Ideas - PT 2: How Journalism is Fighting Against Polarization

Episode Date: October 29, 2024

The crisis in journalism has been blamed for the social and political polarization visible the world over. But newer forms of journalism may point a way out of the quagmire that the media itself has dug everyone into. IDEAS contributor Anik See explores how we got here and where we may be heading in a two-part series.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. The media was in this bizarre business of selling shoe ads to fund war reporting, business of selling shoe ads to fund war reporting, to fund investigations into corruption at City Hall.

Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Then one other thing happened. The platforms came in and took all the money. The introduction of digital platforms in the early 2000s broke the financial model for traditional or legacy media. Ezra Klein is one of the co-founders of Vox Media, and he's confronted that fact firsthand. The big platforms kept the advertising revenue. It could target that advertising at the consumer

better than you could. At the same time, the rise of those digital platforms gave voice to everyone. And things got loud. Telling it doesn't make it true. The constant shouting that defines so much of our era is a symptom of the extreme polarization erupting from the seismic fissures on the media landscape. They're suffering in Dallas. they're suffering in California. As part of our series, The New World Disorder, Part 2, contributor Anik C. explores how the media itself may offer a way out of the polarization

it's been complicit in creating. The question now is whether journalism as we've known it, as the fourth estate of a functioning democracy, can survive. Journalists themselves have known for a while that the media landscape will never return to what it was. So now what? My name is Eve Perlman, and I'm a journalist. And I've been a journalist since the mid-90s. I've been a journalist since the mid-90s. I founded an organization called Spaceship Media in 2016 on the heels of that presidential election,

really looking at the role journalism has to play in building community and supporting productive, meaningful dialogue. On the surface, that doesn't really sound like the role journalists have usually played. But maybe that's the point, because the conventional role of big media doesn't seem to be working anymore. Where we have gotten tripped up and we continue to get tripped up with is the ways in which the old systems of listening to both or all sides, and my fingers are doing quotation marks, have been hacked by actors who are paying no attention to truth or, in fact, actively subverting it. And two, by our habit in journalism of reproducing at face value or in vermatum things that people have said,

even though we know they're not true. And so there's habits of practice that are really hard to change and that's where eve perlman and spaceship media come in and a project they call dialogue journalism where they bring together residents of divided neighborhoods or those on opposite sides of an issue like gun ownership so one of the things that's fundamental to the dialogue journalism process is it's an invitation to community members to talk to one another. They also have another project. It focuses on journalists themselves. It's also an invitation to journalists to think about their role a little bit differently and how they interact with people and how they practice their craft. And one of the things that I started to hear was how divided newsrooms are. The fault lines are often, but not exclusively,

between older journalists who have more traditional ideas about objectivity and reporting and younger journalists who have grown up with the internet and everyone online saying whatever they think. And our society is much more pluralistic now, with more diverse lived experiences on display. We were hearing stories of people just not really communicating openly and not being able to do what you need to do in journalism, which is to really discuss things, right? In an ideal world, you're talking vigorously about a story, what's included,

what isn't, how it's framed, all those many, many, many micro choices, you're having dialogue around it with your editor, with your co-workers, so you get a better story. For older journalists, reporting the news objectively requires checking one's perspective at the door. Stenographer, that's what you are supposed to be. We don't want to hear you. Write it down. Write what the information is. Take it down. You're there to literally convey what someone says, someone in power, what they say, and you bring it to people who want to know. You just go ahead and report what one side says, what the other side says, and that's it. This is actually something that a lot of people who work in media believe you should do.

