Your Second Cause Should Be the Facts

Every cause depends on people knowing what's happening around them: how the school board voted, what the county plans to do about its water system, who is running for sheriff and why. In a growing number of American communities, nobody is reporting any of it. Between 2002 and 2025, newspapers cut about 75% of their newsroom jobs, and two to three papers still close every week. Matthew Copeland calls this a classic market failure, and he runs a newsroom built on a different model.

Matthew is the Chief Executive and Editor of WyoFile, an independent nonprofit newsroom covering the people, places and policy of Wyoming. He started with WyoFile as a freelance writer and took over its leadership in 2017, when the organization was four people with a couple of months of payroll in the bank and a heavy dependence on a few institutional grants. WyoFile now has 16 staff, an audience more than ten times larger, and its stories were republished about 3,000 times in the past year by newspapers across the state.

The model is simple. WyoFile asks people to fund journalism as a public good, the way a community funds its food bank or volunteer fire department, and spends that money on reporting. With profit margin out of the center of the mission, the newsroom has no need to chase attention by picking sides or sensationalizing the news. Its work breaks into three jobs: give people the information they need to take part in civic life, watch over the public's business, and get accurate facts out early enough to crowd out misinformation before it spreads.

Matthew and Eric also dig into why facts keep losing the fight for attention, and why Matthew gives his best answers in person. WyoFile editors pick up the phone for every angry reader email, and many of the newsroom's strongest supporters started out that way. As AI reshapes search and platforms fill with bots, he expects people to place a much higher value on human connection.

For leaders working outside journalism, Matthew borrows a line from the late John Thornton, co-founder of the Texas Tribune and the American Journalism Project: whatever your first cause is, your second should be access to information. Every mission is shaped by how information reaches people and what they do with it, and both are changing fast.

Episode Highlights:

[00:02:05] WyoFile's mission and its three mandates 
[00:04:00] Crowding out misinformation with facts 
[00:06:35] The collapse of local news, by the numbers 
[00:10:00] Funding journalism like the fire department 
[00:11:40] From "three guys and a dog" to 16 staff 
[00:13:35] 3,000 stories republished across Wyoming 
[00:15:55] Why chasing attention skews the news 
[00:19:35] Why trust holds up at the local level 
[00:25:05] Ideas need an arena of fact to compete 
[00:29:30] Facts are losing the battle for attention 
[00:34:25] Make it human and take it off the platform 
[00:42:45] Why your second cause should be access to information

Notable Quotes:

[00:43:15]: "No matter what your number one cause is, your number two ought to be access to information." Matthew Copeland 

[00:04:55]: "The truth does a particularly poor job of standing up for itself when there's not very much of it around." Matthew Copeland 

[00:10:50]: "So too do we need to think about access to the facts as an essential component of a functioning society and funded as such." Matthew Copeland 

[00:26:00]: "That competition of ideas is only functional, is only productive, if it's conducted in an arena of fact." Matthew Copeland 

[00:29:20]: "There really isn't necessarily a shortage of facts so much as facts are losing the battle of attention." Eric Ressler 

[00:48:50]: "Get in the game, get off the comment section and turn the energy that maybe would be spent lobbing grenades into trying to make an impact with and for your community." Matthew Copeland 

Resources & Links:

• WyoFile: Matthew's independent nonprofit newsroom covering Wyoming
• Matthew Copeland's bio (American Journalism Project): background on Matthew and WyoFile
• Matthew Copeland LinkedIn
• Institute for Nonprofit News: network of nonprofit newsrooms, mentioned at [00:47:55]
• Find Your News (INN directory): search for a nonprofit newsroom near you
• American Journalism Project: venture philanthropy for nonprofit local news, mentioned at [00:48:15]
• The Texas Tribune: nonprofit newsroom co-founded by John Thornton, mentioned at [00:43:00]
• A tribute to John Thornton (American Journalism Project): source of the "number two cause" idea
• Timothy Snyder: historian quoted at [00:04:30]
• Wyoming Press Association: the state's newspaper association, mentioned at [00:13:45]
• Medill State of Local News 2025: data on newspaper closures and news deserts, context for the figures at [00:07:00]
• Angus Thuermer Jr. joins WyoFile: the WyoFile reporter quoted at [00:11:55]

Full Transcript:

Eric Ressler [00:00:55]: Okay, Matthew, thank you for joining me today.

