I've covered two elections for Decatur Vote. DV has had 59 new page likes on Facebook since January 3rd, bringing us to 111 followers. We have two monthly patrons at $10 per month, which is about $17.00 per month revenue after Patreon fees. We thoroughly covered the 2023 Decatur election, and did a little other reporting along the way. Decatur Vote's Youtube has 11 subscribers and 40 videos. The Twitter has 7 followers.
So far, this is not a sustainable business. I intend to continue working on it about 25-30 hours per week, though to keep DecaturVote going long term, I need to find income, pay myself a wage, and cover business expenses. Business expenses have been light, since I work from a home-office and use my personal devices (phone, laptop) for business use. I also personally pay for the web-hosting, and personally cover the cost of decaturvote.com and decaturilvote.com ($17 each, annually).
I've been pretty happy with my election coverage, though it still needs a lot of work. For the November election, I covered about 12 candidates, among about 30 that were running locally. This election, I thoroughly covered 10 candidates (city council & school board) and the county auditor referendum. I failed to cover the Richland Trustee election in detail, and I intentionally neglected offices that had no competition.
The principal struggle with growing DecaturVote is that my work-hours are limited by other obligations and my mental health. I've been focusing solely on journalism, which I'm a little slow at, so marketing and business aspects have gotten little attention. Decatur Vote is still a one-person team, and it may stay this way for awhile. I've received a couple offers of volunteer assistance, but I don't feel it would be ethical to accept volunteers while DV is technically organized for-profit (despite making no money).
I've considered incorporating as a non-profit, getting a board, and getting volunteers. Eventually, I want to do this, or incorporate as a worker-owned corporation. However, I believe Decatur Vote needs a stable foundation and stable mission before I yield control. This may be my ego at work, not willing to compromise on my (still-developing) vision.
Work we (I) have done
All candidates for Decatur offices were added to the site, detailed summaries were written for all the city council and school board candidates. Photos were posted for all offices and most candidates. I attended an MLK Day candidate forum, Will Wetzel's Meet & Greet event, and CONO's Candidate Forum for first-hand journalism. The article about Will Wetzel's Meet & Greet article was our third best-performing facebook post with with a reach of 500, plus 36 likes & reactions.
I also reviewed some of the WAND video-interviews, writing a few summaries. I wrote a comprehensive voter's guide covering all the offices and candidates for this election, which pulled from all the aforementioned sources. I'm very proud of this work, despite knowing it could be improved.
Our best performing article on Facebook was about Jalynn Walker's withdrawal from School Board. That reached 2,193 people and had 94 likes & reactions. This article had a good cover photo, original reporting, and broke the news - neither WAND or Herald & Review had published about it yet.
One of my best articles, in my opinion, was the story about the County Auditor Referendum. I interviewed our current County Auditor and gave a detailed account of what the office does and how the referendum might impact the office. I tried to get comments from two Republicans and one Democrat, but none provided comment, which was a disappointment. Herald & Review broke that story first while I was waiting for a promised comment, and the article did not perform particularly well on Facebook.
Our second-best performing article was about Julie Moore Wolfe & Kevin Greenfield organizing a meeting with county-wide leaders to discuss cannabis, while intentionally avoiding being subject to the Open Meetings Act. That reached 518 people and had 94 likes & reactions. This was based upon DPL Watchdogs reporting; all I did was send a FOIA request to confirm their reporting & then share it. It was quickly and lazily shared without any meaningful original reporting, yet it was our 2nd best performing article.
I also did several weekly-news-recaps. Those performed reasonably well (100-ish reach), but viewership declined every week. I think they are incredibly valuable work, and I hope to continue them, but I worry it will take away from original reporting I'd like to do.
We did a little bit of other original reporting throughout this election season. We published about controversies facing the Macon County Health Board, a grievance email from a DPS staff that may have triggered student expulsions, a WAND reporter resignation where grievances were expressed, and a few other minor stories.
I could talk about sources shared & other minor reporting, but I'll leave it at that.
Shortcomings & issues with my reporting
Most of my articles are not as well-sourced as I would like, in that I don't share my sources as thoroughly as I would like. My current tools are incredibly cumbersome, so this should improve after I do some website updates over the next month or so. This is important for transparency. Most journalism isn't very transparent about it's sourcing, and this frustrates me greatly as a reader, so I want to do better as a writer.
Much of my work was not very critical. I didn't do a lot of fact-checking, except on issues that I'm already reasonably well-informed on. This means I run the risk of promoting incomplete or incorrect information when parotting what a politician or official says. It also lends toward a pro-establishment bias, when quoting officials uncritically.
It's hard to report critically and fact-check everything, because it is just incredibly time-consuming. Being incredibly thorough on one story means skipping other important stories. For this election, I largely chose breadth over depth - trying to cover all the candidates reasonably thoroughly, rather than digging deeply into any one candidate.
Rabbit-holes are also a huge distraction. There have been several times I went into a rabbit-hole on a story, digging deeper, then realized I was very behind on other reporting that needed to get done. I think balancing & managing this just requires practice and learning from my mistakes and successes.
