How I used my podcast as business research after leaving my TV job
I didn’t know how it would end, but I knew I had to begin.
I started Outlet Podcast in Dec. 2020 with the description: “Kaitlin McCulley left her job during a pandemic to find a better way to share stories that matter. No BS. Let’s talk.”
Pretty vague, right?
In a 6-minute introductory episode, I said:
“We’re going to break down some of these issues that I’ve been hearing for years, like, ‘Why is the news so negative?’ ‘Why is it biased?’ ‘Is it biased?’ ‘Is there a place that will tell me just the facts?’ ‘Why is it so sensational?’ These questions are really complicated and intertwined with a lot of factors like business and politics and corporations and individual journalists. So we’re going to look at how these issues intertwine and my hope is that through these honest conversations, we’ll come to some better solutions on how we can do a better job at giving you the news.”
The truth is: I didn’t know how it would end, but I knew I had to begin. So I did. I chose Christine Dobbyn to interview for the first episode as a way to introduce people outside of the TV news business to what it’s like to be a reporter over many years. I have an incredible amount of respect for Christine as a journalist and as a person, and I admire her bravery in leaving her job mid-career, going to business school and now running her own digital marketing company as well as a separate startup business. She emphasized curiosity as a key attribute that helped her along the way, saying:
“If you have journalism and you have entrepreneurship, they’re this license to be curious. And I’m an incredibly curious person. You give me a topic and all of a sudden I dive into it a little bit and then I want to know everything about it. And so that’s the commonality. And as I’ve gone down this road with working on a couple of start-up ideas and businesses, I realized that the process and the path is very much like journalism when you’re trying to put a story together.” -Christine Dobbyn, journalist & entrepreneur
After talking with Christine, I placed more emphasis on curiosity, recognizing it as one of my strengths as well and realizing it can be a guide as I navigate this process. I started looking at the TV news business as I would approach a story I was reporting on — gathering facts and talking with experts and others who are affected by it. I wrote an article called “People say they want just the facts: Are they liars?” in which I discussed the wide gap between what people say they want versus what their actions support. I was beginning to understand how a business model that relies on ad revenue was failing viewers (more on that later.)
The problems with the TV news business model and how it affects people’s perception of the world around them had become increasingly important to me during the last few years I spent as a reporter. In fact, I applied for a Harvard Nieman fellowship early last year to study this problem. I wasn’t chosen for the fellowship; however, John Archibald — a man I knew from my time reporting in Birmingham, Alabama several years ago — was offered a fellowship, and he is interested in a similar topic. He’s an excellent journalist and won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2018. So I invited him on the podcast to talk about his research on crime portrayal in the media and how those stories contribute to a culture of fear. He told me:
“This constant wave of crime comes before you, and you say — regardless of the fact that crime over the last few decades has decreased a lot — you just come to believe that we are awash in crime. And hence the rhetoric of fear in politics that we hear so often. It works. You make people afraid, you make them willing to do things they wouldn’t do otherwise.”
After talking with someone as experienced as John, I knew I was on the right track in trying to understand the influence of advertisers on news organizations. I was also interested in the perception of bias. For that, I looked to Dave Lopez, a veteran TV reporter in Los Angeles who retired last year after almost 50 years in the business. I figured he would be able to share valuable insight on how the business has changed over time. I asked him how journalists can restore some level of trust in our profession. This was part of his answer:
“I wish I could give you the golden answer because I’d bottle it and sell it and distribute it across the world. How we get back that trust? I don’t know. But somehow, some way, we’ve got to come to some realization that we need each other. And the world needs an open and free press.”
Dave agreed that a lot of the criticism of the media is fair, and I started thinking more about whether or not it was even possible for journalists to earn back trust that has been lost over time. I began researching other business models to see if there’s any operation that is able to sustain itself financially while also providing quality journalistic content that people actually want and will pay for. I quickly encountered the realities of failing business models across the board. Evan Brandt, who is the last local newspaper reporter living in his town in Pennsylvania, told me this:
“You could give me 20 reporters and I could employ them all here in the newsroom — uh, well, in my attic. We don’t have a newsroom anymore. I could find employment for all of them. Because you’re always missing something. But now, we’re missing so many things that it’s dispiriting, and I don’t think it’s the public service that it should be.”
Evan even confronted the hedge fund president that gutted his paper and still wasn’t able to secure more resources. Clearly this isn’t a path forward, but what about a local news startup that combines every source of funding imaginable to get off the ground? I talked with Ken Doctor next. He was a media analyst for many years and now he’s trying to prove that people will pay for local news in his hometown of Santa Cruz, California, through LookOut Local. He said he’s taking a leap of faith based on his experience:
“I’m making the assumption based on being an American and being on the planet for a while that people do want to know what’s going on in their community. And they want to know the facts of what’s going on. They want people to connect the dots, not in a partisan way, but understanding. And that if you offer them that, enough of them will respond both in readership and membership. There is only one way to prove it, which is to actually do it. And people, especially, you know, we’re close to Silicon Valley here, people go like, ‘Well, start with two people and see and test it out.’ And I said, no, that’s the whole problem. You’ve got to offer high enough quality and enough of it and then see how the market responds.”
