Stephen Joyce, a Bloomberg BNA staff correspondent, covers regulatory, statutory and enforcement developments involving energy and environment, health care, privacy and the business of law in four Midwestern states. As such, he’s no stranger to getting pitched by PR professionals.
But in a recent conversation with the Greentarget team, Joyce said just 25 percent of the pitches he receives are useful – and he provided some guidance on how he thinks media relations professionals can improve.
“Ask yourself: Do you have something to say?” Joyce said. “Who do you want to say it to? From there, figure out what news organization or product or whatever reaches those people, and then figure out who the journalists are in that space.”
In a wide-ranging conversation, Joyce spoke to the Greentarget team about how the media environment has evolved over the past 20 years, and his mantra as a reporter with Bloomberg: Factual, Fastest, Final, First and Future. What follows is a summary of his remarks, edited for length and clarity.
What excites you most about being a journalist?
It can be exciting, but it’s also dull. For example, one day I’m writing about an explosion at a Wisconsin grains mill, another day it’s just a new law, new rule, etc. Being a journalist isn’t always running around chasing a big story.
How has your work as a reporter evolved over the last 20 years?
One word: technology. I learned news writing on a typewriter in college, and now everything is on phones and computers. That’s changed everything – research, how I interview people, etc.
What have been some of the most exciting stories you’ve covered? What have been some of the most difficult?
The financial crisis in New York was the most exciting. I was based in New York from 2007-2016, so I started out there right when the housing bubble burst. My job was to cover the financial crisis.
The most difficult stories we write are related to federal and state rulemakings. Bloomberg BNA covers statutory and regulatory developments in mini briefs (usually a couple paragraphs), but the events themselves are 150-page documents. In short, it’s a lot to digest. “Yesterday wasn’t fast enough” is very accurate in my world, and we have to go through the entire thing fast. But fast sometimes isn’t your friend.
How do you keep up with the latest happenings in the areas you cover?
Shameless plug, the primary source of my information comes from Bloomberg products – I have a terminal and set up a ton of alerts and key terms. I also search for new dockets on Bloomberg Law.
On Twitter, I follow relevant sources, competitors and government agencies. I scan through these threads a few times a day.
I also have regular source calls where I ask relevant experts, “What should I be writing about?” These are terrific as I get original ideas.
Does Bloomberg BNA incorporate artificial intelligence in its day-to-day reporting? If not, do you anticipate it will happen in the future?
Yes – they’re very tech heavy. There are tools that I have that I don’t know how to use entirely yet. About a year ago they created a data-driven journalism unit – I work with them to pull metrics, and because the group has a line into graphics, I can use them as a one-stop shop for data and graphics.
The terminal is very tech-focused, so there’s a lot of data-driven journalism.
At Greentarget we work hard to keep up with the evolving media landscape, given the work we do for clients. Sara Fischer, media reporter at Axios, has been an important resource for us – and probably is for anyone trying to understand the future of news.
So we were excited when Fischer agreed to discuss the latest industry trends with us and provide her thoughts on the role Axios is playing in the current media environment.
Axios was established as a media company delivering vital, trustworthy news and analysis in the most efficient, illuminating and shareable ways possible. Fischer joined when the publication launched in January 2017. She told us why her role as a media reporter made sense – she came in as “an expert on both sides.”
“I had sold advertising on behalf of a number of high-profile outlets, and also had the opportunity to be a reporter,” she said. “When the heads of Axios were looking for a new reporter to cover the media environment, we all agreed it was a good fit.”
A focus of Fischer’s writing has been to better understand user behavior and media consumption. She’s dug into user experience’s impact on how people get news, and her takeaways have shaped the direction of Axios’ news coverage.
“Readers don’t always like long-form content when reading hard, breaking news. However, as it relates to softer news, longer-form is more acceptable,” she said. “User experience is also paramount. Design and technology need to go hand-in-hand. If a site has too many ads, the user won’t stay with the publication. A website must be clean and fast, or a user won’t want to go there.”
Fischer and Axios have extensively researched user behavior and whether people will pay for news – a matter that has bedeviled news organizations for more than two decades. Of particular interest is social media, with fewer than 10 percent of respondents to a new Adobe study saying they are very likely to pay for news through social media channels.
For Fischer, this wasn’t at all surprising.
“There is a news and information gap in the U.S. between highly educated people and low-income people,” she said. “Highly educated people are more likely to pay for news, and they are starting to do so more frequently. However, lower-income people will continue to turn to social media as a way to access news and information, because it’s free. The challenge, however, is that they are still looking for sources of news they believe in and trust, and on social media, it’s not always easy to decipher.”
Fischer analyzed these challenges in an article on a study from the American Press Institute and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. It found that just 25 percent of people have a “great deal” of trust for social media as a news source, with trust in Facebook being much lower at 12 percent.
