In Journalism school, elevating voices

After some sharp disagreements this year over Trump’s Muslim Ban, Hillary’s Emails, Sharia Law, Illegal Immigrants, and the like, most of my family seems to have opted out of Thanksgiving. No one hosted the large gatherings.

Like much of the rest of our nation, we haven’t found a middle ground on the path that Trump’s campaign and election have taken us. Right now, the loudest and most angry are dominating the table talk and, in much the same way, our national debate.

For my year in journalism school studying Social Journalism, I wanted to explore and elevate the humanitarian voices. I wanted to understand how thoughtful leaders were responding to Trump. I decided to spend the year reporting on the work of the interfaith community of NYC.

In a world of rising extremism, and click-hungry media outlets, these aren’t stories that get a lot of attention.

What interfaith isn’t

I decided that I wouldn’t be reporting on the fundamentalist religious sects in the NY Metro area. There are many conservative and isolationist groups on the religious scene in NYC as elsewhere. The faith groups that work together, and the interfaith groups that shepherd important conversations and events, is where I decided to focus.

I learned that where faith organizations work together most are on social justice issues. They are the organizations that are most collaborative. They are progressive, humanitarian, and civically engaged. And right now, I learned, they are often angry.

Social journalism as a basis for serving a community

Social Journalism is much like old-fashioned, small town local news where journalists live in the communities they write about. They attend public meetings that are being held and they listen. They go where they’re invited and learn. They read public documents carefully to understand what a politician or corporation might not be saying. They celebrate victories and elevate concerns. They create conversations that strengthen the fabric of a community.

When I started journalism school, I had experience writing community news: In the 1990’s I edited and published a local newspaper in Washington Heights. At that time, Washington Heights, an area of Northern Manhattan with about 200,000 people, had one of the highest murder rates in the city.

I knew from experience that when the big papers came to our neighborhood, it was to report the most horrible murders. Our everyday news was getting ignored. That’s the news my neighbors and I focused on. We wrote the crime stories, too. But we showed the many faces of our neighbors and their lives. Here are some covers of that newspaper:

Today, the internet allows for new and vibrant definitions of community. A community might be niche, and physically far-flung. Listening might involve reading websites, subscribing to newsletters and email lists, joining Facebook groups and following community members on Twitter, and Instagram. It’s different, but maybe not much.

Begin by listening

I actually didn’t start the year by listening, however. The result was a great lesson about how to dive into a community.

There was an interfaith project I wanted to launch before I started graduate school. It involved asking people of different faiths to explain their traditions in a way that would allow someone from a different tradition to show up for a service and enjoy the experience, without distracting or offending the regulars.

I thought maybe it could be an app, or website or something. Everybody I talked to thought it was a great idea and wanted to participate.

To launch this project — I never got around to naming it — I called the Interfaith Center of NY to connect with them. I got no reply. I called again and spoke with one person, who offered to pass the conversation along to the right person. And still I got no call-backs.

I put my beautiful idea on hold, and started the Social Journalism program at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. When we started talking about the community we were going to serve for the year I circled back to it. My classmates loved it. But I was still getting no calls back.

So, to fill assignments for classes, I started doing shoe-leather reporting. I was in journalism school after all. I was curious about the homeless in NYC and some of the local churches let people sleep on the church steps year round. I wondered if church steps were protected places.

I knocked on the door of the Grace and St. Paul’s Lutheran Church on West 71st Street and met Rev. Martin Hauser, the pastor, who agreed to a video interview.

Just a word, if this all seems really prosaic, most community reporting is. But really, most of our lives in this city are just that. We make connections on — real — lines at the local fruit stand, or over the shared washers in our apartment buildings, or with our dogs on leash. Maybe we have deeper connections in our spiritual homes, clubs and schools, apartment buildings, or a shared community project, but the mechanics of community-building are pretty basic.

What I learned from Rev. Hauser was that, yes, his church has always allowed people in need to sleep on the church steps. And he deals head on with the local police leadership when it’s necessary to defend that right.

But what he was most concerned about was President Trump’s position on immigration. He had begun training with the New Sanctuary Coalition to create a sanctuary against ICE in his own parish. He gave me a business card for Ravi Ragbir, Executive Director of New Sanctuary Coalition and recommended I call them to learn more.

