In this lively episode we’re diving deeper into the world of local journalism with Chris Gailus, a veteran news anchor who's all about keeping our communities informed! We’re not just talking headlines here; we’re unpacking the importance of local news as a collective commitment that fuels democracy itself. We also tackle the tricky terrain of media consumption habits among younger folks and how we need to shake things up to keep them engaged.

Takeaways:

1. Local journalism isn't just about news; it's a collective commitment to our community's heartbeat.
2. Engaging with local news is essential because it helps sustain democracy and keeps us informed.
3. We must pay attention to the stories that shape our lives and advocate for journalism's evolution today!
4. The discomfort of staying informed is part of the journey—embrace it to foster understanding and growth.
5. Support local journalism, as it is the lifeblood of our communities and democracy, lighting the way forward.

Your voice is your superpower. Use it. Welcome to Ignite My Voice. Becoming unstoppable. Powered by Ignite Voice, Inc. The podcast where voice meets purpose and stories ignite change.

Deep conversations with amazing guests, storytellers, speakers and change makers.

Be most suspicious when people are trying to enrage you. Right?

And that, I think, is going to be critical because we're already seeing it as a tool to try to manipulate feelings and points of view about people who are different from ourselves. And that is critical.

Hi, I'm Kat. Today is part two of our conversation with Chris Gaylis, veteran news anchor and powerful advocate for local journalism.

What stands out is this idea that local news isn't just content we consume, it's a collective commitment.

Hi, I'm Kev. In this episode, we move beyond the newsroom and into something bigger.

Why local news matters, why advertising dollars matter, and why community engagement is essential to sustaining democracy.

Chris speaks candidly about privilege, the discomfort of staying informed, the importance of collaboration, and what happens when we curate our news so tightly that we create blind spots.

And we also explore the evolution of the six o' clock news, how it has to live on every plat to reach younger audiences, and why humor and community are essential when the headlines feel heavy.

It's thoughtful, grounded, and deeply human. Let's jump back into our conversation with Chris Gaylis.

Well, I now that I have this platform with you guys, go for it. I want to be an advocate for people. If you feel local news matters, and I do.

Like, I want to know that when I leave this industry, as I will someday at some point, that local news thrives, that there are people who will continue to tell stories that matter to me in my city so that I'll have a source of information to know what's going on and I can get involved and get engaged. I want people to commit to that.

And if sitting through a 15 second or 30 second ad is what it takes to preserve that, then is that really too much to ask? Like, I hope it isn't. And I want to be an advocate for sitting through an ad every now and again because it is what keeps the lights on for us.

Obviously, again, I'm revealing a bias.

It pays my salary, but it also pays the salary of everybody I work with who are good, compassionate, caring people who want to make sure that people are informed in this city and that it can be a better city. And if we shine a light into some of the areas where it's not working out so good, it inspires people to get involved and work for positive change.

Oh, totally agree. But here's another conundrum for you, Chris.

Okay, here it comes.

Our students, which are generally 25 and under, we poll them all the time to see their perspective on things. Do you know how many monitor closely legacy media?

I'm gonna be very depressed by your answer.

Your worst?

Yeah, zero.

It's really zero.

A few will drop in or be forced into an environment where they're catching legacy media once a week or something. But how many have embedded in their life?

So what do we know about. I'm not totally surprised that a 20 something who's trying to in life isn't. And we're arriving at certain milestones in our lives much later.

Kids are coming later, they're deciding not to even have kids.

And I think when you get into sort of the routine that used to be widely accepted as the routine where you have kids, you get a job, you're home at 5:30, you turn the TV on at 6, that was sort of a captive audience that's going away.

And so the challenge for us is to make sure that the information that we put out is available on handheld devices and YouTube and every other conceivable platform. And we're not good at that yet. We need to get much better at that. And that is going to be the future of local television. The.

The notion of a six o' clock newscast and all of our resources organized in the newsroom to feed that beast is changing and the story centric model is overtaking it so that what ends up happening is you're going to be able to. And this has its own pitfalls.

You're going to be able to decide, okay, just feed me the individual stories on bike lanes or ice or dog trails, off leash trails in Pacific Spirit park, like, and then you're going to be able to filter your news experience to your own tastes.

I also worry about that because then there's a lot of blind spots that develop for people where they're just going to be like, okay, well, I'm not really that interested in the politics of it and the mundane. Right. But we have to commit as a society, as a collective. As a collective, we have to commit to.

Even if it's boring or the storytelling isn't always great, that the issues are important enough that you dial in and pay attention somewhere somehow.

Oh yeah, we would.

We're all accountable for that.

Yeah, we would support that strongly. There's a couple issues we've run into in some of the podcasts lately.

We interviewed a wonderful young Woman who's a journalist out of Guatemala, originally from Australia, and she's doing some. Stephanie, some world journalism. That's fascinating. And what she talks a lot about is privilege, which was kind of unique.

