Pat Davis thank you for joining me on New Mexico InFocus today it's great to be back yeah appreciate you coming down and it is nice to have you in person um so we're talking this week on the show about sort of the media ecosystem and the role of Journalism and our state and we will get to your role uh and all of that in just a minute here I wanted to kind of start by having you describe the circuitous Journey that has been your career path you have been a police officer the founder of a politically Progressive non-profit and these days the president of the Albuquerque city councilor and a cannabis industry consultant so how did those things inform your interest in news have you always been a News Junkie I didn't realize it but I totally was and after uh we sort of launched the first newspaper my mom reminded me and said oh yeah like when we were growing up I grew up in Georgia back East my dad would always take us to town every Thursday night to get an early copy of the Friday newspaper because it had the rundown of the high school football games everybody's obituaries were there and you had to know who to call and do all those things and so there was a ritual around Thursday night we got to go to town and we got to go to Dairy Queen when my dad got the newspaper and then there was a big piece about it and then growing up like sitting around my grandmother's table my aunt was a county commissioner all my uh aunt my mom and my other aunts were all teachers are in the school system and so they all talked about what happened at the school board meeting and all that and we all sort of picked up on that a little bit and I think I never lost that but that was kind of that Curiosity of what's Happening who made that happen it turned into policing world because you know asking those questions and trying to figure that out is a lot like journalism I figured out yeah that's really interesting um so I mentioned a minute ago the the non-profit that you founded gosh when was that with progress now 2010 it was like 2020 2011 yeah okay as soon as Susanna Martinez came into office and all the progressives freaked out right yeah so how how did that how did you use that role and that non-profit and how did how did it interact with the news media in ways that you felt were sort of advantageous to your agendas at the time well you know you think about the sort of the non-profit ecosystem now right voices has been around a long time as a really Mexico voices for children is a good policy uh group there have been there were some organizing groups that were Loosely Affiliated labor was doing a lot of door knocking and organizing but everybody looked at this and said what happened and it what was supposed to be a blue State we started to see Republicans gaining ground and said what was going on and we saw two things happen one there were less media coverage of issues and so that made it harder for us to talk about those kitchen table issues with facts and two nobody from the progressive side was really reaching out to the news was really trying to be an influencer on commentary and opinion and putting that the left Progressive message out so that was our job we had these really smart policy people who knew who were working inside the room our job was to be outside the room get media attention on the crisis on potential Solutions who was trying to solve the problems and who wasn't and it became incredibly successful in part because no one else was doing it from the left even the Democratic party at the time was sort of struggling to raise money to just hire basic folks and so we became a non-profit sort of Newsroom for all the nonprofit infrastructure yeah I mean I can certainly remember being a reporter during that time myself and hearing more often from conservatives than I did from progressives um so fast forwarding just a little bit into your time at progress now you ended up under that umbrella founding a digital non-profit Newsroom uh called the New Mexico political report what was the idea with that Newsroom and and what gaps were you trying to fill in the ecosystem then a decade ago well we had spent three four years there trying just to get a foothold and how do we talk to people learning how to we did polling and messaging and trying to figure out how to talk to people and get their attention on issues and educate them what we realized was here was the end of at that time Governor Martinez's first term she had just gotten reelected was heading into the new legislature and we saw for the first time in leading up to that that most of the major news outlets weren't even sending a reporter to Santa Fe none of the TV stations had an assigned reporter that year the journal had one of the dance um AP had somebody but all the news outlets south of I-40 were using sort of syndication or AP wire and so we said we have to be in the room somebody that understands these issues so I got a grant really quickly and hired Matt reichbach from New Mexico telegram that had just sort of was struggling to to gain readership and we gave Matt our email platform of 100 000 people and just started covering it and during that session all those newspapers down south started picking up that coverage and we realized we had something there and it still exists today it's still one of New Mexico's longest running non-profit papers it is for sure so that news organization has taken a little bit of heat from me and from others in particular because it does not disclose the sources of its funding um how successful sort of broadly do you think that operation was in terms of the goals that you were trying to accomplish when you founded it we took a lot of heat rightly so when it was me trying to find a newspaper so we set up some rules we said yeah and we're I use these in all of our papers today it has to be someone who's credentialed by a journalism organization the spj for example the national Federation press women for example somebody who has a professional code of ethics we put that online we invite reporters to screen those those stories and give us feedback kind of like an editorial board we did at the time but really it was the proof of the work like there was a rule that if you had a liberal you had to have a conservative we were really strict about that and what we found was the conservatives were also using our stuff because their name was in it and so they kind of let us go with it because