Scott Greenberger, Tia Mitchell and Anna Johnson Transcript — Oct. 7, 2025
Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:00:00):
So you might, the transfer to an intimately lighted room is probably the right way to go closer to cocktail hour and there might be a little Frank Sinatra in the background, so we’ll try to play along with that. But thanks for making a quick transfer here from the hotel and I want to introduce our topic and our panelists who are kind enough to join us tonight. As you know, and as we talked about a little bit, the transformation of the federal bureaucracy, including key institutions across the government, has been historic and continues to alter American life far beyond Washington. From healthcare and the unfolding tariff policies to the National Guards, expanding local public safety role to immigration enforcement, the ever-changing landscape is testing the country and us like never before. So we are fortunate to have three accomplished journalists who are tasked with interpreting Washington for a local audiences across the country.
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First, Anna Johnson, she is the APS Washington Bureau chief where she oversees coverage of the Trump administration, Congress, Supreme Court, as well as US politics and elections. That’s a lot. Prior to moving to DC in 2022, she was the APS news director for Europe and Africa, based in London, and also held various editing and reporting roles, including in Phoenix, Chicago, Cairo, and throughout the Middle East. Tia Mitchell. Over here, Tia is the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Washington Bureau chief, part of a unfortunately declining group of regional, local presences in dc, but she does it very, very well. She writes about Georgia’s congressional delegation campaigns, elections and Georgia’s congressional delegation campaigns, elections, and the impact decisions made in DC have on residents in Georgia. She is also the co-host of the Politically Georgia podcast. Before arriving in Washington, TIA served as the agcs DeKalb County report, Scott Greenberger.
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Over here, Scott is the executive editor of state law. Scott leads a team of journalists who report on state politics and policy in 50 states and the District of Columbia. Before joining State Line, Scott was a staff writer at the Boston Board. He shared a little bit about his experiences with a sexual abuse case he covered in Boston education and served as the City Hall Bureau chief and worked at the State House. He also reported for the Austin American Statesman when he traveled with then Texas Governor George W. Bush on the presidential campaign trail. He’s the author of the Unexpected President, the Life and Times of Chester, a Arthur, and the co-author with former Senator Tom Dashell of the New York Times Bestseller Critical What We Can Do About the Healthcare Crisis. Please welcome.
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So as I mentioned to them in preparing for this panel, they all come to their work from different perspectives and have different ways of approaching their work all with the same goal, the same goal that you have and are working at in different ways. So I’ve asked them to talk a little bit about how they approach their work in this particularly fraught time and how they’re translating Washington to the communities that they serve. So we’re going to kick it off with Anna and we’ll make the trip around the panel and then we’ll open it up to questions. So Anna, floor’s yours.
Anna Johnson/Associated Press (00:04:24):
Alright. Hi everybody. I feel like there’s really bad static. That one had it. Two. Okay. Alright, I’m going to try to talk without it. Can you all hear me? I know I have a loud voice. I know not everyone does, but mine is usually pretty loud so I’m going to try without it just so you don’t have the static. So I thought when I was thinking about this, how do we do this job every day? It’s obviously very busy as you can probably all imagine in, you’re all doing in your jobs all the time. And I think at AP right now, there’s three I think guiding principles I look at that we try to do every single day in our coverage of any administration. But certainly right now with the Trump administration and just the amount of news, the amount of things happening that can be really overwhelming to our customers and to our readers and our audiences who just are kind of flooded with so much news and information.
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And so I think there’s three things when we look at the kinds of coverage or how we’re trying to differentiate our coverage. And I say the first one is, I mean I look every day at sort of what we’re doing at whatever various topics of coverage, whether it’s directly right about the White House and Prime Minister Carney’s visit today, or it’s about something happening around the shutdown or it’s about something around immigration or it’s about the National Guard or whatever it might be, is that each day we are trying to provide a guide for people to help our customers and our audiences of our just be able to get through it and help guide them through all of the news and try to make sense of it in the best way possible. That often takes just writing really plainly, clearly and really kind of breaking down things for people, but it’s also just in how we present the news and how we’re trying to, we use, we do a lot of live coverages, I’m sure many of you do in your newsrooms.
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And with that live coverage, what can be kind of an overwhelming thing just to have constant updates of all the news all the time. We actually try to organize it in a fashion that gives it sort of a guide. So you could go to it and try to find out what are the three or four things that happen, what’s the most interesting things? What do I actually need to know about it, how can I engage with that coverage? And really trying to do that in the best way possible. We do everything from providing kind of bullet point lists to doing a lot of explanatory work to asking questions of our readers to send in and then us answering them for them. As you can imagine on the shutdown, there were just a lot of questions. It’s really confusing. People don’t understand it. How can we take our expertise in our reporting and help give it to people in a way that can help them understand it and directly answer their questions?
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The second thing that we do every is always about the impact. And I think that’s where the connection between what we’re doing here in Washington and what is happening around the country and around the world is how we can try to really show the impact to decisions that are made of decisions that are not made and what that actually means for people’s lives every day. We’re fortunate at the AP to have journalists all across the US and all across the world. We’ve got a little music in the background there and what we’re trying to do there is that really make sure that while we’re telling you all the news that’s happening here, that we’re directly connecting that news to what’s happening to people’s lives and showing that kind of journalism too. So you’ll often see that in the kinds of stories that we’re doing all of the time.
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And then the third thing that goes right along with it that I think we really lean into and is so important right now and all of you have this great advantage of that. It’s just the being there. It is actually being there to report on communities and to show what is happening and to talk to people about real people about whether or not what these policies or what sort of happening, how it impacts them, how tariffs and trade deals are actually impacting people’s lives. Because starting to happen and you can actually do those kinds of stories and it is so incredibly important. Not every newsroom has that ability to do that, but I think wherever you are, it’s such an important part of it. It’s not just to be telling the story as it’s coming straight from the White House or one of the federal agencies or from Congress or from the Supreme Court.