Matthew Copeland [00:00:55]: Of course. Thanks for having me, Eric.

Eric Ressler [00:01:00]: So I'm really excited to dive into a lot of topics with you here. We've had a couple discussions on our show about the information ecosystem, mis and disinformation. In my opinion, one of the most critical and often not really talked about enough elements of social impact work, civic engagement, and one of the biggest issues in the world right now. And a lot of orgs are working on it in different ways, but I fear that we are being outpaced by technology and culture and some of the worst impulses of human psychology and humanity. So we're going to have a fun show talking about all that today. How's that sound?

Matthew Copeland [00:01:40]: I share your concerns.

Eric Ressler [00:01:45]: Well, I'd love to start to just learn a little bit about, and for our listeners and viewers to learn a little bit more about, the work that you're doing around local journalism and what drives that work and how you're seeing this problem and how you guys are working on it, even just at the local level, and the trends that you're seeing more nationally and internationally as well.

Matthew Copeland [00:02:05]: Yeah. In terms of what drives the work, we are genuinely a mission-driven organization here at WyoFile. That's a phrase that is bandied about all the time. It almost feels like requisite speech. As often as not, it's more lip service than it is fact, but we actually do turn to the mission on a daily basis as a compass for us in helping us make coverage decisions, editorial decisions, business decisions about do we zig or do we zag?

WyoFile's mission is to inform and engage Wyoming with in-depth reporting in the public interest. To be fair, there's a fair bit of elbow room in that. You could interpret that a number of different ways. So we've been very deliberate in defining what we see as three distinct mandates in that mission, or three distinct calls to action. One, first and foremost, and really top line in terms of what gets the lion's share of our attention and resources, is that it's our job to make sure the people of Wyoming have the information they need to participate effectively in civic life. Whatever they want that participation to look like, towards whatever ends are important to them, whatever the cause, whatever the issue, whatever the project, making sure they're able to do that fully informed by the facts.

Second, in no way secondary, and in fact, if you ask most people at WyoFile why they came to work here, this is a big part of it. And that's to be the watchdogs. It's our job to make sure the people's business is being conducted out in the open and in the sunlight where everyone can see it. And when it's not, to drag it kicking and screaming if necessary out into the open where everyone has the benefit of that information.

And then third, and this is unfortunately increasingly taking up a good deal more of our emphasis out of necessity, and this touches on what you mentioned there in the intro about your concerns about being outpaced, is it's our job to set the record straight initially as opposed to try and correct it after the fact. But put another way, it's to crowd out misinformation, disinformation, propaganda and lies with the facts, to provide that alternative to what we are increasingly seeing driving our political and civic discourse in this country.

Timothy Snyder, formerly at Yale, history professor, I believe he's in McGill now in Canada, widely regarded as one of the world's leading experts on tyranny. I think he said it very succinctly in that the truth does a particularly poor job of standing up for itself when there's not very much of it around. When we think about that third call to action, you can think of it in terms of making sure there's plenty of it around, because unfortunately the trend is pointing the other direction. With all of the information that we have out there today, with all of the voices, all of the ever-dividing channels and ways to acquire information or to use the term of the day, content, there is actually a decreasing volume of valid factual information about what's happening at the local level, the information people need to participate and to engage.

Eric Ressler [00:05:50]: Yeah, and I think let's go there a little bit specifically about the local level, because my sense is that even in my early childhood, but certainly before that, there was a little bit more of a shared sense of truth and reality, broadly speaking. Of course, there's always edge cases, there's always going to be tinfoil hat type individuals who have their own idea about what's real. And there were basically a few public broadcast stations on TV. You read your local newspaper, there were maybe one or two of them. They were actually well-staffed and actual real journalists worked there and there was a viable business model there. And my sense is that entire paradigm has completely collapsed for the most part. And I think...

Matthew Copeland [00:06:35]: It's completely shifted, and I think it's fair in many sectors to describe it as a collapse. And to be clear, it's a collapse driven by really a classic market failure. The models that sustained the institutions that we have relied on for generations are not working the way that they have for generations. To quantify that for you a little bit, give some numbers to that, between 2002 and 2025, American newspapers shed about 75% of their newsroom jobs.

Eric Ressler [00:07:15]: Wow.

