Episode 6 - Ashley Fitzpatrick's future

Show Notes:

Before I met Ashley I knew her work. It was consistently the best reporting we had on energy issues in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. She continues to do that today as well at the Atlantic Business Magazine. At the time of “alternative facts,” deliberate disinformation campaign and infinite amount of AI slop, journalism, the kind Ashley practices, is more important then ever.

During the interview Ashley mentioned a couple of books and authors whose work informs some of her thinking about media and the knowledge landscape in today’s society. The first one is the work of Cecil Rosner: Manipulating the Message: How Powerful Forces Shape the News and the other one is Thomas Patterson’s Informing The News: The Need For Knowledge-based Journalism.

I believe that these are important conversations, so there are no ads because you don’t need another mattress commercial interrupting the story and there are no paid perks. If you find yourself listening to the podcast and feel like you can afford to support it, you can Buy Me a Coffee. And if you like the show, please share it with your friends and family.

If you’d like to leave a comment or be a guest on one of the future episodes go to www.futurespossible.com and leave a comment under an episode. The website also features AI-generated transcripts of every show.

Music: Blue Dot Sessions

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Pocket Casts | YouTube

AI Generated Transcript

[HOST] Hello. Thank you for listening to another episode of Futures Possible. I am Bojan Fürst and I make this show in St. John's on the island of Newfoundland. Today I don't stray far from home. Ashley Fitzpatrick is a journalist based in St. John's. Her specialty is energy sector in the province and in Atlantic Canada. And for her, journalism is more than just an occupation.

[AF] Who am I? Oh, that's a, that's a, that's an easy question to start with. Who am I? Um, Ashley Fitzpatrick. I am a journalist based in, I'm actually in Mount Pearl, but I typically work out of St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador. Um, yeah, I think pretty much my life has been defined by my occupation. So, uh, that's probably the best description I can give of myself.

[HOST] Ashley and I spoke about the future of the media industry and the information landscape we find ourselves in in this time of uncertainty. Before we started the conversation, she had just one question.

[AF] Can I swear? How do you feel about swearing? I may get myself worked up.

[HOST] She didn't swear, but we did have a tough conversation. Here is the future Ashley imagined.

[AF] Well, you know, um, you know, I've really fallen into this idea of knowledge, you know, and this idea of information and the importance of it in public debate and the development of public policy and, you know, the improvement of society, not just through the constant back and forth and, you know, people always frame it as the, he said, she said, you know, that, that kind of thing. But ultimately getting past that, you know, what are, what are those moments in time or what are those news stories or what are those, you know, elements that take us from the idea of, okay, I don't really know what I think about this to, okay, I think I have a better understanding of this.

I think there is an information war. I think that, I think that's a real thing. I think we don't talk about it enough or more importantly, that we haven't distilled the information enough to talk about it effectively. That there is a case where our society is changing based on how we get our information, um, how we verify our information, how we challenge our information, how we value where the information is coming from, you know, who are we listening to? In the world of AI, there are, you know, whole news outlets that don't really exist except for, you know, in, in the ones and zeros of some far off server.

It's, it's difficult for me to imagine how that information challenge in terms of the veracity information and, and the local relevance of information, you know, the, the distinct connection. of that broader information environment to your local reality, you know, how that isn't frankly, a war that is being lost.

You know, when I think about society, I, I think about the interactions for a long time, you know, news was a way to put out information to the public at large. You know, you had these mass media, like you were reaching mass numbers of people, the vast majority of societies, but then there's a shift and you start to get this fragmentation. And now, it's a case where you can fully believe that, say your post on Facebook that gets 100 reactions is reaching a wide audience. But the reality of it can be very, very different, where really, it's only people that you know and follow, or people who are flagged by the algorithm as being directly in line with maybe the thinking that is indicated or the AI believes is indicated by what you've written in your post. And so feeds it to people who are frankly like-minded, so these really important, in a lot of cases, issues, and really important ideas that people put forward that, yeah, maybe, maybe gets a little bit of reaction in their own sphere. So it doesn't end up reaching the broader mass of people in society, you know, doesn't get picked up, doesn't get disseminated, doesn't get talked about, doesn't have an avenue or a venue by which it can be investigated and debated and really explored.