We were exposed to that approach for the first time along with somebody that we interviewed looking at Gaza and the West Bank. And her point was similar, that, you know, in a modern Western culture, we're pretty privileged.

And a lot of privileged people don't like being uncomfortable. And we have the privilege to go, you know, this genocide thing.

No.

Or climate change. No. It makes me uncomfortable. I'm not going to look at that. I'm not going to put it on my list of things that can be sent to me.

So I bring that up because we're talking kind of upstream about how legacy media, or any media creates a story or chooses to see things downstream. It's interesting. And we talked about democracy earlier. Downstream. If people aren't informed, in theory, we can't even create a democracy.

No, no. And that. That is true. Just a point I'd like to make on, On. On the notion of. Of privilege. Everybody's struggling in their own way. Right.

Everybody struggles in their own way.

And, and to, and to discount, you know, Western society's view of some of these global issues of human, gross, terrible human rights abuses, violence against minorities and others, and to write that off as sort of a privileged outlook, I think isn't always accurate because people. People are struggling and discounts their own personal struggles. To say that you should be paying more attention to my pain.

I don't care about your pain because you're privileged. I think. I think everybody feels pain in their own way, and that needs to be acknowledged.

Compassion needs to meet compassion and there needs to be understanding across the board. And, you know, for sure, we live in one of the most amazing countries in the world.

We do.

And one of the reasons that it has been great is because we do care about what is going on around the world and in political hotspots, and we commit millions of dollars to help in some of those areas. Could we be doing more? Of course we could be doing more. Should we be doing more? Yes.

But I am proud of what our country has done so far and the systems that have evolved in this country. And it's a work in progress. It always will be. Never has there been a better time to discuss the rights of indigenous peoples.

The amount of coverage and progress that has been made in not just bringing first nations to the table, but

being

invited to their table. Right. And I think we're in a great period of time right now where change is happening.

People are more aware than ever about how our privilege has impacted others.

But you know, to say that there isn't enough coverage or there isn't enough being done, it discounts the concerns and the worries and the fears of people who are just trying to get by. They're just trying to get by. They're trying to survive their own lives.

And it may look a lot different than surviving in Syria or surviving in Gaza, but it feels the same to them.

When you're trying to put your, you know, you're trying to find childcare for your kids and you're trying to put food on the table here, and you're caught in a system that doesn't seem to support you at all, that feels every bit as real and tenuous and dangerous as food insecurity and housing insecurity in the world's worst hot spots. And I'm not saying it is equal, but it feels equal to the people who are going through it.

It reminds me of Maslow's hierarchy, because at the lower end of the hierarchy is just survival. It's safety, it's having food and your shelter met. And before you can rise to the level of self actualization, you have to have those basis covered.

And what I'm hearing from you is, you know, you have passion, you have purpose, you are authentic and you're everything that we talk about. You have charisma, you have all these wonderful qualities.

Thank you.

And you care and you're an emotional human being. And how do you stay grounded? How do you stay authentic when you're hearing all these stories that impact you, like we're talking about today?

Yeah, it's hard, I'm not gonna lie. I have a great partner with a British background. And you know, the Brits, the Brits are well, stiff upper, limp baby. And so Jane grounds me a lot.

Right. And she is also a history buff and reminds me all of this has happened before in various different iterations.

Humanity and civilization has found a way forward. Yeah, I think that's, that's, that to me is, is what grounds me.

And I get home after a particularly difficult day and Jane sees it on me and she'll say, okay, well, you know, what is it? And don't forget, this has happened before. And you know, there are a lot of people who care about other people.

And yes, we've found ways through these crises before when the Brits were being bombed, you know, there was a sense of community that got them through It.

And some humor.

And some humor. Super important. I'm glad you brought that up. Laughing together and finding common ground and a way to. It's just a pressure relief valve. Right.

When you can find people that you can laugh with and find the absurdity in it again.

And your tribe.

Yeah, yeah. You find your tribe. And the Brits are good at poking fun at all of those things, too.

I combined. Honestly, I'm half Scottish, so there you go.

Hey, listen, guys, it's not going to matter anyway. You know why?

Why?

Because we just are going to gladly become the 51st state and we don't have.

How dare you again.

I almost spit out my tea. Stop that, Kevin.

It's so funny, though. Like, I bet.

Like, it's so funny if we rewound the clock and went 10 years back when the Canadian dollar was at par and everybody was buying places down in Scottsdale and Palm Springs, and you ask people like, hey, what would you think about joining the States? I bet you would have had a way higher uptick than now. It's only when it's under threat. And I don't.

And I'm not saying, look, I want to be the 51st state. I definitely don't.

I'm happy about Canada, but there have been times in my life where I've thought, like, we are so similar and our economies are so integrated. Is there a way that we could make this happen and we get the best of both worlds and we create this amazing country together?