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It’s connecting that and really being on the ground. I mean, it is just so important right now that we’re on the ground in Chicago and in the suburbs of Chicago and in Portland and in Memphis and in all of these places around the country and really, and when we’re not there, trying to get there as fast as we can because that’s how I think people, we can understand it and really tie sort of all the things that are happening here to what really matters and really kind of dig below just the headlines of the day. I’ll go to you. Okay. Yeah, I don’t know if I’ll
Scott Greenberger/Stateline (00:08:58):
Scott, we’ll go to
Anna Johnson/Associated Press (00:08:59):
There, give it a go.
Scott Greenberger/Stateline (00:09:01):
Okay. You want to try and try this? I’m told this one. Oh, okay. Alright. I am executive editor of State Line, which is part of a broader organization called States Newsroom, which is a network of nonprofit news organizations around the country. We have outlets in 39 states and we have partnerships with other nonprofit outlets in another 11 states. Many of you have probably heard of some of them. The Texas Tribune, Cal Matters are two of the bigger ones. And before this administration, mostly what we were doing was writing about state policy from a national perspective, sort of connecting the dots between what was going on in various state capitals. Very often increasingly so actually what is happening in one state capitol is also happening in another one. There are more coordinated advocacy campaigns across state borders, but also states very often are facing the same challenges and therefore experimenting with the same kinds of policies.
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With this administration, we have been paying a lot of attention. I would say that 80 or 90% of our coverage, and I should say we have reporters spread around the country, but 80 or 90% of our coverage has been about the fallout from this administration. How the policies and actions of this administration are affecting states and state governments. So for example, federalism is obviously on everyone’s minds now, the relationship between the federal government and state governments and some of that is the traditional division of responsibility. So for example, we spend a lot of time running about Medicaid, which has been in the news a lot since Medicaid is a joint federal state program. It is funded by both the federal government and the states. And the states have a lot of leeway in how they run their Medicaid programs, but also new areas of where the federalism is coming into play.
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For example, vaccinations for a very long time, a century I guess the states took their queue, public health officials in the states took their queue from the federal government in terms of vaccinations. And now we have this fascinating situation where you have state health officials and states banding together and rejecting federal recommendations and putting out their own recommendations on vaccinations. We’ve also written a lot about imitation. There are cases where particularly in Republican LED states where they are doing at the state level, a lot of the same things that the Trump administration is doing at the federal level. So for example, many states had their own or have their own Doge initiatives in imitation what’s happening at the federal level. We’ve written a lot about the conflict between the federal government and in particular blue states. There are I think more than two dozen lawsuits now that have been filed by Democratic State Attorneys General on various issues.
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Everything from immigration enforcement to, so we have immigration enforcement issues having to do with funding and the blocking of grants. There are many, many lawsuits that are in play. And then we also of course deal a lot with democracy issues. Elections are for the most part, are supposed to be run at the state and local level, but the federal government under the Trump administration is trying to assert itself more than the federal government has traditionally. So we’ve covered, for example, recently the just department’s efforts to get voter information from states and some of the resistance, some of the pushback from not just blue states but also red ones. So it’s been a fascinating time to be covering state policy because so much of what’s going on has to do with this interplay between the Trump administration and state governments, and that’s really what we’ve been focusing on.
Tia Mitchell/Atlanta Journal-Constitution (00:13:18):
Hi. So I do come at it from a very different perspective because I am a regional reporter, which means I’m based in DC but I’m writing for a local audience elsewhere. And we actually, yes, the ranks are dwindling because 50 years ago if you weren’t the Post or the New York Times, you were probably a regional reporter if you were based in dc, right? Whereas now we have so many national outlets and of course Associated Press was always there. I mean that’s the get, but now regional reporters are like a subset of the wider group of Washington based reporters. But I like the fact that I’m a regional reporter because no matter what I’m doing on a given day, my reporting is always going to be a little bit different because I am thinking with an audience in mind that no one else is thinking about, which is Georgia for me.
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And so when I’m writing about the shutdown, I’m writing about either how it’s going to impact people in Georgia or what do the lawmakers that Georgian sent to Washington think about this shutdown or how are they voting on the shutdown? How are lawmakers who were elected from Georgia interacting with the White House? How are people from Georgia? What roles do they have in the White House? And of course all the things coming from the White House, which as we know are many, how are they impacting Georgia? So for example, Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens was in town last week for the Congressional Black Caucuses Conference. We did a long interview about the National Guard issue because Atlanta is one of those blue cities in a red state that often gets mentioned either as a possible target or why isn’t Atlanta a target if you’re talking about cities with crime issues.
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So we talked a lot about it and what he’s doing proactively to try to keep himself from being names and how he’s proactively trying to keep good relationships with the White House, good relationships with the governor who the governor’s also trying to keep a good relationship with the White House. So it helps because in the national landscape, it’s easy to feel like you’re all chasing the same story. And I don’t feel like that because I’m always chasing the Georgia angle to the story. And that’s something I know you guys are local reporters. As you all look at these national issues, it’s always good to keep your audience in mind. It’s always good to think about how do I cover this issue for my audience because things that are important in Georgia aren’t necessarily the same things that are important in Connecticut or Oregon or Hawaii and even in Georgia, things that are important in metro Atlanta might not be the same thing that’s important in Augusta or Savannah.
