CAPTivated

EP 03 Why Local Journalism Still Matters with Dave Bangert

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In this episode Sage, Hanna, and Julius sit down with Dave Bangert, a veteran local journalist who spent over three decades covering Lafayette, Indiana, first at the Lafayette Journal and Courier, and now through his independent Substack: Based in Lafayette, Indiana. Dave talks about what happens when newsrooms shrink from 45 people to seven, why those "boring" school board meetings actually matter, and how he's built a subscriber base of over 8,000 people who are hungry for local coverage.

He shares stories about getting called out in the grocery store, why fairness doesn't mean being soft, and what gets lost when there's no one left to cover the community stories that end up clipped and saved on refrigerators. Dave makes the case that supporting local journalism isn't just about staying informed. It's about maintaining the accountability that keeps democracy functioning at the level where it actually touches people's lives.

Three Key Takeaways from Dave:

  1. Support local journalism and subscribe to anybody who is doing the work
  2. Put in the legwork to read enough that you can tell which reporters you trust and which you don't 
  3. As a journalist, make sure that you're able to walk in the grocery store, and people can hold you accountable.

Find out more about:

Some of the texts we refer to in this episode:

Dave’s Journal & Courier article about The Time Johnny Cash stopped in Lafayette to go Fishing

Dave’s Media Diet:

This podcast is part of CAPT’s efforts to encourage open and diverse intellectual exchange. The ideas presented by individuals on the podcast are their own and do not represent Purdue University, which adheres to a policy of institutional neutrality.

We would love to hear your thoughts on this episode! Send us feedback to captivatedpod@gmail.com

In this episode Sage, Hanna, and Julius sit down with Dave Bangert, a veteran local journalist who spent over three decades covering Lafayette, Indiana, first at the Lafayette Journal and Courier, and now through his independent Substack: Based in Lafayette, Indiana. Dave talks about what happens when newsrooms shrink from 45 people to seven, why those "boring" school board meetings actually matter, and how he's built a subscriber base of over 8,000 people who are hungry for local coverage.

He shares stories about getting called out in the grocery store, why fairness doesn't mean being soft, and what gets lost when there's no one left to cover the community stories that end up clipped and saved on refrigerators. Dave makes the case that supporting local journalism isn't just about staying informed. It's about maintaining the accountability that keeps democracy functioning at the level where it actually touches people's lives.

Three Key Takeaways from Dave:

  1. Support local journalism and subscribe to anybody who is doing the work
  2. Put in the legwork to read enough that you can tell which reporters you trust and which you don't 
  3. As a journalist, make sure that you're able to walk in the grocery store, and people can hold you accountable.


Find out more about:


Some of the texts we refer to in this episode:


Transcript:

[00:00:00] Dave Bangert: 

If you worked for the Washington Post or any kind of big media, you're probably walking by your readers all the time, but they don't necessarily know who you are. One thing about this town is it's a grocery store town. I see a lot of people who subscribe, or a lot of people I cover on a regular basis. And the idea is always to be as fair as possible in the coverage. So when I'm walking through the produce aisles at Pay Less, I don't have to duck down and go somewhere else.

[00:00:34] Julius Freeman: 

Welcome to another episode of CAPTivated, a new podcast hosted by the Center for American Political History, Media and Technology at Purdue University. In each episode, we will examine a specific facet of our digital public sphere, how it works, and how we got here. We are here to help you sort through the noise. I'm Julius. 

[00:00:53] Hanna Sistek: 

I'm Hanna. 

[00:00:54] Sage Goodwin: 

And I'm Sage. On today's podcast, we were joined by a local celebrity journalist, Dave Bangert, who is also a member of our advisory board here at CAPT. Dave came to talk to us about the importance of local journalism. He spent over three decades doing local reporting here in Lafayette. He spent most of his career at the Lafayette Journal & Courier , and four years ago, he started a Substack called based in Lafayette, Indiana, which now has over 8,000 subscribers.

[00:01:18] Julius Freeman: 

Sage, that's an interesting point because I didn't actually know what a Substack was. Forgive me, folks, forgive me. But a Substack is a subscription-based publishing platform that allows writers to create and distribute newsletters and podcasts directly to their audience. Dave talked about his model and how it's been able to help him in this time, where it's an era of a local newspaper struggling. 

[00:01:39] Hanna Sistek: 

He also talked about how local journalists have a unique relationship to accountability since they actually run into their audience all the time.

