NC journalists discuss diversity, elections during Sunshine Week

Journalists and researchers from across the state came together on Thursday to exchange knowledge on covering elections, climate change and requesting public information.

The event, which was presented by the North Carolina Open Government Coalition at the Elon University School of Communications during Sunshine Week, aims to help journalists improve their reporting skills.

How the First Amendment applies to virtual meetings, social media

Representatives of the Duke University First Amendment Clinic discussed First Amendment legal issues as they relate to the pandemic and the current age of social media. The First Amendment Clinic offers free legal services year-round to journalists and members of the public.

Legal students Nicole Ligon, Shannon O'Hara and Bailey Frank spoke on existing case law that protects the public's right to public information. During the pandemic, many local governments transitioned to virtual meetings. But even as the pandemic has improved, many entities are slow to transition away from this method and could be violating North Carolina's open meetings law.

For example, if a government entity holds a public meeting in person but requires that the public attend the meeting virtually, that would violate the open meetings law. Local officials may also be breaking the law if they remove journalists from virtual meeting rooms or do not provide them ample time to log into the meeting.

The clinic is concerned over the number of First Amendment violations they are seeing on Facebook pages run by public officials. When public officials use their Facebook pages to conduct official business, it is against the First Amendment for them to block or restrict who can see that page.

The law students addressed situations where local journalists said they were blocked from police department Facebook pages and had their comments deleted. Any sort of moderation on a public official’s page would be a First Amendment violation, the legal group said.

If any member of the public is blocked from seeing an official’s Facebook page or restricted from joining a public meeting, Duke University suggests that they report it to the NC Press Association's 24-hour hotline at 919-833-3838 or the Reporter's Committee for Freedom of the Press at 1-800-336-4243 or hotline@ncpress.com.

Investigating campaign finance reports

WRAL reporter Travis Fain and freelance reporter Jeremy Borden hosted a workshop on how to help people obtain campaign finance data for state lawmakers. The pair encouraged journalists to incorporate weekly campaign finance checks on their public representatives.

"Political parties can take unlimited funds and those political parties can farm out that money as they see fit," Fain said. During non-election years, campaigns are required to report their finances every six months.

Go to the North Carolina State Board of Elections' page on campaign finance reporting, search by "committee entity" and search for reported transactions.

When querying the state's system this way, Fain said, you are looking at receipts of transactions. Committees are like bank accounts for a candidate Borden said, and by requesting this information one is able to see who put money into a candidate’s account.

The state's system will give you a spreadsheet from which you can build a pivot table in Excel to see at a glance who each candidate's biggest fundraisers are over the past six months.

Using this method, Fain was able to break a story about Greg Lindberg, a political donor who ended up being charged with trying to bribe North Carolina's insurance commissioner to gain favorable treatment for his business operations.

These "pay to play" schemes are fairly common, Borden said, and much of the information about them is available to the public.

"Pay attention to how much a given group is giving over an election cycle," Fain said.

Diversity issues in North Carolina newsrooms

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media is performing a diversity audit of the state's newsrooms.

The conference also held a session on diversity in the newsroom, hosted by Report for America. Reporters from Charlotte and Raleigh shared their thoughts on how North Carolina newsrooms can help hire and retain journalists of color.

The three journalists who spoke, Dante Miller, Lara Brache and Eileen Rodriguez, shared their experience being the only journalist of color in their newsrooms.

Dante Miller, now a producer for WFAE in Charlotte, said at her first job she felt "tokenized" and didn't feel valued as a Black woman and journalist.

"When I left there and went to another publication, I felt discriminated against because of my age," Miller said. "I wasn't taken seriously because I was young."

Finally, when Miller started to work for QC Metro in Charlotte, she felt valued.

"Having someone [of color] in leadership in my company has been a phenomenal experience," she said.

Brache, a daughter of immigrants who now works at the News & Observer, said that oftentimes she was pulled off stories relating to the Hispanic community for appearing "too biased" and empathetic to immigrants.

Brache struggled with feeling valued and having confidence in her work in the past, she said. Now, working at the N&O, she works with editors who are diverse and willing to learn about her culture without discriminating.

"Story ideas that I bring to the table are valuable and are real issues," she said.