It was 2016, or thereabouts. A few dozen Montana journalists had gathered for the annual meeting of the venerable Butte Press Club, whose motto, first published in 1891, read “Club met, drank and adjourned.”
That wasn’t entirely true. We often dignified the event by inviting an edifying speaker. That year’s was John S. Adams, a veteran Montana newsman planning to start a statewide news organization, one fueled by donations alone. The crowd, mostly newspaper folks in an industry already facing strains, listened politely but had its doubts.
“I remember the skepticism,” he said last week with a laugh.
Since then Montana Free Press has become a pillar of Montana’s news scene, boasting an expanding staff of smart digital editors and reporters who not only dig for news but take pains to explain it. This week Adams and much of the Free Press crew will be live at the University of Montana’s University Center for Free Press Fest, a three-day conference featuring conversations on subjects ranging from extremism to education funding, housing, food, the news media, and artificial intelligence.
Adams spoke with me last week about what inspired the event — and what he hopes convening these conversations will inspire.
Free Press Fest was modeled after the Texas Tribune’s news and policy festival, known as TribFest, which partnered with Austin’s huge South by Southwest festival. The aim, Adams said, is to gather authors, journalists, policymakers and thought leaders to spark big thinking about pressing public issues. Here are excerpts from our conversation, edited lightly for clarity.
John S. Adams: I looked at the Texas Tribune Festival with envy and said, Man, I think that would be really cool to have in Montana. I think we’ve got interesting people. I think we’ve got interesting ideas. And I think folks would be interested in hearing from folks from outside the state, not just the same policymakers and media folks that they hear on a regular basis. One of the cool things about our job is we get to interview interesting people about exciting things. And you build up a Rolodex full of interesting people who have interesting ideas. And I thought it’d be really cool if I could share some of that with our audience.
“It’s about advancing conversations. It’s about creating a space for civil dialog — something that’s in short supply these days.”
And so that’s the basis of it. I mean, yes, we want to hopefully generate a little revenue. But really, it’s about reaching people who maybe haven’t heard of us yet, or folks who are already on the Montana Free Press bandwagon, giving them an opportunity to engage with us and see acts of journalism being committed live on stage. So that’s the idea. It’s about celebrating the work that we do. It’s about advancing conversations. It’s about creating a space for civil dialog — something that’s in short supply these days. … Look, there’s a lot of craziness out there. There’s a lot of places you can go to get shouting and arguing and opinions and misinformation. We want to create a forum for ideas, for conversation, and for civil dialog around issues that really matter.
Dennis Swibold: You and others have lined up keynote speakers for Thursday, Friday and Saturday, beginning with award-winning Seattle-based writer and journalist Timothy Egan. His latest book, “A Fever in the Heartland,” is about the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, the white supremacist movement that terrorized Blacks, Catholics, Jews and others during in the 1920s until revelations of violence and corruption brought it down. You said your mother insisted you read it.
Adams: I don’t know if you’ve read the book, but it tells an incredible story about the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s in Indiana, of all places. And it’s this incredible tale of history that has kind of been lost. But it is just this very cautionary tale about how fascism, left unchecked and unaccounted, how quickly it can take hold and spread. It was history that was just totally forgotten about, never taught in history books. I never knew about it. And partly I think it was because people didn’t want people to remember it.
When I think about this day and age we’re in with journalism where there aren’t enough reporters, there aren’t enough newspapers, there aren’t enough people keeping the record and reporting on issues and making sure that those stories are being told and preserved for history — that’s concerning to me. One of the narratives in “A Fever in the Heartland” was there were a handful of crusading newspaper reporters and editors who didn’t give up on the story, didn’t buy it, who weren’t bought off by the Ku Klux Klan leaders, who weren’t ignoring the fact that so many people in their community were joining up with the Klan and participating in government, openly as Klan members. But there were a handful of reporters who just did not give up on that story but suffered mightily, financially and physically. One editor had been beaten badly by the Klan. But he didn’t give up. He kept at it. He kept reporting on what they were doing, and he covered the trial, where the Klan leader, who was kind of at the center of the book, was convicted of murder.
