Offline with Jon Favreau - A Newsroom’s Fight Against Misinformation in the Black Community

Episode Date: April 17, 2022

Lauren Williams, former Editor-in-Chief of Vox , sits down with Jon to talk about launching Capital B News, a new local-national nonprofit news organization that centers Black voices. Together, they discuss how the murder of George Floyd inspired a “great reckoning” in newsrooms; how this new organization is aiming to rebuild trust in the black community by providing high-quality, local reporting; and the ways the media has failed people of color in its coverage of Critical Race Theory.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast. 

misinformation, disinformation, lack of trust in institutions that has been caused by, you know, centuries of systemic racism, huge problems. How do you even start to go about fixing those as you guys are sitting down and putting this plan together? Yeah, like we can't fix all that. We can't fix that. We can't fix systemic racism. I think that too often this conversation, particularly around misinformation and disinformation, is just too ambitious. You know, like, how are we going to solve this? Well, people lying. Well, we'll shut down Facebook and Twitter first and then go back to like landlines, no cell phones.

I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. My guest this week is Lauren Williams, former editor-in-chief of Vox and now founder and CEO of Capital B News. So last week, I happened to catch part of the University of Chicago's conference on disinformation and the erosion of democracy. My old boss, Barack Obama, sat down for an interview. There were also a few offline guests who spoke, like Kara Swisher, Charlie Warzel, and Abby Richards. But the panel that stuck with me the most was about the ways the media establishes and builds trust with their audience

in an online environment that's filled with misinformation. And Lauren was one of the speakers. She talked about the media's failures in covering something we've all heard too much about, critical race theory. She talked about how much of the national media tends to frame critical race theory as white parents being concerned about what their white kids are learning at school, and pointed out that we usually don't hear about the perspectives of black parents, black kids, and black educators. Then she talked about how she's working to solve

this problem. Earlier this year, Lauren and fellow journalist Okoto Aforiata launched Capital B News, a non-profit news organization that focuses on Black voices, audience needs, and experiences. In an age of clickbait and hot takes, Capital B is novel. As a non-profit, they're free from the demands of ad revenue or subscriptions. And as a media outlet that focuses on local as well as national news, they have a team in Atlanta, they're setting up newsrooms and communities as a way to rebuild trust between journalists and the people they cover. In fact, Capital B's mission is to, quote, be an antidote to the misinformation, disinformation, and low-quality, low-context news that clouds our information pipelines.

I wanted to talk to Lauren about this mission, so we met up in a studio in D.C. What followed was a great conversation about how Capital B is trying to chip away at the flood of online misinformation and take on systemic racism by going back to the basics of journalism. Rebuilding trust in the communities they cover by telling the complicated, nuanced, in-depth stories that matter to those communities. By trying to make sure that some people's voices are finally heard. As always, if you have any questions, comments, or complaints, feel free to email us at offline at crooked.com.

And of course, please rate, review, and share the show. Here's Lauren Williams. Lauren Williams, welcome to Offline. Thank you. I'm so glad to be here. Well, I heard you speak at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. I guess it was the disinformation conference last week. And I wanted to chat because we spent a lot of time on this show talking about how the internet has contributed to the problems of disinformation and institutional distrust.

You're working on a solution in capital B that's both specific and creative, which is trying to rebuild trust in black communities with journalism for black communities. But I'd love to start with sort of the journey that got you to where you are now. You were editor in chief at Vox until February of 2021, I believe. Yes. Okay. When and what made you start thinking, maybe I want to do my own thing? I wasn't like thinking about this for a very long time. I mean, in the back of my head, obviously, I think in the back of everyone's head, there's a sense of like, what if I started a business within my profession, but nothing close to like, I'm almost there in any way, shape or form. But what changed that was really the summer of 2020.

