The Evergrey: Conversational Journalism – Episode 50

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Mónica Guzmán and Caitlin Moran are thoughtful practitioners of a new kind of reporting – conversational journalism. Their team at WhereBy.Us builds community in five U.S. cities with newsletters that engage their readers in ways that old media couldn’t.

I invited Monica and Caitlin to the podcast because I was impressed with how they had maintained a consistent voice in their Seattle publication, The Evergrey, during a staff transition.

We talked about:

• their impressive journalism backgrounds
• the deliberate approach to voice and tone that they take at The Evergrey, but also the ability of each reporter to contribute their unique voice
• the elements of their publication’s voice and tone:
  • clarity of meaning, no jargon
  • conversational tone, always “hello” and “have a nice day”
  • delightful, light energy, even when the news is heavy
  • light cognitive load: short sentences, simple language and sentence structure
• how their reporting is an ongoing conversation with their readers
• how they developed their style guide
• how the principles of the parent organization style (conversational, friendly, welcoming, warm, energetic) inform their local style
• how local WhereBy.Us publications work to reflect local community concerns
• their development of a conversational approach to journalism
• how conversational journalism is more like writing an email than a conventional journalistic report
• how traditional journalism values like concision and precision are still valuable
• how events fit in with The Evergrey’s reporting – closing a loop with the power of in-person relationships
• how events and in-person interactions result in bigger benefits than quantitative measures can demonstrate
• how they measure the qualitative impact of their work – one way is with a Slack bot that let’s them report and record reader interactions
• how readers’ appreciation of their city fits their style: “Love for our cities is one of the ways that we connect with people in them.”
• how old journalism principles are impractical in the modern connected media age
• how “transparency is the only way you can do it now”
• the changing role of journalists from informants to mediators, moderators, and sense-makers – and the ensuing responsibility to be aware of which role they’re in and their aims and intention
• the importance of being aware that everything is always evolving and the need to “stay nimble and open to whatever’s coming down the road”
• how to figure out which stories matter in “a time when we’re all overwhelmed with content”

Mónica and Caitlin’s Bios

Mónica Guzmán is Vice President of Local at WhereBy.Us, leading a team of entrepreneurial journalists who are helping locals in five cities “live like you live here.” She is the cofounder and former director of The Evergrey, the essential newsletter for Seattleites who want to make the most of their city, and a former columnist at The Seattle Times, GeekWire, The Daily Beast and The Columbia Journalism Review. Moni studied how to connect journalists and the public as a 2016 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, and is studying political and social divisions as a 2019 Henry M. Jackson Leadership Fellow. She is the author of the influential 2016 API strategy study “The best ways to build audience and relevance by listening to and engaging your audience,” served as vice-chair of the Society of Professional Journalists Ethics Committee, and was as a juror for the 2013 and 2014 Pulitzer Prizes. Moni’s a big fan of chocolate, karaoke, nerdy board games, and good stouts, and lives in Seattle’s Wedgwood neighborhood with her husband, Jason Preston, and their two kids.

Caitlin Moran is a Seattle-based journalist who has split her 10-year career between traditional newsrooms and digital media startups. After working as a reporter and editor at newspapers on the East Coast, Caitlin moved back to Seattle and launched a hyperlocal website with Patch in 2011. Her next gig was serving as the first community engagement editor for The Seattle Times’ Education Lab project, where she learned the ins and outs of building audiences and connecting communities. In 2017-18, she took a year-long sabbatical to get married and travel the world with her new husband. Caitlin joined The Evergrey team in late 2018 and became local director this summer. Besides helping Seattleites make the most of their city, Caitlin’s passions include spending time in the great outdoors and testing out new dinner recipes in her cozy Capitol Hill kitchen.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast Intro Transcript

Journalism used to be a one-way street. Reporters and editors shared the news in formulaic, time-tested story formats. That was a great way to do things back in the 20th Century. But conversation is the order of the day now. Mónica Guzmán and Caitlin Moran are developing a new conversational style of journalism. In this episode, I talk with Mónica and Caitlin about their work at The Evergrey, a local Seattle community newsletter, and at WhereBy Us, The Everygrey’s parent company, which operates similar publications around the United States.