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So it’s always good to kind of keep your audience in mind because it will keep your reporting fresh even on an issue that is kind of the news of the day that everyone’s writing about. And what we found at the Atlanta Journal Constitution is our utility stuff that they could get from the AP is not what they’ve been coming to ajc.com for during the shutdown. So our stuff that is general, you can get it anywhere, isn’t doing best on our website, what is doing better is the original content, talking to Senator Warnock and Senator Ossoff and I’ll be having an article about Marjorie Taylor Green, for those of you who follow her on social media or she’s once again kind of zagged when all the Republicans are zigging on the shutdown, and that’s very interesting to cover. It also helps that I come from a swing state. I come from a state that helped Joe Biden get his power. I come from a state that has Marjorie Taylor Greene and John Ossoff and Vock and a bunch of other colorful characters, so it keeps me busy. Okay,
Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:18:15):
Good place for questions.
Sean Keenan | Atlanta Civic Circle (00:18:24):
Hey everybody, my name is Sean Keenan. I’m here from Atlanta Tia. I think you and I are Twitter friends, right? Absolutely. And friends in real life. Is it better for me to use this? Okay,
Anna Johnson/Associated Press (00:18:37):
We can hear it.
Sean Keenan | Atlanta Civic Circle (00:18:38):
Tia, I want to ask you first if you could just kind of reflect on what you’re seeing, how that tells you what to expect from state elections, how rather the federal upheaval could affect state elections. I don’t know if you saw early polling in our governor’s race shows that Keisha Lance Bottoms is top dog right now, which I know a lot of policy wonks who roll their eyes at that. I’m wondering if we should be expecting a wave of referenda across the country on I am the most MAGA or I’m the most anti maga, and does that at all, I guess, discount the true value of what elections are supposed to be about?
Tia Mitchell/Atlanta Journal-Constitution (00:19:23):
Well, I think it’s both, right? Every midterm election, first of all, our elections are becoming more and more nationalized. Why do we know so much about the New York mayoral race? Why do we know that? Why do we know the long shot Republican running for office in a New York local election? We did it 20 years ago. We didn’t knew who the mayor was once he got elected. We didn’t know all that we knew about the elections. So that is just how our media landscape has shifted, where even local election, and I mean don’t get me wrong, new York’s mayoral race has always been a big deal, but again, it wasn’t so nationalized. The fact that John Ossoff is probably going to raise 150 or $200 million to run for reelection shows how nationalized these elections have become. And so as a result, they become more and more of a reflection on how people think about the president and national things like the economy and things like that.
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Still, I believe that if you take Georgia’s governor’s race for example, it’s still going to come down to candidates. But I do think the framework in which these candidates have to campaign is if Donald Trump, if something happens and his popularity surges up, that’s going to make it easier for Republican to win if he continues on the current trajectory where people are becoming more and more concerned about the Trump administration, not just on immigration, not just on the economy, not just on how he’s sending the National Guard. It’s becoming a lot of things with President Trump that doesn’t bode well for Republicans in the midterms. That being said, in a state like Georgia with again, colorful, colorful characters, Keisha Lance Bottoms, former mayor of Atlanta, so she’s got a lot of name recognition as the former mayor of the biggest city in Georgia. She did work in the Biden administration. So I think she does benefit from frustration with the Trump administration, but I also think as the campaign season really gets underway, she’s at a ceiling right now because you’ve either made up your mind, you like her or you don’t. And most of the other candidates in the race have room to grow if they ramp up their campaign and start to win hearts and minds. So to be really interesting, Georgia, also southern states love a runoff.
Anna Johnson/Associated Press (00:22:21):
That is true, very, very.
Tia Mitchell/Atlanta Journal-Constitution (00:22:25):
It comes down to, quite frankly, a little bit of Jim Crow. But I also see the benefit of the runoff. I used to live in Florida and people would win. You can become governor with 30, 35% of the vote in a really, really crowded contest. Or you can win a primary, probably not generalist, but you can win a primary in a crowded primary with 30 or less because it’s just one race in your out, which is far from a mandate. So runoffs will matter in Georgia, probably those primaries for both parties will go to a runoff. The primary for the Senate race will likely go to a runoff. So then that makes it even more interesting. Thank you.
Whitney McKnight | The Edge (00:23:18):
Hi there. I’m really grateful to be here. I’ll tell you just the background is I used to be a Capitol Hill reporter, I was a trade reporter, I covered medicine, and then I kind of carved out back in a long time ago, I carved out a mental health policy and then I moved over to cover an antitrust, which was really eye opening as a reporter. So my question is I left Washington, I started a paper in Kentucky and I’ve been a journalist my whole career and I’ve never really experienced what I see now. And I think part of it’s just the times we’re living in. But I’m curious, Tia in particular, and I don’t remember your name from state line, Scott, Scott, thanks, Scott. The model seems to be changing about, and I think there are a lot of reasons, but I find that local news is less partisan.
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That’s my experience. And also in Kentucky, our town is not a partisan town. You can run without a ticket, you’re not on a party ticket. But I find that local news is actually driven by different things than national news. And I haven’t really been touched by the anger at journalism or at news that is out there, even though I’m in a MAGA state, maybe we have a democratic governor. But I think when you were talking before about what the AP does, for example, I was hearing that and I was thinking, yes, I do that for my readers, but do you think that TIA is being both regional and national, that really what’s locally going on with news is kind of bifurcating from the national? There’s less anger at me being a local person, even though they know I have national background. But I just think that national news is really what’s in the crosshairs and not so much local news because if you are just feeding people things to get upset about, or at least if you’re looking at national news on television and stuff like that, people will tune out. But if you are locally responding to what people actually face in their daily life, you are serving a need. And that’s kind of what I’m seeing the difference. I’m wondering if you felt that being on Washington, but being from a regional area is do you feel like you’re serving different needs in the local sense? There’s less pressure on you to meet a different kind of agenda?