They think it's actually unethical to go out of your way and tell the audience or tell your readers, you know, who's right and who's wrong. It's supposed to challenge those in power, not just, you know, serve as a platform for them. So even her colleagues created a training workshop that helps journalists of all generations uncover their own motives. It skips over this whole idea of objectivity, which can be like a can of worms, but really just says like, who are you and why do you do what you do? And it turns out most journalists do what they do, at least in part, because they want to do good in the world. Once the journalists on opposing sides are made aware of their similarities, they become more open to discussion and critique with their peers, even if there are differences in age, experience, and approaches to practicing journalism. The fundamental driving belief is that

when there are more people in the mix, when you're able to say, hey, did I get this right? Or what did I miss here? When you can do all those things, you get more nuanced story, you get more in-depth story than when it's just you siloed. The best of us know we learn by listening and taking those critiques that challenge assumptions that maybe you didn't notice in your own work. Realizing their own assumptions and biases in the newsroom helps the journalists reflect the communities on which they report much more accurately. And when they do that, they begin to rebuild trust with that community. Eve was schooled, like most journalists, to be objective above all else and never to include

herself in her work. But her thinking about the principle of objectivity has shifted. But her thinking about the principle of objectivity has shifted. The invitation to journalists who've worked with us has always been to step away from what to me are false ideas of neutrality and objectivity in the negative sense of I don't have values and views. And what I mean by that is I can go and convene a conversation with people who disagree strongly with me, but I'm not going to pretend that I don't carry values and views. I'm not going to pretend that I'm not exactly what I am, which is like a white, educated, liberal, Jewish lefty, you know? When I lead with that, people can hear me because I'm not pretending. I'm not burying my views in the story, in what the anecdote in the lead is, or what quote I end on. I'm saying this is what I am, and my job is to serve you, and to help you, and to help you parse what can be really difficult information.

By being upfront with the public about herself as a person, Eve alters the relationship she has with the public as a journalist. I know that helps build trust, because when I'm real, it allows other people to be real. People are not stupid. They know when someone's coming to them in the pursuit of authentically engaging with them and authentically sharing their story. And they know when someone's extractive and hard. And so, you know, I think that trust is earned through every interaction and it's earned through every story and it's earned through acknowledging when you make a mistake. The antidote I see to all the dehumanizing

behavior is even deeper humanization. And I think that's been true if you look at social movements across time. It's how do you answer cruelty? You don't answer it with more cruelty, you answer it with more humanity. it with more humanity. At a time when news organizations are forever scrutinizing and being scrutinized when it comes to their perpetually shrinking resources, Eve has very specific ideas of where she'd allocate them. I would fund local journalism and I would fund specifically human beings. I wouldn't fund workshops and I wouldn't fund conferences and I wouldn't fund think tanks. I would fund journalists who are in communities, who are learning about those specific issues in that specific town that matter to that specific

people with all the specific players. You make a relationship. You show, I'm always here to tell you when the schools are closed. And I'm going to tell you what city council is discussing. And I'm going to tell you how this will impact you. And if I show up again and again, then I'm doing something in restoring community. Then I'm helping community have a sense of itself, a sense of what's going on. And I'm showing by example, a kind of measured, accurate, respectful way of being. Local news in Canada has been on the decline for decades and is now virtually non-existent. But in the past few years, new initiatives have emerged. Think of the Narwhal for climate change reporting, Indigenews covering issues about First Nations,

or the West End Phoenix, a local paper covering the diverse neighborhoods of West End, Toronto. Eve says the proliferation of fact-based news that hits closer to home aids its traditional role, helping to protect democracy. And how do you see journalism's role in democracy? I get emotional with that question because our democracy is struggling right now and journalism is struggling. And I believe with all my heart that a watchdog entity and a critical, discerning, educated institution that's extra governmental is vital to a functioning democracy. that's extra governmental is vital to a functioning democracy. And, you know, one of the things I find myself saying a lot is, if what we're doing isn't working, we need to change what we're doing. And the research is all there, you know, in local government, when there's a vital local journalism organization, government saves money because there's somebody watching where it

goes and how it's being used. And if there's anything nefarious going on or just not to stand or going on, it gets noticed. We need the wisdom and strength and power of people who are good at looking at what's going on and assimilating it and sharing it out. it out. So I'll take a page out of Eve Perlman's book and situate myself in the story I'm telling. When I mentioned to a friend of mine that I was putting this documentary together, she said, imagine if broadcasters switched the news around so that most of it highlighted all the good stuff in the world, and the last five minutes of each broadcast was the terrible stuff. That might sound novel and something of a huge relief these days, but it's already happening.

