Jerry Nowicki and Jennifer Fuller of Capitol News Illinois discuss how the organization started helping replace the loss of print statehouse reporting and how they have expanded into providing multimedia news to supplement government coverage in Illinois media.
Randy Eccles: This is Community Voices on NPR Illinois. I'm Randy Eccles, co-host along with Vanessa Ferguson and Bea Bonner. Today, we want to inform you about an organization that is addressing news deserts, in particular, statehouse coverage here in the Capitol, an essential thing for us to hold our government accountable.
We have Jerry Nowicki and Jennifer Fuller of Capitol News Illinois.
We have heard a lot of stories, for anybody who's been paying attention and all of us being involved with journalism know very well, that there's been huge changes in the business model for journalism.
That includes the statehouse. The statehouse used to have forty or so people working at it in journalism and now it's down to a handful, until Capitol News Illinois came onto the scene. Can you tell us a little bit about why Capitol News Illinois got started?
Jerry Nowicki: We were a project of the Illinois Press Foundation. It was involved with the Illinois Press Association. The board members were lamenting the lack of statehouse coverage that was happening in Illinois and the general inability of newspapers to staff the Capitol with full time reporters and business decisions to no longer have reporters in Springfield to cover the state news.
They got together and decided the best way to address it. They came up with Capitol News Illinois, which initially started as a wire service for all the state's newspapers. There were over 400 at the time. We freely provided stories of committee meetings and anything else that was happening at the Capitol to all the newspapers to get in print the news that was coming out of the statehouse that had stopped over the past five or ten years.
Randy Eccles: Why was it that there had been such a decline in statehouse reporting?
Jerry Nowicki: It was hard for newspapers when ad revenue dried up. It was expensive to staff the Capitol, especially if you were staffing mileage and hotels for someone from, say, Champaign or wherever across the state.
It was an expensive beat. At newspapers, corporate ownership tried to slash positions as much as they could and the focus for many of the state's newspapers went to the hyper-local coverage. Jennifer will chime in later as to how we've expanded to broadcast outlets and expanded the focus beyond just filling that newspaper print gap.
Randy Eccles: When the newspaper model started breaking down and they started pulling their bureaus, was there any immediate sign of lack of accountability because there was less journalism?
Jerry Nowicki: Illinois has its fair share of corruption. I don't know if that's attributable to the demise of newspapers, but certainly it doesn't help if there are fewer outlets covering the Capitol. It's probably easier to get away with some of the things that some of the people in the dome are accused of getting away with and trying to do.
There's no shortage of corruption trials, but if you're there to amplify the voices of people testifying at committee, it certainly makes lawmakers think twice as to what they're saying and the types of bills they're doing.
Randy Eccles: Let's look at that other aspect then. What is the CNI business model? What is making it work where the newspapers couldn't figure out how to fund statehouse coverage?
Jerry Nowicki: We're a nonprofit model that takes donations, but our main funder is the McCormick Foundation, which does a lot for this type of civic engagement, and then the Illinois Press Foundation.
Being able to have that nonprofit status and connections with good donors, but also our development team is branching that out to diversify the types of funding for sustainability purposes. The nonprofit model is what's working.
Jennifer Fuller: One of the things that makes the model work a little bit more in real terms is we don't operate a press. We don't have to pay for a radio or television transmitter. Those are big expenses that traditional media still must deal with and still must figure out how to distribute the content to their audiences in whatever medium it might be.
When it comes to the nonprofit model, we're finding a lot of success in philanthropic organizations as well as some corporate donors that are really interested in making sure that the news is covered in a fair way and with context in the statehouse. When you start to lose staff, that context is what goes out the window very quickly.
Randy Eccles: We're talking with Jennifer Fuller and Jerry Nowicki of Capital News Illinois. They're explaining how they're filling a vacuum in the journalism ecosystem right here in the state capital.
Your real emphasis is to gather this news and then provide it to the other media that have invested in the press or the transmitters so they can get it out to their audiences. Is that correct?
Jennifer Fuller: If there are challenges in what we're doing, that's one of the challenges that we have.
We serve two parallel priorities in that we do want to make sure the content is available for free to our journalism partners, both in print and broadcast and for online publications as well. We also want to be a destination where we have our audience that comes to us specifically for that new reporting that we put out day after day.
We're trying to move along in those parallel tracks at the same time.
Randy Eccles: NPR Illinois has been a partner along with other public media across Illinois. Public media also fund the Illinois public radio statehouse bureau. That's a couple of reporters, but there are additional stories delivered through the public media ecosystem from Capitol News Illinois.
It's been a real asset to us to be able to get to our audiences more information about the government. How are you going about making sure you're catching the right stories with such a broad target audience?
Jennifer Fuller: I'm glad that we've been able to be an asset for you, Randy. And we're very proud to be on so many broadcast outlets. As you may be aware, we just launched into broadcast about a year ago. We're trying to make sure that we're not duplicating efforts very often. As you mentioned, you have your own great team with public media with Alex (Degman) and Mawa (Iqbal) in the Capitol, and we work with them as best we can.
I'd love to say that we have the luxury of being able to have a sit down with everyone in the statehouse and say, okay, what are you all covering today so that we can go cover something else. It doesn't work that way. But we do try to think about, if this is the big story for the day, what else can we go cover? So that depth and that context is available to our media partners.
