In this episode, we talk with Leigh Van der Voo and Emily Harris, two deeply experienced Oregon-based journalists who are working together, along with John Schrag, on Uplift Local, a new organization striving to empower communities through high-quality, community-first reporting and partnerships that close news gaps and disrupt misinformation. As you'll hear from Lee and Emily, Oregon and the nation are facing a range of serious challenges when it comes to news, and we're also in a moment that's full of opportunities.
Show Notes
About Our Guests
Emily Harris is a cofounder of Uplift Local and the organization's director of community journalism, overseeing the local newsroom network and the Documenters program. She is an award-winning journalist with local, national and international experience, serving as a correspondent for NPR in Berlin, Baghdad and Jerusalem, an investigative reporter for CIR/Reveal, the host of the daily news talk show Think Out Loud on Oregon Public Broadcasting and coauthor of the daily newsletter Axios Portland. She also directed editorial content for the Journalism Accelerator startup, promoting financial stability in journalism. Emily grew up in Portland, served on Oregon’s Public Records Advisory Council and teaches journalism and audio storytelling at the University of Oregon.
Lee van der Voo is a cofounder of Uplift Local and the organization's co-executive director. She worked in community newspapers in Oregon for a decade before becoming involved in nonprofit news in 2010, serving as managing director of InvestigateWest and launching the investigations desk at Civil Eats. She has authored two books, numerous articles for national outlets, and won significant grants and awards. Regionally, she won an Oregon Book Award in 2017 and has won or received special recognition for the Bruce Baer Award, Oregon’s top reporting prize, four times. She has served on the boards of Open Oregon, the Society of Professional Journalists, and on the Oregon Public Records Advisory Council.
You can learn more about Uplift Local's work at upliftlocal.news.
Further Detours
The Agora Center at the University of Oregon's School of Journalism and Communication has compiled a survey of Oregon's news and information ecosystem.
The Civic Information Index uses data to map drivers of engaged, informed, equitable, and healthy communities nationwide.
Citizen University is a hub for inspiration, resources, and events to help catalyze a stronger civic culture across the US.
Emily Harris has hosted a pair of Consider This conversations for Oregon Humanities: with journalist Eli Saslow in 2018 (audio | video) and with journalist and reporter Omar El Akkad in 2019 (audio | video)
Lee van der Voo's article "Second Growth" for Oregon Humanities magazine explores the state of forest activism in Oregon.
Transcript
Adam Davis: Hello and welcome to The Detour, which is not a news show. We don't, with The Detour, or with anything else Oregon Humanities works on, break the news. And we don't really analyze the news either. But I believe it's still accurate to say that much of what we do depends on some knowledge of what gets reported in the news. And that without the news, without a whole news ecosystem, we at Oregon Humanities, and people more generally, would be missing out on a great deal of important information that helps us make sense of and shapes our lives, our communities, our country, and even our world. In this episode of The Detour, we talk with Leigh Van der Voo and Emily Harris, two deeply experienced Oregon-based journalists who are working together, along with John Schrag, on Uplift Local, a new organization striving to empower communities through high quality, community-first reporting and partnerships that close news gaps and disrupt misinformation. As you'll hear from Lee and Emily, Oregon and the nation are facing a range of serious challenges when it comes to news, and we're also in a moment that's full of opportunities.
You'll hear Lee and Emily step back from this specific moment, too, to talk about what news is, and who it's for, why news is important, and what people most need and hope for from it. We talked with Lee and Emily in the XRAY FM studios in October of 2024. And we're excited to share this conversation as their efforts around participatory journalism in Oregon and Washington grow and contribute to how we in the Pacific Northwest understand ourselves.
Emily, thank you for joining us here in the basement with XRAY Studio for The Detour. We're gonna get to what you are working on, and some questions about journalism and Oregon, but I wanted to start by asking both of you and maybe Lee, if it's all right, we could start with you. A paper, a newspaper that when you were, say, high school age, was in your house or was where you lived, a paper that you read or that your parents read.
Where were you? What was the paper?
Lee van der Voo: Oh, wow. Well, there were a lot of them. My stepfather was a truck driver, so he would always start the morning with the Record Journal in Wallingford, and usually he would get through it by the end of the day, and then he'd have to pick up the New Haven Register. And if it was a very long day then the Hartford Courant.
So all three of those would often come home and I would read those normally. It got to be kind of a family habit to have a favorite newspaper. He would still always get up at like three in the morning on Saturdays, which was not a work day and often on Saturday we would go camping. So he would make a run for coffee and donuts and everybody's favorite newspaper.
So for me, it was the New York Daily News and I liked the backstories.
Adam Davis: Okay. Yeah. There's. Follow up questions I want to ask about some of those, but let me go to Emily and ask the same question about a paper when you were high school age or papers in your home.
Emily Harris: It was the Oregonian. I grew up here and my parents were subscribers and I actually always loved the comics and the advice columns. I still read advice columns all the time in any publication. But there were other things lying around. My dad subscribed to a lot of sort of specialty newsletters that actually came in the mail at that time, like the Institute of Current World Affairs, which would have these young fellows that they would pay to go to countries somewhere else, live there for two years and write dispatches back. Sort of on the ground things.
And my dad had a strategic way of leaving things he wanted to discuss on the breakfast table. So I did a lot of lying around reading, reading things that were lying around.
Adam Davis: Yeah. So both of you, multiple papers or newsletters, but also interesting to think about the difference between say an international periodical of some kind and hyperlocal stuff.
