The women behind online news.
You got to be crazy to believe the official story.
A global watchdog monitoring the world from her home computer and a new style of community
news that took root into wash out.
I'm Susan Barnett and this is 51 percent the women's perspective.
Community newspapers have taken a beating in the last 10 to 15 years.
A site called newspaper deathwatch.com monitors the carnage and there's a Wikipedia list of
papers in 42 states which are now shut down.
But online news has been blossoming and few online news sources have become the go-to
source of community news as suddenly as the watershed post in New York's Catskill
region.
The watershed post was just a year and a half old when Hurricane Irene blasted through
the area.
And while most news organizations were cut off, the watershed post became an essential
source of local news.
Editor Lisa Harris is one of the founders.
Irene was a breaking news situation.
It was a kind of thing where information would change not only day to day but hour to hour
and even minutes to minute.
And the local weeklies that form the backbone of the local news coverage scene are not
used to putting out, nor do they really have the capacity to put out real time news.
Meanwhile we have about four, maybe a few more, but kind of four main daily that get cover
the Catskills region.
And none of them really cover the whole territory really in the middle of the Catskills where you
saw some of the worst flood damage.
There were not daily reporters on the scene during Irene and that's what we stepped in
to fill is that whole.
And it happened very quickly.
We had no idea how big it was going to get.
We had no idea how bad Irene was going to be.
And we were just going to track the progress of the storm and see where there were problem
areas, where flooding might develop, it proved to develop in many, many places at once.
Which in some of these places were places where it was really tough to get any information.
We had officials who we were losing contact with because their offices were being flooded
and because they were being overwhelmed by dealing with the emergency on the ground and
were too busy to talk to news reporters.
So some of our traditional news gathering methods broke down during Irene because we lost
a lot of those official channels of communication and we ended up relying very heavily on readers
and eyewitnesses on the ground for who were sharing information with us.
The Watershed Post is a very small organization.
This had to have been overwhelming.
We are a tiny organization.
We were two people in an apartment, a little two bedroom apartment in downtown Andes with
a tiny toddler running around around our feet, trying to basically act like a major news
organization.
We were fielding requests from places like CNN and WNYC.
I did I think five live radio interviews on the first day of the flooding.
One of them was on CNN.
We were trying to balance the news gathering part of the operation and dissemination on
our own channels with these requests from larger media outlets that physically could not
get reporters into the region.
We knew that if we didn't talk to them, they might not choose to cover the story at all.
So we thought the more accessible we can make ourselves to national media, the more coverage
this disaster is going to get on a state and a national level and consequently the more
it might help the area to be able to recover.
It's by sheer luck we were able to stay up and running.
Because of our connections that we made with other people who had the power to run the
live log, if we went down, we knew that if we were to get knocked out, somebody could keep
it running.
At that point, that's a little scary because at that point, then it would have been out
of our hands.
We wouldn't have been able to even see what kind of information people were posting.
That was a bit of a leap of faith.
We did some training on the fly.
We recruited people that we knew and trusted and we were constantly telling people, it's
really important to deal with rumors if they come up to make sure that information is verified.
But this is a scary thing.
And that leads me into my next question, which is what training do you have and your publisher,
Julia Raichelle?
My background is in science writing and in the alt-weekly press, mostly.
So I have this odd mix of feature writing and editing and science and community news,
which I think turns out to be pretty useful for this sort of beat, where you have a lot
of rural land use issues and a lot of complicated stories about an environment and that sort of
training.
Julia, who is our publisher and also writes for the site, is a legal reporter by training
and she also kind of came up in the alt-weekly press.
Neither of us ever worked for a daily before we came here, which is kind of interesting because
now the watershed post, certainly during Irene, was more than a daily, it was an hourly.
I think it's scary for all reporters, the Internet, the 24-hour news cycle.
And if you have a daily, now your deadlines have basically been collapsed.
The pressure is always on to publish now.
Newspapers around the country are having financial problems.
Many of them have not survived this economy.
Can you make money doing an online newspaper?
We are paying our own salaries, they are not huge salaries, but the business is breaking
even.
