00:00:25,070	Thanks for joining us for what we hope will be the first of several programs called READ Local. My name is Cecile Wehrman. I've been a journalist for decades, and these days I'm the executive director of the North DakotanNewspaper Association. And READ Local isn't just the program you're about to see.

00:00:46,170	It's a larger initiative of NDNA's underlining the importance of paying attention to local news. As just one prong of this initiative. This interview is aimed at acquainting you with who is bringing you the news in North Dakota. Recent research around the country has shown few people know a journalist. For instance, 51% of rural people in the Americas.

00:01:11,370	Newspapers 2026 Roadmap study said local journalists could do a better job if they make themselves more accessible to readers. So today I'm going to introduce you to one. Joining me is Jacob, a reporter with the North Dakota Monitor, which is a nonprofit news entity based in Bismarck. Now full disclaimer. Jacob was a newspaper reporter before he went digital.

00:01:33,770	I hired him right out of college to work at the Tribune, where he was the news editor for about four years. So we've been acquainted for a while, but I thought you would be a great person to start with in this series just because we are acquainted. And I know a little bit about your story.

00:01:50,770	Plus, you've been doing some fabulous reporting down here. Just before we get into it, introducing who you are and where you came from. Let's acknowledge that for a journalist, it's a little uncomfortable being interviewed. How do you feel about that? How do I feel right now? Yeah. Terrified. This is not something that I normally do.

00:02:18,630	I like to report the news, not be in the news. And that's a little cliche to say, but in my case, it's absolutely true. Right. And so that's almost diametrically opposed to what we think of when we're looking at national cable news or personalities on cable news shows there. You know, they're trying to advance who they are.

00:02:42,030	But that's that's not who you are.

00:02:47,730	Yeah. And it's tough for a lot of journalists to do. But it is really important to know the people that you're reporting for and that you're reporting on. And and in keeping that objectivity that we expect journalists to have, telling people all about you doesn't necessarily feed that. Especially early in a journalist career, you.

00:03:15,770	There's almost an automatic instinct to hold yourself aloof. And this feeds into my story a little bit because I was making a big change, coming to a very small town where I knew. Absolutely nobody. And I did hold myself aloof. But over time, you learned that that's the wrong approach.

00:03:34,730	Even though you need to remain objective and separate from the people and institutions that you cover. It's really important to get to know them as people and for them to get to know you as a person.

00:03:51,100	If you don't, that generates distrust might be the wrong word, but it's in that vein. And trust is one of the most important commodities that anyone but especially journalists, can have. Good point. Good point. Well, let's let's talk a little bit about where you came from.

00:04:15,030	I gave away a little bit that, you know, you were hired to come to North Dakota to be a journalist. But tell me, tell me about where you grew up, where you went to college, stuff like that. Sure. So I was born and raised on the East Coast, almost entirely in Delaware, which is a small state that not everybody has heard of.

00:04:33,530	Some people don't even believe it is a state when you tell them. I attend at university, at the University of Delaware, which is also in the same state, the. I graduated in the spring of 2018, and then I spent months looking for anybody who would hire me as a journalist. FYI, the job market in journalism is not great these days.

00:04:54,670	And then I think it was in September of 2018, I finally got an email back from you, and I remember that interview vividly. You were cautioning me, are you sure you want to make the jump from Delaware to North Dakota, which is about as different as two places in the United States could be? But I did.

00:05:19,400	I came out here to North Dakota, to Tioga, North Dakota, specifically in October of 2018, and I spent nearly five years there. Right, right. Shocked me. I was so tickled to have you for that long.

00:05:41,270	And, I mean, we could spend a whole show just talking about some of the escapades and interesting stories that you covered, challenges, getting to know people there, getting them to trust you, all those things. But was journalism always the plan? I mean, sure, taking the leap to North Dakota was a big leap, but did you know, coming out of college, this is absolutely what I want to do. After after college? Yes.

00:06:03,800	Was it always the plan? Absolutely not. Funny story. I wanted to be an attorney coming out of high school, and that's what I geared my college experience towards. And then roughly about halfway through this was the spring summer ish of 2016. I got hired on at the student newspaper.

00:06:24,670	We call it The Review, or we called it the review at the University of Delaware. And I, over the course of the rest of my college career, I became progressively more involved at the review and in journalism more generally. And I realized that that was what I wanted to do after college. And when I graduated, I was still a little lukewarm.

00:06:44,570	Is this going to be my first job, or is this going to be my career? Well, we know how that turned out. This is this is my career, right? Right. And a promising career you have have going.

00:07:09,370	What's different about being a journalist than you expected? What's different about being a journalist than I expected? I would say two things. One.

00:07:16,130	The first thing that comes to mind is how much work I do that never sees the light of day. Checking on things, talking to people, asking questions about something that I think is a story but ends up being not what I expected.

