one and welcome to our community development committee meeting the first one of the year and I'm still gonna say happy new year even though I was told that it's improper to do so after the 14 I might break and roll so we're gonna go forward with that the first thing that we're oh I also want to invite I'm happy to have he's an orientation today our new council person and new future member of the committee this is orientation for him today mr. Tyler Bailey and so we're glad to have you will I'll let you know if you can talk we'll see we'll see but this should be a fun one and I think we're gonna get some great information today so will you got anything to add to that madam show this more can we know for the record that we have mr. Brennan and myself here as well as orientation for mr. Bailey alrighty so the first thing that we have on our agenda today and I'm super excited about this is Homeworks of America for those of you all who don't know we used to fund Homeworks back in I always say back in my day maybe twenty twenty five thousand dollars to do the work that they do and I wanted to present this emerald to everyone because when I saw the information I was absolutely amazed and I believe that they could be a great great great partner this gentry for redeveloping a lot of our communities and at a really low price point which I think folks will appreciate so I am going to invite up mr. Joe Huggins and you go to the mine so we heard is that something for us we're all nice around the table so are we ready yes yes whenever you're ready well thank you everybody and good morning and thank you again for hosting us here and I want to thank Ms. Tina Herbert who has become a quick fast-deer friend of mine and I'm certainly a longtime friend of Homeworks and so we're very thankful and so rest of the council good morning and thank you for having us once again I am Joe Huggins executive director of Homeworks of America I have with me Ms. Madeline Smith she is our operations director at Homeworks as well as our health works coordinator on one of the programs we have inside off the bat homeworks our mission is to show God's love through serving those in need by repairing their homes assisting youth in their development and empowering communities to care for their own I'm a big believer that mission statements need a translation into English so we provide free home repairs to elderly disabled and veteran homeowners who qualify we use student volunteers I don't want to get hung up on that we work with anyone that's willing to come serve with us so adults whoever it may be our passion is students high school middle school high school and college kids that will come serve along with us we're more recovery based and disaster response obviously if something bad happens we want to get there and help but our our mantra is five and six years later after the flood we're still working on flood homes I'm currently as we speak so we are recovery based moving along we have a four pronged approach kind of our our four pillars or our business approaches there one of them is health we're looking at homes now to see what is making folks unhealthy in their home whether it be air quality or trip hazards or getting in and out of their home affordable housing is something we want to focus on today obviously also workforce development we're working with students right now as we speak teaching them trades such as carpentry the rest of the week we're gonna be working on two homes in the city with students there with plumbing electrical painting and that kind of stuff and so if we can get them interested in the trades we hope that I'll get them excited about workforce development here in the future our DNA is the gospel we want to love people where they are and I tell folks we're not a faith-based organization we're Christ centered everybody in this room has faith and gravity doesn't change the way we look at people our DNA that's what we try to do but obviously we're here to talk about affordable housing and what we can bring there we want to get homes warm safe dry and healthy we do a lot of roof replacements our founder 27 years ago said if we could get folks dry that's half the battle weatherization safety and fall protection when I first came to homework seven years ago you know we were replacing a deck on a lady's mobile home and I was kind of thinking what's the big deal about a deck well when you have a meeting with Prisma and their ambulatory care and if first responders cannot get in the home to get a heart attack victim out that's a very big deal and so we focus a lot on egress in and out of the home we do a lot of painting as I said we work with middle schoolers and we hope more paint gets on the home than on the ground or then before they go home during the day and we also do a lot of bath and kitchen retrofits we have a lot of volunteers that work with us that are two and three person teams that we can send in and retrofit bathrooms not only for mobility but we know where there's water in the home there's a leak where there's leak there's rot and so we want to replace those floors and get them safe so they're able to use matter of fact we're working on a bathroom right now that the lady hasn't been able to use for the last two to three years and so I'm getting her a bathroom into her home is going to be a life changer obviously for her fast facts our repairs usually cost five to seventy five hundred dollars all in per home with volunteer ism we can keep prices down is pretty much materials and then we take advantage of that volunteer service labor to get the work done average we're about 120 homes a year I'm throughout South Carolina most of those are located in the Midlands I'm proud to say that we in 2023 we repaired 65 homes in the Midlands since 2017 221 in the city of Columbia proper so we're here we've always been here and look to and look to work close to home we have a waiting list of about a hundred to 150 folks that are approved and ready to go so there's a huge need out there our office average is about 20 to 25 calls a day for folks seeking help so the need is there and and what we're here to do I guess scientifically or technically is we want to extend the life cycle of that home Columbia South Carolina is full of well-built homes that are from the post-war boom 50 60s and 70s that are just well-built good bones but like anything wood rods and you know and roofs have to be replaced and so if we can go in and extend the life of that home anywhere from seven and a half to 15 to 20 years that is a win for everybody especially our homeowner our requirements our board approved eligibility is home ownership we're not going to be able to do anything that's landlord or rental type and we want to take care of those that are on the low income to very low income with the HUD guidelines and we also look at family situation we want to be good stewards of donated dollars so if you have folks that are helping from the outside or if you have the ability to go get work we want to help those citizens of Columbia that that are that are elderly that are disabled and they can and so we want to take care of them especially first our handshake agreement as you've been there at least five years before we get there and you'll be there five years after we leave we don't want to get into a situation where we're fixing up a home for someone to sell but this is usually not a problem because either a husband or a father built the home that they're living in and they're not going to they're not going to leave and then we're starting to look at health criteria as well not emergent but if we have a home that comes across that they need a ramp that they need a deck to get in and out we're going to prioritize those for safety health and safety reasons like I said I stole my own thunder since 2017 we have repaired 221 homes in the city of Columbia and we want to look to increase that an average of anywhere from 30 to 40 a year we want to take that to 100 we want to move the needle and that's what we're what we're about just want to let you know we've got a very experienced team we've got the capability and the horsepower to do this Chris Kemp is a dedicated construction manager or organizing all of these homes in the scope of work and here recently we were able to add Mr. Roy Kramer who retired from Habitat of the Midlands gives us an all-time quarterback on every one of these homes so we're not just throwing volunteers out there to try to get something done we have over 40 years of carpentry and building experience to get quality to get quality work done volunteer depth our volunteers are traditional they've come from all over and we are never out of room for volunteers but like I said we will work with anyone that comes along our way one of the things I wanted to bring to your attention is the many contractor relationships we have with contractors here in Columbia that when we run into a problem that's a little bit more than a college kid they can come in and help us and they love to give back and we have several homes a year that local contractors just say Joey I got it just give me the address and we'll go do this so Columbia has a big heart they have a great we have a great heart and we love to take advantage of that wanted to let you know we never want to lose our nonprofit family feel of what we do but we do have a track record of program experience we're on year six of Charleston County CDBG which is averaged about $150,000 a year that limit is on them it's not on us we could handle more we're on phase three of Charleston County ARPA to the tune of about $130,000 a year down there we're on year five of Richland County CDBG and that's growing and then for also big program experience we went to Florence County met with the Darla Moore Foundation she gave us a three-year contract to do 83 homes we did 96 and this more typically doesn't go after year three but we're on year six with her and hopefully year seven when we hear that so if we could please her I think we could please anybody but I just said that on there anyway all right bold vision we would love to do a hundred homes annually here in Columbia at about an average of $500 a $5,000 so we're looking to put together a program of about $500,000 to go move the needle it's bold for us but I think we can do it and we would really love the help of the city in any way to be able to help our to help our citizens what's driving this not only is the vision of Miss Tina but I heard the mayor say in one of her meetings that in the next season we're going to need around 16,000 housing units in Columbia homeworks is not going to solve that problem it's got to be done like the mayor said through development through through government through private development but also