Election planning for 2020 starts now

North Carolina's voters face electoral confusion: Looking ahead amid the nationalization of politics and coverage

• From Margaret Sullivan, Washington Post media critic and former New York Times public editor, "Campaign journalism needs an overhaul. Here's one radical idea."
• From veteran Post columnist EJ Dionne Jr., also a familiar voice on NPR, PBS and other broadcast outlets, "The media bias should be toward democracy,"
• From columnist Frank Bruni at the New York Times, "Will the media be Trump's accomplice again in 2020?" 
• From press critic and NYU prof Jay Rosen, a Twitter Moments thread headlined "Election coverage in 2020 is on track to be even worse than in 2016," a debate with comment and links from many voices. (Disclosure: I consulted in 2018 with the national Membership Puzzle Project, which Rosen directs)

Worth Reading

Tommy Tomlinson's new book gets warm welcome

• Last week The Atlantic published "The Weight I Carry," an excerpt from Tommy Tomlinson's new book on his life and experiences with. The autobiographical book, "The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America," is out this week. Tomlinson, a former Charlotte Observer columnist, now hosts the "Southbound" podcast and writes for WFAE public radio. Readers and critics hailed the excerpt for its courage, eloquence and grace, and early reviews of the book are glowing. Tomlinson is beginning his book tour and will be at Scuppernong Books in Greensboro tonight and Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh on Thursday evening. He'll be at the Country Bookshop in Southern Pines next Thursday and at Malaprop's in Asheville Jan. 28. Check Tomlinson's website for more dates and details, including how to order the book.

Use This

Scholarships for coders, a digital CMS toolkit and FEMA grants

• Open News, the network of journalists, designers, developers and editors, is offering scholarships for journalism coders — newsroom or freelance developers — to travel to conferences. Hurry: The first deadline is this Friday. Learn all about it here.
• Small and medium-sized news organizations (i.e. most of us) often struggle with systems for managing digital publishing: WordPress.com is addressing these needs with a new content management system toolkit called NewsPack. NiemanLab's report on the announcement earlier this week offers more detail on NewsPack, which is funded by the Google News Initiative and several other backers.
• National Geographic reporter Andrew Revkin tweeted the other day about upcoming FEMA deadlines for communities to apply for resiliency grants. The links are part of a longer piece for NatGeo by Revkin, "Once derided, ways to adapt to climate change are gaining steam," but also raise questions about the impact of the federal shutdown on recovery funding for Hurricanes Florence and Matthew. It's along read, but of use if you're covering the recovery.

Bulletin board

An honor for Menconi, biz j training for students and N&O event

• David Menconi, author and longtime News & Observer arts and music reporter and columnist, has been selected the 2019 Piedmont Laureate. In that role, which is supported by several Triangle arts councils, Menconi will serve through Dec. 31, "presenting public readings and workshops, participating at select public functions and creating at least one original activity to expand appreciation of writing," according to the announcement. Congratulations, David!
• The UNC School of Media & Journalism and University of California-Berkeley will host two week-long programs for college students to learn about business journalism. Applications are due Jan. 29 for the Bloomberg-UNC-Berkeley Business Journalism Diversity Program, which will be held May 13-17 at UNC and June 3-7 at Berkeley, and will be led by senior Bloomberg journalists and executives. 
• The News & Observer politics team and other journalists will host a public event at its downtown Raleigh newsroom Jan. 29 to talk and take questions and comments on legislative coverage. "Let’s talk about the NC legislature: Attend our CuriousNC Live event," will take place from 6 p.m to 7:30 p.m.

Local Voice: Angie Newsome

Carolina Public Press' founder on starting up and moving ahead

(Note: This week's Local Voice Q&A incorporates and expands on a 2018 post from the Local News Lab site, part of an ongoing series sharing stories from NC Local News Lab Fund grantees and others working in local news. Responses have been edited for length and clarity). 

Angie Newsome’s eyes were first opened to the need for investigative journalism when she saw how factory workers in the Piedmont Triad region of North Carolina were struggling with environmental and work hazards. At the time she was working for a community organization focused on environmental issues.

“One of the places they went for help was the local newspaper, which flat out turned them down,” Newsome said. “That really opened my eyes to how people really view journalism as a resource, as a place for help.”

A Davie County native, Newsome earned a master's degree at UNC-Chapel Hill's School of Media & Journalism and worked as a reporter before founding Carolina Public Press in 2011 with a focus on 10 counties in Western North Carolina. In 2018, CPP moved to expand its reporting, impact and audience statewide, adding staff and coverage. As part of that push, the nonprofit newsroom will pilot efforts to form statewide collaborative investigative news projects and community listening sessions.