I think Lee, you named three or four different papers. What do you think you were getting? Like, what did you like about them? What were you getting from them?
Lee van der Voo: Oh, I loved just knowing what was going on. Knowing what was going on around the world. I mean, the Record Journal was a local paper. I grew up in Connecticut in New Haven County, and it was our community newspaper, but also it had a lot of Associated Press content, and I can remember being 15 and reading about Tiananmen Square and when Roe v. Wade was in the Supreme Court. All those things were very interesting to me as a young person. But I really loved those backstories, those deep mysteries, those really intensive reporting projects that I could lie in a hammock and read on a Saturday.
Adam Davis: Do you remember any in particular?
Lee van der Voo: Yeah, I remember the shoebox murders was a big one. For some reason I got really sucked into that, and I think it was because it had happened near my hometown.
Adam Davis: Hmm. And Emily, you said, the comics and advice. What did you like about those things?
Emily Harris: Well, the comics because they're funny. The advice columns, I mean, I've always just been very interested in how people interact with each other. And that is essentially what advice columns are about. They bring up all kinds of social situations. I mean, there was which way should the toilet paper roll be hanging, which is something that came up in multiple advice columns. I do have opinions about that, but I also, from the papers, I got a sense that you could make a difference with information.
So like, I wrote to the White House, to the president, when I was, I don't know exactly what age I was, but it must have been under 10. I wrote a letter to the editor of the Oregonian criticizing some coverage when I was about 17. So, I felt like you could do something with words, and that's one of the other big things that I learned.
And I mean, I read a ton anyway, but in current events–in news in words that you were going to throw away the next day, birdcage liners, you could still do something with words.
Adam Davis: So you had the Oregonian doing something important for you. We're talking some years ago. Like, what's the space that the Oregonian used to occupy that feels like it's not occupying in quite the same way? How would you describe that?
Emily Harris: Well, it was of course, the Oregonian and the Oregon Journal for a long time. Morning paper and the afternoon paper. And I can't quite remember when they merged, maybe the 80’s. And what the Oregonian and other big daily newspapers did all around the country for many, many years, and this is sort of what Lee was alluding to on getting the AP copy and stuff, was they covered everything, right?
I mean, they were your source for everything: the national news, the international news through wire copy, and then also for local news. I can't really remember what the Oregonian’s statewide coverage was back when I was growing up, but obviously the staff was much bigger. So there was much more thorough coverage.
But the difference I think now is they are a local paper and they're a much thinner staff. And so they have to make a lot of different decisions about what they cover. At that time, you know, it brought the world really to your doorstep in a way. And there was this serendipity, the serendipitous nature of it.
I don't want to be overly nostalgic about this, but you could read an article you were interested in and then see a headline that you didn't know anything about and you could choose to skip it or you could read it, but it was right in front of you, which is, you know, just obviously really different from the algorithmic stuff that we get today.
Adam Davis: And Lee, since you started by talking about Connecticut and Connecticut papers, can I ask you, when you got to Oregon, was there anything that stood out to you about the sort of media landscape here, or the news you ran into here? Was it similar or different from where you'd been before?
Lee van der Voo: Well, I'm listening to Emily describe the Oregonian of days past, and I do remember arriving here in 1999 and being really smitten with that kind of super absorbing journalism that I mentioned being such a fan of as a younger person.
Lee van der Voo: And I think in some of my first days here in Portland, the Oregonian was doing a feature series that I think won a Pulitzer Prize about a boy, I believe his name was Sam Lightner. Does anyone else remember this? He was a boy that had a malformed face and the reporter Tom Hallman was following him through a series of operations to restore him to something more manageable. And it ran, I think, for about seven days and it was like three pages or something. I mean, it was this really, really lengthy reporting that was very deep. I mean, you were in the operating room with this kid. There were those kinds of really absorbing pieces that could just… there was so much space to come alive.
There was this beautiful photography that went with it, of course, that kind of work is very, very expensive. But it was something that the Oregonian used to do really, really well, and still does well, but not as much of.
Emily Harris: And of course, it didn't do everything, right? I mean, There were some stories that the Oregonian didn't report that I remember. Willamette Week would come in and cover. Then The Oregonian would come cover it, or that's not so, especially after The Journal was gone. It was more like a one newspaper, one dominant newspaper town. And, that was a shift at that time that was going on all over the country. That was the start of a big newspaper landscape shift.
Adam Davis: And if we're bringing up to fall of 2024, and this is a lot to ask, but the shift over the last say 15 years, how would you characterize top level, the shift in the media landscape locally within states and locally?
Emily Harris: I mean, I would call it both a shutting down and an opening up because clearly when the classified ads went away, and that affected even alternative weeklies, and when so much, you know, insert and other advertising went away, the budgets went away. And when the budgets went away, then the staff went away.
And when the staff went away, then the stories went away. Because people can't cover everything, you know, they just can't. It's finite. But at the same time, and I think overall, we have a more constricted news landscape than we did before. I mean, you just see that because of staff all over the place and things shutting down.
But of course, other things also started. X Ray started, where the studio that we're sitting in right now, there's people who do their own podcasts. There's a true crime podcast out of Salem, I think, that's covering Willamette Valley crime in that particular way, so a lot of things opened up, and we see that continuing to happen.
But what else I think we've seen is that as the void in the local news has grown and the habits of consuming news have shifted, a lot more attention has shifted to national news. And I think that is a pretty decisive trend around the country.