So, anyhow, I thought that story was incredible. Tim Egan is from our part of the country, specifically a Northwestern guy, so we partnered with the Mansfield Center at the University of Montana. So Mansfield Center did the outreach directly to Egan’s camp. And they are sponsoring his appearance. I’m really excited about that. I can’t wait to have an opportunity to meet him and interview him live on stage.
I don’t want to spoil the book for you, but the story of the courageous woman who brought it down and the courage of a prosecutor and a jury … I mean, when we look at our crumbling institutions and the lack of faith that people have in our institutions, this illustrates just how critically important our institutions are. And if they didn’t work in that case, we could be in a completely different country today. I mean, it’s just remarkable story.
Swibold: Friday’s keynote features a conversation with nation political strategists Jim Messina and Matt Rhoades. Messina ran former President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign while Rhoades managed Republican Mitt Romney’s race that year. Former U.S. Sen. Max Baucus will introduce the two, and Scripps News anchor Maritsa Georgiou will moderate a discussion about the nationalization of local politics.
Adams: We’re in a big election season, and these are two veterans of national campaigns. And I wanted to have these two folks — I mean, they’re both very active and continue to consult on campaigns — but I wanted to hear from them directly about the state of our current politics. One of the issues that Maritsa and I were excited to drill down into is how so much of our local elections, our local politics, are influenced by the national conversations, the national politics.
Like how did our local politics become so nationalized, where people are running for county clerk [are facing questions] about the border or abortion or what have you? I mean, these are issues that aren’t really local issues, but these candidates are aligning themselves with these national policies. And that’s kind of how we’re picking our local leaders these days. So I thought that would be an interesting conversation to have with folks who are among the architects of these national campaigns. So, that’s how that one came about. We partnered with the Baucus Institute, which was kind enough to work with us and the speakers to make that one happen.
Swibold: Saturday’s keynote asks national and international journalists to explain how artificial intelligence is changing the way news is reported. The journalists are Natalia Antelava, CEO and editor-in-chief of the Coda Story, a global nonprofit news organization, and Neil Chase, CEO of CalMatters, a Sacramento-based news nonprofit. Professor Lee Banville, director of UM’s School of Journalism, will moderate that conversation.
Adams: Neil and I are old friends and longtime collaborators. In the nonprofit news world, Neil has been a great resource for Montana Free Press over the years. So I’ve known Neil for a long time. They’re doing some really brilliant stuff with AI. We could talk a lot about that, and we will on Saturday. Coda Story is a global, nonprofit news organization that focuses on in-depth storytelling to explain how things like technology is being used by authoritarians to oppress people in other parts of the world. Natalia is very concerned with AI. She’s currently a Stanford fellow, studying the impacts of technology and AI on the future of journalism.
I think that conversation is going to be absolute fire. I hope people stick around for it on Saturday because I think that’s going to be one of the best keynotes of the entire event. These may not be the most famous names on stage to Montanans, but they are among some of the most brilliant people thinking about journalism and the future of journalism anywhere in the country or in the world.
Swibold: That’s a great lineup. So too are the breakout sessions, most of them on Friday. I can’t think of a timelier set of discussions about problems challenging policymakers, legislators, experts, ordinary citizens, artists and journalists from in and outside Montana. Topics range from how to adapt to climate change to the future of funding public schools, Medicaid and local news. Others seek solutions to Montana’s affordable housing crisis, the challenge of creating more equitable and resilient food supplies and imagining solutions to the state’s mental health crisis.
Adams: I’m genuinely excited about these conversations because we’ve got super smart people who are deeply invested in the issues of health care, Medicaid expansion, public education, housing and affordability. These issues are central to the lives of everyone right now. I mean, even if you don’t have kids in schools, the quality of our schools and how they’re funded impacts you. If you’re a homeowner, if you’re a renter, these are issues that impact you. Same with Medicaid expansion. If you think you might need a doctor someday, this discussion is relevant to you. So these are issues that we know from our reporting and hear from our readers and see from covering the Legislature.
