Alexa Beyer
Aug 31, 2018 · 2 min read

Hi! I’m Alexa, and I’m beyond excited to be a new SocialJ student at Newmark. For years before coming here, I saw myself as an activist. Maybe one who liked to talk a lot — but an activist nonetheless. I’ve spent a lot of my intermittent time in the past five years in communities across the country that are fighting some sort of development project entering their town — privatized water systems, Walmarts — stuff like that. Through getting to know community members as an activist and just as someone who genuinely enjoyed their company, I started to notice that I would hear pertinent details about their struggles (and often the local government corruption that would go hand-in-hand) that — for some weird reason — wasn’t being reported on by local outlets covering the story. The weirdest part tended to be that often, the majority of the affected community would be well-aware of said corruption, to the point of thinking it was obvious or insignificant (it rarely is). Over time, the lack of local reporting on important facts — facts that I was hearing in casual spoken conversation — was what came to preoccupy me the most and lead me here. What I’m coming to realize is that my being privy to these details isn’t because I’m so special — it’s because I’ve happened to be approaching these communities differently than a journalist on deadline does. I haven’t boiled it all down to a science yet (aka, ideal state to enter a program you spend money on), but I think at the end of the day it has to do with caring about them more than caring about your story.

But — important qualifier here: as Jeff’s story about the journalist who did a profile on Iowa evangelicals illuminated, journalists can do everything in their available power to do justice to the groups they’re covering. They can make the ultimate efforts to deeply listen, to spend significant time with the community, to illuminate their subjects’ voices in a way that they feel serves them. And then, back at the editor’s office in Manhattan, a few choices of photos, captions, and titles can be made in the name of ‘serving the audience’ that override it all. To me, this seems to suggest that we are only as good as the systems we work within. If we want to build a more compassionate and connected journalism, we should focus our attention on building more compassionate and connected systems.

Alexa Beyer

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Writer, journalist, and bad democrat who wants you to think differently about democracy. You can sign up for my email list here: http://eepurl.com/c5gGwv