It's called solutions journalism. Solutions journalism, future-focused journalism, is to use old-fashioned reporting techniques to find something that's happening right now that could either be scaled up, possibly, to make the world better, or maybe it's happening in another jurisdiction, maybe it's happening in Europe, and we could apply some of what they're learning there here.

David Beers is the founding editor of the Ta'i, an independent online news magazine that began in 2003 and is based in British Columbia. Journalism designed to help the citizen peer into the future and imagine alternative futures and then possibly mobilize and organize and streak for those futures, which is a vital role in democracy for the citizen. and it's an empowering role. Before starting the TAI, David had written for Mother Jones and the San Francisco Examiner

and been a features editor at the Vancouver Sun. And when he began looking back on stories he'd written, he noticed something. The pieces that seemed to have the most resonance with the readers and that I felt the best about were not about fingering the bad guy. The pieces that stood out were pieces where, instead of asking what went wrong yesterday and who's to blame, they said what might go right tomorrow and who is showing the way right now. The difference between established journalism and solutions journalism

is the time frame they operate in. Established journalism tends to focus on something bad that happened in the past. Solutions journalism focuses on what's needed in the future. So, for example, in a piece he wrote for the San Francisco Examiner, David looked at the problem of urban sprawl, but then went a step further to see if suburbs could be designed and built in a better way. And one of the major people in the piece was a guy named Peter Calthorpe, who had a really interesting diagram for making denser, more

walkable, more livable, mixed-use, mixed-income communities rather than suburban sprawl. And when we published that piece, a big developer in California came along and said, this looks great. I would like to build a city of 30,000 people, according to your guidelines, which then happened outside of Davis, California. While he was working at the Vancouver Sun, David edited a piece on how pollution was damaging the ecology of the waters off the coast of British Columbia, and it recalibrated his thinking. What could we do to fix things? And we then proceeded to do four follow-up pieces on potential solutions,

and the government of Canada came along and pledged tens of millions of dollars to carry out some of those solutions. So, you know, basically identifying potential solutions, not claiming they're the sweeping total solution, but focusing on some positive change that could happen, and applying old-fashioned journalism techniques, reporting rather than spinning. The Taiyi wasn't the only one doing pieces like this. In the late 90s, a movement of journalists broke off from traditional reporting

and started to embrace solutions journalism. And it fulfilled a need not only for audiences, but for the journalists themselves. The other thing I was seeing in my field was burnout. I was seeing a lot of journalists who were angry that they were writing, quote, the same story over and over again, but things weren't changing. Because when you think about what journalists do, especially if we're trying to help sort through some possible solutions to the problems we all know we face, journalists have this amazing privilege of kind of buzzing around the garden. We go from flower to flower, plant to plant, talking to people, picking up a little pollen and bringing that pollen, that information, that perspective to the next person we talk to. If we act as sort of good faith conversation facilitators, as opposed to righteous exposers of wrongdoing, you know, we're acting a little more like a honeybee than a barking attack dog.

So that is the role that I think journalists started to want to play after a while, because they were seeing that they were sowing a lack of faith among the citizenry in the institutions that, flawed as they are, need to exist and need to operate for us to have a functioning democracy. I saw tangible, concrete change come out of some of the stories that I'd done that could go under the heading of solutions-focused journalism. My next two guests, Elisa Smith and James McKinnon, are the Vancouver-based co-authors of the best-selling book, The 100-Mile Diet, part culinary memoir. Remember The 100-Mile Diet, part culinary memoir. Remember The 100-Mile Diet? The book chronicles the couple's year of eating food that was grown within a 100-mile radius of their home. Vancouver

authors Alyssa Smith and J.B. McKinnon took a universal issue, global emissions in food production, and tried to solve it by seeing if it were possible to eat more locally within 100 miles of one's home. Well, our original idea was reducing the carbon footprint because we started to look around us and see apples coming to Canada from New Zealand when apples are grown in Canada, and it just started to seem a bit crazy. Drinking water from Fiji. Exactly. For example.