[00:01:47] Sage Goodwin: 

And it was also interesting to hear him talk about how local journalism can both amplify and verify the impact of grassroots organizing, which I think we all know is pretty important in an era of AI-generated content. And where most people dunno what they can trust.

[00:02:03] Hanna Sistek: 

So we started by asking Dave about his background and his journey into journalism. 

[00:02:23] Dave Bangert: 

I liked seeing my byline in the high school paper. Ended up at the University of Colorado mainly to go skiing. I did a lot of skiing, but I also worked for the campus press. After that, I went to Lawrence, Kansas, where I worked for a family newspaper called The Journal World. I worked there for about three years and then came to Lafayette, where I started as a city hall reporter on a staff of about 40 to 45 people. And a local reporting staff of about 10 reporters. 

[00:02:35] Sage Goodwin: 

Was there like a particular moment in that journey for you where you were like, “This is it, journalism, this is what I wanna be doing”?

[00:02:41] Dave Bangert: 

I had that feeling when I was in high school. I thought it was a cool thing to do. I learned really quickly in college that I was not as good as the people around me. I learned that I was not as good at asking questions, and I had to learn a lot. I thought I could write my way out of everything I did.

I had to learn how to ask good questions, and I didn't get that until maybe five years into being a paid reporter, when I felt like I was starting to get it. Whether there was a moment, I don't know. I do know that I drove my bosses nuts 'cause I did not. I came back with 75% good stories. I did not always have the crucial questions. I learned a lot. There's a guy here in town, named David Smith, who now runs a bakery called Smittybread. As I sat next to him and listened to him on the phone, I learned a lot about what's next question. After I would hang up from an interview, he would just sit there for a minute and then say, “Did you ask what they were gonna do to pay for this?” And I'd roll my eyes and go get back on the phone and ask them, “So how are you gonna pay for this?” And I'd hang up and he'd ask, “So when are they gonna get this done?” He would ask all the questions that I'm sure I was driving him nuts that I wasn't asking. But I learned a lot from him and from others like him who knew what they were doing that I needed to learn. It's like any other craft. You really have to learn that part of it. 

[00:04:10] Hanna Sistek: 

I'm just curious, what brought you to Lafayette specifically? 

[00:04:13] Dave Bangert: 

So when I was in Lawrence, Kansas, I loved it there. I had great friends. It was just a comfortable place for me. We all thought you had to move around every two or three years to make your way in a career. And that turned out not to be true 'cause I have a lot of friends who stayed, who made big career moves within their own area. But I wanted to go to another college town if I was gonna make a move. And that's really what brought me here, was a job opportunity and a college town.

[00:04:43] Hanna Sistek: 

So you started out with 10 people on the beat covering local news in Lafayette. How did that evolve, during your reporting career? The staff, situation? 

[00:04:55] Dave Bangert: 

Yeah. In that time, we were always at about 45 in the newsroom in a building that had 210 or 230, depending on how it was, little pieces of that became regionalized. Gannett owns the Journal & Courier, which has a big reach of a hundred papers, So we ended up having hubs for various kinds of advertising and regional hubs for copy editing and production. As those kinds of things happened, we started getting tighter and tighter. I left in December of 2020. I took a buyout, and when I left, there were seven people left in our newsroom dedicated to Lafayette. So it transformed really abruptly through the last 10 or 15 years that I was there. But then you also have to figure that a lot of that was, obituary policies changed. We didn't have obituary writers anymore. They were actually paid and they just came in and we published what people paid to have in. A lot of changes like that. The production copy desk went away and was more at a distance. My bosses were farther away. Those were the changes that made us shrink down. I learned a lot about doing triage, waking up each day and looking at what needed to potentially be covered. And then deciding what I am not going to do today and what I am going to prioritize first. And can I prioritize, do job A and maybe get job B? It was just more of trying to get as much done as possible. 

[00:06:30] Sage Goodwin: 

And how do you make those decisions about which thing to cover in the limited time and space that you have?

[00:06:37] Dave Bangert: 

I learned a lot as a city editor. I was always pretty good at organizing. One of the rules we had in our newsroom was to come up with a story budget, a weekly budget. By budget, it's more like an agenda, where we would have to cover these three meetings in a week, and then I'm gonna work on these two or three stories. And you give them to your boss and the editors say, “Yeah, but I also need you to do this”. And so you prioritize your week that way, depending on how the breaking news is gonna happen at the same time. Then I learned that running the city desk was overseeing those 10 people and knowing what was on their budgets, and then making that puzzle work for who had time to do things, what needed to be covered, who was gonna have to be pulled off things.