Matthew Copeland [00:07:15]: We're just talking about newsroom jobs. These aren't people running the presses. These aren't people delivering papers or selling ad space. These are journalists, reporters, editors, photographers, et cetera. We're talking about 80,000 folks, upwards of 80,000 folks that are no longer out there digging, no longer out there revealing, no longer out there reflecting the community to itself, no longer out there facilitating the essential conversations that we need to be having as neighbors and as towns and as counties about how we're going to pave Main Street and what we want the sheriff to be focused on and who we should send to Washington DC and who we should send to prison.

If you look at an institutional level, today somewhere between two and three American newspapers shutter every week on average, primarily local institutions. 37% of those American papers have already folded in the last 20 years and they're not coming back. And as you described so clearly, far more of them, the vast majority in many cases of those that remain, have become shells of their former selves. In some cases, literally empty mastheads or ghost papers that are no longer able to effectively cover their communities.

And I want to be careful here and be clear that I'm not trying to be disparaging of these institutions in any way. These are hardworking folks who certainly aren't in it for the money, they're not in it for the glory. In many cases, they're going around every day doing their job with a target on their back and getting beat up for it, and they're doing the essential work, but the model has collapsed to the degree that they do not have the resources they need to be able to continue doing that in an effective way. We need to find a better way forward, and that's really an essential component of why WyoFile does what it does. It's not just the providing this essential public service of informing the public, but doing it in a way that builds a movement, doing it in a way that demonstrates a new path forward so that we can know we will have sustainable, reliable, ready, universal access to the facts going forward.

Eric Ressler [00:09:45]: Can you give us a little bit more detail around how you've built something that works in the current environment, in the current market, in a way that the traditional local paper doesn't?

Matthew Copeland [00:10:00]: Yeah. So I think it starts with putting access to the facts, public interest journalism, at the center of the mission as opposed to profit margin at the center of the mission. And that enables you to do a lot of different things differently. We approach journalism first and foremost as an essential public good, and we ask people to fund it as such, in the same category of: it's essential as a community to fund the local food bank to make sure that the neediest among us aren't going hungry, and the volunteer fire department to put out the flames, and the Red Cross to help our communities recover from disasters when, God forbid, they strike. So too do we need to think about access to the facts as an essential component of a functioning society and funded as such.

So at the risk of oversimplifying, our business model is at the end of the day pretty simple. People give us money and we spend it on producing top-notch journalism. There's obviously a little bit more complexity to that and how we pursue it, but at the end of the day, that's what it boils down to. And the good news is it's working. In the face of this environment where we're seeing such rapid and accelerating declines in capacity in other sectors, we and colleague organizations like ours around the country have been able to add new capacities and bring new resources to bear.

To put that in scale or in context, I had been involved with WyoFile for a number of years, but I assumed this role as the leader of the organization in 2017. And at that point, we were, in the words of one of our longstanding reporters and a Wyoming journalism legend, a guy named Angus Thuermer, "three guys and a dog." He was diplomatic enough to not name the dog. I think we all understood it to be me, but we were a four-person shop and like so many news organizations, it was nip and tuck. We had a couple of months of payroll in the bank. We were existentially dependent on a couple of big institutional grants. And frankly, we weren't quite sure how we were going to keep the lights on. We were forever flirting with insolvency.

And today, by contrast, we've quadrupled in size. We're 16 staffers strong. We have, without a close second, the most experienced, most accomplished, most professional newsroom in the state. Our audience has multiplied by more than a factor of 10. And I think this is an important point. Not only has our direct audience exploded, the folks that are finding their information on wyofile.com or via our social channels or our podcasts, et cetera, but we're also filling the state's newspapers and other news outlets with high quality coverage for free. That's baked into the mission cake. There's nothing in that mission to inform and engage Wyoming with in-depth reporting in the public interest that says anything about on wyofile.com. It's our job to make sure that people have the information wherever they choose to find it.

Eric Ressler [00:13:45]: So your stories are distributed in other papers in the state?

Matthew Copeland [00:13:50]: Yeah. So to give you an idea, I believe there's 39 extant members of the Wyoming Press Association, which is the newspaper association here in the state. Most of those are weeklies, so call it 52 editions a year, give or take. Collectively, that community republished WyoFile stories about 3,000 times in the last 12 months.

Eric Ressler [00:14:15]: Wow.

