Stories to be done and want to do them right . I think, i would say, dont go looking for a bad guy to take down. Toco looking for a bigname. Understand that so much of what we can do is proactive journalism, understand what are the regulations that exist, who put things in place and what is a culture in almost any beat we can cover. Its hard to think of any that wouldnt have intersectionality. Give us an idea of some of the stories you seen and that you edited. Sure. That are stories as small estate houses, i love thinking back to maine, we discovered there had not been one complaint of harassment made in the state house its not that mainers are so lovely its just no mechanism to make the complaint existed. Those kinds of stories wet exists and how can people hold go forward if there are issues and that gives good accountability. So many times, chasing one person could be about a system that doesnt work. Absolutely. It could be a system in your symphony orchestra. It could be a system in the youth sports program, assist them on your city council. There are any number of places wherever there is power and a lack of diversity and a system in place, its just a good idea to take an extra look. We have you here we are happiest, playing editor, tell us what you gonna be doing. Me with my partner lisa have been stretching down every time the word resource has been mentioned that we are compiling all of that and we will put it onto a website tag to the assignment desk where people will see any number of databases with good people to talk to and other resources out there to have the reporting. To help in the effort we always have cards at every desk and every table for people who might not want to stand up and shout that they have an idea i want to bring it forward. We have a couple things to talk about, stories that have been done to give us an idea of best practices and how to do it right but also a request from people in the room, an idea that you say is just a story like to see covered, an idea you think should be developed. That takes us to our conversation to start this off. I want to start with Mindy Marquez from the miami herald i want to make sure you get credit for flying all the way in against all the travel issues you may have faced talk to us about breaking the news story and what it took. We know you are Star Reporters here that we wont let her escape attention. So, in reality julie started looking at this case before the me too movement. She had done incredible work on a womens correctional facility in florida. At the heart of that a lot of it was about sexual traffic and so she wanted to look at that and every time she would google sex trafficking in florida, the top of the name was jeffrey epstein. The case is 10 years old and then, at that moment, the person who handled the case was nominated to be in trumps cabinet. We did a fairly quick turnaround story that highlighted how the story and case was mishandled from the beginning. There was more to do there and i have to say, when julie first came to talk to me about the story, this is been mine so deeply, i said julie what more can we do because so much has been written about this over the last 10 years and julie said, very emphatically, no one ever talked to the victims. No one has talked to them or heard from them. They were shut out of the process and weve never gone back. The work that she did, to find out who those now women but really young, teenagers, some still in braces were and to compile 60 women, was extraordinary. She was able to reach out to about 60 to 80 victims that identified and we got half a dozen to talk to us. Then, she was doing all this work and then the me too movement broke out with this reporting and we were able to really, i think coming out of the new perspective, whats the story of the victim gave us a different perspective. No one took the 30,000 and the material to bear was found by digging and digging and digging. , triggered by someones nomination to a higher position in government but also the conversation, what is there for systemic power abuses and find a way to talk with victims that doesnt cause harm in the process. You have to gain your trust and thats part of the reason the project took so long. There was one where they didnt want to talk at all and a lot of these women never told anybody, this was for those who dont know its a multimillionaire Hedge Fund Manager from new york who owned homes all over the world the police found out about it and in a had alan dershowitz, kenneth starr, roy black, and he managed to lose his money to manipulate, thats another whole part of the story, how he did that, to treat these girls as if they were not the rooms, they were essentially treated as prostitutes because he lured them, they were work rules came from troubled families and had no money so he said, the lord that he used was just come give this old man a massage but it wasnt a massage at all. But somehow, he and his attorney managed to convince the prosecutors that these were not victims they were prostitutes, child prostitutes. So, these girls when i first approached them did not want to talk to me because even though there had been tons of Media Coverage about the story in their minds that had been covered from the sensationalized point of view were all anybody wanted to read was sex and these were famous and in their point of view and also in the view of the police chief never been interviewed for and detect, no one wanted to look at exact the what went wrong and how it went wrong and they felt betrayed. It took a long time to convince them that i wasnt gonna write the story that had been written before, i wanted to write the story about how the prosecutors didnt do their job and you just keep talking to them and then based on the questions that you ask them they realized i really think shes going to tell my story and i think that is really what is help with the project expect to the point that the framing of that situation of these young women as child prostitutes rather than vick comes was also a systemic issue. It was their ability to manipulate the system can i ask you how many women were involved in any of the prosecution in any of the framing. Its an interesting question because with the last panel, they mentioned that a couple panels had mentioned that they were trying to get together employers and there were discussions about this institutionalized problem, brought in lawyers for employees and lawyers for employers and i kept thinking to myself, most lawyers were part of the problem and, also the media white frankly everybody does the best they could but the media back then, this was 10 years ago, didnt cover the story like we would look at it today. It doesnt matter what they were doing they were molested back then it was like that a different way i think by all people involved. You may be a living example of the power shift of the time, to be able to reopen the story in that moment and revisit it with new information. It wouldnt of got the attention if it wasnt for other reporters, when i first pitched the story before the me too movement, they thought it would be a good story, my editor but when the me too movement happened, they were like, lets get this movie story out there its great timing. So speaking of the other reporters, and whose work over many years has been remarkable for all of us, your work, most recently, especially in the cabinet hearings, what do you feel the lessons are, especially from talking to a witness who was terrified to come forward . Explain the back story a little bit. In the nomination of the Supreme Court Justice Brett kavanaugh, obviously, Christine Buzzy Ford came forward to describe what had happened to her in high school. When that happened, we started to hear from other women with other experiences that were in some ways similar. And, i think, they began to walk towards being able to tell their story. It was a hard negotiation in many ways, stepping back, one of the things you