Tia Mitchell/Atlanta Journal-Constitution (00:25:39):
I’ll answer quickly then let Scott and Anna, first of all, I’m from Louisville. So what town is your paper in? Maria? Oh yeah, Louis come. Maria has the cutest little college. Okay, so my short answer is I want to make two points. Number one, it’s very similar many times when people say, I hate the media, but if you ask them specifically about your local paper or your favorite local anchor, like Oh no, they’re great, right? Or they do a good job. It’s just like the media in general gets a bad rap. And some of that is because there are conservative outlets who have been telling people since the new Gingrich area era that mainstream media is liberal and woken bad. So some of that is just we’ve been given a bad rap and it’s stuck. But if you’ve asked people about specific outlets, the ap, there’s a lot of trust. I think that’s it. That’s my short answer. Good for Scott.
Scott Greenberger/Stateline (00:26:49):
But I was just going to say, one thing I didn’t mention in my introduction is that while we have our own website and our sister outlets and our network have websites, our stuff as a nonprofit, we encourage other outlets both for-profit and nonprofit to republish our stuff. And so our stories are running in a lot of local papers, a lot of small papers. I get a report every week which shows that it maxes out at 400 that we have every week. It’s at least 400 other outlets are publishing our stuff. And I don’t think most people other than journalists, mothers notice who the byline is or whether it says Stateline or something else, or even maybe in ap they see it in the paper and they just think it’s in the paper. And like ap, we try very hard at Stateline, we we’re very conscious of that and we take that responsibility very seriously and we tried very hard to be traditional right down the middle, not there are plenty of folks out there both on TV and in print who are coming at these issues from a particular political bent. And we don’t do that. And I try very hard to get my reporters and editors to view what anyone says with skepticism and to just adhere to the traditional nonpartisan journalism values.
Whitney McKnight | The Edge (00:28:08):
Can I respond what you’re
Scott Greenberger/Stateline (00:28:10):
Saying?
Whitney McKnight | The Edge (00:28:11):
Actually what you’re talking about is what I’m kind of seeing that bifurcation is, is that the local news seems to be driving things more than the national corporate kind of model. And I love the state lines and state names. Actually, Jamie in Frankfurt, she publishes my stuff all the time, but she uses my stuff because I am taking the local perspective on the bigger Kentucky issues and other Kentucky local reporters also get republished. And I think that model actually is more responsive and immediate than the typical model, which is kind of what I was getting as the national model. And there’s this kind of the board, just like the corporate model of things, people are tuning out, but if you are local and you are speaking their language, you have an advantage.
Scott Greenberger/Stateline (00:28:58):
Well, I think the key also is to relate the policy to people’s actual lives, to humanize the policy. And very often, and this isn’t, the national outlets are covering the political debates here, which can be somewhat divorced from the way people are living their lives in local communities. And I think that the best, well, not the best, in addition to having the journalism about what’s about a debate in Congress is very important obviously, but it’s also important to have journalism that explains to people how the outcome of a particular policy debate is actually affecting real people on the ground. Yeah,
Anna Johnson/Associated Press (00:29:40):
I would say, I mean we’re obviously a global news outlet, so it is different from a really local news outlet that we do a lot of journalism all over the world in lots of places. So I would say it’s not surprising that there’d be more trust in general with institutions and everything at the local level than there is at the national level. Local politicians tend to be trusted a lot more than the national politicians or people. They might say something really bad about policy around school or something. Well, but my school is great. It’s like if you know it and you understand it and you have a connection to it, it is easier for people to trust it, to believe in it, to not think such a negative outright stereotype about something. And that is a challenge in the national and global media is that for us it’s like to help build that trust and help build people.
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And that comes from being really transparent with the work that we’re doing and trying to show our work whenever possible and taking, doing a lot. I mean, a huge effort we have this year for example, is around, we call it being there, but it’s this idea that we’re showing ourselves actually being in places, reporting. It sounds obvious, but there is a lot of trust factor to go on to show that we’re actually there. We’re not sitting in some room making things up, we’re literally on the ground reporting in communities, or they’re on the hill today or there at the White House or wherever it is to kind of show that, because I think people, it becomes more real then. It’s a real person, it’s a real, there’s some connection that you can try to do, which is, it’s a huge challenge for all of us is around the declining, generally declining trust in not just media, but also just institutions as a whole.
Kirstin Garriss | Independent (00:31:24):
Hey there. Oops. Hello. I’m a TV girl and Mike are usually good friends. Kirstin Garriss, a little correspondent, turned now independent journals because of changing landscape. But I am on Substack and TikTok. So my question is for everyone, but really Anna and Scott, because you’re in charge of newsrooms, there’s recent study, I think it was pure research, but more people have been in news from TikTok, which is fascinating and terrifying all at the same time. What have you noticed, I guess, what is your strategy for covering Washington, telling Washington in TikTok form or in a vertical video where people are getting their news, but what we cover here is mpy complicated. So I guess what strategies are you guys using? What has worked and even what challenges are you facing trying to reach this online news consumer?
Anna Johnson/Associated Press (00:32:13):
I mean, obviously we do a lot in these spaces and obviously trying to meet audiences as much as we can, where they’re at and the way that people consume information. And so yeah, we do a lot more vertical video a lot more. One of the things is this builds up what I was saying just a few seconds ago was that about, for us, I think the AP had always been thought of as this amorphous thing that had, no one knew who worked there and you never knew the five lines, and it was just this thing most people didn’t know in their newspapers or when they’re watching TV that a lot of the news that they consume every day comes from the ap, right? I mean, those customers buy it from us and put it out there and they can do whatever they want with it.
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In a lot of cases, when you’re watching television news, you’re generally watching a lot of AP footage. You just don’t know that you are because it doesn’t say it there. So one of the things we’re trying to do though in that is just be more really lean into that instead of us on video trying to be, we’re a broadcast television and we’re we’re just being ourselves and trying to do more of that authentic type of journalism. And that in two ways on video I would say is both having reporters and photographers and BJs just like, I’m here, here’s what here, or here’s how I did my job today. One of the greatest, I think one of the videos I think that we do vertical videos sort of being there that are really popular runner photographers talk about how they do their jobs and people are just fascinated by that.
