This article is edited for length and clarity.
By Rosemary Ford and Caitliin Agnew
Your right to know — it’s an almost sacred concept here in the United States, enshrined in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights. What do you know about that right, and the news organizations that keep you informed? Today, we’re talking about something we hope you’re about to hear a lot more of, the Know Your News campaign.
This New England–wide effort, coordinated by the Granite State News Collaborative and the New England Newspaper & Press Association’s First Amendment Committee, is designed to raise awareness about the First Amendment and the essential role of local news in civic life.
News organizations across New Hampshire and New England will be participating in this endeavor, and to discuss it we have Jeff Feingold, Granite State News Collaborative editor on the project, and Linda Conway, executive director of the New England Newspaper & Press Association.
Melanie Plenda:
Let’s start with Linda. Can you tell us more about the campaign and the idea behind it?
Linda Conway:
The annual New England Newspaper and Press Association convention is an annual convention where we have dozens of training sessions for journalists. So this year we had a town hall-style meeting with journalists, editors, publishers, First Amendment advocates and attorneys to discuss the importance of a free press and some of the challenges that the news organizations are facing on the local and regional level.
This was our most popular session this year. The room was packed, and the engagement level was off the charts. It was really energizing. So based on this session, we developed a First Amendment committee to look at ways that our organization can help newsrooms. We came out with a whole list of things to do. One was to develop ways to share stories, editorials and information on First Amendment issues, and the second was to develop a public information campaign to tell the story of how our efforts to dig out public information helps our community.
Melanie, the director of the Granite State News Collaborative and a member of our board of directors, and was elected chair of the committee. The collaborative had already developed a platform that they use in New Hampshire, and being generous enough to allow us to use in our efforts to help connect the entire New England news community.
Melanie Plenda:
Linda, how many organizations do you expect are participating across New England? What was the reaction to it?
Linda Conway:
I've gotten emails from several people that are really excited about it. We're anticipating a couple of dozen news organizations to begin with. We're still registering news organizations this week, and I anticipate that a few more will probably join the effort after the kickoff, Sept. 17, on Constitution Day. I think that a couple of newsrooms, after they see other newspapers running the stories, will join as well. Ideally, we'd love every newsroom to join.
Melanie Plenda:
Here in New Hampshire, the Granite State News Collaborative produced a lot of stories for the series. Jeff, can you tell us more about that and what it entailed?
Jeff Feingold:
What we've done is come up with over 30 articles on all kinds of topics, ranging from what local news is, about the role of the press — particularly the role of the local press. That's something that we're really focusing on, local news — because all of the newspapers taking part of this are community papers — and how important the local press is to a strong community. We have articles explaining the First Amendment, media literacy, right-to-know laws and things like that.
What we did was we gathered a group of really good journalists, really strong journalists, who were immediately interested in writing these articles for us. And it was really heartening, because people who have been journalists know how important journalism is, how important understanding what's going on in your community is. This campaign is kind of a way to push back at the unfortunate situation we have now where people aren't quite clear about what the role of the press is. They don’t necessarily turn to newspapers or other media outlets for information, so we're trying to educate people again.
Melanie Plenda:
Jeff can you give us some highlights from these articles?
Jeff Feingold:
We are trying to focus on explaining what local news is and why community reporting is so important. Local news is telling you what's going on in your community and helps you understand more about what it is to be a member of your community. It's telling you about what local businesses are talking about — sports teams and stuff — and it's also telling you about what's going on at the zoning board or the planning board, the selectboard of the city council. Knowing that is important for you as a citizen to understand what's going on because part of the problem we have now is that the lack of understanding about how important news is and turning to professional news organizations for your information means that people are becoming less engaged with their community — which is the whole point of our society. Our job is to be an informed electorate to really make this thing work. This is part of what this campaign is about. It’s kind of reminding people that this is how it works. You have to uphold your end of the bargain by being an informed, educated voter.
Melanie Plenda:
Local news organizations do a lot to inform and educate their communities. But trust in news is at an all-time low. In fact, stories in the series address this. Jeff, can you speak a little about how the media can address the "fake news" narrative?
Jeff Feingold:
I think part of it is getting people to understand what the role of the press is.
What a professional news organization does is collect information, gather information and then disseminate it. We know how to gather information professionally. We try our best to report it. We try our best to avoid bias, to avoid disinformation.
