Troy Swanson: Jeremy, welcome to Circulating Ideas.
Jeremy Shermak: Thanks for having me. It’s so good to be back.
Troy Swanson: I can’t believe it. It has been six years since the last time you were on this podcast, and I gotta say, I’ve fallen a little behind on inviting you and for librarians, I think it’s so important that we have conversations about what’s happening in media and journalism and not that’s like our direct business, but we’re tangential, we’re part of the information landscape and so I appreciate you being here. So maybe you could just give us a quick update on where life finds you six years later.
Jeremy Shermak: Yeah, six years ago seems like yesterday, and you and I have known each other for almost 20 years now, man.
Troy Swanson: Which is frightening.
Jeremy Shermak: But we’ve always had these great conversations, so it’s really fun to have this in a recorded environment ’cause I don’t think people realize that we text each other about this same nonsense all the time.
Troy Swanson: All the time.
Jeremy Shermak: So yeah, I’m out on the central coast of California. I’m teaching at Cuesta College, which is a two year school in San Luis Obispo. I run the journalism program and the student newspaper there, the Cuestonian, which is a lot of fun. And I also am teaching at Cal Poly up the road from Cuesta, a lecturer there. Last quarter I taught a multimedia journalism class, and this quarter I’m teaching a cross-cultural journalism class, which is super cool, really good opportunity to have some really important conversations and apply some theories and all that fun stuff.
It’s been great. I just think about the completely different world we were in, I think what was fall of 2019 maybe when we last talked and all the changes that have occurred. Not to even mention COVID, but like AI and the media landscape, everything. So there’s a massive amount we can talk about here.
Troy Swanson: One thing that caught my eye that you’re working on, while we’re still kinda talking about where you are, is your partnership with the University of Vermont and the Center for Community News. And, I know they have a national network that they’re building and I know that you and your students have been part of that, so I wanted to make sure I took a second to ask you about that work.
Jeremy Shermak: Yeah. Thank you for that. I appreciate it. It’s really meaningful to me because I, more and more every day, believe that local is the way forward for news, hyper-local, and at the Center for Community News at the University of Vermont, I’m working with some great people there. I was really honored to be named a Faculty Champion, it sounds very fancy, Faculty Champion for 2026, and it allows me to work with a network of about 120 journalism faculty, journalists from around the country.
We work with that network, and now we’re also in cohorts related to our interests. So right now I’m in a cohort for those who work at community colleges, which has been really useful to meet with them. I’m meeting people from other parts of California, Colorado, Arkansas, Texas, and we’re all talking about kind of the same mission, which is bolstering local news and finding ways that our news infrastructure can help bridge gaps in the local news infrastructure, so where we have news deserts, those sort of things, how can community college newspapers help bridge that?
One of the things we’re working on and the task, as part of this Faculty Champions program, was building collaborations with local news outlets. So our newspaper, the Cuestonian at Cuesta. We’ve established a partnership with the San Luis Obispo Tribune, which is the major newspaper here in San Luis Obispo County in California. We’re gonna do some shared publications. My students are writing stories really about the college because we went to the editor of the SLO Tribune and he told us. We just don’t have the capacity to cover Cuesta, even though we know you’re doing incredible things that are very newsworthy, and I said we got the people. Let’s do it. They’re writing stories. Our goal is to publish 10 stories collaboratively this semester. It’ll give the students a professional byline. It’ll bolster our coverage of our own college, so it’s really cool, and I’m very energized to be a part of that community. It’s a lot of really good people, like-minded people. It’s fun to find your peeps and talk about things and champion things together. So it’s really cool.
Troy Swanson: Congratulations on that. What a great opportunity for you and for the students too.
And another cool thing that I stumbled across in my podcast player is your podcast called MediaMak, which I gotta say also being Jeremy Shermak, MediaMak. I love the title, it made me laugh, but using your podcast as a lecture for your classes. I don’t know if this was your own idea or you stole this from somebody, but it also seems like such an obvious kind of thing, but then you do such a great job, like very polished very engaging. I know there’s some parts of the podcast that are about your class, so I just skip over those, and really good conversations about media, about books, about journalism, so I find it really useful every week to play it. I hear an old friend, but also to catch up for my own education. So can you talk a little bit about the use of that podcast for your class?
