Interviews

Conversations about mass media, journalism and democracy

Can a year-end giving campaign save independent news in San Francisco?

By Josh Wilson / December 29, 2020 / 0 Comments

Of all the bad years for journalism, 2020 may have been the worst, with the usual woes — declining ad revenue, desperately competitive attention wars, not to mention profound trust issues — compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic’s complete disruption of anything resembling business as usual. In San Francisco, neighborhood newspapers took it hard, as many […]

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Neal Gorenflo: Why Don’t Journalists Start Co-Ops?

By Josh Wilson / July 7, 2017 / 0 Comments

Conspicuously absent from the booming grassroots-sharing economy is the professional journalism sector. For some insight into this conundrum, I spoke to Neal Gorenflo, the executive director and co-founder of Shareable.net — a nonprofit solutions-news outlet covering innovations in resource sharing, new economies, and cities. Neal’s work also gets him in circulation as an adviser to […]

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Sally Lehrman: Rebuilding public trust

By Josh Wilson / March 13, 2017 / 1 Comment

Sally Lehrman directs the journalism ethics program at Santa Clara College and its signature Trust Project. She is a longtime evangelist for journalism values and ethics as a local and national leader in the Society of Professional Journalists and the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation. Watershed Media:  When it comes to identifying/verifying trustworthy news media, what […]

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Molly de Aguiar: "Fundamentally, our work is about building relationships and trust"

By Josh Wilson / July 27, 2015 / 0 Comments

A conversation about public media in the Garden State with the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation’s Molly de Aguiar WATERSHED: Your organization is a longtime, mainline public-media funder — and a household fixture in North Jersey in the ’70s and ’80s, via the public-broadcasting anchors WNET and WNYC. How has the emergence of the small news […]

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Chuck Lewis: How to Start a News Nonprofit

By Josh Wilson / June 17, 2010 / 0 Comments

[Interview conducted May 2008] A former 60 Minutes producer, Charles Lewis hit hard limits on what he could cover in the commercial sector. So he jumped ship, and embarked on the “tough slog” of building his own nonprofit news outlet at a time — the late ’80s — when the industry was still flush, and […]

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Geneva Overholser: ‘Public Media’ or Public Interest?

By Josh Wilson / June 14, 2010 / 0 Comments

[Interview conducted May 2008] It was in the depths of 2006, with the severity of the media crisis only deepening, that GENEVA OVERHOLSER — former editor of the Pulitzer-winning Des Moines Register, ombudsman for The Washington Post, and currently director of the School of Journalism at the University of Southern California — issued her now-classic […]

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