Here’s a short video of my interview with Rev. Hauser.

After the interview with Rev. Hauser, I researched New Sanctuary Coalition and attended one of their trainings at NYU Law School. It was there that I finally met the head of the Interfaith Center of NY, Rev. Chloe Breyer. I recognized her on sight from my research a month or two earlier and introduced myself. She gave me her card and I learned my first vital lesson in Social Journalism.

Go where your community is, and listen

It’s great to have creative ideas. But executing those in a vacuum, without a granular understanding of the community, is an effort in frustration. And if you’re spending money on those creative ideas, it quickly becomes an expensive effort in frustration.

Listening is a big part of Social Journalism. What I heard, when I listened, was that the faith and interfaith community of NYC had been activated by the conservative, xenophobic executive orders being signed by President Trump. His rhetoric had riled lots of different faith organizations into action.

I learned that they were taking to the streets in massive rallies. I went and reported a couple of those rallies in Twitter Storms.

The #IAmMuslimToo rally was captured in a Twitter Moment here.

#NotMyPresident Day rally tweets are in a Twitter Moment here.

I framed my interfaith reporting under the name “New York City Of Love” and started a Facebook Page, new twitter handle, Instagram account and Medium publication to begin aggregating my work.

When I almost immediately ran out of storage on my iPhone 6, I made the leap to the supercomputer, broadcast quality video-making and editing machine that is the iPhone 8 plus. That’s when the fun began.

Digital Reporting

Embracing digital reporting, and diving headlong into new platforms and forms of storytelling was one of my goals in graduate school. And for me, like most people right now, it starts with a smartphone.

One of the many strengths of the Social Journalism Masters at CUNY is its free-fall embrace of whatever reporting technology works. If your community is exclusively on Facebook, that’s where you can expect to spend the bulk of your time. If it’s on Twitter, you need to go there.

This program teaches the platforms and how to best use them. You define the metrics that matter to you and your community, and you learn to measure your results using paradigms like impact and engagement. It then expects you to craft the best reportage to fit your community. Social Journalism is platform-agnostic.

For me, at least for the first two semesters, that meant covering lots of events and meeting lots of people. I made social videos, a mini-documentary, wrote articles, tweeted, and posted on Facebook. I launched a bot using IFTTT to collect references on Twitter to “interfaith” so that I could get an idea of what people were talking about, and who the major voices are.

Here are some images:

And a glimpse of my spreadsheet from my Twitter bot:

Digital Ministry Bootcamp with eFormation

For my final project, the practicum, I thought making a bunch of social video explainers would be the way to best elevate the voices and concerns of the interfaith community. Social videos are quick. They have text overlays. And they’re easy to share on a variety of platforms. Lots can be said in under two minutes.

But in October I attended a Digital Ministry Bootcamp with eFormation, a digital media teaching organization out of the Virginia Theological Seminary. The keynote speaker, Rev. Paul Raushenbush, raised amazing questions about the role of digital technology among faith leaders.

I quoted his powerful observations in a couple of tweets and saved them in a Moment. What he described for the faith community is what people like CUNY Journalism Professor Jeff Jarvis talk about in relationship to journalism: a Gutenberg moment in time. There hasn’t been such a profound shift in communication in 500 years and it’s sweeping over just about every human life on the planet.

See a need

All of a sudden, my needs as a journalism student collided with the needs of my community. And I pivoted.

I used Google Forms to do a quick survey of my community and learned that very few of them were online in any meaningful way. To get the 8 responses you see below (the first was me testing the form), not only had I saturated my social media accounts, the survey was shared by Sarah Stonesifer, the organizer of eFormation and some other fantastic digital ministry projects (see AdventWord, it’s exquisite).

I emailed it to people I know in the faith community, texted them, and called. Eight responses after flogging it for a week.

But according to a Burson-Marsteller study released in April 2017 social media could not be more important.

Where is the faith community on social media? Or on the internet, for that matter?