said earlier is, this is about power this requires, often, people will have almost no power to confront some of the most powerful people in our country whether its someone about to join the Supreme Court or someone at the top of the movie industry or the attorney general of new york state these are terrifying target for these victims to speak out about. So, one of the things you will finish from the start is that the need to try to convince people to step up and tell their stories and i think in doing that, you talked about winning their trust and i think you also have to take extraordinary care to protect them and make sure youre not walking them off a plank but because, they could be in tremendous trouble if things go wrong for them. So, in the case of eric schneiderman, we heard one woman who was willing to speak up about what was basically in her mind Sexual Assault, my initial thought having covered the anita hill hearing was you need a pattern. If its one person its their word against someone elses word, credibility is the thing that all of these stories depend on. The accusers have to be believable and usually there are no witnesses. So, we started a search to see if there were other women who had the same experience and lo and behold it only took a matter of week before we had a handful of women with the same experience because frequently there are patterns of behavior and in the case of Brett Kavanaugh, both of these men were really terrifying but Brett Kavanaugh, it wasnt just the women themselves who were confronting him, it was, the lawyers and the law firms representing him. It was a complete power structure in the legal world. Law firms didnt want to have anything to do with being associated with the women who were going to challenge him. There were people found it hard to give them some work and the confidence they needed to come forward. Of them and weep was serious. That was a big part of getting them to come forward. Also, making sure the story was right. Confronting the people and giving them a chance to respond and seeing responsible reporters. Anyway, it was an incredibly Emotional Experience as a reporter and obviously emotional for the women, and in both of those stories, it was a very heightened Emotional Experience telling the stories and in the Brett Kavanaugh one, it was exhausting. Then, the fbi was supposedly getting in and checking the stories to see if they was true, and he didnt really look into anything. It all seemed to be quite a fake out, and of course, there was hearings that was not really looking for the truth, and i had kind of a dij vu feeling to anybody that covered Clarence Thomas and anita heal. anita hill. Talk about people who have been traumatized in reporting and a little bit about the story too. I am a partner at a Communications Firm in los angeles and has been on all sides of this issue here and worked with times up for eight months and at the end of the year, cbs hired me to give away the money as i call it, and i will tell how examples are being put to good use of this money. I got a call from a longtime friend who have been working with Christine Ford and when i go help Debbie Ramirez . Sunday night the new yorker story come out and monday morning, i was in boulder. The first thing that she said to me when i met her is that the only person i trust issue and him. For her, the only person in this insane world that she trusted and i am still working with debbie and now there are many books coming out and documentaries and it will be an interesting process. What i learned from her and i worked a lot with survivors and victims on various subjects but specifically in this case, the number of reports, the stakeout, i was able to call and say really the stakeout is not helpful. You are not going to get any coverage and what you are causing is her to hide out in her house and that is not helping anybody and certainly not her. Over time that was eventually one camera in the house and we was able to get her out of the house and that was incredibly helpful for her mental health. But there was a couple of reporters who came to me who very clearly had trauma informed training and you guys might do some, but they approach the discussion with her very differently from other reporters. It was not what can i get . Can i get her own heir to tell very difficult details of her story, which was not helpful. It have been reported in the new yorker and for every journalist who came forward to her, she did not want to do that. She wanted to talk about why, and why she came forward, and why she came forward on behalf of survivors. That was less of an interest in the story of can i get her on the air telling the details about her experience with rick, and all. Brett kavanaugh. The trauma informed producers had a different approach to the conversation and i really would encourage people and i think when you put your reporters to that kind of training and i have now worked with some reporters and said to them there is a training and if you go look at that, you can come back into it. The issues with debbie had to do with a memory gap and when you have had trauma from training you understand the memory gaps differently and you can approach the victim with an understanding of why they are having those memory gaps. It help to open the door for her and for her to be talking to these reporters who are writing these books. I do think that is a really valuable component of this work, and more newsrooms should really be looking into doing this. Trauma from reporting helps you avoid the pitfalls of judging peoples assets. Are the angry or not they not angry, and that takes me to soraya, who as written in the book that rage becomes a power of womens anger. I have one of the quotes from your book that we are so busy teaching people to be likable that we often need to teach the girls like boys to be respected. If the woman is angry that could be a problem. If she is not angry enough that could be a problem, and how reporters interpret that even in framing the story can make such a difference. We tend to think of victims be quiet and afraid to speak. They come in all responses. We have seen the same in general that appear in the courtroom, and i think it is really important to understand why the trauma informed reporting structure is so valuable. The women center the studies every year and one of the most important was a study of the coverage of Sexual Assault stories. What came out of that and i think it is important, given what we have heard about the approaches that all of the stories have taken, was that a very disproportionate amount of stories was been written by men in sports departments. That is because so many high profile cases involve athletes. But men in sports departments generally dont come to stories of from the perspective of trauma and the study also showed that there is certain aspects of having this masculine environment in the way the stories are framed and told and the words that are chosen. Roughly in 90 of the sports stories, they are still written by men and when they write about Sexual Assault, they tend to focus on the legal issue and we know that the legal system completely fails the victim over and over again. They tend to focus on a he said she said framing which is very traditional in journalism, but actually unhelpful in situations where there are imbalances of credibility based on gender. Being able to actually have people on staff who have studied Sexual Violence or understand the difference between Sexual Violence and harassment and gender harassment because i think between those two things, it is important to make that distinction. A lot of what women experience writing about this topic is in fact not Sexual Harassment, but gender harassment, which is a confrontation of static. I write extensively about Sexual Violence, and Sexual Violence is the number 1 catalyst for online harassment. Sexual violence is writing about them is a more social justice. These are direct confrontations