[00:07:22] Sage Goodwin: 

So how do you decide what's newsworthy? 

[00:07:25] Dave Bangert: 

So I start, every week, with a round of what meetings are happening and what is based in Lafayette. When I started it, I thought it would be more like a column. I would write columns and tell people, context, and some perspective of what is going on. And what happened was that there just weren't enough reporters out writing the basics. So I had to do a lot of those basics. I don't feel I can write a column about why a decision that the Purdue president made was good, bad, or indifferent without telling people what the decision was and the context. Today, I was at a county commissioner's meeting where the big thing that came out of it was that the county sidewalks. Will have an ordinance that makes you clear your sidewalks as they do in the cities. I know that doesn't sound like much.

It may be three paragraphs by the time I get done with it, but it'll be a piece of understanding what it is to live in Lafayette West, Lafayette in Tipco County, and around Purdue. So I go to things that I swore when I was a reporter and became an editor, I'd never do again, school board meetings, board of works, just the basic work of a city operating, area plan commission meetings where they're deciding rezonings and things like that, which are huge drivers.

People always want to know what that building is going to be. Why are they allowing another high-rise on State Street entering Purdue? Those kinds of things come up. So I look at that all week long, and I just keep it on a day planner kind of thing. And then figure out how much time it's gonna take me to either advance that and tell the story ahead of time, or whether I can cover it as it happens, and fit in all the other things that people have told me or that I know are happening. Then decide what I can't do.

[00:09:12] Hanna Sistek: 

So I'm curious, you mentioned that you used to write columns, right? But then you realized that we don't get this covered in the regular news. How did that, going from 45 people down to 7 in the newsroom, impact the work that you were doing? How has local journalism changed during that time? And how are these changes impacting society at large as you see it?

[00:09:37] Dave Bangert: I think that has hurt journalism, in general, and the community in general. What we had to slough off early on were things that would still be essential to these markets. We had to quit doing what we called sports agate. And all that means is the second page and third page of sports pages that were just box scores of local high school, cross country meets, basketball games, baseball box scores, and those kinds of things. And that may sound small. But I'll tell you what, there are more of those clipped and put into family albums or on refrigerators than anything I ever wrote. When our daughter ran cross country and track, we clipped them all, win, lose, or draw. If her name was in it, we clipped it, and we clipped nephews and nieces and kids that we knew from the neighborhood. They were big deals. The other thing we lost was just straight-up community stories. We had a reporter named Bob Scott, who has passed. I miss Bob in a lot of ways, but he was, for the last 15 years of his career, a community reporter, and his job was five days a week to come up with. Just small stories. Girl Scouts did some kind of community project, and went and talked to them about that kind of thing. He's the guy who would interview, the guy who repeated eight times in a row as the bowler of the year in Greater Lafayette, was a state champion, and then gotten a motorcycle crash and lost his arm. And then learned to relearn to bowl with his other hand. That was the kind of story when Bob died. I told everybody, Bob has more stories on refrigerators and in family bibles and in albums and clipped by grandmothers, aunts, and uncles than all of us combined. Those are the things I think were the immediate things that were lost.

And for me, you know, with a small subscriber base. When people say I didn't know about that, I'm able to at least give them an archive. Those are the kinds of things I find out that a smaller legacy media, even in a small market like this, really matters because people are still looking for. The Legacy paper and the legacy TV have shrunk so much that they can't get to these things, or don't have enough institutional knowledge to know what to cover and how to cover it, and what the impact of that coverage is.

[00:12:09] Hanna Sistek: 

So just to follow up on that, we know that local journalism is shrinking all over the country. What do you think is the broader impact of not being able to cover the community anymore? 

[00:12:21] Dave Bangert: 

I just think it's a matter of having a sense of place and what is happening in the community. It's lost, and I don't know how to necessarily get it back in full. We look at our market alone. WBAA is now run, which is our public radio station in West Lafayette, which Purdue gave to the Indianapolis market. And then it took about a year and a half before those reporters were assigned to Indianapolis. Those were people who were covering things that I was at or that I couldn't go to, and I counted on those folks to do that. The TV station is way down. We have one main. What was A-A-A-C-B-S affiliate? Still is WLFI, which is struggling with a smaller staff and has changed ownership a couple of times. They don't have the institutional knowledge now, and the Journal and Courier is still small, but they try hard.