Adam Davis: Lee, what's standing out for you about this story?
Lee van der Voo: Well, I think, I mean, I agree with everything that Emily has said, and I think also, when we talk about these features of the newspapers that were most noticeable to us in days past, for me, of course, there was always this tremendous undergirding of the work that we appreciated with just the daily bread and butter of the newspaper. This involved being out in the community, attending all the meetings, making a record of everything that was happening in civic life all around us.
And that, I think, is what has a lot of holes now. I mean, we're essentially witnessing the market failure of newspapers, and newspapers are as old as the republic. We don't know, as Americans, what happens when we don't have newspapers. I think we're finding out. And at the same time, I'd also echo Emily's appreciation of the lowering of the barrier to entry, which as we get into talking about our work, you'll hear that's something that we feel is really important.
Adam Davis: So let's move there and maybe we can move, and by there, I mean, to your work. Maybe we can move there with one bridge question, which is what's lost when you don't have the daily bread and butter of reporting on meetings and other local stuff?
Lee van der Voo: A lot. Obviously some situational awareness to put it very simply, but we know from social science now that this is not just an issue of a problem of industry.
There is a real relationship between people's ability to see themselves and the world around them reflected in the news and their ability to engage in civic life and trust. People who don't see themselves in the news tend not to show up to public meetings. They may not know or ever meet their elected officials.
They very likely don't run for office. They often don't vote. And those issues affect already low-power communities more than they affect communities with power. And so there becomes this disintegration of civic engagement that is really quite pronounced. And in the space where that used to be, you see rising misinformation, increasingly polarized narratives and just a real shift in how we view ourselves in our place in the world, in our communities. And that is all directly linked to the decline of fact-based information.
Emily Harris: Yeah. And if you think about it, I'm just reflecting on what I said a few minutes ago about how I felt like I could use words to engage with what was going on around me. That's, I think, exactly a piece of the Swiss cheese, one of the holes in the Swiss cheese of civic life.
Adam Davis: But you talked a minute ago about not only what was closing down, but also what was opening up. And I'm curious about what's lost between those, because it sounds like there's a lot that's not captured and if we were to sort of go, here's what was lost and here are the things opening up, what do you feel like we really need to pay attention to in order to make sure there's opening for that and support for that?
Emily Harris: I think a big thing that's a really complex problem to first diagnose, and second to address, is trust. I mean by that a belief that the person who's giving you the information is trustworthy, has your best interests in conveying the information, is accurate, and sees you in that information. Journalism doesn't always do it right, like a hundred percent. It doesn't always do it right, but there are practices that journalism has honed over time, like asking questions that hold people to their promises, if they're people in power, or double checking that what somebody told you, you can verify another way. Maybe that's somebody else who was at the same meeting. Maybe that's a document, you know, like a report, whatever. And also an interest in correcting things when they're wrong. So there's pieces that journalism has contributed to that whole creation of trusted information. There's a lot of things that are affecting trust right now, but without that core piece and even trust in journalism, then I think that's lost.
Adam Davis: Where do you get your trusted information these days? Where do you go for information you trust?
Lee van der Voo: Well, I go to a lot of places. I have the benefit of being a journalist. And so I think that I develop a lot of information that we have great confidence in day to day as we do our work. We've done a tremendous amount of research that is the backbone of the things that we're engaged with every day in our business life. But I mean, of course, the same trusted sources that have always been there are performing as well as they ever have. Well… maybe to a lesser degree. Right?
But what's there is still good, solid information. So I do still read the Oregonian. I do still listen to OPB, read Willamette Week, read the Portland Tribune, and also the New York Times. So I think that there's lots of great trusted information out there. I also read some really interesting new publications that are things that nobody ever imagined in the days when we had newspapers as our… I hate to use this word, but I'm going to, because I can't think of a better one, but the gatekeepers, if you will, of information.
One example that I really like is a publication called Heated, and it's a couple of very young women who are some of the best climate reporters in the country, and they just started a substack and it is awesome. And they are people who are, I don't know if they're quite Gen Z, but I think so. They're young and I emphasize that because I think previously there's a barrier to entry there that would have affected their ability to put the information that they really cared about out there. You know, the New York Times, historically, did a terrible job of covering climate change. Now they do better, but they have a kind of a really ugly history with that subject.
And so for two young people to come to journalism with a passion for that particular topic and be able to shape it for an audience that same age and really develop the reporting to a degree that I've never seen climate reporting developed, they're, they're naming names. They're doing deep investigations of the way money moves in some of the most harmful practices in the country.
These are still some topics that mainstream, if you will, media, won't touch. And so that stuff is great. And there are publications like Heated that I really, really dig.
Emily Harris: And that gatekeeping piece. That's been one of the big failings of journalism, especially when there's only one newspaper in the town. That is a really great thing that's been changing. It'd be nice if there were more resources for Heated and more resources for the Oregonian, for Willamette Week, for the kind of work that we're doing. Back to your question on where you get information you trust, we get information from so many places, right?
I mean, we do not just get information from quote unquote news sources. And in fact, when I think we make decisions about how to interact with the world, how to help myself and my family, my friends, you're dealing in a huge range of sources of information. Your own personal experience–a very important source of influence.
Also your friends’ and families’ experience. You're not only evaluating the information, you're also evaluating your friends and family. You're like, yeah, my aunt told me that, but she's a little… or my friend told me this, but I know that's really their pet peeve. And I think they might be blowing it out of proportion, right?
