Production and distribution of City Club Forums and Ideastream Public Media are made possible by PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland, Inc.. Hello and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to creating conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, November 1st.

And I'm Mark Ross, retired managing partner of BWC and President of the City Club Board of Directors.

I am excited to be here today marking the City Club's 112th annual meeting, which is also the W CLV Forum endowed by Robert and Jean Conrad.

I don't know about you, but with less than a week until the election, I'm tired and I'm anxious.

Burned out and ready for it to all be over.

When I grew up, we had primarily three networks with local and national news every day, at least twice a day.

And if that wasn't enough, we had our local newspapers.

I was a Cleveland Press paper boy.

For those of you who remember the Cleveland Press, I still I still have some of these.

So genuinely.

January 20th, 1977, when President Carter was was inaugurated.

Back in that day, we had anchors like Walter Cronkite, Harry Reasoner, Barbara Walters and Peter Jennings, who rarely put their fingers on the scale, but rather work to cover both sides with little more than a duty to inform.

There was honesty and integrity with integrity, or at least that's how it felt to me during my youth.

Today, we all choose the version of the news we want to hear.

And it's amazing to me how the same set of facts can sound so different on MSNBC versus Fox.

Accelerating over the years, we have seen the abandonment of local news.

The influence of billionaire news ownership with potentially conflicting motives.

The invention of something called fake news, and most recently, the use of A.I.

to literally put words into people's mouths such that many people can't tell fact from fiction.

And worse, many that don't even want to.

It is exhausting.

So when I heard about how the public was starting to attack this issue through new models of journalism, many of which have been organized as nonprofits, trying to truthfully inform, I got really excited to hear about the new philanthropic collaborative that is the focus of today's conversation.

According to its website, Press Forward is a national coalition investing more than 500 million to strengthen local newsrooms, close longstanding gaps in journalism coverage.

Advance public policy that expands access to local news and to scale the infrastructure the sector needs to thrive.

When Dale Anglin took the helm of press forward as its inaugural director this year, she spoke about the importance of proximity in its role in trust building knowledge and as a powerful mechanism for motivating people to take action.

Prior to joining Press forward, she served as the vice president of Proactive Grantmaking at the Cleveland Foundation.

Dale also led the Cleveland Foundation's journalism strategy, where she encouraged leaders to embrace local news and information as a community need and invest in a regional network of nonprofit journalism initiatives, including Signal Ohio.

At a moment when voters prepare for one of the most consequential elections in a generation, we will now hear from Dale in conversation with the City Club's CEO, Daniel Thrupp, about the state of free speech, the news industry and access to information across our communities.

If you have a question for our speaker, you can text it to 3305415794 and the City Club staff will try to work it into the second half of the program.

Members and Friends of the City Club please join me in welcoming Dale Anglin and Dan Mothra.

Thank you, Mark, and thanks, everybody for joining us today.

It's our it's a very special day, our annual meeting.

And is the forum the forum we associate with our annual meeting.

We thought it would be particularly useful to think about the news and information ecosystem with you, Dale.

So thanks for coming in.

Thank you for having me.

And thanks for all my friends and people for coming out.

It's so fun.

It's a great room.

Thank you.

I just want to bottle you and keep you here it is.

It is a great room.

So, Dale, let's Mark mentioned a little bit about press forward, which, you know, $500 million collaborative.

But what is it exactly?

What are you doing?

Yeah.

So it took us 20 years to get to the point where we are now with the decline of local news.

And in that time period, a few foundations have been focused on local news, but frankly, not that many.

And so over the last couple of years, a number of foundations came together.

They announced officially a year ago to think about what's the role philanthropy could could play in helping revitalize, bring awareness to and frankly, raise more money in addition to the $500 million that's been pledged because 500 million sky is not enough.

So think of us as a huge donor collaborative, doing two things.

If nothing else, we are raising awareness about the importance of local news because we have a lot of information that actually comes to us these days.

National or social media.

How do you distinguish that for people?

And we want people to play for that.

And then how do we raise money and raise awareness amongst philanthropic donors, individuals and foundations to think about how they can support local news, as is going through an incredible revitalization and transformation.

Philanthropy does a good job of that, right?

Giving people an onramp?

Well, things are changing that say to not to stay forever, but to stay for a while while we figure out what this new ecosystem looks like.

You know, when Marc offered his introductory comments, he talked about the demise of local journalism.

How do you see it?

A perfect storm.

Over the past 25 years, a number of things happened.

There's not really one thing that made it happen.

Some people blame social media, some people playing ad revenue going off to other places.

I would say also, frankly, we had large corporate, huge outlets, newspapers that didn't invest in innovation.

They had a lot of money.

I was in a room with somebody who said they had the opportunity 15 years ago to invest in Google, and they did not take it.

So a lot of things happen.

The audience is change is tech has changed to get to this point.

Economic development at certain small rural communities don't support small businesses.

A lot of these newspapers are small businesses, so a lot has happened to get us to this place.

The question is, what does it look like going forward?

And there's a lot of research that says when you don't have local news, not national news, what happens?

Government accountability goes down.

Government budgets go up because people aren't watching.

There's not enough connection amongst communities, amongst people.

There's not a how many people in this room at some point in your life had something happen in the newspaper with to somebody, somebody you knew, somebody in your family, some in your neighborhood who was in the paper for something.

Raise your hand.

It's almost all the room.

When we don't have that, we don't know each other.

