'We won’t get credit for authority if we don’t convey authenticity'
It was a conference of “hard truths.”
Nieman Lab local news staff writer Sophie Culpepper and I spent yesterday at the GBH Media Summit here in Boston. The audience heard from industry and philanthropy stalwarts as well as newer voices such as climate news influencer Lauren Bash and the founder of hyperlocal news site Down in the County Andrea Bruce. But the conference was ultimately defined by its heavy public media presence, including CEOs from Detroit PBS, St. Louis-based Nine PBS, Arkansas PBS, and, naturally, GBH.
“Today, we heard a lot of hard truths about where we are,” GBH president and CEO Susan Goldberg told the audience as the summit drew to a close on Thursday.
Goldberg did not know that at 11 p.m. — just a few hours after the summit’s closing cocktail reception — Donald Trump would issue an executive order seeking to end federal funding for NPR and PBS. But the “hard truth” of a president antagonistic to the free press was in the air.
“The challenges we face will still be here tomorrow,” Goldberg said. “I do know this: people will remember how we act at this time.”
A few other takeaways from the summit:
“What’s your only?” Nine PBS CEO Amy Shaw and Arkansas PBS CEO Courtney Pledger both said focusing on what their station — and only their station — can provide was driving better decisions in their news organizations.
“Don’t just tell the truth, show the truth, show the evidence.” Retired Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron advocated for newsrooms to adopt policies of “extreme transparency” as political leaders seek to fabricate and manipulate the truth. In a world where technology, advertising, and news consumption habits are changing rapidly, Baron noted, “inertia is a decision, and a fatal one.”
Experimentation is “imperative,” Baron said, in part because the customary formal tone adopted by many major news organizations is no longer resonating. “We won’t get credit for authority if we don’t convey authenticity.”
“We have a lot of work to do, and we need to get to it,” said Texas Tribune co-founder and senior advisor at Emerson Collective Evan Smith. “There is no more important time for all of us in this room to get to work.”
‘Tis the season for journalism conferences. This week we also published datelines from Copenhagen, Denmark (where Andrew Deck attended the Nordic AI in Media Summit) and Tempe, Arizona (which hosted the Society of Environmental Journalists’ conference attended by Neel Dhanesha).
This piece was originally published in our Weekly Wrap. You can subscribe to that newsletter — or our daily version — here.
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