Nora Hertel, founder of Project Optimist, explores how regional solutions-focused journalism can rebuild trust and connection
Oh, we ain't got a barrel of money. Maybe we're ragged and funny, but we'll travel along singing a song side by side.
Nora Hertel:If anybody's asking for my advice, get as local as you can and limit your cable news consumption because they're not trying to help you or your local community. Robust local news where people can go and get shared information about local candidates or get the local perspective of national issues, national sources or cable news. There's a lot more stirring up of emotion, sensationalizing topics, things get kind of removed from their original context, and it plays on people's fear and anger, and it really separates them from their locale. So you have people that might be neighbors, but they're getting news from totally different places because the newspaper that maybe used to be there is gone or it's not reliable or it's so small it doesn't cover a lot.
Ellen Wolter:That's Nora Hertel. She's talking about the importance of local news because that is how we more fully understand regional issues and our neighbors down the street, in the next town over, and across the state. Local news is where people can get shared information that will help them better navigate the challenges outside their backdoor. After years as a journalist, Nora launched Project Optimist, which provides news for greater Minnesotans and focuses on solutions based journalism, a form of reporting that emphasizes how people are responding to community challenges. With Project Optimist, Nora aims to bring a more positive and constructive perspective to the news landscape in a way that brings neighbors together to tackle regional issues.
Ellen Wolter:Nora joined me for a conversation to talk about Project Optimist, the fractured news ecosystem and its ability to disconnect communities whether rural, urban or suburban and how she sees solutions focused journalism playing a more important role in reporting moving forward.
Music (Jim Griswold):They've all had their quarrels imparted we'll be the same as we started just traveling along singing a song
Ellen Wolter:This is Ellen Wolter with the University of Minnesota Extension, and welcome to the Side by Side podcast.
Nora Hertel:So I have my master's degree in journalism and worked at primarily at newspapers for ten plus years before I launched Project Optimist. But while I was in school, I was exposed to two digital nonprofit startups. One was called Madison Commons that was hyper local serving neighborhood level stories in the city. And then the other one was the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, which did kind of broad sweeping deep dives into issues across the state. I learned a very rigorous fact checking process there.
Nora Hertel:And really just the exposure to those two organizations planted a seed in me for the value and the possibility of nonprofit news. I went on to work for AP for six months. I had a temporary job with AP covering the legislature in South Dakota. I worked for newspapers in Central Wisconsin and then Central Minnesota. So, was in Central Minnesota covering news for more than four years before I went off on my own.
Nora Hertel:And much of that in Wisconsin, in Minnesota, that was political reporting. So, it's kind of a tough time to be covering politics, kind of saw the division increase over the seven to ten years that I was covering government and politics. But, I mean, it's a very mission driven kind of work and it was hard, but also felt very important. And when you work at a local newspaper, especially one with a small staff, you end up covering so many different things. So events, higher education, agriculture, all of that came across my desk and I really enjoyed the variety and mostly getting into the field and talking with people.
Nora Hertel:And I mean, I love love the work, but it was it got really hard towards the end of my time at the newspaper because of challenges in the field and challenges in politics.
Ellen Wolter:And what challenges in the field? You mentioned division. So I'm wondering what ways in which that division showed up in your work. And then what were some of the challenges that you faced specifically in the journalism field?
Nora Hertel:Yeah. So the root of the challenge is really the breakdown of the business model for journalism. For years, decades, centuries, maybe even newspapers succeeded by selling subscriptions and advertisements. And the rise of the internet in the late nineties and early two thousands just exploded both of those revenue streams. And it's been really hard for newspapers in at first and now television is experiencing the same kind of challenges as well.
Nora Hertel:So not having regular people who are willing to pay for the content, That's the decline of subscriptions because there's so much free content available. And also, there's kind of a feedback loop, right? There's fewer reporters because there's not enough money to pay and maintain the staff size. So, people aren't as happy with the product, so they don't want to pay for it and you have this kind of cycle. So, that's the challenge within the newsroom is dealing with a smaller staff kind of feeling like you don't know when you might get laid off or offered a buyout or that your colleague will take another job and they won't be replaced.
