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Mickey Huff, Executive Director of Project Censored and Distinguished Director of the Park Center for Independent Media and Professor of Journalism at Ithaca College, New York, discusses news suppressed for those who control most of the money for the media and why you should care. He is interviewed by Spencer Graves. AND BENEFIT CONCERT APRIL 19 AT Knuckleheads, 4 PM, to raise funds for Advocates for Immigrant Rights and Reconciliation and Indivisible KC. Tickets available by calling bill at 816-517-4083. More on Huff and Project Censored is available in the Wikiversity article on, "News suppressed for those who control money for the media". Copyright 2026, Mickey Huff and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 international license.

Lois Swimmer, Paul & Louise Freid, and Mike Miles will talk with Radio Active Magazine regular Spencer Graves about their plans for a Catholic Worker Retreat and Resistance event being planned for April 24-27, Friday through Monday.  Swimmer is from the Minnecouji Band within the Blackfoot Tribe, which is part of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. She is a member of the Elders Circle at Cherith Brook Catholic Worker House in Kansas City, Missouri. Paul & Louise Freid are with the Lake City Catholic Worker Farm near Lake City, Minnesota. Mike Miles is with Anathoth Catholic Worker Farm a few miles out of Luck, Wisconsin.  Midwest supporters of the Catholic Worker Movement are organizing a retreat and resistance in Kansas City, April 24-27, focusing on the Kansas City National Security Campus, which manufactures 80 percent of non-nuclear components that go into US nuclear weapons. If those weapons are ever detonated in a war, the most likely outcome would include lofting so much smoke to the stratosphere from burning cities that it would cover the earth and not get above freezing even in the summertime for several years in places as far north as Iowa, according to a team of 10 leading experts in climatology, food production and economics. Ninety-nine percent of humans in the US, Europe and Russia would starve to death if they did not die of something else sooner. Eighty percent of humans worldwide would similarly die. Over 90 percent of the fatalities would be in countries not directly involved in the nuclear exchange.  The US plans to spend $2 trillion dollars over the next 30 years making new nuclear weapons and delivery systems to make them faster, “smarter”, and bomb deeper into the earth. That's $6,000 for every man, woman, and child in the US -- $200 per year per human in each of the next 30 years. To achieve this, the KC plant is doubling in size. This is under the Dept of Energy. A cynic might insist that this facility is more accurately described as the "Kansas City National Insecurity Campus", as part of the Department of Nuclear Bombs, whose budget is not included in the official Department of Defense budget, to make it harder for the public to know how much the US is actually spending on military equipment, supplies and operations.  Over a year ago, DOE agreed to hold public hearings in Kansas City and four other cities, discussing their plans for this and other facilities nationwide. This agreement responded to a lawsuit filed by antinuclear activist organizations. However, PeaceWorks has not yet heard a schedule. Are they planning on holding those hearings in 2060, after the nuclear winter?   Whenever the hearings are scheduled, PeaceWorks will ask supporters to submit comments in person and online. PeaceWorks will offer trainings to help prepare humans to make informed statements. Supporting the Retreat and Resistance April 24-27 can help humans prepare as well. PeaceWorks and the Catholic Workers coming for this insist that everything currently done at the Kansas City National Insecurity Campus is an enormous waste of money and part of a very dangerous new arms race. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which half the world’s nations have now agreed to, makes nuclear weapons illegal. Humans associated with PeaceWorks plan to attend the TPNW review conference at the United Nations in November. The Alliance for Nuclear Accountability will also be lobbying the first week in June against new nuclear weapons and new nuclear power plants and for cleanup of the thousands of tons of US nuclear waste. To join us, see pwkc.org, especially pwkc.org/register-resist.

Fordham University Professor Emerita of Communications Robin Andersen discusses her research on media and war with Spencer Graves. Andersen earned a PhD from UC-Irvine in 1986 with a dissertation on, "The United States Press Coverage of Conflict in the Third World: The Case of El Salvador". She has expanded that work since with numerous publications including the 2006 book on A Century of Media, A Century of War, which shared the Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award the following year with four others. She also has THE COMPLICIT LENS: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza, scheduled to be officially released this coming June 2. More on this is available in the Wikiversity article on "Media and War". Copyright 2026 Robin Andersen and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.