You're doing that all the time. So you're evaluating your sources. And I think that one of the important things for journalists today is to be in some kind of relationship with the people that you are hoping will listen to what you're doing, or read what you're writing, so that you can develop that sense of trust and also evaluation because I think that people, you know, it's not a black and white thing.
You don't 100 percent trust whatever. You 90 percent trust this or yes, that makes sense. And I can see how here's a line in this story where I'm not so sure about that. So we're not like black and white in how we evaluate information. And I think that journalists can benefit by understanding how to fit into that really well.
Adam Davis: What kind of relationship should journalists have with the people who are reading their stuff?
Emily Harris: So first, I think if you are reporting, if you're putting people's names in stories and you're reporting on them, you should be able to feel confident that you could look them in the eye and say, yeah, I wrote this and you didn't like it, but this is why I wrote it. And here's what I stood on, right? So that's number one. Number two, I think that especially if you're doing community based journalism, which is what we are doing now, you need to be visible and you need to be accessible. You need to be a part of the community so that it's clear that you understand the community.
It is a very, very sophisticated skill to be able to be a member of a community and to report on that community. And if you can pull it off, people will trust you, even if they don't like what you wrote.
Lee van der Voo: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I 100 percent agree. I also think a journalist's greatest skill is being able to judge what information really is newsworthy. I mean, that's how we talk about what are the most important things we can be telling people. And I think one of the challenges of our industry is we have elevated our own judgment of what is newsworthy over the practice of listening. And I do think that's an area where we could dramatically improve.
I think as a journalist, my experience of spending the last three years listening to other people talk about their experiences with the media has improved my listening. It has radically changed my fundamental beliefs about how our industry and practice really should work. And I think that I would love to see more of my peers more interested in taking the time to listen.
And that doesn't mean throwing news judgment aside, but it means taking some opportunity to hear from the people that we serve about what it is that they need. A hundred percent.
Adam Davis: You can't say that about radically changing your belief without my asking for a couple of radical changes in your belief.
Lee van der Voo: Radical. Um, well, you know, I mean, I think, you know, Emily and I and our co founder, John Trogg, we've had this conversation many times about how we came to what began as a research project to understand what information Oregonians received, where were they getting their news and how they felt about it.
And we really thought that it would lead us to design solutions around news gaps and misinformation, which was our goal, in ways that we had learned to do. We're all, you know, longtime journalists, newsroom leaders. We all have some history with really deep, probing investigative, explanatory journalism. Community journalism is a practice that we've all engaged in, but I think sometimes when you're a journalist, you really start, as you develop, to gravitate toward this more complicated work. And I think we had the belief that that was the highest calling, if you will, of what we could be doing in our communities– really digging in on these very difficult, dense topics and bringing more resources to them.
But when we talk to people, it's just not what we heard. You know? I ended up in conversation with 3,500 people in Oregon and Southwest Washington in four different languages. And the result was that they simply want to understand what's going on in their neighborhoods and towns and have the information that they need to navigate their daily lives. That is much more important to them than investigative journalism and the practices that were always most important to me as a journalist. And it's really brought me back to the civic duty of simply reporting and the practice of reporting and how even though it's always been core to the work that I did, it wasn't necessarily always where my attention was.
Now, my attention is fully there.
Adam Davis: Please, you nodded a couple of times, so.
Emily Harris: Just that the looking for information to use to navigate their daily lives–what's going on around me– that came out in our research so strongly. It can be super simple. It can be as simple as I heard there's this Christmas tree lighting, but is it… I heard about it on an English flyer and I speak Spanish and my kids speak Spanish. Can we go? Are we welcome? Could be that simple. Could be a little more complex, like, I've heard that Amazon is interested in putting up some stuff here in our town, some data centers. I've heard it. What's really going on? Is that going to impact my water bill? Is that going to impact my property values?
So there can be very complex information needs and there can be very simple information needs, but it's like, what do I need to make sense of the world, make my life better or make my day, my daily existence, you know, on the upward trend.
Adam Davis: I think I want to ask just the follow up to that. What do we need from local news sources to make sense of our daily life?
Emily Harris: I mean, many, many things, right? Anything that is relevant information that can help you do what you need to do. But there's also, like, is the bus running when the roads are icy, right? But then there's also more complex things like just opening up your world. Like putting context in.
So maybe you, what you really want to know is what are my kids doing in third grade this year? You could get that obviously from the school, but say you want to read an article about this new social studies curriculum or something like that because you've got a kid who's going to go into third grade and you want to understand what's going on.
But what you didn't know was how different this is in Wasco County compared to Hood River County. And so that's another piece that somebody whose job it is to ask questions and gather useful information can bring to you. So many, many different things.
Lee van der Voo: And I think that one thing that we determined is we can let the communities decide. So, after all of this research, John and Emily and I and our wonderful coaches and consultants designed a news model that can be responsive to the things that people were asking for. And one of its fundamental premises is, let's ask them first, what they actually want. And that can change depending on where you are in the community that you're serving.
Adam Davis: So at this point, let's go straight to that model for a minute, which I think has a new name recently, maybe, and what have you been working on? What's the model? How's it work?
Lee van der Voo: It's called Uplift Local. We're very excited about that name. That, too, is community informed. It does basically three fundamental things.
