the zip local podcast episode 3

In this episode of The Zip, we cross the great divide into the land of local journalism. I spoke with Mary Miller – President and CoFounder of the NC Newsroom Cooperative, a coworking and support space for local journalists. We discussed the decrease in newspaper funding and the rise in popularity of branded content, and what these changes mean for local nonfiction writers.

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Megan:
This is the third episode of The Zip. In this podcast, I, Megan Hannay of Zip Sprout, interview badass marketers and storytellers on all the things local. From local link building to PR, branding and web UX, I ask each guest about their brains, best practices and favorite philosophies over Wednesday morning coffee… So, in this episode, I spoke with Mary Miller of the North Carolina News Cooperative, which is a non-profit group in the Research Triangle Park Region of North Carolina that aims to connect journalists with brands who want to support them and provide those journalists with the resources to build their craft. Mary and I talked about local news, brand journalism and how in a digital age, even storytellers who use to be able to rely on their outlets to find audience, now have to work to find audience themselves. Kind of like how I, in this podcast, am looking for you… So, thank you! So even though Mary is not a marketer, she sees stories as a product of entities that should aim higher than a disposable newsflash… Also, just FYI, I’m a bit new at this and Mary is such an interesting person with so much to say that she launched into telling me about the cooperative as soon as I sat down, and I was like, “Oh, crap. I got to turn on the mic.” So the chat begins in immediate rest, with Mary talking about Kid Ethnic, who’s a freelance writer and artist local to Durham, North Carolina, and was one of her early recruiting attempts to the Cooperative… Let’s get started.

Mary:
So he came out, because I was like, this is the kind of guy we need. And, we had a long discussion at the Frontier. He’s based out of American Underground. And he was like, “I love this, I think it’s so important, but…” He said, “The last piece I did, I wrote a piece for the The Guardian about the Chapel Hill shootings. Anybody would call that big clip or journalism, but I don’t think I can call myself a journalist because I can’t afford to do it.” I mean I have to… He said, “I have a friend who just, you know, got a piece in the New Yorker, but he’s like literally starving.”

Megan:
I know that’s crazy.

Mary:
So, this is… this was really… this made me pause. It made me realize, OK. The landscape around us is shifting so fast in technology that you’re focusing on… what’s hard is that all of these journalists have been laid off or taken by us, and they still want to do this work because they believe in it and it’s so very important. And they now have to be business entrepreneurs, and they also have to learn to do, you know… most people worked in one medium, but you can’t do that anymore. You got to be able to cross over. You have to walk, you have to write, you have to audio, you have to do visual, you have to be able to do mobile… You know, there’s this huge steep climb on the technology side. But there’s also a cultural shift, I think, taking place that we ignore to our peril, which is that people can’t afford to do this work unless they have some kind of steady income stream… And that I think traditionally so much value of the ethics and credibility of journalism was placed on the outlet. If you had a piece in the New York Times, that was a big deal… We should be valuing the act of its creation; if it’s ethically produced. It matters a little bit less of where it lands because we know… I mean, I know people who are doing spots or content but it’s still created in an ethical manner, and if you are transparent about that… if you label what you’re doing, whether it is sponsor content or whether it is coming from an advocacy view point… then I think it shouldn’t denigrate the act of what that good reporting is. You know, and that that is a shift that must occur. And so, that made us kind of go back to the drawing board a little bit and say, “OK, wait a minute.” I knew…and the other co-founders… Hugh Stephens, who is a media law expert, and Seth Efron, who has been an online sort of digital journalist pioneer and has worked as assistant to curator at the Neiman Foundation and done a bunch of stuff and been in North Carolina for a long time and, actually, worked easily as press secretary. I mean, he has a wide and varied career in non-fiction storytelling, shall we say. We realized that it wasn’t enough to just say, “Let’s build this place right for independent journalists. We have to define and nurture this entire new media ecosystem.

Megan: 
That’s a big undertaking, though.

