The world of media has changed in every way since I earned a journalism degree more than three decades ago, from how journalists do their jobs to how the public gets their news – if they get their news.

According to a global report from The Reuters Institute, people around the world are increasingly avoiding the news (although this trend is improving in the U.S. as we approach the next presidential election). Those who are still seeking information are getting their “news” from less traditional sources – not from newspapers or network TV news broadcasts, but from cable TV shows, websites and social media.

The report confirmed my observation that the public is less informed and more apathetic about what’s going on in the world around them. Many people I know are either uninformed (they avoid the news altogether because they “don’t know what to believe any more”), or they are misinformed (because they’re getting their “news” from unreliable and biased sources).

I’ve always been a “news nerd,” and I still am. Most of my career has been in journalism and related fields, working for more than 22 years as a daily newspaper editor, teaching journalism classes at Eastern Illinois University for 17 years, and handling public relations at EIU’s Booth Library for more than a decade. Four years ago, I was fortunate to be hired at Ad Fontes Media.

I was initially part of the analyst team, and I now work as a media research specialist. As our outstanding team of analysts fully rates sources, I conduct research on each one, adding data such as ownership, targeted audiences, type of news coverage and geographic location. This allows our subscribers to apply filters to our more than 3,000 sources when searching on the Interactive Media Bias Chart.

The Reuters report verified what I already knew – media subscriptions are generally down, citizens are increasingly getting their news from social media, and companies are laying off trained journalists at an alarming rate. My community newspaper, which once had a newsroom of 35 journalists, now has two.

The most rewarding years of my career were spent in that newsroom, where we were a team of people with a common goal – informing residents about what they wanted to know and what they needed to know. Being informed of the facts is vital to all of us – it helps us to know what’s happening in our community and our country, how to get involved, what laws are being considered that will affect us, and how to vote.

Can people today still find that information? Sure. But it’s hard to know where to look and whom to believe when we’re bombarded with conflicting and biased information. I personally believe that if we have the facts, we can form our own opinions, and our Media Bias Chart® is a great place to start to find the most reliable and least biased sources of information.

I retired from my journalism career earlier this year, but I’m excited to continue working for Ad Fontes Media. Like in the newsroom, we’re a team of people with a common goal – to rate the news and make a positive impact on society. This mission has taken shape in a variety of ways – from analyzing websites, podcasts and TV programs, to providing media literacy tools to educators, to launching an effort to bring advertising back to high-quality news providers – and we’re just getting started. I hope you’ll join us on the journey.

Beth Heldebrandt is a Media Research Specialist at Ad Fontes Media. She has 33 years of experience in the fields of journalism and public relations, and was an adjunct instructor of journalism for 17 years at Eastern Illinois University. Beth has a B.A. in journalism from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and an M.A. in English from Eastern Illinois University. She’s a mom and grandma, and enjoys traveling, puzzles and reading.