I could tell people all the time that if they went after me and put me out of business, it would be the best thing that happened in the community because it meant that they really put a lot of effort, and people would say, “Yeah, I'm not subscribing to two news sources anymore”. I really worry about what happens when that brand eats itself or goes away. I would prefer that it gets super strong and takes over again. 

[00:13:44] Julius Freeman: 

And so Dave, it seems like there's been a transition with this struggling from local journalism to find new avenues to get the news out there.  What prompted you to start based in Lafayette, Indiana? And what have you learned about the Substack culture, audience… What's that experience been like for you? 

[00:14:02] Dave Bangert: 

Yeah, so when I left the paper, I had several people say to me they pay for a publication if I just did what I did at the paper. And I thought that was ridiculous at the time. Because I couldn't imagine people paying a subscription rate for something that didn't have obituaries, didn't have sports, didn't have comics, didn't have a broad range of things. I took about six months off, after I left the paper, I did look for other jobs, and I just was gonna get something that was 9 to 5 and those weren't coming. But also I felt like there were some things missing, and I also thought about those people saying, “If you did this, we would subscribe.”

So I started in May of 2021. Just writing a few features. Things that I thought would make up what became based in Lafayette, just to test it out. As soon as I published, I ended up with hundreds of people right away. Social media was a little easier at the time. Twitter didn't diffuse things as much. So there were still a lot of following. That grew really quickly. I did that for about five or six weeks. There were people in town who were already working on some potential, nonprofit media and news gathering. I think they had a longer way to go. They were looking for partners and, in that midst, it became a family decision at our house. Do we go ahead and push the button on a Substack subscription? And how much would we charge and what would be successful and what wasn't? I was really looking for just enough money to cover health insurance and that kind of thing.  And I thought maybe we can do something like that. Carol, my wife, said, “Okay, you're setting it for this amount for monthly and annual, but when you get the first annual subscription. You're gonna be in it for a year, so can you commit to a year?" That was a risk that we took, Substack for me. I went that way because I had known some folks who had done it. I used it mainly as a publication platform more than anything else, more than I know that Substack now is, has become its own controversial entity. People are jumping off for various reasons. I pretty much stay out of that politics. I use it as a way to get mass emails out. And they also do the, subscriber, maintenance for me. So I don't have to do a lot of that. I do a lot of cleanup work, for very specific things, but for the most part, that became a publication platform.

So it was really just, should I try it? I think there was a lot of novelty at first, and that people, were hungry for something. For local coverage. It was a niche that was not being covered, and wanted some hope that something was happening. I was really nervous about one year later in June of 2022, would people resubscribe and they did. I think it was mainly just because I was willing to put in the work. I found that it is a lot of work and people would jump off pretty quickly if it was just meant to be a vanity project.

[00:17:03] Julius Freeman: 

Are most of these subscribers paying subscribers?

[00:17:07] Dave Bangert: 

About a third of my subscribers are paid, and I encourage people to sign up for free. So when I introduce myself, if people say, “I didn't know you were doing this”, I always say, “Just do it for a couple of months for free. You'll get about half of them.” I sent about half of those reports out. Totally free with no paywall. And the people who are subscribers never see that paywall. For the most part, I tell people just to give it a shot. You'll know what the headlines are, even if you know that much, it might help about a third of the people pay to be on it. Which is still amazing to me. 

[00:17:38] Sage Goodwin: 

And how has that, being on Substack versus being a print journalist, changed your relationship to your audience? 

[00:17:47] Dave Bangert: 

It's made it more personal in a lot of ways. I had a fairly personal relationship with a lot of readers as it was, as my bosses got farther away, I never thought a mayor was my boss, but I knew that the mayors read it and gave me feedback immediately. So I was prepared for that. In the last 10 years, or the last 15 years, in that time, a lot of social media we felt. A lot of feedback on an immediate basis all the time. Now that's become more diffuse 'cause it's just harder to lock in. For example, in Greater Lafayette and at Purdue, there was like a Twitterati, there was a really dedicated local Twitter, that if I put a note out, they're changing how they're gonna pick up trash in West Lafayette. What do you think? I would be able to see some real-time feelings about it. And again, that's really parochial, but it was important then. Everything wasn't about what was happening at the White House or in Congress. But now, when I send things out, they go directly to people's emails. I do hear from people immediately on a lot of things. And it's good, a lot of people call me out on things. So I know there are some boundaries. 

