E117: New news formats

What does local journalism look like in the age of evolving media platforms? In this episode, longtime columnist and radio host Dan Rodricks joins Rebecca to talk about adapting storytelling for today's audiences. From his decades at The Baltimore Sun to his new audio column, Dan shares insights on sustaining local journalism, experimenting with audio formats and why personal narrative still matters. It’s a conversation about voice, format and the future of local news.

Chapters

• 0:00 From newsroom to airwaves
• 7:26 Finding a voice as a columnist
• 14:46 The Substack shift
• 23:01 Challenges of fragmented media
• 32:31 Sustaining journalism and looking forward

Transcript

0:01

Welcome. Today I am so excited to have Dan Rodricks here with us in the studio. So welcome, Dan. Thank you, Rebecca. Nice to be with you. it's great to have you. And today we wanted to talk about sort of all the different channels, all the different opportunities and ways that uh journalists can interact with audiences and readers. And you've had a long and storied career and I can't possibly sum it up as well as you can. So tell us a little bit about your trajectory and sort of what you're doing now and where you started and everything in between. Well, gee, it's been almost 50 years. Actually, it's been 52 years since I had my first internship on a newspaper back in the Boston area in the 1970s. And I got hooked on newspaper work immediately. just love the work. I love the environment. I love the people that I was around. And so I made a whole career out of newspaper work. I landed in Baltimore. 1976, and I was a reporter with the Evening Sun, the bygone Evening Sun for a few years. 24 years old when the managing editor decided we needed a, Evening Sun needed a columnist. So he pointed to me and asked me if I wanted to write a newspaper column. it was kind of uh intimidating at first to think about doing that, you know, cause I was just a kid still. I'd only been in Baltimore a few years. I don't think anybody cared what I had to say about anything. So, I made it a reporter's column, a of a newsy uh reporting focus column. And then as time went by, I developed my own voice and started writing more opinion pieces. So that was great, you know, but I did that for a few years and then ah WBAL-TV offered me a chance to do commentary once a week on the air. That was a bit intimidating too. I had to learn how you do that, know, how you do TV. was sort of like a guest appearance once a week, similar to what you might see on MSNBC now, know, commenting on some aspect of the news or developing a feature story. I developed feature stories for Channel 11 TV, did that for quite a while. WBAL radio then offered me a chance to do a radio show. So at one point in the uh sometime in the 1980s, I was doing the column in the evening sun, weekly feature on WBAL TV, and then a nightly radio show, 8 to 11pm on WBAL talk show. Whenever the it sounds like. People could not escape Dan Rodricks. It sounds like you were there all the time. yeah, it might've been too much. uh But I was only on the air on radio when the Orioles were not playing or Maryland basketball was not being broadcast on WBL. It was like a hundred shows a year. And I had a blast doing that. ah I just worked like crazy. I just enjoyed doing that and I learned how to. make radio, I learned how to make television and I continued to write my column. And then the years went by and WMAR TV, Channel 2 offered me a weekly television show. uh So after my time at WBAL, I switched over to Channel 2, WMAR and I had a weekly, it was called Roderick's for Breakfast TV show. That was a two hour live show. oh That was a lot. That was the hardest I think I ever worked. I was still writing my column and doing that and but really had a blast. You know, it was it was so much fun to do a live television show because you never knew when something was going to go wrong. Something crazy was going to happen. But it was it was sort of news focused, but also it had a focus on life in Baltimore and Maryland. You know, so we did feature stories, we did serious interviews, we did. a lot of light fare too on the weekends and people liked it. I had that for about five years. And then, I took, I just, then I, then I, there was a period when I was just writing my column again and then W Y PR radio offered me a chance to do FM radio talk show on W Y PR public, uh, public interest broadcasting. And, uh, that was great that I did that for about eight years. And then, I left WYPR, I went back to the sun. I always stayed with the sun. I was always writing a column for the sun, three days a week. And then a podcast thing happened, you know, sometime in the around 2015 or 16, it seems like everybody suddenly was doing a podcast at a newspaper. Yeah, and newspapers, especially were starting to do podcasts. So I started a podcast for the sun. uh I guess I just had all this energy and ideas and just wanted to uh keep trying new things. So the podcast, I did about 450 episodes of roughly speaking it was called. at some point there I asked the publisher of The