[music playing] NARRATOR: The following program is a production of Ozarks Public Television.

Welcome to "Sense of Community."

I'm Gregory Holman.

In this edition of the broadcast we're talking about challenges and opportunities in American local news.

For most of the history of the United States of America, local newspapers had a central role to play in public life.

They reported on daily events that form the bonds of shared community, like the race for town mayor or the latest high school football game.

But in the 21st century, American local news faces a stark crisis, one that doesn't look great for the prospects of our 247-year-old democracy.

There's a decent amount of research on the problem.

In the US, roughly 70 million people now live in what's called a news desert.

The number of newsroom jobs in the US has dropped by 26% since 2008.

30,000 jobs were lost.

There are now six publicists, corporate spokespeople, and government public information officers for every one journalist in America.

During the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 300 local newspapers closed permanently.

So it's no surprise that communities want to do something about the problem, including here in the Ozarks.

In recent years, a group of local residents gathered to promote the idea of an independent, nonprofit, online newsroom to serve the Springfield community.

"The Springfield Daily Citizen" launched on Valentine's Day of 2022.

Their goal is not only to report and inform, but to work toward helping solve community problems.

That brings me to our guest for this broadcast, David Stoeffler.

He's the CEO of "The Springfield Daily Citizen."

David has more than 40 years of experience working in the news business.

Originally from Wisconsin, David got his start at a small weekly newspaper.

He worked his way up to newsroom leadership jobs in several states before joining "The Springfield News-Leader," our community's oldest news outlet from 2010 to 2014.

David's time at "The News-Leader" is associated with The Every Child Service Journalism project.

After running an education nonprofit back in Wisconsin for seven years, David returned to Springfield to launch "The Springfield Daily Citizen."

You can find it, online only, at sgfcitizen.org.

"The Citizen" has a staff of 14, including 9 journalists.

And they're based here on the campus of Missouri State University.

So please stay tuned.

[music playing] NARRATOR: Welcome to "Sense of Community."

"Sense of Community" is a public affairs presentation of Ozarks Public Television.

David, welcome to "Sense of Community."

Thanks for having me.

Now David, I want to start by congratulating you and "The Springfield Daily Citizen" on what I think is a milestone.

And I hope it bodes well for the future of local news here in Springfield in terms of just assuring that we have many quality newsrooms operating here in the community.

And as you well know, back in August, the Missouri State University Board of Governors voted unanimously to extend out your operating agreement here on the campus of Missouri State University, just extending that support and housing your office space there.

So congratulations.

Yeah.

Thanks.

We very much appreciate the support from Missouri State.

It's very much in keeping with the public affairs mission, which also supports KSMU.

Yes, Ozarks Public Broadcasting.

And so we're a separate nonprofit entity.

We're not actually part of the University.

But nonetheless, having the University's support, it provides financial relief, but it's also moral support for the work that we're trying to do.

Amazing.

So let's get right to our discussion.

David, let's just start really basically.

Why do we need local news?

Yeah, if we don't have journalists providing coverage that can be verified, that is independent of the different organizations in the community, the citizenry won't be well-informed and won't be able to take collective action and important action, whether it's in elections, whether it's in promoting policy, or whether it's just in participating in the community and being a good citizen.

So that's why local news and local journalists vetting and gathering that news is what's very important for our future.

Now David, as you probably know, and I think this will be a common reaction in the 21st century, as you probably know, 240 million Americans have a Facebook account.

There's a lot of information that flows over social media platforms of that kind.

Why not just rely on social media for the exchange of information in a modern society?

Why do we need journalists hanging around vetting facts?

Yeah.

And you've obviously hit the key point there.

It's about vetting the facts.

And it's about reporting information that some people may not want to share on their Facebook pages.

It's making sure that we have folks who are really trained in gathering and in sorting through and in also helping people make sense of that information.

But ultimately, as we all know, there's a lot of misinformation.

And just sometimes, it's deliberate.

Misinformation.

Many, many times, it is not deliberate.

I heard from my neighbor this thing that happened, and it really didn't happen that way.

And so we need journalists who can independently verify and look into that information and then share that in a way that people can access it and understand it.

Just creating a wholesome information diet-free of well-intentioned misinformation and maybe bad actor disinformation.

When Missouri State's board approved "The Citizen's" operating agreement last summer, minutes of the meeting show that Clif Smart, the university president, told the board that "The Springfield Daily Citizen" was doing an excellent job at covering Springfield local news in a nonpartisan way.

Now, why does mainstream news coverage need to avoid taking sides from a political point of view?

If most people in a given area like Springfield vote, say, Republican, why not let that control the news?

Yeah.