One thing about this town is it's a grocery store town. If you worked for the Washington Post or any kind of big media, chances are you're not gonna run into your readers. You're probably walking by your readers all the time, but they don't necessarily know who you are. When Carol and I shop at Pay Less on Green Bush in Greenville Street in the north end of Lafayette, I see a lot of people who subscribe or a lot of people I cover on a regular basis. The idea is always to be as fair as possible in the coverage. So when I'm walking through the produce aisles, I don't have to duck down and go somewhere else.

I have very specific stories about running into people at the grocery store, where they want to use that as a. Here's your customer service feedback right now, and I'm mad about something you wrote about two months ago or a week ago, or whatever it is. 

[00:19:48] Sage Goodwin: 

So for you, it's not just in the comment section on the Substack, it's in real life when you're doing your groceries.

[00:19:54] Dave Bangert: 

And one story I tell people is that a long time ago, when I was doing music reporting, I covered a lot of concert reviews. There was one at Elliot Hall of Music at Purdue, Alan Jackson, who huge country star, about as big a country star as you could be at that moment. I wrote that he had great players. He was good musically. He sounded good. Everything was good, except he didn't move, and he was totally boring. The show was boring to me, and I wrote about how that worked out. And this was the days of probably the early nineties, mid-nineties. And I went to Payless, the same Payless, except it's been rebuilt and moved a little bit. I was paying with a check, and the cashier said, “Are you the Dave Bangert at the Allen Jackson concert?” And I said, “Yeah”. And she said, “You were wrong”. And made somebody else finish my order. I always felt that you were on point, and I still walked away saying, I felt like I was fair. So I felt comfortable about that. Fair doesn't mean you treat anybody softly. You just treat them fairly. Were they accurately quoted? Was their role in what was going on, portrayed, in context, those kinds of things. Being fair is the thing, that I never fear that feedback, except now it just comes right? 

[00:21:12] Julius Freeman: 

And so with this grocery store, town concept that you're talking about, do you see this as a form of just feedback? Do you think of it as accountability as a reporter that people can have this immediate feedback with you, this immediate conversation of I didn't like that, or I felt like that was over the top. I felt like you were doing too much. How do you perceive that? 

[00:21:33] Dave Bangert: 

I do take that as accountability. I take it seriously. When I was the opinions page editor, I had to take care of all the letters to the editor. I learned early on not to argue points with people. We had to call and confirm that they had written it, and whether they wanted it to be in, and often had to fact-check things for people. You can have your opinion, but you can't say incorrect facts that don't back your opinion. And a lot of people took that as, you're out to get me. You'd have to talk through it. And they'd always say, “What do you think about what I wrote?” And I said, “It's not my job to tell you what to write. I'm here to do a production job and a fairness job.” I learned that if people have a problem with what I write or what I've said or I didn't cover, I try to take that to heart and figure out, is that something I need to come back on? Is this way too parochial for what I'm dealing with? Or is this somebody who has an ax to grind? The other accountability I have is with a newsletter, which is when people unsubscribe. They actually have a way in Substack to say why. And so a lot of times it's people have moved or time or price or whatever, but sometimes people say, “Yeah, you're not what I want.” And so I do take that seriously. 

[00:22:47] Hanna Sistek: 

I'm curious, I noticed that some of your stories are supported by sponsors, like the Builders Association in Greater Lafayette. How much of your revenue comes from these corporate sponsorships or association sponsorships?

[00:23:00] Dave Bangert: 

When I first started, I didn't think about doing advertising. In fact, I thought it might get me kicked off of Substack. I didn't know enough about the rules. It turns out that's nothing they worry about. When I first started, before I even started taking paid sponsorships. I had someone come and say, “We'd like to do a year with you. We think we see where you're going. It's similar to where we think we are going.” It's a community play we'd like to support and also, and basically run ads. I don't market those, but I have them open and at a very fairly low rate.