Interview Transcript

Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 50 of the Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I’m really happy to observe this momentous episode, number 50, with two really great local journalists here in Seattle. Mónica Guzmán is, well, actually she’s now the VP of Local for WhereyBy.Us, which is a an outfit based in Florida, but we’ll let Mónica tell you a little bit more about that, her background there. But she’s a really accomplished journalist. She’s worked for the Seattle Times, she’s been a columnist for the Columbia Journalism Review, and just all kinds of other publications. She’s been a Nieman Fellow, a super, super accomplished journalist. Caitlin Moran, her colleague at WhereBy.Us and the local director for The Evergrey, the local publication, is joining us as well. And Caitlin has sort of a balance between conventional journalism working in newspapers, but also a lot of digital work and a lot of local work.

Larry:
The reason I asked them both on today… Well, first let me have you each talk a little bit more about yourselves just so that folks have a good feel for you. And then I want to get into why I invited you on the show today. So Mónica, how about you go first?

Mónica:
Cool. So I just recently stepped into a role as vice president of Local at WhereBy.Us. WhereBy.Us publishes five newsletter platform communities in growing cities around the country. It’s Seattle, Miami, Orlando, Portland, and Pittsburgh. There’s teams of really amazing entrepreneurial journalists working on ways to help urban locals make the most of their cities. I co-founded The Evergrey, which Caitlin is now running, and it’s been a really interesting adventure the last three years. Like you said, I’ve been a journalist for 15 years, which is a really long time when I say it out loud, that’s wild, holy crap. Yeah, mostly in Seattle, but interested in just trying to get to the heart of things and very much trying to engage audiences, which I know Caitlin is also very much interested in and has done some work in. So I’ll turn it over to her.

Larry:
Cool. Caitlin?

Caitlin:
Yeah, so I think Mónica laid out what The Evergrey and WhereBy.Us is about pretty well, but I’m taking over this week as local director of The Evergrey, which I’m super excited about. My background started in traditional media. I worked for a number of newspapers out on the East Coast before coming back to Seattle. When I got back, I started working for Patch, which was a network of hyperlocal websites that went away and then has kind of been resurrected since that time. But that’s where I kind of dove into all the digital audience building and social media and all those good things, and then went on to work for the Seattle Times and be the first engagement editor of their education lab project. That was an interesting role where I was kind of mixing my traditional newspaper chops with a lot of the audience engagement and development work. I’ve been at WhereBy.Us for a little over six months now at this point.

Larry:
Great. Well, thanks to both of you for coming on. And the reason, I ran into Mónica at a networking event a month or two ago, and it came up, I think it was when Caitlin was first… Anyhow, it was the first event I saw the two of you together, and I was like, wait, what? There’s been this transition there. I read The Evergrey everyday. I think a lot of people in Seattle do. I don’t know what your readership is now. But I was really surprised that there had been that big a change in the editorial staff there, because I didn’t perceive any change in my daily news consumption experience at The Evergrey.

Larry:
I would love to hear what voice and tone editorial magic is going on back there, that you organize and manage things in a way that a clueless reader like me is completely… It’s truly the voice of the publication, not of any one person there. How do you make that happen?

Mónica:
Caitlin, do you remember when you even started to write The Evergrey, like fully? When was that?

Caitlin:
Gosh, I want to say March or April, but before that I was kind of pitching in here and there, especially with the news roundup section. So it was a gradual process.

Mónica:
It’s a difficult question to answer, because while we are deliberate within the company about what our voice and tone is, there’s also quite a bit of freedom for each writer to interpret those values that we try to hit in their own way. If you read the different newsletters across our cities, they sound very much like whatever their city sounds like. There is a Seattle component to The Evergrey voice. I’ll say that me and my co-founder, Anika Anand, worked very hard on the voice when we started The Evergrey with kind of an acknowledgement that information is out there, there’s a lot of information, there’s a lot of dense information, but a lot of what’s needed is access, a way to get information that’s actually easy to digest. So from that came this experimentation with a voice that WhereBy.Us also tries to have and embed into everything it does, and it’s very conversational.

Mónica:
So we work on a couple of elements that I’ll highlight very quickly, and then Caitlin, I’d love for you to jump in and talk about how you see these, but we look at things like clarity of meaning. So there’s a way in which The Evergrey is fairly popular with newcomers, but also with people who may not be the biggest wonks in the city. We try to start where people are and we try to stay very, very clear about meaning, staying away from jargon and things like that. There’s a very conversational tone. The beginning of every Evergrey, it’s like a little hello, and at the end, we’re like have a nice day. There’s always some way of saying that in a very friendly personal tone.