00:07:41,130	A surprisingly amount, a surprisingly large percentage of my job is just doing that due diligence on things that readers in the general public have no idea. The second thing is the and we've touched on this a little bit, but the second thing that surprises me is how important relationships are. I came into journalism with a strong, I'll call it an accountability focus. Documents.

00:08:09,200	Records, research, looking for stories, when in reality so much of the job is just developing relationships with the people you cover, with the people you report for, and figuring out what they want to see in their local newspaper and finding out what makes this person tick.

00:08:32,270	What's the historical context for what's happening right now? And once you do establish those relationships, once you take that next step, your journalism becomes ten times better. And getting the information becomes much more easy to because you have trust. Absolutely.

00:08:51,330	So I don't want to put you on the spot unless you want to share an anecdote that you can think of about a relationship that maybe started off on the wrong foot and got better. But but I mean, when you come into a town and nobody knows who you are, and right away you're walking into City Hall and you're asking for documents. I mean, that's that's putting people on the defensive a little bit. And so so you learned to get to get through that? Yes.

00:09:12,500	I don't think any specific anecdotes come to mind at the moment, but but you're right on. And there's several factors that go into that. When I was moving to Tioga, I was an outsider. I was a young and relatively inexperienced journalist.

00:09:32,670	I was not only an outsider in the sense that I was from the East Coast, a different, almost a different culture, almost. But I was a not Tioga citizen. Anybody who's lived. Someone from Crosby isn't necessarily welcome in Tioga. Anyone who's lived in a small, rural community knows that the vast majority of the community has lived there for generations.

00:09:56,930	They grow up knowing each other, and then all of a sudden, here's this reporter who moved to town who has one idea about journalism and has to learn what community journalism means interacting with people in the community, living, living neighbor to neighbor, just down the street from the people that you cover. I mentioned earlier, I remember vividly the job interview I had with you.

00:10:18,100	Initially, you told me that you almost warned me that the people you cover are going to be the same people you see shopping in the grocery store, and that's absolutely true. And that is a incredible difference from what you might expect in a larger community on the coast, is what I was going to say.

00:10:40,370	But that's my experience coming from the East Coast. I'm sure it's like that in any other community. Bismarck, for example, I do not see people in the grocery store that I cover.

00:11:01,400	But it gets back into that accountability factor again, that when you're living in a community and you're part of the community, you're taking on the role of advocate for your fellow citizens. Not not necessarily, you know, trying to push an agenda or but but you know, what you care about because you live in the same community. Absolutely. There is something to that.

00:11:26,470	I wouldn't necessarily call it an advocate for people, but we are we journalists, we local newspapers are the voice of the general public in a lot of different ways. Where are the people who explain the public officials in our reporting, what the general public thinks, and we also do it the other direction. We take what public officials are saying and thinking and report that to the general population.

00:11:48,430	So we are that conduit, and we're also, in some ways, the institution that keeps government accountable in those communities. So what's what what do you like about being a reporter. What are the fun things and the things that when you go to work and you have that kind of a day that you just love.

00:12:15,500	Two things, one big, one small on the small side, I still absolutely love the more documents research focused aspect of the job. I love learning new things and I love reading. And sometimes those two things just coincide when I'm learning about a new topic. And that is probably my favorite part of the job.

00:12:41,730	The other thing I'll say, and this is entirely cliche, but I like when my reporting makes a difference. I really enjoy those stories where I talk to everybody involved in a topic, and my the final version of my story does justice to everybody's perspective, that everybody agrees that while I may not agree with everything in your article,

00:13:10,000	or I may not like your article, you did. You covered my perspective and just ensuring that everybody's voices are heard on a topic and doing justice to that in a small community is extremely rewarding, right? And what you're describing reminds me of a large project that you just wrapped up in the past year that that wasn't

00:13:37,300	a community journalism project, but it was a statewide project. And but it actually stemmed out of some of the coverage you were doing in the oil field back in Tioga, you know, several years ago.

00:13:55,370	Can you talk a little bit about that grant and that work and ultimately what what came it actually brought you back to North Dakota after you left once? Yeah, yeah, I left North Dakota briefly. I was I was a little overworked, a little burned out in Tioga, just that big culture shift and going through the pandemic and all of the resurgence in news afterwards. I need a break.

00:14:19,230	But what brought me back to North Dakota and to the North Dakota Monitor specifically was the ProPublica Local Reporting Network. And this is essentially a grant to give me 12 months to spend diving, deep diving into one particular topic. The topic that we chose was post-production deductions, which. The shortest summary of that I can give is.

00:14:46,930	And gas is owned by mineral owners. These mineral owners lease that that and gas to and gas companies that drill extract it and sell it at a profit. The mineral owners are given a percentage of those of that revenue.