Incredibly, in effort to share a social video I’d made on the Children of Abraham Peace Walk in September, I tried to locate email addresses, websites and twitter accounts for the faith groups who worked together on the event. Very few of the groups were accessible on the web.

I found inactive Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, and dead-end email addresses. Some groups seem to have given it a shot for a while and then bailed.

Rev. Jim Keat

In the meantime, Rev. Jim Keat, another thought leader in the realm of digital ministry, had invited me to accompany on his own digital ministry in Times Square.

Rev. Jim Keat can best introduce himself. His bio at Sojourners says he’s “the Associate Minister of Digital Strategy & Online Engagement at The Riverside Church in New York City and the Director of Online Learning at the Center for Progressive Renewal. He is a divergent thinker, an ideation specialist, and an aspiring minimalist.”

I love this description of Rev. Keat. I would add “and heckuva lot of fun.” See the video I made that day here. And I wrote about it here.

Meet the need

What about a conversation between faith leaders and a nimble, forward-thinking journalism school? I was sitting in the newsroom at CUNY J, watching all these amazing, international communicators practice their craft. And I realized the group I’d been a part of this last year were honing an expertise that might help faith leaders.

It was late in the semester, though, and I needed to act quickly.

Enter Tools of Engagement 101: donuts and a white board. I created a listening post in the newsroom.

I primed the pump with a some veteran journalists and thoughtful advisors: Jeff Jarvis, Jeremy Caplan, Ellen Lai, and Yahaira Castro. And then, over the course of 50 donut munchkins, managed to gather 21 interviews asking the question: What advice would you give faith leaders getting into social media? What would you tell your own faith leader?

I didn’t select for spiritually-inclined journalists. There was no preselection at all other than, “Have a donut and answer a question?” Some people had no faith background, but I knew that all were passionate about communicating.

And for the first part of the endeavor, I tweeted them.

The full Twitter thread is captured in this Moment. Rev. Keat and Sarah Stonesifer jumped in and played wonderful parts in the two day event, retweeting and engaging other twitter hashtags, #chsocm and #eForm. Here are some stills from the tweets, which contained short native videos:

It was great fun. As of December 21, the videos have been watched a total of 488 times. Twitter doesn’t include in that number all the times I’ve watched them. And the response from people on Twitter was sincere and very supportive.

I asked Rev. Keat what he might have done differently. He suggested grabbing screenshots and adding text so they can be shared on Twitter as stills rather than video. And he’s right, according to this Vox factoid.

Sharing them both as videos and as images would also work well on Facebook. If only faith leaders were reliably on either of these two places.

Release the outcome?

It is said that the Gautama Buddha put balls in motion 2,600 years ago that are still rolling today. He could not have known the profound influence his teachings would have, or imagined the environments they’d inhabit. He probably wouldn’t have cared.

Part of me wants to happily sprinkle these beautiful videos and images into the wind of social media and be carefree about their impact: they’ll be found as they’re meant to. And yes, I do think like that much of the time.

They are also my Valentines to the students, faculty and staff at CUNY J, and to the interfaith community.

Service

However, I’m mindful that with the help of my wonderful journalism school, I created a Twitter Storm for a group of people who are not by and large on Twitter. My goal was to serve the community. My mandate, in fact, was to serve. How helpful was this?

I do believe that creating content to help motivate a group of people in a certain direction, is helpful. Faith leaders may believe that social media is too cacophonous for peaceful dialogue. They could be right. But they’re still giving up an opportunity to go where their flocks are. Listen to Jeff Jarvis or Jeremy Caplan or Yahaira Castro on that issue. Or check out the impact the Pope is having on Instagram, as Ellen Lai notes.

However, the flocks of those faith leaders are on Twitter. People in faith communities could bring them back to their faith leaders and congregations. I didn’t see that explicitly happen. It is hard to gauge. And that doesn’t mean that turning these into stills wouldn’t make that more likely.

I haven’t mentioned it explicitly here, but Design Thinking has been part of our Social Journalism training this year. So I’m back at the point of ideating. My guess is that doing something in person, like inviting faith leaders of all traditions to regular Meetups on digital ministry might be well received

But I’ll need to reach out and see what my community thinks, since it’s not about me. And then give it a shot and see what happens.