I really wish him well and hope it works. But I worry that because they are paying so much money for high-quality reporters and photographers and staff in-house, that their model won’t be scalable. Regardless, they’re doing a great service to Santa Cruz for now, and many of us are learning from their operation. I kept looking for other models. At this point, my conversations and research had validated a few assumptions: There’s a huge trust problem in the media. People say they want facts but their actions don’t support it within traditional business models that include advertisers. Catering to advertisers negatively affects news coverage and results in a more fearful society. I touched on this assumption in the first article I wrote, which got the attention of Michael Rosenblum, who has written extensively on the subject. Michael is a big advocate of the democratization of news and citizen journalism. With billions of smartphones in circulation worldwide, he thinks everyone can be journalists. I read his book, “Don’t watch this: How the media are destroying your life” and was interested in his ideas related to citizens taking back control of the narratives they consume in the media.
“Watching teaches you passivity because watching instructs you over and over again that you have no control over your life. That’s why I’m so vehement about taking control in terms of the media. You’re not going to get rid of the media. But stop watching and start doing. And I don’t think that’s such a terrible thing to say.”
Around this time, I also watched the documentary “The Social Dilemma” on Netflix, which I highly recommend watching if you haven’t already. I concluded that between the media we consume on television and what we see on social media platforms, we — the viewers and readers — have become the products, not the customers. The advertisers are the true customers and we are the products being bought and sold. Our time and attention — perhaps our most valuable assets in life — are being bought and sold. Content that keeps our attention, most of it based in fear and controversy, is king. Language plays a big role in this, of course, so I talked with an anti-bias consultant and researcher, Dr. Suzanne Wertheim. She’s a linguistic anthropologist. After the attack on the Capitol, she wrote about the importance of using accurate language to describe what happened.
“Media language is one of the most influential languages we have in terms of taking a little event or thing that happens in a place and time and then broadcasting it out to everybody. So then, that interpretation of the event is made the popular interpretation of the event.”
Dr. Wertheim was clear that even though she continues to raise awareness around these issues, she is not optimistic about media companies’ willingness to stop using emotionally charged language because — as we know — that’s what grabs people’s attention and keeps them watching. It works. It’s profitable. After talking with her, I became more disillusioned with the media landscape. I reflected on my time in TV news and wondered how I didn’t see these problems sooner and how — despite my best efforts to do good work — ultimately, I was part of a system that didn’t have viewers’ best interest at heart. No wonder I was frustrated so often; my values were at odds with the system I worked in. I talked with a young woman just getting started in this business, Paige Hubbard, to find out why she chose this path and how she sees her career developing in a troubled industry. She reminded me why I got into this business to begin with.
“I’m never complacent. In college, the goal was, ‘Ok, get a job in your field.’ And now that I’ve accomplished that, it’s, ‘Ok, get a job in a bigger market.’ So for me, it’s just my desire to continue to better myself and be better than who I was the day before.”
In talking to Paige, I was struck by how much of her career she still has ahead of her and I wondered if there is going to be a place for her to do good work as the TV news system continues to devolve. So I continued researching other platforms where video storytelling exists, and I came across Bianca Graulau’s account on TikTok. She, too, left her TV reporting job and moved back to Puerto Rico where she is experimenting with new ways to share and market her stories. The key problem as she sees it is this:
“The options out there seem outdated but then, what other options are there? Real options. You and I took a huge leap of faith, is the truth. And not everyone can do this. I did this from a privileged position of being able to come back home to cut my costs, to not have children and not have those responsibilities, to be able to say, I’m just going to try this out and see what happens. But not everyone can do that. So the question is: what options are out there and how can we make these possibilities a reality for us where we could, you know, survive and also continue to pursue our passion.”
Here she is, finally producing high-quality content she’s passionate about but without a way to monetize it. I put my thoughts together in another article entitled “Television news isn’t serving you: It’s selling you” in which I explained how news business models that rely on ads skew the content you’re seeing.
So as a result of dozens of conversations with journalists, industry experts, business leaders and entrepreneurs, I’ve decided to build a video storytelling platform that harnesses the power of citizen journalists and digital creators and pays them for their work. I’m removing advertisers from the equation so that viewers are real customers, not the products.
Creators: Wouldn’t you rather be compensated fairly for the time and energy you spend posting high-quality content on social media for free? What else could you create if you could afford to do it?
Viewers: Aren’t you tired of having your emotions manipulated, your understanding of the world warped, and — frankly — your time wasted as you’re being bought and sold for the benefit of big companies?
I’ll be sharing more soon. Want to connect? Find me on LinkedIn or shoot me an email at kmcculley@outlet-media.com.