00:15:11,600	And what was happening and what is still happening is that all and gas companies will subtract the expenses that occur after the oil and gas is extracted from the ground. This is, you'll often hear it called transportation gathering, processing. And this. Is literally impacting anyone who owns mineral rights in North Dakota. So we're talking of people. We're talking, at the very least, tens of thousands of people living in North Dakota.

00:15:33,900	An estimated 300,000 people own the oil and gas rights in North Dakota. Well, around two thirds of those live outside of state. So the people who maybe inherited mineral rights from their grandfather or their great grandfather who homesteaded out here.

00:15:59,530	And the thing I loved about this topic, that this investigation really tied into a lot of the things that we've just been discussing. I got to learn about something new, dive deep into the research, the documents I got to speak to dozens, literally dozens of landowners and attorneys and mineral owners who are affected by this issue. Or if something to say about this issue.

00:16:21,330	And we tied it together with a four part series that was published on the North Dakota Monitor in 2025. How many words? Oh, gosh. 40,000. 50,000. Not quite that many. It was. It was just probably around 8 or 9000. But the original version. Like a book.

00:16:49,170	The original version would have been 2 to 3 times that length before it got whittled down. In the four parts, each part was 2 to 3000 words. Every word counted, every paragraph had to be justified. The editing process. The editors were great. The editing process was brutal on the reporter, which in this case was me.

00:17:12,330	So that was that was certainly a tough process to go through. But the end result, I think, really did justice to that topic. It I'm hoping it helped a lot of readers understand not just the energy industry, but this very specific subtopic of it more in depth. And there are still some there's still some stories to be told on that.

00:17:35,670	There's still a lot of things making their way through the courts. We've got a legislative session coming up, which will be the first legislative session after that series was published. There are.

00:17:49,830	I'll leave it at that. There are still stories to be told on that topic, and I look forward to helping to tell them. Right. And so, you know, I can just imagine during the next legislative session, somebody referencing the reporting by the North Dakota Monitor on this topic, if a bill were to come up

00:18:07,800	and and if, if that were to happen, just an instance like that, that's got to be incredibly gratifying to know that people are paying attention. It is. And we do see our. Work referenced by government officials within government, within government documents like court documents. And it is gratifying.

00:18:33,430	It's nice to know that our reporting is not only being read, but being read and taken into account that we helped inform more people of something. And that goes for every story, not just this, this one on gas story. Right? Right. And I won't I won't make you say this, but I will tell the viewers that you won a pretty big award for that.

00:18:56,230	Reporting from a contest that's tied in with Nana's better newspaper contest, there's a foundation called the Amaq Foundation that rewards investigative reporting. And you were the top the top winner this year. So congratulations on that. Thank you. Cecile. That's that's also rewarding. Although it's not why we do it. Right, right.

00:19:20,700	So let's talk a little bit about how local news is maybe different than what people might perceive of national news. I mean, we've touched a little bit on the idea of community journalism, but, you know, one of the things we wanted to try to get at here is why why is there maybe distrust of the media writ large?

00:19:41,800	And how is what is going on on the national scene so very different from what's going on locally?

00:19:51,070	I think there are a lot of differences between local news and national news. National news. I've never worked at a national outlet, so at Grain of Salt, but they they are reporting to a very different audience in a very different environment.

00:20:13,600	And because they're at the national level, they are less connected to the communities that they're covering, and they cover those communities less frequently. Local news on the other hand, a lot of people like to say it's community journalism, which is its own brand almost. It's far more connected to your readership. It's far more aware of the context of what you're reporting on the North Dakota Monitor.

00:20:37,970	It tends to be a little bit more on the local side. We focus on state government, statewide issues. We're trying to fill that gap where there's really there's not a robust.

00:20:54,630	Press corps in the capital. There are reporters from different outlets that are based here in Bismarck that cover state government, but there's no news outlet. Before we came along that was focused exclusively on state government.

00:21:15,370	And I would just interject and feeding that news out to the local outlets so that if I'm a weekly newspaper in Grafton or Rolla, I mean, I can I can use those North Dakota Monitor Stories if it's something that particularly ties in with my area. So you're providing quality journalism to the members of my North Dakota Newspaper Association, which is fabulous. Absolutely. That's a big part of our of our system.

00:21:41,470	We want to be republished by local newspapers because those local newspapers are the institutions and the staff that have been around for years, for decades. When you're talking about a newspaper, a century or more is not uncommon in North Dakota.

00:22:04,670	So they have that trust built in with the local communities, and we want to almost tap into that by sharing our work product with those papers. And then their readers also get to benefit from that journalism. So in that sense, we're almost just trying to replace the.

00:22:24,130	What's the word I'm looking for at Capital Bureau. Right. Or like whether it was Associated Press or any other wire service that used to feed out stories for many, you know, almost no local news organizations anymore. Subscribe to AP, for instance, just because of the cost, they can't afford it.