Mary: 
Yes, it is! It is, but you know, the question is what do we have here? We are uniquely situated. We, in our small group here try to build this little newsroom, have some amazing assets that I think that some journalism startups don’t. And that thanks to the resource Triangle Foundation does, which in full disclosure, my husband is Bob Geolas which is the CEO and president of that group. They have given us the space and furniture, so we don’t have operating costs. We don’t have overhead, and that’s really sort of the biggest hurdle to most entrepreneurs. That’s why this frontier has been so successful because you can get an RTP address, and a fully furnished office and WIFI for a very affordable amount of money. But, what we’ve got to do is bring together all these different kind of storytellers who haven’t necessarily worked together before. And, you’re really talking about some of these folks who have been laid off, who have been through hard times, who have… you know, they’re kind of battered.

Megan:
Right. And because it has changed so much I think… Twenty or 30 years ago, you would get a job at a newspaper. I mean, people still do, but it’s so much less common.

Mary:
Very few people do. There’s so much more work going out that’s contracted.

Megan:
Or free. There’s Medium now… You put it up and you don’t get paid to put stuff on Medium, and there’s amazing stuff on Medium.

Mary:
It’s interesting, isn’t it? The technology has brought this stunning democratization of voice and storytelling. In many ways, if you have a smart phone, you can capture live events, put it on Facebook. I mean, look at all that has happened even in the last year, it’s astonishing, right? So there is an argument can be made that, “Well, if you have this tool, you can be a reporter covering this scene.” Of course, content is not context. So, it’s not reporting… It’s recording live events, but that is not the same thing as telling me, what does this mean? What has come before? Framing the entire issue… That is a really difficult skillset that should be valued, we think. We are very lucky in this area to have a lot of people who are very good at it. We’ve got the universities… we’ve got Carolina’s School of Mass Med and Journalism… We’ve got strong newspapers and many new emerging magazines and digital publications. But what we also have something that, I think, lots of other places don’t. We’ve got all these people who are developing interesting distribution platforms. That’s the tech side… And they haven’t worked with journalism or journalism hasn’t worked with that… Or, what happened was is when you live in a traditional news room, you just took that for granted. There would be an IT person. Right?

Megan: 
Right.

Mary:
Now when you have to do everything yourself, you can learn how to use WordPress, for instance, but it takes time. It’s hard. I need support. And so, we understand that that group has to be an essential part of this functioning ecosystem but we can’t, they’re here. They’re interested in the quality of journalism as citizens. They know they need quality information. It’s been a very encouraging and interesting endeavor to be reaching out to some of those people, and some of them we had to figure out… We’re not even sure who do we need to have at the table for these things! But we know that even among our, sort of, core members that we have not… We hope in October… I just looked at that because I thought we had calendars up… We hope in October we’re going to really start pushing for membership. We are still working out how those tiers are going to function and who’s in this tent. How do you make the distinctions? But, among our members already, we have members who are digital publishers, [inaudible 10:07] Green Magazine, North Carolina Network… We have straight, sort of, freelancers. We have people who work mostly at a national level. People are working at a local level. People who are working on broken toilets trying to launch a magazine that are trying to launch a magazine at a global level development options. We’ve got… We’re covering all kinds of stuff in terms of what our members are doing. A lot of them are paying on shoestring budgets to have a website… This hasn’t been announced or anything, but what if we provide that in-house? To drive costs down because really the goal needs to be…

Megan: 
So you would provide developers?

Mary: 
Developers.

Megan: 
That’s so cool. Would they be volunteers or would they be employees?

Mary:
I think we will start out hoping that some people will volunteer their time. That’s why we organized as a non-profit cooperative is because everybody has to give up their time and talent, understanding that we’re not going to crack this nut unless everybody comes together and works together on this. But, realizing that we have to help drive down the cost – financially and the cost time wise – in doing the business of journalism for these people is essential.

Megan:
So, they can work on the stories.

Mary: 
Right! Because it’s hard enough to do journalism.

Megan: 
It’s a full time job for a reason!