to power structure and studies have shown that studies about these things tend to generate a lot more online abuse. But that is not actually Sexual Harassment online. It is a form of gender harassment because there is a lot about Sexual Violence that implicates power and that is what we are talking about. Writing about it emits the strong status threat and it is very evident in our newsrooms. I think that we cannot really talk about sources or who is writing stories if we are not talking about the structure of our corporations. If you think back to the Rolling Stone story and the debunking of that story, it gives a picture perfect example because that story started off with framing that is known not to be good for Sexual Violence stories. It was a very extreme story and it wasnt emblematic of the story. People who chose to write about it and ultimately wrote about it did not understand the biological sexual trauma, and for her memory for example, it was not well understood. The breakdown of what failed also followed pretty bad policies about covering Sexual Violence. Even though everybody involved acknowledged the victim had suffered some terrible violence, the story ended up being a second duke. It was much more extensively covered as that than it had been as innate response to Sexual Violence, which what it tried to be. I think is a problem and as a writer i have experienced this, and are very senior editorial spaces insist on justifying, and in a way that protects fraternity. It is not only the fraternity through the media, but again as is the case with any of the cases we have talked about overlapping systems of fraternity. There is a Legal Systems and the media system and that tech world and it is in the spaces where they overlap that the power is particularly telling. I think that even though something as simple as thinking what is the perfect victim look like is far more complicated than representation or who is writing the story because it speaks to a deep knowledge of experience. No better evidence of that as we come from the coverage of the larry nasser story which we have one of the key reporters who brought that to light from a smaller newspaper than the miami herald. Give us your thoughts first of all and a little background on what you did, and then the lessons for the people in the room. My colleagues and i investigated usa gymnastics and their handling of sexual abuse allegations, and we also was the ones who broke the larry nasser investigation as well, and you heard it a lot in this conversation today talking about systems and how systems work and how systems can fail and we heard that with what juliet was talking about earlier as well as others. From what ive seen in my investigation looking at sexual abuse in schools and looking at sexual abuse in gymnastics and other entities is that it is common, and what should you do and what is the right thing to do and what is the law require . What i have seen over and over again is that the systems, they fail and sometimes they feel for good reasons whether it is because they like the person or the person is a good reputation and they think it is somebody who is good, and over and over again, the systems fail and it is not just a usa gymnastics problem and not a court problem, it is not a police problem, it is a community problem, and it is a pervasive problem in creating an environment for people where they can just be comfortable sharing their stories is the first step to creating change. Talk a little bit about some of the barriers that you face, especially, you are not a tremendously wellfunded organization and you dont have a great budget to go into a lot of travel and a lot of attorneys. How did you handle it within the budget you have . We have bosses who are incredibly supportive of the work that we are doing, and believed in the importance of giving survivors a voice. We was making a lot of phone calls and when we needed access to documents, again, we got support from far away. You had to get up in the morning know who had your back and i cannot imagine there was fights that i didnt even know about. I think that we have a relationship were number 1, there is a point where julie needed to come to my office to make sure that i understood the story she was trying to pursue and we had the conversation because i wanted to make sure it was a story that was going to be different and we was going to be able to differentiate what was done. She said i want to make sure you read this because i need a womans perspective on it. The fact that while julie worked very close with the investigative editor, we kept Touching Base along the way and i think in fact i did read every drop that julie worked on, and we just have been committed to that kind of work. It is a commitment because julie is an amazing report and when we have breaking news in which we have had a lot of this year with the bridge collapse and a parkland shooting, and this is the kind of person that you want to throw into the fray. She needed to work, and the other conversation that i dont think ive ever had, is you dont know to a certain extent who youre going to believe by, but julie came in and said i have sources who are refusing to talk to me because they did not believe that the miami herald is ever going to run this story. She have been so successful in quashing the whole proceeding, and she could take it back to the sources that we are indeed going to publish the story. Julie got some absolutely critical Law Enforcement officers to doctor. But you are not done. We are not done. We are fighting in court to unseal some records and there is a lot of information that is not come forth because a lot of the documents in several cases have been sealed, and we are actually right now trying to unseal a case in new york. By the way, i want to point out that is a big problem with these kinds of cases with all of these victims and when they do get, when they do get the courage to finally maybe go public with this, or to sue whoever it is who sexually assaulted them, what happens is everything is sealed in the case. Then it is settled and that is what happened in this. We had dozens and dozens of girls who was molested by this man and he basically made it all go away by making all of the settlements and all of the details of everything that he did including possibly doing it around the world and having recruiters recruit young girls from yugoslavia, and most of it anyway, 99 of it, has been concealed by the court. We are challenging with the support and Everybody Knows is very costly, and we are challenging the court system and saying wait a minute, you cannot keep hiding what he did. That is essentially what has happened here. That essentially is what the newsrooms do. They turned the problem into the story. They report on that roadblock. I could not help but noticing there was an immediate eye contact when you said we are not done in your eyes kind of lit up. [ laughter ] i think they did an incredible job, and we are not necessarily done on the Brett Kavanaugh thing either. We cannot get some people on the record but hope springs eternal. Anymore that you would like to share about that. No, i cant. But i had to ask. I am shannon lee. This is a lot and a lack of media literacy. I know because i am a survivor activist and also a journalist, and i kind of get it from all sides. Trust me there are so many journalists who want to tell the story and who have wanted to tell the stories and i have been writing about Sexual Violence since 2015 and maybe before that. I was writing before metoo and we can only get stories out, and otherwise, the editors was not interested. We want to tell the stories, and i think there is just so many layers as to why these things are not getting out. We dont talk about who gets to tell what stories, and we dont talk about whose stories the editors deemed worthy of a publication, and how that kind of contributes to why certain things are not discussed. Who can actually