It involves more people, and solving the problem of how they get the news and information that their community needs. It retools the pipeline a bit for who can be the provider of that information. In other words, who can be a journalist creates more of an opportunity for people to come from the community and become a journalist and learn it as a craft rather than as a four year degree or a master's degree that they may not have access to.
And it also tries to solve for that last mile gap between the information that people want and need and their ability to access it when and where they need it.
Adam Davis: Can I ask about the second of those three first, the difference between getting a four year degree and then learning a bit about the craft enough to contribute. How does that part work?
Emily Harris: So one piece that we're bringing is a Documenters program. Documenters is the name of a program that was started in Chicago. And what it does is it pays people and trains people to go to public meetings that newspapers and radio stations, TV stations either never covered or cannot cover anymore.
And this is not journalism. This is going to listen to start to learn how this works, learn how to take notes. Notes are then fact-checked, edited, consolidated, and then shared in a couple of different ways. For example they're published on a website and they're also shared as more like a story form in an email or a text-based newsletter that you would get. They're also shared with local journalists who are still in those communities so that they can respond to stories that need follow-up or maybe are more complex, or they just couldn't go to the meeting and they needed to know what somebody said.
You're doing that in partnership with local news organizations. But here's what that program does. It is kind of a first step into civic engagement. And then you can start to see what it means to be able to say, Oh, yeah, I was at that meeting. I know what happened and to also understand over time what else happens that doesn't actually happen in the public meeting.
And so that is a pathway into doing more. It's moving more in the direction of actual journalism. I think it's up and running in a couple dozen cities around the country already. And it's a program that's both brought people into journalism through more of a craft path and also brought people into other things like running for public office and that sort of thing.
Lee van der Voo: So we'll be offering that program and some others in the Columbia River Gorge. It's our target area, where we're going to pilot our first news service. And the reason is because it's a region that struggles with all three barriers to access news and information.
Kind of the biggest news gap issues in Oregon, if you will, is rural communities struggling with access to information and news. Another barrier is people who prefer to receive news and information in language other than English and live in distinct cultural communities, for example, people who speak Russian who live in the Portland metro area.
That is an area that struggles with all three things. When we talk about bringing Documenters in, the reason is because we heard very loud and clear in our listening work, both surveys and focus groups, also interviews and conversations with journalists and community leaders, that the fundamental work of meeting coverage in the Gorge area is really missing.
Not only are the journalists struggling with meeting coverage. There's only eight left in an area the size of Rhode Island serving 86,000 people. The community struggles with not receiving news coverage. Then we have folks who prefer to receive their news and information in Spanish in that area who constitute 25 percent of say, Hood River, for example.
I think in the four counties in the Gorge, it's more like 18 percent of people identify as Hispanic and are primarily Spanish speaking who are dealing with an information gap that is so profound, they are profoundly underserved to the degree that we need to do a little more, and that's where we start talking about how do we provide a Spanish speaking journalist in this region that isn't going to need to leave for the next job in two years.
Our traditional pipeline of training journalists is a college degree and then going to a community and learning for a couple of years. It’s usually a low power community, a rural community where we might train somebody. You get a couple years experience, you leave, you go to the next community, maybe eventually you end up in a city.
But this turnover and this loss of historical knowledge is part of the reason why some of these underserved areas don't have a lot of trust and confidence in journalism. But they are also kind of locked into the problem of being underserved. We think that if we could train more people from the community to learn this craft, and it is a craft, that they would stay, and they would use the established relationships that they have with the community to be a source of news and information in a meaningful, more relevant, culturally informed way that isn't going to pack up and go to Portland in two years. That is a big piece of what we mean when we say we want to retool the pipeline.
Adam Davis: You're listening to Emily Harris and Lee van der Voo on The Detour.
When does that work start in the Gorge? I mean, I'm sure it has started in some ways, but, what's the horizon for it? And then let me also tack on to that…
Emily Harris: Three questions at once.
Adam Davis: Yeah, terrible, terrible practice… Other communities and how to think about focus in one place versus opening up in other places.
Emily Harris: We are aiming to start this early next year. “Early” might vary a little bit depending on how our fundraising comes together, but we're in a position to start early next year. And ultimately we envision Uplift Local not just as a community news service, but a network of community news services. It's going to look a little bit different in each community because as Lee said, the whole point is to figure out what is of interest? What is of desire in this community? And that can include things that they are interested in knowing more about and also the platform that they want to get their news on and the language that they want to get their news in. So rollout for the next community… I mean, this is going to be a pilot. We don't really have that calendar yet, but we're talking to some other communities, and we're feeling our way in different areas. We have a ton of research from around the state and we're totally open to talking to people at this point, but we don't have a calendar for the next steps.
Lee van der Voo: The third part of that question, the horizon. No horizon. We really want to change the way people get news and information in Oregon over the next 10 years or so. And what we hope will come out of this first news service in the Gorge is that we can tell people, “Plug and play, this is what it costs.”
We can go from community to community. That's dealing with the three sort of gap issues that I talked about and tell them what it would take and what it would cost them to get something off the ground.
Adam Davis: I'm thinking back to where we started with the question of the papers that were around you when you were high school age or so and you both had multiple examples and you also, I thought, exhibited a certain excitement in remembering those. And not everybody had multiple papers around, and not everybody was excited about it. I'm curious about your sense of the appetite, not on the production side, but on the receiving side.
Emily Harris: For people who want this? What we found in our research? Is that what you mean?
Adam Davis: Yeah.
