Zócalo is celebrating its 20th birthday! As part of the festivities, we’re publishing reflections and responses that revisit and reimagine some of our most impactful stories and public programs. Connecting California columnist Joe Mathews revisits Southern California author D.J. Waldie’s 2012 essay “The Darkness Behind Huell Howser” and considers why, over a decade after Howser’s death, the public TV’s great California chronicler retains such a hold on us.

“Do you know Huell Howser?”

I got that question recently while chatting with a counter guy at Erick Schat’s Bakery, which produces Dutch pastries and sheepherder bread in the Eastern Sierra town of Bishop.

It’s a question I get at least a couple times a year, in all different corners of California.

I suppose it’s a natural question. People might wonder if I, a longtime chronicler of California’s places, get asked if I know the public television reporter who took viewers into every little town and restaurant and museum, from Alturas to Zzyzx.

It’s a question that never ceases to amaze me. Or stump me.

Because the truth is that I can’t possibly know Huell Howser. And not just because I only met him a couple times. No one can possibly know Huell Howser anymore, because Huell Howser died 11 years ago, of prostate cancer, at age 67.

But the truth is also that people feel like they do know Huell Howser. Because he never really left us. His shows still air regularly on public TV stations in Southern California. And episodes of his California-exploring series—California’s Gold, California’s Green, Downtown, Road Trip with Huell Howser, and Visiting—still attract heavy traffic online.

Why does Huell Howser retain such a hold on us? The best answer to that question came from the Southern California author D.J. Waldie, in a Zócalo Public Square essay published shortly before Howser’s January 2013 death.

Waldie’s thesis was that Howser, in taking viewers to forgettable eateries and little-known places, was finding joy in the thing that Californians most cherish: our broken dreams.

Most people come to California, or grow up in California, dreaming of stardom or riches or invention or new and distinctive lifestyles. Instead, they end up sewing dresses in a little store in Tustin, or working at a dairy outside Turlock. You can feel pretty small doing that kind of work. But when Howser showed up, the public TV explorer in all his geeky ebullience, it made the life you settled for seem big.

“Howser wasn’t just pitching the muchness of California, an abundance anyone should be able to see unaided,” Waldie wrote. “He was pitching the almost infinite otherness within the ordinary of California, particularly when California is considered with joy.”

Waldie wrote that Howser’s deep connection with the regular “folks” of California was not his joy but “the melancholy behind his fierce public niceness.” His TV tours could strike sad notes, especially when his questions revealed wonderful old things that no longer existed. The same relentless dynamism that produces the many wonders of California also destroys the established. Our sunny love of the novel coexists with darkness and loss.

Howser liked to say that his goal was to encourage Californians to embark on their own personal adventures around the state, and investigate the places all around them. Howser modeled that kind of exploration, with a curiosity about everything that showed how fiercely unprejudiced he was.

As Waldie wrote, Howser was not urging Californians to take “a harmless field trip” but rather to begin “an encounter with the differences that reside, intractable, in everyday life—real differences between people, conditions, ethnicities, and cultures that can only be accepted for what they are and mostly with a smile.”

I don’t look or sound like Howser—he was a handsome TV guy with the distinctive accent of his native Tennessee, while I’m a rumpled print guy and fourth-generation Californian. But I suspect I get the “Do you know Huell Howser?” question because my reporting method is so similar to his.

That method: modestly planned, thoroughly unrehearsed wandering—which also happens to be the most practical way to get to know California.

Because Californians are so informal and so flaky (as anyone who has ever invited people to a dinner party knows), I rarely bother to schedule a bunch of interviews in advance when I’m visiting a town. It works much better to show up unannounced, act friendly, and start asking respectful questions about what people do.

I also say, as Howser did, “wow” and “gee whiz” when people are showing me things—a rusting old motorbike, a piece of street art, a loaf of bread—that would seem less than amazing to someone less geekily Californian.