00:22:45,730	And yet they don't have the people to come to Bismarck during the legislative session, just just for equal time. There's another organization that's similar in North Dakota, the North Dakota News Co-op, which takes a little bit of a different viewpoint, but is also feeding story. So we have a really rich, cooperative ecosystem now for these local newspapers to tap into.

00:23:11,770	You know, the monitor, they might have a story from the monitor, they might have a story from the news Co-op that supplements their local coverage, which is, you know, just that's something that's only been a thing for the last couple of years. And it seems like it's been really beneficial for everyone.

00:23:29,600	Big stories can happen in small places, and you can get to cover some pretty big things, even in North Dakota. And I guess that's something I wanted to talk with you a little bit, because you're fresh off the heels of covering President Trump's visit to North Dakota and the opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Library. That was all just last week.

00:23:50,270	As we sit here today, tell me a little bit about all the hoopla and the logistics and and all of that. It was a lot. I'll start off by saying that I tend to treat journalism from more of a local news perspective.

00:24:09,930	My idea of big stories is not necessarily going to be what national news considers to be a big story. I think a lot of things that happen in small towns like Tioga, in Bismarck, in even North Dakota as a state are quote unquote, big stories.

00:24:34,930	But in this particular case, a president visiting North Dakota to cut the ribbon at a dedication ceremony for the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, that's a story that made her on the national radar in all sorts of different ways. It was a heavy lift. We worked as a team. We had three people rotating in on the ground for both Trump's visit and the presidential library opening.

00:24:57,770	That was last Saturday, and I think that we had a pretty robust coverage that I was getting a lot of attention. All of North Dakota's press corps, all the coverage that I saw, whether it was the TV stations doing, you know, live feeds of all of this, your organization, the newspapers all showed North Dakota well up to the task. Our journalists did a fabulous.

00:25:16,870	Job, and I did not want to I did not mean to leave all of those out. All of the TV stations fire. I'm forgetting others. I saw Bismarck Tribune reporters there. The North Dakota press really rose to the occasion on that. It was an interesting week. The day of the event.

00:25:41,430	I'll say this, the amount of the day I spent reporting was actually relatively minimal, just because when the president comes to town, there's a lot of security precautions, there's a lot of procedures, there's a lot of waiting, getting there early, waiting around. The press actually had to get to the music.

00:25:59,330	Trump's speech was in the same place as in Medora musical, so we had to get there at 3 a.m. that morning to set up all of our equipment. We couldn't bring any of our cameras or anything in afterwards. When we did what's called reentry. After the Secret Service did a sweep, we reentered at 7 a.m., so it. Was just 1:00, 2:00 speech.

00:26:18,070	And there was no speaking until 1:01 p.m.. And then, of course, I think the speeches went on for an hour or so. And that entire day, just the sun's beating right at you. I'm sure anybody who was in attendance that day could tell you the impo it was a lot of pomp and circumstance and waiting around.

00:26:44,500	But it was gratifying to cover a story of that. To prove you could you could do it. Sure. Yeah. And, you know, I wanted to talk a little bit about maybe what misperceptions people have about journalists.

00:27:04,630	And, you know, maybe these are stereotypical, but there are things I've heard, you know, through the years, like, but I don't think people realize that that 20 inch story in the newspaper or that two minute package on the television news. Yeah, that was somebody whole day or a whole week of effort to produce that, to bring you into what happened and keep you informed.

00:27:31,030	Do you find that that people just really don't understand, like they think you just show up? And to an extent, yes. I think. When we talked earlier about. Building a relationships, a lot of those misconceptions tend to go away over time.

00:27:50,930	Once you have built or are building those relationships because they get to know you, they see you at the city commission meetings or the school board meetings month after month, week after week, whatever that schedule is for your community. And they see you putting the time in and they get to know you and why you're writing what you are.

00:28:13,570	I will say it's a very common misconception in my experience, that people you've never met assume you're coming in with some sort of agenda. And the vast, vast majority of the time, I never want to say 100% of any profession, but 99.9% of journalists view journalism as a public service.

00:28:40,530	We are there to inform our readers of what's happening at Niemeyer, event or festival or commission meeting, what the government's doing, what's happening on Main Street, what's happening at the county level, at the state level, and that. Journalists want their work to be as accurate as possible, to generally be as nonpartisan and objective as possible, like the North Dakota Monitor and most news outlets in North Dakota.

00:29:09,900	And I think people watch what's happening at the national level and assume it's being disseminated in bad faith. And then they transmute that distrust that develops to the local level. And I'm not entirely sure that's fair, I think. And that's why and that's why we're here.

00:29:36,300	And I'm so glad you touched on, you know, some of the ethical considerations that that journalists hold close and, and try to operate by. Jacob has been fabulous talking with you. I'm so glad you could join us, and we hope that you will join us again for READ Local in the future.