Mónica:
We try to be delightful. Even when the news or what’s going on isn’t always happy, we try to keep that light sort of energy, energetic kind of tone to what we do, and we think about what I sometimes phrase as light cognitive load. Not a lot of long sentences, not a lot of huge big words and prepositional clauses that you trip over and makes it so you have to read the sentence five times to understand what it says.

Mónica:
So that’s just a couple. There’s a lot more to it than that, but I’ll let Caitlin weigh in.

Caitlin:
Yeah, I would just say from a traditional media background, the way that journalists have tended to interact with readers has been very one-way. It’s been, here’s what’s happening, we present it to you, you take it, you consume it, maybe you write a letter to the editor the next day, but that’s pretty much the end of the transaction. I think what’s so great about The Evergrey and our sister publications is that we really don’t see the conversation as ever being completely finished. We’re open to readers replying to us and say, “Hey, you missed this one aspect of the conversation, you forgot to include this perspective,” and we can constantly kind of update where we’re going with things.

Caitlin:
I would also say that Mónica mentioned delightful. That’s a really big one for me. I think that every day I try to include at least one thing that’s just fun or clever or just kind of a lighter, non-serious kind of note on things, because I want people to feel like when they open the email every day that there’s something that they’re just going to feel good about.

Larry:
Right. I’m curious how you acquired that skill base, Caitlin, and Mónica chime in, too. Is there like a formal training thing or documentation, or how was this lore passed on from generation to generation in your newsroom?

Caitlin:
Well, we did develop a style guide and that was a process that I was helping lead earlier in the year. That was really helpful for me because I was able to tap each of the local directors in each of our markets and kind of get their take on what’s the groundwork of their writing styles. So we talked about things like emojis and acronyms and the nitty gritty of what we do and why we do it, and I think that process was really helpful for me.

Larry:
Mónica, I’m curious especially about, now I’m embarrassed, I hadn’t really thought about the WhereBy.Us connection and how it might fit into all this. Is there a common voice and tone and approach across the publications? Or is there a real focus on localizing as much as possible?

Mónica:
So the style guide process is a good proxy for this. There are principles that we try to hit in our voice and tone that are across the board on WhereBy.Us, being conversational, being friendly, being welcoming, being warm, being energetic, and things like that. But there are a bunch of words, phrases, attitudes that influence tone. How you talk about homelessness in Seattle, there’s a set of unspoken guidelines around that, right, that if you are a journalist in the city you have absorbed and you probably wouldn’t think to write down. We’ve written them down, and then other cities have a couple of things they’re looking to do.

Mónica:
The brands also have their own sort of posture within their cities that they’ve tried to articulate in the style guides. So The Evergrey wants to have a welcoming, inclusive posture that tries to set the table for lots of perspectives. That can be challenging in a couple of ways. But, yeah, we think about language a lot and we give folks space to experiment with it. And as Caitlin said, it’s all a conversation with our community.

Mónica:
So for example, I’ll give this as an example. Several weeks ago somebody wrote in about some place where we had used the word tribe. I think it was actually a partner event listings. So one of our partner events was doing something where they used the word tribe, and it wasn’t in in the connotation of Native American tribes, but there’s a conversation in Seattle and really everywhere about certain words that have taken on certain connotations and meanings that might be, yeah, it might just not be great toward a certain group, and this is obviously a really interesting time to be alive right now with these kinds of conversations. So we made the decision to no longer use that word. In fact, inside WhereBy.Us, we made some changes to that as well.

Mónica:
So each city also has to listen to its own community and see where languages and where attitudes and approaches are and how we speak about each other. That is incredibly important. The Evergrey tries this a lot, but we all do, we try very hard to speak in a way that makes everyone feel like they’re part of their city, and what that means in each city is different.

Larry:
Got it. I really appreciate that it’s more of a process than… Like a style guide, a lot of people think, oh, that’s done. You just put her down and there’s your document that you refer to. But that’s not at all how you work. It’s a very dynamic document. I’m curious, you talked about sort of your effing the ineffable, I think is what you were saying, articulating the unwritten rules. Is that an ongoing thing? Is there sort of an ongoing attention and awareness to that in attempts to pin it down in your style guide?

Mónica:
Caitlin, do you want to speak to that?

Caitlin:
I’m not sure that I completely understand the question, but…

Larry:
Well, just how those unwritten rules are eventually codified, if they are, because I think that’s super interesting that there is a lot of… We’re so divided right now and that certain words can trigger people one way or the other. So having a style that accounts for that but still conveys the underlying essence of that archaic term that doesn’t do the job anymore. Anyhow, my perception is you all do a good job of that, but I’m just trying to figure out how that… Does it remain an unwritten rule or at some point do these things get get written down somewhere?