Sun, said, are you guys making any money from this? Is this worthwhile? I actually asked that question because we did have advertising, we had a sponsor for the podcast. But it didn't seem like this where the focus of the newspaper was, where the sun was in those days. They were focusing on emerging news and their website, getting people, getting eyes on their website and not so much the podcast. And I got tired actually of doing it and decided just to go back to write my column. So that was about, I don't know, in the year 2020 or so. Yeah, around the time of the pandemic, I've just been focused on my column. And then I resigned from the sun this past January uh after doing the column for 46 years. You know what? We think it was the longest running uh local column in the country. I haven't been able to confirm that, but I haven't seen any evidence otherwise. eh We had the sun. Yeah. that is impressive. mean, that's a really long trajectory of watching one community grow and shape. mean, uh nearly 50 years, that's a lifetime. And now you also, believe you have a substack. You're working a little bit with the brew. It sounds like you're still engaging with people. Like the end of the column was not the end of Dan Rodrik. So tell us what's going on now. Well, I resigned from the Sun. mean, I guess it's retirement time, but I didn't really want to retire. I just frankly didn't like what's happening at the Sun. I didn't like the new ownership and what the new ownership's influence on the editorial product of the Sun. It bothered me. I thought, I'll give it a year and see what it's like. And then at the end of that year, I decided I'd had enough of this. I wasn't ready to retire. I've written a couple of plays in the last four five years and I wanted to write a third play. So that was part of my motivation to spend some more time on the theatrical undertakings. But I also didn't feel like my column was finished. I feel like there's more Baltimore stories and Maryland stories to tell. oh So I offered my services to Baltimore Fish Bowl, the Baltimore Brew. They were both interested. And they were interested in different things. The brew was interested in feature stories. ah The fishbowl said, you know, write your column, continue to write your column. So there's a little bit more opinion maybe in what I write for fishbowl than what I write for the brew. And then the substack thing is very interesting to me. It kind of crept up on me. I didn't, I must say I didn't fully investigate it before I jumped in and started writing. for Substack on Substack to see what would happen. And I'm really enjoying it. And I find there's plenty of things to write about and plenty of response from readers on Substack. And so that keeps me pretty busy still. And so, I mean, there's a lot to unpack there and I definitely want to understand sort of, and I also think, gosh, if you knew what you were getting into, you wouldn't do half the things that you do anyway. Sometimes you just have to jump in and figure it out as you go along. And so I'm interested about, about Substack, but I kind of wanted to go back really to the start because you, I was intrigued. You were, you were a cub reporter and then, you know, at 24 you were asked to do this column and uh What did you, where do you think the differences are between being a columnist and a news reporter? And it sounded, you said you had done sort of a newsy column. So can you kind of ease out some of those sort of what you expected and then what you made it? Yeah, so at the beginning, like I said, I don't think anyone cared what I had to say about anything in terms of my opinions. And I really hadn't developed strong opinions about things yet, even at the age of 24, you know, it takes a while to know how you feel about uh certain things, uh especially some of the more controversial issues of our times. So I focused on just telling interesting stories and writing it in a way that I really worked on the writing craft. And I had mentors at the paper who helped me. We actually had what you might call salons where the reporters, feature reporters, news reporters would sit around and evaluate each other's writing. It didn't seem to be a lot of time for that anymore, but that's what we did back then. The Evening Sun, by the way, was considered sort of the writer's paper where the Morning Sun had a lot of the straight news. didn't emphasize features as much as The Evening Sun did. The Evening Sun, I think, was more brightly written, the sports writing and the feature stories. um So it was, I considered it the writer's newspaper. And so I worked on developing my voice in telling these stories. So I think with a column, that's what people are looking for. This familiar voice, it takes a while. for people to know you're there and to uh appreciate you. Some don't appreciate you. But I think after a few years, I had found my voice in the column. So then I went from merely observing and telling a story to laying some more opinion in there. Sort of like storytelling with an edge, I called it. I would go to a courtroom and describe what was going on in a