Mary:
It’s a full time job. So, now we’re looking at ways to bring that to bear. What we’re really offering is, on it’s basic level, is space work, opportunities to network, opportunities to learn in cross platforms and hopefully, this sort of network, or safety net, of business support… Lots of people don’t know even basic things. If I’ve always worked for any kind of outlet, whether it’s radio or TV, and now I’m out on my own or I’m with this digital startup, how do I invoice? How do I handle my taxes? What is a business expense? You feeling that?

Megan: 
Oh, yeah!

Mary:
So all of these people have to be a part of this ecosystem to make this function and reach out. So that’s trying to define what this ecosystem looks like and who is in it is a pretty big climb up a hill. But people are here, and they’re willing. There’s a great… Research Triangle Park was built on the generosity of spirit… It’s still here! Look at the Frontier.
Megan: 
Right? It’s works! It’s crazy!

Mary: 
In many ways, we’re a microcosm of what is happening at the Frontier. People are coming together, and they’re figuring out, “How do they work and live in this new way?” That’s what we are doing is trying to do this for people who are non-fiction storytellers. And there are people who want to tell these kinds of stories. There are podcasters who are starting interviewing North Carolina political candidates, for instance, a guy I’m getting ready to meet with next week. There’s the News and Observer that just recently launched this college university website… It’s called College Town… We see all of these opportunities for journalist entrepreneurs who may already have a depth of expertise to launch something because they’re already a brand in their own right. People know so many has written about or covered high school sports journalism in this area for a long time. They have this well defined audience that’s craving information. They’re craving opportunities, and I think there are amazing opportunities in the whole world and realm of food writing. Not just sort of the cultural, new restaurants sort of stuff, but, you know, agriculture is still the number one industry in this state. It ties everything… It ties economics and social justice and politics…

Megan:
You know, well, right around here we have helping create products to make food more growable [sic] and sustainable.

Mary:
How do you gather all of the people who are not just restaurant reviewers but people who are telling the story through the lens of food? We think there are just many ways to help those people to come together regardless of the medium that which they choose to work… But to work together and raise the quality of coverage… We really have to be this catalyst. People say, what are you? In some ways, it’s easier to answer what we are not. We do not intend to be a publication or a statewide digital news service. We don’t employ reporters or journalists, but we support them and strengthen them and elevate their reach and quality of their storytelling, and hope that that serves the greatest purpose of more information citizenry. It can all sound very noble. But, we all recognize that there are many aspects of private business, non-profits and government agencies who are starting to recognize the value of true storytelling… They know that and they know that it is a little bit different than sort of PR spin. They also know that some of them have very complex stories. Just like pick any number of companies cooperate in the park, it takes a certain type of reporter who can understand and go deep on that and tell the story that is engaging, that is accurate and that conveys what they are doing. I think that holds true for government, universities, agencies for private businesses, and I think that another aspect of what we can offer is some sort of story consultation… Help people see their stories.

Megan: 
Among all of the information.

Mary:
How do you see your story? How is it reported? How do you tell it? Which ways do you tell it?
Megan:
You’re talking about how brands begin to see their story and storytelling can be a part of sharing your brand. But at the same time, it may be sort of different than traditional PR methods. So, how would you… actually, my last interview was with someone who does PR. He’s been doing PR for 25 years and he also is a big believer in story… But, I feel like the idea a lot of people have about PR is that, “Oh, you put out a press release and then you email a bunch of reporters, ‘Are you interested in my thing-a-magig-er [sic]’?” So how would you recommend that someone on the business side engage with some of these journalists that you’re working with who might be looking for stories or might be working on a story that, you know, is related to a certain business. How is that changing?

Mary:
What we hope is that people can come here… We applied for a grant that we didn’t get in the first round but we’re going to go back and try again… We envision creating something sort of like Etsy. Alright. You know the concept of Etsy. But for storytellers… You can go in and find out of our members who does what, what kind of work, what kind of expertise.

Megan: 
Interesting!