Nora Hertel:And so, you'll just have another empty desk in the room. And that's really bad for morale. It also decreases community trust in the organization because you don't have as many people doing the work and the quality is not the same. There was a year when Gannett, which owns the two papers I worked for and owns the most newspapers in The US right now, they cut so many of their copy editor positions. And so that you don't have as professional a product because you have little mistakes in there.
Nora Hertel:That erodes trust as well. Like if they can't spell this person's name correctly, I don't know if the information in there is reliable. So the decline in trust has been a huge challenge and is something that I think about a lot. And there's other organizations working on it as well, but it's hard with the decline of newspapers and the loss of revenue there. And then the political division happening at the same time, which is kind of related to what has happened with news that you don't have as much robust local news where people can go and get shared information about local candidates or get the local perspective of national issues.
Nora Hertel:So they go to national sources or cable news and there's a lot more stirring up of emotion, sensationalizing topics, things get kind of removed from their original context. And it just, it plays on people's fear and anger and it really separates them from their locale. So you have people that might be neighbors, but they're getting news from totally different places because the newspaper that maybe used to be there is gone or it's not reliable or it's so small it doesn't cover a lot.
Ellen Wolter:One of the things you wrote, Nora, in your newsletters was that you were kind of describing this was early on when Project Optimist was being launched. And one of the things you wrote was there was this need to churn out I'm I'm quoting here. There was this need to churn out constant stories that garnered eyeballs and emojis, which became increasingly unsatisfying to me. And through my first decade in the field, I could see that local audiences did not feel well served as the media grew more polarized, nationalized, and negative. And so I'm curious, you know, and I think you're kind of describing this.
Ellen Wolter:Did you feel as if you had to create stories that were that people would read? And so it it felt as if there had to be stories that were that clickbait or more sensationalized. And and maybe you didn't feel that way, but are there others in the field that feel that way in in the way that news is now created?
Nora Hertel:Yeah. It was really hard to see while I was in it. But I do remember a training that we went to where we talked about the emotional undertone of a story is very important in getting attention for it. And so, there was some that was some of that was explicit. We talked about, like, if you're talking about a scandal or spending money or a misappropriation of money, that's going to hit a nerve and get a lot of clicks.
Nora Hertel:I mean, as I said before, it was a very mission driven field. So I never would have wanted to be playing on people's fear and anger intentionally. I do think that I did though. I mean, when I think about coverage of elections and the verbs that we use to make those stories interesting because there's so many elections and there's so many races and you want people to, it's like putting cheese on broccoli, right? Like I want people to read these stories about elections, but it gets kind of dry and repetitive.
Nora Hertel:So using like boxing metaphors, so and so threw their hat in the ring or at the debate, they were in fisticuffs or put the conflict in the headline. I will also say there is a negativity bias in media that has been studied. There's been there's a book about it that I really love. And the author, Jody Jackson, talks about this on social media as well. She's British.
Nora Hertel:But there, there is for sure a negativity bias in media that's kind of put it's in the culture, in journalism school, in newsrooms, and it it's not an intentional, we're not trying to like make the world look bad, but we know people click on it as part of this like accountability role that we take seriously. Like, well, if the mayor did this thing that is controversial, we need to tell people about it. But then you're only telling that story. You're not telling like, oh, but also the mayor did this other thing and 500 people showed up to clean the river or, you know, whatever it is. You're not telling the good things that also happen.
Ellen Wolter:So, Noria, that leads me to Project Optimist. What what led you to start I mean, you've described a little bit what led you to start Project Optimist, but what helped you to take the leap? And if you could tell our listeners a little bit about what it is and what you're hoping to achieve with it.
Nora Hertel:Sure. So Project Optimist is news organization serving Greater Minnesota. I launched it in late twenty twenty one. We started producing a newsletter six months after that. So we've been producing a newsletter for two years, almost six, six years.
Nora Hertel:It's getting ahead of myself here. We have, so we have two years of experience publishing a newsletter. The content is primarily solutions journalism. We also do explanatory journalism. So we like to explain things.
Nora Hertel:And then we like to focus on solutions and solutions journalism is a practice that's defined as rigorous and evidence based reporting on responses to social problems. And there are four pillars that make a story a solution story. You, A, focus on a response. B, you include evidence. It could be data or testimonials from people involved in the project or pilot.