I think we can bring something to the table to to extend the life of a of a of affordable housing that we already have the cheapest house is the one that's never built and I think we can be a part of that solution so thank you all very much and we return on investment extents into the structure life we mitigate the health and safety issues weatherizing homes and the 100 homes that we could do is probably an estimated of savings of nine million dollars in wraparound costs okay before we open the floor for questions video certainly if you want to run the video we would love to I love the video no you're gonna love the video it's how stuck right off of no one so that's whose house is oh peter should be here peter was just talking about mealwood and your bank through our church where there is a opportunity to put a roof on someone's house and I was more than happy and wanted to jump on that so I enjoy what I got to do and be able to use my hands be able to work in the community and be able to be able to bless homeowners that were in need I definitely saw the opportunity and wanted to just be a part of it I enjoy it and thankful that I get to do it from the start I mean a pretty good idea what you're going into you're not going in blind and misunderstanding what the work's gonna be we came in and we worked on her roof the day that I was here worked on her soft fit interfacial we did the repairs underneath and the knee walls up in the roof and we're able to get that square away and seal it off and more proofed and all that good stuff so she wouldn't have to worry about well me and my friends talked about maybe signing up together and we just signed up online and we were in the same group so we all worked on the same house and site together I was looking forward to trying some new skills and learning how to do some things so repair houses I think homeworks is a really great way to connect like younger people with the older people that we don't really interact with on a daily basis and we can just see how like even though we may not even know them we can help out and we can serve a purpose in their life that really means a lot to them I was married for about 27 years before I got divorced and then I moved in my own apartment on Broad River Road and after that I moved in a few other places and my father passed away and I moved up here on page with my mom I moved in this side and my mom was on this side level one and I was level one in the head so I stayed with her until she got she and passed away with Alzheimer's and heart trouble so once she moved once she moved in the nursing home and I still stayed here so then I had the whole house to myself so after that then the house of course needed some work so when I talked to my brother my sister and different family members but of course nobody could help because nobody had that kind of money because my parents took care of this house when he was alive my mom and my dad but once I could move then I didn't have the finances to do all the stuff that needed to be done so I had three leaks I got one leak fix and then the other two leaks didn't get fixed until I till homerooms got here and then I had some um what you call the things up on the roof shingles I had some shingles left over and I'm using my shingles and they fixed the whole thing where I had leaks and where the leaks were beginning to start that I didn't know but they fixed that so I only found out about homeworks when uh one of my insurance insurance people forgot me into insurance they called and told homeworks about me and I was so grateful because I'd done everything else I could do and I couldn't get no help so I was so grateful for homeworks oh I feel a lot better a whole lot better a whole hundred and a hundred and fifty percent better than I did before and I always tell people about all works I'm just always bragging on this house so I'm gonna hold my questions maybe well no um well no so this is very important to to us from a city perspective um because I don't when was the last time y'all were funded I want to say it was 2017-18 I want to say I have to go back and look but if you if you are considered underfunding what does it require of the city what does that arrangement look like from and I just I'm too I don't remember from back in the day we just cut checks our I think our original arrangement was just a grant that we applied for and so we uh we took that and that purchased materials for us to be able to to do what we do so a majority of ours is going to be building materials and the equipment needed to get work done and that was probably a cdbg grant I think it was okay I mean we'd love to follow up and have a conversation about the opportunity yes ma'am yeah I think that this would be um from our trip last week a good line item with targeted areas and not the seven targeted areas we have but narrowing that to really um have an impact and we know that if you can put all the resources in one space and be patient and that's the problem because everybody wants it you know it's hard but if we can have a strategy year by year in a particular area and allow people to actually see the change then I think folks um folks get to see the difference um and I think that's um I always go back to the facade program how you could see the difference downtown because it was condensed but you couldn't see it on north main street because it was eight miles um so now I will let you all but I guess just for clarity the city staff doesn't do anything no we're not responsible for anything no paperwork um we don't have to help you find contractors we don't have to inspect to make sure you've checked all the boxes no ma'am we do that anyway and y'all are familiar with cdbg cdbg compliance so I mean they'll have to turn in information so we've got to check compliance but again we're well established organization do you remember frank strange so he's a former colleague of ours that used to volunteer with y'all for many many years he's I think he's passed away now had so I have always heard great things about homework thank you ma'am a couple questions so you mentioned other counties I think I don't know if it's the city of Charleston you said Charleston russian county I don't remember the others and the mouse that you indicated and then on another slide it had like five thousand dollars per home so on the average have a couple questions on average is that the amount that you typically spend per home or the type repairs and you keep it at that and my other question is um have you ever gotten to rate allocations of funding from the state from the state no ma'am is there anything prohibiting you getting using state funds okay and then the other question about on average how much that's on average about five to 7500 it depends on scope of work um in the cdb content in the cdbg contracts I will tell you the the amounts are a little bit more because we can do more with that funding and so sometimes those costs range anywhere from 9000 to 13000 depending on if it's a roof replacement if it's plumbing we're allowed to get into a little bit more with um say termite damage and that kind of stuff but on a typical home that's a typical donation you know we try to keep it at that 5 000 so we because we have so many and so okay so in your in your experience when you are partnering with other entities or cities you go into it with the homeowners knowing that it isn't a fine amount yes ma'am of work that can be done so that you can help you know as many people as you can yes ma'am but on a long lap we don't have anything to do with that right like do you determine what that contract is or are they hearing from us what you're going to work on along those lines we determine that typically we've determined that right so when you work with the other municipalities or counties are you working with their departments when you get the CDBG funds and you're determining what those target in that target an area you may be working in the city or the county is not involved with that determination of where you're going to be working right so I think again those are things we need to be clear about because our programs have typically which is why I think our programs are getting a little bit out of our capacity of what we what we can do and do well I love this concept but I think those are the things we're going to have to be clear about because right now for example the city has done you know we have like a shine program and I totally agree with what you're saying but we're going into what's saying we're going to do much more than five thousand dollars a home and I you know to me the money could be better utilized by partnering with entities like you where there are parameters around it and I think too these projects to me are probably smaller in our shine projects um dollar wise and there's no labor costs because it's volunteer labor right yeah um it was something to do applicants get to you so if we had a pool of folks that have applied for funding but we're not serving is that a conversation y'all are willing to have with us as well yes ma'am we do have a waiting list but we would you know how many years your waiting list about about a year and three months right but if we if we gave funds designated to specific applicants in specific areas how does that impact your waiting list the people who fit from your waiting list in that well it would just be uh it would be it would be a conscious decision on our part that we've had folks waiting but we've got funding coming in that could be allocated to to folks that are on a separate list and I mean well so would so would it be fair to say that it would be most beneficial for you all if you had restricted funds but then you also had funds to deal with your backlog that would be incredible that you can use your own discretion for and Felicia and I will set up a meeting here to talk in more detail for sure that's a question yes councilman Brennan so can you do a great presentation y'all do a great work Joe Joe Joe came to our Main Street Rotary and um I think Tug did a few part shrinks there hopefully get some volunteers out of that the expectations and the scope of work can you dive into that a little bit more on how you make it clear to to a homeowner that you come into work for this is what we can do and give me can you give us an example of where that's kind of gone off tracks and how you have any examples would you what you want that's that's that's where yeah our anxiety and stress is after going through you know what we did with working on houses after the flood um to be honest with you it's not it's not too terribly often that happens because we try to have the clearest and upfront communication Chris Kemp our Midlands Construction Manager touches every home he