Information We Can Rely on with American Press Institute’s Michael D. Bolden
About This Episode
In a world drowning in information, where every click and scroll can lead us further down a rabbit hole of misinformation, what is our cultural and intellectual lifeline?
This week on Mission Forward, Carrie Fox swims the turbulent waters of local news with Michael D. Bolden. He serves as the Executive Director & Chief Executive Officer at the American Press Institute, and he's not here to talk about headlines and deadlines. He’s here to talk about the very oxygen of democracy – the free flow of information and how we've let ours become polluted.
Bolden shares his deeply personal journey, from a childhood steeped in the wisdom of diverse media sources to his current mission of rescuing local journalism from the clutches of apathy and distrust. But this isn't just another lament for the dying days of print. This is a call to arms. Bolden throws down a gauntlet, challenging the very notion of "audience." He speaks of forging genuine connections, of weaving newsrooms into the very fabric of the communities they serve. He paints a picture of journalists not as detached observers but as engaged citizens, listening intently to the whispers and shouts of the people they represent. It's a radical shift, reimagining the relationship between the informed and the informers.
The American Press Institute, under Bolden's leadership, isn't just patching up the cracks in the foundation of local news; they're rebuilding it from the ground up. He reveals their secret weapon: a laser-focused mission to create news organizations that are not just surviving but thriving. He speaks of resilience, of adaptability, of the courage to pivot in the face of relentless change. Along the way, he hints at exciting new initiatives, veiled in a touch of journalistic mystery, promising a future where local news is not just relevant but essential.
As the looming shadow of a pivotal election descends, Bolden offers a glimmer of hope. He sees newsrooms embracing flexibility, thinking beyond the immediate frenzy, and laying the groundwork for a future where trust is not a luxury but the bedrock of our democracy. He reminds us that the work doesn't end on election night; it's a continuous conversation, a constant striving to build bridges and illuminate the path forward. This episode is a stark reminder: we cannot afford to be passive consumers of information. The future of our communities—and our democracy itself—depends on it.
We are grateful to Michael and the American Press Institute for their generosity in making this conversation possible.
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Carrie Fox:
Hi there, and welcome to the Mission Forward podcast. I'm Carrie Fox, your host and CEO of Mission Partners, a social impact communications firm and certified B corporation. Thanks for tuning in to today's episode.
On this show, we talk about the power of communications. We share thought-provoking information and we reflect on what's making news, all of which come into focus in today's conversation. Today, we have Michael D. Bolden on the show. Michael is the CEO and executive director of the American Press Institute, and one of the most intentional and kind CEOs that I have worked with in recent years, and here's why I admire him so much.
So first, on the business side. Michael kind lives at this great intersection of media, entrepreneurship and civic engagement, a trifecta that I know and love as well. He's played some pretty big roles at the Washington Post, the Knight Foundation, Stanford University, the San Francisco Chronicle, and now at the American Press Institute. And because of his fascinating intersection of experiences, he brings this unique perspective on how journalism can serve the needs of our communities and improve the health of our democracy. All right, so that's the business side.
Then there's the heart side. So all of these experiences have taught Michael some important lessons about what it means to be a leader, and this little excerpt from one of his articles is worth repeating. Here's what he said. "I learned along the way the importance of developing work cultures, where people are empowered and valued and feel unencumbered to pursue the mission-driven work that drives so many of us."
Michael, you do have this brilliant way of bringing out the best in people around you, and I've appreciated the chance to see that firsthand. So let's just get right to it, Michael, I'm so thrilled to have you here. Thanks for being on Mission Forward.
Michael D. Bolden:
Well, Carrie, thank you very much for inviting me. It has been a pleasure for us to work with you and your team, and so anything that we can convey that might be useful to your wider audience, we're happy to do.
Carrie Fox:
Let's tell folks a little more about you. I set up your professional background, but I'm curious, where you just talked about how you get folks to drive them. You're so good at driving other people forward. What drives you forward?
Michael D. Bolden:
The most important thing for me, I think, is to remember where I come from. I grew up in Mobile, Alabama. I am the son of a man who had a sixth grade education. He actually left school as a young man to help raise his brothers and sisters and to earn money for the family. And that context, to me, frankly, has always been important in my life. My father, especially, was older than most parents at the same time, and so he was steeped in the Great Depression. He was steeped in the Jim Crow era. He was steeped in wanting to be a good civic participant, but also knowing that there were societal factors that were holding him down. And he did not let that stop him, frankly.
