Stories as Studies
For a social journalist, there is a balance of two crucial goals — firstly, the journalist must cultivate and maintain a good working relationship with the community they work in, and secondly, to provide as extensive a look into their coverage as possible.
The social journalism program at the Newmark school draws heavily from modern anthropology study; when our class read from a “basic packet” of Humanist Qualitative Research for Community Engagement, I recognized a good deal of terminology and methodology for studying and recording communities.
In particular, the author — Dr. Lisbeth Berbary — wrote about newer ethnographies that focus less on “describing and understanding culture” and more on “critical views exploring power structures/relations, marginalization, and discursive discipline within the culture” — that is, looking at how decisions are made and who gets overriden.
The “new” studies, according to Berbary, are “more and more inclusive of participant voice in order to decrease researcher authority and equalize power relations between researcher and those researched” — sounds almost identical to the kind of work our instructors encourage us to work towards in open newsrooms and listening sessions.
Berbary also notes that the newer studies are shorter in length; while a regular-style study would take three years or more to evaluate a particular culture, the newer studies opt for a 9- to 12-month time period to reflect their narrower focus. While somewhat controversial in the academic field, the time span represents a robust period of engagement for a social journalism project (and incidentally, the rough amount of time my class is likely to spend with our chosen communities before our hopeful graduation).
There are differences — Berbary notes that many such studies focus on “privileged/highly visible groups rather than ‘less privileged,’ marginalized, or less visible groups.” While that description could fit some of our projects — mine in particular, focusing on Assigned Counsel attorneys who have enough privilege to graduate from law school — my classmates have presented plans to work with less privileged and more marginalized groups such as LGBT communities, city area sex workers, and those afflicted by the opioid epidemic. Only time will tell how close we all hew to that model.
While the academic jargon in the piece was intimidating to me at first, once broken down, the packet shows that there are ways building connections with the communities we are hoping to serve without overtaking their voice. As it is the role of journalists to record and disseminate information in its proper context, taking care to avoid disrupting that context can help preserve our communities’ autonomy and image.