does previews he has those conversations and you know we're able to explain that we are volunteers we are donated dollars and we're going to look to get you warm safe dry and healthy so Chris when he goes into that home is is looking at the issues that are making you sick that are making this house dangerous and we're trying to weatherize it so you know my on my circuit my joke is we're not chipping Joanna Gaines okay we're not gonna make house beautiful but we're gonna make house safe and we're gonna extend the life of that and I would say 95% of the people that we're we're blessed to work with they understand that but but to that's to your same point there 95% of people you work with probably could use more oh certainly whether it's electrical you mentioned plumbing you don't tackle electrical probably I'm scared of things that are invisible and can kill me exactly when it comes to health let's talk about environmental abatement I mean you're doing a lot of painting how do you how do you because that's expensive yes that's very expensive do you have to pick and choose to what level of say painting yes most likely sanding on the scraping and sanding yeah yeah so we try to we try to encapsulate and and mitigate where we can and so and our and our guys are trained they know you know Tuck Williams our construction manager in Charleston um works very close with their staff down there and we know um what what what fields to step in and what what not to um and we try to mitigate that and I think our our vision of what safety means helps us mitigate those big big problems we're looking for fall protection we're looking for floor replacement and and that that kind of keeps us keeps us in our lane I think as we move forward in these conversations with that let's just keep that in mind certainly we're clearly defining expectations and scopes yes we have you know who hears about it what that's what I was going to ask about how often out of 100 homes how often do you have to go back out and redo work and the next year after the work next six months I can use six months six months out of 100 homes maybe one and that's usually a roof and that's because in those situations it's the way that I hear you saying is because it really was an issue with the roof yes ma'am um not because someone complained about um they didn't like how the roof was put in or quality issues or anything like that now you've mentioned Richland County CDBG how much is Richland County giving me this year we receive 60,000 so we're currently working on that contract right now anybody have any other questions well thank you so much um I'm glad to have you all here and hopefully we can do some follow-up and see where we're going we're doing a lot of figuring out with where we're going with community development so this is this is an exciting time exciting time thank you so much no other questions yep thank you thank you miss Tina thank y'all very much all right now we're going to talk with Miss Missy Gentry and Krista Hampton discussing the town the Columbia Town and Gown Committee so we have um talked about Town and Gown for a while and we have brought back based on the last conversation we had with the committee um we have brought back an updated proposal to talk about Town and Gown and Krista will go over and we can answer any questions and there's also a draft letter that would be sent to all of the colleges and universities um seeking their participation and making sure that they want to be a part of it but I'll let Krista go over the updated proposal yes good morning we'll walk through this um let me know if you need to go slower and a lot of credit goes to Peyton Lang too for for putting this together um university partners to Rebecca Vestas here representing them so it will be 20 representatives from the all of the colleges and universities in the area um so seven uh hopefully with the president or their designee five being city of columbia staff representatives those folks will act in an ex officio capacity only so no voting for neighborhood representatives and those would be selected the those would go through an application process similar to our boards and commissions and so city council would appoint four neighborhood representatives and one of the hospitality sector representatives through that process we have one student from the mayor's council the collegiate engagement council representative and that would um the students would actually lift that person up and appoint them to to this group and then the co-chairs would be the mayor and a representative from the university of south carolina once that group is is formed then there would be subcommittees established and that would be these are the ones that we've discussed with you all that would that would be um recommended although those could change it's similar to an ad hoc committee what we would recommend is that once this group is formed that they establish that they that they have a strategic planning session first so you would have that probably february march more likely um get together decide what the the vision and the goal of the group is i mean we have an idea i think you all have given some feedback on that but i think that would be important for the group to establish through a strategic planning process and then they would meet three times a year with the subcommittees doing um a lot of the work in between times and reporting out we also recommend that there would be a group that goes to the international town gown association conference that is in maryland in june the beginning of june um and have as many of the representatives from from the various colleges in the city to attend that as well so it's a high level overview um happy to answer any questions and get feedback there's some examples of what what the planning subcommittee would um would take on it could take on things like parking or um really any of the land use items that come up in some of these areas as well and it doesn't have to be i mean it could be issue-based it could be could be um such as something that bubbles up that needs to be addressed or it could be looking forward thinking um you know how is the university's growing um what is the student population where are they living those types of things thank you now this may be um i don't know if i'm taking us back or not but i do remember us having a significant conversation about flagship universities are we not going that route at all or is this something separate and i'm okay i mean you mean flagship only well so what i learned during our last meeting was that this program initially came out uh it was designed for flagship universities um is that what i learned okay so the association yes i mean it was a flagship university um the direction we believe we received was we still want to be all inclusive not many cities have the number of colleges and universities we have so we wanted to be inclusive of everyone um the mayor and then the designee from the University of South Carolina would be the co-chairs okay so they would they would guide that um but our intent was to include all as we talked to the association they're neutral to that decision i mean it's really our decision we we develop our strategic plan we do our charter they don't have a right or wrong they just help guide you through a process they're they're more of a resource than a official um stamp of approval really a lot of it is about communication and just making sure that that's going on and the types of you know issues that are experienced by University of South Carolina are experienced to some to a lesser degree but by some of our other colleges and universities as well so i think it's just making sure that everybody's talking and communicating and there could certainly be subcommittees about a particular issue that might focus on one college or university rather than the other if there's a particular challenge or issue that needs to be discussed thank you i just needed a clarity i do think though the letter references a registration process with ITGA so to counsel on her first point when discussed with the association and i know we got into and we got into the various levels of membership or something so is that going to be i know they they were pretty much neutral but i don't know that for me it was totally the clearest how that will go so that in it will have all of the different colleges represented and they would they're going to work with us then wasn't it something about the amount that they the membership for the city and the University of South Carolina will be a higher cost than the other colleges and universities and the the draft letter is intended to just ask them all if they're interested in participating and then from there we'll talk through membership and what that looks like and if you need college or university needed help if the membership cost was the barrier we want to have that conversation with but they all have to be they all would need to be members yes ma'am and do you have any idea of what the registration fee would be 250 dollars yeah it shouldn't be a barrier but if it is we want to talk about how to help with that for those more associate members as i think how it almost seemed as if it was characterized what um the five city of Columbia represent that's advisory an advisory level to this can you let can we add a representative from the comment because i think transportation is so key in promoting transportation to the university students and and i think usc is a large contract provider to the comment as well so as as one of the as an advisory board yeah and i guess columbia cpd will bring in the sheriff's department as needed since some of these campus lie in the county just that's just to think about down the road i'm curious about the neighborhood reps um if we're identifying for um is so is the intent that you would have a neighborhood rep on every committee or no so the subcommittees could have additional members that aren't part of the the larger committee um but yeah i would think at least one neighborhood rep would need to be on every subcommittee oh and they could do multiple well you can have additional members that aren't on the large town gown steering committee so you could bring in extra people depending on the issue and they would be called what it would be up to that subcommittee to organize itself but they don't have to pull just from this group that's what i needed okay so they can go the subcommittees can look anywhere for the appropriate people sounds great all right so when can we uh get the letters out start recruiting you said february march with a strategic planning session when would you think i'm just trying to organize the group so it'll be a lot of calendar work chairman may i make a comment