Caitlin:
No, they do get written down. We use Slack, which is a tool to communicate with each other since we’re a remote across the country. That’s kind of like the first draft often where we’re raising these concerns. But then yeah, it all gets documented in our internal documents and that’s so that we don’t constantly come across the same things and not have resolution on them. We’re a small team, so we need to reach consensus and move beyond things as quickly as possible.

Larry:
Now Slack, I’m in probably 20 Slacks. It’s a great way to do that kind of stuff. The subject of conversation has come up a bunch. That’s your thing at The Evergrey, and I think that’s a huge difference between like the Seattle Times and other conventional publications that you’ve come from. Maybe start with, Mónica, about how… It seems like you were doing that right out of the gate, that that’s always been an intention. It seems like you’ve really mastered it. Can you talk about how, whether you personally, either and both of you, if you had any personal challenges in adapting from a kind of conventional journalism like broadcasting to a more conversational model? Maybe talk just a bit about that. Was that a challenge for you or are you both kind of native to this conversation of the new conversational way of doing journalism?

Mónica:
That’s a great question. Early on in my career, I was in a place where suddenly it’s like, oh, it’s a makeup blog. Makeup blog figured out this whole blog thing. So it felt like I had a bit of an early start on that, sort of breaking with that. I remember it being somewhat challenging, but because I was so young, I hadn’t really gotten all that accustomed to conventional journalism writing. So I guess that’s lucky, I’m not sure, but it’s gotten to the point where I’ve done it for long enough that it feels somewhat natural.

Mónica:
The reason that it was there from the beginning of The Evergrey and the reason WhereBy.Us is such a great parent company for The Evergrey and also kind of helps all these other publications is again this idea that when you’re conversational, more people can follow and feel welcome and feel like they can participate. There’s a posture you set, right, when you sound like somebody across the coffee table from you. Whereas if you are writing in a more traditional journalistic sense, maybe the first two paragraphs, a lot of people have no idea what you mean by Initiative 4235, like what, what? What did they mean, this representative, what did they do? I’m so lost already, and by the end of the second paragraph I feel like this isn’t for me. So we try, it comes from this place of trying to be welcoming, and being conversational, it’s just the way our brains are wired to accept information easily.

Larry:
Caitlin, your thoughts on that?

Caitlin:
I think it’s been a challenge for me. I guess I maybe got a little more steeped than Mónica in the traditional reporting and writing styles. But I did work at the Seattle Times on a couple of newsletters, so I got a little bit of a head start before coming to The Evergrey as well. But yeah, I think we’ve established some good baseline principles of avoiding jargon, keeping sentences short, And those are things that I think about every day. In my mind, I just really imagine that I’m writing this as an email to a friend and how would I phrase things in that context? Instead of thinking about, oh, I’m writing a story in the traditional sense.

Larry:
Got it. Hey, just a quick aside, I don’t want to get too deep in the weeds on this, but in terms of tools for doing that, I’ve become a big fan of the Hemingway app and even Grammarly a little bit, but there’s a lot of gadgetry out there now to help keep your writing tight and accessible. Is this more like just your professional chops being cultivated or do you have any tools that help you accomplish this accessible writing style?

Mónica:
Caitlin, can you think of a tool we use to automate this?

Caitlin:
No, I do Google puns sometimes though . . . They don’t all just come from the top of my head. No, I mean, I do Google vocabulary words a fair amount, just like you would use a traditional dictionary or thesaurus to get my brain working in that way. I think the principles of traditional journalism writing aren’t all bad. Concision and precision has always been a part of it. So it’s not like we have to completely reinvent the wheel here. There’s just certain things that need to be adjusted.

Larry:
Right, but you can be concise and precise without being aloof and snooty, not that that’s… I actually know a lot of old school journalists who I wouldn’t exactly classify them that way, but there was sort of, not an ivory tower, but something analogous to that. Just sort of like knowledge imparted in the earnest… Anyhow, that’s a thing, and you’re the antithesis of that, which I think is probably why you’re so successful, that accessibility.

Larry:
Hey, I wanted to ask, the other thing, part of this conversation is you do a lot of events, and that’s something that I don’t know how common that is in the conventional journalism world, but how important are these events to you … If you’re conversational, it seems like being out in the world is an important part of that. Is that why you do events? Or how does the event stuff fit into The Evergrey and the WhereBy.Us plan?