Fischer explained in her article why this is such a huge problem. “Sixty-two percent of U.S. adults get news on social media, and according to Pew, 68 percent of people don’t trust the news they see or read, which is the highest distrust rate the U.S. has ever seen.”
Fischer also writes about how reporters continue to adapt in the evolving media landscape. Last month, she wrote about how Google is launching new features in its free Cloud Natural Language API to help newsrooms and other businesses sort out information, making it easier to search later.
Artificial intelligence’s impact on journalism is an important topic these days, and Fischer believes AI will continue to affect the stories journalists write and become instrumental in helping reporters market content to reach new readers.
“Reporters will be able to use the machine learnings to better manage reader relationships,” she said. “Some newsrooms are using AI to translate pieces for international markets.”
Following up on our recent conversation with Courtney Radsch, advocacy director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, we asked Fischer about how the current political environment has impacted the media environment, both for better and worse. She noted how media outlets (even publications like Vanity Fair) are creating political verticals to keep up with the public interest and a newfound aggressive fact-checking culture.
“Fact-checking has really become the center of the news landscape, and we continue to see services for fact-checking and verification to counter fake news in social media increase,” she said.
“Some journalists are struggling amid the 24-hour news cycle, longing for the day when they could be done at the end of the day,” Fischer said. “But the chaotic environment has enticed more readers to pay for news.”
“More and more people are looking for ways to distill the truths around them, and a number of publications have definitely witnessed bumps in subscriptions,” Fischer said.
Fischer moderated Axios’ first Future of the Media event last month and wrote about some of the key takeaways from the heavy hitters who participated (it’s definitely worth a read). To close our conversation, we asked Fischer what she finds most fascinating in the evolving news environment.
Her answer: There is no regulatory body that is completely responsible for oversight of the internet. There are three bodies that are responsible for parts of internet regulation. The Federal Communications Commission is responsible for illegal content, like child pornography. The Federal Trade Commission is responsible for false commercialization, like diet pill scams. And the DOJ is responsible for anti-trust.
“With what technology is capable of doing, I’m not sure how people are shocked about Russia using Facebook’s tools to target specific ads,” she said, echoing a recent Mashable story. “Anyone who has worked on the sales side of media knows that there’s nothing crazy about the functionality of this, and how easy it is to do.”
At Greentarget, we value the work that reporters do every day, and appreciate the privilege to collaborate with writers and editors who impact society through their journalism. Our belief that the principles of journalism play a vital role in the proliferation of knowledge and ideas is part of our DNA.
Lately we’ve grown increasingly concerned about journalists’ ability to keep covering the news with independence and integrity. In the last year or so we’ve seen high-profile attacks on the press from the highest levels of government and even threats to curb press freedoms.
So we reached out to Courtney Radsch, advocacy director of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which promotes press freedoms around the world. Radsch says the news media is in the midst of a “galvanizing moment” that’s showing “how important journalism really is.”
“The press is the Fourth Estate, the only independent check on power,” she says. “Given the lack of forthcoming information [from Washington], journalists have a more important role to play to make sure that the public is informed and that they are fulfilling their roles to its greatest potential.”
Radsch has been heartened in recent months to see the press stand up for the core pillars of journalism, but noted an eye-opening tweet that said, “We’re in trouble when quoting the First Amendment starts to feel like an act of resistance.”
Today’s media-government dynamic is a marked departure from the one that had been in place for decades. Despite the adversarial relationship between the media and the government, Washington has stepped up to support CPJ — and the profession — when it mattered. For instance, if a journalist was imprisoned overseas, media organizations could ask the State Department or Defense Department for assistance, and usually, they got it.
Radsch isn’t sure that kind of relationship is possible in 2017, and the potential for declining press freedoms here has ramifications around the world because the U.S. sets the global tone on press protections. CPJ is working with similar organizations across the country to collaborate on a range of press freedom, media justice and open government issues at every level of government. Later this year, CPJ, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Knight First Amendment Center and the Index on Censorship will launch an as-yet unnamed news site to track press-freedom violations in the U.S.
Still, the bitter anti-media rhetoric we saw during the election hasn’t softened or dissipated. “We saw the rise in attacks against journalists during the campaign season and hoped the verbal and physical abuse would taper off, but it has continued — and the attacks have increased,” Radsch says. “Women journalists are getting trolled online, and there has been a rise of attacks on Jewish journalists. We’d like to get ahead of these issues and be informed of the true challenges to press freedoms. It’s hard to advocate for change if you don’t know what the incidents are.”
So will the recent attacks on press freedoms intimidate reporters and news organizations, or prevent them from telling the stories they feel the public has a right — and likely a need — to know? Radsch acknowledges that journalists aren’t naïve about the dangers facing them, but she hopes it won’t impact their reporting.
“We hope this isn’t the way we’re heading,” she says.
