the one hand, most Americans, Republicans and Democrats, see the press as an essential watchdog on government. This is not a new idea: The founders of the country singled out the press for protection from government interference for just that reason. At the same time,  sizable majorities of Republicans and independents today--and a good many Democrats besides--have little to no trust in professional media to report the news accurately. And audiences and advertisers are not willing to spend enough money to support it.

Evaporating trust. Collapsing business models. Along with an ever more obvious need for an independent press. These are the existential contradictions facing journalism today, a topic that we come back to continually here on In Reality. 

However, we’ve never had a chance to discuss them with Norman Pearlstine, one of the most significant figures in institutional journalism of the past 50 years. Norm has crowned the editorial masthead at the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Bloomberg News, Time Inc. with its hundreds of magazine titles and, most recently, the Los Angeles Times. He has been in the room where journalism happened.  Norm recently joined Eric as a guest speaker at his University of Chicago course on the Future of Media. This evening’s class was called, Where We Are and How We Got Here.

Website - free episode transcripts
www.in-reality.fm

Alliance for Trust in Media
alliancefortrust.com

Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
soundsapien.com

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation and the media hosted by Eric Schurenberg, a long-time journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

Among the many forces unravelling institutional media is the relatively recent ability of journalists to become mini-institutions on their own, thanks to social media and especially newsletter platforms like Substack and Ghost.  For journalists with a following or a novel approach, going indy can yield a much better living than they could earn in a traditional newsroom. 

Eric Newcomer was one of the early movers in this parallel media universe and has proven to be one of the most successful. Having cut his teeth as a tech writer for Bloomberg, he was one of the first writers to join the groundbreaking digital newsletter, The Information. Four years ago, he branched out on his own, and now has a newsletter and podcast, two million in revenue, employees, and a highly regarded tech conference, Cerebral Valley AI summit. 

Eric S met up with Eric N at the first HumanX conference in March. That’s accounts for the background noise, if you hear it. Among other things, they covered how to build a one-man media empire in the modern era, the questions of building trust, and whether and how institutional newsrooms fit into the new media ecosystem. 

To join Eric’s Substack: Newcomer.co

Website - free episode transcripts
www.in-reality.fm

Alliance for Trust in Media
alliancefortrust.com

Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
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In this conversation, Jonathan Stray, Senior Scientist at the UC Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible AI, explains to Eric Schurenberg the intersection of AI, media, and conflict, emphasizing the challenges of objectivity in journalism and the need for a new approach to reporting that embraces complexity and 'multipartiality'. He explores the role of AI in shaping social media narratives and the potential for algorithms to foster better understanding in political discourse. Stray also highlights reasons for hope in addressing political polarization and the importance of bridging divides through constructive dialogue.

Website - free episode transcripts
www.in-reality.fm

Alliance for Trust in Media
alliancefortrust.com

Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
soundsapien.com

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about Truth, Disinformation, and the Media hosted by Eric Schurenberg, a long-time journalist and media exec, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

Media overall is in dire straits financially, as In Reality listeners are well aware. Local journalism has been the hardest hit: We’ve lost a third of the papers we had twenty years ago and continue to lose, on average, two a week. Most of the rest have been hollowed out. 

Which makes today’s guest particularly interesting. Andrew Morse is the president and publisher of the 150-year-old Atlanta Journal-Constitution. While the AJC is not immune to recent turbulence, it is expanding rather than contracting, going regional rather than doubling down on the Atlanta metro area.  What makes Morse even more intriguing to me is that he’s not a local paper guy: He comes to the role as the former head of CNN digital, Bloomberg TV and ABC digital. 

Eric asks why he was attracted by the challenge of revitalizing a legacy institution like the AJC, what it takes to rebuild trust in a brand like that, and whether his digital subscription strategy could offer a blueprint for the future of local news. 

He’s a persuasive guy. You’ll like this one.

Website - free episode transcripts
www.in-reality.fm

Alliance for Trust in Media
alliancefortrust.com

Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
soundsapien.com

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about Truth, Disinformation and the Media with Eric Schurenberg, a long-time journalist and media exec, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.  

In Reality is dedicated to the proposition that there is such a thing as objective truth and that the pursuit of it is a noble effort, one that over the centuries has increased human well being. Some objectively verifiable claims are the source of division in the US right now: the 2020 Presidential election was, in fact, legitimate. The covid pandemic was real, not a hoax. 

But that doesn’t mean everyone accepts those facts. And if we are going to thrive as a democracy, if we are going to rebuild trust in the institutions crucial to that form of government, including media, we need to be able to get past differences. Not just on facts, but also on the matters of opinion, or faith, or moral judgment that divide us. That’s where today’s guest comes in.

Monica Guzman is the senior fellow for public practice at Braver Angels, an organization devoted to sparking civil conversations across the political divide, also author of a book Eric enjoyed: I Never Thought of it That Way. How to Have Fearless Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times. They talk about the search for commonality even in our most divisive issues and the power of curiosity. 

Website - free episode transcripts
www.in-reality.fm

Alliance for Trust in Media
alliancefortrust.com

Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
soundsapien.com