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It is really different how they approach where they stand and what they look for and the thing that they saw that no one else saw that actually then ended up being the story. The other thing though is we really lean into just live video in general on social platforms because a lot of people just want to watch the thing happening, and we do a lot of live video. I think the biggest thing in all this that I think is not new, and I’m talking for media organizations, is that we obviously are on TikTok and Instagram and everywhere. You don’t make a lot of money from those, if any money from those. And then it’s on another company’s platform. And so as we’re in sort of this Google zero phase right now, is that increasingly figuring out ways that people come to you directly as opposed to going through another platform.
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So we’re going to be on TikTok, obviously, that’s where so many people are, but we’ve got to do better at newsletters engagement, trying to get people to actually come to the AP and have a direct source, like a direct connection, which is very different for the ap, but have that direct connection because they could change. You’re on TikTok, it’s great. That’s total branding, that’s people understand the ap, they get their information from AP and that is awesome. That is a good thing. But there’s also, they’re not going to the AP then necessarily afterwards, and we’re not making money off of that. You get a little money on YouTube from ads. You get some of that, certainly in some of the platforms. So that is something that as a media organization is sort of you’re doing that while you’re also trying to figure out ways to help deliver information directly to people.
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I will say also because we are the majority, our customers and our members are the most important, is one of the big things that we’re doing is doing a lot more though with vertical video and these type things. So they can use it for whatever they’re wanting to get. They’re on TikTok that they can use our direct video and not have to re-edit it a bunch to make it TikTok tight. So doing a lot more of that for our customers so that they can then take it, repackage it, do whatever, put their logo, have their person front it and get it out for whatever works best for them.
Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:35:41):
Scott, what scares you about TikTok covering
Scott Greenberger/Stateline (00:35:45):
Everything? Well, we are certainly not leaning into video the way AP is, of course. And as a nonprofit, we’re not concerned with customers and making money. However, we do want our name out there and raise our profile to the extent that we can because that’s how we get funders interested in us. So we’re doing more, we’re definitely doing, as Anna said, trying to meet people where they are more audio, more podcasts, doing a little bit of baby steps when it comes to TikTok and video. But yeah, I mean obviously it’s a real challenge and particularly when you think about the demographic split, right? I mean, when you think about younger people, I think we’re at a point now where most people, most younger people are getting their news from TikTok or other video sources. So it’s a real, and now of course with just this week or last week, I guess the new rollout of new and improved AI video, which is going to make it even more difficult for people to discern when something is fake.
(00:37:00):
So it’s a real challenge, and I think the key is to improve the credibility of news organizations. I think that as more and more video is available, more and more information is available and people are aware of the fact that so much of it can be fabricated, I hope. I think that, and I hope for our democracy and for stateline that people will maybe renew relationships with organizations that they trust to produce information on whatever platform that is credible instead of just kind of being out there in the internet free, just grabbing information from wherever.
Rhyma Castillo | San Antonio Express-News (00:37:56):
Hi, my name is Rhyma Castillo. I’m a reporter with the San Antonio Express News. We are a subscriber based print publication with a lot of branches outward on different platforms. Of course, TikTok, Instagram X, excuse me. So one of the primary issues that I have been seeing when looking at our metrics is seeing how much time readers spend on our media stories. So oftentimes a lot of resources go into creating this story, bringing it from a concept into a published piece and a look at our metrics. And thankfully our system shows you just how long readers spend on a story, and sometimes it’s no more than 30 seconds. So it’s sort of discouraging as a journalist to see how much work goes into reporting these finished pieces and seeing people are lacking the attention spans or maybe the interest to follow through to the end of the piece. So my question is, what have been the best strategies that you’ve observed in really getting our readers to engage in the content that we produce? And I mean calling it content is crazy to me now because kind of the world that we’re living in, we’re content producers for readers to consume and packaging that. How can we make it palatable for our audience to really follow through and at least scroll to the end of the piece?
Tia Mitchell/Atlanta Journal-Constitution (00:39:57):
I can start. Yeah, go.
(00:39:58):
I’ll start. So we as a fellow local newspaper that is ending print at the end of the year, so the A JC is thinking and talking about the changing landscape of news consumption and making business decisions. And we’ve talked a lot about our metrics, about the amount of time with people having short attention spans. So I think the first thing is just we have to be sober minded that it makes no sense to make every article a long read and to save those long reads for the topics that truly call for it. And I mean, I say that as someone who never, I’m not good at writing short because everything I have to say is very important that all of us get out, but now we have to say, this doesn’t need 25 inches, it needs 10. And that’s a different mindset when there is a long read justified, I think that’s when we think about the elements that can help make it more readable, your subheads, your photos, your graphics, embedding video, maybe having audio components, and I know that’s easier said and done when you’re at a smaller outlet that doesn’t have all the resources.
(00:41:33):
The New York Times and even AP does amazing stuff. A JC quite frankly has a lot of resources, but as much as you can, I would think that when it’s long, really do a lot on the front end of thinking about how are we going to keep readers engaged with this really important thing that we’re putting out there. And then the third thing I would say is really promoting it. The most impactful story. I love telling people this, if you haven’t heard of it, the Girl in the Window, it’s the Pulitzer Prize winning narrative from what was then the St. Pete Times. It’s now the Tampa Bay Times. If you have not read The Girl in the Window, Google it. I literally just came across it. I don’t even remember how I came across it, but one day I was randomly scrolling, ended up on the Tampa Bay St.