I believe people who are in nonprofits sometimes have to think about whether they can do it, or people who are in very small organizations. When big organizations call me, and I tell them the price. They immediately jump in and say, “This is as cheap as I can find anywhere else.” It is more of a chance for people to use that space to reach those folks in an affordable way. It is probably like 10 to 15%. I'm not ad-driven as much as I am subscriber-driven. The subscribers carry the freight.

[00:24:09] Julius Freeman: 

Dave, I think it would be great to transition here. We've talked a lot about the issues around local news media and the production side of that. Also, the funding for that. And you talked about some of the alternatives with Substack and how you've found your way into that. So I think we want to start to wade into the water now, thinking of some solutions to this problem. And so we wanted to hear your tips for helping people navigate this constantly changing media ecosystem more critically.

[00:24:40] Dave Bangert: 

That's a hard question these days because so much is driven by, I agree with one side or the other, and everything is being framed. That way, from people being assassinated to healthcare, everybody has to immediately put it into a box, which is a problem. The best thing I tell people to do is to start trusting individual reporters. Places you learn you can trust. Sometimes that takes time to learn. It's like movie reviewers. Sometimes the people you trust the most are the ones you disagree with the most, because if they hate this movie, you're gonna like it. Or you can tell by that person's review when she says, “Yeah, this movie's terrible because of these three reasons”, and you like the two reasons that she hates. It works out. So a lot of it comes down to putting in the legwork to read enough stuff that you can tell who you trust and who you don't, and people who tend to report things completely. 

[00:25:43] Julius Freeman: 

And would you encourage people to look for starting at the local level for their news and build from there? 

[00:25:50] Dave Bangert: 

I think you can go anywhere you want. So I get up, and I read a lot of statewide stuff. I read National, as well, and I read as much local as is available. Local news is getting smaller. So I don't know that you necessarily have to start at a local level, but looking for things that you trust can be wide ranging, from local all the way up to international. 

[00:26:10] Sage Goodwin: 

Should we round off by thinking about the three main takeaways you would have for our listeners from this conversation? 

[00:26:19] Dave Bangert: 

Subscribe, and I say that in a joking way. If you find media that you trust and you want to see continue, you do need to subscribe to it. So much in the last 15 years was meant to be free, and that model just did not work. And that's where you see a lot of people trying to. reinvent it in some fashion, whether it's newsletters, new ways to do, mainstream media, or whatever it is. So, subscribing is a big deal for the people who are trying to make a living, doing it. Watch for fair people, and those you think could walk through the grocery store without having to duck down aisles. 

[00:26:58] Sage Goodwin: No, I love that as a takeaway to think about the people that are reporting, and would they be able to freely walk down a grocery aisle?

[00:27:05] Dave Bangert: 

I think there are a lot of good reporters who are out working in marketing or in other jobs now who have just decided they can't hack it. It's just that the business has changed so much that it doesn't make sense, which is unfortunate. 

[00:27:20] Hanna Sistek: 

I'm thinking. Maybe the last takeaway, tell us a little bit about how you think it's impacted society. Journalism is basically struggling, and there's a lack of a lot of local journalism, but also in general. 

[00:27:35] Dave Bangert: 

Yeah, and I think that the problem is only exacerbated by how small and condensed it's become. I still think you have a lot of people who are working very hard at doing it. It's just that not everybody can cover as much ground. It's a decision I made. I could have written a lot about the governor's races or even presidential things and made comments about that stuff. But not enough people are covering the Lafayette school board or the county area plan commission. Those need to be covered to understand what's going on in your own communities. I think that's the thing that is missing. There's plenty of stuff that's out there about covering the Trump administration, even if as that gets smaller and tighter, it still has a broader scope. A set of players that you can choose what kind of coverage you want, whether you want a bent, or whether you want someone who's doing more investigative work, or whatever that is. But what you don't have, it gets smaller as you come down to a state level, and then it gets even smaller when you get into cities of our size. I worry about that as anybody else worries about them. 

[00:28:37] Hanna Sistek: 

So what would be the larger impact of people understanding less about what's happening on the school board or locally? 

[00:28:45] Dave Bangert: 

Number one, how their money's being spent. And then how dynamics are playing out, from the national level to how a school board works, and how schools are administering things.