I grew up in a household where he was an avid reader of the Mobile Press Register, where having the news on was an important part of the day, where voting was a civic duty and one to be taken seriously, one more where you could accumulate as much information as you possibly could. What my dad taught me was very much complemented by the background my mother had, who mostly came from a family of educators because, of course, if you were Black in the south, it was not unusual. It was actually very usual, frankly, for your family to pursue the path of being teachers and principals. And so that was her background. And she was also one of those people who was an avid crossword puzzler, and I don't mean just doing it occasionally. She did books and books of crossword puzzles in ink. And so that sort of rigor, intellectual rigor and intellectual curiosity came to me from both sides of my family.
But I also was sort of steeped in this culture where you depended on different types of media, and not just platforms, but coming from different sources, to inform your worldview. I mean, in my household, I mentioned the Mobile Press Register, which of course was the local daily, but CNN was always on, or the local news was always on. We listened to terrestrial radio as part of the [inaudible 00:04:52]. It was very important for us as Black people to also have Ebony and Jet magazines coming into our household, as well as reading our local Black Weekly. And so this rich mixed media diet was very much a part of my world. And seeing how that could influence opinion and influence relationships is really something that I keep with me every day, and it's a lesson that you'll hear me often talk about because it's an amalgamation of those experiences and those influences that inform everything I do, both professionally and personally,
Carrie Fox:
Influenced information, influenced relationships, and we know, recently, you've been doing quite a bit around influence of democracy. So I want to talk a little bit about what I know you know all too well that a thriving democracy depends on a thriving local news ecosystem. And we have seen what has happened to local news in recent years, but we've also seen the investment that is coming into local news to ensure that it does thrive. So I want you to talk a little bit more about how you see this connection between local news and democracy.
Michael D. Bolden:
It is absolutely fundamental to democracy, and it's a bit cliche, some would call it trite, but we cannot forget that freedom of the press is enshrined in our Constitution. It's enshrined in our Constitution for a reason. And that's because our founding fathers, no matter what foibles they had, and we know there were many, realized that people needed information in order to make the decisions that would affect their lives and the lives of their society and the lives of our country. And that having the free discourse of information, sometimes things that you might not like, are absolutely essential to the democratic process. And so knowing that this is enshrined in the Constitution, and knowing that this is part of where we come from, I think that it is not even possible to separate democracy from the free flow of information.
And so when you look at those things, and you think about where we are now in the landscape with what we've seen happening with media, we know that democracy suffers when people don't have the information they need. When they don't know what's happening at the city council, when they don't know what's happening down the street, when they don't know what's happening in their state capitals, how can you make the decisions if you don't have the information? Especially in a world now that is so complex and so intertwined when the issues can be so magnified, someone has to be able to create the information and to bring it down to a level where people can actually understand it. And that's why we need media at every single level that we have to thrive if we're going to make good democratic decisions.
Carrie Fox:
So for folks who don't know American Press Institute, talk a bit about what you do there to address those issues you just raised.
Michael D. Bolden:
Yeah, so the American Press Institute has actually been around for a long time. We've been around almost 80 years. And we were the idea of the executive editor of the Providence Journal at the time, who felt that journalism, which was really just becoming professionalized as we know it, I mean, there was becoming this emphasis on training and professional knowledge. But that at every stage of a journalist career, there would be training available to help them stay abreast of what was happening. This was 1946, and they realized that this need needed to exist. So for almost 80 years, first at Columbia and then at our own headquarters, we've been engaged in training journalists, throughout the profession, from reporters to editors, to managing editors to people on the business side, in what tools and tactics they need to be effective.
Now, that has evolved over time. The emphasis are always changing. The tools are always changing/ but the need to be intellectually curious, the need to expand your world, the need to be able to think about what makes a good workplace, what makes good community relations, what makes good business sense, those things have not changed. And so the American Press Institute tries to stay abreast of things in all of those areas.
We sort of coalesce that work under four sort of buckets, one being civic discourse and democracy, and we've talked about why democracy is important. Culture and inclusion. And when we talk about culture and inclusion, we're not just talking about culture and inclusion in the workplace. We're talking about how a news organization fits within and responds to its community. Community engagement and trust, which we see going hand in hand with culture and inclusion. And then finally, revenue and resilience. And we don't see revenue as something that exists in a solitary world. It is tied into each of the three areas that I've mentioned previously. And the resilience part of that, the thinking ahead and building into your business and your work culture, the ability to anticipate and to respond to challenges might just be the most important thing of all. I think without the resilience part of the equation, a lot of this just crumbles.
Carrie Fox:
So I mentioned to you, we're doing an event in a couple of weeks, the focus of it will be on addressing change, challenge and opportunity all around us. So I want to look at those words. So when you think about the changes in the news and the journalism ecosystem, the challenges that they're facing coming up to this election specifically, but also the opportunity. So I'd love you just to weigh in on any parts of that, as you think about what you see coming into this last leg of the election season.