I'm not that that thought has come into my head before, that there's a. A great political partnership that could have happened. Unfortunately, the guy proposing it is. You don't want him as your. He's not my guy.

He's not like, not now.

Nothing. No, no. I'm proud to be a Canadian. Thank you so much. Stay that way.

Yeah, I'm with you too. And I'm happy. There's a reason I moved back from the United States too. Right. I mean, we wanted.

We obviously wanted to be close and to have a country to call home.

Because when you do move to another country, and especially the States where you're so familiar and yet you're so foreign until you live there, you don't really realize. Wow.

Yeah.

We are really different.

I like going for a walk downtown Vancouver, knowing there's no permit to conceal, carry people all around me.

I like that, you know, second amendment. They can have. They can have that. And, you know, I feel for a lot of my friends down there, you know, who.

Who have kids and you know, are, they're good people and they're, they're afraid of that.

But they, you know, as most Americans have, because there's been zero change in meaningful change in gun laws down there, they're willing to accept it for all of the other benefits they perceive that come with being an American. That Second Amendment is not worth changing to them at all. Despite the number of school shootings and mass shootings and like, look at all the data.

It's the guns. But you cannot convince them to change it. You just cannot.

Mythology.

Yep.

The American dream.

There's the story for you. And personal narrative all wrapped up into one. Into the Second Amendment, isn't it? Right.

I think you guys do amazing work. And I'm, I mean, despite the fact that none of your students ever watch my newscast, I am very, very thankful for the work you guys do.

We're gonna do a tour now and go stand in front of you, watch you live.

Yeah, yeah, that would be awesome.

Wave at you and distract you.

Yeah, no. Thank you very much for having me on to talk about these things. It's important.

And I know, I know you know, the interest in a younger demographic is not there yet, but we're evolving. Storytelling is important. Local news is important. And we're going to evolve to.

We're gonna have to evolve to become a trusted source of information for that generation or we're done. And that'll be on us.

Well, and society's done. We gotta keep people informed. If nobody's informed, where are we gonna be? Right.

We have to keep education to the forefront, really. Because that' that's what we need for critical thought.

If we don't teach those skills, then we don't have an educated critical thinking population that can't process this. So if we don't have education, that's it.

That's it. Yeah. Be skeptical. If there's one parting thought, it's be skeptical of not be a Pollyanna. Yeah, don't be a Pollyanna.

Be skeptical and check multiple sources. If you see something that really enrages you or delights you, that's so unbelievable. You know, I see so many stories shared that are. They sound. So.

And we talked about one. They sound so fantastical. And you want to believe it's amazing. It's an amazing story. Sometimes it just didn't happen.

And there's, there's a double edged sword to that to me too, because first of all, we're able to get video immediately. Yeah. We have to double source. We have to get permission from the person who actually recorded it, we have to check and make sure that it is real.

Because now we're in the era where that video of that truck going off the road could easily have been created with AI. So we've got a, you know, like, okay, what's the name of the trucking company call, you know, BC Highway Patrol.

Make sure that we get a source to, you know, tell us that what we're seeing actually happened.

Holy crap.

Which is awesome.

It's also made viewers very used to seeing shitty video, you know, so, like, if you, if I, like, I have a hard time sometimes on our newscast seeing some of these zoom interviews that we're doing now. Covid changed everything.

So we did so much on zoom or whatever, and we're not, we're still not in the enough of the habit of telling people, look, can you give your lens a wipe? Can you make sure we've got chin, you know, not too much headroom, and we've got room to put a name key under here and there. So.

But it doesn't seem to matter because viewers are used to seeing.

They see it all the time.

Small screeny, sideways, poorly shot video.

And I see that, you know, we talk about the art and craft of writing, but the craft of television shooting used to be a point of pride for these guys who take a light kit everywhere they went and they'd make sure that it was all set up. No time for that now. There's just no time for that. It's like, or we don't take the time. I think there's times where we really should.

But just going in there with the camera on the shoulder, which is funny because it is still one of these. I'm like, we could do the whole newscast on one of these if we had a Kim, like, give everybody the little gimbal. And I love those things.

Yeah, it would be easy to do it. And a lot of news organizations are doing it that way.

Chris reminds us that journalism isn't just a broadcast. It's a responsibility we share as a community.

If we want informed communities, if we want a functioning democracy, if we want stories that reflect who we are, then

we have to participate in that ecosystem. That means paying attention. It means supporting local journalism.

It means understanding that advertising dollars help sustain the very people who shine a light on the issues shaping our city.

And maybe that's the takeaway. Stay informed, stay curious, find common ground, and don't retreat from the conversations that matter.

Because when we engage thoughtfully, we strengthen the system that supports us all.

If this conversation resonated, share it with someone who values community, dialogue and responsible storytelling.

And as always, ignite your voice, because informed voices build stronger communities.

Ignitemyvoice. Com. Ignite my voice. Becoming unstoppable. Your voice is your superpower. Use it.