Mónica:
Well, I’ll start, but definitely want to hear Caitlin on this as well. For The Evergrey, the person who runs that for The Evergrey is Jordan Lyon, who is really talented at thinking about how interpersonal connections and relationships get built when you are co-present basically. He’s got a real passion for it that I think has benefited The Evergrey quite a bit.

Mónica:
I at least see it sort of part and parcel to what we’re trying to do with our content and trying to take it away from just words on a screen, right? When we get conversational and try to build connections and relationships around it, being in person is very, very powerful. So one of the ways I’ll speak to the Evergrey, The Evergrey talks about making the most of our city and connecting you to each other and to your city. So connection and relationship is really important.

Mónica:
One of the things that the villains that keeps popping up in the narrative of Seattle that you’ll read about in The Evergrey is the Seattle freeze, which is this idea that people are just cold with each other and don’t get warm enough to build relationships that have real meaning to people. WhereBy.Us generally, like one of those sort of hypotheses we operate under, is that you can build a better connection with your city if you build connections with the people in it. If you’re actually finding a local meaningful thing that you’re doing, you’ve made a friend, you have your regular at this coffee shop because you know the barista, you joined a neighborhood dog-walking group, whatever it is.

Mónica:
Events are incredibly important for that because we know the limits of the Internet. We’ve been with social media for like 15 years. We know it’s not everything it was made out to be, right? It’s really wonderful. It makes great connections, but the stuff that really means a lot to your life is the thing that you feel you’re grounded on and that you can look around wherever you happen to be and shake someone’s hand and have a drink or share some experience. So that’s at least some of the philosophical underpinning behind events, but there’s a million other ways to talk about it. So Caitlin, feel free to jump in.

Caitlin:
I think events are a crucial way to close that loop between reader and journalist or writer or whatever we want to call ourselves these days. It’s a way for us to put action behind what we’re putting out to the community and giving them an opportunity to take the conversation that we’re having in the digital space and do something about it. I think a key part of what The Evergrey and the rest of our sister publications are after is not just clicks or opens or those kind of quantitative data, but also the qualitative impacts, and in-person meetings are a big way of how you get there, how relationships are formed, how people feel empowered to do something about what they’re reading in our newsletters. So I think that’s hugely important.

Larry:
You just mentioned both quantitative and qualitative evaluations with what you do. I perceive you as being successful and it sounds like you perceive yourselves as being… How do you measure success at The Evergrey? What are those quantitative measures? What are the qualitative things you’re looking at?

Caitlin:
Well, quantitatively open reads are a key metric for us because it basically tells us who’s coming back every day and viewing us as an essential part of their routines. That’s definitely a big one for us. Qualitative wise, anytime we get a message from someone in the community who says, “Oh, because of you I went out and tried this new thing, I met this new person, I took some action that I wouldn’t have had the knowledge to take otherwise,” that’s definitely one of the biggest signs of success for us.

Mónica:
And we do have, thanks to Anika Anand, she was really instrumental in forming this for all of WhereBy.Us, we have our local impact reports and ways that we… There’s actually a Slack bot and you go into our Slack and you hit slash impact, and then this little form pops up and asks you all these questions about what was the impact, what kind of impact? Was it increasing belonging? Was it a reader action? Was it an influencer sort of doing something as a result of what we do? So we have a whole spreadsheet with the impacts that have been collected from across the country and that helps us see where what we do resonates, and hopefully it makes us smarter about doing more of those things.

Larry:
Interesting. Are you starting to see any patterns emerging? Like any differences regionally or common things that that come up?

Mónica:
I can speak to . . . I think one of the great things about working at a WhereBy.Us publication is there’s quite a bit of local love for the brand and so it’s… I remember, like sometimes more legacy media maybe didn’t do as good of a job cultivating that kind of productive conversation. So a lot of what you hear from folks is negative, tons of negative comments coming into newspaper, websites, things like that. So what we hear a lot of is just general appreciation that sometimes gets kind of snuck in to something else. Someone asks a question about membership and then says, “By the way, I read you all every day, this is awesome. It helps me get up in the morning. It helps me feel like I can do something cool today or this week or whatever, like these are the things we’ve done.” So it’s been really nice to see that. Love for our cities is one of the ways that we connect with people in them.