if you do you have to come to the microphone and what is it regarding is it on topic committee members i'm jim daniel uh two quick comments uh a 20 member committee is pretty cumbersome so it's going to be really important that we have in subcommittees that are willing to work secondly on the neighborhood representations how are y'all going to get the word out so folks will they have some interest will know who to submit our application to of and by when i think we'll do that the public relations the way we do it with all of our other committees okay because i know of several people that have expressed interest to me that they would like to be involved so can it probably be treated through ashley's efforts like other boards and commissions it's unless you're in the know quite frankly it's hard really to know what that information um and there's in the council neighborhoods their information about whose presidents of various neighborhoods is way out of date so they're they're somewhat difficult too but anyway i'll let people that have said something to me know that they need to check but when would you think you'd be sending out some kind of notice about that but then i mean next three weeks or so sometimes sometime in january or February okay great thank you any other questions can we can we get an updated neighborhood list for each district representative populated with the latest information of presidents and executive board members we can and and we do sometimes our list seems to be outdated but we make an effort to reach out and ask for new officers and we don't always get that um timely but yes we can get you a list yeah please send that out to us as quickly as possible and i would i would suggest too that we have a regular procedure and that that's what i was just talking um to miss kilgore about um because and i do know that there's such i don't know if maybe we need to use a different format because there are updates that we send that don't make it to the main list sometimes i send a couple of updates and it's not and the list hadn't been updated okay so um and maybe proactively trying to get updated information would be helpful once maybe once a year once or twice a year okay i don't have anything else that thank you will for that um anybody else have anything do i need a motion to adjourn or can i just adjourn all right with no other matters to be discussed this meeting is adjourned oh wait hold on mr bailey did you have any questions and follow up to your orientation today no questions anything clear this meeting is adjourned no other issues


Our clock is running pretty well, but let's say we wanted to customize it a little bit. Let's say we wanted to move it to a 12 hour clock and show an AM or a PM after it. We can get at all of this going back to our time package and there are a couple of really helpful functions here. The first of these is local time. This is like pulling time, but it makes sure that it converts it to the local time zone. There is a really cool function called strf time or string format time, which takes a time structure which we'll come back to in a second. You're not expected to know what that is yet. It takes a time structure and then based on some pattern that we provide, it spits out the results. This actually describes its own little tiny language for formatting time. It gives all these different pieces that you can use that you can pull out. We can pull out the hour of the 24 hour clock with a percent capital H or the hour of a 12 hour clock with a percent capital I. We can get months, days, minutes, seconds. We can get the weekday either spelled out or as a number or as a three letter abbreviation. We can get the time zone. All of these little bits and pieces we can pull out and here's an example of how they fit together. This looks a whole lot like the C time function output that we were getting before. This shows how to put it together. You can feed it a time. In this case, GM time is how they get that. Here is a string, percent A comma space, percent D space, percent B. We can go back up and see what these correspond to. And A, the locales abbreviated weekday name. This will take into account where you are locally and also what your local language is and use all this to get the weekday name abbreviated. In this case, it's an English-speaking country and it's Thursday, so the abbreviated weekday is T-H-U. We can look at percent D, which is the day of the month as a decimal number. And notice that it's formatted from 01 to 31, so it will always be two digits. So that's super helpful. We can see here how the time is formatted. So percent H colon percent M colon percent S. We look those up. Percent H is the 24-hour number. Percent M is the minute as a two-digit minute number. And percent S is the second as a two-digit decimal number. When you put it all together, you can see how each of these pieces of information being slotted into this string spliced together gives the full day of the week, day of the month, month, year, hour, minute, second. And then this plus 000 is something that just it is added explicitly here in this string. So very, very cool. So this is helpful. We can use this to get any format we want. And we can by using a percent I, percent M, percent S, and a percent P, we can get AMPM or whatever the equivalent is in the local location. At the very beginning here, it calls out that STRF time will take both the format and a time, either GM time or local time. So GM time is the time at GMT, Greenwich Mean Time. So it's the kind of global baseline time zone. Most of us don't live in that. And so it's convenient to get the local time because that's really the one we care about. Unless your appointment's in London or somewhere in that time zone, the local time is a good place to start. When we put this together, we can use this local time function to get our time structure. And we pass that together with our string format, which gives us 12 hour, hour, minute, second, AMPM, create a string, print it with the carriage return, sleep for a second, and then do it all over again. Then when we run it, we can see the result is exactly what we had hoped it would be. 12 hour, hour, minute, second, and AMPM in the local time zone. A couple of things about this. This is at a much more detailed level than anyone should ever be expected to remember. The whole list of percent codes that we can use to format our date and time, that's there in the documentation so you can look it up, so you don't have to remember it. And yeah, if you use the same thing a dozen times a day, it'll stick in your brain after a while. But my advice is don't worry about memorizing that stuff. Look it up when you need it. Another thing to keep in mind is that time zones are tricky. Working with dates and times are tricky. There's a whole lot of caveats and there's local spins on things. There are time zones that are not on the even hour depending on where you are. The names of months and days of week changes no matter where you are. All of these things, the time package takes care of for you. You can if you enjoy the exercise, by all means go and write some time functions. I've done this, I've written some custom date code. Without fail, it is long and messy and has errors in it. But it's super interesting to think through the issues there. When I ever need anything that matters, I use the time package. Because so many people have worked on it for so long and thought through it so carefully that they've worked out all those little kinks. And now I can use it without thinking twice about it and all those things are taken care of. In general, that's a great rule of thumb. Build something from scratch if you want to. Often there is a tool or a package ready to go for you to import and use. And that's a fantastic way to expand your programming capability very quickly.


Time to go behind enemy lines with the Green Bay Packers presented by Microsoft Teams with Amy Wells on Mike Keith. Pleased to be joined by Olivia Reiner with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Olivia, thanks so much for the time. Any time, happy to chat with you guys. Now I want to start off by asking you about head coach Matt LaFleur. What has maybe stood out to you or surprised you about his second year as a head coach? I think what's been so impressive about this season, his second season coaching the Green Bay Packers has been the progression of this offense. The points that they've been able to score from game to game, they've been a lot better on third down this season. Olivia, what has jumped out to you in particular about this defense under Mike Patton? The run defense did not start out very strong. It seemed like every game that teams were averaging over 100 yards on the ground against them and over the last couple of games, they've started to iron some things out. They've also been able to get the pass rush up as well and get some more pressure on the quarterback, especially on some later downs, third and long situations. We've seen outside linebackers, Zidaria Smith, Preston Smith, Rashawn Gary get home to the quarterback a little bit more frequently. I want to talk about Aaron Rodgers. He's having an amazing year. He's got 40 touchdown passes and just four interceptions. Having production like that, is that attributed to a second year in a system or is that just Aaron Rodgers doing what Aaron Rodgers does? I think yes to both perhaps. I think he has gotten a lot more comfortable in the second year of the system and so have his receivers as well. We've seen the emergence of a lot of different players, including tight end Robert Tunyon, wide receiver Marquezvalda Skantling, Equinemia St. Brown, Allen Lazard, of course, Devonte Adams. Everyone has taken a step in the second year of the offense. He has been playing really well. I think he's looking a lot more comfortable. He's admitted he feels a lot more comfortable in head coach Matt LaFleur's scheme in year two. Finally, Olivia, seven Pro Bowlers for the Green Bay Packers of those biggest surprise or most significant to you. I think one of the most significant selections is Gard Elton Jenkins. This is his second year and it's rare to see someone so young make such a big impact on their team so early on in their career and he has made such a big impact. He has played at center, at guard and at tackle this season. He is an invaluable piece to that offensive line. She's Olivia Ryder with Milwaukee Journal Sentinel taking us behind enemy lines presented by Microsoft Teams.


That blast area is all secure! Maul is Marine Corps' new recoilless rifle. It's used for any time of task, from tanks to personnel to even structures such as bumpers. Conflicts that come up, this is going to be huge in controlling that battle space.