Nora Hertel:You need insight from those people involved and limitations. So maybe it was just tried in a very small environment, or maybe it's very expensive, so it's not really easy to scale. But yeah, so those four elements make a solution story a rigorous piece of journalism. And we try to publish one solutions journalism piece a month, at least. We also do a lot of art coverage and our other coverage focuses on the environment, social issues, and business solutions, innovations in business.
Nora Hertel:And the arts coverage, I think, is really important in kind of creating a palate cleanser for people who are have a bad taste in their mouth from traditional news or that negative news, or even if there's no kind of exaggeration, sometimes just hearing about war or sickness or even regular run of the mill political debate is hard to take.
Ellen Wolter:Solutions based journalism is a new concept to me, and I'm curious, is that something that they teach you in journalism school? Is that something that has been around for a while? Where does that come from?
Nora Hertel:I sometimes call myself a solutions journalism evangelist. I am, I'm a trainer, an accredited trainer with the Solutions Journalism Network. But really solutions journalism has been around probably as long as journalism. There's always stories about how people can solve problems or innovative projects or pilot projects that are taking on big issues. But just about ten years ago, two journalists created the Solutions Journalism Network to try to enhance and spread the practice of solutions journalism, give it credibility, and train people to practice it.
Nora Hertel:So I discovered it when I was working at a newspaper through some professional development and I did a training and I started to experiment with it and practice. And a lot of my colleagues had gone through trainings as well with the Solutions Journalism Network. The St. Cloud Times hired a solutions journalism reporter a couple years ago, and they were also covering crime. So, there was kind of a give and take with their time because it's hard.
Nora Hertel:Those stories do take a little more digging, and you have to analyze data sometimes. So I was encouraged to do it, but I often felt I didn't have the time. And especially during COVID, there was so much negative news to cover and not a lot of energy for solutions at that point. And I started to get burned out. And so starting Project Optimist was my exit strategy.
Nora Hertel:Like, I if I'm gonna stay in journalism, I need a different kind of job. And I had thought, first, Greater Minnesota could use more investigative journalism. And then I started to ask people, do you want more investigative journalism in Greater Minnesota? And they, they said, I don't like the news. It makes me feel bad.
Nora Hertel:And I asked them, well, there's this thing called solutions journalism that I happen to like a lot. What do you think about it? And the response was excitement and almost disbelief. You mean you could do journalism that way? And I mean, once you learn about it, it seems very, it's not, it's not complicated, but we can, we have to ask for it.
Nora Hertel:Right. We have to look for it because there is so much vying for our attention in ways that are kind of agitating. Mhmm.
Ellen Wolter:And I imagine correct me if I'm wrong, but I imagine that solutions based journalism requires a kind of digging into exploring and communicating the nuance of problems. And one of the things I hear a lot nowadays is there's kind of this eradication of nuance. For all the reasons you described when you were talking about your your journalism career and your experience. The ways in which the news model is set up, it's sort of these binaries that are often created and discussed. We don't often talk or read about the complexity of these issues that we're facing and many of them are hugely complex.
Ellen Wolter:Right? So I'm just curious how you've approached that with Project Optimist and it's a little bit of a leading question because I know that Project Optimist has been doing the shades of purple dialogues. And so I really love the way in which you've engaged people in these dialogues that require a lot of nuance. And also, it it I assume sort of feeds into your reporting then too.
Nora Hertel:Oh, yeah. A lot of complexity is lost in traditional coverage. And actually with the rise of AI, I'm worried about that becoming more of a thing. If we have AI generated stories, which is gonna happen regularly in the near future, we won't get that complexity. I actually love, love, love the gray area in stories.
Nora Hertel:I've done it in stories about sexual assault, exploring kind of the challenges for people who have been convicted of sexual assault and like how hard it is for them to reckon with what they did and, and still appreciating that they're human beings and have their own histories of trauma. With Project Optimist, we did a large series on nuclear power, which is a really, I think, juicy topic within conversations about carbon free energy. Right? There's it's not quote unquote green in the way that renewable energy is like wind and solar, but it's also, it doesn't generate carbon dioxide. It doesn't kind of get classified with the fossil fuels, but there's a lot of complexity there.