Michael D. Bolden:
Actually, I take opportunity, frankly, as being the most important word in that series that you mentioned. One of the things that we know has happened, especially if we look at the last five or six decades of this country, is that opportunity of participation, opportunity with access to information, opportunities for news organizations to engage with their communities, those are all things that we have not made the most of.
And we have seen the effects. If you go back 55 years, and you think about the Kerner Commission Report that Lyndon Johnson commissioned, which looked at how the media had covered communities, especially African-American communities, and pointed out all of the missed opportunities that existed. And so we stand here in a historic election year, and many news organizations have been reflecting on, how have we missed the opportunity to engage with people? Why don't some people trust our election information? Why do they doubt us? And we realize, it's because we have not capitalized on the opportunities to build these relationships.
And so while we're focused on making sure people have good information, the most important thing is that we focus long-term on building better relationships, on ensuring that people think about news organizations, not just as covering communities, but being part of communities. And that's part of the change that we have to have happening in this season, to make the most of the opportunities that exist before us. So that next year and the year after, and in 2028 when we have another big presidential election, we're not running around in circles, trying to get people to listen to trusted election information, because they're figuring out who to trust, that we will have built relationships in communities that will help sustain us.
Carrie Fox:
Right, opportunities don't last forever, right? There's plenty of opportunities that just close and they're gone. But what you see as this opportunity, the opportunity to build relationships with community, let's talk about that a little bit more. And I'll give you a prompt. You talk a bit about the difference between audience engagement, audience building and community engagement, community building. Talk to me about that.
Michael D. Bolden:
Audience is really a revenue-driven term. When you talk about building audience and attracting audience to your site, it is an other ring, I think, actually of your subscribers and viewers and readers. Community is about partnership. Community is about reaching out to people and bringing them into your process, helping them understand what you're doing and why you're doing it. And I'll go back to a thing that I was talking about earlier. It is seeing journalists and editors, and even the ad people, seeing them as parts of community. If you are a journalist, for example, I'm here in Arlington, Virginia. If you are a journalist here in Arlington, Virginia, people should not perceive that you are separate from Arlington. You are a part of Arlington. You care about Arlington. You live in Arlington. Your kids may go to school in Arlington. And so being able to bridge that gap and help people understand that, I think is just critical to what we do. And it's, again, the opportunity that we had.
Carrie Fox:
We had Alicia Bell on the show a couple of years ago, right when Media 2070 was coming out, and she was telling this story about some research she had been doing. This was earlier in her career in North Carolina, and she was going around having conversations with residents saying, "What kind of relationship do you have with your local news?" And she said she would get these looks where people said, "What do you mean? How do you have a relationship with your newsroom? We don't have a relationship with our newsroom. They just feed us information." And to her, that was the aha moment, that we were missing the opportunity to have a two-way exchange and relationship.
So the importance of this is critical, we know it, and it goes back to the trust and the thriving democracy you talked about at the top. So what do you think is most important to start to close those gaps and take advantage of the opportunity ahead of us?
Michael D. Bolden:
Well, so, Carrie, you've actually hit on something in the question itself, and it's about being in conversation with people. The notion that you just go out report and then you just broadcast information, when I say broadcast, I mean broadcasting, the broadest sense of the word, is not what media should be doing. We should be in constant dialogue.
It's important to engage people to learn about their concerns, to report on their concerns, to address their concerns, and then to go back and ask them again, "Well, what did you think about what we did? Did we miss something? What did you like? What didn't you like? How was that perceived?" And it's also about engaging members of the community as trusted partners. Because we can't be everywhere, even when we are parts of the community, but we both certainly can reach out to people who are in the churches and the community organizations, people who are assets in the community, and enlist them, be in partnership with them, for the mission that we have. Because again, when it comes down to it, it's not about the news organization or the media with a big M. It's about community, it's about society, it's about the country, and it's about the world.
Carrie Fox:
And everything you've said, Michael, just in that answer, transcends media and journalism. So I'm going to ask folks who are listening to go back 45 seconds and listen to Michael, again, answer that question, because I think it's a critical answer, but it's also a call to action for anyone who runs a nonprofit organization, who was thinking about how they engage their community, that you've just laid out the critical steps on how to do that and how to make sure that you're listening between the words, and sometimes beyond the words, to build relationship through that too, so thank you for that great answer.
Michael D. Bolden:
When we talk about the nonprofits and other organizations that are within our communities, those are organizations that really share a common purpose with news organizations, even sometimes they don't think they do. When you think about this through a community engagement perspective, through a community wellness perspective, an organization that might be advocating for child education, that might be addressing homelessness, that might be working on any of a number of issues, it all ties back together, even if your tactics are different. And I think that that is important for us to think about and to think about how we build those bridges in the community itself, because we're all working toward a common goal.