It turns out when we don't know each other, we then argue at the national level.

And there's unfortunately a lot to argue about these days.

And so really, local news is an antidote to the misinformation and disinformation.

And the crazy polarization is not the only thing, but it's one vital component.

The question is, how do we get it back?

But I will just say we want to get it back better because it wasn't perfect when it existed before.

Say more about that.

Sure.

You know who wrote the news over the last 20 or 30 years?

Who were in the newsrooms?

It wasn't often people of color.

It wasn't often women.

It wasn't people with lived experience.

Frankly, we need more of that as we build back.

And so what we say is we want to build it back and we want to build it back better.

And the other thing is think about how young people get your news these days.

And if you read a newspaper right, get one.

Got one.

You are the audience of the future.

I tell my journalists when I talk to them, you can't write what you wrote ten years ago and just expect them to come.

That's not the way the world is working.

We have to think futuristic about how people get their news today and how they will want to get it five and ten years from now.

And frankly, you all are all very different.

Not even the people who want print also want digital, and you want it targeted to things that you care about and wanted to come at a certain time.

That's not the same as just getting a newspaper weekly or daily.

And so the models in which we are delivering the news is going to continue to shift.

How can we help local news be able to manage through those shifts and support?

And by the way, when I say local news, I mean for profit, nonprofit, public media.

There's quite a range of organizations out there that are doing this work.

Press forward is trying to think about all of them and how we help them all play together in this, frankly, changing ecosystem.

So I should just mention, for the benefit of our radio audience on KSU, that there's about 40 students in the room from there, from Lakewood High School and Saint Martin, the poorest high school in Solon High School, and many of them are student journalists.

Oh, thank you.

Which is pretty exciting.

But when you look at you now have moved from having a very Cleveland focused kind of point of view to having this kind of catbird seat, national focus.

And and you're taking in things that are happening in small communities, mostly, I think, throughout the country.

A mixture.

A mixture.

How does Cleveland compare?

Because here here in Cleveland, over the past few you know, the past, I've lived here 20 years and there's been a steady conversation, a drumbeat of conversation about the decline of of local news.

We still have a major news organization that does news.

We've had several major news organizations doing news every day on television, online, in print.

We still have a weekly business, you know, Crain's Cleveland Business.

We have also all of these new nonprofit Marshall Projects Signal and the documentaries and Buckeye Flame and others.

It feels really, really good here from that.

We're not a news dessert.

We're not a news dessert.

Yeah, no, there are.

So there is.

There are the haves and the have nots across the country.

And there's definitely a lot of places that are not Cleveland, Right?

They don't have one of the things that we have, frankly, and there's a lot of conversation amongst philanthropy on how do you support, particularly those.

We have over 1200 counties in the U.S. and either have no outlet or almost next to no outlet.

1200 counties and that's going up, not going down.

And so that's one body of work that has to happen is and there's lots of experience we can tackle.

There's lots of bright spots.

People are trying.

And then you've got places that are cities, mostly cities or big suburbs, Cleveland included, that have things.

The question is those things are shifting and so who's covering what?

And so when you you've got to dig deep when you go to those cities.

So it turns out in some of those cities, certain places were never covered or they weren't covered well.

Or even the existing framework that's there has also declined, frankly, and can't cover everything anymore.

And so Cleveland is actually I'm grateful for Cleveland when I go to other places, to be honest, because I see that other places are not us.

We are an incredible philanthropic community and that's helped create this and sustain what we have.

And yet the other thing that I I'm reading a lot of history about the history of newspapers, and if you remember 30 to 80 years ago, we always had lots of outlets.

They just competed with each other.

We never had just one outlet ever.

We should not have one now.

There's no way one outlet be you digital news newsletter print will cover everything and cover everything.

Well, the question is what should the ecosystem look like?

If we could talk about our chapters, because that's what we created those chapters is to think about what should, what can the ecosystem sustain within a place and how is it filling gaps that were never covered?

So I'll give you an example.

We have major cities, New York, Oakland, a bunch of them actually in COVID.

It turns out we have new outlets that were formed partly just to give health information in certain languages.

And when they started to do that, they realized some of those communities had never gotten news in their language, ever.

And so they've stayed and they've now broaden pass health coverage.

And they're doing great, by the way, and they're being sustained because they have a unique audience that's helping sustain them.

So we had great media in some of those places.

Somehow they overlooked them for the last 50 years.

So I'm just saying when we have sites, I also check when I say who's actually being covered.

How do you know that and how are you talking with your audiences to understand what they want covered?

These days?

It's not just you write it and they will come.

You have to really spend a lot of time engaging with your audience on a regular basis to understand what they want, how they want it, and frankly, what's going to happen once you publish it.

What do you mean by that?

So, you know, people define local different ways.

A lot of the newer last 5 to 6 year local news outlets are doing incredible work working with their community on I would call it kind of engaged journalism.

So we have something here called documentaries.

It's now in 20 cities around the country and we hope it will be in many more.

That's a different form of journalism, right?

They are documenting things.

We have had these people around for a long time, but they weren't documenting our city hall, not in a way that we needed it to be.

And we and we document one of my favorite things.

For those who don't know, the model came out of Chicago, a project called City Bureau there, and the documentaries were community members who are paid relatively modest hourly wage to go and sit in public meetings and report on them, typically on Twitter or on a Google doc somewhere that was publicly available.

