It's All Journalism

Ben Wikler interviews political activists and organizers on his podcast and radio show The Flaming Sword of Justice, which is affiliated with the well-known political advocacy group MoveOn.org. He has previously worked for the well-known online activist communities, Change.org and Avaaz.org.

The host and interviewer got his first big break in media as a student when he helped comedian-turned-activist-turned-elected official Al Franken with the satirical book "Lies: And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right." Wikler went on to work for Franken, now a U.S. senator from Minnesota, on the Franken’s talk show, which aired on the Air America radio network during President George W. Bush’s administration.

A native of Madison, Wis., Wikler said he was influenced by public radio and The Onion, two forms of media that have deep roots in his home town. He also experienced a heavy dose of political activism growing up.

“My first political memory is my mom taking me to a Jesse Jackson rally on Capitol Hill,� said Wikler, “Yeah. It was the 1988 presidential race and I was seven. Very exciting.�

The activist was always interested in journalism, particularly media with a point of view. While still in middle and high school, he started underground newspapers, including one that was banned by his school administration.

As a teenager, he used media to launch a successful campaign to get the local Madison school district to cancel their exclusive contract with Coca-Cola, which promoted students drinking an inordinate amount of soda, he said. While in high school, Wikler was also using his underground newspaper to tell jokes, which eventually lead to headline writing for The Onion and working with Franken on Air America.

“I experienced both one of the like, really exciting and fun journalistic start up experiences, and one of the kind of most disastrous media implosions of the last decade,� said Wikler of his time at Air America.

Unfortunately, the primary investor in Air America turned out to be a con artist, literally. Many of the other leaders of the project weren’t familiar enough with the radio business model to make it work, Wikler said.

Still, Wikler learned a lot about organizing Franken’s followers, primarily people who were angry at the Bush administration. At one point, Franken went on tour around the country, and Wikler was astonished to see that a radio host on a struggling network could fill 1,500 seat theaters, even in the middle of the day.

“You could do a show that is entertaining and engaging, but then actually participatory,� he said.

Wikler is in the midst of a relaunch of his current show, The Flaming Sword of Justice, but he would like it to be participatory like Franken’s old show. He primarily has guests tell stories about how they got involved in different campaigns and causes, such as the fight for marriage equality.

“What’s amazing to me is these people who spent years and years, or decades, fighting these battles that seemed super hopeless for a very long time,� he said, “The stories that really land in the deepest place for people are David verse Goliath stories.�

“The world is actually full of those stories, and I want to bring those forward,� Wikler said.

Check back in with the podcast to hear Part II of our conversation with Ben Wikler, where he talks about his relationship with the late Aaron Swartz, one of the founders of Reddit.

Ben Wikler interviews political activists and organizers on his podcast and radio show The Flaming Sword of Justice, which is affiliated with the well-known political advocacy group MoveOn.org. He has previously worked for the well-known online activist communities, Change.org and Avaaz.org.

The host and interviewer got his first big break in media as a student when he helped comedian-turned-activist-turned-elected official Al Franken with the satirical book "Lies: And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right." Wikler went on to work for Franken, now a U.S. senator from Minnesota, on the Franken’s talk show, which aired on the Air America radio network during President George W. Bush’s administration.

A native of Madison, Wis., Wikler said he was influenced by public radio and The Onion, two forms of media that have deep roots in his home town. He also experienced a heavy dose of political activism growing up.

“My first political memory is my mom taking me to a Jesse Jackson rally on Capitol Hill,� said Wikler, “Yeah. It was the 1988 presidential race and I was seven. Very exciting.�

The activist was always interested in journalism, particularly media with a point of view. While still in middle and high school, he started underground newspapers, including one that was banned by his school administration.

As a teenager, he used media to launch a successful campaign to get the local Madison school district to cancel their exclusive contract with Coca-Cola, which promoted students drinking an inordinate amount of soda, he said. While in high school, Wikler was also using his underground newspaper to tell jokes, which eventually lead to headline writing for The Onion and working with Franken on Air America.