It was, if you recall, if anyone can recall, a difficult time for a variety of different reasons. And just from the perspective of a leader in a newsroom, which was Vox at the time, it was just simply like one of the hardest moments of my life with combined personal and professional. I was at home with my four-year-old who was autistic and my baby trying to run the newsroom. Times were tight in terms of, you know, advertising dollars. And so all media companies were cutting back. And the stories we were covering were really difficult and thorny from the pandemic to the George Floyd protests to the primaries at that point. And it all combined to, you know, create almost like a powder keg

within me of like, what am I doing? What is happening here? What is next for me? And I think the place where it kind of solidified the most was around, you know, being a black woman in a position of authority and privilege in a newsroom, which is relatively rare, watching the quote unquote reckoning happen in the journalism industry where black journalists at the time were, you know, rising up and saying, you know, the way that we've been treated has been unfair. You've ignored our ideas and our criticisms about how we cover Black people and Black communities. And also, many of us have been pushed away from covering these stories, painted as biased simply because we're Black. And it occurred to me that, you know, the experience that I had, the experience that my co-founder and friend, Okoto Foriata, had, we could really take that and put it towards something that felt much more in that wild moment. Something that would be really, really, really worth how hard everything was. And it's like, if it's going to be this hard, we should be channeling our expertise

towards something that's not already kind of happening. And that is the moment that we really decided to branch out and do a thing. What was it like directing and shaping the coverage of george floyd's murder and the subsequent protest um there's no newsroom that feels like they have enough resources or enough people and we i just we didn't have enough people and and um and harder in a pandemic and harder in a pandemic and harder when you're covering a pandemic and you're covering um all the other news that's happening and i you know the story was so multi-layered that you know

finding all the ways to wrap our arms around it was was difficult and i think you know i think we did some good work on it and i think we did some good work on all of the many stories that we were covering. But because of the remote aspect of that moment, it was hard. It was a really hard story to do justice. thinking about a news organization that wasn't pulled in quite as many directions and could really focus on and center black people in the coverage. How do you think that the national media as a whole handled covering the protests? And like, did you have personal reactions that you felt weren't being reflected in the coverage? Yes, I always do. Again, this is another part of why we're doing this, but I think that the lack of diversity in America's newsrooms played out in a lot of different ways during that coverage. And one of the things that really bothers me about coverage of Black people in mainstream media is, you know, it's just this like, well, polls say that this is how Black people feel. And we're going to sort of just like go with that incredibly flattened picture.

And I think there's other groups in the country like, you know, working class white people who don't get flattened in that way and in fact get a lot of attention. They don't just get the poll. They get the diner interview. Yeah, they get the diner interview. to police our desire for safety in our communities um and the ways that those things really can clash against each other often um that was just missing and and so it it it be it became to me also after after a while a story about white people's awakening to black people's problems in this country. And because that's what kind of was happening to the white people in newsrooms. And that's certainly not really the story of what's happening here. And so like it ended up, I think it just lost the plot. And of course, there was really great work done during that time in all kinds of newsrooms.

But I think you look back at it and also look back at what's kind of happened since. It just was very reflective of the issues that have plagued mainstream media forever. Right. Which is you do get some real substantive good investigative journalism and then there's sort of a hive mind uh dynamic that just flattens the whole issue and everything becomes very two-dimensional and it's sort of boiled down to like you said what's the polling one side is saying this one side is saying the other thing and it's all caricatured and then we're sort of like moving on because no one can like pay attention to anything for longer than a week right and then where i and then where i was at vox to return to the previous question is is just

like as a black woman editor-in-chief i felt an enormous amount of pressure on myself that we should have like the perfect coverage and it really like to a moment that was already incredibly stressful became like a real stressor for me of like am i am i appropriately representing and also like i was the senior vice president at vox so i was in charge of our business operations so i was also not always i can always focus like 100 on editorial and it just became this sort of like weight hanging over me of like other people can mess up but I can't mess up and that's um that's that's like a really heavy thing to to deal with which I didn't think about at the time and I've just reflected on since it's like part of part of the struggle yeah it was it was a brutal

summer regardless of where you were and like it's interesting you talked about the um how you also handled the business side too like we were all there at the beginning of the pandemic or in a couple months in when all the advertising dollars seemed like they were going to dry up and we didn't know if they were going to come back right right you're like well that's how we all run our companies here yeah yeah and so like i want to make sure everyone has their has a job and we're in the middle pandemic and their insurance and and job security and so just it was a it was a balancing of a lot of different um stressors so you start thinking about your own news outlet um and and while the floyd protests are the catalyst i imagine that