Jeremy Shermak: Of course. Thank you for listening, first off. I know I always have a guaranteed audience in Troy Swanson.
Troy Swanson: And text follow up with critiques.
Jeremy Shermak: Yeah, which is super helpful, by the way. It is super helpful. It’s interesting. So I teach a class at Cuesta called Journalism 200: Introduction to Mass Communication. And this is kind of the gateway drug to journalism, I call it, because I’m trying to get students in. It’s a transferable class. It fulfills what we have out here in California known as Cal-GETC, which allows students to transfer into the University California system or the CSU system. So I get more numbers in that class.
One of the things when I came to Cuesta in fall of 24, that class was still an online class from the pandemic, and it was meeting live on Zoom, and to be very frank, I got tired of teaching on Zoom, man. It was too much, “Keep your cameras on and participate and blah, blah, blah!” So I just gave up on it. I was tired of battling that and I thought to myself, “Okay, let’s make this asynchronous because there was still very much an appetite for having it online. How can I communicate with them? How can I connect with them personally?” And I do steal a lot of ideas, but this was my idea. So I decided, why not a podcast? These things that I talk about are podcast worthy. It’s up to date, the power of the intimacy of a podcast, being in someone’s ear, I think is really powerful. And I think they needed, even though it’s an async class, they needed some sort of living element of the class. And so that was really my focus for doing it.
It’s been really successful. I think that students are interested. I have it on different platforms: YouTube, Spotify, Apple. Most of my listening actually comes from YouTube which I think is an interesting insight to the way that this generation of students listen to audio, but each week we tackle a different media. We have done books, we’ve done newspapers, radio. This week we’re doing television. If you are listening to this podcast and you wanna hear more of me find me at MediaMak.
It’s been really fun, and it’s invigorated me each week. It pushes me, I can do a lot of these lectures just by heart, I know them, but it pushes me to dig in. Hey, what’s new? What are people talking about? Just this week with television, we were talking about the Tegna Nextstar merger and then some news broke about it that changed things. So I had recorded the podcast already, so I had to go in and do an update on the class website and say, “Hey, this broke after I recorded,” so it gives me that journalistic rush of things being very fluid and it’s reenergized me as an instructor. It’s really cool.
Troy Swanson: And I love because you also have students doing advertisements for the Cuestonian, which I think is a great ad.
Jeremy Shermak: So yeah I decided to make it into a few segments and we built in one ad is for, “Hey, follow the Cuestonian!”, And the other one is “Join the Cuestonian!” Who knows, maybe one day I’ll get actual ads that don’t promote my own things, but it worked out pretty well.
Troy Swanson: It’s very polished, great intro music and everything, and so all the pieces come together. It sounds very good. It’s quite impressive work. I feel a little intimidated being that we’re on a podcast now, that we’re not keeping up!
Let’s shift gears a little bit out to the rest of the world and back in which it feels like so long ago, but it wasn’t that long ago, on February 4th of this year, the Washington Post announced massive layoffs, laying off roughly a third of its entire staff. By the union accounts, closer to half of its journalists, somewhere between 350 and 375 people lost their jobs of one of the flagship news sources for a century in our country. Entire departments wiped out: sports, books, photography. Their daily podcast is gone. Forum bureaus were really gutted. Days later, the publisher Will Lewis resigned. Former executive editor Marty Baron called it, “one of,” and I quote, “the Darkest Days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations.” All of this while owner Jeff Bezos is worth around $250 billion remains pretty much silent. I think in a rounding error of his income, he probably could have fixed or funded a lot of this organization’s financial problems.
And I think I wanted to lead with this with you after our intros. The union called this a choice, while others said it was a necessity to respond to where journalism and media exist today. When we look at the Washington Post troubles, the layoffs and the exodus of readers, editorial tensions, should we understand this primarily as a political story, a broken business model story, an owner interference story, or all three conflated together?
Jeremy Shermak: I think it’s all three. But you have to weight each of those differently because you do have, without question, an interruption in the business model. You have a collapse in traffic from search engines, you have AI cannibalizing the clicks that used to bring them income, and the ad revenue lost just like almost every other newspaper, hasn’t quite been replaced by subscription revenue. So those things are happening. The Washington Post, the New York Times, other major newspapers aren’t immune from those sort of things that are affecting the business model, but I think that’s just one element of it and maybe 33.3% of it.