Matthew Copeland [00:14:15]: Yeah. We are working closely with those partners to make sure that at the local level, those communities have a nutritious information diet available to them.

Eric Ressler [00:14:25]: My sense is that this is a pretty special scenario, in the sense that many communities at the local level have either a shell paper that's private equity backed and stripped of its true mission and value, or nothing, or something more at the state level. And so there's a lack of proper journalism happening at the local level.

And then I also want to talk about the international and national level of journalism that's happening too, because my sense in observing that is that even some of the biggest and most acclaimed papers and television stations... The media is clearly very bifurcated at this point between all different forms of media and short form and social, et cetera. My sense is that there's been a pretty distinct move towards opinion-based journalism and what I would describe as sensationalized journalism, even at some of the biggest papers. And if you look at the same story, even just to make it a little bit more blunt, in AP News versus the New York Times reporting on the same issue, the flavor of that reporting, the emotion of that reporting, is going to have a very different register. Is that something you agree with? Do you observe that too? Am I getting that right or wrong? What's your take on that?

Matthew Copeland [00:16:00]: Absolutely. Insofar as paying the bills is dependent upon driving audience numbers, and I don't want to diminish the importance of audience, right?

Eric Ressler [00:16:10]: Yeah, of course.

Matthew Copeland [00:16:10]: The best journalism in the world is not going to do anybody any good if nobody reads it, nobody engages with it, nobody trusts it, nobody uses it in their daily life. But insofar as you've got a model that is built around keeping the lights on by acquiring and holding on to people's attention at all costs, the incentives get pretty skewed pretty quickly. Really, the most reliable, the fastest, the easiest, probably the cheapest way to acquire regular engagement is to pick sides. It is to preach to the choir, to find your choir and hold onto them, and to be sensational, to grab attention. A lot of what needs to happen to make our society work is not sensational. It's pretty boring.

Eric Ressler [00:17:15]: Pretty cut and dry. Yep.

Matthew Copeland [00:17:15]: When we talk about paving Main Street, we talk about upgrading the water infrastructure in our community. It's also not simple stuff. It is stuff that is complex. It has nuance. To really understand it, you need to understand the context, you need to understand the history, you need to understand the stakeholders and their perspectives. And it's a different approach. I've been enormously gratified over the last, call it a decade, in seeing the degree to which people do find value in that and do choose to give their attention to that when it's something that's made available to them, when it's something that they understand, when it's something that they understand where it's coming from, which is to say they have a relationship with the institution that is producing this information. They have relationships with the people and understand that it's a human enterprise and know these people as their neighbors.

Eric Ressler [00:18:20]: Well, let's get into that, because what I'm concerned by, and I'm not the only one concerned by this, is that there's been a growing trend to basically have distrust in institutions, distrust in media, specifically "mainstream media." And I'm not even saying that we should not have a healthy amount of skepticism from any publisher. I think having a generally skeptical viewpoint around any piece of information is a basic life skill at this point, just given how much misinformation there is. And even the biggest and best journalists get it wrong sometimes. They just do. And it's not even for nefarious reasons, it usually isn't. It's usually just a mistake. And the difference is that actual journalists then publish a retraction instead of just moving on to the next viral post.

Nonetheless, there seems to be in our culture more grace given to individual personalities and influencers getting things wrong, even when they have horrible incentives, a clear political agenda. When they make mistakes, it's whatever, but anytime mainstream media makes even the smallest mistake, it's just more proof that you can't trust the mainstream media. What's going on there?

Matthew Copeland [00:19:35]: I think one of the things that's going on there is the fact that we are talking about national and international things by and large that are far from home and that people don't really have an opportunity to have as much of a meaningful impact on. They do not see the direct correlation with what's happening in their daily lives. And I think that is part of why, with those plummeting trust numbers, the one place we see a lot more strength in faith in the "media" is at the local level.

Eric Ressler [00:20:10]: At the local level, yeah.

Matthew Copeland [00:20:10]: The problem is that there's so much less of it at the local level. And I think that's problematic for our discourse in a lot of ways. The founders built our nation with a great deal of local control for a reason. There's a lot of philosophy and thinking behind this, in that communities work together to accomplish the things that they can together, to address challenges, to capitalize on opportunities, to chart their own course, to define what prosperity looks like and means for them collectively. But obviously smaller groups have limitations, and so the local system feeds into a state system that can fill in the gaps between what communities can do independently. And ideally, a robust and engaged state system then rolls up to and informs a responsive federal system that is reacting to or responding to what the states need. I think we all remember high school civics class.