We have very low overhead, so that helps.
But we got into this not only to do the kind of journalism and the kind of community information
work that we wanted to do, but also a huge part of the reason why we started the watershed
post is that we wanted to experiment with different business models for journalism and specifically
rural community journalism.
I've watched the news ecosystem get smaller and watched weekly papers shrink and disappear
in this area since I was a kid.
If you don't have the business model to support it, it's not going to exist.
We both, Julia and I care really passionately about news and about newspapers.
We want them to live and thrive.
And so part of what we're doing here is to try to find new ways to make money online so
that journalism in the area can continue to exist.
So do you see yourself as basically the 21st century version of that old newspaper man
with the green visor and his sleeves rolled up and making sure the community gets the
news?
Pretty much.
Yeah, I mean, the stuff that we're doing is not new.
It's stuff that reporters have been doing for years and years and years.
It's making calls and talking to people and looking at public documents and trying to figure
out what's happening and then present it to the world.
The tools for doing that are different.
The internet has made it so much easier to organize and disseminate information.
And we use those tools.
We use things like this cover at live software.
There's a lot of tools that we use to get information out to people.
It's the basic job of being a reporter is it is what it is.
We didn't get into this specifically to do online journalism.
We're doing online journalism because that's the level at which you can get something
started without a lot of overhead.
And because you can distribute it without having a fleet of trucks, we came from print journalism
and we love print journalism.
This is something that we can do.
And I think we've discovered as we've gone along how powerful the internet is, just being
able to link to other sources to get into a whole other piece of that aggregation, which
is a huge part of what we do is to just tell people about the other journalism that's
happening that's being done at other news outlets that people should be reading.
Because they're not all reading each other's newspapers.
And there's a lot of little stories that are in a paper for one town that will never
get read in the next town over unless we drop people's attention to it.
So we do a lot of that.
And that the internet is very powerful for that.
And I think that it's having access to information across the region could be a really powerful
thing for the Castles region, which is historically been really bulk and I since lit up into
a little filo of information.
Lisa Harris is editor and co-founder of the Watershed Post in New York's Catskills region.
Interested in reading it?
Go to Watershedpost.com.
Up next, the editor of an online news monitoring site who looks for the news you haven't heard.
If you missed part of this show or want to share it with others, visit the 51% Archives
at WAMC.org.
This week's show is number 1256.
When it's hard to find news without a point of view, a skeptic can be your best bet for
as one news organization likes to put it, keep it a honest.
Citizens for legitimate government is a news monitoring site that definitely has an
opinion, but their efforts to watch the media and hold government accountable can be invaluable.
Editor Lori Price said the story she finds that mainstream media ignores often get noticed
once she posts them.
We amass various stories that are key that aren't really getting enough media attention
and put them onto the site and then we copy that group into a news letter and send it
out.
It goes to social media and to individuals and so forth.
Other lists and just spread the round.
There's 50 something thousand on the list itself and then there's 10,000 more through
the Yahoo e-group and I post key items on a Facebook, a CLG Facebook page and also
on Twitter.
So Lori are any of you trained journalists?
My background isn't in journalism but I always felt writing was a tool that I had and
I used it well, you know, it served me.
So yeah, I just picked up how to collate all this on my own and that's what we've been
doing.
Well what first struck me is what an enormous job this is because your perspective is global.
The first thing that caught my eye was an article that you had about the continuing levels
of radioactivity at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant.
All right.
Yeah.
So first of all, why don't you fill people in on what you had to say about that?
Well that's a good topic that you raised because it's a good example of what sort of like
CLG does.
For example, there's stories that are in the media that are just totally saturating the
media and sometimes that's directed by certain corporations with an end and sometimes it's
not.
But then there's other topics that get, for some reason, very little coverage or a positive
article is on key topics such as the fact that Fukushima is never really stopping a disaster.
Okay.
So when you do find an article in the mainstream on Fukushima, they tend to, which I
found one thing fascinating, they tend to focus on the tsunami and the earthquake.
And in other words, they're always giving a reason why that nuclear plant failed and it
will never happen again.
They always have to reflect back to what caused the meltdown.