So I think there's an agreement that, you know, however you want to define them, that journalists, sometimes people don't think of them as journalists, but that there should be some actors in society that at some point in time, take information and sift through it and bring it to the public in a way that's sort of manageable for folks who are going through their day-to-day and that you can trust that information and that it's factual. And, you know, the models for journalism in the world as it stands are just not there to basically keep people employed, you know, like they're real people. Journalists are real people and they've got bills to pay and they've been running on salaries that even as they've been reporting on things like inflation don't change for decades at a time. And they're fine with that because at least they have a job in the industry when a lot of their, you know, colleagues maybe have lost their jobs as the years have come by.

There's a lot, I think, in the world of journalism that people get upset about. And the bottom line is we're losing people. We're losing experience in the industry. We're losing really valuable and important positions. Most, if not all, of the people that I've met in the world of journalism really have a genuine hope that what they're doing is they're actually helping, you know, the community at large be able to, go about their lives and manage and not have to read the thousand page report. Like, no, we can, we can do that for you and maybe help distill information.

So, yeah, I look at the numbers and I don't expect that in five years things will improve. I think that people talk about the future of journalism and you hear it a lot, particularly when I was in Toronto, I'd hear it a lot of, oh, you should start your own outlet or you should really, you could hire people in those rural areas if you had your own organization that was, you know, dedicated to. But, you know, I don't want to be a business owner. There's always a suggestion that reporters start their own businesses, which everybody forgets takes them away from reporting. Like, there's a really fundamental thing there that, you know, and, you know, that's setting aside the idea that anybody you talk to further about it, you know, can't give you a business model that works. So, even if you said, yes, I'm going to be that person that drops whatever I'm doing or have done and goes out to fill that news desert that exists there, there's no real way for me to survive, to make a living, to make it more than a year. And I'm definitely not going to be heard amongst, you know, the media world in Canada and the media world that Canada has to figure out in terms of the international media world. You know, we have a very small voice and a very, very big echo chamber.

There's about 12,000 reporters in Canada, and there's about 160,000 people working in PR and communications and advertising. You know, the people that we have who are putting forward, in a lot of cases, a very particular message and not one that's sort of formed out of, you know, debate and all sides and input. But really, it's just a position of one particular point of view. You know, those folks wildly outweigh the journalists who are trying, I think, in a very honest way to open up the conversation and come to sort of, you know, informed conclusions about the problems and the suggestions to solve them.

When you asked me to do this, I fell into that intense anxiety that I always feel now thinking about the future. Because, you know, I'm tired of seeing, you know, lots of people in the future. I think that I was, you know, thinking about the future. And I'm not optimistic and I'm not upbeat. And it makes me upset. It makes me very uncomfortable to kind of think of where we might be. And I don't want to sound like a fatalist. I don't want to sound like somebody who doesn't think that we can, you know, make a wonderful future for ourselves. But every time I kind of fall into that regular thinking about it, I end up in a place that I'm not happy with. And I've taken an interest in trying to come up with ways of addressing it. You know, you see a problem. You don't want to just let it sit there and fester and end up in that place that you are horrified to think So, you try and imagine ways that you can shift the narrative, shift the direction, make things better. I think we're all just trying to do that in our day-to-day, you know, in all sorts of ways, even in the smallest of ways sometimes. And you're forgiving of people because everybody kind of sees the problems in But we all also have our regular day-to-days to kind of think about and not always an ability to say, OK, let's, this week I will be able to tackle our greatest problems in society.

I don't know who in Newfoundland and Labrador right now or where I would go if I wanted to talk about a piece of public policy. And not with a politician and trying to make a case, I want to explore a piece of policy. I don't know where I'd go to do that. And that's as somebody who considers themselves like a fairly informed person and who has sat with very intelligent people who know about civics and politics and government. You know, I don't know. And so I don't know how so many other people in my life would know where to go to open up a conversation that reaches people and that has meaning at the end of the day in terms of being able to potentially influence that actual work of policy and government at the end of the day and the actual understanding of the public at large.

Yeah, I should be a little more optimistic. I don't know, but it's not in the nature, you know, journalists, I think they fairly come by this sort of cynicism and because you'll get you'll get rickrolled like you'll you'll do a story that you very much believe that you've got a handle on exactly what's going on here. And here's the facts, Jack, and don't worry about it. Like, I've got you only to find out that you got something wildly wrong. And, you know, in a world where we had multiple outlets and, you know, many labor reporters or what have you, there would have been checks on that. And it would have been a case where, OK, well, one outlet got it wrong, but the other got it right. And so the overall message to society isn't isn't negatively affected, but it's harder now. It's harder now to get it right. And it's harder now to know that if you don't get it right, that you won't harm the public in a much more meaningful way. Like you won't disrupt the overall narrative or put people on the wrong path of thinking or create false realities, you know. And so it makes you hyper paranoid. It's really difficult now to do the job and not be nervous and cynical about everything that you're offered as an idea or solution, you know, challenge everything, question everything.