We know that these are some of the biggest issues facing the state right now and some of the most challenging, from a policy perspective, to deal with. You know, Montana has gone through a lot of changes in the last few years, particularly since the pandemic. And so we’re asking how those changes are impacting everyday lives of Montanans.
“Montana has gone through a lot of changes in the last few years, particularly since the pandemic. And so we’re asking how those changes are impacting everyday lives of Montanans.”
We’re not claiming these are the only issues that matter to Montanans. And this won’t be our only festival, hopefully, exploring issues over the coming years. But right now, these felt like they were most pressing and top of mind for most folks.
So that was why we chose the topics, including some I’m really excited about. You know, we’ve all experienced this “Yellowstone” effect. I mean, especially there in Missoula with [TV crews] filming just down the valley and up the Bitterroot. And with the influx of people and attention that Montana is getting nationally and internationally, the affordability issues that come with that, with folks moving from the coasts, moving from other states, bringing their jobs from those states here, and buying second, third or fourth homes — how is that impacting the affordability for the folks who are already living here? Those issues are really difficult to understand.
We have a couple of panels aimed at tackling that. One is our “Loving Montana to Death” panel, which explores it through the lens of conservation and tourism. We’ve done a lot to promote the state, to get folks here to boost our tourism economy. And that’s been a boon to a lot of communities. But it’s also brought a lot of challenges, certainly on the affordability side of things but also, from a conservation standpoint. I mean, a lot of these landscapes are being more heavily used than they used to be. We’re getting a lot more traffic. We’re getting a lot more conflicts with wildlife. We’re getting a lot more degradation of some of these places that we love so much because so many people are just using them a lot more than they used to, and they weren’t necessarily managed for that level of use. So those are some of the issues that we’ll tackle in that panel.
[Montana Free Press Deputy Editor] Eric Dietrich has a great panel lined up to talk about housing and the affordability angle. It includes Missoula Mayor Andrea Davis and Forrest Mandeville, a Republican lawmaker and a [land use] planner in his day job. It also includes Jacob Kuntz of Helena’s Habitat for Humanity program. Questions they’ll discuss include how do we build communities? How do we add housing capacity to communities that already feel crowded? What rules, what policies? What cultural challenges do we face in trying to bring affordable housing to the masses? We love living in Montana, but what about the folks who are pumping your gas and working in your restaurants, the plumbers, you name it — all of the service industry jobs we need in our communities? If the folks who have those jobs can’t afford to live in those communities, how do we have a community? So that’s a big, big issue. It’s one where folks on different ends of the political spectrum have ideas about how to get at it. And so we’re bringing some of those folks together to talk about that.
Swibold: All these issues have implications for people in towns big and small.
Adams: Absolutely. And that’s what we’re trying to do. We don’t want to make this just a festival for people in Missoula. Hopefully, we’ll get folks from other parts of the state to come to Missoula for this event. But Montana is a big, diverse state with unique challenges because of its geography, because of its rural nature and because of the divides between the ultra-wealthy in certain places and then the sparsely populated counties with just a few hundred people. Those create difficult challenges for our policymakers. And so our hope for this festival is that it will give both policymakers and the public some new ways of thinking about these challenges and hopefully bringing some constructive solutions to the legislative process. It’d be great if we had folks from across the political spectrum, not just the politicians and elected officials, but the people of Montana, the voters, the citizens. If they are engaged on these issues because they learned something new from this festival, and are working toward helping come up with creative, constructive solutions to some of these challenges, then that would be our ultimate goal, right? To move the needle on some of these seemingly intractable problems through conversation, collaboration.
Swibold: You also have a session on the future of news in the digital age. What changes do you see?