Hello everyone and welcome to our program on journalism ethics. It's part of our ongoing commemoration of World Press Freedom Day. Over the next hour we will discuss the field of journalism ethics, its evolution in the digital age, and practical solutions to the ethical dilemmas that journalists face today. We invite our audiences in Bangladesh and around the world to join us in this discussion. So please share your comments, insights, and questions in the online chat space and on Twitter. Please be advised that the opinions expressed during today's program are solely those of the experts and do not represent the official position of the U.S. government. I'm Sharon Machavi, I'm a Vice President at the International Center for Journalists. Joining me from Florida is Kelly McBride, a leading voice on media ethics and the future of journalism in the United States. Kelly leads the Pointer Institute's efforts in providing workshops on journalism ethics to media professionals around the world. A link to Kelly's free pamphlet, a practical approach to journalism ethics, is below this video. Thanks for being with us today, Kelly. And additionally, my colleague Luis Pateo from the International Center for Journalists will engage with you in our chat roll. You can find that on the right hand side of your screen. Please submit your comments and questions in the chat roll, or you can add to the conversation on Twitter by using the hashtag NewEthics. We look forward to hearing from you throughout the hour. So let's start with questions from our audience at the Edward M. Kennedy Center for Public Service and the Arts in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It's great to have you all with us today. Please go ahead with your questions. Great. Thank you. So for our first question, question number one, I'm going to hand the microphone over. Thank you. Hello. Hi, how's it going? Yep, we're here. Hello. Can you can you hear me? Yes, I can. Okay, thank you. And as an analyst on the my question is, can I use any Facebook startups or for for my new studio without permission? Is it ideal? The horse did this to where to use someone's personal Facebook or blog for my new story? Yeah, so I want to make sure that I heard your question right. You were asking about using photos from social media or from blogs for your news story. Is that accurate? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, you know, so so there's two areas of consideration here. One is the ethical area and one is the legal area. And the legal area, the answer to this question is going to change depending on what jurisdiction you're in. But for instance, in the United States, we have a copyright law. And it basically says that everybody who publishes something, there, there, somebody owns that photo, somebody owns that piece of information. And you have to pay attention to that and you have to seek copyright permission. So in the legal area, you really do have to seek permission. Now there is a carve out in the legal area for for news events. And that gives journalists a pretty wide latitude. But still, I think it's really important to seek permission when you're using information for a couple of reasons. One is, it's really hard when you see a photo on social media, to understand the context of that photo. And so when you seek permission, you're also doing additional reporting. You're asking people who took this photo. Where was it taken? Does it it? Am I interpreting it accurately? And so while there may be occasions where when news is breaking very fast, you're pulling in information from the social media stream, like Twitter, or Facebook, or other social media streams. I think it's important to bring as much context to that information as possible. And then to share that context with your audience. So you want to be telling people, you know, who took this photo when it was taken, what the additional circumstances were. And when you can't get that information, but you still feel like the photo is critically important. I think then you need to tell your audience that you haven't been able to get any more information about this photo, that you haven't verified it, you haven't vetted the claims that are made in the captions, and that you really... And so when you're in that situation, you really want the news value of the photo to be extremely high. You know, so the more vetting you do, the lower I think the threshold is for the news value of the photo. But when you cannot vet, you want the news value of the photo to be very high and you want to be very transparent with your audience. Transparency is super important when you're taking information in from the social media stream. You want to tell them what you do know. And you also want to tell them what you can't establish, what you haven't been able to report out. And that instinct is difficult for a lot of journalists. You know, we're very comfortable saying what we do know and what we think we know. We're not as comfortable telling people what we don't know. Great. How about another question? Please go ahead. My name is Shajib and my question is, what's your opinion on rapidly spreading news without confirming it on Twitter, Facebook or Reddit, among other social networking sites? Is it an ethical practice to break the news on the web without being 100% confirmed about it? Won't the journalist, media or other outlets follow this practice? Who follow this practice practically fall behind as other media outlets might as well post it on the web and be the first to break the news? I mean, yeah, how do how does one journalist has to deal with it? Well, this is the reality that we all face today. So I think what you want to do is to think about, first of all, it doesn't pay. It doesn't it doesn't do anything for your credibility to be first if you're wrong. So you want to make sure that whatever organization you're working for that you have really, really strong standards for verifying information. And in this environment, this hyper competitive environment where everybody wants to get information first when news is breaking, you are going to use those standards to help you decide, yes, we're going with this piece of information, or no, we're not ready to go with this piece of information. So the first thing is is outside of a critical or crisis event, you want to establish what your standards are. And you want to have conversations with everybody in your news organization to figure out when you're in a really competitive environment, what standards are you going to use? And then in addition to that, I think you have to assume that your audience is getting information from lots and lots of different streams. So you're not the only organization that's giving your audience information in a breaking news setting, they're seeing all of your competitors. And so when your competitors break news, and you can't confirm it, you have to acknowledge it and let them know that you haven't confirmed it.  So you really do, you really are in this situation where in addition to breaking news, you're acknowledging what your competitors are reporting, which means that you're you're saying their names. You know, you might be saying CNN is reporting this or this blog is reporting this. And then you're saying, we have heard that information, but we haven't confirmed it. So we're not reporting it as confirmed. Or you're saying, you know, our independent sources have confirmed this information. But but all of that is step two, right? Because step one is, here are the standards that we're going to use. If we see something on Twitter, we'll report it. Maybe that's your standards. I wouldn't recommend that. I think that that would be irresponsible. And and you're contributing to a really noisy environment when you have really low standards. But some organizations do have really low standards. I think that whatever you establish your standards as, and one of them might be, you know, we have only sources that are named, you know, so we'll only we'll only break news with a named source. That would be a really high standard. You might say, we'll only break news, we'll only report new facts with two anonymous sources. So two sources that aren't named. You know, that's that's about the average standard, I think for most news organizations around the world is two anonymous sources, or one named source. But but but if you're going to, once you've established that standard, then you have to have the the discipline or the strength in a breaking news environment to stick to it. And I've seen so many situations where journalists haven't been able to do that. They have really good standards. But when they get in a competitive environment and their their competitors are breaking information left and right without sourcing it, they tend to do the same thing. And so you want to be able to you want to be able to stick to your standards in that competitive environment. And then also, you want to be able to say, because we have these standards, we're not reporting this other information, we know it's out there, but we're not reporting it, we're not reporting it is verified because we haven't verified it ourselves. And that allows you to be in the conversation, it allows you to to give your audience what appears to be the latest news, but you can be completely transparent about it. And you can say, you know, we don't know if this is actually true. So that that's a that's sort of a a way to to participate in this this very noisy environment without lowering your standards. Great, Kelly. Thanks. That was a that was a good answer to a complicated question and a complicated issue. Let me ask you, in your pamphlet, you talk about the process for making ethical choices. How journalists kind of how can journalists apply that process to gathering the news from, you know, basically from places like Twitter and Facebook? And is this process the same for traditional news sources? You know, what is different now in this internet age? Yeah, so I mean, what's different is we're just operating so fast. We're going so quickly that it seems like our old processes don't work. In fact, they they work very well. But you have to recognize that it's a process rather than a set of rules. So many journalists are just accustomed to to having a set of rules, you know, don't name sexual assault victims, don't don't criticize political figures without putting a name to it. I mean, you can you can have dozens and dozens of rules. And the problem is, is the rules don't keep up to the environment that we're living in because things change so quickly. We have so much pressure from social media. And so what you really need is a process and a process is where you identify what your core values are. And you can do this as an individual or you can do this as an organization. I would suggest both. You have to do both and you have to make sure that there's no conflicts. But but when you do it as an organization, you sit down and you say, OK, here are our most important values. You know, and I and I recommend three really important values or guiding principles. Seek the truth, act transparently, serve your community. So if you if you apply those three values, then what you'll find is there's two different kinds of ethical quandaries that you find yourself in. One ethical quandary is where you have a good value versus a bad value. So seek the truth versus making money. That might be a good value versus a bad value. Making money isn't inherently a bad value, but it's a bad value when it undermines one of your core values. And then the other type of quandary that you'll find yourself in is where you where you find a conflict between two good values like seeking the truth and serving the community. Sometimes you might be telling the community a truth that they don't necessarily want to hear or that's particularly difficult to hear. In both cases, when you have when you have when you have a good value versus a bad value or when you have a good value versus a good value, you want to find alternatives. And that's what the process is. That's where you're sitting down with your colleagues and you're asking questions. And this doesn't have to be a long, laborious process. I've seen people do this in five minutes or 10 minutes. And you just want to be able to say, OK, our journalistic goal here is and then finish the sentence. It might be to hold very powerful people accountable