Emily Harris: I think Lee's spoken a lot to what we found in our research, but what I'm hoping, right, what I'm hoping for when we get this up and running is that people now have multiple sources of information like we talked about and they have a gazillion now all in one place on their phone, right? But I am hoping and believe that this will happen, that the new service that we're starting for Spanish speakers in the Gorge will be a place that’s the app they go to all the time or the text, the text thread that they're going to all the time because something's coming up that they need. Then they're going to see that person around town and be like, Oh, I know you, you're the person who told me this or did this and they're going to be excited about being connected to a bunch of people who are sharing the same information. They’ll know what's going on together because then they have another common experience and that is one thing I hope is going to happen in terms of the excitement of receiving. What we heard from people shows that that hope is there on their side as well.
And then with the Documenters program, what I've seen in other cities, as I've looked around at how this has rolled out in other places, is that what happens is that a community can develop around just this simple act of going to listen to these people who are making all these decisions that affect our lives, what they're saying. People start to trade notes, and people start to trade skills, and people start to want to do more, and there's just incredible ways that I've seen this program build.
There was an example in Ohio where a reporter at one of the partner newspapers wanted to do some research that needed like 70 people to ride the bus. lThey wanted to see how these bus lines were running, right? But that one reporter cannot do that alone.
So they had this huge group of Documenters who were like, Oh, I don't have to just go to civic meetings, I can ride the bus and tell you what happened. They could share whatever data or anecdotes that reporter wanted. So it develops that this whole group of people are responsible in some way for knowing what's going on in their community and sharing it back out.
And I think that the appetite is there, we will see for sure, but that's where I can see people getting excited about.
Lee van der Voo: We certainly heard a lot of warm responses when we were doing our research. We heard a lot about the need, but as we were developing this model, we also went back to the community and showed it to people and got feedback on whether it would work for you. Would you use this? So we kept moving it in a direction of what people need and what they tell us they want. I can say from the experience of showing up and talking about this, that there's always more excitement in these meetings than boredom. You know, we've had demos where we talk about our work where people start to give testimonials about why they think this is so excellent.
People have broken down and been choked up talking about all that they've lost in terms of coverage and that they're fearful about what this means. Every time we introduce this idea to a new group of people, there's suddenly more people. So that's a really great sign. We're super excited about it, and we're definitely moving in a direction of interest.
Adam Davis: So we're three weeks, as we talk here in the basement, we're three weeks from an election, not an election, from a raft of elections. And we have yet, in this conversation, to talk about something like politics. Partisanship. We've talked more about how economic forces have affected media, but how does this effort navigate what feels like a more pitched partisan world than what we've seen before?
Emily Harris: This is such an important piece and there is really interesting research that maybe will ring true to you. But I don't know. I'll be curious. Local news sources have shrunk, more attention has been paid to national news sources, and when that happens, partisanship rises. But, when people pay more attention to local news, partisanship drops.
There's actually a super interesting experiment, like a black white experiment, with two newspapers in Southern California. They were owned by the same company, and one stopped taking any letters to the editor about national issues and no op-eds about national issues. So instead of Republicans versus Democrats, the White House election, what have you, it was like, should the mermaid statue in front of the mall be gold or should it be sparkly?
People have strong opinions about this kind of stuff. I'm not sure if that was the exact story, but it was something about mermaids actually, that was one big issue. And people have strong opinions about that, but it doesn't necessarily break down along the very familiar partisan party politics lines.
So it's a shift because when you see that you are mad about somebody having a different opinion about the mermaid's outfit, you're mad about that opinion. You're not attaching everything else to them. You're not mad because they're supporting this presidential candidate or that presidential candidate, so there's a connection there, and it's obviously really important when you're building trust in a community to not favor one side or political view over the other because there's always different opinions in a community. It is also very important to reflect the range of opinions. So there's a, you know, that's a really, that's what I'm talking about with these sophisticated skills in community journalism. That's what I'm talking about.
Lee van der Voo: You know what, Adam? I think that one thing that our research tells us is that we are living with some really interesting myths as Oregonians in that polarization has been inflicted upon us. And I'll give you an example. There is, of course, the urban-rural divide. It is forever treated as a blue-red kind of attention.
There is, of course, the reality that sometimes urban areas are getting more resources and representation in Oregon, and that's an issue of tension that I think is real, right? But with it is a feeling that we picked up on in talking to people that urban people don't care. And when we talk to rural people, I mean rural people are a marginalized community in Oregon and they can articulate, like, they can articulate an issue that was important to them that wasn't covered by the media and how it makes them feel, and they use these words like sad and angry and invisible, and many of them, like a very high percentage, can articulate, can connect that experience with the inability to affect change in their communities and a lack of responsiveness on the part of government that isn't solving problems because these things aren't being paid attention to.
But when we go and ask urban people if they care about that, overwhelmingly, they do. Most urban people want to know what is going on in rural areas in Oregon. The think of rural people as their friends and neighbors. They are interested in these issues. They want more coverage. But because of the availability of resources, which, again, fall to that urban-rural divide, there is more attention paid to urban interests and areas and a perception that that's who we are as Oregonians.
It's not actually true. And that sort of a finding repeats itself in other areas. For example, that white people don't care about communities of color is also very untrue. But the resource issues drive that perception. I could go on, but I think that these are myths that we're living with because it's partisan noise, and it's what we're left with when we don't have the resources locally to tell the story of who we really are.
Adam Davis: What is most worrying you as you look to getting this started in the Gorge?