There is no greater flattery in the Golden State than to take an interest in what others do. Californians, whatever their occupation, are instinctive artists, and asking them about their business or their home or their flea market—as Howser did—often elicits detailed and thoughtful responses.

That’s what I was doing at Schat’s. I had been pressing the counter guy. What is that bread? Can I try a piece? What makes it taste so good?

His answer to my last question was perfect: The best bread comes from the baker most determined to make sure you never forget it.

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Two journalists who covered presidential campaigns in different eras—NPR To the Point host Warren Olney and Zócalo California editor Joe Mathews—visited Zócalo to discuss what campaign journalism means to the country right now, and how to make it more useful, during a Twitter Live event earlier today.

Their conversation focused on how campaign coverage—and its influence over the electorate—has shifted in five-plus decades since Olney began his career as a broadcast journalist. During the hour-long discussion, Olney recounted his time covering the Nixon presidency, drawing a comparison between criticism circulated by the campaign that the press was “hostile toward Nixon and favorable toward the Civil Rights Movement” to today’s anti-media rhetoric encouraged by the White House.

Mathews and Olney also considered the degree to which special access on the campaign trail may compromise the integrity of media coverage, and whether the successes of so-called “Teflon” presidents, like Reagan and Trump, represented the candidates’ talent in campaigning or a failure of the reporters responsible for covering their campaigns.

They both also spoke to the difficulty of reporting in an age of misinformation, gaining the trust of an increasingly partisan readership, and whether journalists in 2020 are sufficiently responding to criticisms of coverage of the 2016 presidential election.

”Quoted” with Warren Olney:

There can’t be a downside to revealing the truth about the campaign. And somebody will notice. Something might happen. You have to assume that that will be the case and hope for the best.

Watch the full conversation below:

Zócalo Live: What Do We Need From Campaign Journalism? with @warrenolney1 and @joemmathews https://t.co/RnGJ7jUGjU

— Zócalo Public Square (@ThePublicSquare) September 10, 2020

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That provocative observation, offered by moderator and Zócalo Public Square executive editor Andrés Martinez, framed a Zócalo/Democracy International event in Donostia-San Sebastián, a coastal city in the Spanish Basque Country.

“Does the Digitization of Journalism Threaten Democracy?” was held in conjunction with the 2016 Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy, and drew an audience of journalists, democracy scholars, activists, and elections administrators from six continents to the ornate council chamber, the Salon de Plenos, inside Donostia-San Sebastián’s city hall.

The panelists—journalists from Germany and Switzerland and an international elections assistance official who has worked in conflict zones—wrestled with several challenges that digital media have posed to democracy. These include the undermining of the businesses of established media organizations, the exacerbation of intolerance and balkanization, and the rapid spread of misinformation and fake news via social media. But they also suggested there were reasons to be hopeful about the future of media and democracy.

“Democracy needs informed citizens, and it needs responsive officeholders. On both accounts, we’ve been failing big time,” said Maximilian Steinbeis, a German lawyer, writer, and political journalist well known for his blog on the constitution.

At the same time, he said there is a growing recognition of the need to return to high professional standards in journalism. He also identified “encouraging” new models to support professional, democratically oriented media work. He mentioned crowdfunding effforts; the Dutch news platform Blendle, which unbundles media and allows readers to pay per article; and recent trends suggesting that people are more willing to pay for high-quality media.

Steinbeis also introduced a new “cooperation collaborative” of independent journalists, the Reef, of which he is a co-founder. They are working to build a network of independent and professional journalists who collaborate with each other to build audiences, support good work, and bolster new financial models. (Read a new essay about the Reef by Steinbeis and Christian Schwagerl at Zócalo)

Annette Fath-Lihic, a Sweden-based senior manager for the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, praised the Reef effort. But she also cautioned against pinning too all our problems with journalism and democracy on digital media.

“We need to understand that technology is just a tool … there will always be good guys and bad guys,” she said.