Bill Clause, Nancy Mays, and Beverly Harvey discuss the No Kings rallies being organized for March 28 focusing especially on the KC metro area, Johnson County and the Plaza. This discussion will include the issues that seem to be of greatest concern to the public. NoKings.org invites anyone to "Host an event" and list it with them. As this is being written 2026-03-16, eighteen rallies were found at nokings.org in KKFI's listening area between Warrensburg and Saint Joseph, Missouri, and Topeka, Kansas. The biggest may be at Mill Creek Park on the Plaza from noon to 3 PM. More information for that rally is at indivisiblekansascity.org. BootsOnTheGroundMidwest.org is organizing an event from 9:30 to 11:30 AM between 75th and 119th along Metcalf in Overland Park. Other morning event in the KC metro area are being organized in Baldwin City and Gardner, Kansas, and Platte City, Liberty, Independence, Excelsior Springs and Lee's Summit, Missouri. Other events in the KKFI listening area are being planned for Topeka,  Ottawa, Lawrence, in a grassy area southeast of the intersection of Metcalf and 135th St. in Overland Park, plus Kansas City, Kansas, and in Saint Joseph, Richmond, Warrensburg, and Harrisonville, Missouri. More information at nokings.org.   State Capitol Topeka KS 11:00 14:00 501 S Main St Ottawa KS 14:00 16:00 Watson Park Lawrence KS 15:00 17:00 600 Ames St (only stop light in town) Baldwin City KS 9:30 10:30 East Main Street & South Moonlight Road Gardner KS 10:00 11:30 Grassy area at southeast corner of Metcalf and 135th St. 135th OP KS 11:00 13:00 75th-119th Metcalf OP KS 9:30 11:30 106th Street & Parallel Parkway Kansas City KS 12:00 13:30 Public Sidewalks - East Hills Mall Side Saint Joseph MO 15:00 17:00 300 N Holden St Warrensburg MO 12:00 14:00 (address private: sign up for details) Harrisonville MO 10:00 12:00 2301 Running Horse Rd Platte City MO 10:30 12:00 W. Kansas Street sidewalks between Route 291 and Conistor Street Liberty MO 10:00 11:30 (address private: sign up for details) Independence MO 10:00 12:00 Mill Creek Park Plaza MO 12:00 15:00 Northeast Chipman Road & Northeast Douglas Street Lee's Summit MO 10:00 12:00 Century Park Excelsior Springs MO 10:00 12:00 900 Walton Way Richmond MO 13:00 15:00

