The Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute is now accepting 2021-22 RJI Fellowship applications from individuals or organizations with an innovative journalism project idea that could also benefit the industry.
Potential project ideas could include devising new strategies or models to solve a problem, building new tools, creating a prototype, or advancing a prototype, so it’s ready to launch.
This year’s fellowship projects address the increasing challenges in covering climate change, unpublishing, harassment of marginalized journalists and more.
RJI will be hosting its 15th class of fellows in 2021–22. Applications are due Dec. 18, 2020.
Since launching in 2004, the fellowship program has hosted a wide variety of entrepreneurs and innovators that have come from different backgrounds including large legacy newsrooms and small nonprofits.
“Our fellows are trailblazers, creative thinkers, determined doers and great partners,” says Randy Picht, RJI’s executive director. “If that sounds like you, then it’s time to apply.”
RJI’s eight-month fellowship is a flexible program with three types of fellowship options — residential, nonresidential and institutional that give fellows the time, space and resources they need to work on projects.
The 2020 election is no laughing matter — except that it is, in the great American tradition of humor and satire that has marked virtually every election.
This column expresses the views of Gene Policinski, senior fellow for the First Amendment, Freedom Forum. He can be reached at gpolicinski@freedomforum.org, or follow him on Twitter at @genefac.
This time around: Jim Carey’s nascent “Joe Biden” and Alec Baldwin’s long-running “Donald Trump;” the late-nightly salvoes of Stephen Colbert and the daily — sometimes hourly — haranguing tweets from Trump himself; conservative talk radio’s sharp-edged verbal darts and the Lincoln Project’s wickedly humorous videos.
As it has since the 1970s, NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” again steps into the role of the nation’s satirist, continuing a tradition that stretches back nearly 250 years, into the colonial era with its biting print depictions of King George III and frequent effigies burned or hung from trees in public squares.
The First Amendment’s protection of free speech shelters those who poke, prod and even anger those in power — via satire and parody — and elections bring out those efforts tenfold.
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams tossed insults and satirized images of each other in competing newspapers in the 1800 presidential race. Blunt, single-sheet cartoons were hung in taverns and homes depicting Andrew Jackson as a ruthless authoritarian. One, published in 1830, showed him dressed as a king, complete with crown, trampling on the U.S. Constitution.
“Political satire has been used throughout American history as a more gentle way of commentary,” says Alison Dagnes, a Shippensburg University political science professor and author of the book “A Conservative Walks Into a Bar: The Politics of Political Humor.”
One recurring question: Why there are more liberal political satirists than conservatives, both today and in the past? Dagnes writes that “conservatism supports institutions and satire aims to take those institutions down a peg … the very nature of satire mandates challenges to the power structure.”
Two modern-day comedians exemplify those who have swum against that liberal tide: Dennis Miller, who pivoted to a conservative view after the Sept. 11 attacks, who said of his political views that he found “liberalism is like a nude beach — it sounds great until you get there.” And self-described “libertarian conservative” P.J. O’Rourke, who said the Obama administration was simply “the Carter administration in better sweaters” and supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 over Trump, saying “She’s wrong about absolutely everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters.”
How effective can satirists be in shaping events in the real world? William “Boss” Tweed, whose crime syndicate in the 1870s stole or extorted more than $2 billion dollars (today’s value) in public funds, was the target of Harper’s Weekly cartoonist Thomas Nast. Nast drew the corpulent Tweed as a bulgingly fat character with a money bag in place of his head and historians often credit Nast as fueling the charge to bring Tweed to justice.
Another Nast cartoon of note, from the Newseum collection, “The Only Thing They Respect or Fear,” shows Tweed doffing his hat to a row of hangman nooses, as his cronies cringe in fear. Political cartoonists are credited with helping Abraham Lincoln win reelection in 1864 and a century later, The Washington Post’s Herblock (Herbert Block) was viewed by critics and admirers as a major reason the Watergate scandal remained in public view even as the administration worked to downplay it.
Block relished his work, writing that it was “an irreverent form of expression, and one particularly suited to scoffing at the high and the mighty. If the prime role of a free press is to serve as critic of government, cartooning is often the cutting edge of that criticism.”
Social media often focuses on the “cut” in cutting edge: When Trump returned to the White House from treatment for COVID-19, satirists immediately posted their own version of his purposeful balcony appearance and maskless salute — from titling single images as “Benito Trumpolini” (after a similar pose by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini) to a Lincoln Project video, “Covita,” parodying the lyrics from Broadway showtune “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” as “Don’t Cry For Me, White House Staffers.”