afford to work in journalism . Really, when you talk about trauma informed media, we are talking about who gets to write stories that concerned them. Also, who is just given a beat and they kind of have to take it and run with it. There is a lot of issues that we are dealing and a lot of things have changed since metoo went viral, but i think there is a hierarchy in terms was stories are getting out there. It kind of goes down, and there is a story i tried to get out there, and it was a story about a serial , and it was a survivor who reached out to be a wanted the story to be told from the Vantage Point, and they actually had a story that was going to come out and it was packaged for television and killed because the family threatened the network with a lawsuit. They have been trying to come out and tell the story, and they came to me and it is kind of like you know, we can only do so much as journalists. We will take it to them and after metoo, your voice will be heard. They was from the Recovery Community and it was automatic they was addicts. They was not the good members of the community. There is still a lot of work to be done from the context of the story and also just realizing that we can turn off our work, but i get talk to a lot about language. If i writeand he goes to my editor and comes out sexual misconduct, i cannot help that. I have told it from my truth and hopefully try to present it to whatever the story is about, but there is still a lot of things, and they have to be careful of in terms of a legal risk and things like that. It is not just putting it out there and why are you creating this language about what actually happened . That is not what i turned in, but hopefully it was represented in that story. Just to keep in mind there is a lot of things going on and even in 2019, we just had surviving r kelly come out. [ laughter ] you know what i am saying . We are, and i put something out when that came out because this should be trending everywhere. There is a lot of stuff that came out, and there was some things that we had problems with and some people that was featured in the documentary that was problematic. But the story still stands and because one of the story to be told from their Vantage Point and why isnt this going viral everywhere and why isnt everybody talking about it . Lets let sarah speak to that. Take you for your comments and as members of the mainstream or traditional media or even emerging media, in terms of the Broader Media and the landscape, we have to do a better job of paying attention to truly the emerging media were emerging platforms and voices, because theres so many people out there telling some of the stories and i think from a perspective, the folks that are here today talking about putting resources toward coverage, but all of us, all News Organizations and journalists to put more resources and even think of how whatever stories you are covering is there a sidebar that has to do are overlaps with some of the issues we raise. For example, surviving r kelly for lack of a better word was a project by a producer and has the music background. She is certainly a lot of things and journalists in various markets would have been able to cover r kelly to the trial and through the subsequent issues that we have seen over the course of time, but that was a watershed moment, that three night documentary own lifetime, and for the rest of us, there is kind of a feeling of a media ketchup here in terms of what was covered in the documentary, and i think that is a really good learning moment for us of how there was many stories in our community, and society at large that we probably are not spending enough time on. I think it is a good homework to go back to your newsroom and say what is the r kelly moment in our community that we are not paying attention to, and we need to put some attention and resources to . I certainly want to acknowledge dream hampton again who is a voice out there and certainly taking up media space and i dont know that all of us in terms of traditional media are focused on these really important voices out there trying to speak truth to power. I actually agree with that and i just wanted to jump off what both of you was saying and point out there are predators out there who specifically target individuals who they believe they can discredit, and they find people who may come from difficult backgrounds or who struggle with addiction, and things like that, and it doesnt mean those stories are not valid and dont deserve to be heard. Even how we write because the language that we use is a big difference between disadvantaged and addicted. Go ahead Kate Mccarthy from the womens center. I think it is interesting writing about Sexual Violence as i have been doing for many years. Back in 2017, we put together, and the training, covering. It has been in lgbt magazines and there has been coverage of brian singer in los angeles was a man and prayed on youngman. But i feel like we are leaving those people out of the conversation and leaving people who are not having the picture perfect view of what the narrative is. We really have to break out immediately, we have touched on this a little bit. I think that we cannot have the conversation without talking about how, and on this topic in particular, because women, and you see it is studies after study, and you see it in every single case whether not it was metoo or before metoo of a credibility gap and women overwhelmingly are abused, and male victims believe with the victim is saying but in general, men have a much lower rate of acceptance for what is being said. That makes sense cognitively because to accept what women are saying is a serious threat to the system and to the hierarchy that exist and sometimes it is dominantly white, but in the case of r kelly, that is not the case. We saw the implication of black men denying it are black masculinity Holding Power over these girls. I think that is really in our newsrooms, and we have to figure out, and i believe we all encounter backlash with the stories at some level or another. We do all of the emotional labor of working around, and if i write the words white man, it is not seen as a description, it is seen as an attack. Sometimes it is even attacked by editors who are men who are white, but sometimes it is seen as an attack by editors who are women and are white because it feels like an attack. Having those kind of difficult conversations, i think those are important and what may be, this morning, we was talking about in the new employee orientation and people coming into the newsrooms have really different experiences, but in fact, i think new employee orientation should be for managers and not for the people coming in necessarily. It should be for the people that have been there and havent had these experiences. I wanted to make a point about credibility and whose stories are deemed worthy of telling. Janie made a point that it is helpful to find multiple people for a story regarding one person, and i wanted to make a point through things, that we hear from people who are willing to tell the story. The problem is that harassment and the person who assaulted them isnt a superstar, so it is not deemed worthy of attention. But if that person is a serial actor, those are the kind of stories that help demonstrate the systemic problems in particular industries and workplaces that will help us get to the structural change that we really need and that kind of reform. I would encourage you to be thinking about that and maybe keep an open mind as people who are dealing with these terrible problems and dont have the resources and someone to help them attract attention. The other thing that i wanted to say is about leadership and the resource issue, and we have been talking a lot today about we need leadership from the top to change organizations internally. But clearly talking about when we say leadership, what about investors and shareholders and holding up unaccountable and how