(00:42:26):
Pete Times website, and it was the number one article I looked, the article was a week old and it was the number one most read thing on their website a week after being published. That’s called Impactful Writing, impactful Reporting that it’s probably been 15 years since the article came out. One of y’all are googling it. Tell me what year the article came out. 2008. 2008. And I’m still talking about it still gives me chills. So De Gregory now she’s Pulitzer Prize winning that article won a Pulitzer, I believe she won additional Pulitzer since then. She’s relaunching her podcast on writing now she’s that narrative featurey type person. But what I’ll tell you is if you write the hell out of a article, people going to read it because that article is probably 200 inches. And I sat there, just happened to be scrolling one afternoon and read it and was wiping away my tears as I read it. But I read every inch and that was, again, no one told me about the article. No one sent me a link that was just on the website and clicking.
Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:43:41):
And you were talking earlier about transparency and how people engage off of that, a photographer’s life, a Day of Life photographer. How are you approaching that sort of thought in adding to
Anna Johnson/Associated Press (00:43:57):
And transparencies I think mean it can manifest itself in a lot of ways. I mean, one of the things, and as you’re talking about big projects and things, we just had this discussion in our newsroom today, and I won’t give you because the article won’t be out for a little bit, so I won’t tell you all what it’s about, but one of the things, and it is something we have invested quite a lot of resources on and it’s really good, is thinking about other elements that we want to do with it. And we have this big push sometimes if we’re going to have a really long story, we need to offer a shorter version of it. There’s hit or miss on that. I’m not actually, that really works a lot. I think on the transparency side of things, one of the things that we decide that we’re going to do with this is actually do a separate little story that’s going to be a lot shorter.
(00:44:41):
It’s about how we reported this story because it’s actually a fascinating way how we came about it, how it’s been reported, how all the things with it. And I think that kind of thing, it shows this just didn’t come poof by the thin air. It’s just all the work that went into it. I mean, a lot of times it’s really showing the work and showing the kinds of care that we all and all of you and everyone you work with put into journalism that facts are hard to confirm. It’s hard to do reporting, it’s hard to be on the ground and to actually witness things. And so the more that we can show our work behind that, whether it’s showing how we got all these, we did all these FOIA requests and we got all these documents and then we analyzed all these documents, it can be that.
(00:45:22):
It can be how we found these people in the story that we’re talking or writing about. It can be just so many different things to kind of show it. And I do think people really, we found that people have really engaged with that. And it may be I first thing when it comes to longer things, I think we got to respect our audiences and if we’re going to do something that’s really wanting them to hopefully read longer, it’s just got to be so good. And that doesn’t mean though, there are stuff that we do that I’m like, this is amazing and it doesn’t get the kind of engagement that you hope it for. Sometimes that happens. But oftentimes if it’s really good, people will, and it might take us a longer tail, it might not be that day, it might not be the next day, but over a course of maybe a week or a couple weeks, it starts to build up. It’s like a slower thing than a breaking news story.
(00:46:14):
But offering different ways and entry points for people to get to a story is so important because people aren’t coming to oftentimes straight to your website or straight to your wherever. They’re going to find it in other ways and you’re trying to bring them in. It’s like a hook, it’s like a trailer. You’re trying to get them into things and hopefully they’ll stay. And then I think oftentimes with that can be sort of that transparency thing. People are honestly very interested in how you all do your jobs. And I think the more that we can do, we have work to do as journalists, I believe we have not done a good job across the board of earning people’s trust because we haven’t shown how we do it. We’ve been closed off. We haven’t really wanted to expose even the stuff when we get things wrong.
(00:47:00):
We do make mistakes sometimes the AP does. We’ve got to be super transparent about when we do and own it and really lean into that. It might make, people will probably get a lot of angry emails and a lot of, but it also might make people think, well, at least they owned up to it. At least they showed us how they got that wrong and they fixed it. And to me, that’s just such an important thing in my role. One of the biggest things around transparency is around our calling of the elections. And this is like we used to for years and years, we’ve been doing it since 1848. We just called elections declared who won, and then that was it. And people were like, oh, okay, that’s who won. Obviously we can’t do that anymore. I mean, people don’t believe it. And also they’re like, how did you know that?
(00:47:43):
Did you just make that up? Oh, clearly they’re biased. They must have made that up when it’s not. It’s all based on reporting. We have like 4,000 people, reporters that we have around the country on a general election night in all of these county offices and state offices where they’re getting the ballots out and we’re getting that information. I mean, it’s really hard. We analyze it. It’s all based on facts. So now just trying to pull back the curtain and show how we do this, it may not win over everyone. Not everyone is going to trust us, but even if it helps a little bit, I think that that can go a long way.
Ethan Weinstein | VTDigger | Vermont (00:48:20):
Hi, I’m Ethan. I would move for VT Digger. I was wondering, living in and writing about Washington for audiences outside of Washington, how do you constantly check your own fluency with a topic and make sure that you’re writing for your readers and not developing shorthand that might not be helpful for them?
Anna Johnson/Associated Press (00:48:48):
You mean like the acronym soup that is Washington Acronyms abbreviations. Oh my goodness. I still don’t know them
Scott Greenberger/Stateline (00:48:57):
Well. Yeah, we try really hard to avoid those acronyms in the alphabet soup. I mean, I don’t think anything in Washington, these things are thrown around and normal people don’t know what they mean. Yeah, I was fortunate enough before, I’m one of those rare people who grew up in Washington. My father was a journalist here, but I also spent time covering state houses in Austin and Boston. And so it was a really interesting experience to kind of see how people outside, and obviously one was a very red state, Texas one was a very blue state, but to get that perspective on Washington from outside to see how state and local government affects people’s lives and how people view what’s going on in faraway Washington. But I think it’s incredibly important and incumbent on all of us who are in Washington and covering the stuff that goes on here and from whichever angle we’re taking to write for the readers and to understand that people are doing their own thing.
