5 takeaways:
➀ Legendary Editor Evan Smith’s advice to his staff on nonpartisanship: “There is only one team, Team Texas.” A transcript of his remarks is here. “We try to hire people who we believe don’t have bad habits they have to unlearn in terms of being fair, thorough and accurate in everything that they do,” the Texas Tribune co-founder told NPF Statehouse and local reporting fellows. “We don’t hire crusaders. We don’t hire people who consider themselves to be advocates. We wear the uniform of only one team. And that team is Texas. To the degree that we advocate for anything, it’s for the idea that Texas can be better by making Texans better informed, more engaged, give them the means to be more thoughtful and productive citizens.” But “nonpartisanship is not non-thinking,” Smith said. “If somebody lies, we say they lied. Climate science is not a ‘he said, she said.’”
➁ U.S. democracy is endangered, and journalists cannot fix it — other than through more and better journalism. “Our democracy is hanging right now by dental floss,” Smith said. “And part of the problem, if not the entirety of the problem, is low-information and no-information citizens who don’t have the kind of information that allows them to participate civically, allows them to be part of this representative democracy of ours.” Texas voter turnout is embarrassingly low, and the media has not done a good enough job of providing voters with the information they need to make decisions, he said. “I have a lot of hope for journalism. I don’t have a lot of hope for democracy. Really, honestly… I’m not in the hope business.”
➂ Newsroom leaders must do a better job of prioritizing journalists’ mental health. “The environment for journalists now out in the world is worse than I’ve ever seen it and gets worse every day,” Smith said. “And I think the political system actually is incentivizing the worst actors to double down on how that’s gone. And I think it’s just terrible. And there’s nothing I can say about that, beyond that, and I can’t solve it.” The Texas Tribune was “no different than a lot of other places in terms of a lot of people making a decision that they no longer wanted to be either in this job or in this industry over the last two years,” he said. “I failed to create conditions that made people believe they could continue to do this work or that they wanted to do this work.” He added: “This profession is as important to the functioning of our society as it has been in my 35 years in the business. But I also understand that for some people, it’s not a good time to be doing this work and we have to accept that.”
➃ Journalists need to speak out about their value to society. “We do a great job, all of us in journalism today, about talking about our values and not nearly a good enough job talking about our value,” Smith said. “We don’t talk about our impact as much as we talk about ourselves at the moment.”
➄ Journalism is more important than ever, and the spread of nonprofit news outlets offers more opportunities than ever. Smith cited the opening of nonprofit news organizations in Minneapolis, Baltimore, El Paso, and many other cities, and noted that these outlets are far better funded than the Texas Tribune was in its early years. “I completely call bullshit on the idea… that this is a bad time to go into journalism, that journalism is in trouble,” Smith said. “There are more opportunities available in journalism today than ever. There are more places to go do meaningful, serious journalism than ever. There are more communities being served by journalism that has been specifically created for them.”
Speaker:
This program was funded by Arnold Ventures. NPF is solely responsible for the content.