Disinformation is so widespread now because of social media, because of AI, because of deepfakes and all that other stuff. It's a matter of us as professionals to share this information and to try to get people to understand there's a difference just reading something somewhere that might confirm your own biases, but that doesn’t mean it's true.
Our job is to try our best to not be biased, to be impartial and report it. Other sources are not doing that. They are biased. They are willfully spreading false information, disinformation, and it's important for people as readers or consumers of the news, to understand that there is a difference, and to turn to professional organizations, organizations whose job it is to understand what reality is, to speak.
Melanie Plenda:
Linda and Jeff, this is for both of you. Why is something like this needed now? Let’s go to Linda and then Jeff.
Linda Conway:
Well, as Jeff mentioned, so many people are skeptical of the media right now, especially in today's charged environment, and with the volume of information and misinformation that they find online and through social media it's tough to figure out what's real and what isn’t.
If the public understands how journalists verify their facts, vet their sources, uphold ethical standards, they'll be more likely to trust legitimate reporting and to distinguish it from misinformation, bias, and propaganda. We're hoping that by educating them on legitimate news, promoting transparency, we can empower more people to participate in that democracy.
Jeff Feingold:
Because so many people are spending their time in the digital world, on social media and the like, the result is we don't have that social connectedness anymore in our communities. We're losing it. It's something that's been happening over quite a period of time, but it seems today even more people are disengaged from their neighbors, from the rest of their community.
Having a source of information that everyone could turn to to understand what's going on in the community, can help bring back that kind of connectedness. I think it's something that's really important to think about — that's really what local news outlets are doing, is trying to bring the community together.
Melanie Plenda:
Here’s another one for the two of you: When you hear a phrase like Know Your News, what does that mean to you? Let’s start with Jeff and then to Linda.
Jeff Feingold:
I've been thinking a lot about what it means. It's been an unfortunate reality that fewer and fewer people are working to become well informed, or even trying to keep well informed. And I think Americans in general just are failing to grasp the idea of how our society works. The whole thing falls apart without an informed electorate. It's not just being informed about what's going on in Washington or in the state capitol, but at the local level, the county, the school board, all the things that make this system that we have work. Know Your News is basically a campaign by news outlets to say, “We’re here. We've always been here. We know you like your social media. But that's not the only way to stay informed and be engaged.”
Linda Conway:
The average person doesn't know the processes of a local newsroom. We know that local news is essential to a healthy, functioning democracy, and it still keeps communities connected. As Jeff mentioned, it keeps people updated on issues that directly affect them — school board decisions, city council policies, public safety, if your taxes are increased and how they're spent, local elections, crime and a whole host of things. Without local news, citizens may be uninformed about developments that impact their daily lives, so our goal is to make people aware of what's happening locally and the role that newspapers play in their communities, so that they're more likely to vote, attend community meetings, hold leaders accountable — essentially, to be engaged in their communities.
Melanie Plenda:
Linda and Jeff, what do you hope the outcome of all of this will be? Linda, let’s go to you first. Jeff?
Linda Conway:
There are so many news deserts that have come around the country, with corporate companies owning local news. I feel like many people don't understand what the consequences are of losing a local newsroom. The voter turnout drops and there's less transparency, there's more misinformation.
We're hoping that by educating people they will become more engaged in their local newspaper. Perhaps they'll start working at their local newspaper. Perhaps they become community reporters. They will get more involved in civic things, and they'll be empowered to participate in things. They'll go to community meetings. People don't understand that they can just go to meetings — the average person doesn’t. And then they realize that when they can't go, because everybody has busy lives, they're busy with their children and their jobs,and that local journalists are there to cover that information and give it to them.
Jeff Feingold:
I'm hoping that it makes people aware of how important it is to be media-literate, to understand what the media is, what your sources of information are, how legitimate they are, and how important it is to do your own homework on things. It sounds like a big job, but it's not really. Just learn to take a minute to say, “Is this true? Maybe I could find some other place to find out, to see if this information is true.”
There's also just the idea to be aware of what your source of information is, how valid it is, and how important it is on your part as a consumer of news and as a citizen to understand you have a responsibility. I think a lot of us forget how important that responsibility is.
Melanie Plenda:
That was a great discussion. Linda and Jeff, thank you for joining us.
“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at Franklin Pierce University. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. This story is part of the Know Your News campaign — a Granite State News Collaborative and NENPA Press Freedom Committee initiative on why the First Amendment, press freedom and local news matter. Don’t just read this. Share it with one person who doesn’t usually follow local news — that’s how we make an impact. Find out more at collaborativenh.org.