But as we went through it... That started out as a solutions journalism piece for Ta'i, and it went viral. Media across North America covered it, restaurants offered 100-mile diet menus, a TV series followed, and their resulting books spent weeks on the Canadian bestseller lists. And the term 100-mile diet is now a part of everyday language. The Ta'i doesn't only publish Solutions solutions journalism. It covers regular news as well. But when there's a long-standing issue, it tries to find extra funding and partnerships that will give them the resources to take a solutions journalism approach.

It did that for the housing crisis in Canada, pooling money from foundations and philanthropists to create a website called The Housing Fix and spent eight years reporting on potential solutions. It's the power of, instead of a one-off, funding a beat. In that case, we had a revolving set of super smart reporters who just worried about this one question all the time. And they quickly ramped up in their expertise so that they could get beyond surface reporting and do highly nuanced, interesting reporting. One of the pieces I was looking at today was

something done in 2017 by a reporter named Chris Pollan. It was about patient capital. It was about what if investors in housing didn't have to get as large and quick of a return on their investment. And he looked at two housing projects that were underway at the time that were penciled out so that the people living in them would pay well under 30% of financing housing, you're pointing the way for government and philanthropies to scale up, you know, to supercharge this approach and create results, you know, exponentially. It's the kind of information that decisions can be made on, whereas ideological spin is not. Right. And so it's about more than the readers, but about creating real change. It is. It's about, there are a lot of problems out there,

like affordable housing. We know it's a problem. It doesn't have to be explained to us one more time. Traditional journalism, which tends to focus on the bad news, has been compared to a doctor's appointment where there's a diagnosis, but no discussion of what your treatment options are. Solutions journalism offers something different. Can we have a discussion about what might go right tomorrow and who's showing the way right now? These two housing projects that were funded by Patient Capital and were able to deliver rentals, truly affordable rentals, were small scale. If you looked across Vancouver, very few new developments were funded that way. But the fact that they were working, that the metric showed they were achieving their aims, invites a whole host of interesting questions that are future-focused.

Could we have more of these? What stands in the way? Are there ways that people could collaborate, different sectors of society? Developers, architects, tenant advocacy groups, banks, policymakers, could we formalize methods for making this happen a lot more? So a story like that can catalyze that kind of conversation in society. Small reality check here. Solutions journalism is not the solution for all news stories. It's not appropriate for, say, breaking news about a war.

And the solutions that are highlighted aren't always transferable to other places. Harm reduction drug policies that work in Portugal might not be a good fit for L.A. But at the very least, it can get people to look at ongoing problems differently. We looked at climate change as a problem that everyone agrees exists. You really don't have to spend a lot of time, especially if you're a progressive-leaning publication like we are, you don't have to spend a lot of time

getting people worried about it. And so we decided, you know, we don't have infinite resources. We're going to leave it to other media to track whether government is missing its targets, to track who the worst polluters are, to track which countries create more emissions. What we're going to do is we're going to look at the stretch of territory from Alaska to California that British Columbia is part of that is a distinct bioregion. What we share are coastline and watersheds and temperate rainforest ecology. and temperate rainforest ecology. And we are going to simply profile enterprises,

non-profit and for-profit, that are low-carbon, climate resilient, employ people, and are succeeding. In other words, if we have to change, if we need a different future, what would it be like to live in that future? Well, here are some businesses that are indicative of what it might be like to live in this future. And you know what? It would be okay. They're living the solution. And they're redefining the idea of the good life. And the journalists that are working on these stories for us really enjoy it. And they come back and say, I love doing that story. What's the next one you want me to do? You're listening to a documentary by contributor Anik C about the role the media has played in creating the polarization we're all living in

and how it may help find a way beyond it. Ideas is heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National,

on World Radio Paris, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also find us on the CBC News app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. ShortSighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like