Nora Hertel:And also most people agree that we need nuclear power in the transition away from greenhouse gas emitting energy sources. Yeah, it really does get lost in a lot of stories, especially when you're having to fill a newspaper and you only have a couple hours to write a story. I do still sympathize very much with daily news folks. Yeah. So I think that you're right.
Nora Hertel:Definitely the, the simplifying of complex topics has led to division, has like forced people to decide and forced, I don't know if it forced political parties or if it was political parties that helped make some of these divisions by choosing sides on big issues. But yeah, things have been divided and made black and white that are far too complicated to be one side or the other. We called it shades of purple because that's the middle ground between red and blue. Right? Even though we're not necessarily talking about politics, so much is framed as left or right.
Nora Hertel:Oh, you, you think, you know, you know, thing about this person or you know that they're Republicans, so you make all these assumptions about their beliefs. We want to challenge that. Some of it is me making amends for divisive political reporting in my past. Some of it is to get on the ground and hear the nuance in those conversations when you bring people together from one side or the other. I'm using air quotes because even though people might be on two different sides of an issue, it's almost never stark.
Nora Hertel:So we did a dialogue on guns. The first one that we recorded went really well. We had someone who trained people in how to use firearms, someone who works with guns all the time, is comfortable with them, thinks everybody should have access, that kind of thing. We had a father who lost his daughter to gun violence. We had a teacher, a school teacher, and everybody that went into the conversation, they knew what they were up for.
Nora Hertel:They knew that there were ground rules. And, and it was a lovely conversation about trying to understand where people are coming from, appreciating that you can enjoy hunting and also not want to see guns in other arenas and that some people do want more access. So that was a good conversation that we hosted. We've done a lot of cultural bridging. Those are some of my favorite as well, where we bring people from different backgrounds.
Nora Hertel:We did one in Morris, Minnesota, and we had interpreters there. So the, the conversation took place in Spanish and in English. I'm basically kind of bringing people together across a language divide to talk about building community there.
Ellen Wolter:Nora, do you plan to do more of those?
Nora Hertel:Yeah. Yes. We did four on the topic of belonging. Two of them were in St. Cloud.
Nora Hertel:And we are doing three this fall on social isolation with college students. I think we will keep doing belonging. We did one on housing and we're in talks to do some more on housing and the complications and challenges around living in cities where there's not enough places for people to live. It's not affordable for everybody. Transitional generational challenges where most of the housing stock is held by baby boomers and they're not using all the rooms in their house.
Nora Hertel:And then there's up and coming young people who can't afford to buy those houses.
Ellen Wolter:I'm curious, as you know, and I know you've been on a lot of panels recently talking about the sort of the the breakdown and fragmentation of the the news ecosystem, particularly in in rural Minnesota and greater Greater Minnesota. There was an article in the Star Tribune recently that eight communities lost their community newspapers. How much of that fracturing played a role in your desire to create Project Optimist, if at all?
Nora Hertel:The fracturing is a challenge that I was aware of and actually am more aware of now because I pay more attention to all of the small newspapers that have closed and the ones that are still around and the ones that just have one or two people running them. People now, they go to social media for their information or they go to television. Television has always been a primary source of news for a lot of people, but I think they're going to national television news. So cable sources, which I think cable is the most divisive and often the most negative. And a lot of times it's not even journalism.
Nora Hertel:So if anybody's asking for my advice, I would say get as local as you can and limit your cable news consumption because they're not trying to help you or your local community. The fracturing that is most visible, I think, online has to do with because you can access all of those television resources online as well. And then there's basically all audio and print is also available online. So you have all of that traditional and kind of funded media. And then you have a lot of people creating content who might not have journalism experience, and that's a mixed bag.
Nora Hertel:Some of that's really good. And some of that there's people telling stories without any ethical foundation. There's also social media in the mix. So Facebook groups where people just repeat what they hear on police scanners without any of that being verified. So there's also Facebook groups like where people just kind of share gossip that they, and that's kind of a stand in for some for what communities that used to have newspapers.
Nora Hertel:And there's other apps too, like Nextdoor, where people talk about crime or share gossip. It's not all bad. I mean, these, these build community and kind of fill in for a commons area that we don't really have in person anymore. Yeah. It is really fractured.