Communications professor Bill Yousman discusses media literacy and dispelling myths about crime and justice. He is interviewed by Spencer Graves. Yousman is a professor of communications in the School of Communication, Media & the Arts in Sacred Heart University in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Two of his research reports have appeared in Project Censored's annuals for 2017 and 2025: "Eleven theses on disinformation (with apologies to Karl Marx)" (2025) "Who's afraid of critical media literacy?" (2017). In a section of a book scheduled to appear later this year, he quotes a 2021 tweet from conservative activist Christopher Rufo that, “We have successfully frozen their brand—‘critical race theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. ... The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think 'critical race theory.' We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans." Others of his publications relevant to the current discussion include the following: '"[IN]JUSTICE ROLLS DOWN LIKE WATER. . .": Challenging White Supremacy in Media Constructions of Crime and Punishment'. "Challenging the media-incarceration complex through media education". Prime Time Prisons on U.S. TV: Representation of Incarceration (2009). The Spike Lee Enigma: Challenge and Incorporation in Media Culture (2013). And he is a co-editor of Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Critical Reader, a widely used collection of research reports on issues of power, identity, and ideology in popular culture. More on this is available in the Wikiversity article on, "Media literacy to dispel myths and improve public policy". Bibliography Stephen J. Hartnett, Eleanor Novek, and Jennifer K. Wood, eds. (1 June 2013). Working for justice: a handbook of prison education and activism (University of Illinois Press).  Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth, eds. (2016), Mickey Huff; Andy Lee Roth (eds.), Censored 2017.  Mickey Huff, Shealeigh Voitl, and Andy Lee Roth, eds. (3 December 2024). Project Censored's State of the Free Press 2025 (Project Censored). Rebecca Ann Lind, ed. (2026 forthcoming), Race/Gender/Class/Media: Considering Diversity Across Audiences, Content, and Producers, (Routledge). Bill Yousman (2026 forthcoming), "8", in Lind (ed.), "We Will Eventually Turn It Toxic": Critical Race Theory, Disinformation, and the Weaponization of an Idea.  Bill Yousman (3 December 2024), "6" in HUff et al. (eds.), Eleven theses on disinformation (with apologies to Karl Marx).  Bill Yousman, "26", in Yousman; et al. (eds.), "[IN]JUSTICE ROLLS DOWN LIKE WATER. . .": Challenging White Supremacy in MediaConstructions of Crime and Punishment.  Bill Yousman (2016), "10", in Huff and Roth (ed.), Who's afraid of critical media literacy?, pp. 369–416.  Bill Yousman (2013a), "7", in Harnett; et al. (eds.), Challenging the Media-Incarceration Complex through media education(published 2013).  Bill Yousman (2013b). The Spike Lee Enigma: Challenge and Incorporation in Media Culture (in en). Peter Lang (published 1 July 2013). Bill Yousman (2 September 2009). Prime Time Prisons on U.S. TV: Representation of Incarceration (Peter Lang).  Bill Yousman, Lori Bindig, Gail Dines, and Jean McMahon Humez, eds. (24 July 2020). Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Critical Reader, 6th ed. (SAGE Publishing).  Copyright 2026 Bill Yousman and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 international license.

Representatives of Veterans for Peace discuss their up-coming national conference August 6-9, which they are organizing at UMKC. Guests include Bryson Ripley, a former US Marine and president of their Kansas City chapter. They are interviewed by Spencer Graves. Some might claim that (a) everyone would be safer and more prosperous with honest defense of the bottom 99%, and (b) instead we have a publicly funded escort service pressuring foreign governments to prioritize international business interests over those of their citizens.