Fath-Lihic said that expectations for the positive impact of new media on democracy had been too high. “When it comes to fake news, fact-checking and all that, it was the same hope—kind of like with capitalism—that it would regulate itself … that people would recognize it, and then correct it.” As someone works on elections, including in conflict zones, she’s seen firsthand how poorly used digital media can be a real threat. “You might have the hate speech, you might have false information on electoral results—that is so dangerous,” she said.

Reto Gysi von Wartburg, deputy editor-in-chief for the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation’s Swissinfo, said he does not see journalism as a threat to democracy. But “I do share disappointment for what social media can do to democracy,” he added. He pointed to a Swiss study showing that over 20 percent of young people use only social media to get informed, and he cited the financial pressures on media organizations and the related pressures on journalists to produce more stories.

“One problem is that the quality of journalism is hard to measure,” said Gysi von Wartburg, “But the traffic, the story’s reach, is very easy to measure.”

Martinez, the moderator, pressed panelists on ways to regulate digital or social media sites. While Fath-Lihic acknowledged the problems, including what amounted during the U.S. election to “almost hate speech against certain groups of the population,” she said trying to control social media violated human rights, particularly freedom of expression. She was critical of countries that have shut down their Internet during elections. She pointed out that media controls have contributed to the shrinking of political space in Russia, Turkey, and other countries, as government close down NGOs, are harsh with citizen journalists, and seek control of Twitter and Facebook. She said she preferred that citizens and media develop and sign codes of conduct to encourage responsible behavior around politics and elections.

Steinbeis questioned the algorithms and very nature of Facebook—a private company that is a public space, he noted.

He offered two situations for a journalist or publication posting a new article. “If you have a brilliant story about something interesting and original, and people say this is interesting, they are going to ‘like’ it,” he said. That’s all well and good. “Where if you write something completely outrageous, off-the–wall, batshit crazy, people will click ‘angry’ or ‘hilarious’ or ‘sad’… and these reactions in the algorithm are preferred to the interesting thing.”

The post Fake News Won’t Kill Democracy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We think we’ve found a model at sea. It looks like a reef.

Coral reefs are miracles of evolution. They are among the most diverse ecosystems on Earth. They exist in a nearly nutrient-free ocean and have no central control—and yet they are enormously productive. They are also endangered.

Reefs have more than a little in common with freelance journalists. Freelancers are one of the most important resources for media businesses. In times of cutbacks and shrinking editions, freelancers are often the only people who still have the expertise and specialization necessary to find and tell original and elaborately-researched stories. They know how to reach audiences. They are often creative and entrepreneurial. They are out and about in the world. They make sure that the media actually has something to say about the universe outside its self-referential filter bubble.

But freelance journalists are also one of the weakest links in the media food chain. They are dependent on publishers, who pay them worse and worse wages, and provide less and less support to boost the value of their editorial projects. Freelancers are individual combatants, often without access to colleagues with complementary skills such as photographers, illustrators, data visualizers, and lecturers.

How can such journalists join forces productively? It requires being attached to a larger body: The reef.

Reefs have many niches, small and large inhabitants, symbioses, cooperation—and also competition. Freelance journalists need their own reefs, places where they can join forces to form cooperatives and access the resources they need to do what they do best: quality journalism.

On the “Reef,” journalists would have choices. They could form alliances to cover themes under a common name; they could cooperate with each other and share external costs. They could work with publishers and institutions to disseminate their work. And they could, if they wish, develop ways to get paid by readers directly, or to collect advertising revenues through their work.

A Reef of this sort would require technology. At the core of our Riff Reporter project (Riff is German for reef) is a joint work platform named PolyPublisher, which we have been developing over the past two years. PolyPublisher will offer Reef inhabitants a modern, lean content management system that works with text, audio, video, and still images. It will give writers the possibility to publish as teams or all by themselves, the possibility of monetizing their work through micropayments, and interfaces with social media through tools such as Facebook Instant Articles, and payment platforms.