as you looked across the media landscape you know there must have been other challenges you were trying to solve gaps you were trying to fill you started as a reporter at the at the daily press in newport news um can you talk about sort of how you saw the industry change for better and worse from the time you were in that job until you um left box oh man um i or some i guess some of the some of the big challenges that as you were starting as you guys were starting capital b you thought right these are the holes that we're going to try to fill yeah i mean you know i actually don't know if they still say this in journalism school but when i was in journalism school 20 years ago um the piece of advice for younger

new reporters was like you start out at a small newspaper and work your way up and that is like the path yeah that you have to take and i um particularly then such a rule follower that i was like i will do exactly what my professor said I should do and started a small newspaper and work my way up to Washington Post at that time was my early, early 20s in a newsroom that wasn't incredibly diverse and also was in some ways older. And I didn't feel like it was for me. And because of that, I felt like a failure like i had gone to j school to do this thing and i'm i'm like covering um a board of supervisors meetings that i barely even understood but i really didn't care about um so and it's dry super dry and i was like well you know newspaper no i'm i'm out of here and and um my career ended up veering much more towards digital. But I think now there's tons more options. Right. I think there is much more diversity. And this is a good and bad of of news sources for people to work at, particularly straight out of school that can teach you journalism skills in different ways. But I think that what that early newsroom experience

taught me was that local news, which is in decline, is going to continue to have a black journalist pipeline problem. But the only thing that we focus on is like saving the business model, right? Because it's not just about figuring out what to do now that the advertising can't be the primary revenue driver for local news. It's also figuring out how to do better work and reach more people. And if these places can't be places of comfort or places where younger people, people of color can feel like they can thrive, then those cultural issues will persist. And I don't think they're totally separate from the business issues. And we're going to be leaving wide swaths of of audience behind what are some of the the blind spots or mistakes that most media outlets make when covering black america obviously we talked about like one one problem is not having enough black journalists in the newsrooms but when when

they do cover black america what are some of like the biggest the most common mistakes i think it's kind of different when you when you're thinking about local journalism and national journalism but i'll talk about local journalism here and i think one of the biggest issues is that they they only cover bad things that happen in black neighborhoods um and there is a really interesting study out of the center for media engagement at the university of texas that um talked to a bunch of of black uh news consumers or potential news consumers about how they feel about the media. And most of them have never met a journalist or seen a journalist in their neighborhood in real life. And I think that that is just an enormous mistake in terms of building audience, but also in terms of building audience but also in terms of building trust if the only thing that you kind of care about in your coverage is the worst things that are happening right so when when you guys sat down just what were those early conversations like um i guess you didn't

really sit down together because in the middle of the pandemic it was just telling me calling and zooming it all started actually on a text where um uh okoto and i were and and another one of our friends is journalist janae desmond harris uh we were all just kind of talking and okoto and i just very casually kind of said what if we started something to address all of these things that we're complaining about and talking about and then like a few days later we zoomed and then we wrote a concept paper and things were rolling but like honestly our early conversations were so um what they were so similar to what we ended up actually doing um we came up with an a, an idea that we really like stuck with, which was that we think that really ambitious original reporting,

investigation, accountability, journalism on the national level by and for Black people is kind of missing. And we wanted to fill that hole. But we also very much care about the decline of local news and are concerned that all the sort of energy on the sidelines to revitalize local news are white-led and are either interested solely in invigorating institutions that have never done right by black audiences or black journalists or um helping to prop up uh organizations that are white-led for for white audiences and so we wanted to be a part of that we thought it was really, really important that we focus on local Black audiences that haven't just lost news in recent years as the news has declined, but have never had it outside of the legacy Black newspapers that are in most major cities. And so we were really

serious about finding a local element there and making it a little bit different than what we were trying to do nationally, making it more community-focused, making it a source that the community could feel ownership of. So having community engagement editors who are interfacing every day in real life with community members, understanding what they want out of news with

information they feel like they're missing is and incorporating it into our editorial strategy that's an interesting job how does that how does that work there those editors are just going out into the community and meeting with folks and yeah going to going to community meetings um i mean when a few weeks ago like they just walked around the mall, um, in Atlanta and talk to people and got a lot of stories out of doing that. Um, you know, we haven't started doing this yet. We just launched on January 31st, but we are, you know, we're going to have like in-person convenings, um, almost like town hall type meetings, like what a politician would do,