I think the other parts of it are the political atmosphere. The timing here has to be considered coming in this second Trump administration, which I think is more brazen than the first, and certainly more brazen with media and press than the first, which is almost hard to believe if that can be true. And also the owner’s decision. At the end of the day, if Jeff Bezos didn’t want this to happen, it wouldn’t have happened. I fully agree with the union here, that if he didn’t want this on his watch, if he wanted to fund this and make it strong, he would’ve done so.
I do think it was one of the darkest days in that newspaper’s history, and I think sometimes we lose perspective on the importance of the Washington Post, because even if you’re living in Seattle or San Francisco or something, it’s technically not your local newspaper, but because it’s in our nation’s capital, there’s a local aspect to it, that reporting is the same. They’re on the ground in Washington where major decisions are being made. So having this gutting of that newspaper in particular is really devastating for journalism. I was really upset with it, and I’m not sure what the future holds there.
We’re seeing some of the fallout already with the absence of reporting. A friend of mine, Jackie Spinner, who teaches and runs the newspaper at Columbia College in Chicago. She’s a former Washington Post reporter and has friends still working there, friends who lost their jobs. I saw her at a conference in San Francisco about a month ago and talked about how they all kind of knew it was coming.
And to me, that makes it seem even more political and more of an owner’s decision, like the writing was on the wall, it wasn’t all of a sudden some financial report came out and said, “Oh, we gotta shut it down.” It was coming. And again, it was a decision, it was a choice.
Troy Swanson: And just to kinda maybe drill down a little bit. So the struggles are somewhat different than maybe some of the local news deserts that we see, but also related. Is that fair?
Jeremy Shermak: Yeah. It’s a similar mechanism. You have, like I mentioned, the ad revenue disappearing. The staff cuts themselves are degrading the product a little bit, so that takes away too, so you do have parallels at the local news outlets that are difficult, but none of those local news outlets have a owner worth $250 billion, so that’s the difference, and that matters.
Where local news is dying, it’s dying because no one has come along to save it yet. And I say yet in a hopeful way and hoping that someone will, but I know in my heart there’s places out there where it wasn’t saved and it probably may never be saved, but this again was a choice. He could have saved it if he wanted to. And for whatever reason, like you said, he is been very silent on this. He’s made a choice, and he made choices that hurt the newspaper. They lost 250,000 subscribers when they stopped doing an endorsement.
Troy Swanson: As a protest.
Jeremy Shermak: Yes. Staggering. And that’s a lot of money, and they sent that message and he still didn’t care. So again, it’s a choice.
Troy Swanson: Yeah, that’s a good point. Earlier you had mentioned the impact of AI and clickthroughs with media, and so I thought, while we’re talking, I couldn’t do it without at least bringing up artificial intelligence a little bit and the impact of large language models and ChatGPT and Claude and all the rest.
In higher ed, all of us are feeling it, for sure, changing how we’re teaching, changing the impact of writing classes, especially all of us in the library are thinking about it. Can you talk a little bit about how you’re teaching journalism differently in light of AI in the classroom or in your student newsroom and just thinking about assignments and the different aspects?
Jeremy Shermak: Man, AI fascinates me. I play around with it a lot. I’m interested in it, but I’m also fascinated by the way academia is responding to it because I feel like once every two weeks I sit in a meeting where someone goes through a PowerPoint and says, “AI is coming and it’s going to do this,” and I just wanna scream, “AI is here. It’s not coming, it’s here, and what are we doing with it?” Because you say, “Oh, it’s important to teach your students. It’s important to have the students use it.” And I haven’t heard, outside of using it to write code in Canvas to make your pages more ADA compliant, which I think is an amazing use of it, I haven’t heard a super practical use for it in the classroom.
And I’m a little afraid to introduce it to students and say, “Oh, here’s this thing where you can use it to make your assignments” ’cause they’re already doing that, but in a way that isn’t beneficial. But then I go to a conference like I did a month ago, like I mentioned before, and I hear from those in the industry, in journalism. One journalist told me there, three things that new journalists need to know. They need to know audience engagement. They need to understand news judgment, editorial judgment, and AI. And I pushed a little bit on AI. Like what do you mean by AI? Using AI to make your job a little easier, right? It isn’t writing the stories for you, it’s not that.