are they helping or obstructing cultural change . Similarly, are they helping to drive resources . Are they making it a priority so that you have the freedom and the resources to tell the stories. As we do that, let me ask everyone in the room to start thinking now about the story idea that you want to suggest because shortly we will go into that mode and we will love to hear from people about the untold stories, and then we will go to our panel. I actually wanted to bring this back in a slightly different direction and something closer to my heart, which is employees coming into the newsroom, and especially broadcast journalists, but that also goes for print journalist who carried cameras and get images and etc. There was a story of the week you were a young woman was reporting by herself doing, there was mass overdoses and etc. And some of the people around her felt that her reporting was disrespectful because there was people who have been impacted and died. She was attacked and she was out there by herself. He was attacked and somebody in the crowd pulled the other person all four, the woman. These kind of attacks are happening more often and it is part of the overall environment right now in terms of how the general public sees journalist to a certain degree. We only have three African American white house reporters be vilified by the residents of the white house, and that doesnt help. The has to be more support one way or the other a we have to provide support and if we want these people to stay in the business to do the top stories that we are talking about now because if you are attacked during a standup, you are not going to get the point probably when you are doing this type of story that the miami herald is. The climate has changed and we have to change with it to some thats back to provide the support and have the diversity that we want to go to with the news in the future. I think it might be an opportune time to talk about the impact of nonprofits in this world because in a lot of ways they are the groups that are providing some sort of report in terms of journalist being attacked and heart of what we have been doing for a long time is providing hostile environment training for journalist and granted we have been focusing primarily on your list have been operating in war zones, but we are going to use exit its portion of our funding to provide training to journalists here in the united states, especially in smaller News Organizations who cannot afford to provide that type of training and recognition, and there is danger everywhere. In regards to the types of stories that are being commissioned and reported, grants that are available to journalists who want to cover these kind of stories were the editors might not find the resources to cover them until there is actually something there. We and many other organizations provide grants to cover these and other kind of stories that are generally going untold because there isnt that appeal or that star power and etc. I think it is important for the media organizations to know that there are nonprofit organizations supporting their operation they can go to for these kinds of resources. Whether it is reporting itself or whatever, but also, i think there is a lot of leverage here, and i think it is not used enough to make sure that the kind of communities they are supporting to the other grants are being perpetuated and supported in the news media organizations themselves into the reporting that is being done. I am going to take note of the training so that people will be able to find it to your website. We are going to jane and then to julie. I wanted to quickly follow up on your point about involving maybe stockholders or the Corporate Structure and i think again since a lot of the stories are about power that as a reporter, it is worth taking a look at the Corporate Structure in which these people work and look at who is on the board of this company and look at the stockholders who own the company. Look up there has been boycotts recently. There was at 90 million settlement with the stockholder because of payments that fox was paying out for harassment cases. There is a lot of ways to kind of follow the money and find the power in the stories that are not just what happened with he said she said. Hello everybody, and this is been the best conversation for me so far and i was, and a year to half ago, i did not want to be the person of color coming in , [ laughter ] i think that, my dirty jokes, but this message is for the managers in the Upper Echelon in the room. You have to ease up on trying to get us to fix the problem. It is the equivalent of you revving my car and making my insurance pay for it. Right . Your insurance has to pay for and it has to cost you something. The thing, and i am outside of legacy media now, and my boss is not in the room, but you will see the heads nod, as we are really tired of sitting in rooms, helping people learn basic stuff that we have been applying our entire life. I think however you can figure out, you need to give women and people of color a path on some of these trainings because frankly, we dont need them. Also wanted to suggest i have a company, and we have 2630 people working at any point, and nobody reports to anyone. This is very intentional and i have no hierarchy and everybody gets whatever the job is. I dont even have an assistant and i dont want any hierarchy whatsoever and nobody has to go into any spaces around other people. Especially for women, it is really important to have a little bit of flex time into the job so they dont have to be in the office five days a week nonstop lot maybe make the third week of the month that you work two days out in the field or however you want to work it out, we need physical separation, especially from these people i am never going to leave. For these managers, that is another option and say you want to work every other thursday from home . That would be another psychological break for us to be able to go back yet and say thursday, i am getting my break. Then i will be able to go and walk my dog and that is a sort of peace of mind i need. We talk about fatigue among ourselves all the time and it detracts me from professional development. You are actually keeping me from exercising a huge part of my brain to help other people when i really just want to be a better reporter and editor and i want to learn to be able to do other things. We have to be honest about who needs a healthier, and go and help those people. I think i would like to give you a break and make sure that when you come back there are not any church to have a break from. [ laughter ] thank you so much, i am the executive editor on crisis reporting and happy to see so many friends at this room and new faces, and i just want to say first of all jill you for all of the incredible work that you and kathy have done over the last year convening and keeping the focus on this issue. I wanted to build something what lisa said and im happy she said it which is that nonprofit News Organizations places a crucial role in helping to fix these problems, and kind of move into another stage. I spent my entire career at legacy News Organizations until quite recently, and being in the nonprofit News Organization space right now i want everyone to know that we have resources. We give grants to journalists to do incredible products projects whether not they are freelance or whatever, we have hostile environment training and we are trying to, and i think it is absolutely true of organizations that we are trying to set the standard to get legacy News Organizations to follow our lead in matching diversity and one of the things we are most concerned about is looking at diversity figures in newsrooms and trying to exceed those. Our annual report came out today and we are really pleased that we looked at 40 of the population is minority and most newsrooms dont meet that, and we have met that in terms of our grantees and half of our grantees