or it might be to educate the community about a really difficult topic, say sexual assault or the abuse of children, something like that. That's your journalistic purpose. And then you figure out the best way to do that. You look for alternatives. So it might be to tell a narrative story or it might be to it might be to do it in a photo essay, but you try and you try and name as many alternatives as you can. And then you find the alternatives that serve your journalistic process and uphold your values and minimize the harm that you might find from those negative values like making money or keeping the government from harassing you too much or something like that because those negative values are still there. But it really is a process. And so if you think of it as a set of rules, you're going to find yourself in a situation where the rules just don't hold up. They just don't do their job anymore. And that's because journalism is no longer this industrial process where we're following a script that's the same every single day. Journalism now is this this wild and woolly crazy act where you could never predict what the next day is going to bring. And that's why the process is so important. So the process really is identify your values, identify your journalistic purpose, identify the conflicts and whether it's a good value versus a bad value or two good values competing with each other and then identify the alternatives and then select the best alternative that serves your journalistic process. That makes sense. And as you say, it doesn't have to be a laborious process. It's something that can be done in, you know, a few minutes. Yeah, but it's the kind of thing that you have to practice it, right? Like if you're in a news organization that isn't accustomed to doing this, it's going to take longer. It's sort of like exercise. If you run a lot, you're going to be in shape for the race. But if you don't run a lot and suddenly suddenly you find yourself having to run really far, you're not going to be in shape for it. It's the same thing with ethics. Because it makes sense. OK, now we're going to take some questions for you from our virtual audience. And first up is Tomas from Poland. And he asks, do you consider bloggers or self reporters to be full journalists? Yeah, I really have given up on trying to figure out who's a journalist and who isn't. And that's because so many people who don't set out to be journalists end up committing acts of journalism. And on the reverse side of that, so many journalists, I think, get distracted by acts of entertainment or salaciousness or sensationalism. And so so I really have given up trying to figure out who a journalist is. I can tell you what journalism is. Journalism is a piece of information that allows citizens to do two things and it can be one of two things or it can be both of these things. One is understand your community better or understand the world better. And the second is fulfill your civic duties, fulfill your democratic obligations. So if information does either one of those two things, it could be considered an act of journalism. And the number of people committing acts of journalism is as wide as it could possibly be these days. Great, thank you. OK, now we've got a question from a viewer at the American Center in Aravon who asks, how does the United States deal with offensive comments that are made online? And is it punishable by law? Yeah, in the United States, it's really interesting. It's very, very, very there's a very small amount of speech that's punishable by law. It's almost negligible. And in online dialogues, you find people saying the most offensive things ever.  I think so. So if it's not punishable criminally, which which it rarely is, sometimes you can punish people civilly. So if somebody if somebody says something about you that that is that is false and it harms your reputation or it causes you some sort of of harm, you can sue them in civil court in the United States. And when we frequently find that happening, but still of all the stuff that people say online, very rarely does anybody pursue civil action against that stuff. So I counsel the the journalists and the moderators of these sites where these comments happen. I counsel them to take a very proactive role to try and make the conversation as healthy as possible to minimize the level of horrible things that people are saying to minimize the volume of horrible things. And you do that by doing a couple of things. One is is editors and journalists have to participate in these these conversations. You participate in the comments beneath your stories or or on your blog. You participate in the comments on Twitter and you do it in a way that your role modeling to other people. This is what a healthy conversation looks like.  If you don't want people to call people names and you don't want people to say things that are untrue, you have to ask people first to take those comments down. And then secondly, you have to you have to ban those people from your site by their IP address. So you have to be really proactive on your own site if you want a healthy space for dialogue. And then in addition to that, you don't always have to have comments. You can not allow comments. And if you don't have the resources to monitor them or to make sure that it's a healthy dialogue, then then you really shouldn't be having comments. One of the best organizations to look at for how they're monitoring comments is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. They have done a great job. They've increased their engagement. And in addition to doing those best practices that I've just mentioned, they also only leave their comments open for a defined amount of time. It might be a day or two days or a week. And they do that based on the resources that they have and and and the the interest in commenting. But they don't leave comments open for forever and ever because nobody could monitor them. So in addition to looking at punishing people, either criminally or civilly, who say things that are harmful to the community, which in the United States happens rarely, I think the better solution to that problem is for the journalism organizations to take full responsibility for their commenting space. Great. Thanks, Kelly. We've got some great questions so far from our live and virtual audiences. A reminder to check out the links toward the bottom of the page to access more information on journalism ethics in the digital age. We're going to go back now to our viewers in DACA for their questions. DACA, over to you. Hello, I am Rimi, student of journalism. If I want to report about a murderer, but the murderer may threaten to kill me if I do or give or give me money if I don't journalism. Ethics teaches us to be fearless and always tell the truth. But how far will being fearless work when it's about my and my families and my self safety? What should a journalist do in such a situation? Yeah, that's a really, really tough scenario. When your personal safety is threatened, we have all read stories about really fabulous, courageous journalists who have who have reported the truth in spite of great threat to their personal safety. But this is where journalism organizations and government organizations come into play. This is why, you know, if you're working with a journalism organization, your newsroom has an obligation to help keep you safe. And journalists face such great threat all around the world. I mean, in Mexico, journalists who are covering the drug wars are being murdered left and right and and and in in in other countries as well. And and it is the journalism organizations that need to create the scenarios where their reporters can feel safe. Sometimes that means hiring bodyguards. Sometimes that means sometimes that means not publishing their bylines because it's too dangerous or publishing stories without any bylines. Now, that doesn't mean that you should put fake bylines on it. You don't want to deceive your audience. But journalism organizations have to step in and create a safe environment for their journalists. And and and that said, you know, the other side of that scenario where you suggested, you know, so if he gives me some money, I don't have to report that story at all. That's completely within your personal ability to do the right thing. You know, you can you can refuse the bribe. And I know that that, you know, the converse of that is that we need healthy journalism organizations that can pay journalists enough money so that they don't that they aren't susceptible to bribes. And we're still trying to figure out how to do that in so many economies. But but that's part of it, too. Some of this comes down to charity. Many charitable organizations are figuring out a way to pay journalists healthy salaries and struggling economies so that they're not susceptible to bribes. And and I and I think you may you know. So what I'm getting at is this is a system problem. This isn't just on you as an individual as an individual. I mean, if I felt like my life was threatened or might the lives of my family were threatened, I would have a hard time doing good journalism. I would need to be part of a system that made me feel safe and made me feel secure. And so I really do put that on the system. And if you're working in an environment where that system doesn't exist, then you need some we need public policy to help create that system. And it might be it might be NGOs and it might be government organizations, but you need to create that system so that the journalists can feel safe because journalism is critical to democracy. And that's why those organizations would be motivated to create that system. Hi Kelly, how are you? Hey, I'm good. Thank you. Nice to meet you here. My question is what is your suggestions to become important as a professional journalist? Can you say a little bit more? What do you mean by to become important? Yeah, in fact, you know, professional journalist, as I have seen in my professional in as a professional journalist in my professional, I've seen that who are really professional who who used to work as a professional, they're actually not empowered in work. They have no right to work there with their freedom. And, you know, if they want to work, honestly, and professionally, it is very, very difficult in the team. Actually, as some of our team leaders and maybe somehow, some of our media owners also that involved with any criminal team or somehow they are maybe maybe motivated or they they used to convinced like this, and in in that case, and as an individual, professional journalists are not actually empowered in, I think, in third world country or any other countries like this. So I want to know from you as a professional journalist, if anyone want to work as an individual, or maybe if if she or he want to work with power, she or he should be empowered somehow. If he or she doesn't get any support from team. Oh, OK. I have to be empowered. OK. Thank you. You know, thank you. So, yeah. So so some of this has to do with your own personal sense of who you are. Some journalists, some journalists are totally driven by their egos, right? And I don't think that's the best way to be empowered. But some people, their own personal ego, you know, seeing that byline or getting in front of that camera as that's their empowerment, right? Because they because it reinforces who they are personally. I find that the best journalists are empowered by their ability to inform the community to tell a story that wasn't previously told and to shine a light on an area where it was it was previously dark. And and so these are these are sort of vague things, right? But but but the best journalist find power in in telling the truth to an audience that wasn't able to access that truth. Now, how do you do that? Some people do that just by blogging. But some people do that and the most effective journalists do that within an organization that has a really wide audience. And and and you really have to just keep coming back to the audience and what is the audience getting from your work? But that's so hard to do as a journalist because as a journalist, you see your colleagues and your peers. You see your sources all the time, but you don't see your audience every day. So one of the things I think I think the most important thing that a journalist can do to to keep that sense of empowerment true