On Independent Media
(Plus a Labor Day special on paid subscriptions.)
Several weeks ago, I got to have a great conversation with South Carolina reporter Nick Reynolds about recent attempts to grow more “liberal” media spaces in the state. Reynolds is a good reporter and a good writer, and often provides the kind of coverage and analysis that an informed public needs to effectively engage with its institutions.
He was working on a piece focusing mainly on the launch of The Arena, which has consciously branded itself as a “progressive media company,” but he wanted to talk to me about the newsletter as an example of other attempts to create an alternative to a heavily “conservative”1 media space.
Reynolds’ whole piece is well worth the read, but I thought I would share part of our conversation here, too:
More left-leaning media in South Carolina, where it does exist, tends to come about more organically. One of the more popular left-leaning bloggers in the state is former Columbia-area schoolteacher Steve Nuzum, a South Carolina native and a former organizer with teacher advocacy organization SC for Ed, whose former leader Lisa Ellis ran as a Democrat against Republican Ellen Weaver for Superintendent of Education in 2022.
It was never actually intended to be a liberal blog. A moderator of the organization's 20,000-member Facebook group, Nuzum repeatedly found himself engaging members in the comment sections with lengthy screeds about everything from South Carolina's issues retaining teachers to various bills in the statehouse.
Eventually, he moved his messaging to a blog on the website Substack, where his articles about topics like public school library restrictions and critiques on the conservative-led "parent's rights" movement are regularly cited by top education writers and still receive anywhere from hundreds to thousands of views each.
“It wasn't like a conscious decision to say I want to have like, a liberal blog,” said Nuzum. “It was more me saying 'no one's covering issues that I care about, and talking to the people I think they should talk to.”
Nuzum's blog, he'll admit, is on a niche topic, and an outgrowth of an advocacy organization whose activities today are on an ‘indefinite pause.’ But the strength his material, he said, was largely in something more mainstream media cannot offer: where newspapers and television news aim for passionless objectivity, Nuzum and others seek to directly influence change through perspective-driven commentary.
“I did not care about politics or read about politics or care about what the state budget did until I started teaching in schools, and you saw the direct impact of those policies,” he said. “So it wasn't an abstract thing anymore. It becomes a moral issue.”
Nick gave me a lot of space to share my thoughts in one of the state’s largest papers, and that is huge for a completely independent writer. I also think it illustrates a valuable tendency to look deeply into the issues he is covering.
I especially appreciate that he included the quote about not intending to create a “liberal blog”. I might go a step further and say that I still don’t think of most of the pieces in this newsletter as being “liberal” or “leftist”.
Education and labor— which are the topics of most of these essays and articles— should not be partisan issues. That the Overton window on education has shifted in such a way that opposing school segregation, or arguing that defunding schools hurts students, or that teachers, like all human beings, deserve the right to fight for better working conditions, are considered by many to be “leftist” is, I think, a result of a concerted effort by a minority of people, and not an organic political shift.
For example, what is often considered “leftist” in America (especially in a time where career moderates like Joe Biden are being called “radical leftists”) is considered centrist or even center-right in much of Europe. (That Biden, for example, might be considered “center-left” for his vocal support of labor unions, to me, demonstrates merely that American anti-labor interests have done a great job of convincing us that advocating and organizing for labor rights is an extreme position, even when we know that advocating and organizing for labor rights is effective.)
The “conservative” (see footnote) newsblog FITSNews once compared 2019’s 10,000-teacher march on the SC Statehouse to Communists marching in Soviet Russia. That, to me, is both a stupid comparison and a representation of a propaganda-fueled and ahistorical understanding of both the labor movement and “leftism” as a concept.
And while we have some great education coverage in the state from the bigger outlets— here I’d like to shout out The State’s Zak Koeske, and former Post and Courier reporters Devna Bose and Paul Bowers— efforts by mainstream media in the state to cover issues like education often run up against roadblocks that are not the fault of reporters. For example a pro-privatization lobbying group, the Coastal Community Foundation, is also one of the two founding/ funding organizations behind Post and Courier’s Education Lab. While Education Lab often does fantastic work and breaks important stories on SC education, there have also been legitimate questions about the independence of the editorial decisions over Education Lab.
For example, former Post and Courier reporter and current SC-ACLU communications director Paul Bowers shared a Twitter thread two years ago which raised questions about a story that the newspaper first removed from its website and then reposted in an edited form. The piece concerned the “dark money” group Coalition for Kids, which has ties to Coastal Community Foundation and to Ben Navarro, a school privatizer who helped in a big way to bankroll school voucher/ privatization champion Ellen Weaver’s campaign for superintendent, and its revised form, according to Bowers, specifically changed its wording in describing Navarro.
