How to Report Like a Social Journalist
What I learned during my graduate studies in social journalism.
For the past year and a half, I’ve been part of a group of students at the Craig Newmark Graduate School at CUNY exploring how we can make journalism more inclusive and participatory. The social journalism program emphasizes building relationships with the communities we cover, and it’s transformed how I report.
Throughout the 17-month program, each of us chooses one community to work with. The community I chose is comprised of people in the nation’s jails and prisons, along with their families and other loved ones. This group is much larger than the New York City-based communities that many of my classmates chose to serve. While they have benefited from face-to-face relationships and work rooted in place, the scale of my community has led me to develop a range of projects spanning multiple mediums, some of which fall outside of traditional definitions of “journalism.” I’ve created an interactive voter guide, a ‘zine, an Instagram story series, two pop-up newsletters, several as-told-to’s, profiles, and reported pieces.
For my final project, I worked with Nicole Lewis, a staff writer at The Marshall Project, on a series of crowdsourced articles about the issues facing family members of the incarcerated. The stories were published in partnership with the New York Times, including a five-day pop-up with the Race/Related newsletter.
Through all of these projects, I’ve developed a checklist for myself that I will continue to rely on throughout my career as a journalist. It is built around several simple but powerful criteria — listening, collaboration, accessibility, and sustainability.
Start by listening.
What We Learned
Our foundational course in the social journalism program is called Community Engagement, but it could also be called “How to Be a Good Listener.” The course introduces us to a range of strategies journalists can use to tap into the voices of the communities they cover before they start reporting. We created “information needs assessments” using a playbook developed by The Listening Post Collective. We work in a framework called Hearken (it means “listen,” of course) that many local and nonprofit newsrooms use to collect questions and story ideas from audiences. (I also worked on The Trace’s Hearken project, called Ask The Trace, when I was a fellow there.) We learn from people working outside of journalism, including ethnographers and community organizers, about how they incorporate listening into their work.
How I Listened to My Community
When Queens elected its first district attorney in more than three decades, I wanted to make sure that the people who would be among most affected by the outcome — people with criminal justice touchpoints — had the information they needed to participate in the election. So I created a voter guide specifically for them. The candidate questionnaire was sourced from interviews with formerly incarcerated people and organizations that work closely with them. I incorporated a quiz and other voting rights resources after people in the community told me that they needed more information about how to vote and whether they were eligible.
My practicum project (the series on families and incarceration) was also built on listening. Before I started reporting, I called gatekeepers (admins of online support groups and leaders of advocacy organizations) and asked them what people were talking about in their communities. I asked what they wish more people knew about having a loved one in prison. I wasn’t looking for quotes.
Nicole Lewis and I also created two callouts to help us facilitate listening on a larger scale. The first was specifically about “video visitation” and was intended to complement some of Nicole’s other reporting on prison tech. In November, we created a second callout with new questions drawing from our conversations with community members.
Make your reporting collaborative and participatory.
What We Learned
Our introductory reporting class and second-semester class on metrics and impact are both co-taught by Terry Parris, Jr., director of engagement at The CITY and a god of crowdsourcing. He gave us an inside look at his process of developing crowd-powered projects at WDET, ProPublica, and The CITY.
Journalism crowdsourcing, according to the Tow Center, is “the act of specifically inviting a group of people to participate in a reporting task — such as newsgathering, data collection, or analysis — through a targeted, open call for input; personal experiences; documents; or other contributions.”
Crowdsourcing is a lot like traditional reporting, but instead of a one-to-one relationship, it’s one-to-many. This is the chart Terry used to explain crowdsourcing to us in our first-semester reporting class:
How I Created Opportunities for Participation in My Work
All of the stories in the families of the incarcerated series were crowdsourced. In total, we had more than 300 sources for this project. Crowdsourcing helped us find patterns and made us more confident that we were telling stories that reflected this community’s reality. It also strengthened The Marshall Project’s network of directly-impacted readers and sources.
This participatory approach also helped The Marshall Project build trust with the community. About 90% of those who responded to the second callout said they would be willing to speak with a Marshall Project reporter compared to the just 56% of those who responded when we first started working with this community. This month, one woman told me that she had never shared her story with anyone before, but she felt like she could trust The Marshall Project based on the work she had seen from us.
The callouts provided a space to share and be heard. “I started crying while filling this out because how often does anyone actually give us space to share the challenges we face?” one woman wrote on Twitter. “It feels like someone just asked me ‘how are you?’ for the first time in forever.”
I also used crowdsourcing for my prison food project, collecting food diaries from dozens of people in prisons across the country. In the process, I learned about prison food culture from people directly experiencing it and gave these incarcerated readers an opportunity to be part of The Marshall Project’s journalism. I heard from several that it made them feel like they were making a difference.