Trump has done his own part on social media to carry satire forward in history, with memorable tweeted nicknames such as “Sleepy Joe” (Biden), “Crooked Hillary” (Clinton), “Little Marco” (Rubio) and “Lyin’ Ted” (Cruz).
Mark Twain, often called the father of modern American satire, wrote such classics as “Huckleberry Finn” and “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” using exaggeration and irony to make fun of closed-minded, corrupt officeholders and religious hypocrites.
A direct Twain descendant-in-humor, early radio celebrity and newspaper columnist Will Rogers used homespun language to jab politics in general. “I don’t belong to any organized political party,” he once said. “I’m a Democrat.” Another line from Rogers: “The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected.”
“Saturday Night Live” (SNL) and “The Daily Show,” with comedians Jon Stewart and now Trevor Noah, have set the tone for modern political satire.
Each election cycle for more than 40 years, SNL has produced memorable political parody — from Chevy Chase’s devasting portrayals of Gerald Ford (actually an accomplished athlete) as a bumbler, to Phil Hartman’s cheeseburger-guzzling Bill Clinton, to Tina Fey’s remarkable and transformative skewering of 2008 GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
Stewart’s prominence in political satire from 1999 to 2015 produced a unique form of praise: Some credited him and his program as a new form of journalism. While his staff of writers and researchers included former journalists as fact-checkers to ensure accuracy, Stewart consistently said he put comedy first. Still, as my Freedom Forum colleague Patty Rhule said of Stewart and his program in a New York Times interview about the show as centerpiece of the Newseum’s 2019 “Seriously Funny” exhibit: “For a generation, he was their voice of the news.”
Stewart was the latest iteration of post-World War II comedians willing to take on social mores, censors and sometimes the courts: Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce both mocked powerful political figures of their era — with Bruce famously being prosecuted for using so-called “blue” language that today is a common feature across cable TV comedy specials.
For two seasons in the late 1960s, brothers Tommy and Dick Smothers used satire via a prime-time CBS variety show — prompting President Lyndon B. Johnson to make an angry late-night call to network President William S. Paley. The show later was canceled over fights with network censors. “Doonesbury” cartoons have made fun of presidents and politicians and found humor and targets across American culture since the 1970s. But writing in 2015 in The Atlantic, cartoonist Gary Trudeau reflected on whether there are lines not to be crossed in satire.
In 2015, terrorists angered at French magazine Charlie Hebdo’s criticism of Islam and reprinting of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that had originally appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, attacked the magazine’s Paris office, killing 11 staffers and a security officer.
“Traditionally, satire has comforted the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable. Satire punches up, against authority of all kinds, the little guy against the powerful,” Trudeau wrote. “By punching downward, by attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons, Charlie wandered into the realm of hate speech.” Trudeau called the resulting violence a “bitter harvest.”
Whether they entertain or enrage, inspire or infuriate, comfort or inflame, humor and satire in a political setting often serve to bring out truths. From the subtle to the complex, satire focuses us on facts that otherwise might be lost in the daily horserace reporting that dominates modern-day election reporting.
As that 21st-century sage Homer Simpson once observed, and was quoted in a different Newseum exhibit, First Amendment freedoms of speech, petition and assembly do not exist to protect “burping” — they are there to allow us to speak to our fellow citizens about matters of public importance.
Satire and parody provide information, a release from the seriousness of much of politics and are a means to express ideas that might not find audiences in other settings.
Humor with an edge has been part of American political life as long as there was life in American politics. There’s no requirement that we be polite, respectful or even tasteful in doing it — and there’s also no barrier to getting a laugh at the same time we make a point.
Each year, I survey U.S. publishers and general managers about the health of their newspapers. During the late spring/early summer of 2020, I received completed surveys from participants representing 500 newspapers or groups. In my previous column, I discussed some of the overall results of the survey, especially those related to financial health. In this column, we’re going to look at some of the differences noted between daily and weekly newspapers.
Kevin Slimp is director of the Institute of Newspaper Technology. Email questions to him at kevin@kevinslimp.com.
In some areas of the survey, there were little differences between weeklies and dailies. For instance, when compared to two years ago, both groups report similar health. While 58 percent of weekly newspapers indicate worse overall health than two years ago, 63 percent of dailies gave the same response. Most newspapers in both groups answered “not bad” to “very healthy” when asked about their overall health, while 14 percent of weeklies and 19 percent of dailies indicated they were in poor health.