Emily Harris: Oh, man, I mean just all the regular worries, right? I mean, I gotta plan for some parties. I'm not a party planner.
Adam Davis: What are you planning parties for? What do you mean?
Emily Harris: I'm planning a series of events to basically introduce Uplift Local to folks in the Gorge. We've been out there talking to a lot of people so a lot of people are already familiar, but this is going to be an introduction to what specifically we're planning. It’s also a chance to give some more feedback because I don't expect that exactly the news model we start with is going to be the news model that we're doing, you know, two years from now. It's a chance to figure out how people can get involved, get involved in the Documenters program.
We're going to be talking about the hires that we're going to be doing. And so we're going to have events in all of the four counties that we're planning to serve, which is Skamania, Klickitat, Wasco, and Hood River. So two on each side of the river. Yeah, those are my big party events.
Adam Davis: I mean, if your main worry is parties…
Emily Harris: That's just my immediate, like I was on, you know, dealing with that all day. No, we have, I mean, what else are we worrying about? We need to fundraise. We, you know, need to hire people. We have to figure out if we're going to have an office or be virtual. We need to be continuing to build relationships and networks. I mean, what else should we be worrying about as a startup?
Lee van der Voo: I don't really worry about those things. I feel like they're like, it's a to-do list.
Emily Harris: I worry about my to do lists all the time. It's a to-do list. I mean. I'm more, I'm, I worry about the existential things. I worry about things that I see in the data that are strong correlations that indicate that the way that young people are accessing information is really different and has a very direct relationship with their ability to trust institutions.
Emily Harris: That came out big.
Lee van der Voo: Yeah it came up very big. I mean, basically in one of our experiments, we established a strong correlation between people's relationship with local news and their ability to trust what was going on around them. People with more established habits or more access to local news had much higher levels of confidence in civic institutions and experts and the people who are there to run the show, right?
Younger people, much lower, strong correlation, of course, in that they don't, you know, they don't access local news as much. That's a correlation, it's not causation. We don't know if we provide that in a way that young people can access it, which of course is very front of mind, that they will necessarily gain trust. And that, that worries me a little bit, that there's more going on there than the access issue and the fact that, like, newspapers are not for young people.
You know, young people say interesting things. They tell us, for example, they're more likely to make a judgment about whether something is true by reading the comment thread. They're very interested in, you know, whether it's true or not. A groupthink, if you will, and sort of a bad term because it minimizes the important thing that they're telling us, which is if there's no feedback loop from me to you, I don't trust you. If I don't have a relationship with you, if I can't access you as a authority figure, then I'm not buying in. And that comes from this life of being a groupthinker. Constantly and very often insincerely messaged at as a demographic, right? So they're choosy. And I think that that's an important takeaway, that if the engagement piece isn't there, they're not coming.
And we can address that. Can we address all the rest? Not sure.
Emily Harris: See, it does go back to party planning. Engagement, see?
Lee van der Voo: Party planning. Maybe that's it. It's just better parties.
Adam Davis: Maybe, but it's interesting. Step one. Yeah. I get it. Well, you just brought up young people, and I've had, especially the last, say, 10, 15 minutes of this conversation, I've had my 19 year old and 17 year old in my head, in part because they had an exchange over dinner last night about the fact that Charlie Kirk was at the University of Oregon, national media figure.
So while they're having that exchange, my wife asked, who's Charlie Kirk? Meanwhile, I'm not sure how much my kids know about the changes coming to Portland's democratic process and the shape of government. One other example that I just want to throw out there, not just about young people, but about the local. So, Oregon Humanities runs a free college course for adults living at low incomes. This fall it's called, What is Democracy? It's a mix of a person who came over from Russia the day before Russia invaded Ukraine. It's someone who was born on the Warm Springs Reservation. It's someone who lives way out east. It's an incredible mix. No one in this class of people interested enough to come in two evenings a week for several weeks in the fall knew that these changes were coming. They were not aware of the changes coming to Portland's government and the process of…. So you're both either nodding significantly or taking in significant breath.
So let me ask, what are you thinking with either of these examples?
Emily Harris: On the first example of your kids, I mean, it's easier to focus on the national stuff. It's coming at you all the time. It's what your friends are talking about, but your friends, especially if they live other places, right? So I think a piece there is, you know, to figure out what's exciting about that.
See if that can be translated to local information. And on the elections I am so curious what the voter turnout is going to be. Just so curious. I am having a party. I'm asking my friends and neighbors to divide up the research and everybody take three and then we'll do 10 minute presentations and then we'll, you know, drink and talk and see what people think because it's very overwhelming.
So I'm just, I'm so curious how many people are going to vote just for one candidate in this multi, you know, you're supposed to vote for up to six. How many candidates are going to get like no votes at all because no one's ever heard of them or is there going to be like some sort of complete surprise results?
So yeah, I think that this has been a really complex thing to engage in and I'm also curious if the students in your class regularly vote. And I'm wondering if they believe they have a voice, right? Whether they believe there is a way for them to have an impact, play a role, play a part, be heard.
I do think a piece of that, according to our research, is that when you don't see yourself in the civic life, and I include news in that, then you don't really think it matters if you participate. So that's a finding we found. So I would be very interested when your students experience it.
Adam Davis: Lee, did either of those examples kick something off for you?
Lee van der Voo: Well, I think that you were articulating the thing that we see again and again, which is into the void of local information creeps the national, the national narrative. I mean, we just hear it over and over that there are so many key issues that just are not making it to enough people. And interestingly, we often hear it when we're dealing with folks who are experts.