but, but just to find out from the audience, like what, like what they want to know, what they're missing. What was the thinking behind becoming a nonprofit? The thinking behind that was that we wanted to do the type of journalism I just described. So not quite a business model that would allow you to do that and be a for-profit. Yeah, not quite. I mean, and I've said this before that I think, particularly in that moment, when, you know, everyone was having their kind of brief awakening, I think we could have gotten funding to start it as a for-profit. I just don't think that we would have been able to sustain a business that was solely for profit. I mean, we want to have a diverse model as a nonprofit and have sponsorships and events along with all of the various ways that we have philanthropic revenue. solely on um advertising or subscriptions or um or other types of earned revenue it just

it didn't seem possible i think we would have major mission creep where we would end up covering entertainment and and feeling like we had to publish more stuff and um you know really or even a clickbait but also just like more and the more part of it makes is a is a real drain and and makes it so that you can't be thoughtful and you can't be as careful as you want to be and you can't talk to as many people and do as in-depth reporting and what we really we're so audience focused that we really wanted to give people really high quality. And I wasn't positive that we could do that

as a for-profit. Yeah. I really want to zero in on the misinformation part of this. You know, one of the lines in your mission statement, we aim to be an antidote to the misinformation,

disinformation, and low quality, low context news that clouds our information pipelines do you think the challenge with misinformation and disinformation looks any different in black communities like what what made you want to focus on that issue i think they're ties that bind across many different demos. And one of the major ones is, I think, a trust in institution thing. I think you can find someone on the very far left and the very far right who both believe that you can't trust anything that government

or official sources are telling you. And I think black people sit kind of like in the middle of that but the mistrust is rooted in racism right in systemic racism um and so it you know it plays out in government it plays out in medicine it plays out in in journalism that you know we've been burned and why wouldn't that keep happening you know you mentioned that uh ut study what else have you learned uh about sort of the uh the news and information diet of most black americans is it i feel like there's two challenges with this writ large which is one people getting information from untrustworthy sources and then two sort of a just disengagement altogether with with news and political news um which again is you see across many different demographic groups

i think i mean there's those two and then i also think that there are people who what we found is is. Black people who are not as susceptible to misinformation and disinformation. Are very interested in the news, but feel like what they have is not for them, is not. Covering them or their experiences well. I mean, this UT study, you know, a lot of the respondents, they do trust the media and they consume it, but they don't trust the media to tell black stories. They don't trust the media to understand them and they don't trust the media to do justice to stories about what's happening in their lives or in their communities. And so that's a weird, again, like you can't flatten everything. Like that's a weird sort of contradiction there where like a lot of black people might be really loyal to their local news sources but know um that they're highly problematic when it comes to covering them and this is like kind of just like a metaphor about living being black

in america where like you know we can be really patriotic but also deeply deeply deeply mistrustful of um the country because of what the country has done to black people and i think you know it plays out a lot in in various institutions i think it plays that media too well you mentioned this example uh in chicago but the coverage of critical race theory i mean it is striking that wherever you fall on the issue whatever like none of the stories are you don't see people interviewing black parents black teachers black students and and how they're dealing with these eruptions in schools and in local school board meetings it's all like from the white parents either from the right-wing activists or from the other parents

who don't agree with it but like the effect on on black americans who are in these school districts the parents of teachers like it's not it's not a big topic of a lot of these stories. Right. And the long term effects of it in the places where these laws are being enacted. And, you know, the idea that what is likely going to happen is black teachers and black administrators are going to be just mistrusted just for being you know and i think you know i'm 40 years old so this was a long time ago granted but you know i grew up in virginia and i know personally what it feels like to be in a classroom being taught history that whitewashes slavery. And like, I remember my burning cheeks and my, and like feeling so almost gaslit, although I wouldn't have known that word back then, that like, I know from home, I know from my own reading, I know from movies I watched what was really

