IT’S NO SECRET to anyone working in journalism that the industry is in flux, to put it gently. And here at CommonWealth Beacon, this fall has also been a time of transition completely apart from the usual and unusual political shifts each November. Last week, we said goodbye to our editor of 16 years – Bruce Mohl – and welcomed Laura Colarusso into the role.
I (Jennifer) tend to be the main podcaster of our crew here at CommonWealth Beacon, so when it came time to introduce readers to our new editor, we thought Laura and I might just have a conversation on The Codcast about journalism and its modern role.
It’s a chance for you to get to know her, and a chance for me to pick her brain about the way she’s thinking about our small but mighty newsroom heading forward. Her vision of journalism as a fundamentally public service profession stood out from the jump.
“I think the focus of journalism should be to help people better understand the world around them, make informed decisions as citizens, and create, ultimately, a community,” Laura told me. “I think the service part of public service is really key, because it’s about creating knowledge and information that serves a community, however that’s defined. That’s what I mean in theory, but for CommonWealth Beacon, I really think it means telling people about their government and what the government is doing for them, but also how their tax money is being spent, and how the policies that the government puts into place ultimately affect their lives.”
It can be useful to think of the journalist as something of a scientist, she said.
“I think really implicit in this is the idea that there’s a rigorous adherence to ethical standards and treating the reporting process almost like the scientific method,” she said.
Laura comes to us after more than three years at Nieman Reports, which is the Harvard University Nieman Foundation magazine focused on the journalism industry. Before that, she was digital managing editor at GBH News and a digital opinion editor at the Boston Globe.
It was helpful to me to hear how Laura’s decades in the field – called to journalism after college and by now having worked in “everything from television to newspapers, magazines, radio, and digital-only, and covered a wide variety of topics from the military, to climate change, to the gender pay gap, to local politics” – have shaped her journalistic ethos and her approach to seeking out important stories. Below are a few excerpts from our conversation, which you can listen to in full here.
On “objectivity” in journalism:
“To me, objectivity is not the right word. I know that there’s a big debate about it in our industry right now. I think trying to sum it up in one word is really unhelpful because people are going to have their biases, but if you’re focused on the reporting process itself, and you’re making sure that you’re talking to a range of people, that you’re contextualizing the information that you have … then I think you have a pretty rigorous reporting process. And you might actually come to a place where it’s not balanced, you don’t have two sides equally weighted, but you have something that is somewhat objective because you’ve gone through a process that allows you to really interrogate yourself, your biases, and the information that you’re gathering.”
On a story coming together:
“I think I’ve just sort of developed a sense for what an audience is for a particular publication and what a good story would be for that audience. I hope it’s not corny to say that when a good story idea comes together, there’s a small spark of joy. The story meeting is my favorite part of my job. I love getting together with reporters, editors, just bringing the group together and bouncing ideas off of each other. … And then, you know, there’s also a bit of panic or terror, because once we know we’ve got a good story idea, I don’t want anybody to beat us. I’m really competitive that way. ”
On trends in the journalism industry:
“One thing that I somewhat worry about is trading off innovation for reporting. Technological innovation is so important in so many aspects of life, and in journalism too, but I think sometimes we think that the innovation is gonna get us out of this crisis because we can do good reporting with fewer journalists. And we can – technology has helped us with that to a certain extent – but at the end of the day, if we go back to the public service aspect of the job, I think that it is very community-oriented. And you need people in communities. … Maybe you might have a financial paper that can write up an earnings report with AI, but that’s not going to help you create that bond with a reader or a listener or a watcher that allows them to feel like you’re a trustworthy news organization.”
On coverage in Massachusetts:
“Every state has seen a decline in the number of news organizations. I think we might be slightly better off than others. … But Massachusetts isn’t unique in that in the areas where there’s less population density, where there’s less wealth, it’s harder to keep local news organizations. So you tend to see more rural communities not have coverage. … One other nuance to get at here is even when you still have a news organization, sometimes they’re ghost papers or ghost organizations where it might be a national chain that owns the paper and it’s really more of a regional hub. So they’re not doing local news – they’re doing sort of regional news that’s pulled in from a lot of different places because they’re trying to save money. Maybe they have one reporter or one editor on the ground, but they don’t actually have news people there covering the local community.”
On hope for the industry:
“When the hard work is done, the reporting definitely breaks through. I’m thinking of the New York Times and the New Yorker’s exposés on Harvey Weinstein. That launched a movement. ProPublica shined a light on the ethics scandals at the Supreme Court. … The student newspaper at the University of Florida uncovered how the president, Ben Sasse, had been making all these sweetheart deals with friends in Washington and that his office’s budget had grown by some factor that was quite large. So there’s still a lot of really good work being done. I think I take comfort in that, even when the industry is facing pretty difficult headwinds, polarization in this country is real and it’s something that we all are grappling with. There’s still really excellent work being done that is breaking through and making change. And I think the more we focus on that, the more we focus on what we can control, the better off we’ll be.”
For more with CommonWealth Beacon editor Laura Colarusso – on covering the Pentagon after 9/11, what Walter Lippmann can teach us about modern journalism, and responsible reporting in an era of diminished media literacy – listen to The Codcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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