and stable is to find ways to connect with the audience. And you can do that virtually in a digital environment through social media or you can just get out and talk to the people who are consuming your stories and find out from them what's important, what's working, what isn't working. Because if you can stay in touch with your audience, you will stay true to your values and you'll find a way to be empowered. But if but if you're only if you're only listening to your colleagues and you're listening to your sources, you risk the you run the risk of having a distorted view of who you are and what you're doing. Does that does that work? Does that make sense? OK, great. OK, Kelly, I've got another question for you, which is do journalists, the world over, use the same process or adhere to the same set of ethics? Is there is there a universal standard or is this relative to your culture, your situation, your region of the world? What do you think? Well, so journalists, the world over, have the same standard for trying to establish what's true. And that is that they go out and they do two things. They observe and they talk to sources and they look at government documents and they use those three those three categories, observations, sources and documents for establishing a narrative of what's what's true. Now, the reality is, is that as you move from region to region and country to country, there are very different laws governing journalists. In many countries, there is no licensing and, you know, there is no there's no government control over journalists at all. And that tends to create one type of journalism. And then in countries where you have certain government influence over journalists, either through licensing or through restrictive restrictive speech laws, then you find journalists having to get a little more creative in how they tell the truth. So so really the the sort of the foundational work of what journalists what journalists do and how they do it. In those cases, I think whenever I talk to journalists from no from wherever they are, they they agree on those those foundational methods.  Whereas if you're in the United States, you can mention his name and he might be able to sue you in civil court, but there's no criminal impositions. You know, that's just one example of how the government changes the way you do journalism. But it doesn't change what journalism is. So you know, that said, that said, there are a lot of bad journalists out there. There are a lot of journalists who do who have no ethics who do really crappy work. And in those cases, they sort of taint the rest of us with their with their bad habits. A question I already asked. Yeah, sorry. And so so so really, you know, the sort of the short answer to your question is that there are no universal standards. But we generally all have a common connection when we talk about what journalism is and how we do it. Okay, great. Thanks. We've got a question now from our chat roll. We've got Nazakot from Bangladesh, who is asking, What's the definition of press freedom? What is the definition? You know, I think it's tied to free speech because I think that you can't you I don't I don't want to live in a society where the press has a special set of freedoms. I want to live in a society where citizens have those freedoms and that the press is just one one expression of being a citizen. So in most cases, I think I think it really gets down to free speech. And I think that that press freedom, press freedom should mirror your society's freedom of speech and free speech should be should be very wide. I mean, in a democratic society, you should be able to to express views that are that are critical of the government that are critical of the very powerful, whether that be powerful corporations or powerful organizations or powerful religions. You should be able to say things that aren't popular. And there shouldn't be there shouldn't be repercussions for you just for speech. Speech doesn't generally harm people. And so so that's I guess that's how I would define it. Okay, well, leads well into our next question, which is a question from Pakistan. And that question is, if a certain journalist from a certain country writes a statement that harms US media policy, what would be the US reaction in this regard? That harms US media policy? Yeah. Do you can you elucidate on that a little bit? Yeah. Yeah, I'm not I'm not 100% sure what they what the focus is. I mean media. I think maybe media interests might be a better, a better way of looking at it. And maybe also US policy. So maybe kind of answer it from both the lens of the media had the media would react to something that sort of attack them and maybe how how the media would react to something that attacks US policy. So I think what this gets to is this concept of the marketplace of ideas. And that there's this idea that if you know, so somebody might say something that's harmful to an individual, but that individual or that organization has the ability to also put put ideas into the marketplace of ideas and those become competing interests, right? And so then you have this audience that that has to that that that looks at these competing ideas and has to decide which one is true. You know, so somebody might say idea X, you know, and somebody else might say idea Y and these ideas are in opposition to each other. And then a bunch of organizations or individuals add things to idea X, you know, they add context and they add information and other people add things to idea Y. And and and at a certain point, the audience starts to figure out that, oh, you know, this information seems to be more true. There's more facts here. There's more sources here. This information seems to be more true. And so the consumers, it really puts a great emphasis on the consumers and their ability to to discern good information for bad from bad information. And so somebody might a journalist might report something that's harmful to a to a government's interests. And it might be true. It might be good that it's harming that government's interest because the information is true and that government should be held accountable or it might be false. And and that the information could be bad and could be wrongfully accusing this government of doing something either way, both of those ideas should be able to get into the marketplace of ideas. And then through additional reporting through through adding information that the consumers should be able to figure out that, oh, this is true or this is true. And and that's that's really how democracy works is you have to be able to you have to be willing to risk bad information as well as good information. OK, thanks. We've got a question now from a journalist in Afghanistan asking how can we make freedom of the press more important in our society? What's your response to that? Well, first of all, you have to make your society. You have to you have to you have to make equality important because the more that the more that everyone in your society has equal equal rights, men, women, people of different ethnicities, different races, the more that they have equal rights, the more that they value a free press. When you have when you have a diss when when when when you have one group that that has access to rights and you have lots of other groups that don't have access to rights, that group is not necessarily going to advocate for free press because the free press would then advocate for all these different ideas of equality. And so so it really goes hand in hand with with equality in your society and having having equality be a goal in your society. So I think that's sort of where you start. I think you also I mean with the tools of technology now people get a taste of free press, even if they don't necessarily have complete access to it. When you get into an atmosphere like a social media atmosphere where anybody can post something, suddenly you see what it looks like in a world where everybody is sharing their own ideas. And that's really refreshing. And once you get the ball rolling, I'm not going to suggest that this is easy. I mean, most countries that have that have equality and that have a free press have a very bloody history of getting to that moment. So there's a political there's a political struggle that comes with it. And you can look at recent places like South Africa where that political struggle has happened recently or you can look at the United States where that political struggle happened more than a hundred years ago. But it's always a political struggle to get there. And that's because the people who do hold power don't necessarily want to share that power with everybody and free speech, free press and equality certainly certainly lead to that that that that general equality of an environment. And so that's I mean, I don't want to pretend that it's easy that you can get there in a few a few easy steps. But it really is tied of free press is tied to free speech. Free speech is tied to an equal society. So it is freedom of the press a universal then is it is it again a standard that ultimately is would be the same everywhere. Well, it would be the same in an open democracy. It's not it's not completely the same because even in even in very well established democracies, you see different laws that apply to the press in different ways. But but but but if you consider it like a continuum, the closer you get to free press, the closer you have to an open democracy with vigorous participation. Great. Thanks. OK, we're going to go back to DACA for a couple of more questions. DACA. Thank you. This is Rusty. And my question is, how can I bring accuracy and meet the standards of factual and factual and substantial reporting? Thank you. So are you talking about in your own organization for yourself or for a group of different in general in general like a group of people? Yeah. So professional organizations are really important in these cases because within within one newsroom, within one organization, it's easy to have really good leadership and create a set of standards. But what you want to do is you want to have representatives from all these different media organizations getting together in a professional organization and you want to have those professional organizations be able to apply peer pressure, if you will. So when they might see when they might see one newsroom that doesn't have very good standards, they could they could at least call them out and say, you know, we don't agree with them. So when you have a when you have professional organizations, those tend to be very helpful. In addition to that, I think the organizations that educate journalists, the universities can be very helpful in agreeing on what those standards look like so they can all come together. And once you start having those conversations, you start to agree on a set of principles that translate from one organization to another. But but the you know, the shorter answer, the short answer is you all have to be talking to each other. You have to gather on a regular basis and have these conversations. And then you have to share what you've agreed upon with other people either by publishing it or by well, yeah, by publishing it. I mean, I guess that's the easiest way to do is to have, you know, if you have a professional organization that has a yearly publication or a quarterly publication, that's a great way to create standards that everyone can agree upon or to at least have the conversation. Great. And we've got another question in DACA. Hi, I'm Marina. Hi, Kelly. How are you? Hey, I'm good. How are you, Marina? OK, OK. Thank you. My question is, how can we create awareness about following ethics in practicing journalism in Bangladesh and other countries around the world? I missed one word in your question. How can we create awareness? Awareness, awareness. Yes. OK. You know, again, this gets back to the professional organizations. If you have a group of editors from every news organization and they get together and they have a conversation and there's a record of that conversation, that creates awareness. The other thing that you can be doing is sharing these conversations with the public. A lot of the times when we talk about journalism, we talk about it like, like, like making sausage. You know, it's not a very pretty picture and the public just sees the end product. But if but now that we have