The problem though, and what we're seeing way too much of today, is when the foundation of that type of local participation and engagement erodes, and a huge part of that is access to information about what's going on. When that erodes, the power flow inverts. And instead of talking about how do we want to grow and nurture and diversify our local economy, we're talking about distant, opaque, considerably less responsive institutions. The conversations become simpler. We've all seen this: the soundbite-centric public discourse, the zero-sum, with-us-or-against-us politics, the oversimplification of the very real and very complex challenges that we need to address together.

Eric Ressler [00:22:30]: Hey friends, real quick before we continue today's episode, I'm Eric Ressler, founder and creative director at Cosmic. Cosmic is a creative agency purpose built for nonprofits and mission-driven organizations. For the last 15 years, we've helped leaders like you nail your impact story and sharpen your strategy, but we're not here to just leave you with a fancy slide deck and a pat on the back. We roll up our sleeves and help you bring our ideas to life through campaigns, creative, and digital experiences. Our work together helps you earn trust, connect deeply with your supporters, and grow your fundraising and your impact. If you value the thinking we share here and want it applied to your biggest challenges, let's talk at designbycosmic.com. All right, back to today's conversation.

And I think my fear is that some of the ugliness and messiness at the national and international level seems to be trickling down to the local level, some of the tactics at least, especially when we get into politics. But the other thing I think that's harder and harder to separate, unfortunately, is fact from politics, because politics in the best cases are built on facts. That doesn't seem to be happening quite as much these days, but even the concept of what's true and what's real is becoming politically motivated in a political battle where we can't even agree on basic principles of science in some situations, right? And so I'm watching local issues being debated in the same way that international issues are being debated now, where instead of this community constructive disagreement, let's-figure-out-solutions oriented mindset, it's just this polarized, tribal, black and white lack of nuanced thinking.

And my frank sense of it is that 90% of that blame goes to the medium of the internet, and that if those same conversations were happening more exclusively, or exclusively, in rooms, and the internet were not in the room or part of that forming of beliefs and ideas, we would be talking to each other much more like we're having a conversation right now. We might disagree on some things and we can talk about why and get curious and interested about that. And I just fear that the trajectory doesn't seem to be going the right way for us as a society with regards to those basic common agreeable truths. Do you see a counter story there in your local work? How do you think about the distinction there?

Matthew Copeland [00:25:15]: I do see a counter story there. In fact, the counter story is a large part of why I do this work. For me, it comes down to the competition of ideas. We don't agree. There's an infinite number of things that we don't agree on and never will agree on, and that's perfectly fine. Frankly, I think that's part of the American secret sauce. I think that's a huge driver of what has made us such an incredible nation for 250 years now. Let the best idea win. It is the purest and I think most important and most impactful application of the free market principle. The problem is that competition of ideas is only functional, is only productive if it's conducted in an arena of fact, and that's increasingly not the case.

What we often tell folks is, look, it's not our job at WyoFile to tell people what to think. It's not our job to tell people how to think. It is our job to make sure that thinking at least has the opportunity to be informed by the facts. To choose a very silly example, I'm talking to you from Lander, Wyoming, where 30 below is something that we experience most winters. There, I think, is a valid debate to be had about what the best way is for us to efficiently and effectively heat our homes and structures in Wyoming. We constantly need to be improving on that front, and I think we can have a productive debate about that. We can't have a productive conversation about that though if one part of that conversation is coming from a perspective of, well, it just doesn't get cold here. That's just factually untrue.

And it's a really silly example, but I'm afraid that frankly, it's not that far-fetched when you look at some of the conversations we're having at the national level, and unfortunately at the local level too, because so many of those essential local conversations are being supplanted by what I think could fairly be described as a brand loyalty debate. Are you red or are you blue? The ideas don't matter. It's whose team are you on that I care about.