In the same thread, to be fair, Bowers shared that Navarro had tried to exert pressure on the paper over stories Bowers wrote during his time there, but that in these cases, “my editors weren’t cowed”.
So while the potential conflicts of interest shouldn’t negate the good work Education Lab reporters have done, Bowers’ analysis and insights as an independent journalist are also very important for contextualizing that work, and for hopefully helping the public to hold Education Lab accountable for its editorial choices.
Print media has been famously in trouble for a long time, and low subscribership and low ad revenue probably mean papers have to make difficult choices. It’s hard to fault Post and Courier for taking money from Coastal Community Foundation to allow them to cover important education stories. Their reporting is often fantastic and Education Lab stories are generally free to the public (with a free registration).
Ideally, the public would pay for news directly, and would therefore get news that was at least theoretically not beholden to advertisers and donors. But of course that hasn’t been the case, generally, in any of our lifetimes. I would argue that in the real world these compromises are necessary— though we could certainly debate the specific example of letting dark money education lobbying organizations underwrite education coverage—and also that anyone who can do so should pay for their news.
As I told Reynolds, I don’t consider myself a journalist, and I respect the work journalists do and the training and experience they bring. (And in fact I don’t think I would have started this Substack if not for the example set by Paul Bowers, who deserves credit for creating independent and proudly left-leaning-yet-rigorous analysis and reporting far more than I do.)
But I also think independent media is a vital addition to the work reporters do, and ideally there would be more of it representing more perspectives.
That will only happen if folks are willing to pay for it.
Reporting, researching, and writing take time. It is time-consuming to conduct interviews, to read lots of other news stories, to file FOIA reports, to write and revise. While one of fair arguments against the “everyone thinks they’re a reporter now” era of newsletters, blogs, and podcasts is that we’re inundated with a thousand, often poorly-researched hot takes on every issue, and can therefore sort of pick and choose the reality we choose to experience, the truth is that most people don’t have time to be writers or reporters. When I was a full-time teacher I certainly didn’t have time to do the more reporter-adjacent work I’ve been doing since I quit teaching.
Furthermore, and perhaps by design, most of the stuff worth reporting and analyzing happens in the middle of the work day. For example, today the South Carolina State Board of Education is meeting at 1:00. This is the first regular meeting since Ellen Weaver’s State Board of Education regulation took effect, throwing many districts into chaos by inviting any parent to challenge essentially any book and requiring districts to formally consider those challenges, along with requiring all “instructional materials” to be suddenly catalogued (a process that might sound simple, if you aren’t already aware of the thousands of resources which would be considered “instructional materials” under this regulation, which many teachers use each year, and until you realize that simply including them in a lesson plan won’t count). Some schools had already gone back into session when the regulation was finalized and are scrambling to figure out how to fit these requirements into the already frantic business of yearly back-to-school requirements.
Obviously, there will be very few working teachers or school librarians— those most directly affected by the regulation— at that meeting. I will be able to be there only because I am no longer a full-time teacher.
But without that small-but-steady teacher paycheck, I also wouldn’t have the money to subscribe to (and support) other news outlets, file FOIA requests, or otherwise justify what can amount to many hours out of each week to write these pieces, if people who value this information— or just want to support me— didn’t pay for it with a little bit of their hard-earned money.
So here’s me encouraging everyone reading this who can afford to do so, and isn’t already doing so, to pay for at least one subscription today. (It doesn’t have to be a subscription to this newsletter, although I’d be grateful if you considered that.) Subscribe to your local paper. Subscribe to a newsletter or blog that is doing the kind of work you value.
And if you can’t support writers, researchers, and journalists with your money, support them by sharing links to stories, including stories with paywalls. There are almost certainly people in your network who have enough to support continued coverage of issues you feel need to be before the public.
It would be great if all of this could be free, but nothing in life is free. The only choice is whether advertisers and private donors, or a larger and more diverse set of readers and subscribers, will pay for and ultimately shape the coverage.
(I should say here that I think the words “conservative” and “liberal” are fair starting points, but don’t really describe the specifics of South Carolina’s media landscape. For example, the part-tabloid/ part-news newsblog FITSNews seems to be driven more by founder Will Folks’ quasi-anarchic personal beefs and libertarian views than by classical “conservatism,” while the the Facebook-driven screeds of “outlets” like the 0verton Report seem to be aimed squarely at the intersection between Proud Boys and Moms for Liberty. Again, there’s not much there to appeal to the small government, pro-business crowd that dominates much of SC politics. We probably need new ways to describe politics in the era of The Freedom Caucus and “Joyful Warriors” and January 6.)