Communications professor Stephan Russ-Mohl shares concerns about media, especially in Germany. He is interviewed by Spencer Graves. Russ-Mohl is a prolific journalist, researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Lugano in the Italian-speaking portion of Switzerland. He specializing in quality assurance and quality management in mass media focusing primarily but not exclusively on Germany. Between 1985 and 2001 he was primarily based at the Free University of Berlin. Between 2002 and 2018 he served primarily on the faculty at the University of Lugano. He has also had sabbaticals at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and at Stanford in the US and at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He has published primarily in German but some in English, and some of his work has been translated into many other languages. In a 2023 book on "Deep Journalism", Russ-Mohl and co-editor Sebastian Turner described four categories of media based on people's willingness to pay:1 Job-related information, where people pay to improve their abilities at work. Consumer markets, where people pay to help them get more value from what they buy. Entertainment. Politics and public life, where willingness to pay is low, because most individuals are "rationally ignorant",2 as their ability to influence public policy is limited. He has also written with Susanne Fengler about "The (Behavioral) Economics of Media Accountability".3 In this, they describe "the journalist as Homo oeconomicus, citing Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, and others in behavioral economics. In 2024 he published a chapter on "Strengths and Weaknesses of Corona Coverage"4 in a book on Corona and the mass media.5 Shortly after the 2024 US presidential election, he discussed, "The media power of billionaires".6 Ten months after Trump's second inauguration, he noted that, "Donald Trump manages to dominate the global media landscape even in his second term", then asked "How does he do it? And what should journalists do about it?"7 Bibliography Anthony Downs (1957), An Economic Theory of Democracy, Wikidata Q482418 Anthony Downs (1957), An Economic Theory of Democracy, Wikidata Q482418 Fengler et al., eds. (2014). Journalists and Media Accountability: An International Study of News People in the Digital Age (in en). Peter Lang. Wikidata Q138414279. ISBN 978-1-4331-2281-1. Dennis Gräf and Martin Hennig, eds. (23 October 2024). Corona und mediale Öffentlichkeiten (in de). Springer Science+Business Media. Wikidata Q138414760. ISBN ‎ 978-3658455033. Stephan Russ-Mohl; Susanne Fengler (2014). The (Behavioral) Economics of Media Accountability (in en). 213-230. Wikidata Q138414323. ISBN 978-1-4331-2281-1. Stephan Russ-Mohl (2024a). "7". Stärken und Schwächen der Berichterstattung über Corona (in en) (published 23 October 2024). Wikidata Q138414659. ISBN ‎ 978-3658455033. Stephan Russ-Mohl (2024b). "Die Medienmacht der Milliardäre". Die Furche. 29 November 2024. Wikidata Q138416714. ISSN 0016-299X. Stephan Russ-Mohl (13 November 2025). "Wie Trump alle Kanäle dominiert". Die Furche. Wikidata Q138416801. ISSN 0016-299X. Sebastian Turner and Stephan Russ-Mohl, eds. (1 June 2023). Deep Journalism: Domänenkompetenz als redaktioneller Erfolgsfaktor (in de). Herbert von Halem Verlag. Wikidata Q138414099. ISBN 978-3-86962-659-8. _______ Turner and Russ-Mohl (2023). Downs (1957). Russ-Mohl and Fengler (2014). Russ-Mohl (2024a). Gräf and Hennig (2024). Russ-Mohl (2024b). Russ-Mohl (2025). Copyright 2026 Stephan Russ-Mohl and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.

Bryan Stalder discusses Northeast Kansas City and Northeast News with Radio Active Magazine regular Spencer Graves, and Bill Clause invites y'all to attend a "No Kings 3" rally near you March 28  No Kings 3 March 28: For more information email Diane Bulan Northeast Kansas City and Northeast News Stadler is an illustrator and designer active with the Northeast Kansas City Chamber of Commerce and the Northeast News and former president of the Indian Mound Neighborhood Association. He describes Northeast Kansas City and his vision for that part of the KC metro area. 

Paul Bame, a volunteer broadcast engineer with the Prometheus Radio Project, discusses Prometheus activities including how underserved communities serve themselves with low-power FM. He is interviewed by Spencer Graves. The Prometheus Radio Project was founded in 1998 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, by supporters of the unlicensed "Radio Mutiny" station after the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) shut down their station. Their mission statement says, "The Prometheus Radio Project builds participatory radio as a tool for social justice organizing and a voice for community expression. To that end, we demystify media policy and technology, advocate for a more just media system, and help grassroots organizations build communications infrastructure to strengthen their communities and movements." In 2003 they initiated Prometheus Radio Project v. FCC, a series of lawsuits that made it harder for the FCC to relax media outlet ownership regulations. The Prometheus Radio Project has been a leader in helping communities create new low-power FM stations. This includes helping them through the application process, obtaining the equipment and getting the station on the air. They call the final step a "radio barnraising", where humans from diverse locations come together to build a studio, raise an antenna mast, and achieve first broadcast in three days. The name comes from the rural "Barn raising" tradition. The Wikipedia article on "Prometheus Radio Project" lists eleven "community radio barnraisings" in the US from Spokane, Washington, to Immokalee, Florida, and from Oroville, California, to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. They have also helped groups in Guatemala, Nepal, Colombia, Jordan, Kenya, and Tanzania get on the air. More details and a moderated discussion of issues raised in this interview are supported in the Wikiversity article on “Underserved serve themselves with low-power FM” with a video. Copyright 2026 Paul Bame and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.

