News has a short attention span; good journalism sticks around

Hurricane Florence examples show value of "slow news"

• The News & Observer's Ned Barnett reported this week on complaints from North Carolina mobile-home suppliers that they're being shut out of bidding on FEMA contracts, raising questions "about how much of the federal emergency relief spending after Florence — now more than $1 billion — is going to local companies and workers." 
• Early this month, The Fayetteville Observer's John Henderson reported new figures on municipal sewage spills into the Cape Fear River caused by Florence. From the story: "About 39.3 million gallons of raw or partially treated sewage spilled from Greensboro to New Hanover County due to reasons that appeared to be storm-related: overwhelmed systems, power outages, equipment failures and 'severe natural conditions.'” The story also explored concerns about hog and agricultural waste; together, these make up one of the big long-term concerns for Eastern NC blown open by Florence.
• WECT-TV's Emily Featherston reported this month on price-gouging post-Florence, breaking down and analyzing complaints to go deeper than the initial consumer alerts and anecdotes.
• Coastal Review Online is reporting regularly on Florence's effects on the N.C. coast, including a recent Kirk Ross piece on some "sticker shock" over the cost of beach and inlet damage from Florence and a new series by Jennifer Allen on how federal and state agencies are dealing with hundreds of damaged or displaced boats
• The N&O's Martha Quillin reported in November on nonprofit organizations as the "backbone of disaster recovery" in Florence's wake.
• For WUNC public radio, Jason deBruyn reported in November on Lumberton's efforts to build longer-term flood protection and the financial and engineering challenges involved.
• GateHouse Media's Theodore Decker reported in November on questions along Florence's path in Eastern North Carolina about how and whether communities hit by a series of storms could or would rebuild.
• Greg Barnes reported for North Carolina Health News on a state agricultural plan, funded by FEMA, to make compost out of the remains of millions of chickens killed during Florence.
• Carolina Public Press looked inland to assess how central North Carolina communities were dealing with damage and recovery from hurricanes Florence and Michael, another overlooked aspect of the storms.

Bulletin Board

NC Open Gov's new director; Metrics for News subsidies

• Brooks Fuller will join the Elon University faculty in January as director of the NC Open Government Coalition and its Sunshine Center at Elon, and as an instructor in the School of Communications. Fuller brings both legal experience and media scholarship to the position; after studying journalism as a UNC undergraduate, he went on to earn a law degree and practiced for seven years in North Carolina before returning to Chapel Hill as a doctoral student. Elon's announcement of his faculty hire said Fuller, an assistant professor since fall 2017 at Louisiana State University's Manship School of Communication, won a national award for his doctoral dissertation on free speech issues and conflict. Rick Thames, chairman of the OGC board, said Fuller "will be an outstanding director for this coalition. He cares deeply about the people of North Carolina and he shares this organization's commitment to government that is open and accessible to its citizens."
• The American Press Institute will offer subsidies for 10 newsrooms to use its Metrics for News software and services to measure digital audience behavior and build strategy around it. Deadline is Jan. 18 to apply for funds to cover half of the costs of the services for one year. Metrics for News, API says, "can help you answer important audience questions such as why users engage with you and what drives them to subscribe, or measure the key journalistic qualities you care about (beats, enterprise, watchdog reporting, and more). Ultimately you can identify and refine content strategies to grow audiences and deepen engagement." The subsidies are funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation; learn more and apply here. 

Local Voice: Lackisha Freeman

WNCU's general manager looks to media's future

(The following interview is republished from the Local News Lab website as one in a series of profiles of NC Local News Lab Fund grantees. Learn more via these links about the fund and other grantees.)

If you told Lackisha Freeman as a young student that she would one day have a career in public radio, she may not have believed you. During her first few years of law school at North Carolina Central University, she took a side job as an office  assistant at the campus public radio station, WNCU.

“I discovered something new,” she said. “I was bit by the media bug and I never looked back.”

She now works as the general manager for the station, along with heading the station’s Advancement of Emerging Young, Diverse News Journalists project. The program will train a group of student reporters through mentoring and professional training. Read more about the program here.  The Local News Lab's Rachel Wegner asked Freeman about the power of collaborative media and what’s on the horizon for the station.

Disclosure: I work as a local news consultant for Democracy Fund, which also supports the NC Local News Lab Fund and Local News Lab website.

What drew you to lead the Advancement of Emerging Young, Diverse News Journalists project for WNCU?

I’ve been wishing we could do something a little bit more intensive for students, like a quasi-newsroom experience. There was really never a chance for working with them on a more extensive level. [This project] is more independent. We’ll still guide them to make sure things are ethical with respect to best practices in journalism, but it’s definitely more freedom for them to express themselves, be who they are and have their own voice.
 

Which news or information collaborations have inspired you the most?

Recently, we collaborated with UNC-TV with the documentary, “Tell Them We Are Rising.” We were one of the HBCU campuses that was selected to premiere the documentary. We worked with Deborah Holt Noel. She is the host and also producer of Black Issues Forum. It was a full day, and I just think that was a wonderful success. That, to me, was collaboration at its finest, honestly. To see television and radio come together, along with the documentary — it was beautiful. It was amazing. As a spinoff of that day, they produced a special show on HBCU leaders.

Are there any unsung heroes in the Durham area news community? Who do you look up to?

She’s not unsung, so to speak, but Miriam Thomas Norris, who used to work at ABC11. As a young kid growing up, I was a fan. Part of it was seeing a woman that looked like me who was successful and delivered the news so eloquently. That was something endearing for me because there was a black woman I grew up looking at on TV demanding her space during prime time on television and reigning effortlessly in a field that was not dominant for minority women.

What fed into the idea of this project to help along emerging, diverse journalists?

I’ve been wanting to do this for some time and trying to find opportunities and resources. Not only are we a full-powered FM radio station serving both the campus and the community, but also under the academic umbrella at North Carolina Central University. Part of the charge is to train students. For me, it’s always been, “How can we do more?” For this more advanced level of training, instead of it just being a grade, I wanted students to have a little bit of incentive, where they can [be paid] and feel like it’s more of a job. My wheels are already spinning about how we can continue this. I would love to see us have a full-fledged newsroom where students come in and we include them as part of a news team.

Happy Holidays