are women and 67 are freelance. We feel like we have not done enough, but 67 freelance is also important because so many people are being driven out of the business because of the impossibility of funding and traveling and doing the work they want to do. I put this out is a challenge to all of us that we go back and say it is some small nonprofit News Organization, if they can do 40 minority, surely each of our newsrooms can do that, and it can reflect this country, so we are telling stories not just about minority america, but with the perspective of people of color and women telling those stories. I really echo what you said and not being relegated to certain things and making sure that the people in our organizations that we are not relying on people of color to do all of the heavy lifting and work on diversely because that becomes another second fulltime job for them on top of their other duties. Tried to be sensitive to that and thank you so much. You just release those numbers but you also just came on board so we know next year is going to be better. We will go from good to really good. Just one comment, and i wanted to talk about the fixit issues and the token African American and say it from the perspective of being a lesbian, there is a tension between saying we want to have diversity, and we want to start bringing in people of color or lgbt people who hasnt had someone before. Then the issue of that person i am just a token or been asked to carry too much because that is just straight out tension. To me, the issue is about the courageous conversation of how do we manage that . People say that is why you need not just diversely but inclusion. Fine. What does that mean in terms of the issues that you brought up . What does it mean when you say i dont want to serve on the third Diversity Task force and then the Diversity Task forces all white people and people say where is the representation . I think it is important for us to acknowledge and the same thing, being a lesbian, you need to be present and you need to be out about it, but was one has to recognize that tension and that is the main thing i would say with respect to that. The other thing that i would say in terms of not needing the training, thats right, you would need some of the training but when we are talking about respect for the workplace training, the whole point is that we want to say that is separate and in addition to some of the other work. I remember that likemen who have been hired to do something, and then it turned out a bunch of tweets wrote really of noxious things to straight people. I as a lesbian thought that is not okay, and that probably disqualifies you for the job you was potentially being considered for because the point is you have to show that you can be respectful to everyone. That was my two points. I just had a good story idea in there, and who has done a story about how Diversity Councils have been created and how i would like to be a member of one . Who has a story about that and what toll it will take on the people who was on it . We have a couple of ideas, and let the sears of ideas, either things you have done or stories that you would like to see. I am looking around the room. I have one for you. There has been some coverage of the acts that was passed last year in order to stop sex trafficking. It has been valuable in some communities that a been harmed by that are actually workers who have you see internet as a way to be more safe than 20 years ago. The effects of part of the effects of that law has been to shut down things were there has been communities who would rely on each other and check each other out and make sure the people was in a more safe condition. We have heard when craigslist had to shut down the men for midsection, and that made sex trafficking lets say for those people. It puts them in a more harmful situation, and this might not be the most sympathetic people, but that is part of the reason why we should be going out in some of these communities, and they have been covered in non mainstream publications a lot and be covered a little bit in mainstream publications, but i bet a lot of the people in your community. I go out and talk to these folks, and they are in a more dangerous situation because the way the law has changed and the unintended consequences. I would like you to step back over because i want to put her back on the spot. In the work that you have done with the task force revisited this year, he looked at other occupations and there was some good story ideas in their where there was some effort is being made in the Hospitality Industry and the restaurant industry, and we want to find a camera that can see you. Just make sure that everybody can see you. Right there. Talk to that camera right there and tell a little bit, as there are great story ideas in their. Actually it is very easy to find all of this by going to the eeoc website and just google the task force and dont try to navigate our website. You will get right to it and see testimonies of the different commission and task force meetings. But on this one, it was really trying to bring different specific industries, and i think it is called homeroom, which i think is a great story actually. It is a restaurant, like all macaroni and cheese, but it is a restaurant, in oakland, and by engaging everyone together, to come up with a solution, and i want to get back to what i said before, i totally do not want to minimize the issue, because i have seen it. But, how do you have that conversation . She engaged everyone in the restaurant because they was having issues of customers acting inappropriately, and the mostly female waiters, or waitresses, was going to that mostly male managers describing what happened and the mill manager saying was that really so bad or kind of diminish it. So they came up with, and thank you, yellow, orange, and red. Yellow is that may be uncomfortable and i want to tell you but i am fight about still serving the stable. But, i can say that i dont want to serve this table. Orange is that it may be really uncomfortable and the rule is the manager will serve the table not her. Then read is touching in a weight where the manager goes to the customer and says please leave. It takes that discretion away from the manager to decide whether or not it is orange or yellow or red. What about the Hotel Workers . An hotel worker, lets have a panic button that we can hit if the number of people apparently who they go into the room, and the guy doesnt have anything on. He says good, come in and clean. I am just hanging around with no close. So the union in chicago started the hands up and hands on campaign, and they got an order thats passed that required panic buttons on people because you cannot leave the room to get to the car but heres the part about changing cultural generally, and i got some coverage and i think you could get more, and maybe two months ago, a bunch of hotels change with marriott leading the way and voluntarily said with the this is what we are going to get to our workers. Other people can pick it up voluntarily. I am linda from futures about violence. We work with a coalition of organizations that are supporting women in the janitorial industry in california, and the janitorial women are transforming their industry and if you want to really see who has been working on culture change for quite some time, those are the stories that we need to lift up. There has been some coverage of it but it is been very limited and it would be great to see it in a real mainstream organization to show others what has worked with people who did not have power and how they really turn their vulnerability into power and propelled change within their industry. This other coalition is a partner of ours and they have transformed the Agricultural Industry in florida. I would look to those types of organizations. We are going to go over here and that i want to make sure that people who have not yet spoken also have a chance