(00:49:59):
They don’t live and breathe this stuff every day. And so you need to be cognizant of that. And it gets back to what we were talking about before is that I think it’s very easy to turn people off by writing stories, particularly policy oriented stories that don’t immediately connect what you’re talking about to people’s real lives. I think that’s very important. And really tight writing and not using that alphabet soup and writing in plain clear language. All of that’s important. And that helps, I think helps us to make what happens here understandable to people outside of Washington.
Tia Mitchell/Atlanta Journal-Constitution (00:50:41):
I will say first, just a funny little aside, I used to be, I’ve been a little bit of everything. I’ve been night cops, education, city Hall and State House before I became this regional reporter here in DC. And when I was an education reporter, they have acronyms for everything. And my favorite one is the acronym Nickel Bee. Does anyone know anyone NCLB? No Child Left Behind. I don’t know if that was universal, but in Dall County, Florida, it was Nickel Bee for No Child Left Behind. You were like, how would you know that if you’re sitting in a meeting, they’re talking about Nickel Bee, you’re thinking, who is Mr. Nickel? Okay, anyways, but my real answer to that question is to me that’s where it’s important to have an open dialogue with your editor. And again, I know that good editors very, and sometimes at smaller publications, you might not always feel like you’ve got the most support in that editor role, but maybe if you don’t, your seasoned coworker can always play a good role.
(00:51:59):
I’m very much, sometimes I’ll tell my editor flat out, listen, I feel like I got in the weeds a little bit in this one as you read it, can you read it with that lens and make sure I didn’t lose you or possibly lose the audience? Or this one was pretty complicated topic. Does this make sense? And sometimes the editor will be like, yeah, you tackled that. Well, sometimes the editor will be like, let’s get you out the weeds. And so that’s where that’s a good conversation. But again, if that’s not a conversation that you feel comfortable with your editor, hopefully that’s where it’s good to have, again, either coworkers or mentors in the business. That’s why you guys are going to bond at this fellowship and be able to talk with each other. Even when you leave and say, Hey, I wrote this thing. Can you give me your thoughts? Because sometimes you do have to, you need fresh eyes because you’re in it.
Anna Johnson/Associated Press (00:53:03):
We have these the mean, it is always a huge advantage, and I love it at the AP that we are a global news agency. What also that means is that people are very willing to tell you, I don’t understand that story that you have out there. Or they’ll say something that we might not think is super interesting or new. A colleague in Bangkok will be like, that is the crazy, what is that? And you’re like, oh, is that in? Oh, I guess that’s interesting. So that helps. I think also, I think I always lean on my family and friends who are nowhere near here, and I always think if they’re asking me a question about something, it’s because they really want to know that. And we might, there’s probably, we need to do a better job at trying to explain that or to do or do a story about it.
(00:53:47):
I would lean into that. And I always think if everything that you do, you’re trying to explain it the best way that you can break it down in a way that makes it sort of, at least people can try to understand it or follow it, not make it so confusing. This town does not help. I’ve been here three and a half years and there are still almost a weekly, twice a week, three times a week something. I’m like, what is that? What does that mean? Where does that come from? But I think it’s a constant, constant thing. I also think little ways that you can engage with your audiences. It is great. We have this thing we’re doing right now around readers sending us in questions, and I recognize that someone doing that is already more engaged, right? They’re wanting to ask a question of a news organization about a topic.
(00:54:33):
But a lot of times, we had one last week, it was just surprising me how many questions we’re getting about the Hat Act. This was in response to some of the federal agencies having overtly partisan messages on their websites or in their email responses. And I was like, oh, so first up, kudos for all these people knowing about the hatch or hearing about the Hatch Act. So I was like, okay, we should do something leaning into that more. We had done news stories about it, but it didn’t break it down in a great way. So it’s another way to come about it to try to engage with people and try to do the news. Trying to take something and being like, okay, maybe we should just lean really into the Hatch Act. And that one, we ended up doing it, I believe on video even more so to just, this is what it is. This might apply here and might not apply here. And hopefully that helps a little,
Tia Mitchell/Atlanta Journal-Constitution (00:55:20):
Not just practical for me, if I’m writing something that is starting to feel complicated in my head or I feel like I’m starting to not make sense, sometimes I literally pause and I say, what is this story about? And try to give yourself one sentence. And once you have that sentence, then you can focus on adhering to that and things that if the story, this story is about the Hatch Act and whether the government agencies that posted messages blaming Democrats violated it, then maybe some of the tangents don’t belong. Because this story is about the Hatch Act and whether the messages on the websites violated it. And then sometimes if I’m writing and I’m still in the weeds, I pause and talk. I’m not a talk to myself person. I know a lot of you all out here are. I’m generally not. I’m more of a lot’s going on in my brain, but sometimes I turn into a talk to myself person and I literally say, how would I explain this to my friend?
(00:56:30):
So you’re not going to say The Hatch Act in 19 and 1865, you would be like, the Hatch Act is this law that keeps people from politicizing, that keeps federal workers from being political. That’s what you would tell a friend, right? So then you think about that, and that’s how you make sure your writing is more conversational because it’s easy to feel like you’re writing a book report, but if you say, no, let me out loud say, how would I say this to a friend? How would I explain this to my aunt who was like, what’s going on? And you force yourself to verbalize it. Sometimes that helps me also not be so technical in my writing.
Scott Greenberger/Stateline (00:57:12):
One trick we use is even boiling down further beyond just a sentence. If you could come up with a six word headline, you can almost always come up with a good, if you know what the story’s about, you should be able to come up with a six word headline, no more than six. That boils it down to the essence of the story. And I would also say one other thing, which is that I think that so much of good writing and learning how to write well is knowing what doesn’t belong in the story.
Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:57:38):
That’s very true.