Reverend Mindy Fugarino discusses her work with the Independence Boulevard Christian Church, and Lora McDonald invites you to on-line Pro-Democracy training February 11, 5-7 PM and February 20, 9-11 AM, organized in part by MORE2. Reverend Mindy  Reverend Mindy is the Senior Pastor for the Independence Boulevard Christian Church on the corner of Independence and Gladstone Avenues in downtown Kansas City, Missouri. That church is a Disciples of Christ congregation that has worshiped at that location since 1905. Her work includes leading The Micah Ministry, which supports unhoused and poor humans1 in Kansas City. Reverend Mindy is also Executive Director of Intersect KC, which shares the church building with several wonderful projects including Care Beyond the Boulevard, recently featured on this show. And she partners with various social-justice & trauma-informed organizations. This includes co-chairing our region’s Becoming Beloved Community (anti-racism / pro-reconciliation) team and the Missouri Poor People’s Campaign. Lora McDonald Lora McDonald is executive director of the Metropolitan Organization for Racial and Economic Equality, stylized MORE-squared, website MORE2.org. They are part of the Gamaliel Network with headquarters in Chicago. Gamaliel is partnering with 25 other national networks in promoting on-line Pro-Democracy training February 11, 5-7 PM and February 20, 9-11 AM. To register, go to MORE2.org, then click, "Events", then look in the calendar for either February 11 or 20 and click "Pro-Democ" or "Pro-Democracy" on whichever one you would like to attend. NOTE: You have to register to get the Zoom link for the event.  McDonald and Fugarino are interviewed by Spencer Graves. Copyright 2026 , Mindy Fugarino, Lora McDonald, and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license. _______ 1. In the US, corporations are people and money is speech. Corporations seem not inclined to seek the support of Reverend Mindy. She focuses on helping humans.

Anthony Nadler talks with Spencer Graves about how he claims that conservative media are different. He is a co-editor of (2020) News on the Right and author of (2016) Making the News Popular. He is also lead author of a 2025 article on, "The Left Needs Media That Competes — and Wins". The basic theme of his work is that conservative media tend to segment media markets more on style and cultural identity with "news" that tends to be less consistent with other media than media more often consumed by liberals / progressives. He says we need media that work harder to connect with working class humans and help their audience understand how policies pushed by so-called conservative politicians are more likely to benefit the ultra-wealthy at the expense of the bottom 99 percent. Nadler is a Communications professor at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, roughly 20 miles / 30 km northwest of Philadelphia. More details and a moderated discussion of issues raised in this interview are supported in the Wikiversity article on “Conservative media are different” with a video. Copyright 2026 Anthony Nadler and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.  

PeaceWorks members Kristen Scheer and Ann Suellentrop discuss upcoming events and current trends around nuclear weapons and nuclear energy reactors. Feb 2nd at 5:30pm at All Souls UU Church PeaceWorks members will report back on the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability fall meeting in Las Vegas. Midwest Catholic Workers will gather April 24-27 with PeaceWorks members to protest at Kansas City’s nuclear bomb parts plant. Plans are also underway for events around the August 6th and 9th anniversaries of the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. PeaceWorks is a long-time Kansas City peace organization affiliated with the national group, Peace Action. Join us to hear about upcoming events and current issues pertaining to Kansas City’s nuclear bomb parts plant and other related social justice issues. The federal government will hold public hearings this spring about their plan to produce new nuclear weapons over the next 50 years. When the dates are announced, this will be a chance for humans to weigh in on 2 trillion dollars of our tax money on these catastrophic weapons or on things needed for our real security, such as education, housing, health care, and sustainable jobs.