“I experienced both one of the like, really exciting and fun journalistic start up experiences, and one of the kind of most disastrous media implosions of the last decade,� said Wikler of his time at Air America.

Unfortunately, the primary investor in Air America turned out to be a con artist, literally. Many of the other leaders of the project weren’t familiar enough with the radio business model to make it work, Wikler said.

Still, Wikler learned a lot about organizing Franken’s followers, primarily people who were angry at the Bush administration. At one point, Franken went on tour around the country, and Wikler was astonished to see that a radio host on a struggling network could fill 1,500 seat theaters, even in the middle of the day.

“You could do a show that is entertaining and engaging, but then actually participatory,� he said.

Wikler is in the midst of a relaunch of his current show, The Flaming Sword of Justice, but he would like it to be participatory like Franken’s old show. He primarily has guests tell stories about how they got involved in different campaigns and causes, such as the fight for marriage equality.

“What’s amazing to me is these people who spent years and years, or decades, fighting these battles that seemed super hopeless for a very long time,� he said, “The stories that really land in the deepest place for people are David verse Goliath stories.�

“The world is actually full of those stories, and I want to bring those forward,� Wikler said.

Check back in with the podcast to hear Part II of our conversation with Ben Wikler, where he talks about his relationship with the late Aaron Swartz, one of the founders of Reddit.

Few people go into journalism with the expectation they're going to be rich and famous.

Some do achieve that, but most are satisfied with doing interesting work that has meaning.

But paying journalists enough to sustain them is important, not just for journalists but for society as a whole.

That's the thesis of a recent column by nationally syndicated columnist Tina Dupuy.

"I really didn't mean for it to be so novel," Dupuy told It's All Journalism.

Back in 2009, the media industry was hemorrhaging newspaper jobs â€" something like 40,000 over three years or approximately 1,000 a month.

What those unemployed journalists encountered was a new media reality in which it was easy to find a byline but not so easy to find a paycheck.

"Just by the virtue of writing and being published was your payment," Dupuy said. "If you get to use a byline of a publication, that suddenly was enough for you to make a living. So, there was this proverbial carrot dangling in front of you that if you just get enough readers, become famous enough and somebody's going to pay you to write, you're going to get the book deal or whatever. It's this new model that is just not sustainable."

Many unemployed journalists were having a hard time finding jobs that actually paid enough to sustain them. They either did journalism as a part-time "hobby" or left the field all together. Only those who could afford to do journalism for free were doing journalism.

"Only the well-off are able to work for free, strangely enough," Dupuy said. "It has effectively boiled off the economic diversity of the newsroom. So, the only people who are journalists become people who are â€" for lack of a better phrase â€" elite. They're concerned with other people who are well-off."

This lack of economic diversity isn't just bad for journalists, it's bad for society by creating newsrooms that fail to empathize with those in the lower economic strata.

"We have 46 million impoverished Americans and we treat them like some kind of novelty or some kind of rare occurance when that's really a big swath of the American experience," Dupuy said.

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Few people go into journalism with the expectation they're going to be rich and famous.

Some do achieve that, but most are satisfied with doing interesting work that has meaning.

But paying journalists enough to sustain them is important, not just for journalists but for society as a whole.

That's the thesis of a recent column by nationally syndicated columnist Tina Dupuy.

"I really didn't mean for it to be so novel," Dupuy told It's All Journalism.

Back in 2009, the media industry was hemorrhaging newspaper jobs â€" something like 40,000 over three years or approximately 1,000 a month.

What those unemployed journalists encountered was a new media reality in which it was easy to find a byline but not so easy to find a paycheck.

"Just by the virtue of writing and being published was your payment," Dupuy said. "If you get to use a byline of a publication, that suddenly was enough for you to make a living. So, there was this proverbial carrot dangling in front of you that if you just get enough readers, become famous enough and somebody's going to pay you to write, you're going to get the book deal or whatever. It's this new model that is just not sustainable."

Many unemployed journalists were having a hard time finding jobs that actually paid enough to sustain them. They either did journalism as a part-time "hobby" or left the field all together. Only those who could afford to do journalism for free were doing journalism.