to speak. Quickly, i would just say that i have written about Sexual Violence and disability and i want to see, and i have written about marital and i hope to see more stories on that because i got a great response and it is happening and not talked about. I have written about not hindering Sexual Violence, and i would love to hear more about life after because we are into horrified the public without talking about the life after and how we can actually uplift and empower survivors. Alyssa, we have talked a lot about freelancing, and there really is stories to be done about people that work at the discretion of others. There is so many stories. We have an Emergency Fund for women journalists, and we get one request every 72 hours. The stories abound, but i think what most shocks us is the volume. I think that most people generally dont understand the level of Sexual Violence against journalists around the world, and if we have a hostile environment for training and we asked for our women to raise their hands to a been sexually attacked to be , three fourths of the women raise their hand. The women who we work with go into the field with the morning after pill. It is just given and i think that notion that Sexual Violence is a given in this profession is really frightening and should mortify everybody. Thats is why training is so important and not a foolproof way, but we do know from the people who we work with that it has helped them and i think just the sheer volume and the level of danger that imo journalists are facing on a regular basis is a story in and of itself. There is things that people will take away from today they will remember. The idea of women taking the morning after pill an assignment because of the risk is particularly haunting. I think it is important and i think a lot of our institutions that the environment doesnt include the online environment. There is still this wall between the virtual and the real and because we live with these high rates of harassment and Sexual Violence, sexual threats, and particularly residents, you have either beenas a large percentage of the people have, or you spend your life try to avoid being as every woman on the planet has. I think that understanding online or in a Workplace Environment where the sexual threats are a form of hostile gender harassment, but is effective. We know that women start working in certain areas and they will stop writing about certain issues. They have genuine concerns and fears, and that is important because we need safety to be paramount, but the reason we started this project is because in fact while the safety is important, it is even more important to understand what the degradation of our freedom of expression means for the civic life and political participation and democracy. In the last 10 years harassment of women, vertically marginalizing women with multiple identities, it has not been taken seriously. The harassment of women politicians particularly through fortification is not covered in mainstream media. Yet we know it is happening. Any woman who has reached a level of seniority has been turned and seen. The same thing happens to highprofile women and given the difference between thinking of the shifting text to photography is important in our institution is women are much more likely to be harassed through photomanipulation and turned into pornographic objects having fake videos made of them and having the Children Incorporated into the pornography, and that is really important to understand why we have this hostility happening and what it means for the high burnout rates of particularly among young women. I can imagine, and if you are dealing with a story like that, and the focus of the story, its going to be a what the looks like, or is the focus of the story being on the bigger societal issue because there is an easy story in front of you. We saw the mini belated photo that was sent around by social media. But how is it covered . I think that we have to be mindful of that ourselves, and i think in this case specifically, it helps, and i want to say clearly that a man can be sensitive, but when you have a woman, and so on in the process of reporting or editing, i think that helps bring sensitivity to it, and that is where the diversity issue goes into it because i think, and i am not sure and i have a lot of great investigative reporters, but i am not sure that a man wouldve gotten the story. In addition to teaching at the university of wisconsin, i was in the center of journalism ethics, and on this have less of a story on ideas a morbid call to think differently about the way you practice journalism. A lot of what we have heard today is busting some traditional norms and the things that people always rely on like if there is a problem you run home to mama and there is this code that is lockdown and tells me the way that i should do things. I think we need to talk about trauma and for journalism and you are thinking about different way of going about the reporting and often times i am disappointed when i go to work in newsrooms and hear from people like the society of professional journalists code of ethics on independence tells me i should not do that. I should not think about the persons trauma because i dont know if that trauma ever happened and i approve that and we come at her from this combative approach, and i think yes, those ethics are very important and i spend every minute of every day think about them and i am a geek in that regard, but if we continue to use them as a shield between us and the post we are supposed to serve in the sources we are working with, that can be highly problematic. We have been doing some interesting work on sourcing and i will leave you with something that is striking to me, but not as striking as the morning after pill, but is really stuck with me. That is the one who described journalism like mining as it is an extractive industry and you take what you need for me and leave we be with nothing, and i am stripped. It was a stunning insight and change the way i thought about how we should be approaching what we do and at the most fundamental level, it should be productive. I was just going to jump on that because one of the things in journalism and eyesore have watched is when you have survivors of sexual abuse, it has always been an even with the story to some degree and debate on whether not you call them accusers versus victims. We have a great debate in the newsroom over the story because the debate was whether not we could use the word victim because technically the charge that he pled guilty to was solicitation of prostitution. But we knew these girls were victims because there with lawsuits and other evidence. We knew there was so many of them, and we really had to debate that for a while, and i think there was some people in the newsroom who felt we should use the word accuser and i did not feel we should use that and at one point i got an editorial someone at the Washington Post that was written about the topic, and i said look, we have to stop this and they are survivors and victims and we dont have to say he did it, but we have to acknowledge this happened. That is the debate along the lines of journalists, and people are innocent until proven guilty, but at some point you have to recognize that the victims did suffer and was victimized. I was going to quickly toss an idea before handing the microphone over and say in my home state of North Carolina there is now an effort to change the law because you cannot get a restraining order against her partner. It also speak to the stereotypes of does a man the protection of the law from a partner . Can a woman be the aggressor . We should be exploring those issues as well as the legal issues. Just to follow up on that for a long time they used to refer to as alleged victims and now there is at least some conversation. I want to talk about this idea and i wish we had a color because i would refer to the green washing of whatever its