Mary: 
We also do recognize that there are lots of people who have ideas about ways to tell stories, but they’re just coward by all these different forms of technologies. I’ll give you one example is… I believe right now that, in this state, the real home of long form journalism are the university magazines. OK? If you think about who reads those magazines, it’s really people who have access to believers of power. They’re potentially very, very sharp tooled. Also at an economic journalist, a lot of times university magazines pay very well. Pays better than a lot of other jobs.

Megan: 
Interesting. I didn’t know that.

Mary:
That’s a place where maybe traditionally they might have been viewed as a little more “fluffy” and not hard hitting investigative work. But, I think that they are changing. People are growing more sophisticated about what they ingest and can fact check. And say, “Wait a minute…”
Megan: 
But, how might a brand go about talking to a reporter for a university magazine about getting something that they’re doing included in that?

Mary: 
I think that this is part of an in-story consultation side of what we hope to offer is to be able to put together complex projects that require lots of different communities. Maybe you need data visualization person, and you need a data journalist, and you need a reporter and you need a podcasting specialist. How do you go find all of those people? You know, there’s all kinds of people that say they can cover this or this, but how do you know who’s a person that has depths of knowledge? Our hope is that the people who belong to the cooperative do so because it is a sort of certain level of credential. Anybody would come here and know these are the people who have a depth of experience, knowledge and commitment, and ethical standards.

Megan: 
Got it. So would you work with brands here or are… I guess, what I’m saying is for a brand that’s listening and wants to work with a local journalist, how might they either work with a cooperative or if they’re in another state, how would they approach or how might they find people who might want to cover their story without doing the old method of a press release or a million different emails… Is there a different way you think may be better when working with storytellers?

Mary:
I think that there are ways people like yourself, like Laura Baverman does ExitEvent They’re doing some sponsor content. I’m trying to think of wildly things that people I’ve been working with that are doing sort of concrete examples to give you… I think that they’ve got several, I think a bank, is doing sponsor content. They’re not necessarily saying “you have to cover this.” Our people right now, I can tell you, if Coke comes in and says, “We want a great story about Coca-Cola.”, that’s not… We don’t see that as a pathway… We want to maintain independence.

Megan:
So if Coke were to come in and say, “We want stories about people living a fulfilled life or something?” You know…

Mary:
Right. If there’s any kind of health stories or something, you know, we can steer them to the people who have those kinds of expertise. Ultimately, it will certainly be the journalist decision at the end of the day whether they take that job or not… And by the way, if there’s a potentially… a potential for a conflict, we have a certain member of the board to address that to try to keep everybody on the level where there’s transparency and accountability. But you know… Here’s an example, there’s a guy who use to work at the [inaudbile23:19] who had a column called “Take It Outside.” Joe Miller. Really good column, lifestyle column. He works now, I think, for BlueCross BlueShield. They have an invested interested. They’re a brand with an invested interest in having people live healthier lives, right? Because that makes their costs go down. So, he writes a column about things you can do to have a healthier lifestyle… I think that’s a way… He’s not a member of our group yet… But to me, that’s an example of a when… You know, is he doing his storytelling any different before he started writing for a mainstream outlet? You know, I’m not sure, but I don’t think so… So why would… You know what I’m saying? To try to draw back to the point about the real quality of the column and not necessarily where it lands. The platform that it appears in.

Megan:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So, I guess kind of more a left field kind of question… How would you describe the brain of a good journalist or even a good local journalist? What does a good journalist see that other people don’t?

Mary:
Well, a good journalist is always curious. Number one – always curious. I think that good journalists stop and ask “What am I seeing? What am I not seeing? What is in front of me that I may be missing and I need to ask more questions? And what am I not understanding?” Then they’re sort of ready to go that extra mile to say, OK… I’m just thinking about an example… One of our members Kathy Kliby is a terrific science writer… She was talking about doing a piece for university magazine about a Durham’s tree canopy. Science piece. All of the trees were planted essentially at the same time and a bunch of them are dying now.

Megan: 
Yeah, I’ve noticed!

