(upbeat music) - Hello, and welcome to "The Journal."

I'm Steve Kendall.

The BG Independent News is an online source for local news in and around Bowling Green, an ever-changing and challenging media environment, and our guests are the two principals from the BG Independent News, Jan McLaughlin, Dave Dupont.

Dave, you're starting your ninth year.

Just talk about why you initially started this.

What was the, you know, why an online newspaper versus the traditional print thing?

Because obviously that's the way things have gone.

You were kind of ahead of your time when you decided to make that move.

- [David] I think we were part of what was happening.

There were a number of factors going in.

Part of it was personal on my part.

I had been working for newspapers for 30, 40 years or so, and I was walking to work one day and just thinking about all the stories I'd written.

I'd written over a million words.

- [Steve] Wow.

- I own the rights to none of them.

- [Steve] Interesting.

I thought, "Well, how, with the digital media, how can writers, how can reporters, take some control of that?"

So I quit the newspaper job and just went out, really expecting to earn no money at this.

I was just on my own.

I started a medium.com site, and then about a month later, Jan found herself free, and we were wondering what we were gonna do.

We talked to Elizabeth and John Robert Sybill, and they had been thinking, they were local.

John was involved in the internet and doing website designs at that point.

They were sort of thinking about, well, local news, a local news site, and all of a sudden they had at their disposal two people were there who were veterans.

In Jan's case, a very highly respected reporter.

In my case, a reporter, a journalist, but somebody who had a specialty.

What I brought to it is I really covered and specialized in the local arts, in the local arts scene, and including Toledo, so I had a strong specialty in that.

When I left the paper, much of the comment was, "Who's gonna come out and review our show?

Who's gonna let us know what's happening?"

And that fit the bill, so here we were, very inexpensive to launch.

It was not a major investment.

Jan and my spouses agreed, and the investment was ours.

We're the owners, operate as an LLC.

We're the owners of it, and we have been cash positive for four or five months in.

I think we had paid ourselves back and brought in.

It's very low cost.

We're not getting a lot of money on this, but we are cash positive.

- [Steve] That's something to be said for any startup in any kind of field.

Now Jan, when you wrote your first story, and we'll talk about the very first story in just a moment.

Was it different to not say, "Oh, look, there's my story on paper," versus "Here it is, I'm looking at it on a computer monitor or a TV screen or whatever."

Was that an easy transition, or was it like, "Oh, that's different.

I'm used to having it, holding it in my hand when I'm done."

- [Jan] And I still like paper, paper products.

It was strange in that I had gone a whole month without writing, which was the first time in 31 years that I hadn't been writing pretty much daily.

I wasn't sure if I would remember still how to do it, and so it was a really good feeling when we launched the site.

We really had no idea what would come of it, but it was a good feeling, and the community responded.

They were looking for a source of news, a reliable source, and we took off from there.

- [Steve] I think too, and you mentioned that too, that besides a reliable source, obviously two people with deep roots in the community.

People knew who you were, how you wrote, why you wrote, that kind of thing.

But the other thing is, it provided an alternative, because one of the things, it's the danger of journalism and media markets, is the shrinking number of outlets.

I can see this when I look daily at the BG Independent News and the print newspaper that's still in town covering the same story, but you get different pieces of information.

The core of the story might be the same, but you get different pieces around that that you wouldn't get if you only had just one source or the other.

I think that's one of the values of this.

Now, the deadline situations and things, well, let's go back a second.

What was the first story, before we forget to talk about that?

- [David] The first story Jan covered, the headline was, Jan's headline, "School's Gay Straight Alliance Honored for Silence That Speaks Volumes."

And it was, they received the Drum Major for Peace Award that's given out by the city.

- [Jan] Human Relations.

- [David] Community relations, and it was published on January 16th, 2016.

Seems like yesterday.

- [Steve] Seems like yesterday.

- [David] And just a clarification, the actual site wasn't launched for I think a couple weeks.

This was published, our original stories were published on my medium.com site.

When the site launched, we did use some of what I was writing, because I had been writing through this period.

Not daily, not daily, but I had written things before.

We had populated the site with some of those writings that seemed appropriate.

- [Steve] Now, when you looked at that first story or how you went about deciding, okay, what's gonna be our debut, our premier items, what was that discussion like?

Because obviously that's a pretty important first step, to say what's gonna be the first thing people see, because we know about first impressions and everything.

Was there a discussion about what story should be that debut story, or was that just a, that just fell into place that day?

- [Dave] I think it fell into place.

I think it was just a community event that was coming up.

- [Steve] And covered a lot of.

- [David] And should have been.

We're proud to have that as our first story.

I think that really set the tone for what we would focus on in the community, and I have to say, we had a beautiful photo with Shane Hughes, who we had worked with, provided the photo of Martin Luther King that accompanied that.