Scott Greenberger/Stateline (00:57:39):
Which is a hard thing to learn when you’re starting out. It’s what doesn’t belong in the story. That’s really the key.
Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:57:44):
I think we
Jourdan Bennett-Begaye | ICT (00:57:45):
Have time for one. Okay. Rapid fire. I don’t have rapid fire, but I’m Jourdan Bennett-Begaye. I’m from ICT or Indian Country today. I love Stateline. I love the ap. We, our CEO EO is from the ap. I
Anna Johnson/Associated Press (00:58:00):
Know. Katie’s awesome. She is awesome.
Jourdan Bennett-Begaye | ICT (00:58:03):
I guess I’m kind curious, you all kind of alluded to it throughout the conversation, but I’m curious on what your early thought process were processes were when just a flood of information was coming from this current administration. Because I thought it was only our newsroom struggling, and then now I heard from the New York Times that they were struggling too, even with the amount of infinite resources. So I guess I’m kind of figuring what was your thought process and even going forward now, what you think, are you doing more short briefs? Are you, Lisa, being creative and covering it? More bullet points and explanatory, which you guys have always done.
Anna Johnson/Associated Press (00:58:43):
So the thought process, I’ll start and please jump in. Every day is a fire hose of information. I think for us, because we’re breaking news at the heart of it, a breaking news operation, we do have to think of, is there major news here? And we just have to go with that and then try to figure it out. But it is a lot, I think every day as prioritization on any given day, we could probably do a million things. There’s so many stories you could do, but you can’t do them all. You certainly can’t do them all Well, and you’ve got to make choices. And sometimes, and this is really, I think when I first started at the AP many years ago, it used to be we sort of thought of ourselves as the news agency of record. And so we just did things to put it on the record to do something.
(00:59:27):
And we covered a lot. Now our customer base, our market has totally changed. And that’s not something that’s exactly needed anymore. People don’t necessarily want that anymore. So it really is like, but hard thing is to say similar to what’s not in the story. It’s what are we not going to do today? And that is harder than what are we going to do today? Because you’ve got to make a choice. And sometimes you make the right choice, sometimes you don’t. You miss something, you got to make a decision. You’ve got have infinite resources. People are doing a bunch of things. And for us, you’re trying to be covering the breaking news to doing our own news and breaking hopefully our own news to doing really distinctive work. I mean, you’re kind of putting it in all these buckets, and I think that you have to make choices, and it’s an art, not a science.
(01:00:16):
You’re basing it yes, on what our customers want, our audiences want, but sometimes it’s like, oh, did we do that? Trump just said 17 things. In which one are we going to focus on? We’re lucky we have our live, we call it the live operation, which is both our live video and our live blog all the time, which does help for us to, okay, that was interesting. We’ll do something short and then move on. But when you’re going to devote any resources to it, it is all about prioritization. I feel like we’re better at it than we were even just four or five months ago. I think there was a moment where I think everyone was feeling so overwhelmed, and I was like, this is, we’re in an ultra, ultra, ultra marathon, not a sprint. And if we want to be able to be four months and six months in a year and two years, et cetera, we’ve got to pace ourselves along the way.
(01:01:06):
And it’s not easy. I mean, there are days, Fridays, by the way, we did a little bit, we actually did a data analysis. Fridays are definitely the busiest day. We did a data analysis of how many AP news alerts we do every day of the week from my team Fridays by far. And it is like sometimes you’re like, what is going on? But I don’t know if that helps. But it really is choices. And I think of it truly as an art, not science. And we hope we’re making the right choices that both are getting the most important information out there. We’re doing distinctive work. We’re really helping to put quality, nonpartisan, fact-based news into the world without overdoing it so much that we actually don’t do a good job at any of it.
Scott Greenberger/Stateline (01:01:49):
I mean, I would say obviously our resources are nothing like what the AP has. And it’s interesting to hear that. Whereas AP used to think of itself, we need to get everything on the record that now you have to have a different approach. Look, I think you need to keep in mind, first of all, that your audience is now has access to more information and more different news sources than before. So you don’t need to be, even the AP doesn’t need to be the paper, the news organization of record, because there are so many other source of information. And a couple other things I would say is that part of what this administration is doing, they’ve been very open about it, is that part of it is flooding the zone and kind of, oh, look at this shiny object. Look at this shiny object. So as a reporter, you need to really think about, or an editor, what is the most important thing here?
(01:02:40):
It’s Friday, there’s a million things going on. I only have two reporters. What is the most important thing? What is going to have the greatest impact? A lasting impact on people, A significant impact. So yeah, it, it’s difficult. Someone, I can’t remember, someone said something also about, maybe you said it in writing the question more briefs. You can do things in a shorter way if you really feel like you have to do something, do something short and move on. And then also, of course, you want to be in this increasingly crowded news environment. You want to be distinctive and you want to devote your resources to the stuff that other people won’t do that they’re not doing or that you are best suited to do from wherever you sit. And that sometimes that’s what you need to focus on. Let other stuff go.
Anna Johnson/Associated Press (01:03:29):
I just thought of another thing. I think about this a lot in the world of AI and how when trying to make those priorities, I think of the things that AI can’t do and what can we do every day that you couldn’t ask chat GPT for, the average person couldn’t ask chat GPT or whatever for, and I think a news that is breaking news, they can’t do something that doesn’t know, can’t tell you an answer about something it doesn’t know. So if we can be faster and accurate and be in a space and big breaking news, that’s key is also what all of our customers, that’s so key for them. I think being distinctive, having something that they can’t, would it ever be known if you didn’t spend your time and resources as a journalist reporting that? And I think it’s like that being there, part of it can’t. And so I think when I’m looking at sort of in the future world of what we’re ultimately sort of competing against in a lot of ways, what can we do every single day that kind of makes it distinctive for wherever else you can get your information from? And increasingly, I think of that in the terms of AI.