Like with my practicum, I didn’t just collect their stories and say “thanks.” I created a feedback loop, returning to the people who participated again and again with updates. This was critical for people who participated in the food diaries project because they did not have access to the internet. I sent them stats from how the project was performing on social media and even printed out some of the online comments to share back with participants. I even adapted my social media reporting into a ‘zine to make it accessible to them. (More on that in the following section.)
I also created a database to make these primary sources available to researchers. Several took me up on the offer and the project is cited in an upcoming article in the American studies journal, American Quarterly.
Accessibility leads to impact.
What We Learned
In our second semester, we took a class called Metrics and Impact, where we learned how to design projects that will make a difference in the world and how to measure our success. The central takeaway: journalistic impact depends on engagement.
There are two groups of people who need to see your story in order for it to have a life outside the page, we learned: those who are directly impacted by it and those who have the agency to do something about it.
Sometimes, the people who need to see your story don’t read your website or subscribe to your newsletter. Often, they never will. And that’s okay. But in order for your work to have an impact, you need to make your reporting accessible to them.
How I Optimized My Work for Impact
My crowdsourced food diary project was a social-first initiative. Along with Tatiana Craine and Celina Fang at The Marshall Project, I adapted the food diaries into a five-day Instagram Stories series that we published in real-time to give readers a window into incarcerated life. We hired the artist Janice Wu to create beautiful illustrations of the food diaries, and I published a Twitter thread about my process.
The stories reached hundreds and led to a spike in Instagram followers. But the outcome of my reporting still wasn’t accessible to my community. Most people can’t access Twitter and Instagram from prison.
So I created a printed ‘zine for incarcerated readers. I shared excerpts of the food diaries, along with:
- nutrition tips and information about chronic illnesses common among prisoners
- stories about prison food, including a first-person essay from an incarcerated person
- highlights from successful interventions (like prison gardening programs)
- commissary recipes crowdsourced from my community
Print journalism products like this are more important than ever in the digital era, especially for reaching audiences that don’t have internet access or don’t consume their news online. I also adapted my online voter guide for print so that I could distribute it in public spaces and in jail, where much of my community lives. I printed 1,000 copies of the guide and handed them out at street festivals, libraries, and community centers where formerly incarcerated people gather. I also organized a group of volunteers to distribute them on Rikers Island.
Outlast the news cycle.
My most gratifying moments in journalism school have been watching my projects take on a life of their own. When I was crowdsourcing prison food diaries, for example, I watched some community members adapt my callout for their own networks. One man in Oregon added several questions and published it in his own prison newsletter. He set up a dedicated mailbox in his prison for collecting food diaries from the prison and sent me all the notes he received in a mailer.
Nearly half of the printed voter guides were distributed with the help of a man named Kenny, who found my voter guide online, then distributed print copies at his own cookouts and block parties in southeast Queens. Kenny works with fathers who have been incarcerated and later became a source in an article I am writing for CityLab with Allen Arthur, who has been a mentor to me throughout the program.
One of my goals for my practicum had been to create connections among those who participated — to create relationships that are many-to-many, not just one-to-many. That never happened, but I still believe that the project is sustainable in its own way. The Marshall Project now has a network of people with direct experience with the justice system that they can call upon for future projects.
I’m also confident that the relationships I built with the other engagement-minded journalists in my program will last. It has been such a privilege to work alongside such talented and creative people, including:
- Erica Anderson, whose reporting on adoption didn’t shy away from messy, complicated narratives (I probably learned more from her work in this program than I did from almost any other piece of journalism I consumed during this time)
- Lakshmi Sivadas and Diara Townes, who showed up in the Rockaways week after week to learn about life after Hurricane Sandy and to build something that would help make the community even more resilient
- Danny Laplaza, who brought incredible empathy to his work with New Yorkers with disabilities — it was through that empathy that he was able to deliver information to them that will help them lead better lives
- Mekdela Maskal, whose work on food apartheid is so visionary and creative, truly pushing the limits of what journalism can be
- Lena Camilletti, who drew on her personal experience when reporting on her own community with courage and compassion
- Zanna McKay, who did the same, also reminding us all that the most elegant solutions are often the simplest
- Ariam Alula, who also did this, always emphasizing self-care in a way that feels so radical in this industry
- Isadora Varejao, who created spaces for her community (victims of domestic violence) to share deeply personal stories without fear or judgment
- Tiziana Rinaldi, who reported on immigration in a new way, building lasting relationships and helping community members lead their best lives through the JobUp
- Kerem Inal, a former anthropologist who approached misinformation with an open curiosity that helped him understand a scary and complicated issue in a new way
- Tori Hoffman, whose work helping boys reimagine masculinity might have made a more tangible difference in the world than anyone else’s
- Lauren Costantino, who equipped parents in Red Hook with tools to participate in their school district despite decades of policy that left their voices out
Thank you all. ❤