And and there are incredible things happening in these public meetings.

And during COVID, it was super easy because people could do it from home because the meetings were on Zoom and we've done it.

We found the City Club forums, forum ideas, get out of out of the work of documentaries.

So I find it absolutely fascinating and it really did.

But it made a lot of people in journalism, traditional big J journalists made them feel queasy.

I know, I know.

It's what I say.

Things are changing.

Adapt periods because, I mean, big change journalism is great.

It was a top down approach.

New journalism is really almost a bottoms up and a top down approach.

People want to, after having social media and the Internet for the last 20 something years, why in the world would people just want people telling their own their their story?

People are used to telling their own story.

Now they're good at it.

In fact, why don't we find ways for them to tell other stories?

So documentaries does that.

It tells the story of government, right.

And engages people.

So documentaries was my grant.

We gave it $150,000 when you were 30.

What?

I was like Legal foundation.

We gave $150,000 in March of 20, 20, right before we all went off.

And I said, Oh my God, it's going to be horrible.

The board's going to be mad at me.

And because of COVID, thank you for support chairs in the audience by that.

Six months later, when we were thinking, or maybe nine months later, we're thinking about doing some other stuff in media, I go to a meeting and they have a bunch of documentaries in the room I had actually because it was cold, really not physically met them.

They are every hue, every county, every color, every age.

I was like, What is this?

It was because they felt it was a way for people to feel a part of the democratic process.

We are not going to get back to where we want to go until people feel like they are a part of the process.

Document is is one way.

It's not the only way, but it's a great way.

And you get paid a little bit and stories come out of it.

I'm just saying there are new forms of journalism.

That's not the only one is going to be many more.

We can't rest with what we had for the last 50 years.

It's not going to work.

It's not working.

And we have to think about ways to think about new.

And our job at press forward is to help do that.

That's why we did our 205 grantees.

Can I talk about that?

Yeah, Talk about your 205 grantees.

We we're doing strategic grantmaking.

We have three pots of money at press forward.

You never tell a philanthropy exactly what to do.

And so we have a line grant makers, we have over 70 foundations that are now part of us and some high net worth individuals, they are allowed to do their own grant making under our line bucket.

We also have a pooled fund.

People can pool their money together and out of that pool for we're doing some really fun grants.

And so the first set just we announced $20 million in grants two weeks ago to 205 local outlets of all types and sizes.

They just had to be budgets of under $1,000,000.

So our job with that, frankly, we did that because we wanted to people to see that knew that small is okay.

Philanthropy doesn't do small very well.

Sometimes we just always think everything's got to be big and at scale.

That's not going to save us in journalism.

Big newspapers are not going to save us in journalism, to be honest.

They've got to figure out ways to build in small into their network.

And there are people that are trying to do that.

We also want to make sure that we covered places that hadn't been covered before.

So 40% of our 205 are run by people of color, 25% in rural neighborhoods.

They had never gotten grants before.

Over half are for profits.

One of the things I'm learning in this space, we have about 6000 outlets left, 5000 or something of them are for profit because that's what this industry was.

It was for profit.

So you're not completely going to solve the issue by just going through nonprofits.

We can't create enough.

So you have to think about ways to have foundations understand that you can give to and support for profits.

We're not used to that.

There's a lot of training that's happening in this around this industry, helping philanthropy understand journalism, because they didn't have to before.

They didn't have to support it.

Right.

The those grantees.

Are there any in Ohio?

Yes.

The land and we got four in Ohio.

We did.

We did every every state plus two of our territories and four in Ohio.

The Athens Independent.

I think it's the oh, gosh, retired Richland Saucepot.

I don't know.

I'm trying to forget Athens Independent in Athens, Ohio.

I'm going to forget the other two.

That's okay.

You got two of them.

We got to 500.

That's great.

So are you has this work made you feel more optimistic or less optimistic?

I mean, $500 million is a cause for optimism, I suppose.

But it is.

It is.

I'm you know, I'm I'm technically just an optimistic person.

And most people in this room will tell you that.

And what I see is just we have a way.

First of all, we don't have a choice.

We need local news.

We just got to figure out how to get it and get it back.

So to me, it's not optimism.

Not optimism, it's practicality.

We won't do very well as a country if we don't figure out a way to figure out ways to come together.

More local news is one of those ways and not the only way.

So to me, it's just practical.

So then becomes who do we need on the boat to help us get there?

We need philanthropy.

Philanthropy is very good at giving people on ramps and runways till we try to figure it out.

You just said this is your first year in this building.

This is our first year of press forward.

For the first time in Chicago in September, we had over 100 funders in a room who now fund journalism.

Three fourths of them had never funded journalism before until last year.

That's one of the things we've been doing over the last year when every and my I want to introduce my associate director, Christina Shi, who's helping us do all this.

Every time we talk to a funder, they say the same thing to us.

I am not a journalism funder.

That's the first words always.

And I say, That's fine.

Most funders are not journalism funders.

I was not a journalism funder.

I funded journalism because I cared about education and I wanted someone to report on education because they were not where I was prior to being here.

I became a journalism funder because I realized that every single issue that we covered at the Clinton Foundation, every single one.

If people don't have the information, the news about what's happening in that area, your strategies won't work.

You need people to understand what's going on, frankly.

And so I think of news not as a separate portfolio and people and foundations you'll.

I'm going to do climate.

I'm going to do health.

I'm going to do economic development.