So people talk about, like I said, the solutions and what might come next. And there's a real meat of it for me is it typically comes down to what are we going to invest in? You know, what are we going to say? This is a way to help with the situation. Here's how we will pay for that. But then there are, you know, the next layers. It's, well, how do you finance the organization? How do you finance, more importantly, structural You know, will the governments of the day commit to spending with, you know, Canadian outlets or local outlets when they have to do advertising or their own forms of communication to help support those outlets? Instead of putting it into the conglomerates that really have no commitment to the country and its democratic processes and its public discussions. Right now, the way it stands right now is there really is no halt to the changes that we're seeing in technology and society. But what we do need to kind of start working on is within the frame that we have of how we communicate and how we live our lives. Where do we find those opportunities and how do we find those opportunities to inform ourselves and give ourselves a chance to all communicate, to interject with our own pieces of knowledge and understanding and inform and improve the debate overall so that it becomes this cycle. You know, it feeds into better public policy, you know, it feeds into further improvements in the world as opposed to falling into these echo chambers that let bad actors basically take control and do what they like in the real world.

What I think as an individual and what I think as a journalist, what I think as a person is no more important than the person standing next to me. My job involves trying to distill thoughts, but I am not an expert. And this has fallen by the wayside, but we should all be open to the idea that we can all help improve society. And we need to preserve those mechanisms and improve upon those means by which we come together and try and do that. Everybody, again, everybody, whether they even realize it or not, is going to be a part of the solution here. And I'm hoping that that becomes sort of core as we go forward. And maybe it'll be because horrible things happen and we have no choice but to kind of wake up and contribute to the change.

You live so much in the moment, like when you're trying to do news, quote unquote, or journalism that tends to focus on the immediate conversations that the future, you know, this thing down the road is like this, such an unknown. It feels scary to go there. And I don't mean scary in terms of my own kind of anxiety, but I mean just generally, it's scary to think about. Oh, God, what might be down there? I don't know. I might be dead in five years. What do you want from me? And it's the question, right? It's that grand question of like all of us, you know, what are we doing with our lives? And what might happen in our lives the next few years that change them fundamentally, you know, and nobody has the answers for that. And it's scary to dwell on it for any length of time. I mean, so here's the thing. I have this amazing sense of like wonder at so much of what's being done and what's being put out into the world. And so you see something like, you know, a generative AI that, you know, that is a fascinating kind of a thing.

But then you get into the realities, you know, you get into those. Okay, well, how did it create this and where is it rooted in its understanding? Like, I don't know where that really comes from or why those selections are being made. And then you just, your brain just falls down this complete rabbit hole from, wow, look at this. Isn't this neat to I really question if this is good for us.

So, yeah, I think, I think, you know, there's always that immediate sense of wonder and curiosity and cool. Let's all, you know, play with this. But, yeah, there's always something more serious that comes behind.

I think for me, I keep going back to that information environment. I think that if I was to pick up today, like I said, and move somewhere else for a job, that I would basically just be taking myself out of the equation and not contributing in a way that I know that I can. So, on a very personal level, it's just this goal of doing what is within my capability, which is limited as an individual. You know, there's no person, one person who, you know, has this grand ability to change everything or know everything. But within my capabilities, you know, I can do is take a story that I'm assigned and do the work as best I can and bring forward what I can on a particular subject or issue. So, I fundamentally think that it can change the way all of us think when things are reported well. And it's not just a case of, you know, academics having done the research so that there's evidence out there. People will say, listen to the scientists. Well, there are so many scientists in the world. Sometimes what it takes is someone who's willing to go out there and go through all of the research on a particular subject matter and talk to the people who are there, talk to the scientists, but then distill it down, you know, to kind of work with that. Just trying to do the best I can with that is what's going to drive me in the future and what I'll be doing.

I don't know. Maybe that changes. Maybe it gets to, like, a point where I have to do something else, but I hope not.

[HOST] Thank you for listening. That was Ashley Fitzpatrick, a St. John's-based journalist focusing on energy issues facing Atlantic Canada. I am Bojan First, and you listened to Futures Possible. I talk with my guests about their futures and a way of being they can imagine for themselves in this time. If you want to leave a comment or support the show, visit futurespossible.com. And if you like the show, it would be wonderful if you shared it with your friends and family. Take care.