courtroom. uh And I could go anywhere. I could take a walk down the street and find something interesting. So I didn't have the pressure on me of always coming up with a newsy peg, but I frequently wrote off the news, meaning, you know, something big had happened in the city. Like, well, I mean, I covered train accident, train accident, and I ran out to fires and wrote about tragedies in the city. uh But I also wrote brighter feature stories and more humorous columns too, because I found that uh you got to leave people with a smile once in a while, you know? So you have three columns a week, you have your choices there. You can write about tragedy three times a week, I guess you could. You could write about politics three times a week, but it's better to mix things up and leave people with something they don't expect, try to be unpredictable too. So I did all of that. felt like over the years I developed different tools for for writing a column. Some might have seen gimmicky to people, but you know, all these years, the ones that people seem to like the most, the ones that I get the most reader reaction to are like bits and pieces, like items columns. Sure, I got reaction to uh single subject columns that really struck a chord with people, but often the bright short items which the managing editor who hired me called Bits and Pieces. Bits and Pieces, Bits and Pieces. People love those things, Roddick. That's what he said. you know, readers like those. So I actually stole, I stole a gimmick from the late Jimmy Cannon, who was a sports columnist in New York years ago. And I read a book of his columns called Nobody Asked Me But. Mmm. And his most popular columns were, nobody asked me but, and then he would give his opinion about 20 different things. So. because everyone is like, oh, I think that's not right or I agree with that. I mean, it's a fun way to get into it. yeah, and multiple subjects and they can be serious subjects, a light subject, funny subject, something completely silly too. And so those those got a lot of reaction. Sometimes it would never disappoint me, but I think, hey, you know, I spent a lot of time crafting that piece about uh that priest who died, uh you know, that great priest. oh And yet the ones that people like are the ones about with catfish recipes in them and you know, the best way to catch a catfish and things like that. So, yeah, I had lot of fun writing 6,000 columns for the Baltimore Sun Papers. And I'm interested because, know, journalists traditionally, you you don't want to be part of the story. But when you're a columnist and when you're, when, when it's your opinion and you do it with a newsy edge, essentially, like your whole thing is to insert yourself into the story because you're talking about your reaction. Like, did that ever create tensions for you or did you feel like, because you've also done, you know, you've done a lot of features, you've done sort of the lighter part, but You also aren't afraid to go to harder news and to confront topics. Did you ever feel a tension between sort of putting yourself in the story and the news gathering? Well, at first I did. But after a while, I thought, well, no, this is what you're supposed to do. I I read, uh I grew up reading some really good columnists. I read Jeremiah Murphy in the Boston Globe, uh Mike Barnicle before he committed uh plagiarism. I admired his column, Jimmy Breslin in New York, Pete Hamill. I read those guys, Ellen Goodman in the Boston Globe. You know, and they had a voice. You sort of went to them because it's like going to listen to a song, but a familiar singer that you know. m And uh that's why I gravitated to, I wanted to hear what did Jimmy Breslin think about ah what happened in New York last night? um Or Ellen Goodman, what's her take on the new Pope or something like that? So I figured, well, people in Baltimore are probably doing the same thing. Although, you know, like I say, it took me a while to think that anybody cared what I had to say about something. Honestly, I was very self-conscious of having an opinion. But at some point, editors said to me, go to the Freddie Gray trial, go to uh the trial of the governor who was on trial in Maryland. People want to know what you think about this. uh Go to the City Hall press conference with Sheila Dixon. uh resigning, people want your take on that. um So I said, okay, yeah, that's my job. interested that, you you kind of were creating your own brand and you definitely had sort of the Dan Rodericks as a personality aside from, you know, Dan Rodericks reporter and from the Sun. And I wonder, you know, that's such a precursor, I think, to today's news media landscape, where in some ways it feels like there's so many independent journalists out there, like you have to always be looking after your own brand, your own followers, you know, you social media to feed and you know, now Substack is kind of very much a uh either one person or small group enterprise. How do you think the sort of making a name for yourself kind of feeds into what we're seeing in the media landscape today? Does it? Am I off base there? No, no, I