Nora Hertel:And I think it probably will stay fractured for a while that we just we have to encourage people to become more literate when it comes to news and information and teach them how to fact check and interrogate the source of the content and then do as best as we can to strengthen and build trust in the news organizations that have ethics, that do rigorous fact checking, that work together to tell stories that hadn't been covered, that are kind of getting lost in the decline of local news. And so that's what we're trying to do. We know that solution stories weren't getting as much play as they could or should. We knew that regional issues, like environmental issues and workforce issues that impact businesses across Greater Minnesota, all of those things can there's so many different ways that people are trying to solve challenges there that we could dive into and not say this is the silver bullet, but to say, here's someone who's trying this. This is a real problem that you see and hear about every other day sometimes, like the workforce shortage.
Nora Hertel:How are people trying to address that? How are businesses working to address that and what is working or not working for them? I think failures are also instructive. We're working on some good, like instructive failure stories as well.
Ellen Wolter:How do you think the current news ecosystem, which is, as you described, much more nationalized and fractured, not as local, how do you think that's impacted how rural and urban areas connect with each other, understand each other?
Nora Hertel:The most obvious one that comes to mind is this perception that people have about the twin cities being a really dangerous place. That seems really obvious to me. Know I go to the cities probably once a week to see family or have meetings there. I don't feel unsafe when I'm there. And then there is an enduring stereotype that rural America, rural Minnesota is kind of backwards or super duper conservative in a closed minded kind of way, which is not what I experience when I in the place where I live or the communities I work in and the communities I visit.
Nora Hertel:But I, I do know from these market interviews that we do when we're, we do them once a year market research to check-in with people about how they feel about the news and how they're receiving content. And and I I just the first year that I did those, I heard a story of a woman, a farmer, and her friend was visiting from the cities and wearing a Black Lives Matter hat. And a neighbor or someone else from this small smallish city started yelling at her about her hat. And that's the kind of I mean, that's like a really visible, upsetting kind of conflict moment. I think we mostly experience it in a more insidious way of talking, saying bad things about people based on a t shirt that they wear or a sign in their yard.
Nora Hertel:But at the same time, know that the concern about division and polarization, it's kind of reaching a level where people not only see it, but they actually don't want it anymore.
Ellen Wolter:Do you think there are ways in which the news ecosystem could be redeveloped, you know, created anew in a way that helps to reduce that division. But I think a lot about how if people are getting different kinds of information across these spaces or as you described hearing stories about a space that they don't experience or that are written by people that don't live in that space, it's very difficult to understand truly what it's like to be in that space. So I'm curious if there are approaches or ways in which folks are trying to recreate our news ecosystem so that we're all I don't a level playing field isn't quite the right way to say it, but but that we are finding ways to get information that helps us to understand each other better. Because right now it does seem very fractured.
Nora Hertel:It's tough because well, I don't know about you, but my news diet is all over the place. So I read a ton of newsletters every day or skim. I don't read them. I skim a lot of them. I subscribe to a number of newspapers and I listen to the radio and I listen to podcasts and there's just a lot of content available.
Nora Hertel:I do think there are a few sources that reach a huge amount of the state. I was just looking at the numbers of visitors to the Star Tribune's website and listeners to Minnesota Public Radio, and those numbers are in the millions. So, it's very likely that at least once a month, people in Minnesota are tuning in or looking at one of those sources. There are other news organizations that cover the state. If you think about the Forum owned papers, there's many of them and many of them in small cities in Minnesota so that they share content because they're owned by the same family.
Nora Hertel:So, there's that's a way for a lot of people to get a similar set of facts and data. I will say Forum has paywalls. Star Tribune has paywalls. So, it's not free information there. And then the television ecosystem, I'm not as familiar with.
Nora Hertel:I know there are some, there are networks where of public television, where there's content that's broadcast widely. And I think I think there are types of coverage or topics of coverage that really do unite Minnesotans, sports, outdoors coverage, kind of things that capture Minnesota culture and pride, even to some extent, business coverage about all of the assets that we have as a state. In the work that we're doing at Project Optimist to reach our audience, we don't expect them to come to our website unless they have a particular encounter with me or staff, or they hear us on the radio or in a podcast. We have a newsletter, and so we're working to build that list because that gives you a direct line of communication with people. And then, we are investing in social media where we can find our audience using the tools that Meta already has.