it was down the middle we didn't carry opinion that was one-sided or the other or any opinion at all for a long time and I think there's a piece of that that matters I think people care less I think about the ownership if they can read the balance there it's when we get into these blogs and all this other stuff and we'll talk about that when it looks like an agenda and feels like an agenda it turns people off and you can't make money at that so I think the market is trying to tell us something there yeah and fair enough it's hard to argue with some of the reporter who came through that Newsroom Andy Lyman Joey Peters Laura paskus who of course works here now certainly some really talented reporters came through that Newsroom and I think that's it New Mexico has a great cohort of great reporters that know each other know their issues and when they're willing to lend their name to these organizations I think it really helps because they know they have all their opportunities by lines totally matter to people who know like the Insiders right most of those readers probably never knew a million online readers a year most of those folks probably never knew Laura but the folks who wanted to have their story told or when Laura called them they knew they had to respond that means an awful lot and he still does let's fast forward to 2020. um you and in particular the sort of late summer of 2020. you are kind of starting your second term on the Albuquerque city council the pandemic is Raging I have just taken a 50 furlough in my job working at the alternative weekly newspaper in Santa Fe you go ahead and decide to buy an alternative weekly newspaper in Albuquerque had you hit your head what's wrong with it I think covet had had something going part of the problem was um we were doing I was doing work as a city councilor trying to help small businesses sort of apply for their PPP loans um and tierno and reinos who had been the associate publisher there and I had known at The Alibi yeah at the city and I had known forever reached out and said is can does the city have any grants what can we do and newspapers weren't eligible and so we were looking at other ideas and really started talking to the old owners and saying what's going on well it turns out that for the first time in 27 years they were going to stop publishing right there was no I mean think about all weeklies and you know this totally based around activities and events and restaurants and things to do uh congregating yeah and that's kind of a thing we couldn't do and so we we made an offer to buy the old Alibis it turned out it was probably too far gone at that point but what we decided to do was we saw a gap the journal was doing as much the journal could do in Albuquerque but there were these micro stories these Community stories that needed to be told about artists and small businesses and you know in my district for example and I that we were helping um and so I teamed up with Abby Lewis a lawyer here in town and we offered everybody that worked at The Alibi the chance to come over and start a new newspaper and see if it was worth doing and we thought we would have about six months that we could figure that out and then hopefully pandemic would be done and all that money would come back and of course two years later it never did but what we really learned was there were some great reporting in there and so we we put a digital focus on it uh I brought all my skills from from progress now and the digital political world about how to gain readers um through at the time through Facebook and Twitter and all those things and we gained more than 50 000 email subscribers in the first year just by giving the news away people wanted remember people wanted anything they could find about covid about what was happening and we realized that you could have a digital first paper with the credibility of a print paper and we had taken it down I think to eight pages right the pickup version was just you know twofolds but as things came back into life we've been able to bring that back up but it was not uh it was the idea of buying a newspaper was not on the list when when I got into City another bingo card if you would yeah definitely not a lingo card so one thing I want to talk about in terms of like how you think it has satisfied again like we were talking about with the political report what you were hoping to accomplish there are those gaps you talked talked about you told my friend Alex Devore who's the culture editor at the Santa Fe reporter at the time that one of the things you really felt like the journal was falling down on were the sort of deeper dive heavy investigative pieces do you think folks have seen as many of those in the paper which is what you rebranded The Alibi into essentially as you had hoped at the beginning at the very beginning I think we did there was a lot there were opportunities a lot of non-profit Grant dollars to sort of keep newspapers afloat and they were they a lot of them sort of winked a nod and let us say that we were the continuation of The Alibi for their Grant purposes which was huge like this wouldn't have happened without non-profit journalism support but when you look at that first year right we won the very we won the best right-wing reporting from aan which is the association of alternative newspapers all weeklies best right wing reporting for the day after Coy Griffin showed up in the U.S Capitol we grabbed those videos before he deleted them and that literally started his path was from The Newsroom at the paper um that reporting used in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump from an Albuquerque all weekly that had been in business about six months I think we saw that we were doing that over and over again John Sims a great Native American reporter from Akama won national awards for writing about missing murdered and Indigenous women oh by the way just last week when his second national award for best continuing coverage in the country by the New Mexico national Federation of press women for that topic so what we saw was we can win Awards because they're a good journalists here I'll say what the paper has really struggled with is keeping that going because it's pretty much Grant driven we don't ask for subscriptions advertisers support most of the event coverage and the Arts coverage but being able to pay a reporter 40 or 50 000 a year long enough