So what I’ve tried to do, I came back from that conference and I went into our newsroom as the advisor for our newspaper, and I said, “We need to start using AI,” and the looks on the faces from those students, just pure ick. It was like feeding a little kid vegetables or something. They are not interested and they view it, they’re very big on AI slop, they don’t like it. They push back against it. So that’s another, I think, misconception from academia in that we think that because it’s technology, students love it and they don’t. So not only do I have to figure out a way practically and pragmatically to incorporate AI. I gotta get the students to believe in it and show them how to make it a little bit easier. So I’m taking little inroads to do that.
One thing that I learned about at that conference and I developed for our own newsroom is what I call our meetings bot. So the best way to get news locally, and this includes college campuses, is go into a bunch of meetings. It’s a hard sell for students and a lot of times because, and this is especially true of community college students, they have jobs, they have families. It’s a big ask to say, “Hey, can you go to this meeting at three o’clock on a Tuesday and cover it?” I created a meetings bot where we can take meeting agendas, meeting minutes, and feed those to the bot, and the bot produces story ideas, not stories, not full stories, but story ideas, then the students can peruse those and decide what to report. I feel like that’s a good use of AI. When we as don’t have human time to do it, we can lean on that.
Just yesterday a couple of my students were covering a track and field meet that some of our athletes went to in San Francisco. If you’ve ever followed track and field, it’s a super fun sport to cover in person ’cause there’s so much happening and a lot of good visuals and things, but the aftermath is terrible because you just have a lot of numbers and a lot of results and you don’t really know what to find or what to make newsworthy. So I was working with one of my students remotely last night. We were communicating over Slack and I said, “Hey let’s process this data with AI.” We had 17 different events at this particular meet, and we took those result pages, ran ’em through AI and said, “Find us the Cuesta runners, tell us where they finished, tell us their times, and put it into context for the race.” And within a few clicks we had context, and then I said, “Okay, you have your results, now go write the story.” It’s data processing, right? That’s what it’s used for.
Troy Swanson: And so as you’re doing that, is your reporter then also then going back and checking so there’s no hallucinations slipping in?
Jeremy Shermak: And that was something that I keep saying time and time again, “Look, it’s a nice calculator of sorts, but it still doesn’t have the brains you do. So you need to go back just like you would with any other source interview and kind of fact check yourself. You can’t take it verbatim. It’s designed to get you the information, ’cause we’re not gonna report on every single result, so the results we’re reporting on, go back manually and look at those results and make sure they’re correct.” So that’s absolutely part of the lesson.
Troy Swanson: We’re having a lot of those conversations at my college and when it comes to like information literacy, where does large language models, where do they fit into your kind of tool bag as a researcher? Because it seems to me obvious, and I know there will be people that listen to this that kind of, jump back at it, but to me it seems obvious like these tools aren’t going away. They’re going to be there for us to use. I think there’s a lot of discussions about copyright and pieces like that, that we need to talk about, but also the ability to use them effectively seems increasingly important.
For me, I think of AI as like, a unique monster in the information literacy world because it can search. So it’s replacing search engines and like databases, even though it only searches open things. So there’s some problems there, but also it presents the information itself. So it’s not like doing a search in EBSCO and getting 3000 results back and then you select a result. It’s summarizing and making information as a tool also. So it’s like a publisher, but it’s not a publisher. It’s like a search engine, but it’s not a search engine. It’s also like your kind of drunk friend that can tell you interesting things, but maybe they’re not always right. That’s a great metaphor that I used with students.
How do you think about this with students in terms of a information literacy tool in terms of source evaluation, in terms of credibility and authority, which I think still matter in what we do, but especially matter, I think, in the world of journalism.
Jeremy Shermak: I think pushing home the idea of going back and checking what you get from AI, checking what it spits out, doing that verification, that’s just good old fashioned fact check journalism. Going back to some of those tried and true methods with something that is very new and very fast might seem a little counterintuitive, but that’s what we need to do.
That’s the way home is looking at AI almost like you would a source. If you went out and interviewed someone and they made some claim or whatever, you would go and make sure that it was correct before you published it. You gotta look at AI the same way and that’s the way I’ve been trying to teach it, but it’s difficult.