think it does. But it goes back to really what I was saying. I said I turned to Jimmy Breslin because I wanted to get Breslin's take on something. Ellen Goodman in the Boston Globe years ago. ah Maureen Dowd in the Times, you Paul Krugman in the Times. Why do you go to those people? ah not because they're famous, but because you want to hear what they have to say. They've become familiar to you. Right. So I think the same thing is happening on substack now. As a matter of fact, Paul Krugman from the New York Times, who I always read and admired, is now on the substack. So I gravitate toward him. think other readers do as well. So I don't know that that's any different from the days when we were all published in printed newspapers as columnists. Is it really different? I remember people saying, you're the anchorman of the newspaper, comparing a columnist uh with the anchor man or anchor woman on TV station that people are familiar with, right? People do want the familiar. They learn to trust you after a while, right? So I think there's the same dynamic with Substack. You know, Rebecca, I said to someone the other night, uh or I said to a group, uh I was looking at a newspaper from 1993 and a Baltimore Sun from 1993 and a Baltimore Sun from 1943. Someone gave me a stack of old newspapers to look at. And you know, they were a one-stop shop for everything. Sports, business, crossword puzzles, uh advertisements for dresses and high heels and wingtips. uh What your children's lunch is going to be at school next week. Everything was packed in. The results from Pimlico Racetrack, everything was in there, right? And then we don't really have that anymore, right? It's become atomized. All that information is around in different places. ah So I said to this group, said, and this is the folks who are older and used to having a newspaper like that. I said, there aren't many newspapers like that anymore. ah So you have to sort of cull from all of this, your own array of sources for news, for sports, movies. I mean, we used to have film critics in the newspaper. We used have theater critics, right? You have to sort of like pick out from the vineyard all these different entities to have your own array of information. This is more work. You can't get all in one. place anymore. um That's kind of where we are these days. and I'm interested also because that atomization or fracturing of the media landscape means that like the onus is on the reader to kind of curate all the pieces that they might want to look at. you know, oftentimes it is, it's so much more pleasurable and comfortable to be like, I'm to look at cat videos or I'm going to do this, you know. And so how do you, what does it mean for, you know, I don't want to be like society with a capital S when We don't have sort of those curated packages that are serving the vegetables along with the cheesecake. And people can subconsciously or consciously avoid the hard subjects that the serendipity of paging through a newspaper where you might not read every article, but you're glancing through on your way to the funnies or whatnot. Like, what does that do in the world? Yeah. Yeah, the downside to that is that people, uh they select what they want, right? They select maybe what makes them comfortable, not what makes them uncomfortable. They have an aversion to reading certain opinions, for instance, or stories that make them sad. uh So they miss they miss things, Whereas that one package newspaper from the old days, the one that was this thick, full of advertising, delivered all of that to you, most of it. So, and the downside is people end up in a sort of siloed world of information, right? Because they're doing the selecting and you can say, well, that gives the power to the consumer, but that word curator, it doesn't exist, right? It doesn't exist there. Yeah, that's something I don't know what we do about that. Someone said to me the other day, or asked me this, I got an email from a reader who wrote, I'm sorry, who read a piece I wrote on Substack about the uh level of criminality among undocumented immigrants in the United States, and then the level of criminality among all immigrants in the United States, which is a very large group. Mm-hmm. There's been studies done on this. And I quoted these studies and I laid out how the criminality among uh immigrants that Trump is focused on right now, he's always talking about murderers and rapists and the right. It's not accurate. ah It's far from accurate. uh The crime rate among native born Americans is much higher than it is among. Yeah. Well, this woman wrote to me says, well, how do we get this across to people who are supporting Trump? And I said, I wish I had the answer to that. uh I don't have the answer to that. The people who are, many of the people who are supporting Trump get their news or information from sources that tend to support what Trump is saying. Right. And they keep hearing that and they don't seem to be open to ah general fact finding, right? I wonder if some of that is media literacy, um, sort of, because I see all these new channels for back, lack