Think of it as you all foundations do capacity building.

They almost all do leadership development.

They almost all help you with communications, with development directors.

Those are underlying every other strategy that you do.

I want news and information in that space because I don't want to cut off.

When you change a strategy, it's not about your strategy.

It's about understanding that people have information that is accessible to them in ways they want it to be so they understand what's happening in their community.

That's something that we should we could all get behind.

That includes, by the way, all of you supporting in any way, shape or form, any local news you would like.

But please support daily England.

You've been a press forward about a year.

As you said, there's even not even a year, seven months, seven.

What?

You said something earlier that I want to circle back to and connect with, with what you've just said about news and information ecosystems, but earlier said that local news is when everybody raised their hand about who had had a had something written about them or someone they love in the news at some point.

And that this is part of how we get to know each other as community members, as neighbors, that the local news is part of how we tell the story of our community to ourselves so that we understand our own role in that narrative.

This is going to sound like a self-interested question, okay?

But it is.

But how does how do places that are convening dialog like this fit in?

Yeah, because I mean, people I'll just say like a lot of people I know in Cleveland think that every city has a city club, people who are aware that every city has a city club.

But what's that like?

You might not get to talk to a lot of other City Club leaders around the country.

There are there are almost none.

Oh, it's a very unique institution.

And people ask, you know, why didn't Cincinnati have one?

Why doesn't our community have one?

And I just wonder, you know, who where do we fit and who plays that role in other communities?

Yeah, you are unusual.

And I still remember my first City Club forum walking in.

I think I've been here like a month and I really didn't even understand who you were.

I was like, What is this?

And I want to be a part of it because it was amazing.

No, there are not many places like this that have been around this long and have the storied history that you have, the types of people that have come here over the years.

I will just say there is we are part of press for, but as part of also something, we're going to talk a lot about this, a lot more going forward, something called more perfect.

There are there are a number.

You can look them up.

There are a number of things focused on democracy building these days.

Some focused on using philanthropy, other types of partners.

One of those is called more perfect.

We are the fifth pillar of more perfect.

The other pillars are free and fair elections, a service both national and military.

Bridging divides, which is where you would fit in.

And then, oh, I'm going to get the fifth one.

Oh, and civic engagement.

Young people, right?

Young people.

Yeah.

So there are a number of I will call them all experiments.

Right.

Because we all thought we didn't need to do this.

We thought we were fine.

It turns out we're not.

And so there are people who are trying to figure out how do you create a public square within your universe, within your locality?

How do you support the ones that might be small, that could be bigger?

But how do you just get more people to talk to each other?

Because we all go into our houses even before COVID.

Right.

Between social media and the Internet and our busy lives, we just don't.

And we're more sorted, right?

We've all moved to places where we like our people.

We just don't spend as much time talking to each other.

So it turns out what was.

I will just say what some foundations probably would consider soft.

I'm going to give money to support people talking to each other.

That's a sixties thing.

It turns out we need that back.

The question is, how do you do it in multiple venues and multiple ways?

Multiple ages?

And how do you support that so that it's not a one time thing you're doing, but a regular thing that we're getting used to.

Churches are doing it more right people, but people don't all go to churches.

So you are unique.

But I will say many people in the philanthropic space are trying to create more things like you as not always as organized as this, but there's a lot of conversation about that.

And we're so I tell people, people say, well, it's press.

We're doing acts like, oh, no, no, no, wait.

We're just doing the local news side.

There's a lot of people focused on civic engagement in the public square, and we try to work with them and partner because what I say is press forward.

Our goal in the end, 5 to 10 years from now, is not just to create or to grow a journalism workforce.

That's nice and we want that.

It's to make change on the level of the community.

And so how are even journalists changing so that they are engaging with communities in different ways?

It's not just about the job, it's about change on the ground.

And that's what we want to try to measure over the next 5 to 7 years.

I'm glad you brought up the more perfect initiative.

And it's a I don't need to remind the high school students because they've taken a push and AP reference is the preamble to the US Constitution in order to form a union.

And it's a really good question, like, what is our response to all of us?

What is our responsibility to help form a more perfect union?

It's one of the reasons I like going into cities and seeing some of the unique types of outlets.

We've got an outlet in Texas that built and runs a coffee shop and that and you got to find different revenue streams, right?

So the coffee shop helps pay for the journalists, but it's also, frankly, a way for them to engage with the community.

We've got actually the land here has been doing a lot more community journalism right, training of the community people to do journalism.

That's a good thing.

That's ways to help create the more perfect union.

It's not easy to figure out how to do that except for voting.

And we've spent so much time focused on voting.

And of course, that's important and it's not enough.

We need to do a little bit more than that.

The question is, what does that look like?

Are you seeing any successful or maybe green shoots of successful experiments that are bridging the political divide in more perfect for local or locally, wherever in the country or the urban rural divide, which is sometimes often mirrors the political divide?

Yeah, you know, I don't say I have great examples of that yet.

There are people definitely trying to do it.

There's a great article from this week's Washington Post talking about local news, and they gave an example.

I'd heard of this, but I hadn't seen it all.

Haven't read that much about it.

One of the local papers decided that they weren't going to publish anything about national news for a while.

Just focus on local.

And it worked for a month or two.

People weren't arguing.

They were really getting to know each other, like, maybe we should do a little bit more of that right?

There's a lot of experiments now, and I know that is it's just frankly, it's a scary time of year.