And there certainly are sources that do cater to different points of view, political points of view, special interests, et cetera.

"The Daily Citizen" tries very hard to be nonpartisan in our approach and to offer information that is really based on what is the truth as much as we can verify it.

And sometimes, we're not able to really verify what is true.

Most of us will agree the sky is blue.

Well, then scientists will say, well, it's not really.

But in the end, there are certain facts we can accept.

And then those other facts, or things that people are presenting as facts, is where we need journalists to try to present them in a way that's evenhanded, fair, and that people can say I get this information, and I can make my own decision about how to interpret those facts and what I think is important, or what my view is about the issue.

So in other words, we may be a Republican, a Democrat, whatever, we may have our own different interpretations, but it's good to have at least some sort of a same page of factual information to work from?

Yeah.

One of the things that's been lost over the last, well 35, 40 years is the sources of information have multiplied.

And as a result, most people-- in the old days when I was a kid, everybody got their news from several basic sources.

So we all shared a common sense of what was that information.

Here in Springfield, "The Springfield News-Leader" was certainly a key source.

KY3, Ozarks public television and public radio, those sources could be trusted and could be understood.

Now there are so many different sources.

And people choose sometimes which sources to follow based on their own allegiances.

And as a result, we're not all sharing the same information about what is the action of the city council, what's the school board doing.

Where in the old days, most people saw the same basic news and then they could make their judgments off of that.

Sure.

Now let's talk about the ecosystem of local news.

One phrase I've heard you say is agenda-setting news coverage, where one outlet kind of breaks the story, or maybe newspapers, or quickly to something, and then broadcasting follows, and that sort of thing.

Can you talk about agenda-setting news coverage and what that is and how you see that fitting into your roles there at "The Citizen?"

Yeah.

So at "The Daily Citizen," certainly, again, in the past, when there were many more reporters running around town, reporters were often tripping over each other.

Roy Blunt likes to tell the story about when he was the clerk in Greene County and how literally every day four or five reporters would come to see him, looking for news.

And that doesn't happen anymore.

And I should say Roy Blunt is former United States Senator for Missouri, for people who may be younger and don't know him.

Yeah.

Thank you.

But now it's important, I think, that you have news organizations that are out in front on certain stories.

And every news organization in town has leaders, has journalists that are leaders in their field.

A good example, Claudette Riley, at "The News-Leader," everyone in town would recognize she is an expert on education issues.

And so she sets an agenda by her coverage of the public schools, of Missouri education generally, of regional education issues.

And so "The Daily Citizen," what we're trying to do is establish ourselves as a credible and important source on key sorts of stories and in particular, in-depth coverage of issues that maybe other news organizations don't have the resources or time to pursue.

So that might be something as expansive as a recent living in fear series on domestic violence, or it might be something simple like the closing of Urban Roots Farm here in Springfield and really getting that story out to the public.

And that was certainly a story I think that resonated with a lot of people, that particular one about that local community farm here in the center of town.

Do you think competition among high quality local news outlets is a good thing?

Or should it all just be sort of centralized into maybe one news outlet?

No, I think competition is good.

I think it's part of our system here in the United States.

And I think it makes us better journalists.

Again, we want to try to pick and choose, at least for "The Daily Citizen's" point of view, where we're competing and where we're trying to be different and distinctive.

So, again, on education coverage, we're trying to be more competitive.

We're trying to provide more day-to-day coverage while still looking for our niche of in-depth coverage of education issues in a little different approach to things.

But then we have other areas where we're really the only people in town who are trying to cover some of those issues.

And that's a key part of our mission.

Now we've talked about competition.

Your direct competitor is probably "The Springfield News-Leader," the oldest news outlet here in Springfield.

And I want to make sure to note we contacted Amos Bridges.

He's the editor-in-chief, so roughly your counterpart over there.

And he said he appreciated the opportunity to comment.

He didn't want to be drawn into any kind of discussion that involved other outlets.

I think talking about what he knows mainly is what he was interested.

So we want to note that.

"The Citizen," David, you, I think, pride yourselves on describing the mission of "The Citizen" as locally controlled, independent and nonprofit news.

And I wonder if you can just share what you believe some of the strengths of that model for local news gathering are.

Yeah.

So we're not beholden to anybody other than local people.

We're beholden to our readers, to our subscribers, to a board of directors that consists of local people who have longstanding ties to the area.

We've also tried to hire as many people with local connections as we can.

We want people to be on the staff who have a reason to be here or who want to be here.

I'm an example of that.

I was here from 2010 to 2014.

I moved back to my home state of Wisconsin.

I loved my time in Springfield.

I had great friends here.

I loved the community.

And when the opportunity presented itself to come back, I came back.

