We started off sitting in a circle, and went around and said where we got our news, what we thought of the media today, and our biggest question concerning backpack journalism and the digital age. Through this discussion we learned that many of us believed that while today’s news is extremely accessible, there is a huge underlying problem regarding the biases and “evil sides” of journalism. In other words, fake news and everything it says about our political and domestic culture. In order for us to begin to talk about fake news, we first had to really understand what the term means and where it came from. “Fake News” is a weaponized term that was coined by Buzzfeed and first used by Hillary Clinton. It is used to describe “propaganda,” or one sided news stories, as well as to demonize news media one doesn’t agree with. Having established the main issue about news in the digital age, and its history, we got to work on learning how to detect it, and then solve it. Being able to tell if a story is real news is a vital part of being an informed citizen. Too often, people get sucked into the social media and misinformation vortex, and even “reliable” sources need to be checked. The news industry has become very politically centered, so even a respected paper can offer a completely different take on a different respected paper. This is why it is very important to know where your news is coming from, and find a different perspective on that issue.

News stories should let you make your own mind up about the issue, not the other way around. A real news story needs to contain these six elements: relevant, reliable (transparently sourced), recent, provides historical context, is hegemonically hip (makes clear power relations), and is harmonious (sharing multiple points of view) in order for it to be real news. If it meets all of these criteria, then you have a real news story. If not, it can be a source of “infotainment,” or it can be so-called “fake news.” Infotainment is all about clickbait, they are stories that are not newsworthy, like a cat getting stuck in a tree. Even though these kinds of stories do not further the public’s understanding of the world, they are not fake news. Stories that are specifically produced to present a one-sided persuasive position on a topic are classified as fake news. They spread misinformation, and force opinions into other people’s minds. Being aware of what you are consuming is very important, but not everybody knows how to find the real news in this age of endless information, and knowing doesn’t fix the actual problem.

The next big question we learned about was how do you begin to fix this issue? With Rob’s guidance and expert knowledge, we discovered what the first few steps to take were. The first is to “recognize that all of these manufactured dualisms, like red state vs. blue state… are designed to create a couple of tribes of news consumers that will then sort of argue with each other incessantly, and not get to the root cause of the questions that we are trying to answer as a civilization” (Williams). The second step is to “create our own independent news platforms, and focus on place, locale, and stories produced by real people that matter to real people… and the best place to start doing that is in our local communities” (Williams). Seven Days is a really good example of a newspaper that is implementing these strategies. It is produced in Vermont, written by Vermonters, and the stories have meaning to the people who live here.

To put all of our knowledge from Rob into action, we were split up into five teams. Each team was designated to report on one of the five strands. We planned, researched, interviewed, wrote, edited, filmed, and collaborated. Our team was in charge of reporting on the Backpack Journalism strand, and we interviewed other students in the strand about their process with their own news stories. Helena Raddock, part of the team in charge of reporting on Biological Illustrations said, “we spent the most time on the interviews and that was just when we were asking people about why they were here and what inspired them to be there, and a couple people went through their portfolios. We were just kind of figuring out what they were doing basically.” This was a common theme within the strand and showed us how important it is to gather research from a variety of sources to use in a news story. Ethan Schmitt, reporting on Youth Leadership, reflected on his time with the Backpack Journalism strand. Schmitt observed, “I think from the entire process of working on this journalism project- recording , getting our B-roll, and organizing everything- it’s very difficult overall to incorporate all these things together. But, I think in the grand scheme of things, it’s interesting to learn how they actually do work together to influence every part of our brain- the reptilian part of our brain all the way to the part that interprets language in its basic elements. So, I think this experience, learning about this, from Rob, was once-in-a-lifetime.” As writers reporting on other writers, we had a unique opportunity to see how our group mates tackled, and succeeded in the challenge of writing and producing an entire story. Within the span of less than 48 hours, our Backpack Journalism strand created five polished, professional, and REAL news stories.