Eric Ressler [00:27:45]: Yeah. And I think that's the part that I am, I guess, somewhat skeptical of. What I'm hearing you say is that the free marketplace of ideas is the solution there, and that facts are a big part of that. And if more people just had access to the facts, this would solve itself. I'm very much oversimplifying your argument, I think, but let's just go with that as a thread here. And my concern is that facts are, I think you even had a quote early in this episode, that the truth is something that there's not enough of and doesn't stand on its own. And I think what I'm seeing and what I'm concerned by is that team-based, tribal, sensationalized, emotionally driven dis and misinformation, if not propaganda, seems to work better on our psychology and be more effective, especially for just the average citizen who maybe doesn't really care about civic engagement or politics as much and is just trying to get by, which, no shade there whatsoever. They're going to fall into that trap a lot easier than the, "Well, let me get three perspectives and look at the primary sources."

And so journalism traditionally did a lot of that legwork for society, and I think that's maybe what you're saying a little bit more of, because I don't think just putting the facts out there... The facts are out there, right? There's more access to facts than ever before, maybe not quite at the local level, but because of the sheer amount of access to information most of us have now, there really isn't necessarily a shortage of facts so much as facts are losing the battle of attention. Agree or disagree?

Matthew Copeland [00:29:30]: Yeah, no, I agree that facts are losing the battle of attention for sure. In part, that is driven by a dearth both of the facts at the local level, but also of people's relationship to them and with them. I described earlier building and demonstrating a new model, building a movement. That's a big part of this movement. It's, again, not just the providing of the facts, but giving people an opportunity to put skin in that game, giving people an opportunity to recognize how essential that access is and what we lose when it goes away, and to not only invest in it with their pocketbooks, but to do it with their time and their attention and in their conversations and with their neighbors and in their community.

There has never been more competition for our attention than there is right now. That's accelerating. That's very much accelerating. And frankly, the technology and its practitioners are very good at that. We've got more than a century of advanced psychology that lays out pretty well for us how humans respond to various stimuli. And we have built tools that we carry around in our pockets that are very, very good at pushing those buttons for us. And that is a problem. I am not so Pollyannaish as to believe that providing the facts solves all our problems.

Eric Ressler [00:31:30]: Sure.

Matthew Copeland [00:31:30]: We've got a lot of challenges. We've got a lot of puzzles that we need to figure out. We've got a lot of opportunities that we need to figure out how to capitalize on. And simply flooding the zone, as it were, with valid, valuable, factual information is not going to get the job done on that. I do know that we can't do the job without it though. It is a necessary precursor. Whatever it is we're trying to solve, whatever it is we're trying to address, whatever it is we're trying to accomplish, we can't do it unless we have folks engaged with the information that they need to do so.

Eric Ressler [00:32:15]: And I think that's especially where the local comes in. If there is a new growing shortage of facts, it's at the local level compared to the national and international level, because of this degradation and collapse of the local media environment that's happened over the last couple decades. And I definitely don't mean to diminish the importance of journalism and facts and truth and putting that into the limelight. And I think you're aligned here that that's not going to do it on its own, yet we also can't do it without that part. That's a prerequisite to the rest of it.

But even just thinking about, and frankly watching, maybe not so much colleagues, but definitely friends and family fall, and myself even, frankly. I think all of us are not immune to this. Having beliefs reinforced and having algorithmic tuning gets you into rabbit holes where you see one YouTube short about a thing and then all of a sudden three weeks later you're down into some weird fringe category. Like, how did I end up here? And especially when the incentive of those platforms is attention at basically all costs, and we know that humans have to a degree a bias towards things that trigger their emotions, especially negative emotions. You talked about these psychological tunings. The platforms are well aware, we're seeing this play out in real time in the courts right now, that they are willing to trade public harm for profit and for attention, because attention is their currency of profit.

And so part of me is like, do we need almost some kind of movement-based revolution? Is it regulation on these platforms that needs to happen? How do you compete in this marketplace of ideas in the current state of play with technology without falling prey to some of those same traps that the big tech companies have fallen prey to?

Matthew Copeland [00:34:15]: Yeah. You make it human. You literally, but I think more to the point figuratively, take it off the platform. Form direct, trusting, give-and-take, 360-degree relationships with your audience, with the communities that you are seeking to serve, and be clear and be transparent about what it is that you're trying to accomplish and how people can help do that. Give people an opportunity to engage.