One area that’s really interesting, where I see AI pop up is I also teach a public speaking class. It’s the Communications hat that I wear sometimes, and so I just teach one class public speaking, but I see AI a lot in there and I’ve completely banned it from the class. I said, “Please do not use AI. Maybe it might help enhance your outline. If you do, disclose it.” But it’s so wild to me that when a student gets up to give a speech, I can tell easily that they’ve developed a speech on AI. Just right away. There’s no engagement. It’s super surface, nothing personal in there, that sort of thing.
Troy Swanson: When you use AI as a crutch for your thinking and you’re not deeply connecting the information to your own beliefs and thoughts, we can tell. See it all the time.
Jeremy Shermak: Easy and so the same thing can hold true for journalism. Even though, interestingly, as journalists, we’re trying to do the same job as AI, right? We’re trying to inform our audience, we’re trying to pass along information gathered from other sources, so I think sometimes people think, “Oh AI can just do that for me, right?” But having the personal filter and the human filter to tell those stories is really important. If you’re covering someone who is in some sort of pain or distress, AI can’t measure that. You measure that as a human. You have to tell that story. So we can’t lose that.
I think looking at AI as an assistant, not a replacement, is the best we can do. It’s an assistant, it’s not a replacement. We have to look at it that way. If we look at it as a replacement, I think we’re doomed. I really do. So it’s gotta be an assistant, but what comes in, I think in that, and going back to what I said earlier, we as teachers need to, and I think this is true of librarians, I think it’s true of everyone, we need to show students ways to use it practically and that’s where I think they’re a little lost. It needs to be something that is clear and useful and applicable in order for it to land.
Troy Swanson: And I think we’re still in the early days. We’re all scrambling to figure it out. We’re only a few years in so I think students are also feeling our confusion come through to them and they’re clearly using it, but like you said, they’re also not dumb. They see the problems, they see some of the ugliness, but also sometimes they lean on it too heavily.
I mentioned earlier the copyright issue, and it seems in the journalism media world, copyright in so many ways is the coin of the realm, owning your intellectual property. How are you seeing this playing out with the copyright battles, with the AI companies and the major news organizations? And how much of a existential threat do you see this becoming for journalism itself?
Jeremy Shermak: I think it is a threat, and it’s tremendously complicated because on one side you can make the argument that fair use is very much in play here. Journalism is quoted all the time. It’s out there in the discussions regularly. That’s what we do, and that’s what journalists love to do is be involved and be involved in the discussion. I think AI is probably a place where journalists want to be, but what changes the dynamic a little bit here, I think is the scale, is just how massive this is.
And AI companies are getting very rich off of regurgitating information that journalists worked really hard to obtain. And worse yet is that same information is gutting journalism. It’s being used against it. It’s replacing journalism. That’s where it’s so troublesome. Basically journalism is being used to train the models that are replacing journalism, and that’s where it’s really hard to stomach, as a journalist and a journalism instructor.
I think that, like you said earlier, and I think this is so important to remember, this is very early. I don’t even think we have the extent to which sources of any kind, and I’ll even include, having published in research journals, academic journals, that sort of information, I don’t think we’ve even realized how much of that is being extracted and used to monetize AI. They were way ahead of it before anyone even noticed, quite frankly. The folks that are producing that original content are still playing catch up and might be playing catch up for many years before we figure this out, but I do think it’s a problem. I do think it’s a serious issue where we need to have discussions and I’m happy to see institutions like the New York Times taking some litigation action and really testing this a little bit because that might be how these discussions going forward begin.
Troy Swanson: I think that conversation about how do you make up healthy information ecosystem, I don’t think we’ve answered it yet. I don’t know that we’ve answered it from the dawn of the internet. I think the decimation of journalism, I think there’s a lot of questions that still are hanging out there.
Let’s shift a little bit more into media and information literacy and of course, as one of your avid podcast listeners, I couldn’t help but love the episode on books. And given that, this is a podcast for librarians, I have to ask you about books a little bit. In your episode you called books the first mass media, and I wanna just open the door to help us think through books as mass media and how do we think about that? How does that work for us today? How do books translate? Where are books at for us in today’s media environment?