For students, how money is allocated for roads, those kinds of things are important. Also, knowing who's gonna be elected, and who is covering elections, and in what way. One thing that Based in Lafayette can do, because I don't have anybody who's telling me not to. And telling me not to is the wrong way to do it, but how to do it. I do Q&As on as many contested races, in small races as much as I can. So people can go to the polling places and say, “Okay, I know what this person is about or not about.” Even if they don't answer questions, which happens, they can decide on whether they trust that person or not, or where to go to find that kind of information.

We could sit here all day and talk about how the media is getting smaller and the impact of that. But I mean, you just have to extrapolate from whatever you're watching or following. Having fewer people writing about it or talking about it, in context, is always gonna be worse than having fewer people.

[00:29:59] Hanna Sistek: 

So, a lower civics literacy, a lower understanding of who to even go and vote for.

[00:30:05] Dave Bangert: 

Possibly. And I think that civics literacy's always been a problem. Even when we had what we thought was a sustainable subscriber base, at the paper, we still ran into a lot of people at the polling places saying, “I don't know who is on the ballot or, learned who was on the ballot when I was in the polling place.”

I'll give you an example: a $3.87 billion semiconductor facility going up in West Lafayette was announced in April of 2024. Big hoopla at Purdue and the city, I wrote a bunch about it. The National Press wrote a lot about it. And when it came down to a site selection and a rezoning. All of a sudden, it was something that was real. This $3.87 billion thing was a concept until people started saying it's gonna go where. And even though I had been reporting where it was, it became real for people who lived nearby. A hearing that went three hours and another hearing that went seven hours, which went against what people living near it want. It became a huge issue, and I probably wrote about it 18 times, 20 times, in the course of about five weeks, and people were still constantly saying, “I don't know enough about this.” So you can write a lot of stuff is whether people find it number one, and then they find the context. And now the folks are, they're, this is in a lawsuit after the city's decision. This is still going on, but something that was celebrated in April of 2024 as the state's biggest single economic development announcement at that moment.

It's since been eclipsed by an Eli Lilly project that's three times bigger. But people still didn't pay attention until it was right in front of them, and then it became a huge mess. So, finding information in those cases and the information that people had, some of it was good, some of it was not good. It's still hard to unravel. Would it have been better to have this happen in the days when we had three and four times as many reporters in this town? Yes, definitely would've been better. 

[00:32:12] Julius Freeman: 

So, as I'm hearing it, our three main things are one, subscribe to Dave. 

[00:32:19] Dave Bangert: 

Subscribe to anybody who is doing the work.

[00:32:21] Julius Freeman: 

I heard “Subscribe to Dave.” That's what I'm gonna do. So, subscribe to Dave. Two, make sure that you're able to walk in the grocery store, and people can hold you accountable. And three, support local news to fix some of the problems and achieve some of the solutions that you've talked about today. There has to be real support for local news from the public.

[00:32:45] Dave Bangert: 

If you're gonna do that for musicians or anybody else, you have to support them in some fashion. Otherwise, it's a job, and it's a business. People don't do it for free and shouldn't do it for free. Even though we're all media in some fashion now, you know, people I saw more, we had a No Kings we're talking here right after one of the No Kings Marches. I saw tons of media out there, but they were all citizens. They were people who were in the marches or were against them and wanted to film them in some way. They're not always gonna give you all the context, but we're all media in some fashion.

[00:33:20] Hanna Sistek: 

What's at stake is people being informed so they can participate in democracy and in big decisions locally that affect them directly. 

[00:33:29] Dave Bangert: 

Yeah. No picture, no story is kind of the thing. I've seen more people say that all the no Kings things were fake. Not too many people are doing that, but enough that it's the kind of thing that catches hold in any situation. And so having some people there to document what's happening is important.

[00:33:46] Sage Goodwin: 

I think that brings us to thinking about your individual media diet. We're always super curious about what our interviewees, how are you finding the things that you trust, and in your daily life, what makes up your media diet? So what's your meat and tea veg? What is every day like, the first or main thing that you go to? 

[00:34:09] Dave Bangert: 

So I always read, I start locally, for that I look at the Journal & Courier, often not in the morning, just as they're putting things out. I looked at the Indianapolis Star to get a sense of the statewide level. I also look at the Indiana Capital Chronicle, which is part of the state's newsroom teams. They have a small staff of three or four people who do a great job of covering statehouse issues and statewide issues. A very smart reporting team there. I do read several newsletters that are out now. There are a lot of media efforts statewide, whether it's Mirror Indie or Axios, which has an Indianapolis bureau. I do read those as well, and then I branch out from there. I follow a lot of social media. Drives me to places to read. Go through the headlines and everything in the Washington Post, New York Times. I have a pretty wide from liberal to conservative feeds that get me to a lot of places. So I do read a lot that way, but what I do is so local and parochial. I end up dumping a lot of that and picking it up later. So my habits are pretty scattered. 