Jan had not taken many photos, because working in more traditional medium, and earlier in my career, working in a union shop, reporters were discouraged.

Reporters are discouraged to take photos unless it's convenient.

I've taken photos.

Jan actually was, you were a photojournalism major?

Yeah, you were Jim Gordon.

- [Steve] Well, when we come back, as we're at the end of the first segment, I'd like to talk more about how the decision making about stories when you first started out, because obviously it evolves like everything does.

We can talk a little about what's different now compared to that first week of operation, or the first editions, however you want to phrase that.

Back in just a moment with Jan McLaughlin, David Dupont of the BG Independent News here on "The Journal."

You're with us here on "The Journal."

Our guests are Jan McLaughlin, David Dupont of the BG Independent News.

Jan, you mentioned you had 30 days where after writing daily, daily, daily for years, you hadn't written.

When you sat down and did those first stories, what was the process used to say, "Well, this is the story I want to cover here.

This is a story here."

Was that different than when you were doing print media, per se?

What was your thought process about what stories should we put out here?

Because obviously, again, that's what people are gonna see and read.

What was your mindset on that when you got back into writing and deciding, well, I can decide now if that's the first story at the top of the page, versus I hand this in and somebody else makes that decision.

- [Jan] Well, yeah.

There's great freedom with doing this.

We cover what we think is important, what we think people ought to know, what we think people would enjoy.

But we also had a lot of freedom to do that when we were in print journalism.

After doing it for so long, it just kind of comes naturally.

What's happening in the community that people need to know, want to know.

People don't want to go to council meetings, so we can go through that and give them the easier version to read, or school board meetings, but we're just really good at keeping our eyes and ears open, and we have connections in the community who reach out to us frequently.

I would say we're very responsive to story ideas.

We're very nimble at turning things around quickly.

- [David] Jan is.

(Steve laughing) - [Jan] Well, David's a different kind of writer than I am.

His stuff is just really beautifully written.

It's goes deeper into deeper subjects.

I'm more of just a grunt journalist, daily journalism, and that's okay.

- [David] But she is indubitable.

Jan always turns out.

She'll say, "Oh, I'm going on vacation.

I'll be away.

I won't have any stories."

And then it's sort of like, there's still stuff.

- [Steve] They come in.

- [David] There's still stuff.

We have gone through some stuff.

- [Steve] Yeah, and you know, I think one of the things, one of the things I think is always impressive to me is if you can read a story and you can actually understand what went on, because let's face it, some people write, some people report, some people do whatever, and when it's done, you go, "Well, what was that about?

I don't know, what was the point of that?"

I think the one thing that obviously you guys, with your experience, your skillset, I can read a story about BG City Council.

I can read a story about something at the university.

I can read a story about something in the county or whatever, and I feel like I know why you were there doing it and what I should know, and things that I probably didn't know that I should know come out of that story, and that's a skillset set that not everybody has.

People go out and report.

- [Jan] That's great to hear that.

That's what we want to be.

[Hits Mic] - [Steve] You can look at a story sometimes and go, "Okay, great, but what am I supposed to take away from that?"

I think that's the one thing that when you read the articles that you guys write, you feel like you now understand what went on that night or what's going to happen two days later when that committee meets, or whatever it happens to be, or when that play gets presented, that kind of thing.

When you first started writing, David, has what you thought it was going to be like changed dramatically from what it is now or not?

- [David] I think I have the very brief, a couple months, interim cycle of being on Medium and what I expected to write there did change once we got to BG.

BG Independent pulled me much more onto the news, the more daily journalism side, whereas I was hoping to do more commentary, more criticism.

I had a whole other side.

Those million words weren't just a newspaper thing.

I have a whole other side of being a music writer for national and international publications.

That pretty much fell by the wayside.

That had to do with more of the change in the market and my sort of expecting that.

In general, I will not write for free, and outlets closing down as well, but yeah, it pulled me much more into the day to day, which has, you know, people say, well, the arts day-to-day, the arts coverage has always been an essential part of news coverage.

You think of, in "Citizen Kane," you think of one of the key scenes was when the wife does the big recital, and the guy who was supposed to write about it can't do it because she was horrible.

- [Steve] It was horrible.

- [David] But you need to do that.

You need to do that.

It was expected that that would be in the next day paper, so Kane sits down and writes what he thinks this guy.

- [Steve] Yeah, what he would want to be written versus what the guy was gonna actually say.

If I'm gonna be honest with myself, it wasn't very good.

And yet, what do you say when?

Have you ever, I shouldn't say have you ever.

Have you experienced as journalists any resistance or blow back just because you're out reporting on a story?