by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. ShortSighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. The idea of the press as the fourth estate is attributed to British statesman Edmund Burke in the late 18th century, when a press gallery was opened in the House of Commons. There were the three areas of governance or estates that everyone was already familiar with, the executive, the legislative,

and the judiciary. But in the press gallery, there sat a fourth estate, which Burke said was more important than any of them. That sentiment would be echoed by Oscar Wilde more than a century later, when Wilde wrote, In old days men had the rack, now they have the press. That is an improvement certainly, but still it is very bad and wrong and demoralizing. Somebody, was it Burke, called journalism the fourth estate. That was true at the time, no doubt, but at the present moment, it is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say,

and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by journalism. That era gave way to a healthier regard for the press, and the freedom of the press to question those who have power is largely seen as an indicator of how strong a democracy is. Since 2015, journalistic freedom has decreased dramatically, even in democracies, with leaders discrediting the press or engaging in outright censorship. crediting the press, or engaging in outright censorship. Banned. The BBC documentaries that dig into Narendra Modi's past in a way Indian reporters cannot. This episode by contributor Anik C is part of our series, The New World Disorder, Part 2. 2024 was a critical year for elections, with nearly 50% of the world's

population going to the ballot box somewhere. Russia, India, the European Union, Indonesia, Mexico, or any one of 60 other countries. And that's meant increased tensions, not only within society, but within journalism itself. I am aware of more and more discussions within newsrooms about, you know, how much airtime should we give to which actor? Maria Exner is a German journalist. From 2014 to 2022, she was online editor-in-chief at Die Zeit, one of Germany's largest news organizations. Do we have enough resources to do investigative work on things that will really influence the outcome of elections? So there is a heightened awareness

of the responsibility of good journalism in the run-up to elections. I think the downside is that we are now in a year where the ability of AI technology is really so strong and it's so accessible that we will see fake pieces of news coming up just before people are going to the polls to really influence people's political opinion. And so I'm afraid that at the moment, the powers and the odds are in favor of actors who know how to use both social media platforms and other technologies to really, you to really influence public opinion in their favor. There's been a lot of newsroom navel-gazing in the lead-up to the 2024 U.S. election. Mainstream media doesn't want to get it wrong, like it largely did in 2016.

Eve Perlman. I see a lot of effort being made to not simply both sides it, not reprint lies without pointing out that they're lies. I think it's slow. I think it's hard to change culture. every journalist covering national politics to pause for like 24 hours and just think about where their nation is and what's at stake. And then to work from that, not from fear, but from the importance of the power they hold to tell the story of what's happening here and now. the power they hold to tell the story of what's happening here and now. Fight like hell against the tyrannical Democrats and any Republicans who do deals with them. Well, I have been arguing that our press needs to become more pro-democracy because we have a threat.

Stop the steal! Stop the steal! we have a threat. Jay Rosen teaches journalism at New York University and writes frequently about the media. And the threat is the Republican Party as overtaken by Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. And that movement is specifically a threat to American democracy. It very much depends on a false claim that the 2020 election was stolen. That's a big and important claim. It teaches people that their vote doesn't count. And if people think their vote doesn't count, they're not going to vote, or they're going to withdraw, or they're going to withdraw or they're going to favor undemocratic means to get what they think they deserve. That's part of it. Another part of it is that Trump has incorporated into his political style a kind of hatred for the press. He's turned journalism into a hate object for his supporters. And that is

anti-democratic in a very deep way. That is what is polarizing the situation. So we no longer have two parties that operate in the same way, but have different ideologies or different priorities. And there are several other threats like this to the press and to American democracy that make it impossible, in my view, for journalists to just sit around and observe these things. observe these things, they have to find a way to become more engaged and more ready to defend democracy than I think they sometimes are. It hasn't always been this way. For a couple of months between the November 2020 election and the January 6th insurrection, journalists started to shed their cloak of neutrality, or so-called neutrality, of simply reporting what both sides had said, whether what was said was correct or not.

The peaceful transfer of power, the cornerstone of American democracy, seemed a highly abstract concept today. They noted how dangerous it was to challenge the results of a free and fair election. They rejected this campaign to discredit the election. Earlier in a rally outside the White House, Donald Trump encouraged his loyal base to fight to overturn the result of this bitterly contested election.