We are close to building our Reef. At the end of November, a small alpha version of PolyPublisher will launch, with limited features, for a select number of journalists. In the spring of next year the beta phase is to start. The official launch is planned for early summer 2017.

At the moment, the Reef project is still organized as a limited liability company which develops, operates, and maintains the software and, for the time being, also publishes content. As we bring in more authors and partners, the next step will be to found a cooperative that provides its members with the tools they need and the public with a wealth of high-end journalism.

Reef is a project by journalists for journalists. More than two dozen contributors plan to populate the Reef initially, and to use it to produce diverse stories and projects. The Reef may be low in nutrients (as paying for journalism isn’t typical in the “digital ocean” yet), but it will be rich in species. The reef’s founders will be there. Christian is a freelance journalist for the German magazine GEO, Yale E360, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and a past political correspondent with Der Spiegel; Tanja Kramer is a technology and neuroscience freelancer with editorial experience;. Maximilian is a legal journalist and founder of the widely read constitutional law forum Verfassungsblog, and was formerly a long-standing political correspondent at Handelsblatt. Other co-founders include the web designer and programmer Sebastian Brink, and Uwe H. Martin, freelance photographer and multimedia producer at the Bombay Flying Club.

At first, our main focus will be on science, technology, the environment, health, and society. These are subject areas that interest millions of people, and that require special expertise and creativity in storytelling. At a time of discussion about the “post-factual” age, science journalists remain in demand. If this works—and by “works” we mean produce high-quality journalism, collaborations that support that journalism, and revenue—the Reef can grow to touch other journalistic topics.

What isn’t the Reef? Not another mass-media online magazine with a central website. We don’t think the world needs that. Journalists need support and agility so they can build up their own readership, and present projects through a variety of channels and social media.

Ultimately we don’t believe the Reef should be a publisher. We don’t envision competing with publishers. As in a real coral reef, there will be no boss who controls everything. Every author will be responsible for his projects, both entrepreneurially and legally. At the same time, the Reef will be a creative community that offers standards, tools, and rich possibilities for cooperation.

The Reef is also not a blogger or “citizen journalist” network of the type we see in many cities and countries. It is for professionals, and you won’t be able to buy a membership. The idea is to limit it to people who meet high professional standards and have been invited in by existing members.

In this era of climate warning and ecosystem collapse, coral reefs become ever more endangered and ever more important. Digital media faces a similar problem as the media ecosystem evolves. This is why we think reefs are a perfect symbol for our project: They are a diverse and adaptable living thing that the world cannot afford to lose.

The post How to Build an Ecosystem for High-Quality Journalism appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The media is collectively beating itself up for a series of poor predictions—dismissing the Trump candidacy, calling for an early Clinton coronation, anticipating a contested GOP convention—instead of beating itself up for a deeper pathology: its compulsive haste to predict everything in the first place.

Serious people, and even professors of journalism, have long harrumphed about how polls and “the horse race” dominate election coverage, at the expense of eat-your-broccoli-type substantive reporting of candidate policy proposals. Nothing new there. What is new is the extent to which the media’s obsession with predicting electoral outcomes in advance has seeped into, and practically taken over, the candidates’ own discourse on the campaign trail.

It’s as if sideline analysis has become the game itself.

Trump is the caricature extreme of this trend, giving campaign speeches that consist largely of spinning poll numbers, critiquing the media coverage of the campaign (which the media can then critique, for Trump to then critique back, in a never-ending to-and-fro Wimbledon rally) [and throwing the occasional verbal Molotov cocktail a minority group’s way.]

But Trump is not alone. To an extent that would have been unimaginable not long ago, all candidates this election cycle have spent a fair amount of time discussing polls (selectively, of course) as the ultimate qualification for the highest office in the land. Even when candidates may not have wanted to engage in such horse race spinning, they were often forced to do so by poll-centric questions from the media—“Why are you running given such low poll numbers?”