Journalists, things are changing so fast and they've been changing and it's not easy.

I call all my journalists frontline workers.

Safety and security for journalism is a bad thing right now.

And it's not just international.

I was in Chicago and there's one of the outlets in Chicago where one of the journalists is being followed around by the sheriff as there's nobody stopping him.

So please thank your fellow journalists and because there's not as many of them.

So they have to cover more and they have to make hard decisions about what they're covering.

And that gets really hard and it feels personal.

So I'm thinking of the ones that are in this room if you're a journalist.

Thank you very much.

We're going to go to questions from the folks who are in the room and everybody who's listening online as well and on and on w KSU in a second.

I wanted to ask you to say more about collaboration because you you alluded to this earlier.

You said that the business model, the way the these the way the ecosystem was structured before was built around competition.

Who could scoop the other outlet, who could get to the story first, who had the better sources.

And you said it's really moving towards collaboration.

What are you seeing and what do you think we need to see more of?

Well, first it's already happening, which is amazing.

There's a number of different things from solutions, journalism work to all sorts of collaborations between different types of outlets excuse me, public with private, with for profit.

So it's starting a lot and we just need more shared stories.

Is what's happening is the easiest to happen, right?

Signal here publishes most of its stories for free.

Anybody can pick them up.

That's really good.

What we need to have going forward, frankly, is shared back office.

We've got to figure out revenue models that are sustainable.

One way to do that is hire development person is going to work for three of you, right?

Use some tech stocks that you can all contribute to.

So a lot more of that.

It turns out a lot of our newer outlets, either a WhatsApp or whatever, excuse me, the people who start them are these fabulous journalists who left some other paper or some other outlet.

They have great intention, but they were never on the business side of the news.

And apparently, according to you guys have also me this there's a hard line between the business side and the journalistic side.

Editorial side call a firewall firewall.

We don't have that anymore.

If you are running an outlet, you have to know both the editorial side and the business side.

So there's a lot of training that has to happen.

And philanthropy is funding that to train up the reporters who are doing great work on the editorial side to also understand the business side, because you can do it there are many ways now to become sustainable.

It's not it doesn't it doesn't go fast.

Like think about any new profit, new nonprofit that you guys have all been involved in and support It.

It takes 5 to 7 years to get stable.

It's no different for a journalistic outlet.

They need to build up membership.

They need to build up subscriptions.

They need to build up a following.

And that just takes a while.

So you need people who are comfortable asking for money.

People just don't always know that side.

So we're spending a lot of time in philanthropy doing that.

That collaboration.

And we're so is required on the business side.

It's already happening on the news side.

I just when I talk to enough people, people tell me I don't even have to tell them.

If you are a lone outlet and you don't really have many partners, you're probably not going to make it.

You have to figure out ways to collaborate These days in this industry, that collaboration looks different, different places, but it's not a choice.

The question of how do do it?

And that should you do it.

Okay, Dale Anglin, press forward.

Thank you so much for being with us.

So we are about to begin audience Q&A.

And for those just joining, I am Dave Meltzer with the City Club.

We welcome questions from everyone City Club members, guests.

Those of you joining via our live stream at City Club dot org or our live radio broadcast at 89.7 W WKSU Ideastream Public Media.

You can also text questions to 3305415794.

The number again to text the question is 3305415794 and City Club staff will work it into the program.

May we have our first question, please?

All right.

It's going to start on there.

QUESTION Go ahead, Stacey.

QUESTION Thank you.

Ah, this.

QUESTION Well, the statement is for you, Miss England.

It was intriguing to hear Miss England say that local media is the antidote to misinformation and disinformation.

In recent years, it appears that more large private interests conglomerates are purchasing or have purchased local stations across the country, leaving the door open to concerted messages from a particular point of view across their platforms.

How can local news organizations be that antidote to misinformation with the constant looming threat of corporate intervention?

Yeah, it's a real problem.

It's a real problem.

We don't always have the antidote to that.

But what's what's interesting is that, you know, they're not making money off of these entities.

They take money out and they just leave the shell.

So we.

So one which I'll just say several things are being tried.

You know, full stop.

We're trying lots of things.

One is we're trying to train up philanthropy.

When they when outlets now come to them, more and more, we're encouraging outlets to go to philanthropy.

Right.

And ask for dollars there.

And they weren't used to doing that.

That means foundation staff have to understand the different business models to ask the right questions.

So, you know, have your funding.

We've had that debate in press forward of, you know, who owns this paper and all those types of things.

So you got to train a program.

Officers, frankly, to ask the right questions.

So that's some of the things we're doing.

We're literally about to launch a whole bunch of training for a whole bunch of foundations over the next year with the help of one of our big donors.

So they can just understand when an outlet comes to me, what am I asking?

Because we don't usually have a single program officer that's just focused on journalism and usually doing three or four other things.

Journalism is one thing.

So one is just to get people to understand who the who those ownership structures are, what they look like, what you're and then debate what you should and should not fund.

And frankly, there's a lot of debate about how to shore up the outlets that are not owned by them.

There's there's there's more and more consolidation, which is different types of consolidation.

So in Maine, I'll give an example.

Just in the last two months, four or five newspapers have merged into one, but they're not hedge fund owned.

They're owned by one local person who we actually like.

That's a good thing.

Another bunch of papers in Maine have been brought up by bought up by something called the National Trust for Local News.