Like, for example, we had a conversation with someone in the nonprofit sector about how can we get our nonprofit messages out there? What are our new communication strategies? Well, if you don't have local media, it's social media or bus pretty much, or anything, any other sort of in house communication plan that you can design. But, you know, inevitably, I mean, Emily was on a panel yesterday, and talking with a lot of folks with expertise in timber and forestry, thank you so much, And they felt the same.
How do we get our message out there? Well, if there's no messenger, there's no message. We tell people often, whatever you care about first, whatever is the number one thing that concerns you, your second priority should be local news and information because you're not getting it to anybody else without the infrastructure.
But yeah, I mean. I hope that more folks see that in time. I think we're not always super aware of what we're losing here. These shortcomings are perceived perhaps as bias and organizations doing a poor job rather than a lack of resources. We are not telling this story well.
Adam Davis: So earlier I asked a question about horizon. And, Lee, I think you said no horizon. So let me ask with an artificial horizon of, say, 25, 30 years out, let's say this thing goes the way it hopes. Uplift Local takes in the Gorge, it takes in several other communities, other people recognize that it's taking.
What does Oregon's news and information landscape look like 25 or 30 years from now that's different from how it looks now?
Emily Harris: Okay, let's say Uplift Locals all over the state, right? So you've got a trusted, a commonly trusted source of news and information that you trust locally and then that sort of translates to the other places.
You have a network of community news services that are sharing information to recognize the common things that are going on in communities all over the state. You know, there's a big movement that's been around like 15 years called solutions journalism, which, I was really skeptical at first, but it basically says, okay, we've got a problem and it reports out who has else has dealt with this problem and how do they deal with it?
So, you know, that kind of comparison. If you've got a reporter who's a real expert in housing and has access to these local newsrooms all over the place, he or she can do that. Can be like, well, okay, Tillamook is, you know, dealing with it in this way and Multnomah County is dealing with it this way. So it builds a common experience.
You get back together in the room again. And that's what I would really dream about. And, but not, I don't want to be the monopoly news service, right? No, nobody wants a monopoly news service. That's not good for anybody. And so that is, that is not the goal. Then there is the one piece of the Uplift Local model I was talking about before, this Documentars program.
So then we've got a really robust program where people know what's going on in the spaces where the people have the power, because we give it to them through elections. They are making decisions that affect our lives, right? So we've got a way in to make that accessible and make sense to people and give them the belief and the power and the path where they are a part of that.
And it's also a little accountability lever if somebody is actually there listening to all your meetings, right? So I could see a totally changed landscape where you know where to go to figure out what's going on. And I do think that that's part of what's missing right now.
Adam Davis: Lee, 25, 30 years out.
Lee van der Voo: Oh, well, Emily just expressed that really well. And the part that resonates with me the most is the, just the community vibe of it, that there's just ‘way more people engaged in the process of finding information. That it's multilingual, that it's multicultural, that it doesn't look like so many Oregon newsrooms look now, which are unfortunately predominantly white and largely, or I would say more than half male. Lots of young people to tell us what we're doing wrong.
Like I kind of look forward to democratizing this process involving more people in it and having new ideas coming at us all the time. I think that we can, you know, what we've designed here is something very unique and it can be more so and there's no reason to stop or get fixed in our views of how we're going to do this. And to Emily's point, definitely proceeding with the do no harm ethos. We have zero interest in displacing other existing media and to the extent that what we're doing can provide support through partnerships. We are all about that. We're happy and, and, and proud that all of the existing media organizations in the Gorge were involved.
Lee van der Voo: We'll be launching, have expressed interest in being partners, and we're working on formalizing all of that. But we know that what we're going to be doing with Documenters is supportive for them, and we want that, and we want that everywhere else we go.
Adam Davis: So you're a couple or a few years into this project, and as we wind down this conversation, I think I want to ask, as a last question, like, what's a question that you have?
Emily Harris: For me it's like, what do I get to learn next? This has been so exciting, like to do all this research and to learn all this stuff and to try something new. And so, yeah, that's exciting. It's not keeping me up at night, but it's just getting me out of bed every morning.
Lee van der Voo: Yeah, I would say my question, the most persistent question that I have is similarly just kind of one that wakes me up.
I do a lot of our fundraising, and so I'm always writing grants and imagining the positions that will be filled in this next iteration. And I wonder all the time about who those people will be. And I have this sort of giddy sense of excitement about meeting them and finding them. And it's just like, I don't know.
It feels a little Christmas morning when I think about it.
Emily Harris: And having him take over.
Lee van der Voo: Yeah. Kick me out eventually.
Emily Harris: And there's no horizons.
Adam Davis: Well, thank you. Thank you for the work you're doing. Thanks for the vision that you're putting into practice, and thanks for the conversation here in the basement this afternoon.
Emily Harris: Thank you, Adam, so much. Thank you for having us. This was fun.
Adam Davis: Emily Harris and Lee van der Voo are Oregon-based, award-winning journalists with local, national, and international experience. They're working together on Uplift Local. You can find more about Uplift Local and Emily and Lee's work at upliftlocal.news and in our show notes at oregonhumanities.org. The Detour is produced by Keiren Bond. Kyle Gilmer is our podcast audio engineer and editor. Ben Waterhouse, Karina Briski, and Alexandra Silvester are our assistant producers. I'm Adam Davis. Thanks for listening. See you next time.