NewsBeat

4 NewsBeat February 2017 By JEFF SONDERMAN Newsonomics: Rebuilding the news media will require doubling-down on its core values ournalists and publishers need to breathe new life into the social contract with readers: The audience holds the media accountable, the media holds the powerful accountable. "Alt-what?" I asked the audience of the leaders of America's alternative press, in a talk last Friday, the day of the inauguration and the day before an estimated 100,000 people marched through downtown Portland, Oregon in Protest. "Alt-what in America's growing news deserts" was the title of my talk, and it followed up on my most recent Nieman Lab Column. In that piece, I asked who — struggling dailies, emerging public radio initiatives, spirited startups, local TV stations — might seize the opportunity of the day and ramp up the kind of local news coverage that readers might support with subscription or membership. Could alt-weeklies be part of the solution? More than 100 of them still populate the landscape, from the hometown Portland's Pulitzer-winning Willamette Week to Cincinnati's CityBeat to Vermont's Seven Days to the L.A. Weekly (itself just now put for sale). The alternative press was born out of an earlier tumult, in the 1960s and '70s, and I knew it well, having been part of it early in my career. Then, it was "alt" as in counter, as in counterculture — but that's a blast from a fast- disappearing past. Now, these publications almost all build their audiences around things to do, guides, and calendars; the level of incisive local reporting varies widely. Further, the word "alt" has taken on the dark new reality of "alt-right," the sanitized neo-Nazi umbrella for those who decry ("Lügenpresse!") the press, not build it. And then there's the la-la land of "alternative facts" that Kellyanne Conway unveiled to Chuck Todd. Throughout the past week, the pages of America's news sites have been transformed into what seems an alternative universe itself, as the rat-a-tat-tat of Trump-promised change looks like the flipside of the past eight years. That alt-what dilemma of the weeklies offers just a variation on the theme. For them and for America's news media generally, the question grows more urgent by the day: Who are you now and what can you do for would-be paying readers? "Hold the media accountable, and make your public officials hear you," Zahra Billoo, the executive director of the Bay Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations told the Washington march Saturday. Expect to hear a lot more of that sentiment. Within the demand comes both a threat and an opportunity to reclaim a paying readership for news that newly matters in subscribers' lives. Fundamentally, we've arrived — possibly again — at a place where people expect values- oriented media. Let's talk about what that may mean, and then, more practically, I'd like to offer five ways news media can begin to breathe new life into the notion. "Values" may seem a scary proposition for much of the legacy press and the digital startup press that has followed it. It can conjure up partisanship or "taking sides," but it doesn't need to. Take that word: accountable. Journalists have talked about accountability journalism and practiced it well for decades. But in recent years, it has sometimes seemed like an add-on — maybe a foundation will fund it? — rather than the basic mission of a free press, national and local, in a free society. That's how the framers saw it when they gave the press quite a shout-out. They didn't do that so that fishmongers, tailors, and alehouse keepers would have a place to advertise. They did it to keep tabs on power. As budgets and newsroom workforces throughout the country have been halved, stenography — limp, single-source stories — have become more the rule than the exception. Too few of the remaining local reporters, at the nation's 1,370 or so local newspapers — we have only four national ones — have both the time and local knowledge to hold local and state politicians and business to account. So they largely — with very important and award-worthy exceptions — don't do enough of that work. That's the certainly a question of capacity, one that I raised last week, and it's the gating issue here. Increasingly, though, I've come to believe that we can't rebuild local news capacity until we're more clear about our 21st-century values. What might we include in those values? It may not be bad to start with a few Robert Fulghum tips from All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. They seem oddly modern and newly recited in this toxic political atmosphere: • Share everything. • Play fair. • Don't hit people. • Put things back where you found them. • Clean up your own mess. • Don't take things that aren't yours. • Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody. They seem awfully relevant, don't you think? These seem to be human values and American values, and the press can remind all of us about them. Maybe a few additional ones can be borrowed from the Boy Scouts: being trustworthy, loyal, helpful, thrifty, and brave. Those are just for starters, though. Try the four principles of the long-established and once universally accepted Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics. • Seek truth and report it. • Minimize harm. • Act independently. • Be accountable and transparent. Yes, it does seem quite basic to have to list these, but the times apparently demand remedial courses. Underlying all this, a single word: fairness. Even more than mere "accuracy," it's the word that has driven the best journalists from tiny towns to major metros. It's still the best barometer. Rather than assert some shaky new world or parse meanings of words most everyone understands — "fact" and "lie" now among them — the admonition of Washington Post editor Marty Baron, reaffirmed by others, says it simply: "Just do our job. Do it as it's supposed to be done." Make no mistake, it's not the adoption of a values-based mission that's essential. It is acting on these values that must now define news media. If J By KEN DOCTOR PHOTO BY JEREMY BROOKS USED UNDER A CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE.

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