of a better way to talk about it as really like interesting opportunities to reach new audiences. But there's not the barrier to entry is very low. Like anybody can really like pop on their sub stack, create a podcast. You know, it's a little bit harder to get the radio show or whatnot, but The barriers to entry are so low that anyone can do it. And I think the general population, there was a study maybe a year or two ago about uh how such a small percentage of Americans know a journalist. And partly that's the shrinking of the industry, partly that people maybe don't wear on their sleeve, hi, I'm a journalist. And so sort of in that fractured landscape, How do you build your credibility? And I think you've done such interesting things and you've gone through so many channels that you're already your brand. that's an inarticulate question, but how do you make it right? I understand. I was speaking with a high school student yesterday who called me, wanted some advice on getting an internship, getting started in the news business. She's a senior in high school. And I told her, well, the reality is that uh as far as newspaper internships or internships with news organizations, that probably won't happen until you're in college. ah It's harder to do it as a high school senior over the summer. But I gave her some advice on where she might look. And then I said, If you really like writing, if you like reporting and writing, if you think journalism is going to be your thing in life, you could start a blog. You should get to the habit of writing a lot, developing the muscle memory that you need to write every day, if not every day, every other day. And I don't know what other advice to give her at this point. A high school student, even a college student, I think I would say the same thing. It's not a given that you're going to be able to find an internship or a part-time job. So in the meantime, uh, assign yourself stories, start writing stories. What we used to call clips, you know, you want to show a prospective editor, uh, employer clips. Well, that doesn't exist now. That's, that's, that's all online now anyway. So, uh, go, go do that. and I, I don't know, as I was speaking to her, sounded like good advice. I hope she takes it. But I think that's how you do have to start developing your brand. guess everybody develops a brand, right? It's sort of like developing a resume, isn't it? Yeah, I was a little worried about what the opportunities are ahead for journalists. You can look at it two ways. You can say there's plenty of opportunity on your own as a freelance, right? out there in the world writing about stuff that people see on Substack or wherever you post it. uh On the other hand, you know, in traditional organizations, uh what we call the iron core of journalism, you know, the wire services, the daily newspapers, radio stations, NPR, uh the major TV networks, the opportunities there are more limited than they were in the past, right? Well, and it is definitely the uh Northwestern Northwestern has their news deserts uh survey. And one of the things that they noted, I had Tim Franklin, who you probably know from your days at the Sun. He's a dean now and he works on that project. And he was telling me that Maryland and and DC have, they're in the top three for attrition of journalists over past 10 years. So even though in Maryland, we're really fortunate that every jurisdiction in the state has a print outlet, which we tag that because about 75 % of news comes from those print outlets. know, on the radio and TV, they're pulling from print media for the most part. or wire services. Yep, still true. And so it's really important to preserve your print. you know, the fact is those opportunities are fewer and far between. And I'm wondering, just with the fracturing of the landscape and all these different channels, one of the things that that I get concerned about is the ability to do large scale investigative journalism when you're basically dealing with this. It's not necessarily a passion project, but when you're on your own and you have your substack or your podcast, you're almost a single operator. It takes a lot of passion to keep going. You don't have the infrastructure because it's all coming from you. so how are you in because you've done those sorts of passion projects. You've also worked in traditional media. You've worked in broadcast. How is it different? I think that would be hard for me to do now uh without being based at the Sun and telling an editor I need six months to work on a story that I really care about and I need some help with it. I think it would be hard for me to do now. It's actually not what I want to do now. Although when I write a story for the uh Baltimore Brew, it takes time. It's not really investigative reporting, but it just takes time to Talk to a number of people until you reach the point where you're confident you have the story, uh you have a solid story. But to do that kind of stuff, the project stuff, uh that's harder to do on your own. uh That's why I make donations to ProPublica. I think that the answer is there in part, but