In a time of diminished resources, journalists need to collaborate more and reach out to their communities as they go about their work, the journalists assembled last month for a panel to celebrate the First Amendment said.
The number of journalists coving local news has decreased, they acknowledged, making cooperation rather than competition more important.
Journalists cannot know everything that is happening in a community, they said, so they must depend on their audiences to help them find stories they should be covering.
“Across America today, there are news deserts in a huge percentage of communities,” Ann Hollifield, emerita professor in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Georgia, said in opening the panel discussion.
Hollifield had organized the program as part of a national Stand Up And Sing Out Celebration of the First Amendment initiative of Indivisible. Indivisible GA10 sponsored the local program, held at Piccadilly Farm Nursery and Gardens, 1971 Whippoorwill Road, near North High Shoals.
“I ask you to envision what our local government would be like, what our local officials would be doing, if there were no one paying attention to what they do and communicating to the public about what they're doing,” Hollifield said.
Panelists were Blake Aued, news editor of Flagpole magazine, Chris Dowd, founder of Athens Political Nerd, Jennifer Duck, clinical associate professor in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communications, and Steven Milligan, managing editor of the The Walton Tribune.
Program Structure
Barb and Rick Burt, co-leaders of Indivisible GA10, introduced the program and thanked Bill and Valerie Hindsley, who hosted the hour-long program at their Piccadilly Farm Nursery and Gardens. Just fewer than 70 people attended the June 14 event.
 |
| Hollifield 6/14/2026 |
“If we want to talk about defending journalism and understanding that journalism is a necessary condition for democracy, we need to be talking about local media,” Hollifield said in setting the context for the panel.
Hollifield first asked each of the panelists “what you see as the challenges that your particular organization is facing in the next few months or few years?”
“Well, The Walton Tribune primarily covers just Walton County,” but the parent company also owns The Covington News, which covers Newton (County), and now The Oconee Enterprise, which covers this area,” Milligan responded.
The Brumby family Times Journal Media Group purchased the Monroe Media Inc., after that group purchased The Oconee Enterprise.
“We just try to cover the local journalism issues in our area and anything that impacts that,” Milligan said. “And we hope people just keep reading us.”
“So I started Athens Politics Nerd in 2019,” Dowd said. ‘It was founded, to hold the local government accountable.”
“So I came from activism,” Dowd said. “So I used to be a part of this group called Athens for Everyone, and one of the things we would do would be to go to City Hall and push for progressive policies and things.”
“And we were really trying to get our commissioners on record as supporting certain things and to let the public know what they were doing, because a lot of people don't pay attention, and to get people more involved,” Dowd said.
“And now I am continuing to do that as a journalist, so that was a bit of a shift. So I've been having to adjust, and I've really been enjoying it, and I think the mission is a lot the same,” he said.
 |
| Duck, Aued, Dowd, Milligan (L-R) 6/14/2026 |
“I just need to focus more on being objective than anything,” he added.
“Flagpole started out as kind of a music rag,” Aued said. The Athens Banner- Herald “was not really covering the Athens music scene at a time when R.E.M. was huge, B-52s were huge. The Athens music scene was really nationwide.”
Aued said Flagpole “Later expanded into other areas, including politics, again, kind of in opposition to the local daily, the local broadsheet, which was a conservative paper in a liberal town. And so we kind of represented the majority of Athenians who were not being represented by their local media, which was a very Republican publication.”
“And so now, one of the challenges I think we face is really how we define ourselves and how we serve the community when we're not defining ourselves in opposition to other media, more dominant media outlets. There's no one here from the Banner-Herald, as you can see.”
“So how do we fill that space, especially on a shoestring budget?” Aued asked “We're locally owned. That's an advantage for us because we're your neighbors. We live here, and you see us at the grocery store, you see us at church, you see us at the bar.”
“We're a part of the community,” he said. “We're not some out-of-town corporation or hedge fund."
“But we face the same challenges that every media outlet faces,” Aued continued, “which is money, advertising revenue, competition from social media,” he said.
Teaching Journalism
“So I had a career covering national and international news,” Duck said. “I covered the White House for ABC News with President Bush and President Obama.”
 |
| Duck 6/14/2026 |
“As I was coming up through that, I was actually one-man banding for ABC News because there are shoestring budgets even at the network for journalism. So I would have to film, write the story, edit the time, film it, and send it” to the network for use in its news programs.
“So it was great practice for where we are today, sadly where we are today, with having to do it all,” Duck said.
“I represent Grady News Source today,” Duck said. “So I run the multi-platform news organization out of Grady College at UGA. And what we do is we're trying to train the next generation of journalists.”
Duck said the focus is on local news, and “we're working with all the publications.”
“And they have to do it all,” Duck said of the students. “They write, they edit, they film, they post it on social media.”
“And I will say this,” Duck continued. “I have covered the White House, I've covered national politics, international politics.”
“But what I will say is all politics is local, and it's really important to understand the local issues,” she said.
