(Ryan Van Velzer / LPM)Shay McAlister is on a mission.After a decade in television, she’s seen the local media landscape evolve from a time when nightly news ruled to the phone-based consumption habits of today.With these changes, local newsrooms are shrinking and consolidating and so-called infl uencers are capitalizing — using the unfettered streams of social media to capture audiences hungry for information.McAlister launched the site “Shay Informed” about a year ago to fill the gap between what local news once was and what people still want — facts. She’s a one-woman operation covering some of the biggest issues in the greater Kentuckiana region.She talked about her work with the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting’s Jake Ryan. Listen to the conversation in the player above or read the edited transcript below.Jacob Ryan: So Shay, first get us up to speed a little bit on what “Shay Informed” is, how’d it get started, and drives you to do this.Shay McAlister: I'm a year into it. It’s a website, it's a podcast, and it's a newsletter. And really, the point behind it is, I wanted to do news that I felt was important and I wanted to do it on my own time. I have two, young little girls. I wanted to be able to be there for them in the big important moments, but I also wanted to put the work where I thought people were, which was on their phones. So I wanted to put all of my energy on podcast, on long-form written articles in their inbox, and on social media because that's where I feel like people are, and I want people to have this information.JR: How did you start something from nothing into this following that you have now?SM: Well, I have to give credit to the TV station for that because I worked for the TV station here in Louisville, WHAS11, for 10 years before I went out on my own. And the journalists in that building shaped me into who I am. I learned so much from them. I learned about ethical journalism, good interviews, working on deadlines, picking stories that matter. Everything comes from that, and I don't want to pretend like I just went out here and did it on my own because that's not true, at all. But I hit a point where I thought, can I do this better and differently for me and my audience? And I think I grew an audience, away from TV news, online, and I thought that I can probably do this in a way that serves them better, so I'm not asking them to turn on the news at 6 p.m. and be in front of their television screen. I'm just trying to do it a little bit differently and see what works. I'm still learning.JR: Sure, and it sounds like you're filling a little bit of a gap there as people turn away from the traditional media outlets that we've all known and trusted for years into more phone-based media outlets. But how do you convince people to trust you? And you compete with the people that are more of the influencer types where the information might be a bit more loose, the facts not so spot on.SM: That's one of my main motivators behind this. I felt like more people were getting their news from influencers, not trained journalists, not people with any ethical judgment or fact-checking threshold, and that bothered me. Because there's so many great journalists in this city that are doing the hard legwork that journalism is built on, but the stuff was just falling away. Nobody was seeing it, and then someone who doesn't know anything about journalism was, you know, repeating it, reading it on a TikTok, and maybe not repeating it correctly. So I really wanted to fill that gap. We work so hard to do real, fact-based reporting. In this building, especially [KyCIR], you are huge on investigative reporting, and I feel like that's the stuff that is slipping away.JR: Tell us where we can find the work.SM: So, ShayInformed.com is my website. Shay McAllister on social media. If you sign up on the website, you can sign up for free, or you can sign up for a paid membership. And the motivation behind all of it is just trying to give people the important work in a place that they're not getting it right now. ...read more read less