But as a nonprofit, we don't need to generate a profit for anyone.

All of our investors, if you will, our founder Tom Carlson, our other contributors, they're not going to get any return on their investment other than to see the community be better informed and to have the kind of journalism it needs to provide good guidance for the future of the community.

And we should note Mr. Carlson, former mayor of Springfield, a big donor there for "Springfield Daily Citizen."

And I think you all are proud of saying that.

When I hear about "The Springfield Daily Citizen" and "The Springfield News-Leader," and maybe one or two others in community conversations, one theme that residents come back to, and this could be a function of me working for Ozarks Public Broadcasting, is that they're not a fan of paywalls, the idea that you have to pay some money to have an online subscription to access the news content.

And I wonder if you want to talk about paywalls, why do you have one, why do you need one, and address sometimes there's some grumbling about it.

Let's be honest.

Yeah, totally understandable.

First of all, anybody can access currently three stories a month for free.

And we also have other content that we make free as a regular basis, for instance, any of our Opinion content, Letters to The Editor, Voices columns is all public.

Those are always public all the time?

Yes, those are always public.

Our death notices, for instance, are public.

So we have a certain amount of information that is always free.

And even if you don't pay as a subscriber, you can read a couple of stories a month without having been a paid subscriber.

But gathering news costs money.

And The Living in Fear project is a good example.

It was multiple thousands of dollars, somewhere around $70, $80,000.

And can you just outline Living in Fear briefly, as you discussed it?

Yeah, the Living in Fear series looked at the persistent issues of domestic violence in our community in Greene County, Springfield and Greene County.

And what we found was that it's kind of gone below the surface a little bit.

It's even taken out of the recent community focus report as a red flag, even though Springfield has the highest rate of reported domestic violence calls in the state of Missouri by far, 35% more calls than Kansas City, which is the next highest rate of reports.

Now there's some dispute over whether that translates directly into we are 35% more inclined to have domestic violence is a different question.

But we tried to explore all of the issues around domestic violence, tell the stories of the victims, tell the stories of the perpetrators, and how they're being dealt with in the court and legal system, and what the shortcomings are.

So we had two reporters, Steve Pokin and Jackie Rehwald-- Both very distinguished reporters, I think it's fair to say.

Yeah, former colleagues of yours.

Former colleagues of both of ours, right?

Well, current.

Yeah.

And they spent roughly six months working on that project, creating a unique database, doing over 50 interviews with over 50 people.

So it was a very time consuming and expensive project, and one that I would say is larger than any other news organization in Springfield has taken on for some time.

I remember when Living in Fear was in production.

You told me something it was like $80,000 of dollar cost.

Yeah, if we added up their time, the other expenses that we had involved, we think it would be roughly something like that.

And I just want to emphasize the importance of in-depth and investigative-- here at Ozarks Public Broadcasting with Ozarks Public Radio on KSMU, we do a series called "Sense of Community" three times a year.

It's no secret I used to work at "The Springfield News-Leader" before I joined here.

The team that I was on at "The News-Leader" won best investigative reporting for a report on sexual assault at Kanakuk Camp in Branson.

So these are important things.

And I want to emphasize they exist in our community.

But they're hard, right?

And so back to your question is, why do we have a paywall?

Why do we rely on subscriptions as a key source of revenue?

We actually think it's the right thing to do.

That in the long run, the number of journalists that there are going to be in our community is going to be dependent on the support of the community.

Now public radio and public television rely on a different model, which includes some public funding.

But it also relies a lot on volunteer donors.

We also want volunteer donors.

But we think that having a subscription model is a direct relation, then, to people who are willing to pay $100 a year as our regular rate.

They're supporting my salary.

They're supporting the salary of Steve Pokin and Jackie Rehwald and the other reporters.

They're making it possible for us to do good journalism.

And if we can't get their support, then it means we're not connecting with them in some way.

We're not giving them the content that they value.

And so that makes us adjust and try to make sure that we're doing that.

David, I haven't been working in news as long as you have.

But my years in this business have convinced me that journalists in general need to be compensated with money, health benefits, retirement benefits such that these folks are kind of firmly in the middle class.

And there's a few reasons I would lay it out for that opinion on my part, which is keeping people in the business.

I think that there's an effect where a lot of times it's younger people.

They graduate out of journalism and they go work as government spokespeople or corporate spokespeople, often at pretty young ages.

Keeping people in the field in their 30s, 40s, 50s is pretty essential, I think.

Another point that I would maybe bring up is if you have people who are having a lot of financial hardship, it makes it harder to cover things from a calm, neutral, fair point of view.

I wonder if you agree with me and what you think about just kind of those social topics for what a journalist is.