Jeremy Shermak: Yeah, so much of that, I will say this, Troy, I should have given you more of a shout out on that books episode because that book episode was born in a lot of the conversations we had back when I was there at Moraine Valley and over the years it’s made me think a lot about books. I think I still use a slide that we discussed called “Books are like Teaching Fish about Water,” along those lines.
I call ’em the first mass media because they checked all the boxes that the definition of mass media entails. They distributed information to a larger population. They made information portable. When it comes to books, it wasn’t just about reproducing text. Like they created standards, they standardized language, they invented the idea of authorship and ownership of work. It’s really incredible the amount of establishing standards they created for mass media, and I think portability sometimes is the unsung hero when we talk mass communications.
I always think about radio like when the transistor was invented and that elevated radio into this stratosphere of listenership, when it was able to be put in cars and carried around as a Walkman. Books were doing that very early on. They were able to be carried and transferred and moved and so much of our media has gone that route. I even see that now with television. Television is no longer just this thing we watch in our living room. We watch it on laptops and phones and it can go anywhere when you want to. I referenced a piece in this week’s podcast, it was a piece written in Fortune Magazine talking about how television is not just a device anymore, it’s a state of mind. When I want to escape, when I want to dig deeper on something, I can turn on a television show anywhere, anytime, on any device.
And so that portability, I think is what defines mass media and books were really the first to do it because it created this thing, if you will, that you could take with you and travel and distribute, and then that was made repeatable, which is really important too. Every platform since books has been trying to do what books did: reach a lot of people, be portable, be transferable. And so that’s why I say they’re the first mass media.
Troy Swanson: Recent research has to call us to question, have we seen the peak of books? And of course all of us in libraries have all different kinds of discussions about that. I know my libraries checkout numbers are very healthy. We’re still seeing a lot of books move. Students come in, they’re checking out books for fun, for class, all different reasons. But I think there’s still a lot of research showing that pleasure reading, especially among young people, is really dropping. The amount of students that have read one book for fun in a year, this last year, was like almost none. They’re just not reading for pleasure and books are there when you need them, but also they’re not incorporated as fluently. And of course, there’s some people that are still hardcore readers and they’re out there. But are we seeing book reading, moving into kind of a niche audience, almost like the opera fans or classical music fans, not to knock those areas of expression for sure. But are we heading into a non-literary kind of society?
Jeremy Shermak: Unfortunately, I think so. I was thinking about this.
Troy Swanson: I was hoping you weren’t gonna say that, but yeah, okay.
Jeremy Shermak: I know, and I don’t want to. I don’t want to. It’s funny, we had a family gathering for the Easter holiday, and, I was at my girlfriend’s grandmother’s house and her aunt and uncle were there, and we were there for a long time. There was a baseball game on and then we watched the men’s basketball Final Four. And it was just a chilling, hanging out sort of thing. And her aunt and uncle, almost most of the time, were reading a book. Not scrolling on the phone, and we were talking, and it was fine. I didn’t take it rude, but I think if they were on a phone, I would’ve been more offended, and I wasn’t offended, but I would’ve been like, “Oh, turn off your phone. Come on, participate,” but I sat there and I marveled at them being into a book. I was like, “Oh, that’s cool.” And then I ended up talking to them about, “Oh, what are you reading?”
And it strikes me how we’re viewing books very differently because, they used to be something and they are still, where a lot of folks would get lost in them and that would be an escape. We’re looking to our phones as that, and the phone is not an escape. It is a constant reminder of life. It is a constant reminder of what’s happening in our world. It’s a constant reminder of what is happening in your individual world with your calendar reminders and task reminders all that.
Books changed my life, and that probably sounds really extreme to a younger audience, but I learned so much of what I know starting out as a kid all the way through my PhD studies from books. There’s a reason why I kept so many books because they’re special to me, and I admit that I don’t do as much reading for pleasure. I don’t. I’m crazy busy. My schedule’s insane and I miss it in many ways. I’m more inclined probably to pick up a print magazine instead to read for pleasure.