When it comes to page count, again we see some similarities. 68 percent of dailies answered they had reduced pages compared to two years ago, while 61 percent of weeklies responded similarly.
Digging into other questions, we begin to see differences between dailies and weeklies:
71 percent of weekly newspapers are independent, with local owners, while only 27 percent of daily newspapers are owned and operated in their local communities.
The primary source of revenue for 98 percent of weekly newspapers is print advertising. The same is true for 81 percent of dailies, with subscriptions and digital advertising bringing in a higher percent of revenue than at weeklies.
While only 7 percent of weekly newspapers answered that their digital efforts were financially profitable, 22 percent of daily papers see a financial profit on digital platforms. 30 percent of weeklies and 43 percent of dailies indicate they see other benefits besides financial profit from their digital efforts.
30 percent of daily newspapers report that more than 20 percent of their revenues come from “non-newspaper sources.” Only 6 percent of weeklies responded the same way.
Speaking of digital, only 32 percent of daily newspaper publishers/managers responded that it “might be true” that they would be better off without a digital version of their newspaper. That number jumps up to 44 percent for weekly papers, with an additional 15 percent indicating they believed they “would be better off” without a digital version. Add those together and 59 percent of weekly respondents answered they might, or would, be better off without a digital version of their newspaper.
One answer that has changed significantly since I began surveying newspapers six years ago is “How long do you think you will continue to produce a printed newspaper?” In 2015 and 2016 surveys, more than 90 percent indicated they would be producing newspapers more than 20 years into the future. In this most recent survey, roughly 48 percent of weeklies and 39 percent of dailies expect to be printing papers more than 12 years from now.
What about all that “fake news” we keep hearing about? Fortunately, fake news is “fake news” in most places. While it is a problem for many daily newspapers where 21 percent of respondents answered that more than 25 percent of the folks in their communities consider them to be fake news, weekly newspaper seem to be more trusted by their communities. Only 2 percent of weekly newspapers answered, “more than 25 percent,” while 39 percent of weeklies responded, “That’s silly. None. Zero.” 51 percent of weeklies answered, “Somewhere between 1 and 10 percent.”
I guess it just goes to show, there are always a few crabby readers out there.
In the 2020 survey, hundreds of respondents sent in advice and suggestions about things that have worked at their newspapers. In my next column, we’ll take a look at ideas newspapers have come up with to increase revenue and readership. Yes, 12 percent of weeklies and 17 percent of dailies report being in better overall health than two years ago. We’re going to find out why.
The 80th annual National Newspaper Week, celebrated this year Oct. 4 -10, is a recognition of the service of newspapers and their employees across North America and is sponsored by Newspaper Association Managers.
A content kit to promote the event is available for download at no charge to daily and non-daily newspapers across North America. The kit contains promotional ads, editorial cartoons, and more.
Community leaders from across the nation once again connected on September 24 for the Radically Rural summit, an annual gathering focused on the challenges facing America’s small towns.
The Keene Sentinel and the Hannah Grimes Center for Entrepreneurship co-hosted the summit, now in its third year, which is normally held in venues throughout downtown Keene. Amid the pandemic, Thursday’s sessions were held online, with 500 registrants tuning in from at least 40 states.
Six program tracks focused on sharing ideas around the advantages of rural communities: arts and culture, community journalism, entrepreneurship, Main Street, renewable energy, and land and community.
The community journalism track really delivered some great ideas and resources to keep newspapers and media companies moving forward.
Read the stories written by students from the Franklin Pierce University in Rindge, NH journalism program that appeared in a special section published in The Keene Sentinel.
Pulse Research, Inc., a leader in audience value presentations using shopping research for newspapers, and revenue development company, Advantage Newspaper Consultants (ANC), have formed an alliance to deliver Pulse Research and Pulse Sales Tools to ANC newspaper partners.
As a part of the agreement, ANC media analysts will use Pulse Sales Tools when they work with newspaper and media partners to develop revenue. This will provide ANC and their partners current shopping intelligence and the best ways to engage and help customers with the goal of closing more print and digital annual contracts.
The International Women’s Media Foundation has partnered with Craig Newmark Philanthropies to establish the United States Journalism Emergency Fund. This fund will directly support U.S. journalists in need so they can resume work essential to our functioning democracy. Made available to U.S. based journalists regardless of gender including men, these funds will:
support journalists with immediate needs related to their professional work, such as medical aid, destroyed or stolen equipment and protective gear;
support long-term journalist needs such as trauma, mental health services and referrals to legal support; and,
support journalists targeted as a result of their reporting at events related to the highly charged political unrest and polarization in the U.S., including but not limited to elections, civil movements and other challenging environments.
