Scott Michlin: Well, hi everyone. I'm Scott Michlin. I'm the General Manager of KSJE, the public radio station that is community-supported here in Farmington, New Mexico, based at San Juan College. Really thrilled to be a guest on the podcast today to talk a bit about a topic that I'm pretty passionate about, which is localism.

We live in a pretty unique place, as anyone who's lived here or visited Farmington and the Four Corners area knows. From a media standpoint, though, it is very unique and very, very different. And so, that was kind of what I wanted to share a little bit with you today.

A bit about my background, this is my 35th year living in Farmington. I came to New Mexico in 1989 to take a job at the local TV station. And I was the news director there for about 17 years and we had local news and weather and sports on television every night during the 5:00 and 10:00 news. And then about 2007, they went in a different direction as they say, and I was able to come here to San Juan College and become the general manager of KSJE, which as I mentioned is the public radio station here, and continue to perform a little bit of my news duties here with a local talk show every morning on the radio station.

So, let me talk a bit about localism, just why I think it's so important, local journalism, local information, and all of that. And we see, you know, businesses in the community that really go out of their way to support localism and local journalism. And I really think it's important. The media has kind of taken some hits recently. And here, as I said, in our area, it's a unique situation because our major media market is 200 miles away in Albuquerque. And so, getting information to our community can be somewhat difficult. If there's a major event happening in Albuquerque, they may not get noticed up here. And they are covering their immediate vicinity, and that makes a lot of sense.

So, what am I talking about? Well, just having people in positions to cover things that are happening in our community, whether that's a court case or a school board meeting, or a city council meeting. KSJE, unfortunately, has a pretty small staff. And so, I wish I had a staff of reporters to send to some of these things, but at the moment, we just don't. And I'm one person, so I can't get to every single newsworthy event that I would like to get to in a week's time. But we do have some print facilities in the area that are trying to fill that gap, it's more now than it has been in the past, which is nice to see. Because again, I think we need to have people sitting in those meetings to hear what's going on, to maybe push back a little bit on some of our local officials and ask some of the questions that really need to be asked.

I think we're really fortunate that our local politicians and leaders are pretty transparent and open to questions from the public and the press, but not every community is like that. So, it's important to have kind of that back and forth to make sure that some of our government officials dealing with public dollars are being asked the important questions that they need to be asked. And to their credit, they come on my program. They come on the radio and talk about these things and that's another great public service because they are spending money that comes from ultimately all of us, the taxpayers, in these communities. So, localism is really important and the only way that that's going to keep growing is to have the support of community members and businesses to support the media and organizations that are doing good things here in our community. And so, that's kind of what I wanted to speak about a little bit today.

Through my work at the TV station and now here at the radio station, I met a lot of great people in the community and try to really promote some of these great things that are happening. And that's an important part of localism as well. You know, it shouldn't just have to be from Albuquerque or Santa Fe where these good news stories are happening. We have plenty here in town, and it's really important to be able to highlight those and focus on those and share them with our community and maybe with a bigger community if a story would get picked up in Albuquerque or even in a larger market someplace else.

A lot of really great important stories to tell here from Farmington, Aztec, Bloomfield, Kirtland, the Navajo Nation, Southwest Colorado. I mean, we live in a great place with a lot of great people and a lot of great things that are happening each and every day. So, I'm really thrilled to see some of the newspapers stepping up, adding more staff, covering more stories, and being able to, again, inform the public about what is going on, whether it's crime, whether it's education, whether it's local politics, environment, all those things, businesses. It's really important to have a well rounded view of the community that we all share.

As an older journalist, it's a little disheartening to see kind of where people get their news these days. I also teach a couple of classes here at San Juan College in my part time job, and that is a couple of public speaking classes and a class in mass media, which I've been teaching for probably most of those 35 years. And I always like to ask my students, when they come in the first day, you know, where do they get their news? What media do they use? And of course, it's certainly different from when I was in college, which was a million years ago. They're not watching the news on TV, they're not picking up a newspaper, or even reading one online, and they're getting their news from places like Facebook or YouTube, X, which was formerly known as Twitter. And all that is great as long as the sources are great. And that's another thing I like to talk about, is where we get our news and information is important. If it's just someone on Facebook making a post, it may or may not be true. And before you share it, you might want to find out if that is true or not true before spreading it around social media. It's really important, I think, to know that what we're sharing with our friends, and even our acquaintances on social media, is accurate information.

So, when I was in television, we had a rule in the newsroom that we would never report information that we heard on the police scanner. You know, the police scanner is what authorities use, radios to contact each other back and forth, whether they're responding to an emergency or they're on the scene of an emergency, and they'll send a lot of information back to dispatchers or to other officers and EMTs who are responding when they get on scene. That information may be correct or it may not be until they get more details, and so to use that as fact is dangerous. And I see a lot of that on social media, and it does concern me because folks take that as fact when maybe it's not. And we see a lot of folks kind of backing away from some of their original posts when the facts come out that was very different from what it was first reported.

So, my advice to folks would be know your sources. use credible sources. You know, we live in a very polarized world and there's a lot of different sources on the left, on the right, in the middle. Find sources that certainly you trust and can agree with, but maybe look at the other side too and see what they're talking about from time to time. And you can get a more well-rounded view of the world around us. That's what I've tried to do through my life. And hopefully, that comes through in some of my professional work. but sources are important. And, in sharing on social media, it seems like now everybody with a Facebook account, an Instagram account, a TikTok account has their own little TV station, their own little radio station. And they produce content and they put it out there. And if it's correct and entertaining, that's great. But if it's misleading or not factual, that's a problem for a journalist like me to see it shared far and wide, and folks just sharing it without double checking and making sure that it's legit, what they're sharing with their friends, which puts them at risk as well. So, I'll get off my soapbox, but I did want to share that a little bit with you.

And again, going back to my original comment about localism, talking about what's good in our community is never a bad thing. I'm all for it. We celebrate these successes. We also talk about some of the challenges in our communities as well. I think that's just as important. And going back to some of those local leaders who may not I wouldn't be as thrilled to talk about some of the challenging things that face our community as they are talking about the ribbon cuttings and the new openings and the positive things. It's still important to talk about all of it, I feel, to let the public know what we're facing. It's good, it's not so good, and it's somewhere maybe in the middle, but that's important for the public to understand the challenges that we face and the successes that we celebrate each and every day. We do it here at San Juan College, and I'm happy to be a part of that, but I think we do it to a larger extent in the larger community as well. I'm always happy to document those things and invite folks on my radio program that talks about some of these challenges and also some of the successes that we get to celebrate.

So with that being said, I'm going to wrap up my conversation, but I appreciate again being asked to be a part of this podcast. And I thank you for spending a few minutes of your day, listening to me and some of my thoughts about media and journalism and celebrating our local communities. Thanks so much for tuning in.