This was the tenor of the campaign and its coverage even before the first votes were cast in Iowa. Such is the anti-democratic hubris of media elites: Why wait to let people make their choice on election day when we smart media folks can tell you the results in advance, and tell you why you and your neighbors voted the way you did?

The media, political operatives, and news junkies in this age of perpetual chatter and connectivity via 24/7 cable and social media feel compelled to show they’re in the know not just by explaining what’s transpired—but by being able to forecast with certitude what comes next. And so the media and news consumers who want to seem in the know fetishize certain superstar pollsters and data geeks, and congratulate themselves on the amount of data available to make foolproof predictions.

Again, it’s all anti-democratic, we-know-best hubris. The media’s reliance on ever more complex predictive models advance what psychologists call the illusion of control. If there’s anything we can’t seem to tolerate in the 21st century, it’s uncertainty. And also surprises, which is why we’re seeing the outpouring of earnest if overwrought mea culpas from the media.

These apologies are more disturbing than the mistaken predictions. The apologizers in the media genuinely seem to think their inability to predict this primary season accurately was a blow to the republic—as opposed to their insistence on allowing their prediction addiction to drive, and distort, most election coverage.

Society’s intolerance of uncertainty (the media are playing to its audience, after all) and our mania for perfecting forecasting expands well beyond political reporting and analysis. Meteorology, the science we first think of when we think of “forecasting,” is a pursuit where less uncertainty is a societal good. You want to warn people to take an umbrella along on their commute, or abandon the coastline if an epic hurricane is heading their way. Blown climate predictions do deserve mea culpas and post-mortems—and there’s no positive interest in waiting to see where the hurricane will land, and withholding judgment.

The financial world, on the other hand, is an arena long ago perverted by data-driven forecasting. When you invest your savings in a publicly traded company these days, you’re not making a bet on how that company will perform objectively in the long run. You are betting on how its performance in a succession of quarterly short-terms will compare with the forecasts drawn up by Wall Street analysts. It’s not enough to await a company’s results; what matters is how those results conform, or don’t, to the earnings estimates (or “expectations”) imposed on it by outside data crunchers. For instance, in April, Wall Street threw a collective hissy fit when Apple “missed” expectations set by outside forecasters by reporting $50.56 billion instead of $51.97 billion in quarterly revenue. The company’s stock was whacked as a result, taken down 8 percent in a day.

Having a lot of brainpower attempting to predict what lies around the corner for a company, an industry, or the economy as a whole is not an inherently bad thing. It’s desirable, even, up until the point when forecasting becomes so important that its failures need to be treated like a disaster. For companies trading on the stock market, the tyranny of managing a business to meet the quarterly earnings expectations of outside forecasters end up stifling innovation and risk-taking. It’s the financial equivalent of campaigning on your poll numbers instead of setting your own agenda.

Perhaps the world of political analysis should look to the world of sports for a healthier model of how to blend forecasting with substantive analysis, without allowing the former to overwhelm the latter. Sports journalists and fans alike love making predictions, and devote a great deal of airtime and print (not to mention fantasy league energy) to picking scores and predicting individual performances. But, maybe because it’s still a game in the end, there is more allowance made for the notion that ironclad certitude is elusive, undesirable even. Studio broadcast analysts keep track of the accuracy of their predictions and good-naturedly compete and tease each other over them. But failed predictions don’t trigger weighty mea culpas about how media let society down.

The longest shot ever recorded by oddsmakers happened in the world of soccer last month, when tiny, impoverished and perennially struggling FC Leicester won the English Premier League, despite 5,000-to-1 odds. The story was a feel-good global phenomenon. The political media-operative complex should take note. Smart analysis can help explain how Leicester pulled off its championship, without having predicted it in advance. Some uncertainty is inevitable in life, at least until the games are played, and the votes are cast. And that’s OK.

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