I’m more alarmed by the perception students have of books, particularly of textbooks in a classroom. I think one thing that we need to do better in academia is remind students why we have textbooks in classes. I always tell my students, it’s because this class has to go beyond these walls. I need you to read this material to understand what we’re doing when you’re outside of these classroom walls, and I can’t cover it all myself. And I think sometimes they forget it. They just view it as this busy work or just something to check off a box. And then we give them quizzes, and I know I’m in a fantasy world. I give ’em a quiz on Canvas. They’re probably using some AI plugin to get the answer, but in my head I’m saying, “Oh, they read the book and they pick the right answer!” And I know that’s probably not true, but there’s a lot of pushback on reading now. There’s a lot of pushback against that assigned reading. I’m even seeing pushback from within faculty circles. Oh, maybe you don’t need that textbook, or use an OER option, which I think OER is great. I have it in my news writing class now. I’m using a wonderful OER textbook for them. So that’s important to think about too.
This always reminds me when we talk about reading and pleasure reading, deep reading, it reminds me of the Karate Kid, the original one, don’t gimme this new stuff. I want you to see the original one, but the whole idea of “wax on, wax off,” and doing all these chores around the house, and he is wondering, “Why the heck am I doing this?” And then when he goes to do the karate, “Oh, I did that for this reason! This is why I’m now good at karate.” It’s the same way with thinking. If you don’t exercise that brain and get it into a groove and have it processing and have it thinking critically and analyzing, it’s not gonna happen. It’s a muscle. It needs to be exercised. When we lose that, we lose something really important, and I’m sorry, you’re not getting that same exertion from doom scrolling on your phone. It’s not happening.
Troy Swanson: Broadcasters and publishers and podcasters and now AI companies, everyone is fighting for attention, even this podcast, we’re all fighting for attention. You study the arc of media from books to what we’re doing now, and I do think that point is a good one about attention and exercising that deep thinking. I think there was times where we had things that were books, like an encyclopedia, the reason that you have an encyclopedia as a book is because it was useful at the time ’cause that’s the best you had. There’s no reason that “alligator” needed to be in the same book as “aardvark.” Where encyclopedias are much better online ’cause you can just look up the article and get ’em, but other things work better as books.
I think we’ve spent some time, decades probably, adjusting to say, “books are good for this, books aren’t good for that,” but along the way we lose something. And I think you’ve touched on that, like what are the things that institutions, obviously libraries, universities, colleges, how do we preserve that thinking, and what is our role in thinking about fighting for attention and being a voice for stopping for a minute, deep reading, and working on those kind of muscles?
Jeremy Shermak: When I think about this issue, I think so much, and this is like super nerdy, but I’m going there. I think about displacement theory, and media displacement theory is the idea essentially that you only have x amount of time to consume media so when a new form of media comes along, that doesn’t mean that you’re granted more time to use that new media. You’re still using the same amount of time, so something gets bumped. And I think sometimes folks look at it very practically, if I can get tidbits of information by scrolling X or my Facebook page, God help you, I might be able to get more bits of information than if I dove in deep to a 15 to 20 minute read of a book on the same topic. Time is a limitation here, and we have to think of that.
But I think talking about reading as I just did, as a cognitive exercise, as a “good for you” act, heck, I’ll say it, as an act of self care, maybe that’s the reframing that we need here. Honestly I’ve had sessions in classes where I’ve said, ” Bring your books to the next class. We’re gonna read together, and we might read out loud a little bit and then talk about what we’re reading.” Students have forgotten that. ” Oh, I could read and stop and think?” It’s just not something they’re practicing. Just like anything, you gotta practice it in order to become good at it and used to it. So I think we need to reframe our thinking a little bit about reading. Institutionally that could be just changes in the way we teach, changes in the way we prioritize books.
I’m thrilled to hear that your numbers are still really good at the Moraine Valley library. That’s outstanding. And I’ve heard similar things from our librarians at Cuesta, and the readers who are readers, the people who are really into it, I think have gotten even more into it. I think there is a bit of a rebellion against the algorithm and against the scrolling that have made people say, “No, I’m gonna depart from this and I’m really gonna dig in on reading.” When it’s required, do students even know how to do it anymore, and I would say no. So some of these reminders from an institution, from a teacher, whatever it may be, I think are really important. We’ve gone backwards a bit with information literacy as it pertains specifically to books. We need to be willing, as instructors and teachers to say, I need to pause and help my students get this information and figure out how to go forward.