[00:35:19] Sage Goodwin: 

And what about your junk food part of your media diet? What do you look at to unwind, relax, or stuff that you think is maybe not necessarily good for you, but you enjoy anyway?

[00:35:31] Dave Bangert: 

Yeah. If I'm up late enough, I do watch Seth Meyers. I do enjoy him in general. I read The Athletic Pulse, which is the athletics daily newsletter. I think they do a great job of summarizing things that happened yesterday and then lead me to sports stuff that I like to read. I follow everything from the St. Louis Blues hockey team. I love reading, whatever I can. I do keep up with a lot of music news, whether it's from Greg Kot, who used to be with the Chicago Tribune. Still doing a lot of that kind of work. So I end up catching a lot of that. I watch documentaries, a lot of 30 for 30 kind of documentaries. I do watch a lot of making of albums, documentaries, if I can find them. I watched the one that was the making of So by Peter Gabriel, which ended up being outstanding about Daniel Lanois locking him in a sheep pen until he finished a song. I like a lot of stuff like that. It wastes my time. 

[00:36:27] Sage Goodwin: 

Doesn't sound like a waste of time to me. 

[00:36:29] Julius Freeman: 

Dave, I think we've learned a lot today, and I think our listeners are gonna be really informed by this conversation.

So we wanna say thank you for joining us today, and of all the things that you're doing, where can people find you and support your work? 

[00:36:43] Dave Bangert: 

Thanks for having me. I'm basedinlafayette.com. We will get you right to the homepage. 

[00:36:48] Sage Goodwin: 

Thanks so much. Excellent. 

[00:36:49] Dave Bangert: 

Thanks. 

[00:36:51] Hanna Sistek: 

Hi guys. Hanna here. Before we end things, we want to leave our local listeners with a story about Dave's favorite assignment at the Journal & Courier.

[00:37:00] Dave Bangert: 

I wanted to do something with local bands, and one of the things I thought was, what if I just ask guitarists and bass players and pianists, everybody, and DJs, what's your favorite riff? What's your favorite riff to play? Whether it's when you're sound-checking or singing a song, you will never stop loving it.

And I put them down wherever they wanted to go. So I was in a lot of guys' basements or in their attics or in practice spaces, and we just broke down a riff and then had them talk. And so it was a video series with about 20 people in town, and it was a lot of fun to do. So I was able to do those kinds of things. Or when one of the breweries was gonna name a beer, they had a big whiteboard of all these names, and one of them was Gene Ford. And I asked, “Who's Gene Ford?” And the question back was that's a good question. We can't figure it out. And Gene Ford ends up being in the intro in a demo that Johnny Cash wrote for, if it wasn't for the Wabash River. He talked about stopping the tour bus in Lafayette, Indiana, and fishing on the Wabash River, and meeting a man named Gene Ford who told him he had come back from California, and figured out he was talking to Johnny Cash. The upshot was the guy said, “Yeah, I'd be going crazy if it wasn't for the Wabash River. I don't know what I'd be doing.” Johnny Cash says, “Gene, that sounds like a good song.” And then the song starts, and it's on his Rambler record in about 1975 or 76. 

I ended up talking to session players who were on that song, on that album, trying to find him in old yearbooks, and could not find him, except I found some things that were close, but not quite. Those are the kind that were fun to do with a column. It was the best assignment I had of my 32 years at the paper as a columnist. 

[00:38:45] Julius Freeman: 

This has been another episode of CAPTivated. It's been hosted by a CAPT, you know, CAPTivated you. You guys get it. It's the Center for American Political History, Media, and Technology. 

[00:39:04] Hanna Sistek: 

The ideas presented by individuals on the podcast are theirs and theirs alone. They do not represent Purdue University, which adheres to the policy of institutional neutrality. 

[00:39:14] Sage Goodwin: 

To learn more about this episode's guest, check out the show notes. We really enjoyed this conversation today, and we hope you got something out of it too. Thanks for listening. 



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Hanna Sistek

Host
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Julius Freeman

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Sage Goodwin

Host