Because we know that in the world we live in now, not all journalists are viewed as being positive forces and being, you know, whatever, that they're looked down as like, "Oh, you guys are here to create a problem versus report, or you've got an agenda in your reporting."

Locally, have you experienced that as well?

- [David] Yes, we have.

- [Steve] Really?

- [David] Yeah, because we tackled tough issues.

I think we can say that probably our relations with our state legislators is not the best.

We have one who won't talk to us.

- [Jan] And school issues, when things were really tense, I got threats.

- [Steve] Really?

- [Jan] Yeah, sometimes just from being there, covering something.

- [Steve] Almost if you were just reporting what was going on, which either side, yeah.

Now, did you get it from both sides?

Because sometimes that happens where it's like, "Well, in that case, I must've been doing my job, because everybody's unhappy."

Not necessarily that.

- [Jan] No, in that case, no.

I want to make sure that we bring up that our coverage has changed in the last two years maybe.

We've added two other journalists.

Julie Carl is another writer, and she does a lot of feature stories and really excels at those.

It's added a really good side to our coverage.

And Dustin Galish is a great videographer, and he does podcasts.

That's really added something new and different that readers have responded to.

- [Steve] Well, when we come back, I want to ask you about, because obviously you take letters to the editor, and I think some people, and I guess we can talk about this when we come back, but I just want to maybe talk about the process behind that and how maybe the public views it versus the way newspaper journalists or journalists have to view what constitutes a letter that we should or should not put in a newspaper, or in this case, an online paper.

Back in just a moment with the folks from the BG Independent News, Jan McLaughlin and David Dupont.

Back in a moment on "The Journal."

Thanks for staying with us on "The Journal."

Our guests are from the BG Independent News, Jan McLaughlin and David Dupont.

David, one of the things, obviously, when you look at the BG Independent News online, public opinion, letters to the editor.

I get the feeling sometimes when people feel if they submit something to any newspaper, whatever, I write a letter, you're required to print that.

You can't limit my opinion.

You should print every word I say, and that we know that obviously that would be impossible if you printed every single letter, comment, and some of them may be not actually printable in some ways.

How do you go about deciding what meets a standard for this is an appropriate thing, or this is a topic, and it's well presented, or how do you make that judgment call on that?

- [Steve] Well, it's hard.

I don't know that we do not publish many letters.

That's very rare.

Sometimes I have to hold my nose on them.

Sometimes I'll send a letter back and say this is not, you know, for this reason.

There are letters we don't publish.

We want them not to be a simple three or four line, this person in this article was, you know, whatever.

We want them to be, in a sense, more like commentaries, more like this is thought out.

If there's blatant factual errors, I will send it back and say, "That's not wrong.

That's not right.

Correct it and send it back."

I've sent things back because they were all in caps, and I just told this person, you know, "It's like you're screaming at my readers.

It has has nothing to do with what you're saying, whether I agree with it or not, but just tone it down."

We get it on.

In a way, having, we post on Facebook, we post links to just about everything we put in the paper.

That's a place where people can comment.

We know about Facebook comments.

- And where that can go.

- That can go.

One of that is monitoring, making, trying to make sure that the people who are commenting are actual people, using their real names, and that's a big part of it, because the irony is to get something published as in the opinion section, and this holds true for the newspaper, too.

It's something we carried over from there.

You have to provide an address and a telephone number.

It's not published, but you have to provide that level of accountability.

- [Steve] Of accountability.

- [David] You don't have to do that in Facebook, so I have no problem going through and just flagging accounts and reporting them and deleting them.

We've had some issues with people, people who we actually knew who they were.

- [Steve] Now, and there's a point when you talked about the fact that some people will write something and they're totally incorrect about whatever they're quoting.

- [David] Right.

And of course, we live in an age now where people say, "Well, you're entitled to your facts, I'm entitled to mine," which we know isn't the way the world, actually isn't reality.

Some people say, "Well, I wrote it, you should print it regardless of whether, that's my opinion, and I believe that, so therefore those are my facts."

That's a tough thing to deal with, because people believe in their mind they're right.

- [David] I don't have the time to totally fact check every article, but if there is something that is blatantly.

- [Steve] Clearly, yeah.

- Blatantly, blatantly wrong, we will call it on it.

The response is, nowadays, everybody can have a Facebook page.

There's so many ways of getting it out, getting your opinion out, that if you're gonna be on our page, and we are a private enterprise, we are not government.

Yes, you have a right to express your opinion, but we have a right to control our own site.

- [Steve] That's a good point too, because people somehow believe that you are required to print everything that they send in.

It's my first amendment rights.

Why aren't you honoring that?

Well, you're a private entity, and Facebook could make the same argument.

Hey, look, we're not a public entity.

We are a private organization.

We're in business to make money.

That's what Facebook is, or X or whoever, all those things.