happening here and the effects of it. And what I'm being taught today is leaving all of that out. And I still feel it. I still remember what that feeling was. And nobody fucking cared. Nobody, you know, like nobody was like, oh, this is, nobody cared. Nobody cared about that. Nobody cared about that for the black kids. And to the extent that things are changing in classrooms, I'm not even sure they are that much but to the extent that they are um it's sort of just a such a disheartening thing to see something that would have made me feel less alone in those moments being criminalized yeah um over white parents fear and then to top it off it being covered only from white perspectives and that's it's it's infuriating well and i think the other problem there is when it's only covered from white

perspectives the ultimate goal is to sort of persuade people that this is the right thing to do to teach this full history in our schools the story you just told about when you were in school is such a powerful persuasive story and when you don't have that story in these stories that we're reading then people aren't persuaded because it's only here in the white perspective you know and like that's not the kind of thing you get on twitter or with quick stories like you actually need sort of longer complicated complicated interviews, I think, to bring those stories out. Right. So like misinformation, disinformation, lack of trust in institutions that has been caused by, you know, centuries of systemic racism, huge problems. How do you even start to go about fixing those as you guys are sitting down and putting this plan together?

Yeah, like we can't fix all that. We can't fix that. We can't fix systemic racism. I think that too often this conversation, particularly around misinformation and disinformation, is just too ambitious. You know, like, how are we going to solve this? Well, people lying. Well, we'll shut That's a tough one. Well, we'll shut down Facebook and Twitter first and then go back to like landlines.

No, no cell phones. Like, it's just it is a huge, sweeping, complicated problem. And so the reason that Okoto and I feel confident that in some small way we can try to make a difference here is because we're taking a much smaller bite of the apple and thinking about how to combat misinformation in local black communities by creating actual relationships with the people we want to be our audience and giving them the things that they've always wanted and haven't gotten. And it's not just thinking of them as people we need stuff from, but thinking of this as an exchange of information. You tell us something and we're going to tell you something. And I don't think that that's not true going rampant through the community. Or when there are some real questions about vaccines that we'll be able to be a trusted source. And I don't think that we're gonna like convert everyone but i think that there are some people who are just on the edges and they'll always be on the edges they want to be on the edges and like but i think that there's a a very big group that that just doesn't have

trusted information and we want to provide it and and the important thing is providing it for free and providing it at a local level so you guys you have a a team in atlanta you have an operation in atlanta and then you have a national team but it sounds like you guys are gonna like figure out different cities yes so sort of replicate what's going on in atlanta over the next five years we want to be in around eight cities and that's and that's because part of the philosophy is that local news and being in the communities is one way to actually sort of build this trust.

Yes, like you have to be there. And we're really prioritizing hiring people who are from those places. Our whole Atlanta team has a connection to Atlanta. Either they've never left or they grew up there and and left and have come back to home to work for us and you know part of that is having a connection to the community helps you it adds a layer of um a layer of caring really like if like this law is going to affect your grandma or the school where you went to sixth grade, that feels different than if you found a really good job in Boston and still moved to Boston to cover transportation for the Boston Globe Translation Report, I'm just saying it is a different

that is what we're doing is kind of different than what is traditional where like the best journalist gets the job and that might mean that they have to spend quite a lot of time learning the community and building trust within the community. And

at a baseline our staffers can say like i have a connection to this every media company like wrestles with the challenge of building an audience in a fractured environment where there's unlimited amounts of content competing for people's attention most of it shitty clickbait a lot of it isn's attention. Most of it's shitty clickbait. A lot of it isn't true. Almost all of it is online, especially in people's social media feeds. We think about this at Crooked all the time. How do you think about competing for people's attention with long form, high quality journalism when there's so much crap out there? I realize,

obviously, the nonprofit model takes some pressure off but i imagine just you know your goal even if the goal isn't to make a profit but it is to get people's attention how do you think about that that challenge um i we in in very many ways there is not just one way um you know i think the in-person community engagement locally is a way to try to make that difference. That we can think about this not just from finding people on social or digital and finding people online, but actually finding people in person and working a kind of word of mouth thing. There's, you just released some research recently that, you know, they polled black people

about their science news habits and some very high percentage said that they get their science news from like friends and family. And that is a very like, like you know salient part of like the the in-person communication thing like yeah like if you're not going to read us online like how else can we grab you um and i think you know we also want to do a lot of partnerships where, you know, there are news organizations that have a lot of audience that we're trying to reach, but maybe won't have the same resources