you're right. If you're a single operator out doing this thing, uh on Subsec or wherever or doing a podcast. That kind of journalism, that's hard to pull off. So we need that. Even at newspapers, they're having a hard time coming up with the staff to do those things, right? The staff and the time that's needed to do those things. m I feel lucky that I worked at newspapers when I did because uh In the 80s and 90s and 2000s at the Sun, we had a large staff before the downsizing started and uh editors who wanted to, are willing to spend money to do that kind of stuff. You know, that was sort of the last hurrah for that in Baltimore. Although, you know, occasionally, once in a while someone comes up with a pretty good package of stuff, the banner is doing some of that. um But it takes a commitment, really does. And I'm seeing more in sort of the data journalism field, like looking at deep analysis. And, you know, I think going back to the substack and some of the other sort of smaller channels that are cropping up now, I feel like those are more intimate space with an audience and a reader. you feel like now you've seen it from both sides and I feel like you get a lot of mail no matter what. uh But do you feel like the connection with your audience is different through different platforms? And if so, what does that look like? That's interesting. uh Well, with The Sun, when I was at The Sun, I had regular contact with readers all the time. They were always contacting me. uh One of the reasons I never fell short on story ideas was people would contact me uh with ideas. There's a little bit less of that now because I'm not, I think a lot people think I'm just retired and not doing anything uh besides fishing. But yeah, Substack, I noticed on Substack, uh it's different in that, you know, there's not as much mail, but there's more comments that are delivered online. People don't know where to mail right to me anyway. Or I do get email uh frequently from Substack readers. And there's new readers, people I do not know. At first I thought, well, people who've read my column in the Sun, If they find out I'm a Substack, they might follow me over here. And some of them did. Yeah, some of them did. ah And that's been nice. But I've also gotten a lot of comments just from people who just sort of discovered me because someone else recommended that they read my Substack postings. And that's kind of nice too. And then you can make money doing this. That's the part that I found surprising is that it in some way? mean, we talked a little bit earlier about whether your podcast was making any money. And I kind of want to go back. I want to get into that money, money aspect. Yeah. Well, on Substack, you know, Substack kind of does it for you in this low key way. They say to readers, if you like what you're reading here, you can pay to support this writer. Otherwise it's free. I say, I leave it at that. I don't get into begging people for money. That's not why I'm doing this. But ah the Substack does it for you. And there are people who recognize that I'm a professional journalist out here along with the other people on Substack trying to do professional journalism on Substack and they want to support it. So they sort of like make a donation. That was completely surprising to me. But it's, I think it's one of the nice aspects of Substack. Going back to the podcast and monetizing the podcast. And actually, can go back to the TV show I had on Channel 2 to talk about that. uh That was an intensely local program, uh two hours live every first Saturday and then on Sundays. um And the station sort of failed to monetize or just advertise just my show. They bundled me in with all their other programming on Channel 2. I thought, geez. This sort of stands alone, doesn't it? It is a unique show on the weekend that deserves to have its own sponsors. But there wasn't that kind of thinking about it over there. I guess they didn't know what to do with me. So I wouldn't say it failed. The ratings were pretty good on my show by the time it ended. But uh no one made that effort to pitch it on its own to have its own advertising. Everybody said that at the end. That's where the failing was. m By the time years later when I got to do the podcast for the Sun, I was hoping that they would get sponsors for it. But I don't think the effort went into that as much. I think they made some effort. We did have a sponsor for a while. um Ivy Bookshop was the main sponsor. It was very nice to have a local uh advertiser. um But it didn't go much further than that. And that's when I asked that question. I said, are we making money from this? Is this good for the Baltimore Sun? Because otherwise I'd just rather go back to writing my column. um there was no argument to keep the podcast. Now, there are podcasts associated with newspapers, but I don't think as many as there were in the period that I'm talking about. It seemed like everybody was doing it all of a sudden. And then There was some interest lost. don't know. Maybe you found it. I feel like a lot of that has to do with, you know, like bifurcating your advertising