color is. The Culture Shift which is companies coming out and taking on, and the Hotel Panic Button made me think about it. A bunch of hotels came out in december and say we will commit at some later date and at some later time and did some big way. There was good coverage around that, but the panic worker button doesnt make any sense if you dont have any mechanism in the hotel to answer the call and when the call is answered and an assault is discovered, the hotel backs of the employee in the legal case against that. Those are the two pieces that make all of the difference. It is important that your assault be interrupted and the panic worker button helps you on that, but it doesnt do any good if there is it the additional commitment to backing them up in a court of law and backing them up in the hr process, and you kind of see that in any of these companies is that i think they are potentially saying how great it is all of these hotels came together to support panic worker buttons without a purple washing of that which is what that covers is that it is really popular right now, and it is a good thing to try and get ahead of, but we want to dig down deeper and continue to do the followup reporting. It is a reminder of the role of us as critical thinkers, what else is not involved in this story . This is a good headline and we gave that to the people who made the announcement, but lets go deeper into the process of what happens next and how much does it cost and what other investment is involved and how would we trap the people who are potentially repeat offenders even if they are not , but they are offensive clients and customers . Those kind of questions are the things that sometimes get lost in the conversation around look at the new thing they have done. I just wanted to acknowledge katie i believe from the university of wisconsin and ethics. I just wanted to really piggyback on what you said and it really struck a chord only about the future of journalism is doing things differently, and sometimes the reporting on systematic change has to be internal to our profession. You struck a chord when you talked about codes of ethics and we can call it any organization and the way to do journalism and we often use it as a shield and paraphrasing you as to why we would cover it the way we cover it. I will he wanted to share with you an example of what i did, and i made a difference i hope in that pretty great when he was killed suddenly and the protest ensued, there was an incident of a woman who was beating a boy or something to that effect was a headlines that came out, and it was pretty much instantaneous as the protest was happening. As a people was reporting that story, it was the visual of that video that struck a chord and i think every news outlet wanted to know who was a boy in who was a woman . It got a couple of hours until the store really developed, but it was a mother going to the scene to get her teenage son out of the protest because she was worried about him being a part of potential violence and etc. I remember when that came across the wire and i stood up and said wait before we hit publish on that, lets think about what that headline looks like because for me as a mother of a black male who is now 22 years old, and has a very historical negative context in the meeting and i tried to talk about this with other journalists that we have to be very careful of language and you also mentioned the word cute. What happens is that sometimes we go to the Ap Style Book and we love it, and it is a bible of sorts. But it is a guide and a book, and it should be a breeding document and is part of our toolkit and it is not the only toolkit. When you go to the definition of boy, what does that say . For many newsrooms that headline wouldve been inappropriate and to me it was very inappropriate and hurtful and demeaning and even racist if you will. Just to have that conversation and have someone say to me the Ap Style Book and other journalists in different circles kind of defense that use of the headline on that day and in that moment, and i said okay fine, i was not going to go back and forth with those persons that i know throughout the media industry. I was getting the same kind of reaction, so i said im going to call ap and reach out to them. I found one of the editors at ap that deals with style and reached out to him and he was more than open and willing to talk to me. It was a onetoone conversation that ended up going on over the course of six months, and there was a change, and there is a new definition of the word boy and it includes the nuance of how you would describe like men or to think about the description of black men. I encourage journalists and organizations for us, advocacy is a part of what we do, and i know that different organizations have different modes and methods for advocacy, but you as a journalist can go up and call someone and ask a question and you can make a change and have an impact, and i can only imagine the number of subscribers around the world that picked up that story not just from ap, but from other organizations that ap might put on their wire, and i think that is some of the ways you can have an impact. But dont take that someone said this is the way that ideas and this is the bible of journalism. We are all people and sometimes if it doesnt feel right it is not right. Just have at it, and just having respectable conversation with stakeholders, people are always open to hearing how can we do this thing called journalism better as we continue to go forward and certainly the editor reach out to us for other things and i think there might be some other things that we contribute to in the stylebook, but we have to have these conversations and it should be a part of you not is trying to tell the story, but follow through and do something about it if you have an extra hour, you can call ap or any other organization and have a conversation about it. I think one of the most contested parts of it is a courageous conversation, and it warms my heart, that story. We want to go over to canada. [ laughter ] have a lot of good friends and i will play to the camera. I hold the really unusual role of i am the first ever director of engagement, which is all about job satisfaction, and i am working from coast to coast to coast all radio. Somebody got the idea that after 75 years, we really should fix some of the issues around diversity so first we stopped calling it diversity and called it inclusion because it is about getting leaders and getting diverse employees into key roles. Then we started talk about it is not inclusion anymore but human equity. That is the journey that we are own and we are on the journey toward human equity and the reason that it is working for us in these early days as i am a year to have been to this job and our staff each quarter has the diversity of new hires and is the highest it has been in 75 years and people keep riding say this why it might be working at it is 75 years before we met to do this. But when i took the job, i went to the soninlaw families from the caribbean and a black nova scotia and i said what do you think . They said stop talking about that diversity problem. Can you please just do something . So i said to my colleagues we are not talking anymore so action, action, action. We came to talk to the Senior Leaders of our company will not long ago, but exactly might be working and here is why. What we said is what is a problem with trying to solve in canada . Are we reflecting our audience in richness and diversity. We avoid said gender parity and we had the first ever president of the cdc that was female. I think that i have daily battles against sexist colleagues who would say to me that you would probably prefer drama or food programs and there is other jobs you can do within the company. I made the mistake as a Senior Leader my organization thing of the problem was fixed because it looked a little better in news. I did not look to my left my right to