They're buying up rural papers so that they don't get bought up by the hedge funds who want to turn them into pink slime sites.

So we're a bunch of us are trying to paint pink slime, say, defy the disinformation and misinformation on sites.

There are a bunch of them.

They proliferate.

And what they do is they take existing things.

They turn them into them.

And so this group, as is in Colorado and Georgia and in Maine, trying to get ahead of the game, to get to those rural sites because they are easy to buy up because no one is paying attention.

You said the trust for local news, National Trust for local news, The national amazing.

By the way, I just.

And they didn't exist five years ago.

You're saying there's lots of new players in the space and we need those players in the space.

Everybody's trying to figure out what to do to fight against the hedge fund owned newspapers.

If you're fantastic, I'm glad you brought up City Bureau.

Morgan's a really good friend.

Yes.

One of the conversations that she and I last had and in response to this is how were you dealing with the tension of funding towards growth?

Yes.

Without having a health index that says what a healthy ecosystem is.

And so do you have a blueprint or an index?

Because every place is nuanced, Right.

But is there a blueprint or index that says these are the components that create the foundation of a healthy ecosystem.

Before we get so caught up in what the ultimate goal is that sometimes your funding actually chokes the system because it's funding the right stuff at the wrong time.

Yeah.

So just curious about that tension and how you all are working through that.

I'd just say there's a lot of research and we saw one thing you can think about press forward is we are a huge collaborative and we have lots of partners, not just funding partners, but we also have for the last ten or 15 years have been a number of journalism intermediaries, membership organizations that have been around.

They've been created.

We don't have a big staff.

We have like ten people really on our staff full time and part time, because we also work with those partners to do a lot of the work.

They helped us with our grantmaking and things like that.

It's wonderful in that way.

Some of the things that's been happening is a lot of research and studies over even using the term healthy.

What's the range of things that have to happen in a community for us to say it's healthy?

So two new things have just come out.

One listing collective and we all the stuff is going to be on our Web site.

By the way, press for Dot News.

Really easy to find, Kristina.

I have cards at the end.

We commissioned research from a group called the Listening Post Collective.

They are a national organization that works very much on a local level.

They do research and technical assistance and training, and they've got a new index that has how many?

50.

So many different indicators of what's happening in a community.

So I give an example and it's mapped.

You can go in and play with it yourself.

We're actually going to experiment with having some journalists play with it to see how you could use it to create stories so you can go in a place like Cuyahoga County and see what's the state of our health care, what's the state of our Bipoc led things, what's the state of the civic square?

What's the state of poverty?

But usually, you know, one or those, they're not all layered together.

So listening post collectives, new research and layers it.

And so we're going to see what people do with the information, right?

We just want people to understand it's not just the presence of local news alone that fixes this.

Just having journalists in the building is not enough.

It's what they do with that journalism.

What stories are they covering?

How are they engaging with their public?

It's that listening post collective said that side of it, and then also what the public does with the stories.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And there's there's you can say a lot about that.

The second thing I just want to give people information on, there's one of our big funds is called the Democracy Fund.

They're based in D.C..

Yes.

And they have new research.

Okay.

I'm going to am I going to remember the name of the study with Impact Architects?

They've studied about 7 to 10 places that have local news kind of collaboratives, and they've been gone back to them to say, So what happened once you had those collaboratives?

What changed?

What didn't?

What worked?

What didn't work?

They they're wonderful because they're very transparent about whether it's good or bad.

You can go on their website.

They're called the Democracy Fund, and I haven't even read it yet, but people are trying to figure out what's the impact of all of this.

Right.

We're in the beginning stages, I would say, of that, to be honest.

But the a lot of philanthropy is focused on that.

I will just say that.

Thank you.

Go ahead.

Good afternoon.

Kurt Russell, the National Teacher of the Year, recently shared a short note that he received on Facebook, and I wanted to share it with you.

And I have a question based on it.

It said In my morality classes, the women, The Woman of the Week is Dorothy Height, my teacher brought up her legacy as an anti-lynching activist.

I looked around the classroom.

More than half of the girls whispered to each other, Wait, what's that?

What's lynching?

I've never been in a room full of people who have never heard of lynching.

It made me very sad, embarrassed and disappointed.

I wish that your class could be taught everywhere.

There are so many places that need it.

The reason I'm asking the question is there is a national movement to silence honest history.

And when you talk about teachers being threatened with their license being taken, librarians being threatened to be thrown into jail if they have the so-called wrong books, what impact will that have on students to ever want to become journalists because they don't have the honest history or the information they need to get out there and be effective?

Yeah, it's a problem.

Thank you, Meryl.

There's definitely there's less student newspapers anymore.

There's the whole band book stuff.

If you just if you just a student and you just Google what's happening with news, it feels like, Why would I go into that profession?

I would say three things.

One is don't believe the hype.

It's still a profession.

We still need people in the space.

It's an amazing.

So most people know this.

I used to work on youth development stuff before I took this job, and that's still my heart.

And so we actually are going to be starting 2025.

We operate the working committees and press forward.

It's always peer to peer funded, a funder talking to each other because that's how it works in donor collaboratives.

So we have one on public media, we have one on health, we have one on locals.

We're going to have one on youth and young adults.

And how do we think about funding programs and activities and outlets that particularly focus on young people?

We have great examples in college newsrooms where they are not just doing reporting on their college, doing reporting for their community.

In fact, just look at the Columbia.

Those students were amazing journalists last year.