Randy Eccles: As you've expanded from print stories or text stories in the digital era into broadcast, what has it required CNI or Capital News Illinois to do to prepare for that additional platform?
Jennifer Fuller: We, of course, would have to buy additional equipment. Audio recorders, microphones, cameras, those sorts of things. We've hired staff that are broadcast specific because while journalism as a broad picture, good storytelling is good storytelling, there are some nuanced differences to the way that broadcast journalists tell their story. We've hired there and we're looking to expand the offerings that we have. We've also been able to partner with legacy programming. For example, we took on the Illinois Lawmakers program that many people are very familiar with. Host Jack Tichenor said, "Hey, I need some help in getting this produced," and we were able to bring that along.
We're proud of the fact that a 30-plus-year-old program is going to be able to stay in production because of the help that CNI has, and it's able to expand its reach to more broadcast outlets throughout the state.
Randy Eccles: One of the challenges that we've been seeing is fewer people are going into journalism for a variety of reasons. It's never been super high paying. Also, there's a lot of abuse that journalists must take when they're out there holding people accountable. Trying to improve the pipeline seems to be a really big deal.
You just had some pretty big news in the past weeks with Medill (Northwestern’s School of Journalism). Can you tell us more about it?
Jennifer Fuller: We've been very purposeful in making sure that we are looking into that pipeline and saying how can we make sure that young journalists, student reporters have the experience that they need to go out and do this kind of coverage into the future.
Last year, we had a great partnership with Southern Illinois University down in Carbondale, which continues now with their Saluki reporting lab. In the past couple of weeks, we have finalized a deal with Northwestern’s Medill, so that they can also have some students that will get experience covering state issues, through their lens, through the perspective of a young person.
Of course, we've always had a great relationship with University of Illinois Springfield and its Public Affairs Reporting program, hosting interns in that program each and every year.
Randy Eccles: One of the other challenges that comes up is when you're trying to find enough journalists to staff things, it's not always easy to pull them from major markets these days. Are you finding yourselves being able to attract journalists to cover the Statehouse?
Jennifer Fuller: That is tricky because part of what we want when we're hiring is someone who's got experience covering the statehouse. Part of the reason we exist is because there are fewer and fewer people covering the statehouse.
But we've been very lucky with the talent that we've been able to attract at CNI. We have great reporters now based in the Chicago area. One of the largest markets in the United States. Andrew Adams and Hannah Meisel are working from that area. We have reporters like Peter Hancock, Jerry Nowicki, of course in Springfield, and then we have downstate reporters as well, including Beth Hundsdorfer in the Metro East area. Mollie Parker is based in Southern Illinois, which is also where I am.
Randy Eccles: When you talked about the business model earlier, it sounds like philanthropy is funding CNI so far. Is that a long-term model for you? There's Press Forward out there and a couple other philanthropic efforts, but we we’re hoping that this CNI resource continues. What's the outlook?
Jennifer Fuller: That's what we're most motivated to work on at this moment. Our development team is doing that. The philanthropic donations that we're receiving from the McCormick Foundation and others are really giving us the momentum to move forward into corporate donations, private donations, those sorts of things, keeping that nonprofit model.
But it's tricky. And it's something that I think news organizations all over the country are still trying to figure out, how to make the funding model work to keep good journalism in place and keep it funded in a sustainable way.
Randy Eccles: Is this a model also for local news besides just statehouse? There is a lot of hunger for that, but it's a lot tougher to structure that when statehouse works for the whole state. Local news only works for that community. Do you have any plans there?
Jerry Nowicki: You mentioned the pipeline, that's the area where we're trying to focus on as to how we could use our relationships with the state universities to work with students to branch off into covering some local things as they connect to the state at first, then see what type of regional hubs we can build from there. That's all in the very early process, but our relationships with universities and that pipeline is how we could get creative in trying to expand the local news beyond just what happens under the dome in Springfield.
Randy Eccles: Having sat on the governor's local journalism task force, it's clear that not just public radio or commercial radio or newspapers, but media in general is really struggling with its business model. Streaming services are not able to make money. It’s going to be difficult in the future to make sure we maintain (news media) outlets to be able to take news from organizations like Capital News Illinois. Are you seeing that there's still plenty of outlets able to get the news out in markets?
Jennifer Fuller: On the broadcast side of things, yes, there are still outlets. The opportunity for them to have a robust newsroom has shrunk quite a bit in the 25-plus years that I've been in journalism. I've watched radio and television newsrooms shrink.
That's where a service like this really helps to provide that statewide context that they don't already have. We've all seen the headlines and known of print outlets shuttering newsrooms. Corporate buyouts. Perhaps we're looking at more community-based news outlets, nonprofit news outlets to make sure that the information gets out there.
Randy Eccles: Capitol News Illinois stories appear at nprillinois.org. You can also hear Jennifer and Hannah Meisel and others pop up on stories. I know Sean (Crawford) has had Jerry on State Week many times. We appreciate that. Anything you want to leave with the audience before we go?
Jennifer Fuller: Be involved in the journalism that you want to see. If there is a journalism outlet that you rely on, be sure to give, be sure to let them know that their work is important to you. In the ways that you can give back to the journalism, please do.
Randy Eccles: We definitely have been beneficiaries of that.
Jerry Nowicki and Jennifer Fuller of Capitol News Illinois, thank you so much for joining us today on Community Voices.
Jerry & Jennifer: Thanks for having us.