And then the meltdowns happen and whenever the meltdowns are brought up, only one meltdown
is mentioned when there were like three meltdowns, okay.
And also, they don't mention that the problem is really continuing in a huge way.
So thousands of gallons of radioactive water, you know, painted water and so forth that
are still amassing.
And that's not mentioned.
So where are your sources for this, Laurie, where are you getting this information?
Well, on that particular topic, Japan Times publishes some, there's some blogs out there.
There are people in Japan, obviously, they're covering Fukushima that are not happy with
it.
And there are some news sites in the US and England that we use quite a bit, you know,
various ones, Guardian, Bloomberg news, and sometimes we'll go into depth on items.
And if they, you know, we'll link to their summaries.
I mean, I'll summarize their main article.
So you're basically a professional skeptic when you see these articles and say, well,
that's not something that most people are reporting.
How do you fact check what you find?
You can tell when something sticks out that is not something is a myth.
You're sort of like your own radar goes off.
And you can sort of just judge, maybe it's a feeling, but you can judge.
There are some stories I passed on that the mainstream media had a double back and say
it wasn't true.
I passed because it just didn't seem correct.
Once in a while, an old story gets resurfaced and it's not this year.
It's just an error.
And, you know, when you're trolling around the web.
And, but of course, mistakes happen.
You know, I've made mistakes, of course.
So you can, but one way to check is if there's a few mainstream articles on one topic.
And it's circulating through the web.
And there's no retractions.
You can just kind of generally see, well, this is going on.
And then find the main article that really speaks to what the truth is.
And then I summarize it and put it on the site.
And I add my own commentary periodically in brackets if it fits, if it's appropriate.
What other stories are you following that right now you're saying to yourself, I'm not
seeing this anywhere else?
Well, Guantanamo Bay has gotten coverage recently because of the four speedings, but I felt
that topic wasn't getting enough coverage.
Jeremy Hammond, I actually started a little off-shoot, free Jeremy Hammond's Facebook page.
Jeremy Hammond wasn't getting much coverage.
That is the acute strat for leaker, the military intelligence firm strat for the contractor,
which was taking place before the Snowden issue.
And Mr. Snowden got a lot of coverage.
Bradley Manning will mention periodic updates on his case.
Now the mainstream does cover Bradley Manning.
But sort of it's the beginning when he was languishing there, there wasn't enough coverage
on the fact that the UN reported that he was basically being tortured.
And then he got transferred out of solitary and being woken up every five minutes.
So that issue at the beginning wasn't getting enough coverage.
So we propelled it through the web there.
Oh, and there is one story I'd like to mention.
Sadly, BP, the animals, this is horrifying, but turtles were being burned alive.
I got that from a turtle sort of group, a turtle advocacy group.
And I made that story the lead, and I did get, see that get picked up quite a bit when
we covered it.
That story really needed to be covered.
There was photographs of that, and it did get circulated, and it got picked up by larger
places and CLG.
Sometimes we report something that then gets picked up by the Huffington Post, and so forth,
and it can pick something up that we sort of percolate a little bit, and then they
see it.
This has got to be at least a full-time job for you.
It is, it is.
I mean, you know, I do this from my home, so sometimes the hours are kind of strange.
I came up with something, if I didn't know I snowed and didn't fly under a UN passport,
like the journalist Donald Woods, he was, he fled South Africa after he was banned
for five years.
He flew out of South Africa using a UN passport with his family and one other official.
And I tweeted that, and I was happily surprised.
Wikileaks retweeted that, and it went to like two million people almost, and I was happy
about that.
Sometimes things CLG does get reported in other places, and you know, somebody could
pick up on it.
I don't know.
A lot of people follow Wikileaks.
And somebody in the media might see that from their tweet of, you know, retweeting
us and commenting.
I'm not sure what's going to happen with that.
Laurie Citizens for legitimate government definitely has a point of view you are not
unbiased.
Do you get flak for what you write?
Actually, it's about some libertarian style views, which even the Tea Party can probably
happily espouse, such as very much against the drones.
And no mandatory vaccines, no Florida in the water.