But people somehow have opinion that, well, I'm entitled to be on there.

You have to put me on there regardless, and that's not how it works.

That's just a misconception that's out there.

Jan, when you've written stories, and we talked about that a little bit before, that you get response.

Do you ever have people saying, "Well, I may have said that, but that's not what I meant," after they see it in print, when you post it on site and they go, "Oh, well, I know I said that, but that's not what I meant."

Do you get that sort of, I want to revise that?

What do you do with something like that when somebody says, "Well, yeah," in especially a public meeting, It's out there.

It's a public record at that point.

- [Jan] If they said it at a public meeting, it's fair game.

I will say though, when, I think both of us, probably, I definitely have different standards for people who are public officials who are used to speaking in public and they know the rules, as opposed to someone who is a novice at it and is maybe a little tongue tied.

I tend to give them maybe a little bit.

- [Steve] A little more leeway in terms of.

- Right, and then there are some characters like Alvie Perkins, if you remember him, who purposefully, I think, had his own words, like "flustrated," and they become the way, that's his dialogue.

- [Steve] That was Alvie speak.

Yeah, and then there's something somewhat charming about that in a way, and you know that's what it is.

When you look at, and obviously you can't cover, and no media can, you can't cover every story that's going on today in Wood County or wherever the reach would be.

What's the determinant there when you guys say, "Okay, look, we've got 15 stories here.

We'd like to cover all of them in depth," but no media organization can do that.

They always have to make those kind of editorial and journalistic decisions, so what's the process you use?

Is there a mechanism to say, well, we think this will impact the most people, or this is a topic people need to know about versus this one over here, or this one can wait a day or two.

It's obviously a process you deal with every single day.

- [Jan] Right.

We try to cover as much as we can.

- [David] Within Bowling Green.

Really, our real focus is Bowling Green.

We do a little with county government that does it.

The arts does go into Toledo.

I've expanded the theater troupes I cover, because people go.

People go there, and plus, you know, with theater troupes, we have actors in Bowling Green who are very active throughout.

- [Jan] We try to get to as much as we can, and having two additional people helps a lot.

We have an intern starting this week.

- [David] We just met with him.

- [Jan] That will help, and if we can't be at the event, maybe we can talk to people afterwards.

If it's something we really think readers ought to know about, we make every effort to do that.

- [David] And we're very open to people sending us things.

We have the community voices, which are press releases.

If we can't get it, then we can put photos that they submit and stories that submit.

That's an important outreach and an important thing that we do.

- [Steve] Now, and I guess too, and you mentioned the fact that obviously when you start to cover, because you do have, the Ohio Capital Journal is a link on that site, and they're covering Columbus.

I know when I talk with the political science people we have on, because we do a panel periodically, the disconnect sometimes between a governor of the same party and a legislature of his party is almost entertaining beyond what you'd ever imagine.

I know when you read the columns or the stories that are covered by the Capitol Journal, it isn't all happy, fluffy, whatever.

There's real business getting done down there, and even within the same party, they're not agreeing about what should be done or how this vote.

Well, we're gonna face that with House Bill 68.

It'll be done by the time this airs, but that's a classic example.

The governor thinks one thing, the legislature wants to do something else, he vetoes their bill, they go back and possibly override, whatever.

Those kind of stories, as you said, probably raise the ire of the participants, because some of them are like, "Well, I don't want to, it portrays me in a way that I'm not comfortable with," or "I don't want to be looked at that way."

But yet that's their vote.

That's what they've done.

- [David] Yeah.

We added Ohio Capital Journal I think as soon as they were available.

I think it provides a good outlet.

We certainly can't be down in Columbus, and I think they do a much more thorough job than was done before, aside from the papers that actually have, or the Cleveland paper, Columbus paper.

Toledo I think had a bureau, somebody in the bureau, so they really offer us a chance to get people, insight into what's happening.

I have to say shortly after we put them up, someone said, "Oh, well, we understand publications are doing this just to drive traffic."

Believe me, Ohio Capital Journal drives very little traffic.

It's really surprising.

Some of things with House Bill 68 have gotten somewhat more, but still, you put a dog up for adoption at the Humane Society, that's gonna get a lot more.

Little Molly the pit bull is gonna get a lot more eyeballs.

- [Steve] It's gold.

Hey, I appreciate you coming and talk about this, because obviously what you do, as I said, you provide another source for people to get more information and another view besides singular view, which is always a dangerous thing when there's only one voice out there, so congratulations on what you've done and the great work you do.

We appreciate it very much.

- [Jan] Thanks.

- [David] Thank you very much.

- [Steve] Thank you.

You can check us out at wbgu.org.

You can watch us every Thursday night at eight o'clock on WBGU-PBS.

We will see you again next time.

Good night and good luck.

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