Whatever side you're on it, a yeoman's job of reporting what was happening at their school.

And so what I see is that young people are an important part of this sector.

And we've got to figure a way to support y'all.

And even if you don't stay in the journalism field, which not everybody doesn't, even old journalists, experienced journalists have not stayed in the journalism field.

Sorry, not old veterans, veteran veterans.

It is some of the best training you are ever going to get because it trains you to be curious.

It trains you to talk to people you don't know.

It trains you to go in places where you are not welcome.

It trains you to really think broadly about things that trains you to be apathetic, empathetic.

It will be it will be so useful for everything else that you choose to do in the world.

I don't care where is personal.

So please, if you are a student, journalists stay there.

Thank you very much for your work.

There are things like Report for America.

Once you graduate, you can do a three year stint with them, almost like an AmeriCorps for student journalism for young journalists.

If you are a journalism major and you stay with that in college, frankly, because of decline in some places, you don't have to work through ten different cities to get to the New York Times.

Many places now will hire you.

Frankly, you're cheaper and you get incredible story line.

The story abilities to do that.

So please stay in the profession.

Even if you don't see a journalist, you know you're not going to keep the same profession anyway.

You're a DJ at your age, right?

You're going to change many times.

Think of this as training for everything else that you're going to do.

Thank you very much for what you do.

You know, I want to say a quick word.

There's this narrative about the demise of journalism.

And it's not just change.

It's changing.

There's also never been more opportunities to practice journalism for a wide range of outlets.

That's right.

And the barrier to entry is so low now.

So low.

I mean, any of you could start you're anybody in this room could right now, before this forum is over.

Start your own website devoted to journalism on whatever thing you want to do and different things.

WhatsApp, there's people that just do Instagram, there's just texting.

I mean, there's all sorts of different ways to do it.

There are.

It's totally.

Yeah, that's that's absolutely right.

Also know, you mentioned lynching, and I just wanted to note that the just shout out the work of black environmental leaders here in Cleveland who are working with the Equal Justice Initiative and to have documented the there's one documented lynching in Cuyahoga County, and they're working on bringing a memorial.

And if all goes well, I mean, they're there and they're working really hard on it.

So it could be something that unfolds in the coming months.

So that's a really important piece of our history.

Hey.

Hello.

I have another text question and we're going to squeeze in.

We have a lot of questions.

You didn't mention one of the largest issues in journalism that nearly all journalists are on one side of the political spectrum.

Considering how often this industry speaks of diversity, what is being done to bring diversity of political thought to the industry?

Good question.

Yours?

I will just say at the local level, you often have people you meet some of the existing journalists at the local level.

They're not all of one political persuasion.

They I always everything we do in press forward, I bring in always back to our team is what's happening local.

Local is not always about politics.

It's about what's happening in the community.

You know, whatever.

And so I know a lot of journalists are thinking through how do you turn national conversations into local conversations?

We have this interest, this this problem happening in all types of communities and.

There's lots of documentation.

It doesn't matter.

Red state, blue state, purple state.

This is an issue.

And they all see the issue.

By the way, we've got obviously funders that are not so liberal on our side and within press forward.

So I would just say it's really important for people to think always local people come to us and say, Why aren't we doing Nationalized?

Because National wouldn't work together to get everybody on the press forward bandwagon.

You got to think local.

You know, it reminds me of something the mayor has said on a number of occasions that as a big city mayor, like, you don't have the luxury of being a Republican or a Democrat.

You've just got to do the work, got to do the work.

And those party labels matter less and less the closer you get to home.

Yeah.

Tom, thanks very much for your for your thoughtful opinions and insight.

This is sort of a springboard question out of the one previously asked by Noel.

But I'm just wondering, would it be a fair assumption that the vast majority of your funders are from organizations and individuals who are on the more liberal left side of the political spectrum, or are there, in fact, a number of counterparts on the right side who share the same concern about the need for broader, newer forms of journalism?

First of all, I don't ask that question of my funders.

I just out the money.

But yeah, a number of them are probably people would consider the more center or center left.

Ah, can I put a finer point on that?

The Koch brothers have an enormous kind of network of organizations, some of which are philanthropic in nature, others are advocacy based or advocacy focused.

Are they at all involved?

They are not.

But for example, the Walton Family Foundation just joined.

Okay, So we're just we're new to.

Right.

Right.

So the Koch brothers just haven't joined yet.

I will not turn any money away.

I doubt you would.

That's great.

Hi, Dale.

Thanks for sharing your work and the amazing work that you continue to do.

Can you share more about how you work on changing the mindset of philanthropist to fund for pr Yeah, you know, it's been a learning for me over the last seven months.

You have to you can't change the industry if you're in philanthropy, right?

The industry is the industry.

This industry was a for profit industry, period.

And most of those nonprofits that exist now are less than ten years old, frankly.

So you're not going to if you want to solve this problem or engage in this problem.

Some people would.

There is a debate in the industry.

Some people think you should just go through non-profits.

I just think that's not practical.

And so while we're trying to figure out how to do that, there are many for profits.

This industry that are basically barely profitable.

It's just a tax status.

That's all it is.

They are still doing the great work of reporting on this news.

A lot of our turns out, I've learned, are ethnic media that's been around a long time, by the way, 50 to 75 years there for profits.

It's just easier to be an LLC.

You've got to file a lot of paperwork when you're a nonprofit.