Nora Hertel:So, we can put in there, like, we're looking we're share share this story with people on Greater Minnesota. And we have to pay for that access. We have to, it's basically an advertisement, but that's what it takes to find people to work within the algorithm that kind of make you pay if you want to reach all of those folks. We're also just about to launch a TikTok because we just have to meet people where they are and it does vary with generations as well. So, people are gonna be looking for video content.
Ellen Wolter:Yeah. I have not, joined TikTok yet, so keep me posted on how that goes. Maybe I'll join just to follow Project Optimist. So we'll find out.
Nora Hertel:You should. It'll be good. We have a great social media person. We have a lot of fun making videos.
Ellen Wolter:You know, one of the things I've heard folks suggest as a solution is thinking about, you know, because you mentioned the paywalls. Right? I love the Star Tribune, but, you know, it's expensive if you're on a certain income. I've heard people say, should it be a utility? Should news be funded in the same way that utilities are funded?
Nora Hertel:I mean, it is possible. And there's philanthropy that's supporting this kind of experimentation in media right now. But at the same time, it costs a lot of money to produce journalism, especially original reporting.
Ellen Wolter:And- And to do that complex reporting that we talked about earlier. Yeah. Mhmm.
Nora Hertel:There's a lot of newsletters and content creators out there that what they do is they repackage other people's journalism. And it's legal to do that, but they're making money off of other people's reporting. And I think that reporters and folks who create original content that has value in the community, that we need to be better at making a business case for that so that people who can pay or can donate will do that. Know that there's a need that it's not just, Oh, someone else will pay for that. Actually, maybe not.
Nora Hertel:Maybe no one will pay for it and then it will go away like so many newspapers already have. So, we need to let people know that if they have resources, that we need them to support us. Also, that we need to look for other creative revenue streams, like we train solutions journalism, we provide consulting on public relations and media relations. I mean, this is probably an underestimate, but with all the overhead and the planning and the time it takes to edit and format and fact check, a story costs at least $2,000. I mean, we've, we fact checked our stories and that takes a huge amount of time.
Nora Hertel:Now, a lot of newsrooms don't have time or resources to do that. And it's a priority for us, but even when they don't do that, their stories cost a lot of money to produce. I want people to know and appreciate that. And if you can support it financially, you really should. Especially if you're a person who pays for television or movies or I do all of those things too.
Nora Hertel:You know what? This is original content just like those things.
Ellen Wolter:What is in store for Project Optimist? What what can we look forward to in terms of what what you'll be sharing with the world?
Nora Hertel:We are making a TikTok channel. So that's going to be fun going forward. We are planning content now for next year. And so we're recruiting some new freelancers and making plans for a lot of visual storytelling through infographics, which we have not done a lot of before. That's basically using icons and illustrations to tell data stories.
Nora Hertel:It makes it more digestible than just listing the numbers. And then we are also working on plans to do some more comics, hopefully more storytelling through comics. So, I really love visual storytelling. And so, we have some more ideas for experimenting with that. Topic wise, we're planning to do some advanced care planning.
Nora Hertel:So basically medical directives and these things that are hard to talk about a little bit and really important to get in order to protect your family and yourself. We're trying to come up with fun ways to talk about that, even though it's kind of a thing that like makes us feel a little bit itchy because it's hard to recognize our mortality. We have, I think we have some fun ideas for that if that's not too counterintuitive.
Ellen Wolter:Thanks, Nora. Thanks for taking the time and really appreciate you sharing your wisdom and expertise with us today.
Nora Hertel:My pleasure. Thank you
Ellen Wolter:for listening to Side by Side. We welcome your emails at sidebyside@umn.edu. Side by Side is a production of the University of Minnesota Extension and is written and hosted by me, Ellen Walter. Special thanks to Jan Jackula, who designed our wonderful logo, and Jim Griswold, who sings and plays guitar in our opening and closing credits. You can find episodes of side by side wherever you get your podcasts.
Ellen Wolter:We'll be back next week with another episode. I'm Ellen Wolter, and this is Side by Side.
