Opinion: It’s not information we lack, but information we can trust

Philip Salata was a member of the inaugural cohort of the California Local News Fellowship and continues to report on the environment for inewsource, a nonprofit investigative news platform based in San Diego.

I AM A JOURNALIST.

To me, the role holds the heft and responsibility of public office. It may turn some heads to say it: I see this work as a political act.

I am not talking about red or blue. On the contrary, it’s the work of a journalist to expose what is and or is not real behind rhetoric, what is or is not happening after those who hold power make promises.

It’s not a new notion that journalism serves as a check on power.

But as businesses are rapidly transforming the market of information, our work is at a crossroads. In some ways however, it could actually be for the better. 

For our work to have meaning, we are obliged as journalists to build trust with those for whom we write, and write about. It’s not information we lack, but information we can trust.

For that we need new models of supporting the growth of the new generation of journalists.

Three years ago California legislators decided to invest in an answer of their own: the California Local News Fellowship. Administered by UC Berkeley Journalism, the nationally recognized fellowship has been innovating a path to infuse California’s journalism with new life.

This year, legislators have yet to include funding for the program in the state’s budget. But there are a few days left to change that.

Here are some reasons why it’s worth it.

What the fellowship made possible

First, a few facts. Since 2023 the program has funded more than 110 fellows and newsrooms over the last three years. Two thirds of the outlets include ethnic media platforms and digital news non-profits. Journalists backed by the program have produced more than 10,000 stories.

All the while, in the last 25 years, more than 70% of journalism jobs have disappeared and nearly one-third of newsrooms have closed.

These facts are meaningful, but as usual facts alone do not tell the whole story.

Here is a fragment of mine.

I wasn’t merely stationed at inewsource in San Diego to cover environment. Rather, what I saw in the program was a proposition. I was given the space, time, resources and configuration to invent new answers to what doing journalism responsibly today could mean.

So not only did I look wide-eyed toward the communities I would be writing about, I also had my colleagues, interlocutors throughout the whole state who were facing similar questions and challenges, and coming up with their own answers.

It was not a utopia. The challenges were and continue to be real. But between my colleagues, mentors, my newsroom, and the communities I made it my prerogative to be constantly present in, I was suddenly in a boisterous and mind-transforming conversation about what it can mean to grow a journalism with new roots.

This was possible because the fellowship provided a situation where I could experiment, follow my intuitions and build relationships with communities in ways that I felt had integrity. The people around me helped me make a case for what so many of us valued most and saw as one answer to the future of our craft: building trust.

It also served another purpose that I believe is crucial today for making meaningful, useful and trustworthy journalism: the structure of the fellowship consistently shuttled me between conversations on the hyper-local, to the state and to the national scale. 

The fellowship created an ecosystem of thinking, analysis and critique that pushed me to not only report on local issues, but to expose the connective tissue of what people were facing in their communities to larger systems. That’s an innate power of this craft far too often overlooked.

I believe as journalists we owe it to one another to create and foster situations in which our own thinking can be challenged. In my two years with the fellowship I was exposed to a culture of such challenges, and I carried that culture forward consciously in my newsroom.

It pushed me to be inventive with my work. I put into practice what one my dearest mentors called reporting by hanging out. It took a lot of hanging out to tease out some crucial gaps in reporting on one of California’s most chronic environmental issues, the Tijuana River pollution crisis.

People were getting sick, scientists were sounding alarms, but there was a dearth of documentation of how people’s lives have been transformed by decades of pollution that was only getting worse.

I spent months crisscrossing the U.S. Mexico border throughout the Tijuana River watershed interviewing, along with a small team, more than 100 people living and getting sick in the place they called home. The result was a narrative that documented their symptoms, but more importantly one that wove together experiences that could be overlooked because they seemed disparate.

The fellowship and my platform gave me space to invent.

The work continues

And then inewsource hired me when the fellowship ended. And now, I have a new colleague from the fellowship who has been energetically filling a crucial news gap in northern San Diego. The work continues.

The Fellowship has been a novel setup, in a time calling for novel ideas.

Legislators, please, it’s time to amp up this burgeoning experiment, not cut it. It’s invaluable. 

Philip Salata is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist covering the environment, energy and public health in San Diego and Imperial counties. He joined us in 2023. His work focuses on community impacts of the push toward the green economy and social/cultural issues in the border region related to the environment and climate change. He is a USC Annenberg fellow, and an alumnus of UC Berkeley’s California Local News Fellowship.