that we do that we can share reporting with. There are news organizations that have a lot of resources that we don't have, maybe not the audience, but can work with us on creating something really ambitious that we can serve to our audience. And so we're looking at partnerships from two different ways. And I think that the nonprofit model really does kind of open up. It eliminates a lot of competition that exists in for-profit world and opens up a lot of opportunities to just work with a bunch of people,

give people our content to publish. Yeah. opens up a lot of opportunities to just like work with a bunch of people, give people our content to publish. Yeah. Um, and, and it doesn't have to be from going to capital V news.org. Like we're not, we don't care.

I mean, we care obviously about traffic, but like not like that. We care about audience and it doesn't, it's not always going to be website audience. Well, how do you think about younger audiences? Right. Because they consume less news think about younger audiences, right? Because they consume less news or on websites more, less,

have less trust in institutions across races. Like, do you have like a TikTok strategy, a Snapchat strategy? Like what? Yeah, I mean, we're going to have to. We don't have the resources yet to have TikTok yet. But like, I mean, that's kind of what we're thinking and and i um the local strategy means that we can kind of go in and like spend some time understanding the demographics and like where people are getting their news and then tailor our outreach strategy to that like in atlanta you know there's tons of black colleges. There is, you know, a large younger black population. And so we want to be really creative about how we're reaching them. There could be some cities that we go to where populations use older and we might want to think about creating a print product or something that that might reach that demographic more efficiently.

Local radio partnerships where we could for free give daily news briefs. And yeah, we want to think about it in really creative ways and no one size fits all. If there's a city where literacy is really low, maybe our website isn't the place where people are going to get our news. So how are we going to think about that? That's cool to have all those creative ideas on how to crack that one.

I'm sure you saw the New York Times sent out a memo about its social media policy last week where Dean McKay encouraged the staff to meaningfully reduce how much time they spend on Twitter and warn that feeds become echo chambers. What's your thinking about reporters using social media and particularly Twitter at

capital B? It's funny. I was thinking about doing a thread about this the other day, but I was like, I don't want to do a thread about this. But I have a few vantage points on this like i know why newsroom leaders hate their reporters being on social media because it's where drama is created and it can be external drama but it could also end up being internal drama.

And it takes away from your ability to run things, to think about the stories that we're writing. If you're constantly trying to look at people's Twitter feeds. I mean, it's the worst. It's the worst. Because you, when you were at Vox too, part of your job is to probably monitor everyone's or to like see what's going on when your reporters are getting in Twitter fights, right? I mean, yeah, but like, not like the Vox people are getting in tons of Twitter fights, but I guess you've had your, but like the, the, the, it's the monitoring part of it that, um, actually don't have time to do. And so what would, what ends up happening is there's sort of like a disproportionate kind of um feedback

loop that you might get and so you might not know you're not gonna realize that this is where i'm going with this but like for that reason i think that like too many rules are bad um because they're impossible to enforce equally um even if you are enforcing them equally people are not going to think that you are and that creates a major drama um and i think that um like kind of when you have rules they are um there's so much nuance to like what's a a bad tweet? What's a good tweet? Um, I think you end up sort of freezing the people who are really rules oriented so that they don't do what they want to do on Twitter. They're not promoting their stories.

They're not feeling like they can show their personality. And then the people who don't follow the rules or are blind line towers, um, will do line towing. And, you know, then it's always like, did this person break the rules? Did they not? It is dumb. And so I think that I think that the fewer rules, the better, because rules mean you have to enforce them um and i think dealing um much more one-on-one with people who are not behaving in the spirit of your organization online makes so much more sense and it's so much

less dramatic and i know that that's much harder to do when you have an organization as big as the New York Times. But just in my opinion, social media policies are, I know that we hear about it from a worker perspective often on Twitter, and those are the people that you see talking about it. But I think that they're an incredible drain on leadership. Yeah. Well, there's the drama issue and the rules. Did you also have problems with, you know, reporters writing a piece and you're like, this very well reflects what the conversation is on Twitter, but it may not reflect what's actually going on in the country. Yeah, I mean, I think every newsroom has to have that. And then there are people who, the reporters who are like trying to correct for that and then they also end up doing the same exact thing because they're on twitter seeing the conversation and being like i want to talk about you know what's really happening but then anyone who's