space in some ways or fracturing the advertising space. I mean, like, it has to be worth it to continue to put the effort in. And I kind of wonder, you know, like, if you're thinking about I'm Dan Roderichs, Incorporated kind of thing, you know, is it in all the different Can you piece together enough through the substacks, through the columns, through the podcast? Like, would that ever be enough to make a living? I think that can be very challenging for journalism in general. Like, if you're doing it all on your own and you're a single operator, you know, like, is it enough to do more than dabble? And I think that's, and because there's a lot of successful substack people, you know, there's, uh you know, you could get if you can get the subscribers there. But I'm also just wondering, like, OK, how do you break out from the pack? How do you how do you differentiate? And as a journalist, what I found in my work with the Press Association is journalists are horrible about talking about themselves. You know, they don't they they have that aversion to uh not being to avoid being part of the story. And so How do you reconcile the idea of becoming your own brand, which seems to be necessary in this world, with doing the work and not being part of the story? Right. And also the uh most of us have operated uh in this world where there's the editorial department, the news department, journalism, and then advertising is over there. We want nothing to do with, you know, nothing to do with underwriters or advertisers. ah So if you're out on your own and uh sort of uh trying to create a career by yourself and make a living doing that on your own, you have to sort of say, no. No, I'm going to get advertising. I'm going to take donations. I'm going to have subscribers. um I'm going to go for this because this is how I'm to make my living. And you have to say that to people. But you're right. We don't blow our own horn. don't. We have trouble talking about ourselves like that. ah And traditionally, there's been this barrier between advertising and uh editorial. Right. You don't want to the two confused. Right. Yeah. m for that. And even, you know, the push for philanthropic support for journalism can create this tension that, you know, is sort of, uh that has to be addressed. I think it's not always, you know, at the top of the pile, but nobody has, uh nobody is completely unbiased wherever they are. Well, it's an ethical question. And if you want to stay professional, you cannot write about the people who support you. um just, you can't, I mean, you can disclaim it and say, you know, uh the uh Kraken Bush Foundation is a supporter of my uh online news source. um Let people know that that's the case. I still think it hurts your credibility some day to even go there. You so you probably have to avoid that. You have to establish and keep some standards ah even when you're out here doing this and trying to get your own advertising, your own underwriters and sponsors, right? Yeah. now where do think this is all heading? mean, like, let's let's peer into the crystal ball. You've got tons of experience and sort of lots of differing forms. How do you what do you think is next? Do you think the world's kind of heading to the substack or will this be like the podcast in the early 2000s where everyone had one and now we're we're and then it pulls back? What do think? Yeah. Geez. When the... I mean, the Substack model looks pretty good to me right now. Although I think if everybody goes there, it's such a low bar for admission, it's going to be tough to stand out, right? And actually make a living from it for people. The nonprofit model, which is what we see with the banner in Baltimore. I hope that works. What's going on on the other end of it, uh the corporate side of uh newspaper ownership, media ownership, it's not looking so good now. There's a lot of troubled waters there. um So I kind of hope that this idea of readers and listeners supporting an entity through their donations or subscriptions, think that's where the future would be. I hope the Banner experiment works. ah And I hope there will be more like that. I if there was a nonprofit, well, I am working for sort of a nonprofit, the Baltimore Brew is pretty dominant. Yeah, yeah. And the Fishbowl actually takes donations. So I think that's where it at. If anything, the SubSec thing shows me that people are willing to put their money to support professional journalism, right? They just may not want to corporations that own media anymore. They kind of like the idea of supporting professionals who are out here doing the work and not attached to a corporation. That is it. Maybe that's part of the appeal. I think it is. I think we all agree that local news is still critical and local perspectives on what's happening in our communities is essential. And I'm so excited that you are continuing to do that important work and that you're still making it happen in a variety of mediums. So thank you. Thank you for spending some time with me today. This has been great. you, Rebecca. It's an interesting topic, isn't it? Thank you very much.