Mary: 
So, they have issues… But, because she’s a terrific journalist, she realized there’s so much more than just this story about the ecology or environmental impact.. But if you map it, there’s a social justice component to this story because many of the Black neighborhoods didn’t get trees. So now she’s saying they’re trying to right some of this by planting trees but that in many of the tougher neighborhoods, the more violent neighborhoods, residents don’t want the trees because they see it as a security threat. A tree is something somebody can hide behind and maybe mug them. I never…

Megan: 
That’s so much more complex! Yeah!

Mary: 
Right, so much more complex… You would not… That is seeing something for the trees. See far beyond than the trees.

Megan: 
I like that.

Mary:
It’s having that curiosity, and I think that she’s a great example of somebody who says, “OK, here’s what we’re seeing, but what are we not seeing that’s definitely a part of – or may be part of – this story?” As an example of what the cooperative does, we’re seeing they’re going, “OK you wrote this piece about this one very specific angle to it for this publication but this angle is so much more interesting, and it’s probably not just Durham but it’s probably a national trend,” right?

Megan:
Right.

Mary: 
So you’ve done all this work and how do you take this further, and where would it land? You know, that’s the kind of things that we are trying to think… How do we extend the reach of journalism?

Megan: 
Yeah. That’s such like a small question that really just exposes. So let’s say that a locally based company, IBM, came to you – the newsroom cooperative – and was like, “OK, we want to get started in brand storytelling. Where do we start? Like, what do we do?”
Mary: 
Well, I think we’d want to go in like any reporter and sort of say, “Let’s take a look at what we see here. What have you done in the past?” You would go through their proverbial clip file, right?

Megan: 
Right!

Mary: 
Find out what they’ve done and who they are and what is really… I think that lots of journalists are valued for telling the story, and sometimes they’re denigrated for telling the story, but they’re not valued for the ability to see the story. That is a real skill. It is something that is not just skill, I think it’s craft. I think it takes time to be able to connect those dots and to see life experience… So, I think that’s probably how I would approach or suggest. Let them in. Let them loose.

Megan: 
Let them run around and peak in the corners!

Mary: 
Let them run around! Tell us where our story is that you see… Which is probably a pretty scary risk for a company.

Megan:
For a company, yeah. It’s a different way that… For companies, it’s been keep everything under lock and key and only let out certain key messages and stuff.

Mary: 
Well, because you’re going to craft your message, right? But I would argue that there are also a lot of companies that they don’t really know their story.

Megan: 
That’s true.

Mary:
I think that you can’t be the most successful you are if you don’t have the insight to… How do you operate? What are you doing? You know?

Megan: 
Even if only just for internal. If you’re a big company with thousands of employees… What are they working for? What is there… Beyond just a paycheck? Final question! If you could have lunch with any journalist, who would you sit down with over lunch?

Mary:
Joseph Mitchell.

Megan: 
Why?

Mary:
Joseph Mitchell… He’s sort of a… I think Joe. Just Mitchell, I should tell you is a late, great writer for the New Yorker for many, many years and he’s a North Carolinian and he went to Carolina. He did not graduate because he left right before the Great Depression. He grew up in Robinson County and he sent… on the strength of like one piece that he had written about the tobacco market… He got hired by some papers in New York, and this was kind of in the golden age of print reporting. He covered the city in a way that is just fantastic. Very sort of narrative journalism. There has since been a recent biography that has come out about him. He played a little fast and loose with facts in some of his pieces for the New Yorker, which to me is hardly surprising because he’s got some stories where there are quotes that go on for a page and a half… I mean, come on. They didn’t have technology or tape recorders back then.

Megan: 
They didn’t even have computers to type, right? For writing.

Mary: 
Still, he was able to convey this sense of New York and it’s people and this sense of place and time that really transcended fact to truth. Right?

Megan: 
Right.

Mary:
Right, and I’d like to have lunch with him.

Megan: 
So that was my chat with Mary Miller. She is, as you can see, is one of the most interesting people that I’ve ever met, so I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. And, thank you for listening to another episode of The Zip. If you liked it, please, please share on Twitter or @ZipSprout or follow us on Sound Cloud or iTunes. I’ll be back next week with another conversation, and in the meantime, have a baller Wednesday.