Democracy As Disruption

Mark Trahant is editor of Indian Country Today.

MARK TRAHANT

Trahant, Shoshone-Bannock, was appointed to lead Indian Country Today as a digital enterprise on March 1, 2018.

Indian Country Today moved its headquarters to the Walter Cronkite School for Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University in downtown Phoenix. Under Trahant’s leadership, Indian Country Today is expanding into television with a news show that will soon be available through the PBS network.

He has been a professor at the University of North Dakota, the University of Alaska Anchorage, the University of Idaho and the University of Colorado.

He is known for his election reporting in Indian Country, developing the first comprehensive database of American Indians and Alaska Natives running for office. His research has been cited in publications ranging from The New York Times to The Economist. (And most recently, Teen Vogue.)

The election of 2018 was an extraordinary event, and Trahant launched a journalism initiative as a response: The first-ever live coverage of election night by more than 40 Native media professionals. Six hours of television programming was produced at the FNX studios in California, and viewers were able to get reports about the dozens of Native candidates running for office, including the election of the first-ever Native women to Congress and to a statewide office, Lt. Gov. of Minnesota.

Trahant has been a reporter for PBS’ Frontline series. His most recent Frontline piece, “The Silence,” was about sexual abuse by priests in an Alaska Native village. He was the editorial page editor of the Seattle Post- Intelligencer and has worked for The Arizona Republic, Salt Lake Tribune, The Seattle Times, the Navajo Times Today, and the Sho-Ban News.

DEMOCRACY AS DISRUPTION

by Mark Trahant

When we are surrounded by chaos, it’s easy to get angry or some how be unsettled by it all. But there is another side: It’s just disruption. We are living in a time of change, fascinating changes that will define the next era.

Harvard Business School professor and disruption guru Clayton Christensen once described disruption as a force that displaces an existing market, industry, or technology and produces something new and more efficient worthwhile. It is at once destructive and creative.

Change is inevitable. We are always experiencing change, both slowly and quickly. Much of that change could be thought of as innovation. We get a new device, for example, that makes our work easier.

I have really seen this unfold in the newspaper business. I started a tribal newspaper when I was a teenager in the 1970s. The technology then had evolved so that a small newspaper could typeset in-house. We wrote our stories on an IBM Selectric. Then we typed them again into a composing machine. Strips of photo paper would emerge, we would wax the back of the pages, place them on a board, and take a picture with a very large, room-filling camera. That picture would be used to make a metal plate. Then we would print a newspaper. A lot of money and people were required for that production.

A decade or so later that process was obsolete. We wrote stories on a computer and electronically that material was transferred to a layout page and ultimately went directly to the printer. Think of all the steps that were saved. We typed once, hit a few buttons, and then printed a newspaper.

All those new ways of doing things were great for the newspaper business. It did not take a lot of capital to start a small paper, and the money required was simply to hire and pay people, not the production of the product itself.

Nothing we could do could change the fact that we were looking at a generation of citizens who would not consume information by reading ink on paper. Disruption.

That was innovation. Better tools. An easier way to accomplish the task. And newspapers were rewarded with profits. One newspaper owner joked that owning a press was a license to print money forever. But forever didn’t last very long. The new tools didn’t change everything, and the newspaper world was soon to be hit by a disruptive force—the Internet. Newspapers went from being extraordinarily valuable enterprises to struggling, often debt-burdened institutions, in a relatively short time. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, where I worked, was founded in 1863 – and ceased publication as a newspaper in 2009. That trend picked up across the country with newspapers giving up daily publication or going out of business altogether.

There were two things going on at the same time that destroyed our business. First, the Internet was a better way for people to buy cars, look for jobs, or rent apartments. Online people could find exactly what they wanted instead of reading through columns of classified ads. Our way was more expensive and less efficient. Second, and just as important, a demographic wave crashed on our beach. Young people did not connect with stories the same way that previous generations did.

We kept telling ourselves fibs: Oh, they’ll read when they get older, when they buy a house. Oh, they’ll read when they start voting. Nope. Nothing we could do could change the fact that we were looking at a generation of citizens who would not consume information by reading ink on paper. Disruption.

We knew this was happening. I was involved with several “reinvention projects.” We developed a team of people who were tasked with thinking through these changes and developing a strategy and a response.

I had perhaps the wildest idea. One that was rejected immediately. I suggested that we give up on younger readers entirely and focus our printed news product on Baby Boomers. We are a huge generation. We live for a long time. We could be good customers for, say thirty more years before the newspaper goes out of business.