"Only the well-off are able to work for free, strangely enough," Dupuy said. "It has effectively boiled off the economic diversity of the newsroom. So, the only people who are journalists become people who are â€" for lack of a better phrase â€" elite. They're concerned with other people who are well-off."

This lack of economic diversity isn't just bad for journalists, it's bad for society by creating newsrooms that fail to empathize with those in the lower economic strata.

"We have 46 million impoverished Americans and we treat them like some kind of novelty or some kind of rare occurance when that's really a big swath of the American experience," Dupuy said.

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Michael LaRosa's interest in politics came at a young age. His first politics-related memory is of a placemat his parents put on the dinner table showing all of the U.S. presidents. He quickly mastered all the names and was happy to share that knowledge with classmates and teachers.

"It morphed into the interest in government and politics," he said. "I memorized them at a young age. I started watching CSPAN. I remember some of my earliest memories coming home from fourth grade and watching Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R) from Colorado switch parties. It was right after the '94 election. I was a real junkie at a really young age. Politicians were and still are celebrities to me."

After studing political science at Seton Hall University, LaRosa landed an internship on then Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's (D-N.Y) 2006 reelection campaign. There he learned firsthand about the day-to-day activities of a campaign, from fundraising to event planning.

LaRosa went on to serve as a personal aide to former Rep. Melissa Bean (D-Ill.), scheduler for Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and special assistant to the deputy director of the Office of Personnel Management.

Those jobs set him on a path to his current job as segment producer for MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews.

"That intersection of where the media and politics exists always fascinated me, I think," he said. "The presidential campaigns were a big part of that. The 2008 and the 2004 campaigns were the moments, for me, when I realized I was kind of interested in the message that was coming across to voters, whether it was through the campaigns or the media. I wanted to be a part of that someway."

About the time LaRosa was thinking that, Matthews was looking for a political junkie to help on his show.

"We're both political junkies from Pennsylvania and we kind of hit it off," LaRosa said. "He's taught me a lot since then. I had a lot of practical experience going into journalism about politics, but I had to learn TV and learn journalism. I feel like I thrive on it. I really enjoy living and breathing politics in a way that you can't do in the government."

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Michael LaRosa's interest in politics came at a young age. His first politics-related memory is of a placemat his parents put on the dinner table showing all of the U.S. presidents. He quickly mastered all the names and was happy to share that knowledge with classmates and teachers.

"It morphed into the interest in government and politics," he said. "I memorized them at a young age. I started watching CSPAN. I remember some of my earliest memories coming home from fourth grade and watching Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R) from Colorado switch parties. It was right after the '94 election. I was a real junkie at a really young age. Politicians were and still are celebrities to me."

After studing political science at Seton Hall University, LaRosa landed an internship on then Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's (D-N.Y) 2006 reelection campaign. There he learned firsthand about the day-to-day activities of a campaign, from fundraising to event planning.

LaRosa went on to serve as a personal aide to former Rep. Melissa Bean (D-Ill.), scheduler for Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and special assistant to the deputy director of the Office of Personnel Management.

Those jobs set him on a path to his current job as segment producer for MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews.

"That intersection of where the media and politics exists always fascinated me, I think," he said. "The presidential campaigns were a big part of that. The 2008 and the 2004 campaigns were the moments, for me, when I realized I was kind of interested in the message that was coming across to voters, whether it was through the campaigns or the media. I wanted to be a part of that someway."

About the time LaRosa was thinking that, Matthews was looking for a political junkie to help on his show.

"We're both political junkies from Pennsylvania and we kind of hit it off," LaRosa said. "He's taught me a lot since then. I had a lot of practical experience going into journalism about politics, but I had to learn TV and learn journalism. I feel like I thrive on it. I really enjoy living and breathing politics in a way that you can't do in the government."

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WASHINGTON - Andrew Lih has always been interested in how people communicate and he's found himself a front row seat, taking part in journalism's digital conversion.