all these tools of transparency, we should be letting the public see how we do things. We should be going behind the scenes and showing them and that creates another level of awareness. And that actually helps your cause because as you get more and more citizen journalists, just average citizens who are committing acts of journalism, they start to understand what the standards are. So you really do have to put some effort into not just publishing the newspaper or your your daily broadcast every day, you've got to put some effort into coming together as a community of journalists and talking about what it is that you do. Oh, I lost. There you are. Can you hear me? Yep. Now I can. Great. OK, we've got another chat roll question. This one's coming from viewers at the American Corner Bishkek. And they want to know what how do journalists stay objective? Wow. I mean, so there's a huge argument right now about whether you can even stay objective. And there's that the definition of what objective even means is changing. But so let me start with I recognize that some people believe that you can't even be objective anymore. However, I think that you can I think that you can be fair. And sometimes I think we confuse objectivity with fairness. But there's two ways to go about it. And one way is to reveal what your biases are. And so in a sense to be subjective, but to be dedicated to fairness and accuracy. So even though I might have a certain viewpoint or a belief about an issue, I'm going to tell my audience what that viewpoint or belief is. And I'm going to be committed to seeking out a wide variety of sources and other viewpoints and determining what the truth is. And that's one approach that's that's becoming more and more popular. The other more traditional approach is to not reveal what your personal viewpoints are at all or your biases. So so to be removed or distant from from the subject at hand but to but to but but to be but to be very inclusive to seek a wide variety of viewpoints. And so so you notice that diversity is important in both of those approaches because in both of them you have to bring in conflicting viewpoints and you have to help the audience sort out what the truth is. In one approach you set you you state your biases from the beginning. In the other approach you don't state your biases and I think both work. They work for different audiences and it really depends on which type of audience you're serving and what the economic model of your news organization is as to which approach you're going to take. But objectivity is really connected to accuracy. And if you can be committed to accuracy you're you're you're de facto committed to objectivity. Great thanks. That sort of leads I think a bit into the next question which comes from a local reporter in Kandahar who asks what are the major ethical responsibilities for journalists to consider when reporting. So I guess if you had to pick your top one or two responsibilities ethically speaking what would those be. So I think I think the biggest one is to scrutinize the powerful people whoever they are. It might be your government. It might be it might be powerful corporations. It might be religious leaders but but your your your biggest ethical imperative as a journalist is to scrutinize power and to to challenge authority to make sure that people aren't abusing their power. I think in addition to that I think you have I think the second imperative is to be committed to diverse voices. It's very easy to not listen to minority viewpoints and and and so so I think that the second imperative is is is to seek a wide range of viewpoints on whatever issue. And then I want to add one more and that is to talk about the things that people don't want to talk about in many countries around the world that sexual assault. People don't want to talk about sexual assault and how it affects children. How it affects women. How it how it affects the vulnerable. There are other issues of rights. That's just one that I bring up as an example. But so those three things hold the powerful accountable seek diversity in your work and talk about the things that people don't want to talk about. Great. That's a good list. OK. We've got a question now from an online viewer who asks if a government does not allow for freedom of the press. How can journalists perform their duty. So what do you do in environments that are obviously less than less than perfect. Right. So so two things. One is you you you do it on the down low right.  People doing journalism in spite of oppressive governments that don't allow or protect press freedoms. So you figure out ways to do it. But then you also have to be working with organizations in the that have influence in the international community that can try and pressure that government to bring freedoms into that country. And that's that's really tricky. But that's where the international community comes in is is if you believe democracy and freedom is good for your country you must believe that it's good for for citizens the world over. And you can you can use economic sanctions. You can use political pressure. But that's where international organizations come in come into play and and G.O.'s that work with those international organizations. Again that's a long political process. We've got a question now from a viewer in Bishkek who asks how do government and journalism interact. And that's probably a how should they act. How did they interact. Obviously in different in different environments. But maybe talk a little bit about how how what the reality is and maybe what the ideal should be. Sure. Sure. So so the reality is that that that journalists and governments have our our our intention with each other. And that's a healthy reality. You want them to be in tension with each other. It's an interdependent relationship in addition to in addition to in addition to holding governments accountable. Journalists have a have a significant role in just letting citizens know what's going on in the government. And so you want to be able to do that. But you don't want to be a PR or a mouth piece for the government. So you really want to do that in a way that serves the citizens. Interestingly enough both when it's working well governments and journalists both serve the same group. They serve the citizens of a community or of a of a society. But they have different loyalties to those citizens. And so so you've just got to remember what your promise is to your audience. And and so so there are times when you're going to be in tension or in opposition with the government because you feel like you're reporting on an abuse of power like they're not doing their jobs well. And then it's going to be very tense. But but but the reality is is most of the time you're just letting citizens know what's going on so that they can participate in their government. And so it doesn't necessarily have to be completely oppositional but it shouldn't be all cozy either. You shouldn't be like you shouldn't be best buddies with government officials. You should be professional and cordial. And that's really how that relationship should look is is one of professionalism. But but I recognize that there's a wide range in there. And that sometimes it's very that there's a lot of clashing between government. And sometimes it's way too cozy. Great. Thanks. We've got another question from Aravon which is basically how do how does the U.S. keep journalists safe. Well in the U.S. we have the luxury of having an economy that can pay journalists not as much as it used to be able to because journalism organizations have declined. But we keep journalists safe the same way we keep all of our citizens safe. You know we prosecute crimes when people attack journalists they are prosecuted. It's you know it would be rare for an assault against the journalist to go unprosecuted. We pay them salaries so that they're not susceptible to bribes. We pay them healthy enough salaries that you can live a middle class existence as a journalist. And so so within the United States it's fairly easy as journalists go abroad and as they try and report in in situations where journalists aren't as safe. Journalism organizations spend a lot of money to keep their journalists safe. They hire bodyguards. They pay for special training and the journalism organizations that are committed to doing journalism in in places where journalists aren't safe. They they they spend a lot of money basically to keep their journalists safe. Great thanks. OK we're going to go back to DACA before we go and see if there are any final questions for Kelly DACA. Hi it's me again. Hey. My other question is how do I keep my source secret and at the same time make my story believable. Oh that's a great question. So first of all you only tell your editor who your sources and you try not to have a digital trail of your sourcing and there there are all these best practices about keeping sources safe and keeping their identities confidential when it's really important. In addition to that you only do that for the most important stories. Right. You don't grant all your sources anonymity. You only do it for the most important stories and for where your sources would lose their job or face physical risk. Something like that in order for you to report a story that's really important. But finally if you want to maintain your credibility with your audience you've got to tell them something about your source. Right. So maybe you don't tell them their name but you tell them why you believe them. You know you tell them what their experience is. You know if your source is a government official you tell them which branch of the government they work in and why they're familiar with this issue. So you try and give your audience as much information as you can about the source without saying the name so that they know the source is credible. And then in addition to that you check out the information. So you don't rely just on your one source but you make sure that that information is true because if the information is accurate and you've used an anonymous source your audience will generally have a lot of faith in you. But if when you screw up when you quote an anonymous source and you and you have bad information that that tends to erode the audience confidence in your ability to get it right. And so the next time they're going to look at you with with a little more doubt than they did than they did originally. So those three things. Great. Thanks Kelly and thank you to our audience in DACA and to our global viewers for all of your questions. Kelly is there anything you want to say in closing. Yeah you know I just want to say I hope that if you're not familiar with the pointer institute that you'll turn to our work. We have a daily website that reports on journalism around the world pointer dot org that's P O Y and T E R dot org. And we also have online courses. Many of them are free that are available to journalists the world over. And that's at news university dot org. And there's an abbreviation for it. It's news N E W S U dot org. And we have we have we have we have like 250 maybe even more than that courses that are free to journalists the world over. So please avail yourself of those those opportunities. And the pointer institute is doing a lot of work internationally. We've done work in Bangladesh. We've done work in India. We've done work in in Africa. And so if you have an interest in pointer working with an organization in your country please track us down. Contact us and we will do that work for you. Great. And just another resource real quick to is something my organization puts out called I J net dot org I J N E T dot org. And that's in seven languages and also has great resources for journalists. So check that out as well. Well thank you Kelly and we are grateful for everyone who joined us today from around the world to Luis Pateo over in the chat space. And Kelly again thanks so much for sharing your knowledge to learn more about journalism ethics and world press Freedom Day visit the links at the bottom of the page. You can also continue this great conversation and ask further questions on the Democracy Challenge Facebook page. This program will replay momentarily right here if you missed any of it and it'll be available on demand by the end of the day. Thanks so much for watching. This program has been brought to you by connects.