And no doubt they did that because they knew what the results were and how damaging it would be if a free and fair election were overturned through the threat of violence. That was so extreme that some of the rituals of both sides and, well, maybe he has a point and the sort of the norm of bringing you what both parties said without participating in either one of their campaigns, that whole idea was suspended for a while because there was this danger of Trump being able to overthrow the powers that keep democratic elections free and fair in the United States. And so that was a defense of democracy. However, once that January 6th was assimilated and a new president took office, things sort of fell back into, on the one hand, on the other hand, two-party system. But for a few months there, life was different for our journalists,

political journalists. The American press isn't built to report on a political system in which you have one normal party and one that's coming close to anti-democratic. one that's coming close to anti-democratic. And that's an unsolved problem in newsrooms today, is how do you cover an asymmetric situation like that? Jay Rosen thinks journalists have fallen into the habit of covering what newsrooms nickname the horse race. Who wins by how much, as though it's a kind of sporting event. Who wins by how much, as though it's a kind of sporting event. Often, well over 50% of total coverage is just about the race. And that's something that I had been criticizing for a very long time. I started writing about the horse race as a very limited view of politics in 1988.

The horse race style of coverage is still dominant in the U.S. and Canada. The horse race approach is fairly simple. You design news coverage that can reliably report on who's going to win, who's ahead, what's their strategy, what do the polls say, how likely is it that this candidate can beat that candidate. The thing that I think would be better is sometimes called citizen's agenda model for political coverage. And what's different about it is that it doesn't start with the candidates or the race or the likelihood of Smith winning as opposed to Jones. Instead, the Citizens' Agenda Movement begins when a newsroom asks the people that it's trying to inform a simple question.

The question is, what do you want the candidates to be talking about as they compete for votes? candidates to be talking about as they compete for votes. If you can ask not hundreds, but thousands or tens of thousands of people that question, what will happen is that over time patterns emerge in the public's priority list for the campaign. Because that's what you're trying to do. You're trying to get at the priorities that voters have for their candidates, as opposed to the likelihood of candidates winning over the voters. Then the next step is you publish that list and you essentially say to the people that you're trying to inform, this is our priority list. What you told us was important to you is also our priority. And so you use that list to do the things that you do in covering elections. You use it to drive important questions to ask of the candidates.

The list of what we want the candidates to be talking about as they compete for votes can also be a guide to where you place your investigative resources. Once you've been able to get the candidates to discuss everything the voters said they wanted the candidates to discuss, you have done your job as a newsroom operating in a genuine democracy. You can still inform people about the race, but you don't have to devote all of your election coverage to that. So this model emerged pre-web in 1992. It's been around for a long time, and we are finally starting to see newsrooms, different types, declare to their communities that this year, 2024, we're going to be guided by a citizen's agenda approach. Newsrooms participating in the citizen's agenda approach during the 2020 election cycle

reported an increase in the size of their audiences and also reported an increase in trust between them and their community. Nearly 90% of those newsrooms said they were better able to listen and respond to their communities. And they all committed to using the same approach in 2024. We've also seen among some editors who are telling their communities as they think about what they want to do in election coverage this year, that they are going to demote the horse race, meaning they're going to place less importance on it. And I think that's a significant change as well. So this is a model that I think can work. It's most likely to be attractive to local news providers and local newsrooms I don't have much hope that NBC or CBS or CNN is gonna go in this direction

And so we'll have to see how well some of these local newsrooms Do to know if the citizens' agenda approach has a future. What are the stakes if we continue along the same path? Well, in some ways it means journalists will become bystanders to some critical events that could change American democracy forever. And if they become just watchers and observers and pundits and estimators of who's going to win, if that's the role that they take during an election that may decide the

future of American democracy, I think they may regret that. So that's stakes. And the MAGA movement is in many ways a complete rejection of journalism, the way it has been done post-World War II in the U.S. and in Canada. Half, at least, of the electorate will or already has abandoned the press. has abandoned the press. And this is something that I think people don't know enough that at least 90% of the subscribers of New York Times and Washington Post are two biggest news rooms. No more than 10% of that audience are Trump voters. 90% of the subscribers are either Democrats or independents. And so in a lot of ways, there's a nation out there that isn't consulting the press, isn't informed by it, considers it an opponent or enemy, and not only jeers at journalists, but just feels that their reporting is a lie. That development is exceedingly dangerous for a democratic press.