Carrie Fox:
All right, we've got time for maybe two questions, and I want to focus in on mission on this next one. So you are here on the Mission Forward podcast. I run a firm called Mission Partners. And you all, at API, recently revisited your mission. And I love the way you did that, but I'd love you to talk about why you felt it was so important, to reflect and address and ensure that you were articulating your mission effectively.
Michael D. Bolden:
I think it's important, especially now in this complex media environment. There are so many different problems, frankly, that compete for your attention. The American Press Institute has been around, like I said, a long time. We've seen lots of problems. We've tried to address them in many different ways, but our resources are limited. Our reach is limited. And frankly, we know that there are people in some areas who are better than we are. Being very focused on the universe of what you're working on provides a lot of clarity and consistency. That doesn't mean being inflexible, but what that does do is that, especially when you have a large team and there are questions arising, it really gives you a way to hone in on the things that are most important, and to be more effective in your job and what you're doing, as opposed to chasing every little thing, like a cat with a laser, and going all over. It's like, these are the most important things and this is where we think we can be the most effective.
And even if we had infinite resources, I don't know that we would operate any other way. Because if you're going to have impact, and I think that's what this all comes down to, you have impact by focusing on the horizon and heading forward.
Carrie Fox:
Right, the mission, I mean, is really the foundation of everything. If you don't have a clear mission, you can't build up from there. You can't scale. You don't know how to make the decision. So it grounds you. And your new mission really focuses on fostering healthy, responsive and resilient news organizations. And everything that you've talked about today is a reinforcement of that. You can't be healthy, responsive and resilient without relationships. And so I appreciate how much you focus in on that.
Let's just look forward a bit. So we've got last few weeks here. We know this is the closest presidential election potentially ever that we have ever seen. Every vote, every action is going to matter. What is giving you hope as you come into this last leg of the presidential election?
Michael D. Bolden:
So one thing that gives me hope is the flexibility that we have seen news organizations embrace this opportunity with. One of the things that we teach and that we talk a lot about is the ability to be flexible, to sort of see what's happening on the ground, and to adjust your tactics as need be. But it's also this idea that people are thinking beyond the election, because whatever happens in November is a decision that we're going to have to live with as a country, and we're going to have to move forward from that, no matter who our next president is. And the media has an important role to play, is in ensuring that that happens, and those community bonds are the things that we're going to have to rely on.
And so, when I see news organizations focusing on that, when I see them thinking about what happens in 2025, no matter who wins the election, that's what gives me hope, because I think that that is something we can never lose sight of. It is useful, of course, to focus on what's happening in the moment, to focus on the specific elections, but this broader review, the larger view, the long-term view, is the more important thing, for each individual community, for the news organizations themselves, and for our entire country.
Carrie Fox:
I hear a lot of organizations right now saying, we're just putting things on hold until the election happens. And I continue to reinforce to people that we can't put so many things on hold, that the election will matter of course, but this work must continue either way, so I appreciate you reinforcing that too.
All right, Michael, any final thoughts before we wrap up, on what you're working on at API or anything else that's on your mind today?
Michael D. Bolden:
Well, so I mean, one thing I would say is that, even as you're preparing for things, sometimes you make the most of opportunities that confront you. We're actually working on a couple of things I can't talk about, but that do concern the election. And no matter what you're doing in your work, you do have to be flexible enough to pivot sometimes and to make the most of opportunities that present themselves that sometimes will have good effect.
I also think that it's important, as we pursue these things, to build in learning. As we're thinking about some things that we're going to do over the next several months, it's like, how can we make sure that, even if we're working with a small cohort, that this information gets shared with the wider journalism community, and beyond that, with the community in general? How do we ensure that we extract value that, frankly, is going to last for the longer term? And I think that no matter your work, no matter what you're pursuing, building that into your process at the very beginning is essential to make sure that you extract things that are the most useful, and that you don't miss things.
Carrie Fox:
Yeah, I'm going to take away from this really, never to take information for granted, nor to take relationships for granted, I think those two things are hand in hand.
Michael, thank you so much for your time today, for your insights, your wisdom, but also your leadership at American Press Institute.
Michael D. Bolden:
Carrie, thank you for your leadership and for working with mission-driven organizations everywhere. Community needs people who are committed and who are helping to push us all forward, so kudos to you and your team again.
Carrie Fox:
And that brings us to the end of another episode of Mission Forward. If you like what you heard today, I hope you'll stop right now and give this show a five-star rating wherever you are listening to this podcast., Maybe even forward it to a friend who you think would enjoy today's conversation. And of course, check out the show notes for all of the links referenced in today's show.
Mission Forward is produced with the support and wisdom of Pete Wright and the True Story production team, as well as the wonderful Sadie Lockhart of Mission Partners. You can learn more about our work over at missionforward.us, and of course reach out to me anytime at carrie@mission.partners. Thanks for tuning in today, friend, and I'll see you next time.