Well, no.

The disruptive force was not technology. It was a change in the very core of how people thought about reading, advertising, and the work of journalism. That disruptive force continues today with so many ramifications, ranging from “fake news” to social media.

I’d like to think that my Native American ancestors would have been cool with this disruption. We are, after all, a people of disruption.

There is new evidence that the First People hunted mastodons some 14,000 years ago using tools made of antlers. Think of the scale of that enterprise. Teamwork must have been an essential element in bringing down and sharing an animal that huge.

Then after a disruption, we learned to survive in other ways, hunting fish, buffalo, or in some places, growing food. We figured out what worked.

We are a people of disruption, and so now much of the change around us should be familiar territory—not the technology, but the ideas.

Indian Country Today is an example of at least attempting to embrace disruption. We are building our news operation around the idea that the mobile phone is the most powerful news vehicle ever invented. Think about it. Our readers are always “connected” to news. They look at the phone every few minutes. Even better, they can use that phone to contribute content. It’s not one way, but a back and forth medium.

So what do our readers think about this? We are only a year-plus (the old newspaper went dark in 2017) into this experiment, but our growth is stunning.

Mobile users are now 80 percent of Indian Country Today’s readership. And among new readers that number is 95 percent mobile. Readers see this as the future.

Even better, Indian Country Today is reaching a younger audience. In the past month, the analytics show the 25-34 demographic group at nearly a quarter of Indian Country Today’s readership. It’s our number one age group. (How many in the news media can say that?)

This younger audience is important for two reasons. First, it’s essential that this age group be interested in news and public affairs, and, second, this is a critical cohort for advertisers. (Older readers are considered to have already made up their minds about products.)

We are also disrupting the business model, borrowing much of what we do from public television and radio. We are a nonprofit and raise money as part of our business—and that’s ok. It keeps our news free for everyone.

We even take this to an extreme. Indian Country Today has told tribal newspapers, radio stations, and TV enterprises that all of our content is for them to use freely. So a story published in Indian Country Today can (and is) showing up in a variety of tribal media, from the Sho-Ban News to the MHA Times.

In a previous era, we tried to protect content. It was exclusive. But when news moves at digital speed, that’s nonsense.

Disruption also means rethinking what medium we work in. Are we print? Digital? Video? Those are questions that we cannot answer except to say, yes. The next generation of reporters will shoot stories on their mobile device post to our platform, and coming soon we will offer a video version of Indian Country Today on public television and radio stations.

And that media report will be consumed in so many ways. Many will watch on their phones, some will record on a video recorder and watch when convenient, and some will watch at the appointed hour on their local public television station. In this era of disruption, there is no one way to reach people except where they are.

Our most recent disruption was the last election. Six weeks before Election Day, we realized it was going to be an extraordinary event. So we decided to create a five-hour live broadcast hiring Native American journalists from around the country to tell that story. We had reporters from Alaska to Washington, D.C. We had interviews with the first two Native American women that were ever elected to Congress, Rep. Deb Haaland, D-New Mexico, and Rep. Sharice Davids, D-Kansas, as well as two candidates for governor, Paulette Jordan, a Democrat running in Idaho, and Andria Tupola, a Republican in Hawaii.

Earlier this year I was speaking in northern Minnesota. A young Ojibwe woman came up to me and said she watched every minute of our election night coverage. She said she was crying because, for the first time in her life, the stories on her television were about what she wanted to know, news about the Native candidates.

My favorite story from election night: Peggy Flanagan, then the Lt. Gov.-elect of Minnesota, had given her speech and was ready to leave the stage. Our reporter chased her into the basement saying “You can’t leave until you talk to Indian Country Today.” She did. Live.

The Flanagan interview by Mary Annette Pember was also a good example of how we stretched technology to make this work. We did not have access or the money for satellite trucks, but we wanted a two-way conversation with reporters and those running for office. We did this by broadcasting directly from a mobile phone. But if that’s not cool enough: A second phone, hidden on the reporter, with an earphone, was used so that the anchors in the studio could ask questions live. Disruption.

We will need to embrace disruption. Name the issue: Climate change, election mechanics, education systems, health care —and all are calling for a second, third, or fourth look at the very nature of the problem.

Turning back the page to the newspaper world. My favorite comic strip was “Pogo” about an all-wise possum. The author, Walt Kelly, had the character say: “We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities.” That is disruption: figuring out how to take advantage of the chaos and make it something new.