The Ta'i started using the Citizens' Agenda way of reporting during the 2009 B.C. provincial election, but with a twist. David Beers. We said, we're not going to cover this election as a horse race. Other people will do that, we can not going to cover this election as a horse race. Other people will do that. We can be sure of that. We're going to put the questions to the candidates that you, the readers, want us to. We have the power to show up at these scrums or events or get an answer online.

So we're going to do that. But we need to know what you care about. And so we polled our readers, and at the same time, we asked them to give us some money to do a better job of covering the election than we were able to without the money. It was an approach that was unconventional, so much so that David appeared on CBC Radio's As It Happens that same year to explain how it worked to host Carol Off. So David, what do your readers get for their money? Well, they get a sense of sitting in the editor's chair. We asked them which issues mattered most to them. And they list the one issue and they give us whatever they can. And that money is put in a pot that's dedicated to covering that issue.

And then we're able to hire more reporters to do more in-depth reporting about that specific issue. So are people able to buy stories then? Is that what this is about? No, they're able to invest in reporting on an issue. Buying a story is a little different. They're not telling us how to go about writing the story. They're not telling us who would be in the story. They're certainly not telling us what we might conclude in the course of reporting on the story. What they're saying is this is an issue I want to know more about,

and I think the TAI is pretty good at finding out things. So go find out about this and report back. And how much money have you raised so far to cover these issues? We've raised $13,600 in a week, which is about three times more than we expected. What's the average donation? I can't remember exactly what we raised, but I think it was at least $50,000. And when you think about it, an election lasts, what, I don't know, six weeks or whatever, formally. That's a fair amount of money to spend in a brief burst. That burst resulted in really specific requests from readers for the Ta'i to cover during that election. Issues like claims that the National Democratic Party made in their platform on gas flaring and emissions,

and a welfare-to-work program from the liberal government that hadn't delivered. But about half of the donations didn't come attached with an issue, and that was a vote of endorsement for getting out of the horse race approach. Up to that point, the TAI, as an online publication with no paper copies to sell and not much advertising to speak of, had been considering other funding models. By the time I was on As It Happens, we'd started to really explore a membership model. And our thought was, if we actually invite people in, show them how we do what we do, and help them participate in some of our editorial decisions and even how we gather the news. For example, we sometimes asked our readers to lend some expertise or some insight or even some content in the way of photos or what have you to our stories.

If we made this more of a communal process, we said, I wonder if people would join us the way they'd join some other organization. And so people contributed. It was incredible to see. Today, the TAI, 20 years after our founding, gets the bulk of its budget from people who give us $12 a month, even though we don't have a paywall, even though you can read the Taiyi for free. This year, we'll bring in over a million dollars that way. So it's a real confirmation of this idea that if you reach out and include your readers in the process of imagining, framing, and carrying out your news, they will reward you and they will support you financially and in other ways. With the media landscape and democracy itself in flux, the big question is not only reconnecting with the public, but where that reconnection happens.

Part of thinking about an ethical way to do and distribute journalism, what does this have to look like in the future, is really something I think that not enough news companies think hard enough about. For Maria Exner, part of the problem is the physical construction of traditional media organizations. In Germany and other European countries, most of them are located in their own buildings outside of city centers, in gated parks, and far from the people they serve. And if they meet other people, then they mostly meet other journalists or they meet politicians. And I think it's not a surprise that more and more people out there feel absolutely estranged from the people providing their news and that they

get ideas about how journalists might be steered by the governments and influenced by the governments because they never see each other. We really need to restart the conversation between the citizens that journalism claims their work is for and the journalists and editorial teams who do this work. The one that's in the back is Publix. For Maria Exner, the future looks like a building,

a 65,000-square-foot building called Publix that helps journalists play a larger role in strengthening democracy. This building, Publix, is there to question the way that the journalistic world works. Maria is the founding director of Publix, which is partially funded by a foundation dedicated to non-profit journalism and bringing together different arms of news gathering.