Troy Swanson: Yeah, that’s fantastic. And I think your point about reading out loud together, the library community, that’s the thing we know, like even grownups, even college students, reading part of a story together or a novel. There was a community power in that that was done, especially pre-radio where people would read together because that’s what you had and there’s time together. I think that’s something that we have lost a little bit. And then modeling that for students goes a long way.
Jeremy Shermak: It’s the modeling. It really is. And I think people say, “Oh my gosh, they should know how to do that.” They “should” a lot of things, but they don’t. When we find that in our students, I think it’s a really good approach to teaching to pause and take that step back. I would hope they’d already know that, but if they don’t, let’s pause and let’s get it right.
Troy Swanson: I’d like to end with a question on journalism and I think we are at a kind of precarious, interesting time for journalism with a totally polarized country. I think American journalism has been polarized before, back in the day in the 1700s, 1800s we had very explicitly partisan-aligned presses that would put out information on one side of the other. We’ve seen sensational yellow journalism of the Pulitzer era, of the 1800s. We’ve seen threats come and go to inform democracy, even the fights over Watergate connected to the Washington Post, and yet journalism has survived those eras and arguably emerged stronger, but I don’t know that it feels that way right now. So when you look at today’s hyper-partisan media landscape, the Fox Newses, the MS NOWs, the partisan podcasts that are out there, the algorithmically controlled news feeds, are we living through something historically familiar? Is this something genuinely different? And if history offers any comfort or any warning, what is it?
Jeremy Shermak: I would say the comforting part is, as you mentioned, we have been through these threats before, when we had this very, partisan penny press, yellow journalism, those sort of things. I want to be optimistic, but the scary part about this is just how different this moment is compared to those. When you had a, like I said, the partisan penny press or yellow journalism, you could simply just not buy a newspaper. You could walk away from that and that was it. You didn’t have any more engagement. What’s so different now is the speed, the scale, and I think the reach.
There’s a lot of really interesting research, they call it “stumble upon news,” where we can stumble upon news anywhere now. You’re walking through an airport, you see it on the screen there. You go into a sports bar and there’s no game on, so they throw on the news. I don’t know why they do that at sports bars, but also maybe the biggest culprit here is your algorithm, your scrolling .You’re scrolling through and you’re like, oh, it’s Aunt Louise’s birthday, and Uncle Joe got a new puppy, and oh, by the way, here’s an article, that, it’s always some random weird uncle shared from Infowars or something, there it is, right In your algorithm. You can’t avoid it. You can’t walk away. You don’t want it, but it’s right there and to get rid of that takes a lot of effort. You have to do a lot of clicks to get through that.
So that’s what I mean by reach. This sort of journalism, this fringe, extreme, I don’t wanna call it journalism, content, is reaching people that it never could reach before in an earlier day when we were more print or just television, so on and so forth. The challenge is right now, and what I’m really concerned about is that there’s no competing objective journalism. I feel like objective journalism is being shunned. The more extreme stuff is a little more shiny. The people that are into that are very into it and look at an objective source as partisan, something that’s right down the middle. Associated Press, they look at that source, “Oh that’s left wing, that’s bias.” And that’s a classic example of a hostile media effect, which has been studied for many decades.
But what scares me is that the center is being hollowed out. There’s a lot of reinforcement on the fringes. How do we bring back that center? How do we bring back information that we can agree on as fact? That’s our challenge right now. I’ll go back to what I said earlier. I think the way home there in many ways is local news. We can reenergize these local news in institutions and bring news home to people who can trust it and see it in their community. I think that’s gonna have a positive effect for all of journalism, but that’s a challenge.
Troy Swanson: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. On that difficult note, I do think there’s a lot of people putting brain power into this, and I know a lot of libraries are connecting with local journalism, and I think there’s a lot of people working to try to figure out how we move forward. I will say the positive note maybe, is to just give one more shout out to MediaMak! Tell us how we can find your podcast and connect with you online.
Jeremy Shermak: Yes. So you can find MediaMak on Spotify, Apple, as well as YouTube, and you can find me on Instagram and X @jeremyshermak, so please feel free to reach out. I love talking about this stuff. And thanks so much for having me, Troy. I really appreciate it.
Troy Swanson: Thanks, Jeremy.
Circulating Ideas 