to get into an issue it's hard to come by New Mexico as we were talking about before we sat down and turned the cameras on you said to me you guys are expensive which we are yes reporters don't get paid very much but all the things that go with them right very expensive money to produce this stuff so another thing that you talked to Alex about in that 2020 interview when you were making this purchase you talked to him about firewalls yeah and I want to read you a quote that you gave him at the time you said we're going to take a pass on covering Pat Davis as a key figure so we're coming up on three years now since that purchase you've been on the city council the whole time your council president again now um I know you're not running for a third term but what do you say to folks who are suspicious of a newspaper that's owned by a sitting elected official I think they're right to be and I want them to be but I also think you have to look at how we execute that Carolyn Carlson is a long time journalist for New Mexico ran our own newspaper was a uh from the journal had covered the city and other cities Carolyn's columns on city council I don't see to you see it online and very rarely does she mention I mean when she does it's usually something I said that was stupid and she calls it out we open our editorial Pages anybody that wants to yell at me gets published other folks don't have that privilege but we go out of our way to do it but in the rare instances where we do try to cover the where the editorial team chooses to cover this city I'll use Tabitha clay a veteran reporter on crime and Criminal Justice Reform one Statewide award last year for New Mexico Federation and press women for her coverage getting police body cameras and reports showing what happened in the 14 minutes of that APD SWAT fire in southeast in my district right criticizing the city for doing that and because we're in litigation I can't talk about it can't talk to her about it still can't but I think it shows that we're doing good work on the that they are doing good work on the city if you just let journalists do it and I think the work has to speak for itself and look if somebody else wanted to do this I welcome them to do it I still have not made my money back on this and probably never will but no one else was going to do this and so the alternative of let's not have anything versus let's have a thing run by the guy let's keep a good eye on him seems like a lot better option to me yeah uh fair enough speaking of your other gig uh working in the Cannabis industry now as a consultant I know the paper has a reporter who is assigned to cover that industry how does that work how do you reassure folks about those firewalls you told Alex about three years ago yeah it's so it's been a little that's been a little more complicated because a lot of my clients and the folks that we work with to get into the industry want to be featured in a paper right we have an advertising group run by Kim Stark who's fabulous who takes care of those things I don't see those dollars and we actually segment those cannabis dollars into a different account to be sure that it stays away from the normal uh the rest of the business operations that if and ever there was a profit I might ever get a check from um but honestly you know it's a pretty again it's a pretty open policy if you've got news we try to cover it whether you're ours or not Kim doesn't know who our clients are mostly but again if somebody else did it better I think the the industry would jump onto it but it's the largest cannabis magazine in stayed in part because people who know the industry are giving it a platform to be Equitable on good bad and ugly whether we're talking about industry Trends or industry problems and oversaturation let's open the lens a little bit and get into some ecosystem questions and as a way to get into that um let's talk about what else you're doing in the space right now we're sort of at a place now where it's you know Pat Davis newspaper magnate who nobody ever heard of except for the Nerds like me who are really paying attention you have since you bought the paper you've since bought the Corrales comment the Sandoval signpost and the Edgewood Independent Newspaper ownership for at least the last 15 years has been a brutal business and a terrible business model frankly it is um how is it going for you are you making money do you care to make money what are you what are you doing I I do care I would like to make money um but I will say that transition from cop who could sort of speak both sides in the Cannabis conversation about legalization to cannabis consultant it's I have been very transparent about this the money that I've been able to make helping other folks help their cannabis business has gone into newspapers right so I'm still a city councilor that's my salary that's my health care I put that into that because I think it's important and here you know here's why like I next door is not a good substitute for the Albuquerque Journal city council column we talked about this offline it turns out it's not uh it there are some bloggers in town who do like three quarters of a good job of explaining an issue and then kind of go off the rails and get people all distracted about something that's in their agenda look when I'm a city councilor sitting there at midnight in the basement of City Hall it honestly matters if people understand what we're talking about and our city is just too big to to educate everybody from the Deus one on one the same goes for a village like Corrales if if we don't have the Corrales comment for those four or five thousand households in that that area no one's going to cover that the Albuquerque Journal is not going to put a person there just to cover those issues um and so like they lose the opportunity to participate in democracy um and those are the fun papers those are the ones that have the cool stories those are where the really strange things happen in New Mexico's small towns so I have this sort of romantic view that if we can just keep those papers alive and at least keep one person going through all those little City Council meetings and County Commission meetings and school board meetings and just educating people about what's happening in the community they're more likely to engage they're more likely to show up they're more likely to participate um and from that we'll help