We want to unite editorial teams and non-profit organizations working on polarization, disinformation, and doing investigative journalistic work under one roof to kind of present an alternative ecosystem that can maybe produce new experiments and that can really try to come up with ideas of how to change the relationship to your readers, how public discourse should be organized and in which digital spaces and how these digital spaces should be governed and moderated and ruled. Because, frankly speaking, I have the feeling that the traditional media companies are not the places where the answers to these problems that we've been talking about will really be found.

The idea is to bring together different types of media organizations into the same space so that together they can have more impact. For example, pairing an NGO that works to prevent disinformation with an investigative journalism startup, or an institution that focuses on media literacy with one that researches polarization and online hate speech. Combining journalistic forces has another goal as well. To inspire people who might invest in the setup of these media companies that have a different connection to their readers, that really look into what are the topics that this specific audience needs to know about, where do they have not enough reporting on topics that are really important

to them being able to participate in civic life in a good way, and more questions like these. Publix is not located in the suburbs, behind a gate with security guards, but in the middle of Berlin, in one of its most diverse neighbourhoods. When I visited, it was still being built, and the majority of it will be secure office spaces for NGOs and small media organisations, as well as a place where international teams can come and collaborate. Parts of it are also open to the public as a place to meet,

create their own media, attend workshops and encourage debate. The idea for the whole building was to really connect very public spaces, such as the one that we are currently standing in, where the neighborhood can come in and get a coffee and go for lunch and maybe have a small aperitivo at like six o'clock in the evening. And also here you can come and be part of, you know, kind of maybe seminars or be part of a conference or you can rent one of the studio spaces that are also here on the ground floor. We have studios, audio and video studios. so both the public and the organizations work inside the

house have very easily access to actually being able to do media production like an ecosystem based media house which functions totally different than a traditional media house where nobody has access they never do any public outreach within their buildings. Nobody can, you know, kind of use the infrastructure who is not part of the editorial or publishing team. By inviting people in, they will learn about the kind of work that's been done in the house. I think we might be able to really initiate kind of a wave of new media companies and small media projects being set up all around Germany.

And this, in the end, I think really has the potential to change public discourse. I think we really as media industry and journalism industry really also need to invest in this next generation of readers and listeners and viewers and in their ability to even you know distinguish new sources and value the product that we provide. Because if we don't do that, or if nobody does that, people will probably be content with the kind of information they find on social media platforms. As we were about to leave the public's construction site, Maria's phone pinged.

Alexei Navalny, a victim of both disinformation and an authoritarian regime, had died. He'd been imprisoned by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2021 and spent his last months in failing health in one of Russia's harshest penitentiaries. His supporters accused the Russian government of issuing fabricated charges and of wrongful imprisonment. Hearing that he died at that moment was an ominous reminder of anti-democratic forces on the rise and made the principle of the fourth estate all the more crucial. On my walk back to the train station, the main road and park leading to it were blocked off. Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky was in town, signing a security agreement with the German chancellor. Helicopters circled over the chancellor's residence in tighter and tighter circles.

A few streets over, a pro-Navalny demonstration had already started. That afternoon in Berlin, it really hit home for me. Just how fragile the moment we're living in is. The attacks on the press, the attacks on democracy. But despite the disturbing news, all the noise and shouting and the fences blocking all the traffic, nearby, the Bundestag, the iconic German parliamentary building, was still open to visitors. And as I stood there taking it all in, I saw people continuing to stream inside.

They were still drawn to seeing democracy in action. Thank you. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for Ideas. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Nikola Lukšić is the senior producer. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.