“So much of what happens in this county is because of your local politicians, your neighbors, your grassroots efforts, and it is so important,” she said.
Question On Audiences
Hollifield next asked: “So how do each of you think about your audience and then make news decisions with that audience in mind?” She also asked when should people “contact you about something you might be interested in?”
 |
| Dowd 6/14/2026 |
“I would definitely say contact us if there's something you think we ought to know about,” Aued said. “I can't guarantee we'll cover it, but we certainly want to know. I think Flagpole is so embedded in the community that we really have a partnership with our readers, and we rely on our readers to keep us informed the same way that you rely on us to keep you informed.”
“Yeah, I agree,” Dowd said. “Contact us whenever there's something on your mind. Whenever you have a comment about one of the stories or if you have an idea for a story, I'd love to hear about it. I may not have time to cover it. But, I certainly would like to hear about it.”
“Originally, I thought of my audience as people who maybe didn't pay attention to local government meetings,” Dows said, “and that's changed somewhat. I definitely now focus on more people who do pay attention because those are the people who read my stuff.”
“Being from the most traditional news source here,” Milligan said, “just a community newspaper, our readers are literally anyone who lives within our coverage area.”
 |
| Milligan 6/14/2026 |
“We're not just covering meetings,” he said, “but also cover the high school football games and what the kids are doing at the schools. We're running pictures of kids at the playground during the summer. A little bit of everything.”
“So we reach out to everybody, but we are a pretty conservative county. Our readers are everybody who lives there,” Milligan added. “So we try to make sure we present the news as evenly as possible.”
“But we just try to make sure that we cover everything,” Milligan said. “That's why we're always asking our readers to let us know about events. We try to present the illusion that we're all-knowing, but we don't actually know every event that's going on.”
“Send us letters to the editors,” he said. “Send us news bits. Send us calendar entries.”
“We have a skeleton staff some days, so we can't get to everything,” he said. “But we try to make sure we cover anything of interest to our readers when absolutely possible.”
“I would say the same thing,” Duck said. “We love working with partners, and we have the five communities all around surrounding us here. We work with all of them. So anything maybe they can't cover, maybe the students can look into.”
Athens-Clarke borders Barrow, Jackson, Madison, Oglethorpe, and Oconee counties
“I think as reporters, we're all looking,” Duck said. “But there is a lot of stuff going on we don't know about that you might hear about, so just reach out to us.”
“Our audience is very local,” Duck said.
“We don't need profit,” she added. “We are teaching students, so we are going to continue to do this. What I think we'd love to do more of is partner with our publications...You're seeing a lot of that happen now with journalism, which I think is the way forward.”
“I'm glad you brought that up,” Aued said. “Collaboration, I think, in the current media environment is extremely important. I think that's a way that we can kind of ameliorate our ever-shrinking staffs and capability of covering everything happening.”
“I hope that we can do more of that in the future,” he added.
Audience Questions
Hollified turned the last 10 minutes of the program over to audience questions, and the last of these sought advice from the panelists on how to counter disinformation and misinformation on social media and how to use social media to get out a message.
 |
| Aued 6/14/2026 |
“My big motto with social media is to flood the zone,” Duck said. “So get together, flood the zone, get your children, get your grandchildren, your nieces, your nephews. They have totally different algorithms. They have different followers.”
“And don't get discouraged,” she said, “because disinformation and sensationalism is going to trend, but so does good content. And people want good content and good messages and truth more than ever.”
“I think that's all very good advice,” Aued said, “especially getting your grandkids to help.”
“In addition to trying to get different groups of people with different algorithms involved,” he added, “also looking at multiple platforms and making sure that you're not just on one particular platform.”
“If there's something on social media that you want to spread,” Dowd said, “you want to like, comment, and subscribe, and share it. And if you don't want it to spread, don't interact with it is what I would say. Don't do an angry react or whatever. Just don't comment.”
“We contribute in all of our sister papers,” Milligan said. “We have Facebook pages, so send it to us, and we'll put it on social media for you, too. But other than that, it's just like they're saying, just get everybody to spread it because everyone's got their own circles that they're sending stuff out to.”
Video
I attended the June 14 session and recorded the video below, which is on my Vimeo site.
I have delayed writing about the event because of other developing stories and because of personal commitments. I am posting the story now because I belief the content of the story is not dated.
Hollifield began introducing her speakers at 7:24 in the video.
At 52:30 in the video, a storm began with extremely strong rain, making the audio from that point on difficult, but not impossible, to hear.
Hollifield is communications director for Indivisible GA10. She also is on the executive committee of the Oconee County Democratic Party.
Hollifield is my wife.
I covered this story because of my interest in the topic and the panel, not as a service to Hollifield or to Indivisible GA10.
Hollifield did not read this story before I posted it, and she does not read other stories I post before I upload them.
1 comment:
These people are lunatics. Indivisible should be looked at as a very sketchy org. Do better, Lee.
Post a Comment