I've got a neighbor, we come from different perspectives politically. I think my wife put it perfectly: "Man, I love that guy so long as you don't look at his bumper stickers." If we were talking about national politics in a chat room, it's not even a thing anymore, on a social media platform somewhere, I bet you it would get pretty heated pretty quickly. But when we stand on opposite sides of the fence, or we're both out grilling burgers of a Wednesday evening and are chatting about what's going on locally, that's something that we have in common. It's something that we can talk about with nuance and with perspective. And again, we're not necessarily going to agree on that, but it can be a productive disagreement.

We need to be doing that at scale within the communities that we seek to serve. And that's an essential part of our approach: getting out into the community face-to-face, responding to every correspondence. Many of WyoFile's biggest champions, the relationship started with a comment on a story or a nastygram sent via email saying, "Oh, you biased so-and-so's. Why didn't you include this and that in the story? And I'm never going to read you again." And one of our editors picking up the phone, like we do in every single one of those interactions, and saying, "Hey, thanks for reading. Thanks, Mark, for reaching out. I want to have a better understanding of what your concerns are. Do you have five minutes to walk me through this?" And if this warrants an addition or an update or a correction or what have you, that card is very much in the deck, that's on the table, but I want to understand where you are coming from.

We have a little bit of a luxury in Wyoming in that we are the least populous state in the union. As I believe it was former Governor Mike Sullivan who coined the now famous phrase, Wyoming is really just one big small town with really long streets. This is a community where someone running for statewide office, governor, senator, secretary of state, what have you, there is still an expectation that as a voter, you're going to get a chance to shake that person's hand and look them in the eye maybe a couple of times before election day, and that you can access them after they're in office as well. It does still have that small town community vibe to it.

We also have in our history, much more recently than I think so much of the country, a proud tradition that was maintained and executed until quite recently of explicit civility in our discourse, including with those that we disagree with. Very much a live-and-let-live brand of conservatism. People often talk about how you can't afford to alienate people in Wyoming, because next time you end up in the ditch in February, which happens to all of us, you don't know who the next truck's going to be along.

Eric Ressler [00:38:30]: And there won't be that many of them.

Matthew Copeland [00:38:35]: Yeah, exactly. And it may be a while. You're not going to have a selection to choose from. We can still tap into that. There has been a shift like there has been everywhere nationally. It has grown more polarized. It has grown more nasty. The level of vitriol has definitely ramped up, but that is still fresh in people's memory and it's still something that people value, and it's incumbent on us to find ways to tap into that and to leverage that for everyone's benefit.

There's an irony to that. We are a digital-first publication. We publish online at wyofile.com. Most of our reach is on digital. A lot of our engagement, a lot of our important engagement, is on the social media platforms. But using that as a pathway to genuine relationships, relationships that aren't dependent upon or moderated by intermediaries like the social platforms, like the search algorithms, et cetera, where folks have direct access to us and vice versa, is something that really every news organization needs to be focused on right now, particularly as the way information moves around the internet is changing so rapidly. What AI has done to search almost overnight: organizations that were dependent on SEO for their audience are in a world of hurt right now. I don't see that getting better. It really has to come down to people to people and communities together.

Eric Ressler [00:40:15]: Yeah, I think that's dead on. And looking at this for a second through the lens of some of our listeners, who are also very mission driven, social impact focused, but probably not running a newsroom, there's a version of this that they need to be paying attention to as well. And I think everyone is to a degree realizing the importance of digital engagement and dialogue and how that's happening, and tuned into the social media platforms, tuned into the pros and cons of those things, because there are pros to them also in terms of building movements and missions. And also, I think, not even just worried about, but curious about how AI is coming in and shaking all of this up, even around discoverability of your mission for support that you need, whether that's money or people power or whatever it is.

And now there's a new intermediary that is just a new complex player in this already complex web of information cycles and ecosystems, where you might search AI for something to get truth about who I should vote for or how I should feel about this issue. AI is now pulling from social media on your behalf or other publications on your behalf, trying to figure out how and what to prioritize and to surface, which is also shaped by past conversations you've had with AI. So it's just getting more and more complex. So there's this weird moment I think that we're in, where in-person, human-to-human conversation is going to become a premium almost at some level for our time and attention. And yet so much of what influences our beliefs and our understanding of the world around us is happening and building human context before those conversations happen, which just creates this weird... Sometimes I have conversations with friends where I'm like, "Where did you even hear that? What does your algorithm look like, man? This is the first time I've heard it. What am I missing even?"