Applicants must be U.S. journalists with journalism serving as their primary profession and must provide proof of their financial need. Funding is available to both staff journalists and those working independently.
The Society of Professional Journalists has partnered with experienced Black and LGBT journalists and educators, including the newly formed Trans Journalists Association, to launch a free race and gender hotline.
The hotline will offer fast answers for uncertain or confused journalists. You’ll speak to Black and LGBT experts who are getting paid for their time. But you don’t pay them. SPJ does.
You will gain confidential and nonjudgmental advice for your specific reporting situation in a calm conversation about controversial topics. This is a business transaction, no different than consulting a First Amendment attorney on a story.
Even if you choose not to follow that advice, you’ll hang up with an enlightened grasp of the race-and-gender issues currently in the news media. And whatever happens on your call, it’s all off the record.
NENPA has learned that former Portland Press Herald reporter Josie Huang was arrested last night while covering a protest in California.
According to a story in KPCC/LAist, where Huang has been a correspondent since 2012, deputies arrested her last night while she was covering the ambush shooting of two deputies in Compton.
Huang was wearing a lanyard with her press credential hanging from her neck when she was thrown to the ground and recorded the encounter.
She was released at about 4 a.m. this morning without bail, but was cited for an obstruction charge.
The incident has sparked outrage among fellow journalists, who are calling her arrest a violation of the First Amendment. Read the full story
Huang was a newspaper reporter in New England from 1999 – 2008 working first at the Springfield Republican for almost two years, then almost seven years at the Portland Press Herald.
Before heading to California Huang was a Producer/Host for the Maine Public Broadcasting Network from 2008 – 2012. She has been at KPCC/LAist since 2012.
Community leaders from across the nation once again connected on September 24 for the Radically Rural summit, an annual gathering focused on the challenges facing America’s small towns.
Humor, satire: Making the political ‘cut,’ from our earliest days
The 2020 election is no laughing matter — except that it is, in the great American tradition of humor and satire that has marked virtually every election.
gpolicinski@freedomforum.org, or follow him on Twitter at @genefac.
This time around: Jim Carey’s nascent “Joe Biden” and Alec Baldwin’s long-running “Donald Trump;” the late-nightly salvoes of Stephen Colbert and the daily — sometimes hourly — haranguing tweets from Trump himself; conservative talk radio’s sharp-edged verbal darts and the Lincoln Project’s wickedly humorous videos.
As it has since the 1970s, NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” again steps into the role of the nation’s satirist, continuing a tradition that stretches back nearly 250 years, into the colonial era with its biting print depictions of King George III and frequent effigies burned or hung from trees in public squares.
The First Amendment’s protection of free speech shelters those who poke, prod and even anger those in power — via satire and parody — and elections bring out those efforts tenfold.
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams tossed insults and satirized images of each other in competing newspapers in the 1800 presidential race. Blunt, single-sheet cartoons were hung in taverns and homes depicting Andrew Jackson as a ruthless authoritarian. One, published in 1830, showed him dressed as a king, complete with crown, trampling on the U.S. Constitution.
“Political satire has been used throughout American history as a more gentle way of commentary,” says Alison Dagnes, a Shippensburg University political science professor and author of the book “A Conservative Walks Into a Bar: The Politics of Political Humor.”
One recurring question: Why there are more liberal political satirists than conservatives, both today and in the past? Dagnes writes that “conservatism supports institutions and satire aims to take those institutions down a peg … the very nature of satire mandates challenges to the power structure.”
Two modern-day comedians exemplify those who have swum against that liberal tide: Dennis Miller, who pivoted to a conservative view after the Sept. 11 attacks, who said of his political views that he found “liberalism is like a nude beach — it sounds great until you get there.” And self-described “libertarian conservative” P.J. O’Rourke, who said the Obama administration was simply “the Carter administration in better sweaters” and supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 over Trump, saying “She’s wrong about absolutely everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters.”
How effective can satirists be in shaping events in the real world? William “Boss” Tweed, whose crime syndicate in the 1870s stole or extorted more than $2 billion dollars (today’s value) in public funds, was the target of Harper’s Weekly cartoonist Thomas Nast. Nast drew the corpulent Tweed as a bulgingly fat character with a money bag in place of his head and historians often credit Nast as fueling the charge to bring Tweed to justice.
Another Nast cartoon of note, from the Newseum collection, “The Only Thing They Respect or Fear,” shows Tweed doffing his hat to a row of hangman nooses, as his cronies cringe in fear.