You might see some politicians that are actually on the right embrace.
So we have a variety of viewpoints that are espoused.
It's mainly just to get the truth out there.
We question a lot on 9-11, the official story that's definitely something that I questioned
from the day after 9-11.
So then it became sort of embraced by the Tea Party and so forth.
But we might use our what they are.
Some of them, I believe, growable warming to huge problems.
So my views span the spectrum, I guess.
So the question is, some people may give me flak, yes.
But I think some people by now realize that the CLG won't embrace something just to embrace
it.
I'm certainly not going to give Obama praise when it's not due.
And I'm very disappointed in President Obama just as an aside.
And nowadays anyone who questions the official media or government story of anything is quickly
labeled a conspiracy theorist.
Do you consider yourself a conspiracy theorist?
If you do it mathematically and you add up the probability and statistics of some of these
incidents that happen, you got to be crazy to believe the official story.
You really question things and you have to question them.
And if people want to label me that, then they can.
But I'm not going to, where the truth is, if there's something to be questioned, I'm
going to question it.
Not just for the sake of not to do it just to provoke controversy, but I'm not going
to deny the intellect.
You know, I'm not going to deny that.
Laurie Price is the editor of Citizens for Legitimate Government, an Internet-based
news monitoring website.
You can find out more at legitgov.org.
And finally, a paper hold out in an e-book world.
Wendy Welch has written a memoir about what it means to open an independent bookstore
at a time when physical books seem to be disappearing.
Alison Quant's reports.
This is Jack Beck, co-owner of the first bookstore in Big Stone Gap, Virginia.
See, there never had been a bookstore in Big Stone Gap before ever.
And here's his partner in wife, Wendy Welch.
We had always talked about opening a bookstore someday.
You know, someday, when you retired, someday, when I was teaching college, it was one of
those things people always say, someday I'm gonna.
When they first moved to Big Stone Gap, they weren't actually planning on opening a bookstore.
But then they found this old Victorian house for sale.
And suddenly, that someday just snuck up on them.
The first thing you do is you take your own personal book collection, and you ruthlessly
promise each other that you are going to put every book you will die without parting
with into the bookstore.
The couple had 2000 books to start the store, not quite enough.
So Wendy started haunting yard sales around the town.
And I collected this 1500 or so volumes of readers' digest condensed books and ferrofoset
1970 detox diets and Jackie Collins passed best sellers.
Next, they had to find a way to advertise.
He printed up very small bookmarks, Jack stuffed 3000 of these in his pockets.
And he went up to the super Walmart.
It was the only place that was selling books in the whole three county area.
He stood outside the doors of Walmart and as people walked in, he just handed them a
bookmark.
And somehow, improbably, their bookstore, called Tales of the Lonesome Pine, has been a huge
success.
Recently, they took a road trip to see how the economy was affecting other used bookstores.
But they learned is a little different from what they had been hearing on the news.
A lot of the bookstores that we had gone into, we found were almost like community centers.
It's where people would gather to chat, to have a coffee, to just hang out.
Even with nooks and kindles and Amazon, Wendy and Jack don't seem worried about the future
of these brick and mortar bookstores.
They're coming to the bookstore to talk to the bookstore owner to enjoy a meaningful
conversation, which you cannot get when you surf the net.
In fact, when they talk about the role of small bookstores playing communities, they sound
so confident.
It's almost like they know something about the rest of us that we haven't figured out yet.
Many people over the years coming into our store have said, oh, I always wanted to open
a bookstore.
It seems to be something that, you know, lots of people have hovering at the back of
their mind.
So, you know, potentially there are enough of a bookstore owners out there.
For the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, I'm Alison Kwantz.
Kwantz are a show for this week, thanks to Katie Britton for production assistance.
Our theme music is by Kevin Bartlett.
This show is a national production of Northeast public radio.
Our executive producer is Dr. Alan Shartock.
If you'd like to hear this show again or visit the 51% Archives, go to our website at
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You can also email me at esparnetatwaamc.org.
Thanks so much for joining us.
We'll be back next week with another edition of 51% the Women's Perspective.
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