Why The City’s “Open Newsroom” is literally open

It was an exciting day. On a Saturday in October, I joined a community event called “Open Newsroom,” organized by a nonprofit hyperlocal,The City, as part of my Community Engagement class at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. The school has a close relationship with The City because The City’s editor in chief, Jere Hester, used to be a professor at the J-school.
The City, which launched its news publication service in March, is based in New York City and covers all five boroughs. The way it finances itself is utterly intriguing. You can read the details on its “about” page, but in short, it “raised nearly $10 million from a group of founding donors and will receive additional financial support from foundations, endowments, corporate sponsors and members.” This is the goal to make the coverage sustainable.
“Open Newsroom” is a series of events in which journalists and the local community gather to discuss what The City should cover. “We’re here to listen to New Yorkers, dig into their concerns and deliver stories that drive the public conversation and set the agenda on key issues,” The City’s website says.
How NHK listens to the audience
“Listening” is a big trend among journalists trying to build a better way to communicate with their audience and serve the communities they cover. There are many ways to do it. At NHK, Japan’s public broadcaster, the digital team I was part of launched an “open journalism” project in 2017. NHK’s “open journalism” has three categories;
1. Asking the audience’s experiences and ideas on what it wants us to cover.
2. Asking audience members what they think or experienced related to a specific theme.
3. Having a gathering of people who are interested in a specific theme and discussing a it, including what they think about NHK’s coverage.
With a similar concept, NHK also organizes “Directhon,” a series of events in each prefecture all over Japan. “Directhon” was inspired by hackathons and ideathons to gather ideas, experience and skills of different people and create something together. Participants team up with NHK’s TV directors and pitch their ideas for new TV programs to the producers. The ideas must come from the citizen participants, not the TV directors. The winning team will actually shoot, edit and broadcast the program on NHK TV.
I have experienced all the categories of NHK’s “open journalism” and “Directhon” as either an organizer or a participant. My disappointing experience was in the summer of 2018, in which we gathered with people who were interested in a social issue, bullying against schoolteachers. NHK revealed that a few junior high teachers had been suffering physical violence by students. When NHK published the story, more teachers who were in the same situation raised their voice from all over the nation.
Not knowing who was coming, we titled the event “The Future of Education: How Can We Solve bullying Against Teachers?” Nearly 20 citizens who identified their interests and thoughts in advance joined the event. All the participants were eager to solve the problem. However, it was difficult to have the discussion because there weren’t any students or parents who had actually bullied a teacher. And the fact that they did not know one another made it difficult to discuss their opinions in detail. Participants included teachers, a politician, community managers, an event organizer, university students and a parent, none of whom had directly witnessed or experienced a bully. Their overall satisfaction level with the event was high. But I think we could have improved the discussion somehow. This led me to join the Open Newsroom event as soon as I heard about it.
Great facilitation made the event fun and engaging
The “Open Newsroom” where I went was at the Red Hook Library in Brooklyn. Red Hook, in the area once known as South Brooklyn, has 38,000 residents. It faces the Upper Bay, and from the seaside walk, I could see the Statue of Liberty. The neighborhood has been attracting many artists to live there and open shops and galleries, and now new housing is being built as the area gentrifies.



The City’s engagement director, Terry Parris Jr., was facilitating the event with librarians and The City’s interns, Daniel Laplaza and Mekdela Maskal, who are M.A. students in the Newmark School’s social journalism program. There were 12 participants from the local community and 11 from outside of the community or volunteers. Since it was the third time The City hold the “Open Newsroom” in this area, some of the participants and the organizers knew one another. We sat around four tables, and Terry stood in front at the whiteboard.

He started by saying we were going to think about how to build a story: “I would like you to think about who is involved, what is happening, where it is happening, when it started, why is it like that, how did it become like that, and eventually think about the solutions.” He asked all the participants what they would want to cover in the news if they were journalists.
The community participants’ ideas included housing, school meals and school rezoning, all critical to the community’s daily life and the future. Terry and Mekdela quickly wrote all their ideas on the whiteboard while making sure they got the participants’ points. Then Terry said: “Since we cannot cover everything at once, let’s decide which one to cover first for now. Which is the most pressing topic to cover as a journalist or a resident or a collective power?” Terry let us talk in groups for 40 minutes. At the end, each group presented the topic it thought it would most like covered.

The way Terry facilitated the event was inspiring. He showed the agenda at the beginning of the event but never stuck to it. He was very good at creating a positive atmosphere. At first, it seemed that only a few active participants were talking, but soon, everybody was at the same level of excitement. I thought it was almost like a show because the discussion became so active. In Japan, we tend to be egalitarian in discussions by letting everybody speak. I had thought that it was a cultural thing, but I saw some events in the U.S., too, where attendees are afraid to speak up. Terry’s uniqueness was that he really showed the participants that he and his team appreciated any opinion. He encouraged the participants to communicate not only in words, but with smiles and jokes, making them laugh many times.
The other reason the discussion was active would be that the participants from the local community had all acknowledged that they had the ownership of the event. They were the drive. Terry and his team might have asked them many times to bring their ideas because the journalists cannot write a story without the local people’s participation.

The time passed so fast and he didn’t get everything on the agenda done, but the Red Hook Open Newsroom decided to dig into “Food at Schools” and “Rezoning of the Schools” for the next session. I would like to go back!