So it's a really interesting challenge. So I guess as we work to wrap up here, I want to just ask, what should other social impact leaders in the space be taking away from this, be thinking about, other than support local journalism and the importance of that? How should leaders be navigating this moment in the information ecosystem?

Matthew Copeland [00:42:45]: Yeah, I think putting a social impact leader's particular cause in the context of an information ecosystem in the first place is a big step forward. The late, great John Thornton, one of the founders of the Texas Tribune, one of the founders of the American Journalism Project, and a very generous philanthropist, said it really well when he said that no matter what your number one cause is, your number two ought to be access to information. Recognizing the degree to which whatever it is you're trying to accomplish is going to be affected by the availability of information, how that information travels, how people interact with that information, and recognizing that that is such a rapidly changing set of variables right now and that that has enormous impact on whatever your cause is, whatever it is that you're trying to accomplish, is essential.

I liked a phrase you used just a moment ago about human-to-human relationships being at a premium. This is entirely anecdotal, this is entirely out of my head. I have zero data to back this up, but I think there is going to be a coming renaissance in which people start to recognize that premium and value it as such. And I think in large part it will be a direct response to people's frustration with the alternative, people's disgust with the alternative, and people recognizing how much better the human-to-human interactions are all around. As cyberspace increasingly becomes the purview of the bots and the technology, and less of a place that is responsive to our needs and our desires, I think folks are going to find opportunities to do meaningful work at scale offline. Not entirely. AI is not going away, social media is not going away, but thinking about those as supplements as opposed to central, I think, is going to be a welcome shift, and something that I'm always looking for opportunities in.

Eric Ressler [00:45:35]: Yeah, I also anecdotally agree, and I don't have a ton of data to back that up either, but just observing the world, I have a sense that a lot of people are knowingly, and with a true felt sense, pretty unhappy with the current state of digital experience, and yet we can't seem to put the phones down. And there's even movements around putting the phones down and digital detox and all these things, but they are so well designed to hack our psychology and our attention and to basically prevent us from ever becoming bored, which is a huge issue actually for our brains. We need to be bored, because that's where we process a lot. It's where our imaginative thinking happens. And so I think we're starting to see a lot of people at least having more discussions around this, and hopefully this one can be part of that.

And I agree, I'm not suggesting we go into some sort of digital fast or detox permanently, because I just don't think that's practical anymore, but I do think we need to majorly rethink how these technologies fit into our lives and not just basically accept whatever the big tech companies tell us we should do there, because their incentives are not aligned at all with ours, broadly speaking. But to me that actually ends on a slightly optimistic note, in the sense that if we do start to recognize that culturally, and we can reclaim the best parts of traditional media and the best parts of what these technologies do offer us as benefits, I think that is going to be a better world than either of the alternatives that we've talked about.

Matthew, before we do wrap, I want to just give you a chance to shout out or plug anything to our listeners who are interested in learning more about you or WyoFile or just getting engaged in local journalism. What should people dig into if they're passionate about this and want to go deeper?

Matthew Copeland [00:47:35]: Yeah, I would encourage folks to find their independent nonprofit public interest news agency. This model is proliferating quite rapidly around the nation, takes a lot of different forms in a lot of different places, but there are innumerable organizations doing really essential work. Find it, start reading, subscribe to the newsletter. If you find value there, donate to it. Some resources on that front: inn.org, the Institute for Nonprofit News. I believe they've got a geographic search that you can use. They certainly have a listing of many hundreds of members. An outstanding organization that we've been involved with from the outset is the American Journalism Project. Their portfolio of nonprofit news agencies are really the top performers in this space, and you can find them all over the country.

I'd encourage folks to get involved with whatever that means for you, whether it's changing the hours of the rec center so that they better serve the community, or paying closer attention to the school board, or better yet running for public office locally. Get in the game, get off the comment section and turn the energy that maybe would be spent lobbing grenades into trying to make an impact with and for your community.

Eric Ressler [00:49:10]: Awesome. Thank you, Matthew. This has been great. Appreciate your time today.

Matthew Copeland [00:49:10]: I really appreciate it, Eric.

Eric Ressler [00:49:15]: If you enjoyed today's video, please be sure to hit like and subscribe or even leave us a comment. It really helps. Thank you. And thank you for all that you do for your cause and for being part of the movement to move humanity and the planet forward.