Political cartoonists are credited with helping Abraham Lincoln win reelection in 1864 and a century later, The Washington Post’s Herblock (Herbert Block) was viewed by critics and admirers as a major reason the Watergate scandal remained in public view even as the administration worked to downplay it.
Block relished his work, writing that it was “an irreverent form of expression, and one particularly suited to scoffing at the high and the mighty. If the prime role of a free press is to serve as critic of government, cartooning is often the cutting edge of that criticism.”
Social media often focuses on the “cut” in cutting edge: When Trump returned to the White House from treatment for COVID-19, satirists immediately posted their own version of his purposeful balcony appearance and maskless salute — from titling single images as “Benito Trumpolini” (after a similar pose by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini) to a Lincoln Project video, “Covita,” parodying the lyrics from Broadway showtune “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” as “Don’t Cry For Me, White House Staffers.”
Trump has done his own part on social media to carry satire forward in history, with memorable tweeted nicknames such as “Sleepy Joe” (Biden), “Crooked Hillary” (Clinton), “Little Marco” (Rubio) and “Lyin’ Ted” (Cruz).
Mark Twain, often called the father of modern American satire, wrote such classics as “Huckleberry Finn” and “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” using exaggeration and irony to make fun of closed-minded, corrupt officeholders and religious hypocrites.
A direct Twain descendant-in-humor, early radio celebrity and newspaper columnist Will Rogers used homespun language to jab politics in general. “I don’t belong to any organized political party,” he once said. “I’m a Democrat.” Another line from Rogers: “The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected.”
“Saturday Night Live” (SNL) and “The Daily Show,” with comedians Jon Stewart and now Trevor Noah, have set the tone for modern political satire.
Each election cycle for more than 40 years, SNL has produced memorable political parody — from Chevy Chase’s devasting portrayals of Gerald Ford (actually an accomplished athlete) as a bumbler, to Phil Hartman’s cheeseburger-guzzling Bill Clinton, to Tina Fey’s remarkable and transformative skewering of 2008 GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
Stewart’s prominence in political satire from 1999 to 2015 produced a unique form of praise: Some credited him and his program as a new form of journalism. While his staff of writers and researchers included former journalists as fact-checkers to ensure accuracy, Stewart consistently said he put comedy first. Still, as my Freedom Forum colleague Patty Rhule said of Stewart and his program in a New York Times interview about the show as centerpiece of the Newseum’s 2019 “Seriously Funny” exhibit: “For a generation, he was their voice of the news.”
Stewart was the latest iteration of post-World War II comedians willing to take on social mores, censors and sometimes the courts: Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce both mocked powerful political figures of their era — with Bruce famously being prosecuted for using so-called “blue” language that today is a common feature across cable TV comedy specials.
For two seasons in the late 1960s, brothers Tommy and Dick Smothers used satire via a prime-time CBS variety show — prompting President Lyndon B. Johnson to make an angry late-night call to network President William S. Paley. The show later was canceled over fights with network censors.
“Doonesbury” cartoons have made fun of presidents and politicians and found humor and targets across American culture since the 1970s. But writing in 2015 in The Atlantic, cartoonist Gary Trudeau reflected on whether there are lines not to be crossed in satire.
In 2015, terrorists angered at French magazine Charlie Hebdo’s criticism of Islam and reprinting of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that had originally appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, attacked the magazine’s Paris office, killing 11 staffers and a security officer.
“Traditionally, satire has comforted the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable. Satire punches up, against authority of all kinds, the little guy against the powerful,” Trudeau wrote. “By punching downward, by attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons, Charlie wandered into the realm of hate speech.” Trudeau called the resulting violence a “bitter harvest.”
Whether they entertain or enrage, inspire or infuriate, comfort or inflame, humor and satire in a political setting often serve to bring out truths. From the subtle to the complex, satire focuses us on facts that otherwise might be lost in the daily horserace reporting that dominates modern-day election reporting.
As that 21st-century sage Homer Simpson once observed, and was quoted in a different Newseum exhibit, First Amendment freedoms of speech, petition and assembly do not exist to protect “burping” — they are there to allow us to speak to our fellow citizens about matters of public importance.
Satire and parody provide information, a release from the seriousness of much of politics and are a means to express ideas that might not find audiences in other settings.
Humor with an edge has been part of American political life as long as there was life in American politics. There’s no requirement that we be polite, respectful or even tasteful in doing it — and there’s also no barrier to getting a laugh at the same time we make a point.