everybody else too um informed Electra it makes a better decision at The Ballot Box absolutely they're going to show up anyway and right now it seems like everybody's voting against something like let's at least give them something to try to vote for or at least understand what they're voting about I think those things are really important and so the business model goes hey all these things are not going to stand alone on their own clearly the signpost for example did a great job it was a profitable paper when we inherited it so was the comment it was doing very well but it didn't have a long-term strategy all of these papers by the way have been print including the old Alibi mostly have been print with very little digital had not gotten to the 21st century and so that's what we've been able to bring is we're bringing a shared web platform everybody uses the same system shared email systems that lowers cost right instead of paying five email bills you pay one you pay five web bills you pay one we share designers and so each of them had like a freelance part-time designer because once a week or whenever they put out a paper now I have two full-time designers with Benefits because I have enough words total at those four papers full-time journalists we have six we have 14 Freelancers that regularly contribute and we have another six back-end folks that are full-time sales production Etc and then all get benefits they all get paid really well now because we can share their time amongst a bunch of folks and you're picking up stories from some of the nonprofits I've noticed as well whether it's Source New Mexico or New Mexico in depth or others those are appearing as well um I want to ask about Media consolidation right that's been a Hot Topic since before I was a reporter do you think there is some risk and sort of homogenizing the flow of information whether it's you or someone else who owns four different newspapers what do you think the risk is there and how is the juice worth the squeeze it has to that we see what Gannett does right they come in they've gotten rid of the newsrooms and then they they sell off the nice pieces and then they sell off the Masthead right um we're trying to re we're trying to undo that by putting local people back into these communities right we we hired Glenn Rosales for example who has a long history of writing for the journal just to cover the Edgewood independent Terry last TS last from the journal North now lives in Sandoval County he's the editor up there now and for our papers there we're trying to be sure that we refocus on that and get away from syndication to get away from some of those pieces but I will say what you mentioned is is exactly where I think this model goes I think it's our job as the local newspaper to cover the local stuff we're now segmenting out and and all of those non-profits like Searchlight are going to cover those in-depth issues and we'll pick that up and we'll give them readership for their mission and it helps me feel news pages and get more eyes on our issues so in a 12 16 page paper I might have a third of it to be local stuff that we create a third comes from our partners who do investigative long form stuff and a third is the classifieds and all those cool things that go you know the little widgets that go in the back of the paper and I think that's going to be the news cycle for a little while I'd love to have an investigative reporter in all five papers but I don't need one if Searchlight is doing its job and you've got a way to put Searchlight stories in front of people who might not otherwise see them I'm sort of hearing that as part of your model I want to close by talking some this is a question I'm going to be asking everybody for this show that we're making what is the state of the media ecosystem in New Mexico right now are we all completely screwed or does this still matter it totally matters and here's how I know it matters like I said when during covid when we decided just to give away the news to get eyes on on readers we got more than 50 000 email subscribers that's the second largest email list in the state behind the journal we influence more people every morning and every Friday when our news comes out in our locals then any other newspaper in the group in the state except the journal that says an awful lot about people who want more news and I can tell you that looking at the stories they want to cover when we watch the data really closely everybody what clicks the local story first everybody clicks the local story but they spend more eyes on those long-form Statewide stories they really they're longer stories but they're spending more time with them what it tells me is there's still a class of folks who really really care but unless you live in Corrales or Bernalillo or Edgewood Or Moriarty a lot of our communities don't have that option anymore and so where do you go right very much folks don't care about what happens in Santa Fe unless they're in session and it's hard once you lose a reader so I think we're going to have to get back to this model of figuring out a a model in Nick down in Silver City is doing a great job of what's working well consolidating the back ends I think we're going to look for co-ops and opportunities like sharing printing costs and design costs amongst these small papers riding the boats together if you will yeah it's totally going to do that until we get this right but I'll tell you now not every week every paper makes money and so sometimes one subsidizes the other and if you care you're going to have to pay what used to be twenty dollars a month or twenty dollars a year for your subscription it's going to cost 50 or 60 dollars to support local journalism but I think it matters so the ecosystem is not just us sitting around talking to each other and about each other there are people who this still matters for from your perspective there are totally enough people in New Mexico to make this work and there are totally enough people in every town in New Mexico to make this work it just how how big you make it the independent works is 4 000 square miles and four counties but you put enough of those people together and there are enough eyes but they have to support it and you know the idea that you can just get it online on Facebook or free it can't forever be our model Pat Davis thanks for coming down today I really appreciate the conversation