Professor Tim Franklin and Zach Metzger talk with Spencer Graves about how you can help yourself by helping improve local media. Franklin is the leader of the Local News Initiative and the Metro Media Lab in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, just north of Chicago on Lake Michigan. Metzger is Director of their State of Local News subproject of the Local News Initiative. Medill Local News Initiative News deserts are growing, and democracy is under siege. The Local News Initiative is working to document how this is happening and highlight organizations that are bucking this trend. Their work includes six distinct projects: 1. What drives people to pay for local journalism 2. Human-centered design for local news products 3. Local news accelerator 4. Understanding media markets 5. Medill news leaders project 2019 6. The State of Local News Project Key results from each of these six projects can be summarized as follows: 1. What drives people to pay for local journalism. Key findings of this project include the following: 1.1. Find your own unique strength; don't mimic others. 1.2. Intense news consumers are more likely to drop a subscription, possibly annoyed by ads. 1.3. News outlets should encourage regular visits over intense reading. 1.4. Readers who use ad blockers are more likely to stay. 1.5. Both customers and companies benefit when consumers connect a product to their life goals. 2. Human-centered design (2018-2019): A key product of this project supports "Timelines", which can attract audiences with a sequence of short (less than 20) slides with a strong chronological narrative. 3. Local news accelerator. This project included four sub-projects: 3.1. Shared services. 3.2. Six-month cohort program in which local news organizations develop a project core to their missions. 3.3. Day-long Chicago Local News Summit. 3.4. Week-long innovation and leadership academy. 4. Understanding media markets, which worked to correlate local news consumption with other demographics. 5. Medill news leaders project 2019, which conducted over 50 interviews with news industry leaders (completed in 2019). 6. The State of Local News Project: This project is extending Penny Abernathy's path-breaking inventory of news deserts in the US, with annual reports since 2016. They now have two decades of data on news deserts and dynamic change in the news industry in the US. Tim Franklin Franklin is the John M. Mutz Chair in Local News in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern. Franklin was appointed by Governor J.B. Pritzker to serve on the Illinois Local Journalism Task Force, a bipartisan group studying the local news crisis in the state and recommending potential policy solutions. He also serves as Secretary of the Board of Directors of the Local Media Foundation, the charitable trust affiliated with the Local Media Association, one of the largest local media trade associations in North America representing newspapers, TV stations, radio outlets, digital-only news sites and R&D organizations. He also serves on the board of the Alliance for Trust in Media and The Associated Press Standards Advisory Panel. He also recently served on the board of the Google News Creators Project. He has been at Medill since 2017. Between 2014 and 2017 he was president of the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he almost doubled their revenue in three years. More details and a moderated discussion of issues raised in this interview are supported in the Wikiversity article on “Medill says you can help yourself by helping improve local media” with a video. Copyright 2025 Tim Franklin and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.

Two topic for this episode: First Ira Harritt and Rev. Dr. Vernon Howard discuss local ML King Day events. Then Nurse practitioner Jaynell "KK" Assmann describes Care Beyond the Boulevard (CBB). Martin Luther King Day  Ira Harritt, Secretary of the Interfaith Council of Greater Kansas City, Summarizes an ML King events January 11 (Sunday). A video of that service is available online. Then Rev. Dr. Vernon Howard discusses the origins of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which had ML King as its first president. Dr. Howard also describes events for ML King day next Monday. Dr. Howard is president of the  Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Kansas City and pastor of St. Mark's church at 3800 Troost. They have a press conference scheduled there next Monday, January 19, ML King Day, at 5:30 PM, with a mass immediately after at 6 PM. Care Beyond the Boulevard Jaynell founded Care Beyond the Boulevard in 2017 as a volunteer-based mobile medical clinic operating from the back of a pickup truck delivering high-quality healthcare to the homeless and other patients who lacked access to these services. They have grown substantially since. Care Beyond the Boulevard holds roughly 40 regularly scheduled medical clinics at selected locations each month. They also operate "Carehouse" at 3150 Fiberglass Road, Kansas City, KS 66115, which helps unhoused patients with a high risk of relapse recover after discharge from an area hospital. And they have "street outreach days", where they take healthcare directly to humans under bridges, in parks, encampments, and places where those experiencing poverty and homelessness are accessing other services. They have a fundraiser scheduled for Sunday, February 22, in the Rumely Tractor Historic Event Space, 1222 W. 12th St, Kansas City, MO 64101 in the West Bottoms. They will be sharing "Stories From the Street". They are also looking for opportunities to set up an information booth, join health fairs, and speak at conferences: Email [email protected] or call 913.291.2273. Copyright 2026 Jaynell Assmann, Ira Harritt, and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.  