So we are just trying to train up philanthropy to understand, or at least to understand and then have a debate within your foundation of where you think you should land and what you should fund.

how?

What advice would you give to the next generation when we strive for a better democracy?

How can young journalists and local journalism help this to move towards a democracy?

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you for even asking the question.

So I'll give you an example of one of the things that we're doing.

We have there's a University of Vermont is a school that does not have a journalism school, a journalism.

You can't major in journalism.

I even think they definitely have a master's program.

But they took their journalism students.

They have some teachers professors there, and they started reporting on the community.

And that ended up being wonderful because their outlets started to decline.

They have now shown over the last 5 to 10 years that you don't have to have a journalism school because it's expensive if you started journalism school.

Right?

So they have been given 5 to $7 million over the next few years to work in those 1200 counties that have no outlets, but they also have universities or colleges attached to them.

Could you copy what you're doing here?

Is Vermont in some of those places?

So I would just say, first of all, if you are doing journalism work or if you are even even if you are not a student journalist, but you are curious about the world and you are reading papers online or you are following tick tock, not just for the comedy, but also for the news.

My son taught me a few years back about easy batteries.

I knew he didn't read newspapers, so I was like, Where are you getting this from?

He had organized on his phone and his computer.

YouTube and other things to understand batteries.

You are not reading the newspaper, but you are learning in other ways.

There's nothing wrong with that.

I would say stay curious.

We need you to stay curious.

And frankly, we need you to speak up.

You have thoughts and opinions.

Go to meetings, learn how to write, and don't just sit back and join things.

Right?

Don't please join things.

Don't not.

Don't sit back enjoying things.

Please join things as you are.

As you are thinking about the world.

Because democracy doesn't work unless we are involved in it.

We don't just get to sit and accept it on a platter.

We have to actually be involved in it.

And I think we all sometimes forgot that frankly, over the years, because things were told to us, we just accepted them.

No.

It turns out we got to participate.

We got to have opinions.

I want you guys to have opinions.

I want you to argue with your families at dinner.

Yeah.

Sorry, parents.

No, no, you got it.

I want you to have an opinion about something.

Right.

And it's okay to have the opinion.

The opinion be different from somebody that your school or in your family.

That's all right.

The point is, how did you get to that opinion?

There's so many things happening right now in this.

We will not change what we need change unless we have you all involved.

So thank you even for coming here today.

That alone tells me that you're you're curious, you know, Please follow our website.

We've got lots of stuff just to put it in a in a different way that I just explained to my kids the other day that if you if you're not participating in democracy, if you're not trying to participate in your community, you're basically a non playable character, okay?

You're just a by.

So anyway, so, so be a playable character.

Okay?

Do we have are we.

Is that it?

That's it.

Okay.

So Dale Anglin of Press forward friends.

And you gave our Web site a Google press forward.

Yes.

You press forward.

It's really easy.

We try to push, push, push and put as much on our Web site as possible with this is our, you know, our annual meeting, as I said before, and we're as we wrap, will be opening up a reception in the Commons and the library.

So you're invited to stick around and have some snacks with us.

I want to say, too, that forms like this one are made possible thanks to generous support from individuals like all of you.

And you can learn more about how to become a guardian of free speech at City Club dot org.

Our forum today is the annual W CLV Forum, endowed by Robert and Jean Conrad, which recognizes the extraordinary relationship between that Cleveland radio station and the City Club of Cleveland.

We appreciate Bob and Jean's ongoing support of the City Club and their celebration and the celebration of their mutual respect for the fundamental importance of free speech.

I also want to recognize the schools and students who have joined us today from Lakewood High School, Saint Martin de Paris and Solon High School.

Thank you all so much for being here.

Also, thank you to guests at tables hosted by the Cleveland Foundation College.

Now Greater Cleveland Ideastream, Public Media, The Marshall Project and the Smith College Club of Cleveland.

Thank you all for being here today.

We are going to close it out in just a second.

And ma'am, I need your help.

If you could come over here and stand there so you can ring the gong, please just get over here.

Well, I will finish this out.

Jeff, would you help my mom up there?

She just see she's a little.

Yeah, a little.

Anyway, a reminder that Election Day is next week, Tuesday, November 5th.

I don't need to remind all of you, but early voting is still happening in Cuyahoga County through Sunday, November 3rd.

And if you haven't, if you haven't already, it's time to lock in your voting plans.

Please visit vote Ohio dot gov.

If you need help finding your polling location and all of that stuff after you cast your vote.

City Club has two forms for you next week.

So on Wednesday, November 6th, we'll be back at the Happy Dog for a free conversation featuring Case Western Reserves Doctor Katie Lavelle.

Hang on, Easy does it.

And Cleveland State University's Melanie Stereo, they'll be talking about foreign policy, how tariffs, immigration, multiple contentious wars and more will influence our next president's first 100 days.

And then on Friday, November 8th, Congressman Max Miller and Congresswoman Chantelle Brown will sit down here on the stage to discuss the outcome of the election and the work ahead for the next Congress.

That will be moderated by Claire Ross.

She's managing director at the Ohio NEWSROOM.

That's a project of ideastream public media.

Tickets and more information about those and other forums at City Club dot org.

That brings us to the end of the forum.

Thank you once again, Dale.

I'm Dan Moulthrop.

This is your motor up during the game and I thank you For information on upcoming speakers or for podcasts of the City Club, go to City Club Dawg.

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