We've tried to pay a living wage to each of our employees.

Obviously it varies depending on their experience and their qualifications for the job.

But when we created "The Daily Citizen," we were very competitive in terms of the salaries that we offered people.

In many cases, I think in every case that I know of, they got a raise coming to work for us compared to the place they worked previously.

So we were happy, after our first several months in operation, we were able to add a benefits package that includes health insurance and a 401(k) sharing plan that we match employee contributions.

And so we feel like we have a very competitive and fair system of pay.

And I do agree with you that it's important to be able to retain quality people.

Most journalists you talk to aren't in it for the money.

We're not in this to get rich.

Right.

Let's be really clear.

But we all have expenses.

We have families.

We have other things that we're trying to do with our lives.

And so it's important that we try to pay people fairly and that they can support their families.

At the same time, as you mentioned, there is a value in having journalists who understand what it's like to live paycheck to paycheck.

And we don't want our own employees to do that.

But nonetheless, it's important to be able to understand that part of our community.

David, let's round out our time together with just talking a little bit about journalism itself.

Maybe this is a little high-minded.

But talk to me about your vision of what you think some of the most important characteristics and qualities that a person should have if he or she wants to be in journalism.

Fundamental to me is curiosity, being interested in the world around you, being interested in learning about things.

Usually the best journalists enjoy being the first to learn something.

They enjoy the idea of discovering news.

I often tell reporters when they're working on a longer term or an in-depth story, hey, you realize you may be the first person who's actually put these pieces of information together in a way that reveals a new thing.

And sometimes reporters, and you know from your experience, you've worked on a story for a long time.

And at some point, you start to lose the tree for the forest.

And we want to just make sure that we really think about what are we really learning here and what are we telling people.

So journalists who are curious, who are anxious to try to learn new things, usually they're quick on their feet.

They have a wit about them.

They have an ability to retain information and share that in a way.

And the best stories, you can tell when you read journalism stories, the best stories are told by people who actually understand the subject they're writing about.

When the story is filled with bureaucratic language and lots and lots of quotes that are just narrative explaining a topic, that tells you that the journalist actually doesn't really get it.

They don't really know.

And what we want is journalists who really can pull that all together, can vet the information and make it make sense.

And that can be a little bit of a challenge.

Here on a mid-sized smaller city in a rural context, you have a lot of people wearing a lot of different hats.

I cover all kinds of different topics.

Yes, you get thrown into things that you don't know anything about.

But, again, you have to have the ability to quickly figure out-- Quick study.

Yeah.

And at the same time, try to avoid stereotyping, try to avoid falling into the I'm here from outside, parachuting in.

And I'm suddenly the expert on this community's issues or this problem.

So you've got to be careful about that.

Nobody wants to be a parachute.

Parachute tends to be a word, if someone from the East Coast or West Coast came here and they don't know anything is the impression.

Right?

What do you think about education for journalists?

We're fortunate to be here at Missouri's public affairs university.

There's a lot to learn here.

What do you think about what a journalist should have in his or her educational background?

Yeah.

And I would say we've really been impressed with the student interns that we've had from Missouri State.

You told me every single one had been a good one.

Yeah, every single one, and what we've really appreciated is they haven't always come fully prepared to do the job, but that's the point of an internship.

Right?

Yeah.

They're learning.

And every single one we've had has wanted to learn and has shown each time they've done a story, they've improved.

Maybe they didn't understand how to structure a story.

Then once an editor has shown them a couple of examples, the light bulb goes on.

Oh, OK, I get it now.

This is a common way to organize the information.

So I think that the best journalists obviously are very well-read and they understand how to write.

It's important to have some basic good spelling and grammar skills.

Of course, computers help us with that.

But they don't solve all those issues for us.

But it's about having a broad background, having that liberal arts background is helpful, to have had a political science class, to have had a good science class, to have had other types of courses that help you prepare to have a general knowledge that then you can apply to a specific topic.

I would agree, well-rounded knowledge of history, political science, foreign language, these are all beneficial.

And just as aside, I have an English degree.

I don't have a journalism degree.

And I think I've done reasonably well for myself.

If you're just joining us, I've had the pleasure of having David Stoeffler, CEO of "The Springfield Daily Citizen," on the broadcast.

Thanks for having me, Gregory.

I really appreciated the opportunity to talk about the importance of local news.

It is important.

We want to leave everybody with more opportunities to find out about local news through "The Springfield Daily Citizen."

That information is on your screen.

I'm Gregory Holman.

Thank you all for watching this program.

Until next time, goodbye.

[music playing] NARRATOR: Here is where you can find more information about the topics covered in this program.