Lisa Loving talks with Spencer Graves about media literacy and how you can report for your community. Loving has a wide range of experience as a journalist, including as interim director of the evening news at KBOO, a non-commercial, listener-supported, community radio station in Portland, Oregon. Her experience with KBOO helped inform her 2019 book, Street Journalist. She is working on another book with a tentative title, Watchdog: Investigative Tools for Community Reporters. Highlights Lisa said, "everyday people have the knowledge and skills to report on stuff. You don't have to get a master's degree in journalism ... . [S]ome of the very best newspapers in America today are high school newspapers. In my town, Portland, Oregon, Grant High School's newspaper [is] amazing." Lisa also said that advertising people started newspapers. She described an ad salesman named Ford, who had previously sold used cars but did not drive himself. He made friends with every merchant in a major business district in Portland and brought in revenue that funded local media. But before you go very far as a journalist, you need to decide who do you want to be consuming the news you produce, and then go out, meet those folks. Make sure you understand their concerns and how they want to consume news. "Some people want their information on a cell phone texted to them." Others want to read it on a website. You do need to attract an audience, preferably with careful fact checking and avoiding saying more than you can document. In that, it is also wise to consult multiple sources including looking for sources that might contradict your preconceptions. Hedge funds vs. mediocre men Lisa compared the hedge funds that are destroying newspapers to the doomsday machine planet killer in the Star Trek series. Graves claimed that the hedge funds are merely capitalizing on how newspapers have been losing advertising to the Internet. Lisa disagreed: "My personal theory is the Internet did not destroy the newspapers. Newspapers were destroyed by generation after generation of mediocre men, many of whom inherited these newspapers. [Those men] wouldn't hire people that didn't look like them, and they wouldn't hire people that didn't think like them. That's what killed newspapers. ... This is the purpose of diversity, equity, and inclusion. ... [W]hen you have people from all these different communities, when you have people with a wide array of experiential knowledge, you have a better idea of what's going on" -- and can attract a wider audience. OSINT and FOIA Lisa has been reading about Open-source intelligence (OSINT). "It's everything we've always done, where we were trying to get information where FOIA wouldn't work." BLM Lisa asked, How do everyday people have an effect on political violence? How can everyday people have an effect on, even just violence in their community? Always the beginning is to understand what's going on. ... Even if you can't always find all of the secret data that may be someplace. Everyday people can start in a situation like this by defining a situation like the Black Lives Matter movement. Black Lives Matter, BLM, hashtag was actually created by a couple of women. ... Ten years ago, we started to see this hashtag, BLM. ... All of a sudden, it exploded. The Black Lives Matter movement exploded. Because It had already been defined by its own community [because] so many Black men were killed by the cops. ... That's a perfect example of how community members can have an impact on political violence. ... You set up your system of information. You try to understand what the niche is. What is the need? What is the need for information in the environment that you're inhabiting? You set up your systems of information, and then you just keep doing what you're doing until something happens that brings the public eye to the issue that you're talking about. ... And then you cover that thing. But you have to come up with your idea. You have to listen to people. And figure out what the need is in that environment that you're working in. ... I want to encourage everyone ... to [find] your local independent media outlet, especially if it's a community media outlet, that invites members of the community in to participate, especially kids, ... and get involved. You don't have to have your voice on the air, but you could if you wanted. ... These outlets are all over the country, there's hundreds of them. They don't all look the same, they're not all radio. ... There's hybrid NPR Pacifica stations. ... Pacifica Radio Network is an incredible institution. It's an information distribution system that's controlled by local communities. You should take ownership. More details and a moderated discussion of issues raised in this interview are supported in the Wikiversity article on “Lisa Loving on media literacy and how you can report for your community” with a video. Copyright 2025 Lisa Loving and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.