Since her conversation last fall with the Local News Lab's Rachel Wegner, Newsome and Carolina Public Press have held or scheduled community listening sessions on sexual assault in Durham, Fayetteville and Asheville. The newsroom is working out details for collaborating with other North Carolina news organizations on sexual assault and mapping out ideas for additional efforts in 2019. Meantime, Newsome and her team are part of the second Knight-Lenfest Initiative Table Stakes cohort, hosted at UNC, aimed at helping local news organizations forge digital strategy for news and revenue. Her newsroom met its $25,000 goal for the 2018 NewsMatch program, which will match that amount and then some; Newsome says the year is off to a good start. Reach her at anewsome@carolinapublicpress.org.

Right now, I’m very inspired by the local reporting network that ProPublica is doing. That’s just amazing. I’m following that and reading their reporting. The Texas Tribune also comes to mind. There are more and more nonprofit news organizations across the country. Every single of them is inspiring in some form or fashion. Creating a nonprofit news organization is a lot of blood, sweat and tears. Anybody who takes that on is worthy of my admiration, in my opinion, whether they fail or succeed.

Are there any unsung “news heroes” in the Asheville community that you wish people knew about? If so, who are they and what do they do?

The people that are really unsung in our communities are people asking for public records, pushing for open government and are holding elected officials accountable to meet those laws and ethics and standards. I also admire the media law attorneys working on public records and open government issues across the state. In North Carolina, there’s no ombudsman. Public records and open government laws are tested in the court system.

I especially admire attorney Amanda Martin and everyone at her firm. She’s an attorney that works with the North Carolina Press Association. The NCPA has a hotline, so if you have a question about open government or public records, you can call and she’s the one who answers the phone. She is highly dedicated, highly knowledgeable. We send her an email and she gets back to us within hours. She’s amazing. I personally feel like she should be North Carolinian of the year.

If you could point to a moment — or even a season — that brought about the idea of this project to spur on investigative reporting, what would it be?

Our three main challenges are impact, reach and sustainability. When you think about how to accomplish those visions, collaboration is essential. For our investigative reporting to have impact in our community, for it to reach people — we can’t do that alone.

We have never viewed ourselves as competitors with the legacy press or any other nonprofit news organization. We view ourselves as a tool for North Carolinians seeking in-depth and investigative reporting. We’re also a tool for other news organizations who want to do this type or reporting or who need additional resources to do this type of reporting. That’s how we view ourselves and that’s how this [project] came about.
 

Are there any past, present or future CPP stories that you’re particularly excited about?

One came from a listening session we held in Western North Carolina where we asked people, “What’s happening in your community that’s going overlooked?” We heard a lot about what was happening in the adult care home system in North Carolina.

Out of that developed a test case for us as an organization, to do a statewide investigative project. We looked at three years of public records for every adult care home in the state, which is about 1,200 facilities. We had information on every single county. What we saw were massive problems with the system. There were abhorrent living conditions. In some cases, there were allegations of prostitution, drug dealing, sexual assault. We did lots of reporting about it over about ten months. That [investigation] tested what it was going take for us to be legitimately statewide. That is serving as a model for us going forward.

What are the wins so far in your statewide expansion, and what do you need to accomplish this year?

We added freelancers and contractors across the state, because we have a goal of accurately and with integrity covering the state. In order to make that happen, we obviously had to develop talent outside of Western North Carolina. We also added for the first time a full-time investigative reporter,... located in the Chapel Hill-Durham area. In terms of building our capacity, those are really amazing wins for us. We're also building a board of directors across the state, and that’s ongoing. We also had some fast wins in building readership across the state: Our subscribers to our email list increased 84 percent, our users increased 28 percent, our page views increased 43 percent, our content increased 36 percent. Those were some pretty dramatic increases for us. Speaking from my gut, I just felt like we had a tremendous year of momentum. This year, we have a goal of doing three statewide investigative projects, that meet some of our impact goals. We’re doing that reporting, and that’s a big thing we want to have happen.

Where do you find the joy in this hard work — what makes it worthwhile?

I really go back to the news and the fact that we have really proven and real impact in communities. The Cherokee County jail story is just one of those, this most recent one. Outside community media, there are very few people looking at what’s happening in that county. That’s what really motivates me, is finding the stories that are being overlooked, that are being underreported and bringing them to a statewide audience and a national audience and finding room for impact -- kind of proving that sunlight can matter. We hear a lot of support from people, and that’s also really gratifying.