not on twitter is like why are they even writing this like what is this in response to i'm so confused and that person thought that they were like um that they were being the antidote to to the twitter loop and so so yes i think that shadow shadow boxing your tweets yes what tommy vitor calls it we mentioned something on the pod that was like just something on twitter why do we mention that on the pod no one knows what we're talking about that was our tweet right but no one knows what you're talking about thing is is i think huge and and um I think local helps with that too because there's just not as much happening there um for it to get like dragged into but I think that the hard thing is is like for opinion reporters or opinion writers or people who work in newsrooms that um maybe don't have the budget to fly you out to places or that have a daily deadline.

Like, it is hard not to get caught up in that because you don't have time to find other stories. And so I think that for employers to really say, like, get off Twitter, and I think the New York Times can because they do have the resources. But I think for employers to say, get off Twitter and find your own stories, they have to kind of make space for that. Yeah, give people the resources to do it. Give people the resources to do it. Otherwise, you know, you do Twitter stories and they end up doing well because very online people who are involved in those arguments are reading them and sharing them or hate sharing them and

that gets rewarded. So it's now been a little over two months since you guys launched I think. What do you think the biggest challenge is going forward? Hiring. We still have a lot of hiring to do and it's a pandemic and we're a startup

and I think that it'll be a while before we still have a lot of hiring to do and it's pandemic and we're a startup and um you know i think that they'll it'll be a while before we are you know i think there's a startup person who's like yes i want to join the startup and build and there's and there are the like i don't want to build people and um finding those people and weaning them out is always hard in the startup and i think the other thing is um just continuing to keep the momentum going on fundraising on you know building and continuing to grow we raised a lot of money to start um and that's great but then like the the weight on my shoulders is like oh we have to keep actually it doesn't stop i will have to keep raising the money and um who knows and you know i i alluded to this earlier

but like you know striking while the iron is hot when people are really interested in racial equity really thinking about um uh racism in america and um worried about misinformation and disinformation uh that's not gonna last forever and um wanting to basically shore up our business so we're ready for the moment when people are like well i don't care about black stuff anymore i'm not gonna fund this anymore that's absolutely gonna happen right because again our attention span is very short um last two questions i'm asking all our guests i just added added a new one on this what were you doing the last time you realized you needed to put your phone down when was the last when was the last

time you were like i'm too online i gotta i gotta take a break um can i ask a follow-up question sure is this about what you were doing like outside of the internet or like what were you were doing like with your phone that made you like can you remember a time recently just a time recently when you were like i gotta i gotta unplug like i'm too um i actually think that i just mentioned it when i uh when i was looking at the social media conversation about social media policies, and I was like, I have opinions here. I'm going to weigh in. And then I thought about it and I was like,

does anybody want this from me right now? Does it need to be said? Does it need to be said by me? And does it need to be said right now? Are three questions that more people should ask themselves. Those are great questions. Yeah. That's a great, I love that piece of advice.

And what's your favorite way to unplug um i have a six-year-old and a two-year-old and for the last um year and a half i've been really busy building a news organization from scratch and i haven't spent the amount of time with them i mean mean, they're around, particularly during lockdown. Like, they were there. But I wasn't there, you know? And so I want to spend more quality time and do what my son calls, like, adventures. Because he feels like he's missed out on some things because of the pandemic.

And he has, like, all the little kids have. So finding little ways to like try a new experience, plant something in the garden or cook something or go on a day trip. I know that it's not like the greatest. It's not self-care, but it's something that makes me happy to see discovery in his face. Yeah, that's so nice. Lauren Williams, thank you for joining Offline. This was great. It was wonderful to talk to you.

This was fun. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Andrew Chadwick is our audio editor. Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis, sound engineer of the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Tanya Sominator, Michael Martinez, Andy Gardner-Bernstein, Ari Schwartz, Andy Taft, and Sandy Gerard for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Melkonian, and Amelia Montooth,

who film and share our episodes as videos every week.