Lisa Loving talks with Spencer Graves about media literacy and how you can report for your community. Loving has a wide range of experience as a journalist, including as interim director of the evening news at KBOO, a non-commercial, listener-supported, community radio station in Portland, Oregon. Her experience with KBOO helped inform her 2019 book, Street Journalist. She is working on another book with a tentative title, Watchdog: Investigative Tools for Community Reporters.
Highlights
Lisa said, "everyday people have the knowledge and skills to report on stuff. You don't have to get a master's degree in journalism ... . [S]ome of the very best newspapers in America today are high school newspapers. In my town, Portland, Oregon, Grant High School's newspaper [is] amazing."
Lisa also said that advertising people started newspapers. She described an ad salesman named Ford, who had previously sold used cars but did not drive himself. He made friends with every merchant in a major business district in Portland and brought in revenue that funded local media.
But before you go very far as a journalist, you need to decide who do you want to be consuming the news you produce, and then go out, meet those folks. Make sure you understand their concerns and how they want to consume news. "Some people want their information on a cell phone texted to them." Others want to read it on a website.
You do need to attract an audience, preferably with careful fact checking and avoiding saying more than you can document. In that, it is also wise to consult multiple sources including looking for sources that might contradict your preconceptions.
Hedge funds vs. mediocre men
Lisa compared the hedge funds that are destroying newspapers to the doomsday machine planet killer in the Star Trek series.
Graves claimed that the hedge funds are merely capitalizing on how newspapers have been losing advertising to the Internet. Lisa disagreed: "My personal theory is the Internet did not destroy the newspapers. Newspapers were destroyed by generation after generation of mediocre men, many of whom inherited these newspapers. [Those men] wouldn't hire people that didn't look like them, and they wouldn't hire people that didn't think like them. That's what killed newspapers. ... This is the purpose of diversity, equity, and inclusion. ... [W]hen you have people from all these different communities, when you have people with a wide array of experiential knowledge, you have a better idea of what's going on" -- and can attract a wider audience.
OSINT and FOIA
Lisa has been reading about Open-source intelligence (OSINT). "It's everything we've always done, where we were trying to get information where FOIA wouldn't work."
BLM
Lisa asked,
How do everyday people have an effect on political violence? How can everyday people have an effect on, even just violence in their community? Always the beginning is to understand what's going on. ...
Even if you can't always find all of the secret data that may be someplace. Everyday people can start in a situation like this by defining a situation like the Black Lives Matter movement. Black Lives Matter, BLM, hashtag was actually created by a couple of women. ... Ten years ago, we started to see this hashtag, BLM. ... All of a sudden, it exploded. The Black Lives Matter movement exploded. Because It had already been defined by its own community [because] so many Black men were killed by the cops. ...
That's a perfect example of how community members can have an impact on political violence. ...
You set up your system of information. You try to understand what the niche is. What is the need? What is the need for information in the environment that you're inhabiting? You set up your systems of information, and then you just keep doing what you're doing until something happens that brings the public eye to the issue that you're talking about. ... And then you cover that thing.
But you have to come up with your idea. You have to listen to people. And figure out what the need is in that environment that you're working in. ...
I want to encourage everyone ... to [find] your local independent media outlet, especially if it's a community media outlet, that invites members of the community in to participate, especially kids, ... and get involved. You don't have to have your voice on the air, but you could if you wanted. ... These outlets are all over the country, there's hundreds of them. They don't all look the same, they're not all radio. ... There's hybrid NPR Pacifica stations. ... Pacifica Radio Network is an incredible institution. It's an information distribution system that's controlled by local communities. You should take ownership.
More details and a moderated discussion of issues raised in this interview are supported in the Wikiversity article on “Lisa Loving on media literacy and how you can report for your community” with a video.
Copyright 2025 Lisa Loving and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.