Larry:
Nice. You just mentioned, quickly I want to… just another observation between legacy media and the current mode that you’re operating in. It used to be that the common way to interact in the old days was like a letter to the editor, and those were always snarky and zingers and muck, just like you were just saying, like a more negative interaction. I’m just wondering if you have any concerns that to the extent that I’ve seen interactions, it seems all very positive and productive, but I wonder if by being so accessible, that if there was some benefits to that aloof, know-it-all stuff, to be more objective? Because that’s one of the hallmarks of old journalism. That’s how I was trained. I went to journalism school in the ’80s, and it was the Chinese wall between advertising and editorial, the institutionalized aloofness of how you did journalism back then. Do you think we’re throwing the baby out with the bath water in any respects or is it generally positive change?

Caitlin:
I feel a lot of those principles came from a good place, but they’re just not practical in today’s world, either because of the Internet and how we all communicate or just the fact that I think we’ve realized that true objectivity doesn’t really exist. We all come from a place where we have certain biases and experiences, and I think the more we can be open and honest about that and say this is who I am, this is what I think, but I’m open to learning more and reevaluating my position, I think that’s the best way forward.

Larry:
Nice.

Mónica:
To add onto that, I completely agree. I think transparency is the only way you can do it now. I think it’s also, to frame it another way, in the past because it wasn’t a conversation, journalism was mostly I’m informing you, I’m going and I’m doing the work that you can’t as easily do and you can’t really participate, and now I’m going to tell you stuff. The role of the journalist was informant, right? Like source of things, reporter of the stuff. Now because so much of it is conversation and so much truth and truthiness and untruths are spreading in the conversations of social media, whether journalists like it or not, journalists can’t specifically solely be informants anymore. We also have to be mediators and sense makers, but mediators and moderators of the broader conversation, when you adopt the role of a mediator and moderator, but you are so transparent that you say I believe these things and that’s it.

Mónica:
I imagine an event where there’s a moderator of a focus group or some disagreement in the room. It’s probably not a great way for that moderator to open up the conversation by saying, “Okay, we’ve got this side and we’ve got this side. I agree with this side. Let’s begin the mediation.” So in other words, I think there’s sort of a new understanding of the role of moderator and mediator that is happening in some places where if there’s a commitment to helping make sense of the community’s conversation, then there can be sort of a new set of professional constraints or professional actions that we take in order to do that role well. But it depends on how much you see yourself as an informant, an analyst, a moderator, a mediator. There’s sort of like every journalist has to make their own decisions about what role do they play and how they will behave in order to achieve the outcomes they want for each of those roles.

Larry:
Right, and that used to be so clear cut and now it’s not, and there’s huge benefit to that, I think. Anyhow, hey, I want to observe. We’re coming up on time. I want to make sure I always give my guests an opportunity. Is there anything last, anything that hasn’t come up in the conversation yet or that’s just on your mind about conversational journalism or voice and tone and all that stuff that hasn’t come up? Anything from either of you? Okay. And you don’t have to.

Caitlin:
I would just say it’s always evolving. That’s the nature of conversation. Look at how much change we’ve seen in the last decade or two. I think a key part of it for me is just being open to whatever comes next and not feeling like, oh, I’ve figured it all out. I’ve learned everything. That’s it. We just have to stay nimble and open to whatever’s coming down the road.

Larry:
Yeah, back when I was trained, I think there was an assumption like, yeah, you can figure this stuff out. I really enjoy this refreshing, “No, you’re never going to know anything maybe, and certainly not everything.”

Mónica:
It’s scary. it’s totally scary. I mean, I think a lot of journalists in their heart of hearts are feeling some anxiety around how little is for sure and how little of our craft is something you can read about in a textbook, you get trained on in school. Society’s changing all around us and it’s kind of like a dark place to go to and talk about. But it’s true, and the way we communicate, what technology has done to the way we communicate, who we trust and who we don’t trust, and the lack of faith in institutions. I mean it just gets dark fast. So you know, what are journalists and content providers going to do in such a time when we’re all overwhelmed with content. It’s coming at us all the time. What do we truly want to pay attention to? What truly gives us value and helps us live our lives? And what does that even mean these days?

Larry:
Exactly.

Mónica:
It’s a big thing.

Larry:
I know you didn’t mean to do this, Mónica, but you just put a great little bookend on episode number 50 here. My very first conversation was with Hanson Hosein. That was episode number one, and he talked about, he’s a journalist and a journalism educator, and he talked about do we really need any more stories? That was why I invited him on the show. So I think that’s a great way to wrap it up.

Larry:
Well, thanks so much to both of you. I really appreciated having you on the show.

Mónica:
Thank, Larry.

Caitlin:
Thanks for having us.