Loading...

10 Questions For The CEO … Building Digital Democracy One Reader At A Time 

Monika Bauerlein is CEO of Mother Jones and previously she was co-editor of it. A Fulbright scholar, she was also a reporter and writer for numerous publications.

*****

  1. Mother Jones was reporting news via a nonprofit platform before it was cool. Are you concerned there might be too many publications jumping into the pool?

There can never be too much independent investigative reporting! Over the past decade and a half, America has lost a huge amount of journalistic capacity — some 40,000 jobs just in newspapers alone. Nonprofit newsrooms like Mother Jones have grown during that time, but they haven’t come anywhere close to replacing that capacity.

To mobilize the kind of journalism that our democracy needs, at a time when commercial news continues to shrink, nonprofit news will have to ramp up dramatically. As the nation’s oldest nonprofit investigative news organization, founded in 1976, we see it as part of our mission to test and share tools and methods that other nonprofit newsrooms can use to grow and thrive.

  1. You only get one answer here. What keeps you up at night?

The future of democracy. I was born in Germany and raised in Italy, and though it was decades after World War II, the echoes of fascism and the Holocaust ran through my childhood. I grew up with the understanding that democracy can never be taken for granted, and that fear, hate, and disinformation can take it down.

What gives me hope, though, is that there are so many people who are committed to defending and strengthening democracy, and that journalism is one of the most powerful tools to make that happen. That’s why authoritarians always go after the press first.

  1. Has the disdain many reporters have had for the business side changed since it got tougher to pay for journalism? You were on the other side of “the wall.”

When I came up in commercial newsrooms, the business side was seen as fundamentally at odds with the news side because its customers were advertisers (and sometimes owners or shareholders), whereas the news side’s customers were readers and the public interest at large. But at Mother Jones, where 75 percent of our revenue comes from reader support, both our newsroom and our business side are about the same mission: bringing fearless independent reporting to the audiences who need it and who sustain our work.

  1. What are you reading right now?

I’m trying to keep up with my amazing colleagues. For example Mother Jones’ founder, Adam Hochschild, recently published a book, American Midnight, about what he calls the “Trumpiest time in American history”– the period from World War I to the onset of the Roaring Twenties, which was characterized by an extraordinary amount of division, repression, and violence against people of color and dissenters.

We excerpted a chapter about the era’s rampant press censorship, when the U.S. postmaster general was very busy trying to put independent magazines out of business. It’s a grim tale, but also a hopeful one, because the nation did eventually come back from that moment.

  1. Do things pick up or slow down during non-election cycles?

I honestly can’t remember a time when things have slowed down for Mother Jones. Partly that is because our coverage is driven not by what candidates are saying on the stump or on the Sunday talk shows, but by the bigger debates that often get lost in day-to-day coverage.

How our democracy works and doesn’t, which rights are being rolled back or expanded, how racial and economic inequities are shaping people’s lives, and how people are trying to build a more climate-sane world — all of those are issues that play out in communities, schools, homes and workplaces every day. What happens during presidential or Congressional elections is just one small part of what shapes our priorities.

  1. You’re based in California, land of data and personal privacy. How is Mother Jones finding donors and building circulation?

Fortunately, building relationships around great journalism doesn’t require violating anyone’s privacy. Every day, there are more people out there who understand that the current information ecosystem (including corporate media and social media platforms) is failing and putting our democracy at risk. Our job is to meet these folks, on the channels that they prefer, and share what we do. When people see the reporting and see that Mother Jones is distinctive in our commitment to rigorous reporting and factchecking around justice and a stronger democracy, they also understand how reader support is what makes this possible.

Today, the biggest challenge for us is to build relationships that are not dependent on the whims of third-party platforms. For example, in the mid-2010s, a big portion of our audience found their news on Facebook. Today, traffic from Facebook is 5% of what it was in 2017, and that’s not because Facebook users have suddenly lost interest. It’s because Facebook has decided to show you a lot less news in your feed, even when you choose to follow Mother Jones (or any other outlet).

We need to build connections with readers through other channels, such as our email newsletter (which, if I may offer a small plug, is terrific and free). At the same time, we are working to meet new audiences on the platforms where they are looking for news. For example, we have grown our following on Instagram and TikTok to 400,000 and 29,000, respectively, by bringing solid reporting with a conversational voice to these platforms. Audiences everywhere are hungry for information they can trust. 

  1. What changes, if any, do you foresee for Mother Jones?

For all of our history, Mother Jones has been about serving changemakers and change-seekers with solid, factchecked journalism that’s engaging and doesn’t feel like homework. That’s why our founders made a magazine that was beautiful in both visuals and writing, rather than gray and lecturey.

That’s why starting in the 2000s, we made a big bet to serve readers where they were going — to the internet, and then to social media — while still producing that beautiful magazine for the audience that prefers to lean back with print.

The next big bet for us is reaching more of the millions of people who believe in making democracy stronger, society more just, and keeping the planet habitable–but who are not well served by traditional news. These are often younger audiences and people of color, and we are investing in serving them better. That includes doing research to learn what they need, orienting our newsroom toward those topics and communities, and working with the storytellers and platforms that newer audiences often turn to.

  1. What’s the most misunderstood aspect of running a nonprofit news operation?

If I had a nickel for every time I hear that being a nonprofit means not having to hustle, compete, or strive for excellence, Mother Jones would have a fat endowment. In fact, there’s nothing harder (or more rewarding) than fighting every day to serve an audience and a mission, rather than investors or shareholders.

  1. What’s the best advice you ever got?

The reporting basics I learned in Journalism 101. Ask more questions. Listen closely. Understand your biases. Try to prove yourself wrong.

  1. What’s a skill you’d like to learn and why?

There are so many, but knowing when to shut up and listen, and then actually doing it, is probably right up there.