A huge short-coming of mine is that I don't do a lot of in-person, first-hand reporting. In the future, I'd like to attend more events and interview more people for stories, as a way of sharing multiple perspectives on issues.
Lastly, I only report in writing online. I share source videos, but I don't make my own video news reports, nor do I have any podcast-style reporting. I'd like to do more in these areas, but as a team-of-one, this means sacrificing more original reporting.
Plans for the future
My plans for the future are vague and in the 'vision' phase. I'm trying to nail down details & set realistic goals. But I'll share what my general plan is.
The April 4th election is over. Of course, I need to report election results. Then I need to do a bunch of cleanup-work (organize my files, and photos) because things get messy during election journalism season.
After that clerical work, I have a lot of updates in mind for the website. Much of it is internal tooling, to make it easier to do well-sourced journalism. However, there are many public-facing changes I'd like to make too. And I'd like to start open-sourcing Decatur Vote's software, so others can review the code & even suggest changes to it. I intend to make most of the software free for others to use personally, and probably a paid license for commercial uses.
Once website updates are finished, I should be getting into local investigative journalism, as well as a broad amount of data collection on public offices, officials, and issues. First order of business is to catalogue local government offices, their leaders, foia officer, and other important information. After that, I'm not really sure - I want to investigate elected leaders, controversial local issues, monies involved in local politics, and other matters of public interest. I also hope to catalogue local interest groups, whether political, charitable, or something else (like labor unions).
A lot of these things I wish to investigate are partially covered by Herald & Review or WAND when events happen, but nobody is cataloguing things all in one place or building comprehensive profiles on public officials or issues of public concern. There's also a lot of things I've learned off-the-record over the years that I'd like to investigate on-the-record.
Doing this investigative journalism will help inform the public about issues facing Decatur, and will better prepare me for November's 2024 election. If I'm well informed about and have thoroughly reported on local issues & local officials, I'll know what questions to ask, and I'll be able to share much more thorough political analysis.
I also have to get serious about the economic side of things. I want to run on $10 sponsorships from regular Decaturites, and not depend on large contributions from anyone, as those create another conflict of interest. But that requires a lot of sponsorships. I also don't want to run ads on the site, since ads disrespect user-privacy and make the website worse. I may be able to apply for grants. These are all areas I'm not experienced with.
While I shy away from volunteer support, if you'd like to volunteer to help me with the economic side, please get in touch. I need help with it. I need advice, connections, ideas, and money. But don't expect your help to influence the integrity of my reporting. The integrity of my reporting always comes first. And I have no interest in profit - I just want a liveable wage, and to further grow local journalism.
Bias, Ethics, and Conflicts of Interest
There are constant concerns of ethics and bias in journalism. One example was Mark Reynold's statement about LGBTQIA+ issues. When he was asked about lgbtq curriculum, he talked about not wanting third graders reading about two men having sex.
It was important to report what he said. But what he was saying was harmful and not based in reality, as far as I know. I feel it was my duty to push back and clarify that the question was not about sex. This is a tough situation because, being queer myself, I am biased. So if I leave my thoughts entirely out, then I'm allowing him to uncritically push a harmful (and inaccurate) claim that queerness is primarily about sex. If I include my thoughts, then I am being biased.
There are alternate approaches. One is to interview other people and quote their perspectives on Mark's statement. But would I be doing that as a proxy for sharing my own opinion? Yes. And that would be less transparent. Another option is to interrogate him about the implications of his claim, but again this is a manifestation of bias if I'm not giving the same treatment to other candidates, which I frankly didn't have time for. So in this situation, and many others, there isn't a clear right answer.
Many choices enter into ethical gray areas. Conflicts of interest and on-the-record vs off-the-record are two realms where this is a real challenge. Some of my professional and personal relationships give me access to additional information that isn't in the public account. I can use that information as leads & pursue on-the-record interviews, but I can't ethically report information that I get off-the-record or when I'm not wearing my (figurative) journalist hat.
This on-vs-off the record distinction is incredibly important, and difficult to manage. I suspect it's something all journalists struggle with at times. Perhaps, I struggle with it more because I am politically active and have been for years, plus I am involved in some political and non-political organizations in this community.
To help me better deal with this, I read one book about 'Truth' and have recently ordered two library books about ethics in journalism. I am learning & will continue to get better at managing these ethical conflicts.
I also try to disclose my biases and conflicts of interest. Most of them are listed on my author profile, though I need to add some things I had forgotten at time of writing. And I perhaps need to get better about disclosing these at the end of articles I write. It is cumbersome to do so on a case-by-case basis though.
Closing
This update is intended to give you an overview of Decatur Vote's work during the 2023 election season, and work we will be doing going forward. Transparency is incredibly important to me, so I've shared some of my personal struggles with journalism & business. My primary goal with Decatur Vote is to provide information to the public about local policy issues and community issues, especially in regard to elected leaders. My goal is not to convince anyone of anything.
I hope you have appreciated the work I've done, will continue to follow and support this work, and give feedback about any issues you see. The bottom of every page has an anonymous feedback box, and I read every piece of feedback I get.
Decatur Vote will be relatively quiet for the next month or two, as website updates and clerical work are completed. I am still here if you reach out on the website, by email, or on Facebook. Reporting will return soon.