Adams: That panel is going to be a lot of fun because we have such a diversity of media represented. We have Melody Martinsen from a hyperlocal weekly newspaper in rural Montana who’s been at it with her husband, Jeff, for more than 30 years. She told me the other day they have never missed a deadline. They’ve never missed a single edition. And then we have Maritsa Georgiou who’s anchoring the nation’s only nightly newscast from Missoula, Montana, from a heartland state, not one of the coasts. That’s really awesome and that’s a new model that reaches folks on digital platforms but also traditionally through broadcast. And then, yeah, we’ve got Montana Free Press, which is a digital-first news organization. We’re primarily digital, but we collaborate with a lot of these other mediums. We collaborate with broadcast; we collaborate with print.
And to me, that is one of the secrets to our success. Actually, it’s not so secret because we’re pretty transparent about collaboration with not just other news organizations but with other mediums. That commitment to collaboration is one of the reasons we’ve been able to build sustainability because we’re able to reach audiences that aren’t only on digital, that aren’t only getting their news through their email or on their cell phone. But we’re reaching audiences that are getting the news from the morning newscast on NPR, or the nightly newscast on television, or their weekly newspaper. They’re seeing our headlines and bylines in their community newspapers because we allow our stories to be republished free of charge by any legitimate news organization.
That collaboration, I mean, you’re seeing that throughout this festival. We’ve got other news organizations participating. And I think you’re going to see that panel talking about the different ways in which we serve our audiences in our communities. Melody’s audience might be interested in stuff that we’re doing. We have some overlapping audience there. Some of her readers also read Montana Free Press, but you’re not going to come to Montana Free Press to learn about the 6-year-old kid who got caught 15 feet up in a tree last week. You’re going to know about it because you read about it in your community newspaper.
“As the world gets more and more confusing with the amount of noise that’s being created in the digital space from social media, from political campaigns, from bad actors who profit from us being at odds with one another, folks are going to look for lifeboats in that sea of noise.”
So I think the future for us is not the Missoulian or Montana Free Press. It’s both. As the world gets more and more confusing with the amount of noise that’s being created in the digital space from social media, from political campaigns, from bad actors who profit from us being at odds with one another, folks are going to look for lifeboats in that sea of noise. They’re going to find their local newscasts, and they’re going to find Montana Free Press, and they’re going to know these are people they can trust. These [journalists] are working hard to get at the truth and the facts of the information and provide it to me so that I can make better decisions about my life. I think as the internet gets crazier and crazier, with the advancement of these technologies and these algorithms that are designed specifically to maximize profit from our attention, folks are going to want those places where they can go to get some respite, some just cool, clear, factual information from people they know and trust.
So I think the future for us is good, as long as we keep our focus local, as long as we keep our focus on what our readers need and want, and we don’t get into the game of trying to compete for their attention or compete for their clicks. Instead we should be competing against the bad actors who are creating noise and exposing them.
Swibold: I’ve been impressed with your practice of sending Free Press reporters to community newspapers to work with them on stories.
Adams: Yeah. I mean, we can’t report about the whole of Montana from Helena or Missoula or Bozeman. The people who know what’s going on across Montana are those local community journalists and community leaders. We’ve got good relationships with the Montana Newspaper Association. I’m on its foundation board, where we give out scholarships to budding young journalists. So I’ve gotten to know these editors around the state. And so the reporting residency kind of sprang up by that. And I think our first one was last year. The reporters loved it, the newspapers loved it. It was just fun having that cross-pollination of ideas and perspectives. And yeah, we’ve gotten some great stories out of it. I think we’ve helped raise awareness of the issues in these communities across the state because, you know, the housing affordability issues in Lewistown — sure, that’s their issue — but there are lessons that can be learned about that around the state. So what happens in Lewistown or Whitefish or Ekalaka doesn’t just impact those communities. The lessons learned from those experiences don’t have to just stay in those communities. And I think that’s kind of the goal of that project.
And this year we raised some money around that. We advertised that we were sending our reporters to these different communities and asked people who wanted to support that to cover the costs of gas and lodging and, you know, the actual expense of putting those reporters in those communities. Our readers stepped up and donated and covered those costs and then some. So, that’s really cool. To see of ownership that our readers have of the work that we do is really cool, and I think helps build and maintain that loyalty and trust between news producers and the news consumers.
Swibold: Thanks, John, for your time today, and best of luck with the festival.