Lih was on the ground floor of digital journalism education â€" suggesting to Columbia University that they teach how to write and design for the Web. The school was the first to offer a Web-based journalism program, Lih says, in 1995.

After spending time teaching in Hong Kong, Lih was looking for the next big thing and heard about a site called Wikipedia. His reaction to the initial concept is one many of us can related to.

"That sounds wacky. That sounds like it would be a complete garbage dump of content," Lih says.

But he quickly realized the power of Wikipedia as a rolling archive of what is happening â€" a living transparent document. He says every edit to every page is monitored.

"It's actually a great model for news organizations to look at at least saying that every single edit can be inspected and audited by someone else," Lih says.

Interesting ethical discussions come up about how to edit pages in the discussion pages, Lih says. He offers Bradley Manning's recent name change as an example.

"They were taking in viewpoints from the AP style guide, norms from Reuters and other folks. There was actually a very serious conversation happening behind the scenes even though most people don't see those things," he says.

Lih is one of Wikipedia's 1,000 administrators and an assistant professor at American University in Washington, D.C. He's also the author of The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia.

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WASHINGTON - Andrew Lih has always been interested in how people communicate and he's found himself a front row seat, taking part in journalism's digital conversion.

Lih was on the ground floor of digital journalism education â€" suggesting to Columbia University that they teach how to write and design for the Web. The school was the first to offer a Web-based journalism program, Lih says, in 1995.

After spending time teaching in Hong Kong, Lih was looking for the next big thing and heard about a site called Wikipedia. His reaction to the initial concept is one many of us can related to.

"That sounds wacky. That sounds like it would be a complete garbage dump of content," Lih says.

But he quickly realized the power of Wikipedia as a rolling archive of what is happening â€" a living transparent document. He says every edit to every page is monitored.

"It's actually a great model for news organizations to look at at least saying that every single edit can be inspected and audited by someone else," Lih says.

Interesting ethical discussions come up about how to edit pages in the discussion pages, Lih says. He offers Bradley Manning's recent name change as an example.

"They were taking in viewpoints from the AP style guide, norms from Reuters and other folks. There was actually a very serious conversation happening behind the scenes even though most people don't see those things," he says.

Lih is one of Wikipedia's 1,000 administrators and an assistant professor at American University in Washington, D.C. He's also the author of The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia.

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After reading and hearing mostly negative news out of Pakistan, Aisha Chowdhry wanted to know what was really happening on the ground. She bought a camera and tripod, and traveled to Lahore, with Google as her only guide to shooting video.

Born in Pakistan and fluent in Urdu, she had an urge to tell man-on-the-street stories through a documentary film. Pakistan: Inside the Tinder Box, the end result of more than 100 interviews she made over four weeks in 2009, shows the “smiles and tears of ordinary folksâ€"students, teachers, slum dwellers and musiciansâ€"struggling with terrorism.â€?

“I had wanted to be in journalism when I was younger," Chowdhry said. "I would stand in front of the mirror and pretend like I was anchoring the news, but I knew nothing of what journalism really was.�

In this podcast, she tells It's All Journalism producers Anna Miars and Michael O'Connell about her work as a stringer for Reuters, covering Pakistan and American troops in Afghanistan.

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After reading and hearing mostly negative news out of Pakistan, Aisha Chowdhry wanted to know what was really happening on the ground. She bought a camera and tripod, and traveled to Lahore, with Google as her only guide to shooting video.

Born in Pakistan and fluent in Urdu, she had an urge to tell man-on-the-street stories through a documentary film. Pakistan: Inside the Tinder Box, the end result of more than 100 interviews she made over four weeks in 2009, shows the “smiles and tears of ordinary folksâ€"students, teachers, slum dwellers and musiciansâ€"struggling with terrorism.â€?

“I had wanted to be in journalism when I was younger," Chowdhry said. "I would stand in front of the mirror and pretend like I was anchoring the news, but I knew nothing of what journalism really was.�

In this podcast, she tells It's All Journalism